Do activists often invest their work with religious significance? All the more reason for Christians to be discerning co-laborers.I love nature documentaries, especially those narrated by David Attenborough. Whether watching with my children or on my own, I love seeing the majesty of the snowy Alps or kelp forests.But I’ve noticed that in recent years, nearly every somber vignette of a species struggling on the edge of survival ends with a call to action. Viewers are beckoned to take responsibility for causing a poor animal’s plight and to consider how they can fix things before the species is gone forever.I understand the impulse to believe that animals’ struggles should move humans to action. However, it is the ethics informing the narrator’s pleas that seem a bit muddled.By many documentarians’ admission, the species we marvel at on screen have emerged out of eons of struggles to survive and adapt to their surroundings. Sometimes, the narrators even remind us that this process has resulted in countless prior species disappearing into extinction.Whether you believe in a young or an old earth, in God’s hand or in meaningless physical forces guiding history, we can all agree that change, death, and selection favoring adaptability are features of life on earth. Witnessing it in real time makes for compelling television drama, but the moral indictment that you and I contribute to grave evil when one of these species goes extinct does not seem to square with the documentarians’ worldview.What compels us to see polar bears possibly going extinct in terms of moral right and wrong? If we take human action out of the equation, isn’t history littered with the bones of countless species that have gone extinct? Are not humans and their actions part of nature?A robust theology of creation careIf we listen closely, ...Continue reading...

A recent news article discussed research on how dinosaurs survived the end-Triassic/early-Jurassic mass extinction.

A recent news article discussed research on how dinosaurs survived the end-Triassic/early-Jurassic mass extinction.

What is humanity's biggest threat? It seems to change every week. Consider this headline: “Humans Could Become Extinct Unless We Change Sex as We Know It.”

What is humanity's biggest threat? It seems to change every week. Consider this headline: “Humans Could Become Extinct Unless We Change Sex as We Know It.”

Big animals both living and extinct showcase exquisite detail in bulk.

The extinction of the Tasmanians was another egregious example of the fruits of Darwinism.

Stoicism may be having a renaissance. For centuries, the ancient philosophy that originated in Greece and spread across the Roman Empire was more or less treated as extinct – with the word “stoic” hanging on as shorthand for someone unemotional.The post Stoicism and spirituality: A philosopher explains how more Americans' search for meaning is turning them toward the classics appeared first on Baptist News Global.

Detailed images of a newly discovered species of hell ant—extinct ants with scythe-like jaws—in Burmese amber may hold the answer to how they ate.