Religion & Science

Two brief things:

First, I've put up some more Spring photos on my Flickr page, so if you haven't looked for a while, follow the new link on the sidebar to 'My Flickr Page'.

Second, I spent a good bit of today listening to a recording of one of the debates from Professor Dan Dennett's recent UK tour, which was designed to promote his new(ish) book 'Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Global Phenomenon'. The book has caused a bit of a storm of controversy in the US apparently, although listening to this lecture from the more secular UK, it's a bit hard to see why.

Dennett - who for those who haven't heard of him from Laura - is a Professor at Tufts. He has a reputation for being rather intolerant of those who do not share his faith in scientific method or his view that it is of primary importance in philosophy. In other words, I'm not sure he and I would agree on very much, philosophically speaking. Still, despite this reputation, his contribution to this debate comes across as pretty gentle. He describes it as a 'sketch of a sketch' of what a naturalistic theory of the evolution of religion might look like. He's not claiming to have falsified religion, or indeed to have proved anything. Instead, he's just trying to provoke a bit of healthy debate on a subject about which a lot of people are still absurdly, disappointingly dogmatic.

The best thing about this lecture though is probably Alister McGrath. He's a Christian Scientist, which is the kind of title that would normally send me running for the hills. But he gives Dennett more than a run for his money. The nicest thing about him - and I guess about Dennett's performance here too - is that he is gracious and open-minded. He is genuinely interested in exploring the issues, and not in scoring points with the audience or with 'winning' the debate. Both speakers make some insightful points, and points that I think anyone can appreciate, whether they have any philosophical background and interests or not.

I think the recording, which you can find here, is around an hour long, so I recommend listening to it in bits as I did, but it is well worth listening to, as it encourages us all to reconsider our prejudices on these emotive issues.

[Thanks to Jess for pointing out my original mistake. I confused Alister McGrath (Oxford) with Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame). This was a misunderstanding on my part, a result of a conversation I had with Laura about Notre Dame. Apologies for the confusion.]