Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion
376 pages, 6 x 9
Hardcover
Release Date:15 Oct 2009
ISBN:9781599473147
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Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion

By Jim Proctor
Templeton Press

Contemporary scholarship has given rise to several modes of understanding biophysical and human nature, each entangled with related notions of science and religion. Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion represents the culmination of three years of collaboration by an international group of fourteen natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, and theologians. The result is an intellectually stimulating volume that explores how the ideas of nature pertain to science and religion.

Editor James D. Proctor has gathered sixteen in-depth essays, each examining and comparing five central metaphors or "visions" of biophysical and human nature. These visions are evolutionary nature, emergent nature, malleable nature, nature as sacred, and nature as culture. The book's diverse contributors offer a wide variety of unique perspectives on these five visions, spanning the intellectual spectrum and proposing important and often startling implications for religion and science alike. Throughout the essays, the authors do a great deal of cross-referencing and engaging each other's ideas, creating a cohesive dialogue on the visions of nature.

Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion offers a blend of scholarly rigor and readable prose that will be appreciated by anyone engaged in the fields of religion, philosophy, and the natural sciences.

 

James D. Proctor is professor and director of the Environmental Studies Program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. With a background in geography, environmental science, and religious studies, his research primarily concerns concepts of nature, science, and religion, as well as contemporary environmental thought. Proctor is coeditor of Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain, editor of Science, Religion, and the Human Experience, and coeditor of an upcoming volume tentatively titled After Environmentalism.

Acknowledgments / vii
Introduction: Visions of Nature, Science, and Religion / 3
James D. Proctor
1. The Nature of Visions of Nature: Packages to Be Unpacked / 36
Willem B. Drees
2. Visions of Nature through Mathematical Lenses / 59
Douglas E. Norton
3. Between Apes and Angels: At the Borders of Human Nature / 83
Johannes M.M.H. Thijssen
4. Locating New Visions / 103
David N. Livingstone
5. Enduring Metaphysical Impatience? / 131
Robert E. Ulanowicz
6. God from Nature: Evolution or Emergence? / 149
Barbara J. King
7. Who Needs Emergence? / 166
Gregory Peterson
8. Creativity through Emergence: A Vision of Nature and God / 180
Antje Jackelén
9. Rereading a Landscape of Atonement on an Aegean Island / 205
Martha L. Henderson
10. The Vision of Malleable Nature: A Complex Conversation / 227
Andrew Lustig
11. Visions of a Source of Wonder / 245
Fred D. Ledley
12. Nature as Culture: The Example of Animal / Behavior and Human Morality / 271
Nicolaas A. Rupke
13. Environment after Nature: Time for a / New Vision / 293
James D. Proctor
14. Should the Word Nature Be Eliminated? / 312
John Hedley Brooke
Afterword: Visualizing Visions and Visioners / 337
James D. Proctor
Contributors / 353
Index / 357
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