Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life.
Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.
We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.
Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.
Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.
Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.
You have to know evolution to understand the natural world. And that cannot be a threat to people of faith. There's a serious problem if you are forced by your faith to reject the most well-supported theory in all of science.
We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.
My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts.
We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.
The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.
When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the identification of such mysteries is only the beginning. Science picks up where theology leaves off.
Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.
Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.
Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.
