1. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #109810 by Eratosthenes on January 9, 2008 at 7:41 pm

BAEOZ,

This is how Paulos structures the 1st Cause argument in his book...

1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3.Causal chains can't go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.

(skipping a paragraph)

So have we found God? Is He simply the Prime Bowler or the Big Banger? Does this clinch it? Of course not. The argument doesn't even come close. One gaping hole in it is Assumption 1, which might be better formulated as: Either everything has a cause or there's something that doesn't. The first-cause argument collapses into this hole whichever tack we take. If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn't have a cause, it may as well be the physical world
as God or a tortoise.

2. The evolution of creationism

Comment #87973 by Eratosthenes on November 13, 2007 at 11:27 pm

I was at the Lucy exhibit a couple months back while in Houston. The exhibit very clearly showed the ancestry of humans from the Australopithecines on up. Also, in the exhibit Ethiopia is referred to as the Cradle of Mankind which implies it is where man evolved. I wasn't hunting for the word evolution but it was quite evident that exhibit was not shying away from the theory. FYI the majority of the exhibit is actually dedicated to the history of Ethiopia over the past several thousand years, Lucy is only a part.

Note that the exhibit was created in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Exhibition Coordinating Committee. These groups may be behind the fact that the word evolution is not used in the exhibit, if this is in fact the case.

I can report that all the standard evolution books from the Origin of Species to the latest (such as Evolution for Everyone) are available in the museam's bookstore. Don't recall seeing any of Behe's of Well's stuff there on the shelve.

3. Harper's Index

Comment #74836 by Eratosthenes on September 30, 2007 at 7:26 pm

I went in a Borders Books in Houston TX several weeks ago. I noticed that somebody had actually taken the trouble to pull out and turn around all the new atheist books that were in the Religion section! Couldn't identify the books. How silly is that?!

I turned them back around.

4. Christopher Hitchens Is a Treasure

Comment #43267 by Eratosthenes on May 21, 2007 at 3:16 am

Robert Maynard -
That passage was indeed borrowed from Sam Harris, and was duely cited by Hitchens in GING.

5. Hitchens on Falwell

Comment #41877 by Eratosthenes on May 17, 2007 at 8:47 am

Anderson Cooper generally lets he guests get their points across and often appears to be on the side of reason and rationalism. In the past AC has been very supportive of James Randi when he went after the evil witch Sylvia Brown.