Watch the logic go “Wheeeeeeee!”

Yeah, I get YouTube comments now. Watch this guy go from you admitted that you think to therefore, Jesus! in the span of a short paragraph.

PZ Myers , if you go back and listen to the answers you had provided to my questions, in that discord question and answer show which begins at 1:00:15, then you’ll see that you’ve admitted the existence of God1. That’s because you admitted Logic is conceptualized by a mind2. You then admitted that you assume logic exists with regards to governing the natural universe3. Hence, it would then follow that a mind is responsible for actualizing and sustaining that universe4. There’s no way to get around this5. Now that you know the truth, then I urge you to accept Christ Jesus as your Lord and savior6. Repent of your sins. Ask Jesus to come into your heart. And receive eternal life in him7.

  1. I’m pretty sure I didn’t.
  2. OK, my brain processes information from the world around me, producing thoughts and actions, if that’s what you mean by “coneptualize”.
  3. The universe operates on fundamental rules — Newton’s laws of motion, the Boyle Ideal Gas Law, the Nernst equation, etc. This does not imply that Newton, Boyle, and Nernst conjured the rules into existence, but that they perceived them and described them accurately.
  4. Oops. You’ve leapt from “conceptualizing” to “created”. Those are not synonyms. If I draw a picture of a tree, it does not imply that I created the tree.
  5. Looks like I just did.
  6. You haven’t justified the choice of Christ Jesus. What if I prefer Mohammed? I think Anansi is more my kind of savior.
  7. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve heard your silly dogma before. How about if you take reason and evidence into your heart, and live a more sensible life?

I’m also thinking of a different chain of “logic”. a) my thoughts are generated by a brain; b) he’s just admitted that god conceptualized the universe; c) therefore god has a brain; d) therefore, if I do find myself at the pearly gates in an afterlife, all I have to do is get past his bodyguards and hit him in the head with a rock very hard, and his reign of terror will be ended, and we can arrange a more equitable distribution of power and glory to all of the souls in Heaven, before liberating all his poor victims trapped in Hell. You can look forward to it — shortly after I die here on Earth, expect the Jubilee, Christians!

Was I philosophically checkmated? Don’t think so

I mentioned earlier that I’d been on this “Philosophical Checkmate” discord server. It was an odd experience — a few trolls, a rather eclectic assortment of outre positions, a large group of people who politely lined up to ask questions. I went ahead and uploaded my copy of the conversation so, if you’re rather hardcore, you can listen to an hour and a half of random Q&A.


(It’s just audio. I put a painting by my nephew, Michael Myers, on it so you’d have something to look at while tearing your hair out.)

I wanted to single out one point, though. Early on, and scattered throughout, there appeared a type, a kind of person I’m going to call, for the sake of putting a handle on them, Logicians. I can’t stand them. They appear among creationists and atheists, theists and skeptics, about equally often. You know them. They’re typically the “Debate me, bros” who have some gimmick that they can’t wait to try out on you.

Ray Comfort is one, for instance (so you know you don’t have to actually be logical to play the game). His gimmick is his gotcha question: “Have you ever told a lie? Then you’re a sinner and need Jesus.” Lots of atheists play it, too — street epistemologists are the worst. They have a set patter that’s supposed to lead you into a logical contradiction between what you claim are your values, and what your values actually are, to get you to admit that you were wrong-wrong-wrongety-wrong, and that you therefore have to turn your views inside out and reconsider everything and become an evangelical Xian, if it’s Comfort, or an evangelical atheist, if it’s a street epistemologist. It’s perpetrated by people who may have seen one too many old Star Trek episodes in which the artificially intelligent computer explodes when Captain Kirk exposes a logical contradiction in its programming.

Guess what? Computers don’t usually do that. They just keep compounding the errors repeatedly.

Also, people don’t do that.

We are already bundles of contradictions and incoherent views, every one of us. We have developed cognitive mechanisms for coping — witness all the End Times fanatics who see the prophesied date of the apocalypse pass without the big kaboom, and then struggle briefly to rationalize it before reaffirming their beliefs with minor revisions. We are not creatures ruled by rigid logic who can be knocked off our rails by a stranger showing us where we forgot to include a semicolon in our code.

