jrosenhouse | August 2, 2010Michael Shermer has has an excellent essay responding to Deepak Chopra's “quantum flapdoodle.”
Chopra's use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2010Last week we saw that every positive integer greater than one can be factored into primes in an essentially unique way. This week we ask a different question: Just how many primes are there?
Euclid solved this problem a little over two thousand years ago by showing there are infinitely many primes. His proof was by contradiction. If there are only finitely many primes then we can list them all:
\[
p_1, \ p_2, \ p_3, \ p_4, \ \dots, \ p_k
\]
We can now define a new number, which we shall call $N$, by the formula
\[
N=p_1p_2p_3 \dots p_k +1
\]
That is, $N$ is obtained by multiplying…
jrosenhouse | July 30, 2010Novelist Anne Rice, best known for her series of novels about vampires, has some choice words for institutional Christianity:
For those who care, and I understand if you don't. Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.
Later she added:
As I said below, I quit being a…
jrosenhouse | July 27, 2010A few weeks ago I spent a day at the Virginia Home Educators Convention in Richmond. These are the religious home schoolers we are talking about, meaning creationism was very well-represented indeed. Ken Ham gave several keynote talks. Yay!
I never got around to doing a proper write-up of the conference, but I do want to tell you about one of the talks I attended. It was called “Math From a Biblical Worldview?” Indeed, it was when I saw this talk advertised in the program that I knew I had to attend.
The speaker was Katherine Loop, author of a number of math education resources for home…
jrosenhouse | July 26, 2010If you are in the mood for a little light reading, have a look at this account of Skip Evans, formerly of the National Center for Science Education, conversing with some of the local creationists in Madison, WI.
It's almost a shame that an apparently sincere and pretty decent guy like Kevin has fallen into the Answers in Genesis trap. He's been gullible enough to hitch his theological wagon to the complete and utter stupidity that is young earth creationism. He's been duped into believing, along with denying a staggering amount of legitimate science, that if all the animals alive today didn'…
jrosenhouse | July 25, 2010In my last math post I casually mentioned that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges. That is
\[
\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{5}+\frac{1}{7}+\frac{1}{11}+\frac{1}{13}+ \dots=\infty
\]
That seems like a hard thing to prove. Certainly none of the traditional convergence tests from Calculus II will get the job done. The problem is how to “get at” the primes. Plainly we need to do something clever.
As it happens, the proof is a bit tricky. It has a lot of ingredients, too. On the other hand, each one of those ingredients is pretty interesting in its own right. So how…
jrosenhouse | July 21, 2010I only have time for a quick post today, so how about another quote from Elmer Gantry? Keep in mind that this was published in 1927. See if it sounds familiar:
In some ways he preferred New Thought to standard Protestantism. It was safer to play with. He had never been sure but that there might be something to the doctrines he had preached as an evangelist. Perhaps God really had dictated every word of the Bible. Perhaps there really was a hell of burning sulphur. Perhaps the Holy Ghost really was hovering around watching him and reporting. But he knew with serenity that all of his…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2010Over the past week or so I have been dutifully plugging a hole in my literary education. I am reading Sinclair Lewis' novel Elmer Gantry. If you are unfamiliar with the story, the title character is a rudderless, narcissistic, unsavory fellow who, through a series of somewhat implausible events, gets ordained as a Baptist minister. Mayhem ensues! The book was somewhat controversial when it was first published, since it does not exactly make evangelical Christianity look good. I am currently halfway through it and loving every page of it.
In reading the following brief excerpt, keep in…
jrosenhouse | July 18, 2010Blake Stacey directed me towards a terrific tool for embedding TeX code into a web page. So how about we do ourselves a math post!
Remember the harmonic series? No doubt you encountered it in some calculus class or other. It's the one that goes like this:
$$
1+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{4}+\frac{1}{5}+\frac{1}{6}+\dots
$$
The series is divergent. If you keep adding more and more of the terms your running tally will just get bigger and bigger forever.
