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I want to say first how deeply honoured I am to be chosen for the Templeton Prize. I believe that the goal Sir John Templeton has chosen is of the greatest contemporary importance and relevance: we have somehow to break down the barriers between our contemporary culture of science and disciplined academic study (what the…
November 5, 1931: Charles Margrave Taylor is born in Montréal, Canada, the youngest of three children (one brother, one sister) to Simone Beaubien, a dress designer, and Walter Margrave Taylor, a partner in a Montréal structural steel factory which he helped run. The home is bilingual and the children are brought up Catholic. It is…
Have you heard about “The Secret”? A student invited me to his house to watch the DVD, which has sold over 1.5 million copies. He claimed it had changed his life. We made an informal field trip of it, but I had to cut the engagement short. It made my skin crawl. I couldn’t stay…
The Explanation of Behavior. (Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1964)This was my doctoral dissertation. It was an all-out attack on psychological behaviorism, which tried to show that only muddled philosophical thinking could hide from its practitioners that their research program was reaching a dead-end. Hegel. (Cambridge University Press, 1975; various languages)This was an attempt to…
A February 27, 2007 posting on Wikipedia by Joseph C. Campana with ResearchID.org suggests that “Media Misreports Intelligent Design Research and the John Templeton Foundation”.1 Campana argues that contrary to recent press statements by Charles Harper, the Templeton Foundation in fact does or at least once did supported Intelligent Design Theory (ID). William Dembski has…
For the Judeo-Christian view of cosmogenesis we go to the opening chapter of the Bible, known in English as The Book of Moses, Called Genesis. Its original Hebrew title was simply Bereshith which means “In the Beginning.” When translated into Greek, it became simply Genesis: coming into being. Here it is stated that the world…
Last week I wrote about the way my ambitions shrank to a more human scale at midlife. Before my midlife crisis I had grand plans. I thought making a big difference would bring me satisfaction and peace of mind. By midlife, having not achieved greatness, I felt the monkey slowly slide off my back. I…
The history of the universe, the evolution of life, and the rise of human civilizations are in fact a unified story and best taught that way.
Every culture has its own cosmogony. The stories of genesis are perhaps the first great scientific theories. For they attempt to answer the basic question: How did the universe come about? We are so accustomed to thinking in terms of the major world religions, we tend to forget that other cultures have had their views…
Kurt Gödel, the preeminent mathematical logician of the twentieth century, is best known for his celebrated Incompleteness Theorems; yet he also had a profound rational theology worthy of serious consideration. “The world is rational,” (Wang, 1996: 316) asserted Gödel, evoking philosophical theism, “according to which the order of the world reflects the order of the…