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The Barna Group has released a survey exploring the supernatural beliefs and practices of American teenagers.  Alarmingly, 73% of U.S. teens have "engaged in at least one type of psychic or witchcraft-related activity, beyond mere media exposure or horoscope usage," the most common of these activities included using a Ouija board or reading a book about witchcraft.  I'm not sure if Harry Potter counts.  Potter might have helped, though: One in twelve has tried to cast a magic spell or create a potion.  A quarter of teens have had their palm read and others have participated in seances, consulted mediums, or communicated with a dead person (so they claim).

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this study is discovery that such a large majority of the mosaic generation (currently ages 3-21) believes in the supernatural.  Many teens are unsure of the specifics of heaven, hell, angels and demons--but 82% believe each person is endowed with an eternal soul, and 71% hold to a Christian concept of God.  A majority even believe Satan is real, quite a controversial idea in our culture.  It seems most teens are drawn to the supernatural out of curiosity and "their desire to find out what works for them and what feels right."  Their views on the supernatural world are drawn from a variety of sources, whether family, friends, books, the internet, or television.  It's a sort of "If it works for me, it's okay," approach.

However, (this is me speaking now, not the report) consider this:  In a country where scientific naturalism has reigned for so many decades, in which the appeal to supernatural forces, beings, or concepts has been effectively rejected, in which the rationale for all decision-making for all of life has been reduced to cold, hard, empirical evidence, is it any wonder that they who find the system lacking rebel against it?  In America it is an intellectual taboo to invoke the supernatural--the ongoing war against ID and creationism is case in point--and while believing in God or Satan is all right for country bumpkins or church-going professionals who promise to keep their convictions locked in the closet, such an untenable view of reality would never be allowed to influence science, education, or (heaven forbid) public policy.  No wonder the mainstream is steadily suspicious of George W. Bush.

May I suggest that if the Church (meaning Christians in general) had done a better and more public job of preaching the Bible, and accepting reality as stated in the Bible, we wouldn't have gone so far over the edge of naturalism.  As it happened, the Church backed down on confronting evolution and the idea of God as a living, active being, along with the public declaration that the Bible is a historical record, describing events that actually occurred.  One benefit of The Passion of the Christ is that it woke people up to historical nature of the Gospel.  How about the supernatural?  Why did we have to wait until Harry Potter hit Hollywood for people to take a second look at metaphysics?

According the above Barna Report, only 28% of churched teenagers recalled receiving "any teaching at their church in the last year that helped to shape their views on the supernatural world."   I tell you, Christians should have beat Harry Potter and Gandalf to the punch.

There is a brand new experiment over at Nature.com.  Called the Nature Newsblog, it is a blog corresponding with news@nature.com, allowing readers to comment on Nature news stories as they are posted.

Hitch is, all comments are reviewed by an editor before being published.  Is this ethical?  Does this break an unspoken rule of the blogosphere?  What are the chances of publishing a comment if your views are contrary to what the editor wants?

At any rate, I tried my hand and commented on the ice core story, asking how ice core age dates are obtained, which the original news story didn't clarify.  We'll see.

The ancient "Chinese Columbus" map, (I talked about it here) purported to be a 1763 copy of a 1418 original, is being branded as a fake by many historians and map experts.  Antiquities collector Liu Gang said the map proved that Chinese explorer Zheng He discovered and charted the coasts of North and South America over 70 years before Columbus.  The map shows Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas, and even Antarctica. 

However, China is not centered on the map, as would be typical of 15th-century Chinese map.  Also, California appears as an island, just like on a certain French map from the 1600s.   Many historians think the "Chinese Columbus" map is a copy of the French one.

Zheng He led the imperial Star Fleet of China on several voyages from 1405 to 1433, but most believe he did not sail to the Americas. 

A new study shows that divorce will cut a person's wealth by 77%, while getting married approximately doubles wealth.  Married couples increase their wealth by about 4% per year, just by staying together.  "Divorce causes a decrease in wealth that is larger than just splitting a couple's assets in half," said Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State University, apparently the author of a paper in the Journal of Sociology that details the 15-year study.  "If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married."

Money isn't the main reason to get (and stay) married, but the above conclusions point to the perfection of God's plan for society:  Families based on marriage.  By living together and working in cooperation, a husband and wife generate more productivity than they could by themselves.  And as far as I can tell, more productivity means a stronger economy.  Families and money, the stuff of a great nation.

"It's a slap in the face to that kind of thinking," said a smug Martin Brazeau, referring to creationist and ID theory.  The "slap in the face" he refers to is the revolutionary idea that ears were once used for breathing, a very natural conclusion given evolutionary presuppositions.  The evidence for this incredible belief is the skull of an extinct Panderichthys fish, purported to be 370 million years old, which Brazeau and Per Ahlberg imagine to be a missing link between fish and tetrapods (four-limbed creatures).  Since the design of the Panderichthys skull bears similarities both to other fish and to skull features present in tetrapods, these two Uppsala University scientists postulate that a passageway that probably helped the fish breathe (called a "spiracle") evolved into ears in later land-dwellers.  This is an entertaining story, but hardly the "nail in the coffin of the creationist view," as Mark W. Westneat, associate curator of zoology at Chicago's Field Museum, describes it.  Creationism is not in a coffin, because it is not dead.