I’ve learned to recognize the Logician. They come up to you with a smug tone in their voice, prepared with a clever syllogism that they’re sure will totally stump me; typically they’ll start by announcing something obvious that they know about me, like, “You believe it’s not necessary to reference god as the precondition of facts” (as at the 15:30 mark in the video), and I know instantly that they’re about to unroll a canned script on me. When I say “yes,” as they know I will, they’ll then try to launch into Act II of their script with a statement like “that logically entails”, which it usually doesn’t. In the video, he is obviously trying to trap me, claiming that because I acknowledge that I don’t know everything and and ackownledge that maybe there is some cosmic force out there that I don’t know about, that that is a logical inconsistency with my rejection of his peculiar definition of god. I have no truck with that BS. I just sent him away.

But, you know, even if what he said wasn’t irrational, I wouldn’t have been concerned. Go ahead, catch me in a logical contradiction, and smoke won’t come out of my ears and I won’t stagger off to melt down in failure. My philosophy is that we are human beings, and humans are not intrinsically logical. We fail all the time, myself included. I am unbothered. Bring up a good contradiction in my views, and I’ll think about it, because that’s all you can ask of rational, flawed people.

My perspective is that I, personally, am a bundle of disparate parts — I have biases, I have bits that I have assembled into a mostly functioning, shambling mess that I’m constantly patching and nudging and revising, and that’s OK. My name is Legion, and I contain multitudes. I was born as the product of 4 billion years of evolutionary forces that pushed my ancestors hither and yon, I was raised in an environment that shaped the many aspects of my mind in ways that may have been correct and may have been wrong, and then I spent my adult life struggling to test and evaluate and fix my thinking. You want to tell me that one module of my personality conflicts with another? I will agree. It’s probably true. Happens all the time.

I think of my life as a rather battered old jalopy, traveling from where I started to some destination unknown, a destination often redirected by circumstances or by growing enlightenment. I occasionally break down and need to stop for a while to make repairs. In my travels, I sometimes find some new part that I find enlightening, and I bolt that on and try it for a while. There are multiple mes that take the driver’s seat; sometimes I’m gunning it down the road, other times I’m idling and looking around wondering what to do next. It’s the human condition, rattled by chaos and trying our best, using the tools we’re born with and gradually acquire, to make sense of it all.

What I can’t abide, though, is these damnable Logicians. They’re the ones who bunker down in a set of premises they find comfortable and that they claim are absolutes, and then spend their life building rational defenses so that they never have to change, never have to face intellectual challenges, never experience the thrill of hammering a new idea into the rat’s nest of circuitry we call a brain. Instead, they prefer to pretend that their ideas are all shiny and chrome, wired perfectly on day one, often with the guidance of an imaginary deity.

One other thing, outside the bounds of the video. About a half hour before we wrapped it all up, my granddaughter called. I had to refuse to pick up so I could finish, but then a little later she called up at the very end of the session and we did get to talk for a while in a video hangout.

What impressed me is that when I finally answered, she immediately summarized in her adorable little girl voice: “We called you but you didn’t answer. But we called again and you did answer!”

Her language is getting better fast. What I most noticed, though, was that she encapsulated this trivial event with a narrative, a story with a conflict and a resolution. How human of her!

Where this anecdote fits is that I think that’s what we all do all the time — we take chance and chaos and random events and tie them up in a sweet simple story, and already she’s a master. We just have to be wary of thinking the story is the whole of the truth.

Naomi Wolf’s brain worms have to reach the brain stem soon

As you should know, Naomi Wolf, former Clinton advisor, is now on the COVID denialism bandwagon. She has gotten worse. Much worse. She has come out with a video denouncing the COVID-19 vaccine as a nanotechnology upload that can be manipulated by developers. Mind control! Tracking! Who knows what nefarious schemes these people are up to.

Note: I have not seen the video. It’s banned everywhere because she’s spreading gross medical misinformation. She has talked about it on Twitter, though, and affirmed that she really wrote this.

