Swearing and pain

(Note: I accidentally posted a draft of this yesterday before it was ready for publishing. I deleted the draft and am reposting it today with some additional editing and new material. I apologize for any confusion.)

I myself do not routinely swear. But when I accidentally do something stupid and hurt myself, I will find myself involuntarily swearing. I am sure that many people have had that same experience or at least being strongly tempted to swear when experiencing pain. But why do we do that? [Read more…]

The Catholic Church’s war on women picks up the pace

It is quite extraordinary how the Catholic Church seems to go out if its way to alienate women. Fresh from their assault on nuns (see here and here), the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is now targeting Girl Scouts. Both my daughters were girl scouts and it would be tough to find a more wholesome or inoffensive group. But the old men of the Catholic Church seem to see it as a gateway to evil. [Read more…]

Observation and inference

As a scientist who interacts a lot with the general public, I am often asked to explain phenomena that lay people have observed. I used to take those observations at face value and was often stumped at coming up with an explanation because of the inconsistent elements the observations seemed to contain. But I have found from experience that what people tell me they ‘saw’ is not purely raw observational data but that when you go back and actually repeat the situation, the observations are different from what was originally reported and that much of the paradoxical elements go away. [Read more…]

Bird navigation

There have been some interesting developments in learning how birds navigate. It was thought that birds had tiny chunks of metal in their beaks or inner ears that enabled them to detect the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field. But more research has thrown doubt on the existence of these so-called ‘compass cells’, saying that they were just a type of white blood cells. [Read more…]

Book Review: God and the Folly of Faith by Victor J. Stenger

Victor Stenger has had a long career in experimental high-energy physics. He has become a prolific writer on the intersection of science and religion and I have referred to him frequently in past blog posts, especially to material in his 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis. Stenger is an unabashed ‘new atheist’ who thinks that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible and does not shy away from saying so bluntly. The title of his latest book (and its subtitle The Incompatibility of Science and Religion) leaves the reader with no doubt as to where he stands. The book was released this month and I have just had the pleasure of reading it. It essentially updates and expands on the arguments of that earlier one. [Read more…]

Is philosophy science?

In general, questions such as “Is (subject X) a science?” are not very useful. After all, what does it matter what label you assign to something? In certain situations though, the label matters quite a lot. In the US, because of the Establishment Clause, the answer to the question of whether a theory is scientific or religious can determine if it can be taught in public schools. This is why religious people constantly seek to either label their religious beliefs (creationism and intelligent design) as science or seek to have those theories that threaten religion (like evolution) be classified as something other than science. [Read more…]