Speakers: Dr. Richard Sloan, Director, Behavioral Medicine Program, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, Dr. Owen Gingerich, Professor of Astronomy and History of Science, Harvard University, author of God's Universe, Sam Harris, UCLA, author of The End of Faith and A Letter to a Christian Nation
Over the past decade the relationship of science and religion has been under close scrutiny, with people on both sides developing various positions on how two of the most powerful institutions in the today’s world — one ancient, one modern — can co-exist. And as we have seen in the news coming out of the Middle East, the relationship of religion and politics has also taken center stage, as people of faith and party on both sides square off in the name of God and mammon. In this afternoon symposium we bring to the table four eminent scholars and social commentators, all with new books on these vital topics, to present their views, exchange ideas with one another, and to engage the audience in lively conversation.
Owen Gingerich is a Harvard astronomer and one of the most respected historians of science of our age, and in his latest book, God’s Universe, he presents compelling arguments for people who already believe in God that their faith is not ungrounded, and that no only should believers not be threatened by science, they should embrace it for revealing the wonders of the creation.
In 1999 Columbia University professor of behavioral medicine Richard Sloan published a definitive critique of prayer and healing studies in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet, and his new book, Blind Faith, elaborates on these and the studies in this field published since. Sloan notes that many of these distant intercessory prayer studies — in which religious strangers pray for patients to be healed — failed to control for such intervening variables as age, sex, education, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, marital standing, degree of religiosity, and the fact that most religions have sanctions against such insalubrious behaviors as sexual promiscuity, alcohol and drug abuse, and smoking. When such variables are controlled for, the formerly significant results disappear. Not only is this bad science, says Sloan, trying to quantify God is bad religion.
Sam Harris’s book, The End of Faith, generated a firestorm of cultural controversy as he outlined with unfailing logic and clear rhetoric the dangers of mixing religious fundamentalism with weapons of mass destruction. In https://www.skeptic.com/productlink/b140PBLetter to a Christian Nation, Harris continues his commentary and ups the amperage of his warning about the dangers of mixing religion and politics.
Dr. Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a columnist for Scientific American, and author of Why People Believe Weird Things, How We Believe, and The Science of Good and Evil.
Evolution happened, and the theory describing it is one of the most well founded in all of science. Then why do half of all Americans reject it? In Why Darwin Matters, Michael Shermer diffuses objections to the theory by examining what evolution really is, how we know it happened, and how to test it. Shermer then discusses what science is, demonstrating clearly how and why creationism and Intelligent Design are not science. Dr. Shermer also builds a powerful case for evolution as the scientific theory that most closely parallels the Christian model of human nature and the conservative model of free market economics. Dr. Shermer was once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, and is now one of the best-known public intellectuals defending evolutionary theory, so Why Darwin Matters provides readers with an insider’s guide to the evolution-creation debate, and why science should be embraced by people of all beliefs.
On May 19th, the film version of the wildly popular book by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (over 40 million copies in 25 languages sold), will be released to considerable fanfare and media hype. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, head of doctrinal orthodoxy for the Vatican, issued an official statement on behalf of the Catholic Church, calling the novel “a sack full of lies” and urging Christians not to read the book or see the movie. Even though the book is a novel, Brown claims that it is based on historical facts that, if true (and many people believe that they are true), would revolutionize not only all of the Christian religion, but much of history as well. The central claims is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and sired a royal bloodline that continues to this day, and that a secret society of some of history’s most famous scientists and artists has been dedicated to preserving these ancient secrets for almost a thousand years. If ever there were an extraordinary historical claim that requires extraordinary historical evidence, this is it. How good is the evidence?
Tim Callahan, Skeptic magazine religion editor and author of the books Bible Prophecy and The Secret Origins of the Bible, will explore these and other biblical mysteries recently in the news, such as the “Gospel of Judas” (in which Jesus’ disciple is not a traitor) and other extra-biblical gospels that portray Jesus in a different light. Callahan will review biblical scholarship and show how we know who wrote the Bible and why they wrote it.
Sometime this century the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all other natural factors. Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Niño ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in 200 years, the hottest European summer on record, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida. With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of greenhouse gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are reaching a global climatic tipping point. Dr. Flannery outlines the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future, including what every one of us can do right now to reduce deadly CO2 emissions by as much as 70%.
