July 28, 2009
School and Religion
The idea that injecting religion into schools would somehow undermine education, particularly science education, is ludicrous. All we need is to look at a few facts. Take myself for example, I studied in Hong Kong up until the equivalent of the ninth grade.
Hong Kong boasts an education system consistently ranked among the top in science and mathematics [1]. Most schools there are religious, subsidized by the government. Most religious schools are run by either Catholic or Protestant organizations. A few are operated directly by the government [7].
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July 21, 2009
Fallacies of the “Reducibly Complex Mousetrap”
Virtually every introduction of Intelligent Design invokes Michael Behe’s idea of “irreducible complexity”, which states that some systems depend on multiple parts to work together and missing any one piece results in no functionality at all, rather than reduced functionality [1]. This all-or-nothing nature of such systems, Behe argues, cannot be developed through “numerous successive, slight modifications” as Charles Darwin theorized.
Among more complicated biochemical systems, Behe cites a mousetrap as an example. On his website [2], a picture of the mousetrap illustrates the five essential parts, a hammer, a spring, a catch, a holding bar and a platform. He argues that any missing piece renders this mousetrap useless. Therefore, in order for random mutation to produce such a system, it must come up with all the necessary parts and assemble the system at the same time. This becomes prohibitively difficult for complex systems. For example, the flagellum of a bacterium has more than 30 parts, and it is just a small part of the organism.
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July 8, 2009
Book Review: Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity
The Book
Author: John Stossel
Title: Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity
Subtitle: Get Out the Shovel – Why Everything You Know is Wrong
Publisher: New York: Hyperion, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-0254-8
The Review
John Stossel’s Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity lays out plenty of facts and studies to debunk many popular beliefs, commonly called conventional wisdom. Basically, it seems to be putting in print a collection of 20/20 episodes, which I have almost never watched.
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June 26, 2009
The Religion of Science
It is conventional wisdom among the secular world that people who believe in any religion must possess a considerable amount of “blind” faith, and the only basis for such faith is words of some divinely inspired figure. The truthfulness of this notwithstanding, many who do not believe in religion display precisely this “blind” faith in science. Case in point, most non-scientists who argue in favor of the man-made global warming disaster inevitably cite the “fact” that most creditable scientists believe in such theory. For many, this is their only basis.
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