“Doctors without religious beliefs more likely to help patients to die.”
Atheist doctors are almost twice as likely to take decisions that speed up death for very ill patients as those who are deeply religious, research has found.
Those with a strong faith are also less willing to discuss treatments that hasten the end, according to a poll of nearly 4,000 British doctors.
More here.
Sam Harris asks and answers questions regarding his forthcoming book The Moral Landscape.
Gary Gutting: On Dawkins’s Atheism: A Response.
I find Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” stimulating, informative, and often right on target. But it does not make a strong case for atheism. His case is weak because it does not take adequate account of the philosophical discussions that have raised the level of reflection about God’s existence far above that at which he operates. It may be possible to make a decisive case against theism through a penetrating philosophical treatment of necessity, complexity, explanation, and other relevant concepts. Because his arguments fail to do this, Dawkins falls far short of establishing his claim.
Read more here.
Michael Ruse: Darwinism and the Moral Argument for God.
In my last blog, sparked by the essentially non-directedness of the Darwinian evolutionary process, I raised what seems to me to be a major problem for those who would reconcile Christian belief with modern science. I want to follow this in a similar vein, turning now to morality, a topic discussed in an interesting piece in Friday’s New York Times by the conservative but almost-always-worth-reading columnist David Brooks on the foundations of morality. He is reporting on a recent conference on the topic, where a group of “moral naturalists” argued their case. This is about the claim that morality can be given an entirely natural explanation, no need to get God involved to dictate or support our ethical imperatives. I found it extremely interesting because — okay, I’m talking about myself again — the topic is one that has been of major concern and interest to me from the day that I started out as a philosopher, 50 years ago.
Read more here.
The Humanist on broadening the science vs. religion debate.
Skeptics sometimes frame the science versus religion debate as one of knowledge and enlightenment versus ignorance and superstition. This framing oversimplifies the problem in a number of ways. It leaves the impression that worldviews rejecting religion pose no danger to science. It also fails to make distinctions between religious approaches that are hostile to science and those that are not. Similar to the way this framing implicitly views religion as unitary, it implicitly views science as unitary—ignoring the varied disciplinary perspectives on the debate. Moreover, it often assumes that “science” refers to the physical and biological sciences, thereby omitting important evidence- and logic-based contributions from the social and behavioral sciences. And by implicitly treating the debate as essentially a philosophical one, it often overlooks important cultural information.
Read the rest here.
Atheism and Antihumanism as Intellectual-Historical Objects by Stefanos Geroulanos. See here.