page_title: Matt Dillahunty
section_title: Skepticism
hierarchical_section_title: Matt Dillahunty / Skepticism
caption_attribution_description: QEDCon Day One-39 QEDCon 2015
context_page_description: Matthew Wade Dillahunty is an American atheist activist who is the current president of the Atheist Community of Austin, a position he had previously held from 2006 to 2013. He has hosted the Austin-based webcast and cable-access television show The Atheist Experience since 2005, and formerly hosted the live Internet radio show Non-Prophets Radio. He is also the founder of and a contributor to the counter-apologetics encyclopedia Iron Chariots and its subsidiary sites.
  He is regularly engaged in formal debates and travels the United States speaking to local secular organizations and university groups as part of the Secular Student Alliance's Speakers Bureau. He also frequently travels abroad for speaking and debating sessions. Beginning in the summer of 2017, Dillahunty joined a speaking tour sponsored by the Pangburn Philosophy foundation where he shared the stage with fellow atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence Krauss. Dillahunty has no formal degrees or higher education, and did not attend seminary.
context_section_description: Advocacy of the primacy of skepticism is another of Dillahunty's recurring themes. He said at the American Atheists convention in Austin in 2013 that the closest thing he has to a motto is "to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible," taking his inspiration from David Hume. In the same lecture, he said that being a skeptic is the most important identifier of who he is. In addition, Dillahunty said that skepticism has something to say about untested religious claims, and that philosophical skepticism will lead to atheism. He sees atheism as a subset of skepticism, and he does not see why skepticism should not address religious claims, something that has become a point of controversy in the skeptic community. Dillahunty rhetorically asked, "how popular would psychics be, how popular would ghosts be, if there wasn't this monolithic idea that 70-80% of the population believe, that within each of us is an eternal soul that leaves the body when we're dead and either goes on to some afterlife or lingers around here on the earth?...If you teach people about what we know, about what most likely happens when we die, they will strive to treat people better while they're alive, and their grief will be lessened because they understand reality." He admonished "don't just do skepticism with the goal of getting it right, do it with the goal of not being able to get it wrong." In an interview published by the Norwegian Humanist Association, he said he doesn't see why religious claims about reality should be treated any differently by skeptics than conspiracy theories and allegations about alien visitation.
caption: Dillahunty at QED 2015, a skeptical conference in Manchester
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