It’s been a blissfully sunny week in Seattle — the kind of week Seattleites pine for after their gray and soggy winters. The cherry blossoms have already been out for a long time. Of course, it doesn’t really matter this year. The crowds have been told to stay away from the cherry trees — and from everything else, for that matter. The arrival of spring in 2020 isn’t bringing hope and a sense of new life. It’s bringing fear.

Many of us are locked up in our homes – solid intellectual and scientific content is just the thing to provide an alternative to what we see in the news at the moment. In the case of Darwin's idea of unguided evolution and of a planet of life formed from blind material processes alone, West notes a range of consequences and impacts, on how we see the sanctity of human life, how we understand morality and spirituality, and much more.

The third season of Cosmos has released four episodes so far, with more to come. After watching these episodes, I have concluded that the most consequential historical error to correct as yet concerns the treatment of Baruch Spinoza in episode one.

Two monumental scientific reports appeared in 1953. One was the proposal by James Watson and Francis Crick of their double helical model for deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Almost as if synchronized for the sake of irony, the other report in 1953, by Stanley Miller, offered experimental support for what has become an increasingly apparent contradiction.

Michael Egnor shows how the cosmological arguments follow the same formal structure as any theory in science. They invoke evidence from nature (things change, things are caused, things exist), analyze the evidence on a logical framework, and arrive at an inductive conclusion.