Author: Bill Flavell

The natural world is hard to understand. It took thousands of years for humans to discover how to investigate it. The process requires rigor, diligence and constant checking to avoid making mistakes. All conclusions are tentative and we never stop trying to refine and improve them. Now, after almost 1,000 years, we have plucked much of the low hanging fruit from the tree of knowledge. New fundamen...

Delusion is not an oddity—it’s the norm. Almost all of us can slip into delusional thinking and it’s easy to see why. We all have a tendency to be confounded by cognitive biases. These are thinking errors that seem to be hard-wired into us. An example is the bandwagon effect which makes us feel an opinion that is widely held is probably true. Another example is the gambler’s fall...

I am an atheist, so you may think I would oppose teaching religion to children, but you would be wrong. I think we should teach children about religions—as many as possible. The more children learn about religions the more clearly they will see the fingerprints of our distant ancestors asking questions no sentient beings had ever asked before. These questions were so novel and so imponderable that...

An approach to challenging atheism that has been popularised recently by Ray Comfort, is to show the atheist a book and ask if they believe the book had an author. When the atheist says “Yes, obviously” they are pressed to agree that the book of life (DNA) must have had an author too. One of my Facebook friends used this same argument recently. He said, “You would be stupid to su...