Stephen M. Barr

Since the time of Newton, science has advanced by a strategy rightly called “reductionism.” This method, which explains things by analyzing them into smaller and simpler parts, has yielded a rich harvest of discoveries about the natural world. As a means of analysis, then, reductionism has . . . . Continue Reading »

Anyone interested in the latest pronouncements of Stephen Hawking on God should heed the observations of Martin Rees (now Lord Rees), one of the world’s leading astrophysicists, the Astronomer Royal, and the outgoing head of the Royal Society (one of the world’s oldest scientific . . . . Continue Reading »

Has physics done away with God? A newly release book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow says, “Yes.” What is a Jewish or Christian believer to make of this? Is the Creator now out of a job? … Continue Reading »

It is not clear to me how much of Jody Bottum’s moral analysis in ” Blood for Blood ” and ” They Did It ” is meant to apply only to sad case of the person just executed and how much is meant to apply to all uses of the death penalty by modern states. I will only address . . . . Continue Reading »

The Los Angeles Times reports that an experiment in Europe has confirmed that neutrinos have mass . The article suggests that this shows that massive neutrinos may account for a “large proportions” of mass in the universe. As with most science related articles in the mass media, this one . . . . Continue Reading »

Catholic World News reports that Fr. Michael Kelly, S.J. the CEO of the Asian Catholic News agency, finds the Catholic doctrine of “transubstantiation” meaningless in this “post-Newtonian world of quantum physics”. Since I use quantum mechanics every day in my work, I think I . . . . Continue Reading »

The mass media are reporting today that an experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL or “Fermilab” for short) has just announced some results that could be of great significance, and may be of relevance to how matter—and therefore how we ourselves—came to be. . . . . Continue Reading »

It is twenty years since the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched. Though plagued by cost overruns, and a ghastly blunder in manufacturing the main mirror that had to be corrected by a Space Shuttle mission in December 1993 (which, essentially, put corrective eyeglasses on the telescope), the . . . . Continue Reading »

Joe: I think that a manned mission to Mars would be a colossal waste of the taxpayers’ money for very little scientific benefit. Anything that could be learned from a manned mission could be learned at far less cost by unmanned missions. The billions that it would cost to send men their would . . . . Continue Reading »

Life After Death: The Evidence by Dinesh D’Souza Regnery, 256 pages, $27.95 While much apologetic effort has been spent arguing for the existence of God, relatively little has been spent defending the reasonableness of belief in an afterlife and the resurrection of the body, despite the fact . . . . Continue Reading »