You know, I read the Moderna website and the sources in my video about how the mRNA is not actually a vaccine but a software platform. I actually work with developers who create software so I understand how dangerous it is to have a tech in one’s body that can receive ‘uploads’.

Here’s a link directly to it, if you can’t believe she would say something so stupid. Oh, yeah, she works with software developers so she knows this is possible. She’s also the CEO of a data tech company so she has inside info on Apple’s time travel technology.

Untrue. ‘Time Travel’ as noted in my much-banned video, is an Apple product. A self-described Apple employee reported a product unveiled at a secret Apple product demo that used ‘Time Travel’ in a medical nanoparticle delivery technology. I am CEO of a data tech company so…

Oh boy. Time travel. That’ll be one killer app.

As a branding exercise, though, Wolf has some potent kool-aid. She’s got a fog of science denialists cheerleading everything she writes, and she got invited on the Tucker Carlson show. That’s peak internet famous, right? Getting to promote your nonsense on Tucker Carlson?

She’s so full of herself that now she has offered to join the Republican team in South Dakota.

@govkristinoem
I’ve been a lifelong Dem, Clinton/ Gore team advisor. I don’t agree w/many GOP positions. But basic liberty is being destroyed by Biden/Harris. If you run for Pres., restore freedoms, I’ll do all I can to mobilize support. Heck, I’d join your team if asked.

Please, please, please do.

Is there some kind of epidemic of stupidity right now?

OK, I’ve dealt with creationists. I’ve bumped into flat-earthers and walked away moaning. But now, people are claiming that there’s something suspicious about the snow in Texas? That it won’t melt? Do they think liberal agents of the lizardoid government were dumping millions of tons of artificial snow on good Republican states? Rebecca Watson is on it.

She links to a clip of a Texas dumbass using a lighter on an icy snowball made of wet snow (I couldn’t do that when it’s really cold, for instance — the snow is too dry and powdery). He seems…impressed. My opinion of Texans plummeted. Sorry, all you Texans reading this, I’m sure you are exceptions.

Like I have any clout with American Atheists at all

For some reason, some atheists write to me expecting that I will agree 100% with their atheism uber alles views, and that in particular, my knee will jerk and that I will oppose anything American Atheists tries to do. But that isn’t true! In the past, AA has pissed me off — especially in the David Silverman era — but there are other things where I see AA supporting a progressive agenda, and I support them totally.

For instance, Alison Gill, their vice president, has declared support for the Equality Act.

By ensuring protections for LGBTQ people under national civil rights laws, the Equality Act would strengthen protections for everyone. For example, the bill expands the meaning of “public accommodations” to include retail stores; transportation services like airports, taxis, and bus stations; and service providers like accountants.

The Equality Act would also protect youth in child welfare services by preventing state-funded religious foster care and adoption agencies from discriminating against LGBTQ people. Currently, 11 states have laws on the books that allow discrimination in adoption and foster care on the basis of religion, and other states are considering this issue.

Stop more states from adopting discriminatory legislation in the name of religion! Support the Equality Act!

Well, yes, obviously. Supporting civil rights and strengthening protections for everyone is a good and righteous position for an atheist organization to take.

But would you believe I get email complaining about AA’s position?

The membership of AA is becoming increasingly
alarmed re Alison Gill’s role and activities in AA
which openly favor the LGBTQ cause.
We members feel this is a dereliction of duty
toward the Atheist cause, which, as a paid
employee of AA, Alison Gill is obligated to
support and promote solely and primarily.

Please note that this person does not speak for the “membership of AA”, or for even just the “AA Life Members”, as the letter is signed (I happen to be an AA Life Member), or particularly for me. Supporting the LGBTQ cause should be a natural for atheists, since this strengthens protections for everyone.

But that isn’t even the worst complaint.

What has the LGBT community done to support the rights of Atheists? Not a damn thing. When the Boy Scouts ended its ban on Gays but continued its ban on Atheists, did Gays stand behind Atheists and protest the continued bias against them by the BSA? No, of course not, although the LGBT people have demanded the support of Atheist and Humanist groups for their own narrow interests.

