How to find an elusive transitional fossil – the story of Tiktaalik

How does one find a transitional fossil?  It's a lot harder than I ever imagined. I just started reading a book that looks quite promising: Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body (2008), by Neil Shubin.  The author is a professor of…

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Dangerous Intersection will cease to exist . . . . for a few hours.

Just a heads-up.   We are switching over to a faster and higher-capacity server, but that will necessitate an interruption in service.   It might only be a few hours, but I've been told that it could take as long as 24 hours for this site to once again become available everywhere in…

Continue ReadingDangerous Intersection will cease to exist . . . . for a few hours.

In “Irreligion,” mathematician John Paulos explains why arguments for God just don’t add up

John Paulos, well-known for his writings on mathematics (he is a professor of mathematics at Temple University), has now published a book on the topic of God. In Irreligion he asks whether there are any logical or mathematically substantiated reasons to believe in God. He concludes that the answer is a resounding no.

Irreligion is a short book (only 150 pages) and it is written cleanly, with lots of humor stirred in.

Paulos gets off to a good start when he insists that you can’t really argue whether God exists unless you define what you mean by “God.” He recognizes, for example, that some people use the term God to refer to the laws of physics or nature itself. This book, however, is addressed to those who believe in a more traditional version of God:

Most conventional monotheistic characterizations of God (Yahweh, Allah) take Him to be an entity or Being that is, if not omnipotent, at least extraordinarily powerful; if not omniscient, at least surpassingly wise; if not the Creator of the universe, at least intimately connected with its origin; if not completely and absolutely perfect, at least possessor of all manner of positive characteristics. This formulation will, on the whole, be my definition of God and the many flawed arguments for this entity’s existence will be my primary focus.

By this definition, an atheist is “someone who believes that such an entity does not exist.” An agnostic is “someone who believes that whether God exists or not …

Continue ReadingIn “Irreligion,” mathematician John Paulos explains why arguments for God just don’t add up

Inerrant Biblical Geology Falls Flat

There are 2 places in the Bible that can be interpreted (by squinting at just the right translation) as saying that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. This point of geology is made by counting Genesis periods (“days” in most English translations) and lifetimes in the (assumed complete) genealogies (in which “months” and “years” are regularly cross-translated).

A point that the Bible makes more often and more clearly is that the world is flat. Yep, if you believe in the inerrancy of Bible, then the world is flat. The moon landing hoax conspiracy theory actually got its start from the Flat Earth Society (http://theflatearthsociety.org, or Here is a flat earth site that Google likes better).

Anyway, this is about the pure truth of the Bible with links to the 12 cited passages:

  • Dn.4:11: The tree grew, and it became strong enough and tall enough to reach the sky. It could be seen everywhere on earth.
    (Describe a shape from all points of which a vertical line can be seen)
  • Dn.2:35 Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.
    (Describe a solid shape that another object can completely cover by expanding its size without deforming)

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