I was sitting in the barber shop this morning, waiting for a hair cut, thinking about the question of belief in evolution that has come up in the debates among the Republican presidential hopefuls. It seemed like an appropriate place to think of these things. I sat near the window where there was a patriotic bunting. Across the street, there was an ( Read more... )

Last night, I finished reading Kuhn vs. Popper by Steve Fuller. It's a very interesting book, but I feel somewhat unsatisfied after having finished it. As I mentioned earlier, I've been interested in the figure of Karl Popper ever since I read the book, Wittgenstein's Poker. Popper as a philosopher was very engaged in the world and in politics ( Read more... )

After yesterday's post, I went and looked up Stephen Jay Gould's essay on "non-overlapping magesteria." Gould argues for scientists to respect the boundaries of their area of expertise, and respecting faith's claims to questions of metaphysics and spirituality. But near the end, he describes his personal view:As a moral position (and therefore not ( Read more... )

Don't make fun of Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magesteria." It's not nice. I'm thinking of the self-satisfied professor/aetheist guy in the fourth row at the Intelligent Design panel discussion at Hampshire College I attended a few weeks ago. I'm thinking of him today, after reading a book review that will be in this week's Valley Advocate ( Read more... )

Mark Jurkowitz, media critic for the Boston Phoenix, has a post up about a Pew Research survey showing that Americans are showing more confidence in the media. Jurkowitz dug down into the survey report to find this, because it's all the way at the bottom. One of the things that Jurkowitz pointed out that I find interesting is the disparity between ( Read more... )

A few years ago, I read the book Wittgenstein's Poker. It was a fascinating read and introduced me to the character of Karl Popper. Ludwig Wittgenstein, I had heard of. I don't know that I've ever read any of his writing, or that I have a very strong grasp on his philosophy, but he has certainly been influential. The book related an incident at ( Read more... )

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I have an essay in the works for The Valley Advocate on William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Monkey Trial. It's being saved for next week's paper. But it's getting me thinking about my obsession with fundamentalism. Why is it that I'm so fixated on this phenomenon? When pitching the story to my editor, I told him, "I have an idiosyncratic ( Read more... )

Oh, I just love where the evolution/origins debate takes me! Yesterday, I clicked on a few links and discovered a pro-evolution blog called The Panda's Thumb. It's a pretty high-level discussion, hosted by people who defend Darwinism and attempt to debunk Intelligent Design. That's pretty cool, but what I really love is that they call it "The Panda ( Read more... )