Most likely most of you will recall the late Stephen J. Gould’s principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria or NOMA. In sum, Gould espouses the notion that Science and Religion each have their own realms and hence their own respective magisterium and those boundaries need to be respected. NOMA could be stated more tersely as “science is science and religion and religion – one has nothing to do with the other” or something to that effect. In any case, the main idea of NOMA is for Religion and Science to tell each other “get outta my house!”

As a principle, NOMA has its problems, not the least of which is the question of which magisterium dictates the principle itself? If its either Science or Religion, then it is clearly self-refuting. If its something else, Gould doesn’t tell us what that is or why this third magisterium gets to dictate to Science and Religion where the boundaries are and put up the “Stay Out” signs.

In response, a friend of mine has proposed a different principle: COMA which stands for Completely Overlapping Magisteria. (Its tempting to say something like ‘put NOMA in a COMA’…but I’ll refrain. Read More ›

Hey, you’ve heard it all from the fashion mag at the local clip shop, … so, like, what can I add, really? Neuroscience shows why women love shopping, why gay guys read maps like women, why jealous guys … come to think of it, why does neuroscience only tell us what we already heard from that high school drop-out cousin, shooting pool down in the rec room between his split shifts at the loading dock? Is this really science? Probably not, say a team of statisticians, who took a look at some of these studies. Basically, many of the claimed correlations were simply too high to be possible. That was because the “social neuroscience” people were cherry picking the data. Read More ›

The publications page at EvoInfo.org has just been updated. Two forthcoming peer-reviewed articles that Robert Marks and I did are now up online (both should be published later this year).* ——————————————————- “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success” William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II Abstract: Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs on average as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a moderately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Three measures to characterize the information required for successful search are (1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target Read More ›

In his review for The Sunday Times (January 11, 2009) of a new book on the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo of the Science Museum of London, John Carey begins by noting that Paul Dirac was the greatest British physicist since Newton:

In the 1920s and 1930s, together with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Pauli, he opened up the field of quantum physics, changing the course of science. In 1933, aged 31, he became the youngest theoretician to win a Nobel prize.

pathologically silent and retiring, and as a thinker he was unintelligible except to mathematicians. Even his fellow physicists complained that he worked in a deliberately mystifying private language. For his part, he insisted that the quantum world could not be expressed in words or imagined. To draw its picture would be “like a blind man sensing a snowflake. One touch and it’s gone”. Its beauty revealed itself only in mathematical formulae.

A physics professor at Princeton is the latest of hundreds and hundreds of scientists who’ve stepped up to the plate saying anthropogenic CO2 as the cause of global warming is bogus. Professor denies global warming theory “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.” In other news, what I said before is coming to pass. I wrote that when global cooling takes hold we’ll be left with only a fervent wish that more CO2 could warm it back up. Well, a newspaper editor in Flint Michigan has started praying Read More ›

The big mistake in Origin that Darwinists won’t admit is gradualism. Darwin explained that according to his theory we should expect to observe a continuum of living species each with only the slightest of variations between them. He postulated that we don’t observe this because the fittest species take over and the insensibly slight variants die off leaving species that are fully characteristic of their kind which then makes possible taxonomic classification by those characters. It’s in the full title in the latter half “The Preservation of Favored Races”. That left Darwin with explaining the fossil record which is indisputably a record of saltation. Species in the fossil record appear abruptly fully characteristic of their kind, persist unchanged for an Read More ›

Steve – I appreciate your work in thinking these issues through, and want to encourage you in your research into intelligent design. As your post was seemingly addressed to me I thought it best to reply with a new thread. Firstly, my concern is to address the possible pitfalls for the design argument that might occur by extending it too far, although I think it possible that some progress can be made in this direction with care. There are historical examples, and the danger is that we might only repeat the errors of previous times if we are not careful. I too have an interest in theodicy and I have discussed theodicy and ethical issues in my book Restoring the Ethics of Creation (my PhD supervisor wrote The Groaning of Creation). Read More ›

Memo to bus passengers stranded in massive snowstorm:

Don’t worry! Be happy! Don’t be in such a hurry! There’s probably no God …

… and if you freeze to death by the side of the road, no one cares …
Don’t worry! Be happy!

Apparently, a Christian bus driver has refused to drive a bus with one of Dawkins’s slogans proclaiming that “There’s probably no God: Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” plastered on the side.

Like commenter jstanley, addressing this post on Dawkins’s bus ad campaign, I am mystified why anyone holding a pink slip, foreclosure notice, or list of pills to start – prior to dreadful cancer treatment – would be especially happy to learn that there is probably no God.

And today, those people are pretty numerous, too …

(Pssst! There probably is a God. So pray anyway. It might help, and can’t hurt.)

Actually, it’s odd, and quite sad, to see the career of Dawkins, Oxford’s once Professor of the Public Understanding of Science end this way – raising funds for anti-God transit ads. But that’s his supporters’ problem.

