Designed for Living
Does God exist? You can answer that question in at least two ways, including, notably, “yes.” But how do you argue for that particular answer? A new cottage industry among the religiously minded is the re-articulation of the so-called “cosmological argument” for the existence of God. Its proofs work backward. They start with visible creation and reason that it can Read More ›
Darwinism and Design
Last week the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove from state standards references to evolution as the underlying principle of biology. While the vote allows schools the freedom to teach about evolution, the battle is being reported as a simple conflict between scientific ‘evolutionists’ on one side and fundamentalist ‘creationists’ on the other, following the standard trope of the Read More ›
The Church of Darwin
A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin’s theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: Read More ›
Design & the Discriminating Public
Evolution has enormous purchase on the public imagination, and it’s easy to understand why. Just peek into the average living room where toddlers everywhere are sitting wide-eyed before videos like The Land Before Time series. This series offers nothing less than an excursion into evolution. Colorful one-celled organisms arise in a blue-green primeval ocean, where they “change again and again,” Read More ›
Science and Design
En Español When the physics of Galileo and Newton displaced the physics of Aristotle, scientists tried to explain the world by discovering its deterministic natural laws. When the quantum physics of Bohr and Heisenberg in turn displaced the physics of Galileo and Newton, scientists realized they needed to supplement their deterministic natural laws by taking into account chance processes in Read More ›
What Brings a World into Being?
Testimony to the United States Commission on Civil Rights
US Commission on Civil Rights Hearing
Proceeding’s summation by then sitting board member Robert P. George: Authentic education plainly requires fair consideration of all reasonable points of view. It is disturbing that there are efforts to exclude from the curriculum responsible criticism of Darwinism. There is nothing to be lost, and everything to be gained, from free and open inquiry. Robert P. George McCormick Professor of Read More ›
Evolution Theater
One thing I love about the creation/evolution controversy is that it provides no end of amusement.Take the summer of 1999 for example. When the Kansas state board of education voted to de-emphasize the more speculative aspects of evolution in the state science standards, folks went wild. In a broadside published in Time, Harvard paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould Read More ›