CFP: Recent Scientific Challenges To Theism
Submission deadline: May 15, 2015
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CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
RECENT SCIENTIFIC CHALLENGES TO THEISM
(DUE MAY 15TH, 2015)
Tension between science and theism is nothing new, but recently a number of new scientific challenges to theism have arisen. These challenges arise from various scientific disciplines, including cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and theoretical physics. Specific examples of these challenges include:
-The application of work on cognitive bias to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion and religion in general. For example, Draper & Nichols claim that contemporary philosophy religion – whose practitioners are theists to a greater degree than those who work in other philosophical areas – is affected by confirmation bias and group influence.
-The suggestion by some physicists – e.g., Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carroll – that cosmological theories in physics render theistic explanations of our universe’s existence superfluous.
-Experimental investigations by Sam Harris, and others, identifying neural correlates of religious belief and what this might suggest, if anything, about the truth of theism. More generally, recent activity in the cognitive science of religion.
-Attempts to provide an evolutionary account of religious belief might undermine theistic beliefs. Recent evolutionary debunking arguments differ from debunking arguments of the past (Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud) due to their scientific merits.
-Work by, e.g., Libet or Wegner, that might undermine free will and various versions of theism with it.
-Worrall’s argument that while religion, like science, makes claims about the way the world is, its beliefs are evaluated in virtue of distinct epistemic norms. Insofar as epistemic relativism is unacceptable to both sides of the debate, science appears to debunk religion (or so Worrall claims).
We welcome papers that discuss these (and similar) recent scientific challenges to theism, whether they develop these worries into rigorous arguments against theism or defend theism from these challenges.
Our plan is to gather abstracts to be packaged into a proposal to be sent to publishers by July 1st, 2015.
Please send abstracts to Jason Megill and Daniel Linford at: [email protected]