thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
May 2nd, 2016
Bithi started work in a Bangladeshi clothing factory when she was 12. Abject poverty and a sick father forced Bithi’s family to send the two oldest daughters to the garment factories to sew designer clothes sold mainly in North America. It was either that, or watch the girls slowly starve. Now 15, Bithi helps create […]
April 22nd, 2016
For millennia people have prayed to God, or the gods, for healing. No-one really knew if people were truly healed as a result, and there wasn’t really any way to check. But in recent decades medical scientists have tried to test whether prayer assists healing or can change the course of a disease or injury. […]
April 13th, 2016
Christians believe that God is the most powerful being imaginable, and yet we can’t see him, and many people say there is nothing tangible to show he’s there at all. But has God left any clues for us to read?
April 7th, 2016
Evidence and conflict resolution It is no secret that believers and unbelievers argue a lot on the internet. But it is helpful to consider the nature of the disagreement. Experts on conflict resolution have identified a number of different sources of conflict, one of which is a “data conflict”, that is, a disagreement about the […]
March 27th, 2016
I was reading my favourite atheist blog recently when I saw a commenter make an argument against the resurrection that went something like this: There are natural explanations of the resurrection (e.g. “It is possible that grave robbers stole the body of Jesus [and] …. that the alleged post-death appearances of Jesus were simply vivid […]
March 17th, 2016
I have been interested in astronomy and cosmology since I was a boy, and in recent years have done a bit of reading on the science of universal fine-tuning, and the philosophical questions that the science brings to our attention. Various cosmologists have written on the subject – Martin Rees and Paul Davies are two […]
March 6th, 2016
I started my previous post with the observation that the internet is full of discussions between believers and unbelievers, and not all of them are civil, respectful and constructive.
February 26th, 2016
Arguing about the existence of God seems to be a major part of the internet. But I wonder how much it achieves.
February 16th, 2016
I have always found astronomy and cosmology fascinating since I was a boy, and so I follow several science blogs. Recently two of them published interesting blog posts on probability and Bayes Theorem. Even if you’re not much interested in maths, I think there’s plenty worth looking at in these posts.
February 6th, 2016
We all have different experiences of life and form different views about everything we think about. We bring these perspectives to different questions and challenges we are confronted with – our thinking is, the psychologists tell us, more subjective than we’d like to believe. These presuppositions and biases can’t help but affect our conclusions. Different […]
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.