They say you can’t tell a book by its cover. Not unless you’re Jerry Coyne, that is. He is quite certain that Stephen Meyer’s forthcoming book Darwin’s Doubt is a sellout on the part of publisher HarperCollins: nothing but God-of-the-Gaps.
Nice work to be able to tell that kind of thing without having to bother reading it. Reminds me of Meyer’s last book, Signature in the Cell,which was also roundly pummeled by reviewers who hadn’t read it.
At least most …
Some might consider this ironic: the theist explaining science to atheists. I don’t. I don’t see any reason why it should be surprising, even though some atheists think they have a lock on scientific reasoning.
Starting here in yesterday’s thread on “Five Things You Have Wrong About Christianity,” the atheists in the discussion are trying to push the idea of “scientific” prayer studies. What they’re showing is that they don’t understand how science works in such a setting.
They’ve been confusing experimentation with …
Book Review
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel
Fact: Human consciousness is real.
Fact: Human rationality is real.
Fact: Human value judgments refer to real truths.
Fact: All of this is impossible on a materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature.
So says Thomas Nagel, the highly distinguished philosopher on faculty at New York University. From the above, one might expect him to number himself among the proponents of Intelligent Design, and indeed he mentions Stephen …
I'm about a quarter of the way through John N. Oswalt's very readable The Bible Among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature? I've just been stopped short with a question about the relation of science to myth, and whether philosophcial materialism may itself be a form of myth.
Now I recognize there are a number of problems with that question. The first is that materialism is often associated with a certain school of thinking among scientists, which could cause anyone with half a …
David DeGrazia, professor at George Washington University, has written a peer-reviewed paper for the Journal of Medical Ethics on “Moral Bioenhancement” (MB). The suggestion is to “encourage or require” advanced technologies, including genetic and embryonic “selection” to enhance the moral status of the human race. I learned about this through William Briggs’s excellent blog.
I am struck by DeGrazia’s frequent use of “we,” as in,
The specific questions …
Reddit visitors, thank you for coming. See my notes at the end of the original post here, after you’ve read the post, of course.
I wrote briefly last night about Alex Rosenberg, the atheistic philosopher who ended his debate with William Lane Craig by admitting he believes that no thoughts are about anything.
He meant exactly that. No thought is about anything.
This may come as rather a shock to some readers. It’s strange. It’s really strange. One consequence of it (if …
Book Review
Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture by Jonathan Morrow
I have an all-too-large “guilt shelf,” which is what I call the list of books I know I should be reading. They’re books that I want to read—that’s why I have them—but I can’t seem to get to all of them as quickly as I would like. Think Christianly has been on that list for several months. The timing …
“Stephen” commented on my introductory post, Finally–A Blog For You!,
Maybe this website should be renamed “the rationalizing Christian”. That’s not the same as the “thinking” Christian, but the name seems to fit based my first impression. When we talk about “thinking” we generally consider that our thinking falls out on a spectrum between good and bad thinking. Certain values come into play to make that evaluation. One important one (my evaluation) is that we don’t rationalize. I’m using rationalizing to mean defend our …
One hundred years ago today the most infamous science fraud of all time was presented to the world: Piltdown Man, a “missing link” skull that turned out to a creative composite, a human skull attached to an orangutan jawbone. Some researchers were immediately suspicious, yet still it took until 1953 until the scientific community reached consensus that it was a hoax. In the meantime, it was taken to be solid evidence supporting apelike animal-to-human evolution.
Piltdown Man represented one of the great failures …
"The New Atheists claim to be the party of reason.... The problem is, they're not very good at it." — Discover the provocative ebook True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism.