Journal’s Article on ESP Is Expected to Prompt Outrage. Urban Legends Reference Pages. Fr. Robert Barron's Word On Fire - Theology:Steven Hawking & More Tiresome Atheism. Father Barron weighs in on renown scientist Stephen Hawking's upcoming book release in which he offers his "scientific" view on the existence of a creator. So another prominent British academic has weighed in on the God question. Stephen Hawking, probably the best-known scientist in the world, has said, in a book to be published a week before the Pope’s visit to Britain, that the universe required no Creator. (I’m sure, of course, that there was no “intelligent design” behind that choice of publication date!).
I confess that something in me tightens whenever I hear a scientist pontificating on issues that belong to the arena of philosophy or metaphysics. I will gladly listen to Stephen Hawking when he holds forth on matters of theoretical physics, but he’s as qualified to talk about philosophical and religious issues as any college freshman. Here’s an example from Hawking’s latest book: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Convince Me. What is Convince Me? Many researchers have illustrated the difficulties and challenges that children and adults face with formal and informal reasoning.
Convince Me is a "reasoner's workbench" computer program to help students structure, restructure, and assess their knowledge about often controversial situations. Convince Me guides people to cyclically (1) categorize their own propositions as either evidence or hypotheses, (2) indicate the reliability of their various evidence, (3) connect their propositions with both explanatory and contradictory/competitive links, and (4) rate each proposition's believability. After each (1-4) cycle, users can elicit feedback from a connectionist model, called ECHO, to help improve the coherence of their arguments. JunkScience.com -- Steven Milloy, Publisher. Welcome | cooler heads. JunkScience.com's Ultimate Global Warming Challenge.