Kerry Sheridan advises that a “US atom smasher may have found new force of nature” (YahooNews, April 7 08:07 am) Data from a major US atom smasher lab may have revealed a new elementary particle, or potentially a new force of nature that could expand our knowledge of the properties of matter, physicists say.[ … Read More…
Physics
Martin Rees wins Templeton Prize
A fine tuning and multiverse advocate, Martin J. Rees, today won the 2011 Templeton Prize. The astrophysicist with no religion won the Prize originally “for Progress in Religion.” The 2011 Templeton Prize was announced today. LONDON, APRIL 6 – Martin J. Rees, a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions Read More…
The Nature of Nature — sticky
THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this Read More…
What has Christianity got to do with mathematics?
Just added to the web, the linked article aims to give a short, non-technical, beginner’s answer to the question: “What has Christianity got to do with Mathematics?”
Physicist resigns from American Physical Society, after 67 years, and scorches earth
Hal Lewis* reminisces for Society president, Curtis G. Callan, Jr. of Princeton University, charging: When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as Read More…
Do atheists know enough about the concept of God to reject it on rational grounds?
Sometimes I think atheists are simply having arguments with themselves – or, more precisely, with phantoms bred by their own ignorance. It’s easy to see why atheism does not make more headway, even in modern secular society: Once atheists begin to spell out the sort of deity they are rejecting, it becomes clear that they Read More…
The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs!
A friend directed me to this fun little article from the Jewish World Review. I’m not a regular reader of JWR, so missed this wonderful little piece from Paul Greenberg, in which he recalls the Sokal Hoax of 1996. For those not familiar with it, the Sokal Hoax was an article written by Professor Alan Read More…
Stephen Hawking: “Science Will Win”
World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking says “science will win” in a recent interview with ABC news’ Diane Sawyer. From the interview: But exploring the origins of time inevitably leads to questions about the ultimate origins of everything and what, if anything, is behind it all. “What could define God [is thinking of God] as the Read More…
Granville Sewell on the 2nd Law
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has never been a friend of materialistic evolution. Granville Sewell’s arguments concerning it at the following two links are worth pondering: Link 1: from the book IN THE BEGINNING Link 2: video presentation “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution”
Self-organized Criticality
Many conceptual and experimental attempts have been made by evolutionists to explain the arise of the huge complexity and organization of nature based on unguided processes, that is without the intervention of an organizing intelligence. Among them I recall those related to chaos theory, evolutionary algorithms, emergent properties, far-from-equilibrium dynamical systems, self-organized criticality (SOC). Here Read More…
The Quantum Enigma of Consciousness and the Identity of the Designer
In this thread, I will suggest the identity of Intelligent Designer of life. The question of the identity of the Intelligent Designer is outside of ID proper, but if a design is detected, it inspires the question, “who is the Designer?” If the identity of the Intelligent Designer is outside of ID proper, is it Read More…
Can SETI’s algorithm detect intelligence?
TED granted Jill Tartar her wish to: “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. TED and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has set up SETIQuest.org to: . . . make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish Read More…
Do humans influence temperature records?
Can the methods of Intelligent Design be brought to bear to detect anthropogenic influence in temperature records? Core to the climate debate is the danger of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. We hear of “tipping points” promising coast lands drowning in glacial melt. Defining “very likely” as > 90%, the IPCC’s Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Read More…
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
The title of this post is also the title of a recent book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. According to the website for The Edge Foundation, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, known to Edge readers as a philosopher who has interesting things to say about Gödel and Spinoza, among others, enters into this conversation, taking on these and Read More…
The ID argument from thermodynamics
Since in my last post a commenter put on the table thermodynamics to support evolution I decided to offer my personal answer in a specific post, although UD already dealt with this issue. As known, 2nd law of thermodynamics (SLOT, also called “entropy law”) states that in a closed system the overall energy entropy ΔS Read More…