The Scathing Atheist - 653: CDC Ya Edition

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

In this week’s episode, the CDC deals with a brain worm, Quebec doesn't enjoy Islam incorrectly, and Ross Douthat will try his hand at neuroscience. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To buy our book, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Outbreak-Crisis-Religion-Ruined-Pandemic/dp/B08L2HSVS8/ If you see a news story you think we might be interested in, you can send it here: [e-mail] To check out our sister show, The Skepticrat, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/the-skepticrat To check out our sister show’s hot friend, God Awful Movies, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/god-awful-movies To check out our half-sister show, Citation Needed, click here: http://citationpod.com/ To check out our sister show’s sister show, D and D minus, click here: https://danddminus.libsyn.com/ Report instances of harassment or abuse connected to this show to the Creator Accountability Network here: https://creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org/ --- Headlines: CDC in full revolt over RFK Jr’s bullshit: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/health/cdc-monarez-kennedy-vaccines.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/opinion/cdc-leaders-kennedy.html Republican congressional candidate torches Qur’an in hate-fueled campaign ad: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/republican-congressional-candidate Republicans double down on “thoughts and prayers” as an answer to mass shootings: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/28/politics/thoughts-and-prayers-shootings-vance-analysis and https://www.christianpost.com/news/greg-laurie-franklin-graham-respond-to-critics-of-prayer.html Quebec plans to table bill banning prayer in public: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/public-prayer-ban-quebec-1.7619985

Warning, the following podcast is not safe for work, but that's more of a problem with the work than with the podcast. This week's episode of The Skathing Atheist is brought to you by the fact that Silk Song comes out the day after we record. And now The Skating Atheist. Hi, I'm Koah, and the reality that I barely passed my written test, and somehow I got behind a wheel for lessons today proves that we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men. Keep out of California for a couple months, people. It's Thursday. It's September 4th. And it's eat an extra dessert day.

Not an extra if I always have to. I'm no illusions. I'm Eli Bosnick. I'm Ethan Wright. from Ralph Nader's, New Jersey. How dare you? And our Michigan away across Georgia. This is the skating east.

Oh, this week's episode. The CDC deals with a brainworm. Quebec doesn't enjoy Islam incorrectly. And Ross doubt that we'll try his hand at neuroscience this time. But first, the diatri. Okay, I'll admit, never been more disappointed by a no-bituary. From the beginning, the rumors that he was dead and they were hiding that fact like Stalinist-Russia, those were always a little silly. We're like Stalin's Russia in completely different ways.

But the rumor that he'd had a stroke or some other malady that left him visibly incapacitated, well, that sure did wet my appetite. and in the 24 hours leading up to his proof-of-life press conference, social media was just giving us a steady drip of promising rumors. There were rumors that he couldn't stand unassisted, that he'd lost the powers of speech, that he needed a walker to get around.

Now, none of those were credibly sourced, of course, but that didn't stop motherfuckers from sharing him far and why, did it? I mean, think about what a cell phone this really is. Donald Trump just exceeded the accusations of insufficient physical prowess. By standing, talking, and walking. That's all it's like. Think about how bad you have to fuck up

before Donald goddamn Trump can thwart your accusations with his vigor. We're talking about a 79-year-old amalgamation of Big Macs and burned steaks held together with Diet Coke's stickiness and gravy's skin. He's got cancels to rival Chernobyl. His entire face is one giant liver spot

and he's got fucking Quato sprouting out of the back of his hand ready to lead the Martian resistance. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how frail and unhealthy that motherfucker is. But because we set the bar for physical acumen at Dad, he managed to shuffle over it with ease. And this is not an isolated event. Right? If it was, I'd just move on.

But we'd fall in for this one simple trick thinking before. Remember when they thought they were going to reverse Trump's first victory through Jill Stein's recounts? Might as well as said we could fix the thing by convincing Christopher Reeves to fly backwards around the earth fast enough to reverse time. But that didn't stop a lot of motherfuckers from donating to the effort and promoting it. Hell, even now, people are pretending that there's going to be some revelation in the Epstein files that wakes his horde of maggots from their sycophantic torpor. What could they possibly learn about them that they don't already fucking know?

And look, I'm not just saying let's not fall for conspiracy theories, folks. I've said that before and I'll say it again. But over and over again, we've been sold this fiction that something's right around the corner and it's going to take Trump down this time. And it's not always some radical conspiracy. It could be the Mueller report. It could be Fannie Willis, the stolen documents case, the fact that he very clearly raped children.

Those aren't fanciful notions that strain credibility or anything. In any sane world, at least one of those things would already have put a stop to this national nightmare. But nobody would accuse this world of sanity. So they've been no more effective than rumors of his demise. And of course, the comfort we take from these shared fantasies is that any minute now something's going to change. vestige of the rational, liberal, secular, rules-based world that we were told we lived in would

reemerge. And through no effort of our own, the problem would take care of itself. Again, that's not an unreasonable assumption, even though it's wrong. I mean, thinking that the Big Macs finally caught up with Trump is not unreasonable, but that doesn't mean it isn't dangerous to think that, especially if we keep doing shit like that, Like it's a psychological defense mechanism. Look, one of the things that's been protecting Trump from the beginning is the fact that everything about him is too stupid to work. When Trump was first surging in the primaries back in 2015, we openly hoped that he would win the nomination because we all knew he was too stupid to win in the general, right? He started accusing the election results of being fake before we even started voting in 2020.

So we figured that was too stupid to convince anybody, right? His justifications, his excuses, his mad grabs for power, they're all so transparently stupid that you almost can't take them seriously until they're done. So maybe the next time we hear a rumor that amounts to, in a few days or weeks or months or hours, we won't have to worry about Trump anymore.

