Starting next week, Channel 4 in the UK is screening a three-part documentary series on the scientific legacy of Charles Darwin, hosted by our old friend Richard Dawkins.
Digiguide describes the series:
In 1859, English naturalist Charles Darwin published his masterpiece On the Origin of Species. In it Darwin put forward his theory - that everything on [...]

Christopher Hitchens lets loose with a bit more of that fighting talk that he’s (in)famous for in his article Losing Sight of Progress: How Blind Salamanders Make Nonsense of Creationists’ Claims over at Slate Magazine.
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Well, it’s a possibly.
A study to be published in August’s Journal of Archaeological Science by Danish archaeologists describes how monks engaged in copying biblical and other religious texts may have been poisoned by mercury in a red ink used in illustrating these manuscripts.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian [...]

For those of you with a penchant for stuff dug out of the ground, archaeologists claim to have found the world’s “oldest christian church”, tentatively dated in the 33-70 CE region (although how they got the precision of ‘33′ with a margin of error that large does smell rather odd to my sceptical nostrils).
Time (ha!) [...]

They seek him here, they seek him there…
One of the benefits of working where I do, I have access to some really interesting sources of research. And one of those is physicist Professor Peter Higgs, author of a number of papers on symmetry, gauge fields and massless particles in the 1960s where he first [...]

I’ve just heard on the news that sci-fi author and inventor Arthur C Clarke has died at the grand old age of 90 in Sri Lanka.
While I’ve not read much of his more recent output, his earlier works will stay with me and I am ever grateful for their influence in my childhood.
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although if the Discovery Institute get their way, they shouldn’t have any right to complain at all.

Although it does beg the question as to why they don’t put pressure on their churches to do this already, to lead by example so to speak, if they’re all about “fairness”.
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Pedro over at Way Of The Mind has recently posted about the fallacy often used by creationists to argue that “life could never happen by chance”. Go and read it, then come back, and I’ll give you my take on it.
Back? Ok.
One of the things that Pedro didn’t address is his post was [...]

I’m not convinced by the scale of this graph, but it makes a valid point nonetheless.

Thanks Jesus followers!
(via StumbleUpon)
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Scientists at the National Space Centre and the University of Leicester have come up with a new “space friendly” currency.
The QUID (Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination) was developed to:
…withstand the rigors of space travel – no sharp edges and no chemicals that could hurt space tourists.
“None of the existing payment systems we use on earth – [...]

Professor Michael Reiss, scientist, priest and head of science at London’s Institute of Education, has written a new book aimed at encouraging teachers, who it seems are avoiding the teaching of evolution in schools for fear of the “controversy” and not wanting to dismiss creationist pupils’ beliefs out of hand.
This could leave pupils with gaps [...]

Truth
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Futility Closet has an excellent image of the Earth from 4 thousand million miles away that should put any ideas of the “enormity of creation for the benefit of mankind” squarely into the back of your head.
It also quotes one of my personal heroes (as much as I have such things) although I’ve quoted a [...]

Atheist Ethicist has written an interesting and thoughtful article about the idea of faith hospitals.
I wonder if/when the UK government, to back up it’s proclivity to support faith-based institutions (as demonstrated in it’s increasing promotion of faith schools), will begin introducing the concept of faith hospitals. We’ll need something to replace the many hospitals [...]

I see, especially in theistic literature (as opposed to scripture — but it’s there too), that science is often denounced as being arrogant. Those who claim such things usually have a reason to: it contradicts their own dogmatic view of the universe, usually in some quite fundamental way.
There are many levels of confidence: in [...]