Innumeracy: A Fault to Fix

Innumeracy is more of a threat than scientific illiteracy. And I want to illustrate this today. A Problem Atheists Should Care About Ordinary literacy is not so much a problem online, since participation on the internet requires basic literacy—although of...

A Golden Example of Antichoicers Lying to Your Face

Just this week a student in one of my online classes answered a test question with a real-world example of trying to manipulate people using numbers and graphs, which they had to debunk. The example they chose (from the course text, Levitin’s Field Guide to...

The Jesus Chronicles: Three Things People Get Wrong about Probability

Lately I’ve seen a flurry of repeated mistakes in reasoning about probability. I realized a primer is needed to correct some people so they can stop making those mistakes (assuming you care about not making mistakes; an alarming number of people don’t, but...

We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming

The headline of this article should be a no-brainer. But there are still too many people who think otherwise, causing little action to be taken, and who are thereby dragging the rest of us into hell—a problem recently made fun of in the movie Don’t Look...

Pearce’s New Take-Down of Resurrection Apologetics Is a Must-Have

This book is the definitive starting point for anyone intent on questioning or defending the resurrection of Jesus. Introductory and aimed at a broad audience, but thoroughly researched, all the key works are here cited and arguments addressed, and with sound...

Dumb Vegan Propaganda: A Lesson in Critical Thinking

I noticed some fake news spreading on Facebook last week. Like usual. But then I noticed what a great example it provided of how to defend yourself against just this kind of politicized fake news, with just a few basic principles of critical thinking. This time the...

The Ancient Romans Essentially Did Have Universities

It’s often claimed Medieval Christians invented the university. But this is as false as the similar claim that they invented the hospital. In both cases the underlying claim is used to sell a “Christianity saved the world” narrative in the halls of...

Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply

I contributed a chapter to a great new book that was just released, a book I dare say is required reading for anyone who wants to be up-to-date on the “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” debate. It pits atheist professor Carl Stecher against Christian...

Critical Thinking as a Function of Math Literacy

What do you get when you combine atheism, mathematics, evolutionary psychology, and the science of cognitive biases? Critical thinking skills! I discuss many aspects of this in my online course on critical thinking. (It’s easy, useful, and affordable, so...

Bad Science: No, Atheism Does Not Cause Suicide

More innumeracy for today: this religious apologist is claiming atheism causes suicide, and he cites a study that supposedly proves this, but both s/he and the study’s authors suck at numeracy and basic logic. I warned about this before (Innumeracy: A Fault to...