Science

The gravity of Stephen Hawking’s non-god

September 2, 2010

I thought the silly season for news stories ended when term started. But apparently not. On the other hand I may be unusual in thinking this is a complete non-story: Stephen Hawking apparently thinks scientific theory renders God redundant. The journalist reporting this seems to take Hawking’s earlier reference to “the mind of God” – [...]

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Reason. God’s practical joke?

July 12, 2010

My sceptical maxim provoked one atheist (who blogs here) to protest the legitimacy of comparing God to a flying spaghetti monster. I suggest you read his points in the comments there in his own words. To summarise, he suggests that this shorthand insult is meant to convey a serious point about what he sees as [...]

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My swine flu anniversary: a mixed bag

April 28, 2010

This time last year, everyone was in a serious flap over swine flu. On the blog I had then I think I got the big picture broadly right, but one significant aspect wrong. A year ago I said: It seems to me that the current outbreak of Mexican flu is being driven primarily by the [...]

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Giving fundamentalism no quarter in the battle for the Bible

April 11, 2010

I confess to being confused by John Hobbins. He gives one of the better round-ups of comments on what he calls the scandal (an accurate description) of Bruce Waltke’s “resignation” for mentioning evolution in the wrong company. Yet Hobbins also says in that latter post: Note the “if,” [as in "if the data is overwhelmingly [...]

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Please leave your brains outside the church

April 2, 2010

This post reveals the sad state of some forms of US evangelicalism also coming to infect churches in this country. Any inquisition is always at its most successful when it scares people into self-censorship. The fact that Dr. Waltke felt he was unable to leave the video in place, despite the fact that he still [...]

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Brian Cox, the unknown, and science’s questions

March 27, 2010

I don’t often watch Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, but last night Matt Smith was on, and I want to know about the new Doctor Who. While I like Ross as a film enthusiast, I’m not over-impressed with him as an interviewer: he usually succeeds in irritating me. In the same way, I’m not much [...]

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Scientific evidence for God: cosmology versus biology?

February 19, 2010

Eddie Arthur has drawn my attention to a new site – God: new evidence –which (so far) is exploring the ways in which modern cosmology can be seen to offer support for theism. It has a number of videos, which feature some respectable scientists like John Polkinghorne. Here’s one which circles around the strong anthropic [...]

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Ratzinger and Dawkins

January 10, 2010

NewsBiscuit brings them together: Head of the Catholic Church Pope Benedict XIV has joined with leading evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins to declare that, while they may have their differences, the one thing that ticks them off more than anything else is people who, in a debate on the existence of an omniscient creator against the [...]

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Sceptique? Moi? The big climate change question

November 24, 2009

Various people are pointing to this story as another nail in the coffin of climate change scepticism. The thing is, “climate change scepticism” is a fairly broad term, embracing a multitude of viewpoints. My scepticism is less about the fact that the world is (on most available indices) currently warming up, and more about the [...]

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Why I hate fundamentalists

November 15, 2009

I’m not entirely sure what they are, but I do hate them. I had an interesting pub conversation this evening with someone whose staring point was this: “If you believe in the Bible, surely you can’t believe evolution is true.” (Even Jim West accepts that I’m “an evolutionist and still a priest!” – note, however, [...]

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