The Apparition by Gustave Moreau

Sound thinking and critical reservations were abruptly cast aside in New Delhi during the early morning hours of September 21st, 1995. Statue idols, it seemed, had taken to drinking milk being fed to them by spoon. By what bizarre urging the first pilgrim to report this phenomenon was compelled to test whether a milk offering would pass the lips of a statue is unclear, but the idea rapidly took hold, devolving into a frenzy. The World Hindu Council hastily declared it a “miracle”, and by noon hopeful herds across North India stampeded to the temples leaving trampled bodies wounded underfoot. Police reinforcements were deployed by necessity to restrain outbreaks among the fevered milk-bearing mobs. Faithful conviction ruled the day.

Some believers may well have been unamused — especially those within the ranks of the afflicted and dying — that the gods had chosen such a valueless display with which to affirm their continued beneficent authority, but it was the science-minded unbelievers who were predictably the least impressed… Nor did it take long to figure out what was really going on. Representatives from India’s Ministry of Science and Technology arrived on-scene to demonstrate that what was being witnessed was simple “capillary action”: The surface tension of the milk created an upward pull upon contact with the surface of the statue before the liquid ran downward in a transparent film, while some was absorbed into the porous stones. To illustrate this, the scientists colored their milk with a dye that remained apparent as it coated the statue. When hysteria regarding milk imbibing statues struck again in 2006, the president of the Indian Rationalist Association, Sanal Edamaruku, was quoted in the press, “Forget deities. I fed a cup of coffee to a statue of Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first prime minister) right before television cameras,” he said, “Even bricks are drinking milk.”[1]

The 1995 “Milk Miracle” hysteria spread throughout the world within the span of several days and has seen recurrences in the years since, despite the oft-repeated claim that the phenomenon was mysteriously confined within a 24-hour span. Faithful supernaturalists have proved predictably unwilling to abdicate their miracle to non-magical explanations. Nor has the lasting insistence that the Milk Miracle remains a mystery unsolved been confined to willfully credulous Hindus. A widely used college-level World Religions textbook states in its 2011 edition, referencing the 1995 incident: “Scientists suggested explanations such as mass hysteria or capillary action in the stone, but the phenomenon lasted only one day.”[2]

To refer to the statement above as merely misrepresentative may be overly kind. “Scientists suggested explanations” indicates befuddled skeptics groping for generalized answers with which to force the inexplicable into a materialist framework. In fact, scientists did more than “suggest” capillary action, they demonstrated it. And it was never an either/or question between mass hysteria or capillary action — capillary action accounted for the illusion of milk drinking statues, while mass hysteria best described the temple-swarming religious fervor that the misattribution of “miracle” provoked. Both capillary action and mass hysteria were perfectly evident. To state that it could have been either/or further suggests confusion among scientists unable to accept a miracle taking place before their eyes, while also unable to come to a consensus amongst each other as to what might account for what was being witnessed.

More flagrantly misleading still are the countless accounts of the Milk Miracle which claim that scientists dismissed the entire event as a “mass hallucination”. The site milkmiracle.com, maintained by an outspoken Milk Miracle true believer, Philip Mikas, states:

There are many sceptics and scientists who have tried to explain what happened on September 21, 1995 in terms of science. Some have repeatedly said that this so-called “Milk Miracle” was caused by something as simple as capillary action. Some have tried to attribute it to a case of “global scale mass hallucination or hysteria”. To them, I would like to say this – there are many things that we just cannot explain with our present levels of science and technology. Perhaps, we will need to look into our souls and discover the secret spiritual powers that we all have before we can fully explain such phenomena.

Oddly, among a great many of the sites that treat the Milk Miracle as an unexplained or paranormal phenomenon, the phrase “global scale mass hallucination or hysteria” is offered as a summary of the skeptical position, always in quotes, never with attribution.

And so it degenerates… the actual explanation rejected, marginalized, obscured, and ultimately re-written to the point that numerous bloggers now treat the question of the Milk Miracle as one of mass hallucination versus paranormal activity, weighing the merits of — or elaborating the flaws in — an explanation that never was.

Presenting the scientific attempt at a rational explanation as a snobbish dismissal of mass eyewitness testimony certainly has its advantages to those who wish to maintain that something otherworldly was plainly observed, and arguments against the mass hallucination theory can be found anywhere believers in the improbable attempt to make their case. Thus, throughout the vast blogosphere, lengthy essays can be found heaping derision upon this scientific folly in favor of claims ranging from Sasquatch’s existence, to the reality of extraterrestrial visitations, to Satanic cults conspiring to enslave the Globe… to any number of implausible and bizarre ideas believed by a resolute minority. Almost universally lacking in these tirades against the close-minded “scientific establishment” is any direct citation of an actual argument in favor of the mass hallucination theory, nor is mass hallucination explicitly defined, its meaning presumed intuitively clear.

On the face of it, the idea of any specific event being attributed to “mass hallucination” sounds ridiculous. It suggests a large number of people suddenly, simultaneously, and spontaneously experiencing an intense, shared, detailed, false or grossly distorted shared perception of an event or events contrary to the reality surrounding them. At its most crudely literal, this would have us interpreting the Milk Miracle as an event wherein masses of individuals merely perceived milk disappearing from their spoons, while in actuality it did not; Sasquatch as a sudden unprovoked mental phantom shared amongst unwitting forest explorers; UFOs as but internal synchronized specters projected upon the empty skies.

But is this what “mass hallucination” actually means? And has there ever actually been an anomalous event for which mass hallucination was offered as a scientific explanation? Or — as with the Milk Miracle — is the idea of Mass Hallucination merely a straw man argument meant to paint the skeptical position as both improbable and patronizing?

*****

A search for “mass hallucination” in the American Psychological Association’s PsycINFO — “an expansive abstracting and indexing database with more than 3 million records devoted to peer-reviewed literature in the behavioral sciences and mental health […] covering psychology back to its underpinnings in the 17th Century” — yields a total of zero articles. Of course, this does not bode well as an indication of the concept’s interest among serious researchers.

However, the concept of “collective hallucinations” — first expounded by French polymath Gustave Le Bon in his 1895 classic book on Crowd Psychology, La psychologie des foules (translated into english as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) — has a minimal  presence in psychology books related to Mob Mentality and psychological anomalies.

In The Crowd, Le Bon described inflated suggestibility as a general characteristic of human herds. “[…] a crowd [is] perpetually hovering on the borderland of unconsciousness, readily yielding to all suggestions, having all the violence of feeling peculiar to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of reason, deprived of all critical faculty, cannot be otherwise than excessively credulous.”[3] This excessive credulity, according to Le Bon, primes the crowd to accept, as fact ,“[t]he first perversion of the truth effected by one of the individuals of the gathering”, which then becomes “the starting point of the contagious suggestion.”[4] Collective hallucinations then, by Le Bon’s definition, are the outcome of perceptual interpretations colored by suggestions delivered to a crowd in its throes of thoughtless zeal.

The concept is further expanded upon in a book titled Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking by Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones[5]. There, the authors confront the question of — if an event is presumably hallucinated — how do “2 or 200 people manage to coordinate and synchronize their subjective lives?”

“In collective hallucinations, expectation plays the coordinating role. Although the subjective matter of individual hallucinations has virtually no limits, that of collective hallucinations is limited to certain categories. These categories are determined, first, by the kinds of ideas that a group of people may get excited about as a group, for emotional arousal is a prerequisite of collective hallucinations.”

Collective hallucinations, according to Zusne and Jones, are not spontaneous occurrences, and in accompaniment to “emotional arousal”, there is the prerequisite of “spreading imagery”…

“[…] all participants in the hallucination must be informed beforehand, at least concerning the broad outlines of the phenomenon that will constitute the collective hallucination. This may take the form of a publicly announced prophecy, for example, or someone suddenly looking up and saying, ‘Lo, in the sky!’ or words to that effect.”

And while the imagery preceding the event may only contain the “broad outlines of the phenomenon”, it is important to note that, due to the reconstructive nature of memory, the hallucinations themselves need only be broadly similar…

“Once the general type of hallucination is identified, it is easy to harmonize individual differences in accounts. This may take place during the hallucination or in subsequent discussions.”

*****

As examples of collective hallucinations, Zusne and Jones offer several occasions at various locations in Italy where locals reported “moving and bleeding images of saints”.

Also, in 1981, in Yugoslavia, in a village called Medjugorje, a small group of children reported meeting and speaking with the mythical “Virgin” Mary, whereupon some estimated 11 million pilgrims travelled to the childrens’ village. These pilgrims stared into the sky, toward the sun, looking for Mary’s divine form at an appointed time and place. Interestingly, despite their priming, none of them seemed to manage an actual vision of Mary herself. However, they did report anomalous visions, “such as […] crosses in the sky, double suns”, and some reported “being able to stare at the setting sun without eye damage.”[6]

Similar to the Medjugorje incident, the famous Fatima apparition of 1917 was a mob reaction to reports made by 3 Portuguese children who claimed to have been visited by the ghost of Mary. Here again, reports were less-than-impressive as far as presumably synchronous specific subjective events are concerned. The children, it is claimed, saw the Virgin, while some of the crowd reported seeing the sun “dancing” in the sky, radiant colors, or the sun approaching the Earth… Others still saw nothing at all.

