{"id":545,"date":"2004-03-03T21:20:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-04T05:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/depauw\/"},"modified":"2004-03-03T21:20:00","modified_gmt":"2004-03-04T05:20:00","slug":"depauw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/03\/depauw\/","title":{"rendered":"DePauw"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m spending all day Thursday at DePauw University, as a guest of their Science Research Fellows<\/a> program. It should be fun, although they’re keeping me busy: a lunchtime talk, two seminar class discussions, and a public lecture in the evening. The lunchtime talk will be a reprisal of one I gave at a conference on “God and Physical Cosmology” last year at Notre Dame. The conference consisted primarily of theologians and philosophers, but they invited a couple of cosmologists (Joel Primack and me) along to give some scientific perspective. I didn’t really want to give a standard gee-whiz cosmology talk, so they let me talk about Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists<\/a>. As you can read, it’s just the standard argument about why scientific reasoning leads to a firm rejection of a supernatural being as an explanation for what we see in nature; the kind of thing you’ll find in Richard Dawkins or Steven Weinberg.<\/p>\n

I went into the conference having no idea what the response would be; this was, after all, the only conference I had ever been to where there was a prayer to open the banquet. But as it turned out they loved my talk. I didn’t change anybody’s mind, nor did I expect to (although one participant did say that I had convinced him once and for all that the argument from design wasn’t one that theists should rely on). But they were very happy to get a completely different perspective, and I think they were pleased to really hear what a cold-blooded scientific materialist actually thinks, rather than just being humored. I certainly give everyone at the conference credit for being good sports (which academic theologians generally are, in my experience).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on the drive down from Chicago, I found an evangelical radio program explaining in quite a bit of detail why “old-earth” theories of evolution had been convincingly disproved, and correct scientific analysis had demonstrated that most geological features originated in an hydraulic catastrophe (the Flood) four thousand years ago. (Ed Brayton<\/a> has an interesting discussion of just this issue.) So the discussion continues, needless to say, on multiple levels.
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I’m spending all day Thursday at DePauw University, as a guest of their Science Research Fellows program. It should be fun, although they’re keeping me busy: a lunchtime talk, two seminar class discussions, and a public lecture in the evening. The lunchtime talk will be a reprisal of one I gave at a conference on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}