Yesterday, May 14th, almost 500 Emory University faculty and students expressed their dismay that their commencement speaker did not toe the ideological line when it came to evolutionary biology. Yes, gasp, the renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson does not believe in evolutionary theory. Not only that, but biology professors at Emory and their supporters…
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A University of British Columbia study suggests analytical thinking can be harmful to religious faith. The psychology report, published Thursday in the prestigious journal Science, reveals that religious belief drops after subjects perform analytical tasks or are exposed to Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, The Thinker. However, UBC social psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan insist they…
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by Wes Moore A researcher out of the University of North Carolina says conservatives have lost faith in science over the last forty years. [1] The study, authored by Gordon Gaulet, tracked trust in science by political affiliation based on the General Social Survey, originally performed in 1974 and then every other year from 1994…
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Archaeologists working in Jerusalem claim that a discovery they made inside a burial tomb, dating back to the time of Jesus Christ, could shed new light on the origins of Christianity. Biblical historian James Tabor, professor and chair of religious studies at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, is working with the team, led…
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A new sociological study by Gordon Gauchat claims there has been, in the past four decades, a dramatic decline in churchgoers’ faith in science. The study, published last week in the American Sociological Review, finds that “public trust in science has not declined since the 1970s except among conservatives and those who frequently attend church.”…
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T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, begins “When God Talks Back” by acknowledging this reality: In 21st-century America, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of apparently well-adjusted people who believe not just that they can speak to God but that he hears and answers them. Though not herself a religious person, and certainly…
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The serious writer of today lives in a very much secularized world, a world of measurable objects, a world of space and time considerations, a world that must be studied not only rationally, but scientifically. Now, this situation did not suddenly come about in the middle of the seventeenth century. It has been developing since…
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You know the drawing: a male nude facing front, becurled and muscular, with two sets of arms and legs, one touching the circumference of a circle, the other the sides of a square. In “Da Vinci’s Ghost,” the journalist Toby Lester peers closely at Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man” — its origins, its meaning and the circumstances…
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This is not a book about God: it is a book about what was in 1983 the new physics , by a distinguished scientist who would go on six years later to edit a massive scholarly work called The New Physics, who would then start getting interested in life on Earth, extraterrestrial life and (right…
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Although high levels of narcissism can impair ethical judgment regardless of one’s religious orientation or orthodox beliefs, narcissism is more harmful in those who might be expected to be more ethical, according to a Baylor University study published online in the Journal of Business Ethics. “Devout people who are narcissistic and exercise poor ethical judgment…
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