Download or read book Darwinian Fairytales written by David Stove and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whatever your opinion of ‘Intelligent Design,’ you’ll find Stove’s criticism of what he calls ‘Darwinism’ difficult to stop reading. Stove’s blistering attack on Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish genes’ and ‘memes’ is unparalleled and unrelenting. A discussion of spiders who mimic bird droppings is alone worth the price of the book. Darwinian Fairytales should be read and pondered by anyone interested in sociobiology, the origin of altruism, and the awesome process of evolution. --Martin Gardner, author of Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience

Download or read book Darwinian Fairytales written by David Charles Stove and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Instilling Ethics written by Norma Thompson and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2000-06-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instilling Ethics casts a fresh light on both the historical sources and the contemporary issues of a major preoccupation of our time: ethics. Norma Thompson has compiled essays from prominent scholars in a wide-range of disciplines to address the problems, pretensions, and positive potentialities of ethical practices today. Instilling Ethics offers a new way of connecting today's ethics to the great ethical sources of the past— classical, medieval, and early modern—and presents a wise and witty critique of the current practice of 'professional ethics.'

Download or read book Against the Idols of the Age written by David Stove and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little known outside his native Australia, David Stove was one of the most illuminating and brilliant philo-sophical essayists of the postwar era. A fearless at-tacker of intellectual and cultural orthodoxies, Stove left powerful critiques of scientific irrationalism, Dar-winian theories of human behavior, and philosophi-cal idealism. He was also an occasional essayist of considerable charm and polemical snap. Stove's writ-ing is both rigorous and immensely readable. It is, in the words of Roger Kimball, "an invigorating blend of analytic lucidity, mordant humor, and an amount of common sense too great to be called 'common.'" Against the Idols of the Age brings together a repre-sentative selection of Stove's writing and is an ideal introduction to his work.The book opens with some of Stove's most impor-tant attacks on irrationalism in the philosophy of sci-ence. He exposes the roots of this fashionable attitude, tracing it through writers like Paul Feyerabend andThomas Kuhn to Karl Popper. Stove was a born controversialist, so it is not surpris-ing that when he turned his attention to contemporary affairs he said things that are politically incorrect. The topical essays that make up the second part of the book show Stove at his most withering and combative. Whether the subject is race, femi-nism, the Enlightenment, or the demand for "non-coercive philosophy," Stove is on the mark with a battery of impressive arguments expressed in sharp, uncompromis-ing prose. Against the Idols of the Age concludes with a generous sampling of his blistering attacks on Darwinism.David Stove's writings are an undiscovered treasure. Although readers may dis-agree with some of his opinions, they will find it difficult to dismiss his razor-sharp arguments. Against the Idols of the Age is the first book to make the full range of this important thinker available to the general reader.

Download or read book On Enlightenment written by David Stove and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of enlightenment entails liberty, equality, rationalism, secularism, and the connection between knowledge and well being. In spite of the setbacks of revolutionary violence, mass murder, and two world wars, the spread of enlightenment values is still the yardstick by which moral, political, and scientific advances are measured. In On Enlightenment, David Stove attacks the roots of enlightenment thought to define its successes, limitations, and areas of likely failures. Stove champions the use of reason and recognizes the falsity of religious claims as well as the importance of individual liberty. He rejects the enlightenment's uncritical optimism regarding social progress and its willingness to embrace revolutionary change. What evidence is there that the elimination of superstition will lead to happiness? Or that it is possible to accept Darwinism without Social Darwinism? Or that the enlightenment's liberal, rationalistic outlook will lead to the social progress envisioned by its advocates? Despite best intentions, says Stove, social reformers who attempt to improve the world inevitably make things worse. He advocates a conservative approach to change, pointing out that social structures are so large and complex that any widespread social reform will have innumerable unforeseen consequences. Writing in the tradition of Edmund Burke with the same passion for clarity and intellectual honesty as George Orwell, David Stove was one of the most articulate and insightful philosophers of his day.

Download or read book Apologetical Aesthetics written by Mark Coppenger and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-04-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apart from the work of God in creation, it's notoriously difficult to explain the presence of beauty in the world and man's appreciation for it. Indeed, the aesthetic realm (with its array of phenomena which engage the senses, the mind, and the heart) not only suits the biblical account of the universe, but also points toward it. In making this case, sixteen writers address the shortcomings of naturalistic narratives, the virtues of theistic accounts (particularly those grounded in Christ), and the manner in which the various arts resonate with Scripture. Along the way, readers will encounter the peacock's tail and Farnsworth House; a Schubert piano sonata and "chopsticks"; Kintsugi and Kitsch; Hugh of St. Victor and Hans Urs von Balthasar; Kandinsky and Eisenstein; the Lydian and Phrygian modes; eucatastrophe and liminal space; McDonald's and Don Quixote; Smeagol and the Blobfish; Stockhausen and Begbie; Adorno and Kinkade; Mount Auburn Cemetery and Narnia; Fujimura and Schopenhauer.

