07.Feb.2013 - DOCUMENTARIES: Godless, Shocking Unsolved Crimes, Global Warming, Almighty Dollar, Universe Season 1

GODLESS

This is not the same ‘Godless’ as the documentary made by Staise Gonzalez.  It’s a different piece with the same name.

A couple years ago, a Canadian film crew came to record our Fellowship of Free Thought meeting for a documentary on atheists.  We skipped Skepticon that year to be involved.  I didn’t feel it appropriate or necessary to be interviewed, but my wife did.  Until then, she had never spoken out as an atheist before.  At that time, she was afraid of being recognized by her faculty or students.  We were assured that this movie would only be seen in Canada.  Apparently some copyright condition must have just expired, because on the first day of this year, that video became available on YouTube.

One thing we didn’t know was that the film crew were Christians attempting to present atheism as a religion.  We’ve still never seen this film, only pieces of it.  I thought it was a shame that my wife gave such an eloquent and moving off-the-cuff interview, and almost all of it was edited away.

20 MOST SHOCKING UNSOLVED CRIMES

Some of the biggest unsolved crimes of recent memory are also some of the biggest stories of our time. The fact that no perpetrators were ever found, raises these cases to legendary status. Unsolved Crimes counts down the heists, disappearances, and murders that have captured public fascination for decades. Many of these stories have become the subjects of documentaries, others have become the focus of big budget films. The heists are sensational and the murders are sinister. The culprits may still be out there.

List of Crimes:
#20:(01:16) – Adam Walsh Murder
#19:(06:40) – Jam-Master Jay Murder
#18:(9:45) – Jason Allen and Lindsay Cutshall Murder
#17:(15:00) – Tylenol Poisoning
#16:(19:15) – Bobby Fuller Murder
#15:(22:35) – The Zodiac Killer
#14:(27:27) – Alexander Litvinenko Murder
#13:(31:42) – Vanessa Johnson Murder
#12:(36:06) – Amber Hagerman Murder
#11:(41:25) – Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Robbery
#10:(44:38) – George Allen Smith Murder
#9:(46:29) – Jacqueline Levitz
#8:(49:30) – Madeleine McCann
#7:(54:22) – Anthrax murders of 2001
#6:(58:56) – D.B Cooper
#5:(01:03:13) – Chandra Levy Murder
#4:(01:08:50) – Jimmy Hoffa
#3:(01:13:38) – The Black Dahlia
#2:(1:15:50) – JonBenet Ramsey
#1:(01:22:20) – Natalee Holloway

What You Need to Know About Global Warming

Global Warming is considered to be a serious environmental problem that predicts the incidence of mass migration, human extinction and other catastrophic events in the near future. This documentary aims to shed light on what global warming really is and how it can change the world we know today.

Majority of scientists believe that global warming is indeed real because of various physical evidences. Featured first were the ice fields of Patagonia, which is the largest expansive ice outside of Antartica. Glaciologists studying this area for decades narrate how most of the ice has melted since their last visit. In the last seven years, they have noted a 10% decrease in the mass of these ice formations. The same thing was also observed in Montana, United States and Alaska. Glaciers which have resided these areas for thousands of years have rapidly melted. Records show that of the 21 hottest years recorded in the history, 20 of them have occurred after 1980.

Climate has changed throughout the history for natural reasons. What experts fear is that a climate change in our lifetime will possibly be hundred times worst. Know more about the scientific evidences of global warming in the documentary.

THE MONEY FIX: THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR

Money is at the intersection of nearly every aspect of modern life. Most of us take the monetary system for granted, but it has a profound and largely misunderstood influence on our lives. The Money Fix is a feature-length documentary exploring our society’s relationship with the almighty dollar.

THE UNIVERSE: SEASON 1

The sky and outer space have fascinated man for centuries and the History Channel’s series The Universe is the story of man’s study of the cosmos from his earliest attempts to map and understand the heavens through modern day scientific studies, advances, and theories.

A mix of historical footage, modern space imaging, and conceptual computer graphics presented in high-definition, the visual component of this production is absolutely breathtaking. Each of the 14 44-minute episodes begins with a general introduction of subjects ranging from the sun to individual planets, alien galaxies, the search for extra-terrestrial life, and scientific theories like the Big Bang.

Each topic is then broken down into a series of segments that detail specific ideas, theories, or components integral to the understanding of the main topic as well as historical material, current studies and theories, and projections of potential future events and scientific advances.

1. Secrets of the Sun. How the sun was formed and how it could potentially die; its physical composition; how it makes energy; and the nature of solar eclipses, solar flares and sunspot activity.

2. Mars: The Red Planet. The planet most similar to Earth in our solar system; an examination of Olympus Mons the largest volcano in the solar system; how NASA probes search for evidence of past life on the red planet, and what that life might have looked like.

3. End of the Earth. The end of the world scenarios involving killer asteroid or comet impact events, solar flare and gamma-ray bursts, and the plans that scientists have to potentially save the Earth from an interstellar disaster.

4. Jupiter: The Giant Planet. The solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter; its formation and composition and its mini-solar system of over 60 moons – some of which may have the potential to support extraterrestrial life.

