From astrophysicist Adam Frank at NPR: Sharf has no problem with the creative misreading that allows Buddhist Modernism to share space with scientific worldviews. “My concern,” he told Tricycle, “is not with the selectivity of those who read Buddhism as a rationalist and scientific religion — it is perfectly understandable given the world in which we live. It is really not a question of misreading. It is a question of what gets lost in the process.” Part of the problem for Sharf and others is that by focusing only on the domains of inner experience (i.e. mindfulness via contemplative practice), Buddhist Modernism loses aspects of its function that were central to its history. “Look at how suspicious many Western Buddhists Read More ›

BioLogo = mostly Christian for Darwinism. From Wayne Rossiter, at Shadow of Oz: She derives all of this is a most specious and disingenuous way. The poll contains data dating back to 1981. But, Haarsma cherry picks convenient dates spanning small periods of time in order to make her case (specifically confining the span of interest to just three years: 2014-present). If we simply look at the entire pattern from 1981 to the present we see a very different reality: In 1981, the number of people ascribing to the YEC view was 44%. Today it is 38%. In 1981, the number of people ascribing to the “theistic evolution” view was 38%. It’s exactly 38% today. No change over the last Read More ›

Sure he was. But, see, he bought the “Science” brand. From Jon Cassidy at the American Spectator: Darwinism led to Social Darwinism. As the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has written, after 1859, “subsequent arguments for slavery, colonialism, racial differences, class struggles, and sex roles would go forth primarily under the banner of science.” Most of those arguments have been banished, but were they ever less scientific than Darwin’s own work? After all, Darwin didn’t use the scientific method, either, and worried that his work was “grievously hypothetical.” When you’re working outside of falsifiable propositions, what qualifies a work as science rather than speculation? More. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away Follow UD News Read More ›

From New Scientist: IT IS just over a decade since Richard Dawkins lit the blue touchpaper with his book The God Delusion. It introduced much of the world to the so-called new atheism – a forceful rejection of religion based on the premise that scientific materialism offers a superior explanation of the universe, while religion is a corrosive influence on society: a pathological meme planted in the minds of defenceless children. Though a great read and a liberating influence for many closet atheists, The God Delusion largely omitted a new strand of scientific enquiry emerging around the time it was published. Those working on the “science of religion” – a motley crew of psychologists, anthropologists and neuroscientists – explained it Read More ›

It’s a good thing people are talking about this. What cargo cult scientists are missing is “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty.” Having this virtue of scientific integrity means following the scientific method: conducting rigorously controlled experiments and following the data wherever they lead. Thus while some of Feynman’s examples of cargo cult scientists may have the trappings of good scientists — e.g., they are professors of psychology at major universities — they lack the true spirit of science. In particular, they are too beholden to their theories to follow the observational evidence wherever it leads. The cargo cult story offers what philosophers of science call a “demarcation Read More ›

Even though almost no one uses it? From David Robson at BBC: The practice not only highlights humanity’s amazing linguistic diversity; it may also help us to understand the limits of human communication. In most languages, whistles are used for little more than calling attention; they seem too simple to carry much meaning. But Meyer has now identified more than 70 groups across the world who can use whistles to express themselves with all the flexibility of normal speech. These mysterious languages demonstrate the brain’s astonishing capacity to decode information from new signals – with insights that are causing some neuroscientists to rethink the fundamental organisation of the brain. The research may even shed light on the emergence of language Read More ›

From Matt Ridley/Donna Laframboise at Science New/The Times: The latest university prank is embarrassing to academia and hilarious for the rest of us. Yes. The conceptual penis. And before that: This happened last year, too, when Professor Mark Carey published an even more absurd paper arguing that “a critical but overlooked aspect of the human dimensions of glaciers and global change research is the relationship between gender and glaciers” and introducing “feminist glaciology”. In that case, however, the professor continues to insist, against all evidence, that he was serious. Science magazine gave him a lengthy, softball interview to justify his work after it was laughed at on the internet. I still think he’s a joker in deep cover.More. Yeah. We Read More ›

Doesn’t far more depend on such a claim than is reasonable? From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: A new study may help reveal the nature of dark energy, the mysterious substance that is pushing the universe to expand outward. Dark energy may emerge from fluctuations in the nothingness of empty space, a new hypothesis suggests. … The new study proposed that the expansion is driven by fluctuations in the energy carried by the vacuum, or regions of space devoid of matter. The fluctuations create pressure that forces space itself to expand, making matter and energy less dense as the universe ages, said study co-author Qingdi Wang, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. More. See also: How Read More ›

