I knew when the news of the tragedy at Virginia Tech came out that there would be religious responses that would be obnoxious, and even some that would be downright despicable. It seems that with every tragedy there are uninvolved people available to place blame and to pontificate. I personally have no words that are…
Panda’s Thumb writer Pim van Meurs gave an irony award to Salvador Cordova whom he quotes as saying: Darwinian TE (Theistic Evolution) just doesnt cut it scientifically. That is ironic, considering that young earth creationism makes many assertions that contradict archeology, not to mention geology. Young earth doesn’t even match the written record. But this…
If you’ve seen the information on T. Rex protein and are wondering what it does and doesn’t mean will problem find this post on Pharyngula helpful. There are already creationist misinterpretations of this information, such as this one: For the moment, lets not ignore the importance of what has been found (and as will be…
The attack on moderation, or excluding the middle (broadly conceived) and the assumption that this is all there is are the two key points of disagreement, from which most everything else follows. The assumption that this physical universe is all that exists is illustrated in the discussion of the multiverse theory (pp. 145-147). Now do…
[Continuing my series responding to The God Delusion. The starting entry is From the Land of the Deluded.] It may surprise many readers to know that I have a number of points of agreement with Dawkins. Since I have blogged about many of these things before, I’m only going to give a basic list with…
This CNN article on Francis Collins also comes from a friend’s e-mail. I’m happy to call attention to it. Dr. Francis Collins is both an evangelical Christian and accepts the theory of evolution. His testimony is interesting. I will be commenting some more on the relationship between science and religion in the next few days…
Ed Brayton has an interesting post on views of evolution amongst doctors, which is based on this post by Steve Reuland on the Panda’s Thumb. I should have gotten around to it earlier, like when it was first posted, but it’s finally Saturday, I have a few minutes to work on it, and Ed’s post…
There’s an excellent piece on human evolution in Newsweek, written for those of us who are not scientists. I think there are a couple of unclear points, but for the most part it’s a good update on the state of science. I did notice that things that have been around for some years seem to…
I love it when these kinds of news stories hit the popular media. A new species of dinosaur was discovered by Michael Ryan in Alberta while he was a graduate student, and the find has now been published in the Journal of Paleontology, according to MSNBC. The dinosaur species is named Albertaceratops nesmoi, and it…
Jason Rosenhouse has an excellent discussion or even better dissection of some recent writing by Philip Johnson. I’ve had this partial entry on Johnson sitting amongst my drafts for ages, but since Johnson is now bringing forth many of the same arguments, and Rosenhouse has quite thoroughly demolished them, I will simply refer you to…
