Sadly, that is not the review I get to write. The truth is that this is a deeply frustrating book. It brings out the worst in me, specifically the part of me that wants to point out logical fallacies by name. Now, as the book frequently notes with ever increasing condescension, it is possible that my frustration arises from my fear of the strength of the arguments and my desire to resist them by any means necessary. However, a much more likely possibility is that the book suffers from all of the unfortunate hallmarks of intelligent design style apologetics, which arose as a deliberate strategy to get creationism taught in schools as a competing scientific theory. First and foremost, the book lures people in under false pretences, promising that:

The purpose of the book is not to militate for a particular religion, much less to engage in an analysis of the nature of God or his attributes. The goal of this book is to gather into one volume the most up-to-date rational arguments for the possible existence of a creator God.

Given that stated purpose, I think one can rightfully be frustrated when that pretence of pure rationality and theistic neutrality collapses into a kitchen-sink’s worth of Christian – and in some cases explicitly Catholic – arguments, and “evidence” for the existence of a pretty specific creator god. The book is divided into two parts – “evidence from within the sciences” and “evidence from outside the sciences” – ostensibly because it is valuable to cover all these bases, though in practice it reveals the true nature of their purpose, as the latter half compromises any credibility built up in the first half of the book.

Part one focuses primarily on the fact that our universe appears to have a beginning, and that the natural laws are “fine-tuned” in the ways needed for life to exist. This focus on cosmology is the cutting edge of ‘god of the gap’ arguments, though they do also drop in a chapter on the unlikely emergence of life from non-living things, because you gotta play the hits for the long-time fans.

Part two provides a far less focused analysis of “evidence from outside the sciences”, sacrificing time that could be better spent taking seriously philosophical objections and alternative explanations in order to explain how the Jewish people possess “a destiny beyond the improbable”, and how in 1917 Portugal a bunch of people really witnessed a miracle where the Virgin Mary promised that the sun would dance in the sky and then it did.

I want to be clear here, as an atheist of Jewish heritage it is extremely creepy when Christians suggest that my continued existence and my people’s impact on the world is evidence of a destined existence made possible by a god who cares specifically about my ethnic group, even though it’s also debatable if we’re hell-bound Christ-killers. On top of just being really weird, talking about the pervasiveness of Jewish influence in this way reinforces antisemitic conspiracy theories about global Jewry that has historically resulted in bad outcomes for my people.

I think it’s fair to say there is a reason the book is ordered this way, because if you opened with the creepy chapter about Jewish destiny or the weirdly specific chapter about a Catholic miracle, far fewer people would stick around for the science-based arguments. Having it anywhere in the book still counts strongly against the credibility of the overall project, though, as it suggests the authors are unreliable at assessing what constitutes evidence for the existence of a creator god, and are either unable or uninterested in sticking to the purpose they set for the book. Still, the best I can say about the book is that its structure provides a useful blueprint for understanding how intelligent design arguments function, and how they have evolved in response to pushback.

Some might see the book’s 600-page length as evidence of its thoroughness, but when you actually look at how that space is deployed, all one should be able to conclude is this is a textbook Gish-gallop. Within the part that is ostensibly just about scientific evidence, the authors devote hundreds of pages to irrelevant detail both about the early stages of the universe and about the history of political violence related to cosmological theories. On the scientific evidence side, all that matters for their argument is that the big bang arose from a singularity that was non-spatial and non-temporal, which makes it problematic to talk about anything happening “before” the big bang.

Even more tangential, the authors go into extensive detail about the persecution of scientists who questioned materialism and presented evidence for the big bang, which might be interesting to readers who want to learn about the politicisation of cosmological theory, but is completely irrelevant to assessing whether a creator god exists. Their stated justification for including this material as “evidence” is just that materialists must have been so aggressive in persecuting these scientists because they correctly recognised that this new cosmology provided strong evidence for the existence of god.

The authors don’t even consider the possibility that the materialist oppressors were simply wrong in their assessment of what the science implies about a creator god, and so their persecution of scientists was both intellectually and morally misguided. The result is more implicit skepticism that materialists are unlikely to give their arguments a fair reading.

Generally speaking, you can tell when supposed evidence is actually irrelevant to an argument, because it’s possible to concede every part of the evidence without being in any way pressured to accept the conclusion due to the existence of plausible alternative explanations. The same goes for all of the science that make up the bulk of the first 300 pages of the book: none of it actually forces anyone towards the conclusion they’re advancing, even in the thinnest sense of a creator god.

Conversely, the problem of evil, which even the authors acknowledge is “the philosophical argument that most strongly captures the public’s attention”, is dispatched in just five paragraphs, during which all evil is explained as “the consequence of the bad use that angels and men have made for their freedom”. As I’ve written at length, this is nothing more than the illusion of cosmic justice shielded from threat by the illusion of free will, a frequent move made by apologists seeking to shift blame from god to its creation. We’re told just a few pages earlier that free will is compatible with god’s divine foreknowledge because god is transcendent and can simply choose which things are matters of chance versus being determined by his will. None of this is explained, and any apparent contradictions are simply attributed to the unknowability of god’s nature, so no responses to this cosmic victim blaming are even considered.

It is also odd that any of this is included at all, since the problem of evil only matters if you’re trying to prove not only that an unmoved mover exists but also that it is benevolent, which is not included in the definitions of god provided in the book. For example, the authors initially say they won’t be analysing the features of God, which would make it very difficult for them to explain what sorts of things could count as evidence that such a being exists. So, instead, they explain that they are not intending to argue solely for “the concept of God within the Abrahamic religions, but rather to an entity that, unlike created beings… is the cause of its own existence.” Based on this, one would expect an argument for a very thin account of a creator god, and indeed in the index “God” is defined as “a being transcendent to our Universe, one who is eternal and all powerful, non-spatial, non-temporal, non-material, the first cause of all that exists”.

While it is never made clear why the creator god would need to be all powerful, rather than simply powerful enough to create a universe, this is generally speaking the sort of prime-mover entity one might hope to wring from the fact that the big bang occurred and maybe needed a non-temporal cause, if such a thing is even coherent. However, it is not the sort of entity that would have a weird fixation on the destiny of the Jewish people or would put on a light show for a field of people in 1917 Portugal. Nor is it the sort of benevolent and purposeful entity that the authors actually argue for in the second half of the book.

The authors’ biases impact more than just the style and use of polemical devices, as there are also parts of the book where they fail to accurately explain the concept in question such that unfamiliar readers are likely to be misguided and misinformed. The most glaring example of this was their account of the anthropic principle, where they fail to convey the original meaning of the term, and instead use it to effectively mean the opposite. The anthropic principle was originally proposed by Brandon Carter as an explanation for the “fine-tuning” of the universe, and essentially points out that we must necessarily observe a universe that supports life, because if it didn’t, we wouldn’t be there to observe it. So, even if it is the case that such a universe is extremely unlikely, the odds that we would exist in such a universe are always one. We may marvel at our luck, but since it is the result of a sort of cosmic observer bias, nothing empirical follows from it – particularly not the need for an intelligent designer who wanted us to exist.

However, if you only learned about the anthropic principle from reading this book, you might infer the principle means the opposite. The reason is that the authors treat a book by John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler as “the standard reference work on the subject”, even though critics have pointed out that Barrow and Tipler depart significantly from Carter’s original account in order to try to build a case for intelligent design. The centring of Barrow and Tipler results in an analysis that will mislead readers unfamiliar with the debate, and further undermine the book’s credibility with those who have already seen the anthropic principle evoked as a rebuttal to the argument from fine-tuning. Even if none of this is meant to be duplicitous, it means that the anthropic objection to their whole approach is never given serious consideration.

It is around this point that I honestly struggle with whether it is valuable to continue the extensive litany of remaining criticisms, which is part of how Gish-gallop works: it exhausts the debunker as well as the debunker’s audience, forcing them to choose between letting so many problems go unremarked, or death-marching their way through every leap of logic or questionable insinuation.

Is it worth noting, for example, how they lay out a false dichotomy between “materialism” and “the existence of a creator god”, and then defend that false dichotomy by acknowledging that some people believe in “spirits” unrelated to a divine creator before dismissing those alternatives because they are “rarely rationally articulated”, before then going on to argue for an incomprehensible creator god? Or that it’s both western-centric and false to claim that Plato first argued the existence of a supreme being, when the Brahman of the Upanishads was there at least a century earlier? Or, perhaps most embarrassingly, that the book makes a big deal out of an endorsement from Robert Wilson, who has since had to explain that he was only shown the first half of the book and that, with what he now knows about part two of the book, he should have refused to endorse it.

It certainly won’t be surprising to learn there is a chapter arguing that god is necessary for there to be objective morality, which I have argued elsewhere is just the sophisticated metaethics version of claiming that atheists are immoral and untrustworthy. Given how atheists are portrayed throughout the book and the lack of consideration of actual responses by philosophers on the necessity of god as a source of morality, the authors certainly leave the impression that atheists are at best incoherent when they embrace objective morality alongside materialism, and at worst cannot be trusted.

