jrosenhouse | August 31, 2009If you're in the mood for some Darwin-related reading, have a look at these four offerings from the website of the NCSE. They are reviews of four recent books about Charles Darwin. I recommend especially the eloquent smackdown of The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin by Discovery Institute flak Benjamin Wiker. Reviewer Sander Gliboff puts his finger on precisely why this was such a poor choice of title:
Using that “life and lies” formula in the subtitle of this anti-Darwin book was not a wise move by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Benjamin Wiker. It invites unfavorable…
jrosenhouse | August 30, 2009My friends, there are certian times in your life when you are simply forced by events to reevaluate everything you believe and hold dear. For me, now is such a time. I have argued at length that the aggressive tone of the anti-religion books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens does not hurt the cause of promoting good science education. That position is no longer tenable, in light of events coming out of Sedalia, Missouri:
The shirts, which were designed to promote the band's fall program, are light gray and feature an image of a monkey progressing through stages and…
jrosenhouse | August 27, 2009The success of the New Atheist books has spawned an industry of book-length, pro-religion replies. I have read quite a few of them at this point, and have emerged far more confident in my atheism as a result. Some of the books, like David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion, were obviously the work of hacks just trying to cash in. Others, like Alister and Joanna McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion or John Haught's God and the New Atheism were written by folks who I regard as serious scholars. That they failed so completely to make a cogent case against any of Dawkins' (or Hitchens' or Harris')…
jrosenhouse | August 25, 2009Over at Jeffrey Goldberg's blog we find a brief interview with Congressman Henry Waxman about how his Jewish faith informs his political views:
Tali Yahalom: You are quoted as saying that many of your American values are "synonymous" with your Jewish values. Can you talk about that?
Henry Waxman: Jewish values place a great emphasis on compassion and trying to help other people, and the doctrine of tikkun olam, trying to repair the world -- this of course is a requirement on individuals but also on the community. One way for people to act in a communal sense and to respond to the needs of…
jrosenhouse | August 24, 2009People often tell me that I have a skewed view of religion because of my frequent participation in creationist gatherings. Yes, obviously, the fundamentalists are out of their minds, and it is discouraging that they give religion a bad name generally. But there is also a rich body of serious, probing work in Christian theology that is full of nuance and texture.
Or so I am told. I have yet to encounter it, and not for lack of looking. To me it always seems like an awful lot of intellectual energy wasted on a foolish and pointless project.
Part of the problem is that often, when I read…
jrosenhouse | August 24, 2009Here's The Times of London planting a big wet kiss on Richard Dawkins in one of their lead editorials:
Thomas Henry Huxley, the great contemporary populariser of Charles Darwin's ideas, declared it his aim to "smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of toleration for everything but lying".
That is a fair summary of Richard Dawkins's achievement in four decades of public advocacy of science and its methods. Professor Dawkins does not altogether avoid the use of invective in the controversies that…
jrosenhouse | August 22, 2009I have been a huge Quentin Tarantino fan ever since seeing Reservoir Dogs in college. I have loved all of his movies, with Jackie Brown being the only item in the corpus that gets a rating below brilliant. So you can imagine my excitement over the premiere of Inglourious Basterds. I almost never go to movies on Friday or Saturday nights since I hate crowds, but for this I made an exception.
There are only the most minor of spoilers below the fold. Really, the movie advertisements give away more than I am about to.
Short review: Tarantino is a genius. If he doesn't win Best Everything…
jrosenhouse | August 20, 2009I am currently working my way through the book The Evolution Controversy in America, written by historian George Webb and published in 1994. I got a kick out of the following quote. It will help to know that the Reverend Ben M. Bogard was the pastor of a church in Little Rock, Arkansas in the 1920's. He was not too fond of evolution.
To assist in the initiative drive, Bogard organized the American Antievolution Association. This group solicited membership from all individuals except, “Negroes and persons of African descent, Atheists, Infidels, Agnostics, such persons as hold the theory…
jrosenhouse | August 19, 2009Speaking of crazy right-wingers, the Supreme Court's resident lunatic has been up to his old trick again. Alan Dershowitz administers the proper spanking:
I never thought I would live to see the day when a justice of the Supreme Court would publish the following words:
This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is `actually' innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any…
jrosenhouse | August 19, 2009Barney Frank confronted one of those “Obama is a Nazi!” types at a town hall meeting the other day. Video here.
QUESTIONER (holding a picture of Obama with a Hitler moustache): Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama expressly has supported this policy? Why are you supporting it?
FRANK: When you ask me that question I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time?
You want me to answer your question? As you stand there, with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler, and…
jrosenhouse | August 17, 2009The fall semester begins one week from today. Much work, both physical and psychological, must be done to prepare. Cuts into the blogging time. Sorry about that.
