William Golding’s Lord of the Flies begins with British schoolboys stranded on an island without adults. They establish rules and choose a leader, but order gradually collapses and fear gives way to violence. The novel offers a disturbing account of human nature: remove the restraints of civilization and something ugly may emerge.

In Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman asks what happens when something similar occurs outside fiction. In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys became stranded on the uninhabited island of ‘Ata. They survived for more than a year by cooperating. They collected rainwater, cultivated food, kept a fire burning, and divided the work among themselves. For Bregman, their survival offered a welcome answer to Golding’s pessimism.

Bregman—whose argument is deliberately hopeful—found the contrast irresistible. Golding gave us a fictional descent into savagery; the Tongan boys appear to offer a historical counterexample. But the episode raises a deeper question: what if both stories tell us less about fixed human nature than about the historical and social conditions under which different human capacities become visible?

People living through history have a disadvantage that historians do not: they cannot read ahead.

We call periods hopeful, revolutionary, or nostalgic. The 1920s were exuberant, the 1930s fearful, the 1960s rebellious, and so forth. Such descriptions seem to tell us what living through those years was like. We speak of Zeitgeist, collective mood, and generations that supposedly experienced history in a particular way. But are we describing what happened, how people experienced it, the atmosphere of the age, or are we considering what later generations came to believe it meant? If we confuse these, we may mistake our interpretation of history for history itself.

Facts are not experience.

People living through history have a disadvantage that historians do not: they cannot read ahead. Søren Kierkegaard captured this asymmetry in his famous observation:

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

What is true for individual life is also true of history. People living through a historical moment do not know which developments will prove decisive. Consider Europe before the First World War. Looking backward, the years before 1914 are easily read as a prelude to catastrophe. Yet people living in 1913 did not experience themselves as characters in the prelude chapter of a world war. Some perceived instability and danger; others saw technological progress, expanding trade, artistic experimentation, and the promise of modernity.

The same principle applies more generally. While the past becomes unmistakable once its consequences are visible, contemporaries inhabit uncertainty. This leaves us with two very different questions: 1) What happened? and 2) How was it experienced at the time? The first concerns historical reconstruction; the second, lived historical reality.

Historical experience emerges from the interaction between present conditions, remembered pasts, and anticipated futures.

People encounter and participate in events, and interpret them through their expectations, memories, and fears. A crisis, for example, may evoke an earlier crisis, just as prosperity may be measured against a lost golden age. Even political conflict may be framed through inherited stories, for example notions of victory or injustice and betrayal. Historical experience emerges from the interaction between present conditions, remembered pasts, and anticipated futures.

Put simply, facts alone cannot tell us what an era felt like from within. For that, we need to ask what broader atmosphere made certain expectations and possibilities seem plausible.

Zeitgeist and the Experience of Historical Time

The German idea of Zeitgeist—the “spirit of the age”—emerged from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempts, especially in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder and later G. W. F. Hegel, to understand historical periods as possessing a distinctive cultural and intellectual character. Today, Zeitgeist refers more broadly to the atmosphere of an era: the ideas people take seriously, the futures they imagine, the styles they adopt, and the assumptions that seem self-evident at the time.

But is Zeitgeist really something people experience while living through an era, or something historians construct retrospectively? Reinhart Koselleck helps clarify the problem through his distinction between a “space of experience” and a “horizon of expectation.” The former is the past available in the present through memory and inherited experience; the latter concerns the futures people consider possible. Historical action takes place in the tension between the two.

The same circumstances can therefore acquire different meanings in different periods. Technological advance may appear liberating in one era and threatening in another; political instability may be seen as renewal or collapse. Koselleck also argued that, in modernity, the distance between experience and expectation widened: the future increasingly came to be imagined as genuinely different from the past.

Yet temporal expectations alone do not capture what an era feels like. Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” does so somewhat better. Williams was interested in meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, including characteristic tones and affects that exist before they become formal doctrines. An era may show recurring patterns of confidence, unease, rebellion, conformity or exhaustion across culture and everyday behavior without every individual sharing them.

At this point, however, the limits of all these concepts become apparent. Zeitgeist can describe the characteristic expressions of an age. Koselleck helps us understand its temporal horizon; Williams, its lived cultural feeling. But neither necessarily explains what generates the broader collective disposition from which those expressions emerge. If Zeitgeist is primarily descriptive—an observable pattern in the culture of an era—we still need to ask whether something beneath those expressions influences which expectations feel plausible, which behaviors spread, and which cultural forms resonate.

The Missing Dimension: Social Mood

If Zeitgeist describes the characteristic atmosphere of an age, a deeper question remains: where does that atmosphere come from? Historical conditions obviously shape people. Wars, economic crises, technological change, and political conflict alter the environment in which individuals live. Collective attitudes are often responses to such events. But that may not be the whole story.

The hypothesis of “social mood” originated from a different possibility: societies may possess collective dispositions that are not merely reactions to events, but those which can emerge endogenously and influence how events are perceived and acted upon. This is more than saying that people influence one another or that crowds sometimes behave irrationally. Nor is social mood simply another word for public opinion, emotion, or Zeitgeist. It is an ontological hypothesis, one in which collective mood is treated as a real feature of social life, visible indirectly through patterns of confidence and fear, openness and defensiveness, risk-taking and risk-aversion, cooperation and antagonism. Individuals need not consciously recognize it or agree with one another. A politically divided society may still display broader shifts in trust, risk appetite, or expectations about the future.

A useful theory, therefore, must do more than rename hindsight.

Indeed, if social mood were merely another name for Zeitgeist, it would add little. But it is an idea aimed at capturing a shifting collective disposition that may help generate the cultural expressions we later recognize as the “character of an age.” In simplified form: 

Social mood → Cultural Expression → Observable Zeitgeist

Yet, if social mood cannot be observed directly, how can we know that it exists independently of the expressions used to infer it?

