Was the Star of Bethlehem Real?: Responding to the Go-To Skeptic

Among skeptics, Dr. Aaron Adair is sometimes hailed as the “go to” guy on the Star of Bethlehem. He’s even written a book arguing that the Star didn’t exist. Recently, he engaged a post I wrote about the Star of Bethlehem. I'd like to offer a reply to Dr. Adair in this post. First Things First   First, you can read our previous interaction in the comments box on this post. I want to thank Dr. Adair for striving to maintain a positive tone, both in the combox and in his... Read More

What Does the Latest “Big Bang” Discovery Mean?

Over the past few days the world of cosmology and astrophysics has gone “supernova.” Researchers affiliated with the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica announced that they had discovered empirical evidence for a key part of the Big Bang theory, cosmic inflation. One aspect of this discovery that I found really interesting is that it forms an almost perfect parallel to a discovery that was made sixty years ago. The First Telescope Discovery   In the early twentieth century, the Belgian... Read More

“Cosmos” and One More Telling of the Tired Myth

Seth MacFarlane, well known atheist and cartoonist, is the executive producer of the remake of “Cosmos,” which recently made its national debut. The first episode featured, along with the science, an animated feature dealing with the sixteenth century Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by Church officials. A brooding statue of Bruno stands today in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome on the very spot where the unfortunate friar was put to death. In MacFarlane’s... Read More

Can an Atheist Scientist Believe in Miracles?

Peering down the microscope, I saw a deadly leukaemia cell and decided that the patient whose blood I was examining must be dead. It was 1986, and I was reading a large stack of bone marrow samples "blind" without being told why. Given the nasty diagnosis, I imagined that it must be for a lawsuit. Perhaps a grieving family was suing the doctor for a death that really could not have been helped. The bone marrows told a story: the patient took chemotherapy, went into remission, then relapsed,... Read More

Adam and Eve and Ted and Alice

John Farrel recently wrote a column at Forbes.com entitled "Can Theology Evolve?", quoting from an epistle of Jerry Coyne: "I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity:... Read More

Cosmology and Creation: Contrasting Notions

NOTE: Yesterday we shared a guest post on cosmology from one of our top non-theistic commenters, Paul Rimmer. Today, we're posting a response from Fr. Andrew Pinsent, Research Director at Oxford University's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion.     As a Catholic priest, and former particle physicist at CERN, I thank Strange Notions for the opportunity to respond to Paul Rimmer’s article on the Big Bang. For those hoping for instant controversy, I am sorry to have to... Read More

Like Nothing You’ve Seen Before: Big Bang Errors and God Errors

NOTE: Today we share a guest post on cosmology from one of our top non-theistic commenters, Paul Rimmer. Tomorrow, we'll post a response from Fr. Andrew Pinsent, Research Director at Oxford University's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion.     First things First   Many articles about God and cosmology begin with ignorance, and this article will be no different. I'm not a cosmologist. My research involves much of the same mathematical formalism cosmologists use, and... Read More

Bill Nye, Ken Ham, and the Catholic Third Way

Did you watch the big debate last night between Ken Ham and Bill Nye? It was an excellent exchange with good points made on both sides, but decidedly missing from the debate was the fuller and traditional Catholic view. Thus for the purpose of our dialogue here at Strange Notions, I'd like to explore the "third way" absent from last night's event. How are Catholics taught to view the world? To quote the apologist Frank Sheed, in the very beginning of his book Theology and Sanity: “There... Read More

The Rational Judgment of a Miraculous Cure

Dr. Manuel Nevado (left) and St. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer (right). My goal in this post is to show how the Catholic Church made the rational judgment, after serious investigation, that one man received a miracle of healing through the intercession of another. In discussing this “miracle,” I will rely on two definitions of the word miracle. Fr. John Hardon, S.J., wrote: “In theological language, a miracle is an extraordinary event, performed by God, which can be perceived by... Read More

The Opening of the Scientific Mind

David Gelernter wrote an evocative essay for Commentary Magazine (cleverly) titled "The Closing of the Scientific Mind." His essay was a summary of conflicts in modern "philosophy of mind." He criticized the "bullying" against atheist Thomas Nagel who concluded that Darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain consciousness and who was "unwilling" in Gelernter's opinion "to express sufficient hatred of religion to satisfy other atheists." Then Gelernter discussed the "roboticism" of... Read More

« Previous Page — Next Page »