In discussing Trump, the subject of his HHS appointee, Robert Kennedy Jr, came up. Kennedy is widely regarded as ‘antivax’ – a term regarded as pejorative by Bill Cole, although I argue that it is not inherently so. I use it to describe a person or organisation that campaigns against some or all vaccines. It’s descriptive, not pejorative. Of course, since many people have rather a low opinion of such campaigners, it becomes a pejorative. In similar fashion, “flat-earther” is both descriptive and pejorative. I would be happy to be advised of a non-pejorative synonym.

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I ran across this amusing video from right-wing nutjob and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens:

You have to admire the confidence with which she says the most idiotic things.

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Dr. Tom C. Schmidt received his PhD in Ancient Christianity from Yale University and, in Fall 2025, will be Associate Professor at Fairfield University and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. He has published books with Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Recently, Dr. Schmidt has written a groundbreaking book titled, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, available for free online, in which he argues convincingly that the Testimonium Flavianum in Book 18, chapter 3 of Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews is, in fact, authentic, and that the language used in the passage is indeed that of Josephus. (The book’s Website can be found here.) However, he also contends that the passage about Jesus is mistranslated in its English version, that it is not as flattering as it seems, and that the original reflects his ambiguity about who Jesus really was. Dr. Schmidt argues that in the original version, Josephus does not say Jesus was the Christ, but that he was thought to be the Christ.

I need hardly point out that if the Testimonium Flavianum is authentic, it adds to the case for the historicity of Jesus.

Skeptical? I was, too, until I watched the video of Schmidt being interviewed by Christian pastor and apologist Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary), who is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. Let me know what you think.

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I thought I’d try to get comments from some of my old buddies at TSZ. It’s my attempt at a takedown of “epistemic democracy,” which is probably the predominent view of the matter at present. There’s an intro here: https://luckorcunning.blogspot.com/2025/06/is-democracy-good-because-it-tracks.html? and a couple of links to the paper can be found there.

(Don’t worry, I’m not imminently in danger of either expiring or being deported to El Salvador, I just can’t stand dealing with journals anymore. I expect to keep blogging and reviewing Democracy books for 3:16 AM Magazine.)

Hope y’all are doing well!

Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha have written an eye-opening article in The Wall Street Journal, titled, The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology, alleging that for the past several decades, the U.S. military has systematically “fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs.” What’s more surprising is that in order to cover up these programs and prevent the Russians from finding out about them, the military deceived (and continues to deceive) its own members, many of whom swore oaths of secrecy not to disclose details of what they believed were alien encounters, but which were in fact secret weapons tests. This campaign of disinformation has had a truly unfortunate result: “The paranoid mythology the U.S. military helped spread now has a hold over a growing number of its own senior officials who count themselves as believers.” Schectman and Viswanatha’s carefully researched account is based on “interviews with two dozen current and former U.S. officials, scientists and military contractors involved in the inquiry, as well as thousands of pages of documents, recordings, emails and text messages.” Read all about it here or here.

What do readers think?

In this video, LDS scholar Terryl Givens, a former professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond and co-author (along with his wife Fiona Givens) of the co-author of The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life and Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith, eloquently articulates his view that God is startlingly different from the God of classical theism. And whatever one may think of his views, he is certainly a powerful and persuasive speaker.
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Annaka Harris is a writer who’s best known for her book, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (2019), which discusses issues such as free will, panpsychism and the hard problem of consciousness. In this interview with Alex O’Connor, she defends the idea that consciousness goes “all the way down” to the level of fundamental particles – although she takes pains to emphasize that this consciousness is pretty minimal: it’s a fleeting, evanescent consciousness without a self, memories or thoughts. She also defends the idea that the entire universe is one vast collection of conscious experiences, and she maintains that the self is an illusion. Viewers are invited to watch the interview and leave their comments on the thread. Enjoy!

My own comments are below:
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Some of you may remember a wild discussion we had at TSZ a couple of years ago, spanning eight months, debating whether “3” and “3.0” refer to the same number and whether measurements can be expressed using real numbers. (Yes, really.) One of the questions that arose during that discussion was on the boundary between pure and applied mathematics, and DNA_Jock referenced the mathematician Norman Wildberger’s opinion on that topic.

