Notes
Notes
Chapter 1
| 1. | John Banville, The Sea, New York: Vintage Books, 2005, 53. |
| 2. | For an excellent study of this phenomenon from 1933 to 1973, see Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. |
| 3. | Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, 2 vols, London: Nisbet, 1941–3, vol. 2, 214. |
| 4. | Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, London: Faber & Faber, 1995, 287–90. |
| 5. | Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006, 54–68. |
| 6. | See Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Note especially his reflections on Marcus Aurelius, who was ‘trying to do what, in the last analysis, we are all trying to do: to live in complete consciousness and lucidity, to give to each of our instants its full intensity, and to give meaning to our entire life’. Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 312–13. |
| 7. | Susan R. Wolf, ‘The Meanings of Lives’, in The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 89–106. |
| 8. | Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, New York: Thomas Crowell, 1910, 17. For a philosopher’s reflections on this concern, see Pierre Hadot, ‘Il y a de nos jours des professeurs de philosophie, mais pas de philosophes’. In Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. Paris: A. Michel, 2002, 333–42. |
| 9. | Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 135. |
10. Happily, some professional philosophers are more than willing to engage with such questions. See especially the highly engaging study of Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, New York: Pantheon, 2014.
11. See, for example, Paul T.P. Wong, The Human Quest for Meaning: Theories, Research, and Applications, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2012.
12. See, for example, Karen Gasper and Gerald L. Clore, ‘Attending to the Big Picture: Mood and Global Versus Local Processing of Visual Information’, Psychological Science 13 (2002): 34–40; Joshua A. Hicks and Laura A. King, ‘Meaning in Life and Seeing the Big Picture: Positive Affect and Global Focus’. Cognition and Emotion 21, no. 7 (2007): 1577–84.
13. G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006, 99.
14. See Jean-Charles Falardeau, ‘Le sens du merveilleux’, in Le merveilleux: Deuxième colloque sur les religions populaires, ed. Fernand Dumont, Jean-Paul Montminy and Michel Stein. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1973, 143–56.
15. Hermann Hesse, Mit dem Erstaunen fängt es an: Herkunft und Heimat, Natur und Kunst, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986.
16. A point argued with particular force and clarity in Roger Wagner and Andrew Briggs, The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
17. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 1–11.
18. For our different positions, see Richard Dawkins, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, London: Bantam Press, 2013; Alister E. McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Science, Faith and God, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.
19. For this phrase, see Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Essays, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, 19.
20. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b. See also Plato, Theaetetus, 154b–155c. For useful reflections on this theme, see Jerome Miller, In the Throe of Wonder. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, 11–52.
21. Michael Polanyi, ‘Science and Reality’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18, no. 3 (1967): 177–96, especially 177–9.
22. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/15/books/once-more-admired-than-bought-a-writer-finally-basks-in-success.html
23. Ru?diger Imhof, John Banville: A Critical Introduction, Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1989, 62. See also Elke D’Hoker, Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004, 17–48.
24. Lewis’s own views on this problem should be noted here: see Alister E. McGrath, ‘An Enhanced Vision of Rationality: C. S. Lewis on the Reasonableness of Christian Faith’. Theology 116, no. 6 (2013): 410–17.
25. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown Publishers, 1954, 41–9.
26. Peter B. Medawar and Jean Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas of Biology. London: Wildwood House, 1977, 171.
27. A good starting point is Michael J. MacKenzie and Roy F. Baumeister, ‘Meaning in Life: Nature, Needs, and Myth’. In Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, ed. Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netze. New York: Springer, 2014, 25–38.
28. Massimo Pigliucci, ‘New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2013): 142–53; quote at p. 144. See further Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998; Richard N. Williams and Daniel N. Robinson, eds. Scientism: The New Orthodoxy. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
29. Bernard Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, 182. Williams’s critique of this tendency is highly perceptive, and worth careful study.
30. William James. The Will to Believe. New York: Dover Publications, 1956, 51.
31. See Lloyd P. Gerson, God and Greek Philosophy: Studies in the Early History of Natural Theology. London: Routledge, 1994.
32. Susan R. Wolf, Meaning in Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, 10–11.
33. Alexander Wood, In Pursuit of Truth: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. London: Student Christian Movement, 1927, 102.
34. Salman Rushdie, Is Nothing Sacred? The Herbert Read Memorial Lecture. Cambridge: Granta, 1990, 8–9.
35. Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion. London: Transworld Publishers, 2014.
36. Victoria Harrison, ‘The Pragmatics of Defining Religion in a Multi-Cultural World’. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 59 (2006): 133–52.
37. For evaluations of this distorted idea, see Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. The ‘New Atheism’ tends to assume that American Protestantism provides a template for religion as a whole: see Donovan Schaefer, ‘Blessed, Precious Mistakes: Deconstruction, Evolution, and New Atheism in America’. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 76 (2014): 75–94.
38. Keith Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction. London: Routledge, 1999, 16.
39. On this ‘universal Darwinism’, see Richard Dawkins, ‘Darwin Triumphant: Darwinism as Universal Truth’. In A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Essays. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, 78–90.
40. Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2002, 17–18.
41. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage, 1999, 294.
42. For critical assessments of Wilson’s approach, see Ullica Segerstrale, ‘Wilson and the Unification of Science’. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, no. 1093 (2006): 46–73; Abraham G. Gibson, ‘Edward O. Wilson and the Organicist Tradition’. Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2013): 599–630.
