richh.com | a personal + political blog by rich halvorson

Comedy Central -- Interview with President Bush's "Speechalist"

Here's a great Comedy Central sketch. It's an interview with President Bush's ostensible head speechwriter who knows that "The American people of today's Americas want a President who can speak their language and speak it badly." ...Enjoy a good laugh with this one.   :-)

http://www.xroadsfilms.com/batescomedycentral/

Questioning Cosmological Superstition

Cosmology is the study of the universe--how it works, its origins and its future. Some of the foundational principles of this science have been influenced by superstition rather than scientific reason and observation. In this longer article, I challenge those assumptions and suggest that cosmologists would get further and more accurate with their theories if science played a more fixed role than secular mythology.

Published in the archives of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (www.iscid.org)

Confessions of a Skeptic

This short article was published in The Harvard Crimson after being censored by the editors for over a month. Despite the strong merits of the article, and other articles representing opposing viewpoints being printed, this barely got the editors' approval -- after quite a bit of insisting and bantering.

Questioning the Orthodoxy

This article was published in the Harvard Political Review (www.hpronline.org), and discusses the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools. Among all of the topics I've published on, these articles always generate the most controversy. Therefore, when the editor of HPR found out my article was going in just a few days before publication, he felt the need to throw together an opinion in a scathing response to my piece.

Darwin is Lame

This essay explains why deterministic natural causes (ie, "necessity" as exemplified in Darwinism) is useless to explain the growth and development of organisms. Instead, life and growth in fact require some element of telos, or purpose, direction and possibly even meaning.

Dr. Isotropy & Mr. Homogeneity

The Cosmological Principle is a fundamental premise of astrophysics and cosmology -- the scientific fields that explore the nature and origin of the universe, galaxies, planets, stars, etc. Yet, some of the most prominent scientists in the field have implied or expressed in their writings that at least part of this foundational belief lies more on scientists' superstition than observed data.

Rethinking the Darwinist Paradigm

Are scientists truly scientific and objective when it comes to evaluating evolution? This longer article argues that the scientists who promote evolution can be just as superstitious in holding to their secular creed as religious believers who doubt their conclusions. My position is to make no presumptions, but to see where the evidence points -- and this article emphasizes that both sides of the Evolution-Creation debate should do the same.