Tagdesign in nature
Did Carl Sagan Think the Universe Shows No Design?
Like Fred Hoyle, he seems to have thought it showed design — until that view became politically associated with religionIt’s a complicated story. At one time, a religious skeptic like astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996) could write: The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle — another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn’t matter what you look like, or what you’re made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your Read More ›
How the Explanatory Filter Can Help Quash Conspiracy Theories
I found Dembski’s explanatory filter quite helpful in investigating voter fraud claimsWilliam Dembski’s explanatory filter is a decision strategy for identifying events that are unlikely to have happened purely by chance. The filter proceeds in three main steps, which can be illustrated via the plot device in Contact, a novel (1985) by Carl Sagan, followed by a film (1997): Eliminate events of large probability (necessity): A radio telescope receives a pattern of beeps and pauses. Perhaps the pattern seems strange to us but we could just be overinterpreting inevitable space noise. Eliminate events of medium probability (chance): The pattern turns out to be a sequence of prime numbers. However, large randomly generated numbers sometimes feature apparent patterns (five 5s in a row, for example) that don’t signify anything. Specify the event Read More ›
How Did One Man Gain the Strength to Turn Away From Nihilism?
Chambers was quite willing to accept that he had joined, essentially, a terrorist organization, so long as he could see it as for the greater goodAmerican writer Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) sparked McCarthyism (a witch hunt against suspected Communists at high levels in the U.S. government in the early 1950s), during the trial of State Department official Alger Hiss. Senator Joseph McCarthy began his eponymous crusade against communists largely because Chambers had exposed Hiss as a Communist spy. Chambers, a senior editor at Time Magazine, knew that Hiss was a spy because Chambers himself was a spy who worked closely with Hiss and was in fact a very close friend. Which begs the question, why would a spy turn in his closest friend, as well as imperil himself? To understand the question and provide an answer, Chambers wrote an account of his conversion experience, and the Read More ›
