Recently in Science Category

Richard Dawkins was on Hewitt last night plugging his new book. I can't link to the podcast (since you have to pay for it now) but he's posted a transcript, so you can at least read it.

Hewitt did a great job asking penetrating questions and the hour was quite interesting and informative. Hewitt asks the questions that cut to the chase and get to the point of dispute, like this one:

HH: But the universe is itself awfully complicated, Professor Dawkins. Where did it come from?

RD: Well, the universe is not awfully complicated at the beginning. It has become very complicated through such processes as evolution by natural selection.

HH: No, I'm talking about the whole cosmos. Where did that come from, 13 billion years ago?

RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a complex process. It's a simple process.

HH: And what preceded the big bang?

RD: Well, physicists won't answer that question. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the question what preceded it is illegitimate.

HH: What do you think?

RD: I'm not enough of a physicist to understand what I'm saying, but I have to say that that's what physicists say.

HH: So when you consider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?

RD: I don't consider the question, because I recognize that it's an intuitively appealing question. I recognize that I, along with everybody else, wants to ask that question. Then I talk to physicists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what's north of the North Pole.

OK, let's concede for argument's sake that Dawkins actually accomplishes what he states: that the case he makes for evolution in his book is beyond dispute. What does that prove? It's doesn't tell us how the universe began, physicists (and Dawkins) won't even entertain the question. It still leaves room for a creator God who created the universe and then allowed the planet to populate itself.

And it's pretty silly to reject the Gospels because they were written "decades" later:

HH: On the person of Jesus Christ, did He exist?

RD: I suspect He probably did. I suspect there are lots of itinerant preachers, and one of them was probably called Yehoshua, or various other versions of Jesus' name, but I don't think that a miracle worker existed.

HH: How do you rate the evidence for Christ's existence, manuscript evidence, eyewitness evidence, things like that?

RD: As I said, it wouldn't be at all surprising if a man called Jesus or Yehoshua existed. I would say the evidence that He worked miracles, He rose from the dead, He was born of a virgin, is zero.

HH: Well, you repeatedly use the analogy of a detective at a crime scene throughout The Greatest Show On Earth. But detectives simply can't dismiss evidence they don't want to see. There's a lot of evidence for the miracles, in terms of eyewitness...

RD: No, there isn't. What there is, is written stories which were written decades after the alleged events were supposed to happen. No historian would take that seriously.

HH: Well, that's why I'm conflicted, because in your book, you talk about the Latin teacher who is stymied at every turn, and yet Latin teachers routinely rely on things like Tacitus and Pliny, and histories that were written centuries after the events in which they are recording occur.

RD: There's massive archaeological evidence, there's massive evidence of all kinds. It's just not comparable. No...if you talk to any ancient historian of the period, they will agree that it is not good historical evidence.

HH: Oh, that's simply not true. Dr. Mark Roberts, double PhD in undergraduate at Harvard has written a very persuasive book upon this. I mean, that's an astounding statement. Are you unfamiliar with him?

RD: All right, then there may be some, but a very large number of ancient historians would say...

HH: Well, you just said there were none. So there are some that you are choosing not to confront.

RD: You sound like a lawyer.

HH: I am a lawyer.

RD: Oh, for God's sake. Are you? Okay. I didn't know that. All right. I will accept that there are some ancient historians who take the Gospels seriously. But they were written decades after the events that happened, and they were written by people with an axe to grind, written by disciples. There are no eyewitness written accounts. The earliest New Testament...

HH: I understand you believe that, Professor. I do. But what I don't understand is how you can use the analogy of the Latin teacher or the detective, when it breaks down given your dismissal of evidence you don't see fit to deal with squarely?

RD: I think that's a very, very specious comparison, because the Latin teacher is dealing with enormous numbers of documents. Remember, my Latin teacher is supposed to be confronted with skeptics who don't even think the Latin language was ever spoken. And there's huge amounts of documentary evidence of the Roman Empire. We're talking about the entire Roman Empire here. There's enormous amounts of eyewitness accounts written down at the time. It just is no comparison.

HH: Actually, it is. It's actually a very persuasive...in fact, the arguments for the manuscript evidence of Christ and His doings is much stronger than anything, for example, Tacitus or Pliny wrote. It's just much stronger. Now you might counter with Cesar's Gallic war commentaries, and you do mention those, and those are contemporary accounts by an eyewitness, but so are the Gospel evidences, say, of Luke accompanying Paul about. And yet you're dismissive of the miracles that occurred in there. So I'm just wondering...

RD: They may be. The accounts of Luke accompanying Paul may be real, but Luke never met Jesus.

HH: But again, I'm not arguing that point with you. It's just that you dismiss that all without dealing with it serially, which would not be, I think, consistent with your detective argument, or your Latin teacher argument, because...

RD: I cannot believe that you're doing more than just trying to score points. You cannot seriously be saying that the case for the existence of the Roman Empire is as weak as for Jesus.

