I’ve been following developments in the cognitive psychology of religion over the past few years. I think they’re very interesting, and obligatory reading for anyone seriously interested in questions concerning the truth of supernatural and paranormal claims. I’ve come across a few accessible articles lately that are good introductions: Paul Bloom’s “Is God an Accident?” … Cognitive Psychology of Religion

Speaking as a physicist, I think our biggest problem in science is being boring. Easily 95% of what we publish is ho-hum stuff, perhaps interesting to a handful of fellow experts in a sub-sub-subspecialty, but almost no one else. My own work has been no exception. But as a physicist who is interested in religious … *&^%$#@! Philosophers…

I’d really like to know how some science-related myths enter the public consciousness, sort of like urban legends. There is a lot that concerns physics and religion that, whenever I run across them, I have to wonder how people come up with this stuff. And when I was browsing through an interview recently, I ran … Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, God

It’s a couple of days old now, but it’s rare that I find an op-ed piece that I can so wholeheartedly agree with, so I urge everyone to look at Matthew Parris’s comment in The Times. I realize that the whole Muslim-outrage-over-cartoon situation is more complicated than a matter of free speech versus fanaticism. Still, … Taking Offense

Paul Manata, in a comment on the post about Dan the agnostic who claims there aren’t really atheists, linked to a paper he wrote arguing for a similar conclusion. The position he takes in that paper, following Greg Bahnsen, is that atheists really do believe in God–everyone does–but that they have a second-order belief about … An empirical test of the existence of sensus divinitatis in atheists

Recently, Free Inquiry magazine had a very interesting “symposium in print” on the question, Secularism — Will it Survive? The affirmative answers seemed more like pious hopes to me, I have to say. And the thought I have given the question since has led me in an increasingly negative direction. I think secularism is moribund. … Secularism is Dying

Richard Carrier brought the following to my attention: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/15/12016/649

The cartoon crisis keeps growing, with Muslim protests and threats (and minor acts) of violence worldwide. (See the cartoons.) Ordinary Muslims are, by and large, playing to stereotypes — behaving like easily insulted fanatics. Muslim intellectuals writing in British newspapers are also doing their usual thing — blaming it all on Western racism and exclusion, … Muslims are even more outraged

Environment-concerned members of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals had been hoping for the group to issue a statement on the dangers of global warming and the need to address the issue, but the chances of this were torpedoed “after NAE President Ted Haggard received a sternly written letter from 22 Bush-friendly evangelical leaders, including … Evangelicals fail to speak out on climate change issue