by Carl Howard | Oct 26, 2009 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
Tonight, the University of NSW is hosting a re-trial of Galileo, organised by my honours supervisor Peter Slezak. I was lucky enough to to retry Galileo in my undergrad degree (when Slezak taught a couse on it) as a prosecutor*, so it’s great to see that this has been...
by Carl Howard | Oct 13, 2009 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Resources, Food and Environment, Society
First World Third World Plentitude Starvation Liberal Democracy Genocidal Dictatorship Education Superstition Whites Non-whites Technology Poverty High life span Death before 40 2 child families 9 child families Widespread contraception Genital mutilation You...
by Carl Howard | Sep 28, 2009 | Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism, Sex
Laura Schlesinger once said: “If you’re gay or a lesbian, it’s a biological error that inhibits you from relating normally to the opposite sex” (Source). This created a lot of uproar, but it got me thinking about whether she could “technically” be right (despite her...
by Carl Howard | Sep 3, 2009 | Atheism and Religion, Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Science and Skepticism
One of the most long-standing arguments used by religious debaters (eg. Dinesh D’Souza) is to claim that atheism is responsible for more killings than all the religions put together because of Stalin, Hitler, Mao etc. I have typically seen several types of responses...
by Carl Howard | Aug 15, 2009 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Philosophy
A quickie today. In the Atheist Experience, Russell and Jeff dissect the Argument from Game Design, as proposed on a forum of Christian gamers. It does something like this: If you design a computer game, the only objective purpose/meaning to the game is the one that...
by Carl Howard | Aug 14, 2009 | Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
Tue night, I went to Paul Griffiths’ inaugural lecture at Sydney Uni called Reconstructing Human Nature (thanks John Wilkins for letting me know!). The talk was on conceptions of human nature and what it means for something to be “innate”. I won’t summarise it — but I...