US Invites China to Invade Taiwan
Donald Trump has pulled the last U.S. aircraft carrier out of Asia to help prosecute the war in the Middle East.
Rondam Ramblings
Preaching the gospel of evidence, experiment and reason since 2003.
Latest posts
Seeking God in science part 10: The Mind-Body Problem
The title of this series, "Seeking God in Science", was meant to be a metaphor. This should not come as a surprise. We are (almost certainly) not going to find a literal supernatural being using the scientific method. But — and I cannot emphasize this enough — this is not because the scientific method is prejudiced against such an outcome. This is a charge often leveled
Birthright Citizenship Hangs on by its Fingernails
The papers are burying the lede on the story of SCOTUS ruling in favor of birthright citizenship. The headline should not be that it survived, it should be that the ruling was 5-4 on the Constitutional question. In other words, birthright citizenship, a bedrock principle of law in the United states for over 150 years, survived by only a single vote. That rescinding birthright
PSA: I'm doing another debate tonight
Subject line says it all. The link to the debate is here in case you want to watch it. It starts at 8PM eastern time. This one is with SFT who tends to be better behaved than JimBob. I'm also teaming up with 1stAmender. I've never done a team debate before so that should be interesting. Sorry about the late notice. I've been busy with other things. (
Seeking God in Science part 9: Creating Information
It might appear that I have been going to some pretty extreme lengths to belabor the obvious: we live in a world populated by material objects made of atoms. Atoms exist in particular places at particular times and move around according to laws. Collections of atoms are called systems and the positions of atoms within a system are called states. Correlations between states are
Seeking God in Science part 8: Caring
In the previous installment in this series I introduced the concept of information, which I defined as correlations between states. Commenter Samuel (whose profile says he is a Young Earth Creationist) pointed out that:Shannon entropy implicitly requires a mind to decide which distinct states will be recognized in order to assign a value to "n" (where n is the number of
Seeking God in Science part 7: Information, Knowledge and Belief
We are now finally ready to tackle three of the thorniest topics the human intellect has ever grappled with, the concepts of information, knowledge, and belief. The relevance of these concepts to the scientific search for God should be obvious, but I want to be explicit about it because, as ever in this series, we're going to apply the scientific method. That always begins with the
Big News: The Plausibility of Abiogenesis Has Been Experimentally Demonstrated
From earliest recorded history mankind has wondered how life on earth first arose. The current diversity of life on earth is spectacularly well-explained by Darwinian (or Dawkinsian) evolution, the process of replication with random variation plus natural selection. Things that are better at making copies of themselves make more copies. What makes something better at
Seeking God in Science part 6: Systems and States
In the previous two installments we talked about chairs, specifically, what distinguishes a chair from a non-chair. We considered and rejected the "chairness hypothesis" in favor of the atomic theory, which says that chairs — and all physical objects (at least inanimate ones) — are made of atoms. (N.B. I am actually a human, notwithstanding my fondness for em-dashes.) What makes
Seeking God in Science part 5: Testimony
At the end of the last installment in this series I made a prediction: you believe that matter is made of atoms. I am confident in making this prediction despite the fact that I have almost no information about who you are because, as far as I can tell, no one in the modern world denies it. There are people who profess to believe in all kinds of crazy shit, but I have never heard of
Reflections on dying
My father died last week. I am now the sole surviving member of my immediate family. My sister died in 2020 and my mother in 2024. The experience of dealing with three deaths in the family has been... interesting. There are things I know now that I wish I'd known then, and things I can reveal now that I could not before. I'm writing this in the hope that
Seeking God in Science part 4: Chairness
I concluded the last installment in this series with a deceptively simple claim: Things exist. This two-word quip is a scientific hypothesis, an explanation for some of my subjective experiences, specifically, my ability to see and touch and hear and small and taste, well, things. The explanation is that these things that I perceive really do exist in point of actual physical (
Field report from Maui
Ulua beach, Wailea-Makena, Maui, before the storm: and after:
We interrupt this post series to bring you an important weather update
Those of you who watched my debate will know that I was in Hawaii at the time. Well, I'm still here. I have no idea if this is making news on the mainland, but Hawaii has just gone through two days of one of the most intense Kona storms in many years. I have never in my life seen rain this hard go on for so long. The condo that we are in was not designed for this.