Setting aside all of the red herrings and non sequiturs, the simple reason I find cosmological arguments for god so uncompelling is that they put in so much effort to argue that everything must have a cause, and then claim to solve the problems that generates by simply positing the existence of a being that can actually be uncaused, because its “transcendent” and so gets to be an exception to all the rules that apply to everything in our universe in a way we can’t ever question or comprehend. That’s no different from just giving up on the problem entirely for a deeply unsatisfying answer, the epitome of looking at a real mystery and then just throwing something even more mysterious at it as an explanation. If you convince me that things need causes, of course I’m going to want to understand why god doesn’t need a cause, and I’m going to find “it’s a mystery” to be an unsatisfying answer. It doesn’t move the ball down the field; it just removes it from the field and ends the game.

One final concern to highlight in all of this is the role that books like this play in the larger intelligent design project of getting Christian leaning creationism taught in science classes as “just another theory”. While there is genuine debate about what should count as a scientific theory worth including in a science curriculum, ham-fisted attempts like this to use intelligent design as a thinly veiled cover for pushing Catholic or Christian apologetics are easy to dismiss. Far from being an illuminating, much less likely account of the universe, they clearly fall on the wrong side of separation of church and state.

In conclusion, the problem with this book is not that the authors have a viewpoint and argue for it; it is that they initially obscure their true intentions in order to build credibility, before pivoting to Catholic apologetics. Far from building a credible case for intelligent design, the bait and switch between a creator god and Catholic Jesus laid out in this book is both frustrating to read and a red flag about the overall project. If this is book is truly a comprehensive survey of what intelligent design has to offer, we can all remain comfortably unmoved.

God: The Science, The Evidence, The Dawn of a Revolution by Michel-Yves Bollore and Olivier Bonnassies, is out now, recently translated into English.

The post ‘God: The Science, The Evidence, The Dawn of a Revolution’… and underwhelming apologetics appeared first on The Skeptic.

The humanist movement has existed for centuries, and humanist values and principles are embedded in all cultures. But the humanist movement has not been visible in many parts of the world. Humanists International (HI), founded in 1952, is the umbrella organisation for humanist individuals and groups worldwide. HI is not widely known in many parts of the global South.

The international humanist movement has been effectively organising for over seven decades. Out of these seventy years, I have actively participated in about half of the time. I have been involved in organised humanism since 1996. For the past three decades, I have worked and campaigned to organise humanism at local and international levels. Based on my experiences, the international humanist movement faces a leadership issue. That needs to be addressed.

Before getting involved in organised humanism, I worked for the Catholic church. I trained to be a priest. To become a Catholic pastor, one must undergo some education and formation for at least 14 years. In many cases, the training requires a minor seminary education, which is a high school program, followed by a major seminary training that requires aspirants to study philosophy and theology, earning bachelor’s degrees in these disciplines. Trainee priests gain apostolic experience. They are sent to teach in mission schools and seminaries. I taught in a seminary for two years. The church also sends aspiring priests to communities to assist priests and help grow local Catholic communities. Internships are mandatory for those aspiring to lead as priests and clerics of the Catholic church in Nigeria. 

These programs prepare priests to lead, equipping them with knowledge, educational, and administrative skills and experiences that they need to do their work as pastors and ministers. 

When I joined the humanist movement, I wanted to undergo some training before I could lead humanist organisations. But I didn’t. I joined the international humanist movement in 1996 and discovered that there was no leadership training program. No international humanist training institute existed. I stepped up to lead a humanist group in Nigeria. And that was it. I automatically become a leader, an organiser. No formal training was required. No course. No internship or mentorship. This leadership trend is fundamentally flawed and has made the global humanist movement ineffective.

How can the global humanist movement match its religious counterpart, given this leadership culture? I cannot fathom how humanism can provide an effective alternative to supernatural religions and dogmatic faiths, without a robust training institute for aspiring leaders and representatives, especially in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where religions are dominant. In many places, humanist leadership is improvised, a matter of anything goes. Humanist leaders, especially those from the global South, learn on the job. They are largely self-taught, self-anointed, and self-certified. After a while, these humanist leaders get burnt out, tired, or abandon the role. And it is back to square one. Sadly, organised humanism goes round in this circle in most parts of the global South.

Meanwhile, I never gave up on my quest to train as a humanist leader. I tried to locate a humanist institute where I could learn to lead and guide humanist organisations. In early 2000, I researched and noticed that a humanist institute existed that could train or prepare me to lead. That was the Humanist Institute in the US. I wondered why such an important faculty was largely unknown. I inquired and noticed that this institute was a small organisation and had a part-time training program for aspiring humanist, atheist, and freethought leaders. Their curriculum was American, and graduates were mainly humanists from the US.  I registered for their training course, but did not attend the program due to a lack of funds. I also noticed another institution, the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands. I contacted the university and discovered that their programs focused on Dutch society. It was not devoted to addressing international humanist leadership needs and challenges. 

I came across some educational programs by the Center for Inquiry and the Humanists UK. While these programs were useful and provided humanists with some basic knowledge and understanding, they were patchy, and short of what individuals around the world needed to become effective humanist leaders in this century.

Humanists need to establish a global humanist institute and a sound, substantial leadership program to drive the growth and development of humanism worldwide. The international humanist movement needs a study program where aspiring leaders learn to live together, study together, and yes, work together. International humanist cooperation has suffered because there are no opportunities for humanist representatives to learn to work together.

In the West, humanism has made some progress. The humanist movement is more established, and the situation of humanist leadership is different. Over the decades, Western humanism has forged a tradition of leadership that has served the region. This is not the case in other parts of the world. Humanists must turn this ‘Western tradition’ into a robust facility that serves the needs of humanists everywhere. The humanist movement is more than European and American humanism. In an increasingly interconnected world, humanists must address the challenge of humanist leadership.

In the past decades, I have noticed firsthand how a lack of training and education has affected humanist leadership in Africa. Africa is widely known as religious; the humanist movement has been largely invisible due to a lack of effective leadership. Many individuals proclaim themselves ‘leaders’ without a basic understanding of humanism. Some self-identified humanist leaders have little or no knowledge of the history, ethics, debates, and traditions of humanism. Some have simplistic and superficial ideas of humanism, barely distinguishing between humanism, human rights, and humanitarianism. With some patchy and misconstrued notion of humanism, some openly entertain and espouse racist, ethnicist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic views. A humanist course will provide some conceptual clarity and foundation for aspiring leaders and activists in this region.

In some cases, with the support of ‘international humanist’ individuals and groups that exoticise Africa or are patronising towards Africans, some African humanist leaders and groups proclaim as their main activities rearing grasshoppers, soap making, tailoring, or distributing agricultural products and sanitary pads. They are opportunistic in their actions and initiatives, and often abandon the work after securing a few travel scholarships and grants. But the establishment of a humanist leadership training will help reorient activists and aspirants. 

The leadership course should be a month-long program in two sessions. Part one would introduce trainees to the basic philosophy and history of humanism, including the values, principles, and traditions of humanism including atheism, skepticism, rationalism and secularism. It must also include the basics of non-profit organising, lobbying, community building, membership development, fundraising, event planning, media, communication, editing, and grant proposal writing skills.

In the second part, trainees should take specialist courses in humanist administration, chaplaincy and counseling, ceremony celebrations, and caregiving. Before embarking on the second part of the course, trainees will spend some time working or volunteering with existing humanist organisations, one in the global North and another in the global South, gaining practical experiences, capacities and insights into humanist leadership and organisation.

Already, there is some hope and progress in setting up this international humanist training course in Africa. If the program succeeds, it will be replicated in other parts of the global South. Two professors from the University of Lagos and Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, have agreed to serve as instructors. Leaders of the American Humanist Association and Humanists UK have expressed their support, pledging to make their educational resources available, including their instructors. The AHA Education director, Kevin Jagoe, organised a successful international cohort experiment on the humanist worldview in 2024. Humanist leaders and activists, from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and Malawi, participated. AHA has approved the use of its course material for the leadership training.

Statistics show that millions of non-religious and non-theistic people exist in many countries of the world where there are no humanist or atheist organisations. Many parts of the world need the kind of  leadership that humanists can provide on many issues. But there are no humanist organisations are in several countries because there are no humanist organisers, officers, or leaders to run them. There are no organisers, because there is no facility to train or enable leaders.

The international humanist movement must prioritise humanist leadership training and treat leadership training as a foundational and organisational necessity if it is committed to the growth and development of humanism.

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I did attend Catholic mass – in my village it was on Saturday evening because the local priest was busy on Sunday mornings at the bigger, more important church in a nearby town. But then the BBC started showing Gladiators on a Saturday night and I was old enough to say I wasn’t interested in the men in silly outfits doing silly things, and that I’d rather stay home and watch Gladiators instead.

That was the end of my active participation in religion and, for a lot of people, it’s a similar story – attending a faith school, growing up in a relative desert of non-faith schools, but falling out of religion once they’re old enough to be beyond the instruction of parents and teachers. That has essentially been religion’s role in the UK for most of my life, with each successive generation getting less religious – and less strident about the centrality of religion in their lives – than the last.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that trend had arrested or was reversing, had you been reading the many headlines from the past year proclaiming a growth in religion among the young. These headlines began last April, when the Bible Society published a report headlined “The Quiet Revival”, based on a YouGov poll showing a growth in youth religiosity.