Download or read book What s Wrong with Benevolence written by David Stove and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2011-07-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is benevolence a virtue? In many cases it appears to be so. But when it comes to the “enlarged benevolence” of the Enlightenment, David Stove argues that the answer is clearly no. In this insightful, provocative essay, Stove builds a case for the claim that when benevolence is universal, disinterested and external, it regularly leads to the forced redistribution of wealth, which in turn leads to decreased economic incentives, lower rates of productivity, and increased poverty. As Stove points out, there is an air of paradox in saying that benevolence may be a cause of poverty. But there shouldn’t be. Good intentions alone are never sufficient to guarantee the success of one’s endeavors. Utopian schemes to reorganize the world have regularly ended in failure. Easily the most important example of this phenomenon is twentieth-century communism. As Stove reminds us, the attractiveness of communism—the “emotional fuel” of communist revolutionaries for over a hundred years—has always been “exactly the same as the emotional fuel of every other utopianism: the passionate desire to alleviate or abolish misery.” Yet communism was such a monumental failure that millions of people today are still suffering its consequences. In this most prescient of essays, Stove warns contemporary readers just how seductive universal political benevolence can be. He also shows how the failure to understand the connection between benevolence and communism has led to many of the greatest social miseries of our age.

Download or read book Is the Bible Divinely Inspired Special Edition written by Richie Cooley and published by Richie Cooley. This book was released on 2019-01-11 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to prove the Bible through science, studies on Messianic prophecies, and by examining divine patterns in the Word and in nature. It has been newly revised in 2019.

Download or read book Evolution in the Antipodes written by Tom Frame and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Darwin's profound influence on Australian thinking is explored from a variety of positions in this carefully researched analysis. Providing useful contextual material on Darwin's life and times, including his 1836 visit to Australia in the HMS Beagle, the narrative examines historic disputes and contemporary debates about Darwin's motiva...

Download or read book Nature s Prophet written by Michael A. Flannery and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astute study of Alfred Russel Wallace’s path to natural theology. A spiritualist, libertarian socialist, women’s rights advocate, and critic of Victorian social convention, Alfred Russel Wallace was in every sense a rebel who challenged the emergent scientific certainties of Victorian England by arguing for a natural world imbued with purpose and spiritual significance. Nature’s Prophet:Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology is a critical reassessment of Wallace’s path to natural theology and counters the dismissive narrative that Wallace’s theistic and sociopolitical positions are not to be taken seriously in the history and philosophy of science. Author Michael A. Flannery provides a cogent and lucid account of a crucial—and often underappreciated—element of Wallace’s evolutionary worldview. As co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection, Wallace willingly took a backseat to the well-bred, better known scientist. Whereas Darwin held fast to his first published scientific explanations for the development of life on earth, Wallace continued to modify his thinking, refining his argument toward a more controversial metaphysical view which placed him within the highly charged intersection of biology and religion. Despite considerable research into the naturalist’s life and work, Wallace’s own evolution from natural selection to natural theology has been largely unexplored; yet, as Flannery persuasively shows, it is readily demonstrated in his writings from 1843 until his death in 1913. Nature’s Prophet provides a detailed investigation of Wallace’s ideas, showing how, although he independently discovered the mechanism of natural selection, he at the same time came to hold a very different view of evolution from Darwin. Ultimately, Flannery shows, Wallace’s reconsideration of the argument for design yields a more nuanced version of creative and purposeful theistic evolution and represents one of the most innovative contributions of its kind in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, profoundly influencing a later generation of scientists and intellectuals.

Download or read book The World Turned Upside Down written by Melanie Phillips and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. An astonishing number of people subscribe to celebrity endorsed cults, Mayan armageddon prophecies, scientism, and other varieties of new age, anti-enlightenment philosophies. Millions more advance popular conspiracy theories: AIDS was created in a CIA laboratory, Princess Diana was assassinated, and the 9/11 attacks were an inside job. In The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips explains that the basic cause of this explosion of irrationality is the slow but steady marginalization of religion. We tell ourselves that faith and reason are incompatible, but the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, Phillips asserts, that gave us our concepts of reason, progress, and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based. Without its religious traditions, the West has drifted into mass derangement where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. Scientists skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonized, and the US is vilified over the war on terror—all on the basis of blatant falsehoods and obscene propaganda. Worst of all, asserts Phillips, this abandonment of rationality leaves the West vulnerable to its legitimate threats. Faced with the very real challenges of spiraling demographics and violent, confrontational Islamism, the West is no longer willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it once brought into being.

Download or read book Christianity and Western Thought written by Steve Wilkens and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this second of three volumes which survey the dynamic interplay of Christianity and Western thought from the earliest centuries through the twentieth century, Steve Wilkens and Alan Padgett tell the story of the monumental changes of the nineteenth century.

