jrosenhouse | August 1, 2011Your 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, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing -- even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2011I 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 were there, including my prom date, so it was great to catch up with them.
The whole experience prompted me to pull my yearbook off the shelf for the first time in, well, twenty years actually. I browsed through some of the things that people wrote, and two things stuck me in particular. One was the…
jrosenhouse | July 29, 2011I'm going to my twentieth high school reunion this weekend. Yep. Twenty years. Sigh...
jrosenhouse | July 27, 2011I'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 Public Policy Polling (PPP) -- surveyed 928 people and found that 52 percent of Americans approved of God's overall dealings, while only 9 percent disapproved.
Questions about God were asked as part of a larger survey assessing American opinions of congressional leaders in the midst of the ongoing debt…
jrosenhouse | July 25, 2011Edward 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 opponents have the last word in these little flare-ups. My only reply is that I stand by everything I said in my earlier posts.
jrosenhouse | July 24, 2011Be 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 student at UT (who I'd met at Netroots Nation last month) who is working on finding cures for cancer. The techniques he uses, he explained, rely heavily on understanding the shared ancestry of plants and animals. Indeed, he said, his research on cancer cures “would not work if not for evolution.” He…
jrosenhouse | July 22, 2011Edward 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 portion is just a temper tantrum about the lack of respect shown to the philosophy of religion, I feel no desire to respond in detail.
But there is one place where the magnitude of Feser's rudeness is so out of proportion to the strength of his argument that I do think some response is called for. In…
jrosenhouse | July 20, 2011Michael 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 background once again, starting with the College's own words.
As a college that stems from the Reformed branch of Christianity, the bulk of what we believe is held in common with the Christian church around the world and throughout the ages. Three confessions adopted by Reformed Protestants centuries ago…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2011The 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 online. And since Tegmark so perfectly summarizes my own views about multiverses, I'd like to take a look at his remarks.
After a brief introduction Tegmark gets down to business:
By our universe, I mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us during the 13.7 billion…
jrosenhouse | July 18, 2011A 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:
\[
x^3+ax^2+bx+c=0
\]
We can assume that the leading coefficient is one, so long as we're OK with the idea that the other coefficients might be fractions. If we have a cubic polynomial whose leading coefficient is not one, then we can simply divide through by whatever it is.
We got as far as saying…
jrosenhouse | July 15, 2011I 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. I take a lot of criticism from my fellow atheists, including my fellow Brainstormers, for arguing that science and religion are compatible. I still think that, but increasingly I cannot for the life of me see why any decent human being would want to be religious, and increasingly I think one should…
jrosenhouse | July 14, 2011Picking 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 objections leveled at science. As I see it, however, Feser has been more successful at showing how science is different from theology. Here is the first exchange:
Skeptic: I'm trying to learn science so I can meet head-on the argument that we science critics are ignorant of the subject. So, under the…
jrosenhouse | July 13, 2011We 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, Jerry Coyne called the bluff and started studying theology. He reported on his findings in this post. Short version: He's underwhelmed. This led Edward Feser, a Roman Catholic philosopher at Pasadena City College, to throw a temper tantrum about how unserious he was in undertaking this project in the…
jrosenhouse | July 12, 2011Of 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 random shots to give you the flavor:
That one had me wanting to buy some veggies and make a big salad in my hotel room, but there were a few practical problems with that.
That's a lot of sausages.
Sadly, a handful of photos can't really capture the feel of the place. It seems to go…
jrosenhouse | July 11, 2011I'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 participate in the World Open chess tournament in Philadelphia.
No one seemed to mind that I was standing on a chair while taking that picture.
Since the World Open offers the largest cash prizes of any open chess tournament, it routinely attracts some of the top players in the world. One of the great…
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2011I'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.
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2011Writing 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 to explain some question I'd always wondered about, only to find myself getting distracted as soon as I started reading the explanation. Not long ago the Hubble telescope observed that Pluto's surface is changing rapidly, and noticeably reddening. It's not a bland white ball of ice, but the color of…
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2011This 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 death was announced in a statement from Larry Larson, a longtime friend and the lawyer for Mr. Falk's wife, Shera. He had been treated for Alzheimer's disease in recent years.
Mr. Falk had a wide-ranging career in comedy and drama, in the movies and onstage, before and during the three and a half…
jrosenhouse | June 22, 2011I'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 see, if someone says that he has considered the evidence for evolution and finds it unconvincing, we might shake our heads in disbelief or wonder how seriously he has studied the matter, but in the end it is a matter of opinion whether the evidence is compelling. But if someone says that evolution…
jrosenhouse | June 21, 2011I 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 creation, you have a pretty strong cumulative case. But I always stop short of saying bluntly that you cannot accept both evolution and Christianity. That is not for political reasons or out of fear of offending anyone. It is simply that I do not believe that the question “Can a Darwinian be a…