The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [185]
7. W. Richard Walker, Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl, “Science Education Is No Guarantee of Skepticism,” Skeptic 9, no. 3 (2002): 24–25.
8. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), 7.
Chapter 1: Mr. D’Arpino’s Dilemma
1. The dialogues in this chapter are from an interview I recorded with Chick on Saturday, October 17, 2009, in person at my home in Altadena, California.
2. David L. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Science 179 (January 1973): 250–58.
3. The radio interview is on a cassette tape I’ve had for thirty-five years. Contrary to the expectations of the time that magnetic tape would not last more than two decades, it still sounds crystal clear.
Chapter 2: Dr. Collins’s Conversion
1. Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2007).
2. Interview conducted by phone on Friday, November 6, 2009.
3. The quote is inscribed on Kant’s tomb and comes from his section on the moral law in his 1788 book Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.” Accessible here: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~sobel/Mystery_Glory/m_gStarry.pdf.
4. Quotes from Collins in this section are from The Language of God. Italicized quotes by Collins in the previous and subsequent sections are from my interview with him.
Chapter 3: A Skeptic’s Journey
1. See Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (New York: Times Books, 2006). The central tenet of the book, most notably in the chapter on why conservatives and Christians should accept the theory of evolution, is that scientific theories describe the world as it really is, whereas religion describes the world as we would like to make it in terms of improving the human condition.
2. E-mail correspondence, November 22–23, 2009. That last qualifier is vintage Navarick humor. Interestingly, on the matter of internal states and mind, Navarick added: “However, like Skinner, I fully acknowledge the reality of private events (‘conscious’ experiences) that are directly sensed, like a toothache or internal speech. But I do not see these private events as adequate explanations of behavior.”
3. See P. Edwards, “Socrates,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 7:482.
4. “Books That Made a Difference in Readers’ Lives,” http://www.noblesoul.com/ore/books/rand/atlas/faq.html#Q6.4.
5. Brian Doherty, “She’s Back,” Reason, December 2009, http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/09/ayn-rand-is-back.
6. Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 286.
7. Nathaniel Branden, Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 255–56.
8. Galambos never published his long-promised book in his lifetime, so my summary of his theory comes from my own extensive notes from the V-50 class and a series of three-by-five leaflets he printed called “Thrust for Freedom,” numbered sequentially and presenting the definitions quoted here. In 1999, Galambos’s estate issued volume one of Sic Itur Ad Astra (The Way to the Stars), a 942-page tome published by the Universal Scientific Publications Company Inc. Galambos’s dream was to be a space entrepreneur and fly customers to the moon. In order to realize this dream he believed that space exploration had to be privatized, which meant that society itself, in its entirety, would have to be privatized.
9. As emblazoned in Latin on a plaque posted at the Panama Canal that also served as the institute’s motto: Aperire Terram Gentibus.
10.