by Carl Howard | Nov 2, 2009 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
This post follows the posts on Galileo’s trial background and what happened at the re-enactment. Time to give my verdict. The most common “populist” argument is that the Galileo verdict was a travesty that represented a clear case of religion repressing science...
by Carl Howard | Oct 28, 2009 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
Now that I’ve given some background on the historical trial of Galileo, time to report on the Monday night retrial at UNSW. It had an audience of about 900 and was taped by the ABC for Compass (a show focussing on religion). You can watch Compass online no matter...
by Carl Howard | Oct 26, 2009 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
Tonight, the University of NSW is hosting a re-trial of Galileo, organised by my honours supervisor Peter Slezak. I was lucky enough to to retry Galileo in my undergrad degree (when Slezak taught a couse on it) as a prosecutor*, so it’s great to see that this has been...
by Carl Howard | Sep 28, 2009 | Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism, Sex
Laura Schlesinger once said: “If you’re gay or a lesbian, it’s a biological error that inhibits you from relating normally to the opposite sex” (Source). This created a lot of uproar, but it got me thinking about whether she could “technically” be right (despite her...
by Carl Howard | Aug 15, 2009 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Philosophy
A quickie today. In the Atheist Experience, Russell and Jeff dissect the Argument from Game Design, as proposed on a forum of Christian gamers. It does something like this: If you design a computer game, the only objective purpose/meaning to the game is the one that...
by Carl Howard | Aug 14, 2009 | Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
Tue night, I went to Paul Griffiths’ inaugural lecture at Sydney Uni called Reconstructing Human Nature (thanks John Wilkins for letting me know!). The talk was on conceptions of human nature and what it means for something to be “innate”. I won’t summarise it — but I...
