Comment on Motivation?
Posted on March 5, 2007

This is awesome! I love the "none of us is as dumb as all of us". How unfortunately true.

Comment on Hiking in Israel
Posted on February 21, 2007

I am sorry that you had to deal with such rejection from your family. You sound like a very brave person.

Comment on The Great Sabbatical: God's First Vacation
Posted on February 19, 2007

Did you write this? Please let me know - it's fantastic whoever wrote it.

Comment on Why Religion And Science Should Not Conflict
Posted on December 29, 2006

Bill, again I apologize for any belligerence on my part. I like your work on Scribd a lot, and I look forward to hearing your responses.

Comment on Why Religion And Science Should Not Conflict
Posted on December 29, 2006

Bill, This view, or one similar to it, has been famously proposed in Stephen J. Gould's book "Rocks of Ages". He, like you, argued that science and religion do not conflict because science explains the how, and religion explains the why. This sounds like a nice idea, and it seems to neatly evade a major controversy which is brewing in our world, but I think it is wrong, and here is why. First, as you mention, religion does not always stick to the why questions. Roughly 40% of Americans believe, in short, that the tale of creation in Genesis is literally true. They believe in that six-day-creation story that happened about 4000 years ago. I think it's pretty clear why some of us have a real problem with that. But second, and more importantly, is an overlooked issue. If the bible is wrong about the "how" of our world, and I would argue that it is, in fact, dramatically wrong, why should we give it any credence in explaining the "why"? It may be that science will never be able to answer the question of why our laws of physics are the way they are. As a matter of fact, I think it can explain a lot of that already. But let's just say it ca...

Comment on Is "Merry Christmas!" Politically Incorrect?
Posted on December 24, 2006

Bill, I agree with you. I'm not a Christian, and I possess very strong feelings about the separation between church and state. Nevertheless, I think that the political correctness movement has gone too far in this case. I have no problem with wishing others a Merry Christmas, even though I do not believe in the story of Christmas.

Comment on Does God Exist?
Posted on December 21, 2006

Matthew, I must say I was pleasantly surprised to hear your reasonable approach to the evolutionary and astronomical arguments advanced in this ebook. It is actually rather unusual for me to run across religious Christians who have a sufficiently open mind to understand the anthropic principle and other issues in order to come to an informed opinion on the matter. Your response to my criticisms of the laws of Leviticus as seen by our 21st century ethical sensibilities are totally justified. I agree that from a moral perspective the New Testament is a huge improvement over the Old Testament, and that therefore, it is inappropriate to question a Christian's opinion of Biblical morality based on the weirdness of the Old Testament. There are still ethical issues in the New Testament one could pick on, but I will spare the trouble, as that's not really the issue. I have one question for you, though, really more out of curiosity than anything else. You said that your own belief stems from a "Pascals's Wager" sort of argument, that it is safer to believe in God. My question is this: the Christian God is not the only one supposed to exist. Over a billion people beli...

Comment on You Don't Have to Knock Somone's Brains Out
Posted on December 18, 2006

I agree that, unfortunately, changing people's minds is often a slow and painstaking process. You mention that one reason can be "brainwashing", and I think that this actually the most common reason, and that more can be said of it. In our world, there are really two kinds of disagreements. There are some disagreements that occur when the existing evidence is not sufficient to decide the issue, but which are nevertheless based on evidence. You can tell these sorts of disagreements, because they tend to move forward over time. At one point, the nature of light, whether it was wavelike or particlelike, was hotly contested. Now this no longer so - additional evidence came to light, and there is no longer any disagreement. The other kind of disagreement is unfortunately not based on evidence, but tends to occur when a group of people have been "brainwashed" to believe something, despite overwhelming evidence contradicting it. Brainwashing of this sort almost always happens in childhood. It is well known that children tend to believe what they are told by their parents, especially if their parents believe it themselves. This makes a lot of sense fro...

Comment on Does God Exist?
Posted on December 18, 2006

This article is too long and convoluted for me to bother to disprove its every point, one at a time. I shall restrict myself, given limited time, to what I see as its most egregious excesses. The article spends two full pages proving that Earth is an extremely unusual planet, and that planets that could even theoretically support life are probably exceedingly rare. This is absolutely true, and no scientist denies it. However, this provides absolutely no support, even in a statistical sense, for the idea that the earth was designed by some creator. The reason is a simple fact called the "anthropic principle", which christians seem to have a great of difficulty understanding. The anthropic principle says the following: Since we are here talking about how common earth-like planets are, it must be the case that we are on an earth-like planet to begin with. Therefore, even though earth-like planets are very unusual, it should come as no surprise to us that we happen to find ourselves on one, since otherwise, we would not be able to notice the fact. The same simple counter-argument applies to the common "knob-twiddler-theory" advanced on page 4. According...

Comment on Christmas Jokes
Posted on December 10, 2006

Did you write these yourself? They're cute.

Comment on Computer Tutorials
Posted on December 10, 2006

Wow this is really cool. I could have used this many times.