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Most critical discussions of Arthur C. Clarke’s writings rarely delve beyond his stories and novels; but to understand his fiction, one must examine how Clarke thought about future pos sibilities. His approach to looking ahead is the basis of his vision of human history and its promise. Clarke fulfilled the ambitions of science fiction (SF) …

In his 1697 article “On the Ultimate Origination of Things,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz posed a historic question: he demanded “a full reason why there should be any world rather than none.” In a sequel of 1714, he famously asked more generally: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (italics in original). And yet he spoke …

On the streets of London, the placards scream, “FREE SPEECH, GO TO HELL,” an unintentional masterpiece of British irony. In Beirut, twenty thousand mass at the Danish embassy with signs reading , “Damn your beliefs and your liberty.” In Damascus, the embassy is burned. In Pakistan, the national parliament unanimously passes a resolution of condemnation, …

“I don’t believe in God, but I’m a spiritual person.” These are the exact words I recently overheard a young woman say to a man with whom she was flirting on a train. I hear the same or similar words all the time. Like many secular humanists who have thought their worldview through, I often …

Paul Kurtz once asked, “Can scientific naturalism, insofar as it undermines theism, provide an alternative, dramatic, poetic rendering of the human condition?” Years earlier, Julian Huxley (1887–1975) boldly set sail to meet a similar challenge and called his idea “evolutionary humanism.” No sooner had this ship left port than it came under attack from all …

  The United States has been ridding itself of its First World status for as long as it has been privatizing its critical infrastructure (a.k.a. the common good), at the same time despoiling the natural resource embodied in the health, welfare, courage, and intelligence of its citizenry. —Lewis H. Lapham As we write, Hillary Clinton …

The recent grand tour of the eastern United States by Pope Benedict XVI was a carefully choreographed propaganda event. Its purpose was, apparently, to rescue America’s Roman Catholic Church and perhaps restore it to its former power—which has been hemorrhaging with church closings and the long decline in recruitment of priests and nuns. The obscene …

A recent survey indicates that Americans have been changing their religions at a rapid rate. Remarkably, some 44 percent have moved from their religions of birth into other denominations, other religions, or none at all. This Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey, released in February of 2008 and based on 35,000 responses, also …

My last two op-eds generated unusually strong response, which I’ll acknowledge and answer here. Consider this my feedback to the feedback of others. The Why of Ponzi My December 2007/January 2008 essay, “Beyond Ponzi Economics,” focused on the population crisis (yes, there is one). I asked whether economic models exist that neither demand nor presume …

The most recently published findings of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life have been garnering attention for one principal reason, and receiving insufficient attention for a less evident one. To take the more obvious reason first, the latest research shows that religious allegiance in the United States is much weaker than most people …

  Pneumonia used to be called “the old man’s friend,” because it often brought a swift and relatively painless end to a life that was already of poor quality and would otherwise have continued to decline. Now a study of severely demented patients in U.S. nursing homes in the Boston, Massachusetts, area shows that the …

  We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don’t know. —W.H. Auden (The Week, November 16, 2002) The most popular of ethical viewpoints clearly seems to be altruism. What does altruism amount to? As philosopher W. G. Maclagan put it in an article in The …

Below, the author concludes her examination, begun in the last issue of Free Inquiry, of the negative effect of religion on conscience. —EDS. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX established a system of “legal” investigations to stamp out heresy. The Dominicans (Domini Canes, or Hounds of the Lord) were granted the exclusive “privilege” of conducting the …

Steven Pinker, a renowned cognitive neuroscientist and research psychologist, is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on cognition and language has won the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. His critically acclaimed books include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and …

A New Agenda The editorial by Paul Kurtz in the February/March 2008 issue of Free Inquiry, “Multi-secularism: The New Agenda,” is outstanding in its message. His arguments for multi-secularism are reasoned and powerful. As he points out, the world is indeed a secular environment and is increasingly seen as such by almost every culture on …

Center for Inquiry Hits Textbook Errors A high-school government textbook, American Government: Institutions and Policies, Tenth Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), has been criticized in a twenty-five -page report issued by the Center for Inquiry/Transnational (CFI) on March 28. The textbook was written by two conservative authors—James Q. Wilson and former Bush administration Faith-Based Initiatives and …

The nations of the world agreed in 1948 that healthcare was an innate right for all human beings. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the United Nations—and signed by the United States—reads as follows: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of …

Most experts agree that the present world population cannot live in reasonable comfort without experiencing serious environmental deterioration—and this in as little as one generation. I first began to think about this issue in the late 1960s and early ’70s (from 1968–70, I lived in Afghanistan). Controversy over China’s adoption of its one-child policy was …

During a brief stint blogging about weather, climate, and meteorology, I had occasion to use the phrase “bipedal primate” to refer to those particular hairless hominids who by definition should have the requisite cranial stuffing to make sense of those words. In response, an angry patron wrote me a brief email, “Keep the religion of …

Full disclosure: I no longer consider myself a Christian. I was raised a Southern Baptist, which I found an extremely intolerant, judgmental, and ignorant lifestyle. Once I matured emotionally and intellectually, I shed that myopic view of the world and now consider myself a secular humanist. Many have suggested that Thomas Aquinas played an important …

