Author: John Shook

There was never any doubt about where John Dewey stood: he was a godforsaken and unrepentant atheist. Yet if he were around today, he would probably find the notion of “spiritual but not religious” attractive.

Newly elected Arizona Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema isn’t a believer in God, which is not news. But now it seems that she’s not a nonbeliever either. Intellectuals prick up their ears when informed that a logical dichotomy, such as “believer or nonbeliever,” is in fact a false dichotomy. Let philosophers rethink where logic fails. We need …

Meaning and Value in a Secular Age: Why Eupraxsophy Matters—The Writings of Paul Kurtz, edited by Nathan Bupp (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2012, ISBN 13: 9781616143215) 265 pp. Paper, $19.00. It may be difficult to recall nowadays, but there was a time when the greatest atheists were philosophical giants. They matched their metaphysical, theological, and …

Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, by Alain de Botton (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012, ISBN 978-0-307-37910-8) 320 pp. Hardcover, $26.95. Alain de Botton does n’t think God exists, but he regards thinking about God as only one among many things religion is good for. Subtracting God-belief from religion, in …

Religion’s accusation that science strips humanity of all significance couldn’t be further from the truth. Science should be celebrated by all as an ennobling achievement of our species. We have nothing to fear from scientific knowledge; only those fearful of reality would distrust science. Friends of pleasing illusions and myths are no friends of humanity. …

Religion promises a rewarding relationship with some supreme reality. Neither naturalism nor democracy does that. How can religion function in a democracy? Only religion hijacks one’s cognitive centers. Having committed to religious promises, people feel certain about the spiritual rewards. Religious people love certainty and detest doubt about their commitment, whether that doubt be internal …

Improving the brain’s cognitive performance is the next great frontier for not just the brain sciences but also the wider field of medical therapy. As soon as some fresh discovery about the brain’s functioning is announced, there are novel proposals for modifying and enhancing that brain process. Therapies that repair poorly functioning brains are treatments …

There is no escaping the accusation anymore: humanism, we hear over and over, can’t help the environmental movement. Sure, humanists can say that they love the environment, want to “go green,” and treasure their animal friends. Humanists can even script such devotion into their declarations and manifestos. Yet environmentalists frequently doubt that humanism can form …

It was a great love-hate story, a truly grand narrative. Science and Religion, ever entangled yet estranged, always going in opposite directions yet returning to collide again and again. Somehow they just can’t stay away from each other. They have had a long history going on this way, and the drama won’t end any time …

Science studies nature, and our brains are part of nature. Brains naturally produce beliefs—lots of them. Some of those beliefs are about nature, and others are about God. God is unnatural, yet beliefs about God are natural. It’s a curious situation: why do natural brains produce beliefs about the supernatural? Brain scientists are working on …

Among twentieth-century humanists, none stands higher than the American John Dewey, professor of philosophy at Columbia University during the first half of the century. Dewey taught the world what a sound naturalism, humanism, secularism, and atheism should look like. In his pragmatist philosophy, these four isms not only cooperated but mutually supported each other. Subtract …

Modern science has been around for about four centuries, gradually revealing to us how insignificant our place in nature truly is. Each epochal discovery in fields from astronomy to biology has been a great shock to our cozy little worldview. However, the scientific facts also indicate that we are very special in the universe. Science …

Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination. Created by Benjamin Radford. Available at www.PlayingGods.com. Playing Gods (created by Benjamin Radford, managing editor of our sister journal, Skeptical Inquirer) is a strategy game, perhaps like a smaller version of Risk, except you control the pieces in the manner of a jealous god rather than a …

One of America’s great humanists was the philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910). James served as a vital bridge between the humanism of the transcendentalists and the revival of humanism in the 1920s and 30s. His largest contribution to humanism consisted in his eagerness to champion the individual person and the personal perspective, the direct …

Democracy is rarely so successful as when skeptics can openly question whether it is working and when critics can freely debate antidemocratic alternatives. Like science, democracy works best when its own processes are subject to the same practical evaluation it would give everything else. So democracy evolves like science does: basic methods of free inquiry, …

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 …