Stars, Planets, and God’s Extraterrestrial Sheep

Outer space stirs the inner soul. Might the unfathomable distances, incomprehensible beauty, and magnificent elegance of the universe we view on a starry night communicate a divine call to us? Might the feelings of awe and reverence elicited within us by the Milky Way constitute God’s still small voice within our soul, beckoning us to…
The Very Good Vastness of Creation

“Dimidium” sounds like a rare metal, yet it is a planet far away, circling its sun “Helvetios”. Dimidium—more technically called 51 Pegasi b—has something very special to its credit. It is the first planet ever discovered to be circling a sun like ours beyond the solar system. Swiss astrophysicists from Geneva made the breakthrough, hence…
The Theology X-Files

The gap theory helped many Christians in the nineteenth century bridge the chasm between traditional interpretations of Genesis 1-2 and the emerging fossil record. Few people still read the Bible that way, but it was once championed by Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), the Scottish churchman and eloquent gospel preacher. On the other side of the Atlantic,…
Can we Justify Big Science? (Part II)

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…
Can We Justify Big Science?

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….