Download or read book World History and the Eonic Effect written by John C. Landon and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when theories of evolution are undergoing renewed controversy, the study of the Eonic Effect can break the deadlock, by looking at world history in the light of ‘evolution’. The assumption that evolution occurs at random is the crux of the dispute, and one confused with issues of religion and secularism. We can detect a non-random pattern in the record of civilization itself, to see ‘evolution in action’ on a stupendous scale. We live in the first generations with enough data to detect this phenomenon. In the confusion of evolutionary theories, the unexpected discovery of deep level structure can allow us to deconstruct ‘fl at history’, and assess claims of directionality in evolution. In the process the theory of natural selection applied to human evolution is seen to fail a photo finish test. The book provides a new model for the study of the overlap of history and evolution, and a critique of current views of the descent of man.

Download or read book Biology and Christian Ethics written by Stephen R. L. Clark and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stimulating and wide-ranging book mounts a profound enquiry into some of the most pressing questions of our age, by examining the relationship between biological science and Christianity. The history of biological discovery is explored from the point of view of a leading philosopher and ethicist. What effect should modern biological theory and practice have on Christian understanding of ethics? How much of that theory and practice should Christians endorse? Can Christians, for example, agree that biological changes are not governed by transcendent values, or that there are no clear or essential boundaries between species? To what extent can 'Nature' set our standards? Professor Clark takes a reasoned look at biological theory since Darwin and argues that an orthodox Christian philosophy is better able to accommodate the truth of such theory than is the sort of progressive, meliorist interpretation of Christian doctrine which is usually offered as the properly 'modern' option.

Download or read book Themelios Volume 40 Issue 2 written by D. A. Carson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Themelios is an international, evangelical, peer-reviewed theological journal that expounds and defends the historic Christian faith. Themelios is published three times a year online at The Gospel Coalition (http://thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/) and in print by Wipf and Stock. Its primary audience is theological students and pastors, though scholars read it as well. Themelios began in 1975 and was operated by RTSF/UCCF in the UK, and it became a digital journal operated by The Gospel Coalition in 2008. The editorial team draws participants from across the globe as editors, essayists, and reviewers. General Editor: D. A. Carson, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Managing Editor: Brian Tabb, Bethlehem College and Seminary Consulting Editor: Michael J. Ovey, Oak Hill Theological College Administrator: Andrew David Naselli, Bethlehem College and Seminary Book Review Editors: Jerry Hwang, Singapore Bible College; Alan Thompson, Sydney Missionary & Bible College; Nathan A. Finn, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; Hans Madueme, Covenant College; Dane Ortlund, Crossway; Jason Sexton, Golden Gate Baptist Seminary Editorial Board: Gerald Bray, Beeson Divinity School Lee Gatiss, Wales Evangelical School of Theology Paul Helseth, University of Northwestern, St. Paul Paul House, Beeson Divinity School Ken Magnuson, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Jonathan Pennington, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary James Robson, Wycliffe Hall Mark D. Thompson, Moore Theological College Paul Williamson, Moore Theological College Stephen Witmer, Pepperell Christian Fellowship Robert Yarbrough, Covenant Seminary

Download or read book Transparent written by David Richardson and published by Clovercroft Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assumptions are the most potent of ideas, but also the least understood. Transparent reveals what assumptions we make, how they control us, and how they are all inherently religious. Even atheists are religious at the level of their assumptions. Some assumptions are true and most are not. How can you tell without being an intellectual? Transparent introduces the Transparent App, an innovative and creative tool that helps people quickly see through the messages they encounter daily in the things they read, watch, and hear using the power of assumptions. The Transparent App is simple enough for a student to use, but powerful enough for adults to find God and engage with Him in their areas of interest, expertise, and leadership. How can someone bring God with them to work or school? How does God give us knowledge and guidance in the things that matter in real life? At the level of assumptions God is everywhere. Transparent is not just a theoretical theological exercise for intellectuals. It “translates” the complex ideologies of the intellectuals into everyday language for everyday people. Written more like an adventure than a textbook, Transparent is a refreshing departure from the usual books about apologetics, theology, and culture. Students, parents, pastors, and professionals will all love Transparent.

Download or read book Mood Matters written by John L. Casti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-06-25 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mood Matters" makes the radical assertion that all social events ranging from fashions in music and art to the rise and fall of civilizations are biased by the attitudes a society holds toward the future. When the "social mood" is positive and people look forward to the future, events of an entirely different character tend to occur than when society is pessimistic. The book presents many examples from every walk of life in support of this argument. In addition, methods are given to actually measure the social mood and to project it into the future in order to forecast what’s likely or not over varying periods of time. Casti's writing is a pleasure to read and its contents an eye-opener. "They [the chapters] tell an engrossing story, and the mystery heightens as it goes. . . . it's chatty and knowing." Greg Benford, Physicist and science-fiction writer, author of "Timescape" and "Deep Time" "I am struck by how thought-provoking it all is. I am sure that your book will draw a lot of attention" Tor Norretranders, Science writer, author of "The Generous Man" and "The User Illusion".