I don’t have time enough to blog, but I have time enough to tumble:

http://panningforgod.tumblr.com

… we are so freaking pwned

Apparently, they’re capable of doing more than bouncing balls on their noses and starring in adorable posters.

Seals can orient themselves and navigate to some degree using the stars as a guide. That’s a heck of a lot more than I can do, or most humans, who rely on computerized voices to find their way around these days.

Seals Use Astronomy as Navigation Aid
In a revealing study, researchers at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense have discovered that seals have the ability to recognise stars and groups of stars inside a modified planetarium. A five-metre round pool plus two harbour seals were covered with a dome with 6000 point light sources to simulate the Northern Hemisphere’s starry sky.

I read this quote this morning on a Catholic blog which I follow. It’s from comments made by Pope Benedict on Monday:

"Moreover," the Holy Father added, "hopes for great novelties and improvements are concentrated on science and technology." Yet, "it is not science and technology that can give meaning to our lives and teach us to distinguish good from evil,” he said.

The quote is meaningful for me because I just witnessed a day when the technology media breathlessly followed every hint and detail regarding the release of a new iPhone.

I could have sworn that a star had led every tech reporter on the planet to the Moscone Center, where they paid homage to a small device that now provides faster internet access with that ever-popular Apple design aesthetic. Whee!!

Given the excitement, attention, and devotion given to the release of what is basically a new toy, Pope Benedict’s words could not have been better timed. In three years, this iPhone will be obsolete, and we’ll have three years more when few of society’s real problems have been solved.

I’m having a hard time being convinced that man is somehow superior to apes after reading this sad story of a chimp raised as a human child during experiments in the 1970s.

We don’t this sort of thing these days, do we?

I’m sure that theologians or militant atheists would consider these blog meanderings to be the quaint, at best. Of course, they (think) they have the answers. I’m militant only about the fact that I do not.

Whether you regard the topics of these posts to be hopelessly naïve or worthwhile, this stuff is interesting to me, and I’m going to write about it. If you don’t like it, go ram your face into a tree.

Like this dog.

Part of what has always bothered me about how I interpreted Judeo-Christian theology is that it is amazingly human-centric. Man was made in the image of God, animals are used for sacrifice (at least until Jesus changes that by sacrificing himself), heaven seems to be chock-full of humans, etc.

But I love animals. I can’t believe that there’s nothing there, that they have no soul. That they’re just biological machines. Perhaps I’m reading too much into their behavior, but I look at animals like our family dog and I see emotions like fear, love, curiosity. I see intelligence (not much, admittedly, because he’s not the brightest dog).

Is there some sort of dividing line between a human soul and animal’s soul? Over the line it “counts”, under the line it doesn’t? I have a hard time understanding or believing this.

Anyhow, this type of thinking leads me to be curious about animal intelligence quite a great deal. So, I found this lecture from TED, like so many videos from that amazing site, to be interesting.

more about "TED | Talks | Joshua Klein: The amazi…", posted with vodpod

It really was pretty good size. I had to scale it down.

Of course, this isn’t 1:1 anyway, because it’s a picture of what the universe looked like over time. If it was actual size, it would have to be the size of the whole universe. WordPress is pretty cool, but can’t handle universe-size images yet. 

To the left of the Big Bang, I was thinking of photoshopping “God’s finger”, as in the Da Vinci painting of the creation.

Actually, I really should photoshop GIR in there. I know he’s responsible somehow.

 

One of the compulsions for me to write this blog was the sheer number of militant atheists that I encounter on the ‘net. They’re all over the place, mocking religion, and generally prancing about with what appears to be an innate sense of superiority.

Of course, there are some fairly out-there members of Christian faith, so they’ve got plenty of targets they can mock.

See Jesus in a Jello Pudding cup? There’s an atheist blogger out there ready to make fun of it, and two hundred college kids on Reddit ready to up-vote the item.

