Proslogion : Page 96 of 113 : Thoughts from a scientist who is a Christian (not a Christian Scientist)

The Old Schoolhouse Expo

On October 4-8, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine will be hosting its second online convention, and I will be one of the speakers. It’s not the first time I’ve done an online convention, but I am very excited about it. In order to promote the convention, they are having a couple of “preview” events, and I am speaking at the one on August 24th. The topic is one that I have not spoken on before, but it is very near and dear to my heart:

Be Open-Minded, but Don’t Let Your Brain Fall Out!

This topic is very important to me because if I had not been open-minded, I would not be a Christian today. I was an atheist at one time, but as a result of being taken to an “Atheism versus Christianity” debate, I ended up realizing that I had been incredibly closed-minded regarding my atheism. Thus, I opened my mind and read some books by Christian thinkers, and it changed me forever! I am truly a new creation, but only because I decided to open my mind and read what people I disagreed with said about serious issues.

Over the years, I have tried to apply that same kind of open-mindedness in all I investigate. I honestly believe that’s why I am a young-earth creationist. I could easily have been a theistic evolutionist if I had simply accepted uncritically what my teachers and my textbooks told me. However, because I was willing to consider views that were not necessarily in line with “mainstream” science, I ended up coming to the conclusion that young-earth creationism is the most reasonable scientific position to hold.

So open-mindedness is quite important to me, but at the same time, it brings along a tension. To exercise my open-mindedness, for example, I read a variety of works, including those by atheists. While most atheists (like Richard Dawkins, for example) are rather easy to dismiss because of their irrationality, every now and again, I read atheists like Bradley Monton who make me uncomfortable, as they bring up some excellent rational points.

My goal, then, is to be open-minded, but not so much that my brain actually falls out, and I end up believing everything I read. How do I accomplish that? Come find out!

Why Sacrifice? After All, She’s Just Our Daughter!

A Facebook friend of mine linked an opinion piece from the Denver Post, and I think it illustrates why so many children today are messed up. The author (Daniel Brigham) writes that he and his wife are expecting their first child. They already call her “Lucy,” and their friends have been asking them how they will educate their child. His response is very troubling.

He says he used to teach at the University of Colorado Boulder for more than a decade, so unlike many, he knows about the benefits of homeschooling. He acknowledges (as anyone with intellectual honesty must) that homeschooled students are academically advanced compared to students from public and private schools. Studies clearly demonstrate this, and his experience with one homeschool graduate while he was teaching at the university level is consistent with those studies. He also acknowledges that homeschooled students are not at any social disadvantage compared to their peers.

At this point, he reminds me a lot of myself more than 15 years ago. While I was on the faculty at Ball State University, my best students were the homeschool graduates. My experience with them caused me to look at the studies that had been done on homeschooled students, and those studies confirmed that homeschooled students are, indeed, academically superior to their peers and suffer no social disadvantages compared to their peers.

I took such information to heart and began homeschooling my daughter once we had adopted her. Mr. Brigham, however, has decided against homeschooling his daughter. If he knows that homeschooling offers academic advantages with no social disadvantages, why has he decided not to homeschool her?

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I No Longer Work for Apologia Educational Ministries

In June of 2008, I sold Apologia Educational Ministries, Inc. to Davis Carman. Since then, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the new direction Apologia is taking, as well as the vision of its new owner. As a result, I resigned from Apologia today.

I did not make this decision lightly. It involved many, many hours of prayer, deep discussions with Kathleen (my wife), lots of consultation with homeschooling leaders I respect and admire, and several discussions with my Christian role models. In the end, it truly boiled down to the fact that I cannot continue to work for a company that is opposed to many of the Christian values that I hold dear.

Please don’t take this as a blanket denunciation of Apologia. Obviously, I still like a lot of their products, including the books that I wrote (surprise, surprise). I just cannot support its new direction or the vision of its new owner.

Please note that while I am leaving Apologia for good, I am certainly not leaving the home education community. I will continue to speak at conferences and other homeschooling venues, and I will blog about homeschooling from time to time. I will also be working on a product line that will hopefully make the lives of homeschooling parents a bit easier. I hope to launch that product line in three years.

With Enough Blind Faith, You Can Believe Anything!

Tom Siegfried holds a bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University, where he majored in chemistry, history, and journalism. He earned a master of arts from the University of Texas at Austin with a major in journalism and a minor in physics. I know of him because he is currently the Editor in Chief of Science News. I read that journal regularly, and since he often writes an editorial that appears on the second page of each issue, I have read a lot of his work. He is a talented writer, and he has a good grasp of a broad range of scientific issues. He also seems to have a lot more faith than I could ever muster.

