Posted inCulture Philosophy
Decadence Data: Or, A Doomed Demos Dances
All of these indicators of our quickening hoot-hollering yeah-baby! slide into the muck made the news on the same day. We dare not cast our net wider for fear of…
Posted inBook review Philosophy
True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism Reviewed
Answer me honestly. How rational is it to believe any of the following: Science can explain everything, even itself; The reason anything exists is because of the laws of gravity,…
Posted inPhilosophy
Are We Hard-Wired for Faith? Guest Post by Bob Kurland
Bob Kurland is a "retired, cranky, old physicist." This article originally ran in modified form at Reflections of a Catholic Scientist. "Prayer is the raising of one's mind and heart…
Huffington Post Gives Helpful ‘To Do’ List To Pope Francis
I didn't finish the 'What Statistics Really Is' post so you have to settle for this. After (I imagine) completing a rock-solid thirty minutes of intense theological studies and drawing…
Posted inCulture Philosophy
Could A Virgin Birth Ever Really Happen?
In an article Salon mistitled "About that 'immaculate' conception"1---the immaculate conception speaks of St Mary's entry into the world, not Jesus's---Daniel Engber, a developmental neuroscientist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, gives us…
Posted inPhilosophy
Dawkins Gets It Wrong Again: Similar Is Not The Same
Richard Dawkins in an article to the New Statesman---the same issue which somebody who obviously wasn't in full possession of his faculties assigned to Dawkins as editor---the Christmas issue, mind---an…
Posted inCulture Statistics
Visualization Of Biblical Cross References And Supposed Contradictions
Chris Harris created some pretty graphics showing Biblical cross references and other such things. Below is the main result: The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of…
Posted inPhilosophy
C.S. Lewis On The Validity of Reasoning
From Miracles (Touchstone edition, 1996, pp 23-24; original 1947): All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like…