In his Guardian piece this week Atheist Benjamin Jones is spot on when he says that science works. Cosmology and evolutionary biology, Jones explains, have answered the question of how the world came to be. Indeed, evolution is a fact. What Jones misses, though, is why evolution is a fact. It makes all the difference.  Read more

Despite my disagreements with Professor Larry Moran over the years, I respect him as a fair-minded, intelligent and generally sensible person. Recently, however, he said something which can only be described as rather silly. In a post titled, Evidence for the existence of god(s), he wrote: I am always on the lookout for evidence that some sort of god actually exists. The reason I’m an atheist is because I’ve never seen any evidence that’s the least bit convincing. I keep asking for evidence but nobody ever supplies any. Now, had Professor Moran merely remarked that he found the evidence for God’s existence less than compelling, or unsatisfactory, he would have had a leg to stand on. But he went much Read More ›

See here.  Excerpt: At a UN-sponsored Symposium on the “Space Science and the United Nations” held in Graz, Austria, from 22-24 September 2014, Chandra Wickramasinghe presented a paper entitled “The transition from Earth-centred biology to cosmic life” with co-authors Gensuke Tokoro and Milton Wainwright. The paper, now published in Journal of Cosmology 24, 12080-12096, argues that a paradigm shift with potentially profound implications for humanity has been taking place over the past 3 decades and is on the verge of acceptance.  In an accompanying second paper (JoC, 24, 12097-12101) the same authors show that the recent discovery by radio astronomers of isopropyl cyanide in interstellar clouds adds to earlier discoveries in astronomy that have indicated the widespread occurrence of even more complex Read More ›

In a recent post, I incorrectly identified Richard Norman, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Kent and a Vice-President of the British Humanist Association, as the author of an article on body fluid salinity, written by a Professor R. Norman. I have since been informed that Richard Norman was not the author of the article in question, and that he had nothing to do with it. I would therefore like to offer my sincere apologies to Professor Richard Norman. I should have checked my sources more carefully, and I will be more vigilant in future.

Professor Larry Moran has written a post in which he skilfully debunks the hoary old myth that the ionic composition of blood plasma matches that of seawater, which is supposed to “prove” that our ancestors came from the sea. In a post titled, John F. Kennedy, Carnival cruises, blood plasma, sea water, and evolution (February 6. 2015), Professor Moran traces the history of this myth and the curious story of the man who first debunked it, only to propagate another scientific myth of his own making. For the benefit of readers, I should point out that the myth that blood plasma has the same concentration of minerals as sea water has also been debunked by creation scientist Dr. John D. Read More ›