fundamentalism
goodmath | August 13, 2006The stupidity and innumeracy of Americans, and in particular American fundamentalists, never ceases to astound me.
Recently on Yahoo, some bozo posted [something claiming that the bible was all correct][yahoo], and that genetics would show that bats were actually birds. But that's not the real prize. The *real* prize of the discussion was in the ensuing thread.
A doubter posted the following question:
>please explain 1 kings 7.23 and how a circle can have a circumference of 30 of
>a unit and a radiius of 10 of a unit and i will become a christian
>
>23 And he made the Sea of cast…
goodmath | July 24, 2006This weekend, I came across Granville Sewell's article "[A Mathematicians View of Evolution][sewell]". My goodness, but what a wretched piece of dreck! I thought I'd take a moment to point out just how bad it is. This article, as described by the [Discovery Institute][diref], purportedly shows:
>... that Michael Behe's arguments against neo-Darwinism from irreducible
>complexity are supported by mathematics and the quantitative sciences,
>especially when applied to the problem of the origin of new genetic
>information.
I have, in the past, commented that the *worst* math is no…
goodmath | July 20, 2006A reader sent me a link to [this amusing blog][blog]. It's by a guy named George Shollenberger, who claims to have devised The First scientific Proof of God (and yes, he always capitalizes it like that).
George suffers from some rather serious delusions of grandeur. Here's a quote from his "About Me" bio on his blog:
>I retired in 1994 and applyied my hard and soft research experience to today's
>world social problems. After retirement, my dual research career led to my
>discovery of the first scientific proof of God. This proof unifies the fields
>of science and theology. As a…
goodmath | July 13, 2006Last night, a reader sent me a link to *yet another* wretched attempt to argue for the existence of God using Bayesian probability. I *really* hate that. Over the years, I've learned to dread Bayesian arguments, because *so many* of them are things like this, where someone cobbles together a pile of nonsense, dressing it up with a gloss of mathematics by using Bayesian methods. Of course, it's always based on nonsense data; but even in the face of a lack of data, you can cobble together a Bayesian argument by *pretending* to analyze things in order to come up with estimates.
You know, if you…
goodmath | June 24, 2006I recently got a real prize of a link from one of my readers. He'd enjoyed the [Swinburne][swinburne] article, and had encoutered this monstrosity; an alleged [probability of christianity][prob] argument *significantly worse* than Swinburne.
[swinburne]: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/mind-numbingly-stupid-math.html "My shredding of Swinburne"
[prob]: http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/radio034.htm "Mathematical Probability that Jesus is the Christ"
The difference between Swinburne and this bozo (who's name I can't locate on the site) is that at least Swinburne made *some* attempt to use…