News Feeds

The only television show I watch regularly is the NBC Evening News: I watch the whole thing from 5:30-6, completely ignoring phone calls and other disturbances. Last night the lead story was about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Savannah Guthrie, a well-liked NBC news journalist and co-anchor of the network’s Today show.  Mother and daughter were close, with Nancy often appearing on Savannah’s show.

Nancy Guthrie was 84, and simply disappeared from her home in Tucson, Arizona on Sunday.  She has limited mobility, and when she didn’t show up for church a friend called the police, who discovered her disappearance.  Nancy Guthrie relies on medication that she must take every 24 hours or she might die.  An interview with the local sheriff revealed that there were signs of violence, and that Nancy was probably abducted.  It’s now Tuesday, so she might already be dead.

The NBC news, both national and local, gave the disappearance not only the lead story, but also lots of air time because Savannah’s a member of the network family. The first paragraph of the NBC national news story is this:

“TODAY” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie is asking for prayers for her mother’s safe return as Arizona authorities continue to investigate her possible abduction.

Savannah also related, on the evening news, that the greatest gift she got from her mother was a deep belief in God, as you see in the plea for prayers above.  On the local NBC news, anchor Alison Rosati ended her report on the disappearance by saying that she and other NBCers were also praying for Nancy Guthrie.

This is a tragedy for the Guthrie family, especially because Savannah and her mom were so close, and I won’t be dismissive of the call for prayers by nearly all the reporters. It did, however, get me thinking about people’s views about what prayers are supposed to accomplish, how they’re received by the God people imagine, and how educated people (Savannah has a J.D. from Georgetown Law) come to think that prayers are useful.

It’s clear that all the calls for prayer by newspeople reflect the still-pervasive religiosity of America, though I’m not sure whether, for some, the call for prayer is just a pro forma expression of sympathy. But surely for many prayers are supposed to work: God is supposed to hear them and do something—in this case intercede to help bring Nancy Guthrie back alive. And that got me thinking about how people connect prayer with the listener: God. Religious Jews are, by the way, among the most fervent pray-ers, with prayer serving as a constant connection with God.  And, like prayers in other religions. Jews sometimes use prayer to ask for personal benefits or simply to propitiate God.

The train of thought continued. What kind of God is more likely to effect changes requested in prayer? If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and good, wouldn’t He know that people want things, like Nancy Guthrie’s return, and not need their prayers to find out? (He presumably can read people’s minds.) A god who requires prayers to effect change would be dictatorial and mean-spirited, demanding that obsequious people supplicate and propitiate him. But surely that’s not the kind of God most Christians imagine. (My feeling is that Jews envision a somewhat angrier God—the one in the Old Testament.)

Nevertheless, despite quasi-scientific studies showing that intercessory prayers don’t work, people ignore that data, as of course they would; it’s tantamount to admitting that there’s no personal God who has a relationship with you.  Sam Harris has suggested that these studies are weak, and Wikipedia quotes him this way:

Harris also criticized existing empirical studies for limiting themselves to prayers for relatively unmiraculous events, such as recovery from heart surgery. He suggested a simple experiment to settle the issue:[32]

Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is within the capacity of God. I find it interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions that are self-limiting.

He has a point of course, and that experiment would never work.  But it’s intercessory prayer. Perhaps God answers only prayers coming from the afflicted themselves. But that implies that the “thoughts and prayers” of other people, as in the Guthrie case, are useless. In the end, the very idea of petitionary and intercessory prayer being effective implies that God is, as Christopher Hitchens said, like a Celestial Dictator presiding over a divine North Korea, requiring constant propitiation by obsequious believers. How could it be otherwise?

One response by liberal religionists is that one prays not for help, but simply as a form of meditation or rumination.  In other words, perhaps putting things into words—even words that nobody is hearing—helps you as a form of therapy, or in sorting out your thoughts and problems. That’s fine, though it’s unclear why rumination alone wouldn’t suffice.

I won’t deny anybody their belief in God, but I don’t want people forcing their beliefs on me, which is what occurs when newspeople ask for my prayers. I have none to give, though I wish people in trouble well, and hope that Nancy Guthrie returns.

These thoughts may sound cold-hearted, but they’re similar to what Dan Dennett wrote in his wonderful essay, “Thank Goodness“, describing who should really have been thanked for saving his life after a near-fatal aortic dissection:

What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any  more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends’ remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: “I’ve been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart [another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence] that you come through this OK.” The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?” I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said “I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health.” What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don’t expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.

In other words, “thoughts” are fine; “prayers,” not so much.

I’m writing this simply to work out my own thoughts about prayer and its ubiquity, but I would appreciate hearing from readers about this issue.  What do you think when you hear others asking for prayers.  Is prayer a good thing, and what does it presume about God?  Any thoughts (but no prayers) are welcome, and put them below.

John Martinis has already revolutionised quantum computing twice. Now, he is working on another radical rethink of the technology that could deliver machines with unrivalled capabilities

Engaging on social media to discuss pseudoscience can be exhausting, and make one weep for humanity. I have to keep reminding myself that what I am seeing is not necessarily representative. The loudest and most extreme voices tend to get amplified, and people don’t generally make videos just to say they agree with the mainstream view on something. There is massive selection bias. But still, to some extent social media does both reflect the culture and also influence it. So I like to not only address specific pieces of nonsense I find but also to look for patterns, patterns of claims and also of thought or narratives.

Especially on TikTok but also on YouTube and other platforms, one very common narrative that I have seen amounts to denying history, often replacing it with a different story entirely. At the extreme the narrative is – “everything you think you know about history if wrong.” Often this is framed as – “every you have been told about history is a lie.” Why are so many people, especially young people, apparently susceptible to this narrative? That’s a hard question to research, but we have some clues. I wrote recently about the Moon Landing hoax. Belief in this conspiracy in the US has increased over the last 20 years. This may be simply due to social media, but also correlates with the fact that people who were alive during Apollo are dying off.

Another factor driving this phenomenon is pseudoexperts, who also can use social media to get their message out. Among them are people like Graham Hancock, who presents himself as an expert in ancient history but actually is just a crank. He has plenty of factoids in his head, but has no formal training in archaeology and is the epitome of a crank – usually a smart person but with outlandish ideas and never checks his ideas with actual experts, so they slowly drift off into fantasy land. The chief feature of such cranks is a lack of proper humility, even overwhelming hubris. They casually believe that they are smarter that the world’s experts in a field, and based on nothing but their smarts can dismiss decades or even centuries of scholarship.

Followers of Hancock believe that the pyramids and other ancient artifacts were not built by the Egyptians but an older and more advanced civilization. There is zero evidence for this, however – no artifacts, no archaeological sites, no writings, no references in other texts, nothing. How does Hancock deal with this utter lack of evidence? He claims that an asteroid strike 12,000 years ago completely wiped out all evidence of their existence. How convenient. There are, of course, problems with this claim. First, the asteroid strike at the end of the last glacial period was in North America, not Africa. Second, even an asteroid strike would not scrub all evidence of an advanced civilization. He must think this civilization lived in North America, perhaps in a single city right where the asteroid struck. But they also traveled to Egypt, built the pyramids, and then came home, without leaving a single tool behind. Even a single iron or steel tool would be something, but he has nothing.

Of course, there is also a logical problem, arguing from a lack of evidence. This emerges from the logical fallacy of special pleading – making up a specific (and usually implausible) explanation to explain away inconvenient evidence or lack thereof.

Core to the alternative history narrative is also that those ancient people could not possibly have built these fantastic artifacts. This is partly a common modern bias – we grossly underestimate what was possible with older technology, and how smart ancient people could be. Even thousands of years ago, in any culture, people were still human. Sure, there has been some genetic change over the last few thousand years, but not dramatically, and this is also in how common alleles were, not their existence. In other words – every culture could have had their Einstein. Ancient Egypt had genius architects, and is some cases we even know who they were.

People also underestimate the willingness of ancient people to engage in long periods of harsh work in order to accomplish things. Perhaps this is a “modern laziness bias” (I think I just coined that term). We are so used to modern conveniences, that the idea of polishing stone for 12 hours a day for a year in order to create one vase seems inconceivable. The pyramids, it is estimated, were constructed with 20-30,000 workers over 20 years. This included skilled masons, who likely became very skilled during the project. Egypt had an infrastructure of such skilled workers, supported by many long term projects over centuries.

Which brings up another point – we underestimate how much time these ancient civilizations existed. My favorite stat is that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Space Shuttle than the building of the pyramids. Wrap your head around that. These ancient people were clever, they included highly skilled crafters, and they had centuries, at least, to advance their techniques.

