Now on ScienceBlogs: Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Ricky Gervais on The Book of Genesis
Rob Knop's Blog -- ramblings and rants about astronomy, cosmology, science education, general nerdism, and anything else.
Rob Knop earned a PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1997, and did a 5-year post-doc with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and contributed to the discovery of the accelerating Universe. He was an assistant professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt for 6 years before scattering out of academia. He now works for Linden Lab, the producers of Second LIfe. (Note: this is not an official site of Linden Lab! Although I work for Linden Lab, all content in this blog is posted without the review or approval of Linden Lab. All statements and opinions expressed here are my own.)
![[cc-by-sa]](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/3.0/88x31.png){kind=small}
The contents of each Galactic Interactions post are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Category: Science & Religion
You will frequently hear certain anti-religion science bloggers and commenters on these boards saying that the only way for a non-atheist to be a good scientist is to "compartmentalize"— to wall off a part of his mind while doing science,...
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:06 PM • 179 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
So that people don't feel the need to threadcrap in other threads, I open this thread here for people to make their flames, comments, insults, dismissals, expressions of support, and so forth. I have said before that I'm a Christian....
Posted by Rob Knop at 12:35 PM • 46 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
This is from a letter to the editor that was published in The Tennessean about a month ago. In the "Issues" section on Sunday, they had a page devoted to this, and this time they actually published a long (more...
Posted by Rob Knop at 8:04 AM • 40 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
Creationists like to take the middle-school definition of the scientific method and read it utterly literally to claim that a lot of science is in fact not "proper" science, because it doesn't fit the cookie-cutter definition of a scientific experiment as we learned in 8th grade. This is, of course, woefully wrong. Evolution is not based in "Faith," but is a legitimate scientific theory in a way that creationism is not.
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:30 PM • 23 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
This statement is frequently raised by those who would suggest that there is reason to doubt that evolution happened and gave rise to the species we see today (including us). While this statement is technically true, those who use it use it incorrectly and draw incorrect inferences from it.
Posted by Rob Knop at 7:57 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
I'm pretty sure that nowhere in the Bible does it say that the square root of 256 is 16. I happen to know that, yes, 16 squared is 256. Therefore, if I were to tell you and attempt to convince...
Posted by Rob Knop at 7:56 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
To heck with bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and all the rest. Yes, all of those algorithms were intelligently design, but none of them follow the precepts of Intelligent Design. And, now, David Morgan-Mar gives us Intelligent Design Sort....
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:15 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
Intelligent Design is cleverly designed. Much of what I say here will apply to almost any other religious tradition in the modern world. I refer specifically to Christianity for three reasons. First, it's the most dominant religion in the USA,...
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:17 AM • 11 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
I'm in an interesting position. Having so recently posted my own bitch and whine about how my tenure case is in trouble, suddenly we learn that Intelligent Design advocate Guillermo Gonzalez-- somebody who, frankly, has been viewed as a thorn...
Posted by Rob Knop at 10:40 AM • 14 Comments •
Category: Science & Religion
WARNING : no science in this post. Skip it if that will bother you. In this post, I try to explain why I say that I'm a Christian, and what I see as the core of Christian theology.
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:10 AM • 176 Comments •
PZ Myers 11.19.2009
PZ Myers 11.19.2009
Ed Brayton 11.19.2009
Tim Lambert 11.18.2009
Tim Lambert 11.12.2009
