Signs of the Times

Uncommon Descent Contest winner 5: Why middle-aged men have shiny scalps

Before I announce the winner, I should note that Harper One San Francisco has announced that 5 hardback copies of both Steve Meyer's Signature of the Cell, ( 2009) and Beauregard and O'Leary's The Spiritual Brain (2007 ) are available free to contest winners. Like, win and add them to your library for free.

Okay, now to Question 5:

Winner VJ Torley writes, Go here for more.

The oracle of particle physics descends on science North

At the Canadian Science Writers’ Association convention in Sudbury, Ontario, our Sunday dinner speaker was American theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who presented sample clips from famous sci-fi films. And a whole lot more.

Would you be astonished to learn that the films portray implausible or impossible physics? No? Filmmakers value audience numbers more than atomic numbers. His clips entertained, but did not surprise:

However, his talk frequently targeted religion and politics: although he professed to respect theists, he offered snarky asides suggesting that fear of science is growing in Canada (because it might damage religion), adding, "In many ways I hope it does, but it wasn't designed to do that."

Dr. Krauss also told the assembled science communicators that in many key science controversies, there is only one side and journalists confuse matters by seeking out both sides.

Not so. New discoveries in science often result from minor, not major, deviations from an expected result.

Read more here.

BK's Going Down Into the Gutter

From that fast food chain who gave us Subservient Chicken comes another whopper of an ad campaign. The text reads: The BK Super Seven Incher - It'll blow your mind away. You can click on it if you want, but you probably already get the idea.

Coming across this ad reminded me of the article Advertising A-Z which was in our third issue of Salvo. As the article points out, there are many methods that ad companies employ for getting in our pockets, these just happen to be among the most base and insultingly obvious. And also, this kind of humor isn't exactly that hard to pull off.

Of course, by posting these ads for the advertisers and thereby propagating their exposure, maybe I've just played right into their hands . . .

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Subscribe to Salvo today! (See, it's not so hard to plug your product without the use of suggestive headlines.)

Hooked on a Feeling

Excerpt from Hooked on a Feeling: Is Gender Just a State of Mind by Regis Nicoll

. . .

In the early Greek tradition, everything possessed an essence—an intrinsic nature defined by its purposeful end. For example, the nature of an acorn was to become an oak tree, and the nature of an egg was to become a bird. Likewise, human beings had a nature that, if properly followed, would result in the “good life.”

That notion held sway for nearly two and a half millennia, right up until Jean-Paul Sartre announced that “existence precedes essence.” According to Sartre, the essence of humanness was not innate and fixed; it was emergent and malleable, shaped by the culmination of our life experiences. And since each of us experiences life differently, our natures are as varied as our DNA.

Sartre’s simple jingle turned the wisdom of the ancients on its head, becoming the wrecking ball for a generation of coffee-house dreamers intent on leveling the foundations of good and evil, virtue and vice, and beauty and ugliness. But perhaps no change in the last forty years has been as disorienting as the leveling of gender.

(read more)

This article is from the second issue of Salvo. I will be updating the website with many more articles from our past issues, so be sure to check back often.

Also by Regis Nicoll: Gimme that Spacetime Religion in Salvo 9

Australia and Global Warming

Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare?

Since the Australian government first introduced its Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) legislation—the Australian version of cap-and-trade energy rationing—there has been a sharp shift in public opinion and political momentum against the global warming crusade. This is a story that offers hope to defenders of industrial civilization—and a warning to American environmentalists that the climate change they should be afraid of just might be a shift in the intellectual climate.

You should definitely go read the rest of the article over at Real Clear Politics. It looks like being skeptical of C02-caused climate change is "evidence-based" after all. Who knew!? I've always just disbelieved the hype because once I had a dream where I drove a smiling monster truck into the sun on the exact same day I got a fortune cookie that advised me to "Never wear your best pants when you go to fight for freedom."

Salvo 9 Articles Now Online

Salvo 9 is printed and set to mail out to subscribers and bookstores any day now. To coordinate with the mailing, I've updated www.salvomag.com with some new material from the issue, and it is now available in our online catalog for purchase.

One of my favorite articles from this issue is a piece by Les Sillars (Game Over, Man?) who reviews the book Guyland by way of a mock advice column from one guy to another. It is a great critique of the culture known as "guyland" that the book aims to warn against. But Sillars also points out that the underlying worldview of the books author can do very little to actually convince anyone why guyland is bad. An interesting read. Highly recommended.

Be sure to check out all the new material now available online!

Recession? Finally, big science gets the picture: Think payload

From a Nature editorial:

Whether dealing with the Labour government or the Conservative opposition, UK scientists as a whole need to avoid giving the impression that they are impervious to the requirements of the nation and that any outsider should simply give them the money and leave them to get on with it. This will be especially true over the next 12 months, as the country heads towards a general election and as both main political parties plan future expenditures.

Yes, exactly. The growing ranks of the unemployed do not oppose science, but they do want to know what its payload is. Will their children be more likely to have jobs if they study science? Or is it just an expensive hobby for science profs?