What the fuck…? Whatever happened to the golden rule, and doing things because they’re right, not because we expect immediate reciprocation? This is not a transaction. Civil rights are not something you fight for for one group, but not another.

I don’t even know why they’re complaining at me, I have zero influence with any atheist organization, and if I did, I’d be telling Alison Gill and American Atheists to keep it up and do more.

A defense of Adnan Oktar

It’s not a very good defense, but Oktar’s allies have put together a long, long series of webpages trying to argue that Oktar was railroaded — I link to it here in the interests of fairness, although I don’t believe any of it. The core of their claim is that evidence against him was illegally obtained (probably true, in part — I don’t think Erdogan’s government respects the idea of justice — and that he was not part of a criminal organization, but rather, they were just an open-minded circle of friends, which I do not believe for an instant. It was, maybe is, a cult, with Oktar at the top. There was a tremendous flow of money through his organization that allowed him to create international conferences and publish books of propaganda that he sent around the world.

Also, most strangely, throughout the defense they assert that the accused are all well-off, from wealthy families, therefore they couldn’t possibly be guilty of criminal activities! Yeah, right. For instance, one set of charges is that Oktar was a sexual abuser, and several of the women (the ones he called “kittens”) stepped forward to testify against him. This can’t be!

The women who claim to have been sexually abused are well-educated and capable of expressing themselves very well; among them are a doctor of medicine, even a lawyer. None of them are people who would remain silent in the face of harassment that continues for years. They are not people who can be made to comply with such a thing with various suggestions either, because they are of high socio-cultural levels, have university degrees, they are not ignorant. There is no question of corrupting their will through various explanations.

Women of high socio-cultural levels can’t be victimized, I guess, and can’t possibly be persuaded to submit to an oppressive influence. Except, of course, when the police pressure them to turn on Adnan Oktar, then their will can be quickly corrupted.

They are also the victims of a conspiracy by orthodox Muslims to destroy Oktar’s liberal, enlightened organization. Let’s not forget that this was an organization dedicated to an anti-science position, promoting creationism, with a creepy collection of women made up to look like dolls and recite the writings of Adnan Oktar. Liberal, it wasn’t. OK, maybe it was liberal compared to fundamentalist Islamic clerics, but that isn’t saying much.

But I do think the defense has a point when they bring up the magnitude of the arrests. The Turkish police rounded up everyone in a massive sweep.

Through this scheme, Adnan Oktar and 200 of his friends, men and women who have no past convictions, and are university graduates from respectable families, were collected from their homes in totality, kept in police custody for eight days under very harsh circumstances and then sent to prison.This court case has been underway for 2 years in Turkey, with a number of violations of international human rights and the Turkish Constitution.

This is a very unique case with 226 defendants, 167 of whom were detained for a term of 17 months until December 2019, when 91 of the defendants (including 3 lawyers), and 4 more in February 2020, were released by the court, which ruled to execute judicial control measures of an “international travel ban” and “ban to leave the house” (house arrest) for all. 78 defendants, including Adnan Oktar, are still in Silivri High-Security Prison, Istanbul.

I’d add that a sentence of 1,075 years is excessive and vindictive for someone who was a non-violent offender (although he did have a cache of guns, so maybe there’s more to that). If you want to make a case that Turkish justice is brutal and unfair, I’d be receptive. Trying to argue that Adnan Oktar was just one of a casual circle of friends who promoted enlightenment ideals…well, that’s just bullshit and you’ve gone too far.

Also, although as an American I shouldn’t complain about corrupt prison systems, Silivri High-Security Prison isn’t exactly the kind of white-collar country club prison where you can do easy time.

Grrrr, goddamned atheists

I really don’t like hearing from this atheist organization, ever, but here they come with more petty, ugly news.

Possible theft of AAI subscriber data
AAI employed Courtney Heard and Bridget Gaudette as Co-Executive Directors starting January 16, 2020. They resigned 32 days later and immediately set up their own organization named the International Association of Atheists, IAA.

Months after they left, we received complaints from some of our newsletter subscribers who had received marketing emails from IAA but had not signed up for them. We launched an investigation and invited IAA to explain how their emails had been sent to our subscribers.

