Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne is in high dudgeon over a sign that has just gone up in front of the new Nature Lab at The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which is a public museum. The sign reads as follows: “The Nature Lab is a gift to Los Angeles to celebrate all of God’s creatures and to enable NHM to broaden our understanding of the natural world through the process of scientific discovery.” Anonymous donor – 2013 Despite the fact that the Museum has an official statement endorsing evolution as “a central concept in modern science” and as “no more controversial among scientists than are the theories explaining gravity, light, sound, or electricity,” Read More ›

David Bentley Hart is one of my favorite writers. I can only wish my prose were as lucid and beautiful as his.  I am reading his The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, and he makes powerful points from the very first chapter. Consider: Naturalism – the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural – is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking. The very notion of nature as a closed system entirely sufficient to itself is plainly one that cannot be verified, deductively or empirically, from within the system of nature. It is a metaphysical (which is to say ‘extra-natural’) conclusion regarding the whole of Read More ›