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Schellenberg's evolutionary religion: how evolutionary and how religious?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

WILLIAM A. ROTTSCHAEFER Open the ORCID record for WILLIAM A. ROTTSCHAEFER [Opens in a new window]
WILLIAM A. ROTTSCHAEFER*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR 97219, USA
*
e-mail: rotts@lclark.edu
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Abstract

In Evolutionary Religion, J. L. Schellenberg synthesizes his previous impressive contributions to an understanding of religion by formulating an account of religion supported by a Darwinian evolutionary theory understood as a science of the deep future. Such a future enables the realization that our present understandings of religion are immature, that future understandings of divine reality may be radically altered and that religious practice may become the centre of human well-being. In this article, I argue that Schellenberg's evolutionary religion represents at best but half the evolutionary story, its epistemic side. Ontologically, it remains fundamentally non-evolutionary. Positively, I suggest naturalistic alternatives to Schellenberg's Ultimate. I conclude that Schellenberg's evolutionary religion is neither adequately evolutionary nor adequately religious.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 475 - 496
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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