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Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1924); Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1927, 1961); Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (New York: Collier Books, 1912, 1961); Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1869, 1978); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957); E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1965); Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. M. Banton (London: Tavistock Press, 1966); Rodney Stark and W. S. Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

16. Thomas H. Huxley, Collected Essays (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1894), 5: 237–38.

17. Arthur C. Clarke’s third law states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s first law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Clarke’s second law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” Clarke’s first law was first published in “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” an essay in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future. The second law was originally a derivative of the first and it became “Clarke’s second law” later, after Clarke proposed the third law in a revised 1973 edition of Profiles of the Future. He said, “As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there.”

18. I first proposed Shermer’s last law in Michael Shermer, “Shermer’s Last Law,” Scientific American, January 2002, 33. Since I do not believe in naming laws after oneself, as the good book warns: the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

19. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin, 2006). See also http://singularity.com/.

20. Daniel G. Gibson et al., “Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome,” Science 329, no. 5987 (July 2, 2010): 52–56.

21. Michio Kaku, The Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration in the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel (New York: Anchor Books, 2009).

22. Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (New York: Anchor Books, 2007).

23. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

24. Ibid., 291.

25. For an excellent summary of Einstein’s religious attitudes and belief in God, see Isaacson, Einstein, chap. 17, “Einstein’s God.”

26. Isaacson, Einstein, 386.

27. Ibid., 388.

28. Ibid., 335.

29. Michael Gilmore, “Einstein’s God: Just What Did Einstein Believe About God?” Skeptic 5, no. 2 (1997): 62–64, http://www.theeway.com/skepticc/archives50.html.

30. Read the entire debate here: http://www.templeton.org/belief/debates.html#groopman.

Chapter 9: Belief in Aliens

1. You can read the book in its entirety at Joseph P. Firmage, The Truth (International Space Sciences Organization, 1999), http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_thetruth.htm.

2. Jon Swartz, “CEO Quits Job Over UFO Views,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 9, 1999, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/01/09/ MN19158.DTL.

3. International Space Sciences Organization, http://orgs.tigweb.org/103.

4. Firmage, Truth, 237.

5. The Truth, condensed ed., pt. 4, UFOseek, http://www.ufoseek.org/part4.htm.

6. Ibid.

7. Swartz, “CEO Quits Job.”

8. Firmage, Truth, pt. 2, “Teachers Have Taught Us.”

9. Ibid., 229.

10. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996).

11. J. A. Cheyne, S. D. Rueffer, and I. R. Newby-Clark, “Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations