Links With Your Coffee - Thursday
- Electroacupuncture: The bait and switch of alternative medicine : Respectful Insolence
- Science-Based Medicine » Chiropractic - A Brief Overview, Part I
- The Reason Project
Sam Harris and Philip Ball discuss the conflict between religion and science. They do not agree…
- WNYC - Radiolab » Stochasticity
This hour, Radiolab examines Stochasticity, which is just a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness. How big a role does randomness play in our lives? Do we live in a world of magic and meaning or … is it all just chance and happenstance? To tackle this question, we look at the role chance and randomness play in sports, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body. Along the way, we talk to a woman suddenly consumed by a frenzied gambling addiction, two friends whose meeting seems purely providential, and some very noisy bacteria.
tip to Patrick
- Science-Based Medicine » The death and rebirth of vitalism
- Conversational Reading: Utah and Louisiana Start Down the Slippery Slope to Censorship
Comments
Philip Ball really got his head handed to him by Sam Harris – and Harris didn't even go after some of Ball's dumbest arguments:
Ball:
In trying to make of case for papal "rationality", Ball completely undermines the claim that religion isn't the enemy of science and, in fact, of society in general. When the holy books are exposed as full of factually incorrect bullshit, it undermines the whole basis for religion having any especially important opinion about anything - Ball says the pope knows that and ruled accordingly. If the pope really rejected the empirical reality Galileo's observations put in his face, then he's insane (or he would be if it weren't the scriptures being contradicted). And if he doesn't really reject empirical reality, he's just protecting the church's power - then the atheist's claim that religion is destructive has some very powerful support - just of a different kind.
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