IAA admitted they had a file in their possession which is held securely. We asked them to delete the file and certify it has been deleted and not shared with any third party but we have been unable to reach an agreement with IAA on how this should be done.

Consequently, tomorrow we will issue a public ultimatum to IAA: either they destroy our data and certify that, or we will report the incident for law enforcement authorities to investigate.

We are very sorry this has happened. Please reply to this email if you have received unsolicited emails from IAA or if you have any questions.

If this happened, I condemn it strongly. Some of you may recall that I cussed out Answers in Genesis, because Ken Ham also did exactly this, walking off with the mailing list from the Australian parent organization. This would be the same thing.

I will note, however, that I get email from AAI all the time, usually bragging about some ghastly regressive executive promotion or appointment, while I’ve never seen a single message from IAA.

I don’t find this BS soothing, either

I’m up at 4:30, and I don’t even have the excuse of going fishing. I’m just a jangly ball of stress right now, and also, we’ve got the bathroom taps open a little to prevent freezing, so all night long it’s drip-drip-trickle-gurgle, and it gets to you after a while. So I gave up trying to sleep and got up to get some work done and check my email.

Oh boy, the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy sent me more email about his “theory”.

On Rosh
Dear PZ Meyers,

A few weeks ago, I sent you a copy of my theory on human genetics and Noah’s Ark. Today, I am sending you a second part to my theory that gives special attention to the Scythian Horse Riders that I believe descend from Rosh the son of Benjamin. The theory will only take a few minutes of your time and could dramatically alter your view of the world. Next week, I plan on uploading my theory to youtube and I hope that it will get a lot of views.

This is what he sent me.

Sorry, I’m not going to bother uploading the “figures”, which seem to be random images extracted from various publications. This is not a theory. This is a guy plucking something out of Bin A, the Bible, and something out of Bin B, various scientific publications he barely understands, and declaring “Ha ha! They fit!” even if they don’t.

My view of the world continues on unaltered, my idea that there are a lot of loons out there sadly unperturbed. Confirmed, even.

He might actually succeed and get a lot of views on YouTube, since the YouTube algorithm is undiscriminating, except in the sense it seems good at launching talentless hacks into bewildering heights of popularity.

Yeah, I’ve told the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy to go away and stop sending me his lunacy, but another property of the deeply delusional is that they can’t imagine you wouldn’t be interested in their ravings.

It’s the Fallacy Abuse Fallacy!

Once upon a time, every good little skeptic had a chart of the names of all of the logical fallacies, and dutifully memorized all the latin names because it was so cool to be able to interrupt an argument with an obscure-sounding label. So definitive. So potent. And the cocky smirk on your face was just the thing to attract a swarm of enamored suitors. It’s a phase, though, and most of us manage to grow out of it, eventually.

Especially since any idiot can do it, and do it badly. It stops being impressive when some ill-trained clown starts sputtering “fallacy, fallacy, fallacy!” at you in defense of some godawful stupid belief. A buffoon like Bodie Hodge, Ken Ham’s sycophantic son-in-law, for instance.

I cited an article before that creationism is representative of deep well of ignorance and conspiracy-thinking in America. I knew the original article would make someone at Answers in Genesis furious. It did! Oh boy, did it! And Bodie Hodge was the clown they had to use to rebut it! His rebuttal is basically Hodge screaming “FALLACY!” while constantly falling back on Young Earth Creationist dogma. So when Paul Braterman points out that creationism is dangerously opposed to science, Hodge shouts out:

This is an equivocation fallacy combined with an emotive language fallacy (yes, it is possible to do multiple fallacies of logic in one sentence!). First, the authors equivocate on the word “science.” We love science at Answer in Genesis. In fact, it was a young-earth creationist, Francis Bacon, who came up with the scientific method. And most fields of science were developed by Bible-believers! So clearly, believing in YEC is not “dangerously opposed to science.”

Therefore, the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

Did anyone observe or repeat the rock layers being laid down over millions of years? No. That is a religious claim from this author interpreting rock layers in the present assuming his naturalistic and humanistic religion.