Dr. Flannery is one of Australia’s leading thinkers and writers, and is an internationally acclaimed environmental scientist, explorer, and conservationist. He is the author of over 90 scientific papers, the books The Future Eaters and The Eternal Frontier, and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt argues that culture is the product of deep biological mechanisms that came into being by an evolutionary process. Central to Dr. Goldschmidt’s thesis is the recognition of the separate evolutionary origin of what we call love: sexual and nurturant. These ancient heritages demand very different forms of behavior; one essentially competitive and the other concerned with mutuality. Underlying nurturance is the phenomenon of “affect hunger,” an urge to seek the affection that is needed for the proper development of the neurological system in humans and other social mammals. Goldschmidt shows that affect hunger not only provides a reward system for learning language and other cultural information, but also remains a motive for social behavior throughout life.
Dr. Goldschmidt is Professor Emeritus at UCLA in both Anthropology and Psychiatry. He is the author of The Human Career, Exploring the Ways of Mankind, As You Sow, The Sebei, and Comparative Functionalism. He has served as editor of American Anthropologist, Ethos, Journal for the Society of Psychological Anthropology, and was president of the American Anthropological Association.
One of the greatest thinkers of our age tackles one of the most important questions of our time: why people believe in God and how religion shapes our lives and our future. In this lecture, based on his new book of the same title, Dr. Dennett shows that for the vast majority of people there is nothing more important than religion. It is an integral part of their marriage, child rearing, and community. Dennett takes a hard look at this phenomenon and asks: Where does our devotion to God come from and what purpose does it serve? Is religion a blind evolutionary compulsion or a rational choice? In a spirited investigation that ranges widely through history, philosophy, and psychology, Dennett explores how organized religion evolved from folk beliefs and why it is such a potent force today. Deftly and lucidly, he contends that the ‘belief in belief’ has fogged any attempt to rationally consider the existence of God and the relationship between divinity and human need.
Dr. Daniel Dennett is a professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, and the author of the highly acclaimed Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Consciousness Explained, and Freedom Evolves.
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The concept of additional spatial dimensions is as far from intuitive as any idea can be. In this lecture based on her new book, Dr. Randall employs creative analogies to explain how our universe may have many unseen dimensions. Randall works hard to make her astoundingly complex material understandable, providing a great deal of background for recent advances in string and supersymmetry theory. As coauthor of the two most important scientific papers on this topic, she’s ideally suited to explain these ideas. Although physicists do not yet know if there are extra dimensions a fraction of a millimeter in size, dimensions of infinite size, or only the dimensions we see, Randall shows how these theories will be tested in coming years.
Dr. Randall is a professor of physics at Harvard University and one of the leading theoretical physicists in the world today who works on string theory, particle physics, and cosmology.
How do we as individuals respond when precipitated into a crisis by the break-up of a relationship, a job loss or setback, or just growing dissatisfaction with ourselves? Experience shows that we can tolerate putting our failed old ways up for grabs for about six weeks, within which time we either work out new coping skills or else revert to our old ways. Similar issues arise on a slower time scale for societies or groups responding to a crisis. Meiji Japan, the modern Navajo, and post-World-War-2 western Europe did set about to recast themselves, while the Greenland Norse didn’t, and it remains to be seen if the U.S. of today will. What can we learn from individuals and societies that did embrace new values?
The hottest cultural controversy of 2005 was the Intelligent Design challenge to the theory of evolution, being played out in classrooms and courtrooms across America. The crux of the argument made by proponents of Intelligent Design is that the theory of evolution is in serious trouble. They claim that the evidence for evolution is weak, the gaps in the theory are huge, and that these flaws should be taught to students. In this brilliant synthesis of scientific data and theory, Occidental College geologist, paleontologist, and evolutionary theorist Dr. Donald Prothero will present the best evidence we have that evolution happened, why Darwin’s theory still matters, and what the real controversies are in evolutionary biology.
Dr. Donald Prothero teaches Physical and Historical Geology, Sedimentary Geology, and Paleontology. His specialties are mammalian paleontology and magnetic stratigraphy of the Cenozoic. His current research focuses on the dating of the climatic changes that occurred between 30 and 40 million years ago, using the technique of magnetic stratigraphy. He is the author of Evolution of the Earth, Bringing Fossils to Life, After the Dinosaurs, Horns, Tusks, and Flippers: The Evolution of Hoofed Mammals, and the textbook Sedimentary Geology.
There is no evidence that aliens have been visiting Earth and abducting humans. So how could anyone believe he or she was abducted by aliens? To answer this question, Harvard post-doc psychologist Susan Clancy interviewed and evaluated ‘abductees,’ listening closely to their stories — how they struggled to explain something strange in their remembered experience, how abduction seemed plausible, and how, having suspected abduction, they began to recollect it, aided by suggestion and hypnosis. Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts (abduction reports began only after stories of extraterrestrials appeared in films and on TV), and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. For them, otherworldly terror can become a transforming, even inspiring experience.
