A reply to an old thread, but I’m not an obituary-reader.
I’m very sad to hear Martin Gardner is gone - although he was a very old man, and lived a very full professional life.
Many Christians - at least, this one - have read his stuff with pleasure also; for whatever reasons, his articles almost never were attacks on religion and religious belief in general. The Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science is a good case in point. And he was in some ways an equal-opportunity sceptic: two examples from that book are his expose of the chimps who were claimed to learn sign-language (sadly, the original researchers pooh-poohed his criticism, and more recent research has made the same mistakes), and his panning of ‘Catastrophe Theory’, a useless expansion of ‘scientific’ of mathematical modelling for human crises. (All the ‘tipping-point’ books out now have CT as their ancestor). Both of those are about over-eager scientists not over-eager religionists.
Gardner’s column in Scientific American was ‘Mathematical Recreations’ up until the 90’s; collections can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=Mathematical recreations&rh=n:283155,k:Mathematical recreations,p_lbr_one_browse-bin:Martin Gardner&page=1
Gardner was a class act, too; his replacement in Sci. Am. is not up to his level, but maybe no-one could be. And he had a subtle humor as a sceptic that has (IMO) gone sour in more recent authors. Utterly clear writing, too. Anyone, secular or not, would do well to copy his style.
Anyone here happen to know if his old columns are online at Scientific American’s website? (I’m not finding it, but i’m not a good ‘surfer’) or maybe a fan has downloaded them?
inthegobi