Stay ConnectedPoint of Inquiry is the Center for Inquiry’s flagship podcast, where the brightest minds of our time sound off on all the things you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table: science, religion, and politics.
Guests have included Brian Greene, Susan Jacoby, Richard Dawkins, Ann Druyan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugenie Scott, Adam Savage, Bill Nye, and Francis Collins.
Point of Inquiry is produced at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y.
Copyright: © Center for Inquiry
Tom Quinn has spent the past 15 years as a documentary TV writer and producer for Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic and others. He has traveled the world producing programs that explore and deconstruct urban legends, psychic claims, religious myths and conspiracy theories, and has worked with the likes of James Randi and Michael Shermer.
He's a graduate of the American Film Institute, he's been a film critic, a story analyst for Universal Studios and HBO, and, in 2005, he received two Emmy nominations for his History Channel special, Beyond the Da Vinci Code. He has subsequently done programs for Discovery Shark Week and on the book, Angels and Demons.
Tom is the author of a new book, What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus? An Irreverent History of Christianity. He also gives humors lectures on all of these subjects, and blogs at choco-jesus.blogspot.com.
In this conversation with Robert Price, Tom talks about his new book and how satire can be an effective education tool. He discusses his views on the history of Christianity and how to best approach the books of the Bible. He explains why those who couple religion with morality are wrong to do so, responds to the claim that one must be religious to have an ethical worldview, and much more.
Our guest this week needs no introduction for those in the skeptical and secular world. After all, he has a frakkin' asteroid named after him.
He’s Phil Plait—science blogger extraordinaire for Discover Blogs, where he authors “Bad Astronomy.” Recently, Plait joined Point of Inquiry for a wide ranging conversation about standing eggs on end, Apollo moon landing deniers, wacky yet endearing Hollywood bad science, something called “spaghettification”….and the end of the world.
Phil Plait is a skeptic and an astronomer, and former president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. He lectures widely across the country and is the author of two books, most recently Death from the Skies: These Are the Ways the World Will End.
Adam Savage is an artist, actor, educator, special effects designer and co-host of the Discovery Channel's TV show Mythbusters. Adam has a diverse background in animation and design, and for almost two decades he has concentrated on the special effects industry for film, theater and television. A prominent skeptic and atheist, Adam lectures in science education and is a strong promoter of critical thinking. Karen Stollznow spoke with Adam in Las Vegas at The Amaz!ng Meeting, the annual conference of the James Randi Educational Foundation. In this conversation, Adam spoke about his identification as a skeptic and atheist, and his work to promote science and skepticism to the public. He talked about his experiences on Mythbusters; why the show appeals to skeptics, and how he applies skepticism to his experiments. Adam talks about testing pseudoscience and the paranormal, how myths and legends develop, and how the public reacts when their cherished myths are busted.
Recently in Amherst, New York, two of Point of Inquiry’s hosts sat down for a special in-studio episode of the show. One was a conservative (Robert Price), one a liberal (Chris Mooney)—and both were atheists.
The topic they tackled: Is there any necessary correlation between one’s disbelief in God and one’s place on the political spectrum?
The result was a fascinating—and notably civil, and frequently entertaining—conversation ranging across foreign policy, abortion, stem cell research, animal rights, and many other topics. In the end, the discussants actually found not only much disagreement, but also some common ground.
Robert M. Price is Professor of Biblical Criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute as well as the editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism and a host of Point of Inquiry. His books include Beyond Born Again, The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny, Deconstructing Jesus, andThe Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.
Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist and commentator and the author of three books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. They also write “The Intersection” blog together for Discover blogs. In the past, Chris has also been visiting associate in the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University and a 2009-2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is also a host of Point of Inquiry.
Tom Flynn is Executive Director of The Council for Secular Humanism, Editor of Free Inquiry magazine, Director of Inquiry Media Productions, and Director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum.
A journalist, novelist, entertainer, and freethought historian, Flynn is the author of numerous articles and editorials for Free Inquiry magazine. In addition to The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, his books include two black comedy science fiction novels, Nothing Sacred, its prequel Galactic Rapture, and The Trouble With Christmas, a secularist critique of the holiday. He has made hundreds of radio and TV appearances in his role as the curmudgeonly "anti-Claus."
In this conversation with Robert Price, Tom explains how he transitioned from his conservative Catholic youth Secular Humanist he is today. He talks about the part Mormonism played in his transition to non-belief. Perhaps one of the most consistent secularists around today, Tom elaborates on the problems he has with rites of passage ceremonies and marriage. He talks about what he sees as problems with some secular charity programs and the parts of life he believes should be off-limits to a secular community. Finally, he and Price discuss radical Islam and how we should approach talking about it.
Global warming, we're often told, is an issue we must address for the sake of our grandchildren. We need to cut carbon because of our moral obligation to future generations.
But according to Bill McKibben, that's a 1980s view. As McKibben writes in his new book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, the increasingly open secret is that global warming happened already. We've passed the threshold, and the planet isn't at all the same. It's less climatically stable. Its weather is haywire. It has less ice, more drought, higher seas, heavier storms. It even appears different from space.
