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This course was taught at Chapman University during the spring 2013 semester as an undergraduate course.
Excerpt from Syllabus
This course addresses the evolutionary origins of morality, the developmental psychology of moral emotions, the historical course of moral development throughout the history of civilization, and the forces that have bent the arc of the moral universe toward truth, justice, freedom, and prosperity.
Students will look at how the arc of the moral universe bends toward truth, justice, freedom, and prosperity thanks to science the type of thinking that involves reason, rationality, empiricism, and skepticism. The Scientific Revolution led by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton was so world-changing that thinkers in other fields consciously aimed at revolutionizing the social, political, and economic worlds using the same methods of science. This led to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, which in turn created the modern secular world of democracies, rights, justice, and liberty.
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This course was taught at the University of Texas at El Paso during the spring 2013 semester.
Excerpt from Syllabus
This course is designed to introduce students to a variety of critical thinking skills and to encourage them to practice those skills in the context of evaluating popular claims, especially extraordinary claims about topics relevant to anthropology and archeology. It is intended for students who are attracted to the interesting topics identified with anthropology in the popular media, but the level of instruction assumes no prior experience in anthropology. Students will learn about the methods used to interpret the physical traces of behavior, and how to distinguish scientific arguments from pseudoscience and non-science. Lectures, readings and class exercises will examine a variety of non-scientific explanations for past and present events, such as UFOs and ancient astronauts, Bigfoot, pyramid power, Atlantis, creationism and intelligent design, the Book of Mormon, dowsing, climate change denial, and psychic archeology.
Does Bigfoot roam the mountains of Oregon, and do his cousins hang out in the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico? Are they shape-shifters, or do they use wormholes to travel the time-space continuum? Are extraterrestrial aliens like the ones who crashed in Roswell, New Mexico silvers or greens? Is there really an exotic blood-sucking animal called chupacabra killing livestock in the southern U.S. and northern Mexico, or is it just a hairless raccoon? Should we believe Senator James Inhofe when he says that global climate change is a hoax? Is cell phone use harmful to your health? Do the Power Balance bracelets worn by Drew Brees and Kobe Bryant provide any real scientific advantage to athletes? Are modern humans related to ancient prehistoric peoples, or were we created in modern form? Is there reliable evidence to support the claims that psychics can reveal details about the past or make valid predictions about the future? Was planet earth really visited by ancient astronauts, and did they teach Egyptians how to build the pyramids? How can we know the answers to such questions? In fact, how can we know the truth about any claim? We are bombarded by information and claims all the time, and it is vitally important, now more than ever, that we be able to distinguish valid information and warranted conclusions from those that are not. How can we do this, especially when the claims involve events that occurred in the prehistoric past, were not witnessed by humans, or were not documented in written records?
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This course was taught at the California State University, Northridge during the fall 2010 semester.
Excerpt from Syllabus
One of the characteristics of contemporary American popular discourse is a marked increase in irrationalism. Belief in the paranormal, pseudoscience, and millenialism is perhaps more prevalent than at any other time in the history of Western Civilization. This course seeks to test these beliefs through the application of rhetorical analysis and critical thinking to discourse advancing extraordinary claims.
Learning Goals
Upon successful completion of this course, the students will be able to:
- Identify extraordinary claims in popular discourse.
- Identify the types of appeals, including forms of reasoning and evidence, used to advance extraordinary claims in popular discourse.
- Assess the strength of rhetoric advancing extraordinary claims.
- Prepare critical analyses and refutations of rhetoric advancing extraordinary claims.
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This course was taught at California State University, Los Angeles during the spring 2012 semester
Excerpt from Syllabus
An introduction to skeptical inquiry as a foundation for drawing sound conclusions about popular claims made about health-related lifestyle practices, practitioners, facilities, products, services, and information portals. Healthy skepticism emphasizes careful consideration of scientific evidence and knowledge, and human susceptibility to deception and misperception.
Learning Goals
Upon successful completion of this course, the students will be able to:
- Discuss the major challenges, considerations, and science-based resources for distinguishing fact from fiction regarding information about health products, services, and practices promoted in the health marketplace.
- Apply key concepts of skeptical inquiry and science-based health care to plan and conduct meaningful descriptive studies concerning the promotion of health products, services, practices, and/or information in the health marketplace.
- Explain why testimonials regarding the effectiveness of health products, services, and practices are not trustworthy even when they are appealing.
- Evaluate quackery as a public health problem and efforts to combat quackery.
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This course was taught at the University of Central Oklahoma during the fall 2011 semester
Excerpt from Syllabus
My goal for this course is to have each student leave with increased critical thinking and reasoning skills and the ability to apply those skills in his or her environment. Specifically, this course will teach students how to apply empirical, scientific modes of thinking in explaining the causes of various phenomena, from everyday human behavior to supposedly paranormal events. Students will become skilled in differentiating between scientific and pseudoscientific explanations of things such as psychic abilities, witchcraft, alien abduction, astrology, recovered memories, and the healing properties of various alternative medicines and techniques. In addition, students will come to understand the various ways in which we can be fooled, both by others and by ourselves, thanks to the way the human brain processes information.
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This course was taught at the University of North Texas.
Excerpt from Syllabus
In this class students will utilize scientific critical thinking to examine the causes of various strange phenomena, including alleged paranormal events, magic, superstition, mystery illness, bogus therapies and pseudoscience. The main goal is to teach students how to think about weird things when they encounter them.
Learning Goals
By the end of this course, students should be able to do:
- Describe 3 scientific paradigm shifts that have occurred within the last 1000 years and explain why they happened.
