Science is too often milked for pseudo-insights into non-science. How many times a day does someone announce that “Einstein showed everything is relative” even though he didn’t and was in fact annoyed by the popular belief that he had? Cosmic fine-tuning, the Big Bang, the concept of “energy,” and biological complexity have all been hijacked […]
A headline on Joe Romm’s fine climate-change blog, RealClimate, gives me pause: “Tennessee Enacts ‘Monkey Bill’ To Dumb Down Kids In Biology And Physics, Undermine Their Future.” The bill — now law — orders schools to help teachers present the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of “controversial” topics such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of […]
It’s been drawn to my attention that the blog Everyday Revolutionary recently posed a question: Two bastions of Christian dogma that I have great difficulty accepting are the concepts of resurrection and afterlife. Biology and physics (i.e. “the facts”) seem to be enough to discredit the ideas that earth will eventually be restored (since all […]
To use “natural” as a synonym for “good” is almost a reflex for us. We are the godchildren of the Romantics and Transcendentalists, the cultural and religious heirs of the ancient Hebrews whose God made the world and judged it “good.” Nature is normative, sets us straight, shows us wisdom. “Come forth into the […]
Evolution has been accused of evil by friend, foe, and doubter. Many creationists think that “evolution,” the theory not the thing, is a font of evil. They charge that it teaches us that we are “nothing but animals,” and so leads inevitably to nihilism. The fruits of evolution in this sense, according to prominent creationist Ken […]
A long-time education columnist with the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, has been pushing a strange but all-American thesis (e.g., in his Jan. 18, 2012 essay “We’re smart enough for Darwin debate”): we should inject Intelligent Design ideas into public-school science classrooms and let the kids figure out that it is not science, or at least […]
Sometimes there seems a shortage of mirrors. Case in point, an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 2010 devoted to the interesting question of whether religious cues make people more likely to inflict punishment in certain artificial settings. The piece includes this précis of the state of scientific speculation on the origin […]
Some neurologists are convinced that they are finally closing in on proof that human brains are deterministic chemical mechanisms, more complex than a ticking watch but no more “free.” Civic-minded writers worry how we will keep on talking ourselves into behaving morally and meting out legal penalties if once we become truly convinced that everything […]
Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution and Christian Faith (2006) is a gentle, thoughtful, and—to me—unsatisfying book. For one thing, confirming my initial impressions from a few weeks ago, I am frequently unsettled by the sense that its voice has been crafted to allay or bypass the suspicions of readers who take the Bible as a more or […]