Browsing by Author "Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher"

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Open Access
Caring for nature: from fact to value, from respect to reverence
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2004) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Despite the classical prohibition of moving from fact to value, encounter with the biodiversity and plenitude of being in evolutionary natural history moves us to respect life, even to reverence it. Darwinian accounts are value-laden and necessary for understanding life at the same time that Darwinian theory fails to provide sufficient cause for the historically developing diversity and increasing complexity on Earth. Earth is a providing ground; matter and energy on Earth support life, but distinctive to life is information coded in the genetic molecules that superintends this matter-energy. Life is generated and regenerated in struggle, persists in its perishing. Such life is also a gift; nature is grace. Biologists and theologians join in celebrating and conserving the genesis on Earth, awed in their encounter with this creativity that characterizes our home planet.
Open Access
Commissioned longer critical review of Ian Barbour's Religion in an age of science; metaphysics in an era of history
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1992) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Ian Barbour's Religion in an Age of Science is a welcome systematic, theoretical overview of the relations between science and religion, Gifford lectures culminating his long career with a balanced and insightful appraisal. The hallmarks are critical realism, holism, and process thought. Barbour makes more investment in process philosophy than in his previous works. This invites further inquiry about the adequacy of a highly general process metaphysics in dealing with our particular, deeply historical world.
Open Access
Does nature need to be redeemed?
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1994) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
In the light of evolutionary biology, the biblical idea that nature fell with the coming of human sin is incredible. Biblical writers, classical theologians, and contemporary biologists are ambivalent about nature, finding in natural history both a remarkable genesis of life and also much travail and suffering. Earth is a land of promise, and there is the conservation, or redemption, of life in the midst of its perpetual perishing. Life is perennially a struggling through to something higher. In that sense even natural history is cruciform, though human sinfulness introduces novel tragedy. Humans now threaten creation; nature is at more peril than ever before.
Open Access
Inevitable humans: Simon Conway Morris's evolutionary paleontology - review
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2005) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Simon Conway Morris, noted Cambridge University paleontologist, argues that in evolutionary natural history humans (or beings rather like humans) are an inevitable outcome of the developing speciating processes over millennia. This claim, in marked contrast to claims about contingency made by other prominent paleontologists, is based on numerous remarkable convergences--similar trends found repeatedly in evolutionary history. Conway Morris concludes facing a natural theology. His argument is powerful and informed. But does it face adequately the surprising events that redirect the course of life? The challenge to understand how humans are both "on a continuum" with other species and also "utterly different" remains a central puzzle in paleontology.
Open Access
Lame science? Blind religion?
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
In Consecrating Science, Lisa Sideris argues that an anthropocentric and science-based cosmology encourages human arrogance and diminishes a sense of wonder in human experience immersed in the natural world, found in diverse cultural and religious traditions. I agree with her that science elevated to a commanding world view, scientism, is a common and contemporary mistake, to be deplored, a lame science. But I further argue that science has introduced us to the marvels of deep nature, and vastly increased our human appreciation of nature as a wonderland at levels great and small. Sideris is right to fear consecrating science. She—and the humanists, sages, and saviors—need also to fear blindness to what science has to teach us about cosmogenesis and wonderland Earth.
Open Access
Review of Alister McGrath's A scientific theology: volume 1: nature
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2004) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
This is a learned survey of historical ideas of creation and nature. McGrath is enthusiastic about the social creation of nature, yet he also seeks a "logocentric" account by which Christians have a privileged, or revealed account, appreciating what the sciences can genuinely discover, yet also needing a deeper account of how the wonderful cosmos comes into being.
Open Access
Review of D. J. Bartholomew's God of chance
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1989) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Bartholomew wonders whether God takes chances, or leaves some events in nature to chaos, or permits humans to make their own decisions. His argument merits careful attention because this book is by a professional statistician who is theologically articulate.
Open Access
Review of David L. Schindler's Beyond mechanism: the universe in recent Catholic thought
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1987) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
This worthy volume contains the responses of four Catholics and one non-Catholic to the philosophical views of the physicist David Bohm. The central concept is that of the one "implicate order" unfolded into the many "explicate order." The analyses are stimulating but not definitive.
Open Access
Review of J. Ronald Engel's Sacred sands: the struggle for community in the Indiana Dunes
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1984) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Sacred Sands is a welcome contribution to religious studies, environmental ethics, and American history. Ron Engel narrates the bitterly contested struggle to save the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan. This is a story of the people of Chicago and their landscape with moral vision for Americans and their landscapes everywhere.
Open Access
Review of James W. Jones' the Texture of knowledge: an essay in science and religion
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1982) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
This is a finely and tightly woven essay about the unweaving of hard and fast claims in both science and religion. James W. Jones advocates what he calls an open texture in both fields. He analyzes three leading philosophers of science: Michael Polanyi, Stephen Toulmin, and Thomas Kuhn. He advocates a "critical relativism." This is a thoughtful essay.
