Reviews for Landmarks in the Struggle between Science and Religion

The average rating for Landmarks in the Struggle between Science and Religion based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-06 00:00:00 Alfonso Binilla Well worth reading. Fechner was a scientist and early psychologist; before science was synonymous with atheistic materialism, of course. Today some of his ideas might be considered slightly bizarre. He had the belief that plants had souls. Some of that thought is included in this book. It was part and parcel of his system referred to as panpsychism. Certainly, he makes a good case that plants have some life essence, but using the word "soul" might be extreme; or at least too ambiguous. Greek has three common words to denote life: bios, psyche and zoe. I would certainly ascribe to plants the first, but the second I would only grant if one were to distinguish human psychical life from plant psychical life; and I would certainly not ascribe to plants zoe life. One can't help noticing some strong similarities to Rudolf Steiner's thought in this book; if you are familiar with his work at all. Apparently, Steiner was heavily influenced by Fechner and that is obvious reading this book. I would probably rather read Fechner though. Although Fechner did claim to be a Christian, his ideas could only be considered slightly unorthodox; but I do think some of them have merit. Very little of Fechner has been translated; this book was a selection of extracts taken from different works. Lowrie, the editor, probably did a decent job; he was, after all, one of the first translators of Kierkegaard; but other than this book and Fechner's work entitled "The Little Book Of Life After Death", little else has been translated into English. I do intend to read The Little Book Of Life After Death next. His ideas intrigued me enough to read that work.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-12-20 00:00:00 Michael Villaraza "Alan Heimert in a very large and important work, Religion and the American Mind which is very important, we are going to go into this, studies it in all the literature from about 1750 to about 1800 or shortly thereafter and finds it dominant, in fact, when he was studying the literature of the 1850’s, 60’s, 70’s, he found that he could not understand it without going back to this idea of America as God’s Israel. As a place to build the kingdom of God. To establish a social order in terms of Gods Law." ~ RJ Rushdoony "Motives of Discovery and Exploration" in American History to 1865