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)

inFact: Conspiracy Theories

Are conspiracy theorists really as crazy as they sound?

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Answering 13 Questions About 2012 by Kyle Hill

Via Psychology Today, arm yourself against the pseudoscience of 2012 apocalypse with answers to 13 questions about the supposed end of the world.

[spoiler alert: the whole theory is bogus]

The Mayan Apocalypse is Nonsense

Here are the questions you will find answers to, with a short summary of the answers (read the full article linked to above for the complete explanations):
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Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?

Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?

 January 19, 2012 at 12:00 pm  JT Eberhard

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?

Is the “Jesus of History” any more real than the “Jesus of Faith”?

(From the upcoming book,Jesus: Mything in Action, by David Fitzgerald)

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Psych 101: Controlling This Tendency Will Make You Happier and More Productive

By STELLA

Your coworker is late. You’re angry. “He’s always late!” you say to yourself. Instead of thinking of the myriad of external sources that could potentially explain his tardiness, you default to the fact that he is always late. Does this sound familiar?
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Climate Change, Disbelief, and the Collision between Human and Geologic Time by Peter H. Gleick

Climate Change, Disbelief, and the Collision between Human and Geologic Time

Geologic time scales are long – too long for the human mind to really comprehend. Over millions, and tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of years, the Earth has changed from something unrecognizable to the planet we see on maps, plastic globes, and photos from space. The Atlantic Ocean didn’t exist eons ago and it will literally disappear in the future as the continental plates continue to move inch by inch. A visitor from outer space millions of years ago would have looked down upon land masses and land forms unrecognizable today. As John McPhee notes in his book, Assembling California, “For an extremely large percentage of the history of the world, there was no California.” Or North America, China, Australia, Hawai’i, Mt. Everest, Grand Canyon, or any of the other landforms and natural symbols we think of as immutable.

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John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved

Investigative Files
Joe Nickell
Volume 25.6, November / December 2001



Superstar “psychic medium” John Edward is a stand-up guy. Unlike the spiritualists of yore, who typically plied their trade in dark-room séances, Edward and his ilk often perform before live audiences and even under the glare of TV lights. Indeed, Edward (a pseudonym: he was born John MaGee Jr.) has his own popular show on the SciFi channel called Crossing Over, which has gone into national syndication (Barrett 2001; Mui 2001). I was asked by television newsmagazine Dateline NBC to study Edward’s act: was he really talking to the dead?

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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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How To Debunk Christianity by John W. Loftus

Click on the image to see it full size.

As you can see from this chart of denominations the Church of Christ is represented as the true church. I have not tried to verify the facts, but it’s roughly accurate I suppose in representing when they started and such. Notice that every denomination is part of “Babylon the Great Whore” depicted in the book of Revelation except those in the “Restoration Movement” “non-denominational” conservative middle branch of the Christian Church/Churches of Christ, of which I was once a part. In the lower right hand corner there is a strict warning that people in these other denominations will probably be doomed. A lot of other Christians in various denominations think the same way about the Church of Christ and condemn them as heretical.
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