27th Apr 2008 : This is the third in a series of conversations among leading scientists and scholars about the "Big Questions."

8th Apr 2008 : Nicky Campbell hosts a series of moral, ethical and religious debates live from the West London Academy, Northolt. Panellists are: writer and broadcaster, Cristina Odone; The Rt Rev Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark; Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet from the Mill Hill Synagogue; and the winner for this year's Costa Prize for Fiction, AL Kennedy. The special guest will be the renowned atheist, scientist and writer, Professor Richard Dawkins.

24th Mar 2008 : Sue Blackmore debates Alister McGrath (author of 'The Dawkins Delusion') at Bristol University on the motion that "belief in God is a dangerous delusion". This event took place on November 13, 2007.

19th Mar 2008 :

28th Feb 2008 : Channel 4's Holy Offensive is a documentary that examines two highly
publicised clashes between artistic freedom and religious belief in
today's Britain. Both are from the world of theatre, an art form
usually thought of as old-fashioned, but which keeps finding itself at
the cutting edge of contemporary culture wars.

28th Feb 2008 : Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.

23rd Feb 2008 : Human beings have never lacked for things to fight over, but for the last two millennia, they have fought the most over ideas involving the divine. Politics, technology, military capacity, and diseases have all played decisive roles in shaping history, yet it is impossible to understand the rise and fall of empires, the clash of civilizations, and the evolving balance of power without appreciating the unique fervor that religion inspires, and the speed with which new religions can spread.

14th Feb 2008 : Stephen Moss introduces a debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting.

10th Feb 2008 : Full version of the Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach Debate at New York's 92nd Street Y.

5th Feb 2008 : Emory University, 5-16-2007

28th Jan 2008 : A question that interests me very much (and always has) is this: I know that I do not believe in either any god or any religion, and I can give my reasons in a manner that the other side can at least understand, but can the same be said for those who claim that they do believe? A shorter way of putting this is to ask whether our antagonists in this ancient argument truly mean what they appear to say.

9th Jan 2008 : Are there any logical reasons to believe in God? Mathematician and bestselling author John Allen Paulos thinks not. In Irreligion he presents the case for his own worldview, organizing his book into twelve chapters that refute the twelve arguments most often put forward for believing in God's existence.

8th Jan 2008 : Pat Condell on Pat Robertson's 2007 prediction.

30th Dec 2007 : I realized we hadn't posted this video yet on RichardDawkins.net. It's the 10-minute short film created by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh, highlighting the oppression of women in Islam.

7th Dec 2007 : IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror.

7th Dec 2007 : BBC special on the spiritual fraud, self proclaimed god in human form, Shri Sathya Sai Baba.

6th Dec 2007 :

29th Nov 2007 : I see some fundamental contradiction here. Everybody criticizes Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. But at least they're talking about how ludicrous some of these belief systems are. I know that David Sloan Wilson doesn't take issue with the way I've framed these questions, but to see religion as having a positive influence does not get at the fundamental question of what it means to have faith.

28th Nov 2007 : Gillian Gibbons sounds like a nice woman. She is in her 50s, a teacher from Liverpool with grown-up children, and earlier this year she decided to put her experience to use in one of the most troubled parts of Africa. In August, she started teaching at an independent primary school in Sudan, where she seems to have been popular with her young pupils; she followed a national curriculum course designed to teach them about animals and asked a seven-year-old girl to bring her teddy bear into class.

26th Nov 2007 : It's when you look at the birth-pangs of a religion that you can see most clearly how it was invented not by some mystical "God", but by human beings – usually for cynical reasons.

16th Nov 2007 : When some of the world's leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu. They'll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion.

12th Nov 2007 : Two in five adults say prayers and one in three believes that God is watching over them, a new poll reveals.

11th Nov 2007 : `You don't have the church as gated community,' an author says of Canada. `Yet'

8th Nov 2007 : I am 32 and, until this year, I never had many Muslim friends. At first I thought it was because I grew up in a small town and my family didn't socialize much with other families. Then I blamed my – predominantly white, predominantly middle-class – education and employment choices.

31th Oct 2007 : Efforts to tackle extremism among young British Muslims must be centred on the internet as well as on mosques, the communities secretary has said.