In the study, YouGov compared the results of a 2024 sample of over 13,000 people with the results to similar questions asked of 19,000 people in 2018 and found that the percentage of all adults who attend church at least once a month had risen from 8% to 12%. Among 18-24 year olds, religious attendance had risen starkly from 4% to 16%, with most of that growth being among young men. In the 2024 data, 20% of churchgoers aged 18-24 were Anglican (down from 30% in 2018), while 41% were Roman Catholic, and 18% were Pentecostal. It looked like my mam’s side was winning back a lot of lost market share.

The report caused a flurry of headlines across the press, with the Independent writing about how Gen Z are ‘flocking to church’ because “Christianity is cool again”; the Telegraph declaring “Belief in God doubles among young people”, the Financial Times wrote that Christianity had “regained the underground appeal of its earliest days”, and the Daily Mail pinned part of the responsibility on how “’hot priest’ influencers are drawing young people to the church in their droves”. The Mail also pointed out that sales of the Bible had hit a record high, and Gen Z were behind a huge surge in Christmas churchgoing (the latter being based on an opportunistic PR survey from Christian aid charity Tearfund).

Then there were the follow-up pieces to explain and analyse this new trend. So many news desks sent journalists down to their local church, to interview Christians of the long-established and freshly-minted variety, that they might well have caused a second not-so-quiet spike in attendance. While many of those journalists managed to find someone relatively young to talk to – or, failing that, to settle for a church leader to ask about the new surge in youth attendance – none of the reporting seemed to question whether it was genuinely the case that one in every six young people was regularly attending church.

Christian Concern, partners of the abortion-restricting Alliance Defending Freedom, called it “the return of a prodigal generation” that “has sent ripples ruffling the calm surface of entrenched secularism in the UK”. Meanwhile, Church Times warned that we should “Take care that ‘quiet revival’ is not ‘stolen’ by a form of Christian nationalism”, highlighting that “Tommy Robinson supporters are turning to Christianity, leaving the Church in a dilemma”. While Premier Christianity argued that “The quiet revival has a gender problem”, because of how heavily skewed it is in favour of young men – including an interview with a young man called Tom who had been to a rally in London and heard that our country needs to return to its Christian values, so he’d bought a bible and found a church.

How quiet is quiet?

The repeated reference to the “quiet” nature of this religious revival is somewhat key – because, for all the figures showing a huge surge in belief among the young, there wasn’t a commensurate amount of confirmatory evidence. Admittedly, the Bible was flying off the shelves in record numbers, but if four times as many people under the age of 24 were attending church, why hadn’t churches noticed it until this report was commissioned? Why did the stories about a mass uptick in youth engagement only appear once YouGov discovered that it existed – hadn’t anyone spotted that the size of their congregations had swelled, or that their demographics had radically shifted younger to accommodate the one in six people under the age of 24 who were now regular attendees? Were all of these Gen Z men just too quiet, shy and retiring for anyone to spot?

The answer, of course, is that there is no quiet revival – there never was. As subsequent investigations have shown, the report was wrong because it was based on faulty and fraudulent data.

This ought to have been obvious at the time – after all, YouGov surveys commissioned by the Bible Society are not the sole measure of the religiosity and respective religious demographics of the UK. Data from the Church of England showed an uptick in weekly church attendance of 4.5% between 2022 and 2023, and a further 1.5% from 2023 to 2024… however, those minor revivals didn’t even cover the 19% fall in attendance since 2019. And while the Bible Society’s data suggested most of the growth was more prominent among Catholic and Pentecostal faiths, data from the Catholic Church shows that mass attendance fell from 700,000 in 2019, to 575,500 in 2024. My mam and her family should put the champagne away.

The gold standard measure of religiosity in the UK is the annual British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, which tracks social trends over decades. It shows that while 67% of the UK claimed to be Christian in 1983, it was as low as 37% in 2018; meanwhile, the percentage of “no religion” rose from 31% to 53% over the same time, with non-Christian faiths making up the remainder. In terms of denomination, Brits identifying as Anglican fell from 14% in 2017 to 11% in 2024, with Catholicism remaining steady at 8%, and ‘other Chrisitan’ growing from 18% to 21%. In essence, over the seven year period, all the data could show was 3% of Brits moving from one category of Christian to another.

We can even check the Quiet Revival’s central claim – not about identity, but about church attendance – in the BSA dataset. In 2017, 18% of the country attended church at least once per month. By 2024, that was… 14%. Quiet, certainly, but no revival. And what about the youth? While BSA doesn’t have data for 18-24 specifically, 8% of 18-34 year olds attended a religious service once a week in 2017, and in 2024… it remained 8%.

Record Bible sales?

If the rise in religious identity and attendance was merely a mirage, what of the headlines about record sales of ‘the Good Book’? It does appear to be true that more copies of the Bible were bought in 2025 than in recent years, but this may essentially be a case of the tail wagging the dog: as a result of the interest generated by the Quiet Revival story, the Bible Society released their own annotated version of the bible, with more than 1,000 notes, prompts, stories, and features to help its readers to address “the nitty-gritty detail of life” – “from work meetings to football games to family dinners”.

Not to miss out, other religious groups like the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) got in on the game, releasing their own tailored versions of the Bible. One Christian online retailer now lists more than 10,000 different editions of the Bible on sale. According to the SPCK, some of the best-selling editions are the ones that are priced reasonably enough to make them giveaways in evangelism. It isn’t that there are more Christians, it’s that the existing Christians are buying more bibles, some with the intention of giving them away to prospective converts in order to turn up the volume on that quiet revival.

Susceptibility of online surveys

So, what happened here? As a result of the pushback on these headlines at the time, YouGov re-examined their data, and in March this year they published their conclusions: a large amount of the responses to their survey were actually fraudulent. As a result, they’ve withdrawn the survey completely.

YouGov is among the more respectable opinion polling outfits. They claim to “track every panellist across time, platform, and at every step of their lifecycle – building a unique profile that evolves with every interaction”. Essentially, if you say you’re an 18-year-old with two kids in one survey, and that you’re 25 and childfree in another, they can compare results to see if their system is being gamed and weed out suspect user accounts accordingly.

However, their checking systems have flaws. One of those flaws is to do with ‘hard-to-reach’ populations. If you’re looking to survey men of any age, they’re easy to find, so any inauthentic accounts will be diluted by the large number of legitimate responses. But if your poll is specifically targeting men aged 18-24, there are obviously fewer of those than men overall. And if you’re trying to poll men aged 18-24 who attend church regularly, that’s an even smaller niche. The smaller the subset, the more impact outlier results can have, and the harder it is to ensure those results aren’t tainted by bogus respondents. That appears to be what happened here.

For the Bible Society’s part in this, it wasn’t actually their fault that this data came back cooked – even YouGov have confirmed as much, taking all responsibility for the errors. The Bible Society’s statement expressed their disappointment, but added:

“YouGov’s error does not mean that all of the findings were wrong – it means that we cannot reliably support those findings on the basis of this survey”.

While this might be an effort to save face, it isn’t one that holds much water: the fact that there is now no data either way from YouGov doesn’t mean that the conclusions drawn from the fraudulent data are definitely wrong… but there was plenty of other data from other sources available at the time of publication that disagreed with the Bible Society’s figures, and more since their report was published.

The Bible Society was given a dataset that appeared to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. Did they check it against other available data? If they had, they’d have noticed that their conclusions were huge outliers.

Now that we know the data was fraudulent, the Bible Society don’t get to retreat to an “it is impossible to know either way” position. If I told you my cat can speak fluent French, and then I admitted that was a lie, it doesn’t mean that you now can’t know either way whether my cat can speak French. There is enough data on other cats to make an educated assumption.

YouGov’s statement also points out that,

“There is a tendency for fraudulent respondents to have a bigger impact amongst harder to reach groups. Problematic accounts are more likely to be found among these demographics, as there are fewer available genuine respondents and bad actors target those groups where they think they will receive more surveys and more incentives.”

This should be a familiar story to long time followers of my “Bad PR” work on the many, many issues with market research and PR polling. As I’ve written about extensively, because survey respondents are paid a very small amount for every poll they participate in, and cannot cash out their earnings until they’ve earned over a certain amount, users are incentivised to take as many surveys as they possibly can – even when the survey isn’t directly relevant to them. For it to be worth doing at all, it has to be done at scale, answering as many surveys as you can, as quickly as you can. There is therefore an obvious benefit to falsely appearing to sit within a hard-to-reach demographic niche – you’ll get access to more surveys to answer, and a better chance of meeting your cash-out target, because there are fewer of ‘you’ around.

These are criticisms I’ve been making of the PR polling industry for more than 15 years, but here’s a modern twist: each survey you take only pays you a very small amount, which makes it hard to make economically viable for many people – unless you live in places like the global south, where those micro-rewards might stretch much further. Thus, the rise of ‘survey farmers’, who can target the less-diligent end of the polling industry and use VPNs to evade detection by their verification systems.

Survey farmers can even operate multiple accounts from multiple devices, to ensure there’s no hard-to-reach niche that remains un-farmed. And with the use of AI chatbots, it’s easier than ever to be answering surveys as a 45-year-old divorcee, a 36-year-old mother of two, and a grandparent in his 60s – all at the same time. After all, in this connected world, if your local political influencer can actually be working a lengthy shift from India, then why can’t your local churchgoing Gen-Z Christian?

