In a totally unsurprising announcement, Ayaan Hirsi Ali renounces atheism and declares herself a Christian. I half-expected this to happen — she’s been working at the Hoover Institute with a lot of wealthy conservative Republicans, it was just going to take time to realize who was buttering her bread. I’ve read her autobiography, and it was clear that what drove her was in large part a resentment of the terrible Islamic authoritarians who controlled her life for so long. Well, now she’s come full circle and is identifying with a different set of terrible authoritarians.

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun.

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

Oh. So she has bought into the conspiratorial anti-woke nonsense, and the usual fear-based bullshit that is the foundation of most conservative thought. The communists are coming to get us! Our only hope is to follow a different authoritarian ideology!

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That phrase judeo-christian always sets off alarm bells in my head. Misrepresenting what atheism is about also doesn’t help.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

It’s Jeeeesus. Good luck with that, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

By the way, nowhere in her long essay does she say a word about why Christianity is a good philosophy, other than that it’s a platform for fighting against Muslims and woke atheists.

You know they’ve been lurking there all along. Here’s Ray Comfort, using the ongoing war in Gaza to justify his loony beliefs.

After the horrific attack of Hamas on Israel and the devastating response, it would be easier to floss the back teeth of the lions at the LA Zoo at feeding time than broker peace between Israel and Hamas.

Anyone who could do that would certainly work a miracle. And so, some would say the stage is set for that one man of sin, the Antichrist, who will bring temporary peace between the Arab and the Jew.

Many Christians believe that Daniel 9:27 is a key prophetic verse that speaks of the Antichrist establishing a peace treaty with Israel, which he then breaks.

The twisty part of all this is that the ghouls want a peacemaker to emerge, but only because he will have to betray any resolution. That’s the important part. Their desire is to see the chaos spawning the apocalypse, leading to the extermination of non-Christians. Isn’t it nice that Ray Comfort has cause to find glee in a war?

Some of the philosophy students at my university have asked me to participate in a debate, on my campus, with a fellow named Perry Hendricks. I am like putty in my students’ hands, so I tentatively agreed, with the caveat that I’d like to see what proposition would be debated. The students have come back with their “specific” question. It is…

Does God exist?

I was in the middle of a meeting when that email flew across my view, so it was extremely difficult not to groan aloud and facepalm myself. Just too bleh.

My answer is no, of course, and I assume his will be yes. Are we done already?

The meat of any discussion has to be how that question will be answered, and I don’t see any hint of what approach will be taken, or what the epistemology of any answer will be — it’s just way too broad. I know how I’d approach the question, but I suspect we could easily end up talking past each other.

So now what? Do I say the topic is either ridiculously broad or too subjective and say forget it or go back and revise it, or do I just bull my way through the pathetic question, leaving no survivors?

I’m asking you, the readers, what you think I should do. You know what I think of debates, the only thing that persuades me to do this one is that it’s the students and it’s local.

Wow, a novel argument from a creationist. Ken Ham posted this on Facebook yesterday. Stand in awe before his logic.

We also wear eyeglasses. Do you know any animals who wear glasses? Checkmate, atheists!

I don’t understand how the seven-day week preceded the Bible, though. Did Jesus have a time machine?

If the Bible is the source of logic and reason, why is it that the most fervent believers seem to lack both?

I’ve never had any respect for Alister McGrath, but apparently he thinks I’m a credible source on atheism. He has a book titled Coming to Faith Through Atheism, containing 12 essays about how people returned to religion after a dalliance with atheism, driven by how much they disliked Dawkins and the New Atheism. That sounds incredibly cliched — it’s practically a joke how often theists claim that they used to be an atheist, but then they saw the light.

Fine. More pedestrian pablum from a conventional Christian who doesn’t like Dawkins. I even have some sympathy with the thesis that Dawkins has become a detriment to atheism. However, an argument against one particular flavor of atheism is not an argument for the ridiculous Christianity McGrath favors. I also mildly resent that he cites me (and Ashley Miller) some kind of supporter of his ideas.