And that's just the beginning of the earth-shattering changes in store—a small sampling of what it's like to trade a familiar planet (Earth) for one that's new and strange (Eaarth). We'll survive on this sci-fi world, this terra incognita—but we may not like it very much. And we may have to change some fundamental habits along the way.
Eaarth, argues McKibben, is our greatest failure.
Bill McKibben is a former staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, and author of the famous 1989 book The End of Nature, as well as over a dozen other works. He is currently a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, and founder of the global warming grassroots organization 350.org, which lobbies for tougher climate policies. In 2009, the group conducted what CNN later called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history."
Tim Farley is a computer software engineer, skeptic, and creator of the popular website What's the Harm? His site answers this salient question with over 670,000 stories of people who have indeed been harmed, damaged, injured, or even killed by pseudoscience and the paranormal
What's the Harm's catchphrase is: "368,379 people killed, 306,096 injured and over $2,815,931,000 in economic damages." However, these statistics are calculated from randomly-caught, modern cases documented in English-speaking countries. Many stories are left untold. How much bigger could the problem be?
In this interview with Karen Stollznow, Tim reveals the real-life dangers, and the hidden dangers, of these beliefs and practices. He treats the lack of regulatory bodies for these industries, and what recourse can be taken when harm is done. Tim talks about the question "What's the Harm?" as used in defense of pseudoscience and the paranormal, and why this is wielded as a "checkmate" argument. He discusses the power of anecdotal evidence, and whether people are influenced by cautionary tales, or more persuaded by their own personal experiences.
Tim is a prominent activist and a frequent speaker at events including Skeptics in the Pub, Skepticamp, and the James Randi Educational Foundation's Amazing Meetings. An expert in computer security and reverse engineering, he is at the forefront of the Skepticism 2.0 movement. He talks about finding your own "niche" as an online activist, how you don't need to be a magician or have a PhD to be a skeptic, and how we all have our own expertise to bring to the skeptical movement.
This week's guest is Naomi Oreskes, co-author with historian Eric Conway of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
Through extensive archival research, Oreskes and Conway have managed to connect the dots between a large number of seemingly separate anti-science campaigns that have unfolded over the years. It all began with Big Tobacco, and the famous internal memo declaring, "Doubt is our Product."
Then came the attacks on the science of acid rain and ozone depletion, and the flimsy defenses of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program. And the same strategies have continued up to the present, with the battle over climate change.
Throughout this saga, several key scientific actors appear repeatedly—leaping across issues, fighting against the facts again and again. Now, Oreskes and Conway have given us a new and unprecedented glimpse behind the anti-science curtain.
Naomi Oreskes (Ph.D., Stanford, 1990) is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on the historical development of scientific knowledge, methods, and practices in the earth and environmental sciences, and on understanding scientific consensus and dissent. She is the author of numerous noted books and papers, including a 2004 essay in Science entitled "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," which was widely cited, debated, and referenced in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth."
S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers, mostly in the realms of supernatural and fantasy fiction. He has edited corrected editions of the works of Lovecraft, several annotated editions of Bierce and Mencken, and has written such critical studies as The Weird Tale and The Modern Weird Tale. His award-winning biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, has already become a collector's item.
But critical, biographical, and editorial work on weird fiction is only one aspect of Joshi's multifaceted output. A prominent atheist, Joshi has published the anthology Atheism: A Reader and the anti-religious polemic, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong. He has also compiled an important anthology on race relations, Documents of American Prejudice.
In this episode of Point of Inquiry, Robert M. Price talks with Joshi about Lovecraft and how his writings were an impetus toward Joshi's atheism. Along with discussing Lovecraft's views on religion, Joshi shares his own views on the subject. He reveals his thoughts on religious writers as well as the "new atheism." He explains what horror and fantasy literature have to offer the non-religious, and how it can in some ways take the place of religious writings.
This week, we learned that J. Craig Venter has at long last created a synthetic organism—a simple life form constructed, for the first time, by man. Let the controversy begin—and if New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter is correct, the denial of science will be riding hard alongside it.
In his recent book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, Specter charts how our resistance to vaccination and genetically modified foods, and our wild embrace of questionable health remedies, are the latest hallmarks of an all-too-trendy form of fuzzy thinking--one that exists just as much on the political left as on the right.
And it’s not just on current science-based issues that denialism occurs. The phenomenon also threatens our ability to handle emerging science policy problems—over the development of personalized medicine, for instance, or of synthetic biology. How can we make good decisions when again and again, much of the public resists inconvenient facts, statistical thinking, and the sensible balancing of risks?
Michael Specter has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1998. Before that, he was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the national science reporter for the Washington Post.
At the New Yorker, Specter has covered the global AIDS epidemic, avian flu, malaria, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, synthetic biology and the debate over our carbon footprint. He has also published many profiles of subjects including Lance Armstrong, ethicist Peter Singer, and Sean (P. Diddy) Combs. In 2002, Specter received the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Journalism Award for his article “Rethinking the Brain,” about the scientific basis of how we learn.
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