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

In a series of feature articles prominently displayed on the Answers in Genesis (AiG) website, Creationist Ken Ham seems to promote a point of view that can best be described as postmodern relativism. In an article on searching for silver bullets, Ham writes: “[U]ltimately, the [evolution versus creation] argument is about how you interpret the … Ken Ham: Postmodern Relativist?

Take a look at this poem by Nazim Hikmet, On Living. It loses something in being translated from the original Turkish, but there’s enough of an echo here of what is one of my favorite poems that I have to recommend it. And it’s a very secular view of life, just to make it relevant … On Living

The New York Times issues yet another in a series of found-another-planet-out-there articles that have been steadily coming in from astronomers around the world. In this case, the team reports that the new planet is the “the most Earthlike planet yet to be discovered.” It seems that it’s just a matter of time before we … Aliens Are Coming