Arguments Against Secular Culture

This book is aimed more at people outside the established churches than those within them. It takes for granted the claims of Christianity and the counter-claims of atheists, and attempts to define a position in no-man's land. The author, who is a biologist specializing in brain research, argues that the scientific materialist view of life so dominant today has an almost incredibly narrow basis and ignores most of the important and influential aspects of human experience. Differing also with Christian writers in this area like Don Cupitt on the one hand and John Polkinghorne on the other, he puts forward a positive view which has a place for human subjectivity, for artistic experience, for the reality of persons for a God who combines goodness with severely limited power, and for the existence of absolute truth and absolute values. The first part maps out the dominant philosophical viewpoint amongst educated people in the modern world and explains its relationship to the growth of scientific knowledge, seeing modern materialism as a gross distortion of what has gone before. The second part looks at the whole area of human subjectivity and the relationship of the mind to the brain. The last part argues that modern men and women need myths just as much as primitive people did, and suggests what the most fundamental myths might be. In the face of so much that is negative, here is a positive book about the questions which are basic to human experience, and an important contribution to the discussion between science and religion.