Mr. Moderate

Most English translations of the Christian Bible begin with words like these:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Well, this isn’t a blog post about the word “God” in the above quote, but rather about the word “beginning.” Some prominent Christian apologists (for instance, William Lane Craig) want to take the scientific theory of the Big Bang and assert that this event in the past history of our universe is a “beginning.” Well, I suppose that the nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in New Mexico was in some sense a “beginning” (it was the first manmade nuclear explosion), but it did not mark “the beginning of time” in any real sense. And frankly, I see no real reason to view the Big Bang as “the beginning of time” in any sense more than the Trinity test explosion.
Continue reading ‘The “Big Bang” Is Not A Beginning’ »

By now most intelligent people understand that our genes uniquely describe at some level (high or otherwise) how to make one particular human being, namely ourselves. We may have an argument over how much of some particular feature of some particular person is caused by genes (nature) or environment (nurture), but the default answer needs to be “it is probably some of both.”

We don’t pass our genes from one person to another except when we manage to have children or participate in a transplant (where different genes between the donor and recipient can cause rejection syndromes of various types). But we are constantly passing memes between ourselves as this is part of the essence of human interaction.
Continue reading ‘Transmitting the DNA of Memes’ »

Anybody who pays much attention to science knows that the universe is big. But I’ve found that very few people, even very few scientists, have any idea of just how big the universe is. So, I’m going to attempt to explain what the inflationary theory of cosmology says about the size of our universe.
Continue reading ‘Just How Big Is The Universe?’ »