Topic: Proposed change to comment policy concerning ill-informed comments regarding A) the scientific method and B) evolution by natural selection. At DI, we’ve had a wide-open comment policy. Until recently, I have rarely rejected comments. The ones I have rejected consisted mostly of preaching (see the current comment policy). I’ve…
Are you looking for a really unusual gift idea? I found one at a non-profit Mennonite store in University City, Missouri, Plowsharing Crafts. I spotted this object in the musical instruments section of the store. It looked like an animal's jawbone. The proprietor told me that it was, indeed, "a…
Now that he doesn't need the evangelicals to get elected (and now that John McCain doesn't need them either), George W. Bush can safely say the the Bible is "probably not literally true." In a recent interview on ABC with Charles Gibson, Bush freely admits that Muslims can go to…
It's been awhile since we've discussed the rules for stoning found in the Bible. Rather than rehashing those rules, I decided to post this stoning demo by Monty Python (from "The Life of Brian"). [youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaORknS1Dk[/youtube] BTW, if you enjoy Monty Python (I very much do), you should be aware that…
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.
In 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 …
