KtBlog

Ham on Nye: Beyond the Debate
Having been party to an extremely brief and insignificant debate with Ken Ham in these pages over the account of his Creation Museum in my 2011 book Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, I can attest that to him the facts matter not, the debate is all. Having followed Ham’s organization Answers in…

A Wonder-Cabinet of Creation(ism)
Snakes appear in almost every one of the museum’s exhibits, perhaps as a reminder of Satan’s lone virtue: persistence.

The Problem With Jerry Coyne
In case you missed this August’s issue of the biology journal Evolution, it’s worth taking a look for a grim, late-summer illustration of the state of science-religion dialogue in the United States. Biologist Jerry Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago and a New Atheist firebrand, offers a paper entitled “Science, Evolution, and Society:…

Science and Religion–Sibling Rivalry?
Marilynne Robinson shouldn’t make me mad. She is a lovely Midwestern fiction writer, with long white hair and a demure voice, whose lecture on Religion, Science, and Art my fellow KtB editor Quince Mountain and I had the privilege of listening to at last week’s University of Iowa conference “Futures and Illusions.” And yet, as…

Creationism and Conspiracism
Katha Pollit has an interesting piece in The Nation about why it matters that so many Americans are creationists. It isn’t that 46 percent of respondents are creationists (“God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so”). Or that 32 percent believe in “theistic evolution”…

Adam and Eve or Bust
You’ve probably heard about Professor John R. Schneider, who lost his job at Calvin College, a Christian school, for claiming that Adam and Eve could not have been real people. Science agrees that the number of genetic mutations it takes to go from from homo erectus to homo sapiens couldn’t have emerged from a population…