thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
July 22nd, 2014
I’m not sure how seriously I take this story, but it is interesting – attempting to measure something intangible. How certain are writers about what they say about God and ethics? And how open-minded do they think they are? So I hope it’s worth a look.
July 15th, 2014
It’s a common theme of atheist critiques of religion: religion causes war and mass killing. And yet the historical evidence shows something different.
July 11th, 2014
I expect discussions between christians and atheists to get edgy at times. We are talking about important matters and the two ‘sides’ are poles apart. But some responses seem extreme, even to people on the same side.
June 29th, 2014
I find statistics on religion to be interesting, and helpful in understanding what is going on in the world. In previous posts I have outlined: The major religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) are growing in numbers worldwide, but (Religion statistics), but only Islam and Pentecostal Christianity are growing in percentage terms. Almost half of […]
June 21st, 2014
Last post I discussed The science of universal fine-tuning, a topic that is much argued over these days. Of course we know one of the reasons behind the arguments is that the science of fine tuning forms a basis for an argument for the existence of God. So the stakes are high for both theists […]
June 14th, 2014
Graphs of cosmological variables, with life-permitting regions shown in white. From The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life by Luke Barnes. Don’t worry – you don’t have to understand these graphs to understand this post! Recently I was a participant in a discussion on the science of fine-tuning, on Howie’s blog, Truth is Elusive. […]
June 8th, 2014
Eva, a fellow Aussie who blogs as The Aspirational Agnostic asked me to write a guest post, and so I tried something different – three short, short stories under the title There is love. You may like to check it out.
June 7th, 2014
Human beings have a wide variety of beliefs and opinions on almost any subject you can imagine. This is just as true for the ‘big’ topics of God, religion, ethics, politics and purpose in life. And most of us like to think we are ‘right’ – we have the truth, and others don’t. But we […]
May 29th, 2014
Why do you believe what you do – about religion, politics, ethics or life itself? Many sceptics about religion are evidentialists, that is, they believe we should proportion our belief according to the evidence. Different disciplines (e.g. law, science, history, journalism and everyday life) require different types of evidence, but the principle seems reasonable. But […]
May 21st, 2014
I’ve been blogging for about 8 years and discussing the existence of God for even longer. From that experience, it is clear the christians are generally pretty sure that God exists, and atheists even surer that she doesn’t. Genuine agnostics are much thinner on the ground. The strange thing is, each side believes they have […]
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.