Obviously, every tech exploit is an opportunity for white hats to come in and save the day with detection tools and protocols, so YouGov is doubtlessly working hard to shore up their polling practices to better identify and weed out inauthentic users. YouGov’s business model relies on accuracy; fraudulent and unreliable results are a clear threat to their profitability.

However, the business models of other PR polling firms don’t rely on accuracy – they rely on headlines generated, attention grabbed, and clients promoted. So I’m less optimistic that companies like OnePoll will rush to roll out fixes that might lessen their ability to harvest headline-worthy results from their polling. In a world of survey farmers, such companies are effectively the supermarket conglomerates who rely on a constant supply of cheap produce at scale.

So, the next time you see a surprising headline about how the average British person thinks or acts – or worships their god – bear in mind the findings might not be based on results from actual Brits… or even from actual people.

The post The ‘Quiet Revival’ in British religiosity was only ever a statistical mirage appeared first on The Skeptic.

While Christianity was initially, and occasionally still [is], the target of the New Atheists, the particular contempt which they reserve for Islam is reflected clearly in their language (Al-Jazeera, 2015; Ong, 2016).

All I will do here is follow one of these two references to see what the evidence for such a claim might be.

“Ong, 2016” refers to a 13 January 2016 article by Czarina Ong on the website of the UK evangelical Christian media company Christian Today, titled ‘Richard Dawkins says Christianity is world’s best defence against radical Islam’. These are the first three paragraphs:

Despite spending years criticising Christianity, well-known atheist Richard Dawkins is now admitting that Christianity is much better than Islam.

Dawkins even conceded that “Christianity may actually be our best defence against aberrant forms of religion that threaten the world,” according to The Gospel Herald.

Dawkins noted that Christianity, unlike Islam, does not make use of violent methods to fulfill its teachings. “There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death,” he said.

Foster, Megoran and Dunn seem to be referring to the phrase “abberant forms of religion that threaten the world” when they assert of the “New Atheists” that “the particular contempt which they reserve for Islam is reflected clearly in their language”.

Following the hyperlink to the Gospel Herald, another evangelical Christian media company (based in the USA), leads to a 12 January 2016 article by Elizabeth Delaney, which includes this:

For all of his disdain for the Christian religion and God, renowned atheist Richard Dawkins has actually been willing to admit that he sees Islam as a far bigger threat to world peace than Christianity. He has also willingly admitted that, “Christianity may actually be our best defense against aberrant forms of religion that threaten the world.”

Again we must follow a hyperlink, and this time we land on an article published on the Breitbart website that same day by a Thomas D. Williams, which begins:

In a text that is coursing about on social media, professional God-slayer Richard Dawkins begrudgingly admitted that Christianity may actually be our best defense against aberrant forms of religion that threaten the world.

So just by following a paper trail, we find that the specific text “Christianity may actually be our best defense against aberrant forms of religion that threaten the world”, a remark that both the Christian Today and Gospel Herald articles attributed to Richard Dawkins, actually comes from the Breitbart contributor Thomas D. Williams. Breitbart is a far-right, anti-immigration, pro-Christianity, anti-Islam American news outlet that favours conspiracy theories.

As it was the specific use of language by “the New Atheists” when they refer to Islam that Foster, Megoran and Dunn were referring to in their 2017 article in Political Geography, it is noteworthy that the specific use of language that they appear to be citing as an example was actually that of a contributor to Breitbart. Attributing to an atheist critic of religion a form of words that originates from Christian Islamophobia is a serious academic mistake.

Williams did actually quote Dawkins later in the article:

“I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse,” he said.

Although the text originated in 2010, it has taken on a second life, being sent to and fro on Facebook and Twitter and providing fodder for discussions, even among atheists, of the benefits of Christianity for modern society.

Although the link within is now dead, with help from the Wayback Machine, one finds that Williams was referencing an article on a blog called Transcultural Buddhism by one Sean Robsville, which includes:

From The Times:

“Even among the world’s most famous atheists, the crisis of faith among Christians in Europe has been met with concern.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”

And since it is apparently my job to do everyone’s referencing for them, I have found the 2 April 2010 article in The Times, a piece by Ruth Gledhill on diminishing religiosity in Europe and crises in the Catholic Church (it is paywalled, but there’s a copy of it elsewhere online). The article quotes Dawkins:

Even among the world’s most famous atheists, the crisis of faith among Christians in Europe has been met with concern.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”

As Gledhill does not cite any source, this is probably a comment that Dawkins supplied to her directly: journalists for national newspapers often just directly approach academics for an interview and academics will usually oblige, particularly for The Times. There are no results on any web search for this specific text dating from earlier than 2 April 2010.

So, although we do have evidence here of a miracle in the form of Williams accurately quoting from Dawkins later in the article, this is not a remark that Williams accurately paraphrases in writing that “professional God-slayer Richard Dawkins begrudgingly admitted that Christianity may actually be our best defense against aberrant forms of religion that threaten the world”. Dawkins described his ambivalence, and hedged his remarks with a significant use of the word “might”, and did not refer to any distinction between “aberrant” religion and entirely benign religion, and did not refer to Christianity being a “best defense” against Islam. Williams was speaking his own religious discourse here.

To count the stages of misreporting uncovered here in chronological order:

1. In April 2010, the blogger Sean Robsville lazily referenced a quotation from Dawkins from an article in The Times.
2. In January 2016, the Breitbart contributor Thomas D. Williams quoted Richard Dawkins indirectly, via Sean Robsville’s blog. As Williams mentions that this quotation has “taken on a second life, being sent to and fro on Facebook and Twitter”, what he means is that he has only just learned about it from Facebook and Twitter, which tracks with his citing a blog in referencing the original.
3. Much worse, Breitbart contributor Thomas D. Williams took the text “I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse” and paraphrased it with “professional God-slayer Richard Dawkins begrudgingly admitted that Christianity may actually be our best defense against aberrant forms of religion that threaten the world”, which misrepresents Dawkins significantly.
4. In the Gospel Herald article published later the same day in January 2016, Elizabeth Delaney quoted Thomas D. Williams’ paraphrase of Richard Dawkins as if it was text from Dawkins himself.
5. In the Christian Today article published the next day, Czarina Ong also took the quotation that was actually from Thomas D. Williams and presented it as if it was from Richard Dawkins and also vastly misrepresented even that with the title, “Richard Dawkins says Christianity is world’s best defence against radical Islam”.
6. In September 2017, Foster, Megoran and Dunn’s article in Political Geography channelled these multiple levels of evangelical Christian news-media misrepresentation in which a fictional Dawkins solely criticises Islam and praises Christianity as a global asset and present them as an item of evidence to show that criticisms of religion are the rantings of a clique of bigots. Such egregious misrepresentations of critics of religion are abundant in this article, as well as in Megoran and Foster’s research blog post about the Political Geography article for the academic blog The Conversation.

Atheist activists will often find themselves assailed from both sides like this: both rubbished as a bigot by some believers and ‘recruited’ by other believers as supposedly recommending their specific religion (or denomination) above others in a supposed demonstration of its spotlessness.

There is an intense irony in this instance of that assault from both sides, though: this team of three academics started out determined to class critics of religion as bigots, and found some ‘evidence’ of this in the form of Dawkins-recruiting Christian journalists attributing their own out-group attitudes to him. When the bigotry that a Christian ‘detects’ in atheists is actually the religiously motivated bigotry of their fellow Christians, they have inadvertently provided evidence in support of the criticism of religion that they are trying to stifle.

If you consider the ‘new atheists’ to be elitist or unempathetic or apt to mistake people for ideas, ask yourself: how much of what you think you know about their attitudes actually derives from such collaborations between believers and believers?

The post Are you sure that’s what they said? Down the rabbit hole of academic citations appeared first on The Skeptic.

Every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain. And I naturally go, when I hear about sort of extra-natural phenomenon, that’s where I go, is the Christian understanding that, you know, there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also some evil out there.

Last year, Marjorie Taylor Greene went on Bill Maher’s show and affirmed that she believes in demons and that extraterrestrials could in fact be “fallen angels” cast out of heaven. What began as a conversation about UFO secrecy ended with Greene suggesting UFO entities might literally be demonic, leaving Maher visibly taken aback. These are not fringe pastors saying this on late‑night AM radio; these are well‑connected Republican politicians speaking in front of large national audiences.

Folklorists and anthropologists have long known how this kind of reasoning works. Marshall Sahlins famously argued that Hawaiians made sense of Captain Cook’s sudden arrival in 1778 by folding him into their existing ritual and mythic framework, identifying him with the god Lono because his timing coincided with a festival cycle devoted to that deity. Sahlins called this broader pattern ‘mythopraxis’: people use myths not just as stories about the past, but as active templates for interpreting and organising new historical events in the present. Mythopraxis is myth‑in‑action, a way of taking puzzling novelties and domesticating them by slotting them into familiar sacred scripts.

Sahlins’s thesis has sparked heated academic debate, with many scholars doubting that Hawaiians ever truly regarded Cook as Lono. Yet even if we acknowledge this dispute, the underlying idea remains anthropologically useful: communities often ‘recognise’ the unprecedented by assimilating it into what their symbolic universe already provides. In that sense, Vance is doing something structurally similar when he encounters reports of UFOs and “naturally” classifies them through pre‑existing Christian demonology.

