Skeptic: Promoting Science and Critical Thinking

Does God Exist? In this week’s eSkeptic, Dr. Michael Shermer takes on Dr. John Lennox, who holds three doctorates in the fields of science and mathematics (Ph.D., D.Phil., D.Sc.) and is a Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green College, University of Oxford.

In this week’s eSkeptic, we present ABC Radio National’s show All in the Mind, a debate recorded for National Science Week in Australia, between Dr. Michael Shermer and shareholder activist and Crikey founder, Stephen Mayne.

In this week’s eSkeptic, we present the third in a series of conversations presented by the John Templeton Foundation. The conversation explores the BIG Questions (the theme of this year’s Skeptics Society Conference at Caltech), among which is “Does science make belief in God obsolete?”.

In this week’s eSkeptic, we present two free articles from the current issue of Skeptic magazine on global warming: Patrick Frank’s A Climate of Belief and the other by Tapio Schneider’s How We Know Global Warming is Real.

In this week’s eSkeptic, we present Michael Shermer’s Los Angeles Times opinion editorial on Scientology, followed by several Letters to the Editor that ran in response. And then, we present, in part, Jean E. Rosenfeld’s Los Angeles Times op-ed rebuttal to Michael’s piece.

In this debate, on what are arguably two of the most important questions in the culture wars today — Is Religion a Force for Good or Evil? and Can you be Good without God? — the conservative Christian author and cultural scholar Dinesh D’Souza and the libertarian skeptic writer and social scientist Michael Shermer, square off to resolve these and related issues, such as the relationship between science and religion and the nature and existence of God.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Dr. Clive Wynne, a psychology professor at the University of Florida and the author of the authoritative textbook on the subject of animal cognition, revisits the debate about whether animals have language.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Harriet Hall, M.D. (Skeptic magazine’s resident expert on all matters medical) reviews Jerome Groopman’s book How Doctors Think. PLUS, Shermer appears on CNN’s Glenn Beck show to discuss 9/11 conspiracy theories; Dinesh D’Souza and Michael Shermer debate “Is Christianity Good for the World?”.

In his book, The Physics of Christianity, Dr. Tipler argues that the God depicted by Jews and Christians, the Uncaused First Cause, is completely consistent with the Cosmological Singularity, an entity whose existence is required by physical law. He makes the case for the scientific possibility of miracles, including the Virgin Birth (Jesus was a rare XX male), the Resurrection (a baryon-annihilation process converting flesh into neutrinos), and the Incarnation (reversing the dematerialization process). Tipler outlines practical experiments that can help prove the validity of the “miracles” at the heart of Christianity.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Gary J. Whittenberger gives us a skeptical analysis of the “spirited debate between atheist biologist Richard Dawkins and Christian geneticist Francis Collins” which appeared in Time magazine on November 13, 2006.