jrosenhouse | May 13, 2009Writing in Slate, Marc Oppenheimer has a thoughtful piece about bringing his young daughter to synagogue:
I don't kid myself that Rebekah has some unusual, precocious spirituality. She loves ritual, as all children love ritual. Nothing, except milk and maybe Graham crackers, is more comforting to a toddler than a fun routine enjoyed at predictable intervals. Little boys and girls love the sense of mastery that comes with repetition. They're so proud to finish our sentences as we read them a book for the 50th or one 100th time (“old lady who was whispering...” “hush!”). If we skip bath time,…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2009Matt Taibbi opens a can of whoop-ass on the hapless tag team of Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton. I discussed the same essay in this post. Taibbi writes:
The whole premise recalls Woody Allen's famous syllogism: "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates." And...well, I'm not going to get into this too much, because taking an axe to some soggy old Catholic academic is beginning to feel wrong somehow. But something tells me we're going to be hearing more of this rhetoric, if for no other reason that whenever money gets tight and the times get nervous even…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2009The evolution blogosphere has lately been abuzz over the question of compatibility between science and religion. Jerry Coyne got the ball rolling with this post, criticizing the accommodationist views of the National Center for Science Education. He writes:
Here I argue that the accommodationist position of the National Academy of Sciences, and especially that of the National Center for Science Education, is a self-defeating tactic, compromising the very science they aspire to defend. By seeking union with religious people, and emphasizing that there is no genuine conflict between faith…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2009Jerry Coyne offers some further thoughts on the Richard Lewontin essay I discussed in yesterday's post. Specifically, he addresses the question of why natural selection deserver pride of place among evolutionary mechanisms. He writes:
First of all, yes, it's true that the evidence for natural selection as the cause of most evolutionary change in the past is not as strong as the evidence that evolutionary change occurred. It cannot be otherwise. We can see evolution happening in the fossil record, but it is infinitely harder to parse out the causes of that change. We weren't around when…
jrosenhouse | May 11, 2009The current issue of The New York Review of Books features this essay, by Richard Lewontin. Officially it's a review of three recent books about Darwin and evolution. But since this is the NYRB we are discussing, the essay doesn't really say much about the books themselves.
The essay is disappointing, since for the most part I can't fathom Lewontin's point. Let's take a look:
Why do we call the modern theory of organic evolution “Darwinism”? Charles Darwin certainly did not invent the idea of evolution, that is, of the continuous change in time of the state of some system as a fundamental…
jrosenhouse | May 11, 2009They make creationists sad:
Driving home from church recently, I spotted one of two new billboards sponsored by a local coalition of atheists. “Don't believe in God? You are not alone” was their message, an attempt, the group declares, to let the city know that good people in Dallas, like atheists, don't need God. I'm sad to see the ads go up in my city, but not really surprised. The drift away from conservatism in religion, and in politics, is much more obvious in our nation today.
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2009Odious Catholic League President William Donohue had this to say about the forthcoming Ron Howard film Angels and Demons:
Finally, the pop culture offers many challenges. The film “Angels & Demons,” the prequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” opens May 15. Once again, the tag team of Dan Brown and Ron Howard have collaborated in smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales. And once again, the message conveyed to the audience is invidious: the Catholic Church, which did more to keep the universities open and flourishing during the Middle Ages than any other institution, is painted as…
jrosenhouse | May 6, 2009That's Michael Coulter, production editor for The Sunday Age. Commenter mrcreosote left a link to a magnificent essay by Coulter in in my post of two days ago. It's so good I felt it deserved a post of its own. Let's have a look.
MOST weeks I read The Sunday Age's Faith column, out of professional duty. Most weeks I am left perplexed, unable to reconcile what I am reading with anything I see around me.
What I see is a world slowly tearing itself apart for the sake of one faith or another. A world where an extreme faction of Islam wishes to put me and mine to the sword for my unbelief, and…
jrosenhouse | May 6, 2009The subject of evolution has come up twice on recent editions of the MSNBC show Hardball, hosted by Chris Matthews. Our host has just discovered that the Republicans have a problem with science, you see, and has decided to explore this troubling development.
