Blogs / Bad Astronomy

OK, I know that some people see the face of their religious icons in random things. I’ve written about this a zillion times. And I know that sometimes it’s just pareidolia, our tendency to see faces in random objects. And I know that people will think it’s a miracle, when really it’s the end-product of thousands of generations of the evolution of our pattern-seeking abilities.

But then there’s stuff like this: a guy is "clueless" about how the face of Jesus appeared on his truck window, and why it persists day after day.

Oh, I have a clue. It’s clearly not random, which means it’s either a) divine, or 2) drawn on by someone. My conclusion that it’s (2) comes from having a daughter who would take her finger and draw her name in the misty back window of my car when she was younger. And also doing it myself when I was a kid. And seeing eighty bazillion examples of this as a human living in America.

So I think someone drew it on the window. The oil from their finger doesn’t wash off with water, so every morning the picture reappears with the advent (advent! Haha! A little funny for the upcoming season) on the morning dew.

But, of course, that’s just me. When I hear hoofbeats I think horses, not zebras. And since I don’t live near a zoo or in the African plains, I’m guessing what we have here is a horse-drawn carriage.

Um. Well. You know what I mean.

Picture credit: (AP Photo/Johnson City Press, Lee Talbert)

In Russia, thousands of Muslims are flocking to see a baby who has verses from the Koran mysteriously appearing on his body:

I’d like to be very clear here: this is not pareidolia, our ability to see patterns in random objects. The verses are clearly there, and not just random. As one pilgrim said, "It’s proof that Allah exists, that he is all-mighty…"

However — and perhaps this is just me here — it seems far more likely that instead of an actual miracle, someone is maybe, y’know, writing the verses on the baby. The mother says the baby is cranky when the words appear, which (if she’s being truthful) you might expect if someone is scraping or otherwise irritating the baby’s skin to make the words appear. I’ll note that the words fade with time, too, just as expected if this is a fraud.

If this whole thing is a fake (and the JREF has a million dollars on the line to say something about that) then I don’t know what’s worse: the parents or whoever is behind this doing this to the baby, or the crowd who simply believes it.

Oh, wait! I know what’s worse: the reporter who did this story and the editor who approved it not injecting one single shred of skepticism into the report. There was no journalism here, no investigation. This was simple stenography, the credulous retelling of what is almost 100% guaranteed to be a hoax at best and a scam at worst. Not to mention child abuse.

People sometimes ask me what it’s like to be a skeptic all the time. Maybe I should simply answer, “nauseated.”

I actually am fairly tolerant of religious differences between people. Religious beliefs run very, very deep, and touch a part of us that is incredibly difficult to analyze rationally or with any sort of real self-skepticism. In general, a person’s religious belief is wrapped up in their own sense of self, so attacking that religion is akin to a personal attack on them.

But sometimes, just sometimes, a belief can be goofy enough — and damaging enough — that maybe a little bit of mockery is deserved. Certainly Pat Robertson has done so much damage in his lifetime that he gets no pass at all from me. My thoughts on him are clear and public (for example, he is "bigoted, small-minded zealot who will say anything to appeal to his base").

So it comes as no surprise that his website CBN is a haven for nonsensery at all levels. But a new post there about Halloween has even me scratching my head. Kimberly Daniels wrote a piece there about Halloween that is about as far from reality as it can be:

Halloween is a counterfeit holy day that is dedicated to celebrating the demonic trinity of : the Luciferian Spirit (the false father); the Antichrist Spirit (the false holy spirit); and the Spirit of Belial (the false son).

Really? I thought it was a time to have fun, let a little loose, eat candy, and just be silly. But I guess that’s just me.

… and about 300 million other Americans.

So we’ve established she’s a goofball. Fine. But then she goes too far:

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

Attacking Halloween is one thing, but attacking the candy?

Wow, it must be fun to live in an evidence-free world where you can simply assert whatever you want without proof or references or anything! Here, let me try: CBN is run by a TI 99-4a computer with buggy code that sometimes strings words together in patterns that almost make sense, if you squint and stand some distance away from them.

Hey, that was easy!

I think that it’s not only OK, but appropriate to shake your head and be somewhat dismissive of opinions stated as fact that aren’t within a glancing blow of reality. That anyone can take Robertson^* or his organization seriously is weird. The fact that they make money hand over fist is, well, not a crime since it’s legal, but a real shame.

And I wonder if anyone has told Ms. Daniels about the pagan origins of Christmas celebrations?

Anyway, as for me, I’ll happily be giving out my accursed Kit Kats and demonic Baby Ruths to all the satan-worshipping entrail-reading pagan evildoers in the neighborhood. And probably snitching the occasional hellspawned Tootsie Roll, too.

A couple of weeks ago, thousands of people gathered at Knock Shrine in Ireland, gazing upward, looking for a vision of the Virgin Mary. Why?

Earlier in the week Dublin-based clairvoyant Joe Coleman predicted Our Lady would appear at the old parish church – scene of the 1879 apparition – at 3pm. Quite a number of those present were members of the Travelling community.

If people want to believe in something then that is their right, but doesn’t the Bible say a lot of things about divination and looking to the sky for signs?

OK, still, fine. But what we had here was several thousand people staring at the Sun. That’s a bad idea: it can cause temporary blindness, and permanent damage to the retina (though I know of no cases of both permanent and total blindness).

And of course it can cause you to see things. The retina floods with light and gets saturated, making you see afterimages with illusions of color, movement, and other weird things. And this is just what the pilgrims to Knock reported.

