50 Renowned Academics on God

The title kind of says it all. The following video shows excerpts from presentations, lectures, interviews and debates in which world-leading intellectuals (scientists and philosophers mainly, including various Nobel Laureates) speak on their thoughts concerning the existence of God or the supernatural.And as you might be able to predict, intellectual sophistication and education is normally inversely proportional to religious belief :)The speakers,...

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Lecture 5 - Knowledge (Epistemology)

Ever since Wittgenstein and his theory of family resemblance, philosophers have mainly abandoned the attempt to define concepts in terms of their "necessary and sufficient conditions" originally made famous by none other than Socrates. Still, the attempt is great practice in critical and creative thinking, and it can be incredibly helpful in illustrating what it is precisely that we mean when we deploy certain words in our discourse.Now, one of the...

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Journey Through Canyons Time Lapse

About a year ago I went on a trip through various canyons in the Utah/Arizona area, and while my own feelings about that trip have gotten murky and confused over the past year (due to personal reasons), one thing that can't be denied is the sublime experience of the beautiful and the awesome (in the classical sense) when you get to see some of these incredible places.So, when I came across the time lapse photography in the following video, I couldn't...

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Michael Sandel on The Colbert Report

Questions of right and wrong confront us all the time and from all directions. Unfortunately, most of us are not equipped with the necessary philosophical background to think about them consistently, systematically and with a view to their logical implications.Luckily, Professor Michael Sandel from Harvard University has an entire course (which we have already featured in its entirety) devoted to thinking philosophically about everyday moral issues.But...

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God: Wrong for America, Wrong for Your Penis

I recently reported on the absolutely bananas congregation sponsored by Texas governor Rick Perry. Very quickly, the idea is that a bunch of Christians "leaders" intent on running the country are basically aware that they have no idea how to do it, so their plan is just to ask God to help out. That's what I call leadership: give me the money, pray for someone else to magically fix the problems.But as Stephen Colbert makes clear, having Yahweh as...

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Belief in Evolution versus National Wealth

I have no idea how many of you follow items I share but don't actually post as entries on this blog, so it just occurred to me that you may not have seen the following picture (from Calamities of Nature), which represents a disturbing picture concerning our place in the intersection between financial wealth and sophistication in biological science :(And if you do want to keep up with interesting and funny articles and other bits I share, you can...

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Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan

Political philosophy is tough business. One of its aims, for instance, is to understand how to balance the interests and rights of individual citizens with those of the state of which they are a part. Another has to do with figuring out the basis for the legitimacy of the state, as well as its limits. Even if we just stopped there, I'm sure you can see how difficult such endeavors must be.Interestingly, much of our modern way of looking at questions...

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Final Countdown

With the final launch of the Atlantis Space Shuttle two weeks ago and its (hopefully) safe return this Tuesday, we witnessed the end of an important era for NASA. Unfortunately, given the economic crisis and budgetary cuts, things aren't looking too hot for the near future, and that ought to worry us.There is no denying that the scientific advances made by the space program have been invaluable simply in terms of what we've managed to learn about...

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson - The God of the Gaps

There are many reasons why lots of otherwise reasonable people don't 'believe' in the theory of evolution. Yes, some of it has to do with their religious background and with a lack of basic education concerning science generally and evolution specifically, but that can't be the whole story.Part of it also has to do with the way our minds work. For instance, we have a natural tendency to think teleologically (in terms of goals, purposes and design)...

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Right-Wing Fundamentalists Go Bat Shit Insane!

This is the kind of thing you have to see and hear to believe because otherwise it just sounds like someone got high on some powerful drugs and tried to make up a crazy story: the religious 'leaders' summoned to Rick Perry's prayer rally are a series of Hitler-loving homophobic racists, a series of walking contradictions trapped in cognitive biases, poured over pain-inducing logical fallacies, hidden inside paranoid conspiracy theories, stuffed with...

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Immigrants for Sale

One of the problems with a free market is that when the market is the ultimate decider of values (and doesn't have to answer to anyone), it always decides on the side of profits, regardless of the ethical impact such choices might entail. And when profit is the ultimate goal, even human beings become a mere commodity to be exploited...Of course, most of us are protected by the Bill of Rights, but undocumented immigrants usually have no knowledge...

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Peter Singer vs. Don Marquis - Abortion Debate

Outside of philosophical circles, I'm sorry to say, arguments concerning the issue of abortion, for and against it, usually take place within the context of strong emotional prejudices rather than with the aim to develop a deeper understanding of the issue (not to say anything about the constant conflation of the moral with the legal question). Both sides frame the issue in convenient sound-bites: the sanctity of human life on the one side, and women's...

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I can haz shufistac8ed theolujee?

Look out Pastafarians! LOLCats can haz cheezburger, and Ceiling Cat 2?Awgooments For Ceiling CatThees awgooments ar in ur computer, teechin ur mind bout teh Ceiling Cat. They ar gud. i iz kwl!!!!!!!!!1Felinopik PrinsipulTeh howse is jus riet for us kittehs. Is not too cowd or too hot. Is jus niec an warm an cuddlee. Teh hoomins gif us fud wen we ask an scrach us wen we mew qyoot. We gets to slepe anywhar an teh hoomins even gif us warm piels of cleen...

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Richard Feynman - Cargo Cult Science

There is no denying that Richard Feynman was an eccentric genius, even by eccentric genius standards. It is just a cold fact of life that most of us will never be quite that creative or productive. Still, that doesn't mean that we couldn't train ourselves to be more like him. To begin with, a substantial percentage of what made him stood out was his refusal to just accept any proposition given to him as obviously true. It doesn't matter if we're...

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The Unluckiest (and Cutest) Man in the World

Hey dear readers, I won't be around for a couple of days, so there may be no entries until next week. In the meantime, though, you've got to get a load of this:Imagine that your name is Tsutomu Yamaguchi: you live in, let's say Japan around 1945, and then one day in August you go on a little business trip to Hiroshima. Yeah, you can imagine what happens next. Not good.But here's where the story gets interesting: probably thinking "holy shit, I'd...

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Everything and Nothing - Nothing

The idea of a vacuum, nothingness or the void has troubled Western thinkers since at least the time of Parmenides. The problem started as a logical puzzle: how could nothingness, something non-existent by definition, be?This rejection of the very possibility of nothingness is captured in the famous medieval dictum ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing), used among other things to prove the existence of God, since the universe, it was thought,...

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The Early Earth and Plate Tectonics

So, after watching Brian Cox's documentary Wonders of the Solar System, you now have a basic idea of how the solar system came together. But what about our own planet?Things may normally look stable and sedentary to our eyes, but there are still great geological forces constantly at work (hot enough to liquify rocks!), reshaping the planet and literally moving the ground beneath us...And for this next part, I will admit almost complete ignorance:...

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John Adams - Declaration of Independence

As I've argued before, the Founding Fathers were not this monolithic and unified myth of unanimous agreement we often fantasize or 'remember'. A lot of what they managed to accomplish (even the approval of the Declaration of Independence) was not simply the result of high idealism and selfless patriotism but of back-alley deals and political maneuvering (else we would have gotten rid of slavery from the start). Sometimes, as we all do from time to...

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Wonders of the Solar System - Order Out of Chaos

Taken as a whole, the solar system is a remarkable display of patterns and order: the sun sits at the center, planets rotate around it in regular and predictable orbits, and moons do the same around the planets. The very look of it superficially resembles the workings of a clock. So how did it all come to be arranged so nicely?In the following breath-taking documentary, Professor Brian Cox explains how three key concepts are all we need to understand...

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