I would like to thank Ken Keathley, Clay Carlson, Michael Ruse and Michael Wittmer for their helpful comments and insights, some of which might need a whole new book to address adequately, but I will do my best here in the space available. On the topic of books, I should first mention that I have…

Denis Alexander is a rare double threat: an eminent scientist who writes extremely well. Genes, Determinism and God contains an array of scientific studies and theories, all clearly explained so the uninitiated can follow along. Alexander’s main point is that while our genetic code sets some of life’s parameters, we still retain significant freedom within…

I am sure I am not the only professional philosopher who, from an early age, decided to stay firmly away from the free-will problem. It has always struck me as being like one of those rather cruel animal traps, where the happy little rodent, perhaps attracted by some yummy smell, steps on the platform which…

Genes, Determinism and God is foremost a scientific work that deals primarily with empirical data, providing a wealth of scientific information. Therefore it is often technical, but not so technical that an interested scientific layperson cannot follow along. The book also interacts with philosophy, ethics, and theology. My review focuses on that interdisciplinary interaction. It…

In 1997 Tom Wolfe wrote an influential article entitled “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died.” Quoting E. O. Wilson, he declared: Every human brain . . . is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as “an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer…

I am very grateful to our panelists for their insightful and stimulating contributions. Communicating complex and sophisticated notions from fields as varied as psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and physics in ways that a theologian can understand is no easy task! Our panelists have done excellent work, and I am indebted to them. Their work shows us…

I teach theology at a Christian liberal arts college. My students often hear me long for those halcyon days when theology reigned as Queen of the Sciences. To have colleagues from non-theological disciplines bowing down and kissing my ring—ay, there’s tenure worth having! I crash-landed in reality, however, as I worked through these insightful essays…

The use of inheritance, and then later the use of genetics, to argue for determinism, has waxed and waned over the history of biology. Reviewing some of this background is important for understanding where we are today. Some Historical Background Overall it was the philosophers of earlier centuries who established powerful arguments in support of…

Twenty years out from what has been dubbed the “Decade of the Brain” (1990-99), two central areas of neuroscientific study have emerged with direct implications concerning whether we have free will, and, if so, what kind. One stems from a method of study first developed by Benjamin Libet, which has been widely thought to indicate…

An emergent tension at the interface between science and religion is how to deal with determinism because science often involves deterministic causal laws and religion involves agentic human experiences. Psychology would seem to be a discipline that can offer some insight into this tension because, as I show below, it deals with the same tension….

We’re at the heart of Purgatorio, and the heart of the Commedia, but things get a little weird. There are all these dream visions, and then a lot of philosophy. To be honest, he starts to lose me a little; less seems to be happening than in earlier episodes. But what is all this talk about? Love. Love, remember, created the cosmos all the way down…