Test your creativity in the Florida Citizens for Science's "Stick Science Contest." The challenge is to draw a cartoon or comic strip that educates the public about a misconception the average person has about science or—if you're under 12—to create a cartoon about "why understanding science is important." Here's what's neat: All entries must be drawn using stick figures.
A panel of judges will pick the winners and award some great prizes. The deadline is May 31.

FROM ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN, HOST AND CREATOR OF CLOSER TO TRUTH: Most people believe that God exists and intervenes actively in the world—answering prayers, making miracles, even ordaining history. But if God does exist, this intervening-kind of God, how does this God intervene? What possibly could be God’s mechanism for making things happen? Fiddle with each and every atomic particle? Adjust each and every nuclear force? Command all particles and forces en masse? The physical universe seems closed and complete, so how could something not part of it—God by definition is nonphysical—affect it? How could God interact with the world?
Robert John Russell, founder of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, states that there are at least four ways in which God interacts with the world: (i) creating and sustaining the world (“T [time] equals 0”); (ii) through natural processes (“The regular laws of physics and biology are God’s action… one can call this ‘general providence.’”); (iii) special events of significance (“where God acts to make a difference but which scientists see as part of the flow of nature,” which can be “special providence”); (iv) miracles (“where God’s action goes beyond the ordinary routines of nature”).
Russell, who is an ordained minister with a doctorate in physics, likes to explore the third way and tease out meaning. In the past, he says, the dichotomy “between objective and subjective divine action was forced because we thought we lived in a world which was governed by deterministic laws, a lock-step, billiard-ball, clockwork world.” Quantum mechanics, Russell suggests, “at least re-opens the question of whether or not we’re forced to continue with that split in our theological choices. … And that’s a genuine research question.”
How to progress? Russell states, “The first step is to say God is acting through all the laws of nature. So whatever happens, God is involved in it. Now because there is no sufficient natural cause [when choices are made in quantum mechanics], so God’s action could be thought of as special because God is acting on those events in special ways; that is, God is determining, because nature doesn’t, whether a photon bounces off the surface of water or goes through it.”
Would that not be God’s active intervention? No, Russell argues, “It’s an act. It’s not ‘intervention,’” because he uses the term “intervention” in a technical sense to mean “God violates the laws of nature.” And thus he stresses that “God was clever enough to create a universe which is quantum mechanical, which allows God to be acting all the time.” Following the consequences of this line of thinking, Russell observes that “the distinction between general providence, category two, and special providence, category three, kind of breaks down because God is truly acting all the time at the level of quantum mechanics.“ In this way, Russell claims to eliminate the “artificial distinction” between God’s overall purposes going on continuously and God’s special purposes, which are occasional events. God is acting all the time.
This strange land is home for John Polkinghorne, who was a quantum physicist at Cambridge University, when, in the middle of his scientific career, he decided to study for the priesthood. Today, he is recognized worldwide as a thought leader in science and religion. He too speaks about “the intrinsic unpredictabilities present in physical process … discovered first through quantum theory and then later on through chaos theory.”
But in contemplating God’s action in the world, Polkinghorne begins from a different perspective. He references something familiar, perhaps so very much familiar that we miss its deep significance—what he calls “the fundamental human experience of agency.”
“I, as a whole person, decide to raise my arm,” he says. “I believe that we interact with the world in this sort of top-down way.”
Polkinghorne then draws his analogy. “Now if we interact with the world in a top-down way, it seems to be entirely credible that the world’s Creator also can interact with the world and bring about events in a similar top-down way. So I have a picture in which God interacts with unfolding process, allowing creatures to explore the range of possibilities, but also preserving some providential room so that he as Creator can maneuver in bringing about the future.”
Polkinghorne admits that “it’s a complicated picture,” and “we can’t disentangle it because if things are unpredictable, you can’t parallel park and say: Nature did this, humans will did that, God did those other things—but nevertheless all these influences are at work in the world. That’s a perfectly coherent and believable picture and it’s the one I hold.”
Ernan McMullin, a well-known philosopher of science (a Catholic priest trained in physics and former chair of philosophy at Notre Dame), believes in the same Judeo-Christian God as do Russell and Polkinghorne, but as for explaining how God interacts with the world, he differs sharply. “I don't see quantum theory as answering it, chaos theory even less so,” McMullin asserts. “Of the available menu of theories we have at the present, I don't see any of them as very promising for giving us a way in which God inserts special action in the world. It's as though God is moving behind the scenes and has to find a way of influencing what is his very creation.”
