Nigeria needs science, not futile praying says Governor’s wife
IN A blistering attack on religion, Betty Anyanwu-Akeredolu, above, wife of Ondo State Governor, said that all the praying over Coronavirus was a waste of time and that Nigerians needed science to deal...
View ArticleUS MDs should use religion & spirituality when treating patients
Patients in a America want a deeper relationship with their physician – one that addresses their religious and spiritual needs, according to a group of medical educators, including Kristin Collier,...
View ArticleKeep calm, Muslims. Alcohol-based hand sanitisers are permissible.
AUSTRALIAN neuroscientist and author Dr Sumaiya Shaikh, above, has hit out at companies who are capitalising on COVID-19 by selling ‘halal’ hand sanitisers to Muslims at greatly inflated prices. In a...
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What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson
Continuing with this month’s theme of humanism, the following is an interview with Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK and President of Humanists International. I met Copson in his office...
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Reading list against nuclear war
From a Home Office and Central Office of Information Leaflet, Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack, p. 5. printed in England under the authority of Her Majesty’s Stationery...
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‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins
I met Professor Richard Dawkins at his home in Oxford. An interview with him, even at the age of 81, felt very much like a tutorial with a charismatic and formidable don of the old school. He talked...
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Scientist’s Discovery Leads to Ground-breaking App
© the Freethinker, based on images by Chanilim714 and 10 Downing St. For thousands of years, people have dimly suspected that exposure to the natural world might be good for them. But now Freddy...
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Can science threaten religious belief?
Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570-478 BC), one of the first philosophers to challenge conventional views of the gods. Image: from Thomas Stanley, The history of philosophy (1655), via Wikimedia Commons....
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When science and civil liberties clash
Neil Ferguson, 14 February 2020. Image: elifesciences.org via Wikimedia Commons During the pandemic, outlets that had previously turned to me for pieces on Brexit or prorogation or the Northern...
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‘A godless neo-religion’ – interview with Helen Joyce on the trans debate
I met Helen Joyce at the British Library one overcast afternoon in September. She had just come from the court hearing of Mermaids v the Charity Commission for England and Wales and LGB Alliance,...
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‘The defence of liberty is a state of mind’– interview with Jonathan...
I met Jonathan Sumption on a wet and windy November afternoon at his house in Blackheath, on the edge of Greenwich Park. We sat in the quiet of a small reception room, a fire glowing in the grate, the...
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Image of the week: planet K2-18b
Exo-planet K2-18b: artist’s impression. Image: Arndt Stelter via Wikimedia Commons. New signs of life elsewhere in the galaxy? The BBC recently reported that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may have...
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Image of the week: New super-deep view of the universe
IMage copyright NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Spain), J. D’Silva (U. Western Australia), A. Koekemoer (STScI), J. Summers & R. Windhorst (ASU), and H. Yan (U....
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Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with...
Daniel Dennett in 2012. image credit: Dmitry rozhkov. image used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Introduction Daniel C. Dennett is Professor of Philosophy and...
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‘We are at a threshold right now’: Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism,...
image credit: Sgerbic. Image used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence. Introduction Lawrence Krauss is a Canadian-American physicist and writer who has...
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The need for a new Enlightenment
Editorial introduction Below is reproduced, with permission from the Estate of Christopher Hitchens (to whom I express my gratitude), the final chapter of Hitchens’s classic freethinking text god Is...
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The philosopher’s curse(s)
a godly snooze: If the philosopher Berkeley’s God ever decided to catch forty winks, the consequences for existence itself would be dire. illustration by nicholas e. meyer. From earliest times,...
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The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali
professor sher ali. photo by ehtesham hassan.IntroductionIn October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics to...
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Silencing the voice of God: the journey of an evangelical apostate
Selected, lightly-edited excerpts from Cassandra Brandt’s A Backslider’s Guide to Getting Over God: Journey of an Evangelical Apostate. ‘Christ’s descent into hell’, 16th-century painting. From Chapter...
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80 years on from Schrödinger’s ‘What Is Life?’, philosophy of biology needs...
What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger was a seminal work in philosophy of biology. Published in 1944, this modern classic served as inspiration for Francis Crick and James Watson to pursue the structure...
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