Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

The fate of the paranormal is to become the normal as our horizons of understanding expand.

Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.

Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.