I’ve been reading Keith Ward’s latest book, The Big Questions in Science and Religion (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), with a view to reviewing it on this blog. I’m now reaching the conclusion that the best approach will be to blog about it chapter by chapter, since each chapter deals with such a “big question”.
The book is, in essence, a philosophy of religion primer with specific focus on the relevance of the natural sciences (both their conclusions and their methods) to our understanding of religion, reason and the like.
I offered a quote from the introduction once before, and so won’t reproduce that one here. Instead I’ll share another one that sums up well the author’s interest in the subjects covered in the book and his conviction about their importance: “I believe that the questions with which this book deals are the greatest intellectual and existential questions facing any thoughtful person in the modern scientific age, whether such persons are religious or not” (p.5).
The first chapter (and thus the first one I’ll blog about soon) is entitled “How Did the Universe Begin?” and, like all the chapters in the book, it has a subtitle which is also a question: “Is there an ultimate explanation for the universe?”
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