30th Oct 2007 : Books calling for the beheading of lapsed Muslims, ordering women to remain indoors and forbidding interfaith marriage are being sold inside some of Britain's leading mosques, according to research seen by The Times.

21st Oct 2007 : Socratic Club Debate featuring Michael Shermer and Dinesh D'Souza. Monday, October 15, 7 PM, Austin Auditorium - LaSells Stewart Center, Oregon State University

15th Oct 2007 : Dan Dennett receives the "Richard Dawkins Award" at the AAI 07 conference in Washington, D.C. Julia Sweeney introduces Richard Dawkins, who introduces Dan Dennett.

13th Oct 2007 : This is the speech given by Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the AAI 07 conference in Washington DC. She is the author of the bestselling book "Infidel", and helped create the film "Submission" with Theo Van Gogh.

4th Oct 2007 : The debate features Professor Richard Dawkins, Fellow of the Royal Society and Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and Dr. John Lennox (MA, MA, Ph.D., D.Phil., D.Sc.), Reader in Mathematics and Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science, Green College, University of Oxford.

19th Sep 2007 : Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project (and onetime atheist), rejects the notion that science is sufficient to disprove the existence of God. Biologist Richard Dawkins, aka Darwin's Rottweiler, insists that anyone who believes in an omnipotent creator is suffering a "delusion." Can the gloves of God defeat the punch of proof?

17th Sep 2007 : Sir: Peter Stanford ("Doubts about Dawkins", 14 September) writes that the recent books by Christopher Hitchens and myself "deserve a decent response. But how to fashion it?" A decent start would be to read them.

14th Sep 2007 : On Subjects such as Evolution, Many Americans Are Aware of -- but Reject -- the Scientific Consensus

12th Sep 2007 : In his essay, "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, "Jonathan Haidt worries that the "new atheists"—Dawkins, Dennett, and I—may be "polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process." According to Haidt, Dawkins becomes the Grand Inquisitor whenever the topic of group selection is politely raised; Dennett has misinterpreted the literature on religion and morality for reasons inscrutable; and for my part, I am merely waging war with straw men. As luck would have it, Haidt comes to this debate in the guise an increasingly familiar "straw man"—that of the liberal, atheist scientist who would deliver us to the threshold of moral relativism, if not across it, with the best of intentions.

11th Sep 2007 : I've made a commitment to do interviews here with adults who have recently declared to be atheist. Several people have kindly offered their time to be questioned on various aspects of their skeptical thinking on religion and other issues. I've specifically asked for folks who have become rational free thinkers just within the past couple of years. Some of the people I will be talking to have had certain levels of doubt for many years, but would not have described themselves as atheists until more recently. The first interview will appear here sometime this week and then I'm going to try to do a new one every week or two in the coming months.

10th Sep 2007 : A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam.

3rd Sep 2007 : A nationwide survey of the religious beliefs and practices of American physicians has found that the least religious of all medical specialties is psychiatry. Among psychiatrists who have a religion, more than twice as many are Jewish and far fewer are Protestant or Catholic, the two most common religions among physicians overall.

31rd Aug 2007 : Chris Mooney has a link to this analysis of recent polling data. The analysis was written by David Masci. The subject: How Americans feel about science and faith. Mooney thinks the data supports the Matt Nisbet line that people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens hurt the cause. I disagree.

22nd Aug 2007 : It was genuinely alarming to encounter Ziauddin Sardar's whitewash of Islam in the pages of your journal ('Beyond the troubled relationship' Nature 448, 131–133; 2007). Here, as elsewhere, Nature's coverage of religion has been unfailingly tactful — to the point of obscurantism.

17th Aug 2007 : Author Christopher Hitchens discusses his book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" as a part of the Authors@Google series. The author of Why Orwell Matters and Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor, a Slate columnist, and a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly. He has also written for The Nation, Granta, Harper's, The Washington Post, and is a frequent television and radio guest. Born in England, Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. He now lives in Washington, D.C., and he became a U.S. citizen in 2007. This event took place on August 16, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

2nd Aug 2007 : A few readers sent me a link to this interview with Alister McGrath; most thought it was worth a laugh, but one actually seemed to think I'd be devastated. I'm afraid the majority were correct: everything I've read by McGrath suggests that here is a man whose thoughts have been arrested by a temporal lobe seizure that he has mistaken for a lightning bolt from god.

