CADRE Comments

The original Star Trek television series (featuring William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Commander Spock) introduced Americans unaccustomed to reading science fiction to a number of interesting conjectures. One of which played out in an episode entitled " Mirror, Mirror " where Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura were exchanged with their counterparts from an alternate universe. The universes were very similar in many respects, but in the alternate universe the United Federation of Planets is known as the Terran Empire and instead of being a force largely for good, the Terran Empire is barbaric and ruthless. This raises the question of whether it is possible that alternate universes exist like the Terran Empire where exact replicas of each of us exist, but the replicas are evil rather than good. (For those reading this article who are already evil, just ask if you have a good counter-part living in an alternate universe. It comes out the same. But I en...

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...

An atheist guest comes knocking at the door of the comment section with a string of canned arguments we've answered a million times, hurled lake a gauntlet as though we have never see it before: God is asserted to be all good, all loving, all knowing, all powerful, in possession of free will and having imparted free will to human beings as well as being eternal and uncaused as well as outside of space and time while acting in a time sequence of events within space and time. Sorry, one simply cannot make rational sense to reconcile all these asserted properties. They contradict each other in various ways making the whole package incoherent by it's own theistic definitions. Here is an old answer I put up on Metacropck's blog in 2011, again in 2013: Atheists think it is. I've seen many a knock down drag-out fight, multiple threads, lasing for days, accomplishing nothing. I wrote that dilemma off years ago before I was an internet apologist, ...

On May 23, 2016 I posted newly written argument for the existence of  God from  laws of Physics . It was an Update of old "Fire in The Equations" argument on Doxa. This discussion of new thinking on Laws of physics backs that argument. Science no longer defines physical law in the sense of an active set rules that tell nature what to do (as seen in chapter one). The sentiment is gospel in science. A Canadian Physicist, Byron Jennings, expresses it like this: “It is worth commenting that that laws of nature and laws of man are completely different beasts and it is unfortunate that they are given the same name. The so called laws of nature are descriptive. They describe regularities that have been observed in nature. They have no prescriptive value. In contrast, the laws of man are prescriptive, not descriptive.” 1 Santo D’Agostino tells us, “...[T]he laws of science are not like the laws in our legal systems. They are descriptive, not prescriptive.” 2 Co...

Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" Even though St. Teresa was a great mystic of the Christian faith and she had visions like this one, visions are not part of mystical experience per se. This article is a summary my book, the Trace of God by Joseph Hinman ( available on Amazon ). I recently posted essays showing that the true Christian concept of Supernatural is mystical experience nothing more. Now I show mystical experience is empirical, thus SN is empirical. The argument from religious experience is deemed too subjective to be of any real interest to rationally minded skeptics. Yet over the last 50 years, a huge body of empirical scientific work has emerged in peer reviewed journals that strengthens the case for religious experience as a God argument. Unfortunately, this body of work is largely confined to psychology of religion and is virtually unknown to theology or even religious studies. In this paper I examine the research methods used in this ...