More Evidence For a Human Ring Species

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Relationship between modern humans, Neanderthals and Devisovans (to which now needs to be added a fourth species)

Creationist loons and the professional liars of the Discovery Institute must dread a publication from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. After the recent confirmation that modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (H. neaderthalensis (or should that be H. s. neanderthalensis?)), interbred and that H.sapiens also interbred with the recently discovered Neanderthal relatives, the 'Denisovans', to form what amounted to an incompletely speciated 'ring species' only a few thousand years ago, the Institute has now dealt another blow to Creationism.

At the Biology of Genomes meeting last week, reported in Science, Svante Pääbo's team announced that DNA analysis of samples obtained from Neanderthal and Denisovan bones found in the Denisova cave in Siberia, using a new technique, has yielded a nearly complete, high coverage of the genomes of our closest cousins which not only confirms the previously reported interbreeding but strongly suggests a fourth, so far undiscovered species of Homo involved in the complex.

So far as I am aware, this is the first case of a new distinct group of Homo being identified on the basis of the DNA it contributed to another species with which it occasionally interbred.

Monkeying With Creationist Fossils

Rukwapithecus (foreground) and Nsungwepithecus (background).

Credit: Mauricio Anton

Creationism has taken such a battering recently that one is almost tempted to feel sorry for frauds like Ken Ham, Eric Hovind, Dwayne Gish and the professional liars at the Discovery Institute. It must be a bit like standing in a tornado trying to shelter under an umbrella just to keep the ignorant loons who give them money from finding out the truth.

Hot on the heels of the news that modern non-African peoples interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans to form a possible human ring-species, showing that human speciation was in progress only a few thousand years ago, and the news that a seven million year-old earliest human fossil had been found showing intermediate 'transitional' characteristics between humans and chimpanzees, comes news that the earliest common ancestor of both apes and Old World monkeys has now been found. It's a delicious irony that today's slap in the face for primitive Creationists is news about the evolution of humans from monkeys.

Self-Righteous Bigots Are Whining Again

When Christians become a 'hated minority' – CNN Belief Blog - CNN.com Blogs

I had to laugh when I read this blog by John Blake of CNN.

When Peter Sprigg speaks publicly about his opposition to homosexuality, something odd often happens.

During his speeches, people raise their hands to challenge his assertions that the Bible condemns homosexuality, but no Christians speak out to defend him.

"But after it is over, they will come over to talk to me and whisper in my ear, 'I agree with everything you said,'" says Sprigg, a spokesman for The Family Research Council, a powerful, conservative Christian lobbying group.

So we have the phenomenon of the shy Christian, or should that be shy homophobe hiding behind Christianity?

The hypocrisy of someone who wants to repress a minority complaining about being a repressed minority is all to obvious but it positively shouts out in the very next paragraph:

We’ve heard of the 'down-low' gay person who keeps his or her sexual identity secret for fear of public scorn. But Sprigg and other evangelicals say changing attitudes toward homosexuality have created a new victim: closeted Christians who believe the Bible condemns homosexuality but will not say so publicly for fear of being labeled a hateful bigot.

So closeted gays are perfectly okay and just as it should be, but imagine the effrontery of expecting a Christian to keep his/her bigotry and hate private? The very idea?

Obviously, Christians should be entitled to bully, harass, offend and deny human rights to anyone they wish provided they can find the necessary excuse in their Big Book of Excuses, aka, the Holy Bible. What's the point of a religion if you can't use it to feel better about yourself by elevating yourself above others and pretending to be their moral superior?

But what's interesting is not the usual Christian hypocrisy, inhumanity, double standards and over-inflated sense of entitlement but what these changing times tell us about two things:

1. The state of Christianity and how it's losing its former status.
2. How society's ethics and morality is developing whilst Christianity, like other religions, is trying to act as a break on human cultural progress and moral development.

On that last point, religion is not, and has never been, a source of morality. Religion and morality coexist and to a great extent, morality precedes and, in the early stages, informs religion. No popular religion ever formed around a god or an idea that was repugnant to the majority of people.

If you doubt that, ask yourself if you would think of a god as good or bad if it told you to kill babies? Is killing babies wrong because your god says so, or does your god say it's wrong because it's wrong? How do you think Christianity would have fared if those who made up the Jesus stories wrote about a man who told you to be unkind to old ladies and to kill kittens for fun?

Yes, yes! I know the Old Testament god was a monster - which is why the early Christians had to invent a nicer one when the Bronze-Age Hebrews came into contact with the culturally more advanced Greeks and Romans. Under the influence of newer ideas, 1st century Palestine was on the verge of abandoning Yahweh and becoming Yahwatheist, which is why Christianity was invented.

No matter how much humanism there is in nascent religions, the problem is that religion then becomes a dogma which can only be changed slowly and with great effort, whilst society continues to develop and reassess and re-formulates its morality. In the last few generations we have seen massive changes in our cultures and ethics. We have stopped buying and selling 'lesser races' as slaves; we no longer colonise and deny democratic and human rights to third-world people; we no longer deny working people and women the vote; we no longer fight wars with massive armies slaughtering one another to see who is the last one standing. We now see it as wrong to deny access to goods, services and opportunity to the disable.

Christianity has normally opposed every one of those improvements in human rights for ordinary people. At the very least, religions and theologians have always 'discovered' a perfectly sound theological reason to justify not changing. God created it that way for a reason and ours is not to reason why.

And now we no longer deny people basic human rights because of their gender and sexuality. This is the last bastion of Christian control. Christians like to believe they own marriage, and the ability to exercise what little control they have left is too precious to them to give it up without a fight. No area of human activity is out of bounds for their interference and meddling, even what consenting adults do in private.

Let's look at the excuse they use for this abuse:

Strangely, Jesus was entirely silent on the subject and yet this is the very Jesus whom these same gay-abusing Christians will tell you introduced a new covenant and effectively abolished the laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But only the laws they find inconvenient, it seems.

First, the usual passage:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

Leviticus 18:22

Leaving aside the question of whether gay men actually DO lie with one another 'as with a woman', which would be physically impossible unless anal intercourse with a woman was the norm when Leviticus was written, since neither of them have the right female equipment, why take this law in isolation and ignore so many of the others?

This 'Letter to Dr Laura (Schlessinger) has been around the Internet for many years. I first saw it on a Compuserve forum in about 1997.

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly
states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
7. Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.

I think that makes the point better than I ever could.

