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Science

Behe on the Michael Medved Show

Michael Behe was recently interviewed on the the Michael Medved show. Click on the “Listen Now” button. Medved is an incredibly articulate and insightful interviewer. Behe, as usual, demonstrates sober rationality, good character, composure and respect, even in the face of silly and confrontational questions from some of Medved’s talk-show callers.

Roddy Bullock, One of My Favorite ID Essayists

For those UD readers who are not familiar with it, I recommend visiting ARN. On the right-hand side of the home page you will see a section entitled “The ID Report.” Here, UD’s very prolific author and commentator, Denyse O’Leary, posts on a regular basis. So do other authors, and one of my favorites is Roddy Bullock of idnetohio. In this recent ARN essay, Roddy does an excellent job of summing up UD’s mission statement. Below is an excerpt. I encourage UD readers to check out Roddy’s contributions at ARN whenever they become available. Naturalism, the unscientific crutch for unguided, purposeless Darwinism, turns scientific inquiry on its head. Suddenly a philosophy that presumes only unintelligent causation becomes gatekeeper to the Read More ›

The Greening Earth

This map is the result of 8 scientists poring over satellite data for 18 months. It shows how plant growth (NPP or net primary productivity) around the world has changed in the past 20 years of global warming and CO2 buildup in the atmosphere. The result is a 6% increase when all the globe’s vegetation is tallied up and averaged. The research appeared in Science. The article I got the picture from is at NASA titled Global Garden. Why is it that we don’t hear about this in the popular press? We are inundated with conjecture based on computer models of CO2 induced warming and the supposed ill effects of it. Yet when the facts are allowed to speak we Read More ›

More Silly Psychobabble About “Resistance to Science”

In this essay, psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Weisberg assert:

The developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy.

I’m not quite sure what the “developmental data” are, but I do know something about science, and I am certainly not resistant to it, which is precisely why I am an intelligent-design proponent.

Read More ›

And Hector Avalos deserves tenure at ISU?

The tenure denial of Guillermo Gonzalez by Iowa State University has been much discussed on this blog of late. The tenure of Hector Avalos, religious studies professor and militant atheist at Iowa State University, however, has yet to be broached here. So let’s do it. Avalos conducted a witch hunt of Guillermo Gonzalez back in 2005 (go here). He just posted on PZ Myers’ blog a response to the Discovery Institute (go here). Here is an interesting quote from it: I may not be an astronomer, but my article, “Heavenly Conflicts: The Bible and Astronomy,” passed the editorial review of Mercury: The Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 27 no. 2 (March/April, 1998), pages 20-24. There, I critiqued Read More ›

IPCC Ignores Studies of Soot’s Effect on Global Warming

The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) drastically understates the warming potential of soot (black carbon) in its report to policy makers. The IPCC has an agenda and that agenda is to blame manmade carbon dioxide emission for climate change. Europe and Asia emit most of the soot from burning coal, wood, dung, and diesel in open fires or without particulate filters in stoves, chimneys, smokestacks, and exhaust pipes. The United States has been restricting soot emissions in Draconian fashion since the Clean Air Act of 1963. The IPCC agenda is really about blaming the United States. I document all this below the fold. Read More ›

“We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science.” –Al Gore

Here is a quote from Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason (I took it from the excerpt from his book in the current Time Magazine): In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public’s ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason. In writing this, Gore Read More ›

Newfound Bacteria Fueled by Radiation

Newfound Bacteria Fueled by Radiation By David Brown Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 20, 2006; Page A07 They are the microbes from hell, or at least from hell’s Zip code. A team of scientists has found bacteria living nearly two miles below ground, dining on sulfur in a world of steaming water and radioactive rock. A single cell may live a century before it gets up the energy to divide. The organisms have been there for millions of years. They will probably survive as long as the planet does, drawing energy from the stygian world around them. The microbes, found in water spilling out of a fissure in a South African gold mine in 2003, are not entirely new, Read More ›

Gigantic Bacteria has 300 Times More DNA than Human Cells

Giant Bacteria over half a millimeter long (visible to the naked eye) living in the gut of surgeonfish is found to have over 300 times more DNA (1 trillion base pairs) than humans (3 billion base pairs). I believe this is now the largest known amount of DNA in a single cell having knocked aside the previous record holder amoeba dubia at ~200 times more DNA than humans.