This lens also illuminates the psychology of alien abduction and encounter reports. Scholars of religion and anomalous experience have long noticed the overlap between nightmarish encounters with demons and modern accounts of hostile extraterrestrials: beings who paralyse, violate, or terrorise sleepers, who seem to cross physical and spiritual boundaries, and who leave the experiencer both shaken and oddly certain something ‘really’ happened.

Historically, Western Christians spoke of incubi and succubi; in a more secular, technological age, the same broad phenomenology has often been reframed as grey aliens and abduction narratives. In all of these cases, hallucinations, hypnagogic imagery, and sleep paralysis loom as plausible mechanisms, but the interpretive frame – demon or alien – does the cultural work of making sense of the terror.

Joseph Laycock and Eric Harrelson argue in their book, The Exorcist Effect, that horror films and religious belief now interact in a recursive loop. The 1973 film The Exorcist, marketed as “based on a true story,” both drew on existing Catholic demonology and, in turn, reshaped how Americans imagined and even experienced demonic possession; cinematic tropes migrated into actual exorcism claims and practices. Laycock and Harrelson call this the “Exorcist effect”: religious ideas inspire horror media, and then horror media feeds back to intensify and standardise later religious experiences.

If we map that cycle onto Vance’s comments, things look even more tangled. Obsessions with demons are hardly new, but The Exorcist and its imitators have given contemporary believers a vivid, Hollywood‑inflected vocabulary for thinking about evil spirits. That visual and narrative repertoire can then be extended outward: once we have a ready‑made script about invisible malevolent forces invading bodies, it becomes easy to project it onto any ‘uncharted territory’, from psychological distress to unidentified aerial phenomena. Yet demons, at least in classical theology, are immaterial spirits that can move between bodies; Vance, by contrast, talks as if these entities might be fully corporeal, sky‑travelling agents that behave like aliens but are ontologically demonic. Logical consistency is not the point here; the point is to impose some narrative order on what feels mysterious and threatening.

From a human perspective, this is all understandable. Faced with ambiguous stimuli – lights in the sky, strange dreams, historical shocks – people reach for the interpretive tools their culture hands them. But with possible extraterrestrial life, the stakes are unusually high, and Vance is not just any other human being. He is the vice president of what is still the most militarily powerful nation on Earth, and he helps shape both intelligence priorities and public expectations regarding potential contact. The United States formally enshrines a separation of church and state, but when a sitting vice president publicly frames ambiguous aerial phenomena as demonic, the line between personal theology and potential policy framing begins to blur.

This rhetoric sits inside a wider MAGA subculture that is fascinated by the Devil, apocalyptic imagery, and end‑times scenarios. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, speaking from a very different social location, has given lectures warning of a coming Antichrist, presenting the twenty‑first century as a choice between a deceptive, peace‑promising “one‑world state” and an Armageddon‑style collapse. We do not know how literally Thiel himself takes such eschatology, but Vance’s comments sound far more literal: he appears genuinely inclined to parse anomalous aerial phenomena as the activity of evil spirits masquerading as aliens.

If extraterrestrial civilisations exist – a very large ‘if’ – we would need a cautious, level‑headed approach. The rational starting point would be diplomacy and information‑gathering, especially if the technological asymmetry many people fear actually exists. Framing hypothetical visitors as embodiments of absolute evil is a poor basis for first contact; at best, it distorts risk assessment, and at worst, it primes a self‑destructive crusade against entities we barely understand. The history of human conflict offers endless examples of how demonising the Other leads to catastrophic miscalculation long before any literal demon appears on the scene.

One might also ask: why must Vance assume such beings, if they exist, are demons? Why not angels, or something morally mixed or neutral? Erich von Däniken and the “ancient astronauts” crowd are guilty of spectacularly bad (and possibly racist) history and archaeology, but at least they entertain the idea that advanced nonhuman intelligences could be benevolent or civilising forces.

Contemporary disclosure‑style documentaries such as The Age of Disclosure – however dubious in their evidentiary standards – also float the possibility that UFOs might be engaged in non‑hostile nuclear ‘safeguarding’, allegedly interfering with weapons systems to prevent human self‑annihilation. These scenarios are wildly speculative, and skeptics would be wise to treat them with a very large pinch of salt, yet they still underscore how underdetermined the data are: demonology is hardly the only symbolic toolkit available.

The pattern in Vance’s choice of frame points back to something deeper in the MAGA imagination. Within that movement, the Other is rarely just different; the Other is frequently coded as evil, a node in a cosmic war of good vs evil, rather than a fellow citizen or interlocutor. Historian Elaine Pagels shows in her seminal 1995 book The Origin of Satan that the figure of the Devil in Jewish and Christian traditions gradually crystallised as a way to name, structure, and morally charge human enemies, turning social opponents into representatives of a cosmic adversary. Read in this light, Vance’s demon talk is less a literal ufological theory than a cue about who, in his worldview, belongs on the wrong side of a cosmic struggle: not only hypothetical little green men, but anyone who falls outside the white Christian demographic template that anchors his base.

For skeptics, the task is not to swap Vance’s demonology for some rival mythology about benevolent “space brothers,” but to keep track of how all such stories arise from very human needs to tame ambiguity and threat. A critical outlook asks first about evidence, psychology, and cultural script before promoting any grand narrative – supernatural or extraterrestrial – as fact. That same outlook should also insist that public policy, especially on matters as consequential and uncertain as UFOs and possible contact, be grounded in shared reasons and empirical warrants, not in the private metaphysics of leaders who see every unknown as one more front in a cosmic war.

The post Why aliens look like demons to US Vice President JD Vance appeared first on The Skeptic.

Carlile, as has been briefly noted in The Skeptic before, was a significant figure in the history of skepticism who is largely forgotten today. He spent nine years of his life in jail on matters of principle around the freedom of belief and freedom of expression. While people from across the political spectrum today would consider these basic human rights, he also campaigned for causes that remain controversial, from anti-monarchism to sexual freedom.

Carlile was brought up a strict Anglican, but when hard financial times led him to question traditional values, he began to supplement his income by distributing radical papers, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register and The Black Dwarf. By 1817 he partnered with William Sherwin – who was just 18 years old – to publish his own newspaper, Sherwin’s Political Register. When Carlile was invited to speak at the St Peter’s Field protest in Manchester, calling for electoral reform, he became a first-hand witness to the horrific events that unfolded, leaving 18 people dead and many hundreds injured. He escaped the authorities – this time – and he published an account of the events in Sherwin’s Political Register, advertised with the words “Horrid Massacres at Manchester”.

Carlile’s bookshop and publishing house was quickly raided and shut down, but this just led to him immediately founding a new publication, the even more radical Republican. This activity, alongside his publication of Thomas Paine’s long-banned The Age of Reason, culminated in prosecutions that kept him locked up until 1825 and led to a further 150 of his distributors and associates finding themselves jailed.

The forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest

Of particular interest to skeptics is his (unsuccessful) defence against blasphemous libel for his republication of The Age of Reason. In a letter to The Society for the Suppression of Vice, he insisted repeatedly that discussion of the basis and content of religion must be allowed:

On what ground must the established and dissenting codes of religion of which you boast…. be raised, when a small volume of enquiry into its origin shakes its very centre, and threatens a total annihilation?

During his defence, he added that in a free country the courts should not be responsible for adjudicating between opinions on religion:

[T]here is no Court of justice competent to try a question of honest difference of opinion on religious matters.

While he still refrained in this defence from any overt embrace of atheism – not least because he was, after all, hoping to be acquitted – his prosecutions and the publications he and his supporters made detailing them massively expanded the reach of his arguments, as the kerfuffle caused by the case drew public attention and drove sales of The Republican.

Once in prison, Carlile went on to declare himself an atheist in that very newspaper, and he has been widely credited as the first living person to openly declare himself as such in print, with repeated statements in different issues of The Republican:

It is not till since my imprisonment that I have avowed myself Atheist… There is no such a God in existence as any man has preached

While this uncompromising approach led to many other social reformers distancing themselves from him, the seeds had been sown and a very much wider public had now had the opportunity to read skeptical accounts of religion. Ultimately, this attempt by the authorities to silence the replication of a deist tract had inadvertently led to the first mass exposure of the British public to full-blown atheism.

Men of science, men of society

While in prison Carlile wrote An Address to Men of Science (1821). While Carlile had no formal education and was not a scientist himself, he was well read and drew on scientific advancement that was increasingly popularised through cheap printed summaries of scientific proceedings. As such, he was very aware of the logical endpoint of many recent discoveries, even while the scientists themselves often softened or distanced themselves from the materialist conclusions that could fairly be drawn from their own work.

Carlile attacked scientists for such behaviour, in particular relating to the treatment of surgeon Willian Lawrence, whose materialist beliefs were in opposition to the vitalist beliefs of the day, a debate summarised by Michael Rectenweld (2016):

This foray inaugurated the early nineteenth-century vitalism-materialism debate, which focused on the question of life: was life a substance or vital influence imparted on matter from without (vitalism), or was it autotelic by virtue of an auspicious set of material conditions, including organization (materialism)?

