Topic
Material connected with evidence.
Community Notes are often praised as a scalable alternative to centralised fact-checking. New large-scale evidence from X suggests they can substantially reduce the spread of misleading posts once displayed, but timing limits their overall effect.
On 7 September 2026, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that advanced artificial intelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity and called for stronger safeguards. The warning is serious, but a reasoned assessment must separate observed capabilities, plausible pathways and unresolved uncertainty.
People report visions, sensed presences, unity, revelation and answered prayer across many religions. The experiences may be sincere and transformative while their causes remain uncertain.
Sacred texts often present themselves, their teachings or their messengers as authoritative. The question is whether internal claims can establish authority without independent support.
A miracle is often understood as an event caused by supernatural or divine intervention. Before accepting that explanation, the event itself and the available alternatives must be examined carefully.
The question is not whether any event can be described as evidence for a god, but whether the evidence is sufficiently specific, reliable and difficult to explain without the proposed divine being.
Faith can mean trust based upon evidence, confidence despite uncertainty or belief without sufficient evidence. Whether it reliably finds truth depends upon which meaning is intended and whether errors can be detected.
Ancient beliefs often command respect because generations have preserved them. However, long survival can result from tradition, authority, repetition and social identity as well as from reliable evidence.
People often experience changing their mind as losing an argument, betraying a group or admitting weakness. A truth-seeking approach treats revision as evidence that learning has occurred.
Personal experience often carries greater emotional force than statistics or distant testimony. It can reveal genuine events, but it is limited by the observer's perspective and vulnerability to error.
People can remember events that did not happen or remember real events with important details changed. False memories do not necessarily involve dishonesty; they can arise through ordinary processes of reconstruction.
Eyewitness testimony can provide valuable evidence, but confidence and honesty do not guarantee accuracy. What a person noticed, remembered and later reported can be altered at several stages.
Philosopher · 1872–1970 · Logic, philosophy, scepticism, public ethics
Bertrand Russell is important to Truth By Reason because he joined logic, scepticism, anti-dogmatism and public moral concern.
Philosopher · 1711–1776 · Philosophy, scepticism, empiricism
David Hume is important to Truth By Reason because he challenged weak claims about miracles, causation, religion and certainty through sceptical and empirical reasoning.
Yes. A claim can be true even before humans prove it. But until there is enough evidence, we should not treat it as established knowledge.
Evolution is a threat to some literal religious claims about creation, but not necessarily to every form of religious belief. It depends on what the religion claims.
Reality is what exists or is true whether or not we want it to be so. But humans also experience personal, social, symbolic and imagined realities that must be carefully distinguished.
Evidence supports or weakens a claim. Proof is a stronger standard where the evidence is sufficient to justify accepting the claim as established for a given purpose.
Truth By Reason uses confidence and probability because many important claims are not honestly handled by pretending everything is either absolutely certain or completely unknowable.
