Author: Adam Lee

If you’ve been following the news, you already know that Dr. George Tiller, one of only a handful of doctors left in the United States who perform late-term abortions, was murdered this week. A suspect, Scott Roeder, is already in custody. Since the election of Barack Obama, there’s been a noticeable upsurge in right-wing terrorism.…

I’m no PZ Myers, but I’ve always wanted to try my hand at stuffing a ballot box, and now I have an opportunity. The science and culture blog 3 Quarks Daily has officially begun the voting for its 2009 Science Prize, and I’m pleased to announce that two posts from Daylight Atheism are in the…

Hello Quixote, In reference to your list of reasons why people become atheists or theists, I have to disagree. I don’t think most of those are the initial reasons why people choose one or the other. Many of them are common causes that are frequently taken up by people on one side or the other,…

It’s not only professional philosophers and theologians who have an opinion on matters touching the sacred. Sometimes, gold-jewelry-wearing, mohawk-having, former ’80s television and movie action stars have words of wisdom to express on these weighty matters. Like, for instance, Mr. T, who recently gave an interview to Bizarre magazine in which he made a very…

The story goes that the renowned physicist Richard Feynman was once asked to summarize the most important finding of modern science in a single sentence. Feynman replied, “The universe is made of atoms.” Although there are many other scientific discoveries that are arguably of equal importance, Feynman’s choice makes a lot of sense. The discovery…

Last month, in “Dreams of a Better World“, I considered some of the immediate problems humanity could solve if we had the collective will to do so. I want to continue that theme in this post, but from a longer perspective. Historically, humanity’s knowledge has exceeded its wisdom. As soon as we invent a new…

The outgoing Archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, had some choice words for atheists at the ceremony this week to install his successor: “What is most crucial is the prayer that we express every day in the Our Father, when we say ‘deliver us from evil’. The evil we ask to be delivered from is not…

In honor of Memorial Day, I’ve chosen this poem for this week’s Poetry Sunday, a classic on the horrors of war written by the English soldier Wilfred Owen. Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry, England. His parents were evangelical Anglicans, and Owen himself was a devout believer when young. But, according to Joseph Parisi’s…

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 3 Chapter 3 of Case, which interviews the creationist Jonathan Wells, haphazardly mixes together claims from many different scientific disciplines and will probably take the most installments of any chapter to fully refute. But we’ll begin with a simpler claim. As I mentioned previously, Strobel seeks to create the…

In 2005, the constitutionality of teaching “intelligent design” was tested in court in the landmark case Kitzmiller v. Dover. The lawsuit was triggered by the school board in rural Dover, Pennsylvania, voting to require a statement to be read in science classes which said, in part: Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of…