The Great Story Bead Project—A Timeline of Evolution from the Big Bang to Human Consciousness
How to create your own Great Story Bead Project for classroom use.
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All About Eve: Race, Religion, and Science
“Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word ‘race’ has a fair claim to being the most common, the most ambiguous, and the most explosive.” — Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition, 1937 We start with a quiz: what did Eve look like? Quickly, now! Sorry, there’s no…
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Unlimited Love
The Challenge St. Paulelevated love over a faith that moves mountains (I Cor. 13). He diminished even laudable altruistic actions, such as giving away all one’s possessions to feed the poor, should they be performed in the absence of love (I Cor. 13:2-3). “Do everything with love” (I Cor. 16:14), and extol no loveless beneficent…
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How Deep is Blue? The Present Future of AI
We face the field head-on to evaluate what the pundits are saying, what scientists are building, and how close we really are to the edge of the precipice.
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How Not to Detect Design: A review of William Dembski’s “The Design Inference”
Branden Fitelson, Christopher Stephens, and Elliott Sober review William Dembski’s 1998 book __Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities__(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. xvii + 243 pg. ISBN 0-521-62387-1). How Not to Detect Design*As every philosopher knows, “the design argument” concludes that God exists from premises that cite the adaptive complexity of organisms or the…
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Emergence, Supervenience, and Personal Knowledge
What, if anything, does recent work on emergence in the sciences, in the philosophy of mind, and in theology have to do with the thought of Michael Polanyi? The connection could, of course, be purely external and ad hoc: perhaps the coming few minutes will be one of those polite but pointless academic exercises where…
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Evolutionary Biology & the Meaning of Life
Metanexus: Views 2001.11.30 6334 words At this time of year, many Christians around the world are beginning or havebegun their preparations for celebrating the coming of Jesus of Nazareth ina stable somewhere in Bethlehem sometime at the turn of the eras. Variouslycalled the Little Lent, the Nativity Lent, or Advent, it nurtures theexpectation that the…
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Disgust, Morality, and Human Identity
Metanexus: Views 2001.12.03 5792 words What is embedded or embodied morality? As we try to become more in tunewith, more at home in, this world in which we find ourselves, do we becomeincreasingly guilty of committing the naturalistic fallacy, of convertingour comfortable “is” into an obligatory “ought”? Or do we come closer andcloser to a…
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What Calls You, Pilgrim?
In a generous comment on my book The Yoga of the Christ,[1] the justly highly regarded comparative religionist, Huston Smith, hailed it as a “landmark in interfaith dialogue.” However, I have become increasingly uneasy about this comment because I do not believe that I was engaging in interfaith dialogue in that book or in any…
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Peirce, Lamarck and Evolutionary Love
Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Well, I admit it. I’m spooked. The problem of how one can consistently maintain a hope in a benevolent metaphysical reality while simultaneously accepting the accumulated evidence for a Darwinian model of organic evolution is not, I suppose, a simple…