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The Two Faces of New Atheism

By Konstantin Petrenko

…st Ken Miller are the most prominent examples of how one can be passionate about both science and faith. And yet, atheists seem to have a special affinity for science, perhaps because in the absence of God and divine revelation they see it as our only source of objective knowledge and the only hope we have of surviving and flourishing in an indifferent and often hostile world. Related to the New Atheists’ support for scientific progress is their a…

The ‘Messy’ God of Science

By Mark Vernon

…to become an Anglican priest. In the quarter century since, he has written about two dozen books on the relationship between science and religion. A delightful man to meet, between papers and presentations he talked quite as easily with humble journalists as with distinguished peers. Polkinghorne describes himself as a ‘bottom-up’ theologian. He is concerned to show not only that modern science is compatible with orthodox Christian belief, but tha…

Hide the Religion, Feature the Science: 60 Minutes Drops the Ball on Mindfulness

By jeff wilson

…t. There’s a lot at stake here that could be held up if too many questions about religion were asked. For instance, we learn that Congressman Tim Ryan (himself a Roman Catholic, not a Buddhist, though the program doesn’t ask about his religious background either) has secured $1 million dollars from the federal government to bring mindfulness into Ohio schools in his district. If he asked for that money to teach the rosary to public school kids, wo…

Evolution and Creation Fight to the Death: What Emerges from the Ashes

By Philip Clayton

…two great products of the human spirit can be distinguished: religion asks about the why, science explains the how; science researches matters of empirical fact, while religion is concerned with matters of ultimate values; scientists use empirical techniques and theories to account for the physical and natural world, whereas religionists are concerned with the metaphysical and the supernatural; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to g…

Creationists and Dawkins Agree: Science Rules Religion

By Paul Wallace

…oming from one as ostensibly religious as Bergevin. But there it is. Think about it: Bergevin is saying that if the science of evolution is right, then the universe is necessarily a tale told by an idiot, and we may as well just kill each other. Why? Because, for him, evolution is not just a scientific theory, it’s a full-scale worldview. Bergevin gives science full control over his belief system. He seems unable to contextualize it. Put another w…

Evangelical: Why Do Many Evangelicals Get Science From a Creationist?

By Paul Wallace

…successful in the first place if it were not for the success of mainstream science. Overawed by real science, Ham cloaks his work in its language and bamboozles those who know virtually nothing about it. His and other creationist organizations (like the Discovery Institute) have played directly into the hands of those who would destroy all religion. Back in my physics days I would have called this a positive feedback cycle. The whole thing goes ar…

When the Science Guy Misses the Politics

By Sarah Posner

…stion isn’t whether there are people who are religious and also believe in science, or whether religion and science are incompatible. The question isn’t even whether Ken Ham himself is a fundamentalist. The question is whether one particular religious view, and a highly politicized form of it at that, should be exploited in the public sphere for the purpose of undermining the teaching and practice of science and ensuring that public policy is dict…

New Report: Young People Leaving Church for Science

By Paul Wallace

…certainly more polarized today than it was in, say, 1978. I know that anti-science runs amok in churches today. I read about it every day. But because the churches I’ve attended have been neither conservative nor reactionary, and because I’ve spent the large majority of my adult years on university campuses, I don’t have any direct exposure to life in anti-science congregations. Have any of you left the church (or a church) mainly because of its a…

Sing the Glory of the Smoke: The Spiritual History of Jazz

By Andrew Aghapour

…wrote about Cecil Taylor, I listened to Cecil Taylor. When I was thinking about writing about Charles Mingus the next day, I would listen to Charles Mingus at night. If any piece of writing in the book is successful, it was actually responding to the music. And this is something that I’ve learned about in my own improvising as well, something I’ve been doing for over twenty years. I think I have a listener’s sensibility for it and an understandin…

Does NIH Head Francis Collins Believe in Intelligent Design?

By Eric Reitan

…failures. Many do. But if they fail, it has nothing to do with advances in science. And if they succeed, it isn’t because science has fallen short. In short, moral arguments for God’s existence typically aren’t design arguments, and their success or failure typically has little or nothing to do with science. If Collins is offering an argument for God along the lines of the one proposed by C.S. Lewis, then Bloom has radically missed the point of wh…