Four Challenging Visions

Once there was a man who had been taught to believe something that didn’t really make sense. The man kind of knew that it didn’t really make sense, but he had also been taught that believing it—even if it didn’t make sense—made him a better person. He was a good man, and he wanted to …

Religionists often say: “What about faith? Shouldn’t there be a place for faith? Why do we have this ability if it is not intended to have some useful purpose? Where did it come from?” “Are not most if not many things taken on faith? Atheism is a faith. Believing in science is a faith. Evolution …

Today many nonbelievers accept as a matter of course the presumption of atheism, the position that the idea of a creating god is so fantastical that the burden of proof lies with those who believe in such a being. This position has elicited some aggressive responses. The American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, for example, has claimed …

As Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), French philosopher and historian of philosophy, once observed of Medieval Europe: It is often said, and not without good reasons, that the civilization of the Middle Ages was an essentially religious one. Yet even in times of the Cathedrals and of the Crusades, not everybody was a saint; it would not …

A miracle is usually defined as an event supposedly unexplainable by nature. But such a definition is predicated on a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance—that is, from a lack of knowledge. It is like saying, “We don’t know; therefore, we do know.” Anglican writer C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) succinctly defined a miracle as “an …

How well situated is humanism to face the challenges of the twenty-first century? In particular, what solutions can humanism contribute to the global ecological crisis from which the climate emergency is emerging as the defining crisis of our times? The omens don’t look good, because for a long time, humanism has associated itself with a …

While many of us fret about unaffordable housing or traffic jams caused in part by population pressures, a trending chorus of depopulation doomsaying laments that there are too few people—or will be shortly. Underneath this lament lies something that is factually true. Birthrates are dropping, and people are living longer.1 Human population ballooned in the twentieth …

There were many times when Gail1 thought she’d hit rock-bottom, only to fall even further and land with an even harder thud. Her childhood was rough. Her mother was encumbered with undiagnosed and untreated depression, and her father was bipolar—also undiagnosed and untreated. Part of his mania manifested in his packing up the family to move …

Race Relations In the October/November 2020 issue of Free Inquiry is the article “Farewell to the Pink Race!” by S. T. Joshi. The article celebrates the death of the European race, claiming that “no one need lament their obliteration from the earth.” I want us to live in a society where there is no hate …

I write in mid-July, deep into yet another summer of our discontent. Wildfires that make their own weather, relentless heat waves, and murderous floods driven by “thousand-year” rain events abound. Under such conditions, it’s easy to wonder whether human civilization can survive our naive cleverness. Our relentless fecundity. When you get down to it, our …

The collapse seems to be speeding up alarmingly. I lived through one portent of the acceleration in late June, along with much of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, in the form of a heat wave that broke all records and jumped up and down on them. The peak here in Seattle was 108°, which frankly …

In 1894, French historian and educator Count Pierre De Coubertin conceived of an inclusive worldwide youth movement and great sports festival. It would emulate the pre-Christian tradition of Ancient Greece but be rooted in universal fundamental Enlightenment principles. The ethos was to be an alternative to the aristocratic British imperialist sporting ethos of “muscular Christianity” …

Christianism—like Islamism—refers to the determination of religious ideologues to use the coercive power of the state to enforce religious morality. This is not supposed to happen in the West, where Enlightenment rationalism and its secular legacy have established a rigid separation between church and state. On the other hand, there is no English or French …

Studies by University of Melbourne researcher Nick Haslam and his collaborators have demonstrated a trend, beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s, for concepts related to harm to expand their meanings and applications. For the past forty years or so, many people have contributed, deliberately or otherwise, to concept creep for such words as …

Am I the only one to notice that religions across the world have been even more of a nuisance—and, in a distressing number of cases, far more than a nuisance—than usual lately? At this point, it is hardly worth noting how Buddhists (yes, Buddhists) in Myanmar continue to persecute the Muslim Rohingya or how Israelis …

My June/July 2021 essay on how the little-noticed mass death of billions of immature humans, as well as the endless suffering of animals, rips away any pretense that a god and his earthly creation could be benign and moral spent nearly all its time denouncing worship of a creator as fatally depraved. I briefly noted …

Thinking is like playing tennis, driving a car, giving a talk, dieting, or speaking a foreign language. It can be done well or badly. In the jargon of modern education, good thinkers are called critical thinkers. Critical thinkers have a mix of attitudes, skills, and habits that set them apart from sloppy thinkers. Are you …

Few people realize it, but secular humanism—the progressive crusade to improve life for all—may be the chief driving force of western civilization. Humanism means helping people, and secular means doing it without supernatural religion. The movement soared three centuries ago in the Enlightenment, when bold thinkers sought to end the divine right of kings and …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Modernization is brought about by taking seriously (1) the cognitive claims of scientific knowledge and the scientific method, and (2) the moral claims of secular life and its quality. It is because traditional religions are often inimical to these claims that they need to be combated and their authority …

I appreciate Tom Flynn’s close attention to my book The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism. To have such a long review by the editor himself is satisfying, even when he and I disagree. I’m also flattered to have the book characterized with a reference to the venerable Walt Whitman. Flynn recognizes that my book breaks …

From time to time in this space, I have alluded to the Abrahamic god’s contract. In response to incessant, nonexistent reader demand, I obtained the most recent version of said contract and secured exclusive permission to publish it in Free Inquiry. Aren’t you glad you subscribe? * * * Preamble 1. The purpose of this …

Philosopher Reginald Williams uses Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to flog COVID-19 research and policy as being stifled by authoritarian politics suppressing all but the establishment view (“Thomas Kuhn and COVID-19,” FI, October/November 2020). Kuhn’s book was a wildfire hit among nonscientists. Among scientists, not so much. The failings in Kuhn’s understanding …

At age seventy, my episodic memory can rarely replay events I have witnessed. But every detail of October 8, 2011, is engraved in my mind. On that evening, at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, Christopher Hitchens received the Richard Dawkins Atheist of the Year Award. Five hundred atheists and onlookers attended the awards banquet, …

“You accuse me of being a nihilist? Of course, I’m a nihilist. You say that like it’s something bad.” When I think of nihilists, I usually think of Russian anarchists trying to overthrow the Czarist monarchy at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to my ever-handy Google dictionary, an anarchist is a person who …

An Archaeology of Disbelief: The Origin of Secular Philosophy, by Edward Jayne. Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2018. xx & 198 pages. 978-0-7618-6966-5 (cloth); 978-0-7618-6967-2 (electronic). Edward Jayne, an English professor emeritus in his eighty-third year at the time of publication of this book, offers in eight chapters a compact survey of skeptics and (more rarely) outright …

While we await our Sybil and she denies us entrance Demanding the bough of a tree which in our youth Cried out to us—the one of many looked upon— And when received she shows us in Anchises lures us with the dream we dream at dawn Though he was sworn to secrecy, he welcomes us …

The human heart cannot love; it is the mind that learns to move. The sun does not really set; we simply turn away from it. The sky may blaze a deep azure, but only to one standing here. We wish upon a falling star, a piece of dusty meteor. A child may be invincible; a …