The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Based on a sample of hundreds of respondents to a survey distributed through social media, California State University, Fullerton psychologists Brittany Page and Douglas J. Navarick explain the differences they found in how atheists view God.

Alan Sokal reflects on the hoax perpetrated by James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian who published a nonsensical paper “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” in the peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences.

Since the death of William Peter Blatty—the author best known for his novel turned blockbuster film The Exorcist— exorcism is, once again, showing a robust presence in contemporary life, this time among millennials. In this article, Kathy Schultheis warns that this resurgence of interest in exorcism is a sign of how far reason has fallen.

Can paradoxes that seem to undermine belief in the God of Christianity actually support a belief in Him? Skeptic magazine’s religion editor, Tim Callahan, reviews Paradoxology: Why Christianity Was Never Meant To Be Simple, by Krish Kandiah.

“The conceptual penis as a social construct:” a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies by @peterboghossian and @GodDoesnt.

Dr. Nathan H. Lents catches up with Dr. Lee Berger to ask him about the astounding and far-reaching implications of confirmed rumors that a second cave had been found harboring more Homo naledi skeletal remains, and revealed that the fossils are much younger than previously thought.

As promised last week, this week, we present anthropologist Dr. Vincent M. Sarich’s defense of the bell curve. See last week’s eSkeptic for the critique of the bell curve by Diane Halpern.

On a scale from 1–10, how confident are you in a belief that you hold? What evidence could you encounter that would undermine your confidence? What would it take to lower your confidence from 9 to 8, or even 6?

In light of recent events in which Charles Murray has been booed off stage at two academic institutions for lecturing on ideas from his book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, we think it’s worth revisiting an article from Skeptic magazine from 1995 in which cognitive psychologist Diane Halpern critiques the book.

Tim Callahan reviews the PBS documentary film ‘The Last Days of Jesus,’ which aired on PBS affiliates in the U.S. April 4, 2017.