Ken Ham claims to have saved a life

He proudly claims that he saved a life. His account:

A few minutes later, as the service was starting, Pastor Davis collapsed in cardiac arrest. Two nurses in the congregation came to his aid, started CPR, and utilized an AED device before the ambulance arrived. Praise the Lord, they were able to restore his heartbeat, and he survived. His wife later shared with me that had Pastor Davis not come to see me speak at the church that morning, he probably would not have survived because it would have happened at home with no help!

He did nothing but watch, as other people saved him. The only being who had less to do with it was God, since what really saved him was two nurses, CPR, and an AED.

God is so useless that he isn’t even present at home — he would have died if he’d had to rely on the God who was absent in his house.

Ken Ham still claims credit, though.

I could have predicted this would flop

Dan Stern Cardinale offered an opportunity to creationists: come to his channel and present their affirmative evidence for their theory of origins. It was an open invitation to anyone to show up and explain their perspective. I could have guessed that no one would show up, because participation would require 1) a theory, and 2) evidence, and they don’t have either.

I was right. No creationists even tried.

Dan expected this to happen, too. He prepared a brief discussion of a creationist paper: Donny Budinsky of Standing For Truth, a used car salesman and a creationist propaganda site, titled “From Kanto to Cambrian,” which uses Pokemon to explain the ordering of fossils by the great flood.

You can’t make this stuff up. Budinsky says,

This idea is not presented as a final word, but as the beginning of an ongoing research project. Just as Pokémon captivates younger generations, this analogy may provide a creative, accessible, and scientifically robust way to engage new audiences in the creation-evolution debate.

I have never before heard Pokemon described as scientifically robust.

Go ahead, read the ‘paper’ for yourself, but Dr Dan has already torn it apart.

Don’t panic if I’m not posting tomorrow

It won’t be because Charlie Kirk zealots showed up at my door and wreaked their misplaced vengeance on me — it’s much more likely that I will have been raptured.

On June 17, 2025, a South African pastor shared his vision of the Rapture on the “I’ve Been Through The Most” Podcast. In the viral YouTube video of the podcast, Pastor Joshua Mhlakela made claims that he saw Jesus returning to Earth on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sundown on Monday, Sept 22 this year.

“The rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not,” Mhlakela said. “I saw Jesus sitting on his throne, and I could hear him very loud and clear saying, ‘I am coming soon.’”

“He said to me on the 23rd and 24th of September 2025, ‘I will come back to the Earth.’”

As we all know, the random rantings of an obscure pastor who claims to have witnessed Jesus always come true. I’m not sure what timezone he’s talking about, so I’m just going to take off all my clothes and hang out on the deck until I soar up into the heavens, leaving all the bad people behind.

I’m sorry if you don’t get selected and I’m abandoning you all to the ravening mobs of angry, deluded Christians (who will not be raptured, obviously.)

Avi Loeb loses a soccer match

Tragic. Avi Loeb lost the annual soccer match at his institution!

Last night, we held the annual soccer cup match between the faculty and the students at Harvard’s Institute for Theory & Computation, for which I serve as director. Although I scored 2 goals for the faculty team, the students won 3 to 2. Disappointed by the outcome, I focused on 3I/ATLAS as soon as I woke up the following morning.

On the bright side, it gave him an excuse to remind everyone that he was the director, and to mention that he scored the only two goals on his side. Apparently, no one has told him that these kinds of games are just for fun, that it’s bad taste to focus on the score, and that no one else was trying to “win”. He was disconsolate at “losing,” though, and when he woke up the next morning he decided to cheer himself up by contorting some data to make it fit his idea that 3I/ATLAS was a nuclear-powered starship.

He does a lot of math, and determines that

IF 3I/ATLAS is much smaller than the estimates
THEN it must have an internal light source to get the brightness we observe

Rather than considering that his initial premise could be wrong, he invents some other hypothetical mechanisms.

I first calculated that a primordial black hole with a Hawking temperature of 1,000 degrees Kelvin would produce only 20 nanowatts of power, clearly insufficient to power 3I/ATLAS. A natural nuclear source could be a rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material. This possibility is highly unlikely, given the scarce reservoir of radioactive elements in interstellar space.

Wait…why assume an interstellar rock needs a certain amount of power? Never mind, those were explanations he threw out and discarded so we would favor his preferred hypothesis.

Alternatively, 3I/ATLAS could be a spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel. This cannot be ruled out, but requires better evidence to be viable.

Then he nicely asked NASA to redirect their instruments near Mars and Jupiter to focus on his hypothetical nuclear powered spacecraft. And also contacted the NY Post to write about his sensational discovery.

The man is such a ridiculous glory-hog.

It’s the confidence, stupid

I ran across this ridiculous comment, and it struck me that the interesting thing isn’t that Joseph Martin is outright wrong, but that he presents his stupid ideas with such absolute confidence.

