The Weird Journal Solicitations Continue to Pour In

Here's another one:

Invitation to Submit your Paper

Dear Authors,

We would like to invite you to submit quality ResearchPapers [sic] by e-mail editor@ijcsiet.com or ijcsiet@yahoo.com or both. The International Journal of Computer ScienceInformation and Engineering Technologies (IJCSIET) currently acceptingmanuscript for the following subjects ComputerScience and Engineering, Electrical Communication Engineering, ElectricalElectronics Engineering, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering etc.,. As per the guidelines submit aresearch paper related to one of the themes of the Journals, as per theguidelines.

For more details visit us @ URL: www.ijcsiet.com

Last Date ofPaper Submission: 25 May 2013

Regards,

Editor-in-chief

IJCSIET

I wonder what "ResearchPapers" are. Maybe they're about "ScienceInformation". I sure hope they're "acceptingmanuscript". Those guidelines sound pretty important, too.

Yet Another Strange Journal Solicitation

Dear Jeffrey O. Shallit ,
 
This is Journal of Computer Science, Technology and Application (ISSN 2155-7969) is a new scholarly, peer-reviewed, and interdisciplinary journal focusing on theories, methods and applications in computer science, published worldwide by Academic Star Publishing Company, New York , NY, USA. We have learned your paper'Subword Complexity and k-Synchronization' at 17th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory .We are very interested to publish your latest paper in our journal. If you have the idea of making our journal a vehicle for your research interests, please send the electronic version of your paper to us through email attachment in MS word format. All your original and unpublished papers are welcome.

Hope to keep in touch by email and publish some papers or books from you and your friends in USA. As an American academic publishing group, we wish to become your friends if necessary. We also want to invite some people to be our reviewers or become our editorial board members. If you are interested in our journal, you can send your CV to us. Expect to get your reply soon.

 

Best regards,

 

Amy 

Journal of Computer Science, Technology and Applicatio

Academic Star Publishing Company

betty@academicstar.us, computer@academicstar.us
228 East 45th Street Ground Floor #CN00000267 New York NY 10017 USA  
TEL: 347-566-2153, 347-230-6798 Fax: 646-619-4168, 347-426-1986k

 

  Call for Paper      n

Description

Journal of Computer Science, Technology and Application (ISSN 2155-7969) is a scholarly, peer-reviewed, and interdisciplinary journal focusing on theories, methods and applications in computer science. It is published in English by Academic Star Publishing Company, USA. It aims to provide an international forum and an authoritative source of information in the field of Computer Science, Technology and Applications and related Information Technology. It also aims at establishing channels of communication between Centers of Excellence for computer applications, computer manufacturers, software developers and users worldwide. It covers a wide range of topics of current concern in computer science. Each issue will contain a variety of articles, essays, and book reviews and so on.

The journal welcomes publications of high quality papers on theoretical developments and practical applications in computer science. Original research papers, state-of-the-art reviews, and high quality technical notes are invited for publications.

We would welcome manuscripts on (but not limited to):

•  Computer applications in engineering and technology

•  Computer control system design

•  CAD/CAM, CAE, CIM and robotics

•  Computer applications in knowledge-based and expert systems

•  Computer applications in information technology and communication

•  Computer-integrated material processing (CIMP)

•  Computer-aided learning (CAL)

•  Computer modelling and simulation

•  Synthetic approach for engineering

•  Man-machine interface

•  Software engineering and management

•  Management techniques and methods

•  Human computer interaction

•  Real-time systems

•computational mathematics

•other topics related to computer

 

Information for Authors
1. The manuscript should be original, and has not been published previously. Do not submit material that is currently being considered by another journal.

2. The manuscript should be in MS Word format, submitted as an email attachment to our email box.

3. Manuscripts may be 5000-12000 words or longer if approved by the editor, including an abstract, texts, tables, footnotes, appendixes, and references. The title should be on page 1 and not exceed 15 words, and should be followed by an abstract of 100-200 words. 3-5 keywords or key phrases are required.