But since it hardly seems fair that my problems should cut into your bloggy pleasures, have a look at the latest column from the always excellent A. C. Grayling, writing in The Guardian.
In the aftermath of the Reformation in the 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuit Order as an army of defence against the attack on the One True Church. The Jesuits saw that the reformers had learning and intelligence on their side;…
jrosenhouse | August 11, 2009Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have another of their New Atheist bashing essays up, this time in The Los Angeles Times. It is, alas, a dreadful piece of work. P. Z. Myers has already wieghed in here, as has Jerry Coyne here.
The actual arguments in the op-ed are standard fare: The New Atheists are needlessly confrontational, they scare away moderates, blah blah blah.
The novelty here is the bizarre, and very misleading, way they go about making their points. Even as they encourage mutual understanding and nonconfrontationalism, they are perfectly happy to ignore their own advice in…
jrosenhouse | August 10, 2009You can imagine my dismay upon discovering that I had forgotten to deposit my latest Netflix offerings in the mail. Bereft of quality home entertainment to take my mind off the looming return of the students, I hopped into the Jasonmobile and sallied forth to the local Blockbuster Video.
Typically I rent back episodes of television shows. If I have the attention span for a movie, I simply go to a movie, you see. Nonetheless, I browsed the new releases and discovered an intriguing little film called Fermat's Room.
That Fermat?
So I picked up the box, noticed the first two words of the plot…
jrosenhouse | August 7, 2009Time to wrap up my discussion of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's book Unscientific America. In Part One I focused on the main themes of the book, arguing that it was superficial in its analysis of the issues and that its proposed solutions are impractical and unlikely to be effective. In Part Two I focused specifically on Chapter Eight of the book, which argued against the activites of the New Atheists. I argued that M and K's treatment of the arguments was inadequate, and manifested on a small scale problems that afflicted most of the book.
In this final part of the review I wanted…
jrosenhouse | August 3, 2009Sometimes, when you're reading, you come across a paragraph so well-crafted and eloquent that you just have to pause in admiration. Here's an example, taken from the book Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. Published in 1994, it deals with some of the astonishingly foolish things certain humanities professors had been writing about science. The reference in the present paragraph is to sociologist Stanley Aranowitz.
Now, the uncertainty principle is undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics and one of the most philosophically provocative developments in the…
jrosenhouse | August 2, 2009Probably not, but it's going to get one. I have just signed a contract with Oxford University Press for a book based on my experiences at creationist conferences. It's not going to be an easy book to write, but it should be a fun project.
The basic outline looks like this:
Section one will be based on my experiences at the Creation MegaConference at Liberty University in 2005. Section two will use the Darwin and Design conference I attended in Knoxville in 2007 to introduce ID. Generally speaking, the emphasis in these two sections will be on the scientific aspects of the issue.…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2009Meanwhile, the debate over health care reform is playing out according to a familiar script. Armies of conscienceless right-wing attack dogs make stuff up in their attempt to prevent some sensible piece of social reform. Democrats are slow to respond, figuring that no one could possibly be sufficiently naive and gullible to believe the right-wing fictions. Then, sure enough, a significant segment of the American public rises up to prove them wrong.
Here's Ceci Connelly reporting on the phenomenon:
A campaign on conservative talk radio, fueled by President Obama's calls to control…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2009In Part One of this review I focused on the broad themes of Mooney and Kirshenbaum's book. My general feeling is that their presentation of the state of play is simplistic in crucial ways and that their proposed solutions are impractical at best. Now I would like to zoom in specifically on the eighth chapter of the book. It is called, “Bruising Their Religion” and focuses especially on what M and K see as the doleful influence of the New Atheists.
Regrettably, I think they get a lot of important things wrong. Let us have a look.
They begin with a whitewashed version of the Webster…
jrosenhouse | July 29, 2009The remainder of my review of Mooney and Kirshenbaum on paper will have to wait a bit longer. You see, I now have Mooney and Kirshenbaum in real life to discuss.
Always happy to have an excuse to visit the big city, I stopped by the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC to see Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum speak about their book. I would estimate there were a little ove a hunred people there.
Mooney and Kirshenbaum tag-teamed their prepared remarks. These remarks were brief and mostly focused on the reasons for writing the book, and a brief summary of what was in it. The…
jrosenhouse | July 26, 2009The science blogosphere has been buzzing about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, the new book by former SciBlings Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. For whatever reason everyone else seems to have received their review copies before I did, and I did not want to weigh in until I had read the book.
That has now happened, so I offer my review. There is too much to address in one post, so I will do three. In the first I will adress what I take to be the broad themes of the book. In the second I will specifically address Chapter Eight, which addresses…