How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience, Part I

When lecturing on science and pseudoscience at colleges and universities, I am inevitably asked, after challenging common beliefs held by many students, “Why should we believe you?” My answer: “You shouldn’t.”

I then explain that we need to check things out for ourselves and, short of that, at least to ask basic questions that get to the heart of the validity of any claim. This is what I call baloney detection, in deference to Carl Sagan, who coined the phrase “Baloney Detection Kit.” To detect baloney — that is, to help discriminate between science and pseudoscience — I suggest 10 questions to ask when encountering any claim. (continue reading…)

A review of Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause’s Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

About ten years ago I began research on the question of why people believe in God, I asked a colleague in a religious studies program to recommend the latest path-breaking scientific work in this area. (continue reading…)

Eastern and Western science are put to political uses in both cultures

In the sixth century B.C., Siddhartha Gautama — better known as the Buddha — extolled the virtues of enlightenment through a “middle path”:

Avoiding the two extremes the Buddha has gained the enlightenment of the Middle Path, which produces insight and knowledge, and tends to calm, to higher knowledge, enlightenment, Nirvana. This is the noble Eightfold Way: namely, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

Twenty-six centuries later American physicist Murray Gell-Mann constructed a subatomic model he playfully called the Eightfold Way, because it consisted of eight particles with eight possible rotations. The name was a joke, he told a Caltech audience in a lecture on “Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle,” (continue reading…)

Science is an exquisite blend of data and theory

Writing to a friend on September 18, 1861, Charles Darwin reflected on how far the science of geology had come since he first took it up seriously during his five year voyage on the HMS Beagle:

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!

For my money, this is one of the deepest single statements ever made on the nature of science itself, particularly in the understated denouement. (continue reading…)

A review of three books: Ullica Segerstråle’s Defenders of the Truth, Robin Marantz Henig’s The Monk in the Garden, and Jeffrey K. McKee’s The Riddled Chain.

Creationism, in some form, will probably be with us as long as biblical fundamentalists continue their misguided efforts to squeeze the square peg of religion into the round hole of science. But the debate over whether evolution happened was (continue reading…)