I mean, yes, Schroeder is absolutely doing the Jewish equivalent of Christian apologetics, but that's not the same as doing Christian apologetics. Nobody needs to prove that a literal reading of Bereishis is compatible with 20th century physics since virtually no Rabbi ever has claimed that a literal reading of Bereishis means anything at all.
The big popular science works I read throughout my childhood- A Brief History of Time, Wonderful Life, The Blind Watchmaker, The Elegant Universe, etc... were all based on a dogmatic materialism that I ultimately found (and still find) unsatisfying. The Cambrian Explosion that Wonderful Life is about challenges Gould's assumptions about how evolution works- he's not sure what to replace his theory with, but he knows with certainty that it will be a materialist explanation even though all materialist explanations have thus far failed. And look, obviously if a materialist explanation of the Cambrian Explosion does turn up, that won't itself be a challenge to God's existence, so I'm not bothered by the supposition so much as I'm bothered by the certainty. God's nonexistence is an axiom, not a supposition, in the popular science texts that Schroeder is challenging. And in a lot of senses, The Science of God is a book created by those other books, a book with a kind of Jewish apologetics that only exists because Richard Dawkins is out there writing sloppy and bigoted atheist apologetics, and a book with a lot of the same limitations and faults as the books it is challenging.
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Date: 2016-07-14 01:16 pm (UTC)The big popular science works I read throughout my childhood- A Brief History of Time, Wonderful Life, The Blind Watchmaker, The Elegant Universe, etc... were all based on a dogmatic materialism that I ultimately found (and still find) unsatisfying. The Cambrian Explosion that Wonderful Life is about challenges Gould's assumptions about how evolution works- he's not sure what to replace his theory with, but he knows with certainty that it will be a materialist explanation even though all materialist explanations have thus far failed. And look, obviously if a materialist explanation of the Cambrian Explosion does turn up, that won't itself be a challenge to God's existence, so I'm not bothered by the supposition so much as I'm bothered by the certainty. God's nonexistence is an axiom, not a supposition, in the popular science texts that Schroeder is challenging. And in a lot of senses, The Science of God is a book created by those other books, a book with a kind of Jewish apologetics that only exists because Richard Dawkins is out there writing sloppy and bigoted atheist apologetics, and a book with a lot of the same limitations and faults as the books it is challenging.