Various News and Links- Vox Day, Reppert

I'll round out my first day of this blog by drawing attention to some good recent posts and information on some of the blogs I frequent:

Vox Day answers a readers questions by discussion probablity, the psychology of everyday people and evidence for the supernatural.

I liked this bit- Very astute and accurate perspective:

As for your observation that your fellow secular materialists have become increasingly vainglorious and narrow-minded, I believe it is because they have been misled into a false sense of security by a combination of Christian intellectual sloth and the increasing compartmentalization of Western society. Intelligent, self-satisfied atheists with post-graduate degrees think those who believe in the supernatural are all poorly educated dimwits out to oppress others for the same reason that wealthy, suburban Christians with beautiful families think those who don't believe in God are all miserable gay alcoholics out to commit suicide. Their paths very seldom cross, their assumptions are often confirmed by the extreme examples that come to their attention, and on the rare occasion that the intelligent, highly-educated Christian or the happy, well-adjusted atheist finds himself in the territory of "the other", he's usually going to be inclined to keep his mouth shut about his beliefs in order to avoid unnecessarily rocking the boat. This dynamic can be seen at work even on this blog, as with a few exceptions, the people known with certainty to be atheists tend to be the less intelligent, socially autistic variety, just as on campus the only identifiable Christians tend to be either the genuine saints or annoying evangelizing whackos.

Victor Reppert discusses a major problem for naturalism

I think he understates his case when he asks "isn't this whole thing more probable given theism than it is given ordinary naturalism.". Yes, a lot more probable.

Meanwhile on the forum at Reasonable Faith, posters are discussing a recent talk by Lawrence Krauss given at an Atheist event where he describes the physics of the universe coming from nothing. Upon further inspection, he's talking about Quantum Vacuum Fields and Tunnelling. Now I don't claim to know much at all about basic science much less high level cosmology, but it seems to me that whenever scientists talk about the origins of the universe, they often make a sleight of hand by talking about "nothing". To me, nothing means nothing. No energy, no quantum fields, no vacuum tunnels, no laws operating to activate these things, NOTHING. It seems to me that for our world's top scientists, nothing means.....something very complex.