Skepticism 101

WELCOME TO SKEPTICISM 101! The Skeptical Studies Curriculum Resource Center

THE SKEPTICAL STUDIES CURRICULUM RESOURCE CENTER is a comprehensive, free repository of resources for teaching students how to think skeptically. This Center contains an ever-growing selection of books, reading lists, course syllabi, in-class exercises, PowerPoint presentations, student projects, papers, and videos that you may download and use in your own classes. Lessons in these resources include:

• what science is, how it differs from pseudoscience, and why it matters
• the scientific method and how to use it to investigate and conduct skeptical analyses of extraordinary claims
• how to construct effective arguments and rhetorical strategies
• how to effectively use presentations and papers to present an argument
• reason, logic, and skeptical analysis
• the psychology of belief
• how ideas are presented within academia
• how peer review works
• and much more…

Skeptic » Skepticism 101 » Welcome to Skepticism 101! The Skeptical Studies Curriculum Resource Center:

My Top 25 Substantive Posts in 2011

By John W. Loftus at 1/23/2012

Here they are:

25) I Stand in the Gap

24) The Top Ten Misconceptions About Atheists

23) The Ten Marks of a Deluded Person

22) Once Again, Atheism is Not a Belief Nor a Religion

21) In Defense of Debates

20) Ten Ways How To Resist Preaching to the Choir

19) Science Based Explanations vs. Faith Based Explanations

18) Christians demand that I must show their faith is impossible before they will see that it is improbable

17) The Danger of Belief is Thinking You Believe What God Does

16) The Problem of Miracles

15) Answering Once and For All The Christian Complaint That Skeptics Would Refuse to Believe No Matter What God Did

14) Who Answers Prayers?

13) An Omniscient God Solves All Problems and Makes Faith Unfalsifiable

12) How Christian Apologists Work

11) When Christians Criticize Each Other I Think They're All Right

10) A New and Better Pascal's Wager: If God Asked You to Wager Before Being Born What Would You Choose?

9) The Deuteronomist and King Josiah

8) The Outsider Test is Not Hard to Understand

7) Responding to Thomas Talbott: On Why I Think There is a Material World

6) Assessing The Minimal Facts Approach of Habermas, Licona, and Craig

5) Does a Religious Context Increase the Odds of a Miracle?

4) Michael Licona's Book is Delusional on a Grand Scale

3) William Lane Craig On Whether the Witness of the Spirit is Question-Begging

2) In Defense of William Lane Craig 

1) Let's Recap Why William Lane Craig Refuses to Debate Me

What makes scientists tick?

 from the NewScientist.com

Psychologist Greg Feist is trying to find out what drives scientific curiosity, from ways of thinking to personality types

You are championing a new discipline: the psychology of science. What exactly is this?
It's the study of the thought and behaviour of scientists, but it also includes the implicit science done by non-scientists - so, for instance, children and infants who are thinking scientifically, trying to figure out the world and developing cognitive conceptual models of how the world works.

What areas interest you and what discoveries have you made in this field?
My area is personality. I look at the personality characteristics and qualities that distinguish scientists from non-scientists.

The personality characteristic that really stands out for predicting scientific interest is openness to experience: how willing and interested someone is to try new things, to explore, to break out of their habits. Open people get bored with routine. Another thing I've found is that social scientists tend to be higher in extroversion whereas physical scientists tend to be a bit more introverted.

I understand that certain people - Jewish people, for example - are more likely than average to become scientists. Why?
I was brought up Catholic and I married a Jewish woman. I spoke to my wife's rabbi and asked him this question. He said that in Judaism there is no hierarchy. No one person who has more access to the "truth" than anyone else. And there is a healthy tradition of debate. That way of critical thinking and debate is more congruent with the scientific attitude than Catholicism, say, which is based on dogma and hierarchy.

In the US, only 2 per cent of the population is Jewish, yet about 30 per cent of the members of the National Academy of Science and 30 per cent of the Nobel prize recipients are from a Jewish background. That's no coincidence.

What other areas of the psychology of science are ripe for research?
A couple of graduate students and I have started investigating if there is evidence that any kind of mental disorder is associated with scientific thought and behaviour. The general answer is no. In fact, most disorders seem to be screened out to a greater extent in the sciences than in the arts.

Have psychologists looked into the issue of how objective the scientific process really is?
Scientists are human. They're not perfectly objective and rational, but the scientific method tries to limit that as much as possible by having repeatable, observable, empirical methods to minimise the subjective element. The more we understand about the psychology of scientists the more we can mitigate the effect of cognitive bias.

How will this new discipline benefit science?
One of the things it will do is shed light on how and when people become interested in science. And why do some kids, who started out with an interest in science, then leave it? In the US it's a pretty big deal to discover what is lacking in our training and development of young scientists.

