Author: Adam Lee

It happened in America. It happened in Ireland. Now, it seems that another major Catholic sex abuse scandal is about to break open – this time in Germany (HT: Butterflies and Wheels). As the German newspaper Der Spiegel reports, the pattern we’re now seeing from abuse victims who’ve come forward is very much the same…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 8 The best place to settle a scientific debate is in the peer-reviewed journals and the larger research community – a strategy which, as we’ve noted, the creationists have steered well clear of. This means, when they inevitably attempt to push their beliefs into public schools anyway, that we…

I just finished reading The Happiness Hypothesis, a book by Jonathan Haidt, who’s a professor in the new science of “positive psychology” at the University of Virginia. Most of the book is a straightforward distillation of scientific research on what truly brings happiness and contentment in life, illustrated with quotes and references to famous philosophers…

You may have heard that, after an exasperating series of setbacks and delays, the massive particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running. Even in preliminary tests, it’s set records for the most powerful particle collisions ever recorded in a lab – and when it’s reactivated later this year, it’s expected…

Quick! Somebody call the accommodationists! Several men who went to a suburban mosque to perform morning prayers Wednesday were shocked to discover two bloodied wild boar heads wrapped in plastic bags in the mosque compound, said Zulkifli Mohamad, the top official at the Sri Sentosa Mosque on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s largest city.…

This month, I want to write about some words important to the atheist movement that are frequently misused and abused by religious apologists. The first of these words is secularism. In the rhetoric of spokespeople for the religious right, secularism is often assumed to be the desire to ban all forms of religious expression from…

This week’s guest contributor says: “This is why it pays to rise with the sun. Very few people are blessed with the experience of a wilderness sunrise such as this gem. After a morning like this, the world cannot help but seem a miraculous place.” Sunrise, Pharaoh Lake, Adirondack State Park. Photo credit: Jim Sabiston,…

Last night I had a chance to see Creation, the independent film by British director Jon Amiel that presents an account of the life of Charles Darwin and his struggle to write his great work, On the Origin of Species, while mourning the death of his beloved daughter Annie. The movie is based on Annie’s…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 8 In my review of Darwin’s Black Box, I listed three ways that an irreducibly complex system can evolve: The first can be summed up as scaffolding: extra parts which support a partially functional system until it is completely assembled, at which point the extra parts become unnecessary and…

Summary: A compelling atheist thought experiment, wrapped inside a cleverly plotted and fast-paced tale of transhumanist fiction. This isn’t the first time I’ve reviewed a book written by a fellow blogger, but it’s always a pleasure for me to do, and this one was particularly pleasurable to read. The Quantum Mechanic is a novel written…