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Arguments for the Existence of God |
Award-winning novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein’s new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, – about an atheist with a soul – plunges into the great debate of our day: the clash between faith and reason. World events are being shaped by fervent believers at home and abroad, while a new atheism is asserting itself in the public sphere.
On intellectual grounds, the sceptics have everything on their side. Yet people refuse to accept their seemingly irrefutable arguments and continue to embrace faith in God as their source of meaning, purpose and comfort. Goldstein shows that the tension between religion and doubt cannot be understood through rational argument alone. It also must be explored from the point of view of individual people caught in the raptures and torments of religious experience in all their variety.
Goldstein is in discussion with Steven Pinker – experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of the bestselling and award-winning The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought. A feast of philosophical and religious ideas is promised from a world leading novelist and one of the great scientists of our time.
Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #foigoldstein
Rebecca Goldstein’s novels include The Mind-Body Problem and Mazel, winner of the 1995 National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent book, Betraying Spinoza, won the 2006 Koret International Jewish Book Award. She is the recipient of MacArthur, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships and in 2005 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time and Slate, and is the author of six books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate.
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January 26th, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Is it true that Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker are married?
March 3rd, 2010 at 5:32 pm
His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has no children.
March 5th, 2010 at 11:22 am
For years I have pondered the existence - or not - of a deity. I have grappled with Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens and Sam Harris. Still I was unable to come to a definitive conclusion. However, after hearing Rebecca Goldstein - the recipient of a “Genius Award” - read from her novel on Wednesday evening, everything is clear. There truly is no God.
March 5th, 2010 at 10:03 pm
It is likely true that ‘there is no God’. However, the truth of that statement has little to offer by way of clarification as to what religion is really about. I mean, if it were to be proved that there was indeed no God, it would not explain why so many believed in one, or why so many have spent hard time adhering to any one concomitant religion.
A challenge for an atheistic view of the wotrld is to explain religion in natural terms. To say that a huge (near 100%) of the world’s population is just deluded, is a cop out. We must explain it in natural terms - much of it is here because it has been either adaptive, or rides virally on features of our lives that have been, and are adaptive still.
There is no God, but look at how a God’s groups permit the flow of such information down their demes, kin, members and children - and see how they survive.
Let’s ask the right questions about religion - and within a proper theory of evolution whereby natural selection can be seen to act on multiple aspects of our own very lives.
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