Talking past each other: Bill Nye vs. creationist Ken Ham on evolution. PETERSBURG, KENTUCKY—A brightly lit auditorium was packed with young adults wearing bow-ties, young-Earth creationists, and a gaggle of media there to maybe see sparks fly. The sparks could have been generated by Ken Ham, president/CEO of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, but instead, they mostly talked past each other for two-and-a-half hours on a snowy Kentucky night. The topic was one near and dear to both debate participants: the nature of acceptable scientific discourse. More specifically, they attempted to answer the question “is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?” Ham and Nye both led off with short, five-minute statements followed by 30-minute presentations punctuated by PowerPoint slides, video clips, and graphics intended to buttress their cases.
One of the points of contention throughout the debate was the term "science. " Ham made the distinction between "historical science" and "observed science. " How to do anything.
Subscribe to New Scientist. Humans Are Disrupting the Climate - Room for Debate. Lucas F. Johnston, an assistant professor of religion and environmental studies at Wake Forest University, is the author of "Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment. " Severe weather is becoming increasingly frequent and intense, and that’s happening for a reason.
So it matters whether we think of God or humans as being responsible. We cannot conclusively link individual weather events to human disruption of the climate, but we do believe that human activity is the main force behind climate change and that climate change will lead to more “super storms” like Haiyan and Sandy. Other trends in human activity add to the toll of such storms.
Most 'natural' disasters can be traced to human activity and should not be written off as unforeseeable, unstoppable 'acts of God.' An international consensus of scientists said six years ago that the current rate of climate change is “very likely” attributable to human activity. 'Acts of God' Is a Distraction From Human Responsibility - Room for Debate.
Ted Steinberg, a professor of history and law at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of "Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America" and the forthcoming "Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York. " When the wind whips up and the trees topple, as happened recently in the Philippines, and all that is left are the splintered possessions of those who once inhabited the land, there is a tendency to go looking for a culprit. But to characterize natural disasters as either acts of God or the work of Mother Nature — the secular equivalent — is a habit as destructive as the howling winds. Such interpretations operate to obscure the human history that explains why bad things happen. Last year’s experience with Hurricane Sandy is a case in point. To call the damage of Hurricane Sandy an 'act of God' or an 'act of nature' is a distraction.
To interpret natural disasters as acts of God or nature may be comforting or make for a good sound bite. What Revelation Reveals About Disasters - Room for Debate. Even among believers who take an apocalyptic worldview, the connection between God and disasters is complex and controversial. There are certain forms of apocalyptic thinking that assume disasters are acts of divine judgment against a sinful humanity. Those who take this view may point to scenes in Revelation, which picture divine wrath falling on an unrepentant world.
That idea helps “make sense” of devastation by asserting that it is not random, and that God is ultimately just and in control. The problem, of course, is that many of us cannot see that the people hardest hit by a disaster are somehow more sinful than all the other people, who are not affected. In disasters, some believers see the wrath of an angry God. A second type of apocalyptic thinking is inspired by a more careful reading of an apocalyptic text like Revelation. This second perspective is often linked to the idea that disasters are not necessarily caused by God, but they occur by divine permission. Why We Want to See Disasters as Acts of God - Room for Debate. Human beings are made anxious, even traumatized, by the unexpected, especially events that wreak havoc and take lives — like the dozens of tornadoes in the U.S.
Midwest this weekend or the even more devastating typhoon that ravaged the Philippines recently. Such disasters of epic scale, and also the more common shocks and tragedies closer to home, beg for explanation of some sort. Describing ourselves as Homo sapiens, as beings who know they know, we simply cannot tolerate not knowing — not knowing why and by whose hands tragic events happen, not being able to explain the seemingly inexplicable.
“Religion,” “God” and “gods” are shorthand for human efforts to address such mysteries and the persistently horrific. They represent our attempts to know: to acquire deeper knowing about things otherwise too painful to consider. For as long as we have been users of language and wielders of imagination, we have needed to project some fount of authoritative knowledge. See God in the Response, Not the Disaster - Room for Debate. Ruben C. Mendoza is an associate professor of theology at Ateneo de Manila University. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that while hanging on the cross, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is not hard to imagine why Jesus, or any other believer for that matter, would ask this question in the face of so much hardship and suffering.
