Today at HuffPost: Intelligent Design is dead
I’ve a new piece up today at the Huffington Post. It is the reworking of an essay I wrote a few years ago about Johannes Kepler and Intelligent Design. Here’s a teaser: Kepler reminds us that religious people do not need to shrink from science and its naturalistic methods, because they more than others have [...]
My favorite funny R&S post of 2011
So many good things have been written this year about the sometimes-contentious, sometimes-mind-expanding, sometimes-hopeful relationship between science & religion. But there’s humor too, and the best funny thing I saw all year may be this strip. I found it at James McGrath’s Patheos blog, Exploring Our Matrix, but it has been featured by PZ Myers and [...]
Keep Austin somewhat less weird
Lucky LaRue, Altoids That Bite, 2009. At the South Austin Popular Culture Center. This is the kind of weirdness we like. There are kinds not so likeable. Used with permission of the artist. Image source: redbubble.com it hurts a bit that I’ve never been to weird Austin, Republic of Texas. Alas for me: Everyone I [...]
Suffer the little children: Bees sting you because you’re naughty
Bombus terrestris, 1978. 10-dinar stamp from the Soviet days. Image source: Animal Kingdom I have recently stumbled upon a most depressing trove of nonsense at the Answers in Genesis website. As its name implies, AiG is all about answers. They love answers, which is why they love the Bible so much. The Bible, as we [...]
Mind the gaps
Illumination from the Codex Aemilianensis, 992. In the tenth century we had no reason to suspect Adam and Eve had not been actual people. Now we do. Image source: University of Florida God lives in the gaps. And the gaps must be getting downright cozy for God. The God of the gaps fallacy runs deep. [...]
Meet the new conspiracy
The phases of Venus as photographed in 2002 by Chris Proctor at the Torquay Boys’ Grammar School Observartory in Devon, England. It was Galileo’s observations of Venus’s phases that most powerfully argued against the ancient geocentric system of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Galileo’s observations did not convince anyone of the truth of the Copernican system, [...]
Worldwide arks!
A full-scale replica of Giraffa camelopardalis peers out from the deck of a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark. This particular replica (of the ark, not the giraffe) is being built by Johan Huibers of Dordrecht, the Netherlands. Photo: Michel de Groot/The New York Times Just yesterday, the New York Times posted an article about a [...]
Percy’s conundrum
Walker Percy (1916-1990). Image source: Wikipedia. Here’s a wonderful excerpt on Percy from HiLoBrow (“middlebrow’s not the solution”): “So, if you want to be Walker Percy, here’s what you do: have a father (whose own father committed suicide) who shoots himself with a shotgun when you’re twelve. Have a mother who might or might not [...]
The wages of sin is plate tectonics
Here’s a nice elevation map of our poor fractured home planet. Click on the image for a detailed look. Notice in particular (1) the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the S-shaped mountain range running from the extreme South Atlantic all the way up to Iceland and beyond, and opening up at an average rate of 2.5 cm per [...]
Irony 101, Lesson 7: Creationists co-opt Scopes
John Thomas Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925 for violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools. He was tried in a famous case known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. He later said of the trial, “I furnished the body that was [...]