Yet it wasn’t just that Dawkins and others set out to make religious faith a badge of shame. The “New Atheism” encouraged a discriminatory rhetoric of denunciation and demonisation directed not primarily against religious ideas, but against religious people. Many were alarmed at this trend. The feminist atheist blogger Ashley Miller distanced herself from those who suggested that “people who are religious aren’t worthwhile and are certainly too stupid to be respected”. The debate ought to be about assessing ideas, she insisted, not about publicly ridiculing religious people: “We dehumanize people who disagree with us instead of arguing about ideas.” It didn’t exactly help with the public face of atheism.

Today, the “New Atheism” is generally regarded as having imploded, increasingly (though perhaps unfairly) being seen as the crystallisation of the cultural prejudices of old white Western middle-class males. Many of its former members, disenchanted by its arrogance, prejudice, and superficiality, have distanced themselves from the movement and its leaders.

Of course he’d think it unfair to view the failure of the New Atheism as a result of the cultural prejudices of old white Western middle-class males, since he is one, and his stodgy Christianity is the epitome of Western middle-class bullshit. His religion is not an improvement on atheism!

What he doesn’t acknowledge is that neither Ashley nor I have abandoned atheism, which is something rather different than the peculiarly assertive, aggressive style of Dawkins’ atheism. We aren’t Christians! It’s a little rude to pose two people who oppose his position as somehow backing up his new book.

Why didn’t he link to my assessment of Alister McGrath?

That’s McGrath. Incoherent and contradictory, vacuous and vapid, and bumbling along, triumphantly making fallacious arguments that he thinks are irrefutable.

Jebus, but I love “sophisticated theology”. It makes its practitioners look like such hopeless dolts.

I’m still a bit assertive and aggressive, and I still categorically reject McGrath’s weird beliefs.

Unbelievable. I can’t imagine this. NFTs are worthless.

A new report shows that the non-fungible token (NFT) market has essentially collapsed, and nearly all NFTs are practically worthless.

As seen on Insider, dappGambl’s study investigated 73,257 NFT collections, 69,795 of which have a market value of zero ETH.

“The hype around NFTs peaked in the 2021/22 bull run that saw nearly $2.8 billion in monthly trading volume recorded in August 2021. From this, NFTs captured the collective imagination worldwide with multiple news reports of million-dollar deals for sales of certain NFT assets,” writes dappGambl.

You mean that hype and histrionics don’t add immense intrinsic value to abstract vapor? So many capitalist entities just shuddered with the sensation that someone is walking over their grave.

Oh god. Avi Loeb waxes philosophical, and he sounds like a crackpot theologian rather than a crackpot scientist. He wants to claim that aliens exist because it will make him feel good while simultaneously arguing that his critics disagree with him because they want to unique and special. It’s an amazing load of very special bullshit.

First he tries to persuade his readers that our existence is pointless because the universe is so very large and ancient, making us a tiny inconsequential speck in the immense cosmos. And somehow, thinking that we’re all alone gives us comfort?

We do not know what happened before the Big Bang, so cosmic history could have extended well beyond our experience, making our existence even less significant in the grander scheme of things. Given this perspective, the Copernican realization that Earth is not at the center of the observable Universe pales in comparison to the realization that our cosmic existence is pointless.

With this humbling backdrop hanging over our head, the possibility that we might be the only intelligent species gives us existential comfort. Our pride stems from our intellectual superiority relative to other natural species on Earth. The emergence of large-language-models of artificial intelligence (AI) with more connections than the number of synapses in the human brain, might bring us back to the sober realization that human intelligence is not the pinnacle of creation. If our technological products might be smarter than we are, who is to say that there are no others out there who are even smarter?

As of now, most of my academic colleagues argue that that the notion that we are not alone in the Universe is an “extraordinary claim” that requires “extraordinary evidence”. However, my common sense argues exactly the opposite: it is extraordinary and arrogant for us to assume that we are special.

That’s all nonsense. Speaking for most biologists, I think we generally agree that life is probably common in the universe — it’s just chemistry, after all. Our expectation that that is so has nothing to do with the idea that being alone would make us special, which is just Loeb’s own special brand of twisty illogic.

