John Adams and the Doctrinal Challenge of Extraterrestria...

Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel’s new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the moral implications of there being a ‘plurality of worlds’. This was the sort of metaphysical debate that Herschel had once had with his ...

 Evolution Threatens Creationists Sense of Values

At this point I could simply say, “I’ve given the evidence, and it shows that evolution is true. Q.E.D.” But I’d be remiss if I did that, because, like the businessman I encountered after my lecture, many people require more than just evidence before they’ll accept evolution. To these folks, evolution raises such profound questions of purpose, morality, and meaning that they just can’t accept it no matter how much evidence they see. It’s not that we evolved from apes that bother...