"China’s Openness no One-Way Alley" highlights a revealing and shameful situation: Most of those who pretend to support a larger role for science, secular politics, and society’s rational managing of existential threats like overpopulation, are not just silent, but outright dismissive about the very country where science, secularism, and rational sociology are taken most seriously.

Emergence, for example emergent gravity, implies a lower stratum from which something emerges. “Fundamental emergence” is the idea that all can or must be described as emergent, without however there being a full explanation of lower layers. A lowest fundamental layer may be inconsistent almost by definition (certainly if there is any "ontological commitment") and never more than what the emergence-description must assume. This is non-reductive, since the reduction into a lowest foundation, the resting on the bottom, works only because the bottom "hangs from the top", or better, the whole "floats".

A court in L'Aquila, Italia, on Monday handed six-year-prison sentences to members of a national "Great Risks Commission". Although science has still not yet the means of predicting earthquakes, the scientists nevertheless stated that

“It is unlikely that an earthquake like the one in 1703 could occur in the short term, …”

Six days later, the disaster struck and the L'Aquila 2009 earthquake killed over 300 people and left 1,500 injured.

Design, according to some, needs a designer. However, famous biologists and neo-Darwinists such as D. Dennett say that evolution “designs” by natural selection. If we accept that usage of the term, “design” does not by definition imply an intentional act (much like “the hand evolved in order to grasp” does not imply that evolution desires to achieve anything). If there are “blind watchmakers” who do “design”, then the following question is scientific:

Can we possibly, for example by investigating the designed “creation”, distinguish an intelligent designer, one that did have intentions, from an aimless design process like algorithmic evolution?

As pointed out recently, a new type of creationism has entered popular discourse through the backdoor. That was mostly about computer geeks and physicists trying to outperform "old atheists" in fashionable, gadgety ways, thus unwittingly bringing God back in. But there is another form of implicit denial of evolution worth mentioning, and it is similar in that it is again mostly done by “progressives”, atheists and humanists who claim to defend science, especially evolution!