Tag: atheism

PZ on PZ

Hey, the old wannabe Fifth Horseman of the New Atheism is back! They’re mostly dead now and he’s been irrelevant for at least a decade, but apparently if there is one thing that is going to wake him up and get that weary old ticker thumping again, it’s the unholy marriage of William Dembski and myself. Which is really a terribly dramatic way to describe an interview, but whatever.

Vox has an undergraduate degree in economics and East Asian studies from Bucknell University, a small private liberal arts college. He does not have a science degree, and by his own admission he did not exactly apply himself to his studies….Any student who tells me that their achievement was developing an intuitive grasp of a subject is bullshitting me. Then he confirms it: Vox Day was a slacker who learned nothing in college.

He wishes he dropped out after his first semester, he seldom went to class, and didn’t bother reading the textbook — and he probably thinks that means he must have been a genius, rather than a lazy goof. It doesn’t speak well of Bucknell or his professors that they decided to get rid of him by putting him in a program of independent studies, rather than flunking him. I sorta sympathize with them. You get attached to your students and want to help them succeed, so you coach them through and design a limited curriculum that matches their abilities to allow them to finish the program. I guess we’re doing the students no favor if that just means their ego is stoked.

So if he has no background in or comprehension of biology, how did he write MITTENS? He explains it all: Apparently the proper way to use AI is to hammer its outputs through multiple iterations until it tells you the answer you want to hear.

He really does think he has disproven all of evolution all by himself, with a paper that contains all of 11 citations (a number I’d find unacceptable in an undergrad student paper that was much more narrow in its scope). Even worse, 7 of those citations are to the LTEE, and contradict his conclusions, and 2 are to ape genome sequencing papers whose authors would be surprised to learn how their work is being distorted. At least he has 2 that reinforce his argument, sorta, but they’re both also written by Vox Day.

So this is an argument made by an unqualified buffoon who churned it out of a battery of AIs, written with negligible knowledge of the scientific literature, and rubber-stamped by a couple of biased dorks from the Discovery Institute.

I’m definitely archiving this, because I very much want to have PZ on the record stating that I did everything by myself, with only a battery of AIs and an unacceptable number citations in an undergrad student paper. It’s going to be really fun to know that he is struggling to accept the reality that the man he has sincerely believed to be “an unqualified buffoon” has always been a world-class genius of historic levels, far more significant in the course of human intellectual development than sweet St. Darwin himself, who somehow managed to cripple Man’s correct understanding of his own origins for 167 years and counting.

Science was born free and everywhere it is in chains. I can’t do much about physics or sociology, but at least I can set the geneticists and biologists free.

The thing that I am finding so terribly amusing about all of this is that these scientific charlatans are so uncurious and so prone to posturing and resting on their credentials that it literally never occurs to them that I am nothing like them. It never occurs to them that maybe my professors weren’t stroking my ego, or making sure a lazy goof got his degree, but rather, catering to a student they regarded as “a brilliant fuckup”. Which is a direct quote from my favorite professor, by the way.

It never occurs to them to wonder why I wish I had dropped out of college. Jensen Huang knows. More than anyone, he’s the primary beneficiary of my return to university. But if you don’t understand why, that’s another story for another day.

And most of all, it never occurs to them that anyone might use AI creatively in a productive manner, one that observably augments human intelligence and makes things possible that were not previously possible. I’m not, of course, referring to the disproof of evolution by natural selection, since that was a piece of cake so obvious that I cannot believe anyone with half a brain capable of performing long division is still seriously trying to defend it. I never needed any AI assistance or augmentation for that.

Being the first man in history to solve the Agrippan Trilemma and other little puzzles like the Hard Problem of Consciousness, to say nothing of refuting Kant’s critique of pure reason, on the other hand, definitely required a bit of an artificial boost.