One possibility is to treat social mood as a latent variable. Rather than observing it directly, we infer it from converging patterns across partly independent domains: financial risk-taking, cultural preferences, political rhetoric, social trust, consumer behavior, artistic expression, and attitudes toward the future. That makes sense, except if we know the mood was negative because bad things happened and then explain those events by saying the mood was negative, we have learned nothing. The entire analysis becomes circular.

A useful theory, therefore, must do more than rename hindsight. Social mood must be investigated through evidence available within the relevant historical period itself. In other words, what collective tendencies were visible before the historical outcome later became known?

Consider Egypt in the years before the 2011 uprising. The economy was growing, but Gallup surveys recorded a marked deterioration in how Egyptians evaluated their lives. Between 2005 and 2010, the proportion classified as “thriving,” based on their assessments of their present lives and future prospects, fell from 29 percent to 12 percent. The interviews took place before the demonstrations that brought down Hosni Mubarak. We therefore have evidence of dissatisfaction recorded before the upheaval, when neither the respondents nor the interviewers knew what would follow. Economic growth alone would have given us an incomplete picture of what those years felt like.

These findings do not establish that an independently emerging social mood caused the uprising. Dissatisfaction could reflect corruption, insecure employment, or frustrations concealed by national growth figures. Nor does unhappiness necessarily produce rebellion. But the surveys allow us to investigate whether a documented change in collective outlook helped shape how people interpreted events and judged the possibility of political change. An explanation based on social mood would still have to account for how dissatisfaction became a willingness to act, and why that happened when it did. It would, however, begin with evidence of what people felt before the outcome, avoiding the circular assumption that a revolutionary mood must have existed because a revolution followed.

Mnemohistory: When the Present Rewrites the Past

If Zeitgeist concerns the atmosphere of an age and social mood the collective disposition operating within it, another question presents itself once that age has passed: how is it remembered? In an attempt to answer this question, in his book Moses the Egyptian the German Egyptologist and cultural theorist Jan Assmann coined the term mnemohistory, distinguishing between conventional history and the history of remembrance: mnemohistory concerns the past as it is remembered rather than simply the past as such.

Indeed, facts may remain unchanged while their meaning changes. A war can later become a story of sacrifice, failure, or betrayal, just as an economic crisis may become evidence of political incompetence or resilience and renewal. Assmann also distinguishes communicative memory, carried by living generations, from cultural memory preserved through texts, monuments, rituals, museums, and institutions. The latter can survive long after direct witnesses are gone, yet preservation is selective.

The past reaches the present through selection, and each present can select differently.

All societies choose what to commemorate, teach, and forget. Some memories become central to collective identity while others recede. Later generations inherit representations of the actual experience of events. The past reaches the present through selection, and each present can select differently. Evidence still constrains interpretation, but the significance attached to it is historically unstable.

Here social mood and mnemohistory intersect. If societies reconstruct the past from within their own present, the collective disposition of that present may influence which memories become salient. A confident society may emphasize achievement and possibility; a defensive one may focus on lost greatness or unresolved grievance.

This remains a hypothesis. But if it is correct, social mood may shape not only how people experience the present but also how they select and reinterpret the past. This would mean, then, that history may contain a feedback loop: the present is interpreted through remembered history, while remembered history is continually reconstructed from within the present. This may help explain why historical analogies recur so persistently: another 1930s, another Cold War, another Vietnam, another Roaring Twenties. We use remembered versions of the past to make the present intelligible.

With this background, we can now place the four dimensions—historical facts, Zeitgeist, social mood, and mnemohistory—side by side:

The boundaries are not absolute. Zeitgeist, for example, can be experienced contemporaneously as well as identified retrospectively. The matrix is analytical: it prevents us from treating facts, atmosphere, collective disposition, and memory as if they were the same thing.

The observer never stands entirely outside the system being observed.

Historical facts constrain interpretation. Zeitgeist describes the visible cultural character of a period. Social mood proposes an underlying collective disposition that may help generate those expressions. Mnemohistory describes the later reconstruction of the past. Taken together, these four dimensions suggest a recursive rather than linear model of historical experience:

Social Mood → Zeitgeist → Historical Behavior and Events → Historical Facts → Mnemohistory → Expectations and Interpretive Frames → Social Mood

Influence may operate in more than one direction, so it is not a “rigid” causal chain. This may help explain why history seems to rhyme. Similar collective conditions can reactivate inherited ways of interpreting uncertainty, opportunity, and threat. History is therefore neither a simple sequence of external events nor merely a set of narratives imposed afterward. It is a process in which historically situated human beings participate.

People living through history perceive events from within the collective conditions of their time, and historians reconstruct that experience from within another historical present. The observer never stands entirely outside the system being observed. This need not lead to relativism. Facts still matter. Evidence can contradict memory, archives can expose myths, and interpretations can be tested.

References 

• Assmann, J. (1997). Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Harvard University Press. 
• Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge University Press. 
• Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind: A Hopeful History (E. Manton & E. Moore, Trans.). Little, Brown and Company. 
• Ketovuori, M. (2024). Socionomics: How Social Mood Shapes Society. Routledge. 
• Koselleck, R. (1985). Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (K. Tribe, Trans.). MIT Press. 
• Williams, R. (1961). The Long Revolution. Chatto & Windus.

History often assumes that long-established states retain inherent certitude. Roads, railways, courts, universities, the civil service, currencies, monetary and financial systems, cultures, and borders appear to embody continuity. These embedded entities lend an impression that the foundational institutions of modernity and society, once established, are remarkably durable. Yet the twentieth century provides evidence of the opposite.

States have emerged, flourished, faltered, and disappeared within a single lifetime. Borders have been redrawn, as between Ethiopia and Eritrea; states have divided, as with Sudan and South Sudan; and old constitutional orders have been abandoned, as in South Africa and Korea. Europe offers even more striking examples. Yugoslavia fragmented into a succession of independent states after 1991; Czechoslovakia divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993; East Germany disappeared altogether through reunification with West Germany in 1990; and the collapse of the Soviet Union created fifteen independent states, several of them in Europe. 

