thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
June 1st, 2012
I have previously reported on the ethical dilemmas posed by eating chocolate, due to the trafficking and exploitation of children in growing cocoa in West Africa (see My pleasure, their misery? and Easter eggs and slavery), and on the responses to my letters to chocolate manufacturers (see Fair Trade chocolate – report 1). I have […]
May 28th, 2012
Not so very long ago, many internet critics of christianity were pointing out that there was no archaeological evidence of settlements at Bethlehem and Nazareth in the first century. This demonstrates, they said, despite the fact that few scholars agreed with them, that these towns didn’t exist, and that therefore the Bible accounts are not […]
May 24th, 2012
In the nineteenth century, some writers (not generally qualified historians) argued that Jesus didn’t actually exist, and the gospels stories are legends. These views were generally discredited in the twentieth century as historians developed better methods of analysing ancient historical information. But the movement began a resurgence in the latter part of the twentieth century, […]
May 17th, 2012
Michael Ruse is a philosopher specialising in the philosophy of science, especially biology and evolution. He is an atheist, but one with more respect for religious belief than many prominent atheists today. Ruse has some interesting things to say about science, belief in God and his more militant atheist colleagues.
May 9th, 2012
I’ve been discussing with atheists and other non-believers on the internet for about 6 years now, and patterns start to emerge. One pattern relates to the evidence required to believe in God. Generally, atheists say that beliefs should be based on evidence, and nothing else. Yet I see approaches to evidence that don’t conform to […]
April 26th, 2012
From time to time I hear people say that the New Testament has been significantly changed since it was first written, so we cannot have any confidence in we are reading. Who knows if it is an accurate reflection of what the original authors wrote? Eminent scholar Bart Ehrman’s 2005 book Misquoting Jesus suggests “how […]
April 23rd, 2012
Atheists sometimes characterise christians as people who believe in myths and magic, based on faith, which is the opposite of reason. I think this can be shown to generally be a mis-characterisation (see Is faith the opposite of reason? and Science, faith and certainty). But what if the tables were turned? What if many atheists […]
April 15th, 2012
I came across another story of an apparently miraculous healing the other day. But can I believe it really happened and it was really a miracle? How can we avoid both naive gullibility and closed-minded scepticism? Does it really matter?
April 5th, 2012
I have come across on the internet many atheists who were once christians. With church attendance dropping in most western countries, it may seem like changes in belief are all one way. But statistics show otherwise – that there are almost as many people changing from atheism to belief in God as are going the […]
March 29th, 2012
Many modern atheists oppose the teaching of religion to children. Richard Dawkins has famously said that teaching religion to children is a form of child abuse. In 2004 he wrote: “Isn’t it a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?”. And in […]
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.