Vitalism was of course more fitting with the prevailing Christian thought of the time and so Lawrence’s work was found to be blasphemous, and effectively banned or censored. His book therefore lost its copyright and so was open to Carlile to republish, making the work more widely available.

In Men of Science, Carlile did not stop at anatomy:

My present address is chiefly confined to those Philosophers, who study and practice the sciences of Chemistry and Astronomy. I shall endeavour to point out to them that they are bound by duty, by common sense, and by common honesty, to make known to mankind, or, more particularly their fellow countrymen, whatever discoveries they may make to prove that the others are following a system of error… they have not hitherto done this… because the institutions of the country were connected with them; or, because they feared to offend those persons who might be deriving an ill-gotten profit from them.

He calls out scientists for their vested interests and for being fearful, though such nervousness was quite understandable, given the significant threats to WIlliam Lawrence’s career and even liberty that his materialist publications risked.

Carlile is not just a strong advocate of a materialist explanation; he extends it to a logical conclusion:

…we should consider ourselves but as atoms of organized matter, whose pleasure or whose pain, whose existence in a state of organization, or whose non-existence in that state, is a matter of no importance in the laws and operations of Nature… We are of no more importance in the scale of Nature than those myriads of animalcules whose natural life is but for the space of an hour, or but a moment.

For Carlile, it is the responsibility of scientists to spread their knowledge, expand scientific education for children, highlight natural explanations for the world, and counteract the power of dogmatic and religious controls on society:

It is the duty of the Man of Science to make war upon all error and imposture, or why does he study? Why does he analyse the habits, the customs, the manners, and the ideas of mankind, but to separate truth from falsehood, but to give force to the former, and to extinguish the latter?

…Science must be no longer studied altogether as an amusement or a pastime, which has been too much the case hitherto; it must be brought forward to combat the superstitions, the vices, and the too long established depravities among mankind

Carlile was not, however, immune to the fashionable pseudosciences of the day, not least with his passion for phrenology. He was at least in good company on that error, as many luminaries, like the co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace and psychiatric reformer William Browne, were proponents of the decidedly dodgy practice of measuring skulls to supposedly reveal mental faculties.

“Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.” – Marilyn Monroe

Carlile didn’t restrict himself to science and religion. His advocacy of contraception and female sexual pleasure was truly astonishing for the day, not to mention embarrassing for his associates.

In 1828, Carlile published Every Woman’s Book, which detailed the use of contraceptive sponges, sheaths and the withdrawal method. Carlile’s mentor Francis Place had referenced contraception obliquely in a more scholarly book on overpopulation in 1822, and then anonymously a year later with more explicit instructions on how to use contraception, with the stated aim of reducing the number of children and so reducing poverty. This was obviously an important reason for the use of contraception, and Place is rightly noted as the founder of the birth control movement.

However, Carlile took things a daring step further. Every Woman’s Book was the first mass-market publication with a named author in English that advocated for the use of contraceptives for pleasure, rather than on the basis of avoiding overpopulation.

Carlile was not alone in his work, with women featuring significantly in his life. His wife Jane Carlile shared his politics and also served time for an article published in The Republican. His own correspondence suggests that she was influential in his writing Every Woman’s Book, and particularly the discussion and detail of contraceptive methods.

He was also an advocate of the necessity and normality of sexual pleasure for both men and women, and that since men and women had the same needs they were equal. He noted in Every Woman’s Book “the honourable principle of mutual equality, mutual desire, and mutual pleasure.”

He also suggested that the law should not interfere in people’s sex lives, except with the most modern of caveats:

While violence in this case ought to be punished in the most deterring manner, all other legislation upon the subject, beyond the maintenance of offspring, may be fairly deprecated.

He is not of course entirely modern in his thinking, believing that consumption – tuberculosis – in women was caused by a lack of sex, and that masturbation causes disease, but it is nonetheless a remarkable work for the time.

Estranged from his wife Jane in later years, in the early 1830s Carlile entered into a relationship with fellow radical Eliza Sharples, who gave impassioned speeches while he was (again) imprisoned, a living embodiment of the principles they both espoused. While Sharples has sometimes been dismissed as a mere mouthpiece for Carlile’s views while he was in jail, Gail Turley Houston points out that “when Carlile’s agent informed Carlile about Sharples’s request to visit him in jail, it was not so that Carlile could instruct her, but, rather, so that she could “explain her views” to him”.

Furthermore, when she gave radical speeches on the Blackfriars Rotunda while unmarried and pregnant:

…her very body argued for the right of a woman to own her body, make sexual choices for herself, obtain knowledge, and participate unapologetically and fully in the public sphere without fear of reprisal for enacting her reproductive rights and rights of personhood. While Carlile cautioned her to keep the pregnancy quiet, she begged him to make it public; demanding that her male lover accept equal emotional responsibility for the relationship, she expected him to live up to her feminist political commitments.

Richard Carlile died in 1843, and Eliza Sharples nine years later. While his fellow reformers distanced themselves from the thoroughly scandalous Carlile, Sharples was even more thoroughly forgotten, having been denied the opportunity to even speak at public events on women’s rights by other social reformers of the day.

The post Richard Carlile – Science, Sex and Skepticism in 19th Century England appeared first on The Skeptic.

Through HELP, Adamu was brought to Nasarawa to get artificial hands. After careful examination, experts at the foundation advised that Adamu needed bioelectric hands – costing around £3,000, or six million naira. Efforts to raise this sum have not yielded positive results. But HELP will not give up. Helpers will continue to appeal and knock on doors till Adamu can hold a phone and use his hands again. 

Founding HELP was sudden and unplanned. While we continue to hope for some breakthrough for Adamu, helpers have tried reaching other victims of faith-based violence in the region. We have tried to connect with victims of sharia amputation, sufferers of blasphemy accusations, attacks, and killings. In Zamfara, the first Nigerian state to declare and enforce Sharia following a return to democratic rule in 1999, HELP has tried contacting Baba Bello Jangedi, the first person to be amputated under sharia law in Zamfara, without success. Local sources said he might have died. Hopefully, he has not.

HELPers have also reached out to another sharia amputee, Isa Lawani. Lawani explained that he was accused of theft, then charged under sharia law and sentenced by the sharia court. On March 15, 2022, state officers took him to the state general hospital, where his hand was amputated at the wrist level as a form of punishment.

HELP has also reached out to victims and relatives of victims of blasphemy accusations, attacks, and murder. People accused of blasphemy, especially in Muslim-dominated and sharia-enforcing parts of Nigeria, are treated without compassion. Many are murdered extrajudicially, and no one is ever brought to justice. Victims and their relatives are abandoned without care. They are left to their fate. Where religion is used to justify abuse or murder, humanist values should be deployed to undo and repair the harm; the humanist idea of life should be rallied to help, support, and comfort.

Through its local contacts in Niger, HELP has reached out to Abdullah Saidu, the only child of Amaye, a local food vendor who was accused and lynched for blaspheming against the Prophet of Islam on Saturday 30 August 2025. HELP will work with the office of the National Human Rights Commission and the village head in Kasuwa Garba in Mariga Local Government Area to support Mr Abdullah. HELP will explore other creative and innovative ways of supporting victims of religious abuse and cruelty.

HELP is grounded on humanist principles and values to help humanity and do good for goodness’ sake, not God’s sake. HELP is an initiative forged in righteous anger and indignation over religious violation of humanity. Steeled in rational and compassionate response to an outrage, HELP remedies the viciousness and brutality of humans against humans, often driven by irrationalisms and absurdities coded and covered with religion, culture, and tradition.

We are motivated by the understanding that this is the only life we have, this is the only ‘world’ we have, and we have to make the best of this life in this world. HELP codifies a secular defiance and determination to live this life to the fullest, ensuring happiness in the here and now for all. HELP is a refusal to be cowed or numbed, a resolve not to resign or wallow in despair and helplessness. After all, as stated in the Second Humanist Manifesto, no deity will save us; we must save ourselves. 

HELP is a commitment to acting and doing something where, over the years, nothing has been done, and where doing nothing is a religious duty informed by the religious idea of life, of this life and an afterlife. HELPers not only believe that something can be done, but they also do something. Driven by the quest and thirst to redeem, repair, and relieve, they help.

HELPers draw inspiration from humanist theories and praxis, especially the saying by the late American writer, Isaac Asimov: “Never can we sit back and wait for miracles to save us. Miracles don’t happen. Sweat happens. Effort happens. Thought happens. And it is up to us humanists to help – to expend our sweat, our effort, and our thought. Then, there will be hope for the world.”

Thanks to the sweat, effort, thought, and actions of HELPers, there is hope and there will be hope for victims of blasphemy accusations, attacks, and other faith-based violations. There is and there will be hope for the world.

The post The Humanist Enabling Life Project – supporting victims of sharia attacks appeared first on The Skeptic.

I had a lot of time to reflect on these as I drove home from Manchester, in and out of the rain clouds and through the stunning landscape of the Peak District. I was on my way to a small campsite outside of Buxton on a planning visit to relaunch a skeptical project which aims to answer some of those questions – Camp Quest UK.

Camp Quest – the skeptical, secular, humanist summer camp – isn’t a new idea: we ran in the UK from 2009-2019, and next year we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Camp Quest movement.

