Religion & Law

Santayana's Curse

Posted on October 08, 2008
Daniel Nexon at The Duck of Minerva beat me to it.Curious as to the mouth-breather reaction to that debate thingie we American inflicted on ourselves (full disclosure: I didn't watch it), I went to RedState to see that partisan side's take on the whole thing...

Technological Godlings

Posted on October 07, 2008
The ever-reliable and trustworthy Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine has more on the review article in Science, "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" by University of British Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, that I mentioned the other day...

To Read Pile Piles Up

Posted on October 06, 2008
From Publisher's Weekly:Why Evolution Is True Jerry A. Coyne. Viking, $27.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-670-02053-9With great care, attention to the scientific evidence and a wonderfully accessible style, Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, presents an overwhelming case for evolution...

Behold a Palin Horse

Posted on October 05, 2008
Newsweek's cover story by Jon Meacham is entitled "The Palin Problem" and it exemplifies what Elitist Bastardry is all about. Some highlights:Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans. It is not shocking to learn that politics played a big role in the making of a presidential team ...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

de Tocqueville's Folly

Posted on October 04, 2008
.Hey, sailor, wanna come up and vote for me sometime?Sigh!.

Aping Religion

Posted on October 04, 2008
There is a semi-interview in the Toronto Star with Ara Norenzayan, a University of British Columbia psychologist and lead author of a review paper in Science on the role of religion in expanding social traits such as altruism and cooperation beyond kin groups...

Out of Lux

Posted on October 03, 2008
Joseph Brean at the National Post has an interesting article on a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose, of Oxford University, about the possible revival of the "oscillating universe" model, by which the universe endlessly expands and collapses, from big bang to big crunch and over again...

Under the Counterknowledge

Posted on October 02, 2008
Louis Bayard has a review in Salon of a new book by Damian Thompson, who is described as a "British polemicist," a lead writer the Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of a major Catholic newspaper, the Catholic Herald. Entitled Counterknowledge, Thompson's book describes the seemingly endless incoming tide of woo...

Ouch!

Posted on October 01, 2008
The Christian Post has a more creationist-friendly version of recent events in Texas than the story I linked to yesterday.Well, sort of.The problem with being creationist-friendly is that it sort of requires that you let them talk ... which is never doing them a favor...

Small in the Saddle

Posted on September 30, 2008
More than 800 scientists from Texas universities have formed the 21st Century Science Coalition to fight either the teaching of creationism in public schools or the watering down of evolutionary instruction."Texas public schools should be preparing our kids to succeed in the 21st century, not promoting political and ideological agendas that are hostile to a sound science education," said David Hillis, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin...

English Gets a New Word

Posted on September 29, 2008
funderburk (fun·dur'·burc) v. -burked, -burking, -burks. To endorse insane or wildly dishonest material while holding a position of public trust, particularly political office, and then lying transparently about it. FORT MILL, S.C. -- Fort Mill Mayor Danny Funderburk says he was "just curious" when he forwarded a chain e-mail suggesting Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is the biblical antichrist...

Which Trials?

Posted on September 29, 2008
This story has been kicking around awhile. The Brunswick County, North Carolina, school board wants to teach creationism in its public schools. The state's Department of Public Instruction has been pretty clear that they can't. Edd Dunlap, science section chief for the department stated that neither creationism nor Intelligent Design may be taught as a required course of study...

Purpose and Science

Posted on September 28, 2008
This is just one of my musings about philosophy that is, doubtless, more interesting to me than to others ... but it's my blog! Feel free to spare your glazed-overed eyes.There is a common argument for atheism that runs like this:If purpose was part of the universe then there's no reason at all why science couldn't have detected it...

Gee, Dawkins, What About Santa?

Posted on September 28, 2008
In the course of a review of Stuart A. Kauffman's new book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, Henry Gee, a senior editor of the journal Nature, presents an amusing answer to scientific reductionists: In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins boasted that he once told a child that Santa Claus didn't exist...

God and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Posted on September 27, 2008
Martin Nowak, a mathematician and biologist at Harvard, accepts evolutionary explanations of the appearance of altruism in humans and other species.Yet as a Catholic, he rejects [Richard] Dawkins's notion that believing in evolution precludes belief in a God who included altruism in evolution's bequest to us...

If Not Now, When?

Posted on September 27, 2008
The Fifth Carnival of Elitist Bastards has set sail at The Coffee-Stained Writer. And at this time there is one paramount reason for elitism:By trying to set our towns against our cities, Palin makes the vital mistake of imagining that, despite our differences, we don't need each other, and the equally dangerous mistake of pigeonholing our towns & cities into pre-determined antagonistic roles...

