据载,2000年1月,美国方言学会曾举行过一次有趣的"世纪之字"评选活动。获得提名的"世纪之字"有"自由"、"正义"、"科学"、"自然"、"OK"、"书"和"她"等,而进入决赛的只有"科学"和"她"字(science & she )。最后,"她"竟然以35票对27票战胜了"科学",夺取了桂冠,成为"21世纪最重要的一个字"。
In 2009 two important commemorative events coincide—the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, coincidentally on the same day as Abraham Lincoln’s, and the sesquicentennial of publication of Darwin’s pioneering work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Universities and natural history museums around the world are celebrating Darwin’s achievement throughout the year. Here we take a fresh look at the voyage that turned Darwin into one of science’s greatest thinkers.
Eagleton can, of course, fight back against this kind of rebuttal if he can only show that there is something in theology which undermines the arguments against religion made by the new atheists. And this indeed is what he is up to in Reason, Faith and Revolution when he seeks to show, with the use of the theologian Thomas Aquinas, that the God so readily dismissed by Dawkins and Hitchens is not a god that many theologians, or indeed believers, would recognise.