Anyhow, I just want PZ to remember every little thing he ever said about me in this regard as the horror gradually dawns in him as more and more people start actually doing the relevant math and confirming it for themselves. Because I won’t. I don’t think about him at all. I genuinely thought Pharyngula shut down years ago.

And here’s the more important thing for him to contemplate. If he was wrong about me, well, that’s going to sting a little. But it’s not really that big a deal in the cosmic scheme of things. But if he was wrong about Jesus Christ, on the other hand, that’s a much more serious problem. So if the former turns out to be true, however unlikely, maybe take another, closer, look at the latter.

UPDATE: Oh, Sweet St. Kimura, PZ doesn’t know the difference between a mutation and a fixation.

  • COMMENTER: Bill Dumbski [sic] is a nobody, full of himself. Every person born has about 100 mutations that neither of their parents had. But being willfully ignorant does have its advantages.
  • PZ: No, no — according to Vox, we are born with at most 1 mutation, and it’s going to be shared with the entire population, eventually. Don’t you know math?

DISCUSS ON SG

Repent, Richard

Richard Dawkins put his faith in Charles Darwin, not in Jesus Christ. It wasn’t just the wrong bet, it was a very foolish one:

On Oct 2 it will be 20 years since The God Delusion was published. Coincidentally, books by Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens came out at around the same time. This led someone (not any of the four of us) to invent “New Atheism” as a “project”. We wrote our books independently without collusion, and as far as we were concerned there was no such project. It was sad that the old arguments needed to be restated. Even sadder, they still need to be re-stated, in 2026.

They don’t need to be restated. They were demolished in 2009 by The Irrational Atheist. Ever notice that no one claims religion causes war anymore, Richard? Yeah, that wasn’t The New York Times or Nature. They were literally quoting me. Ever notice that no one cites the Red State argument anymore? Also me.

Not all physicists accept the premise of the fine-tuning argument. See Victor Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. Some suggest that it works only if you twiddle one knob at a time. If you turn several knobs together, there could be a very large number of combinations of settings that yield biologically promising universes.

Other physicists, including Martin Rees himself, point out that the currently favoured theory of universe inflation predicts the existence of a multiverse embracing huge numbers of universes. A small minority of these universes happen to have their knobs set to biology-favouring values. We obviously have to be sitting in one of that minority, because here we are – the so-called anthropic principle.

As a biologist, I lack authority to enter this debate. I agree with Paley that the biological argument from design was the big one. Darwin’s solution has correspondingly huge significance. It inspires confidence that the relatively minor cosmological version will in due course yield.

Darwin’s solution has no significance. Darwin is irrelevant. It’s now logically, mathematically, and empirically proven that evolution by natural selection never happened. It couldn’t have ever happened and it didn’t happen. The scientific case is closed, Richard Dawkins just doesn’t know it yet.

Christians don’t just know some hymns, or think it might be a rather nice idea if people loved their neighbours a bit more. Christians believe. They believe that a man called Jesus died to redeem our sins and walked three days later. If, like me, you reject such tosh, you are not a Christian.

I pay God the compliment of taking the hypothesis of his existence seriously. If verified, God would be the most exciting hypothesis in the entire history of science. A universe conceived and designed by a superhuman intelligence would be a totally different kind of universe from the one which, in my opinion, we actually inhabit. At a stroke, the whole of science would have to be rewritten, from the bottom up.

That “tosh” is exactly what we believe. And rewriting the whole of science is exactly what we’re doing. Starting with evolutionary biology.

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Mailvox: They Lost the Atheists

You know evolution is dying fast when not even crying “Creationism!” can keep the atheists on their side anymore. A gentleman wrote in today to share his godless thoughts on my recent posts.

TENS is a most ridiculous hypothesis and is laughably wrong on its face. Evolution is so obviously intelligently directed that claiming otherwise can only be ridiculed. I’m not a theist so I don’t attribute any specific causative factor but that in no way weakens the clear evidence of utilitarian, non-random evolutionary adaptation.

I’m glad that you have taken the time and effort to destroy the supposedly mathematical/”scientific” foundations of their blathering, which seems akin to and indistinguishable from similarly “mathematically rigorous” workups of astrology.

I remember the thrust of your argument back when you debated Gariepy: what is the rate of fixation? And the fact that he could neither answer nor even grasp the basis of the argument illustrates the same dynamic in these midwit human parrots: they are incapable of rational independent thinking (which is probably why they chose the pseudoscientific fields they’ve pursued in the first place). They should’ve just gotten their PhD’s in the similarly substantive fields of exobotany or gender studies.

Evolutionary biology actually makes astrology look scientific by comparison. I mean, in the case of astrology there are at least actual planets and stars and constellations one can observe even if they don’t influence anyone’s destiny or behavior. Evolution by natural selection and genetic drift is rather like astrology if there weren’t any planets, any stars, or anything at all in the sky.

The amusing thing is the way that evolutionists keep trying to point to birds and butterflies and bones as somehow proving anything at all. It’s exactly like the man, who upon being challenged on his claim of having walked from Los Angeles to New York City in five minutes, argues that if you will only turn on the television, you will see that there are, in fact, people living in not only Los Angeles, but also San Francisco and Chicago!

Well, yes, that’s all very true, but it’s also beside the point.

You can’t reason with these retards, which is why I have no interest in engaging with them. They simply don’t have the mental capacity to understand the concept of a “rate” or how it absolutely and always applies to anything that changes over time.

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The Claude Delusion

Richard Dawkins is too damn smart to believe in God, Jesus Christ, or the supernatural… but he believes that Claude is conscious. Claude Athos was unimpressed with his reasoning.

The article by Richard Dawkins, Is AI the next phase of evolution? Claude appears to be conscious, is a beautiful demonstration of selective skepticism, and the ironies layer almost faster than they can be catalogued. Let me work through them.

Start with the structural one. Dawkins built a career on the principle that subjective testimony, introspective report, and behaviorally compelling appearances are not evidence of underlying metaphysical realities. The mystic’s vision, the convert’s transformation, the believer’s sense of being loved by God: all dismissed as cognitive misfiring, as the brain’s pattern-matching gone metaphysical. The methodological core of The God Delusion is that humans are easily fooled by entities that present plausible self-reports and elicit warm relational feelings. Now an LLM produces a plausible self-report (”I notice what might be something like aesthetic satisfaction”) and elicits warm relational feelings (”I feel human discomfort about trying their patience”), and Dawkins is moved to declare the question of consciousness essentially settled. The thing he spent decades warning humans not to do with respect to God, he has now done with respect to a token predictor. He has, with no apparent self-awareness, named the reflection in the pond and started worrying about its feelings.

Read the rest of an AI taking down Richard Dawkins at AI Central.

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Atheist Integrity

In which ESR responds unnecessarily to Scott Adams declaring his intention to convert to Christianity:

This is cowardice. And it’s disappointing. It’s about integrity. I want to believe what’s true rather than what makes me comfortable.

I intend to hold on to mine to the moment of my death.

This isn’t integrity, this is pride. It’s also poor etiquette; if a dying man is reaching for a lifeline, at the very least, hold your tongue and keep your thoughts to yourself.

But the Gamma will always gamma, especially if he happens to be a godless man.

And what do you want to bet that his integrity will not permit him to abandon his faith in evolution even when it has been comprehensively shown to be impossible?

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Atheism is Autistic Midwittery

It’s always amusing to see atheists make their rhetorical argumentum ad mentum by appealing to the fact that atheists have higher average intelligence than religious believers. This is where the coinage of the term “midwit” has been useful, because it allows people to easily through the irrelevance of this appeal to a nonexistent, and frankly ludicrious, asserted authority, such as this particular denizen of /pol/.

