Darwin, the roots of words, etc

I have had the opportunity to exchange email and links with a man named Josh, who I invited to visit this blog.   Josh’s initial comment was: “Thanks for the Invite! But I must say… you and I are in for many future debates!” I could also tell that Josh and I were different by looking at the homepage of his blog, where he writes: “I enjoy apologetics, studying the Bible, and reading various amounts of other important literature. My passion in life is to please Christ.”

Recently, Josh referred me to an article he wrote last year, an article entitled “The Scientific Truth” published on his blog: http://defendtruth.blogspot.com/.   Below is my reaction to his article. 

Josh:

Thank you for bringing my attention to your article:  I’m truly glad we can have this conversation.  We certainly come from different perspectives.  Different perspectives, but not necessarily different backgrounds.  When I was young, I was told to fear God and to read the Bible. I was told that my questions were “just a phase” and that I would learn to simply love God and stop asking impertinent questions.  I was sent to Christian (Catholic) schools for 15 of my years of education.

I don’t pretend to know all the answers.  I am now an agnostic regarding many things.  I believe that the evidence only goes so far and we need to be brave enough to repeatedly say “I don’t know.”  I struggle to find explanations that make the most sense …

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Pump up your tires to save Alaska

"HOW ALASKA CAN HELP MEET AMERICA'S ENERGY NEEDS" is an article to which Republican Senator Jim Talent of Missouri refers his constituents.  That article argues that we need to start drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) of Alaska, because it holds 10 billion barrels of economically…

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Star Trek’s Error: Spock’s lack of emotion would have made him irrational

Rene Descartes held that the human mind was separate from bodily processes.  Dr. Antonio R. Damasio disagreed, as set forth in Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994). In this book, Damasio introduced the cases of Phineas Gage (long dead) and “Elliot” (a living patient), who both suffered brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal area of their brains. 

Gage’s brain damage occurred when a metal tamping rod was accidentally shot through his brain during a blasting operation (he recovered and lived many years).  Elliot’s damage occurred as a result of a brain tumor. They were both left with high level intellectual functioning but little ability to experience emotion. 

[Gage] seemed to be like a child, with no stable sense of what was important and what was not. He was fitful, intemperate, obscene. It was as if he didn’t care about one thing more than another. He seemed bizarrely detached from the reality of his conduct. So he could not make good choices, and he could not sustain good relationships . .

Elliot had been a good role model, husband and father before his tumor.  After the tumor, he was

weirdly cool, detached, and ironic, indifferent even to intrusive discussion of personal matters- as if such remarks were not really about him. He had not previously been this way; he had been an affectionate husband and father. He retained lots of cognitive functions: he could perform calculations, had a fine memory for dates and names, and the ability to

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Belief in Scripture and Belief in Alien Abductions – A Response to grumpypilgrim

I have to admit, when I read grumpypilgrim’s post that the evidence supporting Christianity is on par with the evidence supporting alien abduction, I got nervous.  It sounded so very harsh. I couldn’t help thinking of the many sincerely Christians who would be insulted by such a comparison.  I’m well aware that many Christians (including many of the people who regularly visit this site) are incredibly generous people who give much more back to this world than they take.  I truly admire their good works.  It is not my purpose (and I’m sure it’s not grumpypilgrim’s purpose) to insult them.  I’ve tried to make this clear as part of other posts.

On the other hand, grumpypilgrim’s post reminded me of some of the many questions Daniel Dennett raised in his recent book, Breaking the Spell (2006).  On page 210, for example, Dennett cited Richard Dawkins (from A Devil’s Chaplain):

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in.  Some of us just go one god further.

I have often criticized believers who are so absolutely certain of their own beliefs, all of which are based upon a personal “feeling” and apocryphal writings, that they take political steps to disparage the beliefs and doubts of all other people.  Jimmy Carter has termed such people “fundamentalists,”:

A fundamentalist believes, say, in religious circles, that I am close to God. Everything that I believe is absolutely right. Anyone who disagrees with me, in any case,

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Support Stem Cell Research to Save Lives

I can’t believe that it’s actually necessary to argue that we should allow medical research that might give numerous people a fighting change to survive horrible diseases.  But here we are.  We live in an age where many things have been turned upside down. 

I wrote the following letter on November 27, 2005 after attending Catholic Mass at a church in my neighborhood.  I attended because I had heard that priests throughout Missouri had been instructed by their superiors to preach against a proposed Missouri Constitutional Amendment that would allow stem cell research to continue

Washington University in St. Louis is a major medical research center that conducts stem cell research.  The Missouri legislature has regularly threatened to prohibit stem cell research in Missouri, giving rise to a proposed Amendment that is being promoted by  The Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures.

http://www.missouricures.com/

MCLC describes the amendment as follows: 

Should Missouri patients have access to medical cures that are available to other Americans?
That’s the key issue that led a coalition of patient and medical groups to develop the Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, a voter referendum measure proposed for the November 2006 statewide ballot.

Stem cells could provide cures for diseases and injuries that afflict hundreds of thousands of Missouri children and adults and millions of other Americans – including diabetes, Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease, ALS, sickle cell disease and spinal cord injury.

Unfortunately, some politicians in Jefferson City are trying to pass state laws that would ban

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