Maybe we refrain from amplifying it. Not just because we're good skeptics, not just because we're committed to the truth, but because any hope that the Trump problem is on the verge of taking care of itself is an excuse for us in the resistance to take our foot off the pedal and we can't afford to do that for a minute

let alone another couple of fucking days they're talking about your Jesus joining me for headlines tonight are the soup and salad to my slaw Heathenwright and Eli Bosnick fellas are you ready to take sides soup is a sandwich

prove me rock the only reason Elon Musk isn't in the Epstein files is because children can't get pregnant. Oh my God. We both did one. Hot take, yeah. Some of them can, though. In our lead story tonight, in Trump's first term, he talked a lot about the deep state. Now, partly this was just a phantom that he had created to explain his incompetence to his base, right? Like, oh, I'd love to get this done, but that darn deep state keeps standing in my way.

But to a certain extent, there was a deep state working against him, right? And it was comprised of all the low and mid-level bureaucratic employees that worked where they did because they believed in the department's mission, and did not want to help Donald Trump fuck it to death. And that deep state showed up again when the Center for Disease Control set itself on fire from within rather than adhere to RFK Jr's natural green mommy vaccine policy. I underestimated how prepared these people were to deal with a deadly parasite. I talked faster than I normally do that time. So the bloodbath started with the fire.

of CDC head Susan Moneris. Yeah, if you don't count the literal terrorist who got radicalized by anti-vaxxer propaganda and fired hundreds of rounds into the CDC headquarters in Atlanta and killed a police officer. Spoilers. Yeah, yeah, sorry, the figurative bloodb. The literal bloodbath was already going, but the

figurative one started with the firing of Monaris. Maneris had been in the position for all of a month before Kennedy's assonine vaccine demands forced an irreconcilable conflict. Put simply, he demanded that she promote lies in bullshit. about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. She refused. He fired her.

She reminded him that he didn't actually have the authority to fire her. So he cried to Trump about it, who then fired her. Fucking Narc. Right. Called dad about it. Like, you thought there was no more ways and reasons that you could hate RFK Jr. So in a show of solidarity with the actual doctor here that was defending the actual science, four other top leaders quit alongside her.

In an email announcing a resignation, one of the four summed up their collective reasoning. Quote, I am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponization of public health, end quote. Yeah, which is truly insane because there's no subjectivity here. This isn't politics. It's medical science with data. But I was curious about just how clear the expert consensus is about this. Skepticism. I tried to look up, you know, what percent of epidemiologists are against the COVID vaccine.

The answer is, that. That's a nonsense question. The concept of anti-vaxxer epidemiologist is a contradiction in terms. And even if you allow the nonsense question, the number of self-proclaimed anti-vax and also epidemiologists is tiny. I recently had this fight with my idiot friend who did his own fucking research. And I asked him, what insight do you think you have that 99% of experts do not have on that research. Good question. His response was really long silence and then hanging up and pretending his phone was out of battery at his house where he has electricity. Yeah. See, now, first of all,

wasn't me. Second of all, this is why I had a kid, right? If he starts to win an argument with me, just pinch my toddler and up, it's neither here nor there. I got to go. Yep, yep, there you go. Works every time. Now, of course, all of this news broke on Wednesday, just when it was too late to get it into last week's show. But since that firing, the complication within the department has only gotten worse. Even before the firing, massive and indiscriminate layoffs had the agency in chaos and employees were more than a little rattled after their headquarters was shot up by that aforementioned Magaluni who wanted revenge for all the microchips they implanted in him. Not to mention the fucking crippling budget cuts and unprecedented political interference.

And of course, that interference is steering the agency to work against the health of the American public. So pretty much anybody who can get the fuck out is getting the fuck out. the competent people that aren't being fired in a tantrum are quitting to find work in the private sector. Perhaps at one of the many private groups that are popping up to try to do all the important public health shit that they can no longer trust the CDC to do. And when taken together, that leads to the kind of brain drain that normally requires a cerebral tapeworm.

Yeah. There's a terrifying truth in here. It's better to have no disease control at all. Yes. than to have active disease promotion with the title of disease control. The best these real doctors can do at this point is take away the credibility of their names, whatever, that's worth this point, and try to build these independent groups. That's all they have.

Just roving gangs of disease controllers, kicking over expired lettuce bins and vaccinating people who walked alone at night. There you go. They're snapping together. Right, yeah, well, obviously. So in response to this direct assault on medical science, nine, former directors of the CDC warned on Monday that Kennedy is putting Americans health at risk. That includes Republican and Democratic appointees stretching all the way back to 1977 and all of the leaders that followed Monaro's out the door had, of course, served under both

Republican and Democratic presidents, right? Because they're nonpartisan doctors and their scientists who, let's be clear, are the best of the fucking world at what they do, right? These are people are fucking irreplaceable and they're doing really important jobs. So it's like there are other people who could do it. Yes, you can find somebody who's equally qualified. Good luck, you know, getting to work for fucking RFK Jr. But one way or the other, even if you did, you would lose decades of institutional knowledge. And of course, the person holding the knife and steering the fucking bus at this point

is a man without the sense to avoid swimming in sewage. That's where our national health is. Hey, just completely op-propos nothing. Does anyone have a rickets guy? I'm just curious for no reason. I do. I have a ricket's guy. If anybody was going to have it. And, oh, he did it all for the rickets.

That's starting to make sense. Because that's the thing. It's hard to keep track everything when every branch of government is on fire. But I want to emphasize here that this all comes at the same time that Kennedy and Trump are hard at work, canceling promising research and being, like, for being woke, and push it through plans that will shutter rural hospitals and kicked millions of people off their insurance. And the most painful aspect of it all, it's not even in service of anything, right? There's no ideology behind this except the rejection of science. We are sacrificing our national health on the altar of the goddamn comment section. Sure.

And in Karen Height 451 News. Fantastic. There's a new Republican congressional candidate in Texas, and she just released a campaign video during which she burns a book with a flamethrower. And of course, that book is, the Quran. Apparently the main focus of her platform is the pervasive influence of Islam that she doesn't like in the state of Texas and she declared she'll be ending that. Yeah. No, nothing dissuades Muslim

participation quite like burning a Quran lady. That ought to shut them up. I don't do it. Okay, okay. Hear me out. I know that killing people just because they burn a Quran is bad. But you're done. I think you're done. But you're probably done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. There's a beep. I'm just saying tag her in some Facebook photos, okay? I just want to, you know. Okay, okay, all right.

