Attempting at present to follow the path blazed from Pascal to modern ideas about probability and statistics, I found myself coming across an interesting little book which I have been glancing through. Just thought I would mention it. J.E. Barnhart, 1977. The Study of Religion and Its Meaning: new explorations in light of Karl Popper and Emile Durkheim. The Hague: Mouton. >From the jacket: "The first four chapters show how religion becomes a universal human phenomenon. Religion emerges with the awareness of one's condition of utter finitude and contigency. This concern manifests itself in at least three kinds of responses--cognitive, moral and emotional-ritual. Once these responses begin to develop a *momentum* of their own, they give rise to new problems and solutions. "Chapters...explore the thesis that religious doctrines--functioning as cognitive thrusts into the world--extend themselves by spawning new claims. But new claims increase the possibility of falling upon severe contradictions. Moral claims take on religious motivation whe, because of conflict and contradiciton among hte claims, the sense of finitude looms. Ritual behavior is religious insofar as it is a response to the intense concern with finitude." And here is a passage from the book: "I hope I have exposed what my motive has been in calling for more God-talk...I presuppose that all theological talk--or any other talk--will eventually run into its share of contradictions. For some believers, this is a frightful and threatening prospect, sufficiently threatening to make them demand a moratorium on theology. For others, however, stepped up God-talk is the challenge--and also the risk--of turning theology loose to wind its course where it will. The development of new theoretical problems, far from killing theology, can be an advance in creative metaphysical thinking. "Positivism, that bitter enemy of theology, would have damned up theology so that it could not even generate more *problems*. Rarely keen and insightful as critics of theology, positivsts sought to ignore, deport it, and declare it unimportant (meaningless) Such anti-intellectualism has, fortunately, been exposed as an arrogant imposition on human curiosity. Postivism hated theology more than it loved the growth of knowledge." (179-80) Rakesh
