Many people are wondering about the effects of pandemic-induced school closures. Here in Ontario’s third wave of the pandemic, schools are closed again (with some exceptions for special needs students). It’s possible the year will finish online. While the closures are necessary from a medical standpoint, what effect do they have on our children? Recently,…
I am currently reading The Sin of Certainty by Peter Enns. Enns’s main argument is that Christians have become enamoured of true beliefs at the cost of trust as our faith’s central virtue. We are too concerned about being correct, and we require others in our community, especially our leaders, to hold correct views on…
What makes humans unique, and is this uniqueness a matter of degree or a qualitative difference? Is it our intelligence, language ability and consciousness? As Christians, we argue that we hold a special place in creation because we are made in the image of God. Two areas of research approach this question from very different…
Last month, I told you about an AI program that can predict protein shapes. Just like the letters that make up a word, the amino acid chain makes up a protein, and the 3D shape it forms determine what a protein does in the body. If one of the amino acids changes, the shape changes…
Our bodies hold a mystery at the molecular level: how do the chains of amino acids that make up all our proteins fold into 3D shapes? When your body uses proteins, it does not read them from one end of the chain to another (like it does for DNA, or like we do when we…
LETTER TO THE EDITOR “Tam’s call to faith leaders (CC Jan. 25) to do her work is a bit of a stretch for me. How do these faith leaders know that Tam is correct in her guidance? How do I know she is correct?The role of Christian faith leaders is to promote the Kingdom of Christ…
In Genesis, one of the first things God says about humans before the Fall is “it is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18). We are alone in many ways right now. Ten months into this pandemic, in the midst of a long winter, many of us are feeling the effects of social…
From June 29 to July 2 this year, the American Astronomical Society held a virtual conference on satellite constellations’ impact on optical astronomy. The scientists were concerned that satellite deployment, particularly bright satellites in low-Earth orbit, will prevent us from collecting meaningful optical data from the stars. I grew up in Montreal and never realized…
In 2017, Alvin Plantinga, a Christian Reformed philosopher, received the Templeton Prize for his arguments that belief in God can be defended with legitimacy in today’s scientific world. We celebrated this event widely in our circles. This year the Templeton Prize was awarded to Dr. Francis Collins, the current head of the National Institutes of…
In a recent column (“Anti-Vax Reversal?,” June 8), I ended with the hope that a vaccine for COVID-19 might be developed quickly. Scientists are working on many possible vaccines in an amazing time frame. Our government has partnered with multiple companies to make a vaccine available for Canadians, and the Americans have implemented “Operation Warp…
Teachers lie. It happens more often than you’d think. We don’t want to do it. It’s just that telling the truth is hard. We lie for a few reasons. First, we may not know the complete story. Often, as an individual or a scientific community, we just don’t fully know how something works. It’s hard to teach half-truths, and so we massage the story to make it complete.
Most of us acquire our science from others either through classes and textbooks or on TV shows We learn about facts that are generally accepted by the scientific community. Then these facts are integrated into theories that explain our world within some overarching framework. This static textbook view of science may include the histories of current theories and the explanations they replaced, but the information is presented as final, accepted truth.
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