Atheist Round Winners [Turing 2013]

September 30, 2013 By 17 Comments
atheist round graph

You may want to keep this year’s answer key and list of entries in the atheist round handy while you read the results. Atheists earned their reputations as skeptics in this round, as their scores were much lower than the Christians gave in their round.  By the crudest metric -- percent of entries with more than a 50% pass (Very Likely Atheist + Likely Atheist) -- only six entries out of eleven hit the mark among the atheists.  For the Christians, only three entries didn't hit this … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ideological Turing Test 17 Comments

An Improbable Definition of Faith

March 13, 2012 By 12 Comments
faith-and-reason

Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards.  I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog.  More details here. Today's problematic definition of 'faith' comes from Loftus, himself, as he expands his description of faith as "an irrational leap over the probabilities."  While emailing a Christian friend, he offered the following definition: In my opinion faith is what fills in the gaps of the probabilities. If, say there is a 70 % probability something is … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy Tagged With: 12 Comments

7 Quick Takes (11/17/11)

November 18, 2011 By 3 Comments

--- 1 --- If you're only going to read one link I put in the Quick Takes, make it this one on the way an over-reliance on mice may be screwing up our understanding of human disease. Mark Mattson knows a lot about mice and rats. He's fed them; he's bred them; he's cut their heads open with a scalpel... Still, he never quite noticed how fat they were—how bloated and sedentary and sickly—until a Tuesday afternoon in February 2007. That's the day it occurred to him, while giving a lecture at … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 7 Quick Takes 3 Comments

Bisexuality Q&A

October 12, 2011 By 17 Comments
Performing Math Calculations at Chalkboard

I'd still like more responses to the questions I posed to opponents of gay marriage yesterday, but, since turnabout is fair play, I'll take a crack at some of the questions you guys asked about bisexuality in the thread.  I'll answer any others on this topic in the comments. UPDATE: there's still confusion in the comments so here's the tl;dr takeaway: Bisexuality is totally unrelated to polyamory.  Bisexuality describes the set of people who might attract you.  Polyamory specifies what … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , 17 Comments

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