Asian Religious Responses to Darwinism

by C. Mackenzie Brown
Asian Religious Responses to Darwinism
Author: C. Mackenzie Brown
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-12-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3030373401
GET BOOK

This volume brings together diverse Asian religious perspectives to address critical issues in the encounter between tradition and modern western evolutionary thought. Such thought encompasses the biological theories of Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Earnest Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, and later “neo-Darwinians,” as well as the more sociological evolutionary theories of thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Henri Bergson. The essays in this volume cover responses from Hindu, Jain, Buddhist (Chinese, Japanese, and Indo-Tibetan), Confucian, Daoist, and Muslim traditions. These responses come from the decades immediately after publication of The Origin of Species up to the present, with attention being paid to earlier perspectives and teachings within a tradition that have affected responses to Darwinism and western evolutionary thought in general. The book focuses on three critical issues: the struggle for survival and the moral implications read into it; genetic variation and its seeming randomness as related to the problems of meaning and purpose; and the nature of humankind and human exceptionalism. Each essay deals with one or more of the three issues within the context of a specific tradition.

Hindu Perspectives on Evolution

by C. Mackenzie Brown
Hindu Perspectives on Evolution
Author: C. Mackenzie Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-01-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1136484671
GET BOOK

Providing new insights into the contemporary creationist-evolution debates, this book looks at the Hindu cultural-religious traditions of India, the Hindu Dharma traditions. By focusing on the interaction of religion and science in a Hindu context, it offers a global context for understanding contemporary creationist-evolution conflicts and tensions utilizing a critical analysis of Hindu perspectives on these issues. The cultural and political as well as theological nature of these conflicts is illustrated by drawing attention to parallels with contemporary Islamic and Buddhist responses to modern science and Darwinism. The book explores various ancient and classical Hindu models to explain the origin of the universe encompassing creationist as well as evolutionary—but non-Darwinian—interpretations of how we came to be. Complex schemes of cosmic evolution were developed, alongside creationist proofs for the existence of God utilizing distinctly Hindu versions of the design argument. After examining diverse elements of the Hindu Dharmic traditions that laid the groundwork for an ambivalent response to Darwinism when it first became known in India, the book highlights the significance of the colonial context. Analysing critically the question of compatibility between traditional Dharmic theories of knowledge and the epistemological assumptions underlying contemporary scientific methodology, the book raises broad questions regarding the frequently alleged harmony of Hinduism, the eternal Dharma, with modern science, and with Darwinian evolution in particular.

Evolutionary Theories and Religious Traditions

by Bernard Lightman
Evolutionary Theories and Religious Traditions
Author: Bernard Lightman
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2023-11-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822990075
GET BOOK

Before the advent of radio, conceptions of the relationship between science and religion circulated through periodicals, journals, and books, influencing the worldviews of intellectuals and a wider public. In this volume, historians of science and religion examine that relationship through diverse mediums, geographic contexts, and religious traditions. Spanning within and beyond Europe and North America, chapters emphasize underexamined regions—New Zealand, Australia, India, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire—and major religions of the world, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam; interactions between those traditions; as well as atheism, monism, and agnosticism. As they focus on evolution and human origins, contributors draw attention to European scientists other than Darwin who played a significant role in the dissemination of evolutionary ideas; for some, those ideas provided the key to understanding every aspect of human culture, including religion. They also highlight central figures in national contexts, many of whom were not scientists, who appropriated scientific theories for their own purposes. Taking a local, national, transnational, and global approach to the study of science and religion, this volume begins to capture the complexity of cultural engagement with evolution and religion in the long nineteenth century.

Creationism in a South Korean Culture

by Hyung Wook Park
Creationism in a South Korean Culture
Author: Hyung Wook Park
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2024-06-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040039456
GET BOOK

Park investigates the unexpected success of early Korean creationists, who were mostly scientists, and argues that creationism is not a product of the lack of intelligence or proper scientific education but a consequence of more profound social developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Known as the religious belief rejecting evolutionary theory, creationism has become a global issue. Although it was often known as a problem unique among fundamentalist Protestants in the United States, it has been appropriated by people with diverse religions around the world, including Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America. Many scientists and educators perceive this dissemination as a threat to modern pedagogy and scholarship, although few of them are aware of its historical and cultural contexts. Through an intensive study of the birth and growth of the anti-evolutionary movement in South Korea during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this book traces an important part of this worldwide movement against evolution. The author argues that South Korean creationism started from the country's past as a developmental state during the Cold War but proliferated further amid subsequent democratization and globalization. Creationism reflected the new identifications of some Korean scientists and engineers with evangelical faith, who actively formed their own domain outside of the state hegemony and authority. This book is a valuable reference for scholars interested in the dynamic interaction between science and religion in East Asia.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism

by Rebecca Ruth Gould
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism
Author: Rebecca Ruth Gould
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 555
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351369830
GET BOOK