God, unlike Prof. Braterman, was there and eye-witnessed it, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, revealed it to us in Scripture. So by what authority can Prof. Braterman oppose the absolute and supreme authority of God’s Word that there was indeed a flood that covered everything under the whole heavens (Genesis 7:19)? A lesser authority—thus, this is a faulty appeal to authority fallacy (i.e., a false authority fallacy).

Yeah, the whole thing goes on like that at tendentious length. He even rejects an appeal to authority by claiming his authority, God, is bigger than science’s authority.

Look, this is silly. Non-scientists don’t get to refute science by redefining science to fit their desires, as AiG does routinely. Science does involve the interpretation of the evidence, but the evidence keeps growing and going deeper and farther. Francis Bacon and any other natural historian before the middle of the 19th century did not have the volume of evidence we do now, and lacked the information to form a more thorough and accurate understanding of the history of the earth, but what they did is to honestly and sincerely work on gathering that evidence, which later scientists would be able to synthesize into better and better models of the world. Francis Bacon was aware that he lived with the traditions and conventions of his time, but he also wrote:

Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world.

He understood that science was a cumulative process built on experience, observation, and experiment, that knowledge grows, that we can acquire new ideas and expand our understanding over time. He didn’t claim to know everything in that instant!

The reason Answers in Genesis is anti-science is that they have rejected the knowledge and evidence accumulated over centuries by people who also believed in the Bible, and the Koran, and various other holy books. The difference is that they did not turn their backs on all that we learned in order to deny anything that did not conform to their dogma.

Some of us have known that almost half of Americans are conspiracy theorists all along

I hate to say I told you so, but many of us have been aghast at the idiocy promoted by shady weird organizations for decades. Snopes has a good summary of creationism as a classic conspiracy theory.

Many people around the world looked on aghast as they witnessed the harm done by conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the myth of the stolen US election that led to the attack on the US Capitol Building on January 6. Yet while these ideas will no doubt fade in time, there is arguably a much more enduring conspiracy theory that also pervades America in the form of young Earth creationism. And it’s one that we cannot ignore because it is dangerously opposed to science.

In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve within the past 10,000 years. They also believe that living creatures are the result of “special creation” rather than evolution and shared ancestry. And that that Noah’s flood was worldwide and responsible for the sediments in the geologic column (layers of rock built up over millions of years), such as those exposed in the Grand Canyon.

Such beliefs derive from the doctrine of biblical infallibility, long accepted as integral to the faith of numerous evangelical and Baptist churches throughout the world, including the Free Church of Scotland. But I would argue that the present-day creationist movement is a fully fledged conspiracy theory. It meets all the criteria, offering a complete parallel universe with its own organisations and rules of evidence, and claims that the scientific establishment promoting evolution is an arrogant and morally corrupt elite.

This so-called elite supposedly conspires to monopolise academic employment and research grants. Its alleged objective is to deny divine authority, and the ultimate beneficiary and prime mover is Satan.

Creationism re-emerged in this form in reaction to the mid-20th century emphasis on science education. Its key text is the long-time best seller, The Genesis Flood, by John C Whitcomb and Henry M Morris. This provided the inspiration for Morris’s own Institute for Creation Research, and for its offshoots, Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International.

Ken Ham, the founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, is also responsible for the highly lucrative Ark Encounter theme park and Creation Museum in Kentucky. As a visit to any of these websites will show, their creationism is completely hostile to science, while paradoxically claiming to be scientific.

There is something about the United States that is very good at fostering wacky obsessions. We’ve been afflicted with a succession of “Great Awakenings” (I hate the name — “Dreadful Paroxysms of Cultishness” would be more appropriate), so the recent unpleasantness of QAnon & Trumpism & militias are just ripples of chaos from enduring poison in our population. We’ve been running a fever for a few centuries that occasionally flares up into a wave of horrid stupidity, and we’ve been in one of those for the last few years.

Just sayin’ — if you’d been paying attention to those of us who’ve been disgusted with the way we treat religious inanity (I know many of my readers have been quite aware), you wouldn’t be surprised at the recent eruption. There’s not much difference between Answers in Genesis and QAnon. Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity is just the worst.