Chapter Four: How We Make Sense Of Things
CHAPTER FOUR: HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF THINGS
1. Peter R. Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 173.
2. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Double-day, 1967), 24. See also the more developed approach in C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 26–148.
3. Paul Humphreys, The Chances of Explanation: Causal Explanation in the Social, Medical, and Physical Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). See also James Woodward, Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
4. Paul Thagard, “The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory Choice,” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 76–92; Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004).
5. Michael Friedman, “Explanation and Scientific Understanding,” Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): 5–19; Paul Kitcher, “Explanatory Unification and the Causal Structure of the World,” in Scientific Explanation, ed. P. Kitcher and W. Salmon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 410–505.
6. Robert W. Smith, The Expanding Universe: Astronomy’s “Great Debate,” 1900–1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe. A History of Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
7. Jeremy Bernstein, Three Degrees above Zero: Bell Laboratories in the Information Age (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1984).
8. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, updated ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
9. Some philosophers have argued that the emergence of a quantum particle from a quantum vacuum is an example of something that begins to exist uncaused out of nothing. This, however, rests on a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics: see Alexander Pruss, The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 160–69.
10. For an introduction to basic Christian understandings of creation, see Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 5th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 215–22.
11. William Lane Craig, “In Defense of Theistic Arguments,” in The Future of Atheism, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 67–96.
12. See Pietro Corsi, Evolution before Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
13. Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1887), 2:155.
14. John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (London: SPCK, 2008), 84.
15. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 2nd ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 684.