Event Date: Wednesday, November 9, 2005 at
7:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Richard Wiseman
This will be one of the most enlightening and entertaining events of the season. Dr. Wiseman has established an international reputation for research into the scientific examination of unusual areas within psychology. This work has been reported in over 40 academic journal articles, including Nature, Science and Psychological Bulletin. In addition, he has co-authored 6 books and presented over 50 papers at both national and international conferences. His lecture will cover his many interests, including: the Luck Project, lying and lie detection, the psychology of magic, eyewitness testimony, the psychology of the paranormal, ghosts and hauntings, and experimenter bias in ESP research. Dr. Wiseman heads the psychology lab at the University of Hertfordshire, but he started his working life as an award-winning professional magician so he may just dazzle the audience with a little magic when he discusses his latest book: Magic in Theory: An Introduction to the Theoretical and Psychological Elements of Conjuring.
The impact on climate from 200 years of industrial development is an everyday fact of life, but did humankind’s active involvement in climate change really begin with the industrial revolution, as commonly believed? Dr. William Ruddiman, a climate scientist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and the author of the controversial new book, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, argues that humans have actually been changing the climate for some 8,000 years — as a result of the earlier discovery of agriculture. The “Ruddiman Hypothesis” has been controversial ever since it was featured as a cover story in Scientific American. It states that the impact of farming on greenhouse-gas levels, thousands of years before the industrial revolution, kept our planet notably warmer than if natural climate cycles had prevailed — quite possibly forestalling a new ice age.
Ruddiman takes us through three broad stages of human history: when nature was in control; when humans began to take control, discovering agriculture and affecting climate through carbon dioxide and methane emissions; and, finally, the more recent human impact on climate change. Along the way he raises the fascinating possibility that plagues, by depleting human populations, also affected reforestation and thus climate — as suggested by dips in greenhouse gases when major pandemics have occurred. The book concludes by looking to the future and critiquing the impact of special interest money on the global warming debate.
In this lecture based on her new book, Dr. Nancy Segal, a leading expert on twins, goes deep into the stories behind her research to reveal the real-life dilemmas and joys of twelve remarkable sets of twins, triplets, and quadruplets. She introduces us to memorable people, from the “Fireman Twins” brothers reared apart but astonishingly alike in personality and even minor habits, and the twin sisters who overcome one’s infertility by having the other serve as her surrogate mother. We meet twin sisters who became one of the few identical brother-sister pairs in the world after one was surgically transformed into a man, and identical triplet brothers, one of whom is gay while the other two are straight.
Dr. Segal, Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, tells these stories and others with an eye for the challenges that life as a twin (or triplet or quadruplet) can bring to parents, friends, and spouses, as well as to twins themselves. These real-life stories remind us how incompletely any theory explains the variety of individual, or dual, or triple, or quadruple, lives.
In a sweeping history, Jennifer Michael Hecht celebrates doubt as an engine of creativity and as an alternative to the political and intellectual dangers of certainty. Just as belief has its own history featuring people whose unique expressions of faith have forever changed the world, doubt has a vibrant story and tradition with its own saints, martyrs, and sages. Hecht blends her wide-ranging historical expertise, passionate admiration of the great doubters, and poet’s sensibility to tell a stimulating story that is part intellectual history and part showcase of ordinary people asking themselves the difficult questions that confront us all. Hecht views the history of doubt as not only a tradition of challenging accepted religious beliefs, including the existence of God, but also as a progression of attempts to make sense of life, the natural world, and the self, each on their own terms.
The Brain, Mind & Consciousness conference, on what Nobel Laureate Francis Crick called “the greatest unsolved problem in biology,” was held over the weekend of May 13–15, 2005 at Caltech. Watch the entire conference for free below in three session (approximately 7.5 hours over 3 videos):
Research on the brain, mind, and consciousness was given a significant boost by Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Crick in 1994, when he wrote in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, “that ‘you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
This is what is called “the hard problem”—explaining how billions of neurons swapping chemicals give rise to such subjective experiences as consciousness, self-awareness, and awareness that others are conscious and self-aware; that is, not only the ability to wonder, but the ability to wonder why we wonder, and even wonder why others wonder why….
