J. L. Schellenberg
NEWS
My two most recent books (2019):
Religion After Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity, published by Cambridge University Press. This book argues that we should view the religious life of humanity not as a success or as a failure but as immature. This simple change of perspective has a number of important cultural consequences. These include a mandate for developmental work on religion at least as careful and concerted as human work on the development of science. In this work the insight that there is no person-like divine being may be little more than an early result, marking not the end but only the beginning of the human religion project. Religion After Science is available from Amazon here: www.amazon.com/Religion-after-Science-Consequences-Immaturity/dp/1108713076
Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate, out from Bloomsbury. This book argues that our halting evolution in social and moral domains -- for example, our ever greater sensitivity to violence -- has an unrecognized religious consequence: it should make us think of God's goodness differently and more demandingly. Updating God in this way yields a more impressive and admirable conception of a person-like divine. But at the same time it opens the door to a more powerful type of argument against the existence of such a being than was available to us in the past. The hiddenness argument (see below) is one example of this type, but only one. Due sensitivity to social and moral evolution also, as it happens, exposes new obligations of religious inquiry for atheists. Progressive Atheism is sold by Amazon here: www.amazon.com/Progressive-Atheism-Evolution-Changes-Debate/dp/1350097195
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I’m a Canadian philosopher known both for my arguments against the existence of a person-like divine being (God as traditionally conceived) and for a broader religious skepticism or doubt quite compatible with such disbelief -- a form of doubt that, as it happens, opens a path to a new evolutionary brand of religion.
In the late ‘80s of the last century I obtained a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy) degree 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. Both universities are in Halifax, the capital city of beautiful Nova Scotia. I live with my artist wife, Regina Coupar, in an old sea captain's house overlooking the Atlantic.
My first book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, introduced a new argument against theism now known as the hiddenness argument.The hiddenness argument has enjoyed a good deal of attention in philosophy. As a result, "the problem of divine hiddenness" is now commonly discussed alongside "the problem of evil" in philosophy classrooms and texts around the world. My short book on the subject from Oxford (www.amazon.com/Hiddenness-Argument-Philosophys-Challenge-Belief/dp/0198801173/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=) is intended to make this argument widely accessible.
In the late 1990s 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. Writing the trilogy was an interesting creative experience. So was the realization, just as I was completing it, that there was an evolutionary framework ready, as it were, to receive all my results. In my short book Evolutionary Religion (www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Religion-J-L-Schellenberg/dp/0198744366) I put that framework in place.
The emphasis here is on completing the shift from human to scientific timescales, and so coming to see how we exist at a very early stage in the development of intelligence and culture on our planet. Our species emerged some 300,000 years ago, but only for a few thousand years have we been thinking seriously and systematically about the Big Questions. Our work on religion in particular has been marred by sexism and violence, as well as dogmatism and an absence of investigative zeal. Set those facts next to this one: that mammal species on our planet endure, on average, for a million years and that Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Then you will see the central point of Evolutionary Religion -- that in scientific terms, intelligence on our planet has just got started, and tens or hundreds of thousands of years of future religious development – whether experienced by our species or others – potentially lie 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 adapted to our place in time. What the trilogy called "skeptical religion," an imaginative rather than believing species of faith focused on an investigation-friendly religious idea much broader than traditional theism, invites our attention precisely because it appears to be thus adapted.
The ideas of Evolutionary Religion are taken further in Religion After Science. And the more general "immaturity view" lurking here has consequences for areas of philosophy other than the philosophy of religion. I am presently hard at work exploring these additional connections in detail.
NEWS
My two most recent books (2019):
Religion After Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity, published by Cambridge University Press. This book argues that we should view the religious life of humanity not as a success or as a failure but as immature. This simple change of perspective has a number of important cultural consequences. These include a mandate for developmental work on religion at least as careful and concerted as human work on the development of science. In this work the insight that there is no person-like divine being may be little more than an early result, marking not the end but only the beginning of the human religion project. Religion After Science is available from Amazon here: www.amazon.com/Religion-after-Science-Consequences-Immaturity/dp/1108713076
Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate, out from Bloomsbury. This book argues that our halting evolution in social and moral domains -- for example, our ever greater sensitivity to violence -- has an unrecognized religious consequence: it should make us think of God's goodness differently and more demandingly. Updating God in this way yields a more impressive and admirable conception of a person-like divine. But at the same time it opens the door to a more powerful type of argument against the existence of such a being than was available to us in the past. The hiddenness argument (see below) is one example of this type, but only one. Due sensitivity to social and moral evolution also, as it happens, exposes new obligations of religious inquiry for atheists. Progressive Atheism is sold by Amazon here: www.amazon.com/Progressive-Atheism-Evolution-Changes-Debate/dp/1350097195
------------------------------------------------------------------
I’m a Canadian philosopher known both for my arguments against the existence of a person-like divine being (God as traditionally conceived) and for a broader religious skepticism or doubt quite compatible with such disbelief -- a form of doubt that, as it happens, opens a path to a new evolutionary brand of religion.
In the late ‘80s of the last century I obtained a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy) degree 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. Both universities are in Halifax, the capital city of beautiful Nova Scotia. I live with my artist wife, Regina Coupar, in an old sea captain's house overlooking the Atlantic.
My first book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, introduced a new argument against theism now known as the hiddenness argument.The hiddenness argument has enjoyed a good deal of attention in philosophy. As a result, "the problem of divine hiddenness" is now commonly discussed alongside "the problem of evil" in philosophy classrooms and texts around the world. My short book on the subject from Oxford (www.amazon.com/Hiddenness-Argument-Philosophys-Challenge-Belief/dp/0198801173/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=) is intended to make this argument widely accessible.
In the late 1990s 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. Writing the trilogy was an interesting creative experience. So was the realization, just as I was completing it, that there was an evolutionary framework ready, as it were, to receive all my results. In my short book Evolutionary Religion (www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Religion-J-L-Schellenberg/dp/0198744366) I put that framework in place.
The emphasis here is on completing the shift from human to scientific timescales, and so coming to see how we exist at a very early stage in the development of intelligence and culture on our planet. Our species emerged some 300,000 years ago, but only for a few thousand years have we been thinking seriously and systematically about the Big Questions. Our work on religion in particular has been marred by sexism and violence, as well as dogmatism and an absence of investigative zeal. Set those facts next to this one: that mammal species on our planet endure, on average, for a million years and that Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Then you will see the central point of Evolutionary Religion -- that in scientific terms, intelligence on our planet has just got started, and tens or hundreds of thousands of years of future religious development – whether experienced by our species or others – potentially lie 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 adapted to our place in time. What the trilogy called "skeptical religion," an imaginative rather than believing species of faith focused on an investigation-friendly religious idea much broader than traditional theism, invites our attention precisely because it appears to be thus adapted.
The ideas of Evolutionary Religion are taken further in Religion After Science. And the more general "immaturity view" lurking here has consequences for areas of philosophy other than the philosophy of religion. I am presently hard at work exploring these additional connections in detail.
