I was raised in a rural Baptist parsonage. My family gathered daily for prayer and Bible reading. I learned the story of Adam & Eve before I could read. I encountered evolution in books by evangelical authors who attacked it, vilifying both Darwin and the scientific community. I attended an evangelical college, planning to join the anti-evolution crusade. As I studied science, I came to realize, much to my consternation, that I had been completely wrong about evolution, Darwin, cosmology, and a host of other things. My personal journey was a microcosm of the intellectual upheaval of the last two centuries—a transformation I find exciting.
I wrote...
Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible's First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World
I loved this book for its sparkling, eloquent prose. As a young writer, I strove to emulate the author. The book’s engaging, often novelistic, narrative tells the tale of how we came to understand and accept that our planet moves, that the universe is very old and very large, and began with a Big Bang.
The characters—Galileo, Newton, and Einstein—come to life as real people struggling to understand. Their bewilderment at our strange cosmic home pulled me into the story. The unwelcome realizations reveal the power of science to force us to abandon our cherished notions of how we wish the world to be—to “Come of Age in the Milky Way.”
I was captured by the first sentence in this book: “Between 1550 and 1650 Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in ancient books.” I think this is the greatest intellectual revolution in history—when we stopped looking back in time for the truth about the world and started looking forward.
We stopped believing that ancient thinkers—Moses, Aristotle, Galen—had privileged access to knowledge. We realized that Newton was better equipped to understand the world than Aristotle and that Darwin knew more than Moses. This realization made science possible, but it’s a fragile insight.
Describing an era of exploration during the Renaissance that went far beyond geographic bounds, this book shows how the evidence of the New World shook the foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that had guided Europeans so far afield. What Anthony Grafton recounts is a war of ideas fought by mariners, scientists, publishers, and rulers over a period of 150 years. In colorful vignettes, published debates, and copious illustrations, we see these men and their contemporaries trying to make sense of their discoveries as they sometimes confirm, sometimes contest, and finally displace traditional notions of…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have always been intrigued by thoughtful doubters who reject mainstream ideas, whose intellects “boldly go where nobody has gone before.” Most of our intellectual revolutions start with such doubters, who look at widely accepted ideas and say “I am not so sure about this.”
I really loved the author's discussion of poor Job as he wrestled with the prevailing belief that a good man would be blessed by God with a happy life. Jennifer Hecht is a gifted writer. She reminds us that now-mainstream thinkers from the past—Pythagoras, Jesus, Marx, Galileo, Freud, Darwin—were radicals in their own time.
In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe…
I love books that debunk widespread popular myths. Most people think Charles Darwin was an anti-religious crusader who sailed around the globe trying to find evidence to disprove the biblical story of creation. Many people have told me this; even more have written about it. They are all so wrong it would be hard to imagine them being more wrong.
Darwin, shortly after some studies to become a priest, boarded the Beagle with a Bible and a traditional Anglican faith—a faith that survived his many explorations as he circled the globe. His theory “tormented” him as it gestated for he understood the damage it would do to the beloved story in Genesis.
A biography of the naturalist disputes misconceptions, including Darwin's status as a true scientist, discussing how Darwin concealed his theory of evolution for twenty years, agonizing over its implications and the impact it would have on his social standing.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Faith journeys fascinate me. I love the dramatic tales of how we come to religious faith, or more commonly today, how we lose that faith. Our individual stories of loss are microcosms of the 19th-century loss of faith, which saw so many Europeans lose their belief in God but not their need for something transcendent to ground their understanding of reality.
I love the way A.N. Wilson tells this story as a sobering tale of loss rather than liberation. He dispels the notion that external forces like science are the full or even most important part of the story. Biblical scholarship was casting doubt on the veracity of the Bible long before Darwin challenged Genesis with his theory of evolution.
A magisterial, colorful narrative illuminating the central tragedy of the nineteenth century: that God (or man's faith in him) died, but the need to worship remained as a torment to those who thought they had buried Him. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all the great writers, artists, and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity, and many abandoned belief in God altogether. This was partly the result of scientific discovery, particularly the work of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species. (No reader here will soon forget the venomous Oxford debate between Thomas Huxley, brilliant defender of Darwin, and Bishop…
My book explores the long shadow cast by Adam and Eve. For more than 20 centuries, we looked to that story to understand ourselves. To be human meant to be descended from Adam. Explorers viewed far-flung tribes as subhuman because they could not be Adam’s descendants. All women, like Eve, were dangerous temptresses. Columbus wrote home in 1498, claiming he had located the Garden of Eden in Venezuela.
Today, roughly half the population in the United States—and almost all evangelicals—reject Darwin’s theory of evolution because it has no room for Adam. How do we explain the origin of sin in a perfect Creation without an original sinner?
