CADRE Comments

My Listmania Lists at Amazon.com One feature I have always enjoyed at Amazon is the Listmania Lists that users create. Basically, Amazon allows users to create lists from 3 - 25 of books about a specific topic, with up to 200 words of commentary on each. They pop up on the right side of the screen depending on the search you do or the book you examine. I've found many excellent books that otherwise might have escaped my notice from them. Over the last few days I have spent some quality time at Amazon putting together my own Lists. I hope that people who share my interests will find some of my recommendations and comments useful. It's a favor others have done for me and I hope I can return it. Some of the lists are more complete and thorough than others. A few are works in progress. You can access a specific list by clicking on it: 1. Helpful Books About The Gospel of Luke 2. A Christian Lawyer's Favorite Books About Culture and Law 3. God and Scien...

Gay Bashing or Principled? What is the real motivation to oppose same sex marriage? I love the Moteworthy blog which often brings forth points of real interest in the culture wars that no one else seems to notice. In a recent post, they took Senator Kerry to task for holding two competing positions on the issue of gay marriage. As reported in Senator Kerry's Marriage Contortions : "In a recent Advocate interview [Kerry] told reporter Chris Bull that, despite his otherwise strong support for gay rights, he could not bring himself to support gay marriage." Yet, in a 1996 article Senator Kerry wrote for the very same gay and lesbian magazine The Advocate cited in the prior quote, Senator Kerry made it clear that he was solidly in favor of gay marriage. To quote Kerry from the Advocate article : "But we are a better nation than that. Echoing the ignorance and bigotry that peppered the discussion of interracial marriage a generation ago, the proponents of DOMA ...

A Horse is a Horse, Of Course, Of Course Unless the horse is Eohippus One of the stumbling blocks to a critical view of evolutionary theory comes from the public understanding that we have transitory forms for a number of species showing their slow rise up the evolutionary ladder from early rat- or dog-like creature to the fully grown species that we have today. One such animal is the horse. If you had a biology textbook in school, you probably saw the same chart I did. It shows the evolution of the horse from a small mammal about the size of a dog to the Kentucky Derby winning Thoroughbreds we have today. But is this chart an accurate picture of what science can show? Consider the following from Neo-Darwinism: time to reconsider , by Richard Milton: Anyone educated in a western country in the last forty years will recall being shown a chart of the evolution of the horse from "Eohippus", a small dog-like creature in the Eocene period 50 million years ago, to "Me...

Playing Columbo Critical thinking Challenges A friend of the CADRE, the Dawn Treader , has been posting some interesting encounters with skeptics and asking his readers to determine what, if any, questions could be asked to expose the intellectual poverty of the skeptic's underlying world view. In essense, he is asking you to play Columbo (based on Stand to Reason's label for the art of asking incisive questions). It really is worth the time to take a look: Worldview Case Study 2: Using Columbo Worldview Case Study 2: Conclusion Worldview Case Study 2: Challenge 2 Debunking Crick's Thinking ... Introduction Crick's View Is Self Refuting Enjoy some critical thinking.

A Helpful New Book on Intelligent Design Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, edited by William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse From Southern Appeal : Here's the description provided by the publisher: "William Dembski, Michael Ruse, and other prominent philosophers provide here a comprehensive balanced overview of the debate concerning biological origins--a controversial dialectic since Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. Invariably, the source of controversy has been 'design.' Is the appearance of design in organisms (as exhibited in their functional complexity) the result of purely natural forces acting without prevision or teleology? Or, does the appearance of design signify genuine prevision and teleology, and, if so, is that design empirically detectable and thus open to scientific inquiry? Four main positions have emerged in response to these questions: *Darwinism* *self-organization* *theistic evolution* *intelligent design*. The contributors...

Is Earth Nearly Unique? Scientists argue that the earth is far from common. In an article released by Space.com entitled "Earth is Rare, New Study Suggests" , there is a suggestion that the study of extra-solar planets and comparions to Jupitar argue that the earth is much more rare than many people assume. According to the article: The leading model of planet formation -- conjured before anyone knew there were planets around other stars -- is called core accretion. A rocky core develops first, then an object either becomes a terrestrial planet (like Mercury, Venus, Earth or Mars) or it attracts huge amounts of gas and grows into something like Jupiter or Saturn. An alternative method forms a gas giant planet via the gravitational collapse of a knot of material. Scientists disagree which way the outer planets of our solar system were born. The core accretion model has shortcomings. For one thing, when run on a computer, Neptune and Uranus typically don't ...

Ran across an interesting article in the UK's Daily Telegraph. Written by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, it discusses the decline of work in Europe vs. the United States. While I was aware of some of the statistics, such as the lengthier vacations and shorter work weeks, other numbers were new to me. There is, of course, the disparity in unemployment rates. 4.6% in the US over the last decade as compared with 9.2% for the EU. ButI had not previously considered the raw numbers of participation in the work force. Remember, unemployment only measures those who are looking for work and cannot find it. It does not measure those able adults who have no job, and are not looking for one. Between 1973 and 1998, the percentage of the American population in employment rose from 41 to 49 per cent. But in Germany and France, the equivalent percentage fell to, respectively, 44 and 39 per cent. So the U.S. has opened up a ten point lead in this stat. And this number is all the more rema...

Peter Hitchins Speaks the Truth Taken directly from Moteworthy.com This is a short post on Moteworthy.com which I thought to be right on. Peter Hitchens (brother of Christropher) has an article in the London Spectator on abortion in the U.K., where, it seems, the government is now willing to pay for an underage girl to have an abortion without even notifying her parents. Hitchens writes that: [Abortion] corrupts any society which freely permits it. The idea that innocent life may be lawfully ended for the convenience of others or for the alleged good of society, once generally accepted, devastates the rule of law itself. In a way it is to our credit that the one obscenity which we rarely allow in print or on television is a picture of an aborted baby, for anyone who sees such a picture knows instantly and for ever what it means. By preferring not to know, we pretend that we are still a lawful, moral country. The idea that a little child, who may well still cuddle a toy as ...

Argument from Design Responding to Objections, Part III "The second objection to this argument is against the premise that the existence of order and/or complexity presupposes the existence of conscious design. It is invalid to automatically infer the existence of a designer from the mere fact of order and regularity in nature - it's just a connection that has been arbitrarily made. In fact, order appears to be an inherent characteristic of the universe itself. What would a universe without order look like? I don't know - and as often as I've asked theists this question, I've never managed to get a straight answer. I don't believe that they really know what a universe without order would look like, either - but if that is the case, how can they assume that their god is needed to impose the order? The simple response is that they cannot. "In general, order and complexity are dependent upon subjective judgments. Where one person may see order, anoth...

Bands Gather to Stump Against Bush So, what's the problem? Bruce Springsteen, John Mellenkamp and other "artists" plan to put on a concert tour to rally support against George Bush (they aren't "for" John Kerry as near as I can tell) reports the AP . Why are they doing this? Well, there are only three quotes which give the reasons, and all three are essentially the same. First quote: The money generated will go to America Coming Together, which promises on its Web site to "derail the right-wing Republican agenda by defeating George W. Bush." Second quote: "A change is in order," [Dixie Chick] Maines said in an AP interview. "There's never been a political climate like this, which is so the polar opposite of me as a person and what I believe in." Third quote: "There's a vote coming up, and a chance to have a regime change at home," Vedder told AP. "I'm feeling the same way, there's a...