The BioLogos Forum: Matt J. Rossano
Matt J. Rossano is Professor of Psychology at Southeastern Louisiana University and author of Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved.
Posts by Rossano
Evolution: Is God Just Playing Dice?
May 12, 2012
Gould was a talented science writer, but he overplayed evolution's whimsy. Increasingly, science is showing that the evolutionary process has many built in constraints which limit its possibilities and bias its pathways. Take, for example, the ubiquitous phenomenon of convergence - the tendency for highly diverse species to independently evolve similar adaptive (analogous, not homologous) traits.
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Evolution: Is God Just Playing Dice?
October 11, 2011
Gould was a talented science writer, but he overplayed evolution's whimsy. Increasingly, science is showing that the evolutionary process has many built in constraints which limit its possibilities and bias its pathways. Take, for example, the ubiquitous phenomenon of convergence - the tendency for highly diverse species to independently evolve similar adaptive (analogous, not homologous) traits.
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The Galileo Affair: Emblematic or Exceptional?
September 1, 2011
On the morning of June 22, 1633 in the hall of the convent of Santa Maria sopra Minvera in Rome, Galileo Galilei knelt before the Lord-Cardinal Inquisitors-General and publicly abjured his false opinion that the sun was the motionless center of the universe. Thus ended Galileo's personal trials; but the "Galileo affair" was just commencing.
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Thomas Aquinas: Saint of Evolutionary Psychologists?
July 18, 2011
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was the foremost Christian scholar of the High Middle Ages and is today regarded as a "doctor" of the Catholic Church. Working six centuries before Darwin, he obviously was not an evolutionist. Aquinas had no doubt that humans were specially created by God. However, he was also convinced that they were created out of the same basic materials used for all creatures and were therefore connected to all of nature.
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Are Infinities More Scientific Than God?
July 8, 2011
So from where does the deepest order originate? From a naturalistic standpoint, we don't know because we have yet to uncover nature's deepest laws. However, even if we reveal these laws, the question of why they give rise to such profound order will still remain a puzzle. The pervasive order of our universe appears to go beyond necessity into the gratuitous.
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The Christian Revolution
July 4, 2011
That the messenger is not a dispassionate observer should not immediately or necessarily discredit the message. It was Christianity, he contends, that bequeathed to humanity an entirely new vision of the human person. That vision, he worries, lies prostrate upon modernity's chopping block in its haste to excise all things illiberal. So what was this new vision of humanity?
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Does Resurrection Contradict Science?
June 10, 2011
So what then does Resurrection mean? For Benedict it represents a new dimension of reality breaking through into human experience. It is not a violation of the old; it is the manifestation of something new.
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The (Lack Of) Conflict Between Science and Religion in College Students
June 3, 2011
Media-hungry atheist, creationist and religious fundamentalist provocateurs have successfully dominated the science and religion narrative for the past decade or so. In doing so, they have created the false impression of an ongoing unavoidable war between the two camps. A recently published large-scale survey of college students, however, finds that the call to arms has fallen on deaf ears.
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