Really, you are not the first one to have heard that creationist claim you just heard. Almost guaranteed. The next time you hear something like any of the following, go to the Index to Creationist Claims published by TalkOrigins. Darwin himself was racist. Fairness demands evolution and creation be given…
In a recent interview published in Salon.com, Richard Dawkins was asked what we should do when science cannot provide answers we crave. Here's what he said: There are two ways of responding to mystery. The scientist's way is to see it as a challenge, something they've got to work on,…
Trying to have a baby is one important reason to have sex. There are other important reasons to have sex regularly, according to this article in Forbes: "Is Sex Necessary?" Refer to this article whenever someone preaches to you that the only proper reason to have sex is to have babies. The article is based on a study that correlated overall health with sexual frequency:
Queens University in Belfast tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study was designed to compare persons of comparable circumstances, age and health. Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards.Here are some of the health benefits to having sex on a regular basis:
One of the many miscommunications between people of science and Creationists is the assumption that the universe was created for man. If so, the engineer behind this place was wa-ay off the mark. The universe is nowhere near human scale, and the vast majority of it has nothing to do with Man.
We only began to understand the heavens when some very careful measurements were made using precision instruments. Copernicus had to note the precise movements of dots in the heavenly sphere for a long time to be sure enough that they were centered on the Sun, not the Earth. It was easier for Galileo, who polished some chunks of glass to see that even these dots had smaller dots in orbit around them. Dots that couldn’t possibly be seen by, nor affect, the average human.
Then Leeuwenhoek ground some smaller lenses and noticed that there were complete creatures too small to see, and that they were everywhere! He opened up the microscopic revolution in which it turned out that humans (and other creatures) are not made of continuous stuff, but rather each organ is composed of colonies of lesser lifeforms, cells. In fact, each organ is an ecosystem. Our skin (our largest organ after birth) is host to an abundance of microbes, mites, bacteria, and fungi that ideally coexist peacefully to maintain the health of our skin. These “parasites” are essential to our well-being, but they do not share our DNA.
When Mendeleev worked out the periodic arrangement …
An evangelical acquaintance recently wrote me a letter arguing that the pro-stem cell research proposal (Missouri Amendment 2) A) is geared to financially enrich its sponsors, B) that it will invite reproductive cloning and C) that poor women will result in poor women selling their eggs. She urged me to oppose the Amendment and oppose various promising forms of stem cell research.
For information on the proposed amendment, see here.
Even before receiving this letter, I knew that my acquaintance believed that a one-minute old fertilized human egg in a Petri dish is a baby that deserved full legal protection and priority over the children with horrible illnesses who occupy hospital beds. My acquaintance indicated that she was part of an organized effort to defeat Missouri Amendment 2.
I am not thrilled with my response (see below), but I couldn’t think of anything better. If anyone has any ideas as to a more effective way to deal with those who oppose stem cell research on religious grounds, I’m all ears.
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Dear [Acquaintance]
I realize that you feel hurt and attacked by my previous email. In this e-mail, I will attempt to put our recent exchange of e-mail in perspective.
The technology for making insulin is currently based on recombinant DNA techniques; the human gene which codes for the insulin protein is cloned and then inserted in bacteria. I want you to assume for a moment, though, that my religion holds that both the cloning of genes and recombinant DNA …