Here’s your chance to let us know what you’d like to read about this fall from ESN’s science coverage!Read more…
Is God Relevant in an Age of Science? (STEAM Grant Series November Question)
Folks who see faith and science as conflicted are at least still engaged, even if it’s to further prosecute that conflict. Engaging folks on a topic they find irrelevant is much trickier.Read more…
Science Reader Question: So you want to read more about evolutionary biology and theology
What I’ve collected here is some of the writing that has influenced my thinking and resources that I and my collaborators and commenters think are interesting and helpful.Read more…
Science Reader Question: Putting the Biology in Evolutionary Biology
When evolution is called “settled science,” it’s easy to imagine the theory as largely in our scientific past. For many biologists, evolution is integral to their scientific present and future.Read more…
Science Reader Question: Life on the Edge
In between the admonition to multiply and an assembly of the resulting diverse humans, we have a series of stories in which someone has to ask “Is the kingdom of God for them too?” Invariably the answer is ‘yes.’Read more…
Science Reader Question: Which Came First, the Sinner or the Sin?
At the same time, the notion that there was a first Homo sapiens ultimately doesn’t work. If we followed humanity backwards in time, there would be no obvious place to draw a line between H. sapiens and earlier hominins.Read more…
Science Reader Question: Original Sin Goes Viral?
So to think about the effects of the primal sin, the concept which we call original sin, seems to hinge in Scripture on two things: our capacity as rational beings, and the exercise of this rational capacity to choose something other than God.Read more…
Science Reader Question: Becoming Made in God’s Image
This conversation on the relationship between an evolutionary natural history and man’s creation in the image of God reminds me of a saying in the world of software engineering: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”Read more…
Science Reader Question: Fugue in the Key of Adenine
Language metaphors for DNA are so natural we probably can’t get away from them entirely, but we can try other analogies beyond individual letters.Read more…
Science Reader Question: Seated at the Right 01101001 of God
Perhaps already you can see where a spiritual God would deal with relationships over forms since he himself does not have a form, and where a consistent God would be continually engaged in creation.Read more…
Science Reader Question: Evolutionary Project Management
Perhaps God expresses his intentions in this relational fashion. This is a very different paradigm than God-as-artist, where he directly selects every detail of the final product.Read more…
The Passion and the Punctuated Day
It is not as mysterious as one might think. It testifies to a view of time as consisting of thresholds to be crossed, not containers to be filled. It emphasizes certain moments/thresholds as particularly meaningful. They serve as dividers between different periods. Crossing them is not moving from one uniform hour to the next, but moving from one state of being to another.Read more…
Science in Review: Is God Outside of Time?
God starting outside of time and coming inside is a tricky notion. When did that transition take place? We can talk about a specific moment from our perspective on the inside, but how do you talk about “when” outside of time? It’s a little like asking which room of your house your backyard is in. Even the notion of a transition that doesn’t take place in time is mind-bendy.Read more…
Cockcrow, Darkness, and the Coming Light
Cockcrows and astronomical twilight are not durations, but temporal thresholds—significant, transformative moments. The story of Peter’s denial is not just one of time passing while he denies, but of the second cockcrow being a moment of revelation—a moment of insight in which Peter reflects on his denials and weeps, and a moment that changes Peter forever.Read more…
Once Upon a Time: The Story of Creation Told in the Language of Science
If God is an artist, time itself is his medium of choice. The result is not forms, but transformations: chaos to order, dust to life.Read more…
Science Reader Question: What’s a Few Minutes Between Friends?
Did we spend our time well? Are we managing it as efficiently as possible? But if we measure our worth with time, what happens if not everyone agrees on the same measurement?Read more…
Science Reader Question: Time and Forgiveness
Effects follow causes; we must live in the future with all the intended and unintended results of our choices. We call this sequence of unrepeatable moments time. In other words, time is that feature of the universe which makes forgiveness necessary.Read more…
Science in Review: “Prediction is hard, especially about the future”
Statistical models, like those used to predict the weather, deal with uncertainty. This runs counter to our expectations for mathematics. Factor in a reliance on probabilities, which are deeply unintuitive, and it’s no wonder we find these models hard to understand. Nevertheless, they can actually be quite useful.Read more…
Science Reader Question: The Human Touch
Humans and statistical models both make errors sometimes. But we understand the human errors because we make the same kinds of mistakes, while statistical models can be wrong in surprising ways. Perhaps we think those errors are worse simply because they are different.Read more…
Science Reader Question: So You’d Like to Win a $1.5B Jackpot
We need to resist the urge to wonder “What are the odds this one specific person would have predicted this one drawing?!?!?” Instead, we should ask the statistical question: “Have enough predictions been made about enough lotteries to get positive results?”Read more…
Science Reader Question: Never Quote Me the Odds!
What distinguishes statistical modeling from New Age predictions? Plenty, but maybe not exactly what you’d intuit.Read more…
Science Reader Question: “I Could Show You the Ways of The Force.”
Does the existence of a mentoring opportunity create an obligation? Or, to put it slightly differently, can we rely on potential mentees’ desire for mentoring to tell us when we need to start? Here’s where I think The Force Awakens is illustrative. Read more…
Science Corner: “Nobody Worries about Upsetting a Droid”
Do you have experience, on either end, with cloning-as-mentoring or apprenticeship-as-mentoring?Read more…
Science Corner: “Fear is the path to the dark side.”
Why and when should we start mentoring and investing in those younger or at a less advanced place than we are academically? Read more…