What Makes Us Moral?: Science, Religion and the Shaping of the Moral Landscape. A Response to Sam Harris - Softcover

'In Roman times crowds were offered the spectacle of Christians being thrown to the lions. The outcome was never in doubt: what, presumably, provided the entertainment was the manner of the Christians demise. Craig Hovey's masterful work offers the reader a different spectacle: the prospect of a lion being thrown to the Christians. How does the lion in this case the atheist Sam Harris, who has made of science a religion face his slow demise? That s the fascination of Hovey's absorbing piece-by-piece dissection. Hovey's work is a tour de force of Christian practical philosophy. It turns out Harris says many new things and many true things. But the new things he says are not true and the true things are not new. You won t want to miss a mouthful.' --The Revd Canon Dr Samuel Wells, London, author of Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics

'In response to the current fashion for a new atheism and its dangerously facile morality, Hovey offers a lively and robust defence not of religion, as one might expect but of faith and of how it is that faith makes us moral. Informed by a deep love of truth, this is an admirable and compelling apologetic.' --Dr Susan F. Parsons, editor of Studies in Christian Ethics

'Craig Hovey s new book is exceptionally clear and jargon-free. He offers a robust and lively critique of the strident claims of Sam Harris and concludes with a welcome account of how Christian ethics is still relevant to science and to the modern world.' --Professor Robin Gill, University of Kent, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics

Is science really all we need to make moral decisions? Will there come a time when reason and science alone can tell us everything we need to know about human values? Will this brave new world be better than the current one? Is religion making its last stand in this debate? Theologian and ethicist Craig Hovey exposes the flaws in the idea that science alone answers our moral questions. He directly engages the latest book by Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values on a host of questions. Hovey argues that Harris' views about human well-being owe and unacknowledged debt to Judaism and Christianity, while his vision of a purely rational moral progress is a fantasy. Hovey draws on Christian morality to give a strikingly different vision of human well-being - one that is more interesting as well as more concrete and beautiful.