The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion

Lacking some resources in the area of religion and science? The Faraday Institute provides resources par excellence!
Just to list the most obvious:
1. Short lectures, articles and commentaries relevant to current issues in science and religion. These are posted under Current Issues and vary from time to time. As of the time of writing, there’s a piece by Nick Spencer on Darwin’s Religious Beliefs, but earlier pieces are available in links.
2. The Faraday Papers: these provide the general reader with accessible and readable introductions to the relationship between science and religion, written by a broad range of authors who are expert in the field.
3. Faraday Lectures: lists up and coming lectures, but also has an archive of earlier ones.
4. The Multimedia page. This archives dozens of papers, talks, discussions, lectures, many of them available as MP3s, or streaming video. Most can be downloaded as videos, and a good number are available as htmls or pdfs. They cover a wide variety of topics from bioethics to cosmology, and others that link religion and science in different ways.
5. A number of news items are archived.
6. Half a dozen research projects are listed and described.
7. Archives of seminars, including news about up and coming ones.
8. The shop sells CDs, DVDs, books and papers.
9. As if you hadn’t had enough, there’s a page of links to other sites of interest.
There now, that should keep you busy on your morning off!

Expelled - Ben Stein

There's a new film available in the States called Expelled, which aims to align Darwinism with Naziism, to disprove the theory of evolution and promote Intelligent Design, to claim that scientists and university lecturers who don't agree with evolution are sidelined in their careers.

Of course the film is being heavily promoted amongst Christians, especially on various evangelical sites and blogs. So I did some checking out, since part of the aim of this blog is source good DVD material for use in churches and amongst home groups. I started by watching (or trying to watch) the extended trailer, but for some reason it doesn't want to download properly. However I got enough of an idea of it to want to check out things further.

Ben Stein, who 'stars' in the movie (it's more a doco than a feature), is anti-Darwinism - not in itself a bad thing - and so are the producers of the movie. Clicking further back and forth across the web I eventually came across a writer who says he's a passionate moderate Christian who is a member of a United Methodist congregation. His name is Henry Neufield. Henry's no slouch, he's no fly-by-night blogger, and he seems pretty sane.

He slams the movie for six reasons:
It misrepresents evolution;
First amendment issues are badly confused;
Academic freedom doesn't guarantee you a job or tenure;
The problem for intelligent design is not that it hasn't been considered;
The connection of Hitler with evolution;
Lastly, the one that annoys me most, is the lie that accepting the theory of evolution is the equivalent of atheism.

I don't have space here to give the detail from Henry's post, so I recommend you check it out on his blog.