An Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion

by John Haldane

Overview

We live, allegedly, in a postmodern age in which we have cast aside the narrative fantasies of the pre-modern era. If postmodernism represents the final abandonment of all grand theories, where does religion stand? If religion is a particularly unbelievable form of explanation, why does it power still affect social and political change? Here, like the skeptics of our age, the author asks, What has theology ever had to say that was of the slightest use to anyone? He argues that religion without God is like a car without an engine, and draws on many aspects of human culture to offer a defense of religion that is not only credible but necessary in an age when postmodernism itself has been exposed as a cruel illusion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780715628676
Publisher:	IPM
Publication date:	11/01/2003
Series:	Intelligent Person's Guides
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	4.75(w) x 6.75(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy, Head of the School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies at the University of St. Andrews, and Fellow of the royal Society of Arts. He is an editor of the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Routledge).

Table of Contents

Preface Introduction
1. Religion and the Prophets of Doom
2. Religion, Science and the Universe
3. Religion and the Nature of Evil
4. Religion and the Nature of History
5. Religion, Value and Purpose
6. Religion, Art and the Aesthetic
7. Religion, Death and the Meaning of Life
8. Religion and the Doubting Philosophers Further Reading Index