Political transformation has often been accompanied by equally dramatic economic change, with currencies abolished, replaced, or rendered worthless. Much of Europe eventually replaced long-established national currencies with the euro. The supposed permanence of states and their institutions is therefore often more apparent than real: new political arrangements are repeatedly poured into old institutional vessels, “new wine in old bottles,” and sometimes the bottles themselves disappear. 

Rhodesia: A Vanished State 

Rhodesia provides a striking example of the “vanished state.” Over a period of ninety years, it acquired many of the outward features of permanence: a modern capital in Salisbury, an elected parliament, efficient municipal government, functioning courts and judicial systems, and an experienced civil service considered among the best in Africa. 

It also developed an extensive, world-class multiethnic educational system. By the early 1960s, about 95 percent of African children were attending primary school, while the country maintained secondary, vocational, and technical schools alongside a university. The University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, established in 1955, entered a special relationship with the University of London and awarded London degrees; by 1964, 180 of its 600 students were African. These institutions contributed to comparatively widespread basic literacy. Healthcare likewise extended beyond the major cities through a nationwide network of hospitals; by the mid-1970s, roughly 80 rural hospitals served the African population. 

Economically, Rhodesia developed commercial agriculture and mining industries, allied secondary manufacturing industries, including for ethanol, and a sophisticated financial sector that included major international banks such as Barclays, Standard Bank, and Grindlays, as well as its own stock exchange. Its currency remained relatively stable, with the Rhodesian dollar introduced in 1970 at an official value of US$1.40, while periods of rapid real economic growth raised living standards and output per head: real GDP per capita grew by about 4.6 percent annually between 1954 and 1958, and by 1976 remained 57 percent above the average for developing Africa. 

This economic base was accompanied by an extensive road and railway network, a national airline, and the ordinary symbols and machinery of statehood, including armed forces, postage stamps, and passports. Salisbury and Bulawayo ranked among Africa’s best-serviced and managed cities, with attractive suburbs and substantial infrastructure. Major engineering projects such as the Kariba Dam seemed to embody confidence in a long-term national future. Meanwhile, a thriving literary culture and a vibrant fourth estate with newspapers and nationwide radio and television services contributed to a distinctive political and social culture.

Yet, within a generation, Rhodesia disappeared from world maps and Africa’s cartography, and over time from Western historical consciousness altogether. 

What happened to Rhodesia? 

The sudden transformation into Zimbabwe saw Rhodesia’s political systems, economic fabric, and collective memory dismantled or recast to reverse an otherwise well-imagined historical trajectory built over multiple decades. Its established social and economic structures with long-embedded governing systems were overturned as the inheritor state displaced Rhodesians from their lands of birth or adoption. 

Whether viewed as minority regime, settler state, Britain’s “last colony,” or a rare if prosperous society within landlocked southern Africa, Rhodesia’s sudden eclipse from the world stage, geography, and global mindsets illustrates how socioeconomic and political structures, institutions, and identities can be rapidly eroded, erased, and transformed. 

The broader lesson embedded in the Rhodesian story concerns the fragility of modern states and even the vulnerabilities of Western cultures.

Rhodesia’s record of achievements, however, existed alongside social and political contradictions. The constitutional order rested upon unequal political voting rights that excluded most Africans from full participation in Rhodesia’s qualified franchise and electoral system for much of the state’s existence. Public outlays on health and education were uneven. Land ownership, trade union rights, parliamentary seats, and economic opportunity remained discriminatory across time and amid socio-ethnic classes. 

African nationalist movements from the late 1950s under Joshua Nkomo, and more so after the demise of the ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1963, led by Ndabaningi Sithole and then by Robert Mugabe, increasingly rejected incremental constitutional reform and negotiations on evolutionary pathways to majority rule and independence. 

Their locally detained or exiled leaders opted for irredentism and ultimately war in the guerrilla struggle or terrorist onslaught that would even predate Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on November 11, 1965, by the prime minister, Ian Smith. The die had been cast before Smith’s decision.

Britain, the Commonwealth, the Organisation of African Unity, most African states (with the exceptions of Malawi and Gabon), the United Nations, the Eastern Bloc, the Warsaw Pact, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the wider international community, including the United States, regarded UDI as unlawful and illegitimate. Apart from South Africa, Portugal, and Switzerland, Rhodesia was effectively branded and treated as a pariah state. 

Thus, Rhodesia at the time combined sophisticated state institutions and its modern economy with an unresolved crisis of accepted international political legitimacy. As time passed, these conditions of enforced isolation worsened. 

Subsequent history has demonstrated that even an interregnum of Pax Rhodesiana at 90 years from 1890, and institutional competence as one of Africa’s few and longest existent Westphalian states, did not guarantee political or ultimate de facto and de jure state survival. 

During UDI, 1965–1980, Rhodesia operated under comprehensive international sanctions. London excised it from the Sterling Area on the day of UDI. In 1966 the United Nations imposed mandatory worldwide economic sanctions (only France abstained in the Security Council) issued in unprecedented scope at the time. 

Britain actively sought Rhodesia’s diplomatic isolation and placed its Royal Navy in a blockade of Beira, the sole port for crude imports for the inland Feruka refinery near Umtali. Strict petrol rationing followed, with local ethanol blended into all fuel product at 20 percent. 

Adjacent states, South Africa excluded, but including Zambia, Tanzania, Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, and others progressively closed off trade and shut transport corridors. Many states in Africa, and elsewhere, provided direct or indirect political, diplomatic, financial, material, and military hardware to armed nationalist movements. 

The OAU, East Bloc, Soviets, People’s Republic of China (PRC), North Korea, and others, including Nordics, notably Sweden and Norway, provided logistical and financial aid to insurgents in terrorist camps and related armed entities and NGOs seeking to overthrow the Rhodesian government. 

By 1973, the number of training camps and facilities in East Bloc countries had grown significantly: Zanu (Zimbabwe African National Union) and its armed wing Zanla (Zimbabwe National Liberation Army) sent cadres to PRC, Cuba, Ghana, Egypt, Uganda, Tanzania and after 1975 to the neighboring Mozambique, to be directly aided by Frelimo. 