Of course, the sun did not make any aberrant movements that day, as witnessing astronomical observatories could attest. The same sun, visible to much of the world, appeared to be following its daily routine everywhere but where expectations for a miracle found faithful pilgrims looking to the sky in anticipation of something extraordinary.

In both Medjugorje and Fatima, observers were staring into the sunlit sky. Joe Nickell (author and Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry [CSI]) explains, “several eyewitnesses of the October 13, 1917, gathering at Fatima specifically stated they were looking ‘fixedly at the sun’ or ‘tried to look straight at it’ or otherwise made clear they were gazing directly at the actual sun […]. If this is so, the ‘dancing sun’ and other solar phenomena may have been due to optical effects resulting from temporary retinal distortion caused by staring at such an intense light or to the effect of darting the eyes to and fro to avoid fixed gazing (thus combining image, afterimage, and movement).”[7]

If UV-beaten eyes are responsible for reports of Fatima’s dancing sun, Zusne and Jones are unclear as to whether their definition of mass hallucination is meant to describe such illusions for which an organic cause is apparent. In either case, however, the prerequisite conditions of emotional arousal, spreading imagery, as well as the subsequent harmonizing of the narrative from various disparate reports, were clearly extremely influential factors in Medjugorje and Fatima.

*****

 In 2001, Christian apologist Gary Habermas published a paper titled Explaining Away Jesus’ Resurrection: the Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories[8]. Though Habermas explains that he surveyed “over 1,000 critical publications on the resurrection”, he offers no hard numbers with which to qualify his claim of any recent “revival of hallucination theories”. In vague terms, he reports, “more scholars apparently support various naturalistic hypotheses [to account for the biblical claim of Christ’s resurrection] than has been the case in many decades. […] Of those who now prefer hallucination explanations, however, only a few scholars have pursued this approach in detail, while several other scholars simply mention the possibility of, or preference for, the hallucination thesis.”

A preference for “the hallucination thesis” opposed to what, one wonders? Opposed to other “naturalistic hypotheses” (such as the quite obvious explanation that the New Testament is a poor fictional work from the start) mass hallucination weighs in rather weakly; opposed to accepting the resurrection myth at its face value, however, mass hallucination can clearly be assigned a much higher probabilistic value by mere virtue of being a naturalistic hypothesis. Missing this point completely, Habermas asks, “[…] why must a naturalistic, subjective explanation be assumed?”

Though the question is presented rhetorically, there is sound rationale for assuming naturalistic explanations. To begin, while there is ample cross-cultural research demonstrating the human tendency to embrace superstition and to exert self-deceiving confirmation biases, there is no such research at all that satisfactorily demonstrates any supernatural phenomena. For that matter, supernatural forces are, by definition, not observable — they cannot be recorded, transcribed, traced, or measured by scientific procedure. As we can never isolate a mechanistic cause of a supernatural event, we are left with simply no other option than exhaust all naturalistic options first.

Further, history provides hard lessons in the unreliability of even large consensus accounts. The archaic minds of Christian philosophers, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, took seriously claims of demonic assaults upon humanity by mere virtue of the claims’ ubiquity, Aquinas even insisting that reports of demonic voices could not have been imaginary as they were reported to be heard to all within earshot.[9] From this logic, prosecutions and brutal purgings of “witches” were deemed sound and fair due to their multiple corroborating witness accounts.

Habermas goes on to contest Zusne and Jones’s description of collective hallucination as it might be applied to the myth of Christ’s resurrection, though he concedes that Zusne and Jones themselves wrote of collective hallucinations “without any application to Jesus’ resurrection”. Further, none of the only three authors from this “revival” of hallucination theories Habermas explores — as examples of those who share a “hallucination theory preference” — invoke Zusne and Jones’s collective hallucination definition to support their positions. Nor are these authors unclear as to what they themselves mean when referring to the resurrection as a hallucination.[10] Of the three authors Habermas disputes, only German theologian Gerd Luedemann advances an explanation directly born of an established collective hallucination theory. Invoking Le Bon, Luedemann describes the appearance of the resurrected Christ to “more than 500 brethren” as “mass ecstasy” stimulated by the “preaching and the recollections” by Peter and the twelve disciples who saw Jesus die on the cross. This proselytizing devotion, according to Luedemann, “led to religious intoxication and an enthusiasm which was experienced as the presence of Jesus[…]”

Summarizing this without offering a direct counterpoint, Habermas goes on to protest against hypotheses published by two more theologians, Jack A. Kent and Michael Goulder. Kent, in his book The Psychological Origins of the Resurrection Myth, proposes that Jesus’s cult individually “experienced grief-related hallucinations or illusions following the traumatic death of their leader”.[11] Kent details the Gospel accounts of “the Easter morning events” and notes that they are “inconsistent, contradictory, and inconclusive”, though he argues that “Mary Magdalene and the disciples did see what they believed were ‘appearances’ of Jesus but those ‘appearances’ were grief-related hallucinations or illusions.”

Likewise, Goulder, in his essay The Baseless Fabric of a Vision[12], describes Peter’s vision of the resurrected Christ as a personal vision — a conversion vision — which he likens to violent conversions reported throughout history wherein the convert typically describes visions accompanying an intense feeling of revelation. As an example, Goulder cites Manson Family murderer Susan Atkins’ prison conversion, which she described in visual terms, with Christ personally appearing to her offering consolation and forgiveness.

The appearances of Christ to the apostles or the 500 brethren, however, are seen as a collective delusion by Goulder, which he likens to today’s Bigfoot phenomenon. With both Bigfoot and Jesus expectation and popular enthusiasm precipitated sightings. “If you sighted Bigfoot, you were the centre of attention; people spoke about you; the press sought you out. If you sighted Jesus, you confirmed the Church’s hopes, and your own.”

Despite these descriptions of purely personal hallucinations acting to precipitate group delusions of resurrection, Habermas — after breezily under-summarizing each author’s actual position — disingenuously states: “One of the central issues in this entire discussion concerns whether a group of people can witness the same hallucination.” In fact, this appears only to be the central point that Habermas was predetermined to argue, while his survey of “over 1,000 critical publications” seems to have yielded little to indicate that this was ever at issue.

*****

From the few academic descriptions available, authored by Le Bon and Zusne and Jones, we see that collective hallucinations are not intended to describe spontaneous herd occurrences of perfectly matched phantasmagoria. Nor is it irrelevant to emphasize the difference in terminology: collective hallucination, as opposed to the often-invoked mass hallucination which, while subtle, further reinforces the suspicion that those arguing against mass hallucination theory (in favor of their cherished chosen implausibility) are in fact inveighing against an imaginary opposition.

While “collective hallucinations” find a negligible presence in psychological literature, “mass hallucination theory” is disproportionately invoked as the primary — if not only — explanation offered to counter extraordinary claims for which there are (presumably) multiple corroborating witnesses. So long as this position is maintained, arguments for paranormal events are presented as less incredible than the alleged scientific alternative: that a mass of people all at once spontaneously shared a detailed mental vision, much like a group of people watching a film, and collectively mistook this shared vision for an external physical reality.

When “mass hallucination” is said to be the scientific counterpoint to any claim, it is worth asking, By which scientists? Where? What other explanations have been proposed? and, of course, “Mass hallucination” meaning what, exactly? Upon inspection, we find that the idea of mass hallucination as the fall-back end-all “scientific” position toward the inexplicable is, in itself, nothing more than a desperately crafted mass delusion… a bullshit argument — attributed to rational arguments against bullshit — that is meant to make said rational arguments look like bullshit.

out-sized forehead, black almond-shaped eyes

Laughlin, Nevada is the kind of place where vegetarianism is deviant. Even the lentil soup comes served with large chunks of sausage in it… Thick, greasy, lips-and-asshole chorizo sausage. Even when picked out, it befouls the rest of the soup with its putrid flavor.

I have to send it back. “This has sausage in it”, I tell the waitress.

“Yes”, the waitress says, nonplussed, “you ordered the lentil soup”.

The atmosphere has abruptly changed. My effeminate coastal dietary peculiarities have made my presence suddenly unwelcome. I feel a wave of panic fill the room. At surrounding tables, the bloated men in cowboy hats are, I imagine, wishing that they were thirty years younger, so that they might rise up to knock some sense into my goddamn skull. To the people of Laughlin, it appears, there is nothing particularly bizarre about a group of UFO seekers holding a conference in their town, but a man who doesn’t eat meat is truly a freakish thought. Christ, it’s already noon and I don’t even have a beer in my hand. To the generally upper middle-aged, beer-bellied, cigarette-sallowed gamblers of this obscure poor-man’s alternative to Reno, I am an interloper.

I feel more at ease among the ET enthusiasts. My initial impression is that they display nothing of the unwelcoming, bitter homogeneity of the Ritual Abuse crowd. Among them are Science Fiction fans and writers, Fortean chroniclers of anomalous events, students of the paranormal, and the mere curious.

The diversity is an unexpected relief. The two-hour shuttle ride from the Vegas airport to Laughlin gave grim indications that the conference would be strictly populated by elderly New Agers.

Earlier that day, I was among the first to be shuffled aboard the small bus just outside the baggage claim. Freshly acquainted geriatric galactic citizens bemoaned the horrifying quality of in-flight meals between refined excoriations against the blind ignorance of the mainstream masses who, despite overwhelming evidence, remain skeptical to the fact that Earth is being regularly visited by extraterrestrial intelligences. They were all warming up for the conference, taking full advantage of this opportunity to preach to a captive choir. Self proclaimed “intuitives”, aura readers, psychics, and UFOlogists all began climbing aboard to contribute to an increasing din of metaphysical philosophies, conspiracy theories, and Aquarian Age wisdom. Full groups spoke to each other simultaneously, without a single member listening. The driver announced that we would be leaving in five minutes, precisely on the hour, no exceptions, at which a strained looking old fellow took immediate leave. “I’ll be right back,” he assured the driver.

Ten minutes after the hour, the impatient passengers abandoned their peaceful transcendent pretensions and began to suggest with undisguised agitation that we should move on without our missing comrade. A man volunteered to look for him. He came back and reported something in confidence to the driver who then announced, “Two more minutes!” and started the engine. Our fact-finder sat back down across from me. “He’s taking a shit”, he muttered ruefully to the passenger next to him.

Soon enough our man returned, sullen and shamed, head low.

We’re away even before he’s seated.

The responsible chronicler in me wanted that I should I mingle with the other passengers, at least listen to what they were talking about, despite a fatigue-induced disinterest. Somebody was talking about media misinformation, another about how the UFO deniers are “asleep”.

Good enough. I put on my headphones and listened to music, partially falling asleep.

Anyway, my interest is in those who claim to have been in personal contact with extraterrestrial beings. That most reports of such contact are based upon recovered memories is a well-known fact. How are these recovered memories similar or different to those reporting satanic cult activity? Proponents of recovered memories of abuse, uncomfortable with the association to ET abduction, are quick to dismiss the parallel as a cheap-shot, a low-brow attempt at discrediting all recovered memories. But, without a method by which one may reliably distinguish legitimate recovered memories from fabrications or confabulations, the abductees present a unique challenge. If one can cultivate entire false memory scenarios regarding sometimes traumatic contact with alien beings, why could one not also construct such false memories about any traumatic experience? And what makes a more plausible recovered memory any less likely to be a false construction than an implausible one?

It was, I had understood, the consistency of the abduction tales that counter-balanced their implausibility with credibility. After all, how could it be that so many people, personally and geographically unrelated, would have such similar narratives of extraterrestrial encounters if these were but personal delusions?

Despite the fact that abduction stories are so prevalent in popular culture as to render this argument ludicrous, the question has proven undeniably compelling not only to fringe spiritual seekers, but to a few respected academics and journalists as well. Most notably, professor John Mack of Harvard Medical School undertook an enormous study of over 200 abductees from 6 continents in the course of over 10 years, till his death in 2004 when he was struck by a drunken driver while crossing a London street. Mack, encouraged by his long-time friend, author Thomas Kuhn, rejected what he felt to be an inhibiting materialist dualism that is “held in place by the structures, categories, and polarities of language, such as real/unreal, exists/does not exist, objective/subjective, intrapsychic/external world, and happened/did not happen.” (Mack, 1994)

Mack set out to “collect raw information, putting aside whether or not what I was learning fit any particular world view.” (Mack, 1994) Inevitably, though, Mack strained to fit his data into a world view, albeit a world view that was unconstrained by parsimony and the standard burden of scientific proof. To Dr. Mack, abduction experiences were real “in some way”, suggesting that they could be attributed to interdimensional travel rather than intragalactic. And while Mack did consider the possibility that the abduction experience was the product of an altered state, his altered state abduction wasn’t a purely internal, subjective experience, rather it was an altered state of higher consciousness that elicited communication with higher beings. (Mack, 1999)

In his book Passport To The Cosmos, Mack explains, “It is not just the experiencers’ conviction that what they have undergone is in some way real that has made me take them seriously. The richly detailed narratives they provide, the appropriate surprise, the convincing incredulity, and above all the genuine distress or other feelings they report, together with the observable emotion and intense bodily reactions they exhibit when their experiences are recalled – all these elements combined can give any witness the sense that something powerful has happened to these individuals, however impossible this may seem from the standpoint of our traditional worldview.” (Mack, 1999)

Dr. Mack’s claims of narrative consistency notwithstanding, the abduction accounts I end up hearing at the 2010 UFO Congress convention in Laughlin, Nevada – from those who claimed to have experienced them – are surprisingly inconsistent even given the near universal knowledge of how “actual” abductions are supposed to be carried out. At the very least, I had felt, everybody agreed upon who was responsible: little grey humanoids – “Greys”, they’ve been cleverly dubbed – with outsized hairless heads, large black almond-shaped eyes, and frail bodies.

Turns out there is a whole carnival of different species beaming people into different types of craft, and for different purposes – some benevolent, some… not so much. The Contactees happily share apparently well-worn, scripted descriptions of the multitudes of distorted other-world craniums and non-human eyes they’ve observed. There are mammalians, crustaceans, and ETs entirely human in appearance. The galactic community, it seems, is as diverse as human imagination.

The Greys? …Oh, yes, them.

Well, they are out there, up to their antics still, but they seem to have fallen out of fashion of late.

Given this variety of interplanetary taxonomic categories and their broad spectrum of individual motivations for the covert Earth capers they’re said to be engaged in, these are not “abductee” sessions that I am attending as an optional evening supplement to the larger conference… As hypnotherapist (and session organizer) Mary Rodwell explains, the word “abductee” carries with it certain obvious negative connotations that do not do justice to many of the “life-enhancing” extraterrestrial encounters that many of her clients have reported. Rodwell prefers the more neutral word “experiencer”. Thus, if we could refer to each other as experiencers rather than abductees, we’d all be a bit happier, yes?

There is dissent. “I don’t think that’s fair,” one harried man objects. His experience has very much been one of being taken against his will, and he seems as skeptical of reports of positive alien encounters as most people are of tales of alien contact in general. His, presumably, was one of those close-encounters of the orifice-stretching kind, and he reserves the right – by God – to refer to himself as an abductee. There is agreement from a few others in the group of about 30 who sat in a tight circle of chairs within the small windowless hotel meeting room. The “Experiencer” label, they feel, is a whitewash. They are Abductees.

Very well then. Rodwell is flexible, conveying herself with a saintly air of tolerance. She wants the evening Experiencer Sessions to “honor” all varieties of ET contact. If there are those who wish to refer to themselves as “abductees”, all well and good. So long as everybody is sensitive to the fact that “abductee” is an unacceptable blanket label to be applied to all in the room. The abductees begrudgingly agree.

Mary Rodwell holds the title of “Principal” at an organization called ACERN (Australian Close Encounters Resource Network), with the stated goal of offering “professional counselling support, hypnotherapy and information to individuals and their families who have ‘anomalous’ paranormal experiences, particularly specializing in Abduction/contact experiences.”

“If you don’t want to share and just want to listen, that’s fine”, Rodwell assures us all, much to my relief. My unease at the prospect of around-the-circle individual introductions and biographical synopses had been growing since realizing that I am, quite possibly, the only person in the room with no memories of contact with ETs.

“The other thing I’d like you to respect is everyone has their own understanding of their experiences,” Rodwell explains. “No matter how one chooses to understand it doesn’t mean you have to subscribe to that, it just means that that’s where they are with their experiences, that’s how they choose to understand it, though it may not resonate for you. It may not fit for you at all. But that’s okay, because we have the right to interpret our experiences whatever way feels right to us.”

A middle-aged Latin man seated to my immediate left is eager to tell of his experiences.

“I’m not really good at public speaking, in fact I have a phobia about speaking in groups. But I’m here tonight because I want to be around people who have had experiences. I’ve been an experiencer for approximately 25 years. It started when I was living in the Central Valley. I was a professional person. I was a parole agent. And when I started experiencing contact, I could never talk to anybody because I was a professional man and I couldn’t approach my supervisor and say, hey, I’m speaking to little grey guys. So I just pretty much kept it to myself. So my main reason for being here is just hearing other people’s stories and not feeling so awkward about what my own personal experiences have been.”

He finishes there, apparently having gotten off his chest what he wanted to express, just enjoying – it seems – being in an environment wherein he can declare himself an “experiencer” without feeling that he’ll have made himself outcast by doing so. And this is how most of the testimonials carry on throughout this first night. Experiencers within the circle talk about the various ways in which they present themselves to outsiders, some claiming to heavily advertise their relationship with extraterrestrials, others describing the daily discomfort of keeping this part of their lives constantly concealed.

One woman chimes in: “I just want to say, chances are that each one of us — in fact chances are really good — I’ve probably already lived half my life. I’m in my fifties. And I’m at a point in my life where it’s really important to me to be who I am. And I think that the extraterrestrial, interdimensional — whatever type of contact it is — that it is a significant part of my life… It has been for a long time. Um… I have had stages of being made fun of, of being talked about behind my back, being called crazy. I used to really, really care about that. And it used to really hurt my feelings… It was more important to me how other people thought of me than how I actually felt about me — you know, as far as being true to myself. So… I’m at a stage in my life where when I meet people — and let’s say they’re neighbors — there are people, like, up in the mountains. We have a place up in the country, about 35 acres around a bunch of country people. When I meet people, they come into my life, I let it be known right away. You know, this is part of my life. They have a choice whether they want to associate with me or not associate with me… there are no secrets… but on the other side of that, you know, at that point in time, they can say or think whatever they want to say or think about me. I don’t care. It’s not important to me any more. I figure people that are like me will resonate toward me, and those that aren’t will hopefully stay away. And also along with that: if I’m like a crazy person that everybody’s talking about, possibly they’ll talk to somebody who is out there who is having life experiences, who doesn’t feel like they can talk to anybody… and they’ll know they can talk to me…”

I find myself sympathizing with the experiencers. Aside from being far friendlier than the morose and self-entitled Ritual Abuse fantasists, they also aren’t directly victimizing individuals by labeling their unfortunate families as the revealed perpetrators of repressed episodes of abuse. Further, it’s annoying to think of religious literalists – believers in the Son of God’s imminent return to Earth to attend Good and Evil’s promosed apocalyptic show-down – having the audacity to laugh at these no-less-probable scenarios constructed by the experiencers. This is not to say that I feel abductees should be able to declare the absolute truth of their ET contact episodes without critical objection. Quite the contrary. Truth matters, and individual liberties are at stake. This sub-set of recovered memory advocates give license to those of the witch-hunting kind.  It’s all well and good to play philosophical games with questions like “Whose Truth?” until individual liberties and personal well-beings are threatened, at which point we must defer to the best method for knowing “truth” we’ve yet devised: scientific “materialism”… unromantic and inhibiting as it might seem.

The most perplexing comments, to my mind, this first night’s experiencer session, come from a couple of fellows who have no conscious memory of abduction, but feel that their lives have been a more-or-less regular stream of anomalous events for which alien intervention seems the most rational explanation.

Karl, a man in his late-thirties from Wyoming, tells of synchronicities, “psychic events”, and vague “anomalies” that have led him to suspect that extraterrestrials are watching him. One night, not long ago, he felt an odd compulsion to take a tent out into the woods. Before sleeping, he tells us, he asked for some sign, some acknowledgment, confirmation from these outer world beings that they are watching. He slept the whole night through without incident. But, upon returning home, he checked his email to find the confirmation that he had asked for: a girl he had gone to school with, who he hadn’t thought about in years, but who had come to mind in short proximity preceding his compelled camp-out, had sent him a Facebook friend request.

I was waiting for more. I was waiting for Karl’s story to bring us inside of a space-craft, into a vivisection lab… Something.

But that was it. A none-too-incredible synchronicity that, even if one felt certain couldn’t be “mere coincidence”, could have fit any number of supernatural narratives…  This was taken as a clear signal of extraterrestrial activity.

A short, over-weight man named Clem tells a tale equally unremarkable. One night, he was in his bathroom when the light-bulb started humming and vibrating. “I reached up to touch it”, Clem tells us, “Bwoosh!”, he spreads his hands and extends his arms, indicating an explosion.

As with Karl, Clem’s story ends before I can figure out its meaning.

After the session, I’m fortunate in that Clem approaches me and immediately begins to elaborate:

“If I was to reach up, you know, and touch something in the light I’m certain that nothing would have happened, but I didn’t want to take the chance.” He’s still marveling over the event, but I still have no idea what this has to do with ETs.

“So did you do hypnosis?” I ask.

“No! No no. No. This was — I was in the bathroom. I’m putting on a t-shirt. And you know, you got those [?] deals on the lights. I got two lights, and I just happen to touch it. And it just went — it just started to vibrate, and — you ever see Star Wars?”

“Yeah.”

“Where the Death Star exploded?”

“Right.”

“That’s what this did. And the lamp, the light itself – nothing happened to it. It burned out like a year later… but this was just… I’d never seen anything like it.”

“Something different entirely entirely, huh?” I ask, not certain what else to say.

“It was – Yeah! That was something different entirely!”

“Did you ever do a regression like she [Rodwell] does?”

It turns out, Clem has been regressed, but he seems reticent to speak of memories of direct ET contact. He continues to tell me about his bizarre electrical problems. “That comes and goes”, he explains.

“And like several years ago, I had a Lincoln…” Clem lowers his voice and leans in closer to me, as though he is about to confide to me something so frightening and abnormal that he doesn’t want to distress any innocent passers-by who might overhear. “I’m driving to work one day, and I keep losing power. And I say, what the Hell’s going on? So, I park it, and I went into work. And I go to my mechanic the next day, and I sez, so what the Hell happened? And he sez, you know, in the hundreds and hundreds of engines I’ve worked on, I’ve never seen anything like this. I was like out of a cheap b-movie… [The mechanic] pops the hood –”

Clem pauses and looks me in the eye dramatically.

“Yeah?” I urge him.

“Takes a wrench and holds it up towards the engine –” Clem raises his fist to illustrate.

“Uh huh…”

“And it goes *chunk*”, Clem opens his fist, his gaze following an imaginary wrench that slams into the engine. “…It was magnetized! And he had to reverse the poles of the engine. Change the battery. Change the alternator. Cost me several hundred dollars. And there was just no rhyme or reason for it.”

I’m at a loss. “Right…” I say, lamely.

“I’ve had experiences, and that kind of thing just drives me nuts. There’s no sense to it.”

I press Clem to tell me what exactly makes him feel certain that ETs were involved, and of what direct experiences he feels he’s had with unearthly beings.

He has had contact with ETs, but contact of the psychic kind. They come to him as voices in his head. They come into his house at night. He hears them crawling around… under the stairs, in the attic. At this point, my oscillating opinion of the hypnotherapists who perpetuate beliefs in ET encounters is decidedly negative. Clem, I feel, may need real help. He begins to describe how difficult it is to talk to some of his friends and family about these kinds of things. It is comforting to hear, at least, that he does have friends and family to talk to.

“You can’t be angry at them for finding these things hard to understand,” I tell him. “You don’t want to keep things from them, but you also want to hear them out and respect their perspective. It’s always good to hear another opinion, regardless of what they make of yours…”

Clem agrees.

We shake hands and part ways.

On my way back to my hotel room, I spot Karl. He’s telling another conference-goer who wasn’t at the session about his remarkable sychronicities. I can already see a shift in his demeanor. While he came to the session uncertain that the “anomalies” he had experienced were indicative of ET contact, he’s growing more and more convinced by the moment…

To be fair, what Cantor exposed for us does, on first blush, seem to make no sense, at best, and be contradictory, at worst. In this article we’re going to look at just a small sliver and, in that, find something bigger than the universe in which we live.

We’ll be using something you first saw in elementary school: the number line. Here’s one i’m referencing from the Wikimedia Commons:

For the moment, this has more information than we need to bother ourselves with, so just pay attention to the numbers -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3. In math-ese, these are examples of what are frequently called the integers – but you may have also heard “whole numbers”. So how many of these integers can we imagine? Well, yes, an ‘infinite’ amount of them.¹ The better questions are things like How big is this infinity? and Can this infinity be compared to the infinity of some other group of infinite stuff?

To improve the former ‘better’ question, we’ll start using a funky word for ‘size’ which is the math-ese word “cardinality”; so we could more formally phrase the former² as What is the cardinality of this infinity? Now, to answer the latter ‘better’ question, and thereby the former, first we need to round up some other groups of infinite stuff. To start to do this, we’ll define a group of numbers that you grew up with knowing as “fractions”; in math-ese, we call these “rationals”. All of the numbers in this group are a number gotten by dividing any integer by any other integer that is not 0.

