Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. McGrath

I am currently grading assignments that asked how the Israelites came to be in the land of Canaan, specifying that I am expecting historical answers and not merely a retelling of the Biblical narrative. Students often equate the existence of debate or the suggestion of uncertainty with a situation in which nothing is certain. I [Read More…]

I first encountered Eric Cline in the wonderful documentary on Joshua and Jericho in the Ancient Evidence series. Now that I have read his recent book From Eden to Exile, I am all the more impressed. His book simply sets forth the current state of our knowledge. He treats even amature archaeologists with respect, even [Read More…]

New Testament scholar C. F. D. Moule recently passed away. He was nearly 99 years old, and rightly famous in his field. Obituaries have appeared in the British newspapers The Independent and The Telegraph. Since he could be called my “Doctor-Grandfather” (since he was Jimmy Dunn’s Doktorvater, and Jimmy Dunn was mine), I thought I’d [Read More…]

Sean Carroll is one of the many top-notch scientists whose public lectures and presentations can be found on YouTube. Ken Miller, Barbara Forrest, and many others also appear: The institution Carroll is connected with, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, sponsored a series of lectures on the subject of evolution and religion: There are many other [Read More…]

Last night Sean Carroll began his public lecture with scenes from Nick Park’s Creature Comforts. Park’s brilliant idea was to interview members of the British public, then to provide animation to accompany the actual voices of the public expressing its views on various topics – including evolution. I’m including the clip here. Enjoy! [Read more…]

Many fundamentalists (including, but not limited to, young earth creationists and proponents of intelligent design) spend a lot of time emphasizing the greatness of the Bible, its importance, and so on. Yet there is a serious dearth of actual knowledge of and about the Bible in detail. Sure, people hear a lot of sermons, read [Read More…]

Having vanquished the unholy proponents of chemistry, we may turn our attention to the next great bastion of falsehood. I am starting another new organization: Linguistics Undermines Scriptural Truth (also known as Scriptural Linguistics Upholds Truth). Our aim is simple: to prove that just as chemistry and biology make no sense without God, the same [Read More…]

I had the privilege of having lunch today with a couple of my colleagues and Sean B. Carroll, who is doing some of the most interesting work at the cutting edge of biology, more specifically in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (or evo devo for short). I had students read a significant number of [Read More…]

One feature I wish my Blogger blog had was the option to subscribe to comments, which would allow the comments section of the blog to become a forum for ongoing discussion and conversation, should anyone desire to use it that way. Many blogging sites do not offer this option, however, which is why I thought [Read More…]

I wonder how many readers of this blog entry are thinking “OK, I know the first two, but…” In a recent article with the nice title “Raiders of the Faux Ark” there is a call to take back archaeology from the crackpots. Biblical archaeology may be the hardest to recover, since its name gives an [Read More…]