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The voice of conscience is widely considered a noble guide to moral conduct, but not everyone agrees that it is reliable. Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor” whose philosophy became the official doctrine of the Catholic Church, did not totally trust conscience as a guide to action. He thought that conscience was intimately connected to the …

Lawrence Krauss is a best-selling author and one of America’s top spokespersons for the scientific outlook. He is Swasey Professor of Physics and professor of astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, where he also directs the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics. A science educator interested in helping define the proper limits …

Race and Intelligence Re Peter Singer’s “Should We Discuss Race and Intelligence?” (FI, February/March 2008): I am one of those who would hesitate to approve any study that claims to relate intelligence and race, for the following reasons: The words are vague, and people would not agree on their meanings. Some scholars deny that race …

A U.S. district judge upheld a Texas moment-of-silence law, even though it had been amended to call specifically for “prayer.” The U. S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case regarding a neon-lighted Bible display outside a Texas courthouse. A lower court decision that the Bible display must go stands. —TF Global Warming, Population, Clericalism …

Philosophical naturalism (hereafter, just “naturalism”) is a general understanding of the world and humanity’s place within it. Naturalism concludes that the only reality is the physical reality of energy/matter as gradually discovered by our intelligence using the tools of experience, reason, and science. Human experience is the ultimate source and justification for all knowledge. Experience …

Among the many frustrating experiences that face humanists, arguing for church-state separation must be one of the worst. I have personally argued till I was blue in the face trying to overcome the intransigent incomprehension of some of my religious acquaintances who could not seem to grasp that something is wrong when church and state …

Below, the author concludes an examination of significant figures in the medieval West’s appraisal of Islam. Parts 1 and 2 appeared in the previous two issues.—Eds. Riccoldo Da Monte Croce (1243–1320) Riccoldo was born in 1243 in Florence. He joined the Dominican Order at the age of twenty-four and traveled in the Middle East as …

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, ISBN 978-1-4000-4367-5) 321 pp. Cloth $26.00. The “Stillborn God” of this fascinating and scholarly work is the God of the Enlightenment, God as conceived by liberal theology. The book places modern-day church-state issues in historical context and …

Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, by John G. West (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2007, ISBN 978-933859323) 495 pp. Cloth $28.00. It must be a strange world John West lives in. His book Darwin Day in America is much more ambitious than the title …

Masters of Illusion: The Supreme Court and the Religion Clauses, by Frank S. Ravitch (New York: New York University Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-8147-7585-1) 241 pp. Cloth $45.00. Even those who have read dozens of books on the meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment have probably never encountered a sentence such as this: …

Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future, by John J. DiIulio Jr. (California: University of California Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-25414-5) 309 pp. Cloth $24.95. There were times while reading John J. DiIulio’s Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future that I would nod my head and think, “That sounds reasonable.” But …

…and history noted of this time, a nation lost its soul and mind. It is recorded for all to see, freedom sought has ended with thee. The dream is gone, a nightmare instead, washed with oil and unrecorded dead. The torch extinguished as darkness reigns, a torture nation documented in shame, our hearts’ permanent stain.

“What if the universe were literally in the process of coming to life?” —James N. Gardner, Biocosm Something happened moments ago on a rock in a galaxy that tows and pushes in the Local Group—something alert, obstreperous, agile, having the oddly beautiful awkwardness of youth, made of inorganic matter from the deaths preceding it, now …

The question I want to pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? (I am here using the fifty-seven countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference [OIC] …

Perhaps the most significant global developments of the past two decades have been the rise of China (and Asia), the relative decline of Europe and Russia, and the weakening of America’s power and influence in the world. These realities were vividly demonstrated during the Eleventh World Congress of Centers for Inquiry in Beijing, China, hosted …

Four significant and interconnected physical problems are likely to reach critical stages over the next two decades. They are: Global warming and environmental degradation Depletion of key resources including oil, gas and potable water Pollution caused by use of fossil fuels with current technologies A world population that has grown beyond Earth’s carrying capacity (which …

The battle for secularism has leaped to center stage worldwide; we find it being contested or defended everywhere. Of the world’s fifty-seven Islamic countries, virtually all except Turkey and Tunisia attempt to safeguard or enact Islamic law (sharia) as embodied in the Qur’an. Radical Islamists wage jihad against the secular society. Pope Benedict XVI rails …

Culminating five years of development, Prometheus Books has released The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, edited by Free Inquiry editor Tom Flynn. Richard Dawkins provided the work’s foreword, reprinted in part below, which he composed before completing the manuscript of his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. Readers familiar with that work may recognize earlier versions of …

  Sam Harris dropped a bomb at a recent atheist convention by suggesting that those who embrace the label “atheist” “are consenting to be viewed as a cranky subculture.” In the last FREE INQUIRY, no lesser an authority than Paul Kurtz agreed (p. 8), warning secular humanists against “accepting the label of ‘atheist.’” But do …

Four years ago, I took the position of executive director here at the Council for Secular Humanism. The job intrigued me, faced as we were at the time with political and social challenges that seemed, frankly, insurmountable. President George W. Bush was at the height of his popularity, and his outrageous affronts to secularism, as …

