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Sure, Atheism Is a Religion, to which Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos Seek Converts David Klinghoffer October 28, 2014 1:46 PM | Permalink Some Twitter correspondents objected to my comment, in connection with our new book The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos, that "Cosmos is not appropriate for public schools, where you're not supposed to advocate any religion, including atheism." But of course Tyson-style atheism counts as a religion. As I'm hardly the first to say, it has almost all the trimmings that religions commonly do: An account of origins (panspermia and Darwinian evolution), a philosophical commitment to a certain way...

In Case You Had Any Doubts About What the Freedom From Religion Foundation Really Is Michael Egnor October 29, 2014 4:35 AM | Permalink The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is planning to distribute some... literature... to public high school students in Florida: An atheist group is planning to distribute a pamphlet in several Florida public high schools that depicts an illustration of a cartoon Bible sexually assaulting a young woman.According to a report by Brittany Hughes at CNSNews.com, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) plans to hand out a pamphlet entitled "An X-Rated Book: Sex and Obscenity in the...

Oct 23, 2014Bob Yirka Homo floresiensis adult female - model of head. (Phys.org) —It's been ten years since the bones of Homo floresiensis, aka, the "hobbit" were uncovered in Liang Bua, a cave, on the island of Flores in Indonesia, and scientists still can't agree on the diminutive hominin's origins. This month, the journal Nature has printed a comment piece by Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London and two pieces by Ewen Callaway, one a retrospective with interviews with the central players, and the other a podcast with the four principle scientists involved in the find—Bert Roberts,...

Evolution is not inconsistent with God, said Pope Francis during an unveiling of a bust of his predecessor, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Monday. "Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation," Francis said. "The scientist," he continued, "must [nevertheless] be moved by a trust in the idea that nature hides, within her evolutionary mechanisms, potentialities that it is the task of intellect and freedom to discover and actuate, in order to achieve the [kind of] development that is in the design of the Creator." The pope, who backed the Roman Catholic...

The Big Bang “doesn’t contradict the intervention of a divine Creator, but demands it,” Pope Francis said Monday morning, because the beginning of the world “is not the work of chaos.” The Pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, gathered in the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.” God is not some sort of wizard, said Francis, but rather “the Creator who brought all things into being.” The origin of the world derives directly “from a supreme Principle of creative love,” he added. “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation,...

Original soft-tissue fossils continue to challenge mainstream understanding of how and when fossils formed. Secular researchers described dozens of them over the years, from mummified skin and dried red blood to still-purple retinas, and they assign them ages of tens of millions of years. However, the science of tissue decay clearly does not permit these long ages. For example, lab bench tests that accelerate tissue decay under high temperatures place a maximum age of fewer than one million years on some of the most resilient proteins, assuming the fossil proteins were kept cold and sterile during the entire process. These...

Michael Gungor, of the Christian worship band Gungor, stepped into a wasp’s nest of criticism and controversy by his comments a few months ago that he doesn’t believe in a literal creation, or in the great flood, or Noah.  In fact, he believes that God-directed evolution is the means our Creator used to bring forth species upon the earth. Meh.  By itself, such a comment is disagreeable to my own beliefs, but not on its face heretical or worthy of disfellowship.  The fact that Gungor has a hit band in the Christian world has no bearing on my opinion. Michael...

A Fuss Over Dust: Planck Satellite Fails to Confirm Big Bang 'Proof' by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * During a high profile news conference in March 2014, the BICEP2 radio astronomy team announced purported direct evidence for inflation— an important part of the modern Big Bang model.1 In Big Bang cosmology, inflation is a hypothesized "growth spurt" in which the universe enormously increased in size. Inflation was an ad hoc addition to the Big Bang model intended to solve some very serious theoretical difficulties, including the Big Bang's own version of the seeing-distant-starlight-in-a-young- universe problem.2 Inflation was originally thought to have...

Oxford Journals, Genome Biology and EvolutionBurial site and skeletal remains of the St. Helena marine forager, who was at least 50 years old when he died DNA from a 2,300-year-old skeleton suggests that the earliest known group of modern humans to branch off from the wider genetic population survived until astonishingly recently. The finding supports the case that southern, rather than eastern, Africa is humanity's ancestral home.Mitochondrial DNA, passed on only from the mother, demonstrates that all humanity is descended from a single ancestor around 200,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence points to the Omo Valley, where fossil evidence suggests that Homo sapiens roamed Africa 195,000...

Scientists have found the beginnings of life-bearing chemistry at the centre of the galaxy. Iso-propyl cyanide has been detected in a star-forming cloud 27,000 light-years from Earth. Its branched carbon structure is closer to the complex organic molecules of life than any previous finding from interstellar space.

