Tag Archives: Atheist

News

New study on tidal heating strengthens stellar habitability argument

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Circumstellar Habitable Zone
Circumstellar Habitable Zone

Note: If you need a refresher on the habitability argument, click here.

Here’s an article entitled “Tidal heating shrinks the ‘goldilocks zone’: Overlooked factor suggests fewer habitable planets than thought”. It appeared in Nature, the most prestigious peer-reviewed science journal.

The gist of it is that tidal forces can alter orbits so that planets don’t spend all of their orbit in the habitable zone. If planets go outside the habitable zone, it damages their supply of liquid water, and any life chemistry going on in there is disrupted.

Excerpt:

A previously little-considered heating effect could shrink estimates of the habitable zone of the Milky Way’s most numerous class of stars — ‘M’ or red dwarfs — by up to one half, says Rory Barnes, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. That factor — gravitational heating via tides — suggests a menagerie of previously undreamt-of planets, on which tidal heating is a major source of internal heat. Barnes presented the work yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division on Dynamical Astronomy in Timberline Lodge, Oregon.

The habitable zone is the orbital region close enough to a star for a planet to have liquid water, but not so close that all of the water evaporates. For our Sun, the zone extends roughly from the inner edge of the orbit of Mars to the outer edge of that of Venus. For smaller, cooler stars, such as M-class dwarfs, the zone can be considerably closer to the star than Mercury is to the Sun. And because close-in planets are easier to spot than more distant ones, such stars have been a major target for planet hunters seeking Earth-like worlds.

There’s just one problem with finding habitable planets around such stars, says Barnes. Because tidal forces vary dramatically with the distance between a planet and its star, closer orbits also result in massively larger tidal forces.

Since planets do not have perfectly circular orbits, these tidal forces cause the planet to flex and unflex each time it moves closer to or further from its star; kneading its interior to produce massive quantities of frictional heat. Substantial heat can be produced, he added, with even slight deviations from a perfectly circular orbit. And, Barnes notes, other factors — such as the rate of the planet’s rotation and its axial tilt — can also influence heat production.

A similar tidal process makes Jupiter’s moon Io the most volcanic body in the Solar System. “I’m just scaling that Io–Jupiter system up by a factor of 1,000 in mass,” Barnes said at the meeting. “It’s the same process, on steroids.”

So, stars that are smaller and cooler will have a habitable zone that is closer to the star, exposing them to more tidal forces. More tidal forces makes their orbits less likely to stay circular – within the habitable zone around the star. These variations cause an increase in heat production on the planet. Too much heat means that the planet is unable to support liquid water on the surface, making it inhospitable for life. Therefore, solar systems with less massive stars can be ruled out as possible sites for life, because of these tidal forces.

News

Obama administration abandons Chinese pro-life activist Chen Guangcheng

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Life Site News writes about a pro-life activist in communist China who asked for help from the American government and was betrayed by them.

Excerpt:

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who has suffered years of imprisonment and beatings for objecting to forced abortions and sterilizations in his native country, thought he could find shelter and friendship in the United States embassy following his recent escape from house arrest. He is now learning the hard way that the pro-abortion Obama administration, which helps to finance the same “one-child policy” that Chen is fighting, would rather see him disappear.

Chen’s presence in the embassy during the past week was little more than a dangerous irritant for Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The main goal of the agency has long been the promotion and protection of American commercial interests abroad, and “human rights” often provide useful cover for criticizing regimes that are recalcitrant in the face of American economic pressure. The Chen affair, however, only threatens an amicable and highly profitable relationship between the U.S. and China, and presents no “upside” for the American bottom line.

Worse for Chen is his uncomfortable and embarrassing opposition to China’s population control agenda, a policy supported by the Obama administration and in particular the State Department, which is spendingtens of billions of dollars on such programs worldwide. Although the administration gives lip-service against coercive abortion and sterilization, it is simultaneously helping to finance the Chinese population control machine with tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which helps to administer China’s brutal one-child policy.

Perhaps that is why, according to Chen, his American “hosts” started to sound more like fellow-members of the international population-control mafia that is killing his country, than starry-eyed defenders of “human rights.”

Chen, who says he felt pressured to leave the embassy, adds that he finally decided to do so when American officials informed him that if didn’t, his wife would be beaten by vengeful Chinese officials. Embassy personnel deny the claim, although they admit that they let Chen know that his wife would be taken back to the residence where the couple had been beaten many times.

I’m not surprised that the Democrats would not support Chen. Recall that Obama appointed John Holdren – a supporter of forced abortions and sterilizations – as his “Science Czar”.

What kinds of things might Chen be protesting? Well how about this forced abortion of a nine month old unborn child?

Excerpt:

A chilling photograph circulating in China shows the body of a 9-months-gestation baby submerged in a bucket of water, apparently a victim of the country’s one-child policy.

Digital Journal reports that the photograph, in which the head and arm of a child can be seen underwater in a large red bucket on the floor, was posted to the Chinese web services company Baidu before it was circulated on Weibo, the country’s version of Twitter, last week.

The abortion appears to have taken place on March 26 after Chinese family planning police in the town of Moshan hunted down the family because the couple already had one child.

According to English reports regarding the original post, the pregnant mother was forcibly held down as she was given an injection to induce labor, after which the baby “even gave a cry when it came out,” but was left in a bucket to drown.

In response to the photo, Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, which opposes China’s one-child policy, confirmed that late-term abortions and infanticide are common means of enforcing China’s one-child population rule.

“These violent procedures can happen up to the ninth month of pregnancy,” Littlejohn told LifeSiteNews.com. “Sometimes the women themselves die along with their full term babies. Forced abortion is China’s war against women.  It is official government rape.”

“Late term babies are injected with poison in their skulls or drowned in buckets,” she continued. “If the Chinese Communist Party wants to be a respected member of the international community, it must stop forced abortion and infanticide.”

[…]Littlejohn pointed out that the abortion allegedly took place in Linyi, the same city where forced-abortion opponent and human rights activist Chen Guangcheng still languishes under house arrest.

That’s the kind of thing that goes on in communist China. Communism, you’ll recall, is an economic theory based on materialism and atheism.

Podcasts

Are moral values and moral duties rationally grounded in atheism?

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Brian Auten posted the audio a few milliseconds after the debate concluded!

Here is the MP3 file.

Sean’s case is similar to the one I make, but he only has 3 minimal requirements for morality.

First, he explains the difference between objective and subjective truth claims, and points out that statements of a moral nature are meaningless unless morality is objective. Then he states 3 things that are needed in order to ground objective morality.

  1. an objective moral standard
  2. free will
  3. objective moral value of humans

The question of the foundations of morality is without a doubt the easiest issue for beginning apologists to discuss with their neighbor. If you’re new, then you need to at least listen to his opening speech. He’s an excellent speaker, and his rebuttals are very, very smooth. The citations of atheist philosophers like Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, e.g. – to show that “religious” wars had nothing to do with religion, really hurt his opponent. He seems to cite prominent atheists like Thomas Nagel, Richard Taylor, Michael Shermer, etc., constantly in order to get support for his assertions. That took preparation. I can’t believe that McDowell is this calm in a debate situation.

When I listen to Frank Turek, he seems to struggle in his rebuttals. McDowell sounds like he foreknew exactly what his opponent would say and pre-wrote responses. He even had powerpoint slides made in advance for his rebuttals! I am not making this up – Corbett even remarked on it.

For those of you who want to understand how these things work, listen to the debate. There is a period of cross-examination if you like that sort of thing. I do!