Critical Thinking

Response to comments on Science and Creationism

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I’ve received an interesting comment within a posting here about “Irreducible complexity explained“. It deserves a bit of thought and a carefully considered response, so I thought I’d post my reply here, its too long to be just a comment reply, and may be of interest to others.

The commenter basically raises four points, so I propose to consider each in turn.

1) We have to take a lot on trust from academia. The assertion that peer review indicated acceptability and not necessarily accuracy muddies things.

Peer-reviewers simply consider if a submitted papers claim is supported by the data in it, ensure its appropriate for the journal, and that the study has used proper controls to account for other possible explanations. Its only one small part of the overall process.

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Unleashing change – We can all become skeptics

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Bill Davidow, a high-technology industry executive and a venture investor, has written an Opinion piece in todays “Christian Science Monitor”. In it he suggests that the Internet will change our physical space in quite a dramatic way … Today, an even bigger change is afoot. The Internet is about to change our physical space. And … Read more

The Christchurch Gay Quake Hoax

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A website has appeared that has sent portions of the media (and for that matter the blog-sphere) into a feeding frenzy. It claims that Christchurch’s devastating earthquake was an act of God triggered by the tolerance of homosexual behaviour in the city. Sound familiar? perhaps so, because it has a sort of “westboro baptist church” … Read more

Intelligent Design examined – Peer Review

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There is a thriving sub-culture of folks out there who dismiss evolution and instead promote an alternative known as, “Intelligent Design”. At the forefront of this movement is the Discovery Institute. Often when I hear such claims, I dismiss them with the observation that they have no actual evidence, hence its not science.

As a response to this observation, they have a list of claimed Peer-review articles that are supposed to be credible. The link to the list on their site is here, so lets take a look.

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Catholic Church is “on the edge” in Ireland

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The news today in the Irish Independent is …

THE Pope will be officially told the Irish Catholic Church is “on the edge” of national collapse and has only five to 10 years to make a radical recovery by giving laymen and women a greater say in decision-making.

This warning will be submitted in the coming months in a confidential report to Pope Benedict XVI by an international investigator examining the state of the Irish church in the wake of the Murphy and Ryan reports into clerical child abuse.

The full article is here, I’ll let you read it all at you leisure.

To some this is perhaps bad news, but for many others such as myself, this is very good news indeed. Having grown up in Ireland, I’d heard some things that I simply refused to believe at the time, but now know that my friends were not simply telling me tall stories. For there lurking under the social covers were deep dark tragic tales. I need not repeat such stories, we all know them.

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$1 Million is yours … if you can prove that Homeopathy works

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To win $1 Million all you need to do is to prove to the James Randi Educational Foundation that Homeopathy actually works. That sounds like easy money, because obviously it works … surely it must, it can’t be a con. Think about it now, almost all pharmacies sell Homeopath remedies, in fact the UK has … Read more