120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.

The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.

Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.