Imagine for a moment, a world in which God and Satan actually exist. God is omnipresent, omnibenevolent and omniscient. Satan, like God, is a spirit with supernatural powers, including the ability to communicate with people. Satan likes to make life difficult for God and for humans. In...

Around 1,000 years ago a few people stopped using intuition, mysticism and faith to explain things and instead started to collect and evaluate evidence. That small step changed everything. It allowed us to test ideas and often to prove them wrong.  A process akin to "Darwinian" selection was born; many ideas went extinct but the ideas that best fitted the evidence survived and...

Does belief in God offer the believer any benefits? A good way to find out is to compare highly religious countries with less religious countries. So I've done just that. I've taken the 10 most religious countries in the world and compared them with the 10 least religious countries. Religiosity...

In 2012, an international team of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss/French border announced they had demonstrated the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson. This was a monumental effort. It took more than 10,000 scientists ten years to build the LHC...

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If there is a scientific theory more despised than evolution by natural selection, I have yet to encounter it. But evolution is not despised by everyone. It is despised by those who prefer an alternative hypothesis to explain the existence of species—the God hypothesis. The courageous folk who prefer the God hypothesis have the odds stacked against them. For starters, they do not...

Judaism spawned two further major religions: Christianity and Islam in that order. These three religions worship the same God but in quite different ways. However, if one God inspired three religions, we should expect some central teachings to be common. For example, all three religions...

Christianity is an elderly religion that is showing its age. It contains such huge helpings of magic and nonsense that it speaks to fewer and fewer people in the age of science.  It has a long and wrong and bloody history from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the oppression of science to child abuse and people cannot understand how goodness can come from such a dark past. It...

The argument One of the common arguments for the existence of God is based on William Paley's famous watchmaker analogy (see here). The argument can be used for any "creator" god and it goes like this: "There are evidences all around you, but most importantly, look at yourself,...

Our lives are like fabric. Fabric woven from stories; some written by people long dead, some more recent. We absorb these stories from childhood and they become part of us. They help us to make sense of the world—they give us substance. But every now and again someone comes along and tells new stories. Stories so different that we cannot reconcile them with the old stories. What do...

Our beliefs, working with our emotions, play a crucial role in determining how we will react in any situation. Our emotions and beliefs engage in an intricate dance, moving so quickly and quietly that we are usually unaware of their tireless cavorting. This frenetic dance drives our behaviour and leaves us, to a significant extent, as mere spectators.  That is why beliefs...