Alas, I am busy beyond reason. Two papers are due (overdue) and summer activities are keeping me dancing. So It’s time to back up and look at some posts you may have missed in my early years . . . er . . . early months. I’ll start with some of those that define science to remind you why evolution is so important as an explanation of the data we find in the biological and geological sciences (and actually scores of sciences from anthropology to economics). Also, from the looks of things only about six people saw this back in the day, so I don’t feel too bad reposting. Here it is again!

“Ah. I understand the source of your misperception, but this is not sleepwear, and I do not have a ‘missus.’” — Star Trek the Next Generation, Data to Jack London (Time’s Arrow, Part ?)

The fancy word for today is abduction. Not the kidnapping type. Abductive reasoning is a way to make an inference. A way to reason. A way to get at the truth of things. Science uses it a lot. Let me illustrate with an example. Suppose I walk into my house and find on the table a nicely decorated chocolate cake, the kind with beautiful red frosting roses gracing the sides. Moreover, (I love that word, it just sounds so philosophical, moreover, it adds a sense of grace to your argument) in the sink you find some cake pans piled on the kitchen counter with that dark bit of cakey stuff that sticks to the bottom of recent baking events. Read the rest of this entry »

The LDS movement was founded on a premise that the Bible is neither complete nor inerrant. As LDS Apostle James E. Talmage wrote, “The opening chapters of Genesis, and scriptures related thereto, were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth-science, or man-science.” Further, Mormonism, from its founding, has traditionally seen God as working within the realm of natural law. As LDS Apostle Parley P. Pratt wrote, “Among the popular errors of modern times, an opinion prevails that miracles are events which transpire contrary to the laws of nature, that they are effects without a cause. If such is the fact, then, there never has been a miracle, and there never will be one.” This notion immediately suggests a truce in the age-old “war” between science and religion: God works within, rather than without, the realm of natural law. Read the rest of this entry »

I
The day Bro. Thane died
he looked out in the morning sun
at a line of green that marked
the Virgin River.
Late summer- it would be
running slow and easy through
the desert he loved.
Read the rest of this entry »

I just came from a powerful film. Waltz with Bashir is Israeli Ari Folman’s animated film on the 1982 Israeli march on Beirut and the Christian Phalangist massacre of Palestinians. This is not one to take your kids to. The animation is rough and shadowy like a graphic novel and switches back and forth between Ari trying to reattach lost memories of the massacre, which he has forgotten, and the present. He knows he was there and he has strange memories of himself walking through the ocean to a beach where flares are lighting up a bombed out city. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1911, The Superintendent of Church Schools, charged three Brigham Young University Professors with Heresy. They were charged with (a) “including man in the process of evolution,” (b) “Joseph Smith’s vision were described in terms of their psychological, and therefore subjective, aspects,” and (c) “In regard to the Bible, teaching from the standpoint of the ‘Higher Criticism’” Read the rest of this entry »

“Is it likely that any astonishing new developments are lying in wait for us? Is it possible that the cosmology of 500 years hence will extend as far beyond our present beliefs as our cosmology goes beyond that of Newton? It may surprise you to hear that I doubt whether this will be so. If this should appear presumptuous to you, I think you should consider what I said earlier about the observable region of the Universe. As you will remember, even with a perfect telescope we could penetrate only about twice as far into space as the new telescope at Palomar. This means that there are no new fields to be opened up by the telescopes of the future, and this is a point of no small importance in our cosmology.”

Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe 1950

Now go watch this for a sense of what is going on in cosmology today:

Could he have been more spectacularly wrong? Dark matter, dark energy, the Hubble Telescope—which would peer into regions unimaginably old and distant, the cosmological background radiation, on and on the discoveries have gone. The fact is it has only taken about 50 years rather than 500 for cosmology to be further from him than he was Newton. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of us have watched at least one episode of the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” show. The rules of the show specify that the subject be allowed to take as much time as he/she wishes to ponder his answer, may consult one of his/her “lifelines” if desired, and may even think out loud on the camera. But no response is considered official until the subject answers in the affirmative to the moderator’s question “Is that your final answer?”. After that, there is no going back. Read the rest of this entry »

To command that the very professors of astronomy themselves see to the refutation of their own observations and proofs as mere fallacies and sophisms is to enjoin something that lies beyond any possibility of accomplishment. For this would amount to commanding that they must not see what they see and must not understand what they know, and that in searching they must find the opposite of what they actually encounter. Before this could be done they would have to be taught how to make one mental faculty command another, and the inferior powers the superior, so that the imagination and the will might be forced to believe the opposite of what the intellect understands. I am referring at all times to merely physical propositions, and not to supernatural things which are matters of faith….

Galileo’s Letter to the Church (1632)

Conflict between science and religion runs deep. Read the rest of this entry »

It was in fifth grade that I decided to become a scientist. The inspiration came not because I actually new what a scientist did, but through a book. Before I had read this revelatory text, my impression of what scientists did came from the movies. They had four standard attributes that would allow anyone to recognize one at a glance: (1) a muffed and wild hair style, Read the rest of this entry »

First let me be up front about my prejudices. The current Star Trek movie is unquestionably the best of the group. Wrath of Kahn used to be my favorite. The rest range from breathtakingly poor to solidly mediocre (see RottenTomatos for their ratings of the ST films sans the current one). This is not just a great Star Trek movie, it’s just flat out great SciFi.

But a complaint. Read the rest of this entry »