This is a six-minute video of several of the Hubble telescope's great accomplishments. Who said scientists can't be inspirational? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw[/youtube]
In Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (1982), Frans de Waal discusses reconciliation, but he's not talking about human beings who are making up after fighting. Rather, de Waal is describing the reconciliation he has observed in communities of chimpanzees: Sometimes the maneuver is fairly obvious. Within a minute…
Published here, you can read the ongoing lively debate between Sam Harris and Dennis Prager, who hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show.
Here’s how Harris responded to the common claim that atheists are arrogant believers that everything “just happened”:
Atheism does not assert that “it is all made by chance.” No one knows why the universe came into being. Most scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. One of the extraordinary ironies of religious discourse can be seen in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. You have done a fine job of this above. And yet, there is no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: The Creator of the Universe takes an active interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…
An average believer has achieved a level of arrogance that is simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.
Prager argues here that God’s existence is proved by the alleged lack of moral fiber found in secular societies.
…My argument is that unlike Judeo-Christian America, secular societies—generally meaning those of Western Europe—lose their will to survive (by not reproducing), and
You’ll never find anyone who writes more clearly about mathematics than John Paulos. Exhibit A is Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1990). Paulos doesn’t limit his inquiries and writings to pure mathematics, however. Mathematics permeates numerous social issues, and Paulos is happy to jump into the fray whereever that is…
I got riled up while reading the latest Utne Reader by an article by Keith Goetzman entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem“. He eloquently argues that we should stop wasting money on space research and spend it solving problems here on Earth.
Let’s look at the numbers. What fraction of a percent of our national budget is spent on space? NASA got about $16B in 2005 (including military allocations) out of $2,200B Federal revenues. That’s 0.72%, leaving only a paltry 99.28% to deal with problems here on Earth. I’m ignoring the record-high deficit spending that makes the NASA fraction even smaller. Look the numbers up yourselves. Check my assertions.
We could spend that little fraction on some other issues here at home. But how will we solve problems such as the next major asteroid impact? Yes, it will happen; we just won’t know when. How will we solve the problem of running out of {pick your resource}? Anything we need down here (or a reasonable substitute) can be found up there. After we build a space elevator, it would be cheaper to get it from up there than to dig it up here now! But, this project would necessarily be a crash program about as expensive as — and probably longer lasting than — a war in the middle east and it’s aftermath. Of course, the space elevator would employ a comparable number of people in a third world location that a hypothetical war on Iraq would kill …