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 [...]
Is it showtime for the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
They have the deity. They have the art. Will the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster make it to prime time? Image source: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Unlike some Christians, I have always found great humor in Pastafarianism, the faux (or not) religion centered on the mythology of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). [...]
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, [...]
Introducing 114 and 116. Watch those shifty scientists
Back a few years ago Cobb County, a major suburban county in metro Atlanta (my hometown and current address), posted stickers in high school biology books that read, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open [...]
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 [...]
Why evolution should be taught in church
Aryan Jesus loves himself a little velociraptor. Image source: Monty Propps at b3ta.com This article first appeared at Religion Dispatches These are busy times for those who fight the teaching of creationism in public schools. It’s like playing a giant game of Whack-a-Mole: In January alone, anti-evolution forces first raised their heads in North Carolina. [...]
Colbert: God lives where we don’t know stuff
Click on the image to get an earful of Colbert on O’Reilly, God, and the tides Snark is usually not accepted here at psnt.net, but this is Colbert and sometimes exceptions just must be made. Although they surely did some creative editing of O’Reilly‘s comments, there is a serious point buried in this clip: God [...]
Science envy is alive and well in old Kentucky
A trilobite, Ceraurus milleranus, found in Maysville, Kentucky. Whence this delight? There are two options here: (1) Ceraurus milleranus lived during the Ordovician, a period that lasted from about 488 to 444 million years ago and all its trilobyie cousins went extinct by the end of the Permian (250 million years ago); or (2) Ceraurus [...]
Richard Feynman and the malaise of science envy
What’s not to envy (I mean, besides the clothes and hair)? Feynman, a physicist who knows baloney when he sees it, chilling at a Caltech blackboard. Image courtesy of the American Institute of Physics Of late I have been engaged in a discussion with Tom and Todd about whether or not Intelligent Design (ID) is [...]
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 [...]
