Sublime

Popper is hardly the only person to have made this distinction. Just about everybody agrees that physicists, biologists, and chemists are real scientists. They utilize rigorous experiments to find how the physical world works. In contrast, many people think that economists, sociologists, and psychologists are soft scientists who throw around meanin

But without it, the place for our blame suddenly vanishes, and even the most terrifying sociopaths begin to seem like victims themselves.

are. In Steven Pinker’s eye-opening book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, he tackles these assumptions head-on. Of our fears that the world is getting less safe, less predictable, less hospitable, he claims:

But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain.

The missing Ripple reminded him of a favorite thought experiment. “You have a close friend, Bob,” he explained. “He’s great. You love him. Bob is at a house party where someone gets murdered. No one knows who the murderer is. There are twenty people there. None are criminals. But Bob is less likely in your mind than anyone else to have killed someo

In some ways, the skeptics are more astute than the average academic, and philosopher-businessman-debunker Paul Kurtz probably has a greater intuitive feeling for the problems posed by the supernatural than do the vast majority of religious scholars. Most of them no longer comprehend the numinous and the supernatural and the deep problems they pres

In The Bottom Line, I presented the dilemma of two boxes, only one of which contains a diamond, with various signs and portents as evidence. I dichotomized the curious inquirer and the clever arguer. The curious inquirer writes down all the signs and portents, and processes them, and finally writes down “Therefore, I estimate an 85% probability tha