Darrel Ray thinks that atheists have better sex lives, citing his study to prove it:

But devoutly religious people rated their sex lives far lower than atheists. They also admitted to strong feelings of guilt afterwards.

Strict religions such as Mormons ranked highest on the scale of sexual guilt. Their average score was 8.19 out of 10. They were followed closely behind by Jehovah’s Witness, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, and Baptist.

Catholics rated their levels of sexual guilt at 6.34 while Lutherans came slightly lower at 5.88 . In contrast, atheists and agnostics ranked at 4.71 and 4.81 respectively.

It’s quite true that devoutly religious people feel bad if they do something they think is bad. Some sources are more unsettled by people who aren’t like that.

Ray is best known as the discoverer of the God virus.

On the other hand, Read More ›

From David DiSalvo’s “NeuropPsyched” at Forbes’blog, we learn about “Five Big Developments in Neuroscience to Watch” (June 17, 2011), such as: Read More ›

You can tell how much the notion of the multiverse pervades popular culture when a media release for the latest woo-woo train advises, Patricia McLaine’s Cosmic Conspiracy explores the common humanity that we all share as members of the Universe or Multiverse, which intricately connects us all. It is a result of the intense emotion generated within the “Mass Mind” that psychics, “regardless of the level of awareness or education” are far more in tune with—picking up negative patterns then positive ones—in predicting future world events.When asked by journalist Hal Jacques to make world predictions for The Star in January of 1977, … Twenty-five years ago, who knew the term “multiverse” so well? File with: What the Bleep Do We Read More ›

In “Scientists put out call for respect” (Sydney Morning Herald, June 20, 2011), Phillip Coorey reports,

Australia’s scientific community will launch a campaign tonight aimed at redressing what it says is the damage to science which is being caused by climate change denial. Read More ›

In “Why liberals fell for ‘Muslim lesbian blogger’ hoax” (OC Register, June 17, 2011), Mark Steyn tells a story that shows why current Big Media won’t likely recover from their current tailspin:

On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl In Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, “Miss Brooks” and “Miss Arraf” were colleagues. “Amina” had posted at LezGetReal before starting “A Gay Girl In Damascus.” As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:”Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.”

It got so crazy that …

This problem will not get any better. There isn’t going to be a mainstream media that writes with any understanding whatever about the intelligent design controversy. The media that do that will either be new media or media emerging alive from the debacle. The only solution is, …

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By now, so many things made us human. Better to say we don’t know?

Here we are told about “How fatherhood made us human.”

According to Alan Boyle at MSNBC‘s Cosmic Log (06/2011/17):

Other research suggests that early humans diverged from chimps in the organization of hunter-gatherer societies. Groups of chimpanzees are generally organized along kinship lines, and there’s a high level of aggression between those kin groups. But Arizona State University anthropologist Kim Hill and his colleagues reported in the journal Science that today’s human hunter-gatherer groups are more mixed up, genetically speaking. Read More ›

Here: Why didn’t polytheistic religions produce modern science? The answer is that finite gods do not create the universe. Indeed, the universe creates them. They are generally said to arise out of some pre-existing, primordial “stuff.” For example, in the genealogy of the gods of Greece, the fundamental forces such as Chaos gave rise to Gaia, the great mother, who created and then mated with the heavens (Ouranos) and the sea (Pontos) to give birth to the gods. Hence, in a polytheistic worldview, the universe itself is not the creation of a rational Mind, and is therefore not thought to have a rational order. The universe has some kind of order, of course, but one that is inscrutable to the Read More ›

Here, we’ve written a fair bit about peer review, but so have lots of sources. Here’s E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance (climate Armageddon skeptics),

It now arises that the failures occur not just in climate science but across the board, as the article “Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun” (published in a peer-reviewed journal!), summarized and commented on here, reveals. Writes Richard Smith in his study of peer review published in Breast Cancer Review:… almost no scientists know anything about the evidence on peer review. It is a process that is central to science – deciding which grant proposals will be funded, which papers will be published, who will be promoted, and who will receive a Nobel prize. We might thus expect that scientists, people who are trained to believe nothing until presented with evidence, would want to know all the evidence available on this important process. Yet not only do scientists know little about the evidence on peer review but most continue to believe in peer review, thinking it essential for the progress of science. Ironically, a faith based rather than an evidence based process lies at the heart of science.

