Science & Religion: Anthologies and Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10217/100492

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 94

Open Access
Responsible man in reformed theology: Calvin versus the Westminister Confession
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1970) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Cambridge University Press, publisher
In the concept of the essential nature of responsible persons, Calvin and the Calvinists that followed him differed significantly. The Calvinists formulated what they called a double covenant between God and humans, a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. Humans were placed in creation and expected to keep God's law, and to be judged on their merits. Humans sinned, broken God's law and failed to keep this covenant. On this basis they are judged, and lost. In the covenant of grace, God enters and redeems human life by grace, and this is the Biblical story in Israel, fulfilled in Christ. The danger that has beset Reformed thought is that in its use of covenant, nature, law, and grace, it makes of the Christian faith something which comes in where human powers fail. Humans need God only for the mending of life's wrongness, to rescue persons from their irresponsibility. The authentic Reformed witness makes place for this, but goes beyond. Religion belongs not just to the weakness of life, but also to its strength. A person's fundamental need for communion with a gracious God springs not merely from redemption, but more basically from one's dignity as a creature formed for grace. Grace belongs before sin, not less than after. In grace God made and makes responsible persons.
Open Access
Community: ecological and ecumenical
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1973) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Iliff Theological Seminary (Denver), publisher
The era of ecology brings a vision of one world environmentally. The ecumenical movement hopes for a community and dialogue of faiths. Both have a common etymological root in the Greek word "oikos," household. These two contemporary concerns, one in science, one in religion, offer the possibility of a more comprehensive sense of community. In the Bible, the earliest sin is ecological, humans despise their garden earth, and the sin of brother against brother follows. Our charge is to live on earth and keep it. Keeping Eden requires that we be our brothers's keeper.
Open Access
Schlick's Responsible man
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1975) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author
A criticism of the concept of responsibility in the work of Moritz Schlick. The solution, or dissolution, of moral responsibility is not nearly so simple as Schlick has proposed. Upon analysis, his hope of retaining responsibility under ethics as an applied science collapses.
Open Access
The Pasqueflower
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; American Museum of Natural History, publisher
The Pasqueflower surviving through winter, blooming at the Pasque, Easter, offers a glimpse of the precocious exuberance of life, a token of the covenant of life to continue in beauty despite the wintry storms. To pause at first encountering it in spring is to find a moment of truth, a moment of memory and promise. Let winters come, life will flower on as long as Earth shall last.
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-, 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 K. S. Shrader-Frechette's Environmental ethics
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1982) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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 Paoli Soleri's The omega seed: an eschatological hypothesis
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1983) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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 J. Ronald Engel's Sacred sands: the struggle for community in the Indiana Dunes
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1984) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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 A. N. Wilson's How can we know? An essay on the Christian religion
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1986) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Princeton Theological Seminary, publisher
A British novelist, critic, and controversial former editor of the Spectator is here an intense disciple of Christ. How Can We Know? is A. N. Wilson's searching Apologia Pro Vita Sua, urbane, gracefully written, and a remarkable tribute to the vitality of Christianity in what many predicted to be a post-Christian generation. Wilson is shrewd in his capacity to recontact a person behind the witness of the early church and the New Testament, a person there who becomes a Presence here.
Open Access
Review of Kenneth Cauthen's Process ethics: a constructive system
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1986) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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
Methods in scientific and religious inquiry
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1987) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Random House, publisher
In generic logical form science and religion are more alike than is often supposed, especially at their cores. At the same time, science and religion typically offer alternative interpretations of experience, the scientific interpretation being based on causality, the religious interpretation based on meaning. But both disciplines are rational, and both are susceptible to improvement over the centuries; both use governing theoretical paradigms as they confront experience. The conflicts between scientific and religious interpretations arise because the boundary between causality and meaning is semipermeable.
Open Access
Review of David L. Schindler's Beyond mechanism: the universe in recent Catholic thought
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1987) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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
Nature, history, and God
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1987) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Random House, publisher
Natural history, with its increasingly emergent complexity over evolutionary time, becomes deeply historical, with superintending levels, supercharged and suggesting Divine Spirit present in historical nature. Three types of theistic explanation are: scientific existentialist theism, process theism, and trans-scientific theism. Insight in both science and religion involves doing the truth in correspondent truthfulness, on the cutting edge of nature and history.
Open Access
Science education and moral education
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1988) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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.
Open Access
Review of D. J. Bartholomew's God of chance
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1989) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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
Creation: order and chance in physics and biology
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1990-04-19) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, speaker; Dean, Charles, speaker; Crombie, Bob, speaker
The relations between physics and theology are surprisingly cordial at present; the relations between biology and theology are more difficult. A key to understanding the interrelations of all three: physics, biology, and religion lies in examining the concept of order and disorder. Astrophysics and nuclear physics are describing a universe "fine-tuned" for life, although physics has also found a universe with indeterminacy in it. Meanwhile evolutionary biology and molecular biology seem to be discovering that the history of life is a random walk with much struggle and chance, driven by selfish genes, although they have also found that in this random walk order is built up over the millennia across a negentropic upslope, attaining in Earth's natural history the most complex and highly ordered phenomena known in the universe, such as ecosystems, organisms, and, most of all, the human mind. Holmes Rolston lecture "Creation: Order and Chance in Physics and Biology" was the 15th Henry Harrell Memorial Lecture in Religion presented at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee on April 19, 1990.
Open Access
Review of John Leslie's Universes and John Leslie's Physical cosmology and philosophy
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1991) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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
Rolston Research Conference - Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, Berkeley, 1991
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1991) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, publisher
Article 1: I begin with some autobiography, hoping to conclude with an ethic for Christians for creation. I move from the particular to the universal. This is a story of how living locally has led me to think globally. I see my experience "writ large" as promising for Christians who are asking what it means to reside on a good Earth. What does it profit to gain the world, only to lose it to gain it economically, to fence it in, pave it over, harvest it, only to lose it scientifically, aesthetically, recreationally, religiously, as a wonderland of natural history, as a realm of integral wildness that transcends and supports us and perhaps even to lose some of our soul in the tradeoff? -- Article 2: Values are cumulatively generated in evolutionary natural history. Reductionist accounts of selfish-genes and genetic determination of human behavior are inadequate. Information is generated, shared, distributed, multiplied, enriched over evolutionary history, coded in genes, with this process of information generation transcended in human cultural history, especially evidenced in the genesis of science, ethics and religion. This compounding of values generated not only permits but invites religious analysis and explanation. -- Article 3: Commentators on Rolston's lectures: Robert T. Schimke, "Reflections from a Molecular Biologist," pages 24-26; Walter R. Hearn, "Science, Selves, and Stories," pages 26-31; Carol J. Tabler, "Value Vocabulary in Biology and Theology," pages 32-33; Ted Peters, "Beyond the Genes: Epigenesis and God," pages 34-35; Margaret R. McLean, "A Moral World 'Red in Tooth and Claw'," pages 36-38.
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-, 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
Wildlife and wildlands: a Christian perspective
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1992) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Fortress Press, publisher
The principal focus of Biblical faith is the culture established in the land. At the same time the Bible is full of constant reminders of the natural givens. Justice is to run down like waters, and the land flows with milk and honey. The fauna is included within the covenant. Life in artificial environments, without experiencing the divine creation is ungodly. Bringing a perspective of depth, Christian conviction wants sanctuaries not only for humans, but also for wildlife.