Some academic reading

I have managed to keep to my planned routine of work for the past few days and have finished a first reading of Reston's "Galileo" moving on to looking at a few of the contributions to "The Cambridge Companion to Galileo". Over the next few days I have to decide how much note taking I expect to take from a book and what form I want this in.

I was particular struck by a piece in the Cambridge Companion on the "God of the astronomers versus the God of the theologions", contrasting Galileo and Bellarmine, and which I will be studying in much more detail soon. A month or so ago I was reading a piece by Adolf Grunsbaum on attempts by theologians to use modern cosmology in support of arguments for God's existence. Some of the books published in response to Dawkin's "The God Delusion" have simply assumed that a creator God would automatically be the God of religion, but this needn't be the case. And the huge variety in religious believes leaves the linkage of a creator God to one religion as a very problematic leap

Some other recent reading including a book on atheism that suggested that the multitude of religious beliefs was actually a real problem for religious believers. Atheists have little trouble explaining why there are so many religious beliefs, but each religion should find other religions problematic. And in an important sense, believers in one religion are atheists about other religions - after all, such beliefs must be wrong if one's own religion is true. These are two arguments that could be developed more fully.