1st Aug 2007 :

24th Jul 2007 :

19th Jul 2007 : Imagine you found a population in the US where the majority of the people believed that 2+2=5, and that attempts to correct them with the actual, correct result of adding two numbers were regarded as insults to their revered traditions. I think we'd all agree that they a) they were wrong; b) they were misled, misinformed, and miseducated; c) that they were ignorant of arithmetic; or d) might very well have been maliciously deceived by someone in their midst. Somehow, though, if the ridiculous error involves God, some people take a big step backwards and are appalled that anyone might criticize them. Those "revered traditions" become more than mere excuses, they are inviolate.

16th Jul 2007 : In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings I remember having a passionate discussion with some friends about who was responsible for the attacks. "It's the work of the security services; I can put my life on it!" one said. "In fact, I think they've killed off these guys, planted their stuff on the trains and then just blamed it on the Muslims again." Then came a timid voice of opposition. "Shaf, I don't think they'd kill their own people, I mean Tony Blair isn't that evil. I think Mossad had a hand in it."

15th Jul 2007 : Was the Nazi Party Based on an Atheist, Anti-Christian Ideology?

13th Jul 2007 : Sam recently spoke at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival.

11th Jul 2007 : Theologian Douglas Wilson and atheist Christopher Hitchens, authors whose books are already part of a larger debate on whether religion is pernicious, agreed to discuss their views on whether Christianity itself has benefited the world. Below is their exchange, one in a series that will appear on our website over the course of this month.

10th Jul 2007 : Riled religious respondents should study epistemology and the disappearance of fairy beliefs, and also apply some sound ethics.

9th Jul 2007 : Doctors are not immune to religious mania.

6th Jul 2007 : Daniel Dennett gives his thoughts on philosophy, science and religion.

6th Jul 2007 : This week, two very different Brits had their say about the latest terrorist plots in their country. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the nation that "we have got to separate those great moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practice violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion." By contrast, a former jihadist from Manchester wrote that the "real engine of our violence" is "Islamic theology." Months ago, this young man informed me that as a militant he raised most of his war chest not from obscenely rich Saudis, but from middle-class Muslim dentists living in the United Kingdom. There's sobering lesson here for the new prime minister.

3rd Jul 2007 : Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously.

3rd Jul 2007 : On the face of it, the Bishop of Carlisle and the young man who staggered blazing from that Jeep at Glasgow Airport on Saturday afternoon don't have a lot in common. The Right Reverend Graham Dow is a grey-haired man with a twinkling smile, rarely armed with anything more lethal than a crozier.

26th Jun 2007 : This documentary-styled one-hour film sees Derren in America attempting to raise questions about the validity of certain religious and spiritual belief systems; belief systems that people are encouraged to base their lives upon - such as new-age faiths and mainstream Christianity. Can he get certain authority figures to endorse him as the real thing?

26th Jun 2007 : Imagine that the year is 1507, and life is difficult. Crops fail, good people suffer instantaneous and horrifying turns of bad luck, and even the children of royalty regularly die before they have taken their first steps. As it turns out, everyone understands the cause of these calamities: it is witchcraft. Not all witchcraft is at fault, of course -- there are "white" witches who use their powers to heal -- but there is no question that some witches have formed an alliance with the Devil. Happily, the Church has produced many learned and energetic men who are equal to this challenge, and each year hundreds of women are put to death for casting spells upon their innocent neighbors.

26th Jun 2007 : CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's state-appointed Grand Mufti said on Sunday that female genital cutting was forbidden by Islam after an 11-year-old girl died while undergoing the procedure at a private medical clinic in southern Egypt.

26th Jun 2007 : It's impossible to satisfy "Rage Boy" and his ilk. It's stupid to try.

26th Jun 2007 : I have just finished reading a deeply disheartening book by my friend Professor Akbar Ahmed. Dr. Ahmed is the former Pakistani High Commissioner to Britain and member of the faculties of Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge, current chair of Islamic Studies at American University -- and is in the front ranks of what we Westerners call the moderate Muslims who we are counting on to win the hearts and minds of the others.

