Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. McGrath

Fans of the current Battlestar Galactica series will recognize the title of this blog entry as the first words of dialogue spoken on the miniseries that started it. The question is asked by an evolved cylon who poses the challenge to a human armistice officer. It was only today that the full significance of these [Read More…]

I lived in Romania for three years, have been married to a Romanian for fifteen, and have had a lot of contact with Romania and Romanians. I love the surprised look on people’s faces when I tell them that I didn’t really understand the New Testament until I lived in Romania. Romania was part of [Read More…]

Yesterday I went fossil hunting. After spending Canada Day in Canada, my family and I came back via upstate New York, where two days ago my son and I happened across a crinoid (sea lilly) and a coral fossil on the beach. This led to us spending some time yesterday at Penn Dixie Paleontological and [Read More…]

This is just a short entry, just to share a further illustration of how the Bible is mythologized, personalized and in some cases deified by well-meaning but misguided Christians. I received a message from someone who disagreed with an answer of mine on Yahoo! Answers, and this individual said he isn’t interested in what I [Read More…]

I thought I had an original idea with my play on the name of Dembski’s blog. As it turns out, there is a blog dedicated to parodying Dembski’s blog called – you guessed it – Uncommon Dissent. It is allegedly maintained by none other than T. H. Huxley, reports of whose death were apparently, like [Read More…]

Has anyone else noticed how hard it is to get one’s comments to actually appear on Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent? I’ve posted lots of times on Richard Dawkins’ site, as have lots of other religious believers (mostly fundamentalists). Sites like that of the Discovery Institute don’t even have forums. One way to interpret this, [Read More…]

I’m been reading Sean B. Carroll’s book Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo, which is thoroughly fascinating. One can almost understand the response of proponents of intelligent design to the marvels of the workings of our genes, which mirror the workings of logic circuits. But of course, this is a reaction [Read More…]

This was my last actual entry on my old blog, and I’ve decided to offer it as the first ‘real’ post on my new blog site as well… I’ve already said plenty, I imagine, on the problem of homogenizing the creation stories in Genesis 1-3. But what about “Pasteurizing” them? Before this is dismissed as [Read More…]

This is my first entry using Blogger rather than Easy Blogs. I will keep my old blog entries archived at the same addresses as previously, with the old front page available at: http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/blog/index2.htm [Read more…]

The title of the posting will presumably clue you in to the fact that this is an attempt to create a “sequel” to my blog. I will be interested to see both whether this works and also whether I can somehow save my old blog entries in the process! [Read more…]