The Skeptics Guide To The Universe

Author : Dr. Steven Novella
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1538760517
Total Pages : 505 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe written by Dr. Steven Novella and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An all-encompassing guide to skeptical thinking from podcast host and academic neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine Steven Novella and his SGU co-hosts, which Richard Wiseman calls "the perfect primer for anyone who wants to separate fact from fiction." It is intimidating to realize that we live in a world overflowing with misinformation, bias, myths, deception, and flawed knowledge. There really are no ultimate authority figures-no one has the secret, and there is no place to look up the definitive answers to our questions (not even Google). Luckily, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is your map through this maze of modern life. Here Dr. Steven Novella-along with Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein-will explain the tenets of skeptical thinking and debunk some of the biggest scientific myths, fallacies, and conspiracy theories-from anti-vaccines to homeopathy, UFO sightings to N- rays. You'll learn the difference between science and pseudoscience, essential critical thinking skills, ways to discuss conspiracy theories with that crazy co- worker of yours, and how to combat sloppy reasoning, bad arguments, and superstitious thinking. So are you ready to join them on an epic scientific quest, one that has taken us from huddling in dark caves to setting foot on the moon? (Yes, we really did that.) DON'T PANIC! With The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, we can do this together. "Thorough, informative, and enlightening, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe inoculates you against the frailties and shortcomings of human cognition. If this book does not become required reading for us all, we may well see modern civilization unravel before our eyes." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson "In this age of real and fake information, your ability to reason, to think in scientifically skeptical fashion, is the most important skill you can have. Read The Skeptics' Guide Universe; get better at reasoning. And if this claim about the importance of reason is wrong, The Skeptics' Guide will help you figure that out, too." -- Bill Nye

Author : Robert A. Burton, M.D.
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 125002840X
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind written by Robert A. Burton, M.D. and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if our soundest, most reasonable judgments are beyond our control? Despite 2500 years of contemplation by the world's greatest minds and the more recent phenomenal advances in basic neuroscience, neither neuroscientists nor philosophers have a decent understanding of what the mind is or how it works. The gap between what the brain does and the mind experiences remains uncharted territory. Nevertheless, with powerful new tools such as the fMRI scan, neuroscience has become the de facto mode of explanation of behavior. Neuroscientists tell us why we prefer Coke to Pepsi, and the media trumpets headlines such as "Possible site of free will found in brain." Or: "Bad behavior down to genes, not poor parenting." Robert Burton believes that while some neuroscience observations are real advances, others are overreaching, unwarranted, wrong-headed, self-serving, or just plain ridiculous, and often with the potential for catastrophic personal and social consequences. In A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind, he brings together clinical observations, practical thought experiments, personal anecdotes, and cutting-edge neuroscience to decipher what neuroscience can tell us – and where it falls woefully short. At the same time, he offers a new vision of how to think about what the mind might be and how it works. A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind is a critical, startling, and expansive journey into the mysteries of the brain and what makes us human.

Author : Philip Yancey
Publisher : Zondervan
ISBN 13 : 0310325021
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Skeptic's Guide to Faith written by Philip Yancey and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2009 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the apparent contradictions in the world and explains how the invisible, natural, and supernatural worlds might interact and affect people's daily lives.

Author : Nicholas B. Tiller
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429820879
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science written by Nicholas B. Tiller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global health and fitness industry is worth an estimated $4 trillion. We spend $90 billion each year on health club memberships and $100 billion each year on dietary supplements. In such an industrial climate, lax regulations on the products we are sold (supplements, fad-diets, training programs, gadgets, and garments) result in marketing campaigns underpinned by strong claims and weak evidence. Moreover, our critical faculties are ill-suited to a culture characterized by fake news, social media, misinformation, and bad science. We have become walking, talking prey to 21st-Century Snake Oil salesmen. In The Skeptic’s Guide to Sports Science, Nicholas B. Tiller confronts the claims behind the products and the evidence behind the claims. The author discusses what might be wrong with the sales pitch, the glossy magazine advert, and the celebrity endorsements that our heuristically-wired brains find so innately attractive. Tiller also explores the appeal of the one quick fix, the fallacious arguments that are a mainstay of product advertising, and the critical steps we must take in retraining our minds to navigate the pitfalls of the modern consumerist culture. This informative and accessible volume pulls no punches in scrutinizing the plausibility of, and evidence for, the most popular sports products and practices on the market. Readers are encouraged to confront their conceptualizations of the industry and, by the book’s end, they will have acquired the skills necessary to independently judge the effectiveness of sports-related products. This treatise on the commercialization of science in sport and exercise is a must-read for exercisers, athletes, students, and practitioners who hope to retain their intellectual integrity in a lucrative health and fitness industry that is spiraling out-of-control.

Author : Robert Shapiro
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Origins written by Robert Shapiro and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Lynne Kelly
Publisher : Allen & Unwin
ISBN 13 : 9781741140590
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal written by Lynne Kelly and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2004 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guaranteed to liven up any dinner party, this delightful, highly readable book offers color photos and scientific case-by-case explanations for 27 phenomena that appear to defy known science, including ghosts and poltergeists, the predictions of Nostradamus, and yogic levitation.

Author : Timothy Keller
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0525954155
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making Sense of God written by Timothy Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Author : Roy Benaroch
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781629976440
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.4X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Skeptic's Guide to Health, Medicine, and the Media written by Roy Benaroch and published by . This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Richard Dawkins
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1984853910
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Outgrowing God written by Richard Dawkins and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we believe in God? In this brisk introduction to modern atheism, one of the world’s greatest science writers tells us why we shouldn’t. Richard Dawkins was fifteen when he stopped believing in God. Deeply impressed by the beauty and complexity of living things, he’d felt certain they must have had a designer. Learning about evolution changed his mind. Now one of the world’s best and bestselling science communicators, Dawkins has given readers, young and old, the same opportunity to rethink the big questions. In twelve fiercely funny, mind-expanding chapters, Dawkins explains how the natural world arose without a designer—the improbability and beauty of the “bottom-up programming” that engineers an embryo or a flock of starlings—and challenges head-on some of the most basic assumptions made by the world’s religions: Do you believe in God? Which one? Is the Bible a “Good Book”? Is adhering to a religion necessary, or even likely, to make people good to one another? Dissecting everything from Abraham’s abuse of Isaac to the construction of a snowflake, Outgrowing God is a concise, provocative guide to thinking for yourself. Praise for Outgrowing God “My son came home from his first day in the sixth grade with arms outstretched plaintively demanding to know: ‘Have you ever heard of Jesus?’ We burst out laughing. Maybe not our finest parenting moment, given that he was genuinely distraught. He felt that he had woken up one day to a world in which his peers were expressing beliefs he found frighteningly unreasonable. He began devouring books like The God Delusion, books that helped him formulate his own arguments and helped him stand his ground. Dawkins’s new book is special in the terrain of atheists’ pleas for humanism and rationalism precisely since it speaks to those most vulnerable to the coercive tactics of religion. As Dawkins himself says in the dedication, this book is for ‘all young people when they’re old enough to decide for themselves.’ It is also, I must add, for their parents.”—Janna Levin, author of Black Hole Blues “When someone is considering atheism I tell them to read the Bible first and then Dawkins. Outgrowing God—second only to the Bible!”—Penn Jillette, author of God, No!

Author : Maarten Boudry
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022649828X
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Science Unlimited? written by Maarten Boudry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All too often in contemporary discourse, we hear about science overstepping its proper limits—about its brazenness, arrogance, and intellectual imperialism. The problem, critics say, is scientism: the privileging of science over all other ways of knowing. Science, they warn, cannot do or explain everything, no matter what some enthusiasts believe. In Science Unlimited?, noted philosophers of science Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci gather a diverse group of scientists, science communicators, and philosophers of science to explore the limits of science and this alleged threat of scientism. In this wide-ranging collection, contributors ask whether the term scientism in fact (or in belief) captures an interesting and important intellectual stance, and whether it is something that should alarm us. Is scientism a well-developed position about the superiority of science over all other modes of human inquiry? Or is it more a form of excessive confidence, an uncritical attitude of glowing admiration? What, if any, are its dangers? Are fears that science will marginalize the humanities and eradicate the human subject—that it will explain away emotion, free will, consciousness, and the mystery of existence—justified? Does science need to be reined in before it drives out all other disciplines and ways of knowing? Both rigorous and balanced, Science Unlimited? interrogates our use of a term that is now all but ubiquitous in a wide variety of contexts and debates. Bringing together scientists and philosophers, both friends and foes of scientism, it is a conversation long overdue.