Reading Time: 11 minutes I shouldn’t be surprised anymore about how poorly fundamentalists understand the word “faith.” They don’t have the faintest idea what it really means, so they tend to twist the word’s various false meanings around and around as necessary to try to force their way into other people’s lives. I don’t seriously think they have the […]
Intelligent Design
Posted inReligion
The Great Debate (Wasn’t So Great After All)
Reading Time: 11 minutes Ken Ham and Bill Nye had a big debate recently. I was of two minds about watching the debate at all. It seemed like such a waste of time. I mean, really: it seems like Christian creationists get a lot more out of these things than the reality-endorsing folks do; it seems like it legitimizes […]
Posted inEvolution, Science
Quote of the Day – Andreas Schueler (I love this one)
Reading Time: < 1 minute Good ole Andy. Always says sensible stuff. Well, this one pops up fairly often in conversations with IDers. Andy uses it to good effect. I thought I would repeat it here as a foil to anybody who asserts that Intelligent Design is any sort of proper theory, with any sort of predictive power. “So an […]
Posted inUncategorized
Dismantling Irreducible Complexity
Reading Time: 3 minutes A system is irreducibly complex when every part is necessary. Remove any part, and the system breaks, so how could such a system have been built, piece by piece, by nature? Any precursor would have been useless and therefore selected against by evolution. But an example with which we’re all familiar undercuts this argument.
Posted inReligion
Redefining Words: Theories (Aren’t Bills).
Reading Time: 8 minutes Recently, Ball State University came into the spotlight when their administration had to rein in an associate professor who decided to teach Intelligent Design in a class called “The Boundaries of Science,” and in coming into the spotlight, BSU has illustrated one of the most pernicious redefinitions the modern fundagelical movement has at its disposal: […]
Posted inGaming, Religion
The Scary Superfluity of Religion.
Reading Time: 8 minutes “It’s either mean or it’s arbitrary,” said the little boy in the strip, “and either way I’ve got the heebie-jeebies.” Set the Wayback Machine to roughly 1992. I was in my living room reading “Calvin & Hobbes,” a comic strip about a rambunctious boy and his imaginary friend. I was beginning to question my Pentecostal […]
Posted inUncategorized
The ‘Why I am a Christian’ series – Randal Rauser
Reading Time: 8 minutes As mentioned in my last post, I was graciously asked by Randal Rauser on his blog recently to provide a synopsis of a few paragraphs to run in his series “Why I am an atheist” (or not a Christian. The series has been interesting and has elicited testimonies from Justin Schieber, Counter Apologist, Jeff Lowder, Ed Babinski and others. I have since asked Randal to return the favour and he has gladly accepted, furnishing me with a much more lengthy expression of the reasons for his Christian belief.
Posted inEvolution
JoeG doesn’t know the first rule of holes – evolution vs ID
Reading Time: 16 minutes Joe G´s shenanigans continue
I´m skeptical that anyone is still interested in seeing more of Joe G´s shenanigans (if you missed the story, it´s the Cdesign proponentsist that challenged me to a $10,000 bet, lost, and then chickened out ). If you are bored of this guy, leave now ;-).
Posted inScience
Quote of the Day: Daydreamer1
Reading Time: 2 minutes So on the second post involving the infamous $10,000 bet about nested hierarchies in evolution, regular erudite commenter Daydreamer1 brought up some really good points about design, but not from a biological standpoint. With intelligent design theories, we often fail to look at them in contexts outside of biology, say, in the earth sciences. I think the criticisms of ID can really be pushed home in these contests, as DD1 shows:
Posted inEvolution
Cdesign proponentsist JoeG loses $10,000 bet and chickens out – UPDATE
Reading Time: 18 minutes A few days ago, Cdesign proponentsist JoeG challenged me to a $10,000 bet over which one of us understands the concept of nested hierarchies better. I accepted his challenge and won and he decided to chicken out and lie about the bet.