jrosenhouse | May 23, 2007The New York Times gives us sneak peek at the big Creation Museum opening in Kentucky this weekend:
The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall,…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2007I only have time for quick blogging today, but we ought to tak a quick look this account, from The Washington Post, about Newt Gingrich's speech to the graduates at Liberty University:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich decried a “growing culture of radical secularism” Saturday morning as he hailed the life of Liberty University's late founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, in an address to the school's 2007 graduating class.
In a speech heavy with religious allusions but devoid of hints about his presidential ambitions, Gingrich drew applause from the graduates and their families in the school's…
jrosenhouse | May 21, 2007Over at BeliefNet, Gregg Easterbrook writes the following:
Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other by the hundreds in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Hindus and Muslims are slaughtering each other in India, herding neighbors into house or trains then setting them afire. Catholics and Protestants continue to kill each other in Northern Ireland. Sunnis and Shias have their arms wrapped around each other's throats throughout the Islamic world. And of course, on Sept. 11, 19 Muslims were so determined to murder helpless Christians and Jews that they were willing to die to shed the…
jrosenhouse | May 18, 2007And now for something completely different.
As a high school freshman I was assigned to read a heavily abridged version of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables. I loved it immediately. Later I resolved to procure a copy of the full, unabridged version, complete in all of its 1200+ page glory. I finally got around to doing that in college. Despite its immense bulk, I found it almost impossible to put down. It was readable on many levels: As a ripping good yarn filled with suspense and plot twists, as a meditation on social justice, or as a study of some of the most interesting and memorable…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2007Two other items caught my eye while I was slumming over at Town Hall. First, here's William Rusher warning us all about the pernicious influence of junk science:
As regular readers know, I seldom review books in these columns, preferring to leave that important job to professional reviewers. But every once in a while a book comes along that illuminates a major political problem so effectively that I cannot resist calling it to the attention of thoughtful readers.
What book would that be, Mr. Rusher?
That is the case with Tom Bethell's “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science,” recently…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2007The next time you see someone criticize Richard Dawkins for not giving adequate treatment to the modal logic version of the ontological argument, remind him that this column, from Town Hall columnist Doug Giles, is far more representative of the depth of American religious thought:
Paul (not the lead singer of the Beatles, but the apostle Paul) states that God has made Himself known, via creation, to all men. According to the apostle, God's revealed Himself not just to Christians and to Jews, but to every one everywhere (see Romans 1:18-21).
This means that from Jo-Jo the Brazilian monkey…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2007Well, I guess it's about time I weighed in on the Gonzalez situation.
Guillermo Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, but he is best known as the coauthor (with Jay Richards) of The Privileged Planet, published by Regnery. Richards and Gonzalez present a novel, and especially vapid, gloss on the old fine-tuning argument. When I attended the big ID confab in Knoxville some weeks ago, one of the featured talks was by Richards, specifically discussing this book. I discussed some of the problems with their arguments here.
Gonzalez recently came up for tenure at ISU, and was…
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2007Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of my call-up to the bigs! Since then I have done 339 posts and have received over 6100 comments. Seems like a good opportunity to thank Seed for putting together this little party, and to all the readers and commenters who have shamelessly enabled my blogging addiction. Here's to another year!
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2007I spent the day in Washington D.C. yesterday. My SciBlings Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney were speaking at the annual meeting of the AIBS (that's the American Institute of Biological Sciences). The subject: How to communicate science effectively.
They make a number of persuasive points, and I certainly agree with their basic thesis. Scientists definitely need to be savvier in dealing with the media than they historically have been. But I'm still a little suspicious of some of their suggestions about evolution specifically. A bit too much “Lay off the religion!” for my taste.
It was…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2007Since I'm criticizing my SciBlings today, permit me a few words about this post from Orli over at Neurontic.
Orli is unimpressed with the recent glut of atheist books. She begins by reproducing a segment from a previous post:
Dawkins and Dennett simply cannot understand the impulse to cling to an antiquated belief system not grounded in fact. (They seem incapable of recognizing that religion, despite its myriad flaws, provides a type of moral succor in times of strife that science can't.) To convince the masses of the errors of their ways, they're using the only weapon at their disposal:…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2007P.Z. Myers does not agree with my take on Mitt Romney's statement regarding evolution.
Now, I agree with P.Z. on about 99% of everything in life. But on this one, and on theistic evolution generally, he is way off.
Let's start with his title: “Mitt Romney, theistic evolutionist...and this is supposed to be a good thing?”
My answer: Yes! This is an unambiguously good thing.
