RE: Debunking Pseudoscience

Glenn Morton wrote (of Martin Gardner)
>
>Another YEC who became an atheist?
>

He is definitely not an atheist. His last column for
Skeptical Inquirer (before retiring) was a polemic
at multiple universes. Exactly what he believes is
not so clear to me. A relatively informed source
once called him a Platonist and said that he
is a Christian, but I've never seen or heard anything
else confirming or denying that.

He is a very good writer, but his tone is extremely caustic.
Perhaps years of debunking scum, but there are times I don't
know whether to laugh or cry.

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
>> Behalf Of gordon brown
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 2:17 PM
>> To: asa@calvin.edu
>> Subject: Debunking Pseudoscience
>>
>> Today I received the latest issue of the Notices of the American
>> Mathematical Society. It featured an interview with Martin Gardner, who is
>> well known for his 25 years as author of the "Mathematical Games" column
>> in Scientific American magazine, but it turns out that he has also written
>> books debunking pseudoscience such as Scientology and Uri Geller.
>>
>> What he said that especially caught my interest was his answer to the
>> interviewer's question "How did you get interested in debunking
>> pseudoscience?"
>>
>> He said that at some time during his childhood he read George McCready
>> Price's "The New Geology" and was convinced by it until he took a geology
>> course at the University of Chicago and understood where Price went wrong.
>> He now describes Price's book as "one of the great crank works of all
>> time".
>>
>> Gordon Brown
>> Department of Mathematics
>> University of Colorado
>> Boulder, CO 80309-0395
>
>
Received on Thu Jun 16 10:32:44 2005