Open Access
Review of John Leslie's Universes and John Leslie's Physical cosmology and philosophy
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1991) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
John Leslie is the philosopher who has most devoted himself to the analysis of recent claims that our universe is fine-tuned for producing life. Here we have the fruit of Leslie's work across two decades, summarized in one accessible book of manageable length, seriously argued but neither overly technical nor esoteric. In a companion book, Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, Leslie couples his systematic treatment with an anthology of the principal articles in the field. Together, the two books are excellent texts for a stimulating class on cosmology.
Open Access
Review of John Polkinghorne's Science and theology: an introduction
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2000) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
John Polkinghorne is well known as a leading figure relating theology to physics. Confronted with the claim that science and theology are inevitably at odds with each other, Polkinghorne replied, and here demonstrates, that "You don't have to commit intellectual suicide to be a believer."
Open Access
Review of K. S. Shrader-Frechette's Environmental ethics
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1982) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Shrader-Frechette has anthologized 25 selections, chosen to be good beginner's pieces. Often there are opposing articles, and the authors come from diverse fields. The selections are provocative, organized around the right themes, and easily readable. There is careful attention to the mixture of scientific and technological matters with ethical and philosophical judgments. As an introductory text in environmental ethics, this is one of the best now available.
Open Access
Review of Kenneth Cauthen's Process ethics: a constructive system
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1986) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
This is a process oriented theology, blending Christian ethics based on the Bible and moral philosophy based on reason and experience. He synthesizes rights-based and utilitarian ethics, agape and eros, love and justice, individual and community, Christian ethics and evolutionary processes, self-love and altruism.
Open Access
Review of Paoli Soleri's The omega seed: an eschatological hypothesis
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1983) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Soleri believes in an Omega God. Inveighing against the Alpha God, traditional theism is misleading. Our present human challenge is to become what we are, the seed of God, and hence Soleri's title. We are the Omega Seed. Soleri's creed is: "There is no God yet, and Soleri is his prophet." This is best considered a hypothesis and we wait to see if there are any fruits.
Open Access
Review of Paul Davies' Cosmic jackpot: why our universe is just right for life
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2008) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Paul Davies is a physicist, a cosmologist with philosophical interest. He is unsurpassed in summarizing the results of recent discoveries in physical astronomy and microphysics about the ways in which the characteristics of the universe are fine-tuned for life. "The universe is bio-friendly." He is much challenged by the differences between physics and biology, especially the emergence of mind. We are still left wondering why life elaborates and persists in the midst of its perpetual perishing.
Open Access
Review of Richard H. Jones' Reductionism: analysis and the fullness of reality
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2005) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
The sweep of the book is to argue that reduction (if distinguished from inter-level connections) is not working well anywhere, and if not lower down, there is even less reason to suppose that it will work higher up. Is there anything super-physics, anything super-biological, anything super-psychological, anything super-sociological--and in the end, more generically, anything super-natural, super to the natural? Jones, a lawyer, assesses the strength of evidence on both sides. He has felt the power of encounter with a mysterious universe.
Open Access
Rights and responsibilities on the home planet (Zygon)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1993) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Earth is the home planet, right for life. But rights is, unfortunately, a biologically awkward word. Humans, nonetheless, have rights to a natural environment with integrity. Human political systems are not well suited to protect life at global ranges. National boundaries ignore important ecological processes; national policies do not favor an equitable distribution of sustainable resources. But there are signs of hope.
Open Access
Rolston review of Franz Wuketits' Evolutionary epistemology and its implications for humankind and Matthew H. Niteki and Doris V. Nitecki's Evolutionary ethics
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1995) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
If what we know and what we ought to do can both be given an evolutionary explanation, then human life will have been thoroughly naturalized. Wuketits advocates an evolutionary epistemology, but also finds that human knowledge vastly transcends any found in biology. In the Niteckis' collection, evolutionary ethics, advocated by some, is met mostly with philosophical skepticism. Is it pointless to consider arguments deceptively disguised as self-interest in defending authentic morality?
Open Access
Science education and moral education
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1988) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Joint Publication Board of Zygon, publisher
Both science and ethics are embedded in cultural traditions where truths are shared through education; both need competent critics educated within such traditions. Education in both ought to be directed although moral education demands levels of responsible agency that science education does not. Evolutionary science often carries an implicit or explicit understanding of who and what humans are, one which may not be coherent with the implicit or explicit human self-understanding in moral education. The latter in turn may not be coherent with classical human self-understandings. Moral education may enlighten and elevate the human nature that has evolved biologically.