Free Republic

What is Life/Non-life in Nature? by Jean F. Drew Everywhere we see the “behavior” of life/non-life (death) in nature; but that doesn’t tell us what life/non-life IS. Darwin’s theory of evolution doesn’t help with this question. It presupposes the existence of life axiomatically, and then proceeds to speak of the origin and evolution of species. Its fundamental assumption is that biological evolution is a wholly naturalistic, material process governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, with random variation and natural selection as the principal drivers of the system. Central to the Darwinist view is that life forms — species...

Roger Highfield describes a heroic mathematical enterprise that could lay bare the fundamentals of the cosmosMathematicians have successfully scaled their equivalent of Mount Everest. Today they unveil the answer to a problem that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. At the most basic level, the calculation is an arcane investigation of symmetry – in this case of an object that is 57 dimensional, rather than the usual three dimensional ones that we are familiar with. Although this object was first discovered in the 19th century. there is evidence that it could contain...

Science continued its victorious march, with all of its attendant ramifications and side effects, throughout our own 20th century, and religious apathy and materialism have spread from the educated classes to all categories of people. This is especially true in Europe, where the percent of those who attend church has dropped into the single digits. It is true to a somewhat less spectacular degree in the United States, where the percentage attending church regularly has declined to below one half of the total population. Yet, despite the fact that the current has long run against traditional beliefs and traditional believers,...