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it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you're given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, "This is how things are." They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism. The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we're learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves. They also tell us that every single human is unique, different than every other human, and each of us keeps changing in unpredictable ways. The societies we live in also keep changing-in part because of science and technology! So in certain important ways, humans resist the kind of explanations that science gives us.

In addition to pondering the notions of changeability and continuity that watching a stream flow into a river tend to prompt, I was also counting and weighing glass eels, tiny transparent fish only two or three inches long that enter the tributaries of the river each spring. Which is to say, I was practicing something called citizen science, loosely defined as scientific research in which amateurs help experts gather data. Eels are tiny envoys from the realm of the inconceivable. Scientists have never been able to document their mating or birth in the North Atlantic's Sargasso Sea, nor do they know what governs their voyage to the coast's freshwaters.

Argument that the scientific frame of mind played a leading role in the emergence of democratic governance and individual rights.

A non-theist argues for non-displacement of science and religion as systems of knowledge

Interview by John C. Reed, MD, PhD - CEO, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, La Jolla, California.

'...the Cochrane Collaboration reported last year that patients who used tools to guide their decisions had a better grasp of their choices and risks. They were also more likely to select less intense or invasive treatment when considering major elective surgery, though results were mixed for other decisions. The influence of decision aids on adherence to medication or overall costs was "inconclusive," according to the report. 'But that uncertainty does not reduce the ethical obligation to better inform patients, or lessen the promise of tools that help patients understand their options and identify their values, some doctors say. "It is the right thing to do," said Dr. Victor Montori, associate director of the Health Care Delivery Research Program at the Mayo Clinic Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery....'

"Goal-priming experiments" - of the sort cited by Malcolm Gladwell - "are coming under scrutiny...." 'A team led by the Belgian cognitive scientist Axel Cleeremans and another at the University of California, San Diego, led by Hal Pashler, repeated the [NYU] slow-walker study and found no difference in the rates of walking between goal-primed and unprimed subjects. 'Mr. Pashler's team also tried without success to replicate a dozen other goal-priming experiments, including one showing that exposure to money made subjects more likely to endorse a free market, and another reporting that exposure to a picture of an American flag prompted subjects to express nationalist attitudes. 'To be sure, a failure to replicate is not confined to psychology, as the Stanford biostatistician John P. A. Ioannidis documented in his much-discussed 2005 article "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." The cancer researchers C. Glenn Begley and Lee M. Ellis could replicate the findings of only 6 of 53 seminal publications from reputable oncology labs.'

Successful theist philosopher - & book against Dawkins, et al.

comic strip on Newt Gingrich's space & political interests

A KERFUFFLE has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe's existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it "moronic" and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.

letters by Daniel Dennett, Judith Shapiro & others (incl F.Smith) pro & con & in between