The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, edited by Tom Flynn (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59102-391-3) 897 pp. Cloth $199.00. Richard Dawkins, in his cogent and engaging foreword to The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, reflects on the peculiarity of having a huge volume devoted to the absence of something. In fact, I was reminded immediately …

Stephen Hawking: A Biography, by Kristine Larsen (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007, ISBN 978-159102-9574-0) 215 pp. Paper $16.95. The famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking had an extraordinary career ahead of him, or so it seemed in his twenty-first year. Acknowledged as brilliant by his fellow physics students at Oxford, he was troubled only by occasional lapses …

Head and Heart: American Christianities, by Garry Wills (New York: The Penguin Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59420-146-2) 626 pp. Cloth $29.95. “The Federal Constitution was, in short, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a secular humanist text. The delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were not a very orthodox group of men in any doctrinal sense. The only born-again …

The Jesus Family Tomb, by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-119202-9) 218 pp. Cloth $27.95. This book does not stray beyond its evidence, but the implications of its findings are what has brought down a heap of abuse on it—often from people who demonstrate, through a telltale factual mistake they …

Science, Evolution and Creationism, National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-309-10586-6) 70 pp. Paper $12.95. This handy book is intended as a resource for people caught up in controversies over evolution and creationism, particularly in public schools. It defines evolution as “a core concept …

The world is fescennine and vermilion with dusk’s lurid insistence The chalice of the moon lifts to the obvolute manner of the colors wrapping round into night relieved at last they are gone It is not surprising to find one’s self lost at the skirt of evening fall The moon concentrates one like a mirror …

As things so often do, it began with Genesis. God commanded the first man and woman to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. …

Dear Pastor, what I fear most is the pervasive combination of religious and secular ideology of a kind that sees little or no harm in the destruction of the Creation. The following speech might be given by the visionary who ranks biodiversity of little account and sees humanity ascending profitably away from and not to …

Global ecology is a notable action item on the agenda of Reformed Christianity, the form of Protestant Christianity traditionally most committed t o a world-affirming faith. To understand this Reformed conception of global ecology, however, we must situate it in the context of the Christian worldview, best summarized for our present purposes as the creation-sin-redemption …

The disasters of the past decade serve notice that our present century will be remembered—should there be anyone left to remember it—as the century in which humans (our species!) confronted the crises of ecological burnout and proliferating weapons of mass destruction. How we handle the crises will determine the future of life on Earth. My …

In Part 1 (FI, February/March 2008), we argued for the rapid deployment of what we called “first-round survival technologies.” These technologies are designed to satisfy certain of mankind’s fundamental needs while buying additional time to hold global warming within tolerable limits—long enough, it is hoped, to make other substantive changes that are required for humankind’s …

In 1792, a young French soldier wrote to his lover of their first night together: “I have awakened full of you. The memory of last night has given my senses no rest . . . what an effect you have on my heart! I send you thousands of kisses—but don’t kiss me. Your kisses sear …

We are chagrined that during the current U.S. presidential campaign, secular Americans cannot point to a single candidate who is willing to maintain a clear distinction between religion and public policy, insisting on the strict separation of church and state. On the GOP side, this is not altogether surprising, given the way in which many …

The culture wars of the past two decades continue to be waged, most overtly in a presidential election campaign of extraordinary duration and ferocity. Much has been said about domestic policies and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet in all the heated campaign rhetoric, another issue is almost totally ignored. A vital foreign policy …

Below we present the conclusion to Richard Dawkins’s foreword to The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, edited by Free Inquiry editor Tom Flynn (the first part was published in the February/March 2008 issue of Free Inquiry). Dr. Dawkins composed this foreword before completing his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. Readers familiar with that work may recognize …

When I initially informed Tom Flynn of my desire to respond critically to his editorial in the last issue of Free Inquiry (“Why the ‘A’ Word Won’t Go Away,” February/March 2008), he shot back in jest, “Only if you begin your response with an admission that my logic is incontrovertible.” Flynn certainly weaves a seductive …

Insufficient attention has been given to the role of religion in helping to impose and reinforce the largest and fastest-growing dictatorial system in the modern world. I am referring to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which is well on its way to becoming a one-party system to rival the former Communist one, with a police apparatus to …

Although the Japanese have called off plans to kill fifty humpback whales (at least for a year or two), their whaling fleet will still kill nearly one thousand whales of other species this year. In response to international protests, the Japanese have responded that the West is trying to impose its values on other countries. …

Americans are virtually unanimous in their professed support for free speech, according to the Freedom Forum’s 2007 report, “The State of the First Amendment.” Ninety-eight percent of survey respondents agreed that “the right to speak freely about whatever you want” is “essential” or, at least, “important.” But this strong expression of support for the idea …

In 1970, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned: “If we create today traditions of spying on people, the time may not be too far distant when a person can hardly speak his mind to any other person witho ut being afraid that the police or someone else will hear what he says and therefore know …