Where-to and Why: Discernment in the 21st Century
We are tiny creatures on a small planet some 10 billion-plus years along the way in what we sometimes call “cosmic evolution.” And we want to ask, where it will all lead?
-
-
Interdisciplinary Dialogue and Issues in Science and Religion
We have entered a new era in science and religion dialogue where resources are increasingly available in a wide number of languages, targeted to different levels of understanding, and appearing in a variety of media formats. Two significant recent publishing events are the multivolume Encyclopedia of Science and Religion from Macmillan (www.galegroup.com) and the…
-
Is Evolution Just another Religion?
The noted American evolutionist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould argues strenuously that science and religion occupy different domains and speak to different issues. Properly understood therefore they cannot be in conflict: the ongoing American controversy about the literal truth of Genesis versus the claims of the evolutionists must be predicated on mistaken understandings…
-
Controversy over the Nobel Prize in Medicine
Dr. Raymond Damadian failed to be included in this year’s Nobel honors for work in Medicine, and feels sore about it. Although he was the inventor of the first machine that discovers cancers through magnetic resonance imaging, the award went to two other and somewhat subsequent scientists, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield. Notoriously, the Nobel…
-
Stephen Jay Gould: An Appreciation
Stephen Jay Gould is dead. He died Monday morning of cancer. In his life, he was many things: a Harvard professor, a baseball fanatic, an enthusiastic singer of oratorio, an outstanding evolutionist, and above all the greatest science writer of his generation. Young people of all ages, in America and elsewhere, have grown up on…
-
Galileo’s Troubles Revisited
Metaviews 015. 2001.03.07. Approximately 970 words. Below is a follow-up posting to Metaviews 012: Galileo’s Troubles.Mariano Artigas clarifies the circumstances regarding Galileo’scondemnation by the Church in 1633. — Billy Grassie =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=From: Mariano Artigas <[email protected]>Subject: Re: Metaviews 012 Regarding Metaviews 012 (Galileo’s troubles), we have received somecomments, that show that the whole thing has been misunderstood…
-
Galileo’s Troubles
Metaviews 012. 2001.02.25. Approximately 1905 words. Below is an article on some new archival research about Galileo¬πsTroubles with the Church. The article is written by Mariano Aritgas,Rafael Martivez, and William Shea. There has been a lot of recentscholarship, which puts into question the story of Galileo as amartyr for science. The piece below contributes to…
-
Counter-Revisionism in the History of American Science and Religion: Reviews of Paul K. Conkin and David A. Hollinger
Counter-Revisionism in the History of American Science and ReligionBOOK REVIEW OF: When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes and American Intellectuals By Paul K. Conkin Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998 Pp. xi + 185. $24.95. ISBN: 0-8476-9063-6 Contents: Preface Introduction: Christian Cosmologies Chapter 1: What Darwin Wrought Chapter 2: Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Modernists Chapter…
-
The Genesis of the Islamic Scientific Tradition
On the eve of Muhammad’s Prophetic mission, the uninviting and harsh city of Makkahhad little to boast by way of science. Arabs excelled in poetry and genealogies–both oral traditions going back for centuries–but they had no science except for certain bedouin techniques of folk medicine and astronomy. The great scientific and cultural centers of the…
-
Social Darwinism and National Socialism
I have just come back from a quick trip to the old German city of Jena, close to Weimar. By one of those unfortunate accidents of history, Jena found itself on the wrong side of the border through the Cold War, so having suffered through thirteen years of the Third Reich and four years of…