He himself claims that he fears that his atheism campaign is losing to religion. Read More ›

It offers a paean of praise to Dutton (and Steve Pinker) who “know” that great tenors could “spot the savanna with little Pavarottis” by catching the ear of ladies:

Natural selection is one thing, but the stronger, and more entertaining, basis for Dutton’s case for an evolutionary aesthetics is sexual selection, which Darwin explored in The Descent of Man. A clear tenor voice wouldn’t help Pleistocene man outrun a jaguar, but it might ingratiate him with the ladies — remember the guitarist on the stairs in Animal House? — allowing him to spread his genes widely and spot the savanna with little Pavarottis. Dutton describes the possession of artistic talent as “an ornamental capacity analogous to the peacock’s tail” — or to a florid vocabulary. These traits signal a certain robustness or intelligence, which are attractive qualities in a potential mate.

First, if Pleistocene man (with whom Katie Couric has never booked an interview, no matter how passionately she believes in him) couldn’t deep-six a jaguar, Read More ›

Steve Fuller, in the preceding article, begins by saying that Darwinists acknowledge the flaws in Darwin’s Origin of Species and seek to correct the flaws and expand on it. He further says this separates the Darwinist reading of Origin from the Christian reading the Bible. Well, I for one would like to know exactly what flaws in Origin of Species Fuller thinks are acknowledged. Furthermore, I know plenty of Christians who believe much of the bible is methaphoric. They don’t think the earth and life was created in 6 days. They don’t think Lot’s wife  was literally turned into a pillar of salt. They don’t think the entire earth was flooded and all the animals were saved in pairs on Read More ›

This post originally began as a response to Andrew Sibley but the issues here may resonate with others wanting to reconcile science and religion, coming at it mainly from the religious side. My concern here, as an interested bystander, is that apologetics tends to be much too apologetic. Christianity, in particular, has a much stronger hand to play with regard to the support of science.

Read More ›

Recently, at Uncommon Descent, we discussed Jesse Kilgore, who killed himself after reading Dawkins and Pekka Eric Auvinen, the young Finnish social Darwinist shooter (2007) , to say nothing of Eric Harris at Columbine. While some have pointed to these examples of the harm done by pop Darwinism, I’ve always been cautious. Disturbed people have taken their own or others’ lives for a variety of reasons. Better evidence, it seems to me, is the bad assumptions of people assumed to be intelligent, emotionally normal, and well-meaning. Consider then the case of Bill Moyers of PBS: Read More ›

As many of you probably saw in the news NASA announced significant new evidence that microbial life exists on Mars. The evidence is methane plumes. There are some rare abiotic mechanisms which can produce methane but the probability that those account for it are slim. For those who follow such things you might also recall that a meteor from Mars found in Antarctica bore what looked like fossilized bacteria. Along with the recent discovery by Mars surface explorers of water and minerals which only form in the presence of water it’s looking like a pretty strong case when all this is taken together. So what does this mean for ID? Well, it means that those ID supporters who put stock Read More ›

Following previous discussion on the influence that Plato’s Timaeus may have had on David Hume and Erasmus Darwin’s work, I thought it would be interesting to compare a well known paragraph of Charles Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species with a passage in the Timaeus. Spot the allusion to ‘forms’ and the phrase ‘most beautiful.’ Having attended a lecture in the Ian Ramsey conference on Design and Nature at Oxford last year, it was pointed out by Stephen Snobelen that Newton had used similar phrases from Plato in his writing such as ‘form’ and ‘most beautiful.’ It is possible that Darwin was referencing Plato through Newton (hence reference to gravity), but also that it stems from Hume and E.Darwin. Leaving aside the question of how Plato ought to be interpreted I would appreciate comments about how people think Charles Darwin used it.  Read More ›

My friend Forrest Mims, called by Discover Magazine one of the 50 best brains in science, has – predictably – been attacked by mediocrities at the mag’s blog, due to his interest in intelligent design, and he has responded:

Returning to Mike’s concern that I advocate Intelligent Design, it is rather ironic that my first visit to Hawaii when the satellite drift was independently confirmed by I83 was to give a keynote talk at a scientific meeting about how I lost “The Amateur Scientist” column at Scientific American when the editor learned I rejected Darwinian macroevolution and abortion. That talk resulted in an annual teaching assignment in Hawaii that has allowed me to continue annual calibrations at the Mauna Loa Observatory since 1992 and to write a 270,000-word book on the amazing history of this world famous atmospheric research station. (The book will be published late in 2009 or in 2010.)

Mike and others who are troubled by Intelligent Design advocates who do serious science and publish in leading scholarly journals (please see my web sites for a list of my publications) need not be so worried, for part of the foundation of modern science was laid by men and women who believed in a designer God.

 

 

In our feature, we recognized Mims specifically for his contributions as an amateur scientist, and we stand by that assessment. His work on the Altair 8800 computer, on RadioShack’s home electronics kit, and on The Citizen Scientist newsletter has been undeniably influential. DISCOVER does not in any way endorse the Discovery Institute’s views on “intelligent design.” At the same time, Mims’s association with that group does not invalidate his role as a leading figure in the American amateur science community, any more than James Watson’s dubious speculations about race take away from his groundbreaking research on DNA.