How could you betray him like that??

Thanks, I'll give them a listen. J. L. Mackie's work I remember finding to be extremely cogent. The challenges he presents to theism threaten its coherency to a far greater extent than any claims about natural science, I think. It's ironic to me that there is so much talk about religion as otiose due to discoveries…

Well, it doesn't matter, but he was being contemptuous in the early interview or he'd not have had to write this one. In any case, that's a more rational perspective, though I still think he's wrong to make 'usefulness' his criterion - if he means 'useful' in his work as a physicist. In the other link, Carroll makes…

Excellent write-up. Hoping the reviews for this continue and they keep you doing them!

I wouldn't say belief without reason or justification, but belief without confirmation. Certainty does seem inconsistent with faith (though someone on here once argued with me that I'd misunderstood 'faith' as a theological virtue, which might be).

It can be two things! Sadly, it can be two.

Well what do you (or he) mean by 'possible'? Perhaps a different universe wasn't possible (at least the one we live in) in the sense that it didn't happen. That doesn't do anything to explain why it wasn't possible, which is the task he pretended to set himself. And how could any physical hypothesis do so in…

I've read that piece, but I'm not clear why you're linking to it. Krauss finds it useless and referred to a critic as an 'idiot philosopher', which qualifies as contempt: http://www.theatlantic.com/…

Rabbit was a huge Mo Udall supporter.

Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon were on Gilmore Girls with their kid very briefly. Because their kid was a fan was my guess?

The King of Jordan was on Voyager. Cos he was a fan of it. What if he and ISIS were on spaceship and they had to cooperate to survive the Borg and shit? WOULD THEY?

Krauss's proposed redefinition is utterly missing the point, though. It is perfectly intelligible to ask, 'why something rather than nothing?'. It's perfectly intelligible to ask, 'why is the universe the way it is rather that some other way?' That particles emerge from relativistic quantum fields doesn't magically…

The first two links are short and written for a lay audience. The material on anti-realism is less accessible (though fascinating).

I didn't mean to be unpleasant, it's just that his book is wholly undermined by basic conceptual errors which have been hashed out very well by critics no less credentialed than he. He doesn't explain creation; he defines 'nothing' as quantum fields into which particles appear spontaneously. That isn't 'nothing',…

Krauss has problems with cosmology (and logical inference) alone, as pointed out by the physicist Sean Carroll, among others, who already wrote Krauss' book before he did, sans the absurd metaphysical claims. I recommend these:
http://blogs.discovermagazi…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012…
http://www.sfu.ca/~rpyke/ca…

Sometimes I think Russian people are okay, but then I see how Rusev acts and I realize they have to be destroyed.

Unless you're a Biblical literalist, which is a heterodox position within Christianity that no serious adherent of it would hold, I truly fail to understand what purpose his endless, decades-long prating on about evolution in this context is meant to serve. Beyond that, his observations are frequently, demonstrably…

You could do far better than Krauss in finding an atheist to argue about that. But I really think there's a false dichotomy between faith and reason that is repeated so often that it's taken as a given by many people much of the time. For one thing, a distinction has to be made between methodogical naturalism in the…

Plenty of reasons to despise the Clintons without inventing anything. I don't know that Jimmy Carter is a hero, but he seems more principled from a distance, and he was always open about thinking they were trash.

Has she ever had a competitive match? I remember when people thought or feigned to think Miesha Tate would be a challenge. Then she just pummelled that gorgeous creature into oblivion.