What we are witnessing now is the end-game for Christianity. The tension on the elastic band keeping us tethered to the Bronze-Age is at breaking point. Society has progress to the point where hysterical Christian attempts to hold it back simply make it worse for Christianity by making them stand out as reactionary bigots merely using an outmoded superstition to try to cling on to the last vestiges of the power they have abused for so long.

Where once you could cross the road to avoid Christians shouting abuse at strangers and threatening them with their god, or the mad person standing in stained underwear shouting Bible verses and abuse from his or her window, we now only need to log on to Twitter or do a quick Google search to find today's batch of religious nutters and Dunning-Kruger simpletons telling the world what God thinks and how science has got it all wrong - with a computer.

Christianity on the Internet is now represented by lunatics, bullies, hate-filled bigots and frauds from which decent, humanitarian, compassionate human beings are recoiling and which is causing people to question the basis of their faith if it can produce people like the repugnant religious fundamentalists we now encounter daily. Consequently, most developed countries are witnessing a phenomenal rise in the numbers of people admitting to having no religious belief, many of whom are coming out of the closet Christians would dearly love to keep them in along with gays. In many European countries Atheists/Agnostics are now the majority and even in staunchly Catholic countries, church attendance is falling rapidly.

The whining Christians complaining about not being allowed to repress a minority any more, and needing to feel ashamed of their bigotry, is merely a symptom of that terminal decline. I'm pleased that they are at least feeling shame for their hate-filled bigotry and are becoming embarrassed to show it in public, when once they would have been proud of it and made sure we all knew it. This is a sign that they are subconsciously adopting humanist morality.

[Update 19 May 2013] Yesterday France became the fourteen nation to abandon yet another inhumane piece if Christian dogma when it legalised same-sex marriages.

'via Blog this'

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Dunning-Kruger Creationists

Science doesn't invent things, that's the job of technology. Science merely discovers things.

Sometimes though, science doesn't so much discover new things as put what is already known into scientific language together with the evidence and data underpinning it. Take, for example the understandable annoyance by Patrick Matthew that credit for describing evolution by natural selection had gone to Darwin and Wallace when he had mentioned it in an obscure book on forestry, assuming that it was such obvious idea that he couldn't have been the first to think of it, so never made much of it until Darwin and Wallace, who were completely unaware of Matthew or his book, were receiving all the credit - and praise for their genius.

Darwin, of course, graciously acknowledged Matthew's prior claim, pointing only to the obscurity of his choice of publication as the excuse for his (and the entire scientific establishment's) ignorance of it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when incompetent people not only fail to realise their incompetence, but consider themselves much more competent than everyone else. Basically, they're too stupid to know that they're stupid.

RationalWiki - Dunning-Kruger effect

Just so with the Dunning-Kruger effect. One of my old mother's sayings - and she had many - was, "They're too daft to know they're silly!" She used it particularly for religious fundamentalists and fanatics but also for the idiot sons of the aristocracy and nouveaux riches who assumed they had the right to govern us and who populated the Tory benches at Westminster and kindly ran the local councils for us. It wasn't her own saying; she had learned it from her parents who were the product of countless generations of the English agricultural working class.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell, The triumph of Stupidity

But Dunning and Kruger, in Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments showed the underpinning data, put it into the language of science and published it - and so claimed the title for its discovery. Which is fair enough really because the experiments they conducted were designed to sort the wheat of wisdom from the chaff of prejudice and ignorance, which are also to be found in those pearls of ancient wisdom. Science is a methodology for ensuring we are right by more than simple chance.

Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

Kruger J, Dunning D.;
J Pers Soc Psychol. 1999 Dec;77(6):1121-34.

Which is a slightly convoluted lead in to a short blog on the Dunning-Kruger effect which I was prompted to look into in an attempt to understand the antics of a particularly obnoxious individual who seems to think that the best way to convince the world of his genius is to put on a daily display of ignorance and stupidity and that the best way to promote his religion is to be as obnoxious and abusive as possible in its name. Maybe it's just hate and frustration at his own social ineptitude and consequent social isolation which motivates him - certainly he shows the social skills of the sociopath - but equally possibly he could be a classic Dunning-Kruger simpleton, too daft to know he's silly.

Basically, Dunning and Kruger found that clever people tend to underestimate their own potential, usually assuming that, if they find a task easy, so will others. Asked to rank their expected performance in a test, clever people will tend to underestimate their relative performance. Stupid people, on the other hand, often over-estimate their own abilities assuming themselves to be experts on very little actual knowledge, assuming that this little knowledge is all that is required to be an expert. They tend to rank themselves higher than they actually perform.

Sound familiar? If not, spend a while on Twitter, especially following the hastags such as #Evolution, #TeamJesus, #Atheism or #Science to see a daily parade of people who know little or nothing of the subjects of either theology or science but who are eager to tell the world that science or biology has got it all wrong, or that there is definitely proof of whatever god they believe in because it says so in a holy book that they know for a fact is never wrong about anything. Few if any of them will have studied science or theology.

To be a dedicated Dunning-Kruger performer one has also to have the ability to wave away anything in the way of logic or facts which contradicts one's absolute certainty that one knows everything there is to know about a given subject. Either the information is obviously wrong - otherwise I'd know about it! - or the opponent is clearly mad, stupid, ignorant or evil. It is simply impossible that the information or logical reasoning could be correct, and who could possibly know or understand the subject better than one of the world's leading experts who knows everything about the subject, having once read a blog or watched a TV program, or read a few pages in a book, or simply thought about it once and decided it was all wrong?

Obviously, if you can't say when a monkey last gave birth to a human or a crocodile turned into a duck, like 'Darwin claimed', or you can't produce all the transitional fossils on which the Theory of Evolution (which is no more than a guess anyway) depends, Evolution is a lie and a religion, and science requires more faith that believing Jesus rose from the dead, that snakes can talk, or that Mohammed flew about on a winged horse.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

So the Dunning-Kruger Creationists imagine they've won the argument and proved their god must have done it all by magic, impressing the world with their brilliance and settling the argument once and for all. Can't think what all those scientists are wasting all their time and money on when it's all so obvious! And what's the point of learning any more when you know it's all wrong anyway? Why is everyone else so stupid!?

