Dr Paul Allen

English: Alvin Plantinga after telling a joke at the beginning of a lecture on science and religion delivered at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The twentieth century has seen philosophers of religion, such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne , reaffirm the rationality of faith and reinvigorate traditional debates about reasons for belief in God—catalysed in part by new scientific understandings of the origins of the universe. There’s a growing consensus that belief in God is perfectly rational—unless, of course, you define rationality in terms that deliberately exclude such a belief.5 Rationality is less concerned with adopting a particular starting point or conclusion than with the rules that regulate reflective discussion leading to a conclusion. New Atheist writers often define the term beyond its fundamental sense, holding that it demands we interpret the world in a specific way that excludes belief in God. Yet this interpretation c...

English: Freeman Dyson (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Major revolutions in science are somewhat rare and frequently ignored by the nonscientist. A new book titled The New Story of Science hopes to make the most recent revolution more understandable. The book is the culmination of five years of collaborative effort by theoretical physicist George Stanciu and philosopher Robert Augros. They believe they hear the creak of masts and timbers as the ship of science alters the course plotted for it in earlier centuries. Every civilization has a cosmic worldview, or story. The scientific story that was gradually built up by research in physics and biology during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was progressively materialistic. But now, argue these authors, science is shifting from this old story to a new story due to the startling discoveries of Einstein, Heisenberg, Sherrington, Eccles, and Penfield. In the early phases of modern science, theism was still dominant. Newto...