Category Archives: Mathematics

Natural Arguments For God

Mark Tapscott has what he thinks are the five best ones. I find none of them particularly compelling, and the third one is very weak.

As I note in comments (the discussion has been going on for a couple weeks), science is orthogonal to the issue of whether or not God exists, and (as I argued with Hugh Hewitt years ago) the desire of believers to misuse/misunderstand the nature of science to validate their religious beliefs is indicative of a certain lack of faith. And of course, the fallacy of the blind watchmaker appears, in which I have to point out that rolexes don’t replicate with random errors to improve the breed.

Dinosaurs And Gravity

I saw an interesting postulation on Twitter that the reason the dinosaurs could grow so large was that there was less gravity during the Mesozoic. My response:

The Risk Of Spaceflight

A new paper assessing spaceflight mortality. Not sure how useful it is, given the admitted paucity of data.

[Update a few minutes later]

When a Mars simulation goes wrong. Yes, we have a lot to learn before we go to other planets, and even then, people will die, often in terrible ways. Part of the answer is that we have to be more ambitious about how many we send. Six simply isn’t enough.