From the category archives:

Science

Scientific evidence for God: cosmology versus biology?

February 19, 2010

Eddie Arthur has drawn my attention to a new site – God: new evidence –which (so far) is exploring the ways in which modern cosmology can be seen to offer support for theism. It has a number of videos, which feature some respectable scientists like John Polkinghorne. Here’s one which circles around the strong anthropic [...]

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Ratzinger and Dawkins

January 10, 2010

NewsBiscuit brings them together:

Head of the Catholic Church Pope Benedict XIV has joined with leading evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins to declare that, while they may have their differences, the one thing that ticks them off more than anything else is people who, in a debate on the existence of an omniscient creator against the idea [...]

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Sceptique? Moi? The big climate change question

November 24, 2009

Various people are pointing to this story as another nail in the coffin of climate change scepticism. The thing is, “climate change scepticism” is a fairly broad term, embracing a multitude of viewpoints.
My scepticism is less about the fact that the world is (on most available indices) currently warming up, and more about the overarching [...]

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Why I hate fundamentalists

November 15, 2009

I’m not entirely sure what they are, but I do hate them. I had an interesting pub conversation this evening with someone whose staring point was this: “If you believe in the Bible, surely you can’t believe evolution is true.” (Even Jim West accepts that I’m “an evolutionist and still a priest!” – note, however, [...]

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Is atheism a scientific movement?

October 5, 2009

There’s an interesting kerfuffle that had rather passed me by among some humanists / atheists / secularists (delete according to taste / applicability). I didn’t even know there was an Atheist Alliance International, but apparently they’ve been causing a stir by giving their Richard Dawkins award to Bill Maher for Religulous.
The New Humanist post linked [...]

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Science and religion: is it all just “how?” and “why?”

September 28, 2009

John Anderson has a good set of quotations in a post setting out his “modest proposal” on science and religion:

I think it is feasible to speak of each as having a specific role and addressing very specific questions that the other does not. This is an approach that, near as I am aware, is ‘unique’ [...]

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Fantastic – Praise the Lord for NGC 6302

September 9, 2009
hubble-image.jpg

This is one of the new batch of images from Hubble. NGC 6302 is also known as the Butterfly Nebula. It is 3,800 light years away, and so what we see is as it was before the first page of the Bible was written.
The second picture, Stephan’s Quintet is 290,000,000 light years away, so what [...]

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Roasted (Ken) Ham

August 25, 2009

Fred Clark has a great polemic against Ken Ham’s young earth creationism:

You can’t be a young-earth creationist and be from Australia. I think if you’re a young-earth creationist, you’re not even allowed to believe in Australia. That continent is evolution’s playground, it’s showroom. Ken Ham couldn’t have built his Creation Museum in Australia because they [...]

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Conservapedia and conservatism beyond satire

August 23, 2009

Tim (having followed some of yesterday’s link-love) notes that he googled the question “Is Conservapedia supposed to be satire?” I had wondered the same thing the first time I discovered it back in the days of my metacatholic existence.
Tim didn’t tell us what results his search returned, so I googled the phrase myself. Fascinatingly these [...]

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The anthropic principle: is atheism irrational?

August 11, 2009

The anthropic principle can be articulated in different ways, but for the purposes of this argument let’s sum it up like this. The history of this universe has proceeded in a way that makes it hospitable for the development of life. This history is remarkably improbable, and so are the fundamental characteristics of this universe.
There [...]

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