September 29, 2009
Category: Culture Wars
I've gotten distracted recently from a couple of topics I desperately want to return to. A look at Jason Rosenhouse's sensitive and personal essay on "Ways of Knowing" will have to wait a bit longer, because I finally got ahold of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, a copy I've had since high school and which I haven't read since then. I'll be spending some time, then, on notions of truth in literary contexts. I do this not to claim that religious truth claims are identical to literary truth claims, but because I think we can sort out some ideas in the less...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 5:53 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 28, 2009
Category: Creationism
Darwinism and popular culture: Darwinists resort to whining when they are not popular (Also, this just in, water runs downhill): In responding to a news item from two weeks ago, I'll assume Creation still has gotten a distributor. Therefore it's crummy and boring and will never get a distributor, as it did last week. With Bonus Shorter D'oh! Leary: Origin of life theory: Complexity theorist Kauffman moving on: I don't know who Stuart Kauffman is or what he does, but he sure isn't a genius. Neither is Bill Dembski, who at least has the courtesy not to self-aggrandize, for instance...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:45 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture Wars
Last Friday I made some remarks about polling and evolution and atheism that got some knickers in twists. To summarize: Kevin Padian was asked to comment on a stupid stunt by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, who are passing out copies of the Origin of Species along with a foreword that alleges Darwin caused the Holocaust. Padian was appropriately dismissive, and noted that "The two kinds people who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist are extreme atheists and extreme religious fundamentalists. Everyone else doesn’t really have a problem. [A majority] of Americans believe that a belief in god...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:01 PM • 80 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 26, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
FDA Admits Politics Trumped Science on Knee Device: For the first time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has publicly admitted that politics has trumped science. The agency acknowledged yesterday that it approved a device to help with knee-replacement surgeries—a device the agency’s own scientists said often failed—only after it received pressure from a cohort of Democratic congressmen from New Jersey, where the device’s manufacturer is located. The $3000 device was known as the Menaflex, a “collagen scaffold” that supported a damaged meniscus in the knee. It failed its initial reviews but received approval in December of last year anyway,...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 1:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 25, 2009
Category: Culture Wars
Jerry Coyne, 9/21/2009: Kudos to the National Center for Science Education for putting up these videos [of Texas science standards hearings], and for their tenacious defense of evolution in Texas.Thank you, Jerry. Since I shot those videos, and was present in Texas as part of that defense, I thought I was off Coyne's shitlist, and it certainly seemed like NCSE was off it as well. But three days later he objects to a line I wrote about "atheists bent on insisting that literalism is the true form of religion": Quote of the week, from the personal website of the Public...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 2:10 PM • 55 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 24, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
I've finally gotten around to reading through hundreds of comments on my posts about truth claims and ways of knowing and whatnot, and posted replies to as many commenters as I could manage (hopefully touching on themes raised by some commenters I didn't respond to by name). I'll be monitoring those threads more closely now, and hope to have a few new posts up on related topics tomorrow. Sorry for the delay, but I've been working and catching up on stuff from my laptop-less stretch. Unread blog posts: 9997. Whee!...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 8:11 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Planet Earth
Nicholas Beaudrot defends the (second) bag fee against Atrios's opposition to any fees, and against Matt Yglesias's defense of all fees for checked luggage. Atrios rightly notes that the fees are part and parcel of the generally crappy air travel experience, Matt argues that the fees discourage excessive packing, thereby reducing the carbon footprint of travel. Nick replies that Matt's economic analysis fails to consider shifts from checked luggage to carry-on: bag fees on the first bag encourage two behaviors:Travelers pack the largest bag they think they can carry on to the plane. This results in higher boarding and de-planing...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:13 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 23, 2009
Apologies for the unusually crappy blogging this week. With the arrival of a replacement from my lost/stolen laptop, I should catch up on the 12,000 unread items in NetNewsWire soon, and return to normal crappy blogging. In any event, Chad Orzel replies to last week's ruckus over "ways of knowing" by observing that "Using Analogies on the Internet Is Like Doing a Really Futile Thing": No matter what the analogy is, any attempt to use analogy, simile, metaphor, or any other lofty rhetorical technique in a debate being conducted on the Internet is doomed to end badly. No matter how...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 6:05 PM • 43 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 18, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
Several commenters on earlier posts have suggested that I am claiming that religious truth claims are the same as literary truth claims. I understand how that misunderstanding could be reached, but it is a misunderstanding. I think that religious truth claims would include aspects of literary truth claims (the Bible surely uses metaphor and other literary techniques), but for religious believers, it clearly encompasses much more. As a non-theist, I don't fully grasp the level of meaning that theists experience in religion, and my analogy to literary truth claims is meant to set a lower limit, not a maximum, on...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 10:52 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As promised, I've put a few tentative definitions below the fold, in hopes of clarifying questions in comment threads here and elsewhere. These definitions represent a starting point, not gospel. I'm not a philosopher, I haven't spent much time reading epistemology, and I may mangle things badly. If so, polite critique will lead to productive revision, and hopefully progress toward broader agreement....
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 6:16 PM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
