Even though it sounds like a big question, the kind of question that fuels hours of late-night coffee house conversations—DOES FREE WILL EXIST?—the truth is, that from an empirical point of view, the consensus is pretty uncontroversial and the answer is surprisingly simple.
Free will does not exist.
Read MoreIt was all there for the modern myth-makers. A ready-made American legend gift wrapped and delivered with a bow. The All-American hero willing to sacrifice everything for God, football, and country. Only, Pat Tillman wasn’t the perfect American Patriot, at least not in the way people wanted.
Read MoreThe greatest threat facing American democracy is not Russian interference. It is not even fake news. It is our own credulity.
Read MoreBronies came to the attention of the internet a few years ago, albeit mostly via derisive memes, but they managed to penetrate the public’s consciousness nonetheless. Bronies are adult male fans of Hasbro’s My Little Pony franchise.
Read MoreI finally saw the documentary, An Honest Liar, about James “The Amazing” Randi over the weekend. I was at The Amazing Meet!ng (TAM!) in Las Vegas last July, when the movie first debuted, but I didn’t get a ticket. About a year before that I enthusiastically contributed to the Kickstarter campaign to help get the movie funded.
Read MoreI crave attention. Not all of the time and not all kinds of attention, but as a general rule I prefer being noticed to not. I’ve shaved devil horns into my hair and bleached a halo into it. I went through a prolonged phase where I dressed, basically, like a teenaged girl and now I blog about my tattoos and post topless pics on the internet. Getting attention may not have ever been my sole motivation, but it has always been a welcomed perk.
Read MoreIn Part I of this two part post devoted to my good friend Josh Petty I promised that I would revisit an argument that we had recently on Instagram. For better or worse, here is Part II.
As I was putting my notes together for this blog entry, reviewing the copious comments sent back and forth between Josh Petty and me, I came to realize that the chasm between our different perspectives – with me, the Skeptic on one side and Josh, the believer on the other – was so vast and so profound that any argument spawned from that chasm was doomed ultimately to be meaningless.
Josh and I do not experience the world in the same way. Our experiences and our desires are so different that when we communicate, we are not even speaking the same language. Even when we appear to be using the same words, we are NOT, in fact, saying the same thing.
Read MoreJosh Petty was in the midst of his Jim Morrison phase. He was wearing black leather pants, without a shirt (or underwear), and holding a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a switchblade in the other. He even got a tattoo on his stomach that read, “Rider on the Storm,” (you know, because he was a solo rider on the storm). This is how I remember Josh stumbling through Europe while we were on tour back in the late nineties.
Read MoreThe universe is big. Incomprehensibly big. And it is very likely just one out of an incomprehensibly large number of incomprehensibly large universes. Our recorded history, recorded human history, goes back less than 5,000 years. It has been less than 10,000 years since humans first started organizing into civilizations and well under half-a-million years since modern humans even existed at all.
Read MoreWould you prefer to live in a world full of mystery and wonder or a world guided by strict laws and rules? For many people this is the question at the heart of the tension between skepticism and belief. If the price of accepting science, or a naturalistic worldview, is the loss of wonder, then perhaps the price is too high.
Read MoreSometime over ten years ago I decided that I wanted to get a skeptical tattoo. I had a feeling in my mind of what I wanted, but there were no clear references to work from. I was aware that people were getting science tattoos, but those were usually pretty straightforward and not exactly what I was looking for.
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