Closer To Truth is a continuing television series on American public television / PBS, created, produced, and hosted by Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn.
The series brings together leading scientists, scholars, philosophers and artists to discuss new knowledge and discoveries, and fundamental issues of our times, particularly the meaning and implications of state-of-the-art science. It seeks to make state-of-the-art ideas in science and philosophy accessible, intriguing and absorbing to intelligent audiences. A total of 160 Closer To Truth episodes have been or are being broadcast. New episodes are in production. The series is broadcast nationally in the U.S. on PBS and other public television stations, including multiple stations in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and San Francisco, and internationally, including Canada, Israel, South Korea, Poland, Portugal, etc. The regular half-hour broadcasts of Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God currently cover ~65% of the U.S. and >75% of the top 25 U.S. markets, encompassing >150 stations and broadcasting >1200 episode airings per month. Though air times are almost never prime, in many cities Closer To Truth is broadcast multiple times per week. A list of Closer To Truth stations is on the Closer To Truth website. Closer To Truth is sponsored by the Kuhn Foundation. In December 2010, WUSF, the Tampa PBS station, ran a Closer To Truth “marathon” – 26 consecutive episodes, 13 hours in a row. Since 2008, there have been over 30,000 Closer To Truth broadcasts in the U.S.
William Lane Craig (born August 23, 1949) is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of time, and the defense of Christian theism. One of his most notable contributions to the philosophy of religion is his defense of the Kalām cosmological argument, which is the most widely discussed argument for the existence of God in contemporary Western philosophy. In theology, he has also defended Molinism and the belief that God is, since Creation, subject to time.
Craig has authored or edited over 30 books, including The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979), The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (1980), Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (with Quentin Smith, 1993), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (with J.P. Moreland, 2003) and Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (3d edition, 2008).
Craig received a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1971 and two summa cum laude master's degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, in 1975, in philosophy of religion and ecclesiastical history. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy under John Hick at the University of Birmingham, England in 1977 and a Th.D. under Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich in 1984.
Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959) is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.
Stephen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, to England in 1933. Wolfram's father Hugo was a textile manufacturer and novelist (Into a Neutral Country) and his mother Sybil was a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He has a younger brother, Conrad.
Wolfram was educated at Eton, where he amazed and frustrated teachers by his brilliance and refusal to be taught, instead doing other students' math homework for money. Wolfram published an article on particle physics but claimed to be bored and left Eton prematurely in 1976. He entered St John's College, Oxford at age 17 but found lectures "awful". Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers before leaving in 1978 without graduating. He received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20, joined the faculty there and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21. According to Google Scholar Stephen Wolfram is cited by over 30,000 publications (up to April 2012) and has an h-index of 58.