Robert Todd Carroll

Robert Todd Carroll (May 18, 1945 – August 25, 2016) was an American author, philosopher and academic, best known for *The Skeptic's Dictionary*. He described himself as a naturalist, an atheist, a materialist, a metaphysical libertarian, and a positivist. In 2010 he was elected a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He was a professor of philosophy at Sacramento City College from 1977 until his retirement in 2007. Carroll was born in Joliet, Illinois, on May 18, 1945. His father worked in a coal processing plant. In 1954 the family moved to San Diego, where Carroll grew up. He described his early years in Ocean Beach as an ideal childhood. He was raised Catholic. Carroll went to the University of San Diego High School and then received a Catholic education from the University of Notre Dame. He went into seminary in Notre Dame, but after a short time he left in 1965 and went back to San Diego. Carroll earned his PhD in philosophy in 1974 at the University of California, San Diego, writing his doctoral thesis under the direction of Richard H. Popkin on the religious philosophy of Edward Stillingfleet, who had defended the Anglican church passionately against Catholics, deists and atheists before becoming Bishop of Worcester. Carroll's thesis was published in 1975. By then Carroll was married, with two daughters. The new family moved to Susanville, California, where he started teaching philosophy at Lassen Community College. He later moved to the Sacramento area and from 1977 lived in Davis. Carroll said he never went through a religious deconversion moment but instead had a long journey to disbelief. He first started doubting Catholicism, he said, when he went into seminary in Notre Dame. After leaving the seminary he became intrigued by eastern religions and, inspired by Alan Watts, started looking at their holy books. Carroll became interested in Paramahansa Yogananda and attended meetings of his Self-Realization Fellowship to do yoga and chanting. At the time, he identified as agnostic. After leaving the Fellowship, he said, he spent years thinking about his religion. He later said, "The more I thought about religious ideas, the more false and absurd they seem to me." Carroll took up Kierkegaard's idea that religious beliefs require a leap of faith because they cannot be rationally proven. But Carroll decided to leap in the other direction. He said he "found many reasons for disbelief and absolutely no reasons for belief." In May 2014, Carroll was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer and liver metastasis. In May 2016 he announced he would no longer be able to write the Skeptic's Dictionary monthly newsletter on account of his illness. On August 25, 2016, Carroll died in a local hospital in Davis, California. He was survived by his wife and his two daughters and two grandchildren.