Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism
The knowledge we’ve gleaned from science has shrunk the remaining possible realm of deities to the infinitesimal. Religionists have responded by arguing that omnipotent deities exist perpetually beyond the detection of science. Half a century... Read More
The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates
As handsome, beloved Amos lay dying, Daisy did her best to make him comfortable. Daisy seemed to grasp Amos’s situation and, being part of a tight-knit community, Amos could count on affection and assistance from... Read More
Icarus of Brooklyn: A Spiritual Quest Gone Wrong
In the last decade we have allowed the primary interest of dignity and the human element in humanism to be slowly superseded by a popular anti-theism that declares religious people stupid, and us intellectually superior.... Read More
How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the elites of Europe and the United States were thrilled by what they perceived as a rather sophisticated class of automatons, mechanical marvels that could do everything from play... Read More
Book Review: The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby
Let me start by saying what this book is not. The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby is not a biography of Robert Ingersoll. It is, rather, an argument for restoring Ingersoll to a respected place... Read More
When God Wept
If ever there were a day deserving to be called—secularly—a “day of reckoning,” this would be the day for Owen Ross, the forty-seven-year-old protagonist of Jon Mills’ provocative first novel, When God Wept. For it... Read More
Joseph Anton: A Memoir
I perforce begin with a confession: I couldn’t finish Salman Rushdie’s two most notable novels, Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses. I don’t love magical realism generally—I hated García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—and... Read More