Posts

Defending Hypocrisy

If we're ever in a debate, please understand that accusations of hypocrisy don't resonate well with me.  Partly this is a function of my own history in this realm.  When I was in graduate school, my thesis adviser would occasionally rail against religious people because of their hypocrisy.  There is no point arguing or challenging the person who has power over your funding and whether you ever graduate with a PhD, so I let the barbs go without comment.  She knew I'm religious and was likely needling me, but she also just talks that way all the time because when you're in academia you can always opine about the Accepted Political Dogmas and if anyone disagrees with you it feels like it's in their best interest not to make it known.

Discourse on non-academic subjects in academia often looks like this: "Religious people are so dumb.  They all talk about the importance of marriage, but then look at all the religious people who get divorces!  So much for their beli…
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Open Questions Meet Settled Science

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This is a direct follow-up to my last post.  In that post, I explicitly questioned Darwinian Evolution - to the extent that the first comment asked me about other articles that do the same.

I want to defend Darwin here and everything he got right, because I read a lot of articles from people who read what experts say and piggy-back on that to proclaim that Darwin's work is being "overturned" or similar war-of-ideas-and-Darwin-is-losing kind of language.  This is the wrong way to understand the scientific process of expanding beyond the clear limits of Darwin's theory.  But I suppose part of the reason people turn to it is because they don't understand the right way to understand this process.  I'm going to spend much of my time here working through that, partly by comparing Darwin's contributions to those of Newton's discovery of universal gravitation.
The Universe Before Newton When I was young, I always had a problem understanding why Newton got so …
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Open Questions: The Origin of Life

In a previous post, I covered the claim that science proves there is no god.  This is one of the weaker arguments I hear when religion and science are discussed, because it's easy to disprove.  You simply have to challenge the claim, "How does science prove there is no God?  What experiments demonstrate this?"  However, in my experience most people who make this weak claim are actually thinking of a stronger atheistic claim, namely: "Science takes the place of religion.  It has now explained all the old gaps in our knowledge, and now we're just filling in the small gaps that remain."  In my last post, I talked about how the domains of science and religion don't generally overlap.  The popular conception is that science explains the how and religion explains the why of the world.  However, there is one major area of overlap for science and religion and that is creation, both of life and of the universe.  If science can explain the creation of the univers…
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Hitler's Evil Twin

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