I think there are very few people now who don’t realise that climate change is happening, the world is indeed heating up, and this is causing some serious problems that will only get worse. So this report card on 2015 can be brief.
thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
January 24th, 2016
I think there are very few people now who don’t realise that climate change is happening, the world is indeed heating up, and this is causing some serious problems that will only get worse. So this report card on 2015 can be brief.
January 17th, 2016
Andy Gosler is an ornithologist at Oxford University who specialises in bird ecology and ethno-ornithology (how people relate to birds). He is a christian, but didn’t start out life with any belief. An adult convert, it was, strangely, evolution and wildlife conservation that led him to faith. Here is how that happened.
January 11th, 2016
Expect some changes in this website soon. I want to update the design, mostly to make it better suited for viewing on mobiles (more than a third of my visits now) and to make it more stable and easier for me to manage. There’ll be disruption for quite a while as I gradually update and […]
January 2nd, 2016
Food for Thought I sometimes get into discussions on the web where the subject of prayer, healing and the existence of God come up. Distressingly, they too often seem to take a similar course.
December 24th, 2015
Food for Thought It is easy for human beings to become set in our thinking, quite satisfied that we know the truth about some matter, and therefore quite unwilling to change, or even consider other ideas. We can become quite “tribal” about our viewpoints, and defend even small differences quite vigorously. It can be as […]
December 13th, 2015
I’m more or less a musical Philistine so I don’t listen to much classical music. But last weekend I went along to the Sydney Opera House to listen to a performance of Handel’s Messiah. It was an excellent afternoon.
December 6th, 2015
Terrorism is on many people’s minds at the moment, and many connect it with religion. Several years ago I wrote a page on this website about religion and terrorism, and it is one of the pages I have had to update most often, because of new understandings. I have just updated it again, with new […]
November 25th, 2015
Science and history are both complex disciplines that require significant knowledge and skills to do well. A research scientist has to have a good theoretical background in their branch of science, keep up with others working in his or her field, probably have a good working understanding of mathematics and statistics and be able to […]
November 17th, 2015
I’m not sure if I was a normal boy, but I always loved maps. So one of my favourite books was the Oxford University World Atlas. I loved it because of the diversity of its maps – it even included details on the solar system (I loved astronomy too!) and the exploration of Australia by […]
November 4th, 2015
The purpose of science and philosophy is to explain difficult facts. If our current philosophy or science cannot explain some facts, we consider a new hypothesis or vary the current hypothesis. But one aspect of reality is proving impossible to reconcile with current science and philosophy, which creates tensions.
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.