William James (1890) put it in his own inimitable (but uncharacteristically concise) style: "Is the Kosmos an expression of intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute external fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in contemplating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of something, we place intelligence at the heart of it and have a religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists." (p. 21)
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge: Harvard. Rick Dr. Richard L. Froman Psychology Department John Brown University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone and voice mail: (479)524-7295 http://www.jbu.edu/sbs/rfroman.html -----Original Message----- From: Stephen Black [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 4:41 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences Subject: Re: Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer I had noted in my letter to the British Medical Journal on Leibovici's experiment on remote, retroactive prayer that Darwin had argued against the idea that God takes a "personal and protective interest in how we live our lives". Jim Guinee commented on this, facetiously, no doubt: > > The great theologian ;) Actually Darwin had pretty good theological credentials. He studied theology at Christ's Church, Cambridge and graduated with a B.A. degree in divinity in 1831. But he gradually lost his faith, helped not only by his developing insight into the nature of evolution but undoubtedly also by personal tragedy. According to Milner (2002), three of Darwin's children died, two in infancy, and "bright and charming 10-year-old Annie, whose death plunged her parents into profound bereavement...[It was] the most wrenching event of the naturalist's middle age". Milner, reviewing a new biography of Darwin by Randal Kenynes, goes on to say: "According to Keynes, Darwin was at a loss to understand why most naturalists at the time thought they saw evidence of..benevolent design in a world so full of pain, death and disease. "There seems to me", he wrote, "too much misery in the world" for a loving deity to have designed it that way." Milner cites several examples known to Darwin, and notes that "with the slow death of Annie, the misery became personal". There are few personal tragedies that can match that of watching your own children die, and few better examples of the absence of a loving and caring God. So I thought it appropriate to cite Darwin in making this point in my note. -Stephen Milner, R. (2002). The first evolutionary psychologist. Scientific American, January. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stephen Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Department web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy Check out TIPS listserv for teachers of psychology at: http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/psyc/southerly/tips/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
