I am reposting this in response to the terror attacks in France last night, resulting in the deaths of over one hundred people. As ever, the internet is awash with right-wing shouts to “kill all Muslims” and refugees, to the left-wing shouts that it is the Imperial West to blame and not Islam or Muslims. Neither of these positions are correct. It is obviously thoroughly complex, indeed involving international politics. However, to deny the Qu’ran, Muhammad and the Hadith causal responsibility in these atrocities is to deny the self-determination of those very terrorists who claim that they are doing these actions in the name of Islam and their god.
Energy Secretary Ed Davey is to make an unprecedented attack later on climate change sceptics.
In a speech, the Lib Dem minister will complain that right-wing newspapers are undermining science for political ends.
He is set to accuses climate sceptics of nimbyism, publicity-seeking, and “blinkered… bloody-mindedness”.
I have been kindly asked to give a talk to the Dorset Humanists next month, They seemed to enjoy my last few talks so much as to want me to create a talk to deliver. I am gratefully obliging.
I will be looking at arguments for and against God, starting off with the wide deistic arguments from philosophy, and then narrowing down to particular arguments concerning the historicity and probability of the Judeo-Christian God. Here is something I am working on with regards to the ridiculousness of the Exodus account.
Those who founded the Republic in 1923 might well be turning in their graves: their vision of Turkey as a strictly secularist and nationalist state – not just a separation of state and religion, but also the removal of religion from all aspects of public life – is being questioned.
In the lead-up to the 89th anniversary of the Turkish Republic on 29 October, political values have never been more openly debated, thanks to a public consultation process, initiated by Turkey’s parliament, for a new constitution.
A multi-national team of researchers has identified genetic markers that predict educational attainment by pooling data from more than 125,000 individuals in the United States, Australia, and 13 western European countries.
I used to be all about music. I lived for music. I went to hundreds of gigs and festivals. And…
Randal Rauser, with whom I have had a radio debate about the Nativity, is running a series on his blog asking atheists why they are atheist (or not Christian). He has asked several atheist bloggers and authors, including myself, to produce a paragraph. Justin Schieber, Counter Apologist and Ed Babinski did a little more than that, so I added a tiny bit extra to mine, but it still remained more concise than theirs! See what you think – it is hard to be super concise:
George Pell says, “I have always been on the side of the victims.” But the archbishop of Sydney has a funny way of expressing his support.
During an inquiry this week into what the Herald Sun describes as “rampant” child sexual abuse by priests going back decades, Pell admitted, “We’ve been slow to address the anguish of the victims and dealt with it very imperfectly.” He acknowledged that his predecessor, Sir Frank Little, “did cover up” sex abuse and that former Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns knew of accusations and destroyed documents and moved suspects to other parishes, actions that were“followed by disastrous consequences.”
The video embedded below was sent to me by someone with whom I am in contact with in my work with the Transition Network which is a n organisation that seeks to mobilise local communities to move from oil dependence to a more sustainable future given the idea of Peak Oil. For those who don’t know, Peak Oil is the undeniable fact described as:
This is Part 3 of a critical examination of the MMEL hypothesis of the Star of Bethlehem. Go to the index here.
So far in this critical appraisal of the MMEL hypothesis, there has not been much attention paid to the actual theory of what the Star of Bethlehem was other than to say it deals with conjunctions of Jupiter and Venus in the years 3 and 2 BCE. While already it is falsified as an explanation of Matthew’s account since it takes place after the death of Herod the Great (see Part 1 & Part 2), I shall not ignore what possible astronomical or astrological explanations are here. Perhaps they can explain the Star in another way (including helping create the narrative based on a back-calculation rather than an authentic historical tradition), or the conjunctions of another type can be related to what the Magi were interested in.
This is a superb article from Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution Is True about the work being done building on and improving upon the Benjamin Libet experiments which I have talked about before online and in my book. Thanks you so much to Jerry who has allowed me to repost his article. Please, please check out his excellent blog.
So a British soldier was stabbed to death in public, the atrocity being caught and shared on social media. They stayed around to be arrested, not afraid of the consequences, and this is the scary thing. Now there is a widespread Muslim backlash. To make matters worse, the government has admitted that “thousands are at risk of radicalisation” in the UK.
So what do we do to unite society? What do we do to make it more inclusive and less exclusive? How do we break the in-group / out-group psychology which fuels the fires of societal discontent and fear? How to we pull down the walls of separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’?
So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of…
New Scientist has started a new feature series on people with bizarre and rare mind / brain disorders and predicaments. This article looks at Cotard’s syndrome. What is fascinating about this article and syndrome is the interplay between brain, consciousness and self-awareness. That these conscious states arise from brian patterns:
“When I was in hospital I kept on telling them that the tablets weren’t going to do me any good ’cause my brain was dead. I lost my sense of smell and taste. I didn’t need to eat, or speak, or do anything. I ended up spending time in the graveyard because that was the closest I could get to death.”
Two episodes of Skepticule have become available with my counter-apologetics segment, called Pearced Off.
The first episode (44) features my piece on free will as an incoherent gift from God, which can be found here. My segment starts at 29.10.
This is an excellent piece from a blog I came across through a post on facebook (H/T Sergio Paulo Sider,…
Chris Hallquist’s blog The Incredible Halq is the first reputable blog that I have seen which has so seriously gone to…
Science Daily – May 24, 2013 — A new study by archaeologists at the University of York challenges evolutionary theories behind the development of our earliest ancestors from tree dwelling quadrupeds to upright bipeds capable of walking and scrambling.
The researchers say our upright gait may have its origins in the rugged landscape of East and South Africa which was shaped during the Pliocene epoch by volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates.
So I am arguing in many different forums at the moment about free will, and in particular, about whether Libertarian Free Will (LFW) is compatible with the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
i define LFW here as the ability to choose otherwise. That means I invoke the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. This means that given a particular situation (CC1), I could choose A or B, and if we rewound time to CC1, and given that everything would remain the same in CC1 (ceteris paribus), then the agent could somehow choose differently, invoking a freedom of the will.
The new leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, has been making plenty of news since taking over in March. Not only is it the case that he may have exorcised demons in public very recently (very old school), but now he seems to have blessed the infidels (not-so old school).
In his Wednesday sermon, he stated the following:
I was posting on Randal Rauser’s blog recently and made a throw away comment about the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) and libertarian free will. It is an argument which have meant to spell out for some time and so I guess this is as good a time as any.