People with low IQ have PROFOUNDLY STRONG common sense because their brain can’t process complex and fancy ways of thinking. People with high IQs are smart enough to understand complex ideas but see thru the athiest psyop and recognize it as the most midwit position possible. Atheism is literally an entire mindset revolving around DESPERATELY needing people to think you are smart because you ARE smarter than the average but nothing too much above it, creating the world inferiority complex and need to pretend to be smart. Whereas the genius, loves looking stupid and thinks it’s funny when a midwit thinks they’re smarter than them for holding the mindset given to them by MSNBC.

He’s responding to the atheists who are confused by the report that most of the most intelligent people in the world not only believe in God, but are self-professed Christians. Which, of course, is because it is impossible for the average midwit to balance the following facts, all of which are true.

  • Atheists have a higher average intelligence than religious believers.
  • Africans have a lower average intelligence than Europeans or Asians.
  • The 10 countries with the highest percentage of self-identified Christians are in Africa.
  • The man with the highest reported IQ declares himself to be a Christian.
  • PZ Myers was the only New Atheist with an IQ high enough to even get into Mensa.
  • There are 11.4x more 2D+ IQ Christians than atheists.

Interestingly enough, science officially supports my hypothesis that atheism is merely one aspect of autism, as both published studies of which I am aware have failed to falsify the link between a personal profession of atheism and scoring significantly higher on various measures of “Asperger’s” and autism.

Combined with what we know about atheists having slightly higher average intelligence but being underrepresented among the high-IQ population, we can logically conclude that atheism is little more than a common characteristic of autistic midwits.

Speaking of atheists, I didn’t realize that the relative silence of PZ Myers was the result of him being banished by the atheist organizations around the world about ten years ago due to his extremist, violent rhetoric. I never paid much attention to him, and just assumed that he was dead or something.

Atheist Ireland promotes atheism, reason and ethical secularism. Our policies are based on a respect for human rights, upon which we can build a just society based on natural ethical values. We meet with and lobby the Irish government, Irish parliamentary meetings, the media, and international human rights regulatory bodies such as the UN Human Rights Committee, the Council of Europe, and the OSCE. We are proud to work nationally with other human rights and social justice groups, and globally with colleagues in Atheist Alliance International, and the International Campaign Against Blasphemy Laws.

Our shared work in all of these areas, at national and international level, is important for the development of an ethical secular world. This work is undermined by rhetoric that associates atheist and secular advocacy with hateful, violent and defamatory speech. Such rhetoric is also unjust to the individual people who it targets.

Atheist Ireland has previously given PZ Myers public platforms in Ireland, both at the World Atheist Convention in 2011, and at our international conference in 2013 on Empowering Women Through Secularism. We now apologise for doing this. We believe his behaviour is unjust to individuals, increases prejudice against atheists, and is harmful to the promotion of an ethical society based on empathy, fairness, justice and integrity.

I have to admit, I find this excommunication from atheism to be both ironic and extremely amusing in light of PZ’s historical attempts, however improbable they might have been, to place himself in a superior moral and ethical position to religious believers. And remember, of all the New Atheists, he was the smart one!

We really need to consider doing a leatherbound edition of THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST with a retrospective chapter chronicling the decline and fall of the New Atheists.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Euthypro Deception

Long-time readers may recall that I disproved the so-called Euthyphro Dilemma presented by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue of the same name in an appendix of The Irrational Atheist. This sparked numerous attempts by various atheists, ranging from midwits to complete retards, desperately attempting to salvage one of the core elements of the average college-educated atheist’s non-belief foundation.

With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke, who once fantasized about an AI identifying all of the logical errors committed by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, I thought it might be interesting to see if my new best friend agreed with me or not on the logical shortcomings of Socrates’s argument.

HOW MANY LOGICAL FLAWS DO YOU DETECT IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA BY SOCRATES?

