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Sunday, March 27, 2016

Miracles, Multiverses, and Easter

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The Christian world today celebrates what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000...
Saturday, March 26, 2016

Clash of Civilizations

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It's been said that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. A mugging tends to concentrate the mind and often causes us to di...
Friday, March 25, 2016

A Good Friday Meditation

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Some time ago we did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya at another blog. I thought that as we approach Good Friday it migh...
Thursday, March 24, 2016

Stop Pretending

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Almost as regularly as if it were a law of nature, whenever someone points out that there is something deeply wrong with a religion which pr...
Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Quantum Spookiness

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The universe is a very strange place, stranger than we can imagine. One of the strangest things about it is something Albert Einstein once r...
Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Faith vs Fact

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Biologist Austin Hughes has a lengthy critique at The New Atlantis of fellow biologist Jerry Coyne's recently published screed against ...
Monday, March 21, 2016

Determinism, Compatibilism and Libertarianism

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In class discussions of free will and determinism, a number of students have asked if there isn't a middle way. One student even dug a p...
Saturday, March 19, 2016

The Inexplicable Conservative Adulation of Trump

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One of the most astonishing phenomena in modern politics has been the support for Donald Trump among people who have spent their careers pos...
Friday, March 18, 2016

Are We a Simulation? (Pt. II)

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By way of concluding Wednesday's post on the possibility that you, I, and our entire universe actual exist in a computer simulation dev...
Thursday, March 17, 2016

On St. Patrick's Day

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The following is a post I've run on previous St. Patrick's Days and thought I'd run again this year because, I say in all modest...
Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Are We a Simulation? (Pt. I)

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Here's a post from last summer (8/22) that's relevant to some of the discussions that have come up in a couple of my classes recentl...
Tuesday, March 15, 2016

The Ides of March

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Today is March 15th. It was on this date in 44 B.C. that the Roman emperor Julius Caesar was assassinated by some sixty conspirators, includ...
Monday, March 14, 2016

Unintended Consequences

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Employment news out of Seattle is discouraging but not surprising. In June 2014 Seattle raised the minimum wage for all employees in the ci...
Saturday, March 12, 2016

Snow Geese

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A friend and faithful reader of VP wrote recently, reminding me that I haven't posted any bird photos in a while and asking to see some....
Friday, March 11, 2016

Science Guy Misunderstands Philosophy

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Bill Nye (The "Science Guy") has blithely wandered onto some thin metaphysical ice. A video of him responding to a young philosoph...
Thursday, March 10, 2016

Reverting to the Dark Ages

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Science has unmoored itself from its heritage in Christian metaphysics and adopted a naturalistic worldview, but it's the former in whic...
Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Bush Lied

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Ten years ago it was all one heard: "Bush Lied, People Died." "The Iraq war was a war to steal Iraq's oil." I argued...

Sixty Years of No Warming

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I'm not sure what to make of this article by Tony Heller, but if he's right then NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra...
Tuesday, March 8, 2016

What Went Wrong?

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A Jordanian journalist, writer, and political analyst named Jihad Al-Mansi wrote a piece in the Jordanian daily Al-Ghad in which he places t...
Monday, March 7, 2016

Can the Universe Be Infinitely Old?

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One thorny problem for any naturalist metaphysics is that the consensus among scientists is that the universe came into being at some point ...