SkepSun #51 (08_11_2013)

Actress and story-teller Julia Sweeney gets a lot of airtime on Skeptical Sunday again this week. We hear the conclusion to her wonderful autobiographical monologue “Letting Go of God” in the second hour of the show.  But we also learn about her current project with Jill Sobule, the “Jill & Julia Show” on Freethougtht Radio. Ms. Sweeney will be a featured speaker at FFRF’s annual convention in Madison, Wisconsin at the end of September. Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor report on an FFRF victory in the Ball State University “intelligent design” controversy and talk with FFRF summer legal intern Chuck Rostof, who tells us about the problems resulting from the growing trend of Catholic hospitals acquiring secular ones across the country. We’ll also hear a song from another entertainer appearing at FFRF’s upcoming convention, Australian singer-songwriter Shelley Segal.

 

 Atheist singer-songwriter from Down Under,  Shelley Segal.

SkepSun #41 (06_02_2013)

On Skeptical Sunday this week, we’ll hear about the personal philosophies of two different particle physicists, an infectious disease M.D. and an experimental psychologist/linguist. How does science influence their personal beliefs? First, on Freethought Radio, FFRF attorney Andrew Seidel describes a controversy at a college over creationism and Dan and Annie Laurie speak to physics professor Victor Stenger, author of God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion.” In hour two of Skeptical Sunday, we’ll hear from another physicist, CalTech’s Sean Carroll describe naturalism, the viewpoint that supernatural stuff just doesn’t exist, with Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef on the Rationally Speaking podcast. They discuss what a naturalistic worldview implies about free will, consciousness, and other philosophical dilemmas and address that long-standing debate: should scientists have more respect for philosophy? In between there, somewhere, we hear from doctor Mark Crislip who looks for some boundaries between science and pseudoscience and also cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker who says that for him, reason goes a long way in his personal worldview.

Sean Carroll, astrophysicist at CalTech.