My book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World is due out November 1, 2009, but likely will be available early September. It is my response to the neo-atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, etc. For the introductory material to this book, including the first chapter, go here. For the endorsements, go here. To pre-purchase on Amazon, go here.
Holy kazoo!
Even Nature isn’t buying the hype about the “missing link”? How soon can we get “evolutionary psychology” be relegated to the tabs and the funny papers?
A hyped-up fossil find highlights the potential dangers of publicity machines.
Last week’s publication of paper describing a 47-million-year-old fossil primate with a remarkable degree of preservation (see http://tinyurl.com/oycvo8) prompted a trickle of news in The Daily Mail that quickly swelled to a flood of media coverage.
In normal circumstances, the interpretation of the specimen given in the paper (J. L. Franzen et al. PLoS ONE 4, e5723; 2009) would have been no more contentious than that of any other fossil primate, and a good deal less so than some.
[ … ]
But the circumstances surrounding the paper’s publication were anything but normal. Before the paper had even been submitted to the journal, Atlantic, a production company based in New York, had commissioned a television documentary and an accompanying book about the find. Just a week after the paper appeared, the book has been published and the documentary has been aired on the History Channel in the United States, as well as Britain’s BBC and Norway’s NRK.
Uh, yeah. They may not have the science, but they sure have the spotlight.
Also, just up at The Post-Darwinist: Read More ›
In “Does Dark Energy Really Exist? Or does Earth occupy a very unusual place in the universe?” physicist Timothy Clifton and astrophysicist Pedro G. Ferreira argue just that: If we give up the Copernican principle, we do not need dark energy to explain the composition of the universe.(Scientific American, March 23, 2009)
Copernican principle? Dark energy? Read More ›
Interesting brief article in the Dallas Morning News about Don McLeroy, head of the Texas State Board of Education: Texas Senate rejects confirmation of conservative education board chief Don McLeroy 12:00 AM CDT on Friday, May 29, 2009 By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News tstutz+@dallasnews.com AUSTIN – The Senate rejected Republican Don McLeroy’s nomination as chairman of the State Board of Education on Thursday after Democrats decried his lack of leadership and “endless culture wars” over evolution and other volatile topics. Sen. Leticia Van de Putte said that the State Board of Education has become a ‘laughingstock of the nation’ under nearly two years of Don McLeroy’s leadership. Along strict party lines, the Senate voted 19-11 for McLeroy, Read More ›
This Sunday, May 30, Wilberforce Forum will feature a special online radio program featuring Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, Director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture. He’ll be discussing his new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, demonstrating that the digital code embedded in DNA points to a designing intelligence and brings into focus an issue that Darwin did not address. Go to www.blogtalkradio.com/wilberforceforum at 6 pm EST, 3 pm PST this Sunday to listen, and ask Dr. Meyer a question by calling in or by posting in the conference forum online.
In Probability’s nature and nature’s probability: A call to scientific integrity, information scientist Donald E. Johnson tackles, among other things, the origin of life.
Johnson takes on the aimless speculation that characterizes so much consensus science today on such issues:
… one should not be able to get away with stating “it is possible that life arose from non-life by …” without first demonstrating that it is indeed possible (defined in the nature of probability) using known science. One could, of course, state “it may be speculated that …,” but such a statement wouldn’t have the believability that its author intends to convey by the pseudo-scientific pronouncement.”(p. 5)
I am so fed up with pseudoscientific pronouncements on the origin of life that I decided to cover all such stories at my Colliding Universes blog, along with speculations about the end of the universe – rather than at Post-Darwinist, where many claims – whether well-supported or not – have at least some basis in fact.
This is a great book for scientists with a background in probability who want to understand why there is a controversy over design in the universe.
Also today at Colliding Universes: Read More ›
I just picked up this article at PhysOrg.com. The kinds of things that scientists are up to these days are quite interesting. Here’s a sample: Researchers design and build networks of genes, splicing them into bacterial genomes to run specific tasks or manufacture desired molecules – a process akin to installing biological computer software. Though the field is rapidly advancing, the gene-based tools available to synthetic biologists remain limited. I found the allusion to “installing computer software” quite compelling. Will these ‘synthetic biologists’ be the ones to settle for us the question of whether intelligence is present in the genome? This work is in the May 29th issue of Science, for those who have online access.
Normally one would expect a story such as this one to be in the National Enquirer. However, in this case, the story presents some interesting features which may have ramifications for the scientific application of ID.
In this case, the Russian scientist is claiming that back in 1908 an ET deliberately flew their spacecraft into a large meteorite to protect our planet. The crash took place in what is called the Tunguska site, somewhere in Siberia. According to Wikipedia, the impact was probably equivalent to a 10-15 megaton nuke. Pretty powerful for 1908. You can see a photo in the Wiki link. Read More ›
[This just in:]
New Website on Faith and Evolution Explores
if the Two are Friends or Foes?