43. Alister E. McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.
Chapter 2
| 1. | Raymond Carver, ‘Late Fragment’. In All of Us: The Collected Poems. London: Harvill Press, 1996, 294. |
| 2. | For an excellent survey, see Louis Tay and Ed Diener, ‘Needs and Subjective Well-Being around the World’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101, no. 2 (2011): 354–65. |
| 3. | Sigmund Freud, ‘One of the Difficulties of Psycho-Analysis’. Journal of Mental Science 67 (1921): 34–9. |
| 4. | Gabriel W. Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. |
| 5. | Dennis Danielson, ‘[The Myth] that Copernicanism demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos’. In Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, 50–8. |
| 6. | Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 2001, 82. |
| 7. | Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. London: Routledge, 2014, 349. |
| 8. | Robin Dunbar, The Human Story. Faber & Faber, 2004, 197–9. |
| 9. | For a good overview, see Richard N. Williams and Daniel N. Robinson, eds, Scientism: The New Orthodoxy. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. |
10. Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014, 161.
11. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books, 2010, 5.
12. For a good discussion, see Paul Thagard, ‘Why Cognitive Science Needs Philosophy and Vice Versa’. Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009): 237–54.
13. Charles A. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1953, 21.
14. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, 20. See further Alister E. McGrath, ‘Multiple Perspectives, Levels, and Narratives: Three Models for Correlating Science and Religion’. In Louise Hickman and Neil Spurway, eds, Forty Years of Science and Religion. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2016, 10–29.
15. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, 21.
16. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, 21.
17. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. London: Simon & Schuster, 1994, 3; 11.
18. For a detailed discussion of Dawkins’ views, see Alister E. McGrath, Dawkins’ God: From The Selfish Gene to The God Delusion. 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
19. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1995, 133.
20. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 21.
21. Noted in John Dupre?, Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, 1–3.
22. Cited in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time. Oxford: Sheed & Ward, 2003, 172.
23. For my own use of anthropology, see Alister E. McGrath, ‘Narratives of Significance: Reflections on the Engagement of Anthropology and Christian Theology’. In A Theologically Engaged Anthropology, ed. Derrick Lemons, New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
24. See, for example, John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. For concerns about its approach, see Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘When the Bough Breaks’. History of Religions 12, no. 4 (May, 1973): 342–71.
25. Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
26. David I. Kertzer, ‘Social Anthropology and Social Science History’. Social Science History 33, no. 1 (2009): 1–16.
27. Rodolfo Maggio, ‘The Anthropology of Storytelling and the Storytelling of Anthropology’. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology 5, no. 2 (2014): 89–106.
28. See further the detailed discussion in McGrath, ‘Multiple Perspectives, Levels, and Narratives’ (ch. 2, note 14 above).
Chapter 3
| 1. | Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, X.vii.15. |
| 2. | Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 30 vols, Berlin: Reimer, 1902, vol. 5, 161. |
| 3. | Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, II.1–2. |
| 4. | Pope, Essay on Man, II.17–18. |
| 5. | For discussion of this general question around this time, see Kevin L. Cope, Criteria of Certainty: Truth and Judgment in the English Enlightenment. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. |
| 6. | Pope, Essay on Man, II.19–30; 35–8. |
| 7. | For example, see James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. |
| 8. | For a good discussion, see Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. |
| 9. | Rowan Williams, On Augustine. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 22. |
10. Liliann Manning, Daniel Cassel and Jean-Christophe Cassel, ‘St. Augustine’s Reflections on Memory and Time and the Current Concept of Subjective Time in Mental Time Travel’. Behavioral Sciences 3, no. 2 (2013): 232–43.
11. See, for example, Karl K. Szpunar, ‘On Subjective Time’. Cortex 47 (2011): 409–11; idem, ‘Evidence for an Implicit Influence of Memory on Future Thinking’. Memory & Cognition 38 (2010): 531–40.
12. See especially Alister E. McGrath, ‘The Enigma of Autobiography: Critical Reflections on Surprised by Joy’. In The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 7–30.
13. Lydia Schumacher, Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
14. See the detailed discussion in Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
15. For example, see Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and Renaissance Civilization. Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2012.
16. The Latin title is ‘Oratio de dignitate hominis’.
17. The rich diversity of Renaissance understandings of human nature is considered in Andreas Höfele and Stephan Laqué, eds, Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011.
18. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1956, 7 [I have altered the translation at points for accuracy].
19. For this translation, see William H. Race, Pindar: Olympian Odes; Pythian Odes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, 239.
20. For reflections on these themes, see Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
21. G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994, 180.
22. Isaac Kalimi and Seth Francis Corning Richardson, eds, Sennacherib at the Gates of Jerusalem: Story, History and Historiography. Leiden: Brill, 2014. For an overstatement of these concerns, see Antti Laato, ‘Assyrian Propaganda and the Falsification of History in the Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib’. Vetus Testamentum 45, no. 3 (1995): 198–226.
23. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, 82.
24. Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 91.
25. Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 50.
26. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997, 14.
27. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin, 1992, 321.
28. Iris Murdoch, ‘Ethics and the Imagination’. Irish Theological Quarterly 52 (1986): 81–95; quote at p. 90.
29. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 78.
30. Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 93.
31. For a fuller consideration of this theme, see Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
32. Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 58.
Alan Grafen, ‘The Intellectual Contribution of The Selfish Gene to Evolutionary Theory’. In Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, ed. Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 66–74; quote at p. 73.
33. Typewritten text of 1966 reproduced in Richard Dawkins, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist – A Memoir. London: Bantam, 2013, 200.
34. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 9–10.
See Marek Kohm, ‘To Rise Above’. In Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, ed. Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 248–54.
35. Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: The Best and Worst of Human Nature. London: Granta Books, 2006, 21.
36. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 10.
37. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 200–1.
Chapter 4
| 1. | T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages. London: Faber & Faber, 1941. |
| 2. | To understand his importance, readers might like to consider Carlo Brentari, Jakob von Uexküll: The Discovery of the Umwelt between Biosemiotics and Theoretical Biology. New York: Springer, 2015. |
| 3. | Jakob von Uexku?ll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, 53. |
| 4. | For a good discussion of this view, see Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 21–34. |
| 5. | Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982, 166. |
| 6. | For comment on this complex work, see Harry M. Solomon, The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’. London: University of Alabama Press, 1993. |
| 7. | Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–1916. New York: Harper, 1961, 75. |
| 8. | John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God. London: SCM Press, 1979, 19. |
| 9. | Taylor, The Go-Between God, 19. |
10. C.S. Lewis, Essay Collection. London: HarperCollins, 2002, 21.
11. For a discussion of this point, see Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003, 188.
12. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. London: HarperCollins, 2002, 197. For a full account of Lewis’s conversion, see Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life – Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, 131–51.
13. C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 90 [my emphasis].
14. Robin Scroggs, ‘New Being: Renewed Mind: New Perception – Paul’s View of the Source of Ethical Insight.’ In The Text and the Times: New Testament Essays for Today. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, 167–83.
15. The same image is used in 1 Clement 36:2 and 59:3. This early Christian letter is thought to date from around the year 96.
16. For a full discussion, see Alister E. McGrath, ‘The Privileging of Vision: Lewis’s Metaphors of Light, Sun, and Sight’. In The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 83–104.
17. C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950, 176–7.
18. Stuart Feder, Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, 150–1.
19. John Alexander Mackay, A Preface to Christian Theology. London: Nisbet, 1942, 27–54.
20. For a biography, see John Mackay Metzger, The Hand and the Road: The Life and Times of John A. Mackay. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.
21. Mackay, Preface to Christian Theology, 29.
22. Mackay, Preface to Christian Theology, 36.
23. Mackay, Preface to Christian Theology, 32.
24. Mackay, Preface to Christian Theology, 37.
25. Mackay, Preface to Christian Theology, 44.
26. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 67–89.
27. Alwyn Ruddock, ‘The Earliest Original English Seaman’s Rutter and Pilot’s Chart’. Journal of Navigation 14, no. 4 (1961): 409–43.
28. Hermann Minkowski, ‘Raum und Zeit’. Jahresbericht der deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 18 (1909): 75–88.
29. J. Daniel Gifford, Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion. Sacramento: Nitrosyncretic Press, 2000, 110–11.
30. Einstein, letter of 21 March 1955; Pierre Speziali, ed., Albert Einstein – Michele Besso Correspondence, 1903–55. Paris: Hermann, 1972, 537–8.
31. See P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1963, 37–8.
32. Lewis, Essay Collection, 438–43.
33. C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 137.
34. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 140–1.
Chapter 5
| 1. | Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Vintage, 2012, 68. |
| 2. | There is a massive literature. A good starting point is Michael J. MacKenzie and Roy F. Baumeister, ‘Meaning in Life: Nature, Needs, and Myth’. In Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, ed. Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netze. New York: Springer, 2014, 25–38. |
| 3. | Joanna Collicutt, The Psychology of Christian Character Formation. Norwich: SCM Press, 2015, 142–59. |
| 4. | Michael F. Steger, ‘Meaning in Life’. In Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, ed. Shane J. Lopez. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009, 679–87. |
| 5. | Steger, ‘Meaning in Life’, 682. |
| 6. | Paul T.P. Wong, ed., The Human Quest for Meaning: Theories, Research, and Applications. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2012; Phillip R. Shaver and Mario Mikulincer, eds. Meaning, Mortality, and Choice: The Social Psychology of Existential Concerns. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2012. |
| 7. | Crystal L. Park and Ian A. Gutierrez, ‘Global and Situational Meanings in the Context of Trauma: Relations with Psychological Well-Being’. Counselling Psychology Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2013): 8–25. |
| 8. | Robert A. Emmons, The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns: Motivation and Spirituality in Personality. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. |
| 9. | See the excellent account of this in Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011. London: Little, Brown, 2012. |
10. C. Daniel Batson and E.L. Stocks, ‘Religion: Its Core Psychological Function’. In Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, ed. Jeff Greenberg, Sander L. Koole and ?Tom Pyszczynski. New York: Guilford, 2013, 141–55.
11. Ralph W. Hood, Peter C. Hill and W. Paul Williamson, The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism. New York: Guilford Press, 2005; Ralph W. Hood, Peter C. Hill and Bernard Spilka, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach. 4th edn. New York: Guilford Press, 2015.
12. Joshua A. Hicks and Laura A. King, ‘Meaning in Life and Seeing the Big Picture: Positive Affect and Global Focus’. Cognition and Emotion 21, no. 7 (2007): 1577–84.
13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Abingdon: Routledge, 2001, 88.
14. Terrence W. Tilley, ‘Problems of Theodicy: Background’. In Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Natural Evil, ed. Nancey Murphy, Robert J. Russell and William R. Stoeger. Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 2007, 35–51; quote at p. 45.
15. For the issues, see Alister E. McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature: The Promise of a Christian Natural Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, 73–100.
