Keep checking the full blog all day for a number of great material on evolution I have tracked down (with a lot of invaluable and much appreciated help from my Facebook friends!) as we celebrate Darwin’s discovery which changed the world! You just might find something for the creationist in your life. If you know [...]
The following is a repost from December 24, 2010: One often hears the refrain that it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution. And it is in fact true, both psychologically and, more importantly, logically, that one may both believe in God and in evolution. Psychologically we have ample evidence that plenty of people [...]
This is another, meditative Sunday afternoon song, each of I’ve lifted from either this post or its comments section). This one though is not satirical and should be genuinely amenable to the more sophisticated theist (or pantheist or other believer in a philosopher’s god of some sort), who wants more God in her view of [...]
It’s Sunday! Gather round all ye atheists to join in singing a god-free hymn about the maker of all things bright and beautiful: Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo. Your Thoughts?
The first, and most interesting, claim: “Nothing will ever prove that evolution is wrong.” Second, and second most interesting, claim: “Nothing can prove the existence of gods, not one thing.” Third, and third most interesting, claim: that all this entails not closed-mindedness but pragmatism. Fourth, and fourth most interesting, claim: atheism is more than what [...]
Greg Laden gives the thumbs up to Sheril Kirshenbaum’s new book The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us and sums up some fascinating takeaways about kissing: Kissing is not a human universal. Not all cultures do this. The history of kissing is complex and interesting, to the extent that we know about it. [...]
One often hears the refrain that it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution. And it is in fact true, both psychologically and, more importantly, logically, that one may both believe in God and in evolution. Psychologically we have ample evidence that plenty of people believe in both and logically it is clear that [...]
The great Qualia Soup is back, with a video explaining the problems with the anti-evolution arguments which rely on the idea of irreducible complexity. Your Thoughts?
In reply to my post a week ago on the incoherence of saying that we relied upon God, or at least religion, in order to either discover or verify what was good and evil, Clergy Guy asks: Daniel, do you have some thoughts on defining good and evil apart from religion? How do we/should we [...]
Eugenie Scott on both the stagnation and the devolution of creationism since the time of Darwin: Your Thoughts?
Nature is amazing: Deep sea microbe populations are evolving in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, helping to digest the oil that continues to contaminate the Gulf of Mexico, according to a study published today (August 24) on the ScienceExpress website. The findings provide tantalizing clues that the ocean is evolving in a way that will [...]
4 years old, but evergreen: Your Thoughts?
I love a long story whose point doesn’t cinch until the very last three words at the very end. Don’t skip ahead!!! Your Thoughts?
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study this February revealed that less than one fifth of all American adults under 30 report regular church attendance. But they still also overwhelmingly claim belief in God. Tom Rees thinks that despite their beliefs, their abandonment of the pews may indicate that a multi-generational secularization [...]
While I agree with, and vigorously defend, the notion that there is an important difference between lacking a belief in gods (as an agnostic atheist) and believing there are no gods (as a gnostic atheist), I also think that atheists should not, based on the best available scientific evidence and philosophical arguments, merely lack belief [...]
Jerry Coyne explains why the proposed idea of a single pair of original human ancestors is refuted by what we know of our evolutionary ancestry: Over at the Templeton-funded BioLogos website there has been a lot of discussion about the historicity of Adam and Eve. This is a problem because scripture claims these two were [...]
Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]
Shermer does TED and explains how two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired traits, useful for survival, backfire on us: Your Thoughts?
Yesterday I replied to Mary Midgley’s article out this weekend, which claimed that evolutionary theory does not refute Genesis since Genesis was not meant to be a literal description of how God made the world. In reply I revisted remarks and videos that I posted last fall which overviewed the ways that even if we [...]
Mary Midgley argues that only the views of fundamentalist literalists are refuted by the fact of evolution: Appeals to evolution are only damaging to biblical literalism. Certainly the events described inGenesis 1 are not literally compatible with what science (from long before Darwin’s day) tells us about the antiquity of the Earth. But this is not [...]
A panel of Richard Dawkins, Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio, Professor Patrick McGorry, Steve Fielding, and Julie Bishop discusses psychology and religion. The reaction to the creationism of the Australian parliamentarian from the audience is heartening. Your Thoughts?
Jason Rosenhouse reads from the Jeffery Sheler’s 2006 book about Wheaton College, Believers: A Journey into Evangelical America: “We do believe that God created the universe, and that Adam and Eve were the first humans,” [Dorothy Chappell, dean of natural and social sciences] said. “But we are agnostic as to how God did it.” In practical terms, [...]