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L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.

That’s not to say that I think everything is within the scope of human knowledge. Surely there are things not dreamt of in our philosophy, not to mention in our science – but that fact is not a reason to believe in supernatural beings. I think many arguments for the existence of a God depend on the insufficiencies of human cognition. I readily grant that we have cognitive limitations. But when we bump up against them, when we find we cannot explain something — like why the fundamental physical parameters happen to have the values that they have — the right conclusion to draw is that we just can’t explain the thing. That’s the proper place for agnosticism and humility. But getting back to your question: I’m puzzled why you are puzzled how rational people could disagree about the existence of God. Why not ask about disagreements among theists? Jews and Muslims disagree with Christians about the divinity of Jesus; Protestants disagree with Catholics about the virginity of Mary; Protestants disagree with Protestants about predestination, infant baptism and the inerrancy of the Bible. Hindus think there are many gods while Unitarians think there is at most one. Don’t all these disagreements demand explanation too? Must a Christian Scientist say that Episcopalians are just not thinking clearly? Are you going to ask a Catholic if she thinks there are no good reasons for believing in the angel Moroni?

Gerd Gigerenzer's test In 2006 and 2007 Gigerenzer gave a series of statistics workshops to gynaecologists, and kicked off every session with the same question: A 50-year-old woman, no symptoms, participates in routine mammography screening. She tests positive, is alarmed, and wants to know from you whether she has breast cancer for certain or what the chances are. Apart from the screening results, you know nothing else about this woman. How many women who test positive actually have breast cancer? What is the best answer? nine in 10 eight in 10 one in 10 one in 100 Gigerenzer then supplied the doctors with data about Western women of this age. (His figures were based on US studies from the 1990s, rounded up or down for simplicity - recent stats from Britain's National Health Service are slightly different.) The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 1% ("prevalence") If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she tests positive is 90% ("sensitivity") If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is 9% ("false alarm rate") In one session, almost half the gynaecologists said the woman's chance of having cancer was nine in 10. Only 21% said that the figure was one in 10 - which is the correct answer.

The magnitude of false positives for medical tests—a positive test for a condition that a patient does not actually have—is something that is not well understood, even by members of the medical community. We should remember this, as the United States prepares to lock away potential scores of individuals who test positive for Ebola. Many observers do not realize just how many people may spend some time in quarantine when they do not have the dreaded disease.

The cognitive psychologist Max Gigerenzer once asked 24 physicians the following hypothetical question, and only two got it right: A test for breast cancer is 90% accurate in identifying patients who actually have breast cancer, and 93% accurate in producing negative results for patients without breast cancer. The incidence of breast cancer in the population is 0.8%. What is the probability that a person who tests positive for breast cancer actually has the disease? Think you know the answer? Many of the physicians in Gigerenzer’s study said there was a 90% probability that a now-terrified patient flagged for breast cancer is an actual victim of the disease. However, the correct probability is less than 10%.

Lately, Johnson draws for pleasure, but for three decades she had a happily hectic career as an illustrator, sometimes presenting clients with dozens of sketches a day. Her playful watercolors once adorned packages of Lotus software; for a program called Magellan, she created a ship whose masts were tethered to billowing diskettes. She made a popular postcard of two red parachutes tied together, forming a heart; several other cards were sold for years at MOMA’s gift shop. Johnson produced half a dozen covers for this magazine, including one, from 1985, that presented a sunny vision of an artist’s life: a loft cluttered with pastel canvases, each of them depicting a fragment of the skyline that is framed by a picture window. It’s as if the paintings were jigsaw pieces, and the city a puzzle being solved. Now Johnson is obsessed with making puzzles. Many times a day, she uses her grids as foundations for elaborate arrangements of letters on a page—word searches by way of Mondrian. For all the dedication that goes into her puzzles, however, they are confounding creations: very few are complete. She is assembling one of the world’s largest bodies of unfinished art.

If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

A 1,000-year-old treatment for eye infections could hold the key to killing antibiotic-resistant superbugs, experts have said.Scientists recreated a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon remedy using onion, garlic and part of a cow's stomach.

From Amie I first heard about Yitang Zhang, a solitary, part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who received several prizes, including a MacArthur award in September, for solving a problem that had been open for more than a hundred and fifty years. The problem that Zhang chose, in 2010, is from number theory, a branch of pure mathematics. Pure mathematics, as opposed to applied mathematics, is done with no practical purposes in mind. It is as close to art and philosophy as it is to engineering. “My result is useless for industry,” Zhang said. The British mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940 that mathematics is, of “all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote.” Bertrand Russell called it a refuge from “the dreary exile of the actual world.” Hardy believed emphatically in the precise aesthetics of math. A mathematical proof, such as Zhang produced, “should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation,” he wrote, “not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.” Edward Frenkel, a math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says Zhang’s proof has “a renaissance beauty,” meaning that though it is deeply complex, its outlines are easily apprehended. The pursuit of beauty in pure mathematics is a tenet. Last year, neuroscientists in Great Britain discovered that the same part of the brain that is activated by art and music was activated in the brains of mathematicians when they looked at math they regarded as beautiful.

Anyone who has ever been in a meeting has seen the phenomenon of "Groupthink" first hand. The will of the crowd over shadows the wisdom of individuals and it can lead to dangerous consequences. Mike Williams asks why humans succumb to "Groupthink" and how we fight the tendency to follow the herd even if it leads to very perilous outcomes.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) got it wrong. Our solar system has 10 planets. As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft glides its way to the cold outer reaches of our solar system to take the first-ever up-close look at Pluto, the time is right to revise the International Astronomical Union (IAU)'s 2006 definition of a planet, which resulted in Pluto's "demotion" from planet to ambiguous dwarf-planet status.

A newly published paper suggests that personality similarity affects teachers' estimation of student achievement. That is, how much you are like your teacher contributes to his or her feelings about you — and your abilities. "Astonishingly, little is known about the formation of teacher judgments and therefore about the biases in judgments," says Tobias Rausch, an author of the study and a research scientist at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. "However, research tells us that teacher judgments often are not accurate."

For example, a recent study from Israel showed that teachers gave girls lower grades on math tests when they knew their gender. And lots of researchers have looked at the importance of having teachers who share the racial and socioeconomic backgrounds of their students.

"In all of my publications I have said that giftedness looks different across cultures," she said. "That means that what these predominantly white teachers are looking for may look different than [for] a person from another culture." She calls this a "cultural mismatch," which can cause teachers to have lower expectations for minority students or misinterpret their behavior. As an example, Ford said a common indicator of giftedness —independence — might not manifest in black students, who tend to have tight-knit and interdependent family structures.