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Here is a book review of Michael Ruse’s Science and Spirituality, which he argues that the core of Christianity is consistent with contemporary scientific conclusions. The reviewer’s interesting conclusion:

My own suspicion is that it is not so easy to divide the spheres of faith and reason. It takes considerable faith, for example, to believe that the very same laws of nature apply throughout reality and that those laws are remotely accessible to the human mind (a problem Ruse insists that “the Victorians” would not have noticed — forgetting that Charles Darwin did, as Alvin Plantinga has pointed out). It also takes faith, and considerable devotion, to believe that reality is worth knowing, and that it’s therefore worth struggling to discover a coherent, unified theory of everything (which we certainly don’t have now). Without those dogmas, “science” only names a compendium of sometimes useful techniques and partial hypotheses which we have no reason to expect to be coherent or of any more general interest than stamp collecting. The question must then be: what sort of universe must we think this is if those dogmas are to be believable? And the answer, perhaps, is that Christian theism provides a more plausible metaphysics than currently fashionable materialism. Science and Religion, by Ruse’s account, are not at war, only because they have different fields and methods. But perhaps they are not at war because Science depends upon Religion, and rebellion will lead in the end to its disintegration.

From a recent NYT piece by Brian Leiter:

What might help philosophy [from budget cuts at universities] is the more widespread recognition that philosophy remains the only humanistic discipline that really teaches students to think critically and analytically, which is why philosophy students remain the leading performs on professional school exams like the LSAT. Even in the 21st century, smarts matter — to lawyers, to doctors, to problem-solvers in all fields, as well as to a good life. After nearly 20 years in law teaching, I can confirm that no one is smarter than the serious undergraduate philosophy major. Any school that cuts philosophy might as well put up a sign that says, ‘The smart kids should apply elsewhere.’

Andy Martin article called “The Phenomenology of Ugly” on why so many philosophers are ugly and how philosophy can save us from our ugliness.

“It is no coincidence that one of our founding philosophers, Socrates, makes a big deal out of his own ugliness. It is the comic side of the great man. Socrates is (a) a thinker who asks profound and awkward questions (b) ugly. In Renaissance neo-Platonism (take, for example, Erasmus and his account of  “foolosophers” in “The Praise of Folly”) Socrates, still spectacularly ugly, acquires an explicitly Christian logic: philosophy is there — like Sartre’s angelic curls — to save us from our ugliness (perhaps more moral than physical).”

And no, not the guy next to Sulu. I once heard Cornel West say the great voices we need to be confronting are Emerson, Chekhov, and Coltrane. (What a cool thing to say.) Read more about Chekhov here. Excerpt:

This elusiveness – a feature of both the life and the work – is a large part of what gives him his enduring fascination, as well as his striking modernity. In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony and idealisation, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness.

An interesting reflection today in the NYTimes on the relationship between philosophy and faith from Gary Gutting (philosophy professor at Notre Dame) here.

An excerpt:

“The standard view is that philosophers’ disagreements over arguments about God make their views irrelevant to the faith of ordinary believers and non-believers.  The claim seems obvious: if we professionals can’t agree among ourselves, what can we have to offer to non-professionals?  An appeal to experts requires consensus among those experts, which philosophers don’t have.

This line of thought ignores the fact that when philosophers’ disagree it is only about specific aspects of the most subtle and sophisticated versions of arguments for and against God’s existence […]. There is no disagreement among philosophers about the more popular arguments to which theists and atheists typically appeal: as formulated, they do not prove (that is, logically derive from uncontroversial premises) what they claim to prove. They are clearly inadequate in the judgment of qualified professionals.  Further, there are no more sophisticated formulations that theists or atheists can accept — the way we do scientific claims — on the authority of expert consensus.

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case.   This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.

This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments.  Believers, of course, can fall back on the logically less rigorous support that they characterize as faith.  But then they need to reflect on just what sort of support faith can give to religious belief.   How are my students’ warm feelings of certainty as they hug one another at Sunday Mass in their dorm really any different from the trust they might experience while under the spell of a really plausible salesperson?”