April 2005 Archives

Alabama and Texas have filed an amicus brief supporting the Cobb County Disclaimers. Some lowlights:

• Denying the separation of church and state.
• Arguing that the lack of a disclaimer would favor irreligion over religion, promoting hostility towards religion. Apparantly, Alabama and Texas feel that evolution is hostile towards religion.
• Declaring the disclaimer an accomidation of religion, despite the fact that it is on every students’ textbook and not just the students that need “accomodation.”
• Being completely ignorant of the fact that “theory, not fact” is creationist language.

I just watched the trailer for Serenity, the movie based on the short lived, but excellent, TV series, Firefly.

Kick Ass!

I’m sure many of you have seen the commercials on TV for Cottonelle Toilet Tissue that compares its softness to that of a puppy.

Am I the only one who isn’t excited by the thought of wiping my ass with a puppy?

We often see creationists declare that it takes more faith to believe the conclusions of modern science than it does to believe that some unknown entity used unknown abilities to create some unknown thing an unknown time ago. I think this is a silly statement for several reasons.

• Faith is belief in the absence of evidence or in spite of evidence to the contrary. As Hebrews 11:1 states, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (NRSV)” It is a significant stretch to argue that something that is evidence-based (science) takes more faith than something that is faith-based (religion).
• Faith is supposed to be something that is very important to Christian theology, especially Protestant theology. It seems very odd then that religious people would use it as a negative.
• To objectively say that something takes more faith than something else requires some sort of way to measure and quantify faith. I can think of no way that this can be done.

The last point is probably the most interesting. Can we come up with a way to measure faith that distinguishes faith from other ways of assurance? Would it be on and absolute or relative scale? What would the unit of measure be? Hebrews?

Creationist complaints about Darwinists wanting to stife debate is more a reflection of projection than it is of reality. Take for instance this recent report at the DI Media Complaints Division. In it Rob Crowther complains that “some Darwinists are seeking to stifle debate.” This statement was made on a blog that has disabled its comment feature. To me, the lack of comments on the DI’s blogs signals that they are not interested in running a true blog, but in pretending that they do. It is much like how they like to pretend to be doing science.

In case some of my readers haven’t noticed, we are trying something new at the Panda’s Thumb: Project Steve Steve.

My wife and I first met Prof. Steve Steve a few months ago when we were out letterboxing. We spent a considerable amount of time conversing with him. Based on this conversation, I asked the contributors to the Panda’s Thumb if we wanted to invite Prof. Steve Steve to contribute to our group blog. Everyone was very excited about having Prof. Steve Steve join the Panda’s Thumb and tell us about his adventures.

So far Prof. Steve Steve has told us about his visits to the Anderson Lab at UGA and Princeton. He is now in Kansas gearing up to participate in the events surrounding a kangaroo court seeking to corrupt biology education in the state. He also plans to visit the University of Minnesota, Morris and visit the World’s Largest Ball of String. After that who knows where his travels will take him.

Are sonograms child porn? - Discuss.

I’ve added a new blog to my links: evolgen. It’s the blog of Rich Meisel who is a grad student of Steve Schaeffer at Penn State. Interestingly enough, Steve Schaeffer did his Ph.D. work under my advisor, Wyatt Anderson and will be giving a talk next weekend at my department’s silver anniversary gala. Steve is a cool guy. When I interviewed at Penn State, we talked about Georgia football since he did his Ph.D. during the Hershel Walker era.

Rich has several posts on his blog about ID:

• Does Intelligent Design Leave a Genetic Signature?
• I come back to PA and this is what I find.
• Unintelligent Design.

Create your own South Park character.

(Blame PZ)