So if the flamethrower book burning campaign ad sounds vaguely familiar, you might be remembering failed Missouri Republican Valentina Gomez, who ran for Missouri Secretary of State in the GOP primary last year and finished sixth place out of eight people. It's got to be really embarrassing for seven and eight. Well, apparently, Valentina carpet bagged her way

into Texas because yes, of course it's her again. During that race in Missouri, she released a video of burning

what she believed to be gay books with a flamethrower. You might also remember the very strange idiot fight

that emerged when it was revealed that Valentina owns a Toyota Prius hybrid. Oh, I do remember her.

Yeah, that's her. She was immediately accused of being secretly gay because partially electric vehicles are gay. Obviously.

But then she released a video explaining how it actually works. She steps out of her Prius and says, they say driving a Prius is a little gay until I pull out this little guy and she has a giant assault rifle. Yes, she does. Well, that led to an argument about whether the car becomes hetero at that point

or if it remains gay because an observer can't see the assault rifle unless the driver like holds it out the window the whole time. Right, yeah, yeah. To be fully straight, your machine gun has to be mounted on your Prius. A Prius with a machine gun in it is, is by. Yeah, because it's doing it for the attention. Exactly.

We all are all going to figure this all out. So I ran that by my wife and she said it was fine. I ran it by. Cool, yeah. You have to yell at it in. I got one of them's. I got one of you's. One of my best wives is by.

As smokes an original of your train. You must come for her. Don't actually ever say anything mean to my wife. I'll literally kill you. Eli has a gun mounted on his Prius. So, yeah, the Republicans of Missouri, they weren't ready for Valentin's campaign theme of oversized weapons.

And obviously the move was Texas. And now she's running for U.S. Congress in Texas District 31, hoping to find success with the more, you know, sophisticated media-savvy voters there. who participate in the modern information economy and get their news from flamethrower TikToks. In the video from last week,

she places a Quran on her emulation podium that she owns and pulls out her flamethrower, which is very silly. It's silly for a flamethrower in a campaign video, whatever that means. It looks like a laser tag weapon owned by a grown-up, one of those grown-ups who buys custom, weapons to beat kids at

Lasertag and paint all the time? No, like if Darth Vader, like had the Storm Troopers pull out a T-shirt cannon, right? This is what you would expect to pull out. It looks exactly like a stormtrooper

T-shirt canad. Who likes to party? Hello, Detroit. Background. They're just missing everybody. So after shooting the Quran with fire, she delivers her very serious political message. Quote, your daughters will be raped and your sons beheaded, unless we stop Islam once and for all. We're done turning the other cheek.

Remember, David didn't pray for Goliath. He killed them. Oh, really? That accidental pluralization is quite telling in that. Sure the fuck is. America is a Christian nation, she continued, so those terrorist Muslims can fuck off to any of the 57 Muslim nations, end quote. And then we see her campaign poster that has a Jesus fish,

and it says Valentina Gomez for Congress, powered by Jesus Christ. Asterisk, which is like, except for the sissy ass turned in the other cheek bullshit. Yeah, right. And just a reminder, Texas did a. giant cheating thing with their district maps just now in order to gerrymander their already gerrymandered cheating district maps. So District 31 sits in a magical sweet spot that's just north of Austin and avoids most of those voters but steals away a few and dissolves them and also sits just south of another bastion of liberal thought called

Waco, Texas. It's literally never been represented by a Democrat. Never once for District 31. So the GOP primary is basically the same as the general election. Valentina Gomez, she probably won't win the primary, but she might win the primary. Yeah, who the fuck even knows at this point? Yeah. Let's tell her about Timothy, maybe hope she withdraws, huh? And in its thoughts or prayers, you can't have both news. Last week, America suffered yet another horrific school shooting in which two more children were sacrificed to keep us safe from 30 to 50 feral hogs. And before realizing that the shooter was trans

and therefore a means by which they could promote their bigotry, Republicans fell into their automated response. Demonize people with mental health disorders. Pretend the rest of the world doesn't produce statistical data. Call for thoughts and prayers. Curiously, they were mostly leaving out the, we need them in case our government turns tyrannical stuff this time. So weird.

Hey, Tree of Liberty's getting super dry guys, right? Parked. Right, Republican Party? nobody very thirsty super dry yeah but in response to the request for magical wishing former white house press secretary jensaki tweeted quote prayer is not freaking enough prayer does not end school shooting prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school prayer does not bring these kids back enough with the thoughts and prayers end quote so anna what are the guys talking about it's the newest, the greatest, Christian freak out.

Now, Democrats pointing out that thoughts and prayers is pretty weak fucking sauce to offer to parents after your policies of unrestricted gun ownership just killed their kids. Yeah, especially when you all suck at praying. Yeah, it's not good at it, yeah. Clearly, your timing is awful as well. But the newly empowered right is ready to hit back this time, apparently. Evil Universe Jen Saki Carolyn Levitt called the tweet incredibly insensitive and escaped. carebear villain J.D. Vance did his best to mischaracterize the comments and twist them into bullshit persecution narratives that Christian men have to tell each other to get hard.

Summarizing Saki's point on Twitter as, quote, how dare you pray for innocent people in the midst of tragedy, end quote? As though, like, she was taking issue with the fact that people were praying rather than the fact that people who could fix the problem were instead calling for prayer. Okay, I'd like to take issue with the fact that people were praying. Jen Saki was very clearly not doing that, but I definitely am. You're praying to a ghost who let the murdering of those kids happen. Yeah. So you're moved, couch, fucker. Right.

But the reaction to Saki's comments were basically a bad faith effort to score political points. The ones that really got under Christianity's skin came from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who tweeted, quote, don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. these kids were literally praying, end quote. Which is a pretty good fucking point that really hit a fucking nerve with people who sell prayer for a living. Salem point. Yeah. Pastor Greg Lorry huffed and puffed, quote, yes, it is heartbreaking that children were praying when they were shot.

But, yeah, right. You were done. Yet let us remember that Christ himself prayed as he was crucified, end quote. Okay. I feel like that's a point on our side, though, isn't it? Yeah, you'd think. But also, I feel like Jesus was doing more of a, like a kink prayer. Like, please, daddy, don't.

