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In a commencement speech at Rutgers, President Obama took an indirect shot at Donald Trump and the Republicans: "Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy . . . We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from." Obama here indulges one of the hoariest progressive clichés: that they are the party of enlightenment, reason, and fact, while conservatives are ignorant obscurantists, “bitter clingers” to the superstitions of religion and tradition. This...

In a move spearheaded by environmentalists, the Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution aimed at eliminating doubt of climate change and its causes in schools. “It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” said Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux in board testimony. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.”

In a commencement speech at Rutgers, President Obama took an indirect shot at Donald Trump and the Republicans: Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy . . . We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from. Obama here indulges one of the hoariest progressive clichés: that they are the party of enlightenment, reason, and fact, while conservatives are ignorant obscurantists, “bitter clingers” to the superstitions of religion and tradition. This...

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." John 14:6 "...in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." Colossians 2:9 John 1:10 tells us that everything seen and unseen was created ex nihilo by the spoken Word of the Son of God, which means that Jesus Christ was active and present long before His incarnation, therefore eternally co-existent with the Father. Jesus Christ is therefore God just as the Father and Holy Spirit are God, thus the Word of the Old Testament's creation account...

“The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our prevalent notions of the character of God, the great moral governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions.” (William McGuffey, d. May 4, 1873, professor at the University of Virginia, president of Ohio University, and author of McGuffey’s Readers; earstohear.net) Andre Comte-Sponville, one of France's preeminent atheist philosophers agrees. In his New York Times bestseller, "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality," Sponville observes that even though Western and American civilization has become nonreligious it is nevertheless profoundly rooted in...

To repurpose Willi Schlamm, the problem with science is scientists. In the current issue of National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke has a pitiless essay on the cult of Neil deGrasse Tyson and “America’s nerd problem,” and in the prior issue I touched on a similar subject, the meme-ification of science for political purposes, in “Nobody @#$%&*! Loves Science.” The common theme is prestige: Science enjoys enormous public esteem, which it has earned for itself, and it is inevitable that political types seek to bask in that prestige themselves, or to dress their policy preferences in white lab coats. Thus...

What has Darwinism got in common with Modernism? Everything! They are two edges of the same blade. A century ago, how could any Catholic dare question the Church’s dogmatic teaching and not be excommunicated as a heretic? The answer is that natural science has allegedly shown that nothing in the realm of the created world is immutable. It has proved thereby that the Church was wrong in dogmatically declaring that fully operating living beings with stable natures were produced from nothing. The knowledge now amassed from biology, physics, and chemistry is already sufficient to render the notion of creation ex...

After two mystical encounters with the evil spirit Zarathustra, the dark prophet Nietzsche announced the "death of the Christian God." Dubbing himself the Antichrist, Nietzsche proclaimed: "The greatest recent event – that 'God is dead,' that the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable – is even now beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe; however, few really understood " what has really happened here, "and what must collapse now that this belief has been undermined – all that was built upon it, leaned on it, grew into it; for example, our whole European morality." (False...

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22). “And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and there was given to him the key of the bottomless pit." (Rev. 9:1) In his Concise Commentary Matthew Henry identifies falling stars as tepid, indecisive, weak or apostate clergy who, "Having ceased to be a minister of Christ, he who is represented by this star becomes the minister of the devil; and lets loose the...

THE recent announcement by a team of astronomers that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy has further fueled the speculation, popular even among many distinguished scientists, that the universe is teeming with life.The astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, an experienced planet hunter and co-author of the study that generated the finding, said that it “represents one great leap toward the possibility of life, including intelligent life, in the universe.” But “possibility” is not the same as likelihood. If a planet is to be inhabited rather than merely habitable,...

A few years ago I began posting brief reflections on movies, music and culture on YouTube, probably the most watched Web site in the world. In my mind, this exercise resembles St. Paul's venture onto the Areopagus in Athens, preaching the Gospel amid a jumble of competing ideas. YouTube is a virtual Areopagus, where every viewpoint—from the sublime to the deeply disturbing—is on display. Never as a Catholic teacher or preacher have I addressed less of the "choir.” The most numerous responses have come to my pieces on atheism and belief. I have made a video called Why Do We...

Evolutionists Call New Plant Epigenetic Study 'Heresy' by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * New research has uncovered a hidden layer of trait-determining epigenetic information that resides outside the DNA sequence in plants. This new discovery challenges the evolutionary paradigms of the scientific community and their long-standing views on how organisms adapt to changing environments at the molecular biological level of the cell. In fact, some are even calling this recent research "evolution heresy."1 For over the past 50 years, Darwinian evolutionists have attributed changes in an organism's traits to the specific DNA sequences that code for them. They never anticipated a...

We look back in time, and say the universe is 15 billion years old. But as every scientist knows, when we say the universe is 15 billion years old, there's another half of the sentence that we rarely bother to say. The other half of the sentence is: The universe is 15 billion years old as seen from the time-space coordinates of the earth. The key is that the Torah looks forward in time, from very different time-space coordinates, when the universe was small. Since then, the universe has expanded out. Space stretches, and that stretching of space totally changes...

Here’s an ugly truth you can drop in the punchbowl at your next office party – most Western men and women, including many who consider themselves conventionally religious, treat human beings as subhuman. They accept without reflection theories of human life that reduce us to brainy animals, or let us play at being gods. These theories render suffering meaningless and train us to live as cowards; they teach us to despise the weak but train us in habits of laziness and avoidance; they speak the language of progress while in fact encouraging the lowest of human instincts; they claim to...

I recently attended a 3-day science policy conference sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The AGU is an association of 62,000 scientists who study the Earth. Although the conference was allegedly about science policy, it resembled a cross between a Scientology rally and a workshop for lobbyists from the Mohair Council of America. The euphemisms for lobbying by people who aren't supposed to be lobbying are "communication" and "outreach." The AGU believes, in a secular way, that God is on their side and the reason why they are being ignored, and not being given enough money, is that they......

Mars had an oxygen-rich atmosphere more than a billion years before the Earth, say scientists. An examination of meteorites and rocks on the planet suggests that oxygen was affecting the Martian surface four billion years ago. On Earth, oxygen did not build up to appreciable quantities in the atmosphere for at least another 1.5bn years

On Theory and Science Generally in Connection with the Fleischmann-Pons Experiment Peter L. Hagelstein 6 INFINITE ENERGY • ISSUE 108 • MARCH/APRIL 2013 I was encouraged to contribute to an editorial generally on the topic of theory in science, in connection with publication of a paper focused on some recent ideas that Ed Storms has put forth regarding a model for how excess heat works in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. Such a project would compete for my time with other commitments, including teaching, research and family-related commitments; so I was reluctant to take it on. On the other hand I...

Coherent Oscillations in an Exciton-Polariton Josephson Junction K. G. Lagoudakis1, B. Pietka1, M. Wouters2, R. André3, B. Deveaud-Plédran1 1ICMP, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne(EPFL),1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. 2ITP, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne(EPFL),1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. 3Institut Néel, CNRS, Grenoble, France. Abstract: We report on the observation of spontaneous coherent oscillations in a microcavity polariton bosonic Josephson junction. The condensation of exciton polaritons takes place under incoherent excitation in a disordered environment, where double potential wells tend to appear in the disordered landscape. Coherent oscillations set on at an excitation power well above the condensation threshold. The time resolved population and phase...

In the March 25 issue of The Weekly Standard, the lead article entitled "The Heretic" deals with philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has abandoned his long-held perspective on philosophy and religion. This has caused consternation and alarm among contemporary philosophy professors, the great majority of whom are strongly committed to an atheistic world-view. A recurring assertion by members of that profession is that they are being very scientific, because science disproves religion. The question arises, "Where did the idea come from that science disproves religion?" It didn't come from within science; rather, it's the province of non-scientists making statements about science....

s there a greater gesture of intellectual contempt than the notion that a tweet constitutes an adequate intervention in a serious discussion? But when Thomas Nagel’s formidable book Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, in which he has the impudence to suggest that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great...