religion
jrosenhouse | March 1, 2012Over at HuffPo, paleontologist Robert Asher serves up the standard cliches about reconciling science and religion:
For many theists, even if they would phrase it differently, “religion” requires a deity who leaves behind evidence in a similar fashion as a human being might do, like Santa Claus not finishing his cookies or a toga-clad Charlton Heston dispensing rules on stone tablets, capriciously ignoring his own natural laws. Many anti-theists agree: if God exists, “he” has to leave behind evidence in a human-like fashion. Notably, such a perspective is at the core of the so-called “…
oracknows | March 1, 2012I've always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another--and justly so, or so I thought. While it's true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny established science. Evolution? They don't believe in it because, apparently, Jesus told them not to. Anthropogenic global warming? they don't buy that, either, because to admit that human activity is resulting in significant climate change would be to be forced to concede that industry isn't an…
oracknows | February 16, 2012Since 2012 was rung in a month and a half ago, I've been writing a lot more about placebo medicine than I have in a while. Specifically, I've written a lot more about placebo effects than usual. This proliferation of posts on the topic was sparked by how Harvard University's very own not-a-PhD faculty, credulous promoter of acupuncture and all things "integrative medicine," and generally clever propagandist for woo, Ted Kaptchuk seemed, like Elvis, to be everywhere for a while. The message he was spreading was, although he didn't admit it or put it that way, a response to the growing body of…
jrosenhouse | February 12, 2012The current issue of The Philosopher's Magazine contains a lengthy interview with philosopher Elliott Sober, a prominent philosopher of biology. Most of the interview focuses on the problem of reconciling evolution and theism, with Sober serving up the standard talking points. For me the interview is a reminder of what I find most frustrating about theistic evolution. Too often the defender of reconciliation acts as though his job is done as soon as he has tossed off a logically possible scenario that includes both God and evolution.
The interview does not seem to be freely available…
oracknows | February 10, 2012Work called last night. (It happens.) Basically, I had two deadlines for two big things (finishing reviewing the grants assigned to me for study section and a major writeup for a project for my job). Unfortunately, both of them were today. I realized as I perused old posts that I hadn't reposted this one in over five years. So, unless you're a long time reader, it's definitely new to you. More importantly, it reminds me that I don't write about thins like this much anymore. Certainly I rarely do personal anecdotes or straight medical blogging much anymore. Maybe I should do more.
[NOTE: This…
oracknows | February 5, 2012It's amazing how fast six months can pass, isn't it? Well, almost six months, anyway, as it was five and a half months ago that I wrote about a particularly execrable example of quackademic medicine in the form of a study that actually looked at an "energy healing" modality known as "energy chelation" as a treatment for cancer chemotherapy-induced fatigue. Actually, the study design itself wasn't so bad, leaving aside the utter ludicrousness of the concept of "energy chelation." Rather, it was how the authors spun interpreted their results that set my head spinning. Surprisingly, a letter to…
oracknows | February 3, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I made the observation that there seems to have been a--shall we say?--realignment in one of the central arguments that proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) make. Back in the day (say, a few years ago), such CAM practitioners and apologists used to try very, very hard to argue that their modalities had actual efficacy, that they had actual, measurable effects that made them medicine rather than woo. Never mind that even back then they had been trying for at least a couple of decades to come up with preclinical and…
pharyngula | January 29, 2012The words of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu 'aleihi was-sallam) have been tested scientifically, and found hilarious. In work carried out under the direction of Dr. Jamaal Haamid, students at Qassim University examined a saying by the prophet, and have published it in a freely available pdf, The Hadeeth on the Fly, which you can download if you desire. Or you could just read this post, which summarizes entirely the complete content of the short paper, which is pretty much unpublishable and unbelievable anyway.
Here are the holy words.
(Notice that I include the original Arabic so there can…
oracknows | January 25, 2012Ha! I must admit, I've said probably about 50% of these things at one time or another, maybe more:
Hmmmm. Maybe I need to come up with new "shit."
Oh, and, by the way, I've been mentioned on PZ's blog more times than I can remember over the last seven years. So there! (Oh, wait. Does that mean PZ won't ever mention me again. Never mind. I take it back.)
jrosenhouse | January 24, 2012Since my little break has turned out to be longer than I anticipated, I fear that my blog muscles have atrophied a bit. So let's start flexing them again by revisiting a familiar topic: Adam and Eve.
