arrogance and ingratitude
Fabiola Gianotti led one of two teams that discovered the Higgs boson, the most exciting feat of modern physics. Her team used a $10 billion particle accelerator to crash protons into each other at nearly the speed of light. When they sifted through the microscopic debris, they found evidence of an energy field, which apparently permeates the universe. As other forms of energy pass through this “Higgs field,” much like an airplane pushes through a stiff headwind, the Higgs bosons attach themselves to these particles of energy and give them mass. And that’s how every physical thing gets its body.
March 12, 2012
This week a court in the US will hear the case of a former “team lead” NASA scientist who—according to the evangelical plaintiff—was fired due to his belief and promotion of intelligent design. Why do you feel that belief in intelligent design and a Creator is apparently not tolerated in many academic and scientific research arenas?
love and magic
When an atheist online reader of ODJ submitted a comment that called religion “anti-science” and Christianity “magic,” a fascinating online dialog ensued. I thought of the books authored by brilliant minds—articulating a reasoned and logical case for belief in God. I pondered the complexity of the human eye, the intricate design of a giraffe’s neck, and the oddity of the duckbilled…
goldfields' miracle
Science’s discovery of nature’s laws makes an intervening God less believable. We surmise that lost limbs don’t grow back, and dead men don’t return to life. Or do they?
In October 2008, medical doctor Sean George was driving from Esperance to Kalgoorlie in the West Australian goldfields, when he started feeling chest pain. He called his wife and got to the…
divine design
Intelligent design. It’s hard to go a day without encountering that phrase, and here’s why. The more scientists study matter like molecular DNA—the building block of life—the more it points to a Creator. As Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, writes, “The best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified, digitally encoded information in DNA is…
micro, not macro
Dr. Fazale Rana, a Christian biochemist, believes in evolution. He notes that there are undeniably at least three types of evolution taking place today: Microevolution within a species; speciation, species giving rise to closely related sister species; microbial evolution, changes in viruses and bacteria.
What Dr. Rana doesn’t see over time, however, is macroevolution—the change of one kind of animal into an…
magic
We were engaged in a refreshingly serious conversation about the origin of things, deep stuff you won’t get to discuss with every teenager. (Him, not me. I’m, uh . . . older.) Shy, brilliant (again, him), he was searching for BIG answers to BIG questions. “I see two basic options,” he said thoughtfully. “Either it all started by random chance,…
God and a goose
Like many in our culture, he’s spiritual. At 17, he’s rejected the organized religion of his parents and grandparents as stodgy, stuffy—stifling. He attends church because that’s what his girlfriend does.
The limitations of science compel him to believe in a god. But the evil, the unfairness, and the hypocrisy he observes force him to conclude that this god is…
humming earth
Do you hear that low, rumbling noise? (No, I’m not talking about your stomach growling—skipped a meal again, huh?) The phenomenon I’m referring to is called the “Earth’s hum.” That’s the term scientists use for the constant rumble beneath our feet that they can detect by using seismometers.
The deep hum, first discovered in the 1990s, is comprised of countless…
