Sal Restivo

Biographic Data

ID3692484
NAMESal Restivo
GIVEN NAMESSal
FAMILY NAMERestivo
SIGNATURERESTIVO S
AFFILIATIONSRensselaer Polytechnic Institute
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS66
TOTAL CITATIONS109
AUTHOR COUNT66
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1970
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2023
H-INDEX5

  • The Dawkins Delusion

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology at Oxford University, published The Dawkins DELUSION? in 2007 with his wife Joanna C. McGrath, a lecturer on psychology and spirituality at Ripon College. Alister McGrath is one of those psychological and sociological curiosities who traded atheism for Christianity. He now views Dawkins’ atheism as a fundamentalist ideology. Having himself earned a PhD in molecular biophysics, he inhabits the “s…

  • The Science Turn and Sociology

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    In order to grasp what the author brings to the New Atheist/theist debates, it is necessary to achieve some understanding of the very ideas of science and sociology. Common sense and professional ideas of science and sociology are not always or at all consonant with what we know about these fields based on empirical research; second, without an accurate understanding of science and sociology, we will miss the fatal flaws of the New Atheism and of…

  • Hans Küng

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    Why do smart, educated people believe in God in the wake of the evidence against the existence of God? Hans Küng’s terrifyingly brilliant command of knowledge across the disciplines is on full display in Does God Exist? ( 1980 ). This book offers up a narrative proof for the existence of God. Why does someone who seems to know “everything” and has a powerfully critical imagination and travels across time, space, history, and culture from Plato to…

  • Case Study

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    Lennox, unlike Turek and many other apologists involved in the debate with the New Atheists, has impeccable scientific credentials. His name is attached to an alphabet soup of letters: MA, PhD, DPhil, and DSc. and he is a professor of mathematics at Oxford University. He adopts a common strategy in these debates, turning the atheists’ criticisms of the theists back toward them, accusing the atheists of the same dogmatic foolishness they attribute…

  • Beyond New Atheism and Theism: A Sociology of Science, Secularism, and Religiosity

    Sal RestivoBOOKBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    This book addresses the flaws and fallacies in the grounds for atheism and theism – flaws and fallacies that contaminate the arguments of non-believers and believers alike. Focusing on the highly visible debates between the New Atheists – such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris on the one hand – and their main theist opponents – including Frank Turek, John Lennox, and William Lane Craig on the other – it appr…

  • Case Study

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    By virtue of what are at the end of day superficial signs of scholarly achievement, Craig is among the most accomplished philosophers in the realm of Christian apologetics. On the one hand, the grounded scientist, humanist, or skeptic should be embarrassed to pay any attention whatsoever to apologetics, Christian or otherwise. On the other hand, there is a clear and present danger in the seductive potential of such apologetics to persuade the un-…

  • The New Atheist Worldview 1

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    This chapter focuses on the thoughts and arguments of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and the fifth “horseman,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In general, they argue that science is worth defending because modifications of technologies are the salvation of our planet. This is really a defense of the “technological fix,” the idea that technology holds the secret to solving all of our problems, technical or so…

  • The Knowing Society

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    In this chapter, the author concludes his assessment of New Atheism and theism as incommensurable worldviews that can only be opposed by an alternative worldview. The debates between the New Atheists and theists, like the movie Groundhog Day , repeat themselves debate after debate. Unlike the movie, these debates go on and on without reaching a moral or intellectual resolution. The debate methodology is a way for the debaters to present their vie…

  • Case Study

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    In this chapter the author considers an exemplary rebuttal to the New Atheists, Frank Turek’s argument that the “atheists need God to make their case.” Turek introduces the acronym CRIMES to ground his claim that atheists must steal from God to make their arguments. Atheists talk and write about C-ausality, R-eason, I-nformation and I-ntentionality, M-orality, E-vil, and S-cience. None of these features of reality, according to Turek, would exist…

  • In the Grasp of Secular Reason

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    Chapter 2 introduces the author as a nonbeliever. Autobiographical remarks might seem out of place in a sociological treatise. The author argues to the contrary that they are not out of place here. The reason is that believers and nonbelievers, theists and atheists occupying soap boxes in the public square do not rehearse their own biographies, which in fact are narratives of how they were socialized. They were not born with their views on religi…

