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A Book of Gifts: Book Review of The Quilted Grapevine

by Judith Miller The Quilted Grapevineby Nancy Lou Patterson, a reader of The Lewis LegacyThe Brucedale Press, Port Elgin, Ontario, Canada. $14.95 Reviewer Judith Miller, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English at Renison College, University of Waterloo. She teaches Canadian Literature and Creative Writing as well as courses on the genres of literature. She publishes poetry, reviews and critical Read More ›

Book Review of Assault on Mars

Assault on Mars, by Michael D. Cooper (a pseudonym for Jonathan Cooper, Mike Dodd, and David Baumann) Privately printed, Spring 2000. Hardcover. This book is a great example of how modern technology enables creative people to design, publish, and share their books today on their own. Lewis Legacy reader David Baumann is an Episcopal priest in Placentia, California; he is Read More ›

C. S. Lewis’s Anti-Anti-Semitism in The Great Divorce

One of 23 essays in Surprised by C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and Dante (Mercer University Press, Spring 2001) In 1933, the year Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany, Lewis published his allegorical Pilgrim’s Regress. There he warned of a tribe of black-shirted dwarfs named the Swastici, who were vassals to a bloodthirsty northern tyrant named Savage. On November 5, Read More ›

Perry Bramlett’s Lists

The 25 Best Books Written about C.S. Lewis Biographical George Sayer: Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis James Como (ed) – C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table W Hooper & R L Green – C. S. Lewis: A Biography Humphrey Carpenter – The Inklings Lyle Dorsett – A Love Observed (formerly And God Came In) Studies Chad Walsh Read More ›

Notes from the Dorothy Sayers Essay “Oedipus Simplx: Freedom and Fate in Folklore and Fiction”

Prepared by Kathryn Lindskoog 1. Freud interpreted the story of Oedipus allegorically in order to better communicate his theory that human males have an impulse to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. 2. Such use of old stories is natural and understandable; but it is an error to confuse the original story with the later allegory. The story of Read More ›

The Lewis Legacy-Issue 86, Autumn 2000 Notes

Cheating the Oracle for 3,500 Years The story of Joseph was supposedly written in about 1500 B.C. The story of Oedipus was told by Sophocles in 431 B.C. Virgil’s story of the trenchers was told in about 20 B.C. (The story of Segismund in the play Life Is a Dream was told by Calderon de la Barca in 1636 A.D.) Read More ›

Portrait of C. S. Lewis

by Clifford Morris (An address delivered on BBC Radio Oxford in 1971. First published in the Portland C. S. Lewis Chronicle.) As an ordinary person with no special qualifications, save that he called himself my friend, I want to share with you some of my memories of the late Clive Staples Lewis, Master of Arts, Doctor of Literature, Doctor of Read More ›

C. S. Lewis: Quick to Call a Fake a Fake

On December 18, 1912, when Lewis was fourteen years old, Charles Dawson, an attorney, and Arthur Smith Woodward, the British Museum’s leading paleontologist, announced to the world that they had discovered an early human fossil in a shallow gravel pit near the village of Piltdown in Sussex. This was promptly accepted as the earliest known human fossil and was the pride Read More ›

Photo by 贝莉儿 DANIST

Self-Organization and Irreducibly Complex Systems

Some biochemical systems require multiple, well-matched parts in order to function, and the removal of any of the parts eliminates the function. I have previously labeled such systems "irreducibly complex," and argued that they are stumbling blocks for Darwinian theory. Instead I proposed that they are best explained as the result of deliberate intelligent design. In a recent article Shanks and Joplin analyze and find wanting the use of irreducible complexity as a marker for intelligent design. Their primary counter-example is the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, a self-organizing system in which competing reaction pathways result in a chemical oscillator. In place of irreducible complexity they offer the idea of "redundant complexity," meaning that biochemical pathways overlap so that a loss of one or even several components can be accommodated without complete loss of function. Here I note that complexity is a quantitative property, so that conclusions we draw will be affected by how well-matched the components of a system are. I also show that not all biochemical systems are redundant. The origin of non-redundant systems requires a different explanation than redundant ones. Read More ›
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3D rendering of abstract blocks of mathematical formulas located in the virtual space

A Mathematician’s View of Evolution

When Dr. Behe was at the University of Texas El Paso in May of 1997 to give an invited talk, I told him that I thought he would find more support for his ideas in mathematics, physics and computer science departments than in his own field. I know a good many mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists who, like me, are appalled that Darwin's explanation for the development of life is so widely accepted in the life sciences. Read More ›