I remember Professor Leszek Kolakowski, one of the great Polish intellectual dissidents from the Stalinist period, saying that when he debated with apologists for the system, he often found himself almost on the losing side. This was because the arguments of his opponents were so antiquated that he’d forgotten what the original refutations were. (Another …

When Dolly the cloned sheep’s existence was revealed to the world ten years ago, panic ensued. World leaders, including presidents Clinton and Bush, the pope, and numerous prime ministers, spent the next few months condemning Dolly’s creation and warning about the horror of human cloning. At the time, my view was that there was no …

In modern liberal democracies in which freedom of inquiry and discussion is widely respected, one issue is still difficult to discuss freely. Long after it has become commonplace to discuss previously taboo topics like the existence of God or sex outside marriage, the intersection of genetics and intelligence remains an intellectual minefield. Though I would …

An array of reports and studies—not to mention Jay Leno’s impromptu questioning of college students on NBC’s Tonight Show—make it alarmingly clear that from grammar school to graduate school, and across the country at large, many Americans are educationally left behind in their knowledge of the basic constitutional, individual liberties. You know—the liberties we are …

Does the First Amendment protect the right to make statements that might be construed falsely as solicitations or offers of child pornography? The Supreme Court confronts this question this term in U.S. v. Willia ms, a case that doesn’t bode well for free speech. In 2003, Congress passed a child pornography law (the PROTECT Act) …

Can we be good without God? That’s a very old question believers like to ask because, I suspect, the answer is very pleasing to them. No, they say, we cannot be good without believing in an invisible spirit who, like Santa Claus, knows when we’ve been bad or good. No invisible spirit, no reward or …

Though some religious activists keep claiming that America was “founded as a Christian nation,” the historical proofs are opposite and in writing. The activists say the Declaration of Independence proves the “Christian nation” claim because it cites our God and Creator; but the purpose of the Declaration was to cite the source of our right …

Few ideas serve more wicked purposes than “fairness.” In public policy, it is probably the most overused justification for increasing the power of some people over others, for meddling in others’ private lives, and for being guiltlessly resentful. Yes, there is some virtue to fairness, as when teachers grade and parents divide the dessert fairly. …

As I read Tibor Machan’s assault on fairness, I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. Surely he must be jesting; surely his tongue is in his cheek. He caricatures the moral principle of fairness, considering it a “minor virt ue,” while at the same time appealing to it in order to justify his opposition to the …

Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of America’s leading science popularizers, directs the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. The host of PBS-Nova’s ScienceNow, he appears regularly in the media. He has just been named a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. This passionate science educator recently discussed communicating science to the public …

What Overpopulation Problem? Tom Flynn’s op-ed “Beyond Ponzi Economics” (FI, December 2007/January 2008) describing his concerns about overpopulation is needlessly pessimistic. With so many Bible-believing Christians asserting the Bible to be the Word of God, all that needs to be done is to get Christians to act upon the wise, loving advice of their Lord …

Guiliani to Push School Vouchers Presidential aspirant Rudy Giliani has named an Educational Advisory Board whose membership is stacked in favor of diverting public funds to faith-based private schools under voucher plans. The panel is to be headed by voucher promoter Terry Moe and former Bush education secretary Rod Paige, and includes voucher advocates Clint …

Though his poetry comprises but four slender volumes—A Shropshire Lad (ASL), Last Poems, More Poems (MP), and Additional Poems (AP), the last two published posthumously—Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) belongs in the pantheon of English poets. Born in Worcestershire, in the environs of the Shropshire hills, Housman liked to amble through highland, field, and dale. As …

What country is in the midst of a long-standing civil war—a war that has displaced hundreds of thousands of citizens, seen the first widespread use of suicide bombers, and in which the government fighting separatist forces has among its most militant allies the country’s religious clerics? Chances are most Westerners thus questioned would search their …

With this article, Ibn Warraq continues the examination of significant figures in the medieval West’s appraisal of Islam that he began in the December 2007/Jan uary 2008 issue. In this installment, he focuses on Robert of Ketton (who probably died in the second half of the twelfth century) and Mark of Toledo (fl.1193–1216).—Eds. The Abbot …

With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military, by Michael L. Weinstein and Davin Seay (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007, ISBN 0-312-38143-2) 258 pp. Cloth $25.95. The places of hell are reserved for those who remain silent, particularly in times of moral crisis. I will not be …

Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise Antony (Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-01951713079) 336 pp. Cloth $28.00. It used to be so easy not believing in God. Now there are books atheists have to read, and books and more books. I thought I’d never read another …

No Country for Old Men. Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. Distributed by Miramax Films and Paramount Vantage. 2007. 122 minutes. The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men turns its back on Hollywood’s sappy, happy-ending film formula. Of course, not all moviegoers seem to appreciate this. The story …

Nothing: Something to Believe In, by Nica Lalli (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59102-529-0) 271 pp. Paper $17.00. Looking for a carefully reasoned philosophical treatise defending atheism and attacking theism? Then this isn’t the book for you, nor does author (and Brooklyn art educator) Nica Lalli pretend to be offering such weighty material. But …

Aunt Vera seemed frail while I was growing up. Every year, she had colds and laryngitis. She could not swim. She had allergies; She could not enter our cat-filled home. But, when I moved back to New Hampshire After my divorce, I saw that my parents were aging; Aunt Vera was not. With a scarf …