Darren E. Sherkat is a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He studies the intersection of religion, family and politics, and he’s working on a book about marijuana legalization.

Barbara Forrest is a noted secular humanist and a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, La., and co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. (Read the first chapter, posted at TalkReason.org.) She says the debate over intelligent design and evolution is necessarily a religious, and not a scientific one because intelligent […]

Michael Shermer is a noted atheist, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and executive director of the Skeptics Society. He has written several books, including How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God and Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. 

Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. He is the author of The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies.

Gregory Koukl is founder and president of Stand to Reason, an organization devoted to Christian apologetics and based in Signal Hill, Calif. He is also an adjunct professor of Christian apologetics at Biola University and has written in defense of faith against the arguments of the new atheists.

Daniel Howard-Snyder is a professor of philosophy at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He wrote the article “Grounds for Belief in God Aside, Does Evil Make Atheism More Reasonable Than Theism?” in the journal Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (2003).

David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. He wrote an April 20, 2007, essay, “The DNA of Religious Faith,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Douglas Hartmann is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the 2006 study on the social acceptance of atheists in America.

Joseph Gerteis is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the 2006 study on the social acceptance of atheists in America.