F6, sad thing is that no believers will ever realize they have lived their lives totally and manipulatively brainwashed from the moment they took on their fairytale belief.
No, don't wish disturbance for the dead .. just saying it would be nice if they could have that epiphany .. for any not 100% on that word
An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ?p?f??e?a, epiphaneia, "manifestation, striking appearance") is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something. The term is used in either a philosophical or literal sense to signify that the claimant has "found the last piece of the puzzle and now sees the whole picture," or has new information or experience, often insignificant by itself, that illuminates a deeper or numinous foundational frame of reference. .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_%28feeling%29
"You had a health scare and spent time in hospital in 2009. What, if anything, do you fear about death?
I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."
God has mellowed. The God that most Americans worship occasionally gets upset about abortion and gay marriage, but he is a softy compared with the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. That was a warrior God, savagely tribal, deeply insecure about his status and willing to commit mass murder to show off his powers. But at least Yahweh had strong moral views, occasionally enlightened ones, about how the Israelites should behave. His hunter-gatherer ancestors, by contrast, were doofus gods. Morally clueless, they were often yelled at by their people and tended toward quirky obsessions. One thunder god would get mad if people combed their hair during a storm or watched dogs mate.
Illustration by Chip Kidd
THE EVOLUTION OF GOD .. By Robert Wright 567 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99
Related .. Multimedia [.. INSIDE ..]
In his brilliant new book, “The Evolution of God,” Robert Wright tells the story of how God grew up. He starts with the deities of hunter-gatherer tribes, moves to those of chiefdoms and nations, then on to the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism that followed, and then to the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wright’s tone is reasoned and careful, even hesitant, throughout, and it is nice to read about issues like the morality of Christ and the meaning of jihad without getting the feeling that you are being shouted at. His views, though, are provocative and controversial. There is something here to annoy almost everyone.
In sharp contrast to many contemporary secularists, Wright is bullish about monotheism. In “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (2000), he argued that there is a moral direction to human history, that technological growth and expanding global interconnectedness have moved us toward ever more positive and mutually beneficial relationships with others. In “The Evolution of God,” Wright tells a similar story from a religious standpoint, proposing that the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. “As the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.” Wright argues that each of the major Abrahamic faiths has been forced toward moral growth as it found itself interacting with other faiths on a multinational level, and that this expansion of the moral imagination reflects “a higher purpose, a transcendent moral order.”
This sounds pro-religion, but don’t expect Pope Benedict XVI to be quoting from Wright’s book anytime soon. Wright makes it clear that he is tracking people’s conception of the divine, not the divine itself. He describes this as “a good news/bad news joke for traditionalist Christians, Muslims and Jews.” The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn’t really exist.
Wright also denies the specialness of any faith. In his view, there is continuous positive change over time — religious history has a moral direction — but no movement of moral revelation associated with the emergence of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Similarly, he argues that it is a waste of time to search for the essence of any of these monotheistic religions — it’s silly, for instance, to ask whether Islam is a “religion of peace.” Like a judge who believes in a living constitution, Wright believes that what matters is the choices that the people make, how the texts are interpreted. Cultural sensibilities shift according to changes in human dynamics, and these shape the God that people worship. For Wright, it is not God who evolves. It is us — God just comes along for the ride.
It is a great ride, though. Wright gives the example of the God of Leviticus, who said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and he points out that this isn’t as enlightened as it may sound, since, at the time, “neighbors” meant actual neighbors, fellow Israelites, not the idol-worshipers in the next town. But still, he argues, this demand encompassed all the tribes of Israel, and was a “moral watershed” that “expanded the circle of brotherhood.” And the disapproval that we now feel when we learn the limited scope of this rule is itself another reason to cheer, since it shows how our moral sensibilities have expanded.
Or consider the modern Sunday School song “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” (“Red and yellow, black and white, / They are precious in his sight.”) Actually, there is no evidence that he loved all of them; if you went back and sang this to the Jesus of the Gospels, he would think you were mad. But in the minds of many of his followers today, this kind of global love is what Christianity means. That certainly looks like moral progress.
