I've never wanted nor pretended to be a biologist. I prefer to blame this possible character flaw on the fact I never liked dissecting animals, or the smell of formaldehyde. My approach to science has always been "need to know" -- meaning if I decide that I need to know something, I'll put a little effort into figuring out how it works. In the years since graduating from college I have certainly learned how to make children and grandchildren. For the longest time, I felt like that was enough knowledge of biology to satisfy my curiosity; I knew how to do my part to perpetuate of the species, and that was all I thought I needed to know. When these evangelists for atheism like Richard Dawkins began using their belief in evolution as justification for attacking belief in the existence of a creator God, I decided it was probably time for me to learn a bit more about this theory used to justify their claims of having eliminated the possibility that a supernatural God could exist. The Business Dictionary provides an excellent definition that I like which describes information as "Data that is (1) accurate and timely, (2) specific and organized for a purpose, (3) presented within a context that gives it meaning and relevance, and (4) can lead to an increase in understanding and decrease in uncertainty." As a former professional software developer, that definition seems both useful and apropos. Computers accept raw data as input. Software applications inside the computer process that raw data to convert it into useful information. The key phrase in the definition … [Read more...]
The Spiritual Brain and the God helmet
In a very good book written by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, titled The Spiritual Brain, (I would give it five stars, if I rated books with stars at my website) there is a chapter called "The Strange Case of the God Helmet" which describes a physical device that "scientists" place on their head so that low-powered magnets can stimulate the temporal lobes of the test subject. Seriously. The tin-foil hat crowd now has legitimate competition. Only a person who doesn't believe God exists and has apparently become desperate to prove it would deliberately try to artificially simulate the effect that belief in God has on people of faith. About neuroscientist Michael Persinger (co-inventor of the God helmet) Beauregard wrote: Echoing Dawkins, Persinger has called religion "an artifact of the brain" and a "cognitive virus." (page 81) Speaking of Richard Dawkins, he had to try the helmet himself, of course, but he didn't experience any of the hallucinations the helmet can allegedly sometimes cause. Persinger attributed the failure of Dawkins to "experience God" using the helmet was due to his "well below average" score in temporal lobe sensitivity to magnetic fields, whatever that means. Of course, Persinger had to publish the results of his 2002 "study" in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. Beauregard (and O'Leary) wrote: Persinger concluded two things: that the experience of a sensed presence can be manipulated by experiment, and that such an experience "may be the fundamental source for phenomena attributed to visitations by gods, spirits, and … [Read more...]
More popular criticisms of my book Counterargument for God
Writers need to have a thick skin when it comes to receiving criticism. Personally, I value every review that any reader has posted on Amazon, whether positive or negative. Of course, positive reviews help sell books. More importantly, negative reviews, if the author listens to his or her audience, can help make future books better. For if we do not learn from our mistakes, we will be doomed to repeat them. My philosophy is when anyone takes the time and goes to the trouble of writing a review of something I've written, I tend to pay attention, even more so to critique than praise. As an example, even though my novel Secondhand Sight won a Readers' Favorite gold medal for Fiction/Horror, I thought the comments on Amazon were very fair criticisms when some readers suggested the sections that described tennis activities intended to provide local color were too long. Those lengthy sections really only served as plot devices that got the protagonist out of his house and could have been achieved with at least a thousand fewer words, to be perfectly honest. It was Shakespeare who, as Polonius in Hamlet, famously said, "...brevity is the soul of wit." As a result of listening to those readers, in my novel titled Premonition that followed Secondhand Sight, my editors and I worked even harder to trim every scrap of unnecessary fat from the manuscript. Our goal was to establish a steady pace that never lagged, increasing speed as we moved from start to finish, which I hope to have accomplished, thanks to the feedback from readers. Once again, we will … [Read more...]
The probability problem
The fallacy in Paley's famous Watchmaker analogy was not that the Watchmaker was blind, as Richard Dawkins has suggested. The problem is that Paley's analogy assumed the rock could have always existed in an eternal universe, whereas if physicists are correct and the Big Bang created our universe, we can safely assume the rock has not. No one is certain why a prehistoric civilization built a monument that we call Stonehenge, but we know this peculiar rock formation exists, because we've all seen pictures of it and can easily visit the physical location. Was it a temple to worship the sun? A giant calendar? An ancient medical center? Nobody knows who built Stonehenge, or why it was constructed. We can rather safely assume that someone built it, though. Or can we? What makes us so certain that Stonehenge isn't merely a natural rock formation somehow created miraculously by the vagaries of Time? Because if you listen to Richard Dawkins explain the probability problems associated with our existential questions, he seems to be saying that as long as something is theoretically possible, it doesn't really matter how improbable the event in question might be. What makes us so sure that Stonehenge is not a naturally occurring rock formation? Well, it is extremely unlikely, no matter well how you craft any alternate explanation. The rocks that form Stonehenge appear to have been quarried from a location several miles away. The rocks that form Stonehenge shouldn't be where they are -- unless humans put them there. The rocks shouldn't be stacked and apparently … [Read more...]
Fossilized rabbits in the Precambrian
In his book The God Delusion, prominent atheist Richard Dawkins wrote, "As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.'" But how does Haldane's rather sarcastic and flippant remark translate into English? Well, consider that the Precambrian describes the geologic period of time between the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion. According to our experts in paleontology, this particular period of time during the Earth's development was dominated by single-celled organisms that descended via asexual reproduction from LUCA, an acronym referring to our Last Universal Common Ancestor, formed by a secular miracle of chemical reaction. So a fossil showing the presence of a more complex and modern product of sexual reproduction, such as a rabbit or a human, shouldn't be found in rocks formed long before that particular creature could have come into existence, according to these "rules" of evolution. When Darwin famously suggested that "monkeys make men", he could have claimed that protozoa make men, but his idea presented in The Origin of Species would have been harder to defend using comparative anatomy as the only weapon in Darwin's arsenal of evidence to argue in favor of common descent rather than common design. The idea that every living organism is related through common descent is the very heart and soul of Darwin's theory -- the belief that simple organisms can gradually evolve to become more complex, given the vagaries of time, through variety created by descent with modification via … [Read more...]