19th Jun 2007 : During a recent trip to the Galapagos with the Center for Inquiry, Richard Dawkins gave a reading of his new preface to the paperback edition of The God Delusion. This video is of the reading, and a separate video (coming soon!) will have the Q&A session that followed.

18th Jun 2007 : For readers who weren't able to attend the Truthdig debate between Sam Harris and Chris Hedges, we now have full coverage. So sit back, relax and enjoy the fireworks.

17th Jun 2007 : RE teachers must provide children with a more sophisticated understanding of the subject in a post-11 September world, Ofsted says.

13th Jun 2007 : A Debate on Religion and Politics May 14, 2007, 7:00 p.m.

12th Jun 2007 : Read the 1st chapter of The God Delusion in Bengali.

11th Jun 2007 : So, who want to argue the case against Mother Teresa? Christopher Hitchens.

11th Jun 2007 : We've got a new Gallup poll on evolution to agonize over. It's nothing but bad news—we are a nation of uneducated morons. Gary chose to weep over the political correlation: look how membership in the Republican party is tied to ignorance about science.

10th Jun 2007 : Britain's Duke of Edinburgh may be planning a quiet birthday celebration at home this weekend, but there will be feasting and flag-waving in an isolated jungle village in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where he is worshipped as a god.

6th Jun 2007 : "OK, let's be frank: Hitchens absolutely mopped the floor with Hedges. It was an embarrassment, really. Scroll down to watch the videos of Hitchens' performance to see what I mean."

3rd Jun 2007 : Two prominent defenders of science exchange their views on how scientists ought to approach religion and its followers

29th May 2007 : Christopher Hitchens speaks about his new book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

5th May 2007 : A 17-year-old girl has been stoned to death in Iraq because she loved a teenage boy of the wrong religion.

1st May 2007 : In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Taner Edis explores whether the Koran anticipates the modern scientific understanding of the world, the intelligent design creationist movement within Islam, and whether science is even compatible with the Muslim faith. He also shares his views about the future of Islam, especially in relation to the secular, more scientific West.

30th Apr 2007 : Richard Dawkins believes science's ability to admit ignorance is one of its greatest strengths. On the flip side, he proposes that faith remains arrogant and all too certain of its validity without any rational set of proofs.

30th Apr 2007 : Disbelief now rivals the great faiths in numbers and influence. Never before has religion faced such enormous levels of disbelief, or faced a hazard as powerful as that posed by modernity. How is organized religion going to regain the true, choice-based initiative when only one of them is growing, and it is doing so with reproductive activity rather than by convincing the masses to join in, when no major faith is proving able to grow as they break out of their ancestral lands via mass conversion, and when securely prosperous democracies appear immune to mass devotion? The religious industry simply lacks a reliable stratagem for defeating disbelief in the 21st century.

30th Apr 2007 : Description: Book TV presents LIVE coverage of the LA Times Festival of Books. At 1:30pm ET/10:30am PT, a panel on the mixing of religion and culture featuring: Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great"), Zachary Karabell ("Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence"), and Jonathan Kirsch ("A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization"). The panel is moderated by Thane Rosenbaum.

30th Apr 2007 : Surrender yourself to a higher power and never feel alone again!

28th Apr 2007 : Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are two of the very dumbest creationists you will find — and they were upset at the Blasphemy Challenge, so they demanded a chance to debate. And of course, since they are the dumbest, most inane, silliest creationists around, television executives jumped at the chance.

27th Apr 2007 : If the followers of the prophet Muhammad hoped to put an end to any future "revelations" after the immaculate conception of the Koran, they reckoned without the founder of what is now one of the world's fastest-growing faiths

25th Apr 2007 : This week Slate is publishing three excerpts from Christopher Hitchens' new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

25th Apr 2007 : Kids with religious parents are better behaved and adjusted than other children, according to a new study that is the first to look at the effects of religion on young child development.

25th Apr 2007 : There is a false, but effective, fiction that one has to be born again to be a Christian. The Christian right refuses to acknowledge the worth of anyone's religious experience unless—in the words of the tired and opaque cliché—one has accepted "Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior."