Darwinist Denies Human Exceptionalism in NYT The New York Times is consistently anti-human exceptionalism, never missing an opportunity to publish articles that seek to reduce humans to just another animal in the forest.Today, the Sunday Review section has University of Washington biology professor, David P. Barash, bragging that he works to destroy faith in his classes (“The Talk”), insisting to his students that science and religion are incompatible.That kind of ideological indoctrination is par for the disturbing course in universities, but not the one of the areas with which I grapple. However, I would be remiss not to point out...

To find out, scientists turned to chemistry. Here on Earth, about one in every 3,000 molecules of water is made with a deuterium atom instead of a hydrogen atom. A deuterium atom is similar to a hydrogen atom except that its nucleus contains a proton and a neutron, instead of a lone proton. (Both atoms also contain a single electron.) That makes deuterium twice as heavy as hydrogen, which is why water molecules made with deuterium atoms (HDO) are known as “heavy water.” At the time that our sun was born, the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen throughout the universe...

A Virginia Tech geobiologist with collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found evidence in the fossil record that complex multicellularity appeared in living things about 600 million years ago – nearly 60 million years before skeletal animals appeared during a huge growth spurt of new life on Earth known as the Cambrian Explosion. The discovery published online Wednesday in the journal Nature contradicts several longstanding interpretations of multicellular fossils from at least 600 million years ago. "This opens up a new door for us to shine some light on the timing and evolutionary steps that were taken by...

Evolution’s oyster twist by David Catchpoole Sadly, many Christians compromised with evolutionary ideas because of supposed ‘proofs’ like the flat-became-twisted oyster evolution story. Oysters have the unfortunate distinction that they were one of the first examples of an alleged proof of evolutionary lineage in the fossil record (mooted by paleontologist A.E. Trueman in 1922).1 The ‘flat’ oyster, Ostrea sp., was said to have evolved into the coiled shell Gryphaea sp. Several generations of science students were taught this as ‘one of the best documented cases of evolution’ in the fossil record.

Progress: “Forward or onward movement towards a destination…. Development towards an improved or more advanced condition.” Progressive: “Happening or developing gradually or in stages.” [Compare with Darwinist evolution theory.] “(A person or idea) favouring social reform; Favouring change or innovation.” Progressivist: A person who is “modern, liberal, advanced, forward-looking, forward-thinking, go-ahead, enlightened, enterprising, innovative, up-and-coming, new, dynamic, avant-garde, modernistic, disruptive; radical, left-wing, reforming, reformist, revolutionary, revisionist” So much for definitions provided by the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language . It seems to me there is a whole lot of pure hope (and hype) associated with the idea of “human...

Raising fish on land seems like the sort of idea you’d get while recovering from general anesthesia. But for three McGill University researchers, it made perfect sense. How else would you find out what behavioral and physiological changes might have taken place when fish first made the move from sea to land over 400 million years ago? "I used to look at fins and their motion, and I always thought it was so interesting and complex," says Emily Standen, lead author of a study published in Nature today, and an evolutionary biomechanics researcher who now works at the University of...

A New Video Documentary Reveals the Hidden Ideological and Scientific Roots of World War I Evolution News & Views August 18, 2014 5:55 AM | Permalink This month marks the hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War. Between 1914 and 1918, the conflict took 16 million lives in brutal combat yet its causes remain strangely cloudy to most of us. One historian titled his recent book about the origins of the war The Sleepwalkers, as if nations and leaders stumbled into the global catastrophe almost by accident, unmotivated by any particular philosophy or ideology.World War II is...

Hmm, what's this? We noticed that overnight eight 5-star reviews for Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt were mysteriously erased. Just vanished. Since these were positive reviews, it is unlikely they were "abusive" which is the normal criterion that Amazon has for removing reviews. Interesting. These kinds of shenanigans always seem to happen when our critics are feeling maximally pressed because they can't answer our arguments on the merits. They thus see the need to resort to schemes and tricks. It's an admission of intellectual defeat. We've also heard claims about people trying to reshelf Meyer's book in the religion section...

When people joyously discover on Ancestry.com that they're related to, say, a medieval archduke or a notorious Victorian criminal, evolutionary biologists may be permitted to snicker. Because in actuality, we are all related: Humans all share at least one common ancestor if you go far enough back. You are related to every king and criminal who ever lived, to Gandhi and Paris Hilton and Carrot Top. You are even related to me. But buckle up — that's only the beginning. Humanity, after all, is but one ugly branch on the big tree of life. Go back far enough, and you'll...

When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination. Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas such as "intelligent design" to be taught as...