Cantor came up with an ingenious way to lay out all fractions in a 2 dimensional matrix such that for each integer, there is one listed fraction. Because we can do this “one to one” pairing³ between the integers and the rationals, this means that the integers and the rationals have the same cardinality, or size. This will be where we find the first bump in the weird world of the sizes of infinities, because the astute reader will notice that all of the integers are included in this list of rationals (2/1 = 2, 12/4 = 3, etc.) — and compounding that: more than once (6/3 = 12/6 = 5200/2600 = … = 2) — and yet the infinity which captures the rationals is the same size as the infinity which captures the integers.

While we casually refer to an infinity of this size as “countably infinite”, Cantor decided to start labelling the cardinality of different infinites using the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph — — and he labelled the cardinality of the infinity which captures the integers, and the rationals, as – spoken as “aleph null”. The grand scheme being that subsequently bigger sizes of infinity would have an increasing subscript — so the next biggest infinity would be labelled as (“aleph one”) and so forth.

Now let’s talk about the “real numbers”; the real numbers can be roughly thought of as any number which can be written as a decimal representation (like 3.500…)⁴. How big is the set of real numbers? Well, if just the integers are infinite, then the real numbers (which contain all of the integers, and rationals, and more) must also be infinite; but how infinite? It turns out that there is no way to do our ‘one-to-one’ trick from the integers to the reals. Cantor (again) presented a robust proof of this which is known as “Cantor’s diagonal argument” – which ultimately means that the real numbers must be of a greater infinity than the integers, et al.
This size of infinity is often referred to as “uncountably infinite”; Cantor, who was unsure whether there was some size of infinity that existed between the infinity of the integers and the infinity of the reals, could not label this infinity and so adopted a convention utilizing the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet (‘beth’) and called this infinity (“beth one”).
Not only is it still unknown whether (a problem which is known as the “Continuum hypothesis”), it appears logically evident that we can never prove it nor disprove it.⁵

If you’ve become somewhat settled with the idea that the rationals, which contain all of the integers, and the integers themselves are groups of the same size infinity, then it shouldn’t be too much of a stunner to learn that the size of infinity of the group of all real numbers is actually the same size of infinity of a group for any continuous range of real numbers. What i mean by ‘continuous range’ is any continuous flow of real numbers between two points; using the number line above as reference, we can consider the group of every real number between 0 and 1 to be a continuous range [between 0 and 1]. Since this equivalence of infinity size is true for all continuous ranges of real numbers, we could then grab a continuous range within that 0-1 range and it, too, would be a group of the same size infinity as all of the real numbers.
This doesn’t translate at all well to what we experience in our physical world and so is often difficult to digest. For example, it would be pure Alice-world were you to operate a power shovel; dig your shovel into the ground and remove a basket full of dirt; rotate and dump that dirt into a pile; dig your shovel into just the center of the pile removing that; find that even though some of the pile is still on the ground, your basket is completely full again.

Ok. So if the real numbers are ‘bigger’ than the rationals (which contain the integers) what else is that stuff hanging out in the real numbers – that stuff which is so numerous as to make the real numbers uncountable? This is the stuff which we call the ‘irrationals’; the irrationals can be thought of as roughly being composed of ‘algebraic’ numbers and ‘transcendental’ numbers. It turns out that our ‘one-to-one’ tool works with the algebraic numbers and not with the transcendental numbers – so here is our real stuff.

Now that we’ve finally arrived at our station, what are transcendentals? Well, we know what some of them are – there are the famous ones shown on the above number line image, like , and – but, truth be told, it can be quite hard to prove that a given number is transcendental and only a small zoo exists. I suppose you could think of them sort of as the ‘dark matter’ of the real numbers.

As an aside, when was finally proven to be irrational in 1882, it sounded the official death knell for a problem more than 2,000 years old called, ‘Squaring the Circle’. The earliest attempts to solve this was first described by the famously named Plutarch 500 years after it was done by Anaxagoras (who was cooling his heels in jail for one thing or another⁶ ). It was a welcome toll as squaring the circle had become such the past-time of math-crackpots that the Paris Academy (Académie des Sciences) had to take an official stand in 1775 and declare that none of its officials would be allowed to review papers claiming to address the solution of this (this, and two other favourites of the time: the trisection of the angle and the duplication of the cube).⁷

We can now finish here with pondering what all of this means when we talk about an “infinite” universe. In what we experience in the physical world and in terms of reality, the concept of an uncountable infinity definitely doesn’t correspond to our idea of physical space as we drill down. From every indication, there is indeed a smallest possible unit of physical space (quantum foam, for example, bumps down to an eensy weensy length of space referred to as the “Planck length“); since there is a smallest definable unit, and if we assume that the universe does expand out “forever”, we can pull out our “one-to-one” tool and see that the group of every smallest definable unit of physical space within the existing universe is countably infinite – its cardinality is .

Rephrased more loose and fast: what this means, in a final twist a weirdness, is that on our above number line the group which contains the continuous range of real numbers between only 0 and 1 has a greater cardinality than the group which is the entire physical space of the universe.

1. A sloppy quick proof would be to pick the largest possible integer you can think of; now just add 1 to it and you have one even bigger. Repeat endlessly.
2. mmmm, consonance
3. math-ese: ‘mapping’
4. where, technically, there are an infinite number of digits after the decimal point; it could be an infinite number of 0s, in which case 3.00… would represent the same item as the integer ‘3’
5. This statement is too general, there are specifications which the reader can discover reading up on the CH…
6. where the ‘one thing or another’ appears to have been that he attempted to explain to people that the Sun was not a deity but rather some physical entity
7. “L’Académie prend en 1775 la resolution de ne plus examiner aucune solution des Problémes de la duplication du cube, de la trifection de l’angle, & de la quadrature du cercle…” — The last entry on page 2 in Volume 9 of “Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences”, published 1786, freely available here (archive.org rocks)

The banana, Ray Comfort famously declared, is “the atheist’s nightmare”. Observe, if you will, the compelling evidence for God’s Creative Hand at work. A banana:

1. Is shaped for the human hand
2. Has a non-slip surface
3. Has outward indicators of inward content: Green — not ripe enough; Yellow — just right for eating; Black — too ripe
4. Has a tab for easy removal of its wrapper
5. Is perforated on the wrapper for easy peeling
6. Has a biodegradable wrapper
7. Is shaped for the human mouth
8. Is pleasing to the taste buds
9. Is curved towards the face to make the eating process easy

The public then craned their necks to observe this brilliant satirist of the Creationist position, only to find an earnest, adamant, evangelical. (With this in mind, I must say it is to my credit that I made none of the obvious jokes when interviewing him following his comment that his wife is “made for Comfort”.)

Ray Comfort by Alethea Jones

Comfort, it turns out, is no lone, babbling, innocuous street-preacher. He is a best-selling author of vitriolic anti-atheist screeds that declare non-believers to be unintelligent, lacking in the sixth sense – Common Sense, the “sense” that apparently puts intuition and gut-feeling above reason and science. With actor Kurt Cameron, Comfort runs a ministry, Way of the Master, which sports its own Evangelism Training Academy and television programme. He is president, founder, and CEO of Living Waters Publications with a stated mission to “inspire in every Christian a God-glorifying passion to fulfill The Great Commission”.

Comfort agreed to speak to me for half an hour by phone and, in his defense, we were past the half hour mark when he asked that we “wrap this up”.

******

Doug: Now what provoked you to write You Can Lead An Atheist to Evidence But You Can’t Make Him Think?

Ray: Well, God’s given us six senses, and the sixth sense is Common Sense. That’s the sense that atheists lack. I just want them to think a little. All you have to do is look around you to see the genius of God’s creative hand. That’s what the book brings out. Any atheist who thinks a little will change his world view very quickly.

That brings us to the question of how can you convince an atheist that God exists?

Well, if you’re in a building, look around and say to yourself, how do I know there was a builder? It is axiomatic that a building can not create itself. It can not build itself. Nor can a painting paint itself. A painting is absolute proof that there is a painter. A building is absolute, 100% scientific proof that there is a builder. There is no better evidence that there is a builder than to have a building. The same applies to the existence of God. Creation is 100% scientific evidence that there is a Creator. You can not have a Creation without a Creator. My agenda really isn’t to convince an atheist that God exists. He already knows he exists. The Book of Romans tells us this: that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even as eternal power and godhead, so they are without excuse.” My aim is to convince the atheist that he needs God’s forgiveness, and to convince the person sitting on the fence that atheism isn’t intellectual, as some people think it is. It’s not scientific, as some people think it is. It’s more than foolish. In fact, the bible says that the atheist (and this is what we see today ) is not only a fool (Psalm 14 verse 1), but he’s a man who professes himself wise for becoming a fool. And that’s exactly what atheists and evolutionists do. They say, we don’t believe in God, and anybody who does is a knuckle-dragger who denies that science tells us the very opposite is the case.