The world has now seen the destruction brought about by Typhoon Haiyan and the suffering it has caused thousands of my fellow Filipinos. One cannot but be affected by the heart-wrenching stories of many of the typhoon’s survivors and the indescribable devastation it caused. In the midst of all of this, where is God? When victims wrestle with the God who appears to have abandoned them, they find a way to be human in what could be a dehumanizing situation. This Sunday, the local news reports here in Manila highlighted many people’s participation in the Mass in the areas devastated by Haiyan. Natural Disasters or 'Acts of God'? - Room for Debate. Kevin Frayer/Getty ImagesBurning debris in Tacloban, Philippines. A Filipino writer pointed out last week that her homeland, vulnerable to both earthquakes and typhoons, is so inured to disaster that “the phrase ‘Bahala na’ is embedded in the culture: ‘Leave it to God.’”
In law in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere, events considered unforeseeable, like hurricanes and tornadoes, can even be considered “acts of God” – potentially absolving humans of liability. Even among people who believe in God, faulting a deity for the mass destruction of natural disasters is controversial. Is it constructive to think of natural disasters as acts of God?
Read the Discussion » Burning debris in Tacloban, Philippines.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images. Bible Hub: Search, Read, Study the Bible in Many Languages. Litemind - Exploring ways to use our minds efficiently. Events. Highlights World-changing talks, debates, film screenings, podcasts, videos, and animations - all made available for free, for everyone. All of our work including our free public events programme is supported by our 27,000 Fellows who inspire, support and enable new solutions to address the problems of the 21st Century. If you share or demonstrate a commitment to positive social change, find out how you can become a Fellow. Is War Good for Us? Thursday 10 April, 13:00 Has killing made the world safer? As the world marks the WWI centenary, acclaimed academic and author Ian Morris, argues a bold thesis: that paradoxically, war has actually made the world a more secure and comfortable place.
Find out more Alcohol and Crime: How Do We Break the Cycle? Tuesday 13 May, 18:30 Find out more The Self is Not an Illusion Thursday 22 May, 13:00 Is there anything more to the self than brain cells and processes? Find out more RSA Animate Re-Imagining Work More RSA Animates RSA Shorts Growth is not enough. The Science Network. Panel 3: How Does Life Originate and How Do We Recognize It? The Science Network.
Reexamining the myth of no-fault capitalism. Actually, those blasts weren’t coming from President Obama. That was Romney’s competition for the Republican nomination, sounding like a speakers’ lineup at an Occupy Wall Street rally. Now, I predict, will come a furious attempt by the GOP to unring the economic justice bell. Damage control efforts began with Newt Gingrich backing away from his sharp-fanged criticism of Romney’s record at Bain Capital, the investment firm he led. Don’t attack the GOP front-runner for being a ruthless, heartless corporate raider, Gingrich announced, but rather for not being conservative enough. This admonition came as a pro-Gingrich political action committee continued to blast Romney as a ruthless, heartless corporate raider. Inconsistency, thy name is Newt. By most accounts, Bain was a relative laggard in the ruthlessness department. But as for heartlessness, well, it comes with the turf, right?
In any event, capitalism means never having to say you’re sorry. That’s my view, at least. Is capitalism moral? For most of the past 30 years, the world has been moving in the direction of markets. The grand experiment with communism has been thoroughly discredited, a billion people have been lifted from poverty through free-market competition, and even European socialists have given up on state ownership and the nanny state. Here at home, large swaths of the economy have been deregulated, and tax rates have been cut. A good portion of what is left of government has been outsourced, while even education is moving toward school choice.
In embracing welfare reform, Americans have acknowledged that numerous programs meant to lift up the poor instead trapped them in permanent dependency and poverty. But more recently, we’ve seen another side of free markets: stagnant incomes, gaping inequality, a string of crippling financial crises and 20-somethings still living in their parents’ basements. Many of those leading this intellectual campaign can be found here in Washington. Pearlsteins@washpost.com. The business of altruism. Smith, however, was also conscious of the power of altruism. He could have been describing the scene in Boston when he wrote in 1759: “The plaintive voice of misery, when heard at a distance, will not allow us to be indifferent about the person from whom it comes. As soon as it strikes our ear, it interests us in his fortune, and, if continued, forces us almost involuntarily to fly to his assistance.” Smith devoted a book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” to explaining why widespread altruism is the natural and unavoidable consequence of the human ability to empathize with others.
