Point of Inquiry

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 Crime: Michael De Dora, director of the Center for Inquiry Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C., discusses the disturbing case of an Indonesian man who was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison, just for questioning whether God exists.

Fox News Bashing, Redux: Chris Mooney responds to recent listener comments, some of them complimentary, some... not so much.

From the Culture Wars to... Chuck Norris: We talk with Ed Brayton, the blogger behind Dispatches from the Culture Wars and owner of the FreethoughtBlogs network, about recent church state issues—and his steady monitoring of everyone's favorite right wing karate menace.

Gotta Keep ‘em Separated: We interview Jessica Ahlquist, the high school freethought activist who was recently victorious in her Rhode Island church-state lawsuit over a prayer banner displayed in her high school auditorium.

Jamie Kilstein: The hilarious atheist comedian and host of Citizen Radio discusses how he became an atheist, the future of the 99 percent, mixed martial arts, and his fighting challenge to conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg.

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 scientific knowledge is vast, ignorance, or what's left to learn, dwarfs what we think we know. Exploring this boundless frontier, neurobiologist Stuart Firestein explains how ignorance, rather than facts, drives science.

Stuart Firestein is the Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences where he studies the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience Firestein serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program for the Public Understanding of Science. His popular course at Columbia University served as the basis of his new book Ignorance: How it Drives Science published by Oxford University Press.

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 runs them.

That system is a meritocracy—and it's supposed to be a fair one in which people get ahead or fall behind based on their own inherent abilities. But in reality, Hayes says, inequality in, inequality out.

It's an intriguing and unexpected thesis, and after reading it, we wanted to ask Hayes about what this means for science in particular—which is, after all, a meritocracy. We also wanted to ask Hayes why people at the top of the totem pole—supposedly so smart, supposedly so well-trained and cultured—are in fact so poor at reasoning about those below them.

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 Live to Geraldo at Large, and has co-hosted an episode of Star Talk Radio with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. She was also recently seen hosting several episodes of The Young Turks' popular web spinoff series The Point. She tweets at @CaraSantaMaria, and you can find her videos at the Huffington Post's Talk Nerdy To Me.

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 of the iceberg in terms of what we're learning about the religious mind. So to get deeper into the topic, we invited on Will Gervais, lead author of the current paper and of much other work besides.

Will Gervais is a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Next year he will be an associate professor in psychology at the University of Kentucky.

His research studies the cognitive, evolutionary, and cultural reasons why people entertain in supernatural beliefs—or, why they don't, which is perhaps equally interesting.

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 to delineate the neural correlates of consciousness, whose famous 18-year collaboration with Francis Crick helped legitimize the field. Koch has never shied away from controversy, commenting on sentience in machines and dogs without skipping a beat.

Christof Koch is Professor of Biology and of Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and Chief Scientific Office of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He is the author of Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist and The Quest for Consciousness, among other books.

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 Europe.

It's a topic I've wanted to explore on the show for some time. So in Berlin, I stopped to speak with Johan Braeckman, who has been tracking the subject closely.

Johan Braeckman is a professor of philosophy of science at Ghent University in Belgium, and his research focuses on philosophical issues in the life sciences, particularly evolution and neuroscience. He's the author of a number of books and papers, including, most recently, Doubting Thomas Has a Point: A Guide to Critical Thinking, coauthored with Maarten Boudry.

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 her writing has appeared, among other places, in Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer. She is editor of the "Best Erotic Comics" anthology series, and of "Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients."

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 can young women today find an unlikely role model in Elizabeth Taylor, an actress dogged by the Catholic Church because of her sex appeal and promotion of secular ideas, including gay and lesbian rights?

Cultural critic and acclaimed author M.G. Lord explores the contributions of Elizabeth Taylor to feminism—and her struggles against the Church—in her latest book, The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted By Her Beauty to Notice.