Below is the cover of my selection for the book of the month in May 2012, and just following that image is the book trailer. Full disclosure: the author, Mitch Stokes, is a friend of mine, which some might assume could skew this review. But no, I write objectively, with steely-eyed resolve. And also, on …
Getting Our Sensate Groove Back
I recently caused a small stir on Facebook by saying this: “One of the greatest aesthetic and arististic gifts the world ever received was the casting down of images in the Protestant Reformation.” I thought it might be good for me to explain what was behind that comment, at least a little bit. Yesterday, our …
Does Tim Keller Live on an Old Earth?
Tim Keller has provided us with a brief introduction to his thinking on the relationship of the current science and biblical revelation. You can find that essay here in six parts at BioLogos. After reading it, there were a number of questions I wanted to ask, and so then I decided to go right ahead. …
Book of the Month/April 2012
Reformer of BaselDiane PoythressReformation Heritage Books This might seem like an odd book to get excited about (at least to some), but I have wanted to see a book like this for years. In Reformer of Basel, Diane Poythress has given us a very fine introduction to the life and influence of John Oecolampadius, the …
But Rather Established
Sam Harris is of the conviction that he can talk about the loss of freedom as though it were the loss of something that left everything else about human nature relatively unchanged — such as when your uncle loses his left leg, well below the knee. You have the same old uncle, just a little …
Flashing the Laymen
The penultimate chapter of Free Will is on politics, and is only a few pages. All it takes is a few pages to snark at conservatives. “Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism” (p. 61) “Living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren’t born …
One Burnt Cookie
G.K. Chesterton says somewhere, I think in Orthodoxy, that given materialist assumptions, it makes no sense to say to someone, “Go and sin no more,” because that involves choices, but you can put the malefactor into boiling oil because boiling oil is an environment. In his next chapter on moral responsibiliity, Sam Harris tries to …
And Pretend Our Driving is Improving
The next chapter that Harris offers is a wee one, asking whether or not the truth he is offering might be bad for us. He doesn’t think so, and offers his own testimony — how “losing the sense of free will has only improved [his] ethics” (p. 45). There he goes again, writing as though …
The Next to Last Rock in the Avalanche
I don’t think I should be too severe in these reviews of Sam Harris’ most recent book. When one of the country’s leading atheists, the author of The End of Faith, trumpets the end of atheism, this is actually something that Christians should welcome and celebrate. Right? The fact that he doesn’t (as of yet) …
An Infinite Plane of Green Velvet
The next chapter was a brief one, and so I will try to be brief as well. The upshot is that Harris shows (and I think he does show) that quantum indeterminate events in the brain cannot be a foundation for free will. If everything is determined, then the cosmos is a locomotive on the …