Bud Stark's blog

Cut it out, Occam!
A parable by Donald Stark

“This Occam?”
“Occam, sir.”
“Chief Investigator here.”
“I recognized your voice, sir.”

God vs Stephen Hawking’s Unbound Theory
by Donald W. Stark
Stephen Hawking was admitted to the hospital, April 20, 2009, with a chest infection. I hope he is recovering well. Like millions of others, Hawking first introduced me to cosmology. Health difficulties are nothing new to Hawking, he has spent most of his life in a wheelchair, and every day of life since 1963 has been a bonus for him. That year he was diagnosed with ALS and not expected to live more than a few years. During those bonus years he wrote A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME: FROM THE BIG BANG TO BLACK HOLES. Published in 1988, A BRIEF HISTORY went on to become the largest selling science book of all time. In its “Acknowledgements” Hawking says that his book discusses the basic ideas about the origin and fate of the universe in language that people without a scientific education can understand. It is necessarily from that perspective that this essay is written, for I have no scientific education.

Richard Dawkins, Witness to Eden
By Donald Stark

Superstition
Climbing Mount Impossible, by the Oxford Darwinian and best selling author Richard Dawkins, begins with Dawkins having been irked by a “stock-in-trade” literary lecture in which the speaker suggested that the fruit in the Garden of Eden with which Eve tempted Adam was a fig. “The speaker obviously knew that there never was a Garden of Eden, never a tree of knowledge of good and evil.”1 Of such stuff he says in The Selfish Gene:

We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [The year Darwin published Origin of Species] are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.2

Weinberg vs a designed universe

God knows whether Dulcinea exists on earth or not,
or whether she is fantastical or not. These are not
matters where verification can be carried out to the full.
Cervantes, Don Quixote