This phenomenon was investigated by Helmuth Nyborg of the University of Aarhus, Denmark:

Abstract
The present study examined whether IQ relates systematically to denomination and income within the framework of the g nexus, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97). Atheists score 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. Denominations differ significantly in IQ and income. Religiosity declines between ages 12 to 17. It is suggested that IQ makes an individual likely to gravitate toward a denomination and level of achievement that best fit his or hers particular level of cognitive complexity. Ontogenetically speaking this means that contemporary denominations are rank ordered by largely hereditary variations in brain efficiency (i.e. IQ). In terms of evolution, modern Atheists are reacting rationally to cognitive and emotional challenges, whereas Liberals and, in particular Dogmatics, still rely on ancient, pre-rational, supernatural and wishful thinking. [My empasis]

Nyborg, H. The intelligence–religiosity nexus: A representative study of white adolescent Americans

As RationalWiki explains, the tendency of clever people to under-estimate their potential is a form of psychological projection: those who found the tasks easy (and thus scored highly) mistakenly thought that they would also be easy for others. This is similar to the "impostor syndrome" whereby high achievers fail to recognise their talents as they think that others must be equally good.

He [Paul Revere] who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.

Sarah Palin, on Paul Revere's midnight ride,
June 3, 2011

It's a supreme irony that, whilst intelligent people can underestimate their ability because they have the intelligence to realise they could be wrong, unintelligent people can stupidly over-estimate their own ability because they lack the intellect to realise they could be wrong. People impressed by displays of self-confidence will often vote for stupid people whereas what we should be looking for in our politicians and leading industrialist, bankers, and generals is healthy self-doubt. Perhaps the single most important achievement of ultra-patriotic American Christian right is that people who are both educated and honest (i.e. the scientists and intellectuals) who should be amongst the best able and qualified to govern America, are effectively debarred from holding public office. Instead, America is governed by what often look like Dunning-Kruger syndrome sufferers.

The Internet at times seems to be crawling with religious loons, creationists and science deniers all confidently telling us, from a position of almost complete ignorance and with absolute certainty, that something is indisputably wrong or indisputably right, and who, when questioned, become abusive or simply dismiss you as a fool, and who never ever take the risk of accepting the answer to the questions they keep throwing out or reading anything which would disturb their cosy certainty and cause a little self doubt.

Refference: Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121–34.
doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367

Wikipedia - Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Manny's Many Twitter Accounts [Update 13]

We recently outed the serial abuser, loon, attention-seeking spammer and Internet troll, Manuel "Manny" de Dios Agosto, the emotionally immature failed wannabee Catholic priest from the Bronx who several of us have known for several months to be behind the Twitter account @Sacerdotus. The evidence can be seen here.

It is also very apparent, and has been for many months, that Manuel's method of abuse and harassment involves using multiple Twitter accounts. This blog will serve as a register for all Manuel's known accounts, so people who wish to ignore his incessant attention-seeking, infantile spam, cyber-bullying and harassment, know which accounts to ignore or block altogether. If Manuel's behaviour again descends to the depths he reached in the summer of 2012, when all his accounts had to be taken down by Twitter Support pending his undertaking to behave in future, this list can serve to support any official complaints against him.

Please feel free to register any new accounts in the comment section below, together with supporting evidence, and I will add them to the main blog. The usual signs that they are Manuel's accounts includes:

• Repetitively re-tweeting tweets from his other accounts.
• Promoting Manuel's blogs.
• Challenging people to a debate about Christianity then ignoring questions or becoming abusive when asked to clarify a point or substantiate a claim.
• Constant claims that people won't debate him or are afraid of him.
• Abusing the people Manuel normally abuses or agreeing with Manuel's abusive tweets.
• Having several of Manuel's accounts in the follower and following lists.
• Sharing Manuel's obsessions.
• Accounts impersonating people who Manuel is currently abusing, stalking or otherwise showing an obsessive interest in.
• Abusive accounts by people purporting to be devout Catholics, showing an obsessive fascination with the trappings of Catholic priesthood and variations on the 'Sacerdotus/Sacerdotvs/curatus/curatvs' theme.
• Replies from Manuel with one account to tweets sent to a different one. Running many accounts obviously gets confusing

