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Charles Taylor has recently provided an in‐depth exploration of secularity, with a central characteristic being the understanding that religious commitment is optional. This essay extends this analysis, considering the possibility that American society may be entering a second stage of secularity, one in which the possibility of religious commitment ceases to be an option at all for many. The possible...
In a world where all of life is on the edge of extinction and destruction by humankind, those who practice religion‐and‐science within a mutual dialogue bear the responsibility of doing so with this edge of life in mind. To speak of religion‐and‐science as a field of inquiry is to acknowledge the ethical responsibilities it entails. If one task of Zygon is to reformulate religion in light of the future...
James B. Ashbrook's “new natural theology in an empirical mode” pursued an integrated understanding of the spiritual, psychological, and neurological dimensions of spiritual life. Knowledge of neuroscience and personality theory was central to his quest, and his understandings were necessarily revised and amplified as scientific findings emerged. As a result, Ashbrook's legacy may serve as a case...
The estrangement between genetic scientists and theologians originating in the 1960s is reflected in novel combinations of human thought (subject) and genes (investigational object), paralleling each other through the universal process known in chaos theory as self‐similarity. The clash and recombination of genes and knowledge captures what Philip Hefner refers to as irony, one of four voices he suggests...
This essay responds to the question “Where Are We Going?Zygon and the Future of Religion‐and‐Science” and was first presented on 9 May 2009 at a symposium honoring Philip Hefner's editorship of Zygon. It offers four suggestions for the future of religion‐and‐science: Ask big questions; encourage cultural literacy in the public sphere; bring a critical voice to other academic disciplines; and include...
The autocell proposal for the emergence of life and natural selection through the interaction of two reciprocally coupled self‐organizing processes specifically provides a protein‐first model for the origin of life that can be explored by computer simulations and experiment. Beyond the specific proposal it can be considered more generally as a thought experiment in which the principles deduced for...
A sign is something that refers to something else. Signs, whether of natural or cultural origin, act by provoking a receptive system, human or nonhuman, to form an interpretant (a movement or a brain activity) that somehow relates the system to this “something else.” Semiotics sees meaning as connected to the formation of interpretants. In a biosemiotic understanding living systems are basically engaged...
The challenge to the journal Zygon as suggested here is to respond to three different reference groups: public intellectuals, academia, and religious communities. An extended discussion follows of what I term the situation of irony in which religion‐and‐science finds itself. I argue that this situation of irony actually constitutes the domain in which our greatest contributions can be offered.
This essay briefly examines the original visions of Zygon, how they helped explain the publication of a new journal, and what they imply for where we might be going today.
We introduce a two‐part collection of articles (Part 2 to appear in the September 2010 issue) exploring a possible new research program in the field of science and religion. At the center of the program lies an attempt to develop a new theology of nature drawing on the philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Our overall idea is that the fundamental structure of the world is exactly that required for the emergence...
Many anthropological explanations of magical practices are based on the assumption that the immediate cause of performing an act of magic is the belief that the magic will work as claimed. Such explanations typically attempt to show why people come to believe that magical acts work as claimed when such acts do not identifiably have such effects. We suggest an alternative approach to the explanation...
We offer a general definition of interpretation based on a naturalized teleology. The definition tests and extends the biosemiotic paradigm by seeking to provide a philosophically robust resource for investigating the possible role of semiosis (processes of representation and interpretation) in biological systems. We show that our definition provides a way of understanding various possible kinds of...
Many in science are disposed not to take biosemiotics seriously, dismissing it as too anthropomorphic. Furthermore, biosemiotic apologetics are cast in top‐down fashion, thereby adding to widespread skepticism. An effective response might be to approach biosemiotics from the bottom up, but the foundational assumptions that support Enlightenment science make that avenue impossible. Considerations from...
A more complete understanding of the biocultural evolutionary origins of the concept of ought as developed by David Hume and G. E. Moore may lower the philosophical barrier between is and ought and provide new insights about the separations between the domains of religion and science. If this conjecture is correct, the resulting wisdom will help transcend a major source of irony that Philip Hefner...
Kalevi Kull and colleagues recently proposed eight theses as a conceptual basis for the field of biosemiotics. We use these theses as a framework for discussing important current areas of debate in biosemiotics with particular reference to the articles collected in this issue of Zygon.
Bruce Lincoln suggests that myth is “that small class of stories that possess both credibility and authority” (1992, 24). When studying the history of mythology we find that myths often are understood as something other people have—as if the group in question possesses the truth while others live by falsehoods. In examining contemporary North American society, we can see how Judeo‐Christian narratives...
Awareness of boundary, both physical and mental, is seen as the beginning of perception. In any account of the world, therefore, boundary must be a ubiquitous component. In sharp contrast, accounts of God within the Christian tradition commonly have proceeded by the affirmation that God is above and beyond boundary as infinite, timeless, and simple. To overcome this “problem of transcendence,” of...
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