I’m fortunate to often run into students whose interests in physics go beyond what they encounter in class, and who might even develop their interests in philosophical directions. Anyway, one of my previous students has apparently been taking the ambitions of physics to describe everything very seriously, and has been worrying about the classic free … Compatibilism

On his blog, R. Joseph Hoffmann published an essay by Stephanie Louise Fisher which, among other things, argues that Bayes’s theorem (hereafter, BT) is irrelevant to historical scholarship. In her words, BT is “completely inappropriate for, and unrelated to historical occurrence and therefore irrelevant for application to historical texts.” Really? Whenever a historian argues that such-and-such an … Is Bayes’s Theorem Irrelevant to History?

This was in the Manchester Guardian last February: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/12/new-anti-science-assault-us-schools Like movie monsters who keep getting killed but keep coming back for more (and more tedious) sequels, anti-science activism keeps rising from the crypt. No surprise here. This is truly the unending story. What does surprise me a bit is that it apparently took so long … The Unending Story

A poster put out by one of the Islamist political parties in Turkey. On top of the image of people turned to stone, with hints of Sodom and Gomorrah, the slogans are “Criminalize adultery” and “Homosexuality is immorality.” They may eventually get their way as well. There’s considerable public support for enforcing religious morality through … Criminalizing sex

Check this out: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pastor-sean-harris-beat-gay-children-sermon_n_1474510?ref=gay-voices Typical. Whenever an extremist is called out for making violent and hateful remarks, the response is always the same: “Just kidding. Hah hah. I was only using hyperbole to make a point.” OK, well, I guess sauce for the goose… I think a 320 pound, heavily tattooed, leather-clad gay biker should … THE HYPERBOLE EXCUSE

You have to wonder about American liberals, as represented by the Democratic party. Their foreign policy difference from Republicans is that they claim to be even better at slaughtering Muslims and erasing civil liberties. Their economic difference is that their version of neoliberalism tilts more toward certain Wall Street factions and Silicon Valley, rather than … Liberal pseudoscience

These days I often run into the notion that in the US, demographics is on the side of nonbelief. The excessive politicization of the Religious Right has turned off the poor, minorities, and the young. The new generation of “millennials” or whatever is less identified with organized religion. So if we just ride out this … Demographics on our side?

Since earlier I mentioned the trouble Fazıl Say, a famous Turkish pianist, has run into due to his open atheism, here’s an update. Apparently he has decided Turkey has become too intolerant of religious dissent, and that he would live in exile in Japan. (Where, let’s face it, a classical pianist will be much better … Fazıl Say to exile himself; Turkish “secularism”

My interview with Nelson Brooke for ThinkAtheist is now available: The talk ranged over a number of issues–really more on philosophy of science than anything else.