But God still has some growing up to do, as Wright makes clear in his careful discussion of contemporary religious hatred. As you would expect, he argues that much of the problem isn’t with the religious texts or teachings themselves, but with the social conditions — the “facts on the ground” — that shape the sort of God we choose to create. “When people see themselves in zero-sum relationship with other people — see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose — they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.” The recipe for salvation, then, is to arrange the world so that its people find themselves (and think of themselves as) interconnected: “When they see the relationship as non-zero-sum — see their fortunes as positively correlated, see the potential for a win-win outcome — they’re more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of their scriptures.” Change the world, and you change the God.
For Wright, the next evolutionary step is for practitioners of Abrahamic faiths to give up their claim to distinctiveness, and then renounce the specialness of monotheism altogether. In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.” But this sounds like the death of God, not his evolution. And it clashes with Wright’s own proposal, drawn from work in evolutionary psychology, that we invented religion to satisfy certain intellectual and emotional needs, like the tendency to search for moral causes of natural events and the desire to conform with the people who surround us. These needs haven’t gone away, and the sort of depersonalized and disinterested God that Wright anticipates would satisfy none of them. He is betting that historical forces will trump our basic psychological makeup. I’m not so sure.
Wright tentatively explores another claim, that the history of religion actually affirms “the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity.” He emphasizes that he is not arguing that you need divine intervention to account for moral improvement, which can be explained by a “mercilessly scientific account” involving the biological evolution of the human mind and the game-theoretic nature of social interaction. But he wonders why the universe is so constituted that moral progress takes place. “If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.”
It is not just moral progress that raises these sorts of issues. I don’t doubt that the explanation for consciousness will arise from the mercilessly scientific account of psychology and neuroscience, but, still, isn’t it neat that the universe is such that it gave rise to conscious beings like you and me? And that these minds — which evolved in a world of plants and birds and rocks and things — have the capacity to transcend this everyday world and generate philosophy, theology, art and science?
So I share Wright’s wonder at how nicely everything has turned out. But I don’t see how this constitutes an argument for a divine being. After all, even if we could somehow establish definitively that moral progress exists because the universe was jump-started by a God of Love, this just pushes the problem up one level. We are now stuck with the puzzle of why there exists such a caring God in the first place.
Also, it would be a terribly minimalist God. Wright himself describes it as “somewhere between illusion and imperfect conception.” It won’t answer your prayers, give you advice or smite your enemies. So even if it did exist, we would be left with another good news/bad news situation. The good news is that there would be a divine being. The bad news is that it’s not the one that anyone is looking for.
Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, is the author of “Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.” His book “How Pleasure Works” will be published next year.
Hawking misses birthday event through ill-health Sunday 08 January 2012
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was not well enough to attend a conference in honor of his 70th birthday, a University of Cambridge official said Sunday.
Hawking's remarkable career is being honored as part of a daylong conference on cosmology being hosted at the university. But Vice Chancellor Leszek Borysiewicz said the celebrity scientist was released from hospital on Friday, and that “unfortunately his recovery has not been fast enough for him to be able to be here.”
He didn't say when Hawking was hospitalized or specify the nature of his condition, although he did say that Hawking would be well enough to meet some of the attendees over the next week.
Hawking was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease — an incurable degenerative disorder known as motor neurone disease in the UK — when he was 21.
Most people die within a few years of the diagnosis, but Hawking has defied the odds and gone on to revolutionize the field of theoretical astrophysics and become one of the best-known scientists since Albert Einstein.
The condition has left him almost completely paralyzed and in a wheelchair since 1970. Since catching pneumonia in 1985, he has needed around-the-clock care and relies on a computer and voice synthesizer to speak. His fragile health has forced him to cancel appearances in the past.
Borysiewicz said he hoped that Hawking would follow the proceedings via videolink.
“If you're listening Stephen, happy birthday from all of us here today,” Borysiewicz said to a round of applause.
