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- Suicide is Painless? Albert Camus's First Problem of Philosophy---and the Southern Novelist Walker Percy's Answer to It
- Does Time Exist? Einstein, Julian Barbour, Lee Smolin, Some Greek Philosophers--And The New Data From The NASA Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
- The Passion of the Christopher: Hitchens's Death Eerily Enacts That of Jesus's
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Tag Archives: science
From A Lion Behind A Bush To God Behind The Oz Curtain: The Evolution Of God Belief
What is the relation between God belief and ignorance? I have a colleague in the science department at my college who said this to me yesterday (I’m paraphrasing): “I’m less sympathetic to the young Earth creationist of today than the … Continue reading
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Tagged atheism, evolution, God, ignorance, philosophy, science, superstition
13 Comments
Does Time Exist? Einstein, Julian Barbour, Lee Smolin, Some Greek Philosophers–And The New Data From The NASA Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
Julian Barbour, Albert Einstein, and Parmenides vs. Anaximander and Lee Smolin. Theoretical physicist, Julian Barbour, believes that what we experience as time passing actually consists of frozen moments of space-time in relation to one another (akin to a flip book). It … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged astronomy, einstein, lee smolin, NASA, physics, science, time
41 Comments
How to Save Adam and Eve from Genetics and Darwin
Darwin and genetics have blown up the idea that Adam and Eve had a special creation physically. No new species tends to bottleneck down to two (unless perhaps two stray birds get isolated on an island and start a new … Continue reading
Why Adam and Eve Never Existed (Illustrated By An Analogy To Birds On An Island)
Imagine an island off the coast of a continent. Two birds from the continent–a male and female–get swept up by a storm and find themselves stranded on this island. They go on to mate and a new species of bird … Continue reading
Life on Enceladus?
It appears that beneath the ice of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, is an ocean with sand resting on its bottom and heat vents reaching 190 degrees. Life around the vents? Possibly. Cassini will get within thirty miles of Enceladus … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged astronomy, Enceladus, extraterrestrials, life, science, space
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How Do You Know? Factive Verbs in Relation to Political, Religious, and Scientific Discourse
I’m thinking about factive verbs this morning in relation to such things as global warming, God’s existence, evolution, the future of the stock market, etc. ESTABLISH, for example, is a very strong, emphatic verb, as in, “I’ve established the truth … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, God, language, philosophy, Politics, religion, science, verbs
3 Comments
How Global Warming Denialists Are Likely to “Reason” about Berkeley Physicist Richard Muller’s Findings
I suppose Berkeley physicist Richard Muller is a fool for putting together a team that included a Nobel Prize winning scientist, revisiting all the data on climate change to date, and coming to the same conclusion as the current scientific … Continue reading
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Tagged climate change, global warming, psychology, religion, science
1 Comment
From His Book, “Unweaving the Rainbow”
This is terrific. Richard Dawkins on death. And life.
Letter Writers Heart Richard Dawkins
The beloved Oxford evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, reads out representative samples of the love he attracts from those who follow his work. __________ The tone and content of the letters remind me of numerous pronouncements made by famous theologians and … Continue reading
Hubble Zooms In On A Distant Island Universe
Some life perspective. In the below video released by NASA this month, the Hubble telescope does a gigapixel zoom-in on Andromeda, another island universe beyond our own. (It was Kant who first speculated that distant nubulae–tiny, blurry “clouds” visible in … Continue reading
The Evolution of Kindness and Sympathy
A really good evolution education video via the University of California at Berkeley. We’ve evolved to be more like bonobos than sharks, and it’s one reason why I’m not worried that the decline of religion will lead to deteriorating moral … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, children, evolution, life, love, psychology, science
4 Comments
An Analogy for Comprehending Why Population Geneticists Say Adam and Eve Never Existed
Imagine an island off the coast of a continent. Two birds from the continent–a male and a female–get swept up by a storm and find themselves stranded on this island. They go on to mate and a new species of … Continue reading
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Tagged Adam and Eve, atheism, birds, creationism, evolution, Genesis, genetics, God, science
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Charles Darwin vs. Thomas Aquinas: What Follows from Our Nature?
At his blog recently, Thomist philosopher Edward Feser wrote the following: “For Aquinas, what is good for us is necessarily good for us because it follows from our nature. As such, even God couldn’t change it, any more than he … Continue reading
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Tagged art, Charles Darwin, evolution, philosophy, poetry, science, Thomas Aquinas
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Jeremy England on the Origin of Life
__________ More on Jeremy England here.
Your Genes Made You Do (Half) Of It
Relax a bit. Much less than we probably imagine is really under our control. Note this quote, for instance, from two psychologists recently summarizing at Slate some findings on genes vs. environment: “Genes influence not only our abilities, but the environments we … Continue reading
Bayes Rule, Julia Galef, and TAM 2014
I went to TAM 2014 in Las Vegas over the weekend and saw Julia Galef of the Center for Applied Rationality on a panel with philosopher Daniel Dennett. I’d never heard of Galef before this weekend, but she has a … Continue reading
God and Evolution?
As an agnostic, I never have any problem with somebody who says, “13.7 billion year-old cosmos and evolution, yes, obviously, but not, ‘It all happened via the combination of chance and natural selection.’ Something more is up, and I think … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, creation, evolution, religion, science, young earth creationism
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Breeding for Intelligence? A Google Employee Asks the Question to Researcher Stephen Hsu of the Beijing Genomics Institute
In the below Google Tech Talk, Stephen Hsu talks to Google employees about the search for the genes behind intelligence (and seeks to recruit them into an ongoing study being conducted at the Beijing Genomics Institute). I shit you not. … Continue reading
Humans Cause Global Warming By Tipping The Balance
Is it true that humans make only a tiny contribution to the Earth’s carbon cycle each year? Yes. Does this mean that humans aren’t causing global warming? No. Science journalist Graham Wayne explains: Although our output of 29 gigatons of CO2 … Continue reading
Gavin Schmidt Of NASA On Why Climate Change Models Are Growing Increasingly Accurate
In the below TED talk, Gavin Schmidt of NASA explains, clear as a bell, why global climate change models mirror, with ever greater accuracy, what we actually observe on Earth. It has to do with a trial-and-error process of calibrating … Continue reading
