A Romantic Rationalist

I am going to be doing something a bit new. I am scheduled to graduate in December 08 and I have a senior Capstone Project to do and I thought it would be fun, as well as therapeutic, to blog about it. First, a description of my project (from the formal proposal): “In July 2007, South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds announced that the former Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, South Dakota had been chosen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the site for a new Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). South Dakota had already invested considerable state monies in preparing the former Homestake mine for this purpose and in lobbying the NSF and the scientific community generally. The Governor, in persuading legislators and the public to make the investment in the mine’s rehabilitation, in addition to the obvious economic benefits, frequently touted the benefits of having such a facility to education, particularly science education. ...

Tragically, the places likely to be devastated first and worst by Global Environmental Change (GEC) are the poorest, most overpopulated regions of the world. There are many elephants in the room that need to be dealt with and one of them is culture (and that includes religion). The governments of such countries must realize that their (predominantly) patriarchal cultures in which women are treated like breeding livestock and that are beset by rampant overpopulation, illiteracy, and lack of economic opportunity, must change. The problem is, no one is going to come right out and say that "The culture of _________ is primitive, backwards, and positively maladaptive in the 21st century." When natural disasters strike regions where life is already marginal at best due to overpopulation, the loss of life is magnified many times over. Not to pick on Myanmar and Bangladesh , which recently suffered terrible natural disasters, but Western, industrializ...

A reader was kind enough to comment on one of my recent posts . I will try to answer each of the points raised. The readers’ original comments will be indented and italicized. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors are as in the original and will be underlined for easy identification. Mr. Mark Northrup . I stumbled upon your space in msn spaces and followed your link here. I am not sure why I am commenting on your blog except that I, being a Christian, have never found an ex-Christian to really have been a true bible believing Christian as they claim. Sure there are those who say they believed as I believe. However after asking a few of them some simple questions I found they never really believed those things set out in your blog here under proposition #1 ever. I think Mr. James's difficulty in finding any ex-Christians that were ever, to his mind, “bible-believing” Christians, is the sense in which he uses the word “believe.” For my ...

As one who aspires to (humbly) carry on the noble work of conveying science to the public in the vein of people like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Stephen J. Gould, I recently become a student member of the National Association of Science Writers. For a senior-year science writing course, we were to review and critique the primary professional website in our respective fields. My classmates are from a number of different fields including computer science, several engineering disciplines, and pre-med, just to name a few. I realize that I may live to regret posting this here as my analysis may be read by other association members, but I feel this piece has a wider applicability than just the dozen or so people that would otherwise read it... In the first decade of the 21st century there are very few public policy issues that are not profoundly affected by science and to have an electorate that is not scientifically literate and informed is a recipe for disaster. This is why having a ...

During a recent conversation with my brother (also a non-believer), he asked, what is the big deal if someone believes in God? Being able to clearly articulate why one has the opinions one does is always a good thing, so I thought about why I am as strident as I am. This essay is the result. Belief in something called God is harmless enough if it is Spinoza’s God (this is the non-dice playing God that Einstein spoke of) that is manifest in the Natural Laws of the universe. The reason I am as strident as I am is that almost no one who says they believe in God believes in Spinoza’s God; the God they believe in is the personal, interventionist God of the Bible. This belief is, in turn, almost invariably the progenitor of a whole memeplex of subordinate propositions (proposition set #1): · Adam and Eve were, literally, the first human beings on earth as recounted in the Book of Genesis · The sun, quite literally, did stand still for Joshua...

This disturbing photo was taken by an acquaintance about a week ago. While this is, of course, a true statement, the disturbing part is that they seem to think reason is a bad thing.

In any kind of rational, informed discourse, especially the kind that is supposed to go on in a democracy or on a college campus, one must be able to distinguish between opinion and fact. In making this distinction, it is vital that the question, what is Truth (big “T”) and what is truth (small “t”) be answered. This is a question that philosophers have been asking since the time of the ancient Greeks. The next question is, is there a difference between Truth (big “T”) and truth (small “t”), and if so what is that difference, followed by; is it important, and if it is, how ought people make the distinction in conversations with others? Some examples may help… A parent may consider it True (big “T”) that they love their children, but this something they can not prove in an easily verifiable sense. It does not follow that, because they cannot prove that they love their children, that it is equally impossible to prove anything else, like, for instance, ...