Skepticblog

I thought that today I would share with you a bit of an insider’s peek at what went into the creation of last week’s Skeptoid episode about the Baigong Pipes. It was a particularly effective use of my research process, mainly the skeptoid-research Google Group mailing list.

In summary, the Baigong Pipes are popularly said to be a series of manufactured metal pipes buried in ancient rock in a cave in China. This example of an “out of place artifact” is sometimes claimed as proof of ancient alien visitation.

My time was limited on this particular episode, so all the research had to be done over the Internet. I didn’t have time to visit libraries or anything. Google Books can often fill in such gaps, but it didn’t turn up much in this case. Worse, I found very little information on the Internet. Oh, there are hundreds of articles all right, but they all contain the same information (which is minimal) and appear to all be sourced from the same original Chinese newspaper article, for which an English version is available. According to the English Internet, that little bit of information is all anyone knows about the Baigong Pipes. And it’s not nearly enough for a Skeptoid episode. (continue reading…)

I am no fan of Deepak Chopra. For years he has gone on TV, in print, and in his books, peddling all manners of nonsense. Here’s a quick reality check: if his claims of "quantum healing" are correct, why is he getting older?

Anyway, he has gone to the very font of new age nonsense, the Huffington Post, to spew more woo: he’s written an article about why skepticism is bad. It’s almost a bullet-pointed list of logical fallacies.

About the "poison darts" of criticism:

Most of my stinging darts come from skeptics. Over the years I’ve found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can’t abide speculative thinking.

<sarcasm>Yes, because scientists have no imaginations and cannot come up with original thoughts.</sarcasm>

But wait, he’s not done! Pandering to religious people: (continue reading…)

Last week, while I was giving thanks for an abundance of family, friends, and food, a brouhaha was brewing over an invited opinion editorial I wrote for CNN celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (on Tuesday, November 24).

The title, “Religion, Evolution can Live Side by Side,” was written by the CNN editors, but it does capture the thrust of the piece which I concluded by noting that if you are a believer in an eternal god, what difference does six zeros make on when the creation happened — 10,000 or 10,000,000,000 years ago — or by what method of creation was used: spoken word or big bang?

Well, this set off a mild firestorm among some observers of the science-and-religion debate, most prominently the estimable Jerry Coyne, the author of one of the best books ever written on the subject, Why Evolution is True, in his website of the same title called me an “accommodationist” and even a “faitheist” (“faith atheist”?) (continue reading…)