Marilynne Robinson, one of College Crunch’s 20 most brilliant Christian professors, has a new book in which she takes on Darwinism: Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. This book is based on Robinson’s Terry Lectures at Yale (see here).
David Bentley Hart’ review of her book (see here) begins as follows:
The chief purpose of Absence of Mind — the published version of Marilynne Robinson’s splendid Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 2009 — is to raise a protest against all those modern, reductively materialist accounts of human consciousness that systematically exclude the testimony of subjectivity, of inner experience, from their understanding of the sources and impulses of the mind. Its targets are all the major schools of reductionism (Freudianism, Marxism, Darwinism), but also all the currently popular champions of the reductionist cause (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and so on). It is, in simple terms, a robust defense of the dignity and irreducible mystery of human conscience, personal identity, and self-awareness; and, as such, it is a stirring success.