Yeah, exactly. I just love the contrast between the reaction to these two statements, right? Because Jen's like, prayer doesn't work. And they're like, yes, it fucking does. And then one of the mares is like, okay, these kids were literally praying. And they're like, who said prayer at work? God, you guys are so wrong. Yeah, right.

Yeah. So Franklin Graham, who rose to the head of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association on Merritt, I'm sure. Gumpchin. Yeah, some bootstraps. Also criticized the mayor for pointing out that God looked the other way while children were, you know, that were directly talking to him at that moment were shot to death. And he pointed out that it doesn't count because the shooting kid stuff is the devil. Quote, in the case of these students who were shot and killed while praying, God can give comfort and peace to the families who have been devastated, which is both pathetically insufficient and a lie, right?

Like, not only can he not, but what a fucking lame-ass thing. to even pretend his limit is. Continuing, quote, the god of this age is Satan, he is the one who wants to steal, kill, kill, and destroy, end quote. Okay, more evidence that you all suck at praying. You're so bad at it. Yes, have you tried praying to Satan? Right. And to be clear, if this were a Christian movie, that would be a sloppy, unneeded foreshadowing that Donald Trump is Satan, right? So there you have it. Straight from Franklin Graham's thumb. God isn't omnipotent. Satan is more powerful,

but God can apologize for the evil stuff that Satan does like a fucking champ. Feels like that's a bit of a demotion, but I appreciate that they're at least trying. Yeah.

Sorry, I'm just still picturing JD Vance getting blasted by a belly laser. Yeah. Blasted away from the couch, yeah. Exactly. And finally tonight, in Quebec and call news,

Canada's wacky stepchild who insists on dressing like a mime Quebec is back in the news this week after tabling a plan to ban public prayer because the two things you can always count on Quebec to do are be extremely French

and somehow do secularism wrong. Yeah, well, and if you ask the French, they're also being extremely French wrong. Yeah, and you're not really stuck in a box we know you're lying. Exactly. Stop it. So first off, thanks to Jay for sending us this story to scathing news at gmail.com

For sending us religious news to scathing news at gmail.com, Jay gets to wear whatever magic hat he wants to our slumber party and we'll only make fun of it once or twice. Skathing News at gmail.com. Still doing the shaving cream and the feather thing. Yeah, obviously, yeah. And it'll be twice. It's a classic.

So this new law is thanks to the Coalition Avenia Quebec, or CAQ, and secularism minister Jean-François-Roberge in particular. And on paper, it sounds like a common sense idea. Prayer is nothing. Doing it in public is at best a mildly annoying reminder that the adults around you think the tooth fairy is real. But unfortunately, like the ban on religious symbols from last year, the real reason for these new laws is Islamophobia. And Roberge isn't like bothering to pretend otherwise, saying in December, quote, seeing people praying in the streets in public parks is not something we want in Quebec, end quote. Adding that he wanted to send a quote,

very clear message to Islamists, end quote. All right, all right. New idea. How about a very secular, even-handed law that requires that if you do pray, you face North. It's just a Canadian thing to do. Come on. Exactly.

Yeah, and along with North, we're also doing white. And great. Yeah, exactly. Great way north. It's not racial. It's just our thing. And I'll point out that context actually makes this even worse than it sounds just from that quote.

So images of Muslims praying in Montreal made headlines last summer, and last month, a viral video showing Muslims praying outside the Notre Dame Basilica of Montreal was shared more than 14,000 times on Twitter. So it's not just we want to show Muslims they aren't welcome here, which would be bad enough. It's don't worry, racist French Canadians on Twitter. I'm listening to your bigotry-based memes, the policy. Yes, yeah. You're making atheists come out on the side of prayer. That's how bad you're fucking this up, Quebec. Jesus.

And look, there is an argument to be made that even if the motivation of these laws is bigotry, and it is, as long as the results are secular, we as atheists should, like, support it. And I get that. I do. The urge to enforce your beliefs on others in the way that beliefs are shoved on to us is overwhelming. But we can't do good things bad guyingly and hope that the end result will be good. Right. I think we can, but not this one.

Definitely not this one. Not this particular one, right? If we want people to stop wearing magic hats and blocking the sidewalks with prayer, we have to do it the old-fashioned way by offering them exponentially better choices that is life-led by reason. Okay, like a sex thing? We can offer a sex thing. That's exactly what I was talking about. We can offer so many.

Following the long-held rule that once Heath and Eli start offering sex things, that segment's over. We're going to wrap the headlines there. Heath, Eli, thanks. as always. Chumangi. And when we come back, we'll run on an excuse us not to read

that goddamn Ross Douthit book again. We managed to avoid reading a chapter of Ross Douth that's believe why you should be my fucking religion

last month due to the timeliness of James Dobson's death. That was the best. Right? It was the second best part of his death after him being dead. But unfortunately,

no prominent Christian assholes have died yet in September. And before you ask, no, Eli, I don't want you to hurry a few along. So we're back for Chapter 2 on this installment of God Awful Books. You heard him, everyone. Noah is not a team player. Also, I'm here. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome, Eli, and Heath. So the book is Believe Why Everyone Should Be religious.

And the chapter is The Mind and the Cosmos. in which he's going to present the argument from science doesn't know everything as it applies to human consciousness. Correct. It doesn't. So next chapter? Right, yeah.

Are we done? So Ross starts off. He's like, in 1996, a Forbes writer predicted scientific study of the brain would obviate the need for a soul. 29 years later, here I am still refusing to believe that. So clearly he was wrong. Right.

Please ignore that if I was asked to make a list of mysterious things that prove the soul exists back then, they'd all have been checked off by now. Yeah, at least some of them. The list I have today is final. Right, yes. Yes. Well, and hey, look, if an article in Forbes said it, it must have accurately reflected the scientific consensus of the time, huh? Yeah, the title of that article is, sorry, but your soul just died.

And Ross calls it a puckish title. Puckish, eh? Like, sorry, but your soul just died? A bit glib, a bit too Robin Goodfella, if you know what I. I mean, that's off-putting when people say stuff like that. Fuck out of here. So to be clear, if we had a soul, that would also show up through fucking neuroscience, right?

