Hello my fellow skeptics, I’ve returned and apologize profusely for my long-held inactivity.
First and foremost, I would like to thank Mitchell for being an absolute champ in filling the void while I was AWOL.  Despite our obvious need for new contributors (whom we will ALWAYS be happy to hire), Mitchell did a good job keeping [...]

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This article about an archaeological find that could support the existence of Jerusalem’s King David (whose existence had been disputed up until now, apparently) is for the most part a fairly interesting article about a fairly interesting discovery.
I say “for the most part”, because the article’s headline and the picture captions (undoubtedly not written by [...]

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I know that this topic has been exhaustively discussed previously, but I still want to rant about it (read: this is a rant, be forewarned).
I describe myself as an atheist. This means that I do not believe in a god. The definition isn’t confusing to me, because I already know what my beliefs [...]

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It’s always refreshing when the journalists actually get science news right. Regarding the Large Hadron Collider:
But there has been a struggle to explain to the public that, though this energy is vast from the perspective of a circulating proton, each collision between a pair of protons will release an amount of energy comparable to [...]

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Why do we drive like jerks, and behave like assholes on the internet?
Some of the more seemingly sophisticated arguments for God (or some type of higher power) revolve around the mysterious nature of human morality. Dismissing evolutionary explanations for morality, some people believe that we simply cannot explain traits like altruism through the evolution [...]

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It should be common sense that staring into the sun may not be the best of ideas.  Doing so can very well result in damaged or loss of eyesight.  So what would it take to incite dozens of adults to stare into the sun long enough to lose it completely?

Well, religious superstition, of course.
At least [...]

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Recently, I’ve been thinking as to the criteria that would cause me to accept the existence of an intelligent god that interacted with humans.
So here’s my challenge to God: start answering prayers. More specifically, start answering the prayers of sick people. If everybody1 with some sort of disease, who prays to God to [...]

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Science and religion are similar in that they both seek to answer questions about natural phenomenon. They both try to come up with plausible explanations for how observable phenomenon appear. Whereas science tells us how inheritance and natural selection causes genetic variance in populations over time (evolution), religion tells us that a divine [...]

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Table O’ Miracles

God
Science/Technology

Lead Moses out of Egypt and into the Promised Land
Landed men on the Moon.

Parted the Red Sea
Dykes in the Netherlands permanently holding back the sea

Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Resurrected Jesus
Cured thousands of diseases, and brings people back from “traditional” death on a regular basis

Caused a global flood
Global warming

God [...]

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Science and religion have an unstable relationship. Oftentimes they are content to stay separate and do their own things. Occasionally, they clash over certain issues of public policy. However, are these two world-views actually compatible, and if not, which one is correct?

Let us look at the last part of that statement first. A favorite argument [...]

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