16. For Traherne’s own approach, see Belden C. Lane, ‘Thomas Traherne and the Awakening of Want’, Anglican Theological Review 81, no. 4 (1999): 651–64.
17. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, New York: Cosimo, 2010, 20.
18. Robert Iliffe, ‘Newton, God, and the Mathematics of the Two Books’. In Mathematicians and Their Gods: Interactions between Mathematics and Religious Beliefs, ed. Snezana Lawrence and Mark McCartney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 121–44.
19. Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. London: Phoenix, 1995, 133.
20. Karl R. Popper, ‘Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind’. Dialectica 32 (1978): 339–55; quote at p. 342.
21. Alexander Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011, 7–8.
22. Robert F. Almeder, Harmless Naturalism: The Limits of Science and the Nature of Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 1998, 36–8.
23. See the important argument of Scott James, An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011, 133–8.
24. Charles Dickens, Hard Times. London: Wordsworth, 1995, 3.
25. Dickens, Hard Times, 11.
26. Dickens, Hard Times, 75.
27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–1916. New York: Harper, 1961, 74.
28. Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, ‘Narrating the Self’. Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 19–43.
29. Michael Bamberg, ‘Who Am I? Narration and Its Contribution to Self and Identity’. Theory & Psychology 21, no. 1 (2011): 3–24.
30. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, eds, Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.
31. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, 87–116.
32. Joseph Henderson, ‘Ancient Myth and Modern Man’. In Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday, 1964, 104–57.
33. J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins, 2001, 56. For reflections on this theme, see Fabienne Claire Caland, ‘Le mythos spermatikos’. In Horizons du mythe, ed. Denise Brassard and Fabienne Claire Caland. Montréal: Cahiers du CELAT, 2007, 7–32.
34. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 71. This theme is discussed further in Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2002.
35. Ibid.
Chapter 6
| 1. | Thomas Nagel, The Last Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 130. |
| 2. | Carl Sagan, ‘Why We Need To Understand Science’. Skeptical Inquirer 14, no. 3 (Spring 1990). |
| 3. | For the issues, see Hans J. Ladegaard, ‘Demonising the Cultural Other: Legitimising Dehumanisation of Foreign Domestic Helpers in the Hong Kong Press’. Discourse, Context & Media 2, no. 3 (2013): 131–40. |
| 4. | Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2002, 105–20. |
| 5. | Pinker, The Blank Slate, 110–11. |
| 6. | Hermann Hesse, ‘Die Sehnsucht unser Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung’. Uhu 2 (1926): 3–14. |
| 7. | See Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment’. Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814–34. |
| 8. | ‘Parce que nous sommes au monde, nous sommes condamnés au sens’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1945, xiv. |
| 9. | The view of Michael Oakeshott: see especially his Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1962. |
10. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 6.
11. Howard Margolis, Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
12. Margolis, Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, 21.
13. Daniel C. Krawczyk, ‘Contributions of the Prefrontal Cortex to the Neural Basis of Human Decision Making’. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 26 (2002): 631–64; Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012, 3–108.
14. See, for example, Herbert McCabe, Faith within Reason. London: Continuum, 2007. An older rebuttal of ‘believing in God as an object’ can be found in Emil Brunner, Our Faith. London: SCM Press, 1949, 13–14.
15. William Ralph Inge, Faith and Its Psychology. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910, 197.
16. For a philosophically rigorous account of Feuerbach’s views, see Larry Johnston, Between Transcendence and Nihilism: Species-Ontology in the Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, New York: Peter Lang, 1995.
17. Brendan Wallace, Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won’t Work. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010, 4.
18. Nagel, The Last Word, 130.
19. Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail’.
20. For Lewis’s wrestling with this issue, see Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, 135–41.
21. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
22. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, I.i.1.
23. Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction. New York: Routledge, 1990, 144–68.
24. For the chaotic implications of this position, see Peter Stoicheff, ‘The Chaos of Metafiction’. In Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 85–99.
25. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982, xlii.
26. Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986, 53–4.
27. David Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992.
28. Philip E. Devine, Natural Law Ethics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000, 32–4.
29. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd edn. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, 107.
30. Kathleen Wall, ‘Ethics, Knowledge, and the Need for Beauty: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Ian McEwan’s Saturday’. University of Toronto Quarterly 77, no. 2 (2008): 757–88; quote at p. 757.
31. For an extended discussion of these issues, see Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996; idem, Knowledge and Power: Towards a Political Philosophy of Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
32. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good. London: Macmillan, 1970. For discussion and analysis, see Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, eds, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
33. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 88.
34. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Devils, trans. Michael R. Katz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 691. The Russian title of the novel can also be translated into English as The Demons or The Possessed.
35. Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein, eds, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987, 446.
36. For an excellent discussion, see C. Stephen Evans, Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998.
37. Susan R. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, 7.
38. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, 10.
39. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, 11.
40. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, 10.
41. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, 11.
42. See especially C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. London: Oxford University Press, 1943.
43. For the defence of this position, see Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
44. On Kierkegaard’s important discussion of the ‘subjectivity of truth’, see Merigala Gabriel, Subjectivity and Religious Truth in the Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010.
45. Letter to William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, 7 September 1943; The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: Volume II, 1937 to 1943, ed. Barbara Reynolds. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 429.
46. For detailed comment on this work, see Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Love’s Sacred Order: The Four Loves Revisited. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000.
47. C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960, 103.
48. See Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. Oxford University Press, 1996, 13–44.
49. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton, 1998.