4. The title of the paper should be on the cover sheet as well as the top of the first page of text. Author names and affiliations should be on the cover sheet only.

5. Authors of the articles being accepted are required to sign the Transfer of Copyright Agreement form.

6. Authors will receive 2 hard copies of the journal within their papers.

7. It is not our policy to pay authors.

 

Peer Review Policy

Journal of Computer Science, Technology and Application is a refereed journal. All research articles in this journal undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymised refereeing by at least two anonymous referees.

 

Editorial Procedures

All papers considered appropriate for this journal are reviewed anonymously by at least two outside reviewers. The review process usually takes 4-6 weeks. Papers are accepted for publication subject to no substantive, stylistic editing. The Editor reserves the right to make any necessary changes in the papers, or request the author to do so, or reject the paper submitted. A copy of the edited paper along with the first proofs will be sent to the author for proofreading. They should be corrected and returned to the Editor within seven days. Once the final version of the paper has been accepted, authors are requested not to make further changes to the text.

 

Submission of Manuscript

All manuscripts submitted will be considered for publication. Manuscripts should be sent online or as an email attachment to: computer@academicstar.us, computer_academicstar@yahoo.com.

 

Address: Academic Star Publishing Company, 70 West 86th Street, #CN0267, New York, NY 10024, USA  

TEL: 347-230-6798  Fax: 347-426-1986

Email：computer@academicstar.us, computer_academicstar@yahoo.com 
Journal of Computer Science, Technology and Application

I'm really glad that they have "learned [my] paper", but the MS word format requirement just is too onerous for me. As for "we wish to become your friends if necessary", that sounds a bit ominous. Maybe it isn't necessary.

Another Weird Journal Solicitation

Here's yet another weird academic journal solicitation:

Dear , [sic]

WatchPlus as a major international publisher with its main focus on Journals spanning broad based interdisciplinary subjects presented in English Language [sic], is currently accepting manuscript(s) for publication. WatchPlus has a unique and effective way to capture expertise, tacit knowledge and research findings. Unlike other publishers, WatchPlus focuses on improving papers instead of only publishing them.

We welcome a timely submission of Original [sic] articles, Case studies, Expert reviews, surveys, opinions, commentaries and essays in all fields covered by our journals.

We accept papers from both academic and industrial contexts, thereby creating a unique community of experts, researchers, practitioners and thought-leading [sic] people. The creative and constructive atmosphere built by WatchPlus is highly productive. We are also working progressively to improve and increase our readership base by indexing our various journals in professional and academic indexes, libraries and large academic repositories and databases/ electronic archives.

Benefits

All submissions will benefit from a constructive iteration process prior to its publication. In this process, authors receive feedback and suggestions for their work where necessary. Papers will be reviewed in deep detail by experts and peers from the same or related domains and authors will get feedback and comments based on the outcomes of the review process.

Authors will receive high quality feedback in a constructive way. The comments and suggestions can be used to improve submitted papers for final publication. Submitted papers will be published along side the next issue proir to the acceptance of the paper by professional Editors. Selected papers will be published in the WatchPlus Digital Archive.

Journals

We are currently accepting papers under the following headings:

    Journal of Advances in Agricultural Science and Technology.
    International Journal of Mathematics and Engineering Research.
    International Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences.
    International Journal of Accounting and Business Management.
    Journal of Education, Arts and Humanities.
    International Journal of Biological and Physical Sciences.

Manuscript Format

Please note that we accept manuscript in .doc, .docx and rtf formats. Figures and table should be submitted alongside the main manuscript or attached as supporting documents. Please see our Instruction for Authors.

All manuscript(s) as well as supporting documents should be submitted as e-mail attachment(s) to submit@watchpub.org.

