The Enlightenment That Won't Go Away: Modernity's Crux

The Critical Process unleashed by the Enlightenment and endlessly resharpening itself to this day has mortally wounded the God of Deism, maybe also of theism, even of Christianity. A temptation of Christian theology is to retreat in denial into an updated version of Deism, seemingly granting full license to modern science but only so long as it does not impugn God's love. The alternative here proposed is to ride out The Critical Process, in fact to encourage it, all the way into modernity's crux: How can a design that is not benign still be divine? The Christian reply is: through a real death of God and of ourselves as well, and through resurrections beginning now, thus freeing The Critical Process from the illusion of insuring our survival and, instead, for the honest Enlightenment task of merely telling the truth.     

The Argument from Design: What Is at Stake Theologically?

This article offers a brief overview of the argument for God's existence grounded in the evidence of design. It gives particular attention to the way the argument has evolved over time and in relation to changing scientific perspectives. The argument from de-sign has in fact been formulated and reformulated in response to the discoveries and challenges it has encountered from the field of science. The conclusion of the article explores the theological importance of this argument—its extent and its limits.     

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY,ETHICS, AND LOVE: TOWARD A NEW RELIGION AND SCIENCE DIALOGUE

Religion and science dialogues that orbit around rational method, knowledge, and truth are often, though not always, contentious. In this article, I suggest a different cluster of gravitational points around which religion and science dialogues might usefully travel: philosophical anthropology, ethics, and love. I propose seeing morality as a natural outgrowth of the human desire to establish and maintain social bonds so as not to experience the condition of being alone. Humans, of all animals, need to feel loved—defined as a compassionate present‐with in dynamic dyadic relation such that one experiences the sense of mattering—but that need has an equally natural tendency to be met by creating biased us‐and‐them distinctions. A “critical” natural ethics, then, is one in which we become aware of and work to undermine our tendency to reify in‐group distinctions between “us” and “them.” Religious communities that work intentionally on this can be seen, to some extent, as laboratories of love—or as sites for co‐creating knowledge in perilous times.     

Difficult but Necessary: Conditions of a Contemporary Theology of Love

Abstract : Nørager takes his point of departure in the observation that in modernity “love” has increasingly and undisputedly acquired the status as the fundamental attribute of God. This in turn, however, has made a theology of love vulnerable to the critique leveled by Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued forcefully that God's love in reality was nothing but humanity's ideal of perfect love. Briefly rehearsing two of the most important solutions to this conundrum (Søren Kierkegaard and Anders Nygren), Nørager finds both of them unduly polemical toward “natural” love, leaving us with the idea of a dichotomy or inner opposition between human and divine love. Instead, Nørager points toward a new theology of love where eros and agape are recognized as differing aspects within a continuum of love, and where human and divine love are perceived as mirroring one another.     

A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF EVOLUTION AND PARTICIPATION

Recent controversies surrounding the discernment of design in the natural world are an indication of a pervasive disquiet among believers. Can God as creator/sustainer of creation be reconcilable with the belief that God's work is indiscernible behind secondary evolutionary causes? Christian piety requires that the order experienced in the natural world be evidence of God's love and existence. Theistic evolutionary models rarely examine this matter, assuming that God is indiscernible in the processes and order of the world because only secondary causes can be examined. This leaves antievolutionary perspectives to interpret and address the problem of seeing God in the world. I examine these issues in order to gain more credibility for the religious longing to discern God in nature while at the same time affirming the indubitable truth of an evolutionary history. I argue that God's trinitarian nature, hiddenness, and incarnation give us reason to believe that God's presence in the natural world will be discernible, but only within the natural processes, and thereby only in an obscured fashion. I also argue that newer understandings of evolutionary mechanisms are more consistent with theological appropriation than are strictly Darwinian ones.     

Oppy,infinity, and the neoclassical concept of God

In this article I concentrate on three issues. First, Graham Oppy’s treatment of the relationship between the concept of infinity and Zeno’s paradoxes lay bare several porblems that must be dealt with if the concept of infinity is to do any intellectual work in philosophy of religion. Here I will expand on some insightful remarks by Oppy in an effort ot adequately respond to these problems. Second, I will do the same regarding Oppy’s treatment of Kant’s first antinomy in the first critique, which deals in part with the question of whether the world had a beginning in time or if time extends infinitely into the past. And third, my examination of these two issues will inform what I have to say regarding a key topic in philosophy of religion: the question regarding the proper relationship between the infinite and the finite in the concept of God.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE THEOLOGY OF DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

The German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer is not widely known for engaging with scientific thought, having been heavily influenced by Karl Barth's celebrated stance against natural theology. However, during the period of his maturing theology in prison Bonhoeffer read a significant scientific work, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's The World View of Physics. From this he gained two major insights for his theological outlook. First, he realized that the notion of a "God of the gaps" is futile, not just in science but in other areas of human inquiry. Second, he felt that an infinite universe, as considered by science, would be self-subsistent and could exist as if there were no God. Bonhoeffer replaced Barth's radical critique of religion with the even more extreme view that it is a mere passing phase in history that grown-up humanity can dispense with. At the same time Bonhoeffer began an important critique of Barth's reaction, namely, the latter's retreat to a "positivism of revelation." While Bonhoeffer did not go quite as far as one might like, his approach opened up hopeful avenues for an answer to "the liberal question" and even a revived place for some kind of natural theology.     

EVOLUTION AND SUBJECTIVITY

Evolutionary theory is becoming an all‐encompassing form of explanation in many branches of philosophy. However, emergence theory uses the concept of self‐organization to support yet alter traditional evolutionary explanation. Biologist Stuart Kauffman suggests that the new science will need to tell stories, not simply as a heuristic device but as part of its fundamental task. This claim is reminiscent of C. S. Peirce's criticism of the doctrine of necessity. Peirce's suggestions reference Hegel, and this essay draws out this Hegelian background, addressing the question of subjectivity and issuing some Hegelian reminders so that such evolutionary and emergent theories will consider the implication of this research program on philosophy of mind. The primary focus is on two post‐Kantian, neo‐Hegelian thinkers in contemporary philosophy who deal with this problem: John McDowell and Robert Brandom.     

Predictive value and psychological meaning of vocational aspirations

The psychological meaning and predictive value of a person's vocational aspirations were examined by applying Holland's typology to the vocational aspirations of high school juniors (N = 1005), college juniors (N = 692), employed adults (N = 140), and a second sample of college students studied over a one-year interval (N = 624). The aspirational data were obtained from the Daydreams section of the Self-Directed Search (Holland, 1972). Categorical and correlational analyses show that a person's retrospective vocational aspirations have coherence and yield efficient predictions of subsequently expressed choice. In addition, the degree of coherence or similarity among a person's vocational aspirations provides a potentially useful index of a person's decision-making ability.     

The accuracy of self-administration and scoring on Holland's Self-Directed Search

This study assesed the extent to which Ss commit various types of errors when completing Holland's Self-Directed Search (SDS) entirely on their own. Nearly all Ss made some type of error and approximately half of the Ss made errors which affected their final three-letter summary codes. Almost one-fifth of the Ss made errors resulting in an incorrect high-point code. Whether or not Ss made errors that affected their summary codes was unrelated to the extent to which they were interested in knowing more about occupations or academic majors they might like. Neither were such errors related to whether Ss felt the occupations suggested by their summary codes seemed reasonable. Only slightly over one-third the Ss actually did feel that the occupations seemed reasonable.