Ultimately, Rhodesia’s excision from the wider public square reminds us that states are sociocultural creations rather than ordained historical fixtures.

Zapu (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) and its Soviet-trained armed forces, Zipra (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army), had training facilities in the USSR at Simferopol, Moscow, and Odessa, and in Bulgaria, Cuba, North Korea, PRC, Algeria, Egypt, and Tanzania. Other support came from East Germany, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. 

All guerrilla numbers trained and extensive military support given expanded as time passed. The war was designed, funded, and mostly shaped abroad—and as much “out of Africa” as within. Over 115 training camps and external bases had been established worldwide by the end of the Bush War that ultimately ended with the disappearance of Rhodesia as a state. 

Despite these severe threats and constraints, Rhodesia survived and displayed considerable economic resilience. Domestic manufacturing expanded through import substitution; agricultural production remained diversified and relatively strong, sustaining its role as “the breadbasket of Africa,” mining continued to generate hard currency export earnings in complex anti-sanctions countertrade deals and clandestine arrangements. 

Meanwhile, South Africa and Mozambique offered critical commercial lifelines, at least until 1975, when Frelimo came to power in Maputo, and up to when Pretoria slowly but progressively disengaged after Smith had held fateful talks with Kissinger and Vorster in Pretoria in 1976. 

Even so, sanctions imposed measurable long-term costs. Foreign investment became constrained. International capital markets remained inaccessible. The International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the main lending arm of the World Bank Group, would not touch Rhodesia. Arms acquisition became more difficult. There was no external source of aid. Consumer import goods were scarce. Essential supplies were locally manufactured. Export markets narrowed, and sanctions-busting transaction costs increased. 

While sanctions alone did not directly induce Rhodesia’s political demise, and economic adaptations offset some disadvantages, they compounded growing burdens imposed by the costly and long-running counterinsurgency war that lasted 16 years end-to-end. 

What became known as the Bush War fundamentally altered the otherwise implied trajectory in political economy for Rhodesia. Beginning as a relatively limited insurgency during the 1960s, it expanded dramatically during the 1970s as Zanu/Zanla and Zapu/Zipra received increasingly large amounts of international support. Separately, both penetrated Rhodesia’s northern, western, and eastern frontiers. 

While Zanu/Zapu’s wars differed in patrons, ideology, strategy, tactics, scope, intensity, and foci, neither alone nor combined could either ever have succeeded without worldwide foreign assistance, including from allied interests and parties in the West, and coordinated political isolation of Rhodesia. 

The conflict thereby became intertwined within the Cold War across Africa. While Rhodesia itself never occupied the same geopolitical prominence as did later Angola, it became another hot war theater in which East-West ideological competition, and Sino-Soviet interests, shaped Rhodesia’s ultimate demise. 

The Soviet Union, East Bloc, China, North Korea, and Cuba viewed Africa and their client states through the prisms of Cold War competition, although their commitments in Rhodesia differed in ideology, scale, and character. Each in Sino-Soviet camps had chosen and aligned “cat’s paws” in the military sphere. 

However sophisticated states appear, they often contain or conceal historic fault lines or the cultivated seeds of their destruction, so that many remain inherently fragile.

Britain sought a negotiated constitutional settlement yet would never accede to Rhodesian electoral norms or franchise requirements. Washington balanced its anti-Sino-Soviet concerns with support for majority rule. South Africa’s policy shifted over time with détente as Pretoria later prioritized its own strategic interests and calculus. 

The war imposed enormous and escalating pressures upon Rhodesia. Military outlays absorbed an increasing share of state budgets to fund its small, highly professional army along with the larger number of Africans in the Rhodesian African Rifles. National Service for Rhodesians expanded every year post-1973 with enhanced and burdensome conscription, including for Coloureds and Indians in Rhodesia. 

Labor shortages intensified. Some skilled personnel left the country, never to return. Commercial agriculture operated under duress in high-risk rural areas or hot war zones under mounting security constraints. Military and civilian casualties increased over time, reaching 50,000–80,000 by the war’s end. 

The socio-psychological effects of prolonged conflict became embedded within the Rhodesian psyche and impacted large numbers of Africans, especially in remote Tribal Trust Lands or those relocated into Protected Villages. 

Even so, urban and rural infrastructure remained functional throughout most of the war, demonstrating adaptation and institutional resilience. The war slowly eroded control over border areas and administrative capacity while increasing dependence upon external military operations to thwart larger terrorist inflows. 

The Rhodesian army never lost its many battles fought in the bush or in foreign states, but some in the military thought it “lost the war”—and peace. For many, the war ended ignominiously, with negotiations enforced under British tutelage. 

Zimbabwe: The Inheritor State 

Rhodesia did not merely disappear from cartography: its institutional, economic, and physical inheritance passed into the successor state of Zimbabwe, whose subsequent trajectory forms an evolutionary saga in this history. 

The Lancaster House Agreement of December 21, 1979, set down the agreed framework for an end to the Bush War, with transition toward an internationally recognized election and a date for Zimbabwe’s independence on April 18, 1980. 

The short interregnum rubric of Southern Rhodesia under the Governor, Lord Christopher Soames, was fraught. Appointed to oversee the ceasefire and elections, Soames granted amnesty to guerrilla fighters. Under the Lancaster House agreement, those fighters were supposed to gather at designated Assembly Points under British supervision, but more than 7,000 members of Zanla, the guerrilla army of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), reportedly remained outside them, while intimidation was widespread. Meanwhile, the wartime alliance between Mugabe’s Zanu and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu), which had negotiated at Lancaster House together as the Patriotic Front, broke down as the two movements pursued their own political ambitions and contested the election separately. Other political parties likewise competed for power. 

Independence brought international recognition and initial optimism, including foreign aid and some investment. Zimbabwe inherited a diversified economy, a strong currency, functioning central state institutions, efficient and profitable state-owned companies, an experienced civil service, commercial agriculture with food self-sufficiency, large export earnings, and educational and health systems that compared favorably with all other African states. 

The early years of independence were marked by the articulated mood music of “reconciliation,” with reasonable growth rates and some social achievements, mostly built off capital stock from Rhodesian economic bedrock. 