Account	Notes	Current Status
@Sacerdotus	Manuel's main account in which he pretends his name is Michael. [Update 4 March 2015] Bizarrely, Twitter have reinstated Manuel's original account after promising to reduce trolling and abuse. It seems the hopeless muddle in Customer Safety which so embarrasses their CEO, is continuing. Of course he immediately recommenced begging for money and harassing his usual victims - Twitter informed.	Active again. Suspended again as of 30-March-2015
@SACERD0TUS	The account Manuel uses to get around being blocked, apparently believing that no one will notice the all caps to disguise the fact that he has replaces the letter 'o' with a zero.	Deleted
@Sacerdotvs	Used by Manuel to get round blocks.	Permanently suspended.
@SacerdotusBlogs	Account set up when all Manuel's other accounts were suspended. Immediately commenced abusing those whom Manuel had been harassing prior to suspension. Also suspended a few hours after creation.	Deleted.
@RosaRublcondior	An impersonation account Manuel was using to post gratuitously offensive obscenities until all his accounts were suspended by Twitter. Then used by him to support a petition to get me banned. Substitution of 'i' for 'l'.	Permanently suspended.
@RationallyFaith	Thinly disguised account normally used by Manuel to agree with himself and to abuse those who disagree with him.	Permanently suspended.
@Bronxbomber777	Used by Manuel to post threats of violence, often sexually explicit, especially to females.	Permanently suspended.
@YearOfFaith2012	Plagiarised by Manuel from an official Catholic account, presumably in an attempt to give it credence. Used for the usual abuse and to make it look like people agree with him.	Permanently suspended
@NYCLATINO2011	Used by Manuel to pose as a gay male prostitute to contact gays prior to spamming them with homophobic abuse. Has been known to post pornography visible to minors. Account appears to have been deleted very recently. Was active earlier on day of writing. (28 May 2013) Now active again and being used by Manny to compliment himself and tell others how brilliant he is. Manuel has developed a tactic for trying to hide his trail when he gets frightened that he's gone too far. He renames an account, then creates a new one with the original name and immediately deletes it. He seems to think this deletes all his old tweets but keeps all his followers. It doesn't, of course.	Name changed to @NYCLATINO2012.
@NYCLATINO2012	Ditto.	Name Changed to @NYCLATINO2013.
@NYCLATINO2013	Ditto.	Permanently suspended.
@jaxz0hnp	An impersonation account used to abuse and harass user @jaxzohnp. Simple substitution of 'o' with zero again.	Permanently suspended.
@StJohnSmith	Used for same function as @RationallyFaith.	Still active but all tweets and following appear to have been deleted. May have been renamed as above.
@Catholic_Blog	Yet another account used by Manuel to promote his blog, post abuse at those who disagree with him and agree with himself because very few real people ever do.	Permanently suspended.
822451ac-f4aa-11e2-802e-000bcdcb5194	This AOL Opaque OpenID account is used by Manuel to spam blogs requiring a registered account to post comments. The purpose of this form of OpenID appears to be to facilitate anonymous abuse and spam on blogs. He assumes people won't know it's him being his usual obnoxious and infantile self - rather like a child who thinks you can't see him when he puts his hands over his eyes. The clue of course is that he invariably agrees with and supports himself - a thing which no sane person would do - and his posts resemble those of a 8 year-old in terms of emotional maturity.	N/A
@TylerNull	Used by Manuel to promote his YouTube efforts because no one else does.	Renamed to @Peregrinusmmvii.
@Peregrinusmmvii	Another new account which began attacking Manuel's favourite obsessions and hate figures soon after the above account picked up its first warning, which came soon after it took up where Manuel left off, soon after @Sacerdotus was warned again.	Permanently suspended.
@RosaIsSuspended	The account Manuel now uses to post automated infantile abuse.	Permanently suspended.
@SacerSpended	Now all Manuel's usual accounts have been permanently suspended he is trying a new trick. He uses this account to pretend to be pleased Manny has been suspended and claims to have found who the 'real' @Sacerdotus is. Of course, it isn't the expelled seminarian Manuel de Dios Agosto but some other innocent person whom Manuel claims he found using links I provided on the blog where we exposed him. Needless to say, these links don't exist. The laugh is that this account was only created a couple of days ago and immediately followed me claiming to know all about @Sacerdotus and his lies, yet appears not to know what his other account is or why he should be interested in Manuel. What he doesn't seem to grasp is that he's simply confirming yet again that he is indeed Manuel de Dios Agosto, expelled seminarian, otherwise why would he be so implausibly pretending @Sacerdotus is someone else? I wonder if anyone can guess why Manuel is so desperate to want people not to know his real identity, and the reason he was expelled from St Joseph's Seminary, New York. [update 19 November 2013] Just when you thought Manuel couldn't get any more stupid, the idiot is now using this account to claim he's me!	Permanently suspended.
@Blog_Catholic	Manuel is back with a new account cleverly disguised so no one will think it's his by creaftily turning round the name of one he used earlier - @Catholic_Blog. I bet that has people fooled, eh, Manuel?	Permanently suspended.
@SacerdotusLives	And another new account so he can continue his obsessive attention-seeking and abuse. Bizarrely he implies in this one's bio that Twitter have given him this temporary account while his 'contacts' in Twitter sort out the mistake they made when they wrongly suspended all his others. I wonder if his contacts in Twitter are any more real than his vast army of contacts who are supposedly watching my every move and sending him information on my criminal/terrorist activities which he claims to be including in the regular reports about me he sends to 'The UK Authorities' Any bets on how long this one will last?	Permanently suspended.
@SCDTVS	After 4 months enforced absence, Manuel is now up and runnign again, and already posting abuse with a brand new account brilliantly disguised by removing a few letters, posting exactly the same stuff and resuming obsessive abuse of his usual victims. Can't accuse Manuel of being anything other than a traditionalist. Name changed to @CatholicGadfly and a new one created with the same name	Permanently suspended.
@Atheist707	Apparently he's been stung by everyone spotting him within a few minutes of starting up again despite his brilliantly disguised account, so he's now come up with another ploy. Now he's pretending to be an Atheist who just happens to mention Sacerdotus, his blog and his @SCDTVS Twitter account in every tweet. It's the same ploy he tried with his @SacerSpended account last November. He's soon abusing all his usual favourites too. And now he's even claiming that other people are him too! You might as well quote the above complaint reference when you have cause to report him for abuse. I'll register this new one against it with Twitter. Name changed to @StudiousAtheist then a new account created and deleted. He has apparently panicked after being threatened with legal action for posting a defamatory tweet depicting a minor without permission and claiming another Twitter user is abusing the child.	Name Changed to @StudiousAtheist.
@StudiousAtheist	Having failed to get away with his idiotic attempt to pretend to be an Atheist with some secret knowledge he was never quite able to explain that he isn't really Manuel de Dios Agosto but me and another Twitter user are ... look! This is Manuel's world we are in, where nothing makes any sense except to Manny and the walls of his bedroom in his mother's apartment just round the corner from the zoo, so bear with me, okay?... Manny has now had the brilliant idea of creating an identical account with a different name. He has already started abusing all his usual obsessive target of course. No one will ever guess so don't tell Manny we all know, okay! [Update] Manuel is now using this account to abuse a Catholic priest from Suffolk, UK by posting his contact details on Twitter and claiming he is demented and responsible for his embarrassingly bad blog on which he used to alternate between posting psychotic lies and begging for money, for no other reason apparently than his email address includes the name 'sacerdotus' (i.e. priest). And you thought Manuel couldn't find new depths to plumb!	Permanently suspended.
@CatholicGadfly	The account Manuel has renamed @SCDTVS to, having been exposed as Manny within minutes of creating it and recommencing his habitual abuse. Presumably, he imagines this will preclude his account being suspended. With this account he's now posing as a Jeff T. Follon MA, who, as a quick Google search will show, appears to have sprung fully formed into existence, complete with a Mannyesque 'degree', last July. I expect everyone will fall for that, eh Manuel? Has now inserted an underscore in the username to try to hide his abuse following a warning from Twitter about his abusive behaviour. (@Catholic_Gadfly). He appears not to realise this doesn't work despite having been shown you can't hide your history when he tried it by changing @SCDTVS to @CatholicGadfly.	Permanently suspended.
@SacerdotusRadio	Used by Manuel to post links to his podcasts where he tells lies, usually to himself, presumably hoping to convince himself that they are right. Usual infantile blather only spoken instead of typed out. Cunningly disguised again presumably in the hope it'll fool Twitter long enough for him to fool a simpleton or two that he's not really the expelled seminarian, Manuel de Dios Agosto, or Mad Manny from Bronx.	Permanently suspended.
@RosaRubicondlor	Don't worry Manuel. Your followers are far too stupid to notice you've cleverly substituted an 'l' for an 'i' like you did with your @RosaRublcondior account with which you used to tweet sexually explicit obscenities pretending to be me. Do you think they'll fall for your latest insane attempt to prove you're not the expelled seminarian by posting links to one of your accounts which you made in a poor copy of my blog and in which you are posting your normal lies? The give away is the insane gibberish you post in it. It has your emotionally retarded signature.	Permanently suspended.
@RationalFaith1	Manny has resurrected this old name for a new account specially to promote a new blog where he can debate with himself in different guises. He's understandably sensitive to being mocked for repeatedly challenging people to debate him then crying foul when they call his bluff, so in his new blog he can hold pretend debates with himself to 'prove' he isn't really afraid. Watch him feed himself idiotic points to knock back and convince himself with the brilliance of his arguments. I guess he's flunked his basic philosophy course at Leahman Community College already - I do hope he wasn't expelled again because of his old problem - and now has a lot of spare time on his hands once more.	Permanently suspended.
@Catholicgadfly	Created when Manny inserted an underscore in his @Catholic_Gadfly account to try to hide his continued abuse and harassment after being warned by Twitter and promising to desist in future. The only reason can have been to try to confuse Twitter Support.	Deleted or renamed.
@SacerdotusHgout	Used to advertise Manuel's little group on Google+ where he can post lies without getting suspended by Twitter. However, G+ also take a dim view of their services being use for targeted abuse and harassment and are quick to delete offending accounts. [Update 05 Nov 2014] Despite being told by Twitter support that this account had been permanently suspended along with the rest of Manny's then active accounts, it appears to have been reinstated. I assume this was following yet another promise by Manuel de Dios Agosto that he would try to control his habitual abuse, he recommenced posting abusive tweets today. Twitter support notified, meanwhile, please let me know when his behaviour deteriorates to its previous level. On previous experience this normally takes about a month as Manuel realises people ignore him. [Update 26 Feb 2015] Now suspended again "because this user appears to have created multiple accounts for disruptive purposes, or with overlapping uses".	Permanently Suspended.
@CatholicGadfIy	In what can only be another attempt to confuse Twitter Support, Manny has again changed the username of this account. The underscore has now been removed and the penultimate character has been changed from lower case 'L' to upper case 'i'. Manny seems to believe this will confuse Twitter support who will think his @Catholic_Gadfly account has been deleted so he can continue his campaign of abuse and harassment despite his recent suspension and promise to behave. 16-Jan 2015 Inexplicably, in the last few days, Twitter have suspended then un-suspended this account, told me they can't find it, that it isn't posting abuse and that it has been suspended while it is still active and Manny is repeating the tweets Twitter originally said they warned him about. Watch this space. Maybe Twitter support will sort themselves out.	Permanently suspended.
@TheBishopOfRome	This account, the name of which shows Manny's delusion of grandeur, had been a suspect for a Manny-controlled account for some time but was only confirmed as such when Twitter took it down simultaneously with his @SacerdotusHgout account, having implied that there were others with: Thanks for letting us know about this issue. We’ve investigated and suspended the account you reported because this user appears to have created multiple accounts for disruptive purposes, or with overlapping uses, which is a violation of the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules). Please note that the suspended user may appeal the suspension, which could result in the restoration of one or more accounts. Clearly, this relates to more than one account being suspended at that time. And Manuel was so confident that he had found a work-around to his problem of creating all his accounts with the same Bronx ip address by creating them from Lehman College. Obviously, Twitter are getting better at this since their CEO expressed his embarrassment at their inability to control the sort of abuses that Manny get off on.	Permanently suspended