- Describe the importance of temporal and spatial contiguity in relation to perceiving weird things.
- Describe how the environment selects superstitious behavior in organisms. o Describe the role that uncertainty plays in why people believe weird things.
- Describe the “law of non-contradiction” and why it must be true.
- Describe differences and similarities between logical and physical possibilities.
- Describe at least two principles of critical thinking. o Define “knowledge” and how it relates to evidence & belief.
- Demonstrate commonsense skepticism by proportioning your belief to the evidence.
- Define the “criteria of adequacy” and use them evaluate competing theories.
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This course was taught at Claremont Graduate University during the spring 2012 semester.
Excerpt from Syllabus
Evolution, Economics, and the Brain is a doctoral-level Transdisciplinary Course designed to address large issues in which students employ knowledge and research protocols from many different disciplines to shed new light on specific problems. One of the books assigned—Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature—integrates evolution, history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, and political science to explain a single phenomenon: the decline of violence. It is a model work in transdisciplinary integration.
A transdisciplinary and integrative overview of evolutionary theory, evolutionary economics, and neuroscience (“Evolution, Economics, and the Brain”) that includes a brief history and science of evolutionary theory, along with the evolution-creationism controversy and how it evolved in the context of American history and culture. As well, the application of evolutionary theory will be considered in its integration into psychology, anthropology, ethics, and economics. The course also includes an introduction to behavioral neuroscience and will focus on teaching students how new findings in the brain sciences can inform their work in the social sciences and humanities. For example: How reward acquisition is affected by risk; Why humans are typically risk-averse and when they are not; Hyperbolic discounting of future rewards; How interpersonal trust is built and maintained; How “rational” vs. “irrational” decisions are made; The basis for cooperation and aggression; The reason people punish others; The role of hormones in decisions; The basis for social norms or ethics; The sense of justice; The basis for love and hate and how these effect decisions; War and peace; Human nature; The decline of violence; The humanitarian and rights movements; and more.
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(338 kb PDF)
This course was taught at Portland State University.
Excerpt from Syllabus
The fundamental learning objectives of this course are threefold: 1) to empower students to be trustful of reason and to give them hope that they can make better communities and live better lives, 2) to demonstrate that there are better and worse ways of reasoning morally, and that the process one uses to make moral decisions can either contribute to, or alleviate, real life suffering and misery, 3) to teach student not to withhold moral judgment, but how to make better, more discerning moral judgments.
This class has the potential to disabuse students of ideologies and specious reasoning processes that bring students’ beliefs out of lawful alignment with reality. Specifically, it is meant to be both an antidote and a prophylactic to pedagogical constructivism, cultural relativism, radical epistemological subjectivism and faith-based belief systems. As such, this course should be viewed more as a moral and cognitive intervention than as a cannon of information that needs to be disseminated, assimilated and then assessed.
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(231 kb PDF)
This course was taught at the University of Maryland during the fall 2011 semester.
Excerpt from Syllabus
What is Science, and how is it distinguished from other aspects of human thought? Physicist Richard Feynman famously said “Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves”: words that get to the heart of the scientific enterprise. In an age when the activities of human society and technology can greatly affect Earth’s systems for decades, centuries, and even millennia to come, we must be able to evaluate the merits of ideas as they relate to the actual natural world, independent of our personal, political, or philosophical preconceptions. In this semester, students will learn the basic intellectual “tool kit” of the scientific enterprise. They will discuss how Science differs from other fields of human endeavor, with a particular emphasis on distinguishing scientific ideas from pseudoscientific thinking. Students will also discuss the influence of our understanding (and often misunderstanding) of Science upon contemporary society. In this course we examine real cases of Science gone bad, and the effect (good and bad) of popular portrayals of Science and scientists has on the public. We begin exploring the details of the origin, use, and effects of the energy resources which we use to run our world.
Learning Goals
By the end of the semester, every student should be able to:
- Accurately employ understanding of logical fallacies and critical thinking skills in evaluating truth claims.
- Effectively distinguish between scientific and non-scientific approaches to the understanding of the natural world.
- Identify the major energy resources used in modern society.
- Write webpages using html code, upload them to a University server, and maintain their personal website.
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(117 kb PDF)
This course was taught at Portland State University.
Excerpt from Syllabus
This course is a systematic examination and analysis of atheism. It is primarily focused upon understanding contemporary secular arguments regarding religion and faith-based belief systems. It is secondarily focused upon exploring what secularism means for metaphysics, epistemology, morality, politics, aesthetics, etc.
Learning Goals
After successfully completing this course students should be able to:
- Use critical thinking skills to analyze arguments for God’s existence
- Examine and evaluate counterarguments
- Understand secular responses to faith-based morality, epistemology and metaphysics
- Investigate the role evidence ought to play in belief formation
- Examine basic logical fallacies and their application
- Explore writings and lectures of contemporary atheist thinkers
- Research 1) A specific argument for God’s existence, and 2) The counter to that argument
- Evaluate, Present and Defend findings to the class
- Address questions of textual exegesis and interpretation and their relevance to religious doctrine and belief
- Explore the controversy surrounding “the new atheists”
- Engage debates from leading religious and secular thinkers regarding God’s existence
- Explore different faith traditions by visiting local religious services and then sharing your experiences with classmates
- Examine Christian epistemology and warrant through writings of Christian thinkers
- Reflect on learning experience and articulate those experiences to peers
- Develop teamwork skills by working with fellow classmates to analyze complicated epistemological problems
- Engage controversial ideas and attempt to come to a consensus
- Empower themselves with the tools to navigate questions about faith, God and the meaning of life
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(252 kb PDF)
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