Carl Sagan and John Polkinghorne both stared into the same cosmos and drew opposite conclusions. Here’s the debate they never had — but absolutely should have.
Stephen Jay Gould argued much of biological form is architectural accident. Francis Collins argued the genome sings of a moral lawgiver. Cold Spring Harbor’s DNA runs through both.
Beneath Long Island’s pine barrens, physicists smash gold atoms to recreate the Big Bang. A Jesuit astronomer named Brother Guy Consolmagno is the only one who publicly answered what that means for creation theology.
In 1990, Carl Sagan and Pope John Paul II became unlikely allies on the environment. Their cosmologies couldn’t be more different. Which one prepared us better for cosmic insignificance?
In 1978, E.O. Wilson published On Human Nature. Father Stanley Jaki published The Road of Science and the Ways to God. Same year. Opposite conclusions. Cold Spring Harbor watched it happen.
Stephen Jay Gould proposed a truce between science and religion in 1997. Both Richard Dawkins and Cardinal Schönborn rejected it. The fallout reshaped modern intellectual history.