I have only met Ken Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, the once. This was when we together appeared on one of William Buckley’s Firing Line television debates, part of the side arguing for evolution against a group of critics, those whom I label the “New Creationists.” I should say that on those…
Review of: Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Nature and Human History, Holmes Rolston III, 1999 Cambridge University Press, 432 pages, $59.95 hardcover, $18.95 paperback Holmes Rolston III is a philosopher, and Genes, Genesis and God derives from his set of Gifford Lectures, a distinguished series given at the University of Edinburgh…
What possibility spaces are needed to get from beginnings to where we have now arrived, in Earth history?
It is not that there is no “watchmaker”; there is no “watch.” Looking for one frames the problem the wrong way.
The system of inheritance of ideas is independent of the system of inheritance of genes. All this is pointing steadily to a difference in being human, to a complex mind indeed adapted for culture, that is, to a distinctive human genius.
“Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.” That has got to be one of my all-time favorite Zen zingers. When I first heard it, my response was an emphatic “yes.” Over time, that quote began to burn like a troubling Koan. So did another all-time favorite I first met with unbridled enthusiasm. The Third Patriarch…
Since genes are not moral agents, they cannot be selfish, and, equally, they cannot be altruistic. But genes can transmit information.
Soon after the emergence of modern science, William Cowper described Newton as the “sagacious reader of the works of God,” and Alexander Pope spoke like the Book of Genesis in his lines: “Nature and Natures laws hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.” However, as modern science, with its esoteric…
Introduction: 1. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters. The quest for God begins with an inner awareness that there is more to life than physical existence. Something unformed and uncomprehended stirs deep…