Part 3 of a series sifting conflicting claims about C. S. Lewis’s views on evolution. Part 1 here; Part 2 here. In 2010, philosophy professor Michael Peterson threw fresh meat into the slow-boiling debate around C. S. Lewis and evolution (“C. S. Lewis on Evolution and Intelligent Design,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62:4, Dec. 2010, also available here). […]
Part 2 of a series of posts sifting conflicting claims about Lewis’s views on evolution. Part 1 is here. An Acworth Shift? Captain Bernard Acworth, born 1885, was a British submariner in World War I. He had strong opinions on bird and butterfly migration, evolution, physics, and other topics, which he published in a number […]
An obscure, slow-motion war is being waged over C. S. Lewis. Was he a more or less secret foe of Darwin and a proto-advocate of Intelligent Design, long before that school of thought named itself? Or was he a champion compatibilitist, serenely accepting the validity of modern biology and finding it no ill fit with […]
An interesting document just came to my slow-moving attention: Loving the Least of These (2010), from the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). It is an attempt by an evangelical pastor, an atmospheric scientist, an MBA, and a VP of the NAE to “start a conversation” about climate change, especially what is sometimes called “climate justice”—the […]
Several years ago, another overwhelmingly asymmetrical conflict between the armed forces of Israel and the Gaza Strip was under way. The terms of debate then were similar to those we hear now: Israel’s undoubted “right to defend itself” versus the claim that its actions in Gaza do not constitute a legitimate or morally proportional exercise […]
A few environmental pundits have recently taken up an oddly contrarian position: personal consumption choices don’t matter. “Lifestyle changes that emphasize greater efficiency, less consumption, and genuine personal sacrifice may feel good and make for good press, but they rarely help the earth,” argue economists Paul Wapner and John Willoughby (Ethics & International Affairs, 12/05). […]
But this habit of close observation—in Humboldt, Darwin, and others. Is it to be kept up long, this science? — Henry Thoreau, Journal, July 23, 1851 I walk a lot. Since I live in Vermont, where endless woods beckon, walking comes naturally—but in the early 1980s, as a student at the Rutgers College of […]
In April, 2012, a Science article suddenly caught an extraordinary amount of media buzz: Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan’s “Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief” (Science 336, 493, 2012). The L.A. Times, Scientific American, Huffington Post, ABC News, Atlantic, Panda’s Thumb, and other prominent venues immediately drew attention to the study (of which an admirably balanced account can be found here). It […]
A friend recently asked me, “What is faith and what belief?” Words of this sort have so many meanings that to think about them is like looking at a dozen unfocused images projected on top of each other in a promiscuous jumble. In practice, to compare “faith” with “belief” means choosing one of each […]