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 [...]
On upper-class medieval persons, Bronze-Age goat herders, and semi-enlightened Englishmen, featuring full-color illustrative proof of the Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit
Almost enlightened, but not quite: Sir Frederick William Herschel, artist unknown. Image source: Wikimedia Commons “Imagine we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would even embarrass a child, but he would [...]
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, [...]
Michael Ruse on Darwin and atheism. Thinking like Jesus
Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Darwin, 1866. Image source: Wikimedia Commons Today an interesting article showed up at the Huffington Post. Written by Michael Ruse, an atheist who is interesting, the piece is about Darwin and atheism. It was written in the wake of Darwin Day, which occurred this last weekend. He points out the oddity [...]
Galileo’s incredible near miss
The sky in the neighborhood of Jupiter as it appeared on the evening of 28 January 1613, as Galileo may have seen it. The four so-called Galilean Satellites of Jupiter are labeled: Io (i), Europa (e), Ganymede (g), and Callisto (c), as is the star HP 59164 (s). All the other points are faint background [...]
Johannes Kepler, Christian astronomer and flat-out genius, opposed intelligent design 400 years ago. This is a man worth knowing
Hans von Aachen, Johannes Kepler, ca. 1610. This image is really a refreshing exception to all the drawings and paintings of Kepler that make him look tight-jawed and authoritarian. It captures the man’s humanity and, IMO, his neuroses, quite well. Image source: art.com Happy birthday, Herr Kepler! He was born on 27 December 1571 at [...]
The majesty of the man: his palace, his serfs, his nose, his elk, his dwarf, his murder(?): exhuming Tycho (again)
Tycho Brahe’s great mural quadrant. One of the most famous images in the whole of the history of astronomy was the fresco that was painted within the arc of the great mural quadrant at Uraniborg, Tycho’s palatial observatory on the (then Danish) island of Hven. Tycho is portrayed beneath portraits of his liege-lord and in [...]
