- How’s this for a happy Friday: school elects first trans prom queen
- Pictures from the annual Chap Olympiad, “a celebration of eccentricity and athletic ineptitude with the emphasis on panache and style over sporting prowess”. Events include umbrella jousting and butler racing.
- This story has to be read to be believed. Louisiana Republican votes for state funds for religious schools but when this ends up including Muslim schools goes off script and explicitly says she only meant Christianity.
- Another case of Cracked.com giving good life advice: 5 popular forms of charity that aren’t helping.
- In case you missed it, paleontologist Richard Leakey proves how naive people with a PhD can be: he believes the evidence for evolution will soon be so overwhelming that even the “skeptics” will accept it. Wow.
- Kid does 24 English accents quite well
- Good post about the platypus fallacy: a wrongheaded bit of anthropocentric evolutionary thinking that catches even very cluey phylogeny experts — to say nothing of us plebs in the general public.
Friday Links (20-Jul-12)
July 20th, 2012
4 comments ↓
Do I sense … an irony on Leaky’s statements? IMHO, regardless of the evidence, creationists (and the like) will never accept evolution. It’s a property of faith: the more the evidence against one’s beliefs, the more the believer will believe. This is called strength, in certain religions. Even if we had filmed (say…) the evolution of homo for the last millenium or so and showed it to religious folk, they would reply that all that is, say, the work of satan. There. They have an answer to anything.
As for the Lousiana Republican, am I surpised? No. Of course not. When they say they are people of faith, and will support any faith, well, what they really mean is that they will support any faith which is identical to theirs. It reminds me of John Lennox, the infamous mathematician who argues that science points to god, to *a* god. Upon careful inspection, one realises that he is talking about his god. Not just any.
Yes, this is why Leaky was roundly criticised by pretty much every blog I read that covered the story. I think he was being serious (and assuming that creationists simply haven’t seen the evidence).
Interesting coincidence, I just scheduled a post on Lennox for next week. But yes, it’s amazing that William Lane Craig can use the Kalam Cosmological Argument (one developed by Muslim scholars as the name suggests) and use logic to prove once and for all that Jesus of Nazareth created the universe.
I have been in two Lennox’s talks. Once, a monologue speech he gave in Edinburgh and then a debate with Hitchens, again in Edinburgh. I have asked Lennox, on both occasions, and online, why he chose the religion he did–if he had a choice–and how come he does not see the correlation between one’s religion and one’s geographical location (and upbringing, society, etc.) His answer has always been that his parents were so open to him that he even had the freedom to read the communist manifesto, but that he found Christianity the best of all religions. So, he claims, it was his own choice. He never comments on the correlation I mentioned above. I hate this kind of circumventing the answer, especially by someone who is a mathematician.
As for Lennox (again), I’m sure you know his site:
http://johnlennox.org/index.php/en/
I just checked it again, to see a response to one of my comments, claiming that it is absurd to choose religion A vs. B… Among other things, the respondent writes:
Christianity, of course, provides the best explanation and best evidence over any other religion.
There, done, problem solved, QED.
I wanted to respond to it today. Alas, Prof. Lennox has disabled responses.