One of the problems we frequently encounter when discussing religion (especially in the context of science) is that a lot of people have a hazy understanding of what superstition is. They think superstition means “silly things other people believe,” and if we describe any of their beliefs as superstition, they think we’re merely insulting their …
Category Archive: Superstition
Sep 04 2012
The cockroach babies
It’s been a long time since I’ve visited the crew over at William Dembski’s abandoned blog Uncommon Descent, but this post by scordova caught my eye. He’s wrestling with the problem of malicious “designs” in nature, and gets right to the heart of the matter. Can the Intelligent Designer of life create malicious designs? If …
Aug 22 2012
How do we know?
Picking up where we left off yesterday, we’ve seen that Pastor Stephen Feinstein would be ill-advised to propose that there are any material preconditions for the universe, “reasonable standards,” and epistemology. That which exists in the same form at all points in time is necessarily uncaused and uncausable, since there’s no point in time where …
Jun 18 2012
3rd degree gullibility
There are three degrees of gullibility. First degree gullibility is when you believe something because you don’t know any better, like a very young child believing in Santa. Second degree gullibility is when you become aware of conflicts and inconsistencies in what you believe, but you do not admit that they are genuine conflicts and …
Jun 11 2012
Science and the supernatural
In a comment over at my other blog, tokyotodd writes: In order for a worldview to be capable of addressing questions about God or miracles, it must first posit some sort of methodology by which these objects (if they existed) could be detected and empirically verified. This requires knowledge of the objects being investigated, without …
Jun 06 2012
Korean creationists get science out of textbooks.
It sounds odd to hear a story like this from Asia, but according to Nature.com, South Korea has a creationist problem as well, to the point that it’s negatively impacting science education over there. A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and …
May 31 2012
An honest creationist?
It’s nice to know there’s at least one honest creationist left. Or at least, partly honest. And he lives in Georgia. Educators across the country are now developing what’s called the “next generation of science standards.” A member of the Villa Rica Church of Christ told Channel 2′s Diana Davis evolution should not be a …
Apr 03 2012
Does God show up through miracles?
Today I’d like to look at Mighty Timbo’s claim that he has evidence of God, in the form of a miracle that allegedly happened to his wife. It follows the traditional outline for miracle stories, so we can reasonably call this a typical case. And that’s a good thing because it also gives us at …
Mar 15 2012
Resistance is… persecution?
This is really not going to end well for the ID creationist community… “David Coppedge alienated his co-workers by the way he acted with them, and blamed anyone who complained about those interactions,” according to JPL in their response. “He accuses his former project supervisor and line manager of making discriminatory and retaliatory employment decision, …
Feb 03 2012
Consistency with the truth
Our recent (and ongoing?) discussion with Kevin got me thinking about truth and the supernatural. By definition, the difference between a true story and a false one is that the true story is consistent with reality and the false one isn’t. This consistency has two aspects: negatively, consistency means the true story does not contradict …
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