Tag: religion & science
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The Multiverse Problem
I’ve got a new article out in Seed about how religious physicists, in particular, are thinking their way around the theological problems posed by multiverse theory. It’s good, mind-bending stuff. Scientists now recognize that if space were expanding at a slightly different speed, or if the strong nuclear force were just a little off, our…
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Dying, Desperately, Heroic
“To study philosophy,” wrote the French essayist Montaigne, “is to learn how to die.” In medieval times, particularly as the Black Death spread through Europe, the art of dying—ars moriendi—became the goal to which a lifetime of piety was devoted. Sure, a person can get by faking a good life. But a good death? There’s…
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Cooking Up Numbers
Christianity is on the verge of collapse! The atheists are taking over! No, wait, the Wiccans! Nevermind—conservative evangelicals are more robust than ever! Yada ya. If you’re used to following religion news, there’s this occasional ritual that happens when one of the major polls gets released. The newspapers find the most sensational story they can…
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What Would Darwin Do?
Happy Darwin Day! If you didn’t already fall victim to all the fuss, today is both the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the origin of species. It’s even Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. (And my friend Jake Rosenberg’s birthday too!) To celebrate, I have essay in today’s Religion…
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The Origins of Knowledge
In book XII of Metaphysics, Aristotle is on a roll. He has already figured out the causes and workings of the earthly world and, by book’s end, will have mounted the summit of God—the prime mover, for the love of whom all things move. The final step before this, however, lies with the stars. At…
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An Experiment in Faith
More on nonviolence. I hope this isn’t dull to some of you. To me it is an important conversation to have in anticipation of the new administration entering office, when any radical hope feels, for the moment, more thinkable than usual, more possible. In several recent articles and posts relating to nonviolence (here, here, and…
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Population Bombs
Population was to the 1970s what climate change is to today. Academia was in a frenzy, governments dragged their feet, and disaster seemed unavoidable anyway. The Al Gore of that period was Paul Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford who wrote the mega-bestseller The Population Bomb. After the mass starvations he had imagined for the…
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Ways of Using Science
The most promising approach in the study of the relationship between “science and religion” today is not to talk about them at all. Neither the warfare model—where the two domains are utterly at odds—nor harmony one—that they are mutually supportive—quite captures the historical and epistemological evidence. Stephen J. Gould’s vision of “non-overlapping magesteria” is a…