The space shuttles have been retired. Nothing is immediately in the pipeline at NASA to replace them. We, as a country, look up into space and know that we are not going there in person any time soon. To commemorate this change, astrophysicist and beloved science communicator Neil DeGrasse Tyson collected his commentaries on space, from magazine articles to interviews to speeches–even tweets–and consolidated them into Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.

Now that NASA has put human space flight effectively on hold—with a five- or possibly ten-year delay until the next launch of astronauts from U.S. soil—Tyson’s views on the future of space travel and America’s role in that future are especially timely and urgent. This book represents the best of Tyson’s commentary, including a candid new introductory essay on NASA and partisan politics, giving us an eye-opening manifesto on the importance of space exploration for America’s economy, security, and morale. Thanks to Tyson’s fresh voice and trademark humor, his insights are as delightful as they are provocative, on topics that range from the missteps that shaped our recent history of space travel to how aliens, if they existed, might go about finding us.

On April 30, Stephanie Zvan and Brianne Bilyeu chatted with Neil about the book, bad depictions of aliens in science fiction, and his favorite poem. Yes, really. A good time was had by all. Please tune in and join the fun.

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

Many religious people claim that religion and science are compatible. This raises the question, what do we mean by compatible? A person may hold both science and religion in high regard, but this tells us nothing about their values as ideas. People can and do hold plenty of contradictory beliefs.

Where some people turn solely to philosophy to tell us whether religion and science are compatible, physicist and author Victor Stenger took a broader view in his new book, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion. As you can imagine from the title, things do not go well for the compatibility argument.

In a sweeping historical survey that begins with ancient Greek science and proceeds through the Renaissance and Enlightenment to contemporary advances in physics and cosmology, Stenger makes a convincing case that Christianity held back the progress of science for one thousand years. It is significant, he notes, that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century occurred only after the revolts against established ecclesiastic authorities in the Renaissance and Reformation opened up new avenues of thought.

The author goes on to detail how religion and science are fundamentally incompatible in several areas: the origin of the universe and its physical parameters, the origin of complexity, holism versus reductionism, the nature of mind and consciousness, and the source of morality.

In the end, Stenger is most troubled by the negative influence that organized religion often exerts on politics and society. He points out antiscientific attitudes embedded in popular religion that are being used to suppress scientific results on issues of global importance, such as overpopulation and environmental degradation. When religion fosters disrespect for science, it threatens the generations of humanity that will follow ours.

Join us this Sunday as Dr. Stenger joins us to talk about his book.

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

Once upon a time, a shoemaker had the fun idea of creating a line of shoes that would allow a person to declare themselves an atheist. So the shoemaker put his idea up on Kickstarter. Lots of people loved the idea, supported the Kickstarter, and got the fun shoes. Everyone lived happily ever after.

If the idea of a successful, openly atheist businessman selling blatantly atheist products sounds a bit like a fairy tale, that may be because you live in the United States. David Bonney, who created the Meaningful Shoe Company, lives in Germany. Join us this Sunday as we talk to him about his business and what it’s like being an atheist in a country where religion has much less political sway.

Related Links

• Atheist Shoes Kickstarter project.
• “Atheist shoes have sole“.

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

Tune in this Sunday May 13th when we interview Ronald A. Lindsay, the president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry. Ron Lindsay is a philosopher, lawyer and the author of Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogmas. He blogs on important current issues that affect the atheist and skeptical movements at No Faith Value as part of the Center For Inquiry’s blog network “Free Thinking”.

During Dr. Lindsay’s time as CFI’s president and CEO, the organization has been involved with campaigns that have garnered significant media coverage. In 2011 the CFI launched two phases of a popular billboard and bus ad campaign. They also submitted petitions to the FDA (which were authored by Lindsay and colleague Barry Karr) requesting that the FDA require homeopathic medications to be tested for efficacy.

Related Links:

• Center for Inquiry
• No Faith Value Blog
• Future Bioethics

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

Much of what we see in our world today can seem hopelessly tangled or intertwined. It can be difficult to see from where problems originate and even tougher to think about how to resolve them.  This can lead us humans to conjure up some pretty strange worldviews, superstitions and spurious advice for each other. But our guest for this Sunday’s show thinks he may have a way to help us sort out some of today’s issues: Evolution.

