Colin Howson

The growth of science and a correspondingly scientific way of looking at evidence have for the last three centuries slowly been gaining ground over religious explanations of the cosmos and mankind's place in it. However, not only is secularism now under renewed attack from religious fundamentalism, but it has also been widely claimed that the scientific evidence itself points strongly to a universe deliberately fine-tuned for life to evolve in it. In addition, certain aspects of human life, like consciousness and the ability to recognise the existence of universal moral standards, seem completely resistant to evolutionary explanation. In this book Colin Howson analyses in detail the evidence which is claimed to support belief in God's existence and argues that the claim is not well-founded. Moreover, there is very compelling evidence that an all-powerful, all-knowing God not only does not exist but cannot exist, a conclusion both surprising and provocative.

The growth of science and a correspondingly scientific way of looking at evidence have for the last three centuries slowly been gaining ground over religious explanations of the cosmos and mankind's place in it. However, not only is secularism now under renewed attack from religious fundamentalism, but it has also been widely claimed that the scientific evidence itself points strongly to a universe deliberately fine-tuned for life to evolve in it. In addition, certain aspects of human life, like consciousness and the ability to recognise the existence of universal moral standards, seem completely resistant to evolutionary explanation. In this book Colin Howson analyses in detail the evidence which is claimed to support belief in God's existence and argues that the claim is not well-founded. Moreover, there is very compelling evidence that an all-powerful, all-knowing God not only does not exist but cannot exist, a conclusion both surprising and provocative.

First published in 1976, this is a volume of studies on the problems of theory-appraisal in the physical sciences - how and why important theories are developed, changed and are replaced, and by what criteria we judge one theory an advance on another. The volume is introduced by a classic paper of Imre Lakatos's, which sets out a theory for tackling these problems - the methodology of scientific research programmes. Five contributors then test this theory against particular and celebrated case-studies in the history of the physical sciences (particularly in the nineteenth century). The volume ends with a characteristically forceful and original critique of the whole enterprise by Paul Feyerabend. the book is a companion volume to Method and Appraisal in Economics. Both are natural sequels to Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge and attempt to work out in particular cases the implications of some of the theories presented in that book.

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