In the Chronicle of Higher Education, David P. Barash briefly reviews eleven recent books about the gulf, or conflict, between science and religion.
Caution: in transcription to a Web page, some of the words in the review were mashed together: appealto, authoras, theirsto, etc.
The books reviewed are these:
- Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)
- The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)
- Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
- Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist by Joan Roughgarden (Island Press, 2006)
- Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion by Barbara J. King (Doubleday, 2007)
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
- The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins (The Free Press, 2006)
- Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (Knopf, 2006)
- Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic Books, 2002)
- Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolpert (W.W. Norton, 2007)
- The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan (The Penguin Press, 2006)
Hat tip to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for the book reviews. As he rightly points out, these reviews are too brief; but if any of the books sound interesting, you can look them up.
Update: ChemBob mentions another book:
- Victor J. Stenger’s God, the Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist (2007).
More books about science and philosophy:
- Why Darwin Matters by Michael Shermer
- The Identity of Man by Jacob Bronowski
- The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins
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