Agents Under Fire
I’ve just finished Angus Menuge’s excellent book Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science. I began the book with the ambitious goal of providing reviews of each chapter as I read. This lasted for a couple of chapters. The book is much more rigorously philosophical than many books which are intended for a more popular audience. I found it increasingly difficult to summarize a chapter’s worth of philosophical argument in a quick blog post. So… you’ll just have to read it yourself. It was quite good though and I think he is successful in applying many of the principles of intelligent design as used in the physical and biological sciences to rationality and the mind.
John DePoe states in his Amazon review of the book:
Angus Menuge has written an excellent book defending the concept of “agency” against the most challenging arguments raised by contemporary materialists. Menuge shows that the Christian worldview gives an account of human agency that is not available to the most sophisticated accounts materialism. For example, Menuge engages Dan Dennett, Paul Churchland, Jerry Fodor, and other key figures in contemporary philosophy of mind. The criticisms Menuge brings to light show the breaking points in leading theories of mind. I read this book as a philosophy graduate student taking a philosophy of mind seminar, and I found that Menuge’s criticisms and scholarship can run with the best of them. His carefully documented work of scholarship was a valuable tool for me as a student even in graduate school.
But Menuge’s book is not just a piece of critical scholarship. He also advances some constructive theories that explain crucial features of human agents. A theistic worldview provides tools for maintaining a robust theory of personal agency that are unavailable to materialists, which Menuge brings into focus with rigorous logic and clarity.