Anthony Pinn kicks off his new podcast with Sasha Sagan, author of For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. Daughter of astronomer/educator Carl Sagan and writer/producer Ann Druyan, Sasha was raised with a sense of awe and wonder about the majesty of the universe, learning to see science […]
Awe and Wonder
Posted inSpace
My humanism comes from the stars
Reading Time: 7 minutes Our views of deep space, such as the new photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, can serve as the basis for a profoundly moral vision.
Posted inSpace
For all of humanity’s failings, we’ve never stopped wondering about the stars
Reading Time: 8 minutes It was an atypically dry English spring when a man in Bath scanned the skies with a 7-inch reflecting telescope he’d designed and built by hand, through painstaking refinements to Isaac Newton’s principles of optics. William Herschel was studying stellar parallax, the phenomenon that makes a nearby star look like it has moved in relation […]
Posted inGeneral
Trust Science
Reading Time: 3 minutes By James A. Haught Long ago, I concluded that no reliable evidence supports gods, devils, heavens, hells, miracles, prophecies and other supernatural stuff of religion. Those magic claims simply arise from the human imagination, I assume. Instead, I chose to trust the honest search of science to explain ultimate mysteries of existence. Aye, there’s the […]
Posted inGeneral
The Code of the Universe
Reading Time: 8 minutes Electrons and quarks, galaxies and black holes, electromagnetic radiation, DNA and cells, gravity, molecular bonds, the speed of light, the power in the nucleus – these contain a gospel more profound than any written by humans.
Posted inGeneral
What I’m Telling My Son About Santa Claus
Reading Time: 4 minutes Sometimes the smallest choices present the hardest dilemmas. I’ve been facing one such this year, which is the question of what, as an atheist parent, I should tell my son about Santa Claus. It sounds silly, but this was one of my biggest parenting dilemmas so far. It was certainly a harder decision than, say, […]
Posted inGeneral
The Dreams of Which Stuff Is Made
Reading Time: 3 minutes By James A. Haught The European Southern Observatory — a fifteen-nation consortium that operates telescopes in Chile — recently released a photo of two galaxies colliding. Here’s the stunner: It happened seven billion years ago, when the universe was younger, but it took seven billion years for fast-traveling light to reach Planet Earth just now. […]
Posted inGeneral
Repost: People of Light and Darkness
Reading Time: 4 minutes [This post originally appeared in July 2012.] The big news this week is that the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator at the European physics lab CERN, has apparently discovered the elusive and long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which explains why other particles have mass. The hunt for the Higgs has consumed […]
Posted inGeneral
Repost: Epicurus’ World
Reading Time: 4 minutes The story goes that the renowned physicist Richard Feynman was once asked to summarize the most important finding of modern science in a single sentence. Feynman replied, “The universe is made of atoms.” Although there are many other scientific discoveries that are arguably of equal importance, Feynman’s choice makes a lot of sense. The discovery […]
Posted inGeneral
Summer Twilight: A Humanist Sermon
Reading Time: 3 minutes On a night earlier this summer, a humid blue twilight in July, I stepped out of my home to run an errand. It was sweltering and heavy after the day’s heat, but it must have been the perfect temperature for fireflies. There were hundreds of them, swarming in the air and the grass, glimmering and […]