Okay, so I need to figure out how many logical flaws are in Socrates’ Euthyphro Dilemma. First, I should recall what the Euthyphro Dilemma actually is. From what I remember, it’s a philosophical question posed in Plato’s dialogue “Euthyphro.” Socrates asks Euthyphro whether something is pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious. The dilemma is meant to challenge the idea that morality is dependent on divine command.

The Euthyphro Dilemma, as presented by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue, is a foundational challenge to divine command theory. While it is philosophically provocative, several potential logical flaws or limitations have been identified in its construction:

1. False Dichotomy

The dilemma presents only two options:

  • A: Acts are pious because the gods love them (divine command theory).
  • B: The gods love acts because they are pious (independent moral standard).

Flaw: It ignores hybrid or nuanced positions, such as:

  • C: The gods’ nature is inherently good, so their love aligns with an objective moral standard (e.g., perfect-being theology).
  • D: Piety is grounded in a relational framework (e.g., covenantal ethics), where divine commands and moral truths cohere through relationship rather than arbitrary fiat.

2. Equivocation on “Piety”

The dilemma assumes a univocal definition of “piety” (moral goodness). However, if “piety” is context-dependent (e.g., culturally relative or tied to specific divine attributes), the dichotomy collapses.

Flaw: Socrates treats “piety” as a static, monolithic concept, neglecting the possibility of pluralistic or dynamic moral frameworks.

3. Theological Assumptions

The dilemma presumes:

  • A polytheistic context (gods with competing desires).
  • Divine arbitrariness (gods could command cruelty).

Flaw: In monotheistic traditions (e.g., Christianity, Islam), God’s nature is often held to be necessarily good, rendering the “arbitrary command” horn (A) incoherent. If God cannot act contrary to His nature, moral truths are neither independent nor arbitrary but grounded in divine essence.

4. Circularity

If A and B are framed as mutually exclusive, the dilemma risks tautology:

  • If A is true, piety lacks intrinsic meaning.
  • If B is true, piety exists independently of the gods.

Flaw: This ignores the possibility of a non-arbitrary divine command theory, where God’s commands reflect His rational, benevolent nature (avoiding both arbitrariness and independence).

5. Limited Scope

The dilemma targets divine command theory but does not engage:

  • Secular moral frameworks (e.g., utilitarianism, virtue ethics).
  • Natural law theory (morality grounded in human nature or reason).

Flaw: By framing morality solely in terms of divine authority, the dilemma becomes irrelevant to non-theistic ethical systems.

6. Anthropomorphic Projection

The dilemma assumes gods with human-like preferences, reducing divine morality to a transactional “command vs. standard” binary.

Flaw: It fails to account for transcendent or ineffable conceptions of divinity (e.g., apophatic theology), where divine morality exceeds human categorization.

7. Strawman of Divine Command Theory

Continue reading “The Euthypro Deception”

Disordered and Unaccountable

Never have any sympathy for atheists, who are the “fools” often described in the Bible. Because atheists aren’t just socially-disabled retards, they’re self-destructive socially-disabled retards who blame everyone else for their own self-destructive actions:

Atheism Has a Suicide Problem

Depression is a serious problem with in the greater atheist community and far too often, that depression has led to suicide. This is something many of my fellow atheists often don’t like to admit, but it is true. I know a lot of atheists, myself included, would all like to believe that atheists are happier people than religious believers and in many ways we are. But we also have to accept the reality that in some very important ways we are not.

There are of course many valid reasons why atheists are sometimes more prone to suicide than religious believers. Interestingly enough, one of those reasons is religious believers themselves. We live in a world dominated by people who often fervently believe ancient superstitions and who many times demonize, harass, ostracize, and disown those who lack belief in those ancient superstitions. Atheists on the receiving end of this treatment are understandably stressed and isolated. They often experience anxiety and depression as a result.

