Point of Inquiry

Victor Stenger is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is also founder and president of Colorado Citizens for Science. He's held visiting faculty positions at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and at Oxford in the United Kingdom, and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy. Stenger's search career has spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos and has also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Vic collaborated on the experiment in Japan which showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. He is the author of many books, including Comprehensible Cosmos, The Unconscious Quantum, Not by Design, Has Science Found God, and the recent New York times best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. In this talk with D.J. Grothe, Stenger explores many of the topics treated in his book, including the scientific evidence against the belief in God, where the laws of physics come from if not from a divine lawgiver, what E.S.P. research may imply about God's existence, the morality of atheism, and whether science should even be treating the topic of God in the first place. Also in this episode, Austin Dacey, director of the Center for Inquiry in New York City details the upcoming Secular Islam Summit in Florida, and the growing grassroots movement of secular muslims working to advance rationalism, science, and the separation of mosque and state in the Islamic world.

Steven Pinker, a renowned research psychologist, is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on cognition and language won the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. He has also received several honorary doctorates and many awards for graduate and undergraduate teaching, general achievement, and his critically acclaimed books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is also a Humanist Laureate of CFI's International Academy of Humanism. In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Pinker explores what science tells us about human nature, explains the implications of and recent advances in evolutionary psychology, and talks about atheism and its relationship to the scientific outlook.

Barbara Forrest is a philosopher and public intellectual at Southeastern Louisiana University. Widely praised for her compelling expert testimony in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, she is a tireless defender of science education and the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools. With Paul R. Gross, she is co-author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press, 2004), which examines the goals and strategies of the intelligent design movement and its attempts to undermine the teaching of evolutionary biology. In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Barbara Forrest examines the intelligent design movement, its history and its agenda, and the so-called "wedge strategy," including the ID movement's public relations efforts and other methods the movement has used to advance the widespread public acceptance of intelligent design. She also talks about the Discovery Institute and the implications of the theory of evolution for theistic belief.

Peter Singer has been called "the world's most influential living philosopher," by The New Yorker and Time Magazine listed him in "The Time 100," their annual listing of the world's 100 most influential people. One of the most controversial philosophers alive today, he is DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne. He has been recognized as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, and is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He writes a regular column for Free Inquiry magazine, and is the author of dozens of books, including Practical Ethics, Rethinking Life and Death, and Animal Liberation, which has sold more than a half million copies, Writings on an Ethical Life, One World: Ethics and Globalization, The President of Good and Evil, about George Bush, and In Defense of Animals. His most recent book, which is written with Jim Mason, is The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. In this wide-ranging conversation with D.J. Grothe, Peter Singer discusses The Way We Eat and the ethics of vegetarianism, topics in bioethics such as abortion and euthanasia, and what world poverty may demand from citizens in developed nations. He addresses common challenges to his robust system of secular ethics, and explores other implications of utilitarianism. He also considers reasons why people should be moral even if there is no God.

Solomon Schimmel is a psychologist of religion and Professor of Jewish Education and Psychology at Hebrew College. He has been a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar and Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and has lectured widely throughout the world. An expert on the psychology of forgiveness and reconciliation among the world's religions, he is the author of The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology and Wounds Not Healed by Time: The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness, both published by Oxford University Press. His forthcoming book, also to be published by Oxford University Press, is tentatively titled The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Jewish Christian and Muslim Scriptural Fundamentalists. In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Professor Schimmel discusses the psychology of religion, why some believers use specious arguments for the divine authorship of their sacred texts, and the threat to civilization that certain Muslim extremists pose. He also talks about the obligation he says scholars have to undermine such anti-social and anti-democratic belief-systems.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of America's leading spokespersons for science. The research areas he focuses on are star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. In addition to many scholarly publications, Dr Tyson is one of America's most respected science writers, and he writes a monthly column for Natural History magazine simply titled the "Universe." Among his eight books is his memoir The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist; and also Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, co-written with Donald Goldsmith. He is the on-camera host of PBS-NOVA's program ScienceNow, which explore the frontiers of all the science that shapes our understanding of our place in the universe. He is the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose Directorship of the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan, where he also teaches. In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Dr. Tyson explores the "popularization" of science, the ups and downs of science education, why scientists should be personally motivated to increase public science interest, whether his studies in astrophysics make him more or less religious, the "spirituality" of the scientific outlook, and other topics that he treats in his new book Death By Black Hole. He also talks about his experiences hosting PBS-NOVA's ScienceNow.

