This topic came up during a correspondence of mine with a creationist. I find it quite interesting, so I bring it here as is. Steve: The big bang is a hypothesis. It cannot be directly tested. God’s creation cannot be tested either. Me: Scientifically speaking, the Big Bang is an established scientific theory. God is […]

Here is a common situation: You are arguing with a creationist about the origin of all the processes in the universe being based on the laws of nature, and then they come up with the strange question: “And who created the laws of nature?” Who told physics to act in certain ways? The real answer […]

The Doctor Analogy This argument is often used by religious preachers to explain why God’s morality is strong and has nothing to do with the suffering we see in our world. The story goes like this: A little boy enters an operating room in a hospital, in the midst of a complex operation. He sees […]

One of the common religious claims about “creation” is that the world was created some 6,000 years ago with all the known scientific evidence already built into it. Sort of “God is trying us”. This claim of retroactive creation makes little sense, and is already discussed here. An interesting method of tackling this issue is […]

One of the strangest claims, widely spread in the world of religious preaching, has to do with the phenomenon known by science as “the Big Bang”. The religious believer imagines a big explosion, say, like the one we observe when a bomb goes off. A great amount of things is blasted in all directions, and […]

“But most people believe in God…” – You’ve probably heard this winning argument in one of your endless discussions with some religious preacher. The calculation done by our partner to the discussion is pretty obvious: Let’s take the number of Christians in the world (say about 2 billion) together with the number of world’s Muslims […]

Stories change over time. This known to everyone who’s had the opportunity to join a “telephone” game (sometimes known as ‘Chinese whispers’). You can more read about it here. One of the strangest things that seem to have change is our… God. Well, not directly him (or her), but rather their name, and – actually […]

There is a big difference between how we perceive the world with our brain and how it really is. Furthermore, this difference is growing bigger as we discover more and more stuff about the world, especially about the behavior of very large things (as in astronomy) and very small things (as in quantum mechanics). The […]

The following partially-translated article appeared in one of Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious newspapers, “Yated Ne’eman” (name roughly translated into “Faithful Tent-Peg”) on May 2000. It was written by Rabbi Chaim Shaul Karelitz, one of the most prominent leaders of the Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy at the time, and largely reflected the Jewish ultra-Orthodox attitude towards the state […]

Religious people try to convince you that there must be a “god”. One of their major arguments has to do with the direction the world has been going to: “Imagine there is no god, no one to direct things. How come the universe has managed to form such complex structures, given the absence of something […]