Editors and Reviewers

We are also looking for focused, dedicated and time conscious scholars, to serve as Editors and Reviewers in our various Journals. If you are interested, please submit a detailed Curriculum Vitae to our Editorial Office at editorials@watchpub.org, stating your research interest and the journal your [sic] are interested in working with.
We are looking forward to publishing your manuscript. 

Regards,

Prof. Abeer Al-Ghananeem
Editor-in-Chief
International Journal of Medical and Bio-Medical Sciences
http://www.watchpub.org

I would be very interested to see how my manuscripts could be improved by this publisher. Perhaps they can insert random capitalizations "in English language". But since I am not "time conscious", I don't think I qualify to serve as a capital-E Editor or even a capital-R Reviewer.

They Offer Nothing But Lies, 2

This could be a regular feature!

Over at Uncommon Descent, the bizarre ravings of Gordon E. Mullings (aka "kairosfocus") included this gem:

FSCO/I is routinely intuitively used to identify artifacts of unknown cause, as IIRC, WmAD has pointed out regarding a room in the Smithsonian full of artifacts of unknown purpose but identified to be credibly human.

No, the Smithsonian does not have a "room...full of artifacts" like that. That bogus claim was debunked back in 2002.

Word Puzzle

What do each of the following words have in common?

chef
facade
hotshots
microscope
racketeering
indivisibility
unpremeditatedly

Answer: if you let a = 1, b = 2, and so forth, then each of these words has the property that the first half of the word sums to the same number as the second half.

My Talk at Eschaton 2013

Here's the video of my talk at the Eschaton 2013 conference. I hope you can stand to watch it, because I can't!

They Offer Nothing But Lies

Here we have a yet another example of the scholarship and devotion to truth of the creationist movement. Lawyer Barry Arrington posts a quote which he ascribes to Margaret Sanger in 1922:

"Slavs, Latin, and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds ... a deadweight of human waste. Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race."

The quote has three suspicious aspects which would make any reasonable person think twice before posting. First, the ellipsis. Have two unrelated quotes been grafted together? Second, the lack of a detailed attribution. Where, precisely, did she say this? What speech or journal? Third, the longstanding record of quote fabrication by political and religious extremists; see, for example, They Never Said It or The Quote Verifier.

When Arrington is informed by a contributor that the quote is apparently bogus, how does he respond? Does he withdraw it, or at least say he will do more research to make sure it is accurate? No, so far he has completely ignored this information. Arrington's efforts were applauded by co-blogger V. J. Torley.

Whether it concerns biology, or climate science, or history, all they have to offer is lies.

Safeway Not Safe for Moose

Here is the sad story of a moose that wandered into a Safeway and ended up getting killed.

Everyone knows that Sobey's is the only safe place for moose to shop.

Another Liar for Jesus

Creationist Bill Randall is another liar for Jesus.

In his barely literate Washington Times piece, filled with gems like "Modern contemporary teachings", there is scarcely a single sentence that is truthful.

I don't have the time or interest to fisk the whole thing, so here is just a single example:

The following are quotes from proponents of evolution: “Many examples commonly cited, such as the evolution of the horse family or of sabertooth tigers can be readily shown to have been falsified and not to be really othogenic.” (G. G. Simpson, “Evolutionary Determinism and the Fossil Record”, Scientific Monthly, Vol. 71, Oct. 1950, pg 264

(Yes, the delightful lack of a closing parenthesis is in the original.)

Now, I happen to have Simpson's article right in front of me. Here is what he actually said:

"The crucial point here is whether evolution is in fact orthogenetic, whether orthogenesis is its law. There are many definitions of orthogenesis, but the pertinent one in this connection is that orthogenesis designates not only full determination of evolution but also rigid and unique predetermination. Orthogenetic evolution is supposed to proceed undeviatingly in a single direction, regardless of environment, organic activity, or such factors as natural selection. Discussion of this point has been so lengthy and extensive that it has, frankly, become boring. There is at present a clear consensus of paleontologists that orthogenesis, in this sense, is not real. There is no known sequence in the fossil record that requires or substantiates such a process. Many examples commonly cited, such as the evolution of the horse family or of sabertooth "tigers," can be readily shown to have been unintentionally falsified and not to be really orthogenetic. All supposed examples are more simply and fully interpreted as due to some other cause, such as natural selection. The fossil record is now usually cited in support of orthogenesis mainly by those least familiar with that record."

