gies of the folks in Andersonville, the historic site has become a major tourist attraction. The Park includes rolling acres of similar gravestones, testifying silently to the thousands who perished under awful conditions. There also one can see markers indicating the extent of grounds once covered by the rotting hell that was the prison camp. A small, granite building covers the only, and inadequate, source of water, which served the teeming crowds that once swarmed over the now silent, green hills. Nearby, the Park Service has rebuilt the main gate to the prison. At another corner of the prison's one-time wooden wall, the Service has reconstructed that wall, with its guard tower; below the wall are recreations of prisoner "accommodations" (i.e., ragged tents). Nearby is the relatively new, National Prisoner of War Museum, which, while not focused on the Civil War alone, has become a major attraction in its own right. ...more

February 15, 2009

The goal of science is not to prove or disprove the existence of God. Science is not a religious belief. Just as psychology is a discipline that explores the workings of the human brain, science is a discipline that seeks to understand and explain the processes of the physical world. Evolution explains, in very specific physical terms, how living things change through time (for example, how does bacteria become resistant to antibiotics? How did jungle fowl become domesticated chickens?) Thousands of sophisticated scientific tests have been used to study evolution and the evidence is overwhelming. When preeminent biologists disagree, it's not the existence of evolution they question. They simply disagree about the specifics of how certain adaptations occurred. These questions are an integral part of the scientific process. ...more

February 16, 2008