Martin Garner passed away this weekend; he was 95. Gardner was a well-known mathematician, skeptic and author. I first became aware of him in the mid-80’s, when he edited The Annotated Alice, a fully annotated version of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
What is interesting about Martin Gardner is that while he was known for his writing on rationalism and skepticism, he remained a lifelong theist who believed in an afterlife. He had been raised a fundamentalist Christian, but turned away from that while in college (a common result of being raised a fundamentalist).While many who reject fundamentalism end up throwing out the whole baby with the bath, becoming fundamentalist materialists, Gardner never could completely shake his belief that there was something more.
There’s a very interesting post today at RationallyThinking.org, a meditation of sorts on Gardner’s The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. I, at least, found it interesting.
