Karl Giberson, Ph.D

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" This simple-sounding question has been at the heart of discussions about the existence of God as long as there have been such discussions.

Physicist and popular author Lawrence Krauss offers his answer in his new book, "A Universe from Nothing." Actually,...

Atheists often talk about religion like scientists at the Center for Disease Control talk about plagues and epidemics -- unambiguously bad things that we should work to eliminate. There is a difference, however. The scientists at the CDC know what they are talking about because they have studied epidemics. Their...

This spring semester, California's Biola University, among the nation's largest evangelical institutions, opens the doors of its ambitious new Center for Christian Thought. Resembling institutions such as Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, Biola's center seeks to bring a mix of senior and postdoctoral fellows to campus to collaborate with internal...

Paul Wallace wrote recently in Religion Dispatches, in a piece titled "Top Ten Peacemakers in the Science-Religion Wars," that 2011 is the "beginning of the end of the war between science and religion."

"Creationism," he says, "cannot last." And the so-called "new" atheists on the...

Survey results recently reported by Christianity Today clarify once again the sober truth that evangelicals are not making much progress in accepting well-established mainstream scientific ideas about origins. Particularly disturbing is the finding that only 27 percent of evangelical pastors "strongly disagree" with the statement that the earth...

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times titled "The Evangelical Rejection of Reason," my colleague Randall Stephens and I argued that most of the GOP candidates, reflecting widespread evangelical sensibilities, were effectively rejecting secular knowledge. The argument was essentially an abstract of our new book, "

Widespread rejection of human-induced climate change by evangelical Christians, of the sort we have seen recently from Rick Perry and others, is a bit of a puzzler. There is no obvious reason why evangelical faith commitments should motivate the faithful to reject climate science. The Bible does not claim that...

Einstein once famously said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler." In our drive to understand the world we are tempted to over-simplify, to see less than what is there, and to fail to appreciate the complexity of what is there. We love to toss out...

I have seen the same question posed by three very different people in the past few days, so I thought I might use this more public forum to answer it. The most recent catalyst for the question was an NPR piece on the controversy over the historicity of...

Are there Big Questions that don't have answers? Are some things simply beyond our capacity to understand with the finite lumps of gray matter in our heads? Are there "mysteries" in the world that simply can't be sorted out no matter how much gray matter is applied to the problem?

After years in the trenches of the creation-evolution controversy I have come to appreciate the complexity of navigating the foggy world of knowledge claims. This is something that college students start learning to do in their first critical writing course and are supposed master by the time they write a...

The May 4, New York Times introduced readers to David Barton, an amateur historian whose ideas about America being a "Christian Nation" founded by evangelicals are quite foreign to the readers of that publication. Described in the article as a "quirky history buff" and "self-taught historian," Barton has...

The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions has several goals but a friend asked me what was the primary purpose. After thinking about this a bit, I would put it like this: the most desired outcome or effect of this book is a reduction of the...

I am on my way to Fort Myers for spring break, currently in the air over the Carolinas, I would guess. It will be one of the last of many journeys -- both great and small -- that I have taken over the past two decades to watch my daughters...

Why won't Americans accept evolution? This was the question on the table on Feb. 19 as science educators, researchers and writers gathered at the National Museum of Natural History in D.C. The meeting was preceded by an off-hours tour of the remarkable exhibit on human evolution. (I took advantage of...

I am sitting now in a pose familiar to millions of Americans: on hold trying to get a response from Comcast after dispatching the various automatons to reach a real person. Of course the first real person you talk to at Comcast -- a maternal type -- can't do anything....

A recent posting on a popular atheist website highlighted the sordid history of torture in the name of the Christian religion. The use of torture by Christians -- or anyone, for that matter -- to motivate people to change their beliefs, admit they hold heretical beliefs or convince...

I recently criticized Jerry Coyne, standing in for the New Atheists, for having a simplistic view of religious people as people unable to abandon obsolete ideas and move into the modern world. The purpose of my piece was to defend religion -- particularly Christianity -- against such charges:...

The discovery of an Earth-like planet outside our solar system has rejuvenated the conversation about life elsewhere in the universe. Dubbed Gliese 581g, the planet is thought to be Earth-like because it is orbiting about its sun in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone," where the temperature would permit liquid water on...

There is a strange, hyperbolic expression favored by the New Atheists: "cramming religion down the throats of children." The idea, and even the wording, appears with regularity in the anti-religious writings of people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and Jerry Coyne. Most recently we saw a lament on Coyne's blog...