CADRE Comments

Oxford Mathematician John Lennox uses an example in his lectures to illustrate the fact that an event can have more than one explanation without creating a contradiction. He asks why does water boil? I might answer that heat energy is transferred to the molecules of water, which begin to move more quickly. Eventually, the molecules have too much energy to stay connected as a liquid. When this occurs, they form gaseous molecules of water vapor, which float to the surface as bubbles and travel into the air. (HT: Wonderopolis.com for that wording). Alternatively, I might answer that the water boils because I want a cup of tea. Both answers are correct. The first answer is scientific in that it explains the physics that leads water to boil. It is what Aristotle would have called the "material cause" for the water boiling. The second is just as correct, but it isn’t a scientific explanation at all; rather, it provides an explanation in terms of purpose or end, i.e., that ...

Last time , I wrote about the Infinite Monkey Theorem, i.e., the thought-experiment that posits that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards for an infinite period of time would ultimately be able to write all of the books in the Library of Congress. I used basic probability mathematics to determine the likelihood that ten billion monkeys typing for three hundred million years would be able to write just the first two clauses of the beginning of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities . As shown in the post entitled, " Infinite Monkeys, Keyboards and Time - What are the Odds? " even with ten billion monkeys each typing 52 letters, spaces and punctuation every minute of every day for 300 million years, the odds of those monkeys randomly typing those two lines calculated to one time in every 2.98*10 77 years (that's once in every 298 million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million years...

When I was young, I read a book called Can you feel anything when I do this? by Robert Scheckley which contained a number of thought-provoking short stories. One of the stories in the book introduced me to the concept of what has come to be known as the infinite Monkey Theorem. For those uninitiated (which is probably no one), the Infinite Monkey Theorem (IMT) is a thought experiment that posits that if you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly punching numbers on an infinite number of keyboards for an infinite period of time, they would ultimately randomly reproduce all of the works in the Library of Congress (or the works of Shakespeare or the works of Steinbeck, etc). The short story in the Scheckley book played on the IMT by having a rich man set up the experiment with only a few monkeys (my recollection was that it was about 100), to see if they would type anything intelligible. In the story, all of the monkeys surprisingly began to type the great novels without a singl...

The last time I posted in a piece entitled " Star Trek, Proxima b, Nanovehicles and the Unlikely Appearance of Life ," I wrote about the Star Trek Vision - a view point that has existed for a long time (thanks to fellow CADRE member Jason Pratt for pointing that out), but has become more in vogue over the last 50 years. The unsupported idea is that the universe is absolutely teeming with life such that any time a planet is thought to have water, it is almost automatically assumed that life exists on that planet. Just this morning, there is a story on Yahoo! News which provides more evidence of this rule. According to Business Insider, NASA is set to announce surprising news about Europa -- (spoiler alert) -- it appears to have oceans of liquid water below its frozen surface. In the article entitled " NASA will soon reveal a 'surprising' discovery about a moon of Jupiter that may support life ."  To say that it " may support life" isn't rea...

Today's USA Today ran an article entitled " Pope says evolution, Big Bang are real " in which he seemed to give a pretty strong statement of support to Theistic Evolution. The Pope reportedly said: "When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so," Francis said. "He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment." I am certain that there are some who will witness this as a caving in of the Vatican to the arms of scientific naturalism. They will note that the Pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, acknowledged that the Biblical account of creation found in Genesis 1 and 2 has been proven wrong by science. Of course, that view is short cited. It assumes that there are only two ways of understanding the evidence for the universe...

The Ideology of Scientism (part 1)               Colin Blakemore (Neuroscience, Oxford) writes an article entitled, "Science is Just One Gene Away from Defeating Religion." He sees religion and science as opponents in a chess match. One wonders, is it only a chess match and not a war that engage science and religion? Thus advances in science are automatically viewed as detraction from religion. He intimates this when he says that the discoveries of Watson and Crick were a defeat for religion because previously life was a mystery that implied spiritual magic. [1]   He wants to see religion as some long ago thing that science is beating. He says, “Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly a vital move in that chess game - if not checkmate. In an interview for God and the Scientists, to be broadcast tonight in Channel 4's series on Christianity, Richard Dawkins declares: ‘Darwin removed the...