Logan Paul Gage

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Our Galileo Complex

Logan Paul Gage on Being Reactionary Against Science via New Polity
Professor Gage, who teaches at Franciscan University, revisits the Galileo affair. The novel religion of science, he says, goes back to the “Galileo legend” that established an influential fiction

A Good Book About Bad Books

10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t HelpBy Benjamin WikerRegnery, 260 pages, $27.95 If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker’s new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn’t Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists–a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism. In the present book, the professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville proposes not a new era of book burning, as some might suppose, but rather a learned critique of toxic ideas floating in our cultural water. Wiker plays the role of

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Upon learning of an employee’s defection to a rival company, one prominent CEO launched a chair across the room. Commenting on the incident in the Washington Post, eminent primatologist Frans de Waal noted that the CEO acted like an ape. But de Waal (and the Post for that matter) wasn’t kidding; he took this incident as further proof of common ancestry between humans and apes. Even a few theists are now embracing the notion of common ancestry — though hopefully for better reasons. Francis Collins, in his much-discussed The Language of God, defends the theory, as does Stan Guthrie, who wrote in a recent issue of Christianity Today about the widely touted “transitional” fish fossil Tiktaalik roseae. Guthrie, in particular, entertains the possibility that God

Intelligent Design 101

Leading Experts Explain the Key Issues
Intelligent Design 101 brings together leading scholars and researchers from the fields of science and intelligent design studies, such as Michael Behe and Phillip Johnson. Their detailed and insightful essays form an introduction to intelligent design, from the basics of the theory, to its history and growing place in science and education.

Shedding the Galileo Complex

A Review of John Lennox's God's Undertaker
God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?By John LennoxLion Hudson, 192 pages, $14.99 A friend recently put it to me that the Church has a Galileo Complex. Terrified by the historical narrative of the Church’s resistance to and persecution of science, Christians are averse to challenging “scientific” claims. “Complex” is an apt description, too: a group of unconscious impressions, not a well-thought argument. Correcting this historical picture — the Galileo story in particular — is one of the great virtues of John Lennox’s God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? The very notion of a science-religion conflict is largely the invention of a few prominent (though now discredited) 19th-century historians. Galileo’s persecution

Deadly Medicine

The Forgotten History of Eugenics
As the congressional debate over embryonic stem cell research reignites after the Easter recess, few will recall the passing anniversary of another great bioethics debate. Only one century ago, eugenics – the attempt to improve the human race through better breeding – was all the rage in the scientific world. And this spring marks the centenary of the world’s first forced-sterilization law. One might guess that such a law was passed in Germany, but they’d be wrong. In the spring of 1907, the Indiana General Assembly passed a bill designed to forcibly “prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” And then-Gov. Frank Hanley signed it into law. Several states followed suit, and by the 1930s, 30 states had passed similar laws.