In a recent editorial on origin-of-life research ¹, Mr. Siegfried made some statements that illustrate what a paragon of faith he really is. After remarking that humans have been trying to puzzle out how to create a simple form of life, he says:

It doesn’t sound like it should be that hard. After all, sometime not quite 4 billion years ago, lifeless molecules gathered somewhere on Earth and self-assembled into an entity that spawned the planet’s full repertoire of ancestral life-forms–without help from any fancy laboratory equipment.

Mr. Siegfried is quite confident that once upon a time, lifeless chemicals randomly interacted to produce something that eventually evolved into all the amazing living organisms we see today. He believes this despite the fact that every origin-of-life experiment has been a miserable failure, which makes him a true paragon of faith.

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The Chicken Did Come First, But Not For This Reason!

An article in Science Daily reports on a study that supposedly answers the question, “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?” Unfortunately, while one of the authors gives the correct answer (the chicken), he doesn’t use the correct reasoning. Also, spending time on that question actually distracts from the amazing results of the study, which demonstrate the incredible design ingenuity of the Creator.

The study focuses on chicken eggs. Specifically, it focuses on the shells of chicken eggs. While you and I (and a baby chick) see the shell as something annoying that needs to be broken, it is actually a marvelously-constructed shield that protects the contents of the egg while allowing them to interact safely with the environment. After all, the contents of the egg need protection, but the embryo needs oxygen, which it must get from the outside world. The egg shell is strong enough to protect the egg’s contents, but it is also porous enough for oxygen (which the embryo needs to take in) to diffuse into the egg and carbon dioxide (which the embryo must expel) to diffuse out.

This marvelous shell is made of a combination of proteins and calcium carbonate crystals. The proteins provide a bit of flexibility, while the calcium carbonate crystals provide strength. Without the proteins, the shell would be too brittle, and without the calcium carbonate, the shell would be too weak. The mother chicken makes both the proteins and the calcium carbonate, but until the study mentioned above was published, there was a big question mark regarding exactly how the calcium carbonate portion of the egg shell was formed.

Continue reading “The Chicken Did Come First, But Not For This Reason!”

I Get Spam

As anyone who has a blog knows, one of the nuisances associated with blogging is the spammers. They have automated programs that find blogs and then leave “comments” that essentially advertise something. Of course, most bloggers use some sort of anti-spam software to keep the spammers at bay, but no such software is perfect. The software I use, Akismet, is pretty good, but every once in a while, it misidentifies a real comment as spam. Since I don’t want to lose any real comments, I go through the spam folder from time to time.

It’s usually not a big deal. Spams have a pattern to them, so I can usually get through 50 spams in just a few minutes. For example, most of them are short, and they say things like:

yes your portal incomparable ac, (link to the site being advertised)

wow that site class ap, (link to the site being advertised)

whant to say this board class gx, (link to the site being advertised)

wanna say it’s site peerless hs, (link to the site being advertised)

Well, yesterday I was going through my spam folder and saw something that didn’t fit the pattern. Here’s what it said:

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia (link) and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forums! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. (link) They’re coming back now. Please send help!
HELP! (link)

I think spammers are probably the lowest form of life, or at least they are giving politicians a good run for that position. Nevertheless, I think I could come to like the spammer who thought up that one!

Galileo’s Daughter, Part 2: The Genius of Galileo

In part 1 of my review of the excellent book Galileo’s Daughter, I concentrated on how the author treats the confrontation between Galileo and the Roman Catholic church. In this part of the review, I want to focus on how the book treats other aspects of Galileo’s life.

The book shares all sorts of interesting things regarding Galileo about which I was completely unaware. For example, did you know that you can see a preserved part of his body if you wish? Indeed, the middle finger of his right hand is inside a glass egg at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence. My wife and I spent a day in Florence, but there are so many amazing things to see, we never got to the Museum of the History of Science. As a result, we never got to see Galileo’s finger.

I also learned that Galileo did not like academic garb. At that time in history, if you were a teacher at a university, you were expected to wear your academic robes at all times while you were working. When Galileo got his first teaching post at the University of Pisa, however, he:

deemed official doctoral dress a pretentious nuisance, and he derided the toga in a three-hundred-line verse spoof that enjoyed wide readership… (p. 19)

Now this is a man after my own heart. I hate it when university professors try to set themselves apart by any pretentious means. Not only did Galileo hate that as well, he actually wrote a snarky poem about it!

