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An Intuitive’s Story Doesn’t Check Out
 March 18, 2021
Kenny Biddle

Early in 2020, I attended an event at Selma Mansion, a historical landmark located in Norristown, Pennsylvania, which also has a reputation of being haunted. The event featured various vendors including crafters, vintage toys sellers, psychics mediums, and even a lone skeptic—me. That’s right, even though the staff swears the mansion is filled with ghosts, …

Meowleficia: Exorcist Says Demon Using Cat’s Face
 March 16, 2021
JD Sword

Cats have a unique relationship with humans as domesticated animals; they’re either loved or loathed. Cats are criticized for being selfish (as much as a nonrational being can be said to be selfish), lazy, and mercurial—and, worst of all, fickle compared to “man’s best friend,” the dog. Black dogs notwithstanding, no other furry four-legged companion …

Freelance Philosophy: Julian Baggini
 March 3, 2021
Wendy M. Grossman

What do you do with a PhD in philosophy if you’re not going to stay in academia? This was the conundrum that faced Julian Baggini after finishing his PhD at University College London in 1997. Nearly twenty-five years later, his founding (and hand-off) of a magazine, twenty books, numerous press articles, and occasional talks add …
Life, the Quniverse, and Everything, Part 1
 Skeptical Inquirer Volume 45, No. 2
March / April 2021
 Stephanie Kemmerer

Featured Image credit: Julian Leshay / Shutterstock.com   This article was completed well before the events of January 6 at the U.S. Capitol. QAnon followers were among the leading participants in the assault. In the 1999 film The Matrix, the entire plot pivots on a choice that Neo must make. He must choose between a …

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Science: The Gold Standard of Truth
 Skeptical Inquirer Volume 45, No. 2
March / April 2021
 Richard Dawkins

What is truth? You can speak of moral truths and aesthetic truths, but I’m not concerned with those here, important as they may be. By truth I shall mean the kind of truth that a commission of inquiry or a jury trial is designed to establish. I hold the view that scientific truth is of …

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Behe, Bias, and Bears (Oh My!)
 Skeptical Inquirer Volume 45, No. 2
March / April 2021
 Nathan H. Lents

After a series of stinging defeats in the U.S. courts, one branch of biblical creationism mutated into a neocreationist movement known as intelligent design (ID) in the late 1980s. The selective pressure that led to this evolution was a single line in the 1987 Edwards decision by Supreme Court Justice William Brennan that emphasized differing …

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Is There a Philosophical Magisterium?
 Skeptical Inquirer Volume 45, No. 2
March / April 2021
 Charles H. Jones

I was at an ethics lecture when the professor stated that philosophy studies what science does not. This was when I became aware of the philosophical version of Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of nonoverlapping magisteria (Gould 1997). This was a little surprising because the lecture was on the ethics of technology, but it was not …

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Continuity, Not Magisterium—A Response to Jones
 Skeptical Inquirer Volume 45, No. 2
March / April 2021
 Massimo Pigliucci

Charles H. Jones does not like the idea that philosophy and science are separate magisteria, analogous to the sharp separation between religion and science once proposed by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Well, I agree with Jones: science and philosophy aren’t separate magisteria, and I actually wrote critically of Gould’s idea in the pages of …

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Psychic Detectives and the Tragedy of Harley Dilly
 Skeptical Inquirer Volume 45, No. 2
March / April 2021
 Benjamin Radford

Investigations into the accuracy of psychic detectives in locating missing persons are typically conducted by skeptics after the fact. One benefit to examining psychic detective information is that it’s often falsifiable (when and if the missing person is recovered). A Tarot reader or medium, by contrast, may give a client generic messages about how dead …

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Fear for Our Future—or Hope?
 Skeptical Inquirer Volume 45, No. 2
March / April 2021
 Kendrick Frazier

When podcaster/journalist Stephanie Kemmerer proposed our cover article on QAnon, I knew little about the phenomenon except for occasional mentions. Once she researched, reported, and submitted it (she interviewed former QAnon followers, and her article by then had expanded to a two-part series), I read the result, “Life, the Quniverse, and Everything,” in disturbed amazement. …

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