In this recent interview, published by Salon.com, Ronald Numbers (a former Seventh-day Adventist and author of the definitive history of creationism) discusses "his break with the church, whether creationists are less intelligent and why Galileo wasn't really a martyr." Here's a sampling. Aren't anti-evolutionists anti-scientific? It's not that easy, according…
According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the U.S. National Park Service won't admit the well-established age of the Grand Canyon. Why? Because our National Park Service doesn't want to offend young earth creationists. Here's the well-established geological story: The principal consensus among geologists is that the Colorado River basin (of which…
We’re right in the middle of massively expensive Christmas displays. No, not just the light displays. I’m referring to the numerous expenditures of time, energy and money that, because they are expensive, serve as reliable messages to others that we are interested in bonding with them . . . or not. Christmas is as good a time as any to let the truth hang out.
These displays take many forms. To whom do we send Christmas cards (and from whom do we receive them?)? To whose parties will we be invited? Who are those select people with whom we will end up exchaning gifts? It doesn’t matter if we don’t really enjoy cards, parties and gifts. It doesn’t really matter whether we believe in virgin birth. It doesn’t matter whether there were three kings or whether there was an especially bright star. As with oh-so-many things, Christmas is really about relationships. At bottom, Christmas is about rubbing elbows and bonding, no matter what the conventional wisdom.
The conventional wisdom says that Christmas is about a particular set of alleged historical truths. We need to keep in mind, though, that there are many cultures that give no credibility to the Jesus story who engage in similar gatherings and similar gift exchanges based on their own lore, much of if as unlikely as the story of a virgin giving birth to a God. They have their own gift exchanges and parties and songs and decorations framed by lore that makes no …
Some of us who sincerely treasure the scientific fact and scientific theory of evolution have brought on some of our own problems with our choice of nomenclature. For instance, sometimes “random mutations” gets uncoupled from natural selection, leading some to believe that it is the randomness of the process that is the be-all and end-all of evolution. Consider also Francis Crick’s description of the associations of amino acids with their three base codons as a "frozen accident." Creationists, ignoring these (legitimate) scientific and scientific/poetic usages, have jumped all over the terms such as "random" and "accident" to characterize scientific evolutionary theory in the following warped way: "All life forms just suddenly spring into existence as accidents." Though I am aware that sophisticated creationists would embellish this attack, this characterization is certainly the straw man put forth by most of the people out there who tremble at the thought that human beings are (gad!) animals. It recently occurred to me that, perhaps, creationists’ willingness to assume that evolutionists are claiming that complex life forms "just happen" might be another symptom of "innumeracy." It might be that they don't understand how incredibly rare it is that biological "accidents" survive and reproduce. In his bestseller, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (1988), John Paulos introduced the term “innumeracy” to refer to "an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance." Paulos bemoaned that innumeracy "plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens."
There are some (usually unacknowledged) semantic disconnects ("failures to communicate") whenever theists and Atheists argue. Neither side responds as though they were aware of the unstated fundamental assumptions of the other side. Here are some of these for your consideration. For Atheist and Ignostic consideration: Theist's perceptions of atheism (as…