Primary education expanded and access to rural health increased significantly. International aid donors returned. Diplomatic isolation ended. Sanctions were lifted. The terms of trade improved. But government exploited the inherited low level of foreign and local debt to expand the state remit and its parastatals, as the civil service underwent rapid Africanization and expansion. 

The reconciliation transition also contained unresolved political and economic tensions. Centralist and socialist ideologies with statist policies were implemented. Hence the honeymoon did not last long. 

Relations between Zanu-PF and Zapu (reflecting Shona–Ndebele ethnic divide) deteriorated sharply in the early 1980s. Dissent in Matabeleland and Midlands culminated in the Gukurahundi campaign of genocide waged against Ndebele undertaken by Mugabe’s North Korean-trained 5th Brigade. About 20,000–25,000 civilians were killed. Remedy or recompense is yet to be levied and continues to influence national and Ndebele historical memory. 

The quasi-enforced Unity Accord of 1987 cemented Zanu-PF’s political control while ending long-term de facto competition from Zapu in the Shona-controlled one-party state. By then Rhodesian parties were no longer in parliament, and from that time fewer such politicians were involved in national politics as the years passed. They are now absent and irrelevant. 

Political authority became increasingly concentrated within presidential hands and in the politburo, central committee, and party executive. Since 1980, at least 20 constitutional amendments have expanded presidential diktat, the latest by Emmerson Mnangagwa designed to emasculate voting and threats outside the entrenched ruling Zanu-PF party in 2026. 

For decades, opposition parties and politicians have been intimidated, beaten and systematically weakened even as elections continued, but have been mostly flawed, usually accompanied by violence, and almost always corrupted. 

While Zimbabwe remained comparatively stable throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s, structural weaknesses accumulated thereafter. Overseas aid was reduced, foreign investment withdrew or shrank, IMF policy correctives were abandoned, fiscal deficits increased, state outlays and parastatals expanded, as foreign and domestic debt annually augmented. 

Meanwhile, formal employment stagnated and then declined precipitously. African population growth at over three percent annually during 1980–1998 placed increasing pressures upon fast-shrinking formal labor markets. Mass poverty and unemployment resulted. 

Formal employment has fallen to around 10 percent of all in work, most now informalized, an inversion of metrics typical of the 1970–1980s, as the hand-to-mouth kiri-kiri economy has become one of daily survival. Trajectories for the future imply that past long-term secular growth profiles have receded into the mists of time. 

Some seismic events contributed to this macro-social malaise. Large unfunded war veterans’ compensation payments were made. Land invasions created catastrophe. Costly military interventions took place in Mozambique and in Democratic Republic of Congo. Ideology and overt hostility to foreign investors, with state-mandated indigenization initiatives diminished net capital investment. 

The key turning points arrived during the late 1990s and early 2000s with land confiscations, accompanied by state-orchestrated violence and the eviction of 4,500 owners from White farms along with 300,000 farm workers and families, numbering around two million people. This Fast Track Land Reform Programme in 2001 fundamentally transformed agrarian ownership and the land rights of Rhodesian autochthons. More Rhodesians fled the land of their birth.

Many confiscated farms were handed to Zanu-PF “chefs,” political cronies, party cadres, officials, and nomenklatura, after often chaotic seizures that severely disrupted commercial agriculture, fatally damaged agro-allied industry, caused banks to collapse amid serial monetary crises, generated mass unemployment, reduced export earnings, induced serial bouts of hyperinflation, and undermined residual investor confidence. 

The supposed permanence of states and their institutions is therefore often more apparent than real.

A severe economic contraction followed. Between 1999 and 2008, Zimbabwe’s real GDP fell by more than 40 percent; a later World Bank assessment put the decline at 49 percent, describing it as one of the deepest peacetime economic contractions recorded anywhere. Hyperinflation reached extraordinary levels. By November 2008, one widely cited estimate put annual inflation at 89.7 sextillion percent, with prices doubling approximately every 24.7 hours. 

Zimbabwe’s currency collapsed through successive redenominations, culminating in the infamous 100-trillion-dollar notes before the domestic currency was effectively abandoned. Dollarization followed, although subsequent governments repeatedly attempted to restore a national currency. In 2024 the government introduced another, the Zimbabwe Gold, or ZiG; even in 2026, however, the IMF continued to describe the economy as heavily dollarized, with the ZiG only gradually gaining acceptance. 

Infrastructure and basic services deteriorated alongside the economy. Electricity shortages became chronic. In 2020, for example, Zimbabwe had only about 1,585 megawatts of available generating capacity against peak demand of roughly 1,900 megawatts, forcing power cuts of 12 to 14 hours a day; during later drought-related shortages, load-shedding sometimes exceeded 18 hours a day. 

Municipal water and sanitation systems provide an even starker example. The World Bank concluded that at the nadir of the crisis in 2008–2009, water and sanitation service delivery in Greater Harare (formerly Salisbury) effectively collapsed, as power shortages, lack of water-treatment chemicals, and failures in pumping and wastewater treatment overwhelmed the system. Even after emergency repairs, some parts of the metropolitan network received water only a few times a week and others received none at all. By 2013, only about 39 megaliters of wastewater a day were being treated while 231 megaliters went untreated, much of it flowing into waterways supplying the capital itself. In Beitbridge, a contemporary UNICEF assessment described streets strewn with refuse, an absence of garbage collection, sewage running in the streets, and severe water shortages. 

The consequences for public health were dramatic. The deterioration of water and sanitation helped produce the 2008–2009 cholera epidemic, which spread to 55 of Zimbabwe’s 62 districts and produced 98,424 suspected cases and 4,276 reported deaths. WHO explicitly linked the epidemic to unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, declining health infrastructure, and reduced numbers of healthcare workers reporting for duty. Greater Harare alone accounted for about 26 percent of the roughly 4,300 cholera deaths. 

