After writing about the death penalty recently, I was reflecting about the real meaning of Justice. It's tempting to think that Justice refers to the thing which happens (or should have happened) in Law Courts. And of course we hope … Continue reading
Suppose we have a field in a curved spacetime, and we want to know how fast it is changing as you move in some direction in space or time. Because there is more than one possible direction to move in, … Continue reading
In the previous post I mentioned that I support the death penalty, without providing any details. Commenter Darryl asks: Aron, (and other commenters, too!) I wonder if I might probe your notions on the death penalty. Given that in the … Continue reading
If you're wondering about the lack of posts recently: for the last 2½ weeks I've been travelling on a research trip to Boston and Canada (to Waterloo, Montreal, and Vancouver). The sashimi in Vancouver is out of this world, by … Continue reading
Random links I've run across in the past couple months: Want to know what ancient music sounded like? (Warning: website plays samples automatically) A possible birthday present for geeky kids: chemistry crayon labels. (Warning: assembly required) Artificial life links. Computer … Continue reading
In this time and place, the secular world does not place a high value on chastity, which seems to be regarded as some sort of eccentric religious virtue. So long as one avoids disease, and harassment in the workplace, and … Continue reading
Many wonderful things happened at my church today, but as we all know the First Rule of Blogging is that one should always focus on the negatives. Admittedly this Rule is in direct conflict with the Christian rule, "Do not … Continue reading
One of the things I've been trying to do on this blog is to explain Einstein's theories of relativity. Here are my previous posts on this subject: Time as the Fourth Dimension? The Ten Symmetries of Spacetime Fields Geometry is … Continue reading
Gentle Readers, I know it's been more than two weeks since I made any new top-level articles, but I hope to resume doing it soon. This was because: i) I got very involved arguing with people on the comment sections … Continue reading
After the discussion in the last post about the authorship of the Gospels, I've created a spreadsheet model, in Open Office format, to illustrate the probability calculus for whether the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This … Continue reading
A common criticism of the Gospel accounts is that they are of low historical value because they are anonymous. This is based on the observation that the authorship is never explicitly mentioned in the main body of the texts of … Continue reading
A lot of people think that the New Testament documents must be unreliable because (like all published texts from the ancient world) they are based on translations of copies of copies. So how can we know whether the original version … Continue reading
Last time I wrote a long discussion of what I think is the best evidence for and against Christianity. When it comes to the historical testimony to the Resurrection, I analyzed the data in terms of a set of minimal … Continue reading
In this post I am going to outline what I consider the most relevant evidence for and against Christianity, in the form of a Bayesian probability analysis. Now, just to be clear in advance, I'm not even going to take … Continue reading
My first pillar of Science is that it is based on repeatable observations. In order to see how Christianity measures up, we need to examine whether it is based on observations, and whether it is repeatable. Observations ultimately boil down … Continue reading
It's a little bit strange liturgically to have Easter on Christmas Day, but that's how things worked out in this series. I'm going to quote a passage from the Gospel of St. John, which illustrates the Resurrection claim and connects … Continue reading
So I'd like to get kicking soon on the project of actually presenting the positive evidence for Christianity. In my view the best evidence is the historical testimony of the apostles to Jesus' Resurrection (along with other ancient and modern … Continue reading
Today I'd like to talk about Bayes' Theorem, especially since it's come up in the comments section several times. It's named after St. Thomas Bayes (rhymes with "phase"). It can be used as a general framework for evaluating the probability … Continue reading
I've told you so far that the gravitational field is encoded in a matrix known as the metric. Here it is, displayed as a nice table: There's 10 components because the matrix is symmetric when reflected diagonally. The 4 diagonal … Continue reading
In my Pillars of Science series, I enumerated six aspects of Science that help explain why it works so well. It should be clear from my analysis that the characteristics of Science are quite flexible. All of the criteria are … Continue reading