Another goofy item. (I know. Like counting sand on the beach, pointing out all the goofy things people say. I know. But we all have our recreations. This is mine. It keeps me out of bar brawls. One day I’ll tell you about my louche past, but not now, not now.)

While reading Johann Hari’s quote of Richard Dawkins, “In the absence of any evidence whatsoever for a belief , we should assume it is untrue”, I am reminded of the conversation between the Astronaut and the Brain Surgeon. To counter the Surgeon’s belief in God, the Astronaut says, “In none of my travels throughout the Universe, have I encountered any evidence indicating the existence of God, and so

And then there’s Steve Fuller’s amazing non-sequitur.

Richard Dawkins complains (Letters, December 19) that Leeds University has not done enough to silence Professor McIntosh’s creationist views. He should take a lesson from his own university, Oxford, which has done nothing to silence his open promotion of atheism.
Professor Steve Fuller
Professor of sociology, Warwick University

Oh, and now that I look at the Letter in question, I see that Fuller also misrepresents what Dawkins said. What a bad man he is. Dawkins simply said that Leeds University ought to revise its press statement distancing itself ‘publicly from theories of creationism and so-called intelligent design, which cannot be verified by evidence.’ The press statement said ‘McIntosh’s directorship of Truth … Read the rest

Theo Hobson is strange. He starts with a guess about what an atheist might say, then reviews the saying as if it actually existed.

The atheist might respond that they do all these things because they believe the story to be literally true, and want to create propaganda for it. But this is his interpretation, and on close inspection it’s rather odd, and it’s pretentious in the sense of claiming to know more than it does. In reality he does not know exactly why people do these things, or what sort of belief in the story they have. He does not know the motivation of my aunt who sends me a card with a nativity scene on it, or