Epistemology
Consciousness, Emergence, and the Limits of Poetic Naturalism
I.
Locating Consciousness: Why Experience Can't Be Objectified
Rational Optimism: Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now
Book Title:
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Naturalism and Well-Being
Introduction
Conceptions of human flourishing vary, but there are requirements for well-being that nearly everyone would endorse: meeting basic physical and emotional needs, having opportunities for learning, mastery and self-expression, being a valued member of a secure community, and finding one’s place in the ultimate scheme of things. These domains of well-being reflect the complexity and variety of human motivations, not all of which, unfortunately, find fulfillment in every life.
Epistemology
The first order of business for a worldview is to represent reality more or less accurately. The articles in this section present scientific empiricism as the rational basis for worldview naturalism, as contrasted with less reliable ways of knowing.
Saving Secularism: The Open Interrogation of Faith
Book Title:
The Secular Conscience
Projecting God: The Psychology of Theological Justification
Book Title:
God and the New Atheism
The Specter of Scientism
Countering the threat of scientism
Tikkun’s November/December 2007 cover story by David Belden, Science and Spirit, concerns the supposed dangers of scientism and the pressing need to counterbalance science with an intuitive and spiritual way of knowing. Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun and leader of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, is quoted as saying that
The Specter of Brain Science, or How the New Age Might Lose Consciousness
“The great specter of brain science is that it will demonstrate that we are merely conscious organic machines, that all our experience and behavior originate in the brain.”[1]
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