John Tunney, from Islandeady, Castlebar, said: “I’m 53 years old and I never seen the sun go like that before. I witnessed the sun go all different colours, yellow, red and green. Then it completely darkened and began shimmering. Sometimes the sun emitted a clean, bright light, then it would darken again.”

Mr Tunney’s wife, Nina, said: “The sun was spinning in the sky. I experienced a feeling of total happiness. It is a feeling I would love to experience again. It was amazing. I felt marvellous.”

Yvonne Rabbitte, from Dunmore, Co Galway, showed other pilgrims a photograph she had taken on her digital camera which showed vivid rays radiating downwards from the sun at the time the image was taken

The first two anecdotes sure sound to me a lot like illusions that happen when staring at a very bright object. And that last story is telling; that kind of thing will always happen when you take pictures of the Sun! I have lots of pictures with rays coming from the Sun that I have taken on days when a clairvoyant has not predicted the apparition of a religious icon.

As I have said here many times, people have the right to believe in what they want. However, I think they should at least try to educate themselves on the way the Universe works so they don’t leap to the wrong conclusions (as Richard Feymann once said, science is a way of not fooling ourselves)– and certainly the journalists out there have an obligation to do a little research when reporting on such events.

This is a case where I think people came to the wrong conclusion. I don’t know if the clairvoyant really believes what he says or if, like so many others, he’s got a somewhat different agenda. But either way the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: people went outside hoping to see visions, and that’s just what happened.

Tip o’ the sunglasses to Padraig Cleary.

If you’re in the US and you want to read the book The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, then you’ll be happy to find out it’s now on Amazon in ‘murica.

Not only that, the audiobook is now available as well, with individual essays read by the authors, including Richard Dawkins, Simon Le Bon, Ben Goldacre, and of course moi.

I guess the audio version is available in case all the hardcopies get burned accidentally or something, but if you listen to it instead of reading it you can keep your eyes closed while reclining in your heathen infidelicious den of iniquity. But the hardcover does make a better stocking stuffer.

Young Earth creationists can be sneaky. First, years ago, they loudly proclaimed their religious beliefs. Then when they got smacked hard in the courtrooms when they wanted to teach religion in schools, they evolved: they changed their snake oil to Intelligent Design and tried again.

And again they got whooped. ID was shown to be creationism in disguise — what some might call a bald-faced lie — so that again fundamentalists could attempt to teach religion in the classroom, despite the Constitution of the United States.

I have wondered aloud what they would do next. After all, when facts are slippery things, able to be misused as openly and ridiculously as so many creationists do, then clearly they won’t just give up. They’ll move on to the next deceptive technique.

And now I have to wonder if we’re starting to see it. Could this new tactic be: telling the truth?

Greg Fish of the blog World of Weird Things clued me in to a post on the execrable Answers In Genesis website talking about black holes. In this essay, creationist astronomer Jason Lisle discusses the topic with clarity and actual accuracy. He uses decent analogies, doesn’t let them run away from him, and makes a good case for the existence of black holes.

Wha wha whaaaa?

Of course, in the end, he says this:

Black holes provide an observable confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Such physics is the basis for several young-universe cosmologies, which allow light from the most distant galaxies to reach earth in thousands of years or less. Scientific discoveries, such as black holes, are not only interesting, but they give us a small glimpse into the thoughts of an infinite God (Psalm 19:1).

Well, he certainly drops the ball there, letting it fall down (ha! haha!) a black hole. Cosmologies which abuse basic physics to change enough to allow a young Universe tend to be wrong in their basic assumptions.

But the point here is that the article itself is pretty much factually correct, making me wonder what’s going on here. Maybe the folks at AiG are hoping that by writing an article not filled with fallacious reasoning, they’ll reap the benefits of Google links (though not from me, since I put a rel=nofollow in the above link to the site). It’s hard to say. But given the sheer amount of nonsense on their site, it’s hard to ascribe noble motives to them.

And let me add an irony: on that page is a description of dark matter. I find that humorous, because dark matter was originally proposed to solve the mystery of how individual galaxies in clusters can move so quickly but still stay bound to the cluster itself. The gravity from the visible matter in the cluster was too weak to hold on to such rapidly-moving galaxies, and therefore, if the clusters are to not fly apart over the age of the Universe, there must be invisible matter holding them together.

So dark matter was originally proposed because we know the Universe is old. Of course, now we know that dark matter has influence all over the place, and would have been found even if we hadn’t studied clusters. But the irony still tickles me.

Anyway, what do we do here? Well, if creationists want to actually describe the Universe for what it really is, then I guess we let them… as long as they do so, pardon the pun, faithfully. But as soon as they step over that broad, broad line into territory clearly denied by the evidence, then they need to be called on it.

Eternal vigilance.

If you don’t know about Mr. Deity, then where have you been? It’s a satirical video series that assumes that God is something of a clueless high-level executive, running into all sorts of issues while constructing the Universe. It’s been around a while, and a new episode just came out called "Mr. Deity and the Science Advisor". Mind you, it’s only a biological science advisor; Mr. D never talked to an astronomer before constructing the Universe. But the advisor looks like someone I know. I assume that must be coincidence. Or some sort of pareidolia.

The sushi line made me LOL; I’ve had sushi with this particular science advisor and he likes it. Before you accuse him of anything, I’ll note that I eat things containing atoms created in supernovae explosions. Does that make both of us science cannibals? Morals get fuzzy sometimes. I prefer physics.

P.S. If you don’t get the joke at the end, then maybe this piece of unintentional creationist hilarity may help.