Debate Post-Mortem
Last Saturday I did my first on-line debate in four years with a YouTuber who goes by the handle MadeByJimBob (who I will refer to simply as JB since JimBob is not actually his real name and MadeByJimBob is just too long). The topic was "Is Evolution a Reasonable Position?" The topic was originally going to be "Evolution on Trial" but I pushed back on that for two reasons. First
Seeking God in Science part 3: Things Exist
The mere undertaking of this project of reconciling the mechanistic and teleological worldviews is already chock-a-block with tacit assumptions. I am assuming that you, my readers, actually exist. I am rejecting solipsism. By choosing writing as my medium I am assuming that you know how to read and that you understand English. But publishing on-line I am assuming that you
Seeking God in Science Part 2: Pits and Pratfalls in the Meanings of Words
About ten years ago I decided to take a deep dive into young-earth creationism (YEC). I was curious to find out how people maintain a belief in something that, to me, was so obviously wrong. Notice that this project was itself an application of the the scientific method to everyday life. I was faced with a Problem, an observation for which I could not (at the time) provide
Seeking God in Science: First Steps
Almost two years ago I started writing a series of posts about the scientific method. In that post I made a promise, as yet unfulfilled, to show how the scientific method could provide a complete and satisfying worldview which fulfills the emotional and spiritual human needs normally serviced by religions. I claim that: Science provides a complete worldview applicable to all
Trump defends the people's right to protest — as long as they live in Iran and not the U.S.
Am I really the only one to notice the staggering hypocrisy in how the Trump administration is responding to protests against the government in Iran vs here in the U.S.?The Trump administration is considering military options in response to unrest in Iran, U.S. officials said late Saturday, as protests there continued despite threats from the country’s supreme leader that he would expand a
The Pro-life Position Leads to Dark Places
One of the things I did this year was to engage in one of the most ridiculously long Reddit discussion threads ever, and that is really saying something. That link doesn't even go to the beginning of the thread because the discussion chain was broken by a post that was deleted by my interlocutor, who goes by the pseudonym "uniformist". The discussion branched and ebbed and
I will remember Charlie Kirk
I don't watch right-wing media personalities much because I find it too painful. For that matter, I don't watch left-wing media personalities much either for the same reason. But the pain in each case arises from very different sources. The right-wing pain comes from being weary of the lies and the distortions and the brazen hypocrisy. The left-wing pain comes from
Sigh, here we go again.
You would think that after the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq that Republicans would have learned that starting a war in that part of the world is a Really Bad Idea (tm). But no. After utterly failing to bring about regime change in both its eastern and western neighbors, the Trump administration is winding up to try yet again again in Iran. Maybe the third time will be the
If the Ten Commandments Reflected Reality
And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.You shall have no other gods before me. Except Donald Trump. If he says something that goes against my word, you shall believe him and not me.You shall not make for yourself any image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters
Hating Trump More Won't Make Things Better
It has been nearly five months now since I published my open letter to Democratic candidates and organizations. Since then I have, unsurprisingly, received dozens of texts and emails asking me to "Donate $5 now!" For a while I responded to every one pointing them to my Open Letter and asking them to read it. I was expecting (hoping for?) one of three responses. 1) "You are
No, Science is Not Just Another Religion
I want to debunk once and for all this idea that "science is just another religion". It isn't, for one simple reason: all religions are based on some kind of metaphysical assumptions. Those assumptions are generally something like the authority of some source of revealed knowledge, typically a holy text. But it doesn't have to be that. It can be as simple as assuming that