In a recorded message played to audience after the conference, Hawking told them that understanding the cosmos was of far more than theoretical interest.
“If you understand how the universe operates,” he said, “you control it in a way.”
Hawking's celebrity status was evident at Cambridge's Lady Mitchell Hall, where hundreds crowded into the auditorium to hear prominent researchers outline the latest developments in cosmology.
Outside the venue, three teenagers — self-described “groupies” — waited for a chance to catch a glimpse of the eminent scientist.
Eighteen-year-old engineering student Marianna Sykopetritou said that seeing Hawking would be “a once-in-a-lifetime thing.” She said that the event had a page-and-a-half-long waiting list.
Borysiewicz said that Hawking had “transformed our understanding of space and time, black holes, and the origins of the universe,” adding that his success in the face of adversity was a “beacon of hope and encouragement for those in difficulty everywhere.”
Hawking is also known for his work popularizing the field of theoretical astrophysics in a series of best-selling books such as “A Brief History of Time” and “The Universe in a Nutshell.”
Hawking too ill to make 70th birthday bash .. excerpt ..
In his recorded speech, Hawking pleaded for interplanetary travel, arguing that humans faced a grim future unless they spread out from their terrestrial home. "I don't think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet," he said.
By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 9:53 PM on 27th February 2012
He may spend his working days contemplating the deepest mysteries of the universe, despite having been robbed of almost all physical movement by the cruelties of motor neurone disease.
But it seems the world-famous British physicist Stephen Hawking also has an interest in more earthier matters.
Cambridge university today admitted the 70-year-old has visited a swingers’ sex club in California.
However, they denied claims that he was a regular.
The story emerged last week when a U.S. website reported that Professor Hawking dropped in at the Freedom Acres club in Devore, where he is said to have arrived with an entourage of nurses and assistants before paying for young, naked dancers to perform privately for him.
Radaronline claimed that Professor Hawking had visited the club in the past five years.
A source told the website: ‘I have seen Steven Hawking at the club more than a handful of times.’
But today a Cambridge University spokesman said: ‘It is not true that Professor Hawking is a “regular” visitor to the club in question.
‘This report is greatly exaggerated. He visited once a few years ago with friends while on a visit to California.’
However, it is not the first time the professor has been linked to a risque establishment.
He has previously been photographed enjoying the attentions of young ladies in London’s Stringfellows club.
Friends: Professor Hawking and Peter Stringfellow pose for a photo in Stringfellows nightclub
A popular customer, he happily posed for pictures with the club’s dancers.
Owner Peter Stringfellow even declares himself a fan of the professor.
He said: ‘I am often asked during interviews of all the people I have met, who I am most impressed with.
‘Of all the film stars I have met, the majority are really nice people, rock stars are a lot of fun and good company, some of the richest men in the world can be surprisingly funny, but when all is said and done Professor Hawking is The Man.
‘Easily one of the most intelligent men in the world with one of the finest brains and on top of that so brave he takes my breath away - but he’s very human with it.
‘I remember asking him if he’d like to have a conversation with me about the universe or if he’d just like to watch the girls. The answer was quite simply, ‘The girls.’
Professor Hawking married Jane Wilde in 1965 and they went on to have two sons and a daughter.
That marriage was dissolved in 1995, when he married Elaine Mason, his former long-term carer. They divorced in 2007.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which owns the German Jewish physicist's papers, is pulling never-before seen items from its climate-controlled safe, photographing them in high resolution and posting them online – offering the public a nuanced and fuller portrait of the man behind the scientific genius.
Only 900 manuscript images, and an incomplete catalogue listing just half of the archive's contents, had been available online since 2003. Now, with a grant from the Polonsky Foundation UK, which previously helped digitise Isaac Newton's papers, all 80,000 items from the Einstein collection have been catalogued and enhanced with cross referencing technology.
The updated web portal, unveiled on Monday, features the full inventory of the Einstein archives, publicising for the first time the entirety of what's inside the collection and giving scholars a chance to request access to items they previously never knew existed.
