On this episode of ID the Future, host and philosopher Jay Richards interviews science historian Michael Keas about the National Geographic channel’s new Cosmos series with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. In the Cosmos episode under discussion, the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza is presented as an early advocate for science.
It makes for a great story, Keas says, except that it’s a serious distortion. Spinoza was an advocate for nature, but he did so by equating it with God, and he opposed some of the most important innovations in science. As both Richards and Keas suggest in their conversation, it appears that the makers of Cosmos: Possible Worlds are trying to use Spinoza’s pantheism to invoke a spiritualized approach to nature and science, one more palatable than strict materialism, but that obscures how Christian theism provided important theological resources for the scientific revolution.
On this episode of ID the Future, John West shares about pygmy Ota Benga, put on display in 1906 in the Bronx Zoo’s monkey...
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Biologic Institute Director Douglas Axe about his response to critics of his peer-reviewed paper...
On this episode of ID the Future, David Boze interviews Casey Luskin about a 2012 study published in Nature that claimed that scientists can...
