Monthly Archives: April 2012

This time it’s christians taking offense (and getting support from the legal system in India) at the”blasphemy” of revealing the actual mechanism behind a purported “miracle”. And yet

Robert Reich’s ‘Thoughts on Tax Day 2012’ is worth noting if only for its reminder of two famous quotes. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.(1904): “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” Louis Brandeis (1897):  “we may have a democracy … Continue reading →

Byron Jennings of TRIUMF has a blog at Quantum Diaries where his latest post challenges the Intelligent Design crowd to actually make some kind of testable prediction. An alternative to making predictions, though, is just to declare the opposition in default for … Continue reading →

British Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks claims to know The Limits of Secularism, but he seems to be confusing secularism with science rather than just considering it as freedom from religion. The two essential roles that he reserves for religion are … Continue reading →

Law professor Stanley Fish probably knows quite a bit about evidence, but from his recent article with the above title I am led to doubt that he really understands much about science. In particular, his main point appears to be … Continue reading →

Philosophers seem to always be worried about not being taken seriously as providers of answers to important questions. But Philosophy Is Not a Science and so it is foolish of them to expect that kind of respect. They do not … Continue reading →

I guess it’s at least a way of generating traffic for The Chronicle Review and those who have written books and articles on the subject, but I don’t know if there’s anything really new being said – either in those … Continue reading →

What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions is collected by Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, and John S Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts has The Knight’s Song, or What is a Theory? My own take is … Continue reading →

William M. Briggs » Good Friday: Rally For Reason With St Anselm’s Ontological Argument believes that one can “come to religion through rational argument”. Of course, if one admits a wrong argument expressed in a superficially rational-looking form as a … Continue reading →