Over at HuffPo, Peter Enns makes another contribution to the genre that tries to explain why evangelical Christians should not be troubled by the fact that science completely refutes the traditional understanding of Adam and Eve. He gets off to a good start:
If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve isn't. If you believe, as evangelicals do…
oracknows | January 17, 2012Last week, I wrote about how advocates of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integtrative medicine" (IM), having failed to demonstrate efficacy for the vast majority of the unscientific, anti-scientific, and/or pseudosciencitific treatment modalities, many based on prescientific concepts of how human physiology and disease work, have started trying to co-opt placebo effects as their own. In essence, given that the larger and better designed the study the more it is obvious that most CAM therapies do no better than placebo, CAM/IM advocates have decided to embrace their inner…
pharyngula | January 15, 2012First we had Steven Pinker writing about The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, with the thesis that we're getting more peaceful over time.
Now John Horgan has declared the potential for The End of War — that we have the ability to stop fighting and cooperate.
Horgan makes the point that human nature requires us to fight, and that many people make this fatalistic assumption that it cannot end. It's a reflection of the usual argument for futility that claims the status quo is thus because it must be so.
It's also the argument that is made to defend the inevitability of…
jrosenhouse | December 4, 2011As I mentioned at the start of Thursday's post, my discussion of the Friedman and Dolansky column about homosexuality in the Bible was really a prelude to discussing this essay by David Lose.
Lose seeks to persuade us that the Bible is in some sense a reliable guide to morality. Beneath the headline, “Is the Bible a Reliable Moral Guide?” he opens:
I know, I know: given that I teach, preach and write about the Bible for a living, I'm hardly the kind of person you think would ask this kind of question. But maybe it's precisely because I spend so much time with the Bible that this question…
jrosenhouse | December 1, 2011For a while now I've been meaning to have a look at this essay by David Lose, on the question of whether or not the Bible is a reliable guide to morality. His answer is a qualified yes, where the qualification seems to be that you bring to your exegesis a highly-developed sense of right and wrong to keep you from taking seriously the Bible's nasty bits. That seems a bit dubious, but rereading Lose's column it is clear that addressing his argument requires first addressing this essay by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky
Friedman and Dolansky have written a book called The Bible…
pharyngula | November 28, 2011I know you kids like the youtube and hate that tl;dr text stuff, so if you couldn't find the patience to read my post on Islamic embryology, you can now watch the screen instead. The Rationalizer goes through the 'science' in the Quran and shows that it's largely plagiarized from Galen, and that it also steals Galen's mistakes, so it's a beautiful example of a plagiarized error of the type biologists use to demonstrate a lineage.
All the straining Muslim apologists use to fit the science to the few lines of poetry in the Quran (I'm looking at you, Hamzas Tzortzis) are futile and really only…
pharyngula | November 23, 2011I have read the entirety of Hamza Andreas Tzortzis' paper, Embryology in the Qur'an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions, all 58 pages of it (although, admittedly, it does use very large print). It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I've ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it's a masterpiece.
Here, let me give you the short version…and I do mean short. This is a paper that focuses with obsessive detail on all of two…
pharyngula | November 8, 2011Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol' Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn't god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)?
William Lane Craig has an answer. His answer involves simply waving the problem away — animals don't really feel pain — and he drags in science to prop up his claim. Basically, Craig is playing the…
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2011As I noted in yesterday's post, John Haught has relented and has allowed the video of his appearance with Jerry Coyne to be posted online. I am pleased that he ultimately decided to do the right thing.
Having now had a chance to watch the two presentations, let me say that I stand by my speculation, from yesterday's post, regarding what happened:
I picture Jerry making his points calmly but forcefully, and I picture Haught not really saying much of anything.
I had intended to go through Haught's talk carefully and explain, point by point, why I think his argument does not hold up at all…
pharyngula | November 2, 2011Keith Ward sounds just like Ken Ham. It's remarkable. You see, Ken Ham has this schtick in which he basically denies all of history: you weren't there (the only valid evidence is eyewitness evidence captured through your biological senses), and because history isn't repeatable, its study isn't a real science, isn't empirically verifiable, and is subject to whims and fads and therefore lacks any substantial objective core. Ken Ham says this kind of nonsense because he believes in a great elaborate line of historical bullshit, and wants to pretend that his illusions are on an equal footing with…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2011The National Catholic Register has the full text of a recent speech given by Pope Benedict XVI. It includes this:
In addition to the two phenomena of religion and anti-religion, a further basic orientation is found in the growing world of agnosticism: people to whom the gift of faith has not been given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God. Such people do not simply assert: “There is no God”. They suffer from his absence and yet are inwardly making their way towards him, inasmuch as they seek truth and goodness. They are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace…