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Village Atheist » Recent Posts http://villageatheist.org/ Village Atheist » Recent Posts en Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:37:01 +0000 drew on "Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence" http://villageatheist.org/topic/absence-of-evidence-is-evidence-of-absence#post-7 Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:46:50 +0000 drew 7@http://villageatheist.org/ Article here: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/the-evidence-against-god_b_682169.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/the-evidence-against-god_b_682169.html</a> <blockquote>Even the most pious believer has to admit that there is no scientific evidence for God or anything else supernatural. If there were, it would be in the textbooks along with the evidence for electricity, gravity, neutrinos, and DNA. This doesn't bother most believers because they have heard many times that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." However, just repeating a statement over and over again does not make it true. I can think of many cases where absence of evidence provides robust evidence of absence. The key question is whether evidence should exist but does not. Elephants have never been seen roaming Yellowstone National Park. If they were, they would not have escaped notice. No matter how secretive, the presence of such huge animals would have been marked by ample physical signs -- droppings, crushed vegetation, bones of dead elephants. So we can safely conclude from the absence of evidence that elephants are absent from the park. For thirty years physicists have been searching for a particle called the Higgs boson that hypothetically plays a key role in the universe, so important that it has been referred to (perhaps facetiously) as the "God Particle." In the standard model of particles and forces put in place in the 1970s and consistent with every observation since, Higgs bosons pervade the universe and generate mass, the very stuff of matter. We have failed to observe them so far because we have lacked the necessary instruments. However, there are good theoretical reasons to believe that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, now accumulating its initial data, should provide evidence for the Higgs. If it does not -- a prospect most physicists regard as possible -- then the Higgs boson would be shown not to exist. That is the situation with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. Until recent times, absence of evidence for his existence has not been sufficient to rule him out. However, we now have enough knowledge that we can identify many places where there should be evidence, but there is not. The absence of that evidence allows us to rule out the existence of this God beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, I am not talking about all conceivable gods. Certainly the deist god who does not interfere in the world is difficult to rule out. However, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, whom I identify with an uppercase G, is believed to play such an active role in the universe that his actions should have been detected, thus confirming his existence. Let me present four examples. I will begin with the origin of the visible universe. Our knowledge today allows us to push back in time to barely a trillionth of a second after the universe began. Extrapolating from there to the origin, we find that the universe began in a tiny (but not infinitesimal) region of space. Now, information only exists when it is embodied in some physical system, and we know that there is a limit to how compact information can be. This tiny region of space could not have contained more than a few bits of information -- far too little to specify the universe that evolved from it. As the universe expanded, it could hold more information. This created an environment in which order could emerge -- as, over time, through an endless series of random events, it did. But the tiny amount of information contained in the very early universe was not enough to include any plans of some creator at that time. This allows for the possibility of a deist god who set things up, started things going randomly, and then left. It does not allow for some specific plan of creation to be embodied in the universe from the beginning. A God with such a plan can be ruled out beyond a reasonable doubt. Next, consider the claim that the universe was designed. Many people give this as a reason to believe in God. They cannot see how the order of the universe can have come about naturally. However, observations in physics, cosmology, and biology have been scoured for evidence for design in the universe, evidence that should be there if there were a designer God. None has been found. This includes the frequently heard claim that the parameters of physics and cosmology exhibit a fine-tuning for the evolution of life. That subject will be covered in great detail in my next book: The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: How the Universe is not Designed for Us. My conclusion is that the claims of fine-tuning are based on inadequate knowledge of physics. Intelligent design in biology has been thoroughly refuted in recent years, so I need not say much. Everywhere biologists look they find evidence of randomness and haphazard arrangements that would be called incompetent if they were designed. No matter where scientists cast their eyes, the universe they see looks just like it should look if there was no divine design. Third, consider the supposed power of intercessory prayer. Well-executed experiments by reputable institutions such as Harvard, Duke, and the Mayo Clinic have failed to find that prayer improves the recovery of hospital patients. Apologists simply say God did not choose to respond to this test. But you can bet they would have changed their tune if the results had been positive. Trillions of prayers have been tendered over millennia. Of course, most sick people get better anyway, except once. If the God most people worship and pray to does exist, intercessory prayer would have a better batting average than what you would get from the normal operation of the natural world, including luck. It doesn't. As the final example, the Abrahamic God is believed by his worshipers to talk to people and provide information they otherwise did not know. Nothing could be easier to test scientifically. All you have to do is find a few examples where a truth has been revealed that later was confirmed. This could be something simple, such as a prediction of some future event that turned out to be confirmed. This has never happened. Of course, claims of revelation can be found in all three monotheisms, but none stand up to critical scrutiny. The so-called prophecies in scriptures were all made in the distant past and can't be tested since the events prophesied have already happened, or, as in the case of Jesus returning in a generation, long been falsified. In all of these examples, evidence for God should have been found, but was not. This absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It refutes the common assertion that science has nothing to say about God. In fact, science can say, beyond any reasonable doubt, that God -- the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God -- does not exist. </blockquote> drew on "Tiny Fish Evolved To Tolerate Colder Temperature" http://villageatheist.org/topic/tiny-fish-evolved-to-tolerate-colder-temperature#post-6 Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:36:11 +0000 drew 6@http://villageatheist.org/ Article here: <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news200145464.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.physorg.com/news200145464.html</a> <blockquote> University of British Columbia researchers have observed one of the fastest evolutionary responses ever recorded in wild populations. In as little as three years, stickleback fish developed tolerance for water temperature 2.5 degrees Celsius lower than their ancestors. The study, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides the some of the first experimental evidence that evolution may help populations survive effects of climate change. Measuring three to 10 centimetres, stickleback fish originated in the ocean but began populating freshwater lakes and streams following the last ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, marine and freshwater sticklebacks have evolved different physical and behavioural traits, making them ideal models for Darwin's natural selection theory. "By testing the temperature tolerance of wild and lab-raised sticklebacks, we were able to determine that freshwater sticklebacks can tolerate lower temperatures than their marine counterparts," says lead author Rowan Barrett from the UBC Department of Zoology. "This made sense from an evolutionary perspective because their ancestors were able to adapt to freshwater lakes, which typically reach colder temperatures than the ocean." To learn how quickly this adaptation took place, Barrett and colleagues from Switzerland and Sweden "recreated history" by transplanting marine sticklebacks to freshwater ponds and found that in as little as three generations (or three years), they were able to tolerate the same minimum temperature as freshwater sticklebacks, 2.5 °C lower than their ancestral populations. "Scientific models have suggested that climate change could result in both a general, gradual increase of average temperatures and an increase in extreme temperatures," says Barrett, who received his PhD last week. "Our study is the first to experimentally show that certain species in the wild could adapt to climate change very rapidly - in this case, colder water temperature. However, this rapid adaptation is not achieved without a cost," says Barrett. "Only rare individuals that possess the ability to tolerate rapid changes in temperature survive, and the number of survivors may not be large enough to sustain the population. It is crucial that knowledge of evolutionary processes is incorporated into conservation and management policy." Provided by University of British Columbia</blockquote> drew on "Fossil Record Pushed Back A Notch" http://villageatheist.org/topic/fossil-record-pushed-back-a-notch#post-5 Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:25:11 +0000 drew 5@http://villageatheist.org/ Article here: <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news201273825.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.physorg.com/news201273825.html</a> <blockquote> Scientists may have discovered in Australia the oldest fossils of animal bodies. These findings push back the clock on the scientific world's thinking regarding when animal life appeared on Earth. The results suggest that primitive sponge-like creatures lived in ocean reefs about 650 million years ago. The shelly fossils, found beneath a 635 million-year-old glacial deposit in South Australia, represent the earliest evidence of animal body forms in the current fossil record, pre-dating other evidence by at least 70 million years. "These scientists have found that animals may have appeared on Earth 90 million years earlier than previously known," said H. Richard Lane of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "This is comparable to resetting modern times to begin during the late Cretaceous." Red autotraced forms from 15 slices through rock; the shape of a single fossil changes. Previously, the oldest known fossils of hard-bodied animals were from two reef-dwelling organisms that lived around 550 million years ago. There are also controversial fossils of soft-bodied animals that date to the latter part of the Ediacaran period between 577 and 542 million years ago. Princeton University geoscientists Adam Maloof and Catherine Rose happened upon the new fossils while working on a project focused on the severe ice age that marked the end of the Cryogenian period 635 million years ago. Their findings, published in the August 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, provide the first direct evidence that animal life existed before--and probably survived--the severe "snowball Earth" event known as the Marinoan glaciation that left much of the globe covered in ice at the end of the Cryogenian. "We were accustomed to finding rocks with embedded mud chips, and at first this is what we thought we were seeing," Maloof said. "But then we noticed these repeated shapes that we were finding everywhere--wishbones, rings, perforated slabs and anvils. We realized we had stumbled upon some sort of organism, and we decided to analyze the fossils. "No one was expecting that we would find animals that lived before the ice age, and since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how a relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the ‘snowball Earth.'" Analyzing the fossils turned out to be easier said than done, as the composition and location of the fossils made it such that they could not be removed from the surrounding rock using conventional techniques, nor could they be imaged using X-ray scanning techniques. X-rays are only able to distinguish between materials with different densities, which is why they can be used to image bones that are inside the human body or buried within a rock. But the most ancient skeletal fossils are made not of bone, but of calcite--the same material that makes up the rock matrix in which they are embedded. Therefore X-rays could not be used to "illuminate" the newly discovered fossils and the researchers had to develop and refine another method. Maloof, Rose and their collaborators teamed up with professionals at Situ Studio, a Brooklyn-based design and digital fabrication studio, to create three-dimensional digital models of two individual fossils that were embedded in the surrounding rock. As part of the process, team members shaved off 50 microns of sample at a time--about half the width of a human hair--and photographed the polished rock surface each time. The team ground and imaged nearly 500 slices of the rock. Using specialized software techniques developed specifically for this project, the researchers then "stacked" the outlines on top of one another to create a complete three-dimensional model of the creature. The technique is similar to the way CAT scan technology combines a series of two-dimensional X-rays to create a three-dimensional image of the inside of the body. The technique that was developed served to automate the process--turning a prohibitively time-consuming task into an efficient and effective method for fossil reconstruction. "For Situ Studio, the most exciting aspect of this collaboration is that we were able to successfully employ knowledge developed within an architectural practice to help solve problems in an entirely different field--applying design tools to spatial problems on a completely different scale," said Bradley Samuels, a founding partner of Situ Studio. "It became an exercise in marrying disparate bodies of knowledge to address pressing questions in the geosciences." When they began the digital reconstruction process, the shape of some of the two-dimensional slices made the researchers suspect they might be dealing with the previously discovered Namacalathus, a goblet-shaped creature featuring a long body stalk topped with a hollow ball. But their model revealed irregularly shaped, centimetre-scale animals with a network of internal canals. The creatures looked nothing like Namacalathus. After considering a variety of alternatives, the scientists decided that the fossil organisms most closely resembled sponges--simple filter-feeding animals that extract food from water as it flows through specialized body channels. Previously, the oldest known undisputed fossilized sponges were around 520 million years old, dating to the Cambrian Period. In future research, Maloof and his collaborators intend to refine the three-dimensional digital reconstruction technique to automate and increase the speed of the process. This could have a significant impact on palaeontology, Maloof said, enabling the analysis of myriad early fossils that are currently inaccessible to the tools of modern science. Provided by National Science Foundation</blockquote> drew on "Rush Limbaugh: Barack Obama Is "Our First Anti-American President"" http://villageatheist.org/topic/rush-limbaugh-barack-obama-is-our-first-anti-american-president#post-4 Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:45:29 +0000 drew 4@http://villageatheist.org/ Original Article: <a href="http://tv.gawker.com/5614128/rush-limbaugh-barack-obama-is-our-first-anti+american-president" rel="nofollow">http://tv.gawker.com/5614128/rush-limbaugh-barack-obama-is-our-first-anti+american-president</a> <blockquote>Limbaugh sarcastically suggests that we build a Hindu Temple next to Pearl Harbor and a Mosque next to the Pentagon without realizing that Shinto, not Hinduism, is the most common religion in Japan, and there is already a Mosque inside the Pentagon and a Shinto temple next to Pearl Harbor.</blockquote> Rush Limbaugh should check his facts before blurting out complete nonsense. Perhaps he thought it was funny, but he's the only one laughing at his own stupidity. drew on "New Austin Coalition of Reason Billboard" http://villageatheist.org/topic/new-austin-coalition-of-reason-billboard#post-3 Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:44:27 +0000 drew 3@http://villageatheist.org/ The Austin Coalition of Reason has placed a new billboard along I35 just north of Austin that reads "Don't Believe In God? Join The Club". This billboard targets those in the area that might not believe in god to let them know that they are not alone. These billboards sure do start up a stir amongst the religious folks, some are offended, some aren't. Those that take offense to our freedom of speech are just looking for controversy. If these billboards are not allowed, then we need to start removing all the religious billboards that line up our roads and highways. drew on "Welcome" http://villageatheist.org/topic/welcome#post-2 Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:53:19 +0000 drew 2@http://villageatheist.org/ So I use to frequent the Richard Dawkins forums and community but those are long gone, probably due to the hassle of upkeep and it was always targeted by malicious users due to the nature of Dawkins high profile. So I decided to add some forums to this site, which use to be primarily a blog about atheism, science, reason and those delusional religions in hopes to bring some liked minded people together in a community sense, discussions, etc. all in one place.