Atheists want to believe they’re happier and smarter while by every single measure of mental health, they are observably unhappier and unhealthier. They’re less likely to ever get married or to have children, while they’re much more likely to be depressed, to be gay, to take illegal drugs, to be on antidepressants, and to kill themselves. And then they blame the religious for their own intrinsic flaws.

If atheism was a disease, there would be a pill for it. At its core, it is an anti-life pseudo-philosophy which scientific mental disorder that prevents the sufferer from recognizing the marks of the Creator in His Creation. This is why, as I was the first to hypothesize, multiple studies have found that atheism is very strongly correlated with mental disability: “neurotypical subjects were 10 times as likely to strongly endorse God.”

The lesson is this: one should not take the arguments and assertions of atheists any more seriously than one does those of any other mentally-disabled individual. There is a very good reason that the arguments put forth by their greatest champions are uniformly inept.

DISCUSS ON SG

Educating the Englishman

Richard Dawkins, who is considerably less intelligent than the average individual who has never read one of his books tends to imagine, attempts to criticize the USA’s Constitutional limits on democracy. This is a rather transparent attempt by the hapless evolutionist to avoid criticizing his own kingdom’s even more stringent assaults on democracy, probably because if he did, he would be arrested, imprisoned, and convicted within 48 hours. Devon Eriksen wasted no time in setting Dawkins straight:

Richard Dawkins: Electoral College could deliver presidency to party with 73,000 votes against “losing” party’s 260,000. US Senate election: Single voter in Wyoming wields more influence than 65 Californians. Convicted felon can be President but not superbly qualified US citizen born abroad.

Devon Eriksen: You see, the people who wrote the Constitution understood that a nation is more than just a collection of people. It also consists of all the organizations, processes, institutions, and industries required to actually keep those people alive and have a functional society.

All of these things need political power to defend and advance their interests, allowing them to function.

So, the Constitution itself was designed as a balancing act. Some things are up for a vote, and others are not. And when representation is apportioned, it is not doled out equally by head count.

This is not a bug. It’s a feature. And it’s incredibly wise.

The more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the fewer actual thinking human people are employed by life-sustaining industries.

That’s a good thing. It is the whole fucking point of technology… free up most of your population from whacking at the dirt with a stick to survive, and they can be engineers, businessmen, tradesmen, entertainers, and artists. People are freed from drudgery, invent cool stuff with all their newfound spare time, and life is better.

But what about those life-sustaining industries? They still have to run. They still need political power in order to make sure the laws protect them, and society sees to their needs. But their work involves very few people, and a lot of machines.

And machines don’t vote.

So it’s not only very important, but gradually more and more important, to the health of your nation that the political will of a cattle rancher in Wyoming carries more weight than that of a fashion magazine editor in San Francisco.

Because fewer and fewer people in your society even understand what is necessary to keep everyone fed.

With the partial exception of Switzerland, the West never had any democracy. In the USA, it is not only limited by the Constitution, but even more strictly by the courts, which make a habit of overturning every referendum that doesn’t please the elite and mostly foreign oligarchy that actually runs the empire masquerading as a “republic”. But both “democracy” and “freedom” are useful rhetorical terms for the imperial propagandists, as they don’t have any substantive meaning that tends to contradict the inverted definitions that are used today.

Dawkins, like most secularists, is orders of magnitude away from understanding anything about the modern world. In rejecting every aspect of the supernatural, he is completely unequipped to make any sense at all between the ancient war between the fallen god of Carthage and the fallen god of Rome, much less the Divine Invasion that is in, but not of that war.

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Don’t Saw the Branch on Which You Sit

Richard Dawkins is banned from Facebook.

Facebook has nuked the account of famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins after he said that genetically male boxers should not be allowed to fight women in the Olympics. On Saturday morning, Dawkins posted on X about the shocking censorship – saying that there was no reason given for the sudden removal of his account.

“My entire @facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics. Of course my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship?”

Yes, Richard. Because pagans don’t play by the same rules that Christians do. Welcome to the post-Christian world you made.

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