5. The Moon. The formation of the Moon; how it played a role in the evolution of life on Earth; and the future plans of NASA to establish a permanent base on the surface.

6. Spaceship Earth. The planet Earth; how it was born out of a chaotic shooting gallery during the formation of the solar system; how life could have began here; and what could ultimately cause its destruction.

7. Mercury and Venus: The Inner Planets. The two most hostile planets in the solar system – Mercury and Venus; one gouged with craters, the other a greenhouse cauldron of toxic gases and acid rain; both scorched by their close proximity to the sun. Scientists theorize about what sort of life could evolve on these alien worlds.

8. Saturn: Lord of the Rings. The planet Saturn and its fascinating rings; how they may have been created; how the latest probes have answered questions and revealed new mysteries about the planet, and how Saturn’s moon Titan may hold more resources of petroleum than Earth will ever need.

9. Alien Galaxies. The space through the amazing images of the Hubble Space Telescope; and a look at the formation of our galaxy and how it is just one of hundreds of billions in the universe.

10. Life and Death of a Star. How gravity causes hydrogen gas to coalesce under friction and pressure to ignite in a flash of nuclear fusion, the energy and glow lasting billions of years, and then the ultimate demise in the largest and most colorful explosions in the cosmos.

11. The Outer Planets. the solar system’s most distant worlds – Uranus, a gas giant with the most extreme axial tilt of any known planet and its wildly orbiting moon Triton; its near-twin Neptune and its moons; and finally, distant Pluto which orbits the sun every 248 years.

12. Most Dangerous Places. The most dangerous objects known in space – all consuming black holes, deadly gamma-ray bursts, powerful magnetars, and galactic collisions.

13. Search for E.T. Possible extraterrestrial life in the universe; the mission of organizations like SETI to find it, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life existing right in our own solar system on the moons of Europa and Titan.

14. Beyond the Big Bang. Back in time billions and billions of years to the origin of the Big Bang. Leading physicists and historians theorize what happened before the bang occurred, how the physical nature of the universe unfolded as energy became matter forming stars and galaxies, and how the universe continues to expand outward at an ever-accelerating rate.

The Atheist Cosmological Argument

by Adam Lee on February 16, 2012, 6:00 AM 

[REPRINT]

In my past writings, I've made it a hobby to call attention to potent, but often overlooked, reasons to believe that atheism is true. Two of these that I've written about are the argument from mind-brain unity and the argument from locality. In the last few months, I've come to realize that there's another powerful argument for atheism that doesn't get as much attention as it should, and I want to discuss it today.

As creationists have brought up ad nauseam, the Earth is very well suited for life like ours. And that's true, and not at all surprising to an atheist: in a natural universe, we'd expect that beings like us would exist only where natural laws permit us to exist. If we found ourselves in a place where the laws of physics weren't conducive to our continued existence, we'd have reason to suspect supernatural intervention.

Of course, to decide how likely our existence is, you also have to take the background probabilities into account. If the Earth was the only life-supporting planet in a very small universe, as the medieval cosmologies taught and expected, then we might well suspect that someone had rigged the circumstances in our favor. What we need, to have a planet well-suited for life in a godless universe, is a large quantity of chance resources - in other words, enough time and space, enough opportunities to get it right, that eventually it would be reasonable for our number to turn up in the cosmic lottery.

To put it another way: If there's no intelligent supernatural creator tweaking the laws of physics to create a life-friendly cosmos, there's only one other scenario we'd have any right to expect: a very old, vast, and chaotic universe, one where it's plausible that a planet like ours and living beings like us could come about by chance.

And guess what? As our scientific knowledge expands, we've found we live in a universe that's very old - 13.7 billion years, according to data like WMAP; that's very vast - we see billions of galaxies, and the full number may even be infinite; and that's highly chaotic - we observe stars of every possible size and variety, from red dwarfs to luminous blue supergiants; and the better our observational techniques become, the more we find that many of them have planetary systems, also of every kind and configuration. Some planets are icy and dark, orbiting very far from their parent stars; some are boiling cauldrons orbiting very close in. Some are rocky, some are gas giants, some may be completely covered with water, and some may even be solid diamond.

Out of this vast profusion of planets, it's entirely reasonable to expect that a rare few would have everything right: the right distance from their parent star, the right material composition, the right amount of liquid water, and all the other factors necessary for life to arise and thrive. We are the lucky ones, because we wouldn't be here if we weren't. Thus, the well-suitedness of our planet - compared to all the other planets that aren't - isn't an argument for theism, but a potent argument for atheism. The universe we live in is what we'd expect a godless universe to look like, or to put it another way, this hypothesis has superior explanatory power: atheism predicts a universe just like the one we see.

Although some religious believers have come up with post-hoc excuses for why God would have created a universe that was so vast, chaotic and mostly empty, the fact is that, before the truth was known, the major religions of the West all imagined small, human-centered cosmoses. (Granted, a few Eastern belief systems came closer to the truth.) And we shouldn't let them forget that. The universe we live in makes far more sense if there is no higher power, and that's a conclusion we can and should hammer on.

Image credit: HubbleSite