One must dig deeply into opposing points of view in order to know whether your own position remains defensible. Iron sharpens iron.
We give our kids vaccinations. That’s a biological enhancement that’s considered not just acceptable but actually admirable.
The best diet is the one that can be sustained over the long term, combined with other healthful lifestyle behaviors.
Sometimes you develop a passion for something because of some personal experience.
Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool – and how important – their work really is.
Science’s domain is the natural. If you want to understand the natural world and be sure you’re not misleading yourself, science is the way to do it.
So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not.
The blooming of a flower is, in my mind, not a miracle. It’s something that we can understand on the basis of molecular biology these days.
What wakes me up at night is this next generation and what’s happening to them. And they’re invariably excited about the science that they’re doing, but invariably anxious about where there’s a future.
I do not believe that the God who created all the universe, and who communes with His people through prayer and spiritual insight, would expect us to deny the obvious truths of the natural world that science has revealed to us, in order to prove our love for Him.
Arno Penzias, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who codiscovered the cosmic microwave background radiation that provided strong support for the Big Bang in the first place, states, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five Books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.
Today, we have discovered that everyone is born with dozens of genetic glitches. There are no perfect human specimens. But not all our glitches are the same, so one treatment often does not fit all sufferers of a given disease.
Studies of the interaction between genetic and environmental risks are pinpointing critical parts of our health that derive from environmental variables.
When we proclaim that someone is subhuman, we not only remove for them the possibility of change and repentance, we also remove from them moral responsibility.
It is the awareness of right and wrong, along with the development of language, awareness of self, and the ability to imagine the future, to which scientists generally refer when trying to enumerate the special qualities of Homo sapiens.
But there is, alas, no doubt that we are becoming a vocabulary-deprived nation – nay, planet. Words have been dropping off all through this century, but the loss increased radically in the sixties with the immorality of “limited vocabulary.
In fact, genetic medicine has brought the problems of rare genetic conditions right to my own door.
Discoveries about genetics are not limited to just those 6,000 conditions of a strongly hereditary nature, however. We are now in the midst of a genetic revolution that will touch all of us in numerous ways:.
In that context, I find theistic evolution, or BioLogos, to be by far the most scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying of the alternatives. This position will not go out of style or be disproven by future scientific discoveries. It is intellectually rigorous, it provides answers to many otherwise puzzling questions, and it allows science and faith to fortify each other like two unshakable pillars, holding up a building called Truth.
The pure, clean water of spiritual truth is placed in rusty containers, and the subsequent failings of the church down through the centuries should not be projected onto the faith itself, as if the water had been the problem.
The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.