"Knowledge is not about hiding. It's about openness," said Menachem Ben Sasson, president of the Hebrew University.
Einstein, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionised science, was one of the founders of the university. He contributed the original manuscript of his famed theory to the university when it was founded in 1925, four years after he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/physics ]. He bequeathed the rest of his papers – and the rights to the use of his image – to the university upon his death in 1955.
The portal now offers a close look at an initial 2,000 documents, or 7,000 pages, from Einstein's personal and public life up to the year 1921. In the coming years, archivists will slowly upload the remainder of the collection.
The online project is part of an initiative with Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology to publish annotated scholarly work on all of Einstein's papers.
The collection includes 14 notebooks filled with research notes in small cursive handwriting, letters to Einstein's contemporaries on his physics research, and a handwritten explanation of his theory of relativity and its summarising equation e=mc2.
It also includes lesser-known papers, including a postcard to his ailing mother, private correspondence with his lovers, and a pile of fanmail Einstein received about his wild hairdo.
"I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have your haircut," one 6-year-old girl wrote in large block print.
In another note, a researcher wrote: "I'm making a scientific survey to determine why genius so often tends to long hair."
One document made public for the first time denies the commonly held view that Einstein's Jewish identity developed later in his career, as Hitler rose to power.
In the aftermath of the first world war, German Jewish scientist Fritz Bauer criticised Einstein's decision to go to the United States to raise funds for the Hebrew University. Bauer accused Einstein of being disloyal to Germany.
In response, Einstein wrote: "Despite my declared international mentality, I do still always feel obliged to speak up for my persecuted and morally oppressed fellow clansmen, as far as it is within my powers ... this involves an act of loyalty far more than one of disloyalty."
The curator of the archives, Roni Grosz, said the letter makes Einstein's priorities clear. Eastern European Jewish refugees in Germany had been denied entry to universities after first world war, and Einstein saw it as an injustice.
"He couldn't fix it in Germany, so he worked hard to find another solution – for fine young Jews to study in a university in Jerusalem," Grosz said.
The curator said the university would publish a copy of Einstein's grades as a young student, hoping it would dispel a popular myth that Einstein did poorly in school. The university is also posting a 20-year-old Einstein's correspondence with scientists, showing how advanced his research already was at that early age.
Other parts of the collection expose the scientist's private life, especially a trove of letters to his lovers, and his interest in a host of social issues, from nuclear disarmament to African-American rights and the Arab-Jewish conflict.
In a letter to an Arab newspaper before the establishment of the State of Israel, displayed to the public for the first time since its publication, Einstein outlined his proposal for peace: an eight-member "secret council" of Arab and Jewish physicians, judges, clergy and labuor representatives which would negotiate a settlement to the conflict that divided them.
The Hebrew University holds rights to Einstein's image, and prohibits advertisers from inappropriately using his likeness. In 2010, the university sued General Motors for grafting the scientist's head onto the body of a well-toned, shirtless man in an ad in People magazine. The ad had the slogan "Ideas Are Sexy Too."
Hanoch Gutfreund, former president of the university now responsible for Albert Einstein's intellectual property, said the collection's online exposure put Einstein's best face forward.
"More than anyone else, he expressed his views on every agenda of mankind," Gutfreund said. "Now we have a complete and full picture of that person."
New revelations in science have shown what a strange and remarkable universe we live in.
By Lawrence M. Krauss April 1, 2012
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis. Everywhere we look, it appears that the world was designed so that we could flourish.
The position of the Earth around the sun, the presence of organic materials and water and a warm climate — all make life on our planet possible. Yet, with perhaps 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, with ubiquitous water, carbon and hydrogen, it isn't surprising that these conditions would arise somewhere. And as to the diversity of life on Earth — as Darwin described more than 150 years ago and experiments ever since have validated — natural selection in evolving life forms can establish both diversity and order without any governing plan.
