Free speech, not forced religion, lies at the heart of the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding the use of public school buildings by religious groups after school hours. But you might not glean that fact from comments by the ruling’s critics, who seem determined to depict the court’s decision in Good News Club v. Milford Central School as an invitation Read More ›
In the closing session of the 1998 Telecosm conference, hosted annually by Gilder Publishing and Forbes at Lake Tahoe, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil engaged a number of critics. He advocated “Strong Artificial Intelligence” (AI), the claim that a computational process sufficiently capable of altering or organizing itself can produce “consciousness.” The session had an unexpectedly profound impact, not least Read More ›
Support for organ donation in this country is, as the clich has it, a mile wide and an inch deep. This is understandable. Most people favor the concept of giving “the gift of life” in the abstract. But when it comes to permitting their own loved ones’ body parts to be “harvested” for transplantation — a decision families must make Read More ›
Looking back, it’s clear that abortion and adoption are issues that cannot be separated. But the link wasn’t necessarily evident when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled abortion legal in 1973. It took three decades for bipartisan consensus to emerge that abortion was unlikely to be declared illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court and that efforts to promote adoption were the Read More ›
If “to err is human,” is being a member of the Institute of Medicine’s, “Committee on the Quality of Health Care,” really divine? We don’t think so! Historian Daniel Boorstin once wrote of the “self-deceiving magic of prestige,” of using aura to cover inadequacy and other sins. The prestigious Institute of Medicine, part of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, Read More ›
If William Dembski sometimes sounds more like a revolutionary than a mild-mannered mathematician from Baylor University, that’s fine with him. It suits his vision for the future of science. Dembski, a Christian and a leading proponent of intelligent design theory, will tell anyone who’ll listen that Darwinism is finished as science’s unifying framework, that its chief value to many scientists Read More ›
“Evolution and the theories of evolution are fundamentally different things,” testified zoologist Maynard M. Metcalf, the first expert witness for the defense in the 1925 Scopes trial. Metcalf’s observation at the “trial of the century” officially marked the beginning of public discussion of the different meanings of evolution for the purposes of science education. “The fact of evolution is a …