Better late than never, I suppose. The Repubs were virulently anti-science all through the Bush administration, but Matthews didn't seem to care. He might have invited Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science to discuss the issue. But Repubs were in the ascendancy then, meaning that Matthews was inclined to overlook…
jrosenhouse | May 5, 2009New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently wrote this interesting column about the persistence of religion. Here is an apt summary:
While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is irrefutable. Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions. Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind. Yes, yes, yes. But when is the choir going to sing? And when is the picnic? And is my child going to get a part in the holiday play?…
jrosenhouse | May 5, 2009As a follow-up to yesterday's post about Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton, go have a look at P. Z. Myers' lengthy review of Eagleton's book. It seems that Myers was trapped on a very bad plane ride with only Eagleton for reading material. So what did Myers think?
As I was marking up his little book with these questions, something routine happened: the plane hit some turbulence, bounced about for a bit, and I looked out the window and had the fleeting, morbid thought, "What if we crashed?" We've all had that thought, and I usually dismiss it with little concern, but this time I had a new…
jrosenhouse | May 5, 2009Supreme Court justice David Souter announced his retirement this past week, meaning that Obama's first justice nomination will come sooner than expected. Since there is also a decent chance that he will be appointing successors to Justices Ginsburg and Stevens, it seems Obama has a real chance to put his stamp on the Court.
My criteria for an SC justice are very simple. I want a flaming left-wing twenty-year old. I want a justice who sees an ocean of separation between church and state, who will be strong on defendant's rights, who will be a zealous guardian of privacy rights, and will…
jrosenhouse | May 4, 2009During a recent bookstore browse, I came across Terry Eagleton's recent anti-New Atheist book Reason, Faith and Revolution. I was tempted to buy it in spite of Eagleton's deeply silly review of Dawkins in the London Review of Books. This review was, in large part, the motivation for P.Z. Myers to coin the term Courtier's Reply. By this Myers meant people who responded to Dawkins not by addressing his arguments in any serious way, but instead by rattling off a load of irrelevant theological esoterica Dawkins is expected to master before ever opening his mouth on the subject.
Since I am…
jrosenhouse | May 1, 2009Just finished teaching my last class for the term. Feels soooo goooood.
Well, there are still finals to get through, and the extra-long office hours I generously hold on the days before the finals. And then comes the grading. Sooooo much grading. First the exams. Then the course grades. Then a lull of a few days. And then the inevitable complaints from a few disgruntled students. Graduation is in there somewhere which is actually kind of fun, except for the part about getting up way early on a Saturday.
But then comes summer break. Yaaaay! Since I am not teaching any summer courses…
jrosenhouse | April 30, 2009Keith Olbermann delivered a nice smackdown of empty-headed Minnesota representative Michelle Bachmann on last night's Countdown:
The bronze to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. We're all laughing at her historical gaffe yesterday about Jimmy Carter and swine flu. It turned out she topped herself on the floor of the House.
The Carter gaffe first, “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under a Democrat President Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama. I just think it is an interesting coincidence.”
Yes, the swine outbreak…
jrosenhouse | April 23, 2009You might have noticed that the overlords have updated my blog template. That was very nice of them! Alas, it does mean that some maintenance is required over on the sidebar. I'm not likely to get to that for a day or two, so you will just have to put up with a distorted view of my smiling mug. Sorry about that. I assure you I look far worse in person.
jrosenhouse | April 23, 2009Browsing through S. T. Joshi's book Atheism: A Reader (Prometheus Books, 2000) I came across an excerpt from H. L. Mencken's writing from the Scopes' trial. It contained the following quote:
Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World's contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever…
jrosenhouse | April 22, 2009Here's Uncommon Descent's Barry Arrington holding forth on on the bleak conclusions he believes follow logically from atheism:
Make two assumptions:
(1) That atheistic naturalism is true.
(2) One can't infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.
At this point you might enjoy the exercise of determining what follows about morality from those two premises. I am happy to grant them both. From the first we conclude that supernatural entities, most notably God, do not exist. From the second we conclude that an understanding of…
jrosenhouse | April 17, 2009In the spirit of ending the week with lighter fare, don't miss this article, from Slate, extolling the considerable talents of action star Jason Statham. He is one of those actors who, even when he is in bad movies (as he often is) , always comes off looking good.
jrosenhouse | April 17, 2009The article by Julian Baggini disucssed in yesterday's blog post was a reply of sorts to this article by Madeleine Bunting. She starts with some encouraging words:
This is Holy Week. It started yesterday with Palm Sunday and continues through Holy Thursday, Good Friday and culminates this Sunday with Easter Day. One can no longer assume most people will be aware of this, let alone the events these days mark; in a recent UK poll, only 22% could identify what Easter was celebrating. What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity? One can only…