Historical Contraception and Carols in mid-October

I was having lunch with Joe the Juggler at the City Diner earlier this week. He was showing me some papers he found in the wall of his house. The original owner in 1892 apparently was in the personal rubber products business. Back then, this was a euphemism for (shocked…

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Can You Define a Conflict of Interest?

A committee has been selected in Texas to define the science curriculum for the next decade. The 6 man committee consists of 3 reputable scientists, two co-authors of a new Intelligent Design textbook, and one chemistry professor who is known for his Intelligent Design stance. Fair and balanced, right? Oh,…

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Why Choose Naturalist Explanations Over Biblical Creation?

Discussions in the comment sections of many posts on this site chaotically tend toward the strange attractor of one generally off-topic issue: Why does Creation/Evolution seem correct to you? It is usually a discussion between Creationists who believe that the scientific conclusions are based on faith, and Naturalists who believe that the Scientific Method is best tool ever invented to extract sense from chaos.

Kepler's UniverseIn the beginning, Natural Philosophers (now called Scientists) in the West all believed in the Bible. Bishop Ussher gave the final word on the age of the universe according to the Bible in the early 1600’s, and the Church had all the answers. But then the idea emerged that one can actually test Aristotelian conclusions (purely rational and based on “what everybody knows”) with observations. Copernicus demonstrated with careful observation and applied math around 1600 that only the moon itself orbited the Earth, and all the other planets circled the Sun. The church accepted this, as a philosophical observation, irrelevant to the place of Man in the Universe. Then Galileo made a gadfly of himself by publishing popular books mocking the Pope for publicly continuing in the preaching of Geocentrism when it was clear, with the aid of a telescope, that not only did the planets orbit the sun, but that some of those planets had moons of their own. Many moons, placed where Man couldn’t even see them without modern technology.

Well, it just snowballed from there. Newton, a devout Christian, developed math in …

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