This episode smacks a bit of internet drama, which I try to avoid, but it also bears on scientific discourse, censorship, and civility, and I wanted to say a few words. According to the “Arts Beat” site of the New York Times, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who organized a prestigious debate on the origins of the […]
I wrote this yesterday—Sunday afternoon, and decided to polish and post it today. ***** Today I fly back to Chicago to begin teaching evolution to undergraduates, and I’ll also begin writing the book that has immersed me so deeply in theology over the last year. This almost certainly means that I’ll have to reduce the […]
This short clip was excerpted by reader Brian from a longer debate in Australia between physicist Lawrence Krauss and Uthman Badar, the media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Muslim organization. It’s a very concise presentation of the difference between science and theology, and of why theology doesn’t find “truth.” I have long used the quote by […]
Four days ago the BBC “Religion and Ethics” site posted a written debate on evolution between a Muslim and a Christian. Unexpectedly, the evolution side was argued by the Muslim, Inayat Bunglawala (media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain), while the wrong side was represented by the Christian: young-earth creationist Greg Haslam, senior pastor […]
I didn’t know much about this video save that it’s an interview of Richard Dawkins at the Oxford Union by an unnamed interlocutor [see below, he's Mehdi Hasan], and it appeared on YouTube about three weeks ago. Hasan turned out to be a pretty fundamentalist Muslim (he says at 14:35 that Mohamed ascended to heaven […]
Last Wednesday there was an Intelligence² debate on the topic, “Does science refute God?” The video is now on YouTube (below), and features Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer on the ‘yes’ side versus Dinesh D’Souza and Ian Hutchinson (an MIT physicist whom we’ve encountered before) on the ‘no’ side. The moderator, who did a good […]
Maybe I frequent the wrong websites, but I see far more debates in which atheists are pitted against the faithful, or creationists against evolutionists, than those in which the faithful debate each other. That is, do we ever see liberal theologians like John Haught debate conservative ones like William Lane Craig about whose idea of […]
Yesterday I put up a video of Richard Dawkins’s debate with Archbishop George Pell of Sydney. Several of the readers noticed that Richard wasn’t as incisive as usual, something that I attributed to his jet lag and punishing schedule (really, the man needs a rest!). There were also problems with the moderator, and the audience […]
Here, courtesy of alert reader Stan, is yesterday’s Q&A debate in Australia between Richard Dawkins and George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney. The debate takes the form of both men answering questions posed in advance by readers. I haven’t yet watched the hour-long debate, but am putting it up so readers can see it in […]
In 2009, Australian creationist Dr. Don Batten, “Ph.D. in Plant Science,” wrote a compendium of evidence for a young earth, “101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe” for Creation Ministries International. RationalWiki has just published a point-by-point refutation of each of these arguments (some of which are truly moronic) in […]
