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Skepticism and Agrippa's Trilemma
Most forms of global skepticism, skepticism about everything, are only hypothetical or methodological. We are not asked to actually withhold belief in everything, we are merely being told that for all...
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It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool
then open your mouth in front of a scholar with the cameras rolling and remove all doubt.Update (17 March): The full video can be seen here. The other gentleman in the video (not the one who asks the...
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Ex nihilo ... something something
Lawrence Krauss has recently published A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing wherein he seeks to explain the origin of the universe in purely physicalist, specifically...
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A Tribute to the Perfect Reader
When authors send their books out into the world, we leave them to fend for themselves. True, there will hopefully be some reviews. But these a strange beasts, often driven by an agenda and not...
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The Jesus Wars
Those among us who remember the old Richard Dawkins forum will recall the ‘What can we possibly infer about the historical Jesus?’ thread; a near thousand page epic which outlived the demise of its...
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P'd off
Just when you think the ‘Jesus Myth’ controversy couldn't get any more surreal, out pops a paper from Stephen Law, a philosopher at theUniversity of London entitled “Evidence, miracles, and the...
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Contra Stenger
Here is a paper from arxiv by Dr Luke Barnes of the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich entitled 'The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life'. This focuses on the manifold errors of one Dr...
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Quote of the Day
The only text from classical antiquity quoted by H. Blumenberg in Die Genesis der kopemikanischen Welt in which the central position of the Earth amounts to a privilege is from Seneca: "That you may...
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Columbus and Bugs
A year and a half ago I wrote a post excoriating those who think that Columbus was trying to prove the Earth is round, and speculated that they may have gotten their information from Bugs Bunny. I have...
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Fressellian logic and why anything exists
We start our journey here where Bill Vallicella, aka Maverick Philosopher, characterizes seven possible responses to Leibniz's question why does anything exist rather than nothing? A very interesting...
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Another Orlando Figes row
One year on from 'review-gate' another row involving Orlando Figes is brewing and this time it's his Stalin-era book 'The Whisperers' which has come under fire. The Torygraph reports that:..a Russian...
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Historians on their books
A cynic might conclude that - far from being one of humanity's greatest achievements - the Internet is in fact a seething mass of banality, pornography and contemptible dribble. There is something to...
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Proof Positive
Last night I left a few comments on another blog that reported the news that a German court had declared it illegal to circumcise children under the age of consent. The comments on the blog veered to...
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God particle found
This is so cool. The Higgs-Boson particle has been discovered. In physics terms, evidence for a new particle requires a “3-sigma” measurement, corresponding to a 1-in-740 chance that a random fluke...
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Defining Ignorance
In the comments to a recent post, Tim argued that agnosticism should be defined according to its provenance in T.H. Huxley. By agnosticism, Huxley meant the claim that no one can know if God exists...
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UK and EU: A Doomed Marriage?
With the Euro-crisis dragging on without any sign of resolution, even the most excitable journalists are beginning to get a bit fed up with waiting for nemesis. The most likely scenario is not a sudden...
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Lukewarmism
England has had a cool wet summer. The relevance of this in the debate on global warming is pretty close to nil. Likewise, the cold winters in 2010 and 2011 didn’t tell us much about the long term...
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Islam: the Untold Story
Tom Holland wrote and presented Islam: The Untold Story for Channel 4. The show follows on from his book In the Shadow of the Sword on the early history of Islam. Most commentary on the show has...
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Luddites and the internet
When I was young, Yellow Pages was ubiquitous. Businesses paid a modest fee to appear in the directory (or a less modest one if they wanted a bigger notice). The big yellow books of listings were...
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Fakes: Jesus' wife, boyfriend and brother's coffin
I have a post at On the Square, the blog for First Things magazine, looking at the Jesus' wife papyrus and some other notorious forgeries.Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum
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