Monthly Archives: November 2011

Skepticism is about the process

Since writing this post, I’ve avoided writing anything about alleged sexism in the atheist movement, in part because a lot of the debate centers around things allegedly said in blog comment threads (which I mostly don’t read) and other people’s hate mail (which I obviously don’t read at all.) But now there’s been another very [...]

Glenn Greenwald’s With Liberty and Justice for Some (a review)

Glenn Greenwald’s With Liberty and Justice for Some is an extremely important book. I don’t exaggerate when I say it’s a book everyone in the United States should read, something I don’t normally say about even my favorite books. Greenwald makes the case in the United States today, rule of law is disappearing. Instead, we [...]

So what do people want me to write about?

Throw ideas at me, people. Some aspect of William Lane Craig’s work I’ve overlooked so far? Plantinga? The relationship between science and philosophy? I’ve tended to judge reader interest in posts by the amount of comments they get, but that’s not a perfect measure–are there any posts you loved even though they didn’t get much [...]

So Andrew Sullivan is an atheist

Wow. So Andrew Sullivan posts a reader e-mail: It does not follow that because there is no God, that life has no meaning. Let’s, for a second, exclude the question of God which is taken as so momentous and examine what we know about the Universe. It is massive in scale, in what we see [...]

In defense of free will and experimental philosophy

Jerry Coyne is unhappy with a Eddy Nahmias’ defense of free will, published on the NYT opinionator blog. Here’s Nahmias: Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling [...]