As a cosmologist, a scientist who studies the origin and evolution of the universe, I am painfully aware that our illusions nonetheless reflect a deep human need to assume that the existence of the Earth, of life and of the universe and the laws that govern it require something more profound. For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.
But science has taught us to think the unthinkable. Because when nature is the guide — rather than a priori prejudices, hopes, fears or desires — we are forced out of our comfort zone. One by one, pillars of classical logic have fallen by the wayside as science progressed in the 20th century, from Einstein's realization that measurements of space and time were not absolute but observer-dependent, to quantum mechanics, which not only put fundamental limits on what we can empirically know but also demonstrated that elementary particles and the atoms they form are doing a million seemingly impossible things at once.
And so it is that the 21st century has brought new revolutions and new revelations on a cosmic scale. Our picture of the universe has probably changed more in the lifetime of an octogenarian today than in all of human history. Eighty-seven years ago, as far as we knew, the universe consisted of a single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by an eternal, static, empty void. Now we know that there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which began with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. In its earliest moments, everything we now see as our universe — and much more — was contained in a volume smaller than the size of a single atom.
And so we continue to be surprised. We are like the early mapmakers redrawing the picture of the globe even as new continents were discovered. And just as those mapmakers confronted the realization that the Earth was not flat, we must confront facts that change what have seemed to be basic and fundamental concepts. Even our idea of nothingness has been altered.
We now know that most of the energy in the observable universe can be found not within galaxies but outside them, in otherwise empty space, which, for reasons we still cannot fathom, "weighs" something. But the use of the word "weight" is perhaps misleading because the energy of empty space is gravitationally repulsive. It pushes distant galaxies away from us at an ever-faster rate. Eventually they will recede faster than light and will be unobservable.
This has changed our vision of the future, which is now far bleaker. The longer we wait, the less of the universe we will be able to see. In hundreds of billions of years astronomers on some distant planet circling a distant star (Earth and our sun will be long gone) will observe the cosmos and find it much like our flawed vision at the turn of the last century: a single galaxy immersed in a seemingly endless dark, empty, static universe.
Out of this radically new image of the universe at large scale have also come new ideas about physics at a small scale. The Large Hadron Collider [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/science-technology/large-hadron-collider-experiments-EVHST0000224.topic ] has given tantalizing hints that the origin of mass, and therefore of all that we can see, is a kind of cosmic accident. Experiments in the collider bolster evidence of the existence of the "Higgs field," which apparently just happened to form throughout space in our universe; it is only because all elementary particles interact with this field that they have the mass we observe today.
Most surprising of all, combining the ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics, we can understand how it is possible that the entire universe, matter, radiation and even space itself could arise spontaneously out of nothing, without explicit divine intervention. Quantum mechanics' Heisenberg uncertainty principle expands what can possibly occur undetected in otherwise empty space. If gravity too is governed by quantum mechanics, then even whole new universes can spontaneously appear and disappear, which means our own universe may not be unique but instead part of a "multiverse."
As particle physics revolutionizes the concepts of "something" (elementary particles and the forces that bind them) and "nothing" (the dynamics of empty space or even the absence of space), the famous question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is also revolutionized. Even the very laws of physics we depend on may be a cosmic accident, with different laws in different universes, which further alters how we might connect something with nothing. Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue.
Perhaps most remarkable of all, not only is it now plausible, in a scientific sense, that our universe came from nothing, if we ask what properties a universe created from nothing would have, it appears that these properties resemble precisely the universe we live in.
Does all of this prove that our universe and the laws that govern it arose spontaneously without divine guidance or purpose? No, but it means it is possible.
And that possibility need not imply that our own lives are devoid of meaning. Instead of divine purpose, the meaning in our lives can arise from what we make of ourselves, from our relationships and our institutions, from the achievements of the human mind.
Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing. Living in a strange and remarkable universe that is the way it is, independent of our desires and hopes, is far more satisfying for me than living in a fairy-tale universe invented to justify our existence.
