Many theistic beliefs originated as hypotheses to explain natural phenomena such as the weather, disease, and the origin of species. As these hypotheses have been superseded by scientific ones, the scope of theism has steadily shrunk. But since our scientific understanding is never complete, the pseudo-argument known as the God of the Gaps is

The almost 5,000 pedestrians killed in 2014 is still a shocking toll (just compare it with the 44 killed by terrorists to much greater publicity), but it’s better than the 15,500 who were mowed down in 1937, when the country had two-fifths as many people and far fewer cars. And the biggest salvation is to come. Within a decade of this writing, most

No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the humanities.53 A society without historical scholarship is like a person without memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off when our thinking is refined and

In 2001 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that “the biggest existential threat out there is cyber” (prompting John Mueller to comment, “As opposed to small existential threats, presumably”).

Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right. Houses burn down, ships sink, battles are lost for want of a horseshoe nail.

The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics. In addition to obliterating wealth (and, in the communist revolutions, the people who owned it), the four horsemen reduce inequality by killing large numbers of workers, driving up the

As copying errors that enhance stability and replication accumulate over the generations, the replicating system—we call it an organism—will appear to have been engineered for survival and reproduction in the future, though it only preserved the copying errors that led to survival and reproduction in the past.

It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals.43 A real society comprises hundreds of

The sentencing phase after a guilty verdict is tantamount to a second trial, and a death sentence triggers a lengthy process of reviews and appeals—so lengthy that most death-row prisoners die of natural causes. Meanwhile, the billable hours from expensive lawyers cost the state eight times as much as life in prison.