The Skeptics Guide to the Universe

I just finished reading a well-written, fascinating book that I would recommend without hesitation to any thinking person. The one caveat is that if you are a person who is concerned that being exposed to different ways of thinking or to the sciences will lead you away from Torah, then you probably shouldn't read it. If, however, you want to learn how to think, and are not afraid that ideas will cost you your belief in God, then this book is for you.
The author, Dr. Steven Novella, along with other family members and his crew have spent many years researching pseudoscientific claims and debunking them. They present page after page of guidance as to how to analyze claims and scientific data and how to discern what is likely true and honest and what isn't. They go around to those who make claims about paranormal activity to debunk them as well. They show how the claims of conspiracy believers, such as anti-vaxxers, follow a predictable pattern as their proofs of conspiracy are debunked. Overall, reading this book should really increase your understanding of scientific methodology and improve your thinking skills as well.
The author comes across as being anti-religious and throws in anti-religious comments along the way. One of the things that struck me, however, was that those who he describes himself debunking are always people on the fringe of religious belief. On no occasion do we find him having a conversation with a serious highly-regarded theologian about religion. For that matter, while he interacts with countless believers in pseudo-science who claim religious adherence, we never find him interacting with top-ranked scientists in the fields of physics or medicine, for example, who are, at the same time, deeply religious people. He seems to only go after the low-hanging fruit who are relatively uneducated and can easily be undone.
I realize that there are those who try to make everything in religion to be scientific in order to try to appease those who appeal to science. I am a believer in both science and religion and I don't believe that there is any dichotomy between them. At the same time I believe that there is more to existence than just science and that the teachings of religion (at least how I view my religion) are not un- or anti-scientific, but are a-scientific. By that I mean they are operating on a plane that science cannot discern. Attempting to use science to prove or disprove religion is like trying to use Euclidean geometry to understand that surface of a sphere. You can repeat over and over again that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but it just isn't true there and in that realm you have to be open to different truths.
I would also point out that the author himself shows his own struggles with universally applying some of the principles he espouses (the vast majority of which I agree with completely). While applying Occam's Razor liberally throughout the book, on at least one occasion he lambastes people for accepting a simple reason when, he believes, a more complicated reason makes more sense. His firm belief that science is close to developing self-aware artificial intelligence smells like pseudo science to me. Finally, while he is very comfortable repeating the fact that scientists don't know everything and often they can know how something works but not why, he is not at all charitable to adherents of religion who say that they do not understand fully why God does what He does.
Despite these shortcomings, I will say again that it is an excellent and compelling book which I highly recommend.