Not the best thing, certainly. The best thing would be for him to denounce God belief as silly and to affirm that scientists have no need of that hypothesis. But this is one of those times where we shouldn't make the…
jrosenhouse | May 11, 2007Matthew and Land look like Nobel Prize winners compared to Bill O'Reilly. He had Kirk Cameron on to discuss the vexing questtion of whether God exists. The video is available here. The interview opened with O'Reilly boasting of having defeated Richard Dawkins in their recent debate. Dawkins couldn't tell him where the universe came from, you see.
To set this up, O'Reilly asked Cameron to prove, in a minute, that God exists. Cameron answered with his stadard child's version of the argument from design. Then the following remarkable exchange occurred:
CAMERON: Plus, Darwin said in…
jrosenhouse | May 11, 2007On yesterday's edition of the MSNBC chat show Hardball, host Chris Matthews had the following surreal discussion with Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention:
MATTHEWS: Let's get to it. On Broadway right now, "Inherit the Wind" is playing. I hear Christopher Plummer is fabulous. I've always been a Brian Dennehy fan. Brian Dennehy is playing the William Jennings Bryant character. Are you surprised that three of the Republican candidates for president in our debate last week openly expressed opposition to a belief in evolution?
LAND: No. I'm not surprised at all.…
jrosenhouse | May 11, 2007According to Michael Luo at The New York Times blog, Mitt Romney has clarified his views on evolution. Here's the set-up:
Mitt Romney expanded on his belief in evolution in an interview earlier this week, staking out a position that could put him at odds with some conservative Christians, a key voting bloc he is courting.
Mr. Romney, a devout Mormon, surprised some observers when he was not among those Republican candidates who raised their hands last week when asked at the Republican presidential debate if they did not believe in evolution. (Senator Sam Brownback, former Gov. Mike Huckabee…
jrosenhouse | May 9, 2007So I watched Nightline tonight, buoyed by the fact that the clips that appeared on the website earlier today were not too bad from the atheist standpoint (as I described here.) I should have known better. Having just watched the actual show, it is clear that they had no intention of giving any sort of accurate picture of what either side said. Instead, the goal was to play in to the standard script in which the fanatical Christians are presented as lovable, but simplistic, while the atheists are presented as dogmatic and obnoxious.
Almost nothing from the clips I viewed this afternoon…
jrosenhouse | May 9, 2007You really have to have a look at this column, from David Limbaugh, posted at Town Hall. It is simply not to be believed.
The title: Leftist Thought Control. I'd respond to Limbuagh's arguments but for the fact that he doesn't provide any. Instead he simply makes assertion after assertion about how the left does not brook dissent about evolution, homosexual rights or global warming. The assertions are tripped out with anecdotes so vague they are impossible to respond to. Familiar stuff.
What makes the column remarkable, however, are its internal contradictions and complete disregard for…
jrosenhouse | May 9, 2007Robert Farley, writing at Tapped, has an excellent review of the new Spider-Man movie. I think he perfectly summarizes the film's good points and bad points. He makes the point, exactly right in my opinion, that it's not that Spider-Man III is unusually bad, it's that Spider-Man II was unusually good. I've placed two excerpts below the fold:
I suspect that much of the negativity about the third film stems from how poorly it stands up to the second. I think that we have an Empire Strikes Back problem. Thinking people everywhere understand that Empire was, by far, the best of the original…
jrosenhouse | May 9, 2007If you have any interest, clips from the big Nightline God debate are now online at the ABC News website. Mostly what you'd expect, though I think things went a bit better for the atheists than I had anticipated.
Representing the forces of darkness and ignorance were Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. Having seen their staggeringly dopey infomercials on television, I was not optimistic that they would have anything intelligent to say here. They are, however, very polished in their presentation, which made me worry they might come off as persuasive. As it happens I needn't have worried.
The…
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2007I saw Spider-Man Three this weekend. I liked it. A lot.
The critics have been panning it pretty severely, but they are wrong. They've been complaining that there is too much CGI, that there are too many supervillains, and that the story is unconvincing. Actually, I was impressed by how restrained the film is. In a two and half hour movie there are really only a handful of big action sequences. Unlike many recent action movies, people actually talk to each other in this one. And, c'mon! The CGI is pretty spectaular. The Sandman effects alone are worth the considerable price of…
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2007Last Thursday the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a debate on the subject of Darwinism and Conservatism. A video of the debate is available online, but I haven't had a chance to view it yet. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with this article from The New York Times.
Over the years evolution has been used in the service of a great many political viewpoints. In Darwin's time, what we might call the “pro-Darwinian right” argued for Social Darwinism. You can still find strains of this thinking in the political right today. Nowadays, however, the pro-Darwinian-right, as…