Linkfest

Folks I'm sorry I haven't been posting much of late. I've had some, well, stuff going on. Academic stuff. Dissertation stuff. And it's still going on and probably will be for a little while. In the meantime, here are a few links.

-- The Seating of Hiram Revels and the Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. A legal analysis of the seating of the first black congressman following the Civil War over at Allergic to Bull.

-- A guy finds a James T. Kirk solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma. Although, technically, the prisoners in the Prisoner's Dilemma can't talk to each other. But it still makes for good viewing.

-- Over at Quodlibeta Humphrey brings up a recent philosophy essay by Stephen Law which argues for skepticism regarding whether the historical Jesus ever existed. I glanced at the article when it appeared in Faith and Philosophy just long enough to shake my head and move on. But it's interesting because Law is leaving comments on Humphrey's post.

-- Francis Collins, biologist, geneticist, the head of the National Institutes of Health, leader of the Human Genome Project, and a total Bible thumper, has been criticized on this last point by some of his betters who insist that his belief in God threatens science. Shadow to Light looked at how many scientific publications the betters in question have published and compared them to how many Collins has published. The answer is just embarassing. Via Victor Reppert.

-- Areligious experience and warranted naturalistic belief over at Prosblogion. I may post about this at some point, but I've never been able to wrap myself around the idea of having an experience of the absence of something. Doesn't that just mean that I don't experience it? How can I adduce from this that "that which I don't experience" doesn't exist? That seems completely unjustified. However, that's not exactly what the link is about.

-- Dallas Willard, "The Case against Quine's Case for Psychologism", from Perspectives in Psychologism, ed. Mark Notturno (New York: Brill, 1989), pp. 286-295.