What amazes me is that this narrative of denying history extends to recent events. Again, the Moon landing is an example. But there is also a narrative circulating on TikTok that buildings from the 18th, 19th, and even 20th century were not built by the people who historians said built them. They were found in place, and were built by an older and more advanced civilization – called Tartaria. Never heard of it? That’s because it does not exist. This civilization was wiped out by a world-wide mud flood in the 19th century. According to this particular nuts conspiracy theory, modern governments just occupied the buildings they left behind then conspired together to wipe the history of the mud flood and Tartaria from all records.

What is even more amazing to me is that, in far less time than it took to create a TikTik video spreading this nonsense, someone with even white-belt level Google-fu could have found convincing evidence that this is wrong. You can find pictures of the buildings being built, or of the city before they were built, or documentation of them being built, or experts who have already gathered all this information for you. You can also find that “Tartaria” was a medieval label used to denote the “land of the Tartars”, which simple refers to Mongols. It was a nonspecific geographic label, not an actual place or nation.

But of course, none of this matters in a social media world in which narrative is truth, everything “they” say is a lie, and in fact truth or lie is not even really a thing. It’s all narrative, it’s all performance and clicks.

And this is why scholars and scientists need to engage with the world, much more than they currently do. We cannot simply ignore the nonsense with the idea that it will shrivel and die if we don’t give it light. That is such a pre-social media idea (if it were ever true). We have to fight for scholarship, or logic, facts, and evidence. We have to fight for history.

The post Forgetting History first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

SpaceX says it wants to deploy an astronomical number of data centres in orbit to supply power for artificial intelligence, but the proposal might not be entirely serious

Magnetism on the Moon has always been a bit confusing. Remote sensing probes have noted there is some magnetic signature, but far from the strong cocoon that surrounds Earth itself. Previous attempts to detect it in returned regolith samples blended together all of the rocks in those samples, leading to confusion about the source - whether they were caused by a strong inner dynamo in ages past, or by powerful asteroid impacts that magnetized the rocks they hit. A new study from Yibo Yang of Zhejiang University and Lin Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published recently in the journal Fundamental Research, shows that the right answer seems to be - a little of both.

The meaning of life has puzzled philosophers for millennia, but new research suggests it could be as simple as lending a helping hand

Researchers have found that manganese, an abundant and inexpensive metal, can be used to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into formate, a potential hydrogen source for fuel cells. The key was a clever redesign that made the catalyst last far longer than similar low-cost materials. Surprisingly, the improved manganese catalyst even beat many expensive precious-metal options. The discovery could help turn greenhouse gas into clean energy ingredients.

How concerned do you truly need to be about vintage ceramicware leaching lead into your food?

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Astronomers have produced the most detailed map yet of dark matter, revealing the invisible framework that shaped the Universe long before stars and galaxies formed. Using powerful new observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the research shows how dark matter gathered ordinary matter into dense regions, setting the stage for galaxies like the Milky Way and eventually planets like Earth.

Astronomers have produced the most detailed map yet of dark matter, revealing the invisible framework that shaped the Universe long before stars and galaxies formed. Using powerful new observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the research shows how dark matter gathered ordinary matter into dense regions, setting the stage for galaxies like the Milky Way and eventually planets like Earth.

Had MAHA doctors been in charge in 2020, when COVID swamped our hospitals and morgues, they would have brought the same level of malevolence and incompetence they are displaying today.

The post Pandemic Gurus: If You Can’t Defend MAHA Doctors Today, Then You Must Discard Everything They Said Regarding COVID. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s making space-based artificial intelligence the “immediate focus” of a newly expanded company that not only builds rockets and satellites, but also controls xAI’s generative-AI software and the X social-media platform. That’s the upshot of Musk's announcement that SpaceX has acquired xAI.

Arp 220 is a well-known pair of galaxies that are merging. New ALMA observations of polarized light reveal the complex and powerful magnetic fields that shape the process.

Ants rely on scent to recognise their comrades, and when they are exposed to common air pollutants, other members of their colony react as if they are enemies

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. This “lens-shaped” galaxy sits in between more familiar spiral alaxies and elliptical galaxies in the galaxy classification scheme. The dark, dramatic dust lanes are the fingerprints of an ancient galaxy merger.

For the first time, researchers have found what seems to be a cloud of dark matter about 60 million times the mass of the sun in our galactic neighbourhood

Yes, the author of the new Quillette article, a critique of sociologist Charles Murray‘s “proof” of Christianity, really is an atheist, though he says he’s not a proselytizing one. Daseler is identified as “a film editor and writer living in LA. And Daseler says in the article below that’s he’s not an ardent atheist, though he’d like to believe in God. But he sure thinks like an atheist as he takes apart Murray’s “scientific” arguments for God.

