Science & Religion
sb admin | July 18, 2007You will frequently hear certain anti-religion science bloggers and
commenters on these boards saying that the only way for a
non-atheist to be a good scientist is to "compartmentalize"— to
wall off a part of his mind while doing science, and likewise to wall
off the scientific part of his mind while thinking about his
religion.
Do I agree with this? Yes and no.
In the yes column: obviously, we have to wall off, to some degree,
our religion when doing science, but no more so than we must wall off
many other parts of our humanity. If you let your preconceptions
from your religion influence…
sb admin | July 16, 2007So that people don't feel the need to threadcrap in other threads, I open this thread here for people to make their flames, comments, insults, dismissals, expressions of support, and so forth.
I have said before that I'm a Christian. I had my three-part (one, two, three) set of posts in the past about being such, about the role I see for Christianity in the modern scientific age, and why I am Christian specifically (given the wealth of religious traditions available). I repeatedly echoed what you can read on the NCSE website (at this link and in other places): that there need be no conflict…
sb admin | July 9, 2007This is from a letter to the editor that was published in The Tennessean about a month ago. In the "Issues" section on Sunday, they had a page devoted to this, and this time they actually published a long (more than 250 word) letter that I'd written. I had seen, a week previously, that they were going to do this, looking for opinions on the question, "should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?".
I saw in the Issues section of the paper today that you will be doing an
op-ed on the Creation Museum, and you are soliciting comments.
Before I start, I want to make it clear that I comment…
sb admin | June 11, 2007This is my second post where I'm writing, for my own reference, the response to one of the old and hoary creationist canards that are brought up in response to things like my long letter to the editor published in the Tennessean, as part of a segment on the question "should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?".
I will quote from one of the letters I received to give one version of this argument:
Science, by definition must be observable, measurable (testable), and repeatable (reproducible).
Neither creation nor evolution can be observed. Both are done. By evolution, we must specify…
sb admin | June 11, 2007I had a long letter to the editor published in the Tennessean, as part of a segment on the question "should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?" I receive a fair amount of e-mail. This has motivated me to put up, so that I can reference it from now on, my own rejection of a couple of creationist canards. Doubtless you can find huge numbers of rejections of this elsewhere, since these are canards that creationists bring up all the time.
"Evolution is a theory, not a fact."
Strictly speaking, that statement is true. However, this statement is always raised by those who would then…
sb admin | May 27, 2007I'm pretty sure that nowhere in the Bible does it say that the square root of 256 is 16. I happen to know that, yes, 16 squared is 256. Therefore, if I were to tell you and attempt to convince you that the square root of 256 is 22, I would be lying, in that I would be telling you something that isn't true.
But, the "mind" (I hesitate to use that word) behind the new Creation Museum, Ken Ham puts to shame even ultraliberal postmodernists who assert that the results of science are merely a social construction. He says:
Many of the media reps chuckled when I said that the people responsible…
sb admin | May 23, 2007To heck with bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and all the rest. Yes, all of those algorithms were intelligently design, but none of them follow the precepts of Intelligent Design.
And, now, David Morgan-Mar gives us Intelligent Design Sort.
(found via Steve Jackson Games)
sb admin | May 22, 2007Intelligent Design is cleverly designed.
Much of what I say here will apply to almost any other religious tradition in the modern world. I refer specifically to Christianity for three reasons. First, it's the most dominant religion in the USA, which is where I am. Second, I'm a Christian myself. Third, a form of Christianity is the religious tradition followed by those who designed Intelligent Design. However, whenever I refer to Christians or Christianity, I am aware that it could easily apply to many other religions.
Consider the situation many people find themselves in. They are…
sb admin | May 16, 2007I'm in an interesting position. Having so recently posted my own bitch and whine about how my tenure case is in trouble, suddenly we learn that Intelligent Design advocate Guillermo Gonzalez-- somebody who, frankly, has been viewed as a thorn in the side of astronomy by a large fraction of astronomers-- has been denied tenure.
I'm in no position to comment, but will do so anyway, because that's my way.
My own whine and rant suggests (or, anyway, states) that I think that the reasons my tenure case is on the rocks aren't the greatest of reasons. I know I'm a good teacher, and I know that I'm…
sb admin | March 15, 2007Warning:: There is no science whatsoever in this post. If that's going to annoy you, give this one a pass.
In a previous post, I said what role I thought religion and spirituality still could play in the modern, scientific world. All of that applied to any sort of religion or spirituality, and was not specific. However, I have claimed to be a Christian. A lot of people have been asking for me to explain just what I mean by that, since the things I have said seem to contradict most peoples' notions (Christians and non-Christians alike) of what it means to be Christian.
So why do I say that…
sb admin | March 12, 2007I suppose you could, with some justification, accuse me of being a troll, given that my post "So I'm a Christian. Shoot me." generated an entirely predictable set of flames tearing me down for unscientific thinking, and for trying to claim that there is any kind of bias against the religious anywhere on scienceblogs. I continue my trolling here -- though, of course, trolling is not the reason I'm doing this. I'm hoping that there are actually some out there who see this as a valid intellectual exchane.
In that post, I lay a few things out which aren't even the things I thought people might…
sb admin | March 11, 2007It's very irritating to come to my blog and see the advertisement at top for a book proclaiming loudly " GOD: The Failed Hypothesis. How science shows that God does not exist." I haven't clicked on the link, and won't, because its very title indicates to me that it's hogwash.
This bugs me on two levels. First, it sets off my bullshit-o-meter in a big way. God is not a scientific concept, and as such science cannot disprove the existence of God. Science has obviated the need for God or gods for many people, and science assuredly has disproven a lot of things people claim in the name of…
sb admin | February 22, 2007A week ago, a colleague pointed me to this New York Times article about Marcus Ross. Ross is an individual whom I personally have a hard time respecting, given what he's done. He's a Young-Earth Creationist who has managed to get a PhD in geosciences studying a species that vanished 65 million years ago... and all along maintaining as if he believed what he was doing.
This has been written about elsewhere in the blogosphere; I'll just point you to Janet's blog entry on the matter, and you can jump forward from there.
Here's my take on the matter: Ross is not intellectually honest, at least…