Was the Star of Bethlehem Real?: Responding to the Go-To Skeptic

Among skeptics, Dr. Aaron Adair is sometimes hailed as the “go to” guy on the Star of Bethlehem. He’s even written a book arguing that the Star didn’t exist. Recently, he engaged a post I wrote about the Star of Bethlehem. I'd like to offer a reply to Dr. Adair in this post. First Things First   First, you can read our previous interaction in the comments box on this post. I want to thank Dr. Adair for striving to maintain a positive tone, both in the combox and in his... Read More

What Makes a Person Special?

A while back my kids were watching the Nick Jr. cartoon Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, and I happened to see something that has troubled me ever since. Kai-Lan is a little girl with a friend named Rintoo, and in this particular episode Rintoo isn’t feeling special. Kai-Lan and her other friends seem to have an instinctive feeling that Rintoo must be special somehow, and spend most of the episode trying to figure out why that is. After some searching, they finally figure it out. At the climax of... Read More

The Acts We Perform and the People We Become

From the 1950’s through the late 1970’s Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) was a professor of moral philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin in Poland, specializing in sexual ethics and what we call today “marriage and family life.” He produced two important books touching on these matters, The Acting Person, a rigorously philosophical exploration of Christian anthropology, and Love and Responsibility, a much more accessible analysis of love, sex, and marriage. These... Read More

How Should We Define ‘Atheism’?

NOTE: The following post is an excerpt from the recently released Oxford Handbook of Atheism (Oxford University Press, 2013), co-edited by atheist philosopher Michael Ruse and Catholic theologian, and Strange Notions contributor, Dr. Stephen Bullivant.     Atheism and Ambiguity   The precise definition of ‘atheism’ is both a vexed and vexatious issue. (Incidentally, the same applies to its more-or-less equivalents in other languages: Atheismus, athéisme,ateismi,... Read More

What Does the Latest “Big Bang” Discovery Mean?

Over the past few days the world of cosmology and astrophysics has gone “supernova.” Researchers affiliated with the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica announced that they had discovered empirical evidence for a key part of the Big Bang theory, cosmic inflation. One aspect of this discovery that I found really interesting is that it forms an almost perfect parallel to a discovery that was made sixty years ago. The First Telescope Discovery   In the early twentieth century, the Belgian... Read More

“Cosmos” and One More Telling of the Tired Myth

Seth MacFarlane, well known atheist and cartoonist, is the executive producer of the remake of “Cosmos,” which recently made its national debut. The first episode featured, along with the science, an animated feature dealing with the sixteenth century Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by Church officials. A brooding statue of Bruno stands today in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome on the very spot where the unfortunate friar was put to death. In MacFarlane’s... Read More

A Manual for Creating Atheists: A Critical Review

Since its release last November, Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists has quickly become one of the most popular new books on atheism (as of now it has 200 reviews on amazon.com). As someone who has also recently written a book on atheism, though from a far different perspective, I was eager to see Boghossian’s method for “creating an atheist.” In this book review I’ll cover the good, the bad, and the ugly in A Manual for Creating Atheists. The Good   Surprisingly,... Read More

Detectives of Despair

In the HBO series True Detective, two investigators of a high-profile murder traverse a desolate Louisiana landscape, looking for clues that will help crack the case. Soon, the conversation about the darkness of their State drifts into a conversation about the darkness of their state—and an investigation into a murder suddenly morphs into an investigation into everything. “It’s all one ghetto man,” the self-proclaimed pessimist Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) declares.... Read More

Is This Mention of Jesus a Forgery?

Many skeptics assert that there is no early, non-Christian evidence for a historical Jesus. But Christian apologists point to the writings of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, who mentions Jesus no less than twice. Yet are those accounts truly trustworthy? Who was Josephus?   Josephus was born to a wealthy family in Judea in the year A.D. 37. In the year 66, a national revolt against Rome broke out and Josephus was appointed commander of the insurgent forces in Galilee. The resistance... Read More

Picasso’s Sublime Tragedy

Pablo Picasso’s Tragedy (1903) depicts three figures huddled on a beach—presumably a family. We see nothing of the ‘tragedy’ itself, however; no trace of specific disaster remains, and we are left to speculate about what series of events may have led to their misfortune. The focus of the painting centers us on the figures themselves. The man and woman are turned inwards in an inherently familial pose, but the distance between them and their downcast eyes reveal their inability... Read More

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