The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science [Paperback]

Ph.D. Bruce L. Gordon Ph.D. (Editor), William A. Dembski (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1935191284 | ISBN-13: 978-1935191285 | Edition: 1

The world’s leading authorities in the sciences and humanities—dozens of top scholars, including three Nobel laureates—join a cultural and intellectual battle that leaves no human life untouched. Is the universe self-existent, self-sufficient, and self-organizing, or is it grounded instead in a reality that transcends space, time, matter, and energy?

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

The intellectual and cultural battles now raging over theism and atheism, conservatism and secular progressivism, dualism and monism, realism and antirealism, and transcendent reality versus material reality extend even into the scientific disciplines. This stunning new volume captures this titanic clash of worldviews among those who have thought most deeply about the nature of science and of the universe itself.

 

Unmatched in its breadth and scope, The Nature of Nature brings together some of the most influential scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals—including three Nobel laureates—across a wide spectrum of disciplines and schools of thought. Here they grapple with a perennial question that has been made all the more pressing by recent advances in the natural sciences:Is the fundamental explanatory principle of the universe, life, and self-conscious awareness to be found in inanimate matter or immaterial mind?The answers found in this book have profound implications for what it means to do science, what it means to be human, and what the future holds for all of us.

About the Author

Bruce L. Gordon is a historian and philosopher of physics who holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University along with degrees in applied mathematics and analytic philosophy. A former research professor and director of the program in science and religion at Baylor University, he was research director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, where he remains a Senior Fellow, and is currently associate professor of science and mathematics at The King's College in New York City.

 

William A. Dembski holds Ph.D.s in mathematics and philosophy and has done postdoctoral work in mathematics, physics, and computer science. The author or editor of more than a dozen books, he has appeared on ABC’s Nightline, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and many other television and radio programs.

Product Details

• Paperback: 900 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute; 1 edition (February 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935191284
• ISBN-13: 978-1935191285
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #536,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Biggest Questions in Science and Life, February 28, 2011

By 

Jonathan Bartlett - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Paperback)

If Francis Crick, William Dembski, Michael Ruse, Alan Guth, Roger Penrose, Howard Van Till, and all their friends all got together for a discussion, what would they talk about? No need to speculate - this book, The Nature of Nature, contains papers from all of these top scholars as well as many others. Just listing out the big names in science that contributed to this volume would be a more than adequate review.

It turns out that all of these scholars are focused on the "big questions" of life - where did we come from? what is the nature of consciousness? what is the nature of ethics? what is the nature of nature itself?

While these questions all sound philosophical, this book focuses on scientific approaches to each question. The book, at over 900 pages, is impossible to summarize in such a short review. However, I will say that on every question, there are multiple perspectives offered, giving the reader a broad view of the ways which each question can be approached.

For instance, on the nature of the mind, there are essays from Nancey Murphy, who gives an explanation as to how the mind can function as a purely physical entity, John Tooby, who provides an evolutionary explanation of the mind's organization, and Henry Stapp, who argues for a dualism between the mind and the brain coordinated at the quantum level. Similar discussions are had about the origin of life, the origin of the universe, the the nature of mathematics, and the nature of nature itself.

I recommend this book to any person who wants to take a deep look at life's deepest questions. There are no shallow arguments here. If you are a scientist, a theologian, or an interested layperson, this volume provides a host of scholarly papers examining life's most meaningful questions from a number of directions.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended, February 19, 2011

By 

The Professor - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Paperback)

The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science is a compendium of the leading scholars in the area of science and religion, including three Nobel laureates, who weigh in on the following question: is the universe self-existent, self-sufficient, and self-organizing, or is it instead organized by a reality that transcends space, time, matter, and energy? When the book came in the mail I was surprised at its mammoth size. It reminded me of Stephens Jay Gould's The structure of Evolutionary Theory book. The Nature of Nature has the same large page size and about as many pages as Gould's book. In contrast to Gould's book, The Nature book is more readable and I did not note any almost full page single sentences as Gould's book contains. As I leafed through The Nature I realized this is not a book that one would normally read straight through, so I selected chapters of interest, as most readers will likely do, in my case mostly those in the area of my graduate work, cell biology. The chapters by Drs Behe, Axe, Meyer, Rana and others reviewed some of their earlier work and responded to criticism. As a whole their chapters served as an excellent succinct summary of their main ideas and past publications. Axe's chapter on Protein folding helped inform me about the latest research in this critical area, one that I have not kept up much with since graduate school. The chapters by critics of Intelligent Design were, judging by the ones that I read, excellent selections that helped the reader understand both sides of the controversy over origins and Naturalism. The number of chapters on each side of the book's theme were close the equal, and the collection for this reason will be valuable no matter which side of the controversy one favors. Michael Shermer argued in his chapter that "experiment after experiment reveals the same answer: we [humans] are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency" (page 455). This conclusion was echoed in several other chapters. The friendly debate between Alvin Plantinga and his critics was a model of the best of a debate undertaken to focus on the issues and eschew personal attacks. Highly recommended and indispensable to understand the current cultural war between theists and naturalists.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engage your mind on the big questions, April 11, 2011

By 

Dave C (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Paperback)

This is a big book. You can use it as a paperweight in a windstorm or a stepstool, but its 963 pages contain an encyclopedia of debate about one of the most critical issues of our time: what exists, and how do we know? Can reality be subsumed in the material categories of particles and forces? This critical question, assumed in the affirmative by Darwinists, is at the fountainhead of all human belief and action. In The Nature of Nature, the question is expanded into numerous sub-questions, each treated by respectable, knowledgeable scholars from various viewpoints and realms of expertise.

That's part of its value. As science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein said, "I never learned from a man who agreed with me." Your opinions, if defensible, will be strengthened by exposure to contrary points of view. Mine have been; in fact, reading in this book some of the best that my philosophical opponents could deliver has been like a good workout, temporarily fatiguing, but afterward, producing that warm rush of confidence. I especially enjoyed wrestling with Ronald Numbers and Christian de Duve and am convinced in my own mind that I found their weaknesses. I also enjoyed watching the closely-matched fight between Plantinga andTalbott over whether naturalism is self-refuting (the latter, I'm convinced, assumed what he needed to prove). That's one way to enjoy this book; see it as a contest to the ideological death between prize fighters.

Don't expect to take this dense, heavy book to the train station or read it at one sitting. Instead, browse the table of contents, then read the introduction to each section. There are 7 parts and 41 chapters, by 36 contributors (including 3 Nobel laureates), writing cogently and sometimes passionately, providing hundreds of references and endnotes. (Some of the best material is in the endnotes.) Don't be daunted by the voluminous text; find a part that interests you, and dive in. You don't have to read it in order. Each chapter is self-contained, and each section is well rounded. After sufficient coverage, you will have learned a lot about history, philosophy, science, and theology, and will understand why the intelligent-design-versus-naturalism debate is not going away any time soon.

The Nature of Nature is also a monument to academic freedom. With its roots in the Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information and Design at Baylor University that was quickly shut down by intolerant evolutionary professors in 2000, the book resurrects and augments presentations that editors William Dembski and Bruce Gordon intended for its "Nature of Nature" conference to provide. They are to be commended for keeping the dream alive for 11 years and bringing this compendium of scholarship to reality.

Darwin himself argued that "a fair result can only be obtained by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." Here it is; the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for what Darwin hoped for: "a fair result" about, in this case, a fundamental, timeless question, pregnant with societal ramifications. Engage.