Underreported Atheists

The authors of the study, published earlier this year, adopted a novel way to measure atheist identity. Instead of asking about belief in God directly, they provided a list of seemingly innocuous statements and then asked: “How many of these statements are true of you?” Respondents in a control group were given a list of nine statements, such as “I own a dog” and “I am a vegetarian.” The test group received all the same statements plus one that read, “I do not believe in God.”...

 The Extended Peer Community

The perspective of Funtowicz and Ravetz on post normal science [59] – characterized by conflicting values and deep uncertainties – is useful in moving forward on messes and wicked problems. When the stakes are high and uncertainties are large, Funtowicz and Ravetz point out that there is demand by the public to participate and assess quality, which they refer to as the extended peer community. The extended peer community consists not only of those with traditional institutional accreditat...

 Kissenger Describes Sayre's law

I've been an academic and I've been a policy maker. And as a policy maker, I've had a lot of trouble from academics. Especially from the Ivy League, and I'm going to say one thing about academic politics to which Mr. Schramm referred. I formulated the rule that the intensity of academic politics and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject their discussing. And I promise you at Harvard, they are passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimport...

 Truth Survives

There is no god, and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing was passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it out again. Without hype, Lot’s salt-heap ho would never be thought of again. Without science, the Earth still goes around the sun and someda...