A guy called Erich Vieth did a useful interview with Paul Kurtz the other day. There are some odd things in it, which could shed some oblique light on the PK-CFI quarrel.

PK says he left voluntarily but under great duress, which is useful to know. I don’t think I’ve seen that before. Then they talk about why no explanation of his resignation appeared in Free Inquiry, and he said it was because it was censored. Vieth said isn’t that at odds with free inquiry?

PK: It is similar to thought police. Alas! They refused to publish three of my editorials, and they refused to publish my statement regarding my resignation. What a contradiction. Even though I am the founder

I skimmed The Observer’s profile of Karen Armstrong yesterday, but I must have done a sloppy job of it, because I failed to notice something that if I’d really been properly skimming, would have jumped out at me. I never would have known about it if Nicholas Lawrence hadn’t told me.

But like Kissinger, Armstrong has enemies. Many devout Catholics quietly accuse her of treachery, while professional theologians despise her for emphasising the opposition between rationality and faith. Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom have accused her of being a religious apologist who covers up inconvenient texts to bolster the idea there is no conflict between modern morality and religion in matters, for instance, of gender and sexuality.

Well now I … Read the rest

I’ve said more than once that I don’t have a firm opinion about who is more right (or wrong) in the dispute between the Center for Inquiry and its founder and former director Paul Kurtz. I still don’t, but one thing I do think is that when the dispute gets into a major media outlet, the reporting is incomplete.

I have an opportunity to rectify that a little, because I saw something Barry Karr said on Facebook this morning that clarified or expanded a couple of points. I got his permission to quote him, and asked two questions of my own. Karr is the Chief Financial Officer of CFI and Executive Director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Here is … Read the rest

Anthony Appiah says something in his review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape that I don’t get – it looks wrong to me, but Appiah’s a philosopher and I’m not, so help me out here. Maybe he spoke in haste, or maybe a sub changed his wording, or maybe I’m just wrong.

Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science…

I thought the point was that facts can’t, as a matter of logic, get you to values. That doesn’t make values not susceptible of … Read the rest

To re-cap: we have The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, edited by Peter Harrison, director of  The Ian Ramsey Centre for science and religion in the University of Oxford, a Templeton-funded outfit whose previous director won the Templeton Prize. Harrison says in his introduction that this Companion gives short shrift to the view that science and religion are in fact incompatible.

We also have a BBC article by Thomas Dixon saying, in a roundabout sort of way, that science and religion are compatible. Dixon wrote the Oxford University Press Science and Religion: a very short introduction. Under “About the author” on that page we learn that

Thomas Dixon is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University