John Shook is Vice President for Research and Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry Transnational in Amherst, N.Y. He received his PhD in philosophy at the University at Buffalo and was a professor of philosophy at Oklahoma State University for six years. His research and writing focuses on American philosophy, philosophy of science, epistemology, and political theory. His most recent book is the Blackwell Companion to Pragmatism, edited with Joseph Margolis. He authored Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, edited Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, and edited the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. He is also co-editor of the journals Contemporary Pragmatism and The Pluralist. In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, John Shook discusses what Scientific Naturalism is, its history and its implications as well as its conflicts with Postmodernist, paranormal, and supernatural ideologies.

Eugene Burger, "universally recognized as perhaps the finest close-up magician in the world," (Stagebill magazine) has written fifteen best-selling books for magicians, starred in a number of instructional videos, lectured widely to magicians' groups in over a dozen countries, and his writings have been translated into several languages. His deep understanding of the psychology and philosophy behind magic has won him international accolades, cover stories in conjuring magazines, and four awards from the famed Magic Castle in Hollywood, California. When the leading international trade journal Magic compiled its list of the one hundred most influential magicians of the twentieth century, Eugene Burger was included for his ability to "arouse feelings of astonishment, as well as a host of other indescribable sensations." His talk, "How Magicians Think," applies his special understanding of deception and perception to the corporate world. He has performed on numerous television shows in Great Britain, Canada, Belgium, Finland and Japan, and has been featured on PBS's The Art of Magic and The Learning Channel's Mysteries of Magic. He's also been been profiled twice on CNN. In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Burger discusses belief in the paranormal, "Spirit Theater," and the possible deception of the public by paranormal claimants or entertainers such as Israeli psychic Uri Geller and American psychic medium John Edward. He also explores the relationship of magic to religion and to science, what magic can teach us about how we believe, and the kinds of benefits the student of magic receives from learning the art.

Ann Druyan is an author, public lecturer, and TV and movie writer and producer whose work focuses on the worldview of science. She is the widow of Carl Sagan, the great astronomer and public advocate of science and reason. With him, she co-wrote the Emmy Award Winning and the Peabody Award Winning television series Cosmos. She served as Creative Director for NASA's Voyager Interstellar Record Project, the goldern record on the Voyager Spacecrafts that includes visual images and music and she co-created and produced the movie Contact, which is based on the novel Contact that she co-wrote with Carl Sagan. She is also the author or co-author of several other books, including A Famous Broken Heart, and Comet, which was on the New York Times best seller list for two months. She edited the recent title, Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, which is Carl Sagan's last book. In this wide-ranging discussion with D.J. Grothe, Druyan discusses the new book The Varieties of Scientific Experience, her relationship with Carl Sagan, science as an outlook on life, what Sagan called "informed worship," the use of the word "spiritual" by nonreligious people, the humility of science, skepticism about politics and the paranormal, and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. She also explores the place of humanity in the cosmos, the relationship of science to religion, and whether they are compatible.

Joe Hoffmann, formally at Oxford, is director of Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER). He has appeared widely in the media and at venues across the United States speaking on Christian origins, the historical Jesus, the proper role of religion in society, and similar topics. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Dr. Hoffmann explores the implications of science for religion, and how to study religion in a scientific way, including from scientific perspectives such as cognitive neuroscience, textual criticism and philology, and through the application of the historical sciences. He also examines bias in the study of religion, from various quarters in the academy, and how the scientific approach to religious studies can help avoid such pitfalls.