See the differences? Randall has deleted the word "unintentionally", has mangled the word "orthogenetic", and has removed the quotes around "tigers". But more importantly, he doesn't even remotely understand what he is quoting. Simpson is not arguing against evolution at all; he is arguing against teleology and a predetermined direction to evolution.

To see this, we can turn to another quote of Simpson, from his 1964 book This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist:

"If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one. It is not the teacher's duty to point this out unnecessarily, but it is certainly his duty not to compromise the point."

Simpson had Randall's number 49 years ago.

Stop Homeopathic "Vaccines"

Here's a site set up by Bad Science Watch to stop the sale of bogus homeopathic vaccines. Please give them your support, especially if you live in Canada.

Doug Groothuis Demonstrates His Intellect Again

Everybody laughed when creationist Ray Comfort thought "bibliophile" was an insult. But it was hardly the stupidest thing said by a creationist this week. I nominate this gem from "Douglas Groothuis, Ph. D.".

I'm not sure which is funnier: that he thinks that a scientific theory could possibly be disproved by a "moral argument", or that he thinks that biologists believe that "various races of humans may be more evolved than other races".

Friday's Passport Moose

From longtime blog reader DS comes this moost excellent innovation in passport design: the flipbook moose.

I hope the government of Canada is listening. We don't want to be left behind.

A Missed Teachable Moment

I attended Jonathan Witt's talk on intelligent design last Thursday here at Waterloo.

Prof. Witt made many good points. He talked about the distinction between "hypothesis", "law", "fact", and "theory". Although he didn't quote Stephen Jay Gould, I think it is fair to say that he agreed with Gould's definition of "fact" as "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent". Prof. Witt pointed out that evolution is both a fact (in the sense that common descent is well-confirmed and organisms today are different from those in the past) and a theory (in the sense that we have explanatory mechanisms such as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift, to name a few, that explain how evolution took place). He also did a good job in exploding the silliness that is Behe's "irreducible complexity".

Prof. Witt did get some minor details wrong (like the old name of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, which is now simply called the Center for Science and Culture). I also had some quibbles about his assertions that religious claims are unfalsifiable. Clearly some religious claims have that character, like "faith alone saves". But when religions claim, for example, that intercessory prayer works, or that a wafer actually becomes the body of a person, or that a statue cries tears of real blood, these can be tested. Even claims about the afterlife, which might look unfalsifiable at first glance, can be addressed to some extent, based on our current understandings about the biological building blocks of living beings, and chemistry, and physics.

The most significant disagreement I have with Prof. Witt was during the question-and-answer period. A student told the story of a group of evangelists who, suffering hunger and poverty, prayed to the Christian god for food and dozens of fish jumped into the boat, enough to feed everyone. He asked, What did Prof. Witt make of this event? (It wasn't clear to me whether this was the Bible story or a claimed modern-day story.) Prof. Witt answered that "Correlation is not causation", which I think was a rather weak answer.

Here is how I would have answered. First, I strongly doubt that the claimed event took place. Reports of miracles are common, but experience tells us that upon closer examination, these "miracles" almost always were entirely made up, or were wildly exaggerated, or had prosaic explanations. Remember the miracle of the juniper bush?

Second, let's suppose the event really did take place as claimed. How uncommon was it? Heck if I know; maybe fish jump into boats all the time. One would have to estimate the probability of the event, and the number of people in boats who prayed for food.

Third, science doesn't do so well in explaining one-time anecdotes. If the claim is that prayer works, how can we test that? Well, there have been a number of tests of this claim for intercessory prayer, and the results are not too favorable to the hypothesis that prayer works.