Behe on Dawkins

In listing the “100 Most Influential People of the Year,” Time Magazine included Richard Dawkins and asked Michael Behe to comment on his significance. Once the editors at Time got their hands on Mike’s piece, however, they took some of the bite out of it (click here for what Time posted). What Behe originally wrote is the following (posted with his permission): Of his nine books, none caused as much controversy — or sold as well — as last year’s The God Delusion. Yet the leading light of the recent atheist publishing surge, Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins, has always been a man driven by the big questions. Born in Kenya in 1941 of British parents, he received a mild Anglican Read More ›

“Are We Typical?” — paper by Hartle & Srednicki

Here are some extracts from a recent paper by James Hartle and Mark Srednicki at arXiv.org. So, if we’re not typical, are we special? And is our specialness more than just having big brains and being successful at passing on our genes? ABSTRACT: Bayesian probability theory is used to analyze the oft-made assumption that humans are typical observers in the universe. Some theoretical calculations make the selection fallacy that we are randomly chosen from a class of objects by some physical process, despite the absence of any evidence for such a process, or any observational evidence favoring our typicality. It is possible to favor theories in which we are typical by appropriately choosing their prior probabilities, but such assumptions should Read More ›

American Scientific Affiliation — Whatever happened to its mission?

The ASA (American Scientific Affiliation) is an organization of scientists who are Christians. It has traditionally been strongly pro theistic evolution. Its most prominent member is Francis Collins. I’m also a member.

About three years ago I received the following mass mailing from the ASA’s Jack Haas (I’ve known Jack since 1990 and our exchanges have always been cordial). In this letter he describes how the ASA had, in times past, been concerned to address “the sweeping tide of scientific materialism,” but had recently decided to change its emphasis to combat young-earth creationism.

If the problem with young-earth creationism is that it is off by a few orders of magnitude about the age of the earth and universe, the problem with scientific materialism is that is off by infinite orders of magnitude about what is ultimately the nature of nature. When I received this letter, I was so upset that I decided to let my membership (which I had maintained since the 1980s) lapse. Only at the instance of some fellow ID proponents in the organization did I decide to stay.

I write this post to put into perspective Denyse O’Leary’s recent remarks about the “gutting of a spiritual tradition from within” (see here — the relevance of her remarks to the ASA cannot be missed) and to highlight that with the efforts by Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris to ramp up their propaganda for atheism since this letter by Jack Haas was written suggests that the ASA was mistaken in shifting its emphasis away from “the sweeping tide of scientific materialism.”

Lay Education Committee of the
American Scientific Affiliation
PO Box 668 ~ 55 Market Street
Ipswich, MA 01938

November 2003

Greetings,

I am writing to report the progress of the Lay Education Committee (LEC) on the “educational package for the person in the pew designed to promote a better understanding of the place of science within a Christian worldview.”

ASA’s original concern “for the waning faith of modern youth subjected to the sweeping tide of scientific materialism” was set aside for other interests as the times changed and the organization grew larger. As a result, our direct impact on the local church has been minimal.

At the 2000 Annual Meeting at Gordon College, some members discussed the difficulties that evangelicals have with questions deemed to have both scientific and biblical input. Later, the ASA office received a letter and a substantial gift from one participant challenging us to reach out to the church laity. He noted:

[BEGIN BLOCKQUOTE]The young-earth message has bitten deeply into the evangelical culture, and people trust this message. What will it take to show people believably that the young-earth view is not the only possible one, without undermining the Christianity or sincerity of those that hold that position?[END BLOCKQUOTE]

The ASA Council directed the formation of a committee to respond to the challenge. The LEC first met at the 2001 Annual Meeting. It was decided to develop an educational package that could be adapted for church adults and high school students, Christian schools and home schools. Read More ›

Frank Tipler’s New Book

My good friend Frank Tipler‘s new book THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY is coming out shortly (see the listing here at Amazon.com). I’ve invited Frank to contribute to this blog about this book and any other topics of interest to him.