The latest issue of Skeptic magazine (21.4), available digitally right now, examines deceptions in cancer treatment and marketing; mysterious “alien” skulls; clown panics; anti-aging claims; defining “spirituality;” memory training; computer simulations; Salem Witch trials; mammoth mysteries; and more…
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eSkeptic for December 7, 2016
Closer To Truth: Does Evil Refute God’s Existence?
Evil is a high hurdle for theists. Given the savagery of moral evil (what humans do to humans) and the horrors of natural evil (earthquakes, tsunamis, disease), how could an all-powerful and all-good God exist? Philosophers offer defenses (evil and God do not contradict) and theodicies (reasons why God allows evil). The problem is the sheer amount of evil. Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews Michael Shermer, for CloserToTruth.com.
From Particles to People:The Laws of Nature and the Meaning of Life
HUMAN BEINGS DO NOT STAND OUTSIDE NATURE; we are a part of it. Ultimately we are made of particles, evolving and interacting according to the laws of physics. And we know what those laws are — the progress of modern science has reached a point where the laws underlying everyday life are completely understood. This is a lecture you won’ want to miss!
10-05-12
In this week’s eSkeptic, we present Dr. Michael Shermer’s review of The Brain and the Meaning of Life by Paul Thagard.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
IN THIS REVEALING TALK based on her compelling new novel, the award-winning writer and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Rebecca Goldstein (Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton and author of The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light, and studies of Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza), reads from her new novel and speaks about how she uses her characters to explore the tension between belief and skepticism.
Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason & Religion
In this controversial lecture based on his new book, the world-renowned complexity theorist Dr. Stuart Kauffman argues that people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality, and that those who do believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief…
04-08-26
In this week’s eSkeptic, we present information about the PBS documentary series Closer to Truth: Science, Meaning and the Future, organized and hosted by Robert Kuhn.
Dr. Daniel Dennett — Freedom Evolves: Free Will, Determinism, and Evolution
Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher and public intellectual, Dr. Dennett, drawing on evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics and philosophy, demonstrates that free will exists in a deterministic world for humans only, and that this gives us morality, meaning, and moral culpability.
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