Well, we knew that math does NOT lead to a more interesting social life but… now get this from American Thinker: One thing you realize when following the follies and foibles of social justice warriors is that there is no limit to their idiocies – that anything and everything can be declared “racist” or “sexist” if they stretch logic and reason beyond the breaking point. Case in point: a course designed to teach high school kids that mathematics, as taught in the Western world, is a “dehumanizing tool” that has been used to “trick indigenous peoples out of land and property.”More. But can anyone imagine a world without math? And how did it get to be “Western” math anyhow? Isn’t math Read More ›

Huh? In a field where one must avoid getting “bought,” we hacks rarely run into people who are not sending us tons of mail/pix/vids. But this just in: From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: German theologian Ulrike Auga’s space images advisory role for NASA seems particularly suspect not just because it smacks of Leni Riefenstahl-style manipulation but because some weeks ago (February 8) Auga abruptly cancelled an interview with me about her work on the nearly $3M NASA/Templeton/Center of Theological Inquiry investigation (2015-2017) into how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space plus we have not seen any report in the US from Auga about her US publicly funded advisory activity for NASA. Auga Read More ›

When some of us were young, our parents would scold us for wasting our time with, like, SuperGirl. But our own Jon Bartlett explains, I have been very pleased with the way that Marvel’s TV show “Agents of Shield” has been at promoting an ID-friendly worldview. Last year I noted that their super-scientists explicitly promoted the idea of “Intelligent Design” (using that terminology) in examining biological phenomena. This season, Agents of Shield addresses moral questions about virtual vs. physical worlds. A common idea in pop culture is the idea that, as computers get bigger, eventually we can just plug our minds into a large computer and live forever. Well, Agents of Shield decided to play with that idea, and look Read More ›

Read the following and then read why it matters to you: From Ed Morrisey at HotAir: The video shows top Planned Parenthood staffers attending meetings of the National Abortion Federation in 2014 and 2015 and it is the latest in a series of over a dozen videos from the organization showing the Planned Parenthood abortion business and others engaging in potentially illegal sale of body parts of aborted babies. The new undercover video shows Planned Parenthood executives and other top abortion advocates making shocking comments about abortions. Several attendees made jokes about eyeballs from aborted babies and other aborted baby body parts “rolling down into their laps.”More. Look, it is probably true. It was true forty years ago but traditional Read More ›

They always have been. And Cool never changed that. Typing “Big Bang Theory” into a search bar links us immediately to the long-running (debut 2007), immensely popular CBS sitcom, a post-modern look at the lives of Caltech physicists. The conventional meaning of the term, our universe’s origin starting with a small singularity currently pegged at 13.8 billion years ago, is a mere second thought. Even “relativity” cannot match that pop culture success: The first hit I tried offered to define the term, as if that really matters. But the Big Bang is unpopular among cosmologists. It survives on evidence alone. And sadly, evidence matters much less than it used to. Science historian Helge Kragh tells us that astronomer Fred Hoyle Read More ›

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Over the years there has been an ongoing effort to produce “predictions” of SUSY particle masses, based on various sorts of assumptions and various experimental data that might be sensitive to the existence of SUSY particles. One of the main efforts of this kind has been the MasterCode collaboration. Back in 2008 before the LHC started up, they were finding that the “best fit” for SUSY models implied a gluino at something like 600-750 GeV. As data has come in from the LHC (and from other experiments, such as dark matter searches), they have periodically released new “best fits”, with the gluino mass moving up to stay above the increasing LHC limits.More. It Read More ›

See vid intro: The Nebraska Department of Education (NDE) uses a consistent process to develop and revise content area standards. The goal of this process is to develop K-12 content area standards that, when mastered, would allow a student to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing postsecondary coursework without the need for remediation. The collaborative writing process utilizes the expertise of Nebraska educators and includes representation from all stages of Nebraska’s educational system (i.e., early childhood education, K-12 education, and postsecondary education). More. Deadline June 23. What role should evidence-based reasoning play? We keep hearing from people who say our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth, Note: Hey, the only reason your humble hack dares say anything is that her Read More ›