Reading Time: 8 minutes It was an atypically dry English spring when a man in Bath scanned the skies with a 7-inch reflecting telescope he’d designed and built by hand, through painstaking refinements to Isaac Newton’s principles of optics. William Herschel was studying stellar parallax, the phenomenon that makes a nearby star look like it has moved in relation […]
Science and Religion
Posted inComedy
List of times religion debunked science
Reading Time: < 1 minute Since time immemorial, religion has revealed to mankind The Truth about life, the universe, and everything…in appropriate context as decided by unelected church officials often no better educated than the lowest parishioner. Everyone who wasn’t branded a witch or a heretic was happy with that system. Then along came upstart “science” throwing their son-of-a-monkey wrench […]
Posted inScience
Bass-ackwards: We are not hardwired for belief
Reading Time: 5 minutes Many Christians seem to love the idea of humans being hardwired for belief. By this phrase, they mean that their god placed in each human’s heart a desire to worship something supernatural. Unfortunately, their god didn’t finish the job.
Posted inPsychology
Semantic paraphasia: The things we can’t help
Reading Time: 5 minutes I often mis-say specific words. I know the word I want and I’m thinking of the right thing at the time, but the wrong word consistently pops out. It turns out there’s a term for this situation: semantic paraphasia. Today, Lord Snow Presides over our brains — and the stuff we literally can’t help sometimes.
Posted inSpace
The science of the stars, from Bethlehem and beyond
Reading Time: 3 minutes Once again, the Christmas holiday has come. Just days before December 25th, the northern hemisphere experienced the shortest day of the year; conversely, the south had it longest. Just one of those things that happens when you have a ball careening around a sustained nuclear furnace at 30 kilometers a second with a small angular […]
Posted inGeneral
We Found a Possible Exoplanet in Another Galaxy! (LSP #215)
Reading Time: 6 minutes If life existed on Earth, my ten-year-old self figured, then it had to exist elsewhere. If our Sun had oodles of planets and moons whizzing around it, then other stars had to have them as well. And on those planets, who knew what might exist? It seemed far more likely to me that at least some other planets hosted life — and more than that, intelligent life — than that none possibly ever could.
Posted inScience
U.S. acceptance of human evolution breaks into majority
Reading Time: 3 minutes A majority of Americans accept evolution. Sadly, that’s a huge improvement from the past.
Posted inResearch
Study finds science classes aren’t the main reason many college students ditch faith
Reading Time: 2 minutes Ken Ham’s not going to like this.
Posted inEthics and Morality
Animal Suffering, William Lane Craig, and Christian Apologetics
Reading Time: 8 minutes Animal suffering is a thorn in the side of Christian apologists because no theodicy adequately justifies its existence. This is due to the fact that most theodicies revolve around the pain and suffering of humans and attach the blame for such suffering solely to humans themselves. In some way, they get what they deserve. If not […]
Posted inUncategorized
Genesis & Cosmology: A Debate
Reading Time: < 1 minute Skydivephil has created, with his wife through the eponymous YouTube channel, some staggering good videos on cosmology, having interviewed pretty much most of the leading cosmologists in the world (from Guth to Vilenkin, Hawking to Penrose). He has also contributed to a chapter in a book I was also commissioned a chapter to write in […]