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Category Archive: Science

The Cosmological Principle - October 03, 2007
Joseph Silk is Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and in The Infinite Cosmos, he offers a layman's summary of what's happening in cosmology. One of the central principles of modern cosmology is the "cosmological principle," the theory that the "universe...

Choosing death - July 19, 2007
With advances in medical technology, it's possible to keep people alive longer than ever before. This certainly has its wonders, but it's really an ambiguous achievement. It means that death more and more is the result of decisions about treatment...

Old news - July 19, 2007
A TLS review of several recent books on bio-computing contained old news for some people, but new news for me. The latest wrinkle in computer technology has been to use biological material - DNA - rather than silicon for information...

Monkeys and Typewriters - July 09, 2007
How long will monkeys typing randomly on typewriters take to produce the works of Shakespeare? That's been a way of thinking about Darwinian evolution since who knows where. In 2002, researches at the Paignton Zoo in England decided to find...

World, Nature, Physis - February 01, 2007
An addendum to an earlier post on Rosenstock-Huessy's essay, "The Metabolism of Science." Though he sees world, nature, and physis as identical in some ways, he also distinguishes them. We have different experiences of the external world, and there are...

Metabolism of Science - January 31, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy's essay "The Metabolism of Science" shows him at his deconstructive best. He doesn't analyze postcards, but he does something similar, finding significance in the most marginal of glosses, in the repetitions of a book title, in the handwriting style...

Scientific law - December 28, 2006
In their Science & Grace (Crossway 2006), Tim Morris and Don Petcher helpfully define a law of nature as "God's sustaining of, or man's description of, that pattern of regularity that we observe in nature as God works out His...

Hierarchy and preference - November 21, 2006
Challenging Cunningham's suggestion, against Deleuze, that without some hierarchy of goods, there is no way to determine preferences, even for something as basic as diet, Kenneth Surin cited a bumper sticker: The top line says, "I love animals," and the...

Classification - November 08, 2006
In his Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff tells about the Australian aboriginal tribe of the Dyirbal, who speak a language that classifies everything into four categories. One of these, "balan," includes "women, bandicoots, dogs, platypuses, echidnas, some fish,...

In Defense of Pluralism - September 19, 2006
The church's response to Copernicanism is often cited as a textbook example of the tyranny of faith over investigation and reason. Dogmatically committed to geocentrism, the church wanted to shut the door on alternative explanations. The truth, Owen Barfield argues,...

Lamarck Redux? - September 05, 2006
In a fascinating review of a recent book on evolution (TNR, Sept 4), Oren Harman suggests that reports of the death of Lamarck, proclaimed in every middle school science classroom for well over a century, may be somewhat exaggerated: Lamarckism...

Bacon's Program - August 24, 2006
Antonio Perez-Ramos argues in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Bacon that while Bacon's method has been severely criticized, Bacon's program of human improvement through scientific and technological progress has not been, until the early part of the 20th...

Interior Senses - August 14, 2006
Murphy goes into admiring detail describing Thomas's theory of interior senses in higher animals. Apart from its purely historical interest and the anticipations of later scientific theories, Thomas's discussion has philosophical and theological interest in its own right. He claims,...

Dueling Theodicies - August 14, 2006
Robert Young claims that the controversy over Darwinism in the 19th century was not so much a religion-v.-science controversy as a duel between competing theodicies. At one level, he argues, "the protagonists in the debate were in fundamental agreement. They...

End of Modernity? - January 29, 2006
Iain Provan offers this comment in his Ecclesiastes commentary: "Modern people tend to view the movement of history, as far as human beings are concerned, as being from primeval swamp to divinity. The beginning was unpromising, but quite against expectation...

Darwin's defenders - December 10, 2005
It's hard to pick up a magazine today without finding an article defending Darwin or Darwinism. Many of them are designed to prove that Darwin was not an opponent of religion, and that religion and science can live happily ever...

Godel's theorem - August 01, 2005
Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system's consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum...

Darwin and evil - May 27, 2005
In his 2001 book, Darwin's God, Cornelius Hunter argues that the theory of evolution was less a solution to a scientific problem than a solution to a moral, theological, and religious problem: the problem of evil. How could one rationally...

