Dialogues Between Faith And Reason

Download or read book Dialogues between Faith and Reason written by John H. Smith and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has asked if the "death of God," proclaimed by Nietzsche as the event of modernity, was inevitable. Did the empowering of new forms of rationality in Western culture beginning around 1500 lead necessarily to the reduction or privatization of faith? In Dialogues between Faith and Reason, John H. Smith traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the "slippery slope" of secularization—from Luther and Erasmus, through Idealism, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary theory such as that of Derrida, Habermas, Vattimo, and Asad. At the same time, Smith points to the persistence of a tradition that grew out of the Reformation and continues in the mostly Protestant philosophical reflection on whether and how faith can be justified by reason. In this accessible and vigorously argued book, Smith posits that faith and reason have long been locked in mutual engagement in which they productively challenge each other as partners in an ongoing "dialogue." Smith is struck by the fact that although in the secularized West the death of God is said to be fundamental to the modern condition, our current post-modernity is often characterized as a "postsecular" time. For Smith, this means not only that we are experiencing a broad-based "return of religion" but also, and more important for his argument, that we are now able to recognize the role of religion within the history of modernity. Emphasizing that, thanks to the logos located "in the beginning," the death of God is part of the inner logic of the Christian tradition, he argues that this same strand of reasoning also ensures that God will always "return" (often in new forms). In Smith's view, rational reflection on God has both undermined and justified faith, while faith has rejected and relied on rational argument. Neither a defense of atheism nor a call to belief, his book explores the long history of their interaction in modern religious and philosophical thought.

Download or read book Between Faith and Doubt written by J. Hick and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This short book is a lively dialogue between a religious believer and a skeptic. It covers all the main issues including different ideas of God, the good and bad in religion, religious experience and neuroscience, pain and suffering, death and life after death, and includes interesting autobiographical revelations.

Download or read book Dialogues between Faith and Reason written by John H. Smith and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has asked if the "death of God," proclaimed by Nietzsche as the event of modernity, was inevitable. Did the empowering of new forms of rationality in Western culture beginning around 1500 lead necessarily to the reduction or privatization of faith? In Dialogues between Faith and Reason, John H. Smith traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the "slippery slope" of secularization—from Luther and Erasmus, through Idealism, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary theory such as that of Derrida, Habermas, Vattimo, and Asad. At the same time, Smith points to the persistence of a tradition that grew out of the Reformation and continues in the mostly Protestant philosophical reflection on whether and how faith can be justified by reason. In this accessible and vigorously argued book, Smith posits that faith and reason have long been locked in mutual engagement in which they productively challenge each other as partners in an ongoing "dialogue." Smith is struck by the fact that although in the secularized West the death of God is said to be fundamental to the modern condition, our current post-modernity is often characterized as a "postsecular" time. For Smith, this means not only that we are experiencing a broad-based "return of religion" but also, and more important for his argument, that we are now able to recognize the role of religion within the history of modernity. Emphasizing that, thanks to the logos located "in the beginning," the death of God is part of the inner logic of the Christian tradition, he argues that this same strand of reasoning also ensures that God will always "return" (often in new forms). In Smith's view, rational reflection on God has both undermined and justified faith, while faith has rejected and relied on rational argument. Neither a defense of atheism nor a call to belief, his book explores the long history of their interaction in modern religious and philosophical thought.

Download or read book An Awareness of What is Missing written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time.

Download or read book Science and Religion written by Yves Gingras and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we hear renewed calls for a dialogue between science and religion: why has the old question of the relations between science and religion now returned to the public domain and what is at stake in this debate? To answer these questions, historian and sociologist of science Yves Gingras retraces the long history of the troubled relationship between science and religion, from the condemnation of Galileo for heresy in 1633 until his rehabilitation by John Paul II in 1992. He reconstructs the process of the gradual separation of science from theology and religion, showing how God and natural theology became marginalized in the scientific field in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the dominant trend among historians of science, Gingras argues that science and religion are social institutions that give rise to incompatible ways of knowing, rooted in different methodologies and forms of knowledge, and that there never was, and cannot be, a genuine dialogue between them. Wide-ranging and authoritative, this new book on one of the fundamental questions of Western thought will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history of science and of religion as well as to general readers who are intrigued by the new and much-publicized conversations about the alleged links between science and religion.

Download or read book The God Dialogues written by Torin Andrew Alter and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The God Dialogues is an intriguing and extensive philosophical debate about the existence of God. Engaging and accessible, it covers all the main arguments for and against God's existence, from traditional philosophical "proofs" to arguments that involve the latest developments in biology and physics. Three main characters represent the principal views: Theodore Logan, the theist; Eva Lucien, the atheist; and Gene Sesquois, the agnostic. They discuss the meaning of life and its connection to God's existence. This in turn leads to vigorous debates about morality and theism, evidence for and against God's existence, probability and the rationality of belief, and the relationship between faith and reason. The strongest arguments from all three perspectives are fairly represented.

Download or read book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion written by David Hume and published by . This book was released on 1779 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical work written by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Through dialogue, three fictional characters named Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes debate the nature of God's existence. While all three agree that a god exists, they differ sharply in opinion on God's nature or attributes and how, or if, humankind can come to knowledge of a deity. In the Dialogues, Hume's characters debate a number of arguments for the existence of God, and arguments whose proponents believe through which we may come to know the nature of God. Such topics debated include the argument from design - for which Hume uses a house - and whether there is more suffering or good in the world (Argument from evil)