No doubt there are other accounts owned by Manuel de Dios Agosto. They will be added as and when they are identified.

This site details how to go about dealing with abusive behaviour on Twitter. Twitter Support should already have records of Manuel's previous form in this regard.

In addition to using these accounts Manuel has recently begun spamming blogs with impersonation comments using a simple method to fake a username and disguise it as a Twitter account. The technique can be read about here. The clue is to check the URL beneath the name. If it is a Twitter domain URL it can ONLY have been entered manually as described in the preceding link. There is no other reason to enter a name this way other than to mislead and impersonate.

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Grains of Truth

Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Cassiopeia A,
a 300-year-old supernova remnant.
Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO.

It must be awful being a Creationist these days with so much information available on the Internet and having to be ignored or explained away and with so many new discoveries being made available to a mass audience and having to be avoided. At times it must be a bit like walking about in a rain storm whilst telling yourself there is no such thing as rain.

Take, for example, this article by Maria Cruz which appeared in Science last week. It concerned a paper published in the Journal of Astrophysics by Haenecour et al. (Astrophys. J. 768, L17 (2013)) which reported on the discovery of grains of material that pre-date the formation of the solar system. These grains were part of the molecular cloud out of which the solar system formed and which subsequently became incorporated into solid accretions.

These presolar grains can be identified by their unusual isotopic composition which can only have been formed outside the solar system. The team used sophisticated techniques called 'nano secondary ion mass spectrometry' (NanoSIMS) and 'Auger electron spectroscopy', to identify silica (SiO₂)grains in two meteorites. The isotopic composition of the oxygen atoms in the silica suggests that they were formed in the core collapse of an earlier supernova - an exploding star in which heavier elements are formed out of helium by nuclear fusion under intense pressure and heat.

This reaction creates such a violent release of energy that it overcomes gravity and causes the star to explode, creating the nebulae in which new stars form. Unlike the first generation stars which formed out of collapsing molecular clouds of almost pure hydrogen, second and subsequent generation stars form from collapsing clouds which include these heavier elements, the so-called stardust. As the cloud collapses under gravity, the heat and gravity causes the fusion of hydrogen nuclei to form helium to start up. The release of energy causes the heavier elements to be thrown out to form an accretion disk out of which planets form around stable orbital centres. This is how we know that our sun is at least a second-generation star.

The problem for Creationist loons and the professional liars who promote Creationism as an alternative science, is that their preferred fairytale version of the creation of the Universe says that everything was created together in a single day, so there would never have been a presolar time or first and second generation stars. The existence of presolar grains will either have to be ignored altogether, or some other traditional coping strategy will need to be called into play, such as attacking the scientists or dismissing science as 'scientism', in order to handle the painful cognitive dissonance without incorporating this new information into their fairytale.

Reference: Supernova Grains Identified in the Lab, Maria Cruz,
Science 3 May 2013: 340 (6132), 526. [DOI:10.1126/science.340.6132.526-a]

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Sacerdotus - The Fraud Exposed

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

This detailed report on Manuel "Manny" de Dios Agosto, aka @Sacerdotus and many other Twitter aliases, has just been published on Twitter by @Yhwh_TheLord. As regular Twitter Atheists will know, Manuel is a notoriously obsessive stalker, fantasist and abuser who uses Catholicism and an obviously fake piety as the excuse for his abusive posts there as well as on his blog site.

