Science

But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.
                                                                - Mark 10:6

Joining scientists' in their giggling excitement over fashion, journalists are pleased today to report the latest study that purports to prove God did not make them male and female from the beginning. A couple scientists did MRI scans of 1,400 brains and are excited to tell us they found male aspects of brains in female brains, and vice versa.

The news pieces don't specify what those male and female brain markers are, nor why they labelled the markers with the simplistic binary classifications of "male" and "female." But having categorized the bodies and the differing characteristics of those bodies' brains, "male" and "female," they announce the death of...

When pastors approach the Bible as if every text in Scripture is simply another opportunity to preach the Gospel, it makes sense for the Bible's detailed history to be relegated to the sidelines. This sort of preaching promoted as "redemptive-historical" or "Christ-centered" provides the perfect justification for the timorous to skip out the back, Jack, and preach John 3:16 every Lords' Day of the year. Then what does it matter if Adam and Eve were the first man and woman or merely the mythological father and mother of an early tribe of hominids? If the sermon text is Scripture's "narrative" of Adam and Eve, Creation, and the Fall, those stories are only there to show...

Ball State University is a state school in Muncie, a small town just north of Indianapolis. According to Indiana Public Media, Ball State administrators recently cancelled an honors physics and astronomy course taught by tenure-track prof Eric Hedin because Hedin's course syllabus included the concept of "Intelligent Design."

Ball State president Jo Ann Gora justified the cancellation to her faculty and staff:

Teaching intelligent design as a scientific theory is not a matter of academic freedom – it is an issue of academic integrity.

Right.

Ms. Gora should be rebuked by her peers at the next...

After watching the recent Creation/Evolution debate between Bill Nye, an atheistic scientist, and Ken Ham, a young-earth creationist, I was challenged to think about how I, as a scientist, should witness to my colleagues. As a six-day creationist working at a secular University, what is my "strategy?"

First, I want to thank God for the work of Ken Ham and others. While I don’t agree with much of his approach, I was reminded recently that the “wrong” evangelism that he does is better than the “right” evangelism that I don’t do.

With that said, though, there are some dangers in trying to learn lessons for our own witnessing from what Dr. Ham and Answers in Genesis do.  It is easy to come away from a debate like that and think, “I wish I knew a lot more science! Then I could really witness to a scientist. Oh well, I better leave it to the experts.” But the truth is that none of that science is needed in witnessing. In fact, it is a hindrance. God has given us all we need in His Word.

Here are a few Biblical points to keep in mind if you want to witness to a scientist...

It's the first rule of journalism to "follow the numbers." C. John "Jack" Collins is a prof at the Presbyterian Church in America's Covenant Theological Seminary, and recently Jack published a book and article purporting to defend the historicity of Adam. Both are dangerous pieces of work because both are carefully wrong in a very soft and seductive way. But the numbers don't lie.

Collins writes:

The story of Adam and Eve, and their first disobedience, explains how sin, the alien intruder, first came into human experience, though it hardly pretends to explain how rebellion against God (as expressed in the serpent’s speech) originated to begin with.

Note that Collins speaks of the Fall as the responsibility of both "Adam and Eve." He uses the plural: "their first disobedience." This is directly contrary to the Word of God which explicitly declares the Fall and Original Sin to be solely the responsibility of...

Here's a letter to Congress signed by a bunch of Evangelical academics who are on the global warning bandwagon and tell us the salvation of Gaia is at stake. Starting with the overpopulation mania of the seventies, I've noted Calamity Jane fads and Christian author fads have about the same half-life—ten years.

Some time ago in Madison, Wisconsin, I used to protest the genocide of over a billion infants with one of the guys who signed this letter, but now he's climbed a couple socioeconomic brackets and is protesting anthropogenic global warming. It might help to explain his new commitments that he's since moved from Madison to Wheaton where he teaches biology.

Which brings me to a couple observations. First, note how many of the signatories are from Wheaton and Calvin where profs live in mortal dread of appearing insufficiently progressive. They should get out more. 

Second, note that only five (2.6%) of these guys have the terminal degree in Atmospheric Science, Climatology, or Meteorology...

A Review of Paul Gutjahr's Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy.

As a teacher of theology I knew a fair bit about Charles Hodge, generally speaking, but reading Paul Gutjahr's biography gave me an inside view.

I knew Hodge used Turretin's text for his theology courses and didn’t publish his own Systematic Theology until the 1870s. Why did he wait so long? Gutjahr fills in the details. It turns out Princeton Seminary's governing board asked Hodge not to take his three-volume systematic theology into print because they thought it would cause a decline in enrollment if anyone could buy his theology text.

I knew his Systematic Theology was thin on the doctrine of the Church. I didn’t know ...

National Geographic breathlessly announces: "Even after centuries of effort, some 86 percent of Earth's species have yet to be fully described, according to new study that predicts our planet is home to 8.7 million species. That means scientists have cataloged less than 15 percent of species now alive—and current extinction rates mean many unknown organisms will wink out of existence before they can be recorded."

So let me get this straight...

(Tim, w/thanks to Pastor Curell) The scientific method is coming in for some hard knocks, recently, as efforts to replicate a number of critical studies fail. Some would prefer to put it that "replication is proving difficult," but after reading some of the stats, "failure" seems the right description. In discipline after discipline, scientists doing experiments over again find themselves unable to replicate earlier findings that minted academic superstars and set the standard for medical practice, for instance.

Some of the inability to replicate is likely attributable to the very old problem we all fall into of looking for proof that we're right. The problem is too widespread, though, for that alone to be the answer. Thus the New Yorker subtitled its article reporting on this crisis under its Annals of Science: "The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong with the Scientific Method?"

After reviewing hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses, Australian National University's Michael Jennions found "a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance. ...Jenions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them publicly."