Someone sent me another stupid Jewish article. It’s still not the
wonderful relativity denial that I lost, but it’s pretty delicious as
stupidity goes. This time it comes from Chabad. For those who aren’t
familiar with it, Chabad is a Chasidic organization, which originally
formed around people following a very famous Rabbi from the town of
Lubav after he emigrated to the US. Chabad grew into a very large
fundamentalist organization that is very devoted to what they call
outreach. (I call it proselytization.)

Anyway – on to the article: “Are Science and Religion a Contradiction?”. Large swaths of it are just rehashes
of standard fundamentalist crap – indistinguishable from the kinds of
rubbish we routinely hear from the various Christian fundies, but with
a bit of low-budget hebrew mixed in. For example:

In the 19th Century it was the prevailing view of scientists and
modernists that human reason was infallible in “scientific” deductions
and that sciences such as physics, chemistry, mathematics etc., were
absolute truth, that is to say, not merely accepted truths but
absolute. Speaking in Jewish terms this meant the establishment of a
new idolatry, not of wood and stone, but the worship of the
contemporary sciences and philosophies.

In fact, in the face of dogmatic and deterministic views of
science prevailing at that time, a whole apologetic literature was
created by well-meaning religious advocates and certain rabbis who saw
no other way of preserving Torah heritage in their “enlightened”
communities except through tenuous and spurious reinterpretations of
certain passages in the Torah in order to accommodate them to the
prevailing world outlook. No doubt they knew inwardly that they were
suggesting interpretations in Torah which were at variance with Torat
Emet, but at least they felt they had no alternative.

See, it’s just another version of the old “science is a religion” shtick. No better than the dreck you’ll find on, say, James Dobson’s website.

Of course, if all that they did was rehash the same-old christian dreck, there’d be no good reason to waste my time writing about this
meshugas. But they’ve got a few unique touches that are worth a moment or two.

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I’ve been sent Yet Another Proof of God. This one goes to rather a lot of trouble
to appear to be mathematical. I thought that it would be fun to rip it apart. For a change, this one is from an Islamic moron, rather than the usual Christian moron.
Alas, it’s pretty much as stupid and shallowly wrong as the usual christian one.

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A few weeks ago, I received an email about a new book, “The Faith Equation”, by Marvin Bittinger. Bittinger is an author of math textbooks – including, I think, my first calculus text. The book is supposed to be Bittenger’s explanation of how mathematics validates christianity. Needless to say,
I asked for a review copy – this is something right up my alley.

I’ve taken longer to get around to reviewing it than I intended, but life’s been busy
lately. I’m going to review it in several parts: it’s too dense, full of bad arguments of so many different kinds that I can’t possibly do it justice with only one post.

Today, I’ll cover the introdution and first two chapters: “The Beginning of a Mathematician’s Journey”, “Apologetics and Faith Axioms”, “Paradoxes in Mathematics and Christianity”.

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Much to my professional shame, PZ recently pointed out David Plaisted, a Computer Science professor at
the University of North Carolina, who has an anti-evolution screed on his university
website. Worse, it’s typical creationist drivel, which anyone with half a brain should know is utter
rubbish. But worst of all, this computer scientist’s article is chock full of bad math. And it’s
deliberately bad math: this guy works in automated theorem proving and rewrite systems – there’s no way
that he doesn’t know what utter drivel his article is.

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