Creation versus evolution: What seems like a cultural crisis of our day, played out in courtrooms and classrooms across the county, is in fact part of a larger story reaching back through the centuries. The views of both evolutionists and creationists originated as inventions of the Enlightenment--two opposed but closely related responses to a loss of religious faith in the Western world. In his latest book, Michael Ruse, a preeminent authority on Darwinian evolutionary thought and a leading participant in the ongoing debate, uncovers surprising similarities between evolutionist and creationist thinking. Exploring the underlying philosophical commitments of evolutionists, he reveals that those most hostile to religion are just as evangelical as their fundamentalist opponents. But more crucially, and reaching beyond the biblical issues at stake, he demonstrates that these two diametrically opposed ideologies have, since the Enlightenment, engaged in a struggle for the privilege of defining human origins, moral values, and the nature of reality. Highlighting modern-day partisans as divergent as Richard Dawkins and Left Behind authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Ruse's bracing book takes on the assumptions of controversialists of every stripe and belief and offers to all a new and productive way of understanding this unifying, if often bitter, quest.

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A new take on Darwin explores the issue of design--does evolution have an ultimate aim or purpose--tracing this idea across the broad sweep of Western science and philosophy.

Product Description: The science-religion debate is a hot topic in academic circles and contemporary culture, and evolution makes the subject particularly contentious. Does modern science tip the scales toward atheism? Or does religion have resources to support its credibility and relevance? And how does evolution influence both worldviews?Comprehensive, balanced, and engaging, Science, Evolution, and Religion provides a dynamic yet respectful introduction to the science-religion debate, framed as a conflict between theism and atheism and structured around the impact of evolution on both perspectives...read more

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Articles by such experts as scientists, philosophers, and theologians present the debate over stem cell research, a technology that uses the tissue of aborted fetuses to research cures for debilitating disesases.

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Highlights the figures, historical debates, discoveries, and controversy within the public schools that led to various theories and changing attitudes regarding origins of humankind.

Product Description: Is there intelligent life on other worlds? William Whewell, one of the most influential British intellectuals of the nineteenth century, weighed in on this question with Of the Plurality of Worlds. Writing anonymously, Whewell argued that there was no life anywhere else in the universe...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: With the recent Sokal hoax--the publication of a prominent physicist's pseudo-article in a leading journal of cultural studies--the status of science moved sharply from debate to dispute. Is science objective, a disinterested reflection of reality, as Karl Popper and his followers believed? Or is it subjective, a social construction, as Thomas Kuhn and his students maintained? Into the fray comes Mystery of Mysteries, an enlightening inquiry into the nature of science, using evolutionary theory as a case study...read more

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Brings together traditional philosophy and modern sociobiology to examine evolutionary biology and its relation to the evolution of knowledge and ethics

Attempts to give a philosophical evaluation of the scientific claims of evolution and creationism (view table of contents)

Product Description: An examination of homosexuality, both historically and in the present, in an attempt to understand what it is, why we have shaped certain attitudes towards it and what intellectual challenges it presents. Ruse examines the Freudian arguments, the empirical data from the seventies, including the the Kinsey report, and the issues which have arisen in the light of the AIDS epidemic and the political, legal and moral questions these issues raise...read more

Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' is now 130 years old, but it continues to provoke fierce debate. This lively and controversial collection of essays looks at Darwinism from historical and contemporary perspectives.