The Human Ecosystem: knowledge and philosophy

All species exist within their ecology and niche. This is a combination of physical things, both favourable and unfavourable: nutrients and prey, predators and toxins, hot and cold, water and salt. If you imagine a deer in the woods, it exists among the trees, eating grass and bark. Humans are not like this. We live…

Responding to Bema Sheep’s Open Letter

Dear Bema Sheep, I read your letter with curiosity and thought it interesting to respond. This is due mainly to the binary opening passages which grabbed my attention for all the wrong reasons. But it may be an opportunity for me to restate some things about atheism and make some interesting comments about science. You…

Hitler and On the Origin of Species

Did Hitler even read On the Origin of Species? If so, did he understand it? And why do people today think biological evolution is a political policy?

Enquiries on Atheism

In my post about the link between biological evolution and genocide, I quickly illuminated the powerful difference between seeing science as a descriptive tool and interpreting it as a prescriptive tool. Science is only ever descriptive. The comments section under that post hosts some gems of information. Tildeb pointed out that we have no evidence that Hitler ever read On the Origin of Species, where we do have evidence Churchill did. With that in mind, Darwin inspired Hitler to commit his atrocities, these would have been second-hand reports. I wanted to find evidence to support Tildeb’s claim, because it is interesting, and I slowly came across many articles on the issue that I implore you to read if you believe natural selection influenced the Holocaust. (I have given you two links on opposing views. Do think critically about them, now.)

Equally, Nate jumped from my trite post to argue that “Social…

View original post 63 more words

22 Messages from Creationists to People Who Believe in Evolution

That Bill Nye and Ken Ham debate happened, apparently. I haven’t watched it. I have, however, stumbled across a Buzzfeed article by Matt Stopera with the title I have given this post. It is a series of pictures he took of creationists with questions they wanted to pose to Bill Nye. I thought I’d weigh…

Ray Comfort’s Promotional Pictures “The Primates”: theatrically displaying ignorance, again

Apparently Ray Comfort still exists. Not only that, but apparently he's done some documentary, or something. On principle, I'm not going to tell you what it's called. Instead, I am going to show you the pictures he's given his followers to promote the documentary. Although these are promotional pictures, I'm not going to promote the…

How Wrong C.S. Lewis is

This quote pops up a lot in religious debates, and I've never given C.S. Lewis the respect to look at the quote and explain why it is such nonsense. The quote is this: Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it…

Dear Theist (2): A quick dip in Atheism, Evolution, God, Morality and “Nothing”

Dear Caroline, I hope you appreciate that I put a lot of thought into my replies and so really do want my thoughts on my blog instead of lost among a comment thread. I also apologise to my readers that Caroline's response is lost somewhere in the comments to her post (although, you are welcome to…

Engaging with Creationism

Creationism doesn’t really come in many flavours: Young Earth, Old Earth and ‘science, but God did it’ are basically the groups. Each of them believes that God seeded life and the Universe. The first two believe that God created life as is, and that no evolution has ever taken place, but they disagree about how long…

On the Illusion of Species

I don’t like to talk much about Creationism, but here I go again. I want to expand on a point I made in an earlier post: Darwin should have called his book On the Illusion of Species. I've tried to get rid of technical terms and keep this readable. The point I’m working up to is…

Evolution and the Piltdown Man.

I don’t like to talk much about Creationism. The fact is that there isn’t an argument for it, unless you argue for ‘God’s creation via evolution’. And I’m fine with that. I don’t believe it, it’s scientifically uncorroborated, and it has major challenges that I implore you to answer. But the argument in favour of…