thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
I have a growing interest in neuroscience. I wouldn’t like to poke around in brains with probes, still less dissect a brain. But I’m finding so much that is fascinating and helpful in the latest findings of neuroscience. One of the interesting researchers is Andrew Newberg, who I’ve briefly written about before, and who researches […]
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. […]
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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
Are we alone in the cosmos? Or are there other, perhaps many other, intelligent life forms out there? An associated question is whether earth is unique, or whether there are many other planets that could support life. This is a scientific question, but also has importance (for some people) for the question of the existence […]