Physicist Alan Lightman has a fascinating piece on the “multiverse” in the latest issue of Harper’s (“The Accidental Universe,” Dec. 2011). Multiverse theories posit that what we have long thought of as the Universe, all the galaxies we can observe, is just one of many universes—perhaps an infinite or endlessly growing number of them, or perhaps […]
I have just started Evolution and Christian Faith (2006) by Joan Roughgarden, who is both a convert to Christianity and an evolutionary biologist specializing in lizards. So far, her book strikes me as painstakingly polite and even-tempered: I don’t want to argue with other Christians. I want to share with them the fellowship and the […]
Evangelical attitudes on evolution are two-sided: all polls show a fat majority for total rejection, about 65%, but a little over a quarter of US evangelicals affirm the statement that “humans and other living things have evolved over time” (a recent Pew Forum survey). Evangelicals who accept evolution, the basic organizing principle of modern biology, […]
A few years ago some psychologists performed an experiment to see if college students who read a violent story would display more aggression afterward if they were told that God sanctioned the violence than if they were told the story was merely from an “ancient scroll.” The story they chose was from the book of […]
To see a fine thinker bamboozled by a minor fallacy is always a freaky spectacle, like watching an elephant trip over a peanut. It’s sad, too: a little spring goes out of my step and my shoulders droop lower. If the mighty can take such falls, what hope for the rest of us? Consider G. […]
In response to a recent post on this blog, a commenter challenged my view that science is quite properly “naturalistic” in its method—that is, ignores God. He raised some points that are worth unraveling. Here’s my response: Dear Trevor, Thanks for writing. I respectfully disagree with your idea that methodological naturalism is “nonsense (at least […]
This continues my previous post. ———————————————————– G. K. Chesterton hated people-breeding. Eugenics, which he called “a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning,” was perhaps the only idea that he wrote an entire book to destroy (Eugenics and Other Evils, 1922).1 It’s easy to forget how mainstream eugenics was in the early twentieth century, […]
I posted this two-part essay on G. K. Chesterton, evolution, and eugenics on this blog quite a while ago — but the original is no longer available online, and a butchered version has been posted on a thing called, I think, the Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia, where it’s received a goodly number of “Likes.” It seems a […]
In a reply to an interesting interview with theologian Conor Cunningham, here at The Other Journal, commenter Denis Devcich says the following: Creationists have no problems with fossils – they had to be rapidly buried in order to be preserved as fossils, and this fits in with Noah’s flood. Yes, the dinosaurs were created with […]