We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Freethought in the light of the sun
John Loftus of the blog Debunking Christianity has very kindly linked to my recent post, "An Inspiring Story", with a post of his own, "Ex-minister Walks Atheist Path". However, it seems that his much-appreciated courtesy has attracted attention from a different direction. Specifically, the ...
A Response to John Searle's Chinese Room Analogy John Searle. "Minds, Brains, and Programs." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, p. 417-424 (1980). In a famous 1980 paper titled "Minds, Brains and Programs", the philosopher John Searle proposed a notorious thought experiment, now known as ...
Sheryl Kay. "Ex-minister walks atheist path." The St. Petersburg Times, February 17, 2006. His message is clear: Jesus is not coming. Not today. Not ever. At 59, James Young has spent almost a decade sharing his atheist beliefs with the public, driving every Wednesday morning from his home in ...
Michael Luo. "Reform Jews Hope to Unmix Mixed Marriages." The New York Times, February 12, 2006. In this age of potpourri spirituality, Anique Olivier-Mason, 25, classifies herself generally as a Christian: she grew up Catholic and often attends a Presbyterian church near her home. But on a ...
In my previous post in this category, Know Everything, I expressed my desire to know every fact there is about the universe, to know how to solve every problem that has been solved. This goal is, of course, impossible. We cannot do that, so what can we do? I have always admired the Renaissance ...
It is a common misperception, promoted and sustained by religious leaders, that atheism has nothing good or positive to offer the seeker. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will be one of the major purposes of this weblog, and more specifically of this category, the Garden, to explode that ...
In August 2005, according to a December article in the San Francisco Examiner, the private Calvary Chapel Christian School sued the University of California. The UC's offense, according to Calvary Chapel's lawsuit, was in not granting college credit for several courses taught from an explicitly ...
Daylight Atheism has now been up and running for several days, and I'm extremely pleased with the response so far. Already the site logs show over 1500 hits, representing over 250 unique visitors, and there have been some excellent comments and discussion. My humble thanks to everyone who's read ...
Mahatma Gandhi said, "All religions are true." If you think about it, they all serve the same purpose: comfort the afflicted, explain the unexplainable, provide moral guidelines for living a good life. The differences are primarily cultural — language, place of origin, traditional elements — not ...
In recent years, Christian apologists such as Alvin Plantinga have advanced arguments purporting to prove that evolutionary naturalism is a self-refuting worldview. According to these people, if evolution is true and there is no intelligent creator-god, then humans' sensory and rational faculties ...
Richard Feynman's blackboard at Caltech at the time of his death in 1988. The text in the lower left reads, "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved." From Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, p. 83. Since I was very young, I have been fascinated by the findings of ...
Before launching into the weightier topics which this blog will cover, I thought it would be helpful to first establish who I am, what I believe and where I am coming from. This, then, is an atheist's creed - not in the sense of a dogmatically imposed set of standards, but rather a set of general ...
Since this weblog is, in a sense, my home on the Internet, it seemed a useful metaphor to divide it into categories symbolized by the rooms of a house, with each room encompassing a specific set of topics. At least to begin with, there will be six categories, which will be as follows: The Foyer ...
Anyone who knows me, either in real life or through e-mail correspondence, should be well aware that I am a steadfast defender of freedom of speech. I consider it to be the most important right any democratic society can have; it is, in a sense, the right upon which all other rights depend. That is ...
Welcome, one and all, to Daylight Atheism! This will be the official weblog and annex of my other website, Ebon Musings, and will contain discussion threads for the articles posted there as well as original essays and writings. In this inaugural post, it seems fitting to explain what led to the ...