May 2013

A few years ago we reported on fascinating eye movement research. If you stare at a horizontal line first, then a circle appears stretched out, like an ellipse. This simple fact was ingeniously used in an experiment to study how signals from the eye are processed. Our eyes move several times per second. If we were aware of what our eyes were seeing we’d have difficulty making sense of such rapid movements. As it is we don’t sense such movements, and one theory held that the signal processing in our vision system deleted certain scenes to keep the image steady in our brains. But when human subjects were shown a horizontal line too quickly to be sensed, they nonetheless then saw a Read More ›

Casey Luskin did a fine job today defending academic freedom on the Michael Medved show against Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). Regardless of what you think about intelligent design, you should consider helping Eric Hedin (pictured left), the physicist at Ball State University who has come under fire merely for allowing students to opt to take a class exploring issues like intelligent design. Read the full details here. What can you do to help Eric Hedin? In his support, you can sign the academic freedom petition which you can find here.

For the holiday weekend LK and I jumped on our hawg, joined some dear friends and headed to the Black Hills of South Dakota.  There is nothing like a long motorcycle ride for contemplation.  The hypnotic thrumming of the big V twin scant inches beneath my seat, the passing scenery, the wind and sun, and above all the absence of any need to converse all combine to create ideal conditions for reverie.  Here are some of the topics I turned over in my mind as the hawg chewed up the miles: Subject-Object  As we were winding our way through Custer State Park I became aware of myself looking through my eyes as if they were a window.  I had a Read More ›

Over at the KF blog, we have recently been entertaining some ghosts from our civilisation’s past, who are concerned about its present and now sadly likely future in light of the sad history recorded in Acts 27, of a sea voyage to Rome gone disastrously wrong because the voyagers were manipulated into venturing back out at Fair Havens, when they ought to have been wintering. That is, while democracy is obviously better than realistic alternatives, there is nothing sacred or necessarily sound and wise about majority rule (even when minorities are heard out, respected and protected — as seems increasingly to be fading away . . . ), especially when the majority view has been manipulated by agenda driven interests. Read More ›

One of the problems Aristotelianism faced in the sixteenth century was that it had become gratuitous. A hot fire dried out a damp cloth because, Aristotelians explained, fire has the quality of dryness and heat. But these were nothing more than descriptive labels. The qualities did not explain how the fire dried the cloth. As Descartes later complained:  Read more

In my earlier post on this subject, I attempted to address the question of whether or not the claim “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or what I called the EC-EE claim, was itself an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. In this post, I want to take a step back from that and just grant that the EC-EE claim is valid, at least as a general guideline, along the order of, say, Ockham’s Razor. That granted, let’s see where that may lead us with respect to how the EC-EE claim is used as an argument against certain kinds of claims on the basis that they are “extraordinary”. For my point of departure, I’ll revisit the quote from Michael Shermer I referenced Read More ›