50. Lewis, The Four Loves, 180.
Chapter 7
| 1. | Anne Frank, diary entry for 15 July 1944; Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Bantam, 1993, 263. |
| 2. | John Locke, Works, 10 vols, London: Thomas Tegg, 1823, vol. 8, p. 447. |
| 3. | See especially Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. |
| 4. | See the analysis in Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. |
| 5. | Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1946, xiv. |
| 6. | Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays. New York: Viking Press, 1979, 2–5; 161–2. |
| 7. | Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 114–15. |
| 8. | Blaise Pascal, Pensées. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003, 64. |
| 9. | Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1946, xiv. |
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung; oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert. Munich: Hanser, 1954, 7. ‘Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie?’ Nietzsche then added the teasing comment: ‘Human beings don’t strive for happiness (only the English do that).’
11. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963.
12. Kenneth I. Pargament, Bruce W. Smith, Harold G. Koenig and Lisa Perez, ‘Patterns of Positive and Negative Religious Coping with Major Life Stressors’. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, no. 4 (1998): 710–24. For discussion, see Joanna Collicutt, The Psychology of Christian Character Formation. Norwich: SCM Press, 2015, 232–3.
13. See Manfred Zaumseil, Silke Schwarz, Mechthild von Vacano, Gavin Brent Sullivan and Johana E. Prawitasari-Hadiyono, eds. Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters: The Case of an Earthquake in Java, Indonesia. New York: Springer, 2014, 53–4.
14. Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing: An Autobiography. Boston: Beacon Press, 1954, 13.
15. Joanna Collicutt McGrath, ‘Post-Traumatic Growth and the Origins of Early Christianity’. Mental Health, Religion and Culture 9 (2006): 291–306.
16. Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, 263.
17. For a useful account of Lewis’s notion of rationality, see Alister E. McGrath, ‘An Enhanced Vision of Rationality: C. S. Lewis on the Reasonableness of Christian Faith’. Theology 116, no. 6 (2013): 410–17.
18. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain. HarperCollins: New York, 2001, 91. Note also the later comment (p. 94) that pain ‘plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul’.
19. Letter to Warnie Lewis, 3 December 1939; Letters, vol. 2, 302. Emphasis in original.
20. C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001, 6–7. For a perceptive analysis of the issues raised by this work, see Ann Loades, ‘C. S. Lewis: Grief Observed, Rationality Abandoned, Faith Regained’. Literature and Theology 3 (1989): 107–21.
21. For the phenomenon, see Joanna Collicutt McGrath, ‘Post-Traumatic Growth and the Origins of Early Christianity’. Mental Health, Religion and Culture 9 (2006): 291–306.
22. See, for example, Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 236–72.
23. For example, see James I. Packer, ‘An Introduction to Systematic Spirituality’. Crux 26, no. 1 (1990): 2–8. A good account of the possibilities of enrichment and integration of theology and spirituality can be found in F. LeRon Shults and Steven J. Sandage, Transforming Spirituality: Integrating Theology and Psychology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006.
24. Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Chapter 8
| 1. | David Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton. New edn, rev. W.T. Lynn. London: Tegg, 1875, 303. |
| 2. | Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1978, 267–79. |
| 3. | Eiseley, The Star Thrower, 278. |
| 4. | Eiseley, The Star Thrower, 271. |
| 5. | Eiseley, The Star Thrower, 169–85. |
| 6. | Eiseley, The Star Thrower, 182. |
| 7. | For a good account, see Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Note especially Fuller’s reflections (pp. 69–79) on the role of wonder in the thought of William James. |
| 8. | Johanna Spyri, Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre. Villingen: Nexx Verlag, 2014, 45. |
| 9. | Anthony J. Carroll, ‘Disenchantment, Rationality, and the Modernity of Max Weber’. Forum Philosophicum 16, no. 1 (2011): 117–37. |
10. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
11. For comment on these lines from Keats’s poem Lamia, see Andrew Motion, Keats. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 431–7; Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, 87–93.
12. A good example is Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. London: Penguin Books, 1998.
13. Huib J. Zuidervaart, ‘The “True Inventor” of the Telescope. A Survey of 400 Years of Debate’. In The Origins of the Telescope, ed. Albert Van Helden, Sven Dupré, Rob van Gent and Huib Zuidervaart. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2010, 9–44.
14. Albert Van Helden, ‘The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century’. Isis 65, no. 1 (1974): 38–58.
15. For the historical aspects of this insight, see Robin Downie, ‘Science and the Imagination in the Age of Reason’. Medical Humanities 27 (2001): 58–63.
16. Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. Boston: MIT Press, 1988, 127–8.
17. I here paraphrase the important analysis in Werner Heisenberg, Die Ordnung der Wirklichkeit. Munich: Piper Verlag, 1989, 38–52.
18. Heisenberg, Die Ordnung der Wirklichkeit, 44.
19. I explore some of these further in Alister E. McGrath, Enriching our Vision of Reality: Theology and the Natural Sciences in Dialogue. London: SPCK, 2016.
20. William James, The Will to Believe. New York: Dover Publications, 1956, 51.
21. For an accessible introduction to this phenomenon, see Ian Morison, Introduction to Astronomy and Cosmology. Oxford: Wiley, 2008, 1–3.
22. Heisenberg, Die Ordnung der Wirklichkeit, 44.
23. For Brunner’s point, see Alister E. McGrath, Emil Brunner: A Reappraisal. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, 50–4.
