Skeptic’s Summer Camp
Monday, August 11th, 2008
All Things Considered recently ran a feature on Camp Inquiry, a summer camp where the the main activity is not rounds of cumbaya but actual philosophical inquiry into the likelihood that there is a higher power. I'm all for it.
Thanks to skepchick.org for the link.
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Thanks to skepchick.org for the link.
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Religious Censorship: Muslim Threats Prevent Publication of “Jewel of Medina”
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
Thanks to the panicky reactions of University of Texas professor Denise Spellberg, outrage about a novel depicting the life of Mohammed's child bride Aisha has led Random House to nix its publication. I'm so pleased to see that Texas can now claim to be home to idiotic religious zealots of more than one stripe.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal today, Spellberg was asked to read the book for a possible endorsement. But:
As reported in the Wall Street Journal today, Spellberg was asked to read the book for a possible endorsement. But:
But Ms. Spellberg wasn't a fan of Ms. Jones's book. On April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a… Read More
Fine-Tuning Questioned Empirically
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
One of the more interesting arguments for the existence of God claims that our universe is "finely tuned" so that life will emerge. In other words, with only slight variations in the physical constants the universe could not bear life, and the best way to explain the aptness of this universe is that the constants were set by an entity that wished for life to emerge. There are problems with the argument, of course, but the basic empirical premise is usually accepted--that the conditions under which a universe would bear life are rare. An interesting result to be published in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, however, questions… Read More
Dawkins and Weinberg on God
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
Dawkins can certainly get tiresome, but this conversation with Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg (at the University of Texas, by the way) is quite good. It provides the simple reason why design and fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God, even on their best days, get you nowhere.
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