JPL, former employee fight over religion in science
By Brian Charles, SGVN Posted: 03/31/2012 07:13:03 AM PDT April 1, 2012 2:48 PM GMT Updated: 04/01/2012 12:03:11 PM PDT
LOS ANGELES - In a court proceeding reminiscent of last century's Scopes Monkey Trial, lawyers for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory find themselves battling a push by intelligent design proponents seeking legitimacy.
On the surface, the civil case between former JPL systems administrator David Coppedge and JPL at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse is a wrongful termination lawsuit.
But much more is at stake for both proponents and opponents of the theory that God created the universe.
Coppedge is "trying to put science on trial," said Joshua Rosenau, program and policy director for the National Center for Science Education.
In fact, Rosenau argues Coppedge is "trying to turn a simple employment law case into a discussion on intelligent design."
Coppedge sued JPL in 2011 on the grounds that the science laboratory used his expressed support of intelligent design to hasten his exit during last year's round of layoffs.
His JPL supervisors reprimanded Coppedge in March 2009 for distributing two intelligent design DVDs: "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" and the "Privileged Planet."
Folks like Coppedge contend intelligent design is real science, while the theory's critics have called it "creationism in a lab coat."
Coppedge, a darling of the creationist/intelligent design community, runs a creationist blog. He has been a member of the Bible Science Association for more than 20 years, according to Coppedge's own testimony.
"Through his links to Bible science groups it's clear to see the linkages to creation science and intelligence design," Rosenau said.
JPL supervisors told Coppedge to cease distributing the DVDs, which the agency viewed as religious in nature. He was also told to avoid engaging co-workers in political and religious dialogue during work hours.
Since the civil trial kicked off March 12, Coppedge has testified that his JPL supervisors reacted with hostility to his open expression of his political and religious beliefs influenced his supervisors in their reviews of his performance at the lab.
"I thought I might be the next `Expelled,"' Coppedge testified, making a reference to the Ben Stein movie which details the perils faced by those in the scientific community who support intelligent design.
JPL denies Coppedge's claims, and the lab's attorneys have presented evidence to bolster their claim that Coppedge was a problem employee. They also argue that Coppedge's layoff was part of a normal reduction in force called for in NASA's budget.
With 21 witnesses to call, the case is expected to last several weeks. But, when Judge Ernest Hiroshige renders his decision, the announcement will resonate far beyond the walls of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, according to advocates for both evolutionary theory and intelligent design.
The stakes
The Coppedge case has become cause celebre for proponents of both evolution and intelligent design and in some ways has reignited a debate started more than 86 years ago with the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Evolution proponents say it is an example of creationists attacking Darwin.
Darwin supporters believe if Coppedge wins at trial, creationists will exploit the finding and claim they've triumphed over big science.
"These groups have a history of distorting information; this might be seen as a win by groups like the Discovery Institute," National Center for Science Education spokesman Robert Luhn said.
Such a win could influence legislative battles over the teaching of evolution in schools in Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma and New Mexico, where over the past 18 months there have been "attempts to wind back the clock," Luhn said.
In Luhn's estimation, creationists and intelligent design proponents like Coppedge want to return to the time before the Scopes Monkey trial when the Bible was used to teach public school children about the origin of life
"There's a nationwide movement of science denial, being pushed by people who do so as a matter of belief or for political reasons," Luhn said.
The conservative Discovery Institute has skin in the game too. Josh Youngkin, a Discovery Institute staff attorney, is assisting attorney William J. Becker, Jr. in Coppedge's lawsuit. And Becker himself is an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian advocacy group.
Conservatives sees Coppedge's advocacy for creationism as having a place in JPL's mission in finding the origin of the universe.
"What happened to David Coppedge, that's not a free society," said John West, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. "Science is supposed to be open to discussion."
West and the Discovery Institute have spent more than a decade trying to sell intelligent design to the broader scientific community.
The organization even put out the controversial "Wedge Document," where the Discovery Institute spelled out its goals to "overthrow" materialism and replace it with "broadly theistic understanding of nature."