Psalms 14:1 says, “Fools say in their hearts there is no God. Their deeds are loathsome and corrupt and not one does what is right.” There’s another one in Deuteronomy: “If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom, or the friend who is not of your soul entices you secretly saying, ‘let us go and serve other Gods’, you should not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hands of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones.” – Deuteronomy 13:6.

…What do you make of that?

Well, Israel had 613 precepts in the law. The law is broken up into three governments. There is the Civil Law, the Ceremonial Law… Civil, Ceremonial. There’s another… I can’t remember. Oh, the Moral Law. The Moral Law is the Ten Commandments which tells us right from wrong. Civil Law was instructions to Israel to carry out court cases. If somebody violated the law, they would be punished, and the laws were very, very harsh. Especially against idolatry. If Israel strayed into idolatry, God gave the death sentence. Ceremonial Law is the one evolutionists often grab and say, ‘look, the bible is so stupid. It says you shouldn’t eat lobster. It says you shouldn’t mix wool with cotton.’ Well, we now know that wool mixed with cotton produces sweat within the human body and God said he didn’t want priests sweating when they came in to the temple. We know that the lobster eats off the bottom of the floor of the sea and it eats filthy stuff, and its meat isn’t exactly good. So, Ceremonial Law was just for the health of Israel. Civil Law was the court system that was put in place – and the Moral Law is the law that will judge humanity on the Day of Judgment. When you understand that, the bible begins to make a lot of sense.

So we’re not talking about actually killing atheists?

Of course not. We want to see them come alive. They’re dead in their trespasses and sins and we want them to come alive. I love atheists. I’ve had meals with them. A lot of atheists are my friends. So, no, I don’t want to kill atheists, I don’t want to kill homosexuals, I don’t want to kill people that disobey their parents. I want them to come to Christ.

This seems like a bit of interpretational hocus-pocus. The Vatican has done essentially the same thing with evolution. They have said that The Creation doesn’t need to be interpreted exactly as such, that Darwinian theory can fit in. But you don’t see it like that. You spoke out vehemently against the Catholic dictates of Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s Pontifical Counsel for Culture.

Yeah. Because there is no way you can reconcile the Bible with evolution. What you have to do is create your own God. Because the God who revealed himself to Israel said that he made male and female, made man in his own image – and God is not a primate. And the scriptures also say that there is one kind of flesh of beast and one kind of flesh of man. There is no way you can reconcile the two. What you have to do is create a God in your own image and say, ‘Yep, the God that I believe in’ – and this is what the Vatican says – says that they’re both reconcilable, that God created man as a primate that evolved into a human homo sapien. There is no way that the scriptures say that at all.

Humans are in the category of primate.

No. I don’t think so. I think man is made in the image of God, and that he’s completely excepted from animals in that he’s got moral accountability. He has a conscience. He sets up court systems. No way do you get dogs, horses, cats, cattle, or primates setting up court systems that mete out justice on those that transgress the laws that I’ve stated. Only man does that, because man is unique in the creation of God, and I believe that that’s because he is made in the image of God. I don’t believe we’re apes as many people do. Some of my friends act like apes, but I don’t believe they are.

…Yeah… Sorry – how do we distinguish the different types of laws in the Books?

That’s what the Jews do. If you’ve studied Jewish history, and studied Jewish scriptures, you’ll see that they break up the 613 precepts into 3 parts: Moral, Ceremonial, and Civil…

So you have the atheist, and you show him “Creation” and you say that it is created. That’s dependent on using the word Creation which presupposes a creator. Now to take it from the reverse, how do you show an atheist something that wasn’t created to compare against?

Can you name something that wasn’t created?

Well, if everything was created, that doesn’t give us a standard to set anything by.

I’m not sure what the question is, to be honest.

If one claims God created everything, then points at something itself as evidence that God created it doesn’t really stand up syllogistically as an argument.

It does if you’ve got Common Sense! That’s all you need! Okay… If God didn’t create everything, who created it?

When the question is “who”, that presupposes that somebody has planned it.

If evolution created everything, is evolution intelligent?

No. Evolution is –

Never mind creating a frog. Let me see. How would you start if you had to create a frog from nothing?? You’re saying evolution created everything from nothing, I’m saying God created everything from nothing. God is eternal, he’s without the dimension of time and he created all things from nothing.

So naturally the question is, where then did God come from?

And that’s a good question. He had no beginning, he has no end, because he doesn’t dwell within the dimension of time. God created Time and subjected man to it, and because we dwell in the dimension of time, logic demands a beginning and an end. God’s eternal. If you don’t believe that, take the time to study Bible prophecy. Look at Matthew 24, or Luke 21 and see how God can flick through history as you or I can flick through the pages of a history book. So, because God is eternal, because He dwells without the dimension of time, he fits the bill of creating the universe.

Well, but then, if something was eternal, why not the material world?

Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics called entropy. If you leave an apple on the table for two weeks, it rots. If you leave a rock for a billion years, it turns to dust. If the universe was eternal, it would have turned to dust. Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says there’s no way the universe could be eternal, and that’s an accepted scientific fact.

Matter disperses in its concentrations, but –

Everything is subject to entropy. It rots.

– Which means our present form may dissolve, but not that the matter from which it came will disappear.

Then everything around us would be dust if it were eternal. But we don’t see that. We see flowers, birds, and trees, and fruits. And we see the genius of God’s creative hand. Look, let’s say I believed in evolution just for a moment. Let’s say there was a Big Bang. We won’t ask where the material came from for the Big Bang, but we’ll just believe that it happened. From there, after a billion years evolved the first dog. We see it evolved. Fully evolved. It’s got four legs, a wagging tail. It’s got a heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, and it’s got eyes. Over a billion years it couldn’t see, but now its eyes are fully evolved to a point in which it can see, and it needs to see, because it needs to find a female. It needs to find a female that evolved at the right place at the right time and the right reproductive organs with which it can mate. Because if he can’t find a female, he’s a dead dog. Then you’ve got to translate that same scenario over the giraffes, zebras, elephants, horses, cats, goats, fish, and birds. In fact there’s 1.4 million species, and every one of them had to have a female evolve at the right place at the right time with the right reproductive organs and a desire to mate, or they couldn’t keep the species going.

Which came first, the blood, the heart, or the blood vessels? If the heart came first, why did it evolve when there was no blood? If the blood came first, why did it evolve, and how did it get around without blood vessels? And if blood vessels came first, why did they evolve when there was no blood? The only way to reconcile this intellectually is to say to yourself, you know, man must have been created fully formed with fully functioning eyes, brain, lungs, heart, kidneys, blood, skin to hold it all in, alongside a female with the ability to reproduce after their own kind. There must have been dogs there with females, horses with females, to keep it all going.

When you think about evolution, it makes no sense at all. There’s no way it can be reconciled. I think it’s intellectually dishonest when we can’t create a grain of sand from nothing, to say this whole Creation just happened without an intelligent designer. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to say that.

Simulations have been run – particularly at MSU [Michigan State University] that allow basic components to follow Darwinian patterns, and what they show is that this can cause for very complex “creations”, and cellular biology covers this – but I must say, I don’t understand your female argument. If you look at biology, and study cellular biology, back to the level of mitosis and meiosis, males and females aren’t said to develop separately –

Then how did they get here? Why is it that every one of the 1.4 million species has a male and female, except for a few worms and things like that? Every single one of them! Giraffes, elephants, horses, male human beings have females. How did that happen? And how did they reproduce before there was male and female?

Male/Female reproduction serves a survival benefit [genetic diversity], but this really isn’t a good forum to go into the deep biology of it –

Do you know why?? Because evolution doesn’t have an answer…

It doesn’t need an answer on where the first male/female common ancestor first split under what circumstances. We can see that –

I do! I need an answer! I want to find answers!

Just because you need an answer doesn’t mean we have an answer, or that your answer is correct!

No. But as –

So is that good enough??

No. Being a skeptic, I want solid evidence. Faith is not enough. I’m not going to sit back and say I believe that Michigan State University did this, or that I believe million years ago, this. Evolution is based on a blind faith, and a pseudo science. I want facts. I used to believe evolution till I asked for facts, and I couldn’t find any.

You’re kidding me.

No I’m not kidding you.

Go to a bookstore. There are bookshelves full of books on evolution that answer exactly the things you’re talking about.

I’ve been to museums where I’ve been told there are millions of fossils. I went to the Grand Evolution Museum in Paris with a camera crew. I spent an hour with my crew looking for the evolution display and evidence. We had to ask somebody, and they took us to a stuffed monkey with ‘Lucy’ written on it and Origin of Species in a glass case. That’s all they had, and that’s all they’ve got. They say that there are millions of fossils in the fossil record, and millions of bones, and there are! But they speak of Intelligent Design. They don’t speak of evolution. There’s no species to species transitional forms in the fossil record. There is none! And the Missing Link is still missing, despite what people may say.

