As I read the preface of Jonathan Haidt’s book, and the concern in the US about “political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines” (p. xvii), my immediate thought was: I wonder if he’s going to acknowledge that people live in different universes? With different views of what a human is, what meaning…

What, if anything, has divine providence to do with disability? This is the opening question of Reinders’s book. For me, there is no ‘if anything’ about it. This is one of the most pressing questions that could possibly be asked. The question of what divine providence has to do with suffering was instrumental in my…

Providence can be difficult to understand in the context of disability; and understanding the contours of this issue and the “conception of the universe, a particular way of looking at the world and our temporal existence in it” (p. 3) that lies behind all answers, is what Hans Reinders’s book Disability, Providence and Ethics: Bridging…

Chance or God? This is perhaps the central theme of the science-religion interaction in evolutionary biology. Most people—even hardnosed atheists—agree that the natural world looks as if it were designed. The question is, what is the explanation of that apparent design? The central argument of Douglas Axe’s book, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our intuition that…

Big Money, Big Science, and God’s Big World In my last post I presented the objections to spending billions on big science projects such as the Large Hadron Collider. Questions certainly arise in the face of this massive public spending, when we live in a world in which millions of people are hungry and lack access…

I have just been reading about the exciting hunt for the Higgs boson— a rather dramatic way to put it, since the scientists involved were not, actually, hunting for a boson, but looking to discover whatever was out there. In this case, however, they indeed found the particle physics had been waiting 40 years for….

The most common motif for the relationship between science and religion is that of warfare. It is the theme that most grasps the public mind; conflict creates good television and a fight will be considered more entertaining than friendly chatting. This motif is almost taken for granted. As many individuals can testify, it’s likely that…