The most interesting strategy employed by anti-evolutionists over the last century and a half has been to report that "Darwinism is Dead" or "Evolution has Collapsed." The exercise is all but meaningless in terms of scientific discussion but it's a marvelous culture war strategy, requiring almost no effort to get...

I was sobered while watching a recent conversation on HuffPost Live about America's troubled conversation over origins. Nominally about recent attempts in Louisiana to get creationism into the public schools, the wide-ranging conversation shines a remarkable light on the country's century-long battle over creation vs. evolution.

All...

Anti-evolution bills continue to circulate in school districts across the country. The concerns that motivate the bills are now about a century old, first making headlines in the famous trial of John Scopes, on trial for disobeying a Tennessee law known as the Butler Act passed in 1925. The law...

The complicated and ancient drama of selecting a new pope will soon begin with the departure of Pope Benedict, our planet's most important spiritual leader. His successor will embrace a tumultuous set of challenges at a critical time in the history of Christianity.

An underappreciated achievement of Pope Benedict...

A friend of mine is in the late stages of a tragic pregnancy that will lead either to a stillborn baby or, at best, to a baby that will struggle for a few hours and die. The prognosis was made early on and the decision to take the baby to...

The ruckus about Rubio's relationship to geology continues unabated. And my attempt last week to deflect attention from him to the larger problem of science literacy in the United States has been misinterpreted as a defense of Rubio's position and a lack of appreciation for the relevance.

The science blogosphere is alive with condemnations of Marco Rubio for being vague on the age of the earth. In a much-discussed interview with GQ, the Tea Party favorite said he thinks there are "multiple theories out there on how the universe was created." The earth, says Rubio, may have...

Evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of hell," according to U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga. They are not scientific theories supported by mountains of evidence, as scientists would have us believe. They are a part of Satan's grand plan to keep people "from...

I have often wondered--quietly and usually to myself--what would happen if we could edit the Bible. After all, textbooks get edited and publishers bring out new and improved versions that are more in tune with how things are, instead of how things were. Wouldn't it be good if some ecumenical...

Earlier this year Pope Benedict XVI created a new foundation to promote constructive dialog between science and faith, something we desperately need (CNA/EWTN News). The initiative draws on years of conversation coordinated by Science & the Ontological Quest (STOQ), a project funded in part by the Templeton Foundation. I made...

Physics is grand. It's the grandest of the many achievements of our species -- greater than music, greater than art, greater than our omni-present consumer marketplace with its daily provision of ever-smarter phones and ever-stupider advertisements.

When physics shows up on our doorstep, as it does when we purchase...

My last post, "Mythologizing Evolution," generated quite a bit of controversy and not a little hostility. Some of this was my own fault for not anticipating some confusion about the meaning of the word "myth" as I was using it.

The confusion about the word "myth" in my...

A prominent new atheist blogger has just completed a week-long series paying homage to the great journalist H. L. Mencken, best known for his coverage of the 1925 Scopes Trial. The series represents ongoing efforts to enhance the mythology of evolution, efforts that have been particularly successful when...

"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...