Find out at FaithandEvolution.Org
SEATTLE – In recent years, debates over faith and evolution have continued to intensify. On the one hand, “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins have insisted that Darwinian evolution makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. On the other hand, “new theistic evolutionists” like Francis Collins have assured people that Darwin’s theory is perfectly compatible with faith and need have no damaging cultural consequences.
Who is right? And why does it matter? A new website being launched today at www.faithandevolution.org by the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute explores the issue in-depth.
“FaithandEvolution.Org is for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the scientific, social, and spiritual issues raised by Darwin’s theory, but who is tired of the limited options they are currently being offered by the media,” says Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Center.
“Increasingly, the only voices being heard in the faith and evolution conversation come from two wings of the evolution lobby: atheist evolutionists like Richard Dawkins, and a handful of theistic evolutionists like Francis Collins. But there are a lot of thoughtful scientists and scholars who are skeptical of Darwin’s theory whose views aren’t being heard.” Read More ›
This from a course to be taught in the fall at Rutgers. I’m a big fan of the Scottish common sense realists (especially Thomas Reid) and will be publishing an anthology later this year collecting together writings of Hume, Reid, and Paley on natural theology. Professor Gregory Jackson Seminar: The Anglo-American Enlightenment (350:629) Tuesdays – 9:50am to 12:50pm Bishop House, Room 211 In this course we’re going to take an extended look at the origins of “intelligent design,” a phrase coined not in our own time but in the context of the debates over science and religion in the eighteenth century. Far from believing that the two were irreconcilable, many of the Enlightenment’s influential thinkers worked tirelessly to integrate the Read More ›
Well, the Canadian Science Writers’ Association conference at Science North in Sudbury wrapped up yesterday, and today I got a chance to tour SNOLAB, the underground neutrino detector in the active Creighton Mine, which is currently retooling for SNO Plus, the hunt for dark matter. Just for now: The Solar Neutrino Observatory (SNO) Lab is 2 kilometres underground, and then about two kilometres walk through an active nickel mine, followed by a serious shower and change into clean room gear. SNO’s main recent experiment is now finished, and the lab is being retooled. But 16 science writers were allowed to tour Sno Plus, Canada’s entry in the race to find a dark matter particle. More on all this great stuff Read More ›
Particle physicist Lawrence M. Krauss* addressed the gathering at the Canadian Science Writers’ Association conference at Science North in Sudbury, May 24, 2009.
I made some notes of his remarks in a darkened cave, the Inco Cave at Science North, though I do not have a transcript.
His talk was billed Star Trek Physics, and the PowerPoint revealed physics bloopers spotted in Star Trek, the X-files, and other film resources.
It was certainly entertaining, but not riveting, at least for me. Anyone who gets their physics from sources clearly labelled science fiction or UFOlogy, well …
But Dr. Krauss had advice for science communicators:
1. Don’t assume your audience is interested. “Don’t expect interest, create it.”
2. Science is dull, hard, and unrelated to the real world. Communicators must work against that. (“Remember how boring science can seem.”)
3. “Most people perceive themselves as fundamentally uninterested in science.”
4. Confront misconceptions: it’s the only way people remember.
Now, I have reservations about career academic scientists advising journalists how to communicate, or high school science teachers how to teach. They tend to emit platitudes that are too general to be put into practice, and therefore too general to fail.
Take the advice offered above, for example:
Sometimes we seek to infer from a design what its requirements might have been, and in ID thought this question comes up. As a practitioner in the architecture of large scale computer environments (the composite set of applications, databases, and communications networks) in major enterprises, I wonder if some of the principles my profession uses in design could be useful in understanding what is going on in biology. First a little background. What I am describing applies, in my opinion, to architecture and I would submit there is a rather considerable tension between architecture and design. But I am not going to get into that now, so let’s assume they are the same and call them “architecture”. Next, in my Read More ›
The winner of the # 2 Question: “Why does Earth’s unique situation for science discovery threaten many?” is Bruce David. For a free copy of The Privileged Planet DVD, Bruce David needs to send a snail address to me at oleary@sympatico.ca. He will not be added to a mailing list. I do not have a mailing list. Sorry I am a bit late judging; I was rushing off to a conference. Here is his entry: To vastly over simplify the actual state of affairs, there are two kinds of people in the world: those whose highest value is truth, and those for whom being right is more important than anything else. <!–more–> Imagine that you have grown up into a Read More ›
Darwinian “Scientists have called it “junk DNA.” They have long been perplexed by these extensive strands of genetic material that dominate the genome but seem to lack specific functions. Why would nature (or an Intelligent Designer) force the genome to carry so much excess baggage?” As predicted by Intelligent Design theorists “researchers from Princeton and Indiana University have found that junk DNA may not be so junky after all. They have discovered that DNA sequences from regions of what had been viewed as the “dispensable genome” are actually performing functions that are central for the organism. They have concluded that Darwinian theory was incorrect the genes spur an almost acrobatic rearrangement of the entire genome that is necessary for the Read More ›