Garbage In ...

Posted on September 26, 2008
The Discovery Institute's Gofer General, Tour Guide and Custodian of Science Ignorance, Casey Luskin, has delivered himself of another dose of stupidity and/or dishonesty.He claims that a Yale University news release from earlier this month threatens one of the "icons" of evolution: the notion that "junk DNA" demonstrates, as Michael Shermer put it, that: Rather than being intelligently designed, the human genome looks more and more like a mosaic of mutations, fragment copies, borrowed sequences, and discarded strings of DNA that were jerry-built over millions of years of evolution...

Blowin' Up

Posted on September 25, 2008
Since the dust is about to fly in Texas, you might as well know why.You can find the draft science standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (or "TEKS") at the Texas Education Agency's site.I haven't studied them in any detail but some things stand out...

And So It Begins

Posted on September 24, 2008
A six-member committee of teachers, college professors and curriculum experts nominated by the Texas State Board of Education has released its recommendation for new standards for the biology curriculum. The recommendation would eliminate the teaching of ideas "based upon purported forces outside of nature...

Bits and Pieces

Posted on September 23, 2008
A few things from around the intertubes:Roger Ebert was, in fact, having us on:Some days ago I posted an article headlined, "Creationism: Your questions answered." It was Q&A that accurately reflected Creationist beliefs. It inspired a firestorm on the web, with hundreds, even thousands of comments on blogs devoted to evolution and science...

Bring Out the Stakes ... and Beer!

Posted on September 22, 2008
Well, it's come to this at last!Christians are being asked to donate to a college campus group that will, as one advertising sign put it, "Make atheists read the Bible."What next? Gangs of Jehovah's Witnesses roaming the streets looking for nuns they can force to recite articles from The Watchtower?This outrage must be stopped before ...

Page Turner

Posted on September 21, 2008
In hopes of inducing a state just short of terminal envy in Larry Moran, I had the opportunity yesterday to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art's special exhibition of J.M.W. Turner's paintings and watercolors.Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775?1851) was an English artist best known for his landscapes and seascapes...

Hobbes and Choice

Posted on September 21, 2008
There's a review of three books purportedly answering the "New Atheists" at something called The American Thinker (would someone please get poor old Uncle Sam some Kaopectate?). Among their other sins, the folks in charge of The American Thinker maintain that Sarah Palin is an archtype of our "best selves burned into history," the frontierswoman, in the same vein as Maureen O'Hara was...

On Attention Spans

Posted on September 20, 2008
John Polkinghorne weighs in on the Michael Reiss affair:I believe that he has been the victim of our sound-bite culture, in which a phrase is plucked from a considered speech and, out of context, is made to seem as if something quite contrary to the speaker's actual intention was being said...

Torah Torah Torah

Posted on September 19, 2008
The Clergy Letter Project, begun by Michael Zimmerman, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University, to demonstrate support for science, particularly evolutionary theory, among members of the clergy of all Christian denominations has garnered 11,672 signatures to date to a statement that reads, in part:We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests...

Stuffed Turkey

Posted on September 18, 2008
A court has denied access by internet users in Turkey to the official Richard Dawkins website based on, of all things, a complaint by Adnan Oktar, the creationist who publishes under the name Harun Yahya. One of Oktar's more notable activities recently was to mail tens of thousands of copies of something called The Atlas of Creation, unsolicited, to schools, researchers and research institutes throughout Europe and the United States...

Stumbling on the Truth

Posted on September 17, 2008
When last we left beautiful downtown Butteville, California, trustees of the Union Elementary School District had agreed to seek legal counsel regarding the "information/action agenda item" entitled "Evolution versus Intelligent Design Taught in the Classroom...

Another One Bites the Dust

Posted on September 16, 2008
Michael Reiss, the center of much recent controversy, has resigned his position as the Royal Society's Director of Education. The Royal Society has issued a press release:Some of Professor Michael Reiss's recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society's Director of Education, were open to misinterpretation...

High Tech Justice

Posted on September 15, 2008
George Bush's wet dream may be in the offing. And if that's not enough of a reason to be suspicious, here's the rest of the story:The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete...

Trouble in Paradise

Posted on September 15, 2008
Well, maybe not paradise ... but it is the home of Charles Darwin and the place where the theory of evolution, now accepted as the bedrock of biology, originated in earnest.According to the BBC, Britain now has its own creationism museum, though there's no word whether it matches America's monument to the waste of money...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.