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Twitter Links The God gap

Religion may have lost much of its power to explain our modern world but we still crave its emotional satisfactions

January 28 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Twitter Links It's time for science to move on from materialism

Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things.…

January 28 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Link The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes…

December 22 2011, 1:24pm | Comments

Twitter Links The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Even in his earliest stories, Dick wrestled with the nature of perception. As he described it to me, “I began to get an idea…

December 18 2011, 3:20am | Comments

Link The Mystery of the Five Wounds

Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St.…

November 21 2011, 1:07pm | Comments

Link Does Pinker’s “Better Angels” Undermine Religious Morality?

It is often argued that religion makes individuals and the world more just and moral, that it builds character and provides a foundation from which we understand right from wrong,…

November 2 2011, 6:58am | Comments

Twitter Links Atheists, theists, and gnostics, oh my!

There’s a popular idea that being an atheist involves sharing the exact ideas of all non-believers, a notion I would argue is extremely misguided.…

October 24 2011, 4:36pm | Comments

Link The Roots of Religion: Myth, Play and Human…

Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page…

October 19 2011, 3:17am | Comments

Link The case for reconciling the scientific with the…

As a both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of…

October 8 2011, 10:01am | Comments

Link Can religion tell us more than science?

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and…

September 21 2011, 3:52am | Comments

Link Can religion tell us more than science?

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and…

September 20 2011, 3:12am | Comments

Link The New Atheism

Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell. The New…

August 30 2011, 8:21am | Comments

Twitter Links Theology is Dead

"...there is, in accord with reason’s movement, no name to which another is not opposed”

August 23 2011, 10:52am | Comments

Twitter Links Shock: Adam and Eve NEVER existed! (If it wasn't for you pesky biochemists...) http://t.co/hjiA8lK #religion #faith…

Shock: Adam and Eve NEVER existed! (If it wasn't for you pesky biochemists...) http://t.co/hjiA8lK #religion #faith #belief #science #x

August 18 2011, 1:37am | Comments

Link Secularism and Its Discontents

These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that…

August 9 2011, 3:57pm | Comments

Link Rebellion Against Pluralism

Anders Behring Breivik, who has admitted responsibility for the death of seventy six innocents, is undoubtedly a madman. But madmen can be spurred on by anything in their environment they…

July 27 2011, 3:08pm | Comments

Link Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a…

How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him,…

July 24 2011, 4:03am | Comments

Link Being human

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) ==…

June 25 2011, 8:55am | Comments

Link When the King Saved God

Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England”…

April 12 2011, 3:57pm | Comments

Link Views on Evolution, Intelligent Design Hinge on Death…

It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for…

April 7 2011, 3:39am | Comments

Link 400 years of the King James Bible

The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated…

February 11 2011, 4:43am | Comments

Link The New Atheists' Narrow Worldview

With tongues in cheeks, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett are embracing their reputation as the "Four Horsemen." Lampooning the anxieties of evangelicals, these best-selling atheists are…

January 24 2011, 3:58am | Comments

Link The Myth of Separate Magisteria

By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as “non-overlapping magisteria” with separate domains —…

November 10 2010, 6:17am | Comments

Link Cosmology, Cambridge Style: Wittgenstein, Toulmin, and Hawking

That headline flashed to all corners of the media universe this month. Of course, we don't know whether a universe has corners. Truth is, we don't know much about the…

September 30 2010, 4:21pm | Comments

Link An Amoral Manifesto (Part I)

Hard Atheism or What Shall I Name This Column? Hold onto your hats, folks. Although it is perhaps fitting that the actual day on which I sit here at my…

August 30 2010, 10:12am | Comments

Link The First Church of Robotics

THE news of the day often includes an item about some development in artificial intelligence: a machine that smiles, a program that can predict human tastes in mates or music,…

August 28 2010, 6:43am | Comments

Link The rise of the new agnostics

Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition…

July 30 2010, 4:38am | Comments

Link What did Jesus do? (Reading and Unreading the…

When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee,…

May 19 2010, 3:52am | Comments

Link Conceiving God: the Cognitive Origin and Evolution of…

Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs. I am not so sure about this. In my…

April 4 2010, 6:56am | Comments

Link Theology for atheists

Theology lets us talk about deep and irrational urges. This is seen by some atheists as weakness. But maybe it's a strength as well James Wood, a writer who himself…

January 8 2010, 3:29am | Comments

Link Atheism: class is a distraction

For some reasons it seems to be anathema to say that there might be an intrinsic reason for the correlation between educational level and the rejection of religion: atheism takes…

October 15 2009, 8:14am | Comments

Link Must science declare a holy war on religion?

This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins -- most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, "The God Delusion" -- returns to writing about science. Dawkins' new…

September 17 2009, 2:32am | Comments