NATURALISM AND THE CATEGORIES “SCIENCE” AND “RELIGION”: A RESPONSE TO JOSH REEVES

This article is a response to Josh Reeve's “A Defense of Science and Religion.” I begin with the disclaimer that this was not solely my project but a joint enterprise. A common commitment of participants was to make the disciplines of history and theology central to the discussion and explore what new possibilities follows for the field of science and religion. I then address Reeves's two central concerns: first that I am too dismissive of the categories “science” and “religion.” In fact I have not advocated dispensing with these categories, but have insisted than we employ them critically and with a sense of their history. The second concern is that my position on naturalism seems to place me perilously close to advocates of ID or scientific creationism. I deny this, but point out that more work needs to be done, beyond simply invoking methodological naturalism, to clarify the differences between naturalistic and theological approaches to the world.     

Embodied and Embedded Morality: Divinity, Identity, and Disgust

Our understanding of human morality would benefit from an integrated interdisciplinary approach, built on the assumption that human beings are multidimensional unities with real, irreducible, and mutually interdependent spiritual, relational, emotional, rational, and physiological aspects. We could integrate relevant information from neurobiological, psychosocial, and theological perspectives, avoiding unnecessary reductionism and naturalism. This approach is modeled by addressing the particular limited role of disgust in morality. Psychosocial research reveals disgust as a universal emotion that enables evaluation and regulation of certain moral behaviors and is involved in cultural identity. Theologically, many religious traditions, including the Judeo‐Christian, use disgust in conjunction with moral codes designed to preserve purity and communal identity as the people of God. The concept of natural moral law suggests that morality is embodied in human nature. Neurobiology is beginning to trace the neural circuitry involved in disgust and in moral evaluation, suggesting that emotions are a necessary basis for moral judgment and revealing intriguing relationships between disgust, morality, and other aspects of the psyche. Several problems that arise within these disciplines and at their intersections are identified. Extension of the model to other aspects of human morality would further illuminate our understanding of morality without sacrificing its complexity and richness.     

FURNISHING THE SKILL WHICH CAN SAVE THE CHILD: DIPHTHERIA,GERM THEORY,AND THEODICY

Amid the diverse ways men and women have viewed the relationship between science and religion, explicit arguments that “Science is God's Provision” remain unexamined by historians. Such arguments are examined here as they relate to the problem of theodicy, by looking at a particular case study that inspired comments on the relationship between medicine and faith, namely, the discovery of the diphtheria antitoxin. This story highlights, first, the flexibility of the tradition of natural theology, and second, the important role the problem of theodicy has played in the history of the relationship between science and religion.     

不同分类水平自然类概念的实例效应

采用Heit和Barsalou的实验范式,以不同分类水平的中文语义自然类概念为实验材料验证实例效应。研究包括2个实验,被试为180名全日制在校大学生。实验1为无修饰词概念的典型性研究．结果表明人们不仅在抽象的水平上表征概念,也在具体的实例水平上表征概念。实验2用不同分类水平的自然类概念检验了在更广泛的概念范围内的实例效应,结果表明,不同分类水平的下位概念和下位概念实例在上位概念中的平均典型性大多显著相关,而且下位概念的实例在不同分类水平上位概念中（如：动物、小动物）的变化趋势和下位概念在不同分类水平上位概念中的变化趋势一致。实验1和实验2的结果均支持了Heit和Barsalou提出的实例效应。     

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME IN NATURAL SCIENCE

The various aesthetic phenomena found repeatedly in the scientific enterprise stem from the role of God as artist. If the Creator is an artist, how and why natural scientists study the divine art work can be understood using theological aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The aesthetic phenomena considered here are as follows. First, science reveals beauty and the sublime in natural phenomena. Second, science discovers beauty and the sublime in the theories that are developed to explain natural phenomena. Third, the search for beauty often guides scientists in their work. Fourth, where beauty is perceived, feelings of the sublime often also follow upon further contemplation. This linkage of beauty in science with truth and the sublime runs counter to most aesthetic theory since Kant. Scholarship in theological aesthetics has recently argued that the modern and postmodern elevation of the sublime over beauty is merely a preference that reveals a bias against transcendence—against God. If doing and understanding science can show this sundering of the sublime from the beautiful to be in error, science also gives evidence of transcendence.     

自然选择与肿瘤转移治疗新策略

微环境以自然选择的方式对肿瘤细胞亚群进行选择,使某些亚克隆更加倾向于向某些位置转移。微环境的自然选择是肿瘤转移的前提条件,始终贯穿于肿瘤发生发展的全过程,从自然选择的角度看肿瘤的转移,研究肿瘤转移需要的微环境,通过破坏转移前微环境,达到预防和治疗肿瘤转移的目的,将为肿瘤转移的治疗开创一条新路。     

Nominalizing Quantifiers

Quantified expressions in natural language generally are taken to act like quantifiers in logic, which either range over entities that need to satisfy or not satisfy the predicate in order for the sentence to be true or otherwise are substitutional quantifiers. I will argue that there is a philosophically rather important class of quantified expressions in English that act quite differently, a class that includes something, nothing, and several things. In addition to expressing quantification, such expressions act like nominalizations, introducing a new domain of objects that would not have been present in the semantic structure of the sentence otherwise. The entities those expressions introduce are of just the same sort as those that certain ordinary nominalizations refer to (such as John's wisdom or John's belief that S), namely they are tropes or entities related to tropes. Analysing certain quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers will shed a new light on philosophical issues such as the status of properties and the nature of propositional attitudes.     

Robert Boyle and the Machine Metaphor

The seventeenth–century chemist and philosopher Robert Boyle argued that the world is like a clockwork machine. This led to the problems of the place of a Creator and of how one can explain the directed, "final–cause" nature of organisms. Boyle thought that he could wrap everything up in one neat package, with a clear place for a designing God, but of course the coming of Darwinism casts doubt on this. Nevertheless, Boyle's thinking does have some very interesting implications for the way in which we today should consider the science/religion relationship.     

Speaking Your Mind: Large Inarticulateness Constitutional and Circumstantial

When someone is asked to speak his mind, it is sometimes possible for him to furnish what his utterance appears to have omitted. In such cases we might say that he had a mind to speak. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true. Asked to speak his mind, our speaker finds that he has no mind to speak. When it is possible to speak one's mind and when not is largely determined by the kinds of beings we are and by the kinds of resources we are able to draw upon. In either case, not speaking one's mind is leaving something out whose articulation would or could matter for the purposes for which one was speaking in the first place. Inarticulation is no fleetingly contingent and peripheral phenomenon in human thinking and discourse. It is a substantial and dominant commonplace. In Part One I attempt to say something about what it is about the human agent that makes inarticulateness so rife. In Part Two, I consider various strategies for making the unarticulated explicit, and certain constraints on such processes. I shall suggest, among other things, that standard treatments of enthymematic reconstruction are fundamentally misconceived.