People who are elderly, disabled, prematurely born, or seriously ill have much to fear from the medical intelligentsia — those bioethicists and moral philosophers who have in recent years transformed medical ethics. It was bioethicists and moral philosophers, after all, who made it acceptable to dehydrate to death people diagnosed as permanently unconscious — a practice that has already spread Read More ›
So, what can be done about Y2K? Technology writer and Discovery Institute fellow George Gilder terms the attitude within the tech industry “a strange one…There don’t seem to be enough people between the positions of ‘panic’ and ‘don’t worry.’ And many knowledgeable people don’t even want to talk about it.” Yet, some farsighted observers are willing to articulate an upside Read More ›
When the clock turns midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, and millions of unrepaired computer applications show the year moving from ’99 to ’00 and then break down in confusion, in the United States there will be many millions more that have been repaired, tested and proven “Year 2000 compliant.” But what about overseas? Asked what his government was doing about Read More ›
From airport traffic control to tax refunds, from “just-in-time” package deliveries to time-sensitive hospital equipment; from fire and police services to defense commands, products and activities we take for granted could slow or stop. That’s the Year 2000 problem scenario, a disquieting possibility that is nagging increasing numbers of public and private leaders. In a year and a half, as Read More ›
Although scientists have been debating the science of evolution since Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the subject, “On the Origin of the Species,” was published in 1859, one of the more recent developments in this debate has been the emergence of a new concept called “intelligent design.” According to Darwin, humans developed from lower forms of animals over a period Read More ›
This is a meditation on the Marines’ MV-22 Osprey, the crash-and-cost-and-scandal-plagued tilt-rotor aircraft that’s rapidly emerging as a media target of opportunity and Pentagon candidate for cancellation. But the Osprey is about more than airlift. In a very real sense, it’s a metaphor for America or, more precisely, what America seems to have become. Before getting into the details, a Read More ›
Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the Read More ›
Objections Sustained is a collection of essays by UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, also the Program Advisor to Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. In the first half of the book, Johnson presents nine short chapters about Darwinists and Darwinism. Johnson first takes aim at the myth that science and religion occupy completely separate realms. This myth, formally approved Read More ›
Abstract: According to Howard Van Till, the early Christian fathers Basil and Augustine taught that life appeared as a consequence of creaturely capacities which God bestowed on the world from the beginning, in contrast to special creationism, which teaches that God intervened in the creation to make living things. To reconcile Christian faith with modern science, Van Till advocates recovering “the historic creationist tradition,” which he characterizes as the “forgotten doctrine of Creation’s functional integrity” taught by Basil and Augustine. Basil, however, believed that God intervened in the creation to make living things, and was thus a special creationist. According to Augustine, God created everything simultaneously and placed causal principles into the creation which subsequently produced creatures in time. But Augustine proposed his theory of causal principles to emphasize that every species was created in the beginning by a special act of God, and he denied that creaturely capacities could produce anything new. Therefore, Van Till’s “forgotten doctrine of Creation’s functional integrity” has no basis in Basil’s theology, and its emphasis on creaturely capacities is alien to Augustine’s theology; so “the historic creationist tradition” is not what Van Till represents it to be.
Some Christians believe that the major features of living things could not have arisen through Darwinian evolution, but must have been specially created by God. Physicist Howard J. Van Till criticizes this position on the grounds that it relies on a “God-of-the-gaps” who must “act directly in the course of creation’s formative history to compensate for gaps or deficiencies in the capacities of created substances.” According to Van Till, the world is characterized instead by “functional integrity,” meaning that it “has no functional deficiencies, no gaps in its economy of the sort that would require God to act immediately.”1
Van Till maintains that his position is rooted in the theological writings of St. Basil of Caesarea and St. Augustine of Hippo. According to Van Till, these two early Christian fathers taught “that at the beginning God created, from nothing, all substances and forms, but that the forms of creatures became actualized only in the course of time. Most importantly, these creatures appeared in the course of history not as a consequence of some new, direct and ‘special’ act of God (an ‘intervention’), but as the consequence of created substances employing their God-given capacities to bring about in time what the Creator had in mind from the beginning.”2
Read More ›Darwin’s Theology Robert J. Richards, “The Theological Foundations of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution,” in Experiencing Nature, P.H. Theerman and K.H. Parshall, eds. (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 61-79. Most historians of science take Darwin at his word in the Autobiography: although he believed in God and special creation as a young man, “disbelief crept over me at a very slow Read More ›