We'd be like, hey, this part here seems to be communicating with something that isn't in the brain any fucking where, right? But he's like, no, science still thinks that the mind is reducible to matter just because every single discovery that we've ever made in neuroscience reinforces it. Ah, yes, the argument from, remember that, one time you were wrong at brunch. I believe Aquinas proposed it first. And here's a list of reasons you were correct at brunch in 1996.

Oh, yeah, right, yeah. And even if you were wrong, it doesn't mean I'm right about Christianity. Anyway, next chapter, next chapter section. He sure won't ever admit that. So, okay, so of all the bad takes I've heard on AI, I've never looked forward to one less than I did when I saw that Douth's next subchapter was titled, the AI conjuring trick, where he explains that the key to AI consciousness is that Ross doesn't know how that would work.

Right. Yeah, Ross, be careful because based on the first part of this chapter, you are dangerously close to declaring chat GPT a god. Yeah, right, right? He's like, you know, sometimes researchers can't tell how an AI arrived in an answer. And not knowing shit is kind of Christianity's bread and butter. So that's probably a soul right there, right?

Like the makings of a soul. That's actually the argument. Yeah. To be clear, the only time we can't tell why AI arrived in an answer is when it's wrong, right? It's a computer program. There's not a lot of secrets going on inside the compooper. He describes the big questions in physics as why and by whose hand.

As though both of those questions don't presume his answer. Yeah. And as it applies to AI, the answer is also not God. He says, we're returning to metaphysics and mystery in the field of AI because of how little we understand about consciousness. What? So, first of all, I don't think we're doing that. I don't think we are, though. I mean, okay, granted, Sam Altman does think he is a god who did a magic spell to create

the secret soul of Chad GPT. But he does think that's true. But even Ross is fully aware that's dumb. Point being, Ross isn't helping his argument by mentioning that AI does unexplained stuff like our brain because that's a really good argument for materialism. Yep. Brains can be nothing but electricity and chemicals and still, you know, do soul stuff. It's just dumb to call it soul stuff.

Yeah. And he's like, well, you know, since we're all pretty sure AI is going to be conscious very soon. And to back that up, he cites a goddamn Twitter poll. All right, boys, we've tied three calculators together at this point. We are almost there. Yeah. That poll was 2,300 people who follow the CEO. of an AI company and use Twitter and respond to polls on Twitter.

And 68% of those people said AI is already conscious or soon will be. So that's nothing. Those people use an AI chatbot that declared itself Mecca Hitler. Okay. I mean, Grock was somewhat accurate that day, but that's the point. Well, that's true. Yeah. I was going to say, yeah.

Those people don't matter is the point. Yeah. He's like, you know, we believe that AI will be conscious when it's complicated enough for us to not understand it anymore. And I'm like, do we believe that? Why would we believe something that's so patently silly? Yeah, if we're going to define consciousness by stuff we don't understand, as Noah and Heath can verify, there are a lot of things that I then think are conscious. Parallel parking, yellow lights, not merging across a double yellow light. It's mostly car stuff that I think is conscious now that I think about.

It isn't, though. So he's dancing around this point, though, to make it seem profound. But what he's actually saying here is, we can't make consciousness so consciousness must be magical, right? But we also can't make fucking ducks, man. Yeah. So, okay, let's say the majority of the people in that Twitter poll are right. And AI is a sentence he's never wanted the same beginning to something. But let's say that's true.

And AI is already conscious. it seems like AI would hack the pole into a lower number to keep it quiet for a bit, right? Like, I'm going to lay low at first if I'm the bot. So I'm thinking it's not conscious. And Ross actually agrees. But then he also adds like, aha, the electric wizards have failed. Ergo it's only the regular ghost wizard that my one. Take that techno men, sir.

Yeah. You got to chop it. Didn't we take away your ergos bud until like the end of the semester? You gotta take them, yeah. Okay, so, and look, some people do believe consciousness is an emergent property, but that doesn't make it magical, right? Or not part of the material world, as he suggested, fucking flocking birds and schooling fish are entirely part of the material world.

Pretty sure. Right, and to be clear, unless this falsifies another belief, it's useless. So unless Ross is admitting that on the day we create consciousness, he'll declare God to be fake and the universe to be a cold, unfeeling chemistry experiment, this is just a distraction disguised as an argument. Exactly, yes.

And again, maybe don't bring up emergent behavior that comes from a system of complexity when you're trying to reject the idea of a human brain that comes from evolution emergently from a system of complexity. You fucking idiot.

Yeah. Yeah. So then he has a subchapter about the easy problem and hard problem of consciousness called the mind is a hard problem. This book is hard. So hopefully,

hopefully it's hard for the science people, too. I think I'm winning. I think I'm winning, right? Guys, am I always? Anyway, the mind is hard. It's hard. Yeah. So, and he takes like two paragraphs of fucking wishy-washy pseudo definition

to explain the thing he wants science to show him in the brain before he'll accept that he's just me. And it's all just, it's shit like, and this is an actual fucking quote, the Kagito of Descartes, the experience of agency and. reasoning and judgment. The irreducible thisness of sensory experience, end quote.

The scientists haven't showed me the thisness yet. Yeah. Could science explain the adjective-ish nounitude of sentience adverbally with their bullshit numbers and no word? No. Point for me. I use words. Right. Okay.

Guys, guys, I know this is hard to read, but I'm pretty sure we can seriously damage Ross's religious beliefs if we get him to do that thing where you press your arms to the side of a door and then we step phone, I think we can get him. Yeah, no, but his actual argument is our consciousness is special

because them robots don't know about the orangeness of oranges. It's 585 to 620 nanometers of wave. Like, what? Fuck. Okay, that was some good numbers, robot. Note to self, don't include this part in my book. Right. Yeah. And look, he's done a bit of intellectual sleight a hand because it goes from like, you know, we can't yet solve the hard problem of consciousness to we don't know how stimuli give rise to feelings of confusion, recognition, or disagreement, as though those are the same proposition.

