Religious naturalism: Humanistic versus theistic
| Abstract | We Americans put a lot of stock in ingenuity. We admire people who come up with better mousetraps or with better ways to predict economic cycles. William James, in his early essay "Great Men and Their Environment," was the first American pragmatist to suggest that there are interesting analogies between the roles that ingenious people play in social change and bearers of genetic variations play in biological evolution.(1) He proposed that the categories in terms of which we conduct various cultural activities start as idiosyncratic "brainstorms" in the heads of individual human beings, much as Darwin theorized that species start as genetic variations in ancestral organisms. When these mental variations occur in a suitable environment, they may end as new forms of science, morality, art, or religion. Such new ideas enable their bearers to cope with the world differently, and perhaps more profitably, than their ancestors did before them. Social progress when it occurs is a function of the meliorative power of this fortuitous human creativity, not of anything preprogrammed with its own logic or method. | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesJ. Wesley Robbins (1995). If Our Genes Are for Us, Who Can Be Against Us? Thoughts of a Pragmatist on Science and Morality. Zygon 30 (3):357-367.
Walter Gulick (2011). The Promise of Religious Naturalism. American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 32 (3).
Robert C. Fuller (1986). Americans and the Unconscious. Oxford University Press.
Jon Avery (1993). Three Types of American Neo-Pragmatism. Journal of Philosophical Research 18:1-13.
J. Wesley Robbins (1994). Is Naturalism Irrational? Faith and Philosophy 11 (2):255-259.
Royal Glenn[from old catalog] Hall (1926). The Religious Tendencies of Humanistic-Naturalism. [N.P.].
Robert Pasnau (2011). Philosophy of Mind and Human Nature. In Brian Davies & Eleonore Stump (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. Oxford University Press.
Jerome Arthur Stone (2008). Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative. State University of New York Press.
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