There’s always missing links. As somebody said, once you fill in one spot with a missing link, you’ve opened two more gaps on either side of it. How do you explain Lucy? Is Lucy not a “missing link”?

No! Of course not. It’s just like the other things. Paleontologists have a huge incentive to just exaggerate a little. Just move this – just call… If you can find a bone with a lump on it, and come up with a theory, and call it a big name, and say that it’s 73 million years old, you could get your face on National Geographic magazine. You could get a book deal. You could be set for life speaking about the discovery you made. I’m a skeptic. I want proof. I’m not just going to say, I believe. I want proof when it comes to something as important as evolution, because your eternity’s at stake. If you say there is no God, that evolution created everything, that everything came from nothing – well, then you’re going to live your life accordingly. You’re going to ignore the claims of the Gospel, you’re not going to repent of your sins and trust the saviour – so it’s a huge issue for Christians.

It is for Christians. That’s Pascal’s Wager. My problem with that is, it’s not between one and the other. It’s not between believing in God and having your proper eternity, or not believing in God. It’s between a whole slew of Gods… or no Gods.

Remember the First Commandment? “Thou Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me”. Of course there are other gods. They are images that man makes up. They are other gods that he feels comfortable with. I did it before I was a Christian. I didn’t shape a God with my hands, but I shaped a God with my mind, a God I felt comfortable with, a God I could snuggle up to, it was a non-existent God that was a figment of my imagination. You know, the atheists believe that everything came from nothing. And he’ll deny that through gritted teeth because it’s intellectually embarrassing. If you say, I have no belief that my Ford truck had a maker… that means you think it just happened.

But if you have a God that came from nothing, you really haven’t resolved anything…

No, no, no, no! NO! NO! God is eternal. He didn’t come from nothing.

That’s just magic-ing the question away.

No, no. It’s not if it’s the truth. He has no beginning and no end. You know, space has no beginning and no end. If you say –

Then why isn’t Space the Grand Creator? “Space: The First Cause”?

Because God’s the Creator of Space. The Creator of the Universe. Space can’t create itself. A painting can not paint itself. There’s got to be a painter, there’s got to be a builder.

And there’s that language game of calling it “Creation”. What if we call everything we can observe, feel, “The Natural World”? So it necessarily follows the laws of Physics, the –

Well, there’s a natural world, there’s a supernatural creator…

[pause]

…See. You see order wherever you look, from the atom to the Universe, there’s order. If you look down the beach and you saw that someone had written in the sand, “Tommy, be home at 2 o’clock for dinner”, you’ve got to say an intelligent mind created it. DNA is a language! It tells us that there’s a designer! The more man’s knowledge grows, the more he should be in awe of what God’s done with his Creation. Look at the flowers, the birds, the trees. The seasons come round every year. Grab a peach, or an orange, or an apple. All these things tell us there’s an intelligent mind. Everything we eat comes from the soil. I mean, what kind of miracle is that?? Everything we eat comes from the soil! It yields, just like the Bible says, “food for man”.

Do you think you’re a good person???

…Hmm. More or less…

Let me ask you something. This will convince you more than anything else of what I’m trying to say.

How many lies have you told in your life?

That’s hard to quantify…

50? 100? 200? Lost count?

Hmmmm…

It’s a hard question. So – what do you call somebody who tells lies?

It depends. They could be a survivalist depending on the situation, or they could –

I’m talking about people who tell lies. It rhymes with fire, begins with L.

Okay. “Liar”.

Have you ever stolen anything in your life, even if small?

Yup.

What do you call somebody who steals things?

Thief.

Have you ever taken the Lord’s name in vain?

Yeah.

That’s called blasphemy, using God’s name is a cuss word. And Jesus said that if you look at a woman and lust for her, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.

Then why not have sex with her too?

Well, you do what you might. So here’s a summation of your moral state, by your own admission: you’re a lying thief, a blasphemer and an adulterer at heart. And that’s only four of the 10 commandments!

Oh, come on! Are you going to tell me you’re not too?

I’ve broken all those commandments, probably more than you. That’s why I need a saviour. That’s why I need somebody to wash away my sins. So I can stand before holy God on the Day of Judgment and not be condemned to Hell. That’s why Christ died. So your sins could be washed away. Mine were washed away 36 years ago. That doesn’t mean I can live like a hypocrite, but it means that I’ve got ever-lasting life, and that’s what I want to share with other people. So the issue really isn’t an intellectual issue, it’s a moral issue. Christianity throws a wet, heavy blanket on a sinful lifestyle. And to change that whole world-view in an instant, somebody can dismiss the whole moral issue by saying, I don’t believe in God, I believe in evolution, I’m not morally responsible to God. I am an animal. These sexual prowlings I have are just me trying to keep my species going – and that’s really the issue.

I don’t think that non-believers are generally so to give themselves moral license.

You can’t say that, because there may be some that are.

There may be some that are, but I don’t think that’s the grand underlying reason for atheism. If our morals come from God, and this is something we feel instinctively, we’re programmed from God’s Word to feel, then how could there be conflicting moral codes?

How do you mean?

How is it that I’d have a different set of morals from anybody else? We’re all getting it from the same source.

We all have our free choice as human beings. We’re not robots. And if I want to steal, I can steal. If I want to rape, I can rape. If I want to lust, I can lust. You can consider stealing to be okay. You can say, my boss is rich, it’s not really stealing. We tend to do this as human beings, but that doesn’t make any difference. God is a moral absolute, and stealing’s wrong, and we have a conscience to tell us it’s wrong.

This is still talking about giving yourself license to do something that’s “wrong”. I’m talking about having a set of morals that isn’t biblical, nor self-serving. For example, I saw on your website that you had attributed the drought and wild-fires in California to homosexual marriage –

No! That’s not my website. I wouldn’t say that! ¹

Atheist Central?

No. That would be a homo– an atheist saying I’d said that. I’d never say that.

Is Atheist Central yours???

Oh, yeah, but it’s not me saying it. You probably read a comment from an atheist saying, ‘you say that…’ No, I’d never say that.

So you wouldn’t say that God would lay wrath upon us for homosexual marriage?

I would say that when we have a nation that has tornados and hurricanes, droughts, fires, and cancer that’s just consuming the nation – these are not a sign of God’s blessings. The Bible says, righteousness exalts nations. If we’re a country that does right and does good, God says he’ll give us good weather, and good crops, and bless the fruit of the womb. So what we’re seeing in the United States at the moment is not God’s Hand of Blessing, but I never said that God’s wrath will come upon the nation for homosexuality. But I’m not saying homosexuality’s right, obviously.

But, if I understand correctly, you’d also be entirely opposed to gay marriage –

– And bestiality, and adultery, and rape. Oh, absolutely.

See. That’s just a point we disagree on. But I’m not giving myself license to do anything here, and yet I feel that homosexuals should have the same rights as anybody else –

What about paedophiles?

I don’t see how that’s similar.

No. But I’m asking you a question… Why not paedophiles? Why can’t they have the same rights as anybody else?

We’re talking consensual. We’re talking about adults, and when we say adults –

A consensual kid, a 10 year old who wants to have sex and play around with a man who’s, you know, 43? What’s wrong with that??

We don’t consider them old enough to make that decision yet.

Well, let’s say it’s consensual, and the kid says, I’m old enough, I know what I’m doing?

What you’re saying –

What you’ve got is – if you start making up your own moral code, what are you basing it on? You know – child pornography. Is that okay? The kid doesn’t know about it. You know, they film the kids when they’re naked, and there’s a hidden camera. They sell the photos. What’s wrong with that?

I still don’t understand how this relates – ?

What I’m saying is that if you start saying that something is right by what I feel, society says it’s okay, where’s it going to stop?

But if what I feel comes from God to begin with, and I’m not giving myself license through my own moral code, where does that come from, if not from “God”. Clearly there’s a separate moral source.

It comes from your feelings, and you can’t trust your feelings. That’s why God gave us the Bible. The Bible puts in black & white God’s will. And you can read his will. It’s the New Testament. It’s the will of God. It’s what God wants, and he says thieves, adulterers, fornicators, homosexuals, etc. will not inherit the Kingdom of God, so what I feel doesn’t matter.

Okay. So we don’t feel the morals that “God” instilled in us? It’s all just text.

No! You’ve got a conscience, and if you listen to your conscience –

Exactly! That’s what I mean. How can my conscience contradict “God”?

The bible says, sear your conscience. Have you ever taken a steak and thrown it on a hot plate, and you actually kill the outside of the steak and make it hard, but on the inside it is tender. That’s called “searing” a steak. You can sear your conscience. You can actually harden it. So, the first time you look at pornography, you think, oh I feel guilty. Second time, not so guilty. Fifteenth time, your conscience doesn’t even speak to you. What you’ve done is sear your conscience. So a conscience isn’t reliable. That’s why you need the bible. It tells you in black & white what God says is right and what God says is wrong. That make sense???

