Dance, Rabbit, Dance. Dance, Rabbits, Dance!

To celebrate the official release of The Design Matrix, go here. And turn up the volume!

The Irrationality of Science is a Viewpoint article which comments on the recent op ed piece by Paul Davies. A quote from the Davies article is followed by the author's response. My comments follow that.

Davies:

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith….In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

Viewpoint author:

The last sentence is an irritatingly common misrepresentation of faith. Faith is not believing despite the lack of evidence, faith is believing despite the fact that the evidence falls short of proof. Anyway, Davies is going to argue that science, like religion, is ultimately based on faith:

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Earlier in the day, this Book Cop reshelved The Design Matrix. The rest is history.

It's rather amazing that despite the fact that I have been tapped into the ID debate for close to a decade, and more than that, reading Mike Gene's posts for just that long, reading his book still felt entirely new to me. A testament to how original and fresh his thesis is. Since I am still making my way through the book, I have yet to discover what it ultimately delivers. However, each chapter reads like a thriller, you simply do not want to skip to the end.

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Bradford posted about Paul Davies' op-ed in the New York Times on the thread Science and Faith. Which quickly went downhill as our live-in critics decended like vultures to put a quick stop to any real discussion.

The SciBlog community wasn't hampered by such tactics, so came out hot and heavy in defense of their ideology against Davies' observations. Anti-theist PZ Myers insisted that Faith is not a prerequisite for science, but only managed to demonstrate laughable ignorance of the relevant science. My favorite excerpts…

When someone says that life would not exist if the laws of physics were just a little bit different, I have to wonder"¦ how do they know? Just as there are many different combinations of amino acids that can make any particular enzyme, why can't there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life?

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This is a little unusual for TT, but I just saw this movie, and I highly recommend it. I haven't seen a truly scary movie for a long time, and I walked into the theater with low expectations. Although I've seen better, I have to say that this tops the list of Stephen King's greatest silver screen adaptations. I feel also that it touches upon issues that are often discussed here and on related blogs. I try not to spoil anything, but I do reveal some parts of the movie. You've been warned.

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Can you guess the city?

Paul Davies authored Taking Science on Faith an opinion piece in the New York Times. He asks some questions about laws of physics at the end of this paragraph:

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion "” all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

Davies next notes an attitude shift and the dependence of life on a limited range of mathematical values. We live in a universe that accomodates life; a most convenient condition.

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A Scientific American article by Paul Davies entitled Are Aliens Among Us? raises some good origin of life issues. I'll focus only on the first page of the linked article in this blog entry and reserve the right to target the remainder of the article in the future.

Davies notes that the origin of life has remained resistent to scientific attempts to solve its mysteries. In fact we are unable to answer basic related questions such as how life originated and precisely when this happened. It is true that there is a consensus that puts the earthly figure at about three and a half billion years ago give or take a couple hundred million years. However, an absence of hard evidence does not lend encouragement.

Davies points out two schools of thought. Life could be the result of some extremely unlikely circumstances. So unlikely as to mean earth could be the only place in the universe where life is found. But alas there are many other universes some argue and this would change the implications of the odds existing in this particular universe.

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Would you like to give yourself a Christmas present? Like a free copy of The Design Matrix hot off the printing presses? Here's all that you need to do.

First, go here, click on the large version of the book cover, and print off a copy.

Second, take this page, get Santa to hold it, and take his picture (no PhotoShopping). If you already have a copy of the book and would like a second one, just use your book instead. The caption for the photo will be, 'Look What Santa Got for Christmas.'

Third, send me your picture by December 21, 2007 and put "Contest Photo" in the subject line. The link to my e-mail address can be found here.

Be creative. Have fun. The best picture will be hosted on The Design Matrix and Telic Thoughts blogs on Christmas Eve and a free copy of The Design Matrix will be sent out the day after Christmas.

[HT to Guts for putting together this truly outstanding video!]

Given that this is the thanksgiving season, I would like to shout out a deeply felt "thanks!" to all the people who pre-ordered The Design Matrix. What's especially remarkable was the way so many of you patiently endured the long delay and hung in there.

Over the years, critics have often complained that I did not focus on Intelligent Design and instead spent too much time arguing about tangential issues. But for those who have a copy of the book, you can now see that I have long had plenty to say about ID, as The Design Matrix is saturated with this topic. In other words, for a long time now, I have had to restrict myself to the left-over topics/arguments, along with the side-issues. But that should change now.

In the preface to the book, I note:

It is my belief that there are people in the world like me "“ people who are tired of the heated debates, name-calling, innuendo, and political fights. Such people might find themselves in the middle ground and would rather focus on the hypotheses, the arguments, and the evidence. We might not be completely convinced that life was designed, yet we find the hypothesis to be tremendously intriguing. Rather than being worried if design should be labeled science, metaphysics, or religion, it is my belief that there are people who would rather just ponder the issues that are raised by design and evolution.

One of the things I plan to do soon after the book is officially released is to revisit some old blog entries, but this time, in the light of the Matrix.

Once again, thanks to all, and have a great holiday!

Writing in Nature, professor of biology Chris D. Thomas bemoans the environmental damages caused by human activity. But not to worry, he says. In a few million years, humans will be extinct.

The geological perspective of Terra is bizarrely reassuring. Humans will presumably be gone within a few million years, perhaps sooner. If the past that Novacek describes is a guide to the future, global ecosystem processes will be restored some tens of thousands to a million years after our demise, and new forms of life over the ensuing millions of years will exploit the denuded planet we leave behind. Thirty million years on, things will be back to normal, albeit a very different 'normal' from before. It is good to be optimistic. The problem is living here in the meantime.

Robin Hanson wonders: "Yet if a plague, for example, were to produce this outcome within the next ten years, I'm pretty sure most everyone would see this as a catastrophe of the highest possible order. So how does this become a good thing if it happens in the next million years?"

More on scientists cheering for the death of humans here.