SCIENCE AND HUMANITY C

Andrew Steane reconfigures the public understanding of science by drawing on a deep knowledge of physics and by bringing in mainstream philosophy of science. Science is a beautiful multilingual network of ideas it is not a ladder in which ideas at one level make those at another level redundant. In view of this we can judge that the natural world is not so much a machine as a meetingplace. In particular people can only be correctly understood by meeting with them at the level of their entire personhood in a reciprocal respectful engagement as one person to another. Steane shows that Darwinian evolution does not overturn this but rather is the process whereby such truths came to be discovered and expressed in the world. From here the argument moves towards other aspects of human life. Our sense of value requires from us a response which is not altogether the same as following logical argument. This points us towards what religion in its good forms can express. A reply to a major argument of David Hume and a related one of Richard Dawkins is given. The book finishes with some brief chapters setting religion in the context of all human capacities and showing in fresh language what theistic religious response is or can be in the modern world.