science and religion

As you probably know, a couple of weeks ago the pope was in England smack-talking the atheists. What is generally less known is that, at the same moment that pope was having his say with the UK’s radical non-believers, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, also in England, was busy talking…

A new search engine touts its conservative Christian bias. What happens when we lose the ability to hear opposing views?

Despite these publicly marked divides, the field of religion and science cannot easily be described by sticking a “vs.” between the two words. Rather than an ideological battle in which, as Hawking states, one side of the ring will “win” over the other, for some, the question is about how the two sides might work together.

Creation is a heavy word these days. So, when it showed up in the title of one of this summer’s hottest science papers, it drew me up short. The word itself comes from the Latin for ‘bringing forth into being’, which already sounds pretty deep. But then it also has the…

What kind of people do cell phones make us?

When David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute called me out last week on a recent RD post, I decided to take the opportunity to review the history of the conservative think tank’s role in promoting the inclusion of intelligent design theory in the American science curriculum.

The department of physics in the University of Oxford is a hodgepodge of buildings, old and new. In a warren of rooms, its scientists pursue interests from quantum computing to theoretical cosmology. The diversity says much. As a tree of knowledge, modern physics has branches that shoot off in…

Much of Steve Fuller’s new book is just a strong way of saying what is entirely uncontroversial among historians of science, even if easily forgotten by most everyone else.

A new four-volume work from the Vatical Library suggests that the concerns of the papacy in the early modern period were focused almost entirely on the new threat posed by the Protestants. If some scientists, especially the astronomers, got caught in the cross-fire, then this was only because they were perceived to be Protestant-style “free thinkers.”

The week in religion, poetically.