Of course, all this bugs me a bit. When things seemed the darkest for me, I found an inexplicable peace in the words of the Bible and the homilies of our local pastor. I had labeled myself as an agnostic, someone who believes that there are indescribable higher powers at work, although we have no clue what they are. But what I heard in church rang true in a very powerful, life-affirming way.

I have a theory that God reveals himself in the manner in which we’re best able to perceive him. Five thousand years ago, that may have been as voice behind a burning bush pounding words into stone tablets. Two thousand years ago, that may have been through a rabbi of possibly divine birth who wandered through Judea. Different voices, different forms, different times.

Today? I wonder if God is revealing himself through the mathematical precision of the universe. The universe as revealed by science is stunning and complex, driven by laws which are mankind’s greatest challenge to understand.

As complex as it is, the universe, as cosmologist Fred Hoyle once wrote, seems to be a “put-up job”, designed so that creatures like us would eventually show up.

Here’s an interesting quote from an article in Salon that I found in a similar blog:

…more and more physicists point to various laws of nature that have to be calibrated just right for stars and planets to form and for life to appear. For instance, if gravity were just slightly stronger, the universe would have collapsed long before life evolved. But if gravity were a tiny bit weaker, no galaxies or stars could have formed. If the strong nuclear force had been slightly different, red giant stars would never produce the fusion needed to form heavier atoms like carbon, and the universe would be a vast, lifeless desert. Are these just happy coincidences? The late cosmologist Fred Hoyle called the universe “a put-up job.” Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has suggested that the universe, in some sense, “knew we were coming.”

Yeah, that.

I read about how science has failed to prove the existence of God, and I wonder if folks have <lame cliché> missed the forest for the trees </lame cliché>

You need proof that something weird is up? It’s right in front of you.

I think a number of the atheists I’ve met on the web are too quick to embrace science and reject faith, and too many faithful too eager to do the opposite. My suspicions is that, as smart as we think we are, humanity still is an adolescent, searching for our purpose. And the universe will continue to hold mysteries our little monkey brains don’t yet even know exist.

If you’re loony enough to read this blog, you might want to check these items out as well:

Salon: We are meant to be here

The 2001 Principle: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe

Guardian: The weirder edges of the universe

Templeton: Does science make belief in God obsolete?

Newsweek: Will Physicists Find God?

Live Science: How scientists really feel about God

I’m pretty sure that God didn’t plant dinosaur bones to test us. We find dinosaur bones because, well, there used to be dinosaurs. Duh.

If there is a Judeo-Christian god, and if Jesus was his son, for me, the biggest test of faith won’t come from dinosaur bones or the irritating inconsistencies between science and the Bible. It will come from people.

I’m not a Bible thumper by any means. I’m someone who is searching, and as part of that I’m reading through the New Testament. I started with Mark, read Luke, and am now partially through Matthew.

It’s hard to read the words attributed to Jesus without thinking of all the charlatans, cultists, and profiteers who have shouted out his name in the 2000 years since.

Like Fox Mulder, “I want to believe”. Of all the challenges to faith that I’ve found, the worst by far are humans.

How could anyone grow up with faith in a world filled with things like Scientology and the video shown below?

This is on my mind,because last night I read through the part of the Gospel of Matthew that has the following:

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.

The world may be running out of oil and polar bears, but there seems to be an endless supply of false prophets

 

This is one messed-up critter.

A new study published in Nature has revealed that the Duck-Billed Platypus has a “bizarre mix of mammal, bird, and reptile” in its DNA, and ten (count ‘em, ten) sex chromosomes, totally pwning the human count of a mere two.

Plus, the males of the species can produce venom, and the females lay eggs, both unique among mammals. Or whatever the heck this thing is.

People used to say that the duck-billed platypus indicated that God had a sense of humor.

I suspect that God doesn’t micro-manage DNA and, if he does, we need to have a talk about my eyesight, foot speed, and a need to ram my face full of Buffalo wings and beer that is clearly driven at the cellular level.

Pondering the duck-billed platypus doesn’t help me understand any more about faith, science or the fate the universe holds for conscious beings, but it’s clear that, given enough time,  life will fill every nook and cranny available for it.