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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Christian apologist Cameron Bertuzzi is a busy beaver. On January 30, 2025, he posted a video titled, “Millions Saw This Miracle — Why Do Christians Ignore It?”, in which he discussed an alleged series of apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Zeitoun, a suburb of Cairo, Egypt, which were witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people (including Christians and non-Christians alike) in the late 1960’s. Now, less than a week later, he has put up a new video, titled, “The Best Evidence for Christianity… Isn’t in the Bible?!”, in which he argues that the evidence for Christianity based on the Marian apparitions at Zeitoun is stronger than the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus from the New Testament, and challenging Protestants to face up to this fact:

Readers who watch the first six minutes of the video will get the gist of it. Later in the video, Bertuzzi rebuts Protestant arguments that the apparitions might have been demonic in origin.

In response to Bertuzzi’s latest video, I posted the following message:

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In a video which is modestly titled, “The Trinity explained PERFECTLY! – No analogies REQUIRED! [MUST WATCH]” (June 8, 2024), Christian apologist Sam Shamoun of Answering Islam attempts to explain the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in 12 minutes. Unfortunately, all his argument shows is that he holds to an anthropomorphic notion of God, and that he rejects the notion that God has one Mind. To cut a long story short: he thinks God has three minds, each with its own thoughts, volitions and emotions (including the emotions of anger and sadness), and that all of these minds are somehow identical with one and the same being (God), sharing the same existence. He further argues that just because we don’t see a being that’s more than one person in the human realm, it doesn’t follow that there can’t be a multi-personal Being in the Divine realm. Confused? So am I.

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In a recent 10-minute video, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues that we cannot rule out the possibility that the universe actually thinks, incredible as it may seem. In brief, the reasons why we cannot rule out this scenario are that (a) quantum physics is non-local, (b) even Einstein’s theory of general relativity is perfectly compatible with the existence of wormholes, which don’t respect locality and which could connect the universe with itself, and (c) additionally, Einstein’s theory of relativity does not rule out the existence of faster-than-light signals; all it rules out is the possibility of going from speeds below that of light to speeds above. Moreover, faster-than-light travel would not create causality paradoxes, as commonly believed. What all this adds up to is that the universe could be self-connected on a micro-scale, and that it could transmit signals much faster than we imagine, making it possibly able to think.

Here are some excerpts from Dr. Hossenfelder’s fascinating talk:

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Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity has put up a new video titled, “Why Atheism is Silly,” in which he responds to critics of his earlier video on atheism. The new video is quite slick and not too long (less than 30 minutes), so it is well worth watching. Here it is:

Here are my own comments, posted on Bertuzzi’s blog, which I wrote in an irenic vein. In my rely, I deliberately refrained from discussing the problem of evil, despite the fact that I find Bertuzzi’s soul-building theodicy utterly unconvincing, as he went on to say that that he was willing to allow for argument’s sake that the probability of the evil we see in the world under perfect being theism (PBT) might be as low as one in a trillion. I also refrained from mentioning his careless mathematical error of equating one in a million with .0000001 instead of .000001, as it did not materially affect his argument.

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Hi everyone. Happy New Year! I thought I’d kick off the year with a video by a skeptic named Brandon (who goes by the moniker of Mindshift), titled, “10 New Year’s Resolutions for Christianity.” You might not agree with everything he says, but he does make a lot of valid points. Enjoy!

Feel free to share your thoughts and ask questions.

UPDATE:

Brandon has issued a follow-up video, titled, “I Challenged Christianity – Now I’m Being Challenged!” in response to a Christian who raised three objections. Readers can view it here:

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Christian apologist Michael Jones, who goes under the handle “Inspiring Philosophy,” has just put up a video arguing that the Gospel of Luke was written by a physician named Luke, who was a traveling companion of St. Paul, and who consulted eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection before penning his Gospel. The video, which I’ve posted above, makes a very well-argued case. It may persuade some of my viewers that Luke did indeed base his account of Jesus’ life on the testimony of eyewitnesses with whom he had conversed. However, I was not so easily convinced, and after viewing the video, I posted some critical comments, which I’ve appended below. (For some strange reason, they appear to have been deleted.) I’ll let viewers decide who has the better case, but before I present mine, let me state candidly that I do not claim to be certain of my position. It is entirely possible that I am wrong. If I am, though, then I think the author of Luke’s Gospel has got a lot of explaining to do, about why he wrote his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles the way he did. Without further ado, here’s my reply to Jones.