HH: That's not what I'm saying at all. I didn't say that. I said that your argument, by analogy, to a Latin teacher being harried by people who deny certain things, but especially your idea of a detective using evidence at a crime scene, that it doesn't comport with your dismissal of the evidence for Christianity and the historical Jesus.

RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?

HH: Yes.

RD: You seriously do?

HH: Yes.

RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?

HH: Yes.

RD: My God.

When you look at how oral tradition works in the Middle East, I can't see how you'd have a problem with a book written years after the death of Christ. Oral tradition explains the similarities in the Gospels and how the NT Gospel writers could be certain they were conveying the words of Jesus.

Richard Dawkins was on "The Colbert Report" again, this time plugging his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. For those of you who might have missed it:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Richard Dawkins
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

Well, that's what they're calling this painting. Based on this portrait they're thinking that maybe da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in variety of ways. They're saying this even though the model doesn't bare a resemblance to the Mona Lisa:

The work, which documents suggest was at least based on never-seen similar work by da Vinci, is now on exhibit at the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, where da Vinci was born in 1452.

[...]

The lady in the portrait does not exactly resemble the original Mona Lisa, but there is little doubt it has parallels with the painting hanging at the Louvre museum in Paris.

"The frontal look, the position of the hands, the spatial conception of the landscape, with columns at the sides, show a clear link with the Mona Lisa's iconographic theme," Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the museum, told Discovery News.

Here's the original so you can compare but I'm not seeing the similarity beyond a superficial posing-the-model-in-a-similar-manner-with-a-background way:

But of course it's more exciting to say that this obscure painting has something to do with the Mona Lisa. Don't we like to link all kinds of obscure theories to that painting?

An anonymous analytic philosopher posts his take on the exchange between Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga and atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett on the question of whether science and religion are compatible. He's anonymous because he sides with Plantinga and doesn't want to "suffer at the hands" of his "ardently secular colleagues" (so much for free thinking and the end of groupthink).

(via)

Justin Taylor has a link to an audio of the exchange.

Great! I guess these people don't watch "ReGeneis" otherwise they might not be so quick to mess around with genetic engineering:

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering -- a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.

[...]

Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization, warned that synthetic organisms in the hands of amateurs could escape and cause outbreaks of incurable diseases or unpredictable environmental damage.

"Once you move to people working in their garage or other informal location, there's no safety process in place," he said.

And of course we have to worry about terrorists deliberately trying to release an incurable disease or environmental damage.

Oh.My.Heck! Do they not realize that it's robots' "ethics" that lead to them trying to eliminate the source of the world's problems: man. In all of the robot-takes-over-world type movies that is the issue, I, Robot, Eagle Eye, and The...

Hits Obama on experience and reform. She has more experience in the area of change which is Obama's campaign theme. Pretty smart ad :-)...

The fish or the residents? That's my question to the environmentalists among us. Californians need water but the fish are being killed by the pumps. What should California do? It is being run by liberals (including the governor) so, thy...

How cool is that? Here's an episode about robot car races: And here's one on the Holy Land: You can view the rest here. They also have episodes of Scientific American Frontiers. Here's one on robots trying to understand humans:...

This is what I love about America, the environmentalists and their willing accomplices in Congress put roadblocks in our way to drilling for gas oil and someone figures out a workaround:"Ten years ago I could never have imagined I'd be...

A U.S. research base in Antarctica received a shipment of 16,500 condoms so that the researchers wouldn't be embarrassed buying them. Isn't nice that we can save them the embarrassment, huh?"Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable,"...

Because the federal government is about to force you to stop using it. I wonder how many asthma patients will wind up in the emergency room do to problems with an unfamiliar inhaler? Old-fashioned asthma inhalers that contain environment-harming chemicals...

If there are extraterrestrials, how are they our brothers? Would he say that angels (another being created by God) are his brother? We are all brothers because of unity in Adam, a unity that would not exist, obviously, with an...

This is either a story of a black widow or there may be something to the theory that the organ retains some type of personalty from its previous....er...owner, itself?A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later...

So, do you guys think that who we are could exist at some cell level. That all of our cells know who we are and what we have experienced because our entire body shares the information at the cell level?...

But don't add the milk because that inhibits the antibacterial activity: A new study by an international team of researchers from Cardiff University and University of Maryland has revealed how the humble cup of tea could well be an antidote...

This is pretty bad, you lose your husband and then develop breast cancer on top of it:Research findings from a Queen’s University study have for the first time uncovered a possible biological link between severe psychological stress and an increased...

Since they haven't tested humans yet, I'm not sure I buy it but since I eat broccoli all the time (it's practically the only vegetable I can get my kids to eat) I'd be happy if it were true:Eat your...

This looks promising especially since I drink tea all the time:Drinking black tea could help prevent diabetes, according to new findings by scientists at Dundee University. The researchers said black tea may have the potential to combat type 2 diabetes,...