  • Case Study

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    Alvin Plantinga argues that a person can assert that they know God exists, without argument, as a basic belief; belief in God is rational and basic without evidence of existence. Who is Alvin Plantinga? Alvin Plantinga (1932–) is by any measure a distinguished fixture in the pantheon of twentieth-century analytic philosophers and Christian philosophers. The author condemns all of the honors attached to Plantinga’s achievements, the very “discipli…

  • Godless but Good

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    In this chapter, the author counters the theist claim that morality cannot be justified if there is no God. Sociologist of religion Phil Zuckerman has demonstrated that societies without God not only are possible but are a reality (e.g., Denmark and Sweden). Atheist and secular philosophers argue that (1) religion is at war with rationality, (2) religion veils us from a reality that poses formidable challenges (such as death without the promise o…

  • Religion and God in Sociological Perspective

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    This chapter sketches a paradigm for the sociology of religion and the gods. Religious beliefs and institutions were an important concern of the nineteenth-century social thinkers who fashioned the sociological perspective. Among the leading contributors to the sociology of religion in that century were William Robertson Smith, Ludwig Feuerbach, Louis Wallis, Karl Kautsky, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and, most importantly, Emile Durkheim. These thinker…

  • Genesis

    Sal RestivoCHAPTERBeyond New Atheism and Theism2023

    In this chapter, the author introduces and defines the scientific cogito, compares it to the theological cogito, and reviews the history of the very idea of atheism. The scientific cogito defines science as presumptive, corrigible, fallible, and a collective historical process that establishes facts of the matter over time and always colored in skepticism. Faith and blind faith have no role in this process. The theological cogito, which seeks a r…

  • Afterword

    Open AccessMário Mesquita, Mônica Mesquita et al.ARTICLERevista Latinoamericana de…2020

    From the moment that authors from different parts of the world began to question the absence of sociocultural bases in the formation of mathematical knowledge, inside and outside the academic universe, a fertile field was opened to face truths that had long been ignored in discourses about the nature of mathematics. This problem was addressed directly and creatively by the Brazilian educator and mathematician Ubiratan D'Ambrosio in 1977. In a tal…

  • Einstein's Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks

    Sal RestivoBOOKEinstein's Brain2019

  • The Age of the Social: The Discovery of Society and the Ascendance of a New Episteme

    Sal RestivoBOOKAge of the Social2018

    The concept of society sui generis – society as a level of reality which could be studied scientifically – crystallized in the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, with the work of Durkheim, Marx and Weber and today, more than at any other period in history, the idea of the social has gained a foothold in philosophy, biology, and neuroscience. However, this idea has emerged into prominence not through the historical or contemporary efforts…

  • Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism

    Sal RestivoBOOKRed, Black, and Objective2016

    Drawing on the empirical findings generated by researchers in science studies, and adopting Kropotkin's concept of anarchism as one of the social sciences, Red, Black, and Objective expounds and develops an anarchist account of science as a social construction and social institution. Restivo's account is at once normative, analytical, organizational, and policy oriented, in particular with respect to education. With attention to the social practi…

  • Bruno Latour

    Open AccessSal RestivoOTHERThe Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to…2011

    This chapter contains sections titled: The Once and Future Philosopher The Social and Intellectual Contexts The Major Works The Theory Basic Concepts in Actor-Network Theory Critique and Opposition Bibliography

  • Obituary: Bernard Barber and Mary Douglas

    Open AccessSal Restivo, Rachel DowtyARTICLESocial Studies of Science2008References: 10

  • Science, technology, and society: A Sociological Approach

    Wenda K Bauchspies, Jennifer Croissant et al.BOOKScience, technology, and society2006

  • A Humanistic Perspective on Science and Society

    Open AccessSal Restivo, Michael ZenzenARTICLEHumanity & Society2003References: 13

  • STS and the Unabomber: Personal Essays

    Open AccessSal RestivoARTICLEScience Technology & Human Values2001Cited by: 1

  • The Cultural Dynamics of Science

    Open AccessSal RestivoARTICLECultural Dynamics2000

  • The Invention of Science

    Open AccessSal Restivo, Julia LoughlinARTICLECultural Dynamics2000References: 15

    Social and cultural studies of science revolutionized our understanding of science during the last quarter of the 20th century. This achievement has been accomplished in the face of great resistance and at great cost to the critics and theorists of science. In this paper, we explore some of the reasons for the resistance to and costs of analyzing science as a social fact. At the same time, we try to regain some of the momentum science studies ach…