Dr. Jim West has implicitly claimed that because evolutionists often defend the theory of evolution so passionately and vociferously (or as he puts it, with “religious zeal”), then that must mean that evolution is “doctrine” 1. (his post title: If It’s Not A Doctrine, Why Are People So Defensive?).
I hear this argument all the time, in [...]

C. L. Hanson over at Letters From a Broad: The Adventures of a Friendly Ex-Mormon Atheist Mom Living in France Switzerland (I love that title) has composed the 98th biweekly edition of Carnival of the Godless, a blog carnival containing a myriad links to thoughts on atheism or tangentially related topics. This edition is particularly [...]

Transhumanism, to quote Wikipedia is
“a term often used as a synonym for “human enhancement“, is an international, intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and overcome what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, [...]

Update: This essay can now be found on the NPR “This I Believe” website.
Recently, I wrote an essay for This I Believe, an NPR radio series that asks Americans to answer this simple question. My essay has not yet been reviewed; however I doubt my chances of getting selected on the radio program. It is [...]

I’ve recently been reading “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a nineteenth-century Russian novelist, and I came across the following quote:
“Remember always, young man… that science which has become a great power in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of [...]

Update: 8/2/2008 – I wrote this stuff many years ago – please note, that modern quantum machanics seems to support the idea that true randomness does in fact exist, which renders all possibility of a deterministic Universe impossible. I am still not so certain that I believe that deterministic laws do not underlie the apparent [...]