24. For my own contributions to discussion of this topic, see especially Alister E. McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature: The Promise of a Christian Natural Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
25. Kathryn Schifferdecker, Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
26. For comment on the reception of these lines, see Hartmut Günther, ‘Psalm 19 und die Verkündigung des Evangeliums unter den Völkern: Zum Verständnis von Psalm 19 bei Paulus und bei Luther’. In Unter einem Christus sein und streiten: Festschrift für Friedrich Wilhelm Hopf, ed. Jobst Schöne and Volker Stolle. Erlangen: Verlag ELM, 1980, 11–25.
27. James Barr, ‘Do We Perceive the Speech of the Heavens? A Question in Psalm 19’. In The Psalms and Other Studies on the Old Testament, ed. Jack C. Knight and Lawrence A. Sinclair. Nashotah, WI: Nashotah House Seminary, 1990, 11–17; Randall C. Zachman, ‘The Universe as the Living Image of God: Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation Reconsidered’. Concordia Theological Monthly 61 (1997): 299–312.
28. McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature, 18–22.
29. For a fuller discussion of this theme, see Alister E. McGrath, Dawkins’ God: From the Selfish Gene to the God Delusion. 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, 166–9.
30. Richard Dawkins, ‘A Survival Machine’. In The Third Culture, ed. John Brockman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 75–95; quote at p. 85.
31. Eugene Wigner, ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics’. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1960): 1–14, especially p. 8.
32. E.g., see John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding. London: SPCK, 1988, 20–1. For further discussion, see Daniel J. Cohen, Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
33. Paul Dirac, ‘The Relation between Mathematics and Physics’. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 59 (1938–9): 122–9.
34. Johann Kepler, Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Max Caspar, 22 vols, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1937–83, vol. 6, 233.
35. P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1963, 37–8.
Chapter 9
| 1. | Blaise Pascal, Pensées. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003, 61. |
| 2. | Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. London: Penguin, 1997, 2. |
| 3. | The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward Fitzgerald. London: Wordsworth, 1993, 66. |
| 4. | Marcel Arnould, Stephane Goriely and Kohji Takahashi, ‘The R-Process of Stellar Nucleosynthesis: Astrophysics and Nuclear Physics Achievements and Mysteries’. Physics Reports 450 (2007): 97–213. |
| 5. | Gordon C.F. Bearn, Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Existential Investigations. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997, 163–97. |
| 6. | Michael Mayne, This Sunrise of Wonder: Letters for the Journey. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008, 15. |
| 7. | G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006, 99. |
| 8. | Chesterton, Autobiography, 134. |
| 9. | Stephen Hawking, Black Holes: The Reith Lectures. London: Bantam, 2006. |
10. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 5 vols, Paris: Gallimard, 1991, vol. 3, 220.
11. Heidegger’s views on what constitutes ‘authentic existence’ are complex and contested. For a useful starting point, see Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds, Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
12. Douglas Burton-Christie, ‘Place-Making as Contemplative Practice’. Anglican Theological Review 91, no. 3 (2009): 347–71.
13. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith. 2nd edn. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2002, 5. More generally, see Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, 285–330.
14. Marc Augé, Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992. See further Emer O’Beirne, ‘Mapping the Non-Lieu in Marc Augé’s Writings’. Forum for Modern Language Studies 42/1 (2006): 38–50.
15. Matthew Arnold, Poems, 2 vols, London: Macmillan, 1891, vol. 2, 185.
16. C.S. Lewis, Essay Collection. London: HarperCollins, 2002, 96–106.
17. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. London: HarperCollins, 2002, 136–7.
18. For examples of such worldviews, see Carole M. Cusack, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, especially 7–25.
19. For a good introduction, see Ge?rard Valle?e, The Shaping of Christianity: The History and Literature of Its Formative Centuries (100–800). New York: Paulist Press, 1999, 64–73.
20. G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles. London: Methuen, 1909, 209.
21. For a full discussion, see Erhardt Gu?ttgemanns, Der leidende Apostel und sein Herr; Studien zur paulinischen Christologie. Go?ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966. More generally, see Andrew T. Lincoln, Paradise Now and Not Yet: Studies in the Role of the Heavenly Dimension in Paul’s Thought with Special Reference to His Eschatology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
22. Cyprian of Carthage, On Mortality, 7.25.
23. For a detailed study, see Avi Faust, Judah in the Neo-Babylonian Period: The Archaeology of Desolation. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012.
24. Ellen F. Davis, ‘Singing for the Peace of Jerusalem: Songs of Zion in the Twenty-First Century’. In The Bible and Spirituality: Exploratory Essays in Reading Scripture Spiritually, ed. Andrew T. Lincoln, Gordon McConville and Lloyd K. Pietersen. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013, 75–94.
25. Joseph Pieper, On Hope. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986, 38.
26. Edward Said, ‘The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile’. Harper’s Magazine, September 1984, 49–55; quote at p. 49.
27. Simone Weil, L’enracinement. Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1949.
Chapter 10
| 1. | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–56. London: Harvill Press, 2003, 75. |
| 2. | Charles Frankel, The End of the Dinosaurs: Chicxulub Crater and Mass Extinctions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Michael J. Benton, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. |
| 3. | William Hazlitt, Essays. London: Walter Scott, 1889, 269. |
| 4. | Baretti’s remark was recorded by Boswell, although it is often misattributed to Samuel Johnson. For the quote, see Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, eds, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766. London: Heinemann, 1955, 281. |
| 5. | For detailed documentation of this point, see Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. London: Pimlico, 2001. |
| 6. | Glover, Humanity, 7. |
| 7. | See the superb analysis in Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Boston: Mariner Books, 2015. |
| 8. | G.R. Evans, Augustine on Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; Rowan Williams, On Augustine. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 79–105. |
| 9. | Louis F. Fieser, ‘The Synthesis of Vitamin K’. Science 91 (1940): 31–6. |
10. For the story of Fieser’s intimate association with this development, see Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 5–44.
