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Dr. Hearn has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Rice University and a Ph. D. in biochemistry from the University of Illinois. He has served on the biochemistry faculties of the medical schools of Yale and Baylor Universities and then of lowa State University. He now lives in Berkeley, California, and is on the editorial board of Perspectives on Science Read More ›

For so the whole round earth is every wayBound by gold chains about the feet of God. Alfred Lord Tennyson George MacDonald’s spiritual influence upon C. S. Lewis is common knowledge, but until now Sadhu Sundar Singh’s influence upon C. S. Lewis has been overlooked.1 The earliest hint that Lewis was acquainted with the life of Sundar Singh appears in Read More ›

By Dr. Cleaver Keenan285 Clear Lake DriveEspanola, Ontario P5E IN6CanadaE-mail address: INTERNET:cleaver1@sympatico.ca Way back in the early fifties when I was a medical student in T.C.D. (Trinity College Dublin) I heard that C. S. Lewis was going to be the guest speaker at the Historical Society. I had a struggle with my conscience. You see the Hist was a ‘secular’ Read More ›

The “Monkey Bill” now before the Tennessee Legislature is a bad means to a good end. The good end is to teach students the fascinating process by which scientific theories come to be established as “facts.” Scientific theories in general and Darwin’s in particular are human interpretations of nature which come to be accepted because they are persuasive. The public Read More ›

There’s an old joke about the philosopher Rudolf Carnap and his method of doing philosophy. According to the joke, Carnap’s method was to begin any philosophical investigation with the statement “Consider a formal language L.” As the good logical positivist he was, Carnap desired the precision inherent in formal languages. Unfortunately, precision has its price. Formal languages are not natural languages and the problems expressible in formal languages need not connect to actual problems in the real world. With formal languages the question ever remains whether they adequately capture the subject under investigation.

Appropriately modified, the joke about Rudolf Carnap can be retold about Stuart Kauffman and the scientific method he employs in At Home in the Universe. According to the modified joke, Kauffman’s method is to begin any scientific investigation with the statement “Consider an NK Boolean network.” Indeed, throughout At Home in the Universe just about every real-world problem gets translated into a toy-world problem involving NK Boolean networks. As with Carnap’s formal languages, NK Boolean networks have the advantage of complete logical precision. But they also suffer the disadvantage of losing touch with reality. And it is this disadvantage which ultimately proves the undoing of Kauffman’s project.

Review of What is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science and ReligionCharles Hodge, Edited and with an introduction by Mark A. Knoll & David N. LivingstoneGrand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994. 182 pp. The central administration building at Princeton Theological Seminary is Hodge Hall, named after the most prominent and respected Presbyterian theologian in mid-nineteenth-century America. Charles Hodge taught theology Read More ›

Charles Darwin on Social Darwinism Richard Weikart, “A Recently Discovered Darwin Letter on Social Darwinism,” Isis 86 (1995): 609-611. For many decades, historians have debated whether Darwin was himself a social Darwinist, i.e., someone who believed that human beings were and should be subject to the same competitive forces acting on all other living things. The debate is sharpened by Read More ›