A century later, Charles Darwin laid out a theory of natural selection based on the struggle for individual survival. However, in “The Descent of Man,” Darwin also described what we would call group selection: “An advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. More recently, research by the distinguished Harvard biologist E.O. C. S. Lewis, Evangelical Rock Star. Lewis’s remarkable combination of theological simplicity and tweedy British scholarship is no doubt one reason for his appeal. In his famous book “Mere Christianity,” adapted from a series of BBC radio talks during World War II, Lewis laid out a clear assertion of what it meant to be Christian. Molly Worthen, a historian of religion, points out that nearly a century after the Scopes trial, many evangelicals still worry that secular intellectuals regard them as country bumpkins.
Christians like Lewis have helped to keep that sense of cultural inferiority at bay. But the text for which Lewis is best known is his “Chronicles of Narnia.” And what “Narnia” offers is not theological simplicity, but complexity. The story of Bob, a man I got to know while writing a book on evangelical belief, offers some insight here. Bob married young — too young — and soon divorced. In “Mere Christianity,” Lewis wrote that to pretend helps one to experience God as real. Obama’s German Storm. Beyond the Brain. This is what’s happening right now with neuroscience. The field is obviously incredibly important and exciting. From personal experience, I can tell you that you get captivated by it and sometimes go off to extremes, as if understanding the brain is the solution to understanding all thought and behavior. This is happening at two levels. At the lowbrow level, there are the conference circuit neuro-mappers. These are people who take pretty brain-scan images and claim they can use them to predict what product somebody will buy, what party they will vote for, whether they are lying or not or whether a criminal should be held responsible for his crime.
At the highbrow end, there are scholars and theorists that some have called the “nothing buttists.” Human beings are nothing but neurons, they assert. These two forms of extremism are refuted by the same reality. The first basic problem is that regions of the brain handle a wide variety of different tasks.
How to be More Productive Under Stress. Got stress? If you’re like 75% of other Americans, you’ve experienced moderate to high levels of stress in the past month, and often lie awake at night because of it. Trying to balance the demands of your work and family life can stretch even the strongest among us to the breaking point. But there is a way to be successful and productive even when under stress, says Sharon Melnick, PhD and author of “ Success Under Stress: Powerful Tools for Staying Calm, Confident, and Productive When the Pressure’s On .”
In her book she writes that stress is not necessarily the result of too much work or continual interruptions, but rather when the demands of your situation exceed your perceived ability to control them. Every challenge, she writes, can be divided into the 50% you can control and the 50% you cannot. In this interview with Anita Bruzzese, Melnick offers strategies to cope: In the book you address being “impeccable” for the 50% you can control when faced with a challenge. SM: 1. 2. 3. Why Can't America Be Sweden? Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington. Rob Schoenbaum for The New York Times Do these Swedes lack innovation? Daron Acemoglu, an eminent economist at M.I.T., has ignited a firestorm by arguing that contemporary forces of globalization bar the United States from adopting the liberal social welfare policies of Scandinavian countries. “We cannot all be like the Nordics,” Acemoglu declares, in a 2012 paper, “ Choosing Your Own Capitalism in a Globalized World ,” written with his colleagues James A.
Robinson , a professor of government at Harvard, and Thierry Verdier , scientific director of the Paris School of Economics. If the “cutthroat leader” – the United States — were to switch to “cuddly capitalism, this would reduce the growth rate of the entire world economy,” the authors argue, by slowing the pace of innovation. Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier put their argument technically, but there is no mistaking the implications: Acemoglu elaborated: Belief Is the Least Part of Faith. 3.7 Überblick über das System der Einkommensteuer (Personal Tax) - Steuern in Japan - Gesetze & Vorschriften - Aufnahme einer Geschäftstätigkeit in Japan - Investieren in Japan.
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