The Center for Science and Culture
Science teaching, and the teaching of evolution in particular, continue to be a flashpoint in American education. Hoping to correct the problem, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation just released a report (with the American Association for the Advancement of Science), “Good Science, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States.” Written by Lawrence Lerner, the report recommends increased emphasis in America’s Read More ›
The Clinton Administration recently issued a new set of rules permitting federally funded research on embryonic stem cells. The guidelines were hailed in many quarters as a victory for “science.” But what kind of science? Astonishingly, some supporters are offering arguments that echo the ideas of the racist scientists who paved the way for the Third Reich. The medical value Read More ›
We count on scientists to tell us what they know and do not know–not just what they want us to hear. But when it comes to the origin and evolution of life on earth, spokesmen for official science–and science education–have been far less forthcoming than we might wish. When writing in scientific journals, leading biologists candidly discuss many scientific difficulties Read More ›
Most Christians and Jews try to find ways to show that faith and science are compatible. They may be compatible, indeed, but on what terms? About 40% of scientists cited in a Nature magazine survey believe in a personal God who takes part in human history, yet the other 60% emphatically do not. Even many of the believers have compartmentalized Read More ›
University of California at Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson enjoys taking on the theory of evolution … even if it means swimming against the tide in a place not exactly known as a bastion for anti-Darwinist views. He has written a new book, which has sold nearly 50,000 copies, aimed at giving parents and students material to counter Darwinism in Read More ›
Note: The Simpson’s, television’s popular prime-time cartoon known for its satirical commentary on various social issues, recently took a shot at the creation-evolution debate by featuring Stephen Jay Gould prominently in one of its episodes. Here is Bill Dembski’s review and observations of that episode. For those of you who regularly watch the Simpsons, you’ll know that to have one’s Read More ›
The school board in Melvindale had what it thought was a reasonable idea: Let students know there are increasing scientific arguments against the Darwinian dogma of evolution by chance and natural selection (“materialism”). But then they ran up against “the script.” The script is Inherit the Wind, a popular film from 1960 that presented a fictional version of the famous Read More ›
In Melvindale, Michigan, a blue collar suburb of Detroit, the school board held a tumultuous public hearing this week that seems to have caught everyone by surprise. The Board chairman, John Rowe, a former science teacher who now directs nuclear medicine and radiology at an area hospital, started with what he thought was a reasonable idea: Let students know that Read More ›
In a retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books, Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin tells how he first met Sagan at a public debate in Arkansas in 1964. The two young scientists had been coaxed by senior colleagues to go to Little Rock to debate the affirmative side of the question: “RESOLVED, that Read More ›
Traditional approaches that fail to take account of new findings in molecular cell biology cannot survive the present day. Materialistic explanations for the origin of information have been systematically eliminated over the past forty years. Has origin-of-life research brought us to the brink of a new scientific revolution? Despite the now well-documented influence of Christian thinking on the rise of Read More ›