And guess why? From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views:
Writing in the Washington Post, Harvard astronomer Howard Smith forcefully blunts Stephen Hawking’s assertion that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.” Of course, it’s not only Dr. Hawking who says as much — denying human exceptionalism is close to universal orthodoxy among the socio-academic demographic he occupies. Carl Sagan put the same view a little more mildly: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.”
Smith points out, however, that science considered objectively is much closer to the exceptionalist conclusion.
Sure, but…
Atheists aren’t having any of it. At Why Evolution Is True, biologist Jerry Coyne hits back, complaining that Smith doesn’t confess right up front that he is in fact, as Smith himself has written elsewhere, an observant Jew. Coyne frets that Smith is a “religious Jew who spends his time reconciling science with the mystical tenets of the Kaballah.” Actually from his bio it appears that Smith spends his time working as a “lecturer in the Harvard University Department of Astronomy and a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.” Coyne, a retired academic who spends a fair amount of his own time posting pictures and videos of cute cats, rants … More.
Ranting about religion is socially okay if one is an atheist like Coyne. In fact, organizing persecutions against declared non-atheists is okay. Those are the rules accepted among our opinion leaders, including hordes of compliant church-going dhimmis. They secretly assume that being an atheist and a Darwin defender proves that Coyne is smart. They never stop to wonder what else Coyne has going for him. Unless, of course, Darwinian atheism is the latest new branch of science.
All that said, one rather wishes people did not attach as much importance to being published in the Washington Post. Woodward and Bernstein are long retired and the paper is the hobby of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Books will be written about the way in which traditional media like the Post are demonstrating an utter inability to grasp what is happening in their historic areas of competence, such as reading American voters’ opinions, 2016. Never mind sponsoring a serious discussion of the universe.
A person with ideas worth listening to, like Smith, should really publish with people with a better current track record. Just a thought.
See also: Mathematics: “Particle collisions are somehow linked to mathematical ‘motives.’”
“There is a connection from nature to algebraic geometry and periods, and with hindsight, it’s not a coincidence,” said Dirk Kreimer, a physicist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
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as to this comment:
“Coyne frets that Smith is a “religious Jew who spends his time reconciling science with the mystical tenets of the Kaballah.”
Although Coyne, an atheist, apparently strongly believes being a ‘religious Jew’, or a Christian, automatically disqualifies someone from being a real scientist, the fact of the matter is that if anything would ever automatically disqualify someone from being a real scientist it would be if that person were an atheistic materialist, such as Coyne himself proudly professes himself to be.
Let us be VERY clear to the fact that ALL of science, every discipline within science, is dependent on basic Theistic presuppositions about the rational intelligibility of the universe and the ability of our mind to comprehend that rational intelligibility. Modern science was born, and continues to be dependent on, those basic Theistic presuppositions:.,,,
Moreover, if we cast aside those basic Theistic presuppositions about the rational intelligibility of the universe and the ability of our mind to comprehend that rational intelligibility, and try to use naturalism, i.e. methodological naturalism, as our basis for understanding the universe, and for practicing science, then everything within that atheistic/naturalistic worldview, (i.e. supposed evidence for Darwinian evolution, observations of reality, beliefs about reality, sense of self, free will, even reality itself), collapses into self refuting, unrestrained, flights of fantasy and imagination.
To reiterate, it would be hard to fathom a worldview that is more antagonistic to modern science than Darwinian evolution, and Atheistic Materialism and/or Naturalism in general, have turned out to be.
Verse:
Moreover, modern science itself reveals that we are far from just being, as Hawking put it, ‘chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet’.
Hawking’s own area of expertise, which he cut his teeth on, i.e. General Relativity,,,
Hawking’s own area of expertise, which he cut his teeth on, i.e. General Relativity, gives us powerful evidence that humans are not nearly as inconsequential as Hawking, (and Coyne), would prefer to believe.
In what I consider an absolutely fascinating discovery, 4-dimensional (4D) space-time was created in the Big Bang and continues to ‘expand equally in all places’:
Thus from a 3-dimensional (3D) perspective, any particular 3D spot in the universe is to be considered just as ‘center of the universe’ as any other particular spot in the universe is to be considered ‘center of the universe’. This centrality found for any 3D place in the universe is because the universe is a 4D expanding hypersphere, analogous in 3D to the surface of an expanding balloon. All points on the surface are moving away from each other, and every point can be considered central to the expansion, if that’s where you live.
In fact, as far as general relativity itself is concerned, centrality in the universe is left completely open for whomever is making a model of the universe to arbitrarily decide for themselves what is to be considered the center in the universe,
Moreover, in both General and Special Relativity, the observer himself is given a privileged frame of reference in which to make measurements,,,
And whereas in General Relativity. (and Special Relativity), the observer himself is given a privileged frame of reference in which to make measurements, in quantum mechanics it is the measurement itself that gives the observer a privileged frame of reference in the universe:
I find it extremely interesting, and strange, that quantum mechanics tells us that instantaneous quantum wave collapse to its ‘uncertain’ 3-D state is centered on each individual conscious observer in the universe, whereas, 4-D space-time cosmology (General Relativity) tells us each 3-D point in the universe is central to the expansion of the universe. These findings of modern science are pretty much exactly what we would expect to see if this universe were indeed created, and sustained, from a higher dimension by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal Being who knows everything that is happening everywhere in the universe at the same time. These findings certainly seem to go to the very heart of the age old question asked of many parents by their children, “How can God hear everybody’s prayers at the same time?”,,, i.e. Why should the expansion of the universe, or the quantum wave collapse of the entire universe, even care that you or I, or anyone else, should exist? Only Theism offers a rational explanation as to why you or I, or anyone else, should have such undeserved significance in such a vast universe:
And although General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics both give the observer an ‘unexpected’ privileged frame of reference in the universe, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, none-the-less, in the much sought after ‘theory of everything’, simply ‘refuse to talk to each other’.
i.e. The expansion of every 3-D point in the universe, and the quantum wave collapse of the entire universe to each point of conscious observation in the universe, is obviously a very interesting congruence in experimental science, yet it is a very interesting congruence in experimental science that Physicists, and Mathematicians, seem to be having an extremely difficult time ‘unifying’ into the much sought after ‘theory of everything’. (Einstein, Penrose, and Hawking, among many others, have failed at mathematically unifying the two theories).
And yet when the Agent causality, i.e. God, of Theists is rightly let ‘back’ into the picture of physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned, (Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, and Planck among others), then an empirically backed unification between Quantum Theory and General Relativity is readily achieved by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death:
Thus General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, our two most powerful theories in science, both give the ‘observer’ unexpected importance in the universe, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead gives us the primary reason why the universe was brought into existence by God in the first place:
Verse and Music
Supplemental note:
actually the mantle of science is within YeC not just ID.
SPIRAL cosmological redshift hypothesis explains why the overwhelming amount of empirical evidence attests to YeC and falsifies all deep-time dependent scientific hypotheses such as NDT and SCM
so Coyne is a con and or just ignorant of the science.
reference:
‘Distant Starlight and the Age, Formation and Structure of the Universe’
aka ‘Distant Starlight and Torah’
Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1519262205
The Pearlman SPIRAL vs Standard free cosmology model info-graphic:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291972501_ThePearlmanSPIRALvsSCM