Wile E. Coyote heads towards the cliff but doesn’t see it. We’ve all seen the cartoons – he can keep running, until he looks down and notices there is no longer anything beneath his feet to support him. This is, in essence, the situation of the young-earth creationist movement. Every single objection that did not consist of pointing at unanswered question – and even some of those – has been answered by scientists, and still more evidence than we might... Read more

I seem to have ruffled some feathers. The blog Telic Thoughts has posted what is not so much a response to what I wrote recently as a complaint. Mike Gene felt that I painted with too broad a brush in my earlier post in which I suggested that proponents of Intelligent Design are dishonest. I don’t think that my statements were completely unjustified – indeed, some will probably say I didn’t go nearly far enough – but I will add... Read more

One reason Intelligent Design has trouble being taken seriously is because it lacks what all cool things must have nowadays: its own video game. To show that I have nothing personal against the proponents of ID, I thought I’d help by rectifying the problem. In the game I created, using MIT’s Scratch program, you play Michael Behe (yes it really is him, but you have to look really closely), being chased in a nightmare by four of Ken Miller’s mousetrap... Read more

The Intelligent Design movement accuses biologists of claiming to know more, and with a greater degree of certainty, than they do. I would like to suggest that the proponents of ID are claiming to know less than they think they do. No true scientist, whether driven by intellectual curiosity or the desire to be famous, would claim to have found evidence that there was intervention by some powerful intelligence in our world, and then throw up their hands and say... Read more

An interview of me has just been posted on the TheoFantastique blog, on the subject of religion and science fiction. Read more

Last night, as continued my ongoing struggle to solve the mystery of the black screen after login on Windows Vista, I put on R30, the DVD of a concert the band Rush issued to celebrate their 30th birthday. I’ve liked Rush’s music since the first time I heard it, which was the album Grace Under Pressure, which relatives put on in the car when we visited them. It was the combination of good music with lyrics that were worth listening... Read more

The question of whether Jesus was, or at least had the status of, an illegitimate child is one that has been widely discussed in recent scholarship, including by me (in an article published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus). Today I received an e-mail from someone who had read my article and wanted to ask a follow-up question. Here is the e-mail and my response: Dear James McGrath, I have a question on your JSHJ article... Read more

I had to force myself to pick up The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, since my expectations were not high, largely because I was not impressed with the views O’Leary has expressed, and the way she has expressed them, on her own blogs and on Uncommon Descent. The reason I have started reading it anyway is twofold: First, its subject matter is of interest to me generally, as... Read more

In my religion and science class yesterday, we compared the different feelings that scientists seem to have about the appropriateness of bringing God-talk into the discussion in cosmology and in biology. Has anyone else noticed that it is relatively uncontroversial for Einstein, Hawking, Davies, Peacocke, Polkinghorne and many others to mention God in discussions of cosmology. Certainly they would disagree in their attempts to articulate what they mean by such language, but it is not felt to be inappropriate in... Read more

I had a letter to the editor published in today’s issue of a local newspaper, NUVO. It was in response to a letter to the editor that appeared the previous week, claiming that Christianity was invented in the time of Constantine. Here’s the letter I wrote: I certainly agree that “faith” cannot and should not be used as an excuseto rewrite history (Letters, “America’s Collective Craze to ‘Trust God,’” Oct.3-10). This is something Christians ought to accept: as I often... Read more