On April 18, NASA announced that the Kepler space telescope had discovered three new planets that might be capable of supporting life. Two are part of the stellar system Kepler-62 that now has five identified planets with masses ranging from 0.54 to 1.95 times the mass of Earth. The

On March 23, 1882, a girl named Emmy Noether was born in Erlangen, Bavaria. The daughter of a mathematician, she would turn out to be a mathematical genius and make one of the most important contributions to physics in the twentieth century. Its impact is only now beginning to be...

This essay is based on my 2012 book, God and the Folly of Faith (Prometheus Books).

Religious apologists, spiritualist gurus, and accommodating atheists have been bombarding us with assertions that science and religion have no reason not to get along. This may be politically convenient, but it's simply untrue. Science...

In a blog titled "Celebrating Darwin: Religion And Science Are Closer Than You Think" posted on Darwin's birthday, February 12, MIT physicist Max Tegmark reported on a survey he conduced with Eugena Lee and Meia Chita-Tegmark, The MIT Survey on Science, Religion, and Origins:...

In commemoration of Charles Darwin's birthday on February 12, we will be reading again about evolution. Much if it will have been said before, many times. Here I am going to try to take a less familiar line and show how Darwinian evolution by natural selection has roots in the...

In my last blog I objected to a statement made by physicist David Tong in the December 2012 Scientific American who said it is a "lie" that the building blocks of nature are discrete particles such as the electron or quark. Rather, Tong asserted, the building blocks of...

In an article in the December 2012 Scientific American, physicist David Tong makes the following statement:

Physicists routinely teach that the building blocks of nature are discrete particles such as the electron or quark. That is a lie. The building blocks of our theories are not particles but fields: continuous,...

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times on June 10, 2012 titled, "Physicists, Stop the Churlishness," essayist Jim Holt criticizes the public disdain that many top contemporary physicists unfortunately hold for philosophy. Holt quotes the late Richard Feynman as mocking "cocktail party philosophers" for thinking that...

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
-- Isaac Asimov

In my last HuffPuff, "Not Dead Experiences (NDEs)" I remarked that neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander had used the "argument from ignorance" in claiming that his personal...

Watch Ric Elias' TEDTalk on the three things he learned while his plane crashed.

Newsweek magazine can always be counted on to give us the latest scientific evidence for God. The cover of its October 7, 2012 issue proclaims, "Heaven is Real." Inside is the

Every major scientific society has affirmed that all our knowledge of biological science convincingly supports evolution by natural selection and cannot be understood without it. At the same time, these societies have carefully avoided offending religious groups by assuring that evolution does not conflict with religious beliefs. (See, for example,...

So far, the Higgs boson has been a disappointment. Of course, it was a major discovery that generated worldwide attention. The two independent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider that reported the discovery on July 4, involving thousands of physicists, engineers, and technicians, were conducted with praiseworthy skill...

In full-page ad in the New York Times on Monday, August 20, titled "Why This Fat Cat Likes Obama's Tax Plan," Norman Litz of La Jolla, California tells us that his income has averaged over eight figures annually for the past seven years. He warns that if Obama...

In all the recent hoopla about the long-sought Higgs boson, you often hear it said that it is responsible for the mass of the universe. This is not true. Assuming it exists, the Higgs boson is actually responsible for only a small fraction of the total mass of the universe....

As the world knows, on July 4 it was announced that the Higgs boson, or a reasonable facsimile, has been seen by two independent experiments at CERN. The statistical significance reported was expressed as "5-sigma." Let's look at what this means.

When subatomic particles are smashed together at high energy,...

The following is an interview that will appear in the book How to Prove God Does Not Exist by Trevor Treharne, to be released in September by Universal Publishers.

What is the fundamental conflict between science and religion? Is it one that will never be resolved?

The...

Research in neuroscience has revealed a startling fact that revolutionizes much of what we humans have previously taken for granted about our interactions with the world outside our heads: Our consciousness is really not in charge of our behavior.

Laboratory experiments show that before we become aware of making...

This essay first appeared on Science & Religion Today.

I find it surprising that most scientists, believers and nonbelievers alike, refuse to apply their critical thinking skills to matters of religion. Unless religious teachings impinge directly on their work, such as in opposing the teaching of evolution or,...

On April 20 I gave the keynote speech the Humboldt State University Philosophy Forum "Science & Spirituality: Falling Awake to Diversity." The next day four other presentations were made on Confucianism, Sufism, Christianity, and Atheism. Before these talks, I was asked to summarize my presentation of the...

In a recent book called A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, cosmologist Larry Krauss describes how our universe could have arisen naturally from a pre-existing structureless void he calls "nothing." He bases his argument on quantum physics, along with now well-established results from...