Bayesian Analysis of God’s Existence

This caught me off-guard (kudos to Chris­tian­i­ty Today Blog for find­ing it): a sci­en­tist has done a Bayesian cal­cu­la­tion to deter­mine the prob­a­bil­i­ty of God’s exis­tence (which he pegs at 67%).

The sci­en­tist’s name is Stephen Unwin (read an inter­view), and the book detail­ing his thoughts is The Prob­a­bil­i­ty of God: A Sim­ple Cal­cu­la­tion That Proves the Ulti­mate Truth

The open­ing line of his book is “Do you real­ize that there is some prob­a­bil­i­ty that before you com­plete this sen­tence, you will be hoofed insen­si­ble by a way­ward, minia­ture Mediter­ranean ass?”

How cool is that?

I’ve not read it yet–so I have no fur­ther com­ments except to say that it looks extreme­ly inter­est­ing.

Top 10 College Temptations

I just ran across a handy arti­cle called The Top Ten Col­lege Temp­ta­tions. It’s not stuff you’ve nev­er heard before, but it’s a good sum­ma­ry of sim­ple truth.

Bizarre Little Website Glitch

FYI: I just tried to upgrade our pho­to gallery soft­ware, and some­thing went hor­ri­bly awry. All the pho­tos are still there, but some­thing weird is hap­pen­ing with them.

UPDATE: I fixed it. Check out the new pho­tos.

An Awesome Statement of Beliefs

I just ran across a state­ment of faith writ­ten by Mike Yaconel­li (who recent­ly died) for his com­pa­ny, Youth Spe­cial­ties.

I high­ly rec­om­mend What Do You Real­ly Believe?

Extreme Pumpkins And Other Halloween Oddities

Hal­loween is upon us once again.

Three ran­dom links for your view­ing plea­sure:

* Extreme Pump­kins shows us the pump­kins that deep-down inside we’ve always want­ed to carve…

* In a true sto­ry, a tough sailor saves his crew by killing a 600 pound shark in 1–1 com­bat.

* The Home Star Run­ner Hal­loween series:
   2000: The Home­S­tar­Loween Par­ty
   2001: The House That Gave Sucky Treats
   2002: A Pumpakin Carve-nival
   2003: 3 Times Hal­loween Fun-job!

Time on “The Religious Superiority Complex”

Time mag­a­zine has an inter­est­ing arti­cle on the idea that one’s reli­gion is bet­ter than anoth­er’s. The author paints a more nuanced pic­ture than you might guess based on the title.

As a devout believ­er, Boykin may also won­der why it is imper­mis­si­ble to say that the God you believe in is supe­ri­or to the God you don’t believe in. I won­der this same thing as a non­be­liev­er: Does­n’t one reli­gion’s gospel log­i­cal­ly pre­clude the oth­ers’? (Except, of course, where they over­lap with uni­ver­sal pre­cepts, such as not mur­der­ing peo­ple, that even we non­be­liev­ers can wrap our heads around.) Although Boyk­in’s ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty seems less like monothe­ism than the star of a high school poly­the­ism tour­na­ment, his basic point is that Chris­tian­i­ty is right and Islam is wrong. Does­n’t the one imply the oth­er? Pre­tend­ing that my reli­gion is no bet­ter than your reli­gion may make for few­er reli­gious wars, but it seems con­trary to the very idea of reli­gion. For this, you take a leap of faith?

Read The Reli­gious Supe­ri­or­i­ty Com­plex (check out Chris­tian­i­ty Today’s weblog for relat­ed info).

Shaowei’s Talk on Science and Religion

Shaowei’s talk on the rela­tion­ship between sci­ence and reli­gion went real­ly well last night.

Around 55 peo­ple showed up in the Oka­da Tea Room and lis­tened intent­ly as Shaowei laid out his thoughts for them.

Shaowei did a great job, and I saw sev­er­al peo­ple engaged in very seri­ous dis­cus­sion after­wards (Shaowei got them think­ing in a major way).

Woohoo!

Shaowei’s talk was inspired by a paper he wrote for one of his class­es and has put on his web­site: Is There Room For God in Sci­ence?

He even has a sec­tion of his web­site devot­ed to Chi Alpha. Aww…

Random Eye Candy

Bored at 3am try­ing to get a paper done? Divert your­self with this smat­ter­ing of opti­cal illu­sions.

My favorite is the bio­log­i­cal motion illu­sion.