I happen to be his most recent obsession ever since I exposed his ludicrous claims to have scientific proof of the Christian god by simply challenging him to produce it and debate it in a neutral forum, but apparently I'm not the first.

It fully validates everything I had exposed about Manuel and his murky past in blogs here and here.

[Update] Within a few hours of this blog going live, Manuel had taken down most of the sites listed. Fortunately, anticipating Manuel's panic, @Yahweh_TheLord had grabbed and saved screenshots which are linked to at the end of this blog.

[Further update - 31 March 2024] Sadly, the online account where @Yahweh_TheLord placed the screenshots has now expired and Manuel has taken down all the social media posts they relate to. Sceptics might like to speculate about why he would do that if they don't incriminate him.

Enjoy.

St Paul - Lying On The Road To Damascus

The Conversion of Saul, Michelangelo Buonarotti Simoni,
Capella Paolina, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican City.

One of the problems Bible apologists face is the frequency with which the Bible was obviously written by people who made crass errors because they were ignorant of so much history and yet needed to set their tales in olden times to give them credibility.

Leaving aside such obviously glaring examples as the Noah's Ark story which was set in an event which simply never took place at all - a global flood a few thousand years ago - and the Tower of Babel story which was set on a flat Earth before there were enough people alive to build such a building if the Flood tale was true, there are plenty of more subtle examples.

I have written about one, identified by Thomas Paine in The Age Of Reason, where Genesis talks of people being "chased unto Dan" - somewhere which wasn't so called until many hundreds of years after the event it purports to describe - See How Dan Destroys The Bible.

Ear Worm Crosses The Species Barrier

Outside near my garden right now is a male Blackbird in a beech tree announcing to the blackbird world, and particularly to any spare females, that this is his territory and he is available. He has been there every day for about two weeks or more singing variations of his repertoire of musical phrases and cadences and competing with the Gold finch's babbling silver trickle of notes and Great tit's piping in the same tree. (A typical Blackbird song on this RSPB site).

European Blackbirds are noted for incorporating musical phrases into their song and extemporising on them. This particular one seems to have a snatch of a song by Robert Burns called Ye Banks and Braes which is ironic really because the phrase it keeps singing is the tune to the lines "Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird, That wantons thro' the flowering thorn!"

Ye Banks and Braes

Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae weary, fu' o' care!
Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons thro' the flowering thorn!
Thou minds me o' departed joys,
Departed, never to return.
Aft hae I rov'd by bonnie Doon

To see the rose and woodbine twine;
And ilka bird sang o' its luve,
And fondly sae did I o' mine;
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose,
Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!
And my fause luver stole my rose -
But, ah! he left the thorn wi' me.

Robert Burns

Maybe it's just a coincidence and that it my brain's ability to recognise patterns which is working, but what we have here is an example of a meme or ear worm. It's something every successful pop tune writer tries to achieve - a phrase you keep playing over and over in your mind.

This Blackbird has pulled off the neat trick of passing a meme across the species barrier so my mind now keeps singing "Thou'll break my heart, though warbling bird...". A meme is of course a unit of cultural inheritance; in this case a musical phrase which interprets in the context of my British cultural background and my personal development as a song by Burns, complete with the Galawegian Scottish dialect words with phrases like "And I sae weary, fu' o' care!" and "And ilka bird sang o' its luve, And fondly sae did I o' mine; Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!"

In the context of the Blackbird's culture of course, that same meme has a totally different meaning understood only truly by another Blackbird.

This is the exact analogy of how genes only have meaning in the context of the environment in which they are expressed and by which the information in them is translated into meanings. This is a point which Creationist pseudo-scientists either don't understand or deliberately obscure when they claim that no new information can arise from mutation (which is nonsensical anyway) when what is important is not the information but what that information means in the context of the environment in which it expresses. Even with no change in information, an environmental change can produce a change in the meaning if that information and so an evolutionary change in the species carrying it.

The importance of the cultural context of memes is also illustrated in a blog I wrote a few days ago about cultural bias in which I presented some common 'proofs' of the existence of the locally popular god and the truth of different holy books with 'proofs' which only work on people with a pre-exiting belief in those gods and holy books. To people from other cultures, the fallacy of those 'proofs' is laughably obvious because it is quite simply devoid of an rational meaning.

It is because the interaction between the genotype and the environment produces the phenotype and the environment selects in favour of fitness to survive in that environment, that species look as though they were made for that environment. They were. They were made by the environment itself.

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Looking At Life

In an earlier blog I looked at life and showed how, although people use it to mean something else, biologically speaking, 'life' is simply entropy management. Most people use the word life to express some hazy, often muddled, idea including consciousness, thinking, existing or even an idea of a 'soul' as though being alive means you have some magical entity inside you which gives you 'life'.

Religious people even think 'life' is something you get at some stage in your development as an embryo, although they will argue ceaselessly about when this occurs - the moment of conception, at the first 'quickening', at birth. In this respect, as in so many others, the ideas religious people have are almost unchanged from the opinions held by people in the childhood of our species when the world was so poorly understood it must have seemed a magical place.

It has even been claimed that there is something qualitatively different about the chemistry of carbon and the molecules based on it - the so-called organic molecules - as though they obey a different set of physical laws which separates organic 'life' from inorganic 'non-life', so life is what carbon atoms, together with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur and occasionally other atoms produce.

This muddle and confusion over what exactly life is would be amusing if only Creationists in particular didn't keep challenging people to explain what it is, or to create it, or to say what its purpose is. Challenging one of them to define it first is a sure-fire way to bring the conversation to a shuddering halt, often with an indignant flounce and an insult hurled over the shoulder together with a passive aggressive threat to back it up. But never any coherent definition of 'life' of course.

Oldest Americans Refute The Bible

The Toca da Tira Peia Rockshelter during the 2008 excavations.

The news just keeps getting worse for the frauds at the Discovery Institute.

Today New Scientist brings news of what could turn out to be evidence that humans were living in Brazil 20,000 years ago, some 14,000 years before the Universe was created according to the Christian mythology the Discovery Institute is trying to get illegally insert into US public schools disguised as science.

For those who haven't yet encountered the Discovery Institute and its professional liars, it is the organisation behind the current attempt to con the American people into believing that 'Intelligent Design' is science, despite it being found not to be in the 'Dover Trial'.

