Fans de Waal is a crucial figure in the research into morality, fairness, reciprocal altruism and suchlike within the realm…
I love this picture:
Recently, Andreas Schueler and myself have been having a debate about abortion, particularly with regards to the context of spontaneous natural abortion. The idea came out of my post God Loves Abortion. Apologist JW Wartick, on his own blog, concluded this:
(RNS) Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., the only openly atheist member of Congress, lost his race for another term on Tuesday (Nov. 6).
But nonbelievers will not remain unrepresented in the Capitol. Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, a former Arizona state senator, Mormon-turned-nontheist and a bisexual, has narrowly won her pitch for a House seat by 2,000 votes.
Why, indeed, do normal people believe ridiculous things? We have heard much from John Loftus about the OTF – the Outsider Test for Faith – which essentially illustrates that religion is a (geographical) accident of birth. It claims that if believers used the same critical powers they use to assess, and dismiss, other religions and their claims, then they are obliged to turn those critical faculties on their own. If they did, John would claim, then they would surely end up dismissing the claims of their own religion (this is a simplistic view of the OTF, no doubt).
What is interesting to me here is not so much the fact that people do special plead their own religion in this way (though that is incredibly interesting and important in itself), but how this comes about. I will put forward a theory which is fairly well accepted anecdotally, and see what you think. I will use an example which I experienced the other night which should show the theory with clarity
Some good news, courtesy of James McNair at City Beat. The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., created quite an uproar…
Here is an excellent set of analysis of the demographics of the voters in the US Presidential Election 2012 from the BBC. What I found fascinating is the religious vote not being quite what I expected, though I would like to see results for evangelicals and fundamentalists.
It’s a weird situation that speaks volumes when you are more scared about a political party and their leader getting into power in a foreign country than you are in who does get in in your own country!
Now that Sandy has exacted a steep toll in lives and property, the question is unavoidable: why do so many people in America refuse to take climate science seriously?
Rick Santorum at the RNC, in August 2012: the former presidential candidate has voiced Christian Dominionist ideas. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Reuters
I am not assuming that Sandy was the direct consequence of human-caused climate change. But with this fresh evidence of the impact of climate issues on real people, how is it possible for anyone to think that thousands of scientists around the world are engaged in an elaborate hoax?
The standard reply is that some powerful organizations – above all, in the fossil fuel industry – think that they can benefit from misleading the public, and have funded a successful disinformation campaign. There is a lot of truth to this answer, but it isn’t the whole truth.
I recently came across Gregg Caruso’s book Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will. Gregg dropped me a line after coming across my blog and we got chatting. I have not read this book yet, but it seems to ally itself pretty strongly with my first book, Free Will?. Below is a review by Andrei A. Buckareff of Marist College. The book is aimed at academics in the field, but seems accessible to anyone with a working knowledge of the free will discipline. I said I’d post the review for him. Check it out:
Here is my latest video offering to the world of You Tube. Let me know what you think.
Partly in response to some feedback, and partly because it is about time, I thought I’d post a philosophical essay of mine looking at epistemology. Here, I hope to set out how I come by knowledge. Let me know what you think, as ever.
In the context of all of the claims made by Republicans about rape, this video is rather amusing (though about…
In one of my recent posts about the Nativity, JohnM has been defending a particular harmonisation of a biblical difference.…
There is a problem in the world of philosophy (only one?) dealing with the subject of science known as the demarcation problem: what counts as science, what is good or bad science, and what is pseudoscience? Generally there is agreement that there is no fine line between science and pseudoscience, though there are clear examples of both. But what features can we look for to know which is which and avoid the bad?
I was wondering today, as I lay there with one of my twins in my arms, as to whether oughts can be derived from a natural pre-programmed’ behaviour. For example, if an evolved characteristic, such as aggressiveness in males (I am generalising here, of course) or to want to eat meat, or, if it could be proven, that it were ‘natural’ to be heterosexual was inherent in a human, are we then obliged in some way to act in accordance with that ‘natural’ inclination?
In the same way that evolution improves organisms’ fitness for survival in their environment through performance, feedback and revision, at ATP we would like some feedback to make any necessary revisions. So far our performance here seems to have done just fine with a growing readership and some lively commenting. However, it is hard to know from the inside, sometimes, whether one is hitting the mark or not.
Recently, I have featured Frank Turner on a couple of posts, mainly due to his rousing hymn to atheism, Glory Hallelujah. See the embedded video where Frank is playing at London’s Wembley Arena. It’s incredible to think that some 12,000 people are singing the words “there is no God” in unison. I really advise you listen to the video even though it is not great quality and is recorded on a mobile phone. It is truly rousing!
Dear GOP candidates and party members,
I’m going to give you some free campaign advice: stop talking about rape.
The latest Republican rape commentary comes from Romney-endorsed Indiana senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock, who tells us:
“I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
Cue outrage, then cue “apology” from Mourdock – not for his comments, but for “any interpretation other than what I intended”. National Republican senatorial committee chairman John Cornyn voiced his support for Mourdock and added that he also believes “life is a gift from God.”
I have been reading the first chapter of Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish recently and it really struck me again how strong, persuasive nay indomitable, the predictive powers of evolution are. The simple idea that a paleontologist can think that the first fish fossils were found at time A and the first limbed land animal fossils were found at time C, and so to find the transitional fossils for animals in between fish and limbed land animals should be found at time B (in this case, the late Devonian period). But this is already dependent upon the prediction that the fish should transform over time to limbed land animals.
I thought I’d re-post this thread from when I was regularly contributing to John’s original Debunking Christianity blog. See what you think:
I was recently talking, an a thread or two, about the historical implausibility of pretty much all of the claims in both Luke and Matthew with regards to the infancy accounts of Jesus’ birth.
The situation is this. I maintain that, to hold to the notion that the accounts are historical, one has to jump through hoops. However, the Christian might say that one or two claims in the accounts may be false, but that does not mean that the other claims are false. But in this approach lie many issues. For example:
1) If we accept that some claims in the accounts are false, does the Christian special plead that the other claims are true?
2) The claims are so interconnected that to falsify one or two of them means that the house of cards comes tumbling down.
3) If we establish that at least some of the claims are false, how does this affect other claims within the same Gospel? How can we know that claims of Jesus’ miracles are true given that the reliability of the writer is accepted as questionable?
And so on.