The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

In the last post I addressed dysgenics as presented by Edward Dutton in his most recent book, Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West . He argued that reduced evolutionary selection pressures since the late 1800s has weakened average cognitive ability, resulting in lower fitness individuals who push for self-destructive societal beliefs and behaviors. I found no evidence for the central claim that intelligence has been in decline since the Industrial Revolution, and dismissed his argument. Here I will try to address a more reasonable framing of the dysgenics hypothesis. I am learning as I go from a fairly naïve position, so please let me know if my ideas have already been debunked elsewhere, or discussed in greater detail previously. My investigation of Dutton was in response to a  VoegelinView  article and  Orthosphere  follow-up essay by Dr. Richard Cocks, both of which treated Dutton's ideas as scientifically credible. Despite my difference of opinion, Dr. Co...

I have in my head a framework for a multi-post series on rationality and Christianity, building in part on insights from a couple of books I am reading, including  Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop (2020) (I commented on his refreshing historical approach in my last post ) and Christianity and History by Herbert Butterfield (1949). But my time is short and I get distracted. But this is at least tangentially related. Earlier this week a book recommendation came up on Amazon for a book with the provocative title  Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West , by Edward Dutton. The cover was a picture of a woman being burned at the stake with flames rising all around her. My wife saw this recommendation come up and jokingly expressed some concern about what I must have been reading that would prompt such a suggestion. She read the overview on Amazon out of curiosity. From the summary, we agreed with Dutton that there has been a decline in our culture, but we were highl...

I. 8 months ago I wrote in my post The Return of Civilization that I was looking forward to reading Larry Siedentop's book Inventing the Individual.  I was excited about it because it looked like a return to old times when academics were able to talk about how values and beliefs impacted historical developments. [C'mon man! Of course beliefs and values will impact societies! Why are we pretending otherwise?] Well, I finally got around to starting Inventing the Individual , and so far it has not disappointed. I will surely reference this book in future posts, but today I will just share a couple of thoughts from the Prologue, in which Siedentop expresses his philosophy of history and motivations for writing this book.  First of all, Siedentop echoes Andrew Zwerneman's concerns about the loss of a narrative origin story for the West, and connects it with a loss of unity and morality. This loss of narrative and belief in historiography is, of course, a result of the neo-Ma...