To McMullin the answer is stunningly simple: “God affects the universe by making it be! If one accepts the postulate of creation, then in fact the universe is the product of a single act of creation—and that's how God influences the universe. My goodness, what a powerful influence that is! The point here is not a matter of asking how could God sort of work within this universe and not, so to speak, upset the laws of physics. The point is that God has in fact produced the universe and that simple act of creation is the most powerful influence you could have.”
Thus McMullin says he has “no difficulty with miracles at all because if in fact we have a universe which is the product of God, and in which the mere continuance of the law of gravity is God's choice, the fact that at some point the law of gravity could be suspended, well, of course a creator can do that!” According to McMullin, a sophisticated thinker, “It's simple! The way by which God works in the world is by being the creator of that world in the first place. It's not a matter of intervening. It's a matter of making that kind of world to begin with, a universe within which at a certain point this or that would happen.” (McMullin takes pains to emphasize that “what I do find difficult is to discern when and where miracles actually did occur—that’s the tough one.”)
Russell, Polkinghorne, and McMullin are traditionally and proudly Christian, which no doubt affects their views. Not so cosmologist Paul Davies, who has iconoclastic ideas about “purpose” in the universe (in his view, “the universe is ‘about’ something”). Davies accomplishes the neat trick of opposing both theists and materialists.
“I’ve always had a problem about a God who’s a miracle-working super-being, a cosmic magician,” Davies states. “I often say that there are no miracles except the miracle of nature itself. And so if I use the word ‘God’—which I’m always very careful about because it carries so many different meanings—it is in terms of the meaningfulness of the whole package, not in terms of a being who is sort of meddling from time to time.”
Speaking as a scientist, Davies says, “the idea of a God who intervenes actively in history—through prayer, working occasional miracles—is really pretty horrible and I wouldn’t want that.”
Davies has a better idea, he says, a “challenge” for “God,” as it were. “Come up with some deep mathematical principles, something of that sort, and then let it go. Let the universe generate its own life, its own self-awareness, so that the whole thing self-organizes and self-complexifies. No meddling, tinkering, making things happen by fiat. That’s much, much harder.”
To Davies, the universe as a self-generating, self-observing, self-organizing and self-complexifying thing “looks really deeply ingenious, really clever.” On the other hand, “a cosmic magician looks like just a conjurer,” he emphasizes, “so I can’t have much respect for such a being.”
But the traditional personal God who knows and cares for us is appealing.
Can that kind of God be saved?
Alvin Plantinga, one of the world’s leading Christian philosophers, is not at all embarrassed by God’s interventions. “People argue that special divine action can't happen because it conflicts with the laws of conservation of energy [and mass],” Plantinga says. “If God, say, were to create a full-blown horse in the middle of the Notre Dame campus, this would violate all these conservation laws. But this is not in fact correct. The conservation laws are stated for closed systems, where there is no energy input from outside the system. But, of course, if God were to create a horse right here, then no system that includes that horse would be a closed system because such a system would, by definition, have this influx of energy from the outside, which is God creating the horse.”
But isn’t the universe in totality a closed system? “The material universe as a whole is a closed system,” Plantinga responds, “but if God acts in it, then it's no longer a closed system. And it's not part of physics to assert that God doesn't act in it. That's not a physics truth or a physics claim. That's a theological truth or claim.”
Plantinga’s argument may sound simplistic or circular, but it strikes me as possibly profound. If God intervenes in the universe, then that very act causes the universe not to be a closed system, thus voiding any violation of the laws of conservation of energy and mass.
Where then with God’s interaction? For the sake of the argument, I’ll assume God exists. So I then ask, in what way could a nonphysical being intervene in the physical world? Because if there is no way that such intervention can make coherent sense, then I must question the initial assumption that God exists.
One view is that God just suspends his own laws. I guess that’s possible. But then wouldn’t God be distorting the natural functioning of God’s own world?
What about the contemporary idea that God’s place of action lies in the scientific “gaps” of unalterable uncertainty—quantum mechanics and chaos theory—where clockwork determinism does not hold?
I pause and wonder … but quantum uncertainties seem truly random and chaos theory seems more a lack of knowledge, so neither seems ideal as that super-special place for God to work his wonders.
For me, for now, I can come to only one conclusion: If a nonphysical supreme being, “God,” does exist, and if God does intervene in the world, I’d be surprised if we could ever figure out how.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Nancey Murphy, John Polkinghorne, Robert Russell, William Dembski, Paul Davies, Alvin Plantinga, and Ernan McMullin in "How Could God Interact With the World?" the 30th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

