thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
February 7th, 2012
In a recent talk, Richard Dawkins spoke about education, atheism and intelligence. His comments are interesting.
February 2nd, 2012
Christians and other theists sometimes argue for God’s existence based on facts about the universe that science cannot explain, or has not yet explained. But non-believers sometimes accuse these arguments of being fallacious, because they use ‘God of the Gaps’ reasoning. Is this a problem?
January 23rd, 2012
A week or two back I posted on scientist Jerry Coyne’s discussion of free will (Jerry Coyne: why we don’t have free will) I have just come across a discussion of Coyne’s views on former academic philosopher Bill Vallicella’s blog, Maverick Philosopher. It’s pretty strongly critical, but worth reading.
January 9th, 2012
One of the enjoyable things about writing a blog is the things you learn when researching a topic. I have read a little on the big bang and the fundamental laws that underpin our universe and I agree with the suggestion that the universe didn’t get the way it is by chance. But in preparing […]
January 6th, 2012
Jerry Coyne is a Professor of biology at the University of Chicago, probably best known for his book Why evolution is true. In a recent column in USA Today, he presents the case for the unpalatable reality that our apparent ability to freely make choices is in fact an illusion. The column raises some interesting […]
January 1st, 2012
There is an old argument, used for example by CS Lewis, that Jesus claimed to be divine, something a good and sane person would not do. Therefore Jesus must either have not been good, or not sane, or he was indeed divine. But the argument depends on Jesus actually claiming to be divine, which critics […]
December 26th, 2011
Tom Chivers is a journalist for the Telegraph newspaper in the UK, and an atheist. He has written recently about God and Jesus in a refreshingly honest way.
December 25th, 2011
Back in November I reported on exploitation in the world cocoa trade in My pleasure, their misery?. At that time I wrote about this to two prominent chocolate manufacturers. I subsequently reported (Fair Trade chocolate – report 1) that I had received a reply from Cadbury indicating their ongoing support for Fair Trade products. I […]
December 18th, 2011
Using philosophical arguments in an attempt to prove the existence of God has a long tradition. Not long ago, these arguments had fallen a little out of favour as non-believers thought they proved nothing and believers often felt they didn’t need to prove anything. But interest in them has grown in recent times, as christian […]
December 14th, 2011
One of the occupational hazards of blogging is spam comments. You’d expect them to be from the usual sleazy suspects, but more often they’re from small businesses selling laptop batteries, obscure medicinals, and search engine optimisation, etc, hoping they’ll get a link from my site to theirs. Many have a very generic comment praising the […]
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.