jrosenhouse | October 15, 2009You are probably familiar with the Bloggingheads website. The site, founded by Robert Wright, features conversations between various bloggers, journalists and scholars on whatever issues it amuses them to talk about. The site has long featured scientists among its participants.
Two recent dialogues hurt that relationship. The first featured historian Ronald Numbers palling around with YEC Paul Nelson. Numbers seemed mostly uninclined to challenge Nelson on some of his more dubious pronouncements. Even more egregious was the dialogue between John McWhorter and Michael Behe, in which…
jrosenhouse | October 12, 2009I only have time for quick blogging today, so how about a brief observation.
Here is Paul Krugman's latest column. It is a characteristically lucid and informative column about some bad economic ideas that are circulating around Washington these days. Here's a sample:
What ideas am I talking about? The economic historian Peter Temin has argued that a key cause of the Depression was what he calls the “gold-standard mentality.” By this he means not just belief in the sacred importance of maintaining the gold value of one's currency, but a set of associated attitudes: obsessive fear of…
jrosenhouse | October 9, 2009And mostly favorably, too. You might need a subscription to read the review, alas. The reviewer is Donald Granberg, a sociologist (now retired) at the University of Missouri. He published several papers on the MHP during the nineties.
I liked this part of the review:
The author does a masterful job of tracing the problem back to its origin.
And this part:
One difficulty with word problems is their ambiguity. Rosenhouse does a superb job of reducing, if not eliminating, this source of endless argumentation with his canonical version.
Not to mention this part:
The Monty Hall Problem…
jrosenhouse | October 8, 2009Richard Dawkins stopped by the NCSE the other day. Josh Rosenau writes:
And no, blog drama did not spill over into the real world. It was a great visit, with Dawkins and Genie getting along swimmingly.
Anyone surprised by this? Let's face it, the blog drama hasn't really been that dramatic, occasional whining from certain SciBlings notwithstanding.
jrosenhouse | October 5, 2009Andrew Sullivan has posted several more blog entries on the subject of theodicy. Here's one written from a theistic perspective. It gets off to a bad start:
The emails you have received regarding the theodicy problem are, I think, very telling. Most striking to me is how few of your correspondents -- and none in the set of notes posted just yesterday morning -- seem interested in, or even cite with a measure of familiarity, any of the great Christian theologians on the matter: St. Augustine or St. Thomas, Luther or Calvin, Kierkegaard, or even a near contemporary like Reinhold Niebuhr.…
jrosenhouse | October 5, 2009Via Andrew Sullivan I came across this article, from the Canadian magazine The Walrus, on the subject of science and religion. The article's focus is on Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit astronomer. It was the article's conclusion that really caught my eye:
Consolmagno has little patience for intelligent design. “Science cannot prove God, or disprove Him. He has to be assumed. If people have no other reason to believe in God than that they can't imagine how the human eye could have evolved by itself, then their faith is very weak.” Rather than seeking affirmation of his own faith in the heavens,…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2009As a companion to this post, I would like to put forth Alan Grayson, a first-term representative from Florida, as a candidate for Speaker of the House. On Wednesday Grayson said:
Now, the Democrats have a different plan. The Democrats say that if you have health insurance, we're going to make it better. If you don't have health insurance, we're going to provide it to you. If you can't afford health insurance, then we'll help you to afford health insurance.
So, America gets to decide. Do you want the Democratic plan or do you want the Republican plan? Remember, the Republican plan: Don…
jrosenhouse | September 30, 2009Dawkins begins his case for evolution in the same place as Darwin himself: by discussing the myriad successes of plant and animal breeders. Whereas Darwin was very taken with pigeons, however, Dawkins prefers dogs, cabbages and cattle.
The chapter opens with a brief discussion of essentialism in biology, and how evolution shows it to be false. The following paragraph provides a well-written summary of the main point:
If there's a `standard rabbit', the accolade denotes no more than the centre of a bell-shaped distribution of real, scurrying, leaping, variable bunnies. And the distribution…
jrosenhouse | September 27, 2009Here's Kevin Padian, paleontologist and President of the National Center for Science Education, commenting on the science/religion issue:
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 is compatible with evolution.
This is from an article in People magazine commenting on the plan by Kirk Cameron and Ray Confort to distribute doctored versions of The Origin of Species on college campuses this November. (…
jrosenhouse | September 24, 2009The other day I sallied forth to the local Barnes and Noble to pick up my copy of Richard Dawkins's new book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. As I walked into the store I noticed a person stacking books on the main kiosk. She asked me if I was looking for something in particular.
