When my advisor Dick Lewontin’s book, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, appeared in 1974, one reviewer criticized him for equivocating about the significance of genetic variation. In his text, Lewontin seemed to vacillate endlessly between the “neutral theory,” which saw variation at the DNA level as of no selective consequence to the organism, and […]
For those who claim that no religious scientists allow their scientific statements and beliefs to be infected with religion, here’s a counterexample. It’s from Francis Collins’s BioLogos website (funded by our friends at The John Templeton Foundation) and is a statement about how God may influence the world through quantum mechanics: The mechanical worldview of […]
In the WSJ — of all places — we find physicist Lawrence Krauss attacking the compatibility of science and faith. Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed […]
Today involves a bit of tidying up: I want to hook several red herrings that appear at the beginning of Ken Miller’s critique of my anti-accommodationist views, ‘Thoughts of an ‘Ardent Theist,’ or Why Jerry Coyne is Wrong, and call him out for taking a quote out of context. Miller clears his throat as follows: […]
The recent debates about accommodating scientific with religious views have been scattered across several websites. The whole megillah began with a post on Chris Mooney’s site, arguing that the atheist attack on accommodationism was inimical to our joint interest in promoting the understanding of evolution. Mooney also characterized anti-accommodationists as “uncivil.” Since then, the arguments […]
Over at the Guardian website, James Hannam has appeared from the woodwork to argue that by critiquing the philosophical accommodation of faith with science, I am explicitly rejecting an alliance with the enlightened faithful to go after creationism: It’s popularly imagined that the history of science and religion is one of violent conflict, but the […]
Well, Chris Mooney has decided to continue the discussion about the compatibility of science and faith that he and Barbara Forrest began on his Discover blog. If you’ve followed all this, they criticized me for my “divisiveness” in going after the idea that science and faith are compatible. I responded to this, saying that since […]
Karl Giberson, whose accommodationist book Saving Darwin I reviewed in The New Republic, is vice president of The BioLogos Foundation, the Templeton-Foundation-Funded organization headed by born-again Christian Francis Collins. Giberson is also a trained physicist, a professor at Eastern Nazarene College, and head of a faith and science initiative at Gordon College. I criticized Saving […]
Over at that hilarious goldmine of accommodationism, Francis Collins’s BioLogos website (generously supported by The Templeton Foundation, they have posted an answer to the question, “Did evolution have to result in human beings?” Now if you know anything about this history of faith/science accommodationism, you know that the answer has to be “yes”, at least […]