He doesn’t seem to realize that his critics are not arguing that the idea we are not alone in the universe is an extraordinary claim — we are arguing that his assertion that a transient observation of a rock passing through the solar system, or of tiny metal spherules at the bottom of the ocean, is piss-poor evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial intent. Loeb is making an extraordinary specific claim on the basis of weak evidence, and dragging a sledge through mud is not the kind of work needed to justify it.

Here’s a counter-example. The JWST has found a planet with emission spectra that suggest the existence of chemical products characteristic of life.

It may have detected a molecule called dimethyl sulphide (DMS). On Earth, at least, this is only produced by life.

The researchers stress that the detection on the planet 120 light years away is “not robust” and more data is needed to confirm its presence.

Researchers have also detected methane and CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere.

Detection of these gases could mean the planet, named K2-18b, has a water ocean.

Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, of the University of Cambridge, who led the research, told BBC News that his entire team were ”shocked” when they saw the results.

“On Earth, DMS is only produced by life. The bulk of it in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments,” he said.

But Prof Madhusudhan described the detection of DMS as tentative and said that more data would be needed to confirm its presence. Those results are expected in a year.

Are scientists freaking out an claiming that this can’t be so, that the data must be rejected because we have a prior certainty that alien life cannot possibly exist, we have to be alone in the unverse? No. That’s a really interesting result, cool stuff that ought to be pursued, but we also need to consider other alternative explanations. Madhusudhan is practicing a kind of cautious interpretation of the data that is totally alien to Loeb.

Scientists don’t seem to have the kind of knee-jerk hostility to the premise of extratrerrestrial life that Loeb imagines. Instead, we’re hostile to bad evidence advanced in service of half-assed hypotheses.

But he worked so hard on gathering ‘data,’ how dare anyone criticize him.

Traveling to the Pacific Ocean for two weeks to retrieve millimeter-size spherules that melted off the surface of IM1 and settled on the ocean floor at a depth of 2 kilometers across a ten-kilometer region, and analyzing these spherules by a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer at Harvard University for two months, was hard work that culminated in a 44-pages-long scientific paper. Tweeting superficially about the findings was an easy escape route for all the naysayers who chose to behave unprofessionally and harass our research team for following the scientific method.

In the imagined reality of cosmic loneliness, our cosmic significance is self-declared. We can ignore packages in our backyard by not searching for them or by ridiculing any search made by the true scientists among us. But irrespective of what some of us tweet, an objective observer of IM1 or `Oumuamua would repeat Galileo’s words: “E pur si mouve” (and yet it moves).

No one is claiming that `Oumuamua didn’t move. That was an observable fact. Rather, those superficial tweets he finds objectionable were by people disagreeing with his claim that its movement was intentional and planned by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Rocks move through space all the time. Spaceships, especially spaceships from an extrasolar origin, are considerably more rare, and you need to be prepared to demonstrate why you attach such an extraordinary cause to it.

And there he goes, trying to hide behind the “scientific method.” His whole research program is a collection of slipshod rationalizations for his a priori biases, backed with haphazard observations that don’t actually support his ideas. His version of the ‘scientific method’ is damned sloppy.

But it gives him meaning, he says.

My second important point is that finding interstellar senders would bring a meaning to our meager cosmic existence. In our personal life, finding a partner often gives us meaning because it channels existential sentiments back to us, providing us comfort. And this comfort is better than that afforded by arrogance and loneliness. The sense of pointlessness brought by comprehending the Universe must have resulted from the focus of cosmologists on lifeless entities, like elementary particles or radiation. If we find a partner out there, the cosmos might not be pointless anymore.

That’s a religious argument — just replace “interstellar senders” with “god,” and it’s the ordinary ravings of a thousand clueless preachers who really, really want you to believe. How can you find meaning in your pathetic, lonely existence if you don’t have Jesus, I mean, Aliens?

His logic doesn’t even hold up internally. If humans are but brief, insignificant specks in a gigantic universe, how does finding another tiny speck suddenly bring us cosmic significance? Oh, but it would make Avi Loeb feel better about his speckiness if he could imagine sharing it with another speck.

And yet, the tininess of my speck neither causes me regret nor makes me seek out bigger, more powerful imaginary specks. Funny how that works.