We took a hiatus for similar reasons many Skeptics in the Pub groups have closed over the last few years: the Covid pandemic, venue costs, promotional problems, volunteers moving on to other projects and questions over our purpose in the UK’s changing conversation about beliefs and skepticism. We’re relaunching for the same reasons Skeptics in the Pub are popping up again. We think social problems like climate-denialism, artificial intelligence and online radicalisation/alienation are crying out for compassionate skepticism, and we realise that the communities which sustain that type of skepticism aren’t going to build themselves.

Skepticism can be associated with aloofness and elite or academic conversation. Skeptics in the Pub challenges that stereotype by moving skepticism into a place associated with more social friendly conversations. Camp Quest UK also moves skepticism into different spaces, and reaches different age groups.

By getting young people out of their familiar surroundings, into different activities and away from cynicism and expectations, they are able to explore more freely. In previous camps, young people learned hands-on skeptical investigation skills from volunteers and special guests such as Michael Marshall.

We have a unique approach of mixing physical and traditional camp activities with sessions focused on developing critical thinking, and personal, philosophical and scientific discovery. Young campers may be drawn more to one aspect or another, but both work together. Once everyone’s been tipped in the lake young people can be less worried about seeming cool and cynical. Showing off their confidence on the zipline can give a young person the confidence to speak up in a philosophical discussion. Having to work together on a treasure hunt improves young people’s listening skills and observation, and reconnecting with nature can be a great way to gain perspective.

Silliness can be the best way to draw attention to serious issues and playing with our fears in a safe environment helps us understand the limits of our rationality. Movement skepticism can be most successful when it embraces these juxtapositions.

At this year’s QED there was a panel on ‘Why Do Skeptics Love Horror?’ which explored how a genre associated with an escape from logic and scientific realism can be so engaging for skeptics. It reminded me of the strange mix of ghost stories, philosophical discussion and reflection on the day’s experiments that you find around the campfire at Camp Quest UK. These moments show that skepticism and curiosity are as deeply ingrained in our nature as community building and storytelling.

This reminded me of something Andrew Copson, Humanists UK’s CEO, said of the Camp Quest UK relaunch: “Since the dawn of our species, humans have had an innate drive to gather round the campfire to share ideas, stories and community. Around one of those campfires the first scientists asked what caused the flames, the first philosophers asked why we are here and the first humanists were inspired to believe human endeavours could conquer the darkness. Camp Quest UK will provide opportunities for future generations of freethinkers and skeptical explorers to continue in that great tradition.”

We believe there is a niche for Camp Quest – for children, young people and families interested in freethought, and asking big, small and weird questions. A safe place for those who may not fit in traditional summer camps. A place away from overwhelming misinformation and cynicism, where skeptical young people can have their curiosity nurtured and their critical thinking skills developed, while – most importantly – having fun.

As my colleague Helen Chamberlain – a mainstay of the Camp Quest UK community since 2012 and a member of our new committee – said: “As society continues to become more polarised and it becomes harder to discern fact from fiction I think it’s so important for spaces like Camp Quest to exist, to encourage critical thinking and compassionate skepticism. When planning my first session I was advised to not underestimate the campers – and they were right. Over the years we covered everything from quantum mechanics, to medical ethics, to how magic tricks work – and it definitely did create a space for young people to think deeply, discuss complex topics with respect for other opinions and embrace curiosity.”

The family camp will be at a smaller scale than previous outings, and at a campsite rather than activity centre. But this will allow us to experiment with new approaches and provide parents an opportunity for input on the model. It will be a chance to meet other skeptical parents – exchanging ideas and strategies for raising ethically engaged, curious and critical thinkers.

The Family camp will take place near Buxton in the Peak District over the May 2026 bank holiday weekend. Tickets are £250 from www.CampQuest.uk

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The Black Non-Belief Project provides an opportunity to correct misconceptions and misrepresentations of black people and communities. Black people have stereotypically been presented as religious. They have been identified as Baptists, Christians, Muslims, or as theists when they are not. Black people have longed to live free from dogma and superstitions. 

To combat the prejudice and misconception that darken and destroy too many lives, it is pertinent to highlight the wave of reason, critical thinking, and freethought sweeping across black communities. Data from the Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) helps to shed light on just one of those initiatives: the anti-witch-hunting campaign. Are alleged witches persecuted in Nigeria and other parts of Africa? Yes, of course. Can we end witch hunting in Africa? I believe we can.

fThere is a tendency to compare witch hunting in early modern Europe, 17th-century America, and contemporary Africa. This comparison discounts the fact that the social, cultural, and historical circumstances of the 17th-century West were different from the life situations in Africa today. Many tend to hold the simplistic notion that witch persecution persists in Africa because Africans, and by extension blacks, are hard-wired to be religious. The situation is more complicated than that. Blind faith in religion and paranormal beliefs is still widespread in the West and in the rest of the world.

In 2020, I founded the AfAW with the goal, as French philosopher Voltaire noted, Ecrasez l’infame: to crush the infamous campaign of witch hunting. I founded the advocacy group to correct mistaken assumptions. I was dissatisfied with the way that the campaign against witch hunts in Africa had been waged. I objected to the lacklustre approach and wanted to do things differently. 

Over the past decades, I have worked with Western organisations that focused on specific demographics; they were not ready to address the problem as a whole. Some frowned at criticising pastors and churches, even when religious actors and institutions were the infamous drivers of witch persecution. Once queried for using the slogan “No Witches No Wizards” in my public education programs, I was told that such a tacit atheistic approach would alienate the people. These NGO leaders have forgotten that the campaign against witch hunts is not meant to entertain but to enlighten, to weaken the grip of this superstition on the minds of the people.

The advocacy campaign was meant to reorient and awaken people from their dogmatic slumber. Many Western NGOs use a patronising approach under the pretext of respecting African religious and cultural sensibilities. Some deny funding to African NGOs and activists who do not align with their agenda. 

To provide a framework for this change and challenge, AfAW outlined a decade of activism aimed at ending witch hunts in Africa by 2030. To some observers, the vision sounded like a pipe dream. However, it is achievable, as long as the will exists; we do not even need to wait ’til 2030 to make this dream of ending witch-hunting in Africa a reality. Witch hunting persists in the region due to ignorance, misinformation, and disinformation. Witch persecution continues due to actions and reactions motivated by superstitious and irrational beliefs. Witch hunting takes place because of the inaction of the victims and the accused. 

Navigating resistance

At the information level, AfAW tries to clarify the concept of witchcraft, highlighting embedded misinterpretations. Witchcraft is not a Nigerian or an African word, but an English word used to explain a phenomenon that manifests in non-European and non-English settings. Witchcraft comes with so much conceptual baggage, which many have overlooked to their peril. A lot has been missing and mistaken in translation and application. And those missing bits and pieces have complicated efforts to situate and end witch hunts in the region.

As part of our strategy, AfAW corrects the misconceptions and misrepresentations by Western anthropologists and their African counterparts. Anthropologists have argued that, unlike in the West, witchcraft accusations have some domestic value and fulfill useful functions in Africa. Witch hunting is a mechanism for social stability and harmony. Anthropologists conflate witchcraft with African traditional religion, mischaracterising traditional religious beliefs as evil. The notion of witchcraft in Africa, layered with Christian bias, serves the missionising purpose of Christianity, making witch hunting a form of traditional religion-hunt.

As a part of the campaign, witchcraft accusers, and romanticisers, peddlers of misinformation and disinformation linked to witch hunting, including scholars, clerics, state and non-state actors, are challenged and compelled to provide evidence for their claims. Advocates debate, argue, and dispute baseless assumptions on social and mainstream media. They call out flimsy, whimsical, and anecdotal evidence that enables witch-hunting. For instance, advocates interrogate the claim that humans turn into birds or cats, or engage in spiritual and nocturnal flights to inflict harm, cause diseases, accidents, or death.

This skeptical approach touches on people’s religious beliefs and sensibilities, and often elicits pushback, some opposition, and hostility from witch-believing people. At AfAW events, people get visibly angry and upset when one challenges their deep-seated superstitious narratives. At the Benue State University, some students told me that someone suspected of turning into a hyena was killed. In response, I said to them that the perpetrators should be jailed, because they murdered an innocent person, and that no human being could turn into a hyena. In response, some students told me that if I came to their communities and made that comment, people would beat me up. Advocates run the risk of being attacked and killed for their views. Sometimes they accuse advocates of intolerance or of imposing ideas on them. 

On many occasions, when I post comments on social media that witches do not exist, some respond by asking me, “Are you an atheist?” Some stigma is attached to being an atheist, and the question is asked to discredit my argument and position. To many people in Nigeria, one must be a non-believer, an atheist, or a humanist to dispute the reality of witchcraft and wage an effective campaign against witch hunts. And many Africans are not ready to relinquish their ‘faith’ to advance the cause of a witch-hunting free Africa.

In addition to dispelling misinformation and disinformation, the Advocacy for Alleged Witches initiates and facilitates actions, interventions, and reactions to cases of witch persecution. Witch hunting persists because of impunity; because there are no consequences for acts of witchcraft accusation and witch persecution. Witch persecutors largely go scot free. Most often, victims resign themselves to the situation; they take no measures against their abusers. They do not hold witch hunters accountable and responsible. In Nigeria, many victims of witch hunts tell advocates that they have handed their cases over to God to judge and reward. 