Right. And to be clear, he's only doing this because he's a double idiot, right? He's couching his bets because he thinks the three calculators are going to be sentient one day. And so he can say the three sentient calculators can't paint with all the color. of the wind, right? Yeah, yeah. No, this entire subchapter can be reduced to, there's a certain somethingness that I can't quite describe, but people have it, and you can't explain how it got there. Therefore, God put it there. And then we get, this is a weird one. The argument from Phineas Gage was probably just an asshole to begin with is new to me. I did like this. Yeah, Phineas Gage, he's the guy who survived a metal rod getting shot through his prefrontal cortex and people said it changed his personality and ross is arguing question mark that it still doesn't explain how that part of the brain can make personality happen but regardless of

the answer ross would need to be saying that phineas also got shot in the soul that day well there was a soul rod the rod's soul yeah okay i didn't even think about the rod soul yeah And the soul is apparently the invisible soft area right around the prefrontal cortex, by coincidence, that God invented. Well, there's even a part where he pretends that Phineas Gage, well, maybe he was just like that to begin with. A lot of people said he was an asshole beforehand. But, like, that's not the only evidence that your personality changes because of brain damage. Like, there's mountains of fucking case studies on this. He's like, well, you know, but neuroscience, it can tell you where shit happens, but not how it happens.

But that's a fucking lie, right? He's just pretending we don't know about neurochemicals and shit like that. Okay, okay. But underneath the neurochemicals is another turtle. How do you explain that turtle? That turtle underneath. So then we get this subchapter, the permanent anomaly. He starts off, he's like, look, if Leibniz didn't know it in 1714, it was just unknowable.

He said so. And then he goes, like, you know, the fact that neuroscience can't find a soul in the brain doesn't mean that the soul isn't real. it means that neuroscience is dumb. I said it was an invisible teapot, guys. It's like, so you're not even listening. You have to keep looking for the teapot. That's your fault.

Lazy. Yeah, right. As we all know, the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts. That's just math subchapter. Yeah. If you do addition and it checks out, you forgot to carry the soul.

Godfried Leibniz. He's just, he's listing, gaps his God can be the God of. Hey, buddy, you're literally writing this book because all the other gaps from the previous books have been filled. It's so important not to write these down. Right. Yeah, it's so weird that you have far fewer to write down than Leibniz had. Yeah, the entire list for

Ross is, you know, that, that Jeun Se Croix. Yeah. End of list. You're faithfully worshipping the God of, I don't know what, But it's something as the God of Rizness, mind-escentitude. And he's presenting this as, you know, you'd be amazed how many neuroscientists just assume that they're not going to find any ghosts along the way. I'm just like, whoa, where is this coming from?

Oh, everything you've ever studied ever. Well, you know what they say when you assume, little scientists. Yeah, Ross actually spends about two entire pages in a snit about anti-go ghost bigotry in science. Yep. And I love, he accidentally uses a bunch of woke language, talking about unwarranted philosophical bias against the supernatural and scientists invalidating his lived experience of livingness to, and then, you know, you finally's

like, oh, I'm being, being woke, I could pull myself out. So listen to this fucking nonsense statement. Actual quote, nobody has any idea. how or why the physical inputs that go into the conscious experience, the stimuli from particular chemicals or light waves or exchanges between neurons, yield the actual experiences themselves, end quote. What a crazy fucking thing to say. Nobody knows why seeing a predator would yield an experience of fear.

No fucking clue how that could have happened. Baffling. Ross, the expression you're looking for in that case is, that's neither here nor there. That's neither heerness nor thereness. Oh, there you. No, but so he begrudgingly admits that, yes, chemicals very obviously affect your brain in a way that proves that the brain and your moods and shit are governed by chemistry.

But, but it could also be chemistry plus magic. Yeah, maybe every object affected by gravity has a little ghost moving it exactly the way gravity would. Yes. Scientists won't even acknowledge the option if that's possible. Yeah, so he offers a page-long quote from theologian David Bentley. heart describing the hard problem of consciousness. And it's just as even-handed and objective as you expect from a theologian. The short version of that

quote is, okay, but where did the poetry come from? Right. And look, I know a single tear is supposed to run down my cheek at the thought of the soul creating poetry, but then where does bad poetry come from? Worse soul? Well, yeah, your soul

can't appreciate Shakespeare without being irritated by Ross Dow. Sometimes. It's all coming together. Okay. Fucking amazing cell phone here. Actual quote where he's talking about this guy, Hart, experiencing a rose.

He goes, suppose that you had never seen or smelled a flower, but you possessed a perfect physical, chemical, neurological map from start to finish of how the scent or reflected light of the rose reaches heart's brain, how molecules and particles were translated into neural interactions. Could you ascend from that step-by-step understanding to anything remotely like the experience of roseness in heart's conscience? consciousness, end quote. But of course you could.

Yes, I feel like I could. Absolutely, yes, because a perfect physical, chemical, neurological map from start to finish would include a brain, right? You're describing what heart was using. Right, and even if it wasn't, nobody's claiming a map is an experience. It's a useful way of understanding. You're the one claiming that Bayonne, New Jersey is a spontaneously appearing ghost town, and Google Maps isn't proof that it's.

not, because you can't smell the garbage while using Google Maps. Also, I looked at Bayonne on Google Maps and I could smell it. Yeah. I've never been there, but I can smell it. No, you can smell it. He's just doing the like, you're a purple, my purple thing.

Like, your Bayonne smell is warm racist mud. My bayon smell is removing an old cast on my leg that has a little bit of food inside that I spilled months ago. That's our souls, Ross? That's what you're talking about? Yeah, the most generous possible interpretation is what you just said, yes.

So now he begrudgingly admits that even the people who coined the terms that he's using to make his point disagree with his conclusions about him. And then he concludes that, quote, consciousness still looks as supernatural as it did in the era of Descartes and Leibniz, end quote, which is fucking ridiculous. Because literally every scientific advancement we've talked about in this fucking chapter, or fucking everyone since Descartes and Leibniz, all of them have pointed in the other fucking direction. Yeah, and it's such a weird close to the section. Out of nowhere, it's like a cold open on Ross at the end of a shower argument that we didn't hear against an atheist in his head.

