jrosenhouse | May 31, 2008From Michael Ruse's review of The God Delusion in Isis:
More seriously, Dawkins is entirely ignorant of the fact that no believer - with the possible exception of some English clerics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - has ever thought that arguments are the best support for belief.
From Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books:
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For…
jrosenhouse | May 30, 2008In his book Indiscrete Thoughts, mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota spoofed a certain style of book reviewing:
The bane of expository work is Professor Neanderthal of Redwood Poly. In his time, Professor Neanderthal studied noncommutative ring theory with the great X, and over the years, despite heavy teaching and administrative commitments (including a deanship), he has found time to publish three notes on idempotents (of which he is justly proud) in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.
Professor Neanderthal has not failed to keep up with the latest developments in…
jrosenhouse | May 29, 2008There are certain milestone moments in the history of any household that, while representing small triumphs, are also tinged with a bit of sadness. Baby's first steps. The first visit from the Tooth Fairy. High school graduation. Each represents a passage from a comfortable and familiar phase of life into something new and unknown. An opportunity to spread your wings and explore new horizons, but also a sign that something good has been lost. Such are the vicissitudes of a life well-lived. My friends, my little slice of heaven has experienced such a moment.
Isaac the cat has started…
jrosenhouse | May 28, 2008There is something about Richard Dawkins that seems to drive otherwise intelligent people completely out of their minds. Dawkins writes a book called The Selfish Gene, and some scholarly critics actually go after him on the grounds that genes can not be selfish. Then he wrote The God Delusion, a badly needed bit of pushback against the seemingly endless flood of religious ignorance, bigotry and violence, and some critics thought the really important thing to note was Dawkins' lack of respect for the ontological argument, or the fact that he did not discuss the views of Wittgenstein.
Now…
jrosenhouse | May 28, 2008According to former White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan, the Bush administration has been somewhat less than forthcoming:
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.
Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs…
jrosenhouse | May 27, 2008This essay by Peter Bebergal is getting some bloggy attention. Chad Orzel liked it. John Wilkins calls it “lovely, lyrical and wistful.” P.Z. is less impressed.
I'm with P.Z. Surprise!
The essay starts off strong with a condemnation of the Creation Museum. Hard to object to that!
Sadly, the essay quickly veers off into an all-too-familiar defense of the allegedly good sort of religion, as opposed to the simplistic kind represented by the fundamentalists. His message can be summed up as follows: “Sure, if you take religious claims seriously then of course you will think religion is…
jrosenhouse | May 27, 2008Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the big Creation Museum in Kentucky. They grow up so fast, don't they?
To recognize the occasion, the Northern Kentucky Enquirer offers us this article. It's a sadly typical representative of the genre.
All 280 staff members of the museum and founding ministry, the nonprofit Answers in Genesis, begin their days in prayer before visitors arrive.
Since it opened May 28 last year, more than 400,000 people have visited the $27 million, 60,000-square-foot museum, which presents a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the belief that God created the…
jrosenhouse | May 23, 2008It seems I'm not the only one who's spent the last year worrying about whether I needed to update my CV. My SciBling Janet Stemwedel got tenure! In philosophy no less. (You can have a career doing that?)
So congratulations to Janet!
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2008Check it out:
Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2008I'm about halfway through Reza Aslan's book No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam, published in 2005. I've read enough to recommend the book whole-heartedly. Aslan is an excellent writer who presents some very dry material with a lot of verve. At times the book is hard to put down.
On the other hand, I don't entirely buy Aslan's view of things.
As Aslan tells it, Muhammad was a social reformer of stunning moral insight, far ahead of his time on the subject of social, especially gender, equality. The notion of jihad, far from being a license to go out and kill…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2008The big Monty Hall book has finally been sent off to OUP, so it's time to get back to blogging. We begin with lighter fare.
I caught the midnight screening of the new Indiana Jones movie last night. Did it live up to its billing?
No. It was terrible. A true disaster. Cringe-worthy. Hard to see how it could have been worse. At least there's still Get Smart and The Incredible Hulk to look forward to.
I see that P.Z. Myers has a post up describing the process by which Indiana Jones movies get written. Methinks P.Z. is giving them too much credit. There was not one single, solitary…
jrosenhouse | May 16, 2008Every once in a while Chris Matthews does a good deed. On last night's edition of Hardball he had conservative radio talk show host Kevin James on his show. James was keen to pontificate on the nature of appeasement. Matthews' other guest was Mark Green. What happened next was priceless:
MATTHEWS: I want to do a little history check on you because the president's referring to history. He attacked those who would imitate Senator William Boar of Idaho, who was a Republican isolationist back in the late '30s, who supported whatever, some notion of getting along with Hitler better. Let me…
jrosenhouse | May 14, 2008That's the title of a truly excellent article by Stephen Pinker for The New Republic. The subject is the 500+ page report by the President's Council on Biotheics attempting to define what human dignity actually is. I despair of selecting just a few quotes, since the whole article is superb, but I will give it a try beneath the fold.
Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.
The report's oddness begins with…
jrosenhouse | May 13, 2008What a charming President we have:
For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.
“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the…
jrosenhouse | May 13, 2008Ed Brayton has an interesting post on one of my favorite subjects. It is based on remarks made by two of Ed's commenters. Let's have a look.
Commenter Sastra begins with the following:
I suspect that ID advocates haven't bothered to condemn Stein's statement because they have all intuitively translated it into what Stein actually meant. They translate everything into their own idiom, because they are fighting a different war. It's not about the science.
“Science leads to killing people” doesn't really mean what it appears to say. Instead, it means:
“If you base your world view only on…
jrosenhouse | May 13, 2008David Brooks has a fairly goofy column in today's New York Times. Apparently “hard-core materialism” is on its way out:
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.
The idea that meaning, belief and consciousness emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of nerual firings is not an alternative to materialism, it is a consequence of it. The…
jrosenhouse | May 8, 2008There's nothing to see here. Let's all move along now...
Oh, and go see Iron Man. Great movie!
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2008It's sweet. It's soooo sweet. All the years of hiding, of playing along, of pretending to be one of them, just to get to this point. How many times did I sit there during afternoon tea, throwing darts at the board with Michael Behe's face on it, laughing at their sick little jokes:
How many Creationists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Creationists don't use lightbulbs. They prefer the Dark Ages!!
Hahahahahaha! Hey, that's a good one. Tell me that one about William Dumbski again...
Sure, I went along. I participated in all those morbidly anti-religious initiation rites…
jrosenhouse | May 6, 2008Here at EvolutionBlog we're sometimes a bit slow with the routine maintenance. My blogroll over there has long been in need of a massive updating. My brief attempt to come up with a cool banner for the blog foundered on my general lack of motivation for such a project. And I still haven't gotten around to figuring out why my Chess links don't quite format properly.
But if you look carefully you'll notice one change I managed to get around to with all due speed. I received a letter today informing me that I am no longer expected merely to Assist the other professors, I am now entitled to…
jrosenhouse | May 1, 2008I have often commented that it is the arguments of theistic evolutionists, as opposed to those offered by Creationists, that have convinced me that evolution and Christianity can not be reconciled in any reasonable way. A good case in point is Francisco Ayala.
Via Ed Brayton I came across this profile of Ayala from Tuesday's New York Times. In it we find items such as this:
Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said,…