September 12, 2011
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg decided not to include any religious clerics among the speakers at the 9/11 memorial service this weekend. Unsurprisingly, this caused some controversy:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has come under attack by some religious and political leaders for not including…
September 9, 2011
Jerry Coyne weighs in with a few thoughts about the various attempts, considered in my last post, to preserve the notion of original sin in the light of modern science. It turns out he's even less impressed by those attempts than I am. Go have a look!
Since Wednesday's post was already quite long…
September 7, 2011
One of the many problems modern science poses for Christianity is the question of how to understand original sin. The traditional teaching, which holds that Adam and Eve were the only humans on the planet when they were created on day six of Creation Week, that the ground was cursed and they were…
August 30, 2011
I will not be actively supporting Obama's reelection next year. I will not donate money to his campaign. I will not even put a sign on my lawn. In the end I will vote for him, but only because to do otherwise would be to reward the Republicans for their appalling and unpatriotic behavior over…
August 29, 2011
The Humanist has posted a fascinating interview with Leo Behe, son of ID luminary Michael Behe. The younger Behe does not share his father's faith, and has become outspoken about his lack of belief. That takes some courage, given his upbringing:
The Humanist: Talk about your early life and…
August 23, 2011
From the department of self-promotion, let me call attention to the current volume of The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. If you click on the link and scroll down to P164, you will find a barn-burning, rhetorical masterpiece of a paper entitled, “Isoperimetric Numbers of Regular Graphs of…
August 22, 2011
One upside to my recent convalescence has been that I have had plenty of time for reading. Currently I'm working my way through Graham Oppy's book Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Oppy is best known as a philosopher of religion, writing from…
August 16, 2011
A number of years ago I attended an ID conference near Kansas City. One of the breakout sessions featured a fellow from the Heritage Foundation (an ultra-right-wing political think tank) presenting a lecture about probability and evolution. His talk was mostly just a watered-down version of…
August 15, 2011
In his latest HuffPo piece, Karl Giberson writes:
The story of Adam and Eve originated as a Hebrew oral tradition, which is a long ways from an English prose translation. And there are more complex filters related to culture, author intent, literary form, historical setting, anticipated audience…
August 10, 2011
Sorry for the disappearing act. I've been using this time to better myself by learning about new things. Like the various causes of sciatica. Or where you go in Harrisonburg when you need to have your back X-rayed. Turns out I have a degenerate disc in my lower back. When you consider that…
August 1, 2011
Your required reading for today is Jerry Coyne's essay in the USA Today. His topic? Where morality comes from if not from God. Here's an excerpt:
So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially,…
August 1, 2011
I have now returned from my twenty-year high school reunion. It was a lot of fun, but it's really quite shocking just how blurry my memory of high school really is. There were about fifty alums there, but I recognized less than half of them. Happily, two of my closest friends from high school…
July 29, 2011
I'm going to my twentieth high school reunion this weekend. Yep. Twenty years. Sigh...
July 27, 2011
I'm not quire sure what what to make of this. t doesn't appear to be from The Onion.
More than half of U.S. voters approve of God's job performance, according to a new poll, making God more popular than all members of Congress.
The poll -- which was conducted by the Democratic research firm…
July 25, 2011
Edward Feser has now posted two responses, here and here, to my previous post. I'm sure everyone will be shocked to learn that I don't think he replied very effectively, but if you're curious go have a look. SIWOTI Syndrome is not a hang up of mine, and it doesn't generally bother me to let my…
July 24, 2011
Be sure to read Josh Rosenau's account of the goings-on with the Texas School Board. Josh was in town to testify on behalf of sunshine and puppies. Here's an excerpt:
The best thing about the day was the stories of scientists, and nonscientists who've been touched by science. There was a grad…
July 22, 2011
Edward Feser has posted a reply of sorts to my two essays from last week (Part One, Part Two.) Turns out he's pretty touchy about people who are dismissive of the cosmological argument. The post is quite long and only a small portion of it is directed specifically at me. Since most of that…
July 20, 2011
Michael Ruse is back with another post over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Let's take a look:
I have written before about Calvin College in Western Michigan and its troubles. I have now to tell you that things have wended their way to their expected and sad conclusion.
To give the…
July 19, 2011
The current issue of Scientific American has an article, by George F. R. Ellis, expressing some skepticism about the multiverse. Sadly, it seems that only the beginning of the article is freely available online. However, replies to the article by Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark are available…
July 18, 2011
A while back I I began a discussion about deriving formulas for solving polynomial equations. We saw that linear and quadratic polynomials did not pose much of a challenge. But cubic polynomials are considerably more complex. The set-up was that we had a polynomial equation of this form:
\[
x^3+…
July 15, 2011
I certainly have my disagreements with Michael Ruse on questions related to science and religion, but sometimes he really comes through:
There are days when, I swear to God, I am all set to enroll under the banner of Richard Dawkins and anathematize all religions and those who subscribe to them.…
July 14, 2011
Picking up where we left off yesterday, most of Feser's post is devoted to a hypothetical dialogue between a scientist and a skeptic who thinks that science is all a lot of nonsense. The idea is to make Jerry Coyne's objections to theology seem silly, by showing the absurdity of comparable…
July 13, 2011
We New Atheist types are often lectured about the need for studying theology. The idea is that if we tuned out the distressingly popular and highly vocal forms of religious extremism and pondered instead “the best religion has to offer,” then we would not be so hostile to religion. Recently,…
July 12, 2011
Of course, I also had time to explore Philadelphia a bit. Vacations are not built on chess alone. During my explorations I stumbled upon the Reading Terminal Market. It's a pretty spectacular collection of small concessions, most of them selling food of one sort or another. Here are a few…
July 11, 2011
I'm back! Did I miss anything?
The big summer vacay turned out to be much harder work than what I was doing in Virginia prior to leaving, but it was tons of fun nonetheless. Far too much to report on in just one blog post, so we'll do a few.
Of course, the first order of business was to…
June 25, 2011
I'm leaving town! For the next two weeks. Among other things I shall be sallying forth to Philadelphia to participate in the annual chess extravaganza known as the World Open. Regular blogging shall resume when I return.
June 25, 2011
Writing in The New York Times, Tim Kreider wonders if the immediate availability of information has robbed us of the romance of not knowing:
Instant accessibility leaves us oddly disappointed, bored, endlessly craving more. I've often had the experience of reading a science article that purported…
June 24, 2011
This is sad news:
Peter Falk, who marshaled actorly tics, prop room appurtenances and his own physical idiosyncrasies to personify Columbo, one of the most famous and beloved fictional detectives in television history, died on Thursday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83.
His…
June 22, 2011
I'm sure we're all familiar with the creationist chestnut that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. For people with a basic science education it is something of a litmus test. As soon as you hear someone make this argument you can be certain that you are dealing with a crank. You…
June 21, 2011
I often write posts arguing that it is difficult to reconcile evolution and Christianity. When you consider that evolution challenges certain claims of the Bible, refutes the traditional design argument, exacerbates the problem of evil, and suggests that humanity does not play any central role in…
