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. But
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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 Evangelical
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“[R]ejection of the supernatural should not be a part of scientific methodology…. [S]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 true
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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, ethereal
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Last week I summarized the argument of John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate and promised to explain exactly what I take to be problematic about it. This week, I fulfill my promise. I would like to begin by playing with an intuition that I think most people
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I can’t imagine a more beautiful place to write than where I’m currently sitting, in the lounge of Grand Teton National Park’s Jackson Lake Lodge. The view from here steals your breath away, especially at sunset when the mountains glow from behind with a golden halo and the sky turns a profound royal purple. If
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Recently I have become interested in the history of science, particularly of biology, and my wanderings in that field have led me in countless surprising and interesting directions. I have learned, for example, that the whole science of evolutionary biology owes its existence to the first primitive herbalists, that the invention of the microscope was
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