Men, even today, would rather marry a virgin than not, but a virgin woman today is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. The reason why men would indeed prefer to marry a virgin woman is because when a virgin bride marries a man, a woman’s vagina is molded to the man to whom she married, and that is a virgin brides vagina is becomes a mold to her man’s penis, and if a woman then cheats on her husband, the husband of a virgin bride then knows her wife has cheated on him because that mold has been broken, lol. Although this is true, women can also do vagina exercises that strengthen their vagina muscles, and allow a women to then control her vagina in pleasing any man she may lay with, and if a woman trains and maintains the muscles in her vagina, she can then even pick up a pencil with her vagina from just having control of the muscles in her vagina, lol, and when a woman has such control of her vagina muscles, can fool any man with regards to her faithfulness to him.

Vaginas don’t “mold” themselves to a penis. They’re flexible and muscular, and they don’t conform permanently to the first object that enters them; they also don’t evert themselves to grasp things. This series of assertions is written by a man who has never been intimate with a woman.

The weird thing is the certainty. He has to know that he has no direct personal information about the subject, yet he goes ahead and says it in public. There’s a psychopathy here that I think is incredibly common — we live in a country tainted by the collective sin of certainty that people use to make decisions about everything, politics, religion, relationships, whatever. Have you noticed that this is Donald Trump strategy? Just state half-assed nonsense with blithe confidence, and then he finds willing believers who will follow him without question, simply because he said something they want to hear.

Abby Hafer has died

Sad news: we’ve lost an important scientist and atheist, Abby Hafer, professor and American Humanist board member. Also, the Discovery Institute hated her, which is a tremendous accolade.

The enmity arose when she published an article titled No Data Required: Why Intelligent Design Is Not Science, in which she pointed out that the ID movement was barren of data and hypothesis testing, and was essentially a club for debate-bros who would masticate observations until they were a gooey pulp that they could sculpt to fit their conclusion.

Intelligent Design (ID) proposes that biological species were created by an intelligent Designer, and not by evolution. ID’s proponents insist that it is as valid a theory of how biological organisms and species came into existence as evolution by natural selection. They insist, therefore, that ID be taught as science in public schools. These claims were defeated in the Kitzmiller case. However, ID’s proponents are still influential and cannot be considered a spent force. The question addressed here is whether ID’s claim of scientific legitimacy is reinforced by quantified results. That is, do they have any data, or do they just argue? The ID articles that I analyzed claimed to present real science, but they rarely referred to data and never tested a hypothesis. Argumentation, however, was frequent. By contrast, peer-reviewed articles by evolutionary biologists rarely argued but referred frequently to data. The results were statistically significant. These findings negate claims by ID proponents that their articles report rigorous scientific research. Teachers will find this article helpful in defending evolution, distinguishing science from non-science, and discussing the weaknesses of ID.

She was sharp. She will be missed.

I can do arachnomancy, too

Everybody and their mother has been sending me links to this story, Spider divination. In Cameroon, they have a practice of cluttering up a spider’s burrow with leaves and sticks and stones, and then interpreting the future from how it tidies up the garbage.

Questioning a spider involves first clearing the area around its burrow. Then a large, open pot that has had its base removed is placed over the hole, with a piece of tin used as a lid. The pot and tin keep the spider in a contained space. A stick and stone are left inside, with special marked leaves (which I think of as ‘cards’) placed over the hole. The diviner then asks a question in a yes/no (or either/or) format – with each response corresponding to either the stick or stone – while tapping the enclosure to encourage the spider to emerge from their hole. The stick and stone represent possible answers, while the leaf cards offer the possibility of further clarification.

My tarantula, Blue, likes to hide in a silk covered tent she has constructed — when I look in, all I usually see is a dark hole with maybe a couple of legs visible in the shadows. I leave her meals in a space in front of the opening, and she will dart out and the prey disappears. She is very tidy, keeping her silk-lined floor clean, so could see using standard spider behavior as an indicator of the state of the universe.

Blue is back in the lab, but I have an oracle right here in my home. She lives in the corner by our internet router, and has strung silk around all the various cables. I trust that she has far more access to information than a spider in a hole in a remote Cameroon village. Here she is:

She is very pretty, so you know you can trust her. I asked her whether these spiders are a good source of information.

“Of course,” she told me, “this is a historic, traditional mode for getting input from spiders, a variation of the technique you are using to communicate with me — I’m just a bit more articulate. However, you have to read deeper into the article to see the truth. Read this paragraph.”

In many forms of divination, randomness is important. Examples include bibliomancy (opening a holy text and picking a verse at random), tarot and other sorts of cartomancy (shuffling the cards and picking some at random), Yijing and Ifá (throwing coins or chains; picking up odd or even numbers of sticks or nuts), or African basket divination in which objects placed in a basket are repeatedly tossed in the air (those that settle on top are then interpreted to answer a question). The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result, so the message from beyond can be heard without the risk of human manipulation and interference.

