Atheism and Freethinking

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Photo by Tim Butterfield

Photo by Tim Butterfield

Atheists like to call themselves freethinkers. Many of them have thrown off the shackles of religious and cultural bondage, and escaped the herd mentality, the taboos of religion and even culture, and pride themselves in their independent thinking and daring to strike out from the shores of conventional thought. New Atheism is even religious about it, but that is a topic for another day.

It seems that atheism and freethinking go together, at least by the declarations of the atheists I have known and read. But do they go together?

Can they go together?

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The Gap between the Death of Jesus and Explosion of the Church

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What happened in the gap between the death of Jesus on the cross and the explosion of the early church? Christians, of course, will say it was the resurrection of Jesus, but skeptics will naturally question that answer.

Most western skeptics doubt (or are convinced) that miracles (like rising from the dead) simply do not happen. Most skeptics dismiss the New Testament accounts out of hand. Fifty years ago, skeptic scholars were convinced that the resurrection idea developed as a legend over time, generations after Jesus died.

Thus, an appropriate question as we approach another Easter is this: what accounts for the rapid spread of the following of a man who, by all legitimate accounts, died a cruel, shameful and certain death?

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Bacteria Tell an Interesting Story

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bonnie-brassler-ted-talk

From How bacteria “talk” – Bonnie Bassler – TED-Ed

Who knew that bacteria are social “creatures”? Yes, social! It turns out they do not act as separate organisms, but as communal organisms. Dr. Bonnie Brassler gives an interesting TED Talk on bacteria that explains what incredible social or communal organisms bacteria are, and these bacteria tell an interesting story.

Bacteria not only interact with themselves; they work in harmony with other more complex organisms. Bonnie Brassler points to the example of a squid that engages in an intricate dance with bacteria (virio fisheri) to provide an “ingenuous” anti-predator scheme that prevents the squid from casting a shadow. The symbiosis between the squid and bacteria is amazing, down to signal proteins given off by the squid and signal receptor proteins from the bacteria that are like “lock and key”.

It turns out this is no anomaly. All bacteria have systems like the bacterial friends of squid. “All bacteria can talk to each other. Continue reading →

If Abortion was Legal in 1961

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My Parents and I circa 1960

My Parents and I circa 1960

With a title like that, you might think that I am going to get religious or moral. While it is hard to ignore religious or moral ground on the subject of abortion, my intention is simply to relate stories that are close to me, stories of flesh and blood.

You see, if abortion was legal in 1961, I might not be married to my wife.

Her mother became pregnant out of wedlock. I don’t know the whole story. It certainly isn’t for me to judge. My wife’s parents got married, in spite of what their families wanted them to do. As time went on, however, the marriage suffered. The family struggled.

If abortion was legal in 1961, and if her mother walked into a Planned Parenthood office (or, perhaps, her doctor’s office) asking for help as a pregnant teenager, they would have likely suggested, maybe even urged, that she get an abortion. Her parents would have never known, though they might have agreed.

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Challenger Disaster Restrospective

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Official STS-51L Crew Portrait (NASA)

Official STS-51L Crew Portrait (NASA)

I was listening to NPR today, this anniversary of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, that was etched in our minds because the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, was on board. The host of the afternoon show asked for people to call in recounting where they were and what way they were doing on that day, January 28th, 1986, and how that disaster affected them in regard to teaching or space travel.

This particular event is etched more deeply into my mind that most events. I was living in New Hampshire at the time. Christa McAuliffe was a teacher at a school in Concord New Hampshire, not even 30 minutes away. It was a big deal four people living in New Hampshire at the time. School children were watching the lift off in most schools throughout the State. I will never forget the horrified looks of those children, their teachers, the McAuliffe family and the country as they watched the shuttle explode in real time in the sky.

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The Irreducible Complexity of the Universe

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(c) Can Stock Photo

I recently read the book, Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge University Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Science. The book uses Darwin’s acknowledgment that the Cambrian Explosion was a significant problem to his evolutionary theory of the origin of life as a springboard to explore in detail that problem which Meyer aptly names “Darwin’s doubt”.

I have summarized the first ten chapters of the book on a different Blog, Perspective, starting with a summary of the first four chapters of the book. If you want to read a summary description of the detail that Meyer explores without buying the book, though I strongly suggest buying the book if your are interested.

In this blog, I want to provide an overarching description of the basis for Intelligent Design, which is ultimately the theory that Meyer espouses. For Meyer, the key basis for Intelligent Design is 1) the argument from biological or genetic information and 2) the argument from physics or cosmology. Both arguments can be summed up in the statement that we live in a universe of irreducible complexity that could not have happened by chance or unguided “natural law”.

Meyer focuses on the biological argument, observing that, to build the complex biological machines that we see, there is a need for prior information, and any discussion of that complexity begs the question: where did that information necessary to build the protein parts out of which the complex structures are made come from in the first place? What cause is capable of generating that information? Meyer argues that we can use the same scientific method that Darwin used to infer that the cause had to be conscious mind or intelligence.
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