11. Described in Neer, Napalm, 60.
12. Interview on BBC Newsnight programme, 15 September 2009.
13. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta, 2002, 29.
14. Gray, Straw Dogs, 14.
15. Gray, Straw Dogs, 4.
16. Gray, Straw Dogs, 92.
17. For some good introductions to this grim theme, see Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds, Studies in Comparative Genocide. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999; Omer Bartov, Anita Grossmann and Mary Nolan, eds. Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century. New York: New Press, 2002; Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. London: Routledge, 2006.
18. R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography. London: Oxford University Press, 1939, 79.
19. Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 17.
20. I explain more of this in Alister E. McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Science, Faith and God. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.
| 21. | Washington Post, 27 February 2016. |
22. Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, 101–2.
23. Some liberal Protestants unwisely melded some Darwinian values into their ethics in the name of ‘progressive religion’: see, for example, Gary J. Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 69–73. Most, however, recognised this was a false turn.
24. Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’. In Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. London: Macmillan, 1905, 46–116.
25. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’, 51–2.
26. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’, 53.
27. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’, 81–2.
28. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’, 81.
29. James D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998, 51–78.
30. Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 197–206.
31. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents in Civilization, Society and Religion, 20 vols, London: Penguin, 1991, vol. 12, 302.
32. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, 2 vols, London: John Murray, 1868, vol. 1, 5–6.
33. Patricia A. Williams, ‘Sociobiology and Original Sin’. Zygon 35, no. 4 (2000): 783–812.
34. Steve Jones, In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny. London: HarperCollins, 1996, 207–42.
35. For an excellent study, see Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History. New York: HarperOne, 2008. For a thoughtful theological defence and exploration of this important concept, see Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meaning. New York: Paulist Press, 2002.
36. Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence. New York: Continuum, 1994, 85.
37. A point stressed by Susanne Kappeler, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behaviour. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, 9.
38. Anne Frank, diary entry for 15 July 1944; Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Bantam, 1993, 263.
39. A good example of this is found in the conversion of Charles Colson, Richard Nixon’s hatchet man and master of dirty tricks. Following his conviction in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Colson recognised Lewis’s description of sin in himself, and converted to Christianity: see Jonathan Aitken, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed. London: Continuum, 2005, 192–211.
40. Steven J. Bartlett, The Pathology of Man: A Study of Human Evil. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 2005, 75–90.
41. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief. London: Routledge, 2001, 38. See the full discussion in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian, 1958.
Chapter 11
| 1. | Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. Trans. Robert Caponigri. Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1956, 11. |
| 2. | Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2 vols, London: Murray, 1871, vol. 2, 404–5. |
| 3. | See further Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. |
| 4. | As noted in the ground-breaking article by Paul O. Kristeller, ‘The Myth of Renaissance Atheism and the French Tradition of Free Thought’. Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (1968): 233–43. |
| 5. | See the classic study of Hanna H. Gray, ‘Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence’. Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 4 (1963): 497–514. |
| 6. | For a representative collection of his writings, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. For an assessment of his approach, see John Monfasani, ed., Kristeller Reconsidered: Essays on His Life and Scholarship. New York: Italica Press, 2006. |
| 7. | See, for example, Paul Kurtz, What is Secular Humanism? Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006. |
| 8. | For an excellent account, see Mason Olds, American Religious Humanism. Minneapolis, MN: University Press of America, 1996. |
| 9. | For example, see Mark Oppenheimer, ‘Closer Look at Rift Between Humanists Reveals Deeper Divisions’. New York Times, 1 October 2010. |
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, 44.
11. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 11.
12. John J. Coughlin, ‘Pope John Paul II and the Dignity of the Human Being’. Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 67 (2003): 65–79. For the development of John Paul II’s Christian humanism, see George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II. New York: HarperCollins, 2005, 145–80.
13. Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 80.
14. Dawkins, God Delusion, 31.
15. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007, 8.
16. Hitchens, God is Not Great, 10.
17. Daniel C. Dennett, ‘The Bright Stuff’, New York Times, 12 July 2003; Richard Dawkins, ‘The Future Looks Bright’ Guardian, 21 June 2003.
18. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 5.
19. William Temple, Nature, Man and God. London: Macmillan, 1934, 22.
20. Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.
21. See especially Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.
22. John W. Dodds, ‘The Place of the Humanities in a World of War’. Vital Speeches of the Day 9 (1943): 311–14.
23. Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
24. For the document, see http://www.ghwk.de/ghwk/deut/protokoll.pdf. Note especially p. 8.
25. These were later published as Mere Christianity (1952). For details, see Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis – a Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, 205–13.
26. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
27. Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, 94; http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_29061943_mystici-corporis-christi.html. I have altered the translation at several points to catch the sense of the original Latin.
28. For a good exploration of this idea and its relational implications, see Stanley J. Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.
29. Lactantius, Divine Institutions VI, 10.
30. Yechiel Michael Barilan, Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Responsibility: The New Language of Global Bioethics and Biolaw. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, 57–64.
