Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science
From the title, this appears to be an invitation to integrate knowledge with faith. Ruse, a professor at Florida State Univ. is a skeptic who believes that the "central core claims of Christianity by their very nature go beyond the reach of science." He takes the reader through a thorough labyrinth of philosophers from Plato, John Henry Newman, and Reinhold Niebuhr in an attempt to show humans as a product of the environment. The world is a machine and Ruse, an expert on Darwinian evolution, sees humans as machines who learn to adapt through evolution and experiences. Where science and spirituality share common bonds is in human morality. Ruse's view of Christianity makes it easy to dismiss miracles, life after death, mysteries of faith and even the theory of the soul by using science. He makes room for spirituality but is dismissive of faith. With its long block quotations and diagrams, this book is more suited for the college classroom than a general reader.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.