If you didn’t have the Bible, would you act immorally?

Yeah. We all act immorally, whether with the Bible or not.

But you wouldn’t rape or murder or whatever else if you didn’t have the Bible to tell you not to.

Well, why were there 200,000 people murdered in the United States between the years of 1990 and the year 2000? In a 10 year period, 200,000 Americans – murdered! People still murder. We do wrong, because we have a propensity to do evil. We lie and steal and lust and commit adultery and fornicate, because we love to sin – and when you become a Christian, God changes your heart, so you love that which is right and hate that which is wrong.

What of Christians who commit murder?

That’s called hypocrisy. Christians that commit adultery and murder, and lie and steal – that’s hypocrisy. Hypocrite means “pretender”. If you’re not fooled by a hypocrite, how much less is God? So, don’t worry about hypocrites, they’ll answer to God on Judgment Day.

Well… okay. I just have to get back to the female question…

(Laughs) Don’t all men feel like that?

This idea that… (sighs)… I just hope you can elaborate this more. The idea that females kind of developed — I’m actually not sure how you picture this. I’m really not sure what your concept is on the biology of male/female division.

Well, everywhere I see, I see male and female: giraffes, elephants, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, fish, birds. Everywhere! You ask the evolutionists how this happened. They’ve got no answer…

But they do.

Well, then tell me simply, what happened? Where did the female come from and how did it happen to 1.4 million species without an intelligent mind?

Okay. This goes to Cellular Biology, and they have a common ancestor, all males and females, and they’re not left in separate locations at separate times to find one another! We’re talking about a method of reproduction –

How could they reproduce without a female? They can’t just split in two.

Cells can –

When did the dog start doing the female thing? When did she come along? And the elephant, and the giraffe, and the horse, and male and female homo sapiens? It becomes a huge nightmare when you start thinking about it.

No. You see, we have a common ancestor at the cellular level and beyond. And this does take a good deal of explanation, but my challenge to you then is if I can show you clippings from five textbooks that explain this process –

From billions of years ago. And then I have to believe this, because the professor tells me.

You don’t have to believe this, but you have to admit that you’re misrepresenting Biology.

No I’m not. Not scientific Biology. There’s a pseudoscience. A lot of these scientists should have got jobs as Disney imagineers, because their beliefs are based on imaginations of men. That’s my opinion. And I’m allowed my opinion because this is America. I don’t have to be shaped in a mould and believe the theory of evolution. And I don’t believe Evolution, even though I did once. So what we’re going to have to do is agree to differ, but that’s healthy, isn’t it?

It is healthy. But I do have a problem in that you associate yourself with people like Pat Robertson –

No I don’t.

You do his programme!

I’m doing an interview with you!! It doesn’t mean I’m married to you! Wouldn’t say I’m associated with you.

Yes, but Robertson’s more low-brow.

More what?

Low-brow.

Yeah, well, that’s your opinion. I think he’s a nice guy.

Here’s a guy who, with Falwell – who was a plainly odious character – claimed that 9/11 was some kind of vengeance for –

Well, I would never say that.

I’m glad to know that.

It’s an awful thing. Think of the relatives hearing that.

Exactly. I agree. And my problem with people’s beliefs imposing on public policy is-

Well, remember, it’s people’s opinions, and this is America, and that’s allowed. It’s not people’s beliefs being imposed upon people. I’m not imposing my opinion on you. I’ve got my belief, you’ve got yours, and that’s fine.

What of these “bad atheists” [you write about] who are trying to “take away the rights of Christians”? I don’t see that…

No, it’s the rights of Americans. We have a Freedom of Religion in this country like no other nation. We can be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, Christian, Jew, Gentile. That’s been purchased by the blood of our soldiers. We’ve got a wonderful freedom in this country. What certain atheists have got an agenda to do is – not to push their beliefs or opinions – they legally are taking away these rights of freedom of worship in this country, and I’m going to fight it.

How are they doing this?

Suing the Gideons for giving bibles out in schools.

That’s just Separation of Church and State. They can distribute propaganda anywhere else.

They can give bibles out in schools. This is America. Come on! The Bible’s a wonderful History book.

Not at a State-sponsored school.

It’s Freedom of Literature. Why not give a bible out in schools? It’s the world’s greatest seller. Let them become educated. Let them make up their own minds. Let’s teach Evolution and Creationism. What’s wrong with that? Why censor Intelligent Design?

Because it has no basis in Science.

It is Science.

How is it Science?

It’s The TRUTH! And you’re censoring Science.

I would have to direct you to the judge’s ruling in the Dover trial and tell you that it [Intelligent Design] is not Science. Evolution has a vast body of research supporting it. Somebody like Richard Dawkins, or PZ Meyers – even though I know he adjudged you a moron – to call them “unintelligent” –

Yes, they’re both very silly men. Dawkins thinks that we came from aliens, and that aliens created everything. And PZ Meyers is in that same category, so I don’t see these as being intelligent, as you do. I see them as having great, great faith – blind faith amidst the genius of God’s Creation.

And you know what? I have a beautiful wife who’s just come home. I leave for Florida tonight on a plane. I just got back from New Zealand three days ago after being seven days here, so I really want to have dinner with her, so can we wrap this up?

Sure.

She’s a beautiful wife. Made for Comfort.

Okay. Very good. Thank you very much for talking to me…

It’s been really good talking to you, Doug…

1. You be the judge.  On his site, Ray received this comment: “There’ve been several hundred gay marriages enacted in California in the past few days. Maybe a couple of thousand by now, I haven’t checked the numbers. And in the non-gay-marrying Midwest, they’re fighting floods, while in California it’s fair and dry. How is The Golden State managing to escape the wrath of your imaginary friend, I wonder?” It was attributed to the name of “Weemaryanne”.  Ray’s response was as follows: “Maryanne. At present there are 840 wild-fires that are burning at once in California, destroying many homes. The fires were started by lightning strikes. Guess who’s in charge of the electrical department? These are from thunder storms that have no rain. Guess who gives the rain? You said “while in California it’s fair and dry.” We are having the worst drought in our recorded history. Last year 1,155 homes were destroyed. You live in an imaginary world. I suggest you get out more.” http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2008/06/atheist-worldview.html

To paint an example: i flew to New Zealand over Thanksgiving. I boarded a plane in Vancouver on a Friday evening around 5.30p; it was wintry – typical for that time of year. I flew for 14 hours and arrived in the morning — but it was now Sunday. Walking around downtown Auckland at 8.00a on what was already shaping up to be a warm summery day (typical for that time of year), i gave my friends T&E a call; they were in California so i knew they’d be awake since it was a few hours ahead: they were answering the phone at 11.00a — but on Saturday. On my return flight, i boarded a plane on Sunday night around 8.00p, flew for 13 hours, and arrived at 12.30p — it was Sunday, early afternoon.

So, how did we get to this state of chronometric cluster fuck? Well, this is just one of the side effects of our living on a sphere.

Instead of one of my usual tilting-at-windmills articles¹, i thought i’d do an article about geometry. Wait – don’t go – you might actually enjoy this. It’s an article about the differences between the geometry we perceive in our every day lives as ground dwellers, and the geometry we’re actually living in on Earth. The three topics i’ll talk about are:

• the time zone / calendrical scenario i described above
• those flight progress maps they show on video screens during flights
• the difference in seasons between hemispheres

Also, this can be an interactive article: should you choose to play along at home, you should scrounge up:

1. two oranges
2. a sheet of ordinary letter paper
3. a ruler
4. a sharpee
5. a pen or a pencil (unless you want to use the sharpee on paper)
6. paper towels
7. one object of your choosing, no bigger than the oranges
8. a Pringle²
9. a decently sharp knife

You’ll also need a responsible adult if you’re a minor (or particularly incompetent with a sharp knife).

A foreword:

On with the show:

Time zones and calendrical hoo-hah:

Flight Progress Graphics:

The Seasons Change, Change, Change:

1. don’t worry: i’ve got one on social networks which i’ve been writing in quasi-parallel to this
2. … or a hunter-jumper / dressage saddle, if you’re a horse person.
3. Again, don’t stop reading here though.
4. quite possibly all living together in a trailer park somewhere, and potentially splitting the rent with the chemtrail-conspiracy-theorists and the folks who think that the moon landing was faked
5. Well, nothing except the decent excuse that they didn’t have a mountain of invalidating measurement and observation.
6. Once again, Prockey comes to my rescue…
7. 6.39 x 10^-17 times the area
8. For example, Greenland is almost three times the size of Texas, but the usual kind of world map shows a Greenland that visually would cover nearly the entire continental U.S
9. … though that appears to vary between 22.1° and 24.5° with a periodicity of 42,000 years
10. An improvement would be if you could some how have the orange sitting with its center in the table’s surface, since a planet’s orbit follows its center of mass and not its ‘bottom’.
11. Technically: diameter