That's a difficult question because often no one really knows whether a given pioneer research project will lead anywhere. Electricity led somewhere; phrenology did not. At the time, who knew? Tactful and honest answers are very well advised.

Also, just up at Colliding Universes, my blog on competing theories of our universe:

Tales from the kingdom of smug: ID linked to government financial regulation

Commentator Tony Blankley attempts to link financial regulation with intelligent design (bad) and non-regulation with "an evolutionary process" (good).

The whole tangled metaphor reads like the guy doesn't get it.

Whether one regulates or doesn't regulate is intelligent design - because intelligent agents make the choice either way.

And regulation has its own evolutionary process - often, alas, it is the law of unintended consequences = the system evolves without guidance to produce unintended outcomes.

Some people should read up on ID and Darwinism before they use them as metaphors.

See also Quote mining: Old media vs. new media

Five Critical Things You Must Do with New Media

Five Critical Things You Must Do with New Media

(Yesterday, at Write! Canada 2009, the annual conference sponsored by The Word Guild I gave a workshop on the way the new social media are changing the publishing world, and how writers might adapt. I made some notes and said I would put them up at Future Tense, the Word Guild's blog on the rapidly changing face of media.)

One caution: I am not an expert. I am in the process of working it out myself, and hope to share what I have learned so far.

1. Understand the difference new media make.

Go here for more.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Beholding Beauty

The Kuyper Foundation has now come out with their Summer 2009 edition of their online biannual journal 'Christianity and Society'. There are a lot of good articles in this edition, which can be downloaded as a pdf and printed HERE. My article, which is titled "Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?" seeks to establish the objectivity of beauty using both theological and philosophical arguments. The essay finishes with the following applications for the church:
 
Many of the aesthetic norms which have characterized Western society have come as a direct result of the Christian worldview being deeply saturated in the fabric of our cultural ethos. Although the doctrine of the image of God as well as the doctrine of God’s common grace mean that unbelievers are capable of producing artifacts which truly reflect divine beauty, over a long period of time non-Christian cultures generally tend towards ugliness – a corollary of the relativism necessitated by the rejection of any final standard of truth. A world without God is an ugly and frightening place. Indeed, if there is no God, then beauty is but a transitory parenthesis in a world in which the ugliness of chance, chaos and death have the final say over all of us. Medieval cathedrals, with their spires pointing to the heavens, were the appropriate artistic outworking of the Trinitarian worldview, while nihilistic art, with its hopelessness and celebration for the ugly is a consistent outworking of a world without God.
 
Conversely, over long periods of time Christian cultures tend to increase in beauty. That is what happened in the Christian West, which gave rise to the symphony, polyphonic harmony, perspective in painting and many other developments that have made the world a different place, to say nothing of specific creative geniuses from Bach to Michelangelo, from Shakespeare to Beethoven. Some of these men may not have been believers, but they lived, worked and breathed in a civilization that was built (albeit imperfectly) on the Christian worldview. Whether or not every great composer, artist or poet explicitly acknowledged that worldview, they worked on the basis of presuppositional aesthetic norms which arose out of the West’s Christian orientation. Long after our society threw off this heritage, these norms continued to operate like a lizard’s tail which continues to twitch even after it has been severed from the body. But a severed lizard’s tail will not twitch forever.
 
What is happening in our society today, and has been happening very gradually for some time now, is that our art and our ideas about aesthetics are finally catching up with the collective worldview. As the nihilism birthed by both modernism and postmodernism has begun to seep into the very air that we breath, beauty has become one of the chief casualties. The result is that our world has become a very ugly place.
 
This is good news for Christians, since it presents us with an enormous opportunity. In the midst of the shallow ugliness that relativism has birthed in our society, the church of today has the marvelous opportunity to corporately witness to the beauty of God’s holiness. We should be people of beauty, just as we pray to be people of goodness, truth and righteousness. To a world that is slipping into ever deeper degrees of ugliness, a rediscovery of Biblical aesthetics is necessarily at the heart of our spiritual warfare and evangelism. For too long the church has evangelized with Gnostic aspirations, thinking we must appeal simply to a person’s spirit or the mind instead of seducing the whole person with the loveliness of Christ’s Kingdom, confirming Nietzsche’s complaint that modern Christianity is anemic, opposed to life rather than an affirmation of life. Believing that God is only interested in disembodied souls, we have retreated from a central aspect of the good news.
 
The gospel is the message that Jesus Christ has saved the world from death. One way that we can show this is by letting the gospel confront whatever aspects of the death-principle are most prevalent in our age. Since our age manifests the death-principle in, among other things, excessive degrees of ugliness, it follows that the articulation of beauty – in word, deed, music, drama, worship, dance and all the arts – is not an optional extra for the church, but a central feature in our annunciation of Christ’s Lordship. Through our artifacts, lives, homes, churches and all our other kingdom-building endeavors, we can and should constantly be announcing the beauty of the God we worship. Our prayer should be that of Psalm. 90:17: “And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”

This project is only possible with a clear understanding of the objectivity of beauty. If we subscribe to the notion that beauty merely exists in the eye of the beholder, our witness as Christians will be severely diminished.