There are many ways to show that it is divergent. If you remember your calculus then you know there is a little gadget…
jrosenhouse | July 15, 2010Any time I am looking for something to blog about, I know the HuffPo religion section will serve up something delicious. In this essay, Peter Enns of the BioLogos Foundation exposes the naivete some people bring to reading the Bible:
I've read enough of the New Atheists to see a pattern in their thinking about the Bible, and it is disturbingly similar to what you see in the Southern Baptist Convention or Bob Jones University. Conservative Christians and New Atheists share naïve views of what the Bible “ought” to be, namely the notion that if the Bible is really the “Word of God,” it will…
jrosenhouse | July 14, 2010Be sure to read this excellent post by Julian Sanchez addressing the old chestnut, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”
Sanchez was replying in particular to an appallingly bad essay by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate. How bad? Here's one sample:
Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence--the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most…
jrosenhouse | July 13, 2010Jerry Coyne has a post up reporting on new polling data on science and religion coming out of Virginia Commonwealth University. Jerry notes that the numbers for the evolution questions are broadly consistent with what past surveys have found. I mostly agree, but there was one number that jumped out at me. Here was the question:
Which of these statements comes closest to your views on the origin of biological life: biological life developed over time from simple substances, but God guided this process, biological life developed over time from simple substances but God did not guide this…
jrosenhouse | July 12, 2010Karl Giberson has a new column up at the Huffington Post.
Jerry Coyne and I had an interesting exchange yesterday that will appear in a brief video on USA Today's website at some point. The question related to the compatibility of science and religion. Can one accept the modern scientific view of the world and still hold to anything resembling a traditional belief in God?
My answer to this question is “yes, of course,” for I cannot see my way to clear to embrace either of the two alternatives -- a fundamentalist religion prepared to reject science, or a pure scientism that denies the reality…
jrosenhouse | July 8, 2010Yesterday afternoon I checked my e-mail and found something from the ScienceBlogs management. Apparently there was to be a new blog around here sponsored by PepsiCo. that was to focus on nutrition and other food related issues. I only skimmed the e-mail and did not really think much about it. I am still on blog vacation, after all, and I wanted to get back to my other work.
Later in the day I decided it was time for a break. Figured I'd check in with my favorite Science Blogs and see if anything was happening. Turns out, something was.
Apparently a lot of my fellow bloggers were up in…
jrosenhouse | June 29, 2010It will continue to be bloggus interruptus around here for a while. There are two main reasons for this. One is simply that I have two books under contract, both of which must be at least substantially done by the time school starts up again at the end of August. That means I am already spending many hours a day trying to make words appear on a screen. Makes it hard to work up the enthusiasm for blog writing on top of that.
But the other reason is simply that I'm feeling a bit burned out. There's been plenty of blog fodder recently, but I just flat haven't felt like writing about it.…
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2010
My cat, Isaac, died on Monday. He never did anything like a normal cat, and that includes the manner in which he died. He went from no symptoms to multiple organ failure in less than a week. We'll come to that in a moment.
Cats like Isaac are the reason people own cats. If he were a person he'd be a hard-living, hard-drinking kind of guy, never afraid to tell you what he thought but ultimately with a heart of gold. He loved being handled and had no sensitive spots. Cradle him like a baby in one arm (not so easy to do considering his weight) and rub his tummy and he was a very happy…
jrosenhouse | June 10, 2010Over the past few years I have asked a fair number of creationists what it is they find so objectionable about evolution. They have a great many complaints, but the one I hear most often is some version on the problem of evil. Evolution by natural selection is a cruel and wasteful process. It is not at all the sort of thing a just and loving God would set in motion.
They are hardly alone in thinking that. In his book Living With Darwin philosopher Phillip Kitcher wrote, referring to the evolutionary process:
There is nothing kindly or providential in any of this, and it seems…
jrosenhouse | June 8, 2010Have a look at this interview with Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero. It contains a number of interesting nuggets, but this is the part that jumped out at me:
Baer: Proselytizing atheists like Dawkins have carved out a niche within a largely religious public sphere. Would a less emotional, less evangelistic atheism be capable of maintaining even this degree of influence?
Prothero: I feel quite certain that a less emotional and less evangelistic atheism would garner far more influence. Atheism has a brand problem. Lots of the people who do not believe in God refuse to…
jrosenhouse | June 6, 2010Over the past few weeks I have been working my way through season three of Dexter. Somehow I had gotten my Netflix cue out of order, so that they actually delivered the final disc, number four, to me before sending me the other DVD's. This particular disc contained only a single episode, the final one of the season. I decided to hold onto it until I was ready.
When I am at my peak I can plow through a full season of a television show in a few days. In this case, however, I got a bit distracted with other things. It took me rather a long time to work my way through the rest of season…
jrosenhouse | June 3, 2010Last year I attended a paleontology conference in Cincinnati. While I was there I attended a session on science and religion, during which a parade of people trumpeted the warm relationship between the two. Predictably, there was much bashing of the New Atheists, with Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Stenger all specifically called out by name. There was a lot of preening about how it is only clueless atheists who blur the lines between science and religion. This, remember, at a paleontology conference. The session consisted of a series of fifteen minute presentations with no Q and A's…