When did religion arise? Judging by burial practices, perhaps about 95,000 years ago. That is the age of the oldest known symbolic burial site, a grave in Qafzeh, Israel where a nine-year old is buried with their legs bent and a deer antler cradled in their arms (Elizabeth Culotta, “On the Origin of Religion,” Science, Nov. […]
Journalists seem to reserve a special inanity for questions pertaining to space travel and extraterrestrial life. The New York Times is particularly heinous, uncritically cheering any and all claims for our manifest destiny on Mars or for the wonders of space tourism or the International Space Station (which has produced less scientific return on the […]
Operator, give me information. Information, give me long distance. Long distance, give me heaven. . . . Give me Jesus on the line. —“Operator,” The Manhattan Transfer, 1975 What is the Bible? Most obviously, a book—hence its English name, from the Greek biblion, “book.” Like any book it consists (or used always to consist, until […]
If you could go back in time and genetically engineer Jesus—wave some futuristic gizmo over Mary’s womb and edit his DNA—would you do it? Would you trust a large, for-profit corporation to do it? In 2001, David Quist and Ignacio Chapela of U.C. Berkeley announced in Nature that transgenes—chunks of DNA artificially transferred from one species […]
I’ve been thinking about zealotry. Religious zealotry is as common as pig tracks: the very word zealot derives from a militant first-century Jewish group resisting Roman occupation. There is plenty in this department to expose, reject, and confess. But what is saddening and disturbing me at the moment is the zealotry of a group that I […]
Kazmir commented on my previous post, “Any speculations about why white American evangelical Protestants are so slow in catching up with the rest of the world on the issue of climate change?” Good question. Such a good question that my reply is big enough to be a post. First, let’s keep in mind that according […]
When it comes to science, Christians are too often on the defensive: the Earth is so stationary (stamp foot), we are not descended from monkeys, and so on. Or else we can be heard elaborately explaining why science is OK by us after all — a project with which I have much sympathy. But one […]
It is tempting but tricky to ask if something at the theological roots of Christianity and Islam makes one or the other inherently friendly or hostile to evolution. The attempt has been made by G. Willow Wilson in an essay for Science and Spirit titled “Only in America” (2007).1 Wilson begins by reviewing the case of Kitzmiller […]
I am quite sure that we should all be very humble. At least, I think I’m sure — I’ve heard it so many times from so many authorities. If there is one perfectly reliable, utterly safe platitude in science writing, it is that we should all be very, very humble. The platitude comes with […]