Maybe you already know about Fred Reed. Me, I’d never heard of the dude till recently. I tend to be a little slow that way. He’s been blogging for over a decade, so I have some catching up to do. But I couldn’t wait to get fully up to speed on all things Fred before sharing [...]
In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010), neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that science is uniquely qualified to answer moral questions. A committed materialist atheist, he offers to steer a course between two widely held views: dogmatism (God has woven moral good and evil into the fabric of reality) and [...]
Let’s say I’m a sensitive, atheist skiing enthusiast. Here I go, swooshing down the slope on Montana’s Big Mountain, enjoying my vacation at the Whitefish Mountain Resort. Suddenly, looming ahead, I catch sight of a truly appalling vision—a life-sized statue of a long-haired, bearded man, draped in powder-blue robes, his arms uplifted, rising out of [...]
Yesterday, James Barham wrote about an aerospace technology officer who—his lawyers say—was fired for distributing DVDs to interested employees at NASA affiliate JPL that argued that the fine-tuning of the universe is real. The fashion in current cosmology is to insist that fine-tuning is not real, and can be explained away by such arguments as: [...]
News Item: In a decision announced on November 18, a Los Angeles Country Superior Court Judge has ruled that a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed against NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) may move forward. The suit was filed last year by a 14-year-veteran JPL employee named David Coppedge. In the suit, Coppedge, who was Team Lead System [...]
Three somewhat incorrect thoughts, in the hope that they may help a student decide: Are you seeking a degree because you and others think you should have one? You might all be right. But if the desired degree costs $75,000, can you afford it? Can your friends and family help? Will an outside funding source [...]
I am happy to announce that Denyse O’Leary has accepted my invitation to make occasional contributions to TheBestSchools blog. As she mentioned in her inaugural post today, Denyse is a journalist, author, and blogger based in Toronto. She has authored or co-authored a number of books, notably By Design or by Chance? (Castle Quay, 2004) and [...]
Hello, I’m a Toronto-based Canadian journalist, author, and blogger. I will post here on what works and doesn’t work in education, and how it relates to culture. Recently, I ran into a retired editor of a national Baptist women’s magazine, who was disheartened by the decline of Baptist congregations in Canada. I have a fair [...]
Technical expertise is a wonderful thing—in its place. Unfortunately, its place is fairly limited. Scientific and other forms of technical expertise mainly apply to matters about which people already have a great deal of experience. For, it is on the basis of experience that we learn what to expect. However, expertise should not be confused [...]
Over the past several generations, the United States has undoubtedly been the leader in exporting cultural degradation to the rest of the world. Still, when it comes to misrule by unelected elites under the banner of “science,” Europe has been out in front of us for a while now. Of course, it hardly matters where [...]