SCM Press has made chapters from two books related to religion and science available on their web site: Keith Ward, Religion and Human Fulfillment, Chapter 1: The God Gene: The Relation of Religion and Altruism Neil Messer, Selfish Genes and Christian Ethics, Chapter 1: Introduction Read more

The online University of Illinois Press catalog provides the two blurbs from scholars that will appear on the back of my forthcoming book The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context. Here they are: “This work puts forward a compelling thesis, questioning the default assumption that what separated first-century Jews and Christians was the Christian elevation of Jesus of Nazareth to divine status as equal with YHWH. McGrath shows decisively that this was not so, arguing with... Read more

Next Monday the season finales of Chuck, Heroes and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles are scheduled. The latter looks particularly intriguing, since it seems from the commercial that a machine will ask whether he is one of God’s children. Whatever answer may be given on the show, the fact that the question is being posed is itself worthwhile. As for the season soon to begin, the new season of LOST, the producers have offered yet another video clip, as well... Read more

At Best Buy yesterday, looking at the Nintendo Wii, one of the salespeople pointed out that in Wii Sports, one of the characters you can box against looks like Jesus. What do you think? Many Christians, while they might disagree, can at least just barely tolerate the desire (expressed in a particular song) that someone might want to punch St. Paul in the head. But if one says the same thing about Jesus, that will be crossing a line. Yet... Read more

“Let’s try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage... Read more

Here are two more quotes from Chet Raymo‘s book When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: “If science has given one great gift to the world – greater than the wonders of technology, greater than modern medicine, greater than flights to the moon and planets – it has given us permission not to know everything” (p.63). “Prescientific people invested every tree, brook, and celestial body with personhood. For all its grandeur and refinement, the modern idea of a transcendent personal... Read more

“All personal gods are idolatrous, especially any personal god we dignify with a capital G. The great service to humanity of science has been to sweep the anthropomorphic gods away or, at the very least, to show them for what they are, phantoms of the human brain. What we are given in their place is not Truth, but reliable empirical knowledge of the world, tentative and evolving. To be sure, science does not exhaust reality, or even begin to encompass... Read more

Jim West has declared the quest finished. Albert Schweitzer has also chimed in: The study of the Life of NT Wrong has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Wrong, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Blogger and Bishop. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of minimalist doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and... Read more

I am getting caught up on two weeks’ worth of episodes from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In episode 10 from this season, entitled “Strange Things Happen At The One Two Point“, the artificial intelligence known as “Babylon”, during a power outage, redirects all power to its systems in order to survive. As a result, a psychologist that had been working with the AI died as air conditioning and other systems were cut. When asked how it felt about the... Read more

Blog readers may be interested in the video featuring Kevin Padian: Investigating Evolution, from Grace Cathedral. The link will take you there. For some reason, when I try to embed it, I get a video about Wikipedia instead. So you can take your pick! 🙂 Read more