Point of Inquiry

Host: Indre Viskontas In an election year, it is especially important that our critical thinking skills be sharply honed. We have to sift through facts, fiction, and hyperbole in order to decide who it is that should lead us for the next four years. To remind us what the right questions to ask are and how to ask them, we invited on the show Dr. Christopher diCarlo, noted philosopher of science and...

Kerry Emanuel is a leading atmospheric scientist and a self-described conservative. As a result, lately he's been at the forefront of trying to convince his ideological brethren that the science behind global warming is real. We invited Emanuel on to talk about whether global warming is indeed influencing the extreme weather that is afflicting the United States—and also for the unique vantage poin...

Host: Chris Mooney Can people who care about secularism take America back from the religious right? Of all the questions that concern us on this show, this is perhaps the most important, the most central, of all. And David Niose has an answer to it. Simply put, he thinks we can. In his new book, Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans , Niose outlines the damage the religious right has d...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest is Tina Dupuy— the reporter, comedian, skeptic, and editor-in-chief of the startup publication SoapBlox. Dupuy appears frequently on MSNBC, Current TV, RT and the BBC and on numerous radio shows. She has written for Mother Jones, the Atlantic, Skeptic, and many other publications. Her weekly oped is syndicated nationally by Cagle Cartoons.

Host: Chris Mooney For this episode of Point of Inquiry , we tried something a little different. At Center for Inquiry headquarters in Amherst, NY, we filmed  a special hour long program  with multiple in-studio guests, including the famed atheist comedian Jamie Kilstein. As usual, the program is also available as an audio-only podcast. In either format, here's what it contains: When Doubt is a Cr...

Host: Indre Viskontas The idea that science moves forward by carefully peeling back layers of the onion of truth, one by one, in a deliberate fashion, is so prevalent that it borders on cliche. But the truth is that running scientific experiments often feels more akin to dipping a cup into a bottomless well of information: each new study simply raises more questions than it answers. Although scien...

Host: Chris Mooney  Our guest this week is Chris Hayes , host of MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes and editor at large of The Nation . Hayes has come out with a much anticipated new book that makes a surprising argument. It's called Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy , and in it, he attributes the stunning loss of trust in American institutions to, well, the system by which we chose who r...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Cara Santa Maria , the senior science correspondent for the Huffington Post and the personage behind its "Talk Nerdy to Me" video series. Recent topics range from cannibalism, to the non-power of positive thinking, to the strange sex lives of animals, to the, well, bizarreness of creationism. Cara has appeared previously on shows ranging from Larry King Li...

Host: Chris Mooney In late April, a  study came out in Science   that really got the secular blogosphere hopping. It was a paper showing that something we've long suspected may be true—less critical thinking is associated with more religiosity. In fact, having a cognitive style where you're less analytic, and more intuitive, promotes faith. And vice versa. It turns out this paper is just the tip o...

Host: Indre Viskontas Recently, there has been a flurry of neuroscientists declaring that free will is an illusion in the popular press. But before we can assess the extent to which we are zombies, we need to first tackle the question of what, exactly, is consciousness. To get up to speed on the state of the art, we talked to Christof Koch, a colorful pioneer in the application of scientific tools...

Host: Chris Mooney Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the 2012 World Skeptics Conference in Berlin. It's important to keep tabs on our skeptical and freethinking colleagues around the world, and the challenges they're facing. And in this case, perhaps the most disturbing story out of the conference involved the spread of a new form of creationism—namely, Islamic creationism—in Euro...

Our guest this week is Greta Christina, a leading atheist blogger, speaker, and commentator, and a regular contributor to  AlterNet.org . Christina is author of the new ebook Why Are You Atheists So Angry?: 99 Things that Piss Off the Godless , which grows out of a  2007 blog post  on the same topic. The book will also be out in print in June. Greta Christina blogs at  FreeThoughtBlogs.com , and h...

Host: Indre Viskontas In developed countries at least, the status of women has improved considerably in the last century. But in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), they remain underrepresented in all but one field, according to a recent study conducted by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Often, femininity can seem incompatible with STEM and other male-dominated careers—but...

Host: Chris Mooney This week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a conference convened entitled "Science Writing in the Age of Denial." The keynote speaker was a former Point of Inquiry guest and a very popular one—Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the influential book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming . Point of Inquiry...

Host: Chris Mooney This week, our guest is a return one: Austin Dacey . He's a philosopher, a writer, and a human rights activist, and the creator of the  Impossible Music Sessions , which we featured in  a past show . Austin's books include The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life and, just out, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights . This show...

Guest Host: John Shook   In this special episode of Point of Inquiry , we interview our host himself—about his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality . From climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing, as is the denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy and much more. Why w...

Host: Chris Mooney This week, Point of Inquiry is thrilled to welcome back one of our most popular guests: Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famed astrophysicist and Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Last time we had him on, Dr. Tyson engaged in a wide ranging discussion about science communication and the place of science in America. This time, we focus in on his new b...

Host: Indre Viskontas The end is nigh. 2012 is a banner year for doomsday prophecies, though there still seems to be debate concerning precisely how life as we know it will be snuffed out. Hollywood seems to prefer the 'death from the skies' scenario, with Lars von Trier's latest film Melancholia exploring the psychological consequences of believing that another planet is on a collision course wit...

Host: Chris Mooney Why is it that some of us are religious, some of us not... some of us liberal, some of us not? If you've been paying attention, then by now you might have noticed that this doesn't really have a lot to do with the intellectual validity of religious, or irreligious, or liberal, or conservative ideas. So what causes it? And why can't we all get along? To get at this, Point of Inqu...

Host: Chris Mooney If there's one thing Point of Inquiry  is concerned about, it's ensuring a rational, sensible conversation in politics, in public life. And you simply can't have such a conversation if the culture is awash in political, and politicized, misinformation. What do we mean by "misinformation"? The denial of global warming. Claims about "death panels." Assertions that the President of...

Host: Chris Mooney A common goal of freethinkers, humanists, skeptics, and atheists is to preserve Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state. But we haven't always been successful in this area—help from the courts notwithstanding—or at beating back the steady advances of the religious right. How can we do better? Our guest this week has a new book on the topic, and just as i...

Host: Indre Viskontas One of the costs of being conscious is that, once in a while, we are forced to contemplate the fact that we are mortal. Ironically, a close brush with the grim reaper leaves many people more convinced than ever that our minds are not tethered to our bodies, and therefore can survive physical death. What can these near-death experiences tell us about how well we understand our...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Michael Mann, the prominent climatologist and, above all, leading defender of his field—and himself—against political attacks. Mann is out with a new book this month, which details his ten year battle against political attacks and misrepresentations. It's called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines . And already, people ar...

Host: Chris Mooney So who's right , factually, about politics and science? Who speaks truth, and who's just spinning? It's kind of the million dollar question. If we could actually answer it, we'd have turned political debate itself into a... well, a science. And is such an answer possible? What does the scientific evidence suggest? In this episode of Point of Inquiry , Chris Mooney brought back a...

Host: Chris Mooney We had Lawrence Krauss on Point of Inquiry less than a year ago, to discuss his recent book on the scientific works of Richard Feynman. But in order to keep up with him, we had to have him on again. Already. You see, Krauss has a new book out that's causing quite a stir right now— A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing . Here's a hint as to why: Krau...