If prayer did work in a more or less consistent basis (say, 1% of all prayers were answered), this would represent a currently-unaccountable regularity of the universe that we could study. How, exactly, does this answering work? What if you pray for X and I pray for not X? Does your probability of success increase if you pray more fervently, or more frequently, or if you get more people to pray at the same time? Or if you pray for reasonable things versus unreasonable things? All these can be tested.

Ultimately, I think Prof. Witt missed a teachable moment.

Why I Talk the Way I Do

Because I was born in Philadelphia, that's why.

Here a short radio piece about Philadelphia's unique sounds and how they are changing.

Paul Erdős Would Have Been 100

If Paul Erdős were still alive, he would have been 100 today.

I met Erdős for the first time in 1977, at a conference in number theory at Miami University, when I was an undergraduate. It was, if I remember right, my first scientific talk, and I spoke about my results on continued fractions with bounded partial quotients. Erdős was in the front row. I remember feeling crushed because in the middle of my talk, he fell asleep. But then, a few weeks later, I found a postcard in my university mailbox from him, asking for a reprint. What an honor it was for an undergraduate! I still have that card somewhere.

I must have seen Erdős speak in the years following that, but if so, I don't remember it very well. I think he spoke at Berkeley when I was a graduate student. My memory is that he was not a very good speaker. He would do things like say, "Let x be a real number" and then just write down "x" on the board. Then he'd say, "Let y be a power of x" and then just write down y on the board. Not the best way to express ideas! He also said something like "It's hard to be bold when you're old and cold and you fold."

But when I was a professor at Dartmouth College -- it must have been in 1989 or 1990 -- he came to spend a few days, and we talked about a problem on Pierce expansions that I was having trouble making progress on. In just a few minutes, he had an idea that he thought would reduce the upper bound in my problem to n^1/4. I went back to my apartment and thought about it a bit, only to discover that Erdős had made a mistake! His idea only reduced the bound to n^1/3. Nevertheless, it was a significant improvement. We put the result together with some other ideas and it was published in the Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux in 1991.

While he was visiting Dartmouth, I was assigned the task of picking him up from his hotel room and taking him to dinner. I remember when I picked him up, I washed my hands in his hotel bathroom, and was amazed by the number of pill bottles he had laid out. Apparently he was a bit of a hypochondriac, and he was also known to take speed to stay awake. This was also the first time I heard him call a child "epsilon", as he famously did.

I didn't have the chance to work with him ever again after that. Too bad! I would have loved the chance.

Doug Axe Doesn't Understand Information Theory

]

Here we have the Discovery Institute's favorite biologist, Doug Axe, demonstrating his ignorance of information theory:

"... So, really, you put all that together, we now understand something about digitally-encoded information in cells, encoded in the genome. We understand why it's there: to encode proteins. And we understand how the proteins function to do the chemistry of life. And we also have the ability to measure, to some degree, how much information is there. If you put all that together, we now see something that looks very much like human designs, where we use digitally-encoded information to accomplish things, and we know that it's impossible to get information on that scale through a chance process that Darwinism employed."

This is false. We don't "know" any such thing. Axe cannot point to a single paper in the peer-reviewed literature that correctly explains why one can't "get information on that scale through a chance process that Darwinism employed". This is just something that creationists repeat over and over again without real justification.

In fact, just the opposite is true. Ironically, I am lecturing about Kolmogorov's theory of information today in my class CS 462. In that class we show that it is, in fact, while it is possible to produce information through a deterministic process (for example, by iterating the map x → xx), it is even easier to produce as much information as you like through a random process -- precisely the opposite of what Axe is claiming.

"I remember thinking at the time that this looks like something, not just the product of engineering but the product of brilliant engineering. And that was the point where it occurred to me that someone needed to do the experiments to test whether that was really the case or not."