West said the document was used as a fundraising letter to make an argument for man's dominion over the Earth, the importance of God in science and the end of materialism, which West insists is responsible for the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century.
The scientific community hasn't budged on its adherence to evolution, and those in the scientific community say there is good reason to separate science from intelligent design.
"People in philosophy and science want things that are testable and intelligent design doesn't make claims that are testable," Rosenau said. "Intelligent design, when you look at it, it's not science."
Or as Luhn put it: "We are not teaching alchemy side-by-side with chemistry."
Coppedge supporters brush off such comments.
"The fact that the other side won't engage in debate and will engage in ad hominem shows you that how weak the other side's argument must be," West said.
Ultimately intelligent design proponents want to debate.
"The end goal is to get to place where intelligent design and the criticism of Darwinism can rise and fall on its own merits," West said.
And that's exactly what Coppedge attempted to do at JPL, according to deposition testimony of JPL co-workers.
Coppedge challenged his supervisor Greg Chin to an after work debate over the origins of the Universe.
Tale of the tape
At the core of the argument made by intelligent design proponents lays the assertion that the theory has nothing to do with God or religion and that the most complex scientific phenomenon can't be left up to chance.
"The definition of intelligent design is that key features in the Universe and living things are best explained as a product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process like natural selection," West said. "There are limits to science. People in the intelligent design community will say you can't answer everything with science."
Intelligent Design scientists themselves battle over the question of the identity of the "intelligent designer" and West says the theory doesn't seek to identify a designer at all.
Perhaps intelligent design proponent's best weapon in their fight for legitimacy is evolution itself. Like all science, evolution is fraught with gaps which science can't explain, Rosenau said.
But those gaps aren't reason enough to discredit the theory at large.
"Yes, of course their gaps in evolutionary theory, but there is this inference that we don't have enough to make a conclusion and we have T-Rex fossils up to our noses," Luhn said.
The premise that lack of evidence in support of evolution provides proof of a God doesn't sit well with USC Professor Emeritus of Religion, who studies the intersection of faith and science.
"I don't like the approach that science has limits therefore God must be there to fill in the gaps, Crossley said. "That God filling in the gaps theory is always troubling."
Crossley said science has not progressed to explain everything, but that should not serve as a condemnation of science but an illustration of the limits of man.
Lawrence M. Krauss is an American Theoretical Physicist who is Professor of Physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the Origins Project at the Arizona State University. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek.
http://99faces.tv/ met him at the World Economic Forum WEF) in Davos in January 2011. It is a great honor that Eli de los Pinos, herself a great scientist (see http://99faces.tv/elisabetdelospinos/ ) and awarded WEF Tech Innovator, interviewed him about his research focus: the beginning and end of the Universe.
99FACES is a website and video-platform introducing movers, thinkers, innovators, visionaries and changemakers in both short elevator pitch format and short interviews.
I have never quite understood the conviction that creation requires a creator.
By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS September 8, 2010
Physicist Stephen Hawking has done it again. This time he's sent shock waves around the world by arguing [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54118385 (two posts back)] that God didn't create the universe; it was created spontaneously. Shocking or not, he actually understated the case.
For over 2,000 years the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" has captured theologians and philosophers. While usually framed as a religious or philosophical question, it is equally a question about the natural world. So an appropriate place to try and resolve it is with science.
As a scientist, I have never quite understood the conviction, at the basis of essentially all the world's religions, that creation requires a creator. Every day beautiful and miraculous objects suddenly appear, from snowflakes on a cold winter morning to rainbows after a late afternoon summer shower.
Yet no one but the most ardent fundamentalists would suggest that every such object is painstakingly and purposefully created by divine intelligence. In fact, we revel in our ability to explain how snowflakes and rainbows can spontaneously appear based on the simple, elegant laws of physics.
So if we can explain a raindrop, why can't we explain a universe? Mr. Hawking based his argument on the possible existence of extra dimensions—and perhaps an infinite number of universes, which would indeed make the spontaneous appearance of a universe like ours seem almost trivial.
