Recent Books on ≡ Theology, Science and Religion

Books reviewed in this article:
Keith Ward, God, Faith & the New Millennium: Christian Belief in an Age of Science.
Fraser Watts ed, Science Meets Faith: Theology and Science in Conversation.
Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues.
Philip Clayton, God and Contemporary Science.     

The Risk of Obedience: A Consideration of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

This paper argues that Kierkegaard's defence of Abraham is in the first instance a polemic against the notion that the demands of faith are co-terminous with the best insights of practical reason. It is further argued that while no justification of Abraham's action at Mount Moriah may be offered, he is nevertheless to be admired for trusting in God beyond the limits of his understanding. Such trust is admirable, however, only in the context of a long life of obedience and love.     

On the Poverty of Scientism, or: The Ineluctable Roughness of Rationality

If there is one rationality there must be a plurality of them. This conclusion follows, I argue, partly from the extreme and ineradicable vagueness of the fundamental concepts that every would-be rational explanation must presuppose. Logicistic/scientistic assaults on this vagueness are doomed to fail partly because they are unable to acknowledge the imaginative dimension of rational thought. Being limited to the play of "outward appearances," scientific investigations are also dependent on "inward imaginings" on their speculative side. The upshot is that schools of philosophy should be characterized by the kind of imaginary they adopt rather than by their logics. In which case, every attempt to get and tell something right about the world is bound to incorporate mythopoeic elements in its explanations.     

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater: The catharsis hypothesis revisited1

Boys between the ages of 9 and 10 participated in one of three experimental activities. One involved movement and aggression, the second movement devoid of aggression, and the third minimal movement of a nonaggressive nature. Aggressive fantasy decreased in the aggressive movement and minimal movement groups but increased in the nonaggressive movement group. The results are consistent with a cathartic view of the functional relationship between aggressive behavior and aggressive fantasy when the effects of movement and completion of an aggressive response are considered. This study supports the notion that the enactment of an aggressive goal response is essential to the occurrence of a cathartic effect and points up the importance of controlling for movement in investigations of the relationship between aggressive fantasy and aggressive behavior. An additional, exploratory investigation of daydreaming suggests that children who are high in aggressive fantasy are likely to daydream more frequently than children low in aggressive fantasy.     

Time out from avoidance as a reinforcer: a study of response interaction

Monkeys could either postpone shock by pressing a lever or pull a chain to produce a period of time out from the avoidance procedure. The period of time out proved to be an effective positive reinforcer. Certain features of the animals' behavior were attributed to interactions between the two responses.     

Classical Avoidance without a warning stimulus

White rats were scheduled to be shocked every 15 sec; but they were given a limited time interval between shocks when they could prevent the next scheduled shock from occurring if they pressed a lever. The duration of this limited avoidance period was varied, as was its location within the interval between scheduled shocks. Response rate, shock frequency, and the temporal distribution of lever presses were examined. Conditions were generated in which the formation of a temporal discrimination prevented the animals from maintaining successful avoidance behavior.     

Equivalent effects of grouping by time, voice, and location on response timing in verbal serial memory

The grouping of list items is known to improve serial memory accuracy and constrain the nature of temporal errors. A recent study (M. T. Maybery, F. B. R. Parmentier, & D. M. Jones, 2002) showed that grouping results in a temporal organization of the participants' responses that mimics the list structure but not the timing of its presentation. Here the authors tested the prediction that the temporal grouping of responses should yield the same pattern of response time (RT) irrespective of the method of grouping at presentation. Comparing temporal, location, and voice grouping, the results show that although these methods impact on recall accuracy to varying degrees, all 3 conditions produce significant and equivalent peaks in RT at the first position of each group. The RT data were accurately simulated through a model based on ACT-R's (J. R. Anderson & M. Matessa, 1997) basic principles. Altogether, the data suggest that the temporal organization of responses in verbal serial recall results from (a) declarative knowledge about the list's structure that is independent of the perceptual means by which grouping is induced at presentation and (b) the level of activation of the items per se.