For months we've been following the case of Christine Comer, who filed a lawsuit against the Texas Education Agency challenging the constitutionality of its policy that requires its staff to be neutral on the topics of evolution and creationism. The case was dismissed earlier this week when a federal judge ruled that the agency's neutrality policy doesn't violate the constitution.
Comer was asking the court to overturn the policy and require the agency to give her back her job: She was forced to resign as the agency's director of science curriculum after she forwarded an email from the National Center for Science Education (a pro-evolution group) announcing that Barbara Forrest would be speaking in Austin about (and against) attempts to get "intelligent design" into science classes. Comer said she was just passing on information; the agency saw it as an endorsement and terminated her employment. —Heather Wax

FROM RABBI RICHARD ADDRESS, UNION FOR REFORM JUDAISM: Fred Grinnell is a professor of cell biology at Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and the author of the new book Everyday Practice of Science. In a recent piece in The Chronicle Review, he illustrates the differences between science and religion by describing a case in which you find yourself walking on a beach and coming upon a large and unusual rock. There are two possible types of questions you can ask, he says. Questions of the first kind include: What kind of rock is this, how did it get here, and what can be done with it? A second type of question would be: What does it mean that this rock is here sharing this beach with me and what can this rock, or moment, teach me about the meaning of life? “The first set represents science and technology. Knowing the answers enables the control essential to obtain and use the rock according to one’s needs and desires,” he writes. “The second set represents religion and spirituality. It concerns the meaning and purpose of the individual and of life. If your religion requires six literal days of creation, then it clashes with science. But if your religion teaches that the unseen order of the world has purpose and meaning, then is it at odds with science?”
Here we are introduced to a fantastic question, maybe the question of human existence. If there is some unseen order or force or power in the universe, what is my place in that order? It all does come down to finding one’s sense of meaning. This month, much of the world’s religious focus will be on the celebrations of Passover and Easter—both of which focus on the possibilities in life, the potential for renewal and rebirth on both an individual and communal perspective. Both, in the end, ask each of us to look at our lives and how we find meaning. The questions we ask provide the pathway to the answers we seek. At the root of each search is a belief in a type of faith that transcends the individual: Each question is based on a belief, a faith that at the end of our search there is meaning.

Take a sneak peek at a new clip from the upcoming Angels & Demons movie (based on the novel of the same name). One of the film's main themes, of course, is the relationship between science and religion, with a focus on how scientists have been studying the origin of the universe and trying to understand the moment of creation (some scenes were even shot at the real-life CERN).
The film opens in theaters on May 15.

Check out "Religion and Science: Pathways to Truth," a DVD series featuring lessons by well-known scientists and theologians and hosted by Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Watch the introduction online (in which Collins talks about his personal faith), as well as short clips of the rest of the program. You can also order an audio version of the lectures and bonus material on CD.

Texas has new science standards, approved on Friday by a vote of 13 to 2. Students will no longer discuss both the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories—including evolution—in science class, making the standards "better than the old ones, but those old standards really did suck," says Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education. However, the new standards aren't that much better—they allow "all sides" of scientific theories to be taught—and "are deeply compromised at every level from the decent standards offered by the writing committees," he says.
The old standard for high school biology read:

"The student is expected to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information."

A committee of scientific and education experts changed the requirement to read:

"The student is expected to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing."

And the final version approved by the board reads:

"in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific experiments so as to encourage critical thinking by students."

The board then added a number of confusing amendments that "crafted a road map that creationists will use to pressure publishers into putting phony arguments attacking established science into textbooks," says Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network. "We appreciate that the politicians on the board seek compromise, but don't agree that compromises can be made on established mainstream science or on honest education policy."
One amendment, for example, requires students to "analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data on sudden appearance and stasis and the sequential groups in the fossil record," while another requires students to "analyze and evaluate scientific explanation concerning the complexity of the cell." ("Sudden appearance" and "irreducible complexity" are favorite creationist and "intelligent-design" concepts.)
Keep in mind, as well, that an "academic freedom" bill introduced into the Texas House of Representatives a couple of weeks ago could require the Texas Board of Education to put the "strengths and weaknesses" phrase back into the science standards. If the bill passes, students would be "expected to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information," and no student or school could "be penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position on scientific theories or hypotheses." —Heather Wax