Explaining each of the functional parts of the brain is the easy problem, such as the differences between waking and sleep, discrimination of stimuli, or the control of behavior. By contrast, what has come to be known as the hard problem in consciousness studies is experience: what it is like to be in a given mental state? Adding up all of the solved easy problems does not equal a solution to the hard problem. Something else is going on in private subjective experiences—called qualia—and there is no consensus on what it is.
Dualists hold that qualia are separate from physical objects in the world and that mind is more than brain. Materialists contend that qualia are ultimately explicable through the activities of neu- rons and that mind and brain are one. Our speakers, some of the top neuroscientists in the world, will address these and other problems, such as the evolution of the brain, and how and why it got to be so large. Skeptics will get a chance to interact with these world-class scientists on the breaks, during meals, and in a formal discussion period. We will also consider the implications of this new brain research to better understand apparent paranormal phenomena, as well as how and why people believe weird things.
Lectures included: The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach with Dr. Christof Koch, Children as Scientists: How the Brain Learns to Think with Dr. Alison Gopnik, In Search of Memory — True, False, Repressed, Recovered with Dr. Richard McNally, Sleep, Dreams, and the Subconscious with Dr. Terry Sejnowski, Exploring Altered States of Consciousness with Dr. Susan Blackmore, The Search for the Neurological Basis of the Social Emotions with Dr. John Allman, From Whence Trust Comes: Oxytocin and Behavioral Economics with Dr. Paul Zak, Consciousness is Nothing But a Word with Dr. Hank Schlinger, and From Biology to Consciousness to Morality with Dr. Ursula Goodenough.
In August 1930, on a voyage from Madras to London, a young Indian looked up at the stars and contemplated their fate. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar — Chandra, as he was called — calculated that certain stars would suffer a most violent death, collapsing to virtually nothing. This extraordinary claim, the first mathematical description of black holes, rankled one of the greatest astrophysicists of the day, Sir Arthur Eddington, who in 1935 publicly ridiculed Chandra, sending him into an intellectual and emotional tailspin — and hindering the progress of astrophysics for nearly forty years. Tracing the rise of two great theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, which meet head on in black holes, Miller recounts the dramatic story of this intellectual feud. This sweeping history examines the quest to understand one of the most forbidding objects in the universe as well as the passions that fueled that quest over the course of a century.
Dr. Arthur I. Miller is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Department of Science & Technology Studies, University College, London. He lives in London.
Germs, germs, everywhere! We live with them all day, every day. Did you know that some germs are good for you, or even delicious? There are more germs inside you than there are people on Earth? Your body is constantly fighting germs, even when you aren’t sick? Come hear Bill speak, and you’ll learn about these things and more. Find out about germs and how to stay healthy in this delightful presentation based on his new book, as well as a few new things from Nye Labs. Bring the kids, and the kids’ friends, for an afternoon of science and a blast of fun.
Bill Nye is best known for his hit PBS television series Bill Nye the Science Guy, which ran from 1992–1998 and won Emmy Awards for Best Performer, Best Writing, Best Producing, and Best Show. He is the host of the Science Channel’s 100 Greatest Discoveries in Science, and the forthcoming series The Eyes of Nye. He is the author of Bill Nye’s Big Blast of Science, Bill Nye’s Consider the Following, Bill Nye the Science Guy’s Big Blue Ocean, and Bill Nye the Science Guy’s Great Big Dinosaur Dig. He is also an inventor, with patents pending for a baseball retrieval device, a ball throwing technique training gizmo, and an improved ballet toe shoe. As part of the Mars Athena Exploration Team, he played a key role in the design of the MarsDials, the sundials on Mars. Bill serves on the boards of The Planetary Society as Vice President, the New Horizons Mission to Pluto, and the National Health Museum in Washington, DC.
Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don’t exist? Strange though they sound, however, these “myths” did not begin as fiction. (more…)
In Parallel Worlds, world-renowned physicist and bestselling author Michio Kaku takes readers on a fascinating tour of cosmology, M-theory, and its implications for the fate of the universe. Kaku begins by describing the extraordinary advances that have transformed cosmology over the last decade, forcing scientists around the world to rethink our understanding of the birth and fate of the universe. (more…)
The renowned theorist of analytical design, Edward Tufte, was described by the New York Times as “the Leonardo da Vinci of data” for his pioneering work in the display and analysis of visual evidence. His lecture here draws from his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence, which develops the fundamental theory of analytical design and proposes methods for display for nearly every type of evidence (time series, images, causal arrows, data tables, statistical graphics, public presentations). (more…)
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