In his book Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n” Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World Rob Brooks shows how evolution may help us understand such seemingly disparate issues as political disagreements, obesity, declining fertility in industrialized nations and why men dominate the rock and roll scene.

Rob Brooks joins Atheists Talk this Sunday to discuss his book. It should be pretty entertaining – and maybe a little steamy. As he says in his official website, “My book is absolutely soaked in sex. The very first sentence states that my job is to think about sex. The word sex is found on 219 of the 310 pages.” Evolutionary biology is sexy!

We look forward to having him with us this Sunday.

• Official Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll website
• Rob Brooks’ Huffington Post article on Sex, Genes & Rock & Roll 

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

“Living fossil” is a term that might well have been calculated to drive evolutionary biologists insane. Evolution has stopped for no organism on Earth–except those that have gone extinct. However, some plants and animals have proved resilient enough that they still live on our planet in roughly the same forms they wore millions of years ago.

Richard Fortey is a distinguished writer and a BBC presenter. He is also a palaeontologist who is fascinated by the idea of seeing ancient history in our modern world. His latest book, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind (in the UK, Survivors: The Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind) details and communicates that fascination, as does the BBC series Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures, which Fortey presented.

This Sunday, join us on Atheists Talk as Richard Fortey shares that fascination with us.

Related Links:

• Richard Fortey on his favorite fossil (video)

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

Actually, that’s a bit of a trick question. I’m interviewing Neil on Monday (air date to be determined) about his new book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.

Now that NASA has put human space flight effectively on hold—with a five- or possibly ten-year delay until the next launch of astronauts from U.S. soil—Tyson’s views on the future of space travel and America’s role in that future are especially timely and urgent. This book represents the best of Tyson’s commentary, including a candid new introductory essay on NASA and partisan politics, giving us an eye-opening manifesto on the importance of space exploration for America’s economy, security, and morale. Thanks to Tyson’s fresh voice and trademark humor, his insights are as delightful as they are provocative, on topics that range from the missteps that shaped our recent history of space travel to how aliens, if they existed, might go about finding us.

I’m reading the book, so I can handle questions about that. Feel free to add questions if you’re particularly interested in some part of the U.S. space program, however.

Mostly, though, the number of media appearances Neil does makes me curious. If you had the chance to sit down and talk with him for an hour, what would you ask him? What do you want to know (keep it appropriate for radio, Neil fans) that you haven’t heard a million other interviews?

John Hawks is one of the nation’s leading palaeoanthropologists and has lately been working with ancient DNA, recent and earlier Human Evolution, and an interesting project that is a sort of casting call for extinct humans and their relatives.

Most of you know John from his famous Internet site called “John Hawks Weblog: Paleoanthropology, Genetics and Evolution.” John is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which is one of the better known and respected for this sort of research.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that there are many interesting and exciting things going on in human origins research these days, and on Sunday morning, on Atheist Talk radio, John and Greg Laden will cover as many of them as they can. Were the Clovis people Solutreans? How many hominids were there in recent prehistory? And what do both ancient and modern DNA studies tell us about the Neanderthal side of the human family?

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

Bleah. Sick. Coughy, achy, virusy thing that made me nap on the couch and miss Ayanna Watson’s speech at the Minnesota Atheists Meeting. But before that happened, this happened. So that’s cool.

Pictured: me, Ayanna Watson, and Aly Jiselle Lejuene. Not picture: ibuprofen, antihistamines, cough suppressant, and August Berkshire, who took the picture. The podcast for the show is here.

Now it’s time for more drugs.

On Sunday April 15th, Ayanna Watson will join Atheists Talk to discuss Black Atheists of America (BAAm), the national organization that seeks to bridge the gap between atheism and the black community. The vision statement of BAAm:

Our vision is to build a stronger and more diverse atheist community. Our efforts will provide for a society where one can embrace the label “atheist”, without the fear of being ostracized by family, friends, and members of their community. We envision a world where individuals embrace critical thinking, in lieu of faith.

Ayanna Watson will be interviewed by August Berkshire and Aly Jiselle Lajeune.

After the radio show, Ayanna will be presenting a talk at 2pm on Famous Black Freethinkers for the Minnesota Atheists Public Meeting.

Related Links: 

• Black Atheists of America website
• BAAm Facebook page

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.