No experiment that Axe has done has tested the question of whether life occurs through the process of "brilliant engineering" or not. No one has a testable definition of "brilliant engineering" and no one has a procedure to test whether something is "brilliant engineering". Wes Elsberry and I gave eight challenges related to this kind of claim back in 2003. Ten years later, and not a single creationist has taken up our challenges.

We recognize human engineering because we are good at recognizing artifacts: the characteristic products of human activity.

"It's strange how your preconceptions really color the way you process data. And some people just went along with what they were taught, and I never tended to do that. I was always questioning what I was taught, including Darwinism."

And of course, creationists are miraculously free of preconceptions. That's what they're known for!

Here are a few other conventional ideas Axe has rejected:

1. It's not a great idea to publish your papers in a vanity journal where you yourself are the managing editor.
2. If you're a scientist, it's not a great career move to work for a "scientific" institute that gets most of its funding from the Discovery Institute --- a group with a documented history of misrepresentations, and driven by religious and political goals.
3. It's not a great idea to have your colleagues extol the brilliance of your work, especially when referring to papers that have received few, if any, citations.

But hey, just go right ahead and ignore those conventions. You're a questioner, right?

"If you believe that everything was cobbled together through random processes, then there would be a lot of junk, there'd be the residue of cobbling sitting there and that's why people jumped to this junk DNA hypothesis. They found out that a very small fraction of the genome actually encodes proteins --- that was the one aspect of genomes that we understood well, is that they encode proteins --- so they assumed all the rest of it is junk. Well, the truth is, we didn't know what the rest of it was doing, but that doesn't mean it's junk. And it's becoming increasing clear that it isn't junk, and that's a significant prediction. It's not a prediction that Darwin himself made, but it follows very readily and naturally from Darwinism, and it turns out not to be correct. And that's becoming increasingly clear."

Axe misrepresents the history. Junk certainly could arise from an evolutionary algorithm, but it need not. It's logically possible that junk could have such a high evolutionary cost that it would tend to be weeded out. Acceptance of junk DNA came from data, not just theory. If you maintain that there is little or no junk in the genome, you have to explain exactly why different species of Allium have such wildly different genome sizes.

Axe likes to claim that he questions everything. But he hasn't questioned the ENCODE claims, even though they've been widely criticized. I guess that's due to his miraculous lack of preconceptions.

Tom Bethell is Our Best Friend

I've written before about Tom Bethell, the completely clueless journalist who likes to write about evolution despite not understanding even the most basic things about it.

I really like Bethell. Why? Because, over and over again, he makes it completely clear how stupid and dishonest the creationist movement is. And the fact that Discovery Institute happily features his blathering can only be good for our side. What could be better than to see creationists discredit themselves so frequently?

Bethell's latest complaint? That evolution's "central claim" is "unlimited variation" and that this unlimited variation "has not yet been observed".

The first claim is simply false. Evolution is heritable change in a population over time. The theory of evolution describes the mechanisms (mutation, natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, founder effects, etc.) that explain how this change takes place. Speciation has been observed, so the usual creationist claims that evolution is limited to change "within species" have been thoroughly discredited.

But the funny part is Bethell's second claim: that unlimited variation has not yet been observed. What would it mean to observe unlimited variation? At what point could we put our foot down and say, "Hey, now we know that unlimited variation has finally been observed!"? The whole meaning of the word "unlimited" is that it is without bound. It's like alleging (incorrectly) that the central claim of cosmology is that the expansion of the universe goes on forever, and then saying "That endless expansion has not yet been observed!"

What we do see is evolution taking place today, and we have the fossil record that shows the changes in the past. You have to be particularly dense or dishonest to deny this.

Please, Tom, keep it up. You're our best friend.

Solution to the Plouffe Puzzle

Yesterday I posted the following puzzle from Simon Plouffe: why are there so many zeroes in the base-10 expansion of sqrt(51)/14 = 0.51010203061020 ... ?

