Darwin’s descent into agnosticism was fueled by a legitimate personal experience with the problem of evil, specifically in the suffering and death of his daughter.

Calvin sought to respect the context of the Old Testament while also realizing that Christ makes a difference in how one appropriates the Old Testament. This, I would suggest, is an unavoidable tension for all Christian readers, and it comes to bear on the science/faith discussion.

The journey of Charles Darwin in this movie is one of a troubled soul in conflict with his pursuit of truth

A central and persistent mystery in both science and faith is the boundary between life and non-life.

What do you think of this project that the Discovery Institute has launched, with a laboratory where they want to do genuine scientific research, with their own in-house scientists?

Calvinism has been a dominant Protestant theological tradition since its teachings were first systematically articulated by John Calvin (1509-64). It is known for its intellectual depth and detailed argumentation.

For readers who have followed my series, it will come as no surprise that I think that Cunningham’s work exemplifies the mission of the Biologos Foundation.

This lack of a strong view of providence in the ID position can easily merge into semi-deism. Indeed, even if ID design arguments were accepted, they could by themselves lead no further than a deistic or semi-deistic position.

Like the hero’s obstacles in his journey, anomalies build tension in reigning scientific stories of reality, until a crisis occurs.

An experiment with this level of detail might sound too good to be true, but one of exactly this sort has been going on since the late 1980s, studying the bacterium, E. Coli. It’s called the Long Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE)

Evangelicals often have widely different opinions on how evolution and Christianity can be in conversation—indeed, whether that conversation can happen at all. This prompts a question...

Of the themes present in Contact, one stands out for discussion in this essay.

“I think salamanders are cute, don’t you, Uncle Jack?" he asked. A good professor, I quibbled with his word choice and said, "They’re sleek and beautiful.”

There is an interesting claim being made today by people like Phillip Johnson that evolution is based on a big deception, that there isn’t any solid basis at all for the theory, and that people are gradually abandoning evolution. Are there evolutionists that are jumping ship?

In the Old Testament there is no real attempt to argue for the fact that this is a created world, rather it is treated as almost self-evident.

“Dr. Arroway, you come to us with no evidence, no record, no artifacts. Only a story that strains credibility. Are you really going to sit there and tell us that we should take this all on faith?”

In Contact, Ellie’s worldview is one of enlightened atheistic humanism, an elevation of intellectual and scientific inquiry that values humanity but rejects the supernatural.

Last week I came across a blog post by Intelligent Design leader Bill Dembski, provocatively titled "Craig Venter denies common descent — Dawkins incredulous." Surprised by the headline, I clicked over to read the story.

An early pagan myth held that music was learned from birds. Like many pagan myths, it was Christianized in the early church.

The evidence is overwhelming. And it is becoming more and more robust down to the details almost by the day, especially because we have this ability now to use the study of DNA as a digital record.

Secular readers might find the chapter confusing for its strong emphasis on Jesus Christ as witnessed to in the Christian Scripture as the key to sustaining evolutionary science.

Given our current, and continually growing, knowledge of the deep past, it is increasingly clear that the rise of multicellular animals is not an impenetrable mystery.

One prominent antievolutionary argument put forward by the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM) is that significant amounts of biological information cannot be created through evolutionary mechanisms – processes such as random mutation and natural selection.

The very structure of a story itself is an incarnation of an argument for redemption – that is to mean the recovery of something lost in our humanity.

If death did not exist before Adam and Eve, how could God have used evolution to create man? And what about predators and natural catastrophes such as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs?

If we accept the long-drawn-out saga of the evolution of living forms in creation, how must we then understand ourselves? Where and how do we humans “fit” in this development?

As we have seen for the past several weeks (see sidebar), ancient interpreters produced some inventive interpretations of the story of Cain. The story is ambiguous in places, and some of those ambiguities could be theologically objectionable if left to themselves. This week I want to end our discussion of the story of Cain by listing three other issues that early interpreters felt needed to be addressed.

Long before Charles Darwin was born, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about the subject in Summa Theologiae.

Snakes—especially the poisonous varieties—evoke a primordial dread in many people, a response sometimes even attributed to God’s curse of enmity between Eve and the serpent in the second chapter of Genesis.

I wish we could say, “We can get comfortable with evolution now just as easily as the church has gotten comfortable with heliocentricity.”

One of the most important features of the Cambrian "explosion" was the very rapid diversification of organisms with shells, plates, and various other types of hard parts. A wide variety of soft-bodied organisms are also known from the Cambrian.

A friend asked me what I might suggest was the primary purpose. After thinking about this a bit, I would put it like this: the most desired outcome or effect of this book is a reduction of the tension and hostility between science and religion.

What do I mean by Militant? Nothing different from what the dictionary says. 'Vigorously active and aggressive, especially in support of a cause'.

Cain was a “logical” candidate of sorts because his act was the only truly wicked act recorded in the chapters preceding the flood story. Cain’s murder of Abel, therefore, was understood not just an isolated wicked act, but a crucial factor in God’s decision to destroy the world in a deluge. One clear example is from the apocryphal book Wisdom of Solomon 10:3-4.