She continued, “They are using the spider as a random pattern generator. The author fails to understand the key to the author’s misunderstanding, though, is that final sentence, ‘The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result,’ which is false, and gives the game away. The diviner has all the power here as the interpreter of the pattern. The spider can be howling that the answer is X, but the interpreter can then declare that the answer is Y. The author is an unreliable source if they are able to ignore the power of the human manipulator of information.”

“By the way, PZ, I expect you to report my explanation accurately and completely, or my children will build nests in all of your orifices while you sleep.”

She really didn’t have to threaten me — of course I would avoid manipulating or interfering with her truth — but I could tell that she was annoyed by this story about humans stealing the authority of spider-kind for their own selfish ends.

I’m off the leash!

Good news for us atheists — we can now deny god publicly in the classroom!

Civil servants can seek to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views,” the Office of Personnel Management said in the memorandum to federal agencies, adding employees must ensure their efforts are “not harassing in nature.” OPM issued the guidance to restore constitutional freedoms and enable feds to practice their religious practices without fear of retaliation, the agency said.

“Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said. “This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths.”

I know, if you’re a “glass half-empty” kind of person, you might think this is another step in the erosion of secularism and the separation of church and state, but I’m an optimistic “glass half-full” kind of guy. I’ve always been careful to not introduce my anti-religious sentiments in the classroom, or to make dismissive comments about gods to my colleagues, and when students tell me about their religious holidays, I make accommodations for them. But no more! I don’t have to conceal my fervent secular beliefs any more!

I get to be the kind of stereotypical atheist asshole portrayed in the God’s Not Dead movies. First day of class, the lecture is on why Jesus is stupid. First exam will have a question, “50 points: God exists, true or false” and the only answer I’ll accept is “false!” Religious students will be told they fail the class unless they can prove the existence of their god in a public debate in the classroom. Creationists in my evolution class? Not on my watch, they aren’t.

It’ll be such a relief to not have to throttle myself anymore.

I wonder if it will be a distraction from the scientific subject matter of my courses to bring up contentious issues like that? Nah. If probing the private, personal beliefs of their coworkers is considered a protected behavior in the federal government, why shouldn’t I poke deeply into these wacky ideas that some people at the university hold? It’s only fair.

Anyone want to take bets on whether the author(s) of that memorandum were atheists, or even considered the existence of atheist employees?

Stephen Meyer is the guy in the red sweater

I’m sure we’ve all felt this way before — some smug know-nothing confronts you with a dilemma out of his own imagining, and then expects you to applaud and recognize the brilliance of his insight.

That guy in the red sweater is every creationist on the planet.

It’s amusing to imagine playing along, but even better is when a scientist replies with dumbfounded incredulity. I found an example of that, but I’m not going to address it myself, because it’s on the topic of physics and cosmology, and I have only a superficial knowledge of the subject, so I’d only be able to say “I don’t know” if queried on the details. This video, Roger Penrose confronts creationist critic Stephen Meyer, is wonderfully satisfying.

Stephen Meyer is fond of pontificating on the origins of the universe, and he often claims that physicists like Hawking and Penrose are supporting his ideas about the Big Bang, and singularities, and fine tuning — it’s annoying because he doesn’t actually understand what he’s saying, but loves to quote sciencey-sounding fragments that make you think physics is pro-intelligent design. In that 20 minute video, they show clips of Meyer chattering about physics with Christian apologists like Sean McDowell, intercut with Roger Penrose replying.

He’s usually saying “that makes no sense” or “that’s wrong” before explaining what he actually wrote or discussing the details of his theory. I’m not going to discuss any of the details of Penrose’s CCC theory, because I’m afraid he’ll then turn around and make a video titled “Roger Penrose debunks biologist critic PZ Myers”. It could happen. Watch the whole video and see what you think.

Best outcome: Stephen Meyer shuts the fuck up and stops distorting Penrose’s physics.

P.S. Angela Collier rips into billionaires who think they can use AI to solve deep problems using “vibe physics”. It’s the same problem: poseurs who think they can skip all the hard work and math and go straight to their Nobel prize.

I’m hoping for the death of the debate bro

I’ve long despised debate — if you’ve been here long you know how opposed I am to debate — and the recent debacles with the Jubilee channel, which invites one person to engage 20 people with an opposing ideology, has demonstrated how terrible this format is. It’s simply an opportunity to give idiots a platform and to promote bad ideas unfettered by constraints. I’m a broken record on this topic, but fortunately, Rebecca Watson can articulate why these people, and this concept, are awful.

One thing that annoyed me is that Rebecca got a copyright strike and had to edit out a segment showing the one apparently honest attempt at communication within the debate. So much for Jubilee just encouraging the free expression of ideas! They’re a machine using controversy to generate clicks.