Yet there are remarkable, testable arguments that provide firmer empirical evidence of the possibility that our universe arose from nothing.
One of the greatest sagas in physics over the past century has been the effort to "weigh the universe." Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity explained that space is curved and therefore our universe can exist in one of three different geometries: open, closed or flat. A closed universe is like a three-dimensional sphere, which may be impossible to imagine, but is easy to describe. If you looked far enough in one direction in such a universe you would see the back of your head.
While these exotic geometries are fun to talk about, operationally there is a much more important consequence of their existence. A closed universe whose energy density is dominated by matter will one day recollapse. An open universe will continue to expand forever at a finite rate, and a flat universe is just at the boundary—slowing down, but never quite stopping.
Some of us have spent our careers trying to figure out what kind of universe we live in so we could be the first ones to know how the universe would end. After 80 years of trying we have actually determined the answer. Observations of the cosmic microwave background from the Big Bang have unambiguously confirmed that we live in a precisely flat universe.
It appears that the dominant energy in our universe doesn't reside in normal matter, or even mysterious dark matter. Rather, it is located in a much more mysterious form of energy in empty space. Figuring out why empty space has energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in physics and cosmology today.
The existence of this energy, called dark energy, has another consequence: It changes the picture so that knowing the geometry of the universe is no longer enough to determine its future. While this may be a disappointment, the existence of dark energy and a flat universe has profound implications for those of us who suspected the universe might arise from nothing.
Why? Because if you add up the total energy of a flat universe, the result is precisely zero. How can this be? When you include the effects of gravity, energy comes in two forms. Mass corresponds to positive energy, but the gravitational attraction between massive objects can correspond to negative energy. If the positive energy and the negative gravitational energy of the universe cancel out, we end up in a flat universe.
Think about it: If our universe arose spontaneously from nothing at all, one might predict that its total energy should be zero. And when we measure the total energy of the universe, which could have been anything, the answer turns out to be the only one consistent with this possibility.
Coincidence? Maybe. But data like this coming in from our revolutionary new tools promise to turn much of what is now metaphysics into physics. Whether God survives is anyone's guess.
Mr. Krauss, a cosmologist, is director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. His newest book, "A Universe From Nothing" will be published by Free Press in 2011.
Lawrence Krauss is a professor in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University. His lecture entitled Life, the Universe and Nothing was recorded at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto on March 27th, 2009.
'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009
Uploaded by richarddawkinsdotnet on Oct 21, 2009
Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on Physics and Cosmology, including "The Physics of Star Trek."
oops .. Hawking says he lost $100 bet over Higgs discovery
AFPAFP – 10 hrs ago
FILE - In this March 30, 2010 file photo a scientist looks at the pictures of the first collisions at full power at the CMS experience control room at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in... [can't copy, see 1-12] .. http://news.yahoo.com/photos/the-god-particle-mystery-slideshow/
Renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking said Wednesday the Nobel Prize should be given to Peter Higgs, the man who gave his name to the Higgs boson particle.
Former Cambridge University professor Hawking also joked that the discovery had actually cost him $100 in a bet.
In an interview with the BBC Wednesday, Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, said: "This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize.
"But it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect.
"For this reason I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found. It seems I have just lost $100."
After half a century of research, physicists announced at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) Wednesday they had found a new sub-atomic particle consistent with the elusive Higgs boson which is believed to confer mass.
Hawking said the discovery was of major importance.
"If the decay and other interactions of this particle are as we expect, it will be strong evidence for the so-called standard model of particle physics, the theory that expains all our experiments so far," Hawking said.
Why has Hawking lost his bet if the "God Particle' has not been confirmed? .. either the particle article in this one .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77215147 .. is not spot on, or the situation is close enough for Hawking to concede defeat .. lol lesson learned .. search more before jumping in .. check!
.. actually according to that one, he said, "It seems..." .. so it seems he has not conceded, yet .. lol .. good ..
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