Alas, I can never completely know my home, the Earth, for even from way up here I can see only one hemisphere at a time. Woe is me! I am not ubiquitous!

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett would LOVE to ban the Bible in this country.

I am perplexed why you spend so much energy criticizing Christian belief. Why does faith bother you so much? Because it's illogical? The world is filled with paradoxes which you declare don't exist, as in your example that "A" cannot also be "not A". Here's a famous paradox: "Everything I…

Truth is a slippery concept. We slide from "consistent" to "truth" after several repetitions that yield similar results. The word truth infers a static absolute. I'm not sure anything in the universe is static or absolute. Perhaps only words are static and absolute. You can read this now and read it again tomorrow and the words are the same and hold the same meaning. Therein lies the problem: We think in words and are led astray by their static absoluteness, projecting onto the world static absolutes when reality is always in flux. We observe only consistencies, not truths. Only in the abstract world of mathematics can we have truths. But being abstract means they are not real. If they are not real, can they be true in the real world?

"At some point .... the gap between the emission of the cosmic microwave background and the formation of the very first stars will finally be definitively revealed to us." That's exactly what Sam Bankman-Fried told his shareholders: "At some point the gap between your investment and your profits will be revealed to you." I am skeptical, to say the least, that a TOE is attainable for puny humans in an infinite universe. It's a delusion of grandeur fraught with disingenuous presuppositions ill suited to a scientist. But, what the heck, keep on investing in it if gambling gives you a thrill.

"Nonbelief is the default position." I disagree. That's a faulty supposition. As soon as you're born and your eyes focus, you believe your eyes, you believe your mother loves you, long before you begin compiling evidence. …

I have a theory about why you hate armchair theorists who are mathematically challenged. Einstein often emphasized the important role of imagination in scientific discovery. Without the math chops to flesh out his imaginative ideas he'd be just another Uncle Larry with his crackpot theories. In the upper echelons of any profession one will find an abundance of narrow-minded snobs. A professional artist with an MFA overheard someone say "I'm an artist in my own way" and couldn't help but put his two cents in. "Yes, and I'm a brain surgeon in my own way," he sneered.

Our Milky Way and Andromeda won't actually collide. They'll pass through each other. Their components - mostly stars - will just whizz past each other, warping orbits, etc., but there will be almost no physical contact.

The Hubble tension may be an artifact of the passage of time not being consistent throughout the history of the universe. Time itself may be speeding up (or slowing down) as the universe expands. We don't notice this change and can't measure it because everyone and everything (including clocks) in the local universe is experiencing this change in synchrony.