Chapter 12
| 1. | Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred; or, The New Crusade. New York: Walter Dunne, 1904, 78. For the historical context, see Paul Smith, Disraeli: A Brief Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 86–8. |
| 2. | See the points made by Bastiaan T. Rutjens, Frenk van Harreveld and Joop van der Pligt, ‘Yes We Can: Belief in Progress as Compensatory Control’. Social Psychological and Personality Science 1, no. 3 (2010): 246–52; Paul G. Bain et al., ‘Collective Futures: How Projections About the Future of Society Are Related to Actions and Attitudes Supporting Social Change’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 39 (2013): 523–39. |
| 3. | I here follow some basic themes outlined in Daniel Sarewitz, ‘The Idea of Progress’. In A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen Friis, Stig Andur Pedersen and Vincent F. Hendricks. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 303–7; Philip Kitcher, ‘On Progress’. In Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business, and Society, ed. Subramanian Rangan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. |
| 4. | ‘The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’. In William Wordsworth, Collected Poems. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2006, 245. |
| 5. | Frank Martela, ‘Fallible Inquiry with Ethical Ends-in-View: A Pragmatist Philosophy of Science for Organizational Research’. Organization Studies 36, no. 4 (2015): 537–63. |
| 6. | See the comments of Anne McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term “Post-Colonialism’”. Social Text, no. 31/32 (1992): 84–98. |
| 7. | Thomas Sowell, On Classical Economics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, 184. |
| 8. | Neil Harding, Leninism. London: Macmillan, 1996, 155. |
| 9. | See the classic critique of Marxism developed by Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957. |
10. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, 2 vols, London: Nisbet, 1941, vol. 2, 248.
11. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianinity. London: HarperCollins, 2002, 28–9.
12. The works of the philosopher John Gray should be noted here: see especially his Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta, 2003; and The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. London: Penguin Books, 2014.
13. Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. It is instructive to read Eagleton alongside the older work of Georges Sorel, Les illusions du progres. 3rd edn. Paris: Rivière, 1921.
14. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 28.
15. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 87–9.
16. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991, 280.
17. Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015, 11.
18. Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism, 9.
19. A point made forcefully in Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
20. Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
21. One of the best accounts of this technological transformation of warfare is found in Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. 2nd edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. For Tolkien’s experience of the First World War, see John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
22. Alan Jacobs, ‘Fall, Mortality, and the Machine: Tolkien and Technology’. Atlantic Monthly, 27 July 2012.
23. Michael Ruse, ‘Charles Darwin and Artificial Selection’. Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (1975): 339–50.
24. Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300 to 362 BC. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2002, 84.
25. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2 vols, London: John Murray, 1871, vol. 1, 168.
26. David J. Galton and Clare J. Galton, ‘Francis Galton and Eugenics Today’. Journal of Medical Ethics 24 (1998): 99–105.
27. Mark B. Adams, Garland E. Allen and Sheila F. Weiss, ‘Human Heredity and Politics: A Comparative Institutional Study of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor (United States), the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (Germany), and the Maxim Gorky Medical Genetics Institute (USSR)’. Osiris 20 (2005): 232–62.
28. Marie Carmichael Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future. London: Putnam’s Sons, 1920, 223.
29. Mark B. Adams, ‘The Politics of Human Heredity in the USSR, 1920–1940’. Genome 31, no. 2 (1989): 879–84.
30. For a good historical example, see Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York: Dialogue Press, 2012.
31. http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.pdf
32. Julian Savulescu, R.H.J. ter Meulen and Guy Kahane, Enhancing Human Capacities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
33. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/future.pdf
34. Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg, ‘The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement’. In Human Enhancement, ed. Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 375–416.
35. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/future.pdf
36. Victor C. Ferkiss, Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality. New York: New American Library, 1970, 34.
37. Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
38. For example, see Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, eds, Global Catastrophic Risks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
39. Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism, 31.
40. John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, 235.
41. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday, 1965.
42. J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins, 2001, 87.
43. For what follows, see Gray, Immortalization Commission, 156–67.
44. Anna Dickinson, ‘Quantifying Religious Oppression: Russian Orthodox Church Closures and Repression of Priests 1917–41’. Religion, State & Society 28 (2000): 327–35. See further William Husband, ‘Soviet Atheism and Russian Orthodox Strategies of Resistance, 1917–1932’. Journal of Modern History 70 (1998): 74–107.
45. Also known as the ‘League of the Militant Godless’. For its history and methods, see Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Chapter 13
| 1. | John Banville, The Sea. New York: Vintage Books, 2005, 71. |
| 2. | Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Essays. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, 19. |
| 3. | John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008, 126. |
| 4. | Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1946, xiv. |
| 5. | On Berlin’s ‘value pluralism’, see John Gray, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013, 74–110; Mark Thompson, ‘Versions of Pluralism: William Empson, Isaiah Berlin, and the Cold War’. Literary Imagination 8, no. 1 (2006): 65–87. |
| 6. | Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 109. |
| 7. | ‘The Tables Turned’. In William Wordsworth, Collected Poems. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2006, 574. |
| 8. | Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, ‘Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual and Aesthetic Emotion’. Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003): 297–314; Patty van Cappellen and Vassilis Saroglou, ‘Awe Activates Religious and Spiritual Feelings and Behavioral Intentions’. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 4 (2012): 223–36. |
| 9. | Dante, Inferno, I.1–3. |
10. Barbara Reynolds, in The Divine Comedy, trans. D.L. Sayers and B. Reynolds, 3 vols, London: Penguin Classics, 1986, vol. 3, 16. Reynolds’ best study of Dante is Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man. London: I.B.Tauris, 2006.