Like Ross Douthat, Murray has a new book about why we should be religious; Murray’s is called Taking Religion Seriously.  And many of Murray’s arguments for God, which we’ve encountered before, overlap with Douthat’s: they are arguments for God from ignorance, posting not just God but a Christian god—based on things we don’t understand.  Here’s what I said in an earlier piece on this site:

Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.

Murray, then, has a harder task than just convincing us that there’s a supreme being: he has to convince us that it’s the supreme being touted by Christianity. To do that he must, as Daseler shows, support the literal truth of the New Testament, and even Bart Ehrman doesn’t do that.

But I digress; click below to read Daseler’s review, which is also archived here.

I’ll summarize Murray’s arguments for God in bold; indented headings are mine while Daseler’s test itself is indented and my own comments flush left.

a.) There is something rather than nothing.

b.) Physics is often mathematically simple, like equations for motion and gravitation. 

I’ve discussed these two before, and also provided links to others who find them unconvincing arguments for God. (Why do I keep capitalizing “God” as if he exists? I don’t know.)

c.) Some people show “terminal lucidity” (“TL”). That is, some people in a vegetative state, or with profound dementia, suddenly become very lucid before they die. 

In another post I pointed out Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer’s arguments against taking TL as evidence for God  Daseler adds further evidence:

Terminal lucidity is no better at propping up Murray’s case for an immortal soul, as he tacitly admitted during a recent back-and-forth with the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. To date, only one very small study has been conducted on terminal lucidity, indicating that it occurs in approximately six percent of dementia patients. No EEGs, brain imaging, or blood samples were taken during these episodes, so any explanations of the phenomenon must be speculative. The neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston has hypothesised that terminal lucidity may result, at least in some instances, from a reduction in brain swelling. “In their final days, many patients stop eating and drinking entirely,” he explains. “The resulting dehydration could reduce brain swelling, allowing blood flow to increase and temporarily restoring some cognitive function—a brief window of lucidity before the dying process continues.” Nonetheless, Zeleznikow-Johnston is quick to acknowledge that this is merely an educated guess. Murray, by contrast, jumps straight to the conclusion that corroborates his priors: episodes of terminal lucidity reveal the fingerprints of the soul.

I should add that Murray also accepts “near-death experiences” (“NDE”s) as evidence for God, as do recent books like Heaven is for Real and Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Both of these books have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere, and some Googling will turn up ample critiques.

d.) The universe is “fine-tuned” for life. That is, it is more than a coincidence that the physical parameters obtaining in the Universe allow life on at least one planet. Ergo, say people like Murray

This argument seems to convince many people, but not physicists. Indeed, even Daseler finds it hard to refute. But there are many alternative explanations save Murray’s view that the parameters of physics were chosen by God to allow his favorite species to evolve. There could be multiple universes with different physical parameters; most of the Universe is not conducive to life; or there could be a reason we don’t understand why the physical parameters are what they are, and are somehow interlinked. The best answer is “we don’t know,” but Murray thinks that one alternative—the Christian God—is the most parsimonious answer.  But of course he wants to believe in God, and since we have no other evidence for a supreme being, it’s not so parsimonious after all.

e.) There is evidence that the Gospels are factually true.

Anyone who’s studied religious history with an open mind knows this is bogus, for the canonical gospels were written well after Jesus’s death, and by people who had never met the purported Savior.  Murray does some mental gymnastics to obviate this, but he isn’t successful. And, as Daseler points out, the New Testament is full of mistakes (so is the Old Testament: there was, for example, no exodus of the Jews from Egypt).  Here’s a handy list provided by Daseler:

• There was no census during the reign of Caesar Augustus for which citizens had to return to their ancestral homes, as the Gospel of Luke maintains.
• Cyrenius was not the governor of Syria at the time of Jesus’s birth.
• There’s no record, outside the Gospel of Matthew, of Herod the Great slaughtering hundreds of newborn babies.
• When Jesus quotes the Old Testament in the Sermon on the Mount, he quotes from the Septuagint, which was written in Greek, a language neither he nor his listeners spoke.
• The Romans didn’t allow the Jewish Council to meet at night.
• By law, capital trials of the kind Jesus underwent had to be conducted over two days, and never on a Sabbath or holy day.
• There was no tradition of releasing a prisoner to the Jewish people before Passover. The notion that Pontius Pilate, a notoriously ruthless governor, would have released Barabbas, a murderous insurrectionist, is highly unlikely.
• Crucified criminals were commonly left on their crosses for days, as a warning to would-be malefactors, then dumped in mass graves, not promptly taken down and buried in rich men’s tombs.