AfAW rejects such impotent posturing and postulations. As noted in the second humanist manifesto, “No deity will save us, we must save ourselves”. The AfAW works and campaigns, bearing in mind that no deity would save or rescue the accused. No supernatural agent would stop witch hunting or take on cases on behalf of the accused. We empower victims to take actions against their accusers and persecutors. Non-belief is deployed as a resource to end witch-hunting in black communities.

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After looking through their Facebook page, I found that the Good Counsel Network was hosting a lecture at Newman House, a Catholic student hub located in Bloomsbury. The lecture was quite literally titled “How I Ended Up Praying Outside an Abortion Centre and Why It’s a Good Thing to Do.”

Just before the lecture started at 6pm, I stepped off the busy street and into a building with a Pope Francis cut-out in the window, making sure every pedestrian knew exactly where I was going. The small lecture room felt familiar, reminding me of my old classrooms at Catholic school, with stained glass windows, crucifixes, and marble statues of Mary. I was struck by a large, large painting of a foetus in the womb in the room’s corner.

After I had settled in for a few minutes, our speaker nervously walked in: a young woman wearing a long skirt and a Good Counsel Network T-shirt. On her wrists, she wore not one but two rosaries, and in her left hand, she gripped the cross in her palm for the duration of the evening, like a fidget toy.

As the title of the lecture suggested, the first half focused on her personal journey, and the second half on why praying outside abortion clinics, in her view, a good thing to do. Her background was eerily similar to mine. She had also attended a Catholic primary school, which she said “wasn’t very Catholic,” before becoming what she called a “blasphemer” – showing photos of herself in various mock nun costumes, and a Mary-like look complete with a gold halo. I was the only one who laughed at the photos; I think I was meant to be appalled.

She then spoke about moving from her comfortable small town to London, to attend UCL’s art school. I couldn’t help smiling at our similarities. I, too, went to a Catholic primary school, which also made me a heretic of sorts. She described London as lonely and full of “darkness”. Whenever she felt the weight of this darkness, she would say Hail Mary prayers to soothe herself. She said she didn’t like where she was living. I imagine she felt lonely; university halls can be lonely spaces. From experience, I know they can be strange, isolating, and even toxic environments. She eventually decided to move into Newman House, a Catholic boarding house.

When she told her “liberal, pro-choice art school friends” where she was moving, they began to drift away one by one. The painting she brought with her marked the grand unveiling of her new identity, which she presented to her class while “showing them the rosary” and singing a hymn. A girl who had once been her friend couldn’t bear to watch and got up to leave.

I vividly pictured the scene in my mind, and can only imagine how uncomfortable it must have been. The speaker told us that her professor had said she couldn’t even look at the painting; she and the Good Counsel Network’s priest speculated that the professor’s reaction perhaps stemmed from guilt over a possible past abortion.

She went on to say that while she was living at Newman House, the priest in the corner had told her about a local abortion centre and suggested she might think about going over to help the women.

Then she moved on to why, in her view, praying outside abortion centres is a good thing to do. She spoke at length about how she cannot take credit for any of her work because, since devoting her life to the cause, she is purely a vessel for Mary, simply doing what the mother of God wants from her. She explained that she feels compelled not to sit idly by while innocent babies die on her doorstep.

She described the setup at the centres: they go in pairs so that one person can hand out leaflets while the other “leads the prayer.” She also made it clear that she prays out loud. When she tried to persuade the rest of us to go, she spoke about the pure sense of peace she feels standing just outside the buffer zone.

She said that when she first started, she was concerned that her presence might feel like an “invasion” to the women seeking an “intimate procedure” at a “very difficult and even traumatic time”. I smiled and nodded at her instinct, before she said she had cast it from her mind, because to her that was part of the old “pro-choice mindset” she had inherited from art school.

During her crisis of faith in her first few months in London, she described feeling despair at the thought that if there were no God, then there would be no hope or purpose. She said she sat with the feeling and really hoped it would be true, and once you reach that point, it’s only a small step before you start to believe it is. She joked that her conversion was “social suicide”. Now, she said, she is “on the other side,” adding, “Are you really Catholic if you aren’t dead to the world?”

As I sat in the church hall, I felt a little sad that her coping mechanism had cost her all her friends. I thought about how, if I had struggled with moving here in the same way she had, and if I had found a different passion, I might have been joining her on the street, handing out leaflets.

After hearing her speak, I wanted the chance to talk with her, to meet her peers, and see what they might say to a potential volunteer. Over email, I was told I could meet more representatives at Newman House’s volunteer fair. So, I returned the following week, hoping to see the speaker again. From the lecture, I had learned a lot about the journey to the buffer zone, but very little about what being there actually involves.

When I arrived at Newman House, the atmosphere contrasted sharply with the quieter, sparsely attended lecture the week before. The two rooms hosting the fair were lively and crowded. Even though it was midday, they were serving coffee and croissants, as most people had been at mass since ten o’clock. I moved around the room, chatting with representatives and collecting leaflets.

When I saw the speaker from the lecture standing alone, I approached her and opened by complimenting her lecture, before mentioning our shared experiences. She remained very soft-spoken, speaking as though she were apologising. When she started opening up, she said that what she had lost in community and friendship at art school, she had more than regained at Newman House and where she now lives, in the Good Counsel dormitories. It was hard not to believe her in such a lively, bustling room. As a returning face, I, too, received a very warm welcome back.

She hinted at something I wanted to know more about. When I asked how she found living at a pro-life centre and working for the cause every day, she said it was both easy and hard. She said that although it is hard to commit to showing up, it is ultimately a very easy thing to do. When I asked if she meant physically, she disagreed and said that sometimes she feels as though all she is doing is standing on the street saying prayers. After a pause, she seemed to contradict herself, saying that despite that, she does feel she is on the “front line of a spiritual war”. Her sudden conviction surprised me; it felt rehearsed.

It might have been her hesitant speech patterns, or the constant grip she kept on the rosary around her wrist, but I couldn’t help thinking she felt some level of conflict, not about the impact of her efforts, but about her role as a soldier in this “spiritual war”. I sensed she believed she was taking the easy route, that she could be doing more. This was a feeling shared by the other two interns there. I began the conversation by asking how they had got to where they were. Only one replied. It was her gap year, she said, “for experience”.

I wanted to know how they felt about the hardships they faced. They spoke about the abuse hurled at them by passers-by, and laughed when I compared it to a hit-and-run. The lecturer last week had said that she feels protected by a prayer shield from Mary when she is out there, but the two newer girls said they found it harder. I wouldn’t wish anonymous street abuse on anyone, but they implied that they saw it as a signal that they were fighting the good fight.

I asked what impact they felt their presence had. This was when they brought up the buffer zones. It is the most frequent talking point I have found at events like this: dissatisfaction with the government’s rules that set a 150-metre limit on their presence around abortion centres. These two had never worked before the buffer zones were introduced, but they said they had heard stories about the contact they used to be allowed. That is, of course, their goal: direct contact with women approaching the centres, which they make very clear.

I asked what they could see from their station, and they said they could not see the entrance or the exit. I replied, “I suppose that’s probably a blessing and a curse, because at least they do not feel the pain of seeing women leaving after the procedure.” They agreed in part but still wished they could be closer. They admitted that in the two months they had been stationed in the same spot every day, they had not spoken directly to a woman considering an abortion. I have to admit I was relieved, but they did not seem disheartened. They said people take leaflets every day, and even though they never see the impact they make, they feel it just as strongly.

I felt a much stronger connection with these girls than at the larger events. I do feel sympathy for them. I even liked them. They were very kind and friendly, and they seemed genuinely unwilling to impose themselves (partly because the buffer zone prevents them), and truly believed in what they were doing. They see themselves as standing up to what they believe is a murder clinic, their response limited to praying and handing out leaflets while being shouted at.

I cannot help but think about the restrictions placed on them and wonder what they might be like without those limitations, and what impact they still have on the women seeking medical care. They may no longer be an overtly invasive presence, but instead a distant one. I do not know what to believe about them. I want to think that they simply stand and pray, silently or quietly, and as they say, only exist if women need them. But if that were true for all of them, the law would never have intervened. They cannot all be telling the truth, though I believe these particular girls were.

They may be wholly committed to their cause and genuinely believe they are on the right side of history, but there is a sense of frustration among them. I do not doubt that they feel the impact of their work, yet I also sensed a lingering feeling that they could be doing more.

I do not feel comfortable drawing any comparison between abortion and a real genocide, but it is one that the first lecturer made, and I can see a similarity in how both groups of activists cry out and are ignored. The pro-life activists believe that mass murder of innocent lives is taking place in our own city and, if I truly felt that way, I would probably fight back too, and feel frustrated at being silenced or ignored by the law.

Perhaps my stance has softened since being around them and trying to empathise truly, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. I understand more clearly where they are coming from and why they act as they do. Although we live in very different worlds, and their beliefs conflict with mine, we share a concern for human life. We simply disagree on when it begins.

After observing the movement more closely, I see people who are both steadfast and disaffected, frustrated by their marginal status among other activists, yet convinced they are right. What I have learned is that, while our side may doubt whether we will succeed, they never doubt that their cause will eventually prevail. I hope they are wrong.

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