J. L. Schellenberg
NEWS
September 2019: TWO NEW BOOKS!
The first is Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate, just out from Bloomsbury. This book argues that human moral evolution -- for example, our ever greater sensitivity to violence -- should make us think of God's goodness differently and more demandingly, and that this discovery opens the door to more powerful arguments against the existence of a personal God than were available to us in the past. The hiddenness argument (see below) is one such argument, but not the only one. Progressive Atheism is sold by Amazon here: www.amazon.com/Progressive-Atheism-Evolution-Changes-Debate/dp/1350097195
The second book, just published by Cambridge University Press, is Religion After Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity. This book argues that, rather than viewing the religious life of humanity as an aberration or mistake, we should think of it as immature. A number of big cultural consequences wait to be unleashed by wider recognition of our religious immaturity. 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 developmental work, the awareness that there is no personal divine being (no God), ruling out as it does but one option, may be no more than a first step. Religion After Science is available from Amazon here: www.amazon.com/Religion-after-Science-Consequences-Immaturity/dp/1108713076
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I’m a Canadian philosopher known both for my atheism and for a broader skepticism compatible with atheism -- one that, 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, introduced a new argument for atheism 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. Contemporary western philosophers can be a little reluctant to go into regions beyond theism and beyond belief, but truly fundamental thinking -- which philosophy is supposed to be about -- will inevitably take us there. And as I argue in the trilogy, a new reconciliation of reason and religion is waiting there.
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. Set that next to these facts: 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, maybe even millions, 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 calls ‘skeptical religion,’ an imaginative rather than believing species of faith, 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
September 2019: TWO NEW BOOKS!
The first is Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate, just out from Bloomsbury. This book argues that human moral evolution -- for example, our ever greater sensitivity to violence -- should make us think of God's goodness differently and more demandingly, and that this discovery opens the door to more powerful arguments against the existence of a personal God than were available to us in the past. The hiddenness argument (see below) is one such argument, but not the only one. Progressive Atheism is sold by Amazon here: www.amazon.com/Progressive-Atheism-Evolution-Changes-Debate/dp/1350097195
The second book, just published by Cambridge University Press, is Religion After Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity. This book argues that, rather than viewing the religious life of humanity as an aberration or mistake, we should think of it as immature. A number of big cultural consequences wait to be unleashed by wider recognition of our religious immaturity. 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 developmental work, the awareness that there is no personal divine being (no God), ruling out as it does but one option, may be no more than a first step. Religion After Science is available from Amazon here: www.amazon.com/Religion-after-Science-Consequences-Immaturity/dp/1108713076
------------------------------------------------------------------
I’m a Canadian philosopher known both for my atheism and for a broader skepticism compatible with atheism -- one that, 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, introduced a new argument for atheism 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. Contemporary western philosophers can be a little reluctant to go into regions beyond theism and beyond belief, but truly fundamental thinking -- which philosophy is supposed to be about -- will inevitably take us there. And as I argue in the trilogy, a new reconciliation of reason and religion is waiting there.
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. Set that next to these facts: 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, maybe even millions, 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 calls ‘skeptical religion,’ an imaginative rather than believing species of faith, 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.