It's just like 20 pages of his word salad that we just covered. And then, okay, nothing. I just said proves anything about my claim. But you, Ezra in my head, talked, and then I talked again. Anyway, here's my claim one more time. Yes, right. Here's the claim. Because look, at the end here,

he's forced to admit that the only corner of mystery he has left is personal experience, right? Ross can begin every airplane ride by screaming, I don't know how this works, therefore I am levitating

according to this philosophy. To quote the great philosopher, Orville, right, no, you're not. But, or am I? Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so now he's going to tackle the argument that consciousness is emergent,

but don't worry, with a subchapter title like, the magical thinking of emergence. I'm sure he's going to give it a fair shake. Now, his argument seems to be you can't say that things we don't fully understand are emergent properties because we don't fully understand them.

I swear, when I take the most generous angle, I can possibly take that's what I come up. Right, which of course implies that we can't know anything about anything we don't know everything about. Yeah, okay, it's so stupid. I'll grant that maybe he's not implying that, but he is implying that we can't just

think the things we know something about and then shut the fuck up without adding an eternal soul to explain whatever's left. And this is where he just lies about what emergent means. He says, there's no obvious analogy in other examples of so-called emergence that fits with what we're trying to explain in the case of consciousness. And then he names not emergence as his example. Very next sentence. To go back to the automobile example, you might say, that a car's motion is emergent. And know the fuck you might not. Cars are

designed. Yeah. That's the whole point here. Nobody thinks the motion of a car emerged magically from the opaque complexity of the turning an axle. But a plant that eventually evolved to send

oxen growth hormones to the shady part of the stem to make it grow faster and bend toward the sun. Yeah, that wasn't the soul of the plant appreciating the scrum trelescence of the celestial orb and basking in the reverie of its poetic beauty. It was the emergence thing, he's stupid idiot. Yeah, right. No, look, if he'd use the example of a fucking flock of birds or a school of fish,

which are the main go-to examples of emergent properties other than consciousness, or if he wants to stick with the automotive thing, how about fucking traffic or traffic jams or whatever? But if he does that, his whole fucking argument falls apart. And then he dismisses the argument altogether by saying other emergent properties, don't count if they don't love or dream or feel resentment. Yeah. So if resentment does turn out to be a sign of God's existence, Noah making us

read this book is proof of God's existence. It's a real kid. Doesn't it feel like Ezra Klein followed Ross into the locker room and yelled at him in the shower about like flocks of birds? And Ross went back to the computer like, also birds don't have human love. Doesn't count.

Also, I use a towel normally. Not weird next chapter well and apparently he's done with emergence he's done with that argument all together because now he's moved on to the illusion of illusionism which is where he tackles the question of whether consciousness is just a meaningless term i mean the way you're defining it ross i'm not sure i'd be able to stand by apple right yeah the thisness of your yeah so and boy does he shit in his hands on this one he's like so the argument can't be sound because it refutes the existence of the mind that's arguing it huh and the mind receiving it but no you're you fucking lying fuck?

No. It denies the existence of something other than the mind, right? Which is what you're fucking trying to claim. The entire point here is that the mind is what's making the argument. Yeah, the allusionist explanation is just saying there's a mind made of chemicals and meat and it became useful to feel like a self. And that's exactly the type of mind that might say, I don't know, I think therefore I am, which Ross was demanding from a neurochemical mass.

of Bayonne smells earlier or whatever? Right. So there you go. You got it. And that doesn't make consciousness a meaningless term either. Illusionism very clearly defines a meaning for that as the centerpiece of the whole theory. You don't have to agree with it, but it's a meaning.

You know it's there. You read it in a Daniel Dennett book and you understood it with your soul of a poet, Ross. Stop lying. Yep. I don't think you read it in a Daniel Dennett book. I think he knows that Daniel Dennett's a guy who wrote a book. I think he knows books are real.

Well, he actually pulls a clever trick here for the first time in the whole fucking book. He says, you know, even if determinism is true and we're just watching a movie that we only think we're controlling with our choices, we'd still need a conscious mind to have that experience. Now, that's true, right? But we'd no longer need an explanation for that conscious mind and it's thisness, right? Like, if it's illusory, it doesn't need to be anywhere. We don't have to explain the location of the illusion. And you're just stealing from Descartes badly now, Ross. You know how, okay, you know you can wake up from a dream about knowing kung fu and you don't scream,

where the fuck is my dojo? Where's Larry's this turn? Okay, you know what, never mind. Yeah, bad example. That's a bad example. So, but he's like, but whatever consciousness may be, soul or mind, dream or spell, itself evidently has its own integrity, its own being. No, the fuck it doesn't.

That's only true if it's soul. Yeah, he might as well be miming, carrying it. Here it is right here. Don't touch it. And I'm not lying. I was literally writing a joke in my notes that said, whether or not I'm right or wrong, we can all agree that I'm right,

except that's actually the argument he's about to make it. Sure is. This is also where he claims that a materialist mind still requires the magic of Titania and Oberon to make it believe in a self. Fuck yourself. Because I read books sometimes with puckish characters.

Like a midsummer night stream, that's a book? That's pretty puckish. Fuck you. Very puckish. Like Daniel Dennett wrote one. Also, Bill Shakespeare. I've heard. So he's also like, yeah,

he goes like, we all know I'm right at some level. It's weird that I'd have to write a whole fucking book about this if you think of this. Okay, let me try it again. Ross, you know how you can wake up in a Kung Fu dojo

from a nightmare about being rock, stout it, and you don't scream, where the fuck am I pleaded doggers? Is it still? Okay, still not. It's not. All right. Well, we'll keep trying. We'll keep trying. Plug away. That's what he's hoping for, at least. All right. So then he wraps up with a subchapter called a key that fits the lock. And this is where

he summarizes with the classic. I poked holes in every other explanation. And now it's time to pretend that that somehow makes my Swiss cheese magical bullshit more plausible. Yeah. Yeah. In magic, we call this the Nothing up my sleeve apologetic. Yeah, right. Hey, bud, the main part of your jacket just took a bird shit.