Now, ordinarily I would have said something like, “No thanks, I'm good.” I spend so much time hanging out at Barnes and Noble, you see, that I'm pretty certain I know the layout of the store better than most of the people who work there. Besides, half the fun of browsing is all the must-…
jrosenhouse | September 23, 2009Andrew Sullivan takes another stab at the theodicy question. His new gambit plays off of this heartbreaking report of a young child with CIPA (Congential Insensitivity to Pain). As a result of not being able to feel pain, the child is constantly hurting herself without realizing it. Sullivan's take:
Maybe one can imagine a physical existence where pain does not exist. But not on this planet, where pain has helped organisms survive and prosper, and where suffering has often prodded humankind's spiritual dimension. This complex interaction between good and bad - captured graphically in the…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2009There is bloggery afoot on ye olde problem of evil. Russell Blackford got the ball rolling with this post, an admirably succinct essay on why evil and suffering pose serious problems to tradtional notions of Christian theism. Andrew Sullivan demurred here, and then elaborated here. Jerry Coyne was unimpressed with both posts. Coyne weighed in further, as did Sullivan here.
Okay, I think that is all of them. Regular readers of this blog are aware that I regard the problem of evil and suffering as a slam dunk against traditional notions of Christian theism. Theologians have squirmed and…
jrosenhouse | September 18, 2009In yesterday's post I mentioned a chess combination that arose during a tournament game I played a while back. For the benefit of my chess-playing readers I thought I would conclude the week by showing it to you.
This was played at the World Open a number of years ago. I was black. I had blundered out of the opening and had been defending grimly for some time. My opponent, happily, had been playing very sloppily, and missed several clear wins. It is not immediately clear how white should make progress in the endgame below, but you kind of get the feeling that his material advantage…
jrosenhouse | September 18, 2009The other day I mentioned the book The Unlikely Disciple, by Kevin Roose, about a Brown Univeristy student who transfers to Liberty University for a semester. The book has all sorts of quotable nuggets, but I especially got a kick out of the following one. I should mention that Roose changed all the names of the people he is describing.
On Monday night, the radio debate between Dr. Caner [a professor at Liberty] and the Rational Response Squad finally comes to pass.
I listened to the debate -- all three hours and forty minutes of it -- and it was time well spent. The Rational Response…
jrosenhouse | September 17, 2009Spend any time immersing yourself in science/religion disputes and you will quickly encounter the idea that “science is not the only way of knowing.” Nearly always this is intended as a way of carving out intellectual space for religion. For atheists like me this claim raises a red flag. I want to know what ways of knowing religion contributes to the discussion, and what sorts of things we learn from these methods. The problem is that one of the biggest ideas religion offers, especially in the West, is that of revelation. Apparently God sometimes talks directly to certain human beings,…
jrosenhouse | September 16, 2009For my Virginia readers, I have just learned that Judge John Jones, of Dover trial fame, will be speaking at Bridgewater College on Thursday, September 17. Bridgewater College? That's about twenty minutes from Harrisonburg! Looks like I have plans tomorrow night...
jrosenhouse | September 16, 2009I'm currently reading the book The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by Kevin Roose. Roose was a student at Brown University (my alma mater!) when he decided he wanted to learn more about the culture of evangelical Christianity. So he transferred to Liberty University for a semester.
I am only about a third of the way through the book and will probably post a full review when I have finished it. For now, though, I would like to post one brief excerpt that really jumped out at me. Roose is listing, in bullet point fashion, certain things “Liberty really…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2009The Wall Street Journal recently hosted an exchange of essays on the subject of evolution and God. The participants: Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong. Here's your first question: Which of them wrote this:
Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine…
jrosenhouse | September 11, 2009The main reason I haven't been blogging lately is that I have been seriously under the weather for the past week or so. These days people are seeing swine flu in every case of the sniffles, but I am unconvinced.
My symptoms: fever, cough, general achiness, fatigue, sore throat are certainly consistent with swine flu, but they are also pretty generic. All I can say is that even when things were at their worst on Monday and Tuesday (I was shivering in eighty-five degree weather) things never went from “Very Unpleasant” to “Pondering the Afterlife.” I didn't even cancel any of my classes,…
jrosenhouse | September 11, 2009By now I assume everyone has heard that South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson heckled President Obama during the latter's big health care speech on Wednesday. When Obama claimed that there was nothing in his bill that would extend health insurance to illegal aliens, the congressman yelled out “You lie!”
By doing so Wilson showed that there are at least three different ways in which he is a jerk. First, there is the sheer, childish rudeness of heckling a President. This is really what it's come to? We can not agree anymore that when the President addresses a joint session of Congress you…