The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

In this week’s eSkeptic, David Priess reviews Red Team: How To Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy by Micah Zenko.

David Priess reviews Red Team: How To Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy, by Micah Zenko.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Stephen Beckner reviews Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary film The Look of Silence, produced by Signe Byrge, Executive Producers Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Andre Singer Sørensen, Presented by Drafthouse Films, Participant Media, and Final Cut For Real, 103 minutes.

Have you ever questioned your faith, or worried about what life would be like without it, or do you know someone who has? Have you ever wrestled with issues of how to replace religious practices and ideas with secular ones? In this week’s eSkeptic, Donald Prothero reviews Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions: a book by Phil Zuckerman that addresses these topics.

In this week’s eSkeptic, William M. London reviews the Skeptics Society Conference on the Future of Science and Humanity that took place at Caltech May 29–31, 2015.

Daniel Loxton reviews a colorful nonfiction dinosaur book for children.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Sigfried Gold reviews Sam Harris’s new book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Donald R. Prothero, reviews Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason, by Seth Andrews.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Michael Shermer reviews Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History by Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing. This review was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on July 5, 2014.

Sigfried Gold reviews Atheists in America, edited by Melanie E. Brewster.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Donald Prothero reviews Karen Stollznow’s book, God Bless America: Strange and Unusual Religious Beliefs and Practices in the United States.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Harriet Hall, M.D., The SkepDoc, reviews Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero (Columbia University Press, 2013. ISBN: 978-0231153201). This review appeared in Skeptic magazine issue 18.4 (2013)

In this week’s eSkeptic, Michael Shermer reviews Will Storr’s book, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science. A shorter version of this review ran in the Wall Street Journal on April 1, 2014.

Pseudoscience runs rampant in much of the popular media, reducing science to stereotypes of evil mad scientists. With the recent reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentary, we see the return of science popularization in a manner that inspires people (especially children) to be fascinated by science, to think about careers in science, and to pass Sagan’s mantle on to another generation. In this week’s eSkeptic, scientist and educator Donald Prothero reviews the first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which…

In this week’s eSkeptic, Norman Levitt discusses some of the intellectual follies of leftist postmodern academics who would denounce science in favour of fringe science, pseudoscience, and outright antiscience. This article appeared in Skeptic magazine issue 6.3 (1998).

All scientists are naturalists, taking for granted that we live, experiment and study nature in a closed universe where God never intervenes. This is a first principle of science. But Alvin Plantinga says that there is deep conflict between naturalism and science but deep concord between theism and science. In this week’s eSkeptic, William S. Moore reviews Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Patrick Arnold reviews The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith by Rosaria Butterfield.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Ingrid Hansen Smythe wittily dissects the farcical visions of the afterlife presented by James Van Praagh in his book Growing up in Heaven.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Ryan L.A. Shaffer reviews How to Get Rich in Your Own Psychic Business, by Herb Dewey and Marc Sky. Dewy and Sky. This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 15.3 (2010), which is available digitally with the Skeptic Magazine App.

How many people can our planet hold? Can we expect calamities to result from overpopulation and resource depletion when our planet reaches ten billion people? In this week’s eSkeptic, Michael Shermer reviews two books: Ten Billion by Stephen Emmott (Vintage Books, 2013), and Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman (Little Brown, 2013). This review appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 4, 2013.