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Steve Fuller, reviewing Conor Cunningham’s Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Eerdmans, 2011) for Times Higher (24 March 2011), comments,

Let me start by conceding the central, most controversial thesis argued in this book: that neo-creationism and ultra-Darwinism are opposing offshoots of the same modernist root. Both read the Bible literally and take nature itself to possess a crackable code. Neither wishes science and theology to exist in separate spheres. To be sure, William Dembski and Richard Dawkins, say, differ radically on what should happen once the two are brought together: one infers natural theology, the other atheistic naturalism. These are the terms on which the ongoing “Darwin wars” are fought.My disagreement starts with the suggestion in the subtitle that Read More ›

In “Human consciousness is much more than mere brain activity,” Mark Vernon writes, “When we meditate or use our powers of perception, we call on more than just a brain” (The Guardian, June17, 2011):

How does the animated meat inside our heads produce the rich life of the mind? Why is it that when we reflect or meditate we have all manner of sensations and thoughts but never feel neurons firing? It’s called the “hard problem”, and it’s a problem the physician, philosopher and author Raymond Tallis believes we have lost sight of – with potentially disastrous results.Vernon, reviewing Raymond Tallis’s new book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, offers,

What is astonishing about this rampant reductionism is that it is based on a conceptual muddle that is readily unpicked. Sure, you need a brain to be alive, but to be human is not to be a brain. Think of it this way: you need legs to walk, but you’d never say that your legs are walking.  Read More ›

Steno tells us that Jay Richards’ (ed) God and Evolution won World Magazine’s Book of the Year (American), as did Norman Nevin’s (ed) Should Christians Embrace Evolution (British).

Don’t miss Marvin Olasky’s thoughtful discussion of why these two books deserved to lead. First, because

Think about the three main intellectual influencers of the 20th century: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. Two of the three—Freud and Marx—have lost most of their influence. The exception is Darwin. Two years ago his millions of fans celebrated the bicentennial of his birth, which was also the 150th anniversary of his famous book On the Origins of Species.He highlights the role of the Templeton Foundation in fronting Christian Darwinism, which most Christians actually do not and cannot accept.

Or, as I like to say, “Your church would make a nice little block of condos, but why are you giving it money in the mean time? Shouldn’t you be buying shares?” Read More ›

World Magazine has this year nominated two books for its Book of the Year. Should Christians Embrace Evolution? (ed) Norman Nevin, and Jay Richards (ed) God and Evolution. http://www.worldmag.com/articles/18207

In his new book, The Science of Evil, developmental psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinkshe has the mysteryof evil worked out, or so Katherine Bouton explains, in “Book sees evil as zero empathy: Baron-Cohen’s study could stir controversy” (Halifax Chronicle-Herald, June 18, 2011):

“My main goal is to understand human cruelty, replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy,’ ” he writes at the beginning of the book, which might be seen as expanding on the views on empathy expressed in his 1997 book, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Bradford). Evil, he notes, has heretofore been defined in religious terms (with the concept differing in the major world religions), as a psychiatric condition (psychopathology) or, as he puts it, in “frustratingly circular” terms: “He did x because he is truly evil”).[ … ]

“What leads an individual’s Empathizing Mechanism to be set at different levels?” Baron-Cohen asks. “The most immediate answer is that it depends on the functioning of a special circuit in the brain, the empathy circuit” …

Must be somewhere near the charity neurons but far from the God circuit, right?

Baron-Cohen reckons without my friend Five Feet of Fury, who took his test and found it flawed: Read More ›

I don’t have much of a lead-in for this post, so I’ll get right to the point: I think it’s important to draw a distinction between two concepts when it comes to ID. Namely, the distinction between the Design Question, and Intelligent Design itself.

When I say ‘the Design Question’, I mean more or less this: The question of whether X is designed, where X is some particular artifact, some particular part of nature, or nature as a whole.

And by Intelligent Design, I think a good, concise view was given here by Jonathan Wells: Intelligent design maintains that it is possible to infer from empirical evidence that some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than unguided natural processes.

The purpose of this post is to point out that while ID and the Design Question are related (not to mention very important) they are nevertheless distinct: It’s possible to answer “yes” to the Design Question, and still reject ID as stated. Likewise, it’s possible to affirm an ID inference in many cases, yet still answer in the negative on the Design Question (say, affirming that organism X was designed, while still believing that nature as a whole was not designed.)

More below.

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