Creation-Evolution Headlines has also commented on this news item.

The NASA Stardust mission has been considered a huge success, since the returned tennis racket-sized collector seems to have obtained hundreds of specks of space dust--some visible to the naked eye.  "This exceeded all of our grandest expectations," said Dr. Donald Brownlee, the chief investigator for the Stardust project.  The mission has cost $212 million over 10 years, but was a "bargain considering the amount of knowledge it should provide about the origins of the solar system and Earth," according to the New York Times story that interviewed Dr. Brownlee.  "The way I like to look at it," says Brownlee, "it's the same cost as a well-paid baseball player over a 10-year period."  Except that baseball players bring in ticket sales, while NASA missions bring in taxes, for the purpose of proving cosmic evolution.

An intriguing Chinese map purportedly drawn in 1418 shows Australia and North and South America, and would seem to indicated that a Chinese explorer--such as Admiral Zheng He--discovered the Americas over 70 years before Columbus did.  Most historians are scoffing at this idea so far, but who knows?   Only a comparison of evidence is the fair way to debate.

9,000 to 13,000 man-made objects larger than four inches wide are currently orbiting the earth, but not all are for your cell phone.  Besides satellites, a lot of space debris is swirling around up there--leftover rocket bodies and other spacecraft parts that have been jettisoned in the course of numerous missions since 1957.  While these pieces seem few and far between in the expanse of space, even the smallest debris poses a threat, since they travel 22,000 miles per hour.  At that speed even a fleck of paint will leave a mark on a spacecraft.  A chuck of metal, then, could cause destruction.  While most space debris orbits at a further distance out than, say, the International Space Station, the amount of space junk is expected to triple in the next 200 years, substantially increasing the hazards of future missions.  Scientists are now wondering how to cheaply dispose of the debris, which must be done by shoving the objects into an earth-bound trajectory, where they will enter the atmosphere and burn up.  Since 1991, there have been three known collisions between space debris.

Tough Little Guys:  You'd be surprised how resilient a handful of dirt can be.  That is, if the dirt contains a nice assortment of bacteria.  Scientists gathered soil from several locations, identified strains of bacteria, and threw several natural and man-made antibiotics at them.  All were immune to one-third of the antibiotics, and a couple were resistant to over half.  This could be bad news for larger species, and for humans (especially drugmakers), who are constantly plagued by mutating bacteria that cause infections and resist the most powerful drugs on the market.  Yet if doctors knew about these soil bacteria before they had a chance to infect humans, they'd have an edge on the little suckers from the start. 

California caves have revealed 27 new species of spiders, centipedes, and pseudoscorpians.   When it comes to creepy critters, pictures are worth a thousand words, and these four pdf reports contain plenty:   First Progress Report  ~  Second Progress Report  ~  Third Progress Report  ~  Fourth Progress Report

 More creepy critters:  Giant jellyfish inundate Japan.

Finally, the Vatican Newspaper has denounced Intelligent Design, and committed a common offense by lumping the movement with creationism, the Biblical view of origins which GlobeLens upholds.  The newspaper also demonstrated the ignorance that normally accompanies ID critics, dismissing ID arguments (and in this case, creationist arguments) of irreducible complexity as "ideology."  The newpaper's position is apparently in contrast with the remark by Pope Benedict XVI that the origin of the universe was an "intelligent project."

Evolution itself is the true ideology.  ID proponents are now understanding what creationists have known and experienced all along:  That the battle of origins is a battle of worldview, upon which hang crucial questions like the existence of God, the existence of spirituality, the foundation of morality and law, and the prospect of life after death.  People get touchy about these things, whether or not the evidence before them is real.

"Oldcroghan man" and "Clonycavan man," two preserved male bodies found in Irish peat bogs, were unveiled to the public this month in Dublin.  Both were murdered before being thrown to their muddy grave, and were dated to be over 2,000 years old, according to radiocarbon dating.  Both are beautifully (to a scientist) preserved, and Clonycavan man wore imported hair gel--an ancient mix of vegetable oil and tree resin from pine trees found in Spain and France.  Theories of why the two men were killed range from human sacrifice to punishment for breaking cultural codes of honor.

 Benjamin Franklin was born 300 years ago today.

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled 6-3 in favor of Oregon's assisted suicide law, which allows doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminal patients who want to die.  Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority decision and included a not-so-subtle jab at former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who brought the challenge of the Oregon law to the Court, citing drug dealing laws.  "[The] authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and design," wrote Kennedy.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts voted in the minority.

 You can read what I think of suicide and euthanasia here.