The Problem of UFOs and Reported Miracles

Everyone who visits this blog should understand that there is not enough evidence to support the idea that alien spacecraft have visited Earth. However, you can find tons of eye-witness testamony regarding UFOs and UFO abductions. Why is this so?

Part of the reason for people believing they saw a UFO is due to a psychological phenomena known as argument from ignorance. Someone sees bright lights in the sky, they don't know what it is, so they say, "It must be a UFO!" Their thought processes should have stopped after they realize they don't know what it is, but the human mind craves understanding of the world. We sometimes impose improbable and unlikely rationales simply because our minds cannot stand not understanding.

The same is true of God. Plenty of people claim to have experienced miracles by the hand of God, but as evidenced by UFO beliefs, eye-witness testamony is a horrible form of evidence. Here's a typical story of a theist explaining a miracle:

Theist: "One time, I got in a car accident. I should have died, but God saved me. That's how I know God exists; through miracles like that in my life."

The statement above falls prey to the argument from ignorance phenomena. The theist got in a car accident, doesn't know why he survived, but proclaims divine intervention as a way to understand what happened.

So whenever someone proclaims to have seen UFOs or miracles from personal experience, you can remind them of how our brain tricks us through argument from ignorance.

If Genesis Were Written in the Language of Science...

If Genesis was written in the language of science, it would have sounded like this:



By the way: Sorry for not updating my blog for a while, my computer went down for a while.

Universal Healthcare is Actually Very Popular in the United States

Despite what the GOP and Fox News would have you think, the American people are overwhelming in support of universal health care and a public option made available by the government. So just how much are the American people in favor of universal health care? You won't believe it.

86 percent of Americans support universal health care. 79 percent are in favor of a public option. These numbers come from a recent poll by the AARP which included Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.

Not surprisingly, Fox News watchers are woefully misinformed (that's why I'm here!) about the current health care bill. 72 percent think illegal aliens will be covered, 79 percent think health care reform was a government takeover, and 75 percent believe in "death panels" which I debunked in an earlier post.

Link to the poll results.

Skeptical Comedy Jam

I present to you the comedian Dara O'Brian. In this video, he lambastes homeopathy and nutritionists. Please enjoy.

Best Fossils of the Year

Just a heads up! National Geographic posted a new article showcasing many of the most well-preserved fossils recently unearthed.

You can read it in full here.

World Health Ogranization Says Homeopathy Is Not a Cure

The World Health Organization is discouraging the use of homeopathy for the treatment of diseases such as TB, HIV, and malaria. Why is this so? Homeopathy doesn't work, and when it's used in place of real medicine, lives are lost.

I would like to thank the WHO for taking a stand in debunking homeopathy. Nonsense should never disguise itself as medicine.

Paula Ross, the chief executive of the Society of Homeopaths wrote in response, "This is just another poorly wrapped attempt to discredit homeopathy." No Paula, the lack of evidence of the efficacy of homeopathy has already discredited it. The WHO is just stating facts.

Here is the full story via BBC News.

Debunking Cambrian Explosion Myths

I have heard creationists claim on multiple occasions that the Cambrian explosion disproves evolution. For example, Lee Strobel in this video claims that the all the phyla appeared at once, independently, and therefore they were created.

First we have to understand what the Cambrian explosion is. The Cambrian explosion occurred about 530 million years ago and lasted around 80 million years. (EDIT: Quasar brought to my attention that the exact length of time of the Cambrian explosion is under dispute. However, the lowest estimate is still around 5 million years.) During this time, many of the phyla or general body types first appeared for animals. Before the Cambrian explosion, very few fossils exist of multicellular creatures, and life appears to be mainly composed of single cell organisms.

However, not all phyla made their appearance during the Cambrian explosion. Land-based life such as flowers, ferns, etc... developed much later.

While fossils from the Cambrian explosion and Precambrian are rare, evidence exists that all these body types did not evolve completely independently. All animal phyla, for example, share many common characteristics. They are all triploblastic (the embryo forms in 3 layers), bilatteral (have left and right halves) coelomates (have internal body organs). Therefore, evidence of common ancestry is suggested in the formation of these early phyla groups.

More importantly, geologists found fossils predating the Cambrian explosion of burrows which require a digging mechanism and multicellular creatures. So the idea that creatures found in the Cambrian explosion arose without precedent is simply untrue. Life had been developing into more complex, multicellular forms in the Precambrian.

The easiest way to explain the Cambrian explosion is through the theory of punctuated equilibrium. According to the theory, the evolution of most sexually-reproducing creatures occurs in short bursts followed by long stretches of few changes.

While the theory of punctuated equilibrium may have been over-sold, the idea that changes to the environment spur evolutionary development is well understood by biologists. After all, the information for evolution comes from the environment - change the environment, change the creature.

It just so happens that the amount of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere dramatically rose during the time of the Cambrian explosion, giving animals more oxygen to work with. This extra oxygen could have enabled creatures to grow larger than ever before without suffocating their body parts due to a lack of oxygen.

So while much remains to be learned about the Cambrian explosion, the idea that it somehow proves that omnipotent deity magically created life on Earth is a very much unwarranted.