The Next Thing We Need To Do About Carbon
This week, in its long awaited 2013 report, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made the bold proposal that no more than a trillion tons of carbon should be burned and released into the...
View ArticleWhy the One Appealing Part of Creationism Is Wrong
Earlier this month, Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky, held a debate with Bill Nye at the museum. Within the creationist crowd, Ham represents the young-Earth wing,...
View ArticleWhy Hollywood Thinks Atheism Is Bad for Business
After Matthew McConaughey took the stage to accept his Best Actor award at the Oscars on Sunday, he began his speech by thanking God, praising the deity for giving him “opportunities that I know are...
View ArticleA Scientific Breakthrough Lets Us See to the Beginning of Time
At rare moments in scientific history, a new window on the universe opens up that changes everything. Today was quite possibly such a day. At a press conference on Monday morning at the...
View ArticleNo, Astrobiology Has Not Made the Case for God
Recently, the Wall Street Journal published a piece with the surprising title “Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God.” At least it was surprising to me, because I hadn’t heard the news. The piece...
View ArticleTeaching Doubt
Last month, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin and a presumed Presidential candidate, delivered an address at Chatham House, an international-affairs think tank in London. For Walker, the point of...
View ArticleAll Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more...
View ArticleBen Carson’s Scientific Ignorance
For a man with an impressive educational C.V., Ben Carson makes a lot of intellectual missteps. In his September 16th debate performance, he displayed a profound lack of foreign-policy knowledge; last...
View ArticleWhat Neutrinos Reveal
This week the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for their discovery that elementary particles called neutrinos have mass. This is, remarkably, the...
View ArticleTangled Up in Entanglement
No area of physics causes more confusion, not just among the general public but also among physicists, than quantum mechanics. On the one hand, it’s the source of New Age mythology, and has enabled...
View ArticleThinking Rationally About Terror
Earlier this winter, in the first week of December, I set sail for Antarctica. During the cruise, which was arranged by the Origins Project, an academic institute that I run, I was to give a series of...
View ArticleStill Three Minutes to Midnight
In 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published, on its cover, a “Doomsday Clock.” The clock was designed to represent the existential threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. That year,...
View ArticleDo the New, Big-Money Science Prizes Work?
When I last attended the Nobel Prize ceremony, in 2004, one of the other guests was a multimillionaire philanthropist named Fred Kavli. I had met Kavli a few years earlier, in California, while...
View ArticlePut an Atheist on the Supreme Court
Who should replace Antonin Scalia? On Monday, the Times reported that the Justice himself had weighed in on the question: last June, in his dissenting opinion in the same-sex marriage case Obergefell...
View ArticleThe Fantasy of the Deathbed Conversion
Earlier this spring, a prominent evangelical Christian named Larry Taunton published a book alleging that Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, had been, during the last years of his life,...
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