Theology

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Turkana Boy Causes Museum Ruckus

February 7, 2007

Christians want the boy arrested and locked up. Scientists want to put him on stage. The stage is Kenya’s National Museum, and the boy is Turkana boy, a fossil classified by evolutionists as Homo erectus and claimed to be 1.6 million years old. CNN reported that the museum is showcasing the fossil, the most complete […]

Politics and Ethics

Evolutionary Ethics Teeters on Brave New World

November 29, 2006

What happens when science pursues whatever it can do, unfettered by moral standards? Three recent news stories should cause all futurists to ponder the ramifications: A BBC News story this month asked, “UK scientists are seeking permission to place human nuclei into animal eggs in a bid to create stem cell lines. Why do researchers […]

Politics and Ethics

Anti-Religious Sentiment Increases in Intensity

November 25, 2006

The two poles could hardly be farther apart. In the East, a hundred million radical Muslims swear death to all Americans and Jews and work themselves into frenzies of jihad for the worldwide triumph of Islam. In the West, radical atheists are determined to eradicate religion from the Earth. Somewhere in between, millions of Christians […]

Uncategorized

Quote: Chuck Norris Joke

October 23, 2006

Alleged Chuck Norris Fact: “There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.” What does Chuck Norris himself think of this? It’s funny. It’s cute. But here’s what I really think about the theory of evolution: It’s not real. It is not the way we got here. […]

Cell Biology

Science Potpourri

October 13, 2006

Interesting articles from recent issues of Science have piled up in the queue. These might have made separate entries in CEH if time and space were unlimited. Deep Impact: The team of the Deep Impact mission to a comet published spectral results in the July 13 issue. “Emission signatures due to amorphous and crystalline silicates, […]

Uncategorized

Evolutionary Anthropologists Seek to Study Christianity

October 2, 2006

According to a press release on EurekAlert, “Anthropologists have almost no track record of studying Christianity, a religion they have generally treated as not exotic enough to be of interest.” This omission needs to be rectified, says Joel Robbins (UC San Diego): “Anthropologists, who are specialists in the study of religion outside the West, ought […]

Dumb Ideas

Atheist Dilemma: Fight or Smooth-Talk Religion?

September 25, 2006

The unpopularity of evolutionism and the persistence of religious faith has scientific materialists confounded and dumbfounded over how to respond. Some want to fight, some want to shrug it off, and some want to dialog with religious believers, in hopes of convincing some of them that evolution is not the bogeyman they think. Richard Dawkins […]

Human Body

Evolving Consciousness Without a Soul

July 7, 2006

A paper tackling the theory of consciousness begins, Any scientific study of consciousness is based on the premise that phenomenal experience is entailed by neuronal activity in the brain. Given this premise, an adequate theory of consciousness must be consistent with physics and with evolutionary principles. Nonphysical or dualistic forces or processes must be excluded, […]

Astronomy

Paper View: Why SETI Hears Only a Great Silence

June 30, 2006

Enrico Fermi posed a curious question in 1950: “Where is everybody?” If life emerges on planets as a consequence of evolution, there should be other intelligent civilizations out there, and some of them must have colonized other worlds. He thought there must have been plenty of time for galactic colonizers to achieve technologies far beyond […]

SETI

Researcher Denies SETI Is a Religion

June 3, 2006

Apparently irritated by charges that SETI research is like a religion (see, for instance, the article by novelist Michael Crichton mentioned in our 12/27/2003 entry), David Darling of the SETI Institute has issued a response. On Space.com, his title was direct: “Of Faith and Facts: Is SETI a Religion?” The answer was a forthright NO […]

SETI

Deities for Atheists, or Atheism for Dummies?

March 9, 2006

Michael Shermer wrote a book review in Science entitled “Deities for Atheists.”1 The article reviewed George Basalla’s recent book, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials (Oxford, 2005). Basalla (historian of science and technology, U of Delaware) contends that SETI is the continuation of an ancient religious quest. If so, who are the […]

Dumb Ideas

How Apemen Learned to Give Christmas Presents

December 25, 2005

For your Christmas amusement, some scientists think they have solved the evolution of gift giving. In an announcement on EurekAlert called “Why we give: New study finds evidence of generosity among our early human ancestors,” the introduction states, “A groundbreaking new study examines the origins of holiday giving and finds that our early human ancestors […]

Intelligent Design

Catholic Astronomer Takes On the Pope, and Other ID Battles

November 19, 2005

Right after Pope Benedict XVI essentially affirmed intelligent design (11/10/2005), his court astronomer rejected it. The Rev. George Coyne, Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, sounded like he was reading the NCSE playbook: “Intelligent design isn’t science even though it pretends to be…. If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be […]

Early Man

Is Archaeology Like SETI, or is SETI Like Religion?

September 24, 2005

Archaeologists have their Rosetta Stone, but so far, SETI investigators have no artifacts. Still, Douglas Vakoch wrote for Space.com, archaeologists and anthropologists can teach SETI researchers how to prepare for encountering “exotic cultures with strange languages.” Vakoch recounted the interest in this angle at an anthropology conference last year: One of the best-attended […]