The Discovery Institute is using the Wedge Strategy to try to discredit science and replace it with the primitive Bronze-Age origin myth from Genesis, prior to overthrowing the American Constitution and establishing a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Its power ambitions are not limited to the USA. It is supporting similar subversive activities in other secular countries.

These theocracies would be almost indistinguishable from the form of government established in Afghanistan under the Taliban, complete with a Christian version of Sharia courts and a strict, literal enforcement of the biblical Laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. For more on this see Why Creationists Lie To Us.

The article by Michael Marshall in New Scientist reports on a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science in which the authors present evidence of stone tools which were found under a rock shelter in Brazil being 20,000 years old.

Abstract.
When and how did the first human beings settle in the American continent? Numerous data, from archaeological researches as well as from palaeogenetics, anthropological and environmental studies, have led to partially contradictory interpretations in recent years, often because of the lack of a reliable chronological framework. The present study contributes to the establishment of such a framework using luminescence techniques to date a Brazilian archaeological site, the Toca da Tira Peia. It constitutes an exemplary case study: all our observations and measurements tend to prove the good integrity of the site and the anthropological nature of the artifacts and we are confident in the accuracy of the luminescence dating results. All these points underline the importance of the Toca da Tira Peia. The results bring new pieces of evidence of a human presence in the north-east of Brazil as early as 20,000 BC. The Toca da Tira Peia thus contributes to the rewriting of the history of the peopling of the American continent.

Lahaye, C., Hernandez, M., et al; Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 40, Issue 6, June 2013, Pages 2840-2847.

Of course, like all scientific claims, this one is not universally accepted. As Marshall says:

For others, it is the tools that are raising eyebrows. "Rock shelters are difficult to interpret," points out John McNabb of the University of Southampton, UK. Stones falling from above can break, making them look like human-made tools. As a result, McNabb calls the evidence "suggestive but unproven".

Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

The Wedge Document,
Discovery Institute

It has long been accepted that the earliest traces of human habitation in the Americas were of the 'Clovis People' who are known to have entered North America from Siberia about 13,000 years ago. However, evidence have been accumulating for the last 30 years that there was an earlier colonisation by at least 15,000 years ago.

This latest find should probably be regarded as tentatively adding to that evidence, pending corroboration. If true, it would show that modern humans had crossed into North America from Asia and had penetrated down the Panamanian Isthmus and deep into South America much earlier than previously thought. It has long been assumed that they came via the 'Beringia Land Bridge' during a lowering of sea levels during a glaciation period. An earlier migration is certainly not precluded by that theory.

We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula.

The Wedge Document,
Discovery Institute

But of course, even if 'Clovis' turns out to have been the earliest culture to arise in the Americas, it is devastating for biblical creationism and especially for a notion of a 6,000 year-old Earth and life being reset about 4,000 years ago by a devastating global flood.

The surprising thing is that Christian fundamentalists persist in this denial of the evidence when even one of their favourite founding fathers, regarded as one of their greatest thinkers, St. Augustine of Hippo, inadvertently proved that humans could not all have descended from Noah when trying to argue that people could not live on the other side of Earth:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled.

It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man. [My emphasis]

Source: De Civitate Dei, Book XVI, Chapter 9 — Whether We are to Believe in the Antipodes; Augustine of Hippo,
translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.; from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College.

To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

The Wedge Document, Governing Goals,
Discovery Institute

Well quite. It's not often that I agree with St. Augustine but one can't argue with that logic. We know there are people living on the far side of Earth and, as St. Augustine points out, they wouldn't have been able to get there in such a short time, ergo there never was a flood and Earth is much older than the Bronze-Age goat-herders thought. St. Augustine's blunder was in making a testable prediction of course - something that the more astute apologists and creationist frauds know they must avoid at all costs incase it is ever tested.

St. Augustine's prediction has been tested and the Bible was promptly falsified, as is so often the case when its claims are compared to reality.

So, all we need now is for the frauds at the Discovery Institute to accept reality and abandon their strategy of trying to fool the American people into giving them unaccountable power to abuse and with which to abuse others. Any bets on that happening any day soon?

Reference:

Christelle Lahaye, Marion Hernandez, Eric Boëda, Gisele D. Felice, Niède Guidon, Sirlei Hoeltz, Antoine Lourdeau, Marina Pagli, Anne-Marie Pessis, Michel Rasse, Sibeli Viana, Human occupation in South America by 20,000 BC: the Toca da Tira Peia site, Piauí, Brazil, Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 40, Issue 6, June 2013, Pages 2840-2847, ISSN 0305-4403, 10.1016/j.jas.2013.02.019.

( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313000733)

Keywords: Optically stimulated luminescence dating; Toca da Tira Peia; Brazil; First peopling in America; Luminescence

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Confirmation Bias

Er... But which god?

Confirmation bias is what causes people to say stupid things like, "Everything proves God/Allah". The Cosmological Argument and Teleological Argument depend on confirmation bias in the target audience - something of which religious apologists are only too well aware since they use it all the time.

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

Wikipedia - Confirmation bias.

So what's this got to do with religion? You're probably thinking it doesn't apply to you. If you're religious you probably believe you have very good, objective reasons for your beliefs and you see evidence of your god all around you. The strange thing is, and what gives the lie to it being objective evidence, is that people of other religions see the same thing and think it's evidence for their god and their religion.

Well, you might say, we have proofs for our religion that can't be proofs for theirs. The problem is, so do they.

The strange thing is that your 'proofs' don't seem to convince people who don't already share your beliefs and their 'proofs' don't seem to convince you. Take a look at these which I came across researching for an article on miracles.


Any Muslims convinced by these and ready to accept Jesus as their personal saviour yet? Why not? Plenty of Christians are convinced.

How about these?


Have they got any Christians or Jews chanting, "There is no god but God and Mohamed is his Prophet", yet? How come? Millions of Muslims will tell you they are proof of Allah.

Isn't it strange how they only convince people who are already convinced?

You seen now why Atheists don't find any of these 'miraculous' appearances convincing at all? Just like Christians do with the Islamic 'evidence' and just like Muslims do with the 'miraculous' images of Jesus or Mary, we see them for what they are - evidence only of the human ability to see patterns and of the human ability to look for and find 'evidence' which 'confirms' pre-existing beliefs.

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Impossible Miracles

The problem with miracles is that no one can prove they happened - which is a bit of a drawback for a church like the Catholic Church which relies so heavily on miracles to impress the 'flock' and keep them in awe and wonder.

The problem is with the definition of a miracle in the first place. Here's what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say:

(Latin miraculum, from mirari, "to wonder").

