Jason Rosenhouse on the alleged opposition between religion and science: The apparent contradiction is between a view of things that says we are the purposeful creations of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, and a view that says that we are the chance result of tens of millions of years of bloody and violent evolution. Yeah, it’s… Continue reading

Casinos Won’t Help Massachusetts. Dan Kennedy: Mr. Liberal has come around to the anti-casino position, but he still wants more data and for “cooler heads to prevail.” I’m not sure why. Patrick’s three-casino proposal is the most damaging idea any governor has come up with in a long time. What’s needed is to defeat it… Continue reading

Polish priest and physicist Michael Heller has won the Templeton Prize. Heller’s two books on Lemaitre were key sources for my own book. In his statement released today, he has some interesting comments on that brand of creationism peculiar to the U.S.: “Adherents of the so-called intelligent design ideology commit a grave theological error. They… Continue reading

David Mamet stops being a liberal: I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and… Continue reading

The Bubble Dependence of the economy and its consequences: The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership… Continue reading