22nd Apr 2007 : The debate over creation and evolution, once most conspicuous in America, is fast going global

20th Apr 2007 : 'God is Not Great' by Christopher Hitchens arrives May 1st!

19th Apr 2007 : Bishop Harries and Richard Dawkins have collaborated on several occasions to promote the proper teaching of science in UK classrooms. This is the full unedited interview, which was originally filmed by IWC for the Channel Four documentary 'Root or All Evil?'

18th Apr 2007 : The coverage of my recent debate in the pages of Newsweek began and ended with Jon Meacham and Rick Warren each making respectful reference to Pascal's wager. As many reader's will remember, Pascal suggested that religious believers are simply taking the wiser of two bets: if a believer is wrong about God, there is not much harm to him or to anyone else, and if he is right, he wins eternal happiness; if an atheist is wrong, however, he is destined for hell. Put this way, atheism seems the very picture of reckless stupidity.

12th Apr 2007 : He was slow in learning how to talk. "My parents were so worried," he later recalled, "that they consulted a doctor." Even after he had begun using words, sometime after the age of 2, he developed a quirk that prompted the family maid to dub him "der Depperte," the dopey one.

10th Apr 2007 : In London's Westminster Central Hall on March 27, some 2,000 people turned out to hear Hitchens, Dawkins and philosopher A.C. Grayling debate a trio of religious authorities on the question "We'd be better off without Religion." (The motion carried, 1,205 to 778.)

9th Apr 2007 : 2 comics on religion.

9th Apr 2007 : And those gathering today in this church wait for the final, welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast, bloody cleansing that will lift them up into the heavens and leave the world they despise—the one that was devastated by corporatism—to be racked by plagues and flood and fire until it and all those whom they blame for the debacle of their lives are consumed and destroyed by God. It is a theology of despair. And for many, it can't happen soon enough.

7th Apr 2007 : The conventional explanation of the Crucifixion is illogical, insane and makes God sound like a psychopath, according to one of the country's most controversial clergymen.

7th Apr 2007 : During Holy Week we are treated to a variety of decent-sounding people in print and on the airwaves explaining that religion — or "faith" as they now prefer to call it — is basically all about shared moral values, making the world a better place and gaining a proper sense of awe at life's mystery. We are given to understand that the great world religions are all really fumbling towards the same truth.

1st Apr 2007 : At the Summit: On a cloudy California day, the atheist Sam Harris sat down with the Christian pastor Rick Warren to hash out Life's Biggest Question—Is God real? A NEWSWEEK exclusive.

28th Mar 2007 : Are science and religion converging? No.

There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who call themselves atheists. Ursula Goodenough's lyrical book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, is sold as a religious book, is endorsed by theologians on the back cover, and its chapters are liberally laced with prayers and devotional meditations.

27th Mar 2007 : Does religious belief damage the health of a society, or is it necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society? Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion in discussion with Professor Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford Univ, chaired by Joan Bakewell

24th Mar 2007 : NEARLY A decade and a half ago, this condemnation of fundamentalism was issued: "The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life . . . instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem. . . . Fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations." This robust denunciation came from the Vatican, in a 1993 document entitled "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church."

22nd Mar 2007 : A special debate between Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, author of "Dawkins' God" and "The Dawkins Delusion" and Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, well-known atheist and supporter of Richard Dawkins. As seen on Channel 4's "The trouble with atheism".

22nd Mar 2007 : The "Salem Hypothesis" is a description of an observed correlation between scientists who profess a belief in creation and the engineering disciplines. There are two distinct wordings of the hypothesis, each having a different implication. Both are associated with the "Salem Hypothesis" name, though.

22nd Mar 2007 : H. Allen Orr and Daniel Dennett are tearing into each other something fierce over at Edge, and it's all over Orr's dismissive review of Dawkins' The God Delusion.

21st Mar 2007 : This is the call Matt Dillahunty has been waiting for. He's been preaching on the air for almost 90 minutes, and so far, there has been no robust debate with his viewers. No real challenge.

17th Mar 2007 : The president of the leading Southern Baptist seminary has suggested that a biological basis for homosexuality may be proven, and that prenatal treatment to reverse gay orientation would be biblically justified.