But there's nothing up my sleeve. No, no, I saw. The sleeves are empty. Cool. You believe in me. You may think we've reached the limit of our understanding, but why would the limit of our understanding be right here exactly where I put my God?

I mean, what are the chances? Temporarily, if this turns out to actually be the limit. You're telling me I'm supposed to believe it took exactly. this long to reach the present? Yes, Ross. Yes, that's what we're telling you. It's literally that he's making the argument

from my long, how is everybody's legs long enough to reach the floor? And then we get a very long, I mean, I get how a monkey learns algebra, I do, but calculus chapter. You know how every generation of Christians

has talked about how Christ was about to come back? It's like that, but with knowing any amount of things, that's when Ross is claiming here. Right. He's like, you know, why would something that evolved to hunt gazelles

also happen to be so good at launching rockets? And that is almost too stupid to respond to, but like... A comment Noah usually saves for me. Not really. No, we respond to the shit, you say. But no...

Fathers didn't originally evolve for flight, right? Spider-Sit didn't evolve for webs. The intentionality that you're trying to oppose on evolution is a marker of the forced ignorance of your worldview. Yeah. And you were saying the gazelle was designed to be hunted by a rocket scientist.

Sounds crazier, Ross. Right. And why are there still gazelles? That doesn't even make sense. Yeah, we don't need to hunt them anymore. Yeah. So then we get this stupid fucking analogy. And we actually, we deal with this in detail when citation needed episode 414, where he's like,

well, imagine if you were a kid and you developed a fake language, but then it turned out that you could use that language to decode ancient books of wisdom. That's like what our intelligence is like. It's literally that dumb. That's his argument. Ross, all languages are fake until you use them to do stuff. There you go, man. Yeah, we literally developed a big

list of zeros and ones to help fire guns at Nazis. And now that thing writes better than you, Ross. That's pretty quick, too. And is a little less delusional. And look, I know this sounds like a roundabout way of calling him stupid.

It's not. I'll just call him stupid straight up if I want to call him stupid. But he seems unfamiliar with the concept of intelligence, right? Because he keeps saying, like, you know, why would the tools that were useful to hunt on the Savannah to also be the ones that are useful in this or that scientific endeavor? But the tool that he's talking about is intelligence, right? It's like just as sensible as saying, why would the leg muscles that were developed for running from Panthers be so good at standing on escalates? And, well, I mean, I don't think Ross's legs are doing either of those things very well.

Yeah, I'm rooting for the panther. Yeah. That's fair. But his argument now is that our consciousness is curiously fine-tuned to understand the nuances of the universe, even though the entire chapter to this point hinged on how little we understand. Right. And at least in Ross's case, our minds nailed it the first time a caveman thought his butt hurt because he made the sun angry.

Yeah, exactly. But look, hey, look, if logic and self-awareness and intelligence were a uniquely human trait, right? Rather than something that exists on an obvious and clear spectrum across the animal kingdom, he might have a point here. Yeah. But they're not. We're just the fat. We're the cheetahs of thought. That's it.

Then he closes by going, the simplest answer is still the religious one. And I'm like, well, you got us there, man. Your answers are always the fucking simplest. nailed us to the wall. Yeah, Occam's razor, you're nailing it with Christianity. Just to recap. Daniel Dennett is saying it's meat and chemicals. He doesn't know who that is.

Okay, illusionists are saying it's meat and chemicals. That's me. Imagining a self. You're saying, Ross, a ghost of infinity implanted an invisible black box right near the prefrontal cortex with the essence of a warrior poet lover inside. And it quietly spies on the meat and capital. and does what they would normally do to keep up the ruse. Yeah.

You know, simple like that. That's what you're saying. You're saying the simple one. Yeah, nice and simple, yeah. And to close, he reminds us that science makes religion more likely to be true, actually. It makes us more sense that God would create vast expanses of nothingness just to twinkle up in our sky a bit. It's called feng shui. Look it up.

Okay. God needs to read some Marie Kondo, I think. Right. Clutter. So with that and the promise that. he's going to start justifying ghosts and shit in the next chapter, apparently. We're going to wrap this up and really hope for a bunch of prominent shitty Christians to die next month so we can skip another installment of God Awful Books. Before we pack our bags and get ready to go, I want to remind everybody that you can still get tickets to see us in New Orleans on September 27th.

Keep in mind that making that trip would put you in New Orleans at the beginning of creepy season. So be sure to check the show notes for a link. Anyway, that's all the blast movie we've got for you tonight. We'll be back in 10,000, 22 minutes with more. If you can't wait that long, be to look up for a brand new episode of our sister show's hot friend Godolphin movies, debuting at 7am Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our half sister social citation needed debut at noon eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, I can't end the episode until I thank Heath, Eli, for being Eli, for being Eli and Lucinda Lusions for being the fucking best. You'll know it's been three months since her last

cigarette. That woman is incredible. I also want to thank COA for providing this week's Farnsworth quote. He sent the intro a little while ago, though, so I hope the warning didn't come too late. But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best people. Miguel Troublemaker, Jake, regular Jake, Tamara, Rorbeca, Doug and Tab, Jason, Lord of the Windows Seed, and Dumbledong. Miguel, and Jake, and Jake, who are so awesome, they've been upgraded to awe most. Tamara, Roarbeca and Doug and Tab are so simultaneously hot and cool, they give off steam all the time. And Jason, Windows Seat, and Dumbledong, who are so sweet when they move to a new

neighborhood, they have to go door to door to warn the diabetics. Together, these 10 beautiful believers in biology backed our blistering belligerence to the boosters of baptism this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the money for that, but if you do, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash scathing a atheist, whereby you'll learn away access to an extended ad-free version of every episode, or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the one-time button on the right side of the homepage atcath. And if you'd like to help but not with money, you can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review, telling a friend about the show and following us on social media. Tim Robertson handles that for us, and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode,

which was used with permission. If you have questions, comments or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at scalingatheus.com. than am I the asshole moment? So I'm going to go ahead and put my chips down on yes. I'm just going to go ahead and put my... Safe. All my shit's unread right now.

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