Like Christmas, each New Year’s Day is symbolized by a baby, but one destined to grow old and be replaced only 365 days later as the next year supercedes the one before.

As an academic historian, I take heart in Richard Dawkins’ stretch to algorithms. It shows a major problem in natural history that can’t be answered easily.

There are various ways to test the hypothesis that certain regions of DNA are non-functional, and in this series we will explore some of them.

Recently, we became aware of an email conversation between two young persons: one a young physicist and a deeply committed Christian named Aron and the other a person named Josh who identified himself as a skeptic. The exchange is so rich that we’ve asked for permission to post it here.

Is there a clear enough definition or understanding of what natural science is to justify distinguishing it from non-science?

“Nature is messy,” a geologist tells writer John McPhee, “Don’t expect it to be uniform or consistent.” McPhee’s books on geology tend to emphasize the humbling effect of the real earth on the overly-intellectual geologists who want to over-simplify it.

The Incarnation is a revelation of who we are. It is a retelling of Genesis chapter 3 and that is why, in this season of retelling this story, we enter a dangerous time.

One way to categorize college professors—an overgeneralization but a useful one—is to split them into Totalizers and Tentative Investigators. There are Darwinist and Christian professors of both types.

In this video, Alister McGrath discusses the importance of going beyond surface readings, both in Scripture and in the natural world. The parable of the sower, for example, contains a far deeper meaning than a story of a man scattering seed.

We want to cultivate a world where Christian young people feel emboldened in their faith—rather than weakened—when they come to understand the strength of the scientific data.

Clarity is a requirement for the expression and communication of reproducibility; so these two scientific traits are partners. The results of any scientific investigation have to be expressed in terms that are unambiguous.

Ours is one of the few academic disciplines that does not believe that the simplest answers are probably the truest. We thrive in complexity, disorder, and the general messiness of human life.

This traditional American carol turns to Song of Songs 2:3 for inspiration; it uses the familiar apple as a emblem of the very tree of life, emphasizing that the promise we have in Jesus goes beyond the merely material to encompass our complete shelter, nourishment, and passionate joy.

It is important for scientists to emphasize that uncertainty is central to science, and advocacy is disruptive of it. When a scientist becomes an advocate, he loses for himself the power to use scientific discipline to discern reality.

Mount Darwin was named thirteen years after Charles Darwin (1809–1882) died. Evident throughout his Voyage of the Beagle is a serious young man, diligent and humble. Also evident is a young man with little interest in an active and communicating God.

In today's video, Oxford physicist Ard Louis discusses the famous debate between renowned evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris over the idea of evolutionary convergence.

Some want to lay the blame for the Republican Party’s anti-science lurch at the feet of evangelical religion, but evidence from a number of recent sociological studies indicates that the picture is a lot more complicated.

It was said that whenever the great 19th century scientist Michael Faraday heard of some new phenomenon the first thing he would do was attempt to reproduce the effect in his own laboratory. He understood that science is concerned with reproducible experimental phenomena.

There are few things more enjoyable than a serious academic discussion in which students and faculty lose themselves in strategies pursuing understanding.

The season of Advent is a time when we are particularly attentive to images of Christ gleaned from the prophetic texts of the Old Testament, in addition to those that emerged from Jesus’ earthly ministry in Palestine.

Above all, we teach scientists to distrust all measurements, but to distrust most those that confirm what we want to believe.

This series is about the reasonableness of biblical Christianity in universities. By reasonableness, I mean the warranted credibility, if not the persuasiveness, of Christian claims about ancient history.

I commit myself to my Christian belief for reasons that are sufficient enough for me to bet my life upon it. But we don't have absolute certainty in the 2+2=4 sense. And that is true of everybody.

In his new book Monopolizing Knowledge, physicist Ian Hutchinson engages with the world-view he calls “scientism”: “the belief that science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge”.

Science is set within a culture. Culture, defined broadly, is a collection of generally-accepted models describing reality (Thomas Kuhn used the word "paradigm"; others have called it a "received view").

Scientists refer to the year 1905 as Albert Einstein's "annus mirabilis"—his year of miracles. While working as a patent clerk, Einstein spent his free time debating physics and working on theories that would end up altering the way we think of the world

in Genesis two, God calls humankind to know and study the surrounding world. The scriptures say that Adam took on the God-given task of naming the animals, which is, in fact, science: the exploration of the natural world.

So, for Driscoll, the choice is a simple dichotomy: Scripture or science. Scripture is the highest court of authority in all matters, and the role of believing scientists is to affirm Scripture. To fail to do so is to “exchange the truths of Scripture for the truths of science”.

Where we find this particular Gnostic tendency reappearing today is in ways that some Christians affirm certain privileged interpretations of Scripture.