Reviews for Christianity and Other Faiths; An Essay in Comparative Religion

The average rating for Christianity and Other Faiths; An Essay in Comparative Religion based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-20 00:00:00 Kimberly Munoz So much writing on emergence is desperately muddled, and a few essays in this volume are true to that form. But there are also clear, strong essays that illuminate interesting problems in the nature of consciousness. Deacon lays out his three levels of emergence more straightforwardly here than in his overly long Incomplete Nature, Peacocke has a fun essay thinking about God by analogy to the emergent human mind (the idea of God as the "mind" of the cosmos gets recharged on this account). Whatever else it does, careful and honest thinking about the nature of emergence makes clear that strict physicalism is as much a declaration of temperament and conviction as it is a rigorous account of the world. There's still a lot of good work to do and a lot of charlatanism enwrapped in scientific terminology (on both sides), but this collected volume houses some important contributions. PS, it's not for the casual reader: the essays are almost uniformly academic/technical.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-11 00:00:00 Casey Norris The Re-Emergence of Emergence is a collection of thoughtful essays on emergence. I read this initially last year (?) but keep coming back to my favorite essay of the book by Terrence Deacon, Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub. Deacon's thesis is: "emergent phenomena grow out of an amplification dynamic that can spontaneously develop in very large ensembles of interacting elements by virtue of the continuing circulation of interaction constraints and biases, which become expressed as system-wide characteristics. In other words, these emergent forms of causality are to a curious type of circular connectivity of causal dynamics, not a special form or causality." Deacon goes on to make a pretty compelling case. As one other reviewer noted, there are parts of this books which are pretty technical (for the Deacon essay mentioned above, I liberally used the dictionary and a couple of science reference books in my library)---that said, this volume is worth the price. Highly recommended.