Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEPtics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Massimo Pilucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, today, I'm delighted to announce that we are joined by Sean Carroll, who is a professor of physics at Caltech, and a popular speaker

and author of many engaging and fascinating books, such as From Eternity to Hear and the

particle at the end of the universe.

And he's also the author of the blog Preposterous Universe.com.

Sean, pleasure to have you today.

It's great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

So today we were going to focus particularly on a topic that, Sean, you led discussions about at a workshop last winter on the subject of naturalism.

Wait, what I mean?

We're talking about naked people on the beach?

Oh, no, that's naturalism.

Nature isn't, Massimo.

Right, right.

I hope you didn't prepare for that podcast because that's not the podcast we're

happening today.

Now, all my notes are wrong, you know?

That would be a video cast, I'm afraid. So if I could take a stab at defining naturalism, and Sean or Massimo, feel free to tweak this definition, I'd say naturalism is the philosophical position that there is no world other than the natural world around us whose behavior can be we can study and learn about

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