thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
My friend Gordon is an atheist and a reader of this blog. Recently in a comment on a previous post, he made the above comment. It is still holiday time, I’m a nerd, and I enjoy a challenge, so I wondered whether I could analyse the science, and the belief. People with dedicated serious minds […]
The Daily Telegraph in Sydney has been mounting an extensive disinformation campaign on climate change for years now. The tactic is simple, and apparently effective, if not truthful – latch onto any isolated “fact” that seems to show some evidence of a cool world, ignore all the facts, evidence and reports to the contrary, and […]
It’s almost Christmas, so it’s a good time for a look at something interesting but not so serious. What was the star that the wise men followed to lead them to where the baby Jesus was in Bethlehem?
I have commented before about the “atheist-christian wars“, and how courtesy and common sense sometimes seem to be the victims. I think it is likely to get worse before it gets better.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms “faith” in the dignity and worth of the human person and declares all humans are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Is this true, or is it just a legal fiction?
“Confirmation bias …. is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way …. [or] interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.” (Wikipedia) Atheists often accuse christians of confirmation bias, […]
In recent decades, cosmologists have investigated the ‘fine-tuning’ of a number of physical laws and values that determine the structure and nature of our universe. It appears that these parameters have to be very carefully selected for our universe to survive and for intelligent life to evolve. This scientific conclusions has been used to argue […]
David Sloane Wilson has long been a critic of Richard Dawkins for having unscientific views about religion (and other things). He criticised him again in When Richard Dawkins Is Not An Evolutionist, but it is another of his comments I am more interested in. One of the things Wilson says he and Dawkins agree on […]
I am a great fan of the Science on religion blog and website. I have gained much insight and information, and not a few blog topics, from these sites. I’ve bookmarked dozens of topics, some of them a little obscure, and I think it is time to introduce you to some oddities.
We all like to think we are thoughtful, rational people. In our modern scientific world, it has become an ideal. To label someone as ‘irrational’ is a severe insult. But have we taken this ideal a little too far?