Ancient Science Archive

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt W.W. Norton & Company, 2011 356 pages (Hardcover) Available Amazon Powell’s Some ideas are heralded with the blast of a trumpet and brazenly ushered in, but some are stumbled upon. In Stephen Greenblatt’s (John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University) now

Forty-six percent of Americans are creationists. Just thought I should rip that Band-Aid off right now, particularly since I know that for many, this is a big disappointment. For thirty years we’ve seen the end of tape and the rise of digital. We’ve watched the end of the Space Shuttle fleet and the rise

Does Jesus wave to the International Space Station at his return? Is the horse he’s riding on a funky, but cool space-horse? Last fall I gave a lecture before the student body on the historical contexts behind ancient Christian ideas of the end of the world. My point at that time was that many

The final part of my two-part series “Copernicus, Interrupted” is now up at Biologos.org. The series looks at the delay in the reception of Copernican heliocentrism and compares it to the delay evangelicals have in accepting evolution. You can read part 1 here. Today, Protestant students in the classroom may not know Copernicus’ name

Part one of my two-part post “Copernicus, Interrupted” is up at Biologos.org. In this post I compare the similarities between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century evangelical resistance to Copernican heliocentrism to that of evangelical resistance to evolution today. The similarities are very interesting. Copernicus’s basic conclusion may be accepted today, but it was a long time

Part 2 of my two-part series on Augustine and Genesis (“Augustine, Genesis, and “Removing the Mystical Veil”) is now up at Biologos. It is now standard practice for any study on the history of Genesis 1 to note Augustine’s view—that creation was instantaneous. Some see this as a clear precedent for rejecting literal creation

Part one of my two-part series on the affect of Augustine’s worldview on his reading of Genesis is up at Biologos (“Augustine, Genesis, and “Removing the Mystical Veil”: Part I“).   My previous posts on Origen of Alexandria (“Origen on the Species“) examined Origen in much the same way. Augustine’s approach to the Bible, then,

Part 2 of my two-part series, “Origen on our Species and Divine Baby Talk” is now up at Biologos.org. When we try to retrofit the Genesis account with scientific terms (for example, arguing for a vapor canopy), we do both the Bible and science a disservice. What we end up constructing is an ancient