Fewer Women in Biblical Archaeology

I teach in a Christian School where only men teach the Bible classes. I have offered several electives over the past 7 years on books of the Bible and rarely have I had a female student in the class. It may be that females are getting the idea that the Bible is a "guy thing." On the other hand, my course on "Women of the Bible" which I teach at a women's college has had only one male student in three years. Perhaps women are more likely to engage if the course of study is tailored to them. This is true certainly true for Biblical Anthropology, the field I have been pioneering for 30+ years.


Read more here.

Reading God's Second Book

Delicate

Hello readers. I’m Karen McReynolds, a professor of science at Hope International University in sunny Orange County, California. Hope is a small Christian university, so small that I should really say “the” professor of science. (Well, we do have a couple of adjuncts this semester.) We offer upper division courses only through our contract program with the Cal State campus across the street, so my full time responsibility here is science for the non-major student meeting general education requirements. I teach biology, environmental science and earth science – quite a broad spectrum for the college level. I like the variety of courses though. My childhood home in rural central California nurtured in me a love for birds and sky and wetlands, framed by the distant Sierra Nevada. Our parents wisely let us kids roam, and even encouraged me by supplying my own Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds, the adult version, when I was eight. Now I do my best to encourage my students to marvel, as I do, at God’s Second Book: the Book of Nature.

I like to tell the students the first day of class that my role model is Ms. Frizzle. It’s always good for a laugh. I hope to share with you occasionally some reflections on nature, teaching, and the intersection of the two, in the indefatigable spirit of Ms. Frizzle.

Some years ago, my husband, my father and I were working as a team on a biological survey of a large property in the northern Sierra Nevada. This was rather like having our cake and eating it too. For three seasons in a row, our teaching schedules permitted several weeks in the summer at 6400 feet, making observations and collecting data on natural history while the heat of the San Joaquin Valley passed us right on by. We found time to jump in the lake at the end of each day, and slept outside on tent platforms under the wide open, star-laden sky each night.

One afternoon I took a path that was new to me and came across the remains of a fawn nestled in a hollow of pine duff. More accurately, it was a fragment of the remains of a fawn: most of the rib cage, a bit of the spine, and the right foreleg of a very small deer. It must have been out in the woods for a while, because the bones were nearly white and free of flesh. The tiny hoof at the end of the leg was graceful and dainty, quite miniature in comparison to the numerous hoof prints of mule deer I had seen through the weeks of this project. It had clearly been dragged in from somewhere else, as there was no sign of any of the rest of the body, but the way it was settled in its spot so tidily suggested that it had seen some seasons pass in that location. The doe that returned to her baby’s ill-chosen hiding spot had made her fateful discovery some time ago.

. . . . . . . . 

I am a rather clunky woman, heavy of foot and inclined to drop things. Perhaps in accordance with this, I frequently need to be whacked over the head by something before I will notice it. I have developed reasonably astute observation skills after years of field experiences and practice, but it has taken intentional effort and is not my default character. Perhaps this is why my discovery delighted me more than it made me sad. It made me realize that if such a delicate specimen could remain, there is hope that I too might leave something behind that could speak of life in the midst of death.

There isn’t much about me that is delicate. That is not a word I would think to apply to myself and indeed it is an adjective I seldom use at all. It certainly would not seem to be an appropriate term to describe skeletal remains. But nature subsists on inappropriate truth. In all its grisly detail, the evidence I encountered that day of the early death of a young deer was indeed quite strikingly beautiful and delicate.

The Faith vs. Science Mentality

Kelli B. Trujillo

Embracing Science
Let’s put the faith vs. science mentality to rest

While there certainly are arenas in which the interaction between faith and science may be difficult to parse out, those experiences of tension certainly don't mean science must be rejected as a matter of faith.

By Kelli B. Trujillo

If you were to listen to the views espoused by some of today's foremost "new atheists," you'd quickly draw a conclusion: We humans don't need religion, faith, or "God" any more. Science has answered(or is answering or someday will answer) our questions. Faith—akin to belief in a made-up fairy tale—has no place in a life of honest, logical scientific inquiry.

And if you were to listen to the views perpetuated by some Christians, you'd quickly draw another conclusion: we Christians ought not trust science or its conclusions or, for that matter, most scientists. The Bible, rather than science, answers our questions. Wherever they appear to be in conflict, faith trumps science every time. Science—which is just secular humanism in disguise, after all—has no place in a life of true, devoted Christian faith.

But is this really the case? Are faith and science mutually exclusive—archenemies, locked in a centuries-long battle for truth? Ought people of faith stay away from the sciences and view scientific findings with suspicion (at best) or utter disbelief (at worst)?

Read it all here.

How Far Can We Go With Science?

What a Wonderful World
How science leads us toward -not away from -our Creator
By Dr. Christa Koval with Amy Simpson

You are fearfully and wonderfully made! With more than 100 known elements in the universe, you are made of only 4. Your body is 96 percent oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. And most other organisms share these elements with us. Isn't it amazing that such complexity and variety exist among living things as the result of combining only four elements in different ways?

Our bodies are just one mind-blowing element of God's impressive creation, all of which points directly to our Creator and teaches us about him. Hundreds of years of scientific discovery have revealed astounding depths of knowledge about our world, and yet in many ways we're still only just beginning to explore. Scientific exploration draws us toward a deeper appreciation of the unfathomable being who could create so much complexity—it moves us toward a deeper sense of awe and worship.

Consider plant life, for example. Plants use three of the elements found in our own bodies (oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen), plus the energy of sunlight to produce larger compounds. This process of photosynthesis is complicated and understanding it earned Melvin Calvin a Nobel Prize in 1961. But it wasn't until 1988, after 27 long years of additional research, that scientists understood the structure of RuBisCO, the enzyme required to initiate photosynthesis and the most abundant protein on earth (plants produce about 40 million tons per year). RuBisCO consists of a mind-boggling 37,792 atoms put together in a three-dimensional structure that will function only if every atom is in position. Our existence depends on this delicate balance.

Read it all here.

Our Big God and a Crisis of Faith

Ginger Kolbaba

Several years ago I had a crisis of faith. It all began with a Science Channel television program on supermassive black holes, of all things. Basically the premise was that scientists have discovered giant black holes (like the size of an entire solar system) in the center of every galaxy, and each plays an important role in the creation and sustainability of its particular galaxy.

The scientists described the extreme order of these black holes in the whole universal space-time continuum and how it’s forced them to rethink physics. The narrator, summing up several scientists, said, “If, as it now seems, every single galaxy has a black hole at its heart, this can’t be a coincidence.” 

You got that right, I thought. It’s called—we’ve got a supermassive, supergenius Creator at work in the universe.

My finite brain couldn’t handle the size and power and strength of my Creator.

Then the screen exploded with all these multi-colored, multi-shaped, multi-gaseous galaxies. And my brain, for an instant, exploded with how awesomely vast and mammoth our God is. My finite brain couldn’t handle the size and power and strength of my Creator.

Read it all here.

Roughly 60% of Pioneers in Science Were Christians

Ian H. Hutchinson

Ian H. Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that there is no conflict between Christian belief and scientific thinking. That conclusion is reached by considering the percentage of pioneers in Science who self-identified as Christian. The percentage would be greater were the number of female pioneers added to this list. 

The following is an excerpt from his August 2002 American Scientific Affiliation Conference presentation  "Science: Christian and Natural."

Going further, though, I believe there is a constructive case to be made for the phrase Christian Science.

First, as represented by the theme of this conference "Christian Pioneers", we should recognize that modern science is built upon the foundational work of people who more than anything else were Christians. Christians were the pioneers of the revolution of thought that brought about our modern understanding of the world. MIT, my home institution, the high-temple of science and technology in the United States, has a pseudo-Greek temple architecture about its main buildings. The fluted columns are topped not with baccanalian freizes, but with the names of the historical heroes of science (not to mention William Barton Rogers, the founder). A rough assessment was carried out by a few of us some years ago of the fraction of the people listed there who were Christians. The estimate we arrived at was about 60%.

Any list of the giants of physical science would include Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, all of whom, despite denominational and doctrinal differences among them, and opposition that some experienced from church authorities, were deeply committed to Jesus Christ.

Second, I observed over the years in my interactions with Christians in academia, that far from scientists being weakly represented in the ranks of the faithful, as one would expect if science and faith are incompatible, they are strongly overrepresented. The sociological evidence has been studied systematically for example by Robert Wuthnow [Robert Wuthnow, The Struggle for America's Soul, Eerdmanns, Grand Rapids, (1989), p146.], who established that while academics undoubtedly tend to be believers in lower proportion than the US population as a whole, among academics, scientists were proportionally more likely to be Christians that those in the non-science disciplines. The common misconception that scientists were or are inevitably sundered from the Christian faith by their science is simply false.

Third, the question arises, why did modern science grow up almost entirely in the West, where Christian thinking held sway? There were civilizations of comparable stability, prosperity, and in many cases technology, in China, Japan, and India. Why did they not develop science? It is acknowledged that Arabic countries around the end of the first millenium were more advanced in mathematics, and their libraries kept safe eventually for Christendom much of the Greek wisdom of the ancients. Why did not their learning blossom into the science we now know? More particularly, if Andrew White's portrait of history, that the church dogmatically opposed all the "dangerous innovations" of science, and thereby stunted scientific development for hundreds of years, why didn't science rapidly evolve in these other cultures?

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