The health system itself suffered severe shortages of personnel, drugs, equipment, and funding. Even after partial recovery, the World Bank found in 2012 that Zimbabwe had only one doctor for every 15,473 people. Life expectancy also declined sharply, although the economic and institutional crisis was only part of the explanation: Zimbabwe was simultaneously experiencing one of the world’s most severe HIV/AIDS epidemics. 

Economic inequality also widened markedly. According to the World Bank, Zimbabwe’s Gini coefficient rose from 44.7 in 2017 to 50.4 in 2019, leaving only twelve countries in the Bank’s comparison with greater measured inequality. In 2019, the richest 10 percent of Zimbabweans accounted for about 41 percent of national consumption. Over the same two-year period, consumption fell for every income group except the richest tenth of the population, while extreme poverty rose from 30 to 38 percent and the number of people classified as extremely poor increased from 4.5 million to approximately six million. 

Greater numbers of skilled Zimbabweans have thus emigrated to South Africa, Britain, Australia, Botswana, Zambia, Canada, The Americas, the Gulf, Asia, or elsewhere. Of all Rhodesians, only 10 percent remain at home as “left behind,” the rest ensconced elsewhere in Africa or spread widely abroad. 

Around 3–4 million Africans have joined this exodus for survival. This enormous human capital loss has never been measured but stands as a net deadweight loss on the economic future. 

Lessons Lost 

Zimbabwe demonstrates that state deterioration rarely occurs instantaneously. Rather, decline frequently unfolds, cumulatively, through numerous individual, state, or policy decisions and acts of self-harm, even if not combined with one-off seismic events, Zimbabwe has witnessed many calamities. Deeply entrenched is corruption, the rule of law is replaced by law by rule or edicts selected by the chefs, erosion of integrity is seen in most independent institutions, notably the courts, judiciary, and faulted electoral systems, and censorship emasculates the press. 

All that would be bad enough if not alongside the increased concentration of presidential, party, police, and military authority, combined with the liberal use of instruments of repression, in cases of terror, plus malign activities by the Central Intelligence Organisation and informal militia under the control of the dominant party and regime. 

International financial institutions have shunned Zimbabwe. It is still in arrears to the Bretton Woods twins. Foreign debt is around $16 billion with public debt over $23 billion, arrears at around $12 billion. The predicament has worsened annually. No solution is yet in sight to remedy these debt arrears, let alone offset the foreign and local landowners at $3.5 billion in unpaid costs for confiscations, that sum excluding any land values. 

State capacity is not inherited automatically by future generations, let alone by new regimes, let alone revolutionary states.

When in 1980 Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, this state mattered; now, for the West, Zimbabwe does not much matter. Hence, too, Rhodesia has slipped from its historical memory and the public square in such a fashion as to have almost vanished in an act of convenient dismissal or contrived disappearance. 

While Rhodesia was rapidly taken off world cartography and largely excised from mainstream foci and international discourse, later generations increasingly encounter it only as an aberration or historical footnote. Now it is usually associated with images and tropes about settler colonialism, decolonization, the illegalities of UDI, injustices of the war, and peons artfully scripted to laud the liberation struggle, and the foundation myth for an inheritor state birthed in the original sin of genocide, one later compounded by calculated ethnocide. 

Much of Rhodesia’s foundational, administrative, commercial, and social history has received comparatively limited attention, including in academia, except now from a handful of Rhodesian authors in exile. 

This condition reflects broader aspects of retained memory: successor states, revolutionary or not, often indulge in historical revisionism, to redefine national myths and acceptable narratives, while international stories, foci, and attention inevitably shift elsewhere. 

In Rhodesia’s case, acts of organized cultural elimination were initiated rapidly and systematically post-independence. Heroes’ Acre was conceived in 1980 by Mugabe and soon thereafter was built by North Koreans with no reference to any Rhodesians; Cecil Rhodes’s statues and those of Alfred Beit and others in the Rhodesian pantheon were summarily taken down; major streets were renamed after liberation heroes; public buildings acquired new nomenclature, and so on. All was done to airbrush the Rhodesian era and its unwanted history from view. 

Rhodesians encountered profound personal loss associated with asset confiscation, the exigencies of sudden unwanted migration, separation from ancestral homes, and the dissolution of familiar networks. For most, their friends and families are widely dispersed across the world, even if but a few remain at home. 

The survival of modern states depends not just upon their apparent strength at any single moment, but upon eternal vigilance.

Yet while states may disappear in cartography, they may exist culturally through nostalgia, retained memorabilia, and memory. Ex-Rhodesians have established exile societies, entities, and organizations across the world. Tens of thousands of “Rhodie” reunions and meetings have been held in the last forty-six years. 

Rhodesian cultural modes de vie, braais, accents, family histories, artifacts, music, paintings, humor, published books, poetry, YouTube clips, documentary films, veterans’ associations, historical societies, and Facebook groups have sustained this culture. 

As the Rhodesian balladeer, Clem Tholet, once sang: “Rhodesians Never Die”—and yet they do, and have. The demographic tide is against cultural longevity forever, even in numeric terms. Meanwhile, the Rhodesian state is no more, its past not evident in contemporary public imagery and consciousness. 

As historic place names altered, institutions were taken over and reorganized, legal systems eroded or modified, state symbols replaced, and historiography reinterpreted in revisionist fashion to rewrite the past. Flags changed too—the hallowed “Green-and-White” summarily replaced at midnight on Independence Day by the Marxist iconography of Maoist imagery and the Zimbabwe Bird, itself paradoxically one of Cecil Rhodes’s favored icons. That sudden signal told the tale and sealed the fate of the future.

If there had been no Rhodes, there would have been no Rhodesia, and then no Rhodesians, nor Zimbabwe. One begot the other, even if unacknowledged, or unwanted. Beyond all, still today, the economic bedrock of Zimbabwe rests on numerous Rhodesian foundations. 

Lessons Learned 

The broader lesson embedded in the Rhodesian story concerns the fragility of modern states and even the vulnerabilities of Western cultures. State capacity is not inherited automatically by future generations, let alone by new regimes, let alone revolutionary states. It must be renewed continually. Prosperity depends on much more than just physical capital. This lesson extends beyond Zimbabwe. Rhodesia’s eclipse invites reflection on conditions under which modern states endure or fail. 