Here's the answer. Let f(x) = (sqrt(1-4x²) + 2x - 1)/(2x - 4x²). Then it is not hard to see that f can be expanded as a power series
f(x) = 1 + x + 2x² + 3x³ + 6x⁴ + 10x⁵ + 20x⁶ + ...
where the coefficients are binom(n, floor(n/2)), the central binomial coefficients.
It now follows that
f(1/t)/t = 1/t + 1/t² + 2/t³ + 3/t⁴ + ...
= sqrt(t²/4 - 1)/(t-2) - 1/2.
When we substitute t = 100, we get
sqrt(51)/14 - 1/2 = 1/100 + 1/100² + 2/100³ + 3/100⁴ + ...
which explains the expansion we see.

We can get even more of the central binomial coefficients by taking t to be larger powers of 10. For example, for t = 1000, we get
sqrt(249999)/998 = 0.501001002003006010020035070126252462 ... .

A Puzzle from Simon Plouffe

Here is a fun puzzle from Simon Plouffe: consider the decimal expansion of sqrt(51)/14. It starts

0.51010203061020 ...

That seems like a lot of 0's at the beginning! Is it just a coincidence, or is there something deeper behind it?

Answer tomorrow.

"God and Reason" short course - Final Thoughts

The "God and Reason" short course given by four Christian professors at my university is now over. I was able to attend 7 of the 8 sessions. Here are my comments on the course and the talks:

• Initial announcement
• Week 1: "Doesn't science disprove Christianity?
  • More thoughts about Week 1
• Week 2: Does God exist?
• Week 3: The Problem of Pain
  • Week 3: After the course
• Week 4: Doesn't the church produce hypocrites and injustices?
• Week 5: Is the Bible reliable?
• Week 6: Who was Jesus?
• Week 7: Could there be just one true religion?
• Week 8: The next step

My colleague Jeff Orchard also blogged about the lectures. He attended all of them! Here are his accounts:

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6
• Week 7
• Week 8

Now that the course is over, here are some brief reactions.

Although the course was entitled "God and Reason", this was (as I guessed) a misnomer. Reason played very little role in what was presented, with the last presenter, John North, even disparaging reason as a tool for understanding the world. A much more representative title would have been "Why you should be a Christian" or (as the presenters sometimes called the course) "Christianity 101".

The course was largely evangelical in nature. There was not that much scholarly content. The usual evangelical claims were presented, and only rarely was there any acknowledgment that these claims were controversial or debated or (even, in some cases) largely abandoned by serious scholars. One claim, made by Prof. Matthews, that there are "85,000 quotations from or allusions to the NT in documents of early church fathers, 100-200 CE", seems very likely to be false. I raised this issue with Prof. Matthews but never received a response about it.

It was clear that much of the reason for being a Christian was based on emotion and culture, rather than reason.

By far the best talks were given by Robert Mann. This is probably, in part, because he has given a course covering some of the content of his lectures before, and also because I think he takes more seriously the objections of non-believers. He also had the best argument, which is the argument of "fine-tuning", although I don't find it very convincing.

It also didn't seem to me that the professors (with the exception of Robert Mann) were really interested in answering the challenging questions put forth by some in the audience. It seems we were more of an annoyance than offering a chance to explain some questionable point in Christian doctrine in more detail.

Not everybody seemed to agree with me. I saw some comments on Facebook that said things like "I love this course! It is the best one out of all of the courses I have taken so far at university because "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge"."

Overall, I would give this course a "C-", with some sessions (those of Robert Mann) getting an "B+".

How could the course be better? For one thing, I'd like to hear people who are really experts in the fields they address. Why no religion professor? Why no historian specializing in the middle East of Jesus' time?

Here's another idea. Guy Harrison has a new book out, entitled "50 Simple Questions for Every Christian". I haven't read the whole book yet, but there are significant excerpts on amazon and here, and it seems really good. I'd love to see a short course built around that book, where Christian academics do their best to answer the questions that skeptics usually ask. It would have been a lot more interesting than what was presented.