For those interested in science-faith relations, this important study examines popular misunderstandings about key events in history. It covers the major episodes such as Galileo's trial, the Wilberforce-Huxley debate, and the Scopes trial of 1925, but also looks further back through the medieval period to the Classical age, revealing how these events have acquired mythical and misleading statuses.
Chapter 1. Myths, Monotheism, and the Origins of Western Science
The Popular Myth that Atheism is New
Classical and Medieval Unbelief
Thomas Hobbes, Materialism, and Man the Machine
Atheists, Deists, and Unbelievers
Romantic and Revolutionary Atheism
Robert Owen, George Holyoake, and the Victorian Secular Atheists
The Myth that Simple Faith Was Destroyed by Darwin in 1859
The Myth of the Medieval “Dark Age”
The Myth of the “Enlightenment”
The Problem of Eternal Damnation
Biblical Criticism, “Myth”, and Early Biblical Archaeology
The Growth and Power of Science
Christianity and Science in “Conflict”: Two Nineteenth-Century American “Atheists”
All Christians Are Really Biblical Fundamentalists
The Church Has Always Persecuted Science and Scientists
Religion Causes the World’s Troubles: Only Secularism Can Bring Peace
Chapter 7. Monkeying around with History: The Myth of the Big 1860 “Oxford Debate” on Evolution
The Origins of Life: Pre-Darwinian Ideas of “Evolution”
Chapter 9. Charles Darwin: Monkey, Man, and Myth
Why Do Humans Respond so Positively to Beauty and Elegance?
Science Describes Effects, Religion Talks of Causes and Purposes
Why Has Religion Failed to Die Away?
Are Atheism and Secularism More Superstitious than Christianity?
Forced to Act: Mechanism and Evolutionary and Neurological Determinism
The Myth of Human Perfectibility
The Unacknowledged Pillaging of Christian Morality by Secularists
Believing in an External Transcendent Reality
Why Must Humans Be Always Saving Something?
How “Enlightened” Are the New Atheists?
Conclusion: So Where Do We Stand, and What Do We Do?
Why Get Hot under the Secular Collar?
History? But the Gospels Were Just Made Up – Weren’t They?