Brendan Sweetman

Evolution, Chance, and God looks at the relationship between religion and evolution from a philosophical perspective. This relationship is fascinating, complex and often very controversial, involving myriad issues that are difficult to keep separate from each other. Evolution, Chance, and God introduces the reader to the main themes of this debate and to the theory of evolution, while arguing for a particular viewpoint, namely that evolution and religion are compatible, and that, contrary to the views of some influential thinkers, there is no chance operating in the theory of evolution, a conclusion that has great significance for teleology. One of the main aims of this book is not simply to critique one influential contemporary view that evolution and religion are incompatible, but to explore specific ways of how we might understand their compatibility, as well as the implications of evolution for religious belief. This involves an exploration of how and why God might have created by means of evolution, and what the consequences in particular are for the status of human beings in creation, and for issues such as free will, the objectivity of morality, and the problem of evil. By probing how the theory of evolution and religion could be reconciled, Sweetman says that we can address more deeply key foundational questions concerning chance, design, suffering and morality, and God's way of acting in and through creation.

The emergence of modernity in Western thinking entails a new, radically different worldview from the past, one dominated by secular understandings of history and tradition, and of new forms of what Cochran calls “collective consciousness.” Modernity also requires a rethinking of the role of human knowledge in the world. Cochran’s aim is to explore the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of these developments by looking at the ideas of a variety of thinkers, and by focusing in particular on the rise of the print medium, the book, as the dominant medium for recording, preserving, and disseminating thought. By modernity, Cochran means the world’s “relative disengagement from a theologically grounded view of human history”. His approach is fundamentally postmodernist, although he mentions few postmodernists in his exposition; he is inspired mainly by critical theory, especially Gramsci. He wants to challenge the traditional view of the progress of knowledge, which he believes was strongly influenced in terms of its theoretical understanding by Leibniz and Kant. This is the view that history is linear: that we are always adding to the sum total of knowledge, which inevitably opens a distinction between the present and the past; that we learn from the past, and project toward a better future. This view is fundamentally against the relativistic tendencies of the modern age, and it contributed to the emergence of several concepts that became central to our understanding of culture: the totality of human knowledge, adding to knowledge, the university as center of knowledge, the scholarly expert, the emergence of the subject, the expert informing the public, and so on.

This book argues that contemporary liberal democracy is reaching a crisis. Brendan Sweetman contends that this crisis arises from a contentious pluralism involving the rise of incommensurable worldviews that emerge out of the absolutizing of freedom over time in a democratic setting. This clash of worldviews is further complicated by a loss of confidence in reason and by the practical failure of public discourse. A contributory factor is the growing worldview of secularism which needs to be distinguished from both the process of secularization and the concept of the secular state. After describing the crisis, and exploring these themes, and also rejecting proposed solutions from recent liberal political theory, Sweetman develops an approach to pluralist disagreement which requires a re-envisioning of the relationship between religion, secularism and politics, and which allows a limited place for all worldviews in the state, including religious worldviews. Engaging with the work of Philip Kitcher, Robert Audi, John Rawls, A.C. Grayling, Martin Luther King, Cécile Laborde, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, and Plato, Sweetman's approach is a formidable innovation in the quest to maintain a free and fair society.