Reflecting on the weight of history, William Faulkner lamented.
The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.
The centuries old relationship of science to philosophy and to religion is as tangled and contested as a Shakespearean melodrama. A history of mythic battles, real and imagined, looms over the contemporary conversation, making partisans of every stripe defensive.
In the interest of clarifying the issues, some history …
Every year Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture recognizes a Censor of the Year, an outstanding example of a person or institution that contributed to the pro-Darwin “consensus” through intimidation, agitation, or professional retaliation. The 2018 Winner is…
Correcting this historical picture — the Galileo story in particular — is one of the great virtues of John Lennox’s God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? The very notion of a science-religion conflict is largely the invention of a few prominent (though now discredited) 19th-century historians. Galileo’s persecution is the linchpin of this tale. Read More ›
The conventional wisdom in constitutional law is that the debate that began with the famous Scopes trial in 19251 over the teaching of origins in public school science classrooms officially ended in 1987. In that year the U.S. Supreme Court, in Edwards v. Aguillard,2 struck down a Louisiana statute, the Balanced Treatment Act, that required its public schools to teach creationism if they taught evolution and vice versa. The Court held that the statute violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. A small group of academics, however, with university appointments, impressive publications, and better credentials than their creationist predecessors, have raised questions about evolution and have offered alternative arguments that have changed the texture, tenor, and quality of a debate once thought long dead. Read More ›