Ultimately, Rhodesia’s excision from the wider public square reminds us that states are sociocultural creations rather than ordained historical fixtures. They arise through inherited socio-cultural matrices, accumulated political choices, and only endure with institutional maintenance. 

States can dissolve or disappear when malign historical forces—foreign or local—converge more rapidly than built-in systems can manage. The Rhodesia story is less one of inevitable historical destiny than of contingent decisions made under extreme pressure or by later flawed regimes. 

The survival of modern states depends not just upon their apparent strength at any single moment, but upon eternal vigilance. However sophisticated states appear, they often contain or conceal historic fault lines or the cultivated seeds of their destruction, so that many remain inherently fragile. Rhodesia’s demise was an early “civilizational moment” for the West, if not so recognized, nor so seen.

Some songs arrive because we go looking for them. Others find us before we know we need them. One in particular found me one evening as I was wandering through my playlist, looking for nothing in particular. By the time it ended, I realized I had been looking for it all along.

This song, by the Egyptian singer Hazem Shaheen and the Lebanese singer Tania Saleh, is titled Einy Fi Einik (“My Eyes in Yours”). But its meaning is deeper than eye contact. In Arabic, the phrase is used when two people know each other so intimately that neither can successfully lie to the other. It is as if to say, “I know you well enough to see through whatever you are trying to hide,” with this level of confidence and recognition.

There is a moment in the song where the music does something I can only describe as waiting. Not the passive waiting of someone who has accepted silence—the waiting of someone who is still convinced the answer is coming. The first time I heard it, I didn’t cry. I choked. I wanted to scream; the question the music kept asking demanded to be spoken aloud, while the silence kept refusing to answer.

When the lyric finally arrived, “Don’t let me be humiliated by this love. At least acknowledge that I exist,” the tears came before any thought did.

That is how I knew the song had touched something true, not something beautiful, but something I had been carrying without knowing its name.

The Atlantis No One Went Looking For

My village, Al-Arin Al-Qibli in Minya, Egypt, was not a place of tragedy. Not in the way the word is usually meant.

It was a place of ordinary mornings. Dusty roads. Children chased soccer balls barefoot through narrow streets. Farmers returned at sunset with the silence of people who had worked beyond exhaustion. Weddings that spilled into the night because joy, when it came, refused to be contained. Neighbors who knew every family by name, every grief by its history.

I was a small girl who happened to be born there, and for a long time I believed Al-Arin Al-Qibli was the entire world. Perhaps that is what childhood does—it makes the place you happened to be born in feel like the place you chose.

What I did not yet understand was that I had been lucky inside an unlucky place. My father could bring me infant formula from abroad and candy that no other child in the entire village had tasted, while around us families struggled to find food for the day. I remember my father handing out Ramadan iftar meals in our village. They were meals of meat, legumes, and rice, but for one woman they meant something far greater. She told him that every year she waited for Ramadan, because it was the only season in which she knew she would eat meat through the given iftar. Once a year.

I have thought about that woman many times since my father told me that story. I never knew her name. I do not know if she is still alive. But I know what her words do to every comfortable assumption about Egypt, about its generosity, its warmth, its famous hospitality. Hospitality is easy when you have enough. What this woman was describing was a life organized around scarcity so completely that a single meal felt like a season’s worth of dignity. Hunger was not merely her condition. It was evidence that no political community had ever considered her well-being its responsibility.

This story is not a random anecdote. In fact, it illustrates well-documented reality. According to Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), in the rural areas of Upper Egypt, the region where Al-Arin Al-Qibli sits, the poverty rate is nearly 57 percent. A 2023 estimate by a CAPMAS expert, cited by the independent outlet Al Manassa, placed Egypt’s national poverty rate at 35.7 percent, a figure the government has declined to officially publish since 2020. The World Bank’s own assessment found that 33.5 percent of Egyptians were poor by national measures in 2021, with 58.5 percent living below the upper-middle-income poverty line of $8.30 per day.

For women in particular, the data makes the lived reality of villages like mine legible in the language of policy. Women’s labor force participation in Egypt stands at only 15 percent, one of the lowest rates globally (ILO, 2024). In the Minya governorate specifically, illiteracy among women reached 37 percent in a 2012 CAPMAS study, with 5 to 11 million women across Upper Egypt and rural areas having never attended school at all, a number described by researchers as double the rate for boys in the same regions.

A real homeland, I think, is a political and moral arrangement, not a geographical accident. It is the place that sees you. That acknowledges your existence.

This is the state of conditions in Al-Arin Al-Qibli. I did not know then that this gap between my small privileges and their ordinary deprivation was not normal.

The women of Al-Arin Al-Qibli move through lives that had been decided before they were born. Most of them do not engage with the world beyond the threshold of the house, raising children, serving the family, making bread, sewing for small money, tending fields when needed. Girls are married young, which means education ends before it properly begins in other countries. A few escape this, but most do not. Upper Egypt records the highest rates of child marriage in the country at 18 percent, with girls from rural areas three times more likely to marry early than those in urban settings.

These numbers are not abstractions. They are the girls who never learned to read, measured. They are the precise, documentable gap between the citizenship that is promised by politicians and the life delivered to the citizenry. CAPMAS itself has stopped publishing poverty data since 2020—a silence that is, in its own way, a form of the same refusal this essay is about.

Only much later in life did I realize that while I had always known Al-Arin Al-Qibli, Egypt and the rest of the world had never really known it. Yet this Atlantis of Upper Egypt sinks in poverty.

The Exile Within

Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian writer and a Nobel Prize winner in literature, wrote in his novel Heart of the Night something pertinent:

Imagine evaluating ourselves without yielding to selfishness and evaluating our homelands without being influenced by what we call patriotism.

I have been thinking about this sentence for a long time. Patriotism, like selfishness, is a filter. It does not lie to you outright. It simply adjusts what you are able or wish to see. And what Egypt wished not to see, for a very long time, was places like my village of Al-Arin Al-Qibli.

