I’ll be in St Louis on October 22, speaking at a “Skeptics in the Pub” event. It’ll be about Islam and science, particularly Muslim creationism. It should be interesting.

Ibn Warraq, the well-known critic of Islam and author and editor of books such as Why I Am Not A Muslim, has left the Center for Inquiry to join the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative Washington DC think tank. [Thanks to David Harding for pointing this out to me.] There is an interesting … Neoconservatism and critics of Islam

Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim“A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say … American Ignorance

One way of understanding “science” is that it is concerned with the discovery and verification of facts. But, what is a “fact”? The word “fact” has different meanings or shades of meaning, depending on what it is that we are contrasting with “fact”. One important distinction is that of fact vs. theory. D. Fact vs. … A Scientific Question? Part 10

Turkey recently had a referendum on constitutional changes, in which the ruling party enjoyed a crushing victory. The Western press, to the extent it paid attention, was preoccupied with questions such as whether this was a victory for democracy, and whether it was a victory for Islamism. The answer to both is yes. Western powers … Another loss for Turkish secularism

In Part II of The Coherence of Theism (revised edition), Richard Swinburne discusses the idea of a “contingent God”. This is because the characteristic of “necessary being” makes it so that, according to Swinburne, the concept of “God” cannot be defined in ordinary and non-stretched words. So, in Part II, Swinburne sets aside the property … The Sentence “God exists” – Part 4

The discussion on “The X that created the universe” raised some interesting points, especially the exchange between Ted Drange and Dianelos Georgoudis on consciousness. There were two points of disagreement: (1) Whether, and in what way, consciousness is a problem for physicalism and (2) whether theism has a problem explaining consciousness. Dianelos and other advocates … The “Hard Problem,” Physicalism, and Theism

Video footage of a Dawkins speech to a crowd of around 10,000 at the Protest the Pope rally in London: H/T: Why Evolution is True

My “retirement notice” from philosophy of religion posted a couple of weeks ago has drawn an amazing and entirely unexpected amount of comment on Prosblogion, the Leiter Report, Debunking Christianity, and Dangerous Idea. My! I’ve gone viral! Seriously, I thought that maybe a dozen people would be interested in my decision, and since most of … “Retirement” Responses

The Kalam cosmological argument includes this bit of reasoning: 1. The universe began to exist.2. If the universe began to exist, then something (other than the universe) caused the universe to begin to exist.Therefore,3. Something (other than the universe) caused the universe to begin to exist.This reasoning seems fine to me. The universe did not … The X that Caused the Universe