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This past weekend I found a few good bargain bin items. I got the Excalibur and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior DVDs for $7.50 each at Wal-Mart. At Half-Price Books in Fremont, I picked up two video documentaries at $3.98 each: Icons of Evolution: Dismantling the Myths and Unlocking the Mystery of Life: The Case for Intelligent Design. These two videos cover the growing dissatisfaction among many in the scientific community about Darwinism’s insufficiency to answer questions about the origins of life. These documentaries are quite balanced, interviewing proponents of both intelligent design and (macro)evolution.

On a related note, here are the opening paragraphs of a December 2002 Wired article entitled “The New Convergence” by Gregg Easterbrook touching on the emergence of a “reconciliation between science and religion”:

“The ancient covenant is in pieces: Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.” So pronounced the Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monod in his 1970 treatise Chance and Necessity, which maintained that God had been utterly refuted by science. The divine is fiction, faith is hokum, existence is a matter of heartless probability - and this wasn’t just speculation, Monod maintained, but proven. The essay, which had tremendous influence on the intellectual world, seemed to conclude a millennia-old debate. Theology was in retreat, unable to explain away Darwin’s observations; intellectual approval was flowing to thinkers such as the Nobel-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who in 1977 pronounced, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” In 1981, the National Academy of Sciences declared, “religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought.” Case closed.

And now reopened. In recent years, Allan Sandage, one of the word’s leading astronomers, has declared that the big bang can be understood only as a “miracle.” Charles Townes, a Nobel-winning physicist and coinventor of the laser, has said that discoveries of physics “seem to reflect intelligence at work in natural law.” Biologist Christian de Duve, also a Nobel winner, points out that science argues neither for nor against the existence of a deity: “There is no sense in which atheism is enforced or established by science.” And biologist Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, insists that “a lot of scientists really don’t know what they are missing by not exploring their spiritual feelings.”

Read the rest here. Interesting stuff.