God
milhayser | October 20, 2014"Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet'." -Carlos Castaneda
"When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. And his thoughts soon clash.…
milhayser | February 13, 2014As an alternative to biblical creationism, Intelligent Design infers a less obtrusive God to explain life on Earth. This deity doesn't hurl bolts of lightning, unless it's with the express purpose of sparking abiogenesis in the primordial soup. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse dismisses probabilistic arguments against the likelihood of complex organisms, explaining that even the most improbable-seeming outcome of natural selection is more or less inevitable. As a flawed analogy, he imagines flipping a coin 500 times. This will always manifest a sequence of heads and tails that only had a…
oracknows | November 4, 2013It occurs to me that things have been perhaps overly serious here at the ol' blog for the last couple of weeks. Don't get me wrong. I think I done good lately, if I do say so myself. However, the constant drumbeat of quackery and depressing stories takes its toll after a while. I need a break.
And our old buddy, Deepak Chopra, was kind enough to give it to me.
So what is it this time? Chopra's been a frequent topic of this blog for a long time, albeit nos so much lately. Indeed, longtime readers know that I was the one who coined a term—Choprawoo—for the pseudoprofound metaphysical mystical…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Talks About Doubt, Uncertainty and Religion, science, imagination, religion, god, doubt, uncertainty, beliefs, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman talks about the improbability of the existence of a god, and his thoughts about the mythologies that form the basis of religion.
gregladen | April 1, 2010This is not only the true story of easter, but it is also a commentary on which is better, cats or dogs. Verily, many mysteries are explained in this epic documentary:
h/t: Julia
edyong | November 30, 2009For many religious people, the popular question "What would Jesus do?" is essentially the same as "What would I do?" That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.
Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people's mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point…
grrlscientist | October 4, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, amputees, god, atheism, streaming video
Theists who try to respond to the question, Why doesn't God heal amputees? end up avoiding the question altogether and lecturing the questioner about a bunch of unasked questions. Could it be that they have no good answer for why their god refuses to heal amputees every single time, so they try to explain why they're god allows bad things to happen instead and hope we don't notice? This video discusses this observation and the reason why the question itself is important.
grrlscientist | July 5, 2009tags: science, god, religion, creationism, humor, funny, satire, Edward Current, streaming video
This video provides an unbiased look at whether Earth's favorable conditions for life prove that a loving God planned it that way all along. (Hint: There's no other explanation.) [3:45]
grrlscientist | June 7, 2009tags: disease, god, religion, creationism, humor, funny, satire, Edward Current, streaming video
In a live webcast, Edward Current explains how God created a perfect world and had nothing to do with creating disease. But letting just anyone write in and comment probably wasn't the best idea [3:51]
razib | April 19, 2009The blog of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle has responded to my post that Buddhists generally believe in God. Some of the comments also brought up some semantic issues which are real in how Buddhists view God, and how it might be distinguished from more personalized conceptions of the divine being, especially in the Abrahamic religions. The short of it is that many Buddhists will accede that gods may exist, but that their role in the religion is relatively marginal. Additionally, Buddhists reject the Creator God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which is an important distinction.
First, though the…
esiegel | May 14, 2008Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God.
Next year, the Vatican is organizing a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Whoa. And whoa's wobbly cousin, woah. Did I just step into the 21st century? After my post last week on what Americans don'…
esiegel | March 26, 2008WARNING: Sensationalism ahead! Are you kidding me, Newsweek? They really titled their article Will Physicists Find God? Presumably, the title is named because physicists are searching for the Higgs Particle, and the title is taken after Leon Lederman's (mediocre, IMO) book, The God Particle. Leon's a pretty humorous guy, and was told by his Editor (according to him, anyway) that he couldn't name his book, "The Goddamned Particle," which is what he called the Higgs, so he shortened it.
For better or worse, the article is an interview with Steven Weinberg, one of the most illustrous living…
grrlscientist | January 7, 2008tags: God, MySpace, humor, streaming video
An amusing music video by Bradley Bandara, based upon the Eric Bazilian song One of Us, which was a 1996 hit when sung by Joan Osbourne. This video features a badly-costumed supreme being accepting and rejecting friend requests, responding to prayers in the form of messages, and being barraged with IM attempts. [5:04]
illconsidered | September 21, 2007For most of us who believe in science as a great way to understand the physical realities around us, the question "Do you think the world is flat?" is hard to imagine as something to be asked seriously. But on The View, with millions of viewers, not only can it be asked, but the answer was "I don't know".
Seeing is believing!
(hat tip to Crooks and Liars)
[Update: youtube link is fixed now, pertinent material begins around the one minute mark]
sb admin | September 20, 2007Ok, so this is not my first blog post ever, but it is my first post as a member of Science Blogs. Unlike Groucho Marx, who did not wish to join any club which would accept him as a member, I am very excited to be here and very flattered by that invitation.
So some breif introductory messages...
To fellow Sciblings, I would like to say hello and I look forward to getting to know you as people and writers. I am already a fan of Tim Lambert at Deltoid, William Connolley at Stoat and Chris Mooney of The Intersection and I have come across many excellent articles from others here, so I am eager…