In general, a wonderful thing, the word being so used in classical Latin; in a specific sense, the Latin Vulgate designates by miracula wonders of a peculiar kind, expressed more clearly in the Greek text by the terms terata, dynameis, semeia, i.e., wonders performed by supernatural power as signs of some special mission or gift and explicitly ascribed to God...

The wonder of the miracle is due to the fact that its cause is hidden, and an effect is expected other than what actually takes place. Hence, by comparison with the ordinary course of things, the miracle is called extraordinary. In analyzing the difference between the extraordinary character of the miracle and the ordinary course of nature, the Fathers of the Church and theologians employ the terms above, contrary to, and outside nature. These terms express the manner in which the miracle is extraordinary.

A miracle is said to be above nature when the effect produced is above the native powers and forces in creatures of which the known laws of nature are the expression, as raising a dead man to life, e.g., Lazarus (John 11), the widow's son (1 Kings 17). A miracle is said to be outside, or beside, nature when natural forces may have the power to produce the effect, at least in part, but could not of themselves alone have produced it in the way it was actually brought about. Thus the effect in abundance far exceeds the power of natural forces, or it takes place instantaneously without the means or processes which nature employs. In illustration we have the multiplication of loaves by Jesus (John 6), the changing of water into wine at Cana (John 2) — for the moisture of the air by natural and artificial processes is changed into wine — or the sudden healing of a large extent of diseased tissue by a draught of water. A miracle is said to be contrary to nature when the effect produced is contrary to the natural course of things.

The term miracle here implies the direct opposition of the effect actually produced to the natural causes at work, and its imperfect understanding has given rise to much confusion in modern thought. Thus Spinoza calls a miracle a violation of the order of nature (proeverti, "Tract. Theol. Polit.", vi). Hume says it is a "violation" or an "infraction", and many writers — e.g., Martensen, Hodge, Baden-Powell, Theodore Parker — use the term for miracles as a whole. But every miracle is not of necessity contrary to nature, for there are miracles above or outside nature.

Source: The Catholic Encyclopedia (accesses 28 April 2013).

A cynic might think that the last sentence above is deliberately confused and designed to give the appearance of refuting Spinoza and Hume whilst not redefining a miracle to bring it within the realm of nature, and thus not miraculous. Both Spinoza and Hume had pointed out essentially the same thing - that miracles are, by definition, unnatural or 'super-natural' and are thus a violation of natural laws. To argue that a 'miracle' which is 'above or outside nature' is not contrary to nature is absurd if one accepts the normal definition of 'nature' as everything about the material Universe.

na·ture
n.
1. The material world and its phenomena.
2. The forces and processes that produce and control all the phenomena of the material world: the laws of nature.

Source: The Free Dictionary (accessed 28 April 2013)

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.

Source: Wikipedia - Nature (accesses 28 April 2013)

So there can be little doubt, despite what the Catholic Encyclopedia tries to imply, that miracles, at least as they are defined and understood by those who promote them and those who believe in them, are things which have no natural explanation or, in Spinoza's and Hume's words, violate natural law. In fact, Spinoza goes further and says natural laws cannot be violated, so even if miracles appear to be unnatural, this is simply due to the ignorance of the observer. Miracles are simply natural events for which we don't yet have a natural explanation.

And this is where the problem begins.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions

Because there can be no natural explanation there can be no evidence other than someone else's word for it that a given miracle actually happened. Additionally, because miracles are unnatural the likelihood of them occurring spontaneously is zero - otherwise they could have a natural explanation. Even if we are charitable and allow that they are not actually impossible (how can something that happened be impossible?) but are just so highly unlikely that a natural cause can be excluded, or at least given a lower probability that a supernatural or 'divine' intervention, we are left with a highly unlikely event.

We are, in effect, being required to take someone's word for it that a highly unlikely, even impossible, event actually happened, without them supplying any evidence. Why on Earth would any rational person do that?

How many people would you believe if they told you, without the slightest scrap of evidence, that, for example, they had just seen the Virgin Mary appear out of thin air in Central Park, New York, or a man fly to Heaven and back on a winged horse from Hyde Park, London? How about if they claimed to have just witnessed a man satisfy the hunger of thousands of people with a few loaves of bread in Montreal, Canada?

What other explanations would you consider first? Which other perfectly natural causes could there be for that person telling you such a thing? Note: 'because it's true' is only one possibility amongst many. Why would you consider explanations other then it being true more satisfactory or more believable than that they were telling you the truth?

And would you really believe them without wanting to see just a little evidence? I suggest that you wouldn't believe a word of it. And yet when religious people read about, or are told about, miracles, they believe what they are told, yet nowhere in all that was there ever more than one person telling another something that you would never have believed had they told you first hand. The story has been given a spurious gloss of credibility by being repeated by authority figures - authority figures who had no more basis for belief that you did.

This is how the church uses its 'authority' to persuade people to believe the unbelievable. Believing everything the church teaches by faith simply means the church has not yet found your lower limit of credulity.

As John W Loftus points out, Christians have a double burden of proof when it comes to proving miracles.

On the one hand, they must show that a particular "event" was not very likely...

On the other hand, Christians must show that the purported miraculous event happened. And yet, everything they say to establish the first burden of proof takes away the strength of the second burden of proof. That is, the more they argue that an event was miraculous, the less likely such an event occurred. But the more they argue that an event was likely to have occurred, then the less likely that event can be understood as miraculous.

The only way people judge whether or not a miracle occurred is whether or not it fits within their control beliefs (i.e., which God he believes in and was taught to believe). One cannot start with the evidence for a miracle to show that the Christian God exists, simply because a person must already believe it’s plausible for the Christian God to exist in the first place (unless it’s a case of accepting what someone says because that person is believable). Otherwise, the evidence isn’t evidence for anything, much like how the evidence in a criminal trial isn't evidence of anything since the prosecutor and defense attorney will have two different ways of seeing that evidence based in separate control beliefs. And yet, how is it possible to believe in the Christian God in the first place without the cold hard evidence that will lead him to believe? The explanation of a self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit doesn’t solve anything.

John W. Loftus. Miracles, a Double Burden of Proof, and Control Beliefs

So here is a simple challenge for any Christian. Take any miracle you wish and which you believe, and explain why a non-believer should believe it really happened and that the cause could only have been the Christian god. After all, if you believe in said miracle, that must be what you believe, so all you need do is explain the rational basis for your belief. It is not enough to say that someone else believes it.

What could be easier than that?

If you can't, you might like to consider exactly why you believe it yourself.

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