And this is to say nothing of the supernatural events described in the gospels, such as Matthew’s report that, after the crucifixion, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many,” an incident that, had it actually occurred, would certainly have been recorded by additional sources. Likewise, there are scenes that, logically, must have been invented. If Jesus and Pilate had a private conversation together just before Jesus died, how does the author of the Gospel of John know what they said? And if Matthew and Luke actually witnessed the events they describe, why did they feel the need to plagiarise so many passages word-for-word from Mark?

Still, Murray thinks that the gospels are statements of witnesses, which simply cannot be true based on both historical and internal evidence.

Murray also has a weakness for nonreligious woo, which speaks to his credulity. Daseler:

Like Douthat, Murray has a capacious definition of the word religion that encompasses a fair amount of woo as well as Christian orthodoxy. “I put forward, as a working hypothesis, that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing,” he writes, discarding his commitment to fact-based assertions. Murray devotes an entire chapter to discussing near-death experiences—or NDEs, as they’re popularly known—and terminal lucidity, the rare but documented phenomenon of brain-damaged patients regaining some cognitive abilities just before they die. “In my judgment [NDEs and terminal lucidity] add up to proof that the materialist explanation of consciousness is incomplete,” he writes. “I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”

The only credit Daseler gives Murray is that the sociologist isn’t “preachy”, and hedges his assertions with words like “I think.”

In the end, Murray offers the same tired old arguments advanced against God during the last few decades: all arguments based on ignorance, ignorance equated to a Christian God. And although Daseler says he wants to believe, he simply can’t because, unlike Murray (who claims to proffer evidence in the book The Bell Curve for group difference in intelligence), Daseler is wedded to evidence. And so the reviewer fights his own wishes in favor of evidence—or the lack thereof:

I’m not nearly as ardent an atheist as this review might lead some to think. I wasn’t raised with any religion, so I don’t have a childhood grudge against any particular creed. And unlike Christopher Hitchens, who liked to say that he was glad that God does not exist, I can’t say I’m overjoyed to think that the universe is cold and conscienceless. I’d be delighted to discover that there is a supreme being, so long as He/She/It is compassionate and merciful. I am, in short, exactly the type of person Murray is trying to reach—someone much like himself before he started reading Christian apologetics. Every time I open a book like his, some part of me yearns to be persuaded, and to be given an argument or a piece of evidence that I’ve yet to consider. But Murray fails to deliver. After reading his book, I’m less, not more, inclined to take religion seriously. It’s hard to believe in God when even very bright, thoughtful people can’t come up with good reasons why you should.

I guess I’m like Hitchens here: why wish for something that doesn’t exist? Why not face up to reality and make the best of it?  Apparently Murray doesn’t share those sentiments.

If you want a decent but flawed explanation of “God of the gaps” arguments, click on the screenshot below. You can have fun mentally arguing with the author’s claim that some “gaps” arguments from theism are better than related arguments from naturalism, though the piece as a whole is anti-supernatural. Personally (and self-aggrandizingly), I think the discussion in Faith Versus Fact is better.  But I like the picture (it’s uncredited), and the author does quote theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

 “. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”

But in the 80 years since Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis, we still haven’t found God in what we know.

The most robust evidence to date shows that people with a type of lung cancer lived longer if they received immunotherapy before 3pm

Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Tapping into these communication networks is opening up radical new ways to boost health

Over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, they dragged out a groggy groundhog (Marmota monax), Punxsutawney Phil, from his wooden-box den, and determined whether he could see his shadow.

He did, and that means that we have six more weeks of winter weather to come.  Is that any surprise?

Below is a short video in which Phil is forced to look at a piece of paper. Who knows if he actually saw his shadown, but the top-hatted flacks, members of the so-called “Inner Circle” who interpret Phil’s predictions, did.

But looking at Phil’s history, the rodent is not accurate at predicting the long-term weather:

The Inner Circle claims a 100% accuracy rate, and an approximately 80% accuracy rate in recorded predictions. If a prediction is wrong, they claim that the person in charge of translating the message must have made a mistake in their interpretation. Empirical estimates place the groundhog’s accuracy between 35% and 41%.

So it goes.  It’s a groundhog, for crying out loud, not a weatherman. And the Inner Circle is a religion. . . .