materialism

About the Book

Americans love to trash their politicians as corrupt and self-interested, but they don’t agree on a solution. How can America attract good leaders to the thousands of elective offices in the land? In Polticians: The worst Kind of People to Run the Government, Except for All the Others, Bruce Chapman lays out a bold plan for the changes we need to make in our public life if we are serious about enable worthy leaders to emerge to and to succeed. Drawing on history as well as his own extensive experience in politics and public policy, Chapman challenges the conventional wisdom about politicians, arguing that their chief rivals — the media, bureaucrats, college professors, and even political “reform” groups — are often sources of further political demoralization rather than renewal. Republicans and Democrats alike, conservatives and liberals, have a stake in responding to the stirring and provocative challenge raised by this book.

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin,” writes Richard Dawkins, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” This little book shows more persuasively than ever before that Dawkins is wrong and that the origin of life continues to pose insurmountable difficulties to unguided material processes. The authors discuss why traditional origin-of-life research has failed and Read More ›

The 2014 reboot of Carl Sagan’s classic 13-part series Cosmos struck a chord with viewers, garnered 12 Emmy Award nominations, and is headed straight into schools as a science teacher’s instructional aid. It’s also an agenda-driven vehicle for scientific materialism, casting religion as arch foe of the search for truth about nature and pressing its message that human beings occupy Read More ›

This impressive volume contains critical essays on naturalism from the perspectives of theology, ethics, cosmology, ontology, and epistemology. Various Discovery Fellows make contributions including Robert C. Koons, J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and William Dembski. Koons, a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, begins by noting that there is a simple correlation between existence and the requirement of Read More ›

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since Read More ›

Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He offers compelling evidence that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin, making a convincing case for what many in scientific fields are Read More ›

With the publication of Darwin on Trial in 1991, Cal Berkeley legal scholar Phillip Johnson became the leading figure in the intelligent design movement. Exposing and calling into question the philosophical foundations of Darwinism, Johnson led the charge against this largely unquestioned philosophy of materialistic reductionism and its purported basis in scientific research. This book reviews and celebrates the life and thought Read More ›

In the first study of its kind, Agents Under Fire defends a robust notion of agency and intentionality against eliminative and naturalistic alternatives, showing the interconnections between the philosophy of mind, theology, and Intelligent Design. Menuge argues that Behe’s irreducible complexity is a challenge to reductionism not only in biology, but also in psychology, and shows the inability of the Darwinian psychology Read More ›

In this technical philosophical treatise, Discovery Institute Fellow Robert C. Koons investigates an innovative philosophy of mind. Koons takes on two powerful dogmas in this wide-ranging philosophical work: anti-realism and materialism. In doing so, Koons develops an elegant metaphysical system that accounts for such phenomena as information; mental representation; our knowledge of logic, mathematics and science; the structure of spacetime; Read More ›

For over a century, the scientific establishment has ignored challenges to the theory of evolution. But in the last decade such complacency about its scientific and philosophical foundations has been shaken. As cracks in the Darwinian edifice have begun to appear, many are asking whether a defensible alternative exists. In response to this growing crisis, a movement has emerged among Read More ›