Profile

Greg Feist is at San Jose State University, California. He is president of the International Society for the Psychology of Science and Technology, and author of The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind (Yale University Press, 2006)

The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films - - - Open Culture

The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films - - - Open Culture

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Communicating Science: The Difference Between Science and Common Sense

"One of the strongest features of science is that it can correct our seriously flawed cognition and give us an unfiltered view of reality. Most people put a lot of faith into relying on common sense and intuition, but as any psychologist will tell you, this faith is misplaced."
Go To Article

Researchers Again Verify That Near-Death Experiences Are All in Your Head

"Another report by researchers has found that all of the wacky phenomena experienced by people having a near-death experience have a biological basis. Translation: there is absolutely no evidence that NDE’s are supernatural, spiritual, or unexplainable. It’s all in your head. This report squares with what we have talked about before, as NDE’s are science after all."
Go To Article

William Lane Craig and the problem of pain

PZ Myers shreds Craig's counter to problem of pain in the world.
"Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol’ Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn’t god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)?"
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The Twelve Reasons I Don’t Believe in Supernatural Claims, Part I

What a great collection of arguments against believing in nonsense.

"The Twelve Reasons I Don’t Believe in Supernatural Claims, Part I"

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The Twelve Reasons I Don’t Believe in Supernatural Claims, Part 2

The Twelve Reasons I Don’t Believe in Supernatural Claims, Part II
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Faster than light story highlights the difference between science and religion

"Most physicists believe, as Einstein proposed, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. You might say that some, like Jim Al-Khalili who promised to eat his shorts if this was proved untrue, hold this belief religiously. But the recent fuss over the possible existence of faster-than-light neutrinos illustrates precisely how different science and religion are when it comes to questions of "belief" or "knowledge"."

Go To Article

Thinking Scientifically « Science-Based Life

"Why Do We Need Science?

Humans are poor data gathering machines. We have numerous biases, cognitive flaws, and psychological errors that prevent our unguided minds from grasping reality in any accurate way."
 Go To Article

Near-Death Experiences: Science After All « Science-Based Life

"Here I will give the supposedly supernatural claims of near-death experiences (NDE’s) and provide the science behind them. Although only approximately 3% of Americans declare to have had a near-death experience, their seemingly paranormal components have perpetuated pseudoscience for years. Until now."

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Faster than light story highlights the difference between science and religion | Science | guardian.co.uk

"Most physicists believe, as Einstein proposed, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. You might say that some, like Jim Al-Khalili who promised to eat his shorts if this was proved untrue, hold this belief religiously. But the recent fuss over the possible existence of faster-than-light neutrinos illustrates precisely how different science and religion are when it comes to questions of "belief" or "knowledge"."
Go To Article

Why I Am a Naturalist - NYTimes.com

"Naturalism is the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge. In a recent essay for The Stone, Timothy Williamson correctly reports that naturalism is popular in philosophy. In fact it is now a dominant approach in several areas of philosophy — ethics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and, most of in all, metaphysics, the study of the basic constituents of reality. Metaphysics is important: if it turns out that reality contains only the kinds of things that hard science recognizes, the implications will be grave for what we value in human experience."

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Peace of Mind: Near-Death Experiences Now Found to Have Scientific Explanations: Scientific American

"Near-death experiences are often thought of as mystical phenomena, but research is now revealing scientific explanations for virtually all of their common features. The details of what happens in near-death experiences are now known widely—a sense of being dead, a feeling that one's "soul" has left the body, a voyage toward a bright light, and a departure to another reality where love and bliss are all-encompassing."

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New Scientist TV: Time-lapse Tuesday: Milky Way forms in fine detail

"This epic time-lapse shows the Milky Way forming and evolving over 13.7 billion years (see video above). Developed by a team led by Piero Madau from the University of California in Santa Cruz and Javiera Guedes from the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Zurich, it's the most detailed simulation of a galaxy's evolution yet made. Unlike previous attempts, the massive galaxy that appears closely resembles the Milky Way - with its central strip of bright stars surrounded by spiral arms swirling in a flat disc." Watch Video Here

Ask Sam Harris Anything #1 - YouTube

"Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape, answers questions submitted by users on Reddit.com.
Hear Sam talk about everything from meditation to religion, and see if one of your questions got answered!" Watch Video Here

Ask Sam Harris Anything #2 - YouTube

"Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape, answers questions submitted by users on Reddit.com.
Hear Sam talk about everything from meditation to religion, and see if one of your questions got answered!" Watch Video Here

Building Blocks of DNA Found in Meteorites From Space | Biological Molecules on Meteorites | Life's Building Blocks | LiveScience

Again science begins filling in the "gaps" in supernatural beliefs.

"The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.

A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space.

Past research had revealed a range of building blocks of life in meteorites, such as the amino acids that make up proteins. Space rocks just like these may have been a vital source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth." Go To Article

Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve : NPR

"Let's go back to the beginning — all the way to Adam and Eve, and to the question: Did they exist, and did all of humanity descend from that single pair?

According to the Bible (Genesis 2:7), this is how humanity began: 'The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.' God then called the man Adam, and later created Eve from Adam's rib. Go To Article

Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe this account. It's a central tenet for much of conservative Christianity, from evangelicals to confessional churches such as the Christian Reformed Church.

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: 'That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.'"