Category: Physics, Earth & Space
Atlantic Monthly on Climate Science: “The Stink of Intellectual Corruption is Overpowering”
Senior Editor of Atlantic Monthly Clive Crook is revising his earlier sanguine view of ClimateGate. What happened? He read the emails. In a post on ClimateGate that Crook wrote before he had read the emails carefully, he observed: …nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Over the weekend, he read the documents more carefully: Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back..The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And… this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not Read More ›
Logic vs. Emotion: Discovery Institute Fellow William Lane Craig Debates Christopher Hitchens on “Does God Exist?”
On Saturday April 4th, I attended a debate between Discovery Institute fellow William Lane Craig and “new atheist” Christopher Hitchens on “Does God Exist?” As the debate venue was Biola University, the audience was partial towards Craig. But a sizeable number of Hitchens-fans turned out as well, though they probably weren’t energized by Hitchens’ admission during the debate that “there’s nothing new about the new atheists, it’s just that we’re recent.” Craig’s opening statement presented 5 arguments, but I will only recount two (maybe three) at present: the Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, and the Moral Argument. As it turns out, Darwinian evolution and the “cruelty” of biological processes played a major role in Hitchens’ arguments against the proposition that Read More ›
David Medved, RIP
Whether in science, politics, or religion, one of the qualities most lacking in modern culture is breadth of vision.
Materialist Science Fiction Promoted to Students at a Local Public Library
Recently I went to a public library to do some work, and I saw a book featured on top of a reference desk titled Life on Other Planets (by Rhonda Lucas Donald, Watts Library, 2003). The title page featured little green men with big alien bug-eyes, the kind of picture you might see on some nutty UFO website. The book and its display were clearly aimed at students — perhaps junior high or high school-aged. Fun and silly pictures don’t bother me if they get kids interested in reading about science. The problem here was that when I opened the book, what I found was not science, but science-fiction. Where Does Your Information Come From?The second page of the first Read More ›
Considering Buying Into the Multiverse? Caveat Emptor: Multiverse Proponents Hide Their Philosophical Motives to Avoid the Cosmic Design Inference
Last year I blogged about how Newsweek science columnist Sharon Begley had promoted the multiverse hypothesis as if it were a reasonable scientific proposition, avoiding mentioning to readers that this speculative idea was invented for the purpose of avoiding the conclusion that the cosmos was intelligently designed. As I wrote, “Begley tries to steer the reader into believing the wildly speculative multiverse hypothesis–a pet philosophical favorite of materialists–while barely even hinting that the alternative, and much more elegant explanation, is intelligent design of the cosmos. For those who are informed on this subject, her article comes off as if she is trying to hide the design inference from the reader as a reasonable conclusion to explain the incredible fine-tuning of Read More ›