“But ye shall receive power after the Holy Ghost is come upon you; and ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” – Acts 1:8 As a college professor concerned with the broadening of my students’ compassionate understanding of oppressed people in other parts of the world, I have spent the last several weeks helping to plan an encampment. My students and I will spend our nights in tents that I personally … [Read more...]
Using the Cultural Mandate of Genesis 1:28 and the Ten Commandments as Basis for a Christian Ethic of Earth Stewardship
Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash Introduction As recently as the 2018 Gallup poll, climate change ranked near the bottom of Americans’ environmental concerns. But that has changed. A Google search on the question “What are the largest problems facing the 21st century?” on May 15, 2023, generated a substantial number of links, including to various lists, with environmental issues, including climate change, near the top. Climate change has become a hot-button issue. It moved out of the … [Read more...]
C.S. Lewis On Atomic Theory and the Cross of Christ
Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash In Europe, at the turn of the twentieth century, great advances were being made in atomic theory. In 1904, the British physicist and Nobel laureate Sir Joseph John Thomson, who had discovered the electron, proposed his “Plum Pudding Model” of the atom, characterizing it as a smear of positive and negative charges much like pudding with embedded raisins (which the British called plums). Five years later, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, working under … [Read more...]
Teaching Science Students to Think Critically About EVs and to Peek Behind the Curtain
“The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps.” – Proverbs 14:15 ESV“Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.” – Proverbs 31:8-9 ESV In one of the laboratory classes I teach, students learn techniques to separate heterogeneous mixtures of solids. One procedure involves the separation of sodium chloride from beach sand by mixing the solid mixture in water, … [Read more...]
Graciously Making the Case for a Literal Genesis Account of Creation
(Editor's Note: The Cornwall Alliance does not take a position on the age of the earth but thinks this is a worthy discussion of the issue.---E. Calvin Beisner) “And God said, ‘Let there be light’: And there was light” (Genesis 1:3 KJV) As a professor teaching at a Christ-first university, it comes as no surprise that some of my students are from conservative, traditional, evangelical denominations. I even have several “PKs” and “MKs” who take their faith seriously, although not all wear … [Read more...]
A Multi-generational Perspective on the Covid-19 Pandemic
Editor's Note: Whether war, famine, or pestilence, or smaller-scale troubles like an individual injury or illness or a business failure, people have, throughout history, suffered. “In the world, you have tribulation,” Jesus told His disciples. In our day, whether people fear climate change, or the “solutions” to climate change, the “Great Reset,” or inflation, we all need Jesus’ next words: “but take courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Gregory Rummo’s article below offers … [Read more...]
Creating God-awareness through Intentional Faith Integration in the Science Classroom
“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” –Genesis 2:7 (ASV) Back in the 70s when I was in college, pop culture had co-opted a quote from Carl Sagan1 that “we are stardust.” Joni Mitchel echoed this theme and Crosby, Stills, and Nash embellished on it in the song “Woodstock,” adding that we are nothing more than “billion-year-old carbon.” Another 70s songwriter, Kerry … [Read more...]
Latest Discoveries in the Field of Structural Biology Point to Intelligent Design
The August 9, 2021 edition of Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) featured a story in the field of structural biology entitled “How Transcription Gets Its Start.” Transcription is the biochemical process that occurs in every cell in the human body when protein synthesis is initiated. It is a complex series of steps that begin in the nucleus when a gene—a section on a strand of DNA—expresses instructions for a specific protein to be produced. In … [Read more...]
Faith in the Invisible and the Nature of Reality
When I was a teenager, I remember hearing the question “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? – and thinking what a stupid question – of course it makes a sound. But the longer I teach science, and the more I learn about our world at the quantum level, the less sure I am about the true nature of reality. Like Neo in The Matrix – do I want the blue pill or the red pill? Of course, when a tree falls in the forest it sets up a … [Read more...]
Solar Energy’s Surprising Sources
Whenever I hear someone praising solar energy or electric cars to the exclusion of fossil fuels, the pragmatist in me cringes. Aside from the fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants and possibly the formation of methane deep in the earth's core from “non-biological processes … creating stable reserves of fuel within the much more extreme conditions of Earth's mantle,” virtually all of the power we depend on comes from the sun. The Earth's vast resources of fossil … [Read more...]