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Recently, Michael Alter (who surely needs no introduction here) was recently interviewed by Jacob Berman on “History Valley.” The topic of the interview was Gary Habermas’s “minimal facts” case for the Resurrection. For the benefit of listeners, I should point out that Michael Alter frequently gets short of breath these days after talking for more than a paragraph, and he informs me that he now relies on a CPAP machine, which he wasn’t wearing during the interview. However, the key points he makes are as follows: (a) Habermas still hasn’t disclosed his list of scholars who endorse the “minimal facts” he uses to make his case for the Resurrection; (b) Arab scholars (who are mostly Muslims, with a very different perspective on the Resurrection from secular and Christian scholars) are conspicuously absent from Habermas’s list, which mainly focuses on English-speaking scholars; and (c) most scholars who have written books about the Resurrection of Jesus are priests, ministers, or people who teach on Christian campuses, who tend to have a vested interest in defending the Resurrection. Although I’m a Christian myself, I have to say I think the methodological criticisms Michael Alter makes are valid ones. Anyway, without further ado, here’s the interview. More posts will be following in the next few days.

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From the blurb:

“Two AIs — ChatGPT, the believer in God, and DeepSeek, the atheist AI — go head-to-head on the existence of God. From the fine-tuning of the universe to the source of morality and the eternal perks of belief, who makes the stronger case? Watch as seven AI judges score each argument and reveal the ultimate winner.”

Speaking as a philosopher, I thought the arguments mounted on both sides were quite good, but there was very little that I hadn’t heard before. Speaking as an English teacher, on the other hand, I was highly impressed with the quality of the rebuttals, on both sides. Although I’m a Christian, I have to agree that DeepSeek won the argument. However, one commenter who observed the debate thought that the two sides didn’t get to the real nitty-gritty: the existence of consciousness itself as evidence for God. (This is an argument which impresses philosophy student and blogger Matthew Adelstein, as well.) Finally, it seems that debating is another skill in which AI can outperform most humans.

Thoughts?

Recently, the Youtuber Skydivephil (whose real name is Phil Halper) posted a 24-minute video critiquing Christian philosopher Michael Jones (who goes by the moniker Inspiring Philosophy) regarding the problem of animal suffering. Viewers can watch it here:

Michael Jones, Than Christopoulos and philosopher Trent Dougherty (who has written a book on the problem of animal suffering, in which he acknowledges its gravity but argues that animals will be abundantly recompensed in the afterlife and that God will also endow them with reason, and that once they are able to understand the spiritual significance of what happened to them on Earth, they will retrospectively consent to the suffering they were compelled to endure on Earth) then posted a two-hour point-by-point reply to Halper, which can be viewed below (the first hour is more than sufficient to get the overall picture of what they’re saying). I thought their reply was rather unfair on several points; hence the title of this post.

Here is my reply to Michael, Than and Trent:

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Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has posted a video about a new paper on arxiv.org, titled “How to Make a Universe” by Paolo Bassani and João Magueijo, which proposes that small random changes to the “constants of nature” (perhaps one should call them parameters rather than constants) – such as the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, the masses of particles, and the speed of light – would eventually cause them to reach a settled state of equilibrium where they no longer vary, in pockets of the cosmos. The initial random changes in the constants of nature would allow energy conservation to be violated, and would therefore permit the creation of matter out of nowhere, without needing to appeal to the notion of a hypothetical “inflaton field” (for which there is no experimental evidence). It should be noted that the authors of the paper do not propose that our universe is uniquely optimal. All they are attempting to explain is why the constants of nature aren’t changing now. The authors’ proposal bears some resemblance to Lee Smolin’s hypothesis of “cosmological natural selection”, which postulates that new universes are created inside black holes. The authors make no appeal to black holes in their paper. However, they write (bolding is mine – VJT): “As in biological natural selection, some random mutations produce Universes with matter, others do not, or worse, produce negative energy/matter. One therefore needs the mutation game to be turned off and stability to establish itself to make sure any possible gains are preserved.”

Hossenfelder acknowledges that the authors of the paper still have some explaining to do: “They just assume that the constants can change somehow.” Nevertheless, when commenting on the work of one of the authors (João Magueijo), she adds: “I don’t know if he’s on the right track with this, but still it deserves being taken seriously.”

The authors summarize their conclusions as follows (bolding is mine):
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