Intel’s AAI (Atheists & Agnostics at Intel) is hosting Dr Peter Boghossian at the Intel Jones Farm Campus in a lecture on critical thinking. Should be a good event. Admission is free and food is allowed in the auditorium.
Event details:
When:
Friday May 11, Noon – 1:00PM
Where:
Intel Jones Farm Campus (JFCC Auditorium), 2111 NE 25th Ave, Hillsboro, OR
The general public is invited to this free lunch-time event.
Speaker:
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Portland State University (PSU) philosophy Professor Pete Boghossian.
Lecture topic:
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“Critical Thinking Crash Course: 3 Techniques, 20 Minutes, Lifetime Reward”
(20 minute presentation with the remaining hour for Q&A).
Summary of talk:
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The purpose of this talk is to provide audience members with three simple and effective techniques that will improve their ability to think critically. After providing a brief definition and explanation of what’s involved in critical thinking (a skill set and an attitude), he’ll discuss the following specific techniques/skills:
1) “How does someone know that?”
2) Counterexamples
3) “How could my belief be wrong?”
These techniques can better equip one to differentiate truth from falsity, and can be used when evaluating almost any claim.
Freethinkers of Portland State University 
Wish I could attend. I live blocks from the campus but work in Vancouver. Will the lecture be video taped and rebroadcast?
I live in Montana, but came across your site. If you’re interested, a local author has a book for children that you might like. It’s on Kickstarter right now. I think it’s pretty incredible. I grew up Mormon and I’m so glad to have found myself as a free-thinker!
I forgot to put this link in!
Atheists contend that because no one can prove the existence of elves, fairies, spirits or gods, that religion and superstition are bullshit. I think that conclusion is almost elementary. Any scientist knows the earth is not 6000 years old. But, while atheists are trying to open the eyes of the world to what religion is, they have created one of their own. And in doing so, have defeated their own purpose.
Put yourself in a layman’s shoes. He learns in his chemisty class that you cannot create something out of nothing. The same branch of science that can create an alloy or composit on a piece of paper and predict it’s properties before it even exists. That’s science you can believe in.
If you say the universe is an accident, and life spontaneously generates where conditions allow, then you lack the evidence base that makes it science. What it is, is theory, and if you choose to believe it as fact, that’s faith, religion. Much of what science knows began as someone’s theory, which is someone’s proposition of what might be true, then it is put to the test to see if it is true or not. But, a hunch is not truth.
Now, let’s put your god to the test. Hubble discovered through red shift, and triangulation from earth at opposit ends of it’s orbit, that the further a galaxy was from earth, the faster it was moving away from us. It was deduced that it proves that some energy was prying the universe apart in defiance of gravity. Idiots!!!!!!! Take a piece of paper, and draw a dot in the center of the page, and call it the epicenter of the big bang. Now draw rays radiating from that centerpoint representing the trajectile path of matter. Now, find one point on that graph where it is not true that the furthest projectile from that point is not travelling away from you at the highest velocity. Second grade math, yet astrophysicists still say dark energy is real. Religion 2.0.
NL
I’m amazed, I have to admit. Seldom do I come across a blog that’s equally educative and interesting,
and let me tell you, you have hit the nail on the head.
The issue is something which not enough men and women are speaking intelligently about.
I am very happy that I found this in my hunt for something
concerning this.