thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
I have been doing a little reading on DNA, evolution and human history, and the implications of the latest science for christian belief (see DNA, genes and human history). The questions of what do we class as “human”, when the first humans appeared, and how many there were, pose some interesting challenges.
The rise of a more assertive and public brand of atheism is a phenomenon of the last couple of decades. One feature of the so-called “new atheism” is its strong anti-religion stance. Not content to live and let live, many high profile atheists, and their internet followers, vehemently oppose religion, believing it is responsible for […]
People trafficking is the coercive trade of human beings to provide cheap or free labour – effectively slavery. It is happening around the world, and leaves millions of powerless people in misery.
It’s more or less a stereotype, especially in the US: christians are thought to be anti-science. Except the evidence apparently says something different.
Readers will know that courtesy in discussions between believers and unbelievers is something dear to my heart (see, for example, Atheists vs christians: does it have to be war? So when Matt, who has a blog titled Confessions Of A (former) Young Earth Creationist, asked me to write a post on Conversing with atheists and […]
This website has been online, in one form or another, for almost 7 years. In that time it has mostly been about evidence and reasons for believing in the God of christianity. My idea was to offer readers food for thought from a reasonably fair-minded viewpoint. But I haven’t indicated what people might do with […]
It has been long established by research that religious observance provides a number of health and wellbeing benefits, including a higher level of happiness. But why is this so?
We all know that the number of committed religious people is dropping in most western countries (see, e.g. Who believes in God?). And it’s not too hard to find stories on the internet of people who were brought up religious, but now disbelieve. It may be less well known that, at the same time, a […]
The late Christopher Hitchens famously wrote that religion poisons everything. One aspect of this sort of conclusion is the claim that religious people do more harm than good. As Stephen Weinberg once said: With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that […]
I’ve long thought that one of the reasons for believing in God is the fact that without God, it is hard to make sense of ethics and human freewill. But here’s an atheist (and a philosopher) who turns a lot of things on their head – he agrees it is hard to make sense of […]