This is a skeptical Website, where empirical arguments in support of supernatural claims are subjected to heavy scrutiny. The subject of today’s post is Eucharistic miracles, which if true would violate the laws of chemistry. I happened to attend a Catholic Mass last Saturday evening. It was in a cathedral, but I won’t say exactly where it was, as I wish to respect the privacy of those who attended. I was sitting at the back of the church, which is where bad Catholics like myself tend to sit. At this time in the liturgical year, the Mass readings focus heavily on the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist: that when the priest celebrating Mass says the words of consecration over the bread and wine (“This is my body … This is the chalice of my blood…” – full text here), the bread and wine, while remaining unchanged in their outward appearance and their empirical properties, are actually transformed into Jesus Christ’s body and blood, which spiritually nourishes those members of the Church who receive the Eucharist worthily, and who believe it to be the body and blood of Christ (which they confess when they say “Amen” at Holy Communion). The priest celebrating the Mass which I attended had a fervent faith in the Eucharist, and he said he wanted his parishioners to say their Amens more enthusiastically when receiving Communion, so during his sermon, he attempted to inspire faith in his audience by talking about Eucharistic miracles, of which (he said) there were 107 that had been officially certified by the Church as worthy of belief by Catholics (although I should point out that they are in no way obliged to believe in them). Naturally, the priest didn’t have time to discuss them all, so he proceeded to focus on the best-known one: the miracle of Lanciano, said to have taken place in the eighth century as a sign given to a Catholic priest-monk who was having doubts about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2315000121

How did specific useful protein sequences arise from simpler molecules at the origin of life? This seemingly needle-in-a-haystack problem has remarkably close resemblance to the old Protein Folding Problem, for which the solution is now known from statistical physics. Based on the logic that Origins must have come only after there was an operative evolution mechanism—which selects on phenotype, not genotype—we give a perspective that proteins and their folding processes are likely to have been the primary driver of the early stages of the origin of life.

In my earlier post, I documented how the Discovery Institute has failed to keep up with the literature on the evolution of developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs). In today’s post, I’d like to illustrate my case by looking at a creature whose embryological development has been documented in minute detail: the humble lancelet (also known as amphioxus), a fish-like creature belonging to the subphylum Cephalochordata, whose ancestors diverged from other chordates either before or during the Cambrian period. Before I do so, however, I’d like to quote some insightful excerpts from a comment by Rumraket on my earlier post, which explain how developmental gene regulatory networks are able to evolve, in the first place.

Structure of a gene regulatory network. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

In a series of three articles (see here, here and here) over at Evolution News and Views, Dr. Casey Luskin, a geologist and an attorney who is also an Associate Director and Senior of the Center for Science and Culture, recently discussed the question of whether mutations in gene regulatory networks are capable of giving rise to significant changes in phenotype. Dr. Luskin argued that unguided processes, be they microevolutionary (i..e. neo-Darwinian) or macroevolutionary, are simply unable to account for the evolution of new body plans.

Dr. Luskin’s articles were irenic in tone and commendably fair in their discussion of opposing views. The author’s style of exposition was also admirably lucid. However, what struck me most about the articles was their use of dated sources. Reading them, I felt like I was stepping back in time.

Regular readers of articles on The Skeptical Zone will have noticed that the site has been down for a few weeks. On this point, I have some good news from Elizabeth Liddle, who messaged me a few hours ago with the latest update:

“…I’ve been trying to sort this out, but I’ve been absolutely swamped with work things, so it has taken longer than it should have done. The issue was that the hosting service had migrated us to new servers, and the domain name wasn’t pointing to the new servers. This is now sorted, and the site is back up.”

I will be putting up posts in the near future. Others are welcome to contribute their own material. Stay tuned!

I’ve just been watching a video posted on the One Life Network, titled, “Experts DESTROY Darwin’s Theory in 16 Minutes”, in which Peter Robinson (who is best known for writing President Ronald Reagan’s famous “Tear down this wall!” speech in 1987, and who is currently the host of the current affairs show Uncommon Knowledge) interviews David Gelernter, David Berlinksi, and Stephen Meyer on the possibility of life originating from non-living matter (abiogenesis) and on the possibility of new animal body types arising as a result of unguided mutations.

The “meat” of the interview is from 5:40 to 10:15, for readers who have little time to spare.

One viewer who went under the handle @TenMinuteTrips made a highly pertinent comment:

Here’s my issue with this discussion. You have three “experts” in their particular fields, discussing mathematical odds that supposedly prove that evolution could not possibly have happened the way Darwin described. We have a professor of computer science, a Princeton PhD who taught mathematics, and someone who specializes in something called, “the philosophy of science.” Where, pray tell, is an actual evolutionary biologist to defend their contributions to research in the field?

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