While little facts like these are interesting, there were two things I read in this book that I had never heard before, and they clearly show that Galileo was nothing short of a true genius!

Continue reading “Galileo’s Daughter, Part 2: The Genius of Galileo”

Homeschool Version of “I Will Survive”

I am a big fan of homeschooling, which I knew nothing about until I was on the faculty at Ball State University. As I taught there, I started encountering students who were truly head and shoulders above their peers. When I asked them where they went to school, they said, “at home.” I had no idea what that meant or how it was legal. Furthermore, I couldn’t begin to fathom how an untrained mother could teach her children physics and chemistry well enough to allow them to come to university and ace all my tests. Nevertheless, the longer I taught at Ball State, the more amazing homeschool graduates I encountered.

I decided to look at the academic literature to see if studies had been done on home educated students, and the studies I found agreed with my experience: on average, homeschooled students simply are academically and socially superior compared to their publicly- and privately-schooled counterparts. That’s the reason I started working with homeschoolers. I simply wanted to be a part of what is clearly the best kind of secondary education available in the United States.

Since I have been working with homeschooled students, I have come to learn that the real heroes of homeschooling are the parents. They face adversity, anxiety, strife, and financial hardships, yet they survive. Not only do they survive, they produce some amazing students. This video clip is for all the homeschooling parents out there!

Three-Way Mutualism: A Clue to Pre-Fall Viruses

I came across an article I had pulled out of the journal Science back in 2007, and it reminded me of a very interesting form of mutualism that I had completely forgotten about. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, mutualism is a situation in which two or more organisms work together so that they each benefit. It is quite common throughout creation. For example, one of the ways you get the Vitamin K that you need is through a mutualistic relationship between you and some bacteria that live in your intestine. You provide them with food and housing, and in exchange, they provide you with Vitamin K. Well, this article discusses a mutualism that involves three partners, and in order for the situation to work, all three partners must be present. Amazingly enough, the partners are a fungus, a plant, and a virus!¹

In the article, the scientists were studying Dichanthelium lanuginosum, a grass that is often called “panic grass.” While this grass can grow in many places, it actually flourishes in the geothermal areas of Yellowstone National Park, where the soil is far too hot to support most plants. When scientists initially studied this plant, they found its roots infected with a fungus, Curvularia protuberata. Now this is not unusual at all. Indeed, roughly 80% of plant species that have been surveyed participate in a mutualistic relationship with at least one species of fungus.² Typically, the plant provides sugars for the fungus, and the fungus absorbs minerals from the soil and gives them to the plant.

It was assumed for many years that the fungus found in the roots of panic grass provided the plant not only with minerals, but with something that allows the grass to tolerate soil that is simply too hot for other plants. The authors of the Science article found that this is only a partial explanation.

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Galileo’s Daughter, Part 1

I recently mentioned the book Galileo’s Daughter in a previous post. I wrote then that it might become my new favorite book regarding this amazing scientist, and it most certainly has! The book is not only an excellent look at Galileo, his accomplishments, and his struggles, but it also is incredibly unique. In the process of discussing the events of Galileo’s life, the author weaves in actual letters written to him by his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste Galilei. Since she was a nun, there are also nice interludes where the author discusses what Suor Maria Celeste’s life was like at the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri. In addition to all that, despite the fact that this is a biography of a well-known scientist, there is actually a surprise ending! At least it was a surprise to me, and I have read quite a bit about Galileo.

There are so many good things about this book that I cannot cover them all in one post. So to start, I will discuss how this book treats the most famous issue involved in Galileo’s life: his confrontation with the Roman Catholic church. Obviously a lot of very detailed, very carefully-researched tomes have been written about this affair, and I have read many of them. However, I think this book deals with the issue better than any other book I have read.

Why is this book’s coverage of the struggle between Galileo and the Roman Catholic church so good? For one thing, it doesn’t try to take sides. I have read books about Galileo that portray him as the champion of science who was persecuted by the mighty Roman Catholic church, and I have read books that portray him as a egotistical man who tried to use the force of his personality to make the Roman Catholic church change its theology based on very little evidence. Neither of those portrayals is accurate. Instead, as is the case with most history, the confrontation between Galileo and the Roman Catholic church was very complex, with no pure villains and only one pure hero. That hero was neither Galileo nor the Roman Catholic church. Instead, it was Suor Maria Celeste Galilei.

Continue reading “Galileo’s Daughter, Part 1”