Polkinghorne on God's knowledge - April 24, 2005
Stephen Barr has a fine review of John Polkinghorne's recent Science and the Trinity (Yale) in the May issue of First Things. Along the way, he offers some sharp and devastating criticisms of Polkinghorne's unfortunate acceptance of open theism, which...

Brain Death - November 12, 2004
Caveat: I am no scientist. If details of the following are in error, please let me know. Brain death is one of the conceptual foundations of organ transplantation. If the person from whom the surgeon takes a beating heart is...

Dawkins and the Devil - August 26, 2004
Stephen M. Barr offers a hilarious review of Richard Dawkins's latest, A Devil's Chaplain in the August/September issue of First Things. He chides Dawkins for getting his facts wrong and for pervasive, stubborn superficiality. He concludes that there are several...

Adult Stem Cell Research - July 29, 2004
Nigel Cameron, director of a Wilberforce Forum council on biotechnology includes the following in his recent email update: "I gave a presentation at the Experimental Biology conference in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago, where I was surveying the ethical...

Prenatal Screening - April 04, 2004
Agnes Howard reports in The Weekly Standard on new developments in prenatal screening. Last winter, it was reported that scientists had put together a "combination of maternal blood tests and ultrasounds to detect Down syndrome at 10-13 weeks," and a...

Darwin's Worms - March 09, 2004
The Winter 2004 issue of The Wilson Quarterly also has an article on Darwin's studies of earthworms, in which Darwin made innovative contributions. Darwin was inspired to study works after a visit to his uncle, Josiah Wedgewood: "Upon arriving, he...

Rats - December 23, 2003
A recent issue of Science News reports that rats live longer if they are constantly stimulated by novelty. Rats that have nothing to look forward to but another day in the maze or on the wheel die sooner. That may...

Nicolaus Steno - December 07, 2003
The November 21 TLS has a review of a biography of Nicolaus Steno (1638-86), a Danish physician, theologian, and convert to Roman Catholicism who was beatified in 1988. The reviewer gives this account of Steno's contribution to medicine: "Between 1663...

The Sense of Being Stared At - December 07, 2003
Rupert Sheldrake's latest book, The Sense of Being Stared At, is full of amusing and entertaining oddities, as Sheldrake continues his assault on reductionistic modern science. At the outset of a treatment of "paranormal" phenomena, Sheldrake points out that such...

Peppered Moth - December 03, 2003
Phillip Johnson reports on the scandal concerning the peppered moth in the December 2003 issue of Touchstone. It's a pretty grim story, recently told by Judith Hooper in Of Moths and Men. What Johnson calls the "juiciest" scandal "is that...

How Children Learn - December 02, 2003
The November 15 Science News has a brief review of a multi-author book entitled Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less. The review states that the authors...

Pawan Sinha - December 01, 2003
The November 22 Science News reports on the work of Pawan Sinha, a neuroscientist at MIT who has observed the effects of cataract surgery on youngsters born blind. One of the interesting findings is that correcting the cataracts does not...

Prophets - October 25, 2003
One way to make the point above about Michael Denton and Philip Johnson is to say that they are "prophets" in the sense that Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Jim Jordan use the term: They create a new future with their words....

Intelligent Design - October 25, 2003
Thomas Woodward has written a fascinating history of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement in Doubts About Darwin (Baker, 2003). His focus is on the history of the rhetoric of the debate (examining the ethos of each participant, the appeals to...

Bottom on Bioethics - October 21, 2003
The remarkable Jody Bottum �Epoet, poetry editor for First Things, and Books and Culture editor for The Weekly Standard �Ehas made bioethics his bailiwick, having published several essays in The Weekly Standard in the past few years. He writes the...

Biology and the Cell - September 08, 2003
Why does biology start with the cell and work upwards? Why explain biological phenomena in terms of cell activity, rather than cell activity in terms of the activity of larger systems? No doubt there is experimental evidence to support this...

Abortion and Technology - August 23, 2003
There's an important article on the abortion issue in the August 18/25 issue of The New Republic. Though written from a pro-choice perspective, it shows how advances in technology are likely to undermine Roe v. Wade. The main breakthrough has...

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