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse and ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts. As the first extended collection to offer perspectives on translation and activism from a global perspective, this handbook includes case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised people from over twenty different languages. The contributions will make visible the role of translation in promoting and enabling social change, in promoting equality, in fighting discrimination, in supporting human rights, and in challenging autocracy and injustice across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, the US and Europe. With a substantial introduction, thirty-one chapters, and an extensive bibliography, this Handbook is an indispensable resource for all activists, translators, students and researchers of translation and activism within translation and interpreting studies.

Most Adaptable to Change

by Alexander Hall
Most Adaptable to Change
Author: Alexander Hall
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2024-10-22
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822991519
GET BOOK

In a globalized and networked world, where media crosses national borders, contributors reveal how transnational processes have shaped popular representations of scientific and religious ideas in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Ecuador, India, Spain, Turkey, Israel, and Japan. Most Adaptable to Change demonstrates the varied and divergent ways evolutionary ideas and nonscientific traditions and ways of understanding life on Earth have transformed across the globe. By examining a range of popular media forms across a multitude of different geopolitical contexts from the 1920s to today, this book traces how different evolutionary traditions and figures have been championed or discredited by different religious traditions, their spiritual leaders, and politicians using the cultural authority of religion as leverage. It analyzes the ways in which evolutionary theory has been mobilized explicitly for the purposes of addressing wider sociopolitical questions, and it is the first collection of its kind to explicitly explore the role of popular media formats themselves as mediators in institutional debates on the relationship between evolution and religion.

Was Hitler a Darwinian?

by Robert J. Richards
Was Hitler a Darwinian?
Author: Robert J. Richards
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2013-11-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022605909X
GET BOOK

In tracing the history of Darwin’s accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most scholars agree that Darwin introduced blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing moral values from the understanding of nature. According to the standard interpretation, the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including moral behavior, ultimately selfish. Few doubt that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by the master’s German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. In this collection of essays, Robert J. Richards argues that this orthodox view is wrongheaded. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and provided it with a goal: man as a moral creature. The book takes up many other topics—including the character of Darwin’s chief principles of natural selection and divergence, his dispute with Alfred Russel Wallace over man’s big brain, the role of language in human development, his relationship to Herbert Spencer, how much his views had in common with Haeckel’s, and the general problem of progress in evolution. Moreover, Richards takes a forceful stand on the timely issue of whether Darwin is to blame for Hitler’s atrocities. Was Hitler a Darwinian? is intellectual history at its boldest.

Insistent Life

by Brianne Donaldson
Insistent Life
Author: Brianne Donaldson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520380568
GET BOOK

"Insistent Life is the first full-length interdisciplinary treatment of the foundational principles and principles of application for engaging contemporary bioethics within the Jain tradition. The book fills a significant gap in both the fields of bioethics and Jain studies since Jainism, perhaps more so than any other South Asian tradition, is strongly focused on the ethics of birth, life, and death, with regard to humans as well as other living beings. Brianne Donaldson and Ana Bajželj analyze a diverse range of Jain texts and contemporary sources on Jain doctrines and practices, alongside bioethics, to identify Jain perspectives on bioethical issues while highlighting the complexity of their personal, professional, and public dimensions. The book also features extensive original data--represented in visual graphs--based on an international survey the authors conducted with Jain medical professionals in India and diaspora communities of North America, Europe, and Africa"--

Science and Religion

by Yiftach Fehige
Science and Religion
Author: Yiftach Fehige
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-02-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317335236
GET BOOK

This volume situates itself within the context of the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field that is dedicated to the study of the complex interactions between science and religion. It presents an innovative approach insofar as it addresses the Eurocentrism that is still prevalent in this field. At the same time it reveals how science develops in the space that emerges between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. The volume examines a range of themes central to the interaction between science and religion: ‘Eastern’ thought within ‘Western’ science and religion and vice versa, and revisits thinkers who sought to integrate ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ thinking. It studies Zen Buddhism and its relation to psychotherapy, Islamic science, Vedantic science, atheism in India, and Darwinism, offering in turn new perspectives on a variety of approaches to nature. Part of the Science and Technology Studies series, this volume brings together original perspectives from major scholars from across disciplines and will be of great interest to scholars and students of science and technology studies, history of science, philosophy of science, religious studies, and sociology.