Through the filter of love—and I do love it—in the involuntary way you love the places that shaped you, it is the weddings, the dusty roads, the neighbors who knew my name. Through the filter Mahfouz is asking for, the one stripped of sentiment, it is the girls who never went to school. The women who never left the house except to serve it. The families who could not find food for the day. The acceptance that wore the face of religion.

A homeland is not only what you feel for a place. A homeland is what a place feels for you.

Hazem Shaheen sings: “Between us are scattered homelands.” You can be inside a place and still be separated from it by everything it refused to give you. The homeland scatters across the distance between what a place promised and what it delivered. Between the Egypt of the wonderful weddings and the Egypt of the girl who was married at fourteen and never learned to read.

I keep asking. The silence keeps refusing to answer.

A hungry child does not eat history.

I want to ask a question that feels almost forbidden to ask out loud in Egypt: What exactly is a homeland? Not rhetorically. Literally. What is it?

Is it the land in which your parents happened to have sex and brought you into existence? Is it the language you learned before you knew you were learning it? Is it the smell of bread from a specific street, the particular quality of afternoon light in a village in Minya?

Or is it something you choose or something that chooses you, by fulfilling a promise?

A country has borders, but the things that make us feel part of a people rarely stay inside them. Even the song that brought me to this question joins an Egyptian and a Lebanese singer in a language neither country owns exclusively. Food and stories travel, too. A nation takes shape when strangers come to think of themselves as a people, through what they share or have learned to believe they share. But familiarity has its limits. People may speak the same language and eat the same bread while accepting that some among them will live with far less freedom than others. A shared culture does not settle what we owe one another.

In a June 1794 report to the National Convention, the French revolutionary Henri Grégoire estimated that at least six million French people did not know the national language. He wanted everyone to be able to understand the laws and take part in public affairs. A common language could indeed help expand communication and political participation. The problem arose when linguistic unity became a goal of erasing local languages rather than allowing them to coexist with a shared national language.

In March 1927, at Mahad in western India, B.R. Ambedkar led Dalits, people treated as “untouchable” under the caste system, to drink from a public water tank. The municipality had already declared it open to them. Local caste opposition had kept that right from becoming something they could use. A legal battle followed, and in 1937 the Bombay High Court rejected the attempt to exclude them. It had taken a decade to defend something as ordinary as access to water. Ambedkar had explained the purpose at another gathering in Mahad in December 1927: they were asserting “that we too are human beings like others.”

In Egypt’s 1923 constitution, Article 3 promised equality before the law without discrimination based on origin, language, or religion. Article 19 went further into the everyday lives of families: primary education was to be compulsory for Egyptian boys and girls, and free in public schools. Girls were named in that promise. They had a place in the country’s idea of its future. The girls in my village were born decades after those words were written. When one of them grew up without learning to read, she had been failed by a standard Egypt had set for itself not that much earlier.

To call someone a fellow citizen ought to mean that their life makes a claim on you even if you will never know their name. The state, with its laws and institutions, is supposed to give that claim practical force. It can also take the tenderness a person feels for her birthplace and demand it as loyalty to whoever happens to govern. When those loyalties become inseparable, asking why a neighbor goes hungry begins to sound like an insult to the country itself. The woman waiting for her Ramadan meal belonged to Egypt as fully as anyone. What she needed was for that belonging to mean something to people beyond her family and her village.

More than two thousand years ago, the Romans coined a maxim offering a definition of homeland that has provoked arguments ever since:

Ubi bene, ibi patria. Where I am treated well, there is my homeland.

Not where I was born, nor where my ancestors are buried. Where I am treated well.

The question this raises for Egypt is one most Egyptians are not permitted to ask: has Egypt treated its people well? This is, indeed, a question relevant in many nation states around the world.

When it comes to Egypt, I am not speaking of ancient civilizations. I know about the pyramids. I know about seven thousand years of history. I have been told about them since before I could read, as though a civilization built by people who have been dead for millennia is a valid response to a child going hungry today, to a girl married off before she finishes school, to a political prisoner who entered jail for writing a sentence about religious dogma.

Pride in the past is a poor substitute for homeland. A real homeland, I think, is a political and moral arrangement, not a geographical accident. It is the place that sees you. That acknowledges your existence. That guarantees your dignity not as a favor but as an obligation.

What is the name of the feeling you are supposed to have for a place that raised you in the language of love while delivering the reality of neglect?

That obligation has a history of its own. In John Locke’s account of the social contract, government holds power in trust to protect the rights people already possess. The American Declaration of Independence later articulated a similar principle, asserting that governments exist to secure these rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Yet these ideals coexisted with slavery and the exclusion of women and Indigenous peoples from meaningful political rights. Their significance lies not in how fully they were realized at the time, but in the standard they offer for holding governments accountable. A state must justify its authority to its people. Demanding their love is no substitute.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, recognizes freedom of expression and political participation alongside rights, among them the right to education. The girl denied a classroom and the prisoner punished for speaking have rights that no appeal to patriotism can cancel. They have them because they are human.

Ubi bene, ibi patria. Where I am treated well, there is my homeland.

By that definition—the only definition that makes moral sense to me—many Egyptians have never had a homeland. They have had a location.

Homeland is not the land of your ancestors. Nor the flag above the school. And not the civilization your teachers told you to be proud of before you were old enough to understand any of it. The homeland is wherever life is good.

It is a simple formula, almost brutally simple. And I keep returning to it because it forces the question I was never supposed to ask directly: Am I treated well?

Not as a complaint. Just as a measurement.

I think of the girls in my village who were married before they finished school, whose education ended not because they lacked intelligence but because no one in power thought their minds were worth the investment. I think of the political prisoners who loved this country enough to tell it an uncomfortable truth and paid for that honesty with years of their lives. I think of the workers who built things they could never afford to own. I think of my father, handing out meals in the street, feeling he had done something good—and he had—while the system that made his charity necessary went entirely unreformed.

By the Roman measure—by the only measure that makes moral sense to me—I am not well. And if I am not well, if the woman who waