I live out in the middle of nowhere. It’s a great transition from the urban environment that I usually inhabit when I’m up in Cambridge–it’s quiet, it’s peaceful, it’s simple. But, more than anything, it is so beautiful here. Everything is blooming, our first vegetables and fruits for the year are starting to come...
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Be thankful. Three days ago I went snowshoeing in the woods of northern Minnesota, where our family has a cabin on an island. We went out through the fresh drifts of snow while the sun was still shining brightly on the flocked trees, but by the time we turned back dusk was drawing on...
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I recently read a popular science book called Life on a Young Planet by Harvard’s own Andy Knoll. The majority of the book was a decently interesting synopsis of current thought on paleobiology. But because every popular science book must have sappy epilogue (or a sappy prologue, or both), Knoll took a few pages...
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Yesterday, free copies of a new edition of Darwin’s groundbreaking On the Origin of Species were distributed at the entrances to Harvard Yard on Massachusetts Avenue. I was pleasantly surprised to receive the book (even though the text is available online), because it may be one of the most influential works of all time....
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To what extent should science inform our understanding of scripture? Always and not at all, if we are to believe the pronouncements of most contemporary Evangelical thinkers. I present as a starting point the following series of short excerpts from a systematic theology by John Feinberg, Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity...
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“ejection of the supernatural should not be a part of scientific methodology…. cientists should be free to pursue hypotheses as they see fit, without being constrained by a particular philosophical account of what science is…. If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism, it follows that the aim of science is not generating...
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It was Nietzsche who said it first, but it’s a common thought—Christianity is nihilistic. People may not express themselves in so many words, but who hasn’t heard the argument that Christians are prudish, repressed, reactionary, life-denying—life-hating? That Christians want to stamp out natural loves and pleasures? That Christians are so fixated on their pie-in-the-sky,...
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