A thoughtful piece from England on the findings of recent brain research and the implication it has for politicians on the Right and the Left.

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Supernatural beliefs about mind, morality and the self are losing plausibility as naturalistic explanations gain traction. In response, supernaturalists argue that gaps in these explanations are evidence for the failure of naturalism.

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Looking through the eyes of my overseas colleagues, what do we see?

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Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation.

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The ideal of critical thinking is a central one in Russell's philosophy, though this is not yet generally recognized in the literature on critical thinking.

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Everyone has hunches — about friends' motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it.

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David Hume defined a miracle, rightly in my view, as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the deity, or the interposition of some invisible agent." Do we have any reasons to suppose that any such miracles have occurred?

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Many people often feel disempowered, believing that scientific knowledge is obscure, boring and simply not for them.

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Faith is not the abandonment of reason. People who think faith needs to be divorced from our intellectual faculties have in effect abandoned the very possibility of discernment.

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Vote Republican?

This was a response to the very smart Shaun V. I disagree with him, but I realised this was worthy of being written as its own article, to garner fair answers from a group, not detract from Shaun's discussion of Obama's economic plans.

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Benjamin Franklin said that in this world nothing is certain except death and taxes.

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ACLJ Seeks to Intimidate Professor, Claims Victory for Religion

Some of you may recall an April Newsvine story, in which the ACLJ (the American Center for Law and Jusice) claimed that a professor at Suffolk County Community College had violated a student's right to freedom of religion by requiring that she renounce her religion.

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Despite its common and ubiquitous usage in science circles, what does everyone actually mean when they use the phrase "public understanding of science?" Clearly institutions and scientists believe it is important, yet the term's exact definition remains elusive.

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As a professor of sociology who studies U.S. Muslim assimilation patterns, I have analyzed numerous nationwide polls of American Muslims on a variety of topics. U.S.

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Rationality is a fundamental assumption about human behavior used in models from neoclassical economics. A question that has long nagged the discipline, however, concerns how much of human behavior actually shadows those models, and what innate divergences exist.

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Certain western thinkers use rationality as a ground for the superiority of western civilisation, a ground that gives them the moral authority to look down upon, and manipulate, the "irrational". It may come as a shock to them to learn that we are all irrational, equally human.

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The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity's natural tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We're just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.

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Teetering between its medieval past and the "Age of Reason," early 18th-century London was an environment in which the ancient practice of astrology held wide appeal.

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If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it? Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny.

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Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning. Last week I watched, open-mouthed, a Newsnight piece on the spread of "Brain Gym" in British schools.

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"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837. But his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States.

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From the perspective of neoclassical economics, self-punishing decisions are difficult to explain. Rational calculators are supposed to consider their options, then pick the one that maximizes the benefit to them.

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The Beyond Belief Conferences-- Lectures on Video

The Science Network has provided access to a full list of videos from the Beyond Belief 2006 conference, including lectures by many notable authors on science and religion- Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies, Patricia Churc …

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Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.

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""With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is that light comes into the soul?" ~ Henry David Thoreau

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