In a thoughtful column on the end of NASA, Cal Thomas offers some reflections worth considering:

Former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin believes the space agency has “lost its way.” In an article for Air & Space magazine in 2007, Griffin set out the philosophical argument for “The Real Reason We Explore Space”: Read More ›

.. and could occupy our time persecuting dissenters, we learn from CBC News (July 7, 2011),

A female grizzly bear who lived in Ireland less than 50,000 years ago was an ancestor of all modern polar bears, suggesting “grolar” hybrids were an important part of polar bear history.The unexpected DNA evidence suggests that interbreeding between polar bears and brown bears — usually known as grizzly bears in North America — is not unusual at times when climate change caused the range of the two species to overlap, such as around the beginning of the last ice age.

– “Polar bears had Irish grizzly ancestor”

Yes, the grolar bear (grizzly +polar) is real, including second generation hybrids. Read More ›

The gradual shutdown of accomplishment is described here. Our physicist author, Rob Sheldon, offers UD News a guide, speaking only for himself, in the hope it may help you interpret rapidly spun news stories. Since you asked what it means, let me try my best analysis, though I speak only for myself and perhaps some of my less politically correct NASA engineer friends. Exploring the cosmos hostage to local politics? Republicans have generally put US Space Policy or Foreign policy above politics, and have funded unpopular endeavors even when begun by previous Democratic presidents, recognizing that it takes 10 years to see a NASA program from start-to-finish, which is longer than the usual presidential double-term. Democrats, however, believe that there Read More ›

In “Shuttles’ end stirs doubts about U.S. space program,” Irene Klotz (News Daily, 2011/07/06) reports

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, July 6, 2011 (Reuters) — As the clock ticks down to this week’s final space shuttle launch, there is a mounting sense of uncertainty about future U.S. dominance in space.

[ … ]

… veteran former astronauts say the space program is in “disarray” and fear the end of the shuttles could mean a permanent decline in U.S. space leadership as well. Read More ›

Imagine if a police detective was told his theory had to be strictly natural. The evidence at the crime scene was obvious, but the boss wants no criminals indicted. The cause of the crime must be limited to the wind, rain, earthquakes, polar shifts, whatever. Absurd you say? Welcome to evolution.  Read more

The day had to come. The day that the political correctness mob, feminist division, turned on Dawkins and his atheists. Apparently, in a response to a complaint about sexual harassment, Dawkins had said,

The man in the elevator didn’t physically touch her, didn’t attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn’t even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that….Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‘creepy’ was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

Bet Dawkins doesn’t know what hit him. He failed to buy into the “I feel like a victim, therefore my accusations are just” line that governs modern, materialist culture. And that’s just unforgivable.  😳

In “Atheists, your moral and intellectual superiors” (July 7, 2011), Canada’s Five Feet of Fury opines Read More ›

At ABC Science, professional skeptic Michael Shermer lays it out for us in “God or ET? You decide” (June 29, 2011), an excerpt from his recent The Believing Brain :

Computer scientists calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the singularity — the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything we can imagine that they will appear nearly infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience. When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades.Deduction 2: Extrapolate these trend lines out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years — mere eye blinks on an evolutionary time scale — and we arrive at a realistic estimate of how far advanced an ETI will be. Read More ›

At Creation-Evolution Headlines, we hear that the story that bird flight evolved from “flap running” has been resurrected in the pop science media. Must be summer. (“Flap Over Flight Evolution” (June 26, 2011):

This just-so story is so lame, it should be a huge embarrassment to the Darwin Party. These guys don’t understand evolutionary theory at all. You can’t draw analogies between chick development to adult bird in a year, and say a similar transition occurs in evolutionary time over millions of years. Chick development is encoded in DNA and in numerous epigenetic regulatory codes, and is observable in the present. Are they believers in some mystical meta-Gaia belief, that the history of the life on Earth develops from embryo to adult? This hypothesis is a cross between Lamarckism and recapitulation theory, both of which have been tossed into the dustbin of history. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Here’s a pigeon flap running:

Some think flap running is a consequence of already having feathered wings. Would a penguin improve its speed on land by waving its flippers about?

In a familiar play for the popular Darwin market, the theory adds discarded ideas as a cook adds ingredients to a spoiled soup.

Read More ›

This vid is a comic rip on the theme of Darwinian atheist Richard Dawkins framed as coward for refusing to debate Christian apologist William Lane Craig, on a United Kingdom speaking tour:

Voiceover: “It’s not often that one atheist accuses another of cowardice for refusing to debate a Christian; it’ even rarer when both are Oxford dons. Richard Dawkins is facing that accusation because he has turned down an offer to debate a man regarded by many as the world’s leading defender of Christian belief.”

The vid comes from sources partial to Craig, of course, but features many voiceovers from Dawkins, giving his reasons, as well as links below. Read More ›

The headline says it all: “Environs Prompt Advantageous Gene Mutations as Plants Grow; Changes Passed to Progeny.” It could also have read: “Lamarck Was Correct, Evolution is False.” Of course this is not new news. For the umpteenth time we hear about the inheritance of acquired characteristics—the catch phrase most often associated with the pre Darwin naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—which evolutionists desperately opposed for so many years until it could no longer be suppressed so now they say it was their idea all along. Yes there is indeed a battle against science, it’s just not the one evolutionists want you to believe.  Read more

When I was in college I studied classical piano with Istvan Nadas who was a Hungarian concert pianist and a student of Bela Bartok. Istvan was a miraculous survivor of one of Hitler’s death camps. The stories he told me still haunt me to this day. The commandant of the death camp liked to play Bach over the loudspeaker system while he had random inmates shot or hung, just for fun and entertainment. Nadas told me about the horror of listening to Bach while he watched his fellow inmates being machine-gunned to death in front of him. Nadas told me, “I knew every note of that music and could play it on the piano, but I also knew that if Read More ›

David Penny, the New Zealand evolutionary biologist at New Zealand’s Massey University who is trying to save Darwinism by claiming that Darwin attached no importance to the Tree of Life is, it must be said, one convinced Darwinist. In “20 Points on the structure and testability of Darwin’s theory” ( Biology International: Evolution in Action, September 2010), he explains,

Darwin’s theory of evolution is analyzed, firstly as the three major areas of microevolutionary processes, macroevolution, and the sufficiency of microevolutionary processes for macroevolution. The overall theory is then divided into 20 components, each of which has been thoroughly tested. A conclusion is that microevolution is simply inevitable; there is no way that we could stop, for example, the evolution of RNA viruses. Nor do we find well studied areas where microevolution is not able to account for macroevolution, though this is still an active area of research. 

What to make of that last sentence? Read More ›

A terrible thing happened to me some years ago.  I ached so badly I lay down on the floor and cried and cried great heaving sobs of anguish, and as I gasped for breath between my sobs I repeated one word over and over, “why? why? why?” 

Why indeed?  When terrible things happen, whether a personal tragedy such as my own or a natural disaster in which hundreds of thousands perish, we seem compelled to ask, “Why did God let this happen?”  Before answering this question let me discuss two extreme and equally erroneous answers to the question from two opposite schools of thought.  One school I will call the “sadistic maniac” school and the other I will call the “amiable bumbler” school. 

The sadistic maniac school asserts that God actually causes horrible things to happen in order to accomplish his purposes.  Read More ›