Steve Taylor, On Scientism, Spirituality and Going Softly |500|

Dr. Steve Taylor thinks science needs spirituality.

Click here for Steve Taylor’s Website

His new book: Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

Click here for forum Discussion

Skeptiko-500-Steve-Taylor

Skeptiko-500-Steve-Taylor

Audio Clip: [00:00:00] And then there’s Jong Il’s golf game, he is reported to have once claimed to have shot a 38 under par round, as you might expect, no highlights to bring you from that round.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:12] That’s a news report from CNN, well I guess if you can call what CNN does as news. But anyways, it’s about obviously this fantastic golf round of the dear Leader Kim Jong Il. The late great Kim Jong Il and it’s a funny story and I thought it’d be kind of an interesting capstone to Episode 500 of Skeptiko and in this episode, of course you’re going to hear a lot of the same stuff like it or not, that you’ve grown accustomed to with Skeptiko, a clip will explain.

Audio Clip: [00:00:51] My point is you got your book wrong. It’s not that science needs spirituality. Science is doing everything it can to keep spirituality infiltrating where they’re trying to go. So when I’m saying, is that you can sort of trace materialism to historical factors, cultural factors, which are not necessarily linked to the social engineering process.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:16] That is, by the way, our very excellent guest, Dr. Steve Taylor, who is a terrific guy and we really synced a lot of things, but not so much in some other things, again, what you’ve come to expect with Skeptiko. But I want to get back to the golf story, because it’s very skeptical as well. First off I gotta tell, you haven’t heard the clip that first introduced me to the golf story, I don’t even know this thing about Kim Jong Il, but a couple episodes back, which will be coming up because the order that I’m putting these out is a little out of sequence. Matt Whitman, a guest from the 10 minute Bible hour terrific guest really loved having this guy on. Anyways we’re talking about the credibility of different sources and he brought up as an example, yeah well of course, I mean, no one would believe the North Korean government issuing a press release saying that Kim Jong Il’s shot 38 under par, including, by the way, five hole in ones on that route. So we laughed, got our chocolate, made the point, kind of moved on. But as I, a lot of times do, I got to thinking about that and I said, is that really a real story? How did it come down? And the reason I did it, as I’ve explained so many times on this show, is that I’ve been duped. So the first thing I did is just a quick Google search. Is this really a story that’s out there? And yeah, it’s this story that’s turned into this meme and it’s kind of echo chamber example of how wacky North Korea’s is. So next layer down, I found a link, five top fake news stories about North Korea and like this it’s really interesting, I don’t know how to make this any quicker, I’ll try and make it as quick as I can. But in these five myths, what they start out with, their number five on the list is North Korea beat Brazil in the World Cup and won the World Cup. And then they go on to say how this isn’t really a myt...