Today in Sunday School we arrived at the last of our classes on the ways Jesus is presented in the canonical Gospels, focusing on the Gospel of John with its unique features such as the notion of Jesus as the Word-become-flesh and the pre-existence of the Son of Man. I gave a brief overview of my book (3 years of research in 15 minutes!) and my suggestion that the developments in the Gospel of John result from an attempt to... Read more

Nature has made available a helpful resource about 15 gems of evolution. Meanwhile Ken Miller (HT AIG Busted, see also John Pieret) takes on disinformation about ID and the Dover trial. Sandwalk picks his top 10 articles on evolution from New Scientist. Michael Dowd has a list of evolutionary resources. Mike Beidler blogs about a creationist attempt at DIY peer review. Steve Matheson discusses evolution’s speed limit. The Austringer blogs on an IDC vs. FSM smackdown. Jeffrey Shallit tests your... Read more

For those who noticed a lull in my blogging activity, my family and I had a nice brief getaway in Chicago. We got to enjoy the bitterly cold wind off Lake Michigan, as well as swimming, visiting some relatives and doing some shopping for those Eastern European products that are that little bit harder to find in Indianapolis. I was delighted to see that discussions which had begun before I left are continuing. While I was away, NT Wrong posted... Read more

I did not finish my review of Keith Ward’s The Big Questions in Science and Religion last year, but at least I can get it done early in 2009. The subtitle to this chapter is “Are there any good science-based arguments for God?” Ward begins by surveying the once-popular (and in some circles still-popular) notion that humanity naturally progresses through three stages in its intellectual evolution: religion, metaphysics, and finally science. Yet the twentieth century demonstrated that science did not... Read more

Happy New Year! An nou fericit! La multi ani! Welcome to 2009! (Hope you enjoy your stay) Read more

I finally watched the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connoley, and of course GORT. The allusions to the story of Noah and the ark were explicit, but I wonder how many who are familiar with both stories will really think about both the similarities and differences. For one thing, it seems that a super-intelligent, powerful alien may well be the closest we can come, in the context of our own worldview, to the... Read more

Apparently the forces of darkness are mounting an attack, this time on the Christian holiday of New Year’s Day, which commemorates and worshipfully celebrates the anniversary of the day on which a Romanian monk miscalculated the year in which our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born. In addition to the anticalendricals, it seems that the Chinese, Jews, and Muslims are all opting out and deciding to celebrate other days as their new year. More recently the ranks of these... Read more

I have not yet read the book Christology and Science that has made some ripples in the blogosphere lately. I certainly hope to do so in the near future. The subject definitely interests me. Here are some questions one might ponder about Christology. If one believes that God is omnipresent, then in what sense if any could God be present in Jesus to a greater extent than elsewhere? If one believes Jesus was fully human, then how could he not... Read more

Reflecting further on the tendency of fundamentalists and inerrantists to flatten the voices of Scripture, to blend them or select from among them in order to reduce them to a single voice, it became apparent to me that the early church chose a different path, consciously trying to avoid this. Matthew rewrote Mark, adding to, subtracting from, and otherwise modifying Mark’s story in numerous ways. Had the church wanted to go the fundamentalist route, there was a clear path to... Read more

I think another aspect typical of inerrantist approaches to the Bible interfered with communication in a recent discussion of the subject of “literalism” in the comments on an earlier post. There I asked about the specific meaning, in context, of Matthew 16:28. One commenter kept trying to turn the discussion onto the breadth of possible meanings of “kingdom of God”. Thinking about why this happened, I suspect that this commenter may have been substituting (consciously or unconsciously) Mark’s version of... Read more