Does having faith in God need to be an emotional decision, or can it be purely an intellectual one? What difference does faith make in your everyday life?

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Where do our concepts of right and wrong come from? Do humans share a moral law that transcends time and culture?

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Is the suffering we experience in the world evidence for or against God? What do you believe happens after death? How does belief or lack of belief in an afterlife affect your understanding of life?

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The following book review of Mark Oppenheimer’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (Yale University Press, 2003), (originally published in the Los Angeles Times) ran in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (4/1/04). I used the book review to further support the group selection thesis proffered by David Sloan Wilson in his book Darwin’s Cathedral, as well as my own analysis in The Science of Good and Evil, to explain the success of religion. It was published as Countering the Counterculture. My original title better describes my thesis and what the book is about. But it is an unalterable law of nature that all book review and opinion editorial editors must change the author’s original title or else they will go to editorial hades.

In April, 1993, in his address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Pope John Paul II acquitted Galileo for his heretical belief that the earth goes around the sun, explaining that “the theologian must keep informed about the results (continue reading…)

Michael Shermer’s tour for his book, The Science of Good and Evil, found him here explaining why we are moral, the evolutionary origins of the moral sentiments, and how to be good without God.