If you stop to listen to the “solution” to the energy crisis, you’ll hear millions of people (including most politicians) reassuring themselves that coal will be the new oil, because the United States has plenty of it and because there is now a way to burn coal “cleanly.” This last…
Chimpanzees aren't the only spectacularly intelligent animal species. Sometimes human beings act intelligently! Yes, humans are animals, as difficult as this is to believe for many people. In this TED video, Joshua Klein reminds us about the intelligence of yet another species: crows. Using their intelligence, crows continue to flourish…
I just found out why we English speakers use apostrophe-ess ( 's ) to indicate the Saxon Genitive Case. "Huh?" I can hear you gasp. I've been using it for 40 years to indicate the possessions of an object by a subject. It just always was this way, like mountains…
Several soldiers who have returned from combat zones talk with the American News Project about what they say is the widespread practice of using "drop weapons" to cover up the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You read that right! No reader of Dangerous Intersection, radical materialist or hard-bitten skeptic believes in science. To say otherwise is to give a false impression of what science actually is. Science is not something in which a person believes or does not believe. Science is not a belief system; it has no holy screeds or sacred tenets. It is merely a tool, a method of gleaning knowledge, and the language used in reference to it should reflect this.
What on earth am I ranting about? Well, it goes back a few years to the Discovery Institute, and spans all the way to the present with Ben Stein’s film Expelled. The intelligent design/evolution debate has become quite the pop topic, and hence, the endless battle of science vs. religion has come into everyday discussion as well. Everyday people in normal daily settings run through these issues, turning any public place into a potential battleground.
I’ve heard a lot of the less experienced science advocates say things about science that frankly aren’t accurate. While these people mean very well, they fail to frame their debates properly, and the content of the discussion suffers for it. Since science vs. religion has become as much a layman’s debate as an expert’s one, I think the time has come for those of us on the science side of things to agree on the language we should use.
I have no expertise in science, religion or philosophy, I have no refined understanding of the …