J.L. Schellenberg
NEW
Oxford University Press will be bringing out The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy's New Challenge to Belief in God in July 2015 in the UK and in September elsewhere. This book is a short and inexpensive presentation of my thinking on hiddenness for a general audience. You can see the OUP ad here.
Michael Shermer writes:
“When I was a born-again Christian I rarely doubted God's existence, but I’d often lament the fact that He didn’t just come right out and make it obvious for everyone to see that He was real. Later, after I abandoned faith as a way of knowing, I saw this indiscernibility in a new light: a lack of evidence indicates a lack of existence. Had I read John Schellenberg’s brilliant new work that gives title and cogency to this argument from the hiddenness of God I would have become an unbeliever years before. In fact, of all the arguments for and against God’s existence (and I’ve heard them all) this is the most powerful I have encountered in support of the atheist position. A tour de force."
- Michael Shermer, Publisher Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist Scientific American, author of The Moral Arc.
If you think you might like a copy of The Hiddenness Argument, I invite you to pre-order; pre-orders strongly impact first week sales, which in turn strongly affect the overall success of the book. Here are direct links for pre-ordering from Amazon:
Amazon UK
Amazon Canada
Amazon USA
Note that Amazon will only charge you when the book is sent.
About a month earlier (in June and August 2015, respectively), Oxford will be bringing my book Evolutionary Religion out in paperback. Go here for more information.
And the pre-order links:
Amazon UK
Amazon Canada
Amazon USA
New endorsements for Evolutionary Religion come from Robert Audi, Philip Kitcher, and Patrick Arnold:
"In this extraordinary book John Schellenberg steps through 'Darwin's Door' and provides a provocative way to view religion as an evolutionary development that can embody a metaphysically parsimonious religious faith, a moderate scientific naturalism, and a philosophically critical skepticism."
- Robert Audi, Notre Dame University
"Schellenberg offers a new and intriguing perspective on religion, one that takes the evolutionary timescale seriously. He opens up new possibilities for fruitful discussion between enlightened religious believers and secular humanists."
- Philip Kitcher, Columbia University
"Evolutionary Religion introduces a staggering number of new and original ideas to the philosophy of religion, and it marks a welcome change to the typical debates between atheism and theism, and science and religion, that are often published."
- Patrick Arnold, Marginalia
To see my article on deep time at AEON magazine, click here
For a brief reply to Keith Ward's review of Evolutionary Religion, in which I correct the record, click here
A special issue of the Cambridge journal Religious Studies containing critical discussion of my work in the philosophy of religion together with my responses appeared in June 2013. For more information, click here
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I’m a Canadian philosopher known both for my atheism and for my defense of a broader skepticism compatible with atheism -- a form of skepticism which, as it happens, opens a path to a new evolutionary brand of religion.
In the late ‘80s of the last century I did a DPhil in philosophy at Oxford (studying with Richard Swinburne, David Brown, Maurice Wiles, and Anthony Kenny). Currently I am Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University.
My first book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell 1993; paperback 2006), introduced a new argument for atheism now known as the hiddenness argument. That argument has enjoyed a good deal of attention. As a result, 'the problem of divine hiddenness' is now commonly discussed alongside ‘the problem of evil’ in philosophy classrooms and texts.
But in the late ‘90s several factors conspired to push me beyond the theism/atheism debate and into more fundamental investigations in philosophy of religion. The result was three books that make a trilogy: Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism, and The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion (Cornell 2005, 2007, 2009; paperback 2012). Contemporary philosophers of religion can be a little reluctant to think beyond theism, but my way of doing so is brand new.
Writing the trilogy was an interesting creative experience. And so was the realization, just as I was completing it, that there was an evolutionary framework waiting, as it were, to receive all my results. In a book called Evolutionary Religion, published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and intended for a wide audience, I try to put that framework in place.
The emphasis here is on completing the shift from human to scientific timescales, and coming thereby to see how we exist at a very early stage in the development of intelligence on our planet, with many millions of years of future development – whether experienced by our species or others – potentially lying ahead of us. Seeing this, we will also see that the central question about faith and reason is whether there is a form of religion appropriate to our place in time. What the trilogy calls ‘skeptical religion,’ an imaginative rather than believing species of faith, invites our attention (in part) because it appears to be thus appropriate.
Evolutionary Religion encapsulates my recent work on philosophy of religion, concerned with deep time. But deep time has consequences for other areas of philosophy. One of them is epistemology, and I am presently hard at work exploring this connection in detail.
NEW
Oxford University Press will be bringing out The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy's New Challenge to Belief in God in July 2015 in the UK and in September elsewhere. This book is a short and inexpensive presentation of my thinking on hiddenness for a general audience. You can see the OUP ad here.
Michael Shermer writes:
“When I was a born-again Christian I rarely doubted God's existence, but I’d often lament the fact that He didn’t just come right out and make it obvious for everyone to see that He was real. Later, after I abandoned faith as a way of knowing, I saw this indiscernibility in a new light: a lack of evidence indicates a lack of existence. Had I read John Schellenberg’s brilliant new work that gives title and cogency to this argument from the hiddenness of God I would have become an unbeliever years before. In fact, of all the arguments for and against God’s existence (and I’ve heard them all) this is the most powerful I have encountered in support of the atheist position. A tour de force."
- Michael Shermer, Publisher Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist Scientific American, author of The Moral Arc.
If you think you might like a copy of The Hiddenness Argument, I invite you to pre-order; pre-orders strongly impact first week sales, which in turn strongly affect the overall success of the book. Here are direct links for pre-ordering from Amazon:
Amazon UK
Amazon Canada
Amazon USA
Note that Amazon will only charge you when the book is sent.
About a month earlier (in June and August 2015, respectively), Oxford will be bringing my book Evolutionary Religion out in paperback. Go here for more information.
And the pre-order links:
Amazon UK
Amazon Canada
Amazon USA
New endorsements for Evolutionary Religion come from Robert Audi, Philip Kitcher, and Patrick Arnold:
"In this extraordinary book John Schellenberg steps through 'Darwin's Door' and provides a provocative way to view religion as an evolutionary development that can embody a metaphysically parsimonious religious faith, a moderate scientific naturalism, and a philosophically critical skepticism."
- Robert Audi, Notre Dame University
"Schellenberg offers a new and intriguing perspective on religion, one that takes the evolutionary timescale seriously. He opens up new possibilities for fruitful discussion between enlightened religious believers and secular humanists."
- Philip Kitcher, Columbia University
"Evolutionary Religion introduces a staggering number of new and original ideas to the philosophy of religion, and it marks a welcome change to the typical debates between atheism and theism, and science and religion, that are often published."
- Patrick Arnold, Marginalia
To see my article on deep time at AEON magazine, click here
For a brief reply to Keith Ward's review of Evolutionary Religion, in which I correct the record, click here
A special issue of the Cambridge journal Religious Studies containing critical discussion of my work in the philosophy of religion together with my responses appeared in June 2013. For more information, click here
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’m a Canadian philosopher known both for my atheism and for my defense of a broader skepticism compatible with atheism -- a form of skepticism which, as it happens, opens a path to a new evolutionary brand of religion.
In the late ‘80s of the last century I did a DPhil in philosophy at Oxford (studying with Richard Swinburne, David Brown, Maurice Wiles, and Anthony Kenny). Currently I am Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University.
My first book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell 1993; paperback 2006), introduced a new argument for atheism now known as the hiddenness argument. That argument has enjoyed a good deal of attention. As a result, 'the problem of divine hiddenness' is now commonly discussed alongside ‘the problem of evil’ in philosophy classrooms and texts.
But in the late ‘90s several factors conspired to push me beyond the theism/atheism debate and into more fundamental investigations in philosophy of religion. The result was three books that make a trilogy: Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism, and The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion (Cornell 2005, 2007, 2009; paperback 2012). Contemporary philosophers of religion can be a little reluctant to think beyond theism, but my way of doing so is brand new.
Writing the trilogy was an interesting creative experience. And so was the realization, just as I was completing it, that there was an evolutionary framework waiting, as it were, to receive all my results. In a book called Evolutionary Religion, published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and intended for a wide audience, I try to put that framework in place.
The emphasis here is on completing the shift from human to scientific timescales, and coming thereby to see how we exist at a very early stage in the development of intelligence on our planet, with many millions of years of future development – whether experienced by our species or others – potentially lying ahead of us. Seeing this, we will also see that the central question about faith and reason is whether there is a form of religion appropriate to our place in time. What the trilogy calls ‘skeptical religion,’ an imaginative rather than believing species of faith, invites our attention (in part) because it appears to be thus appropriate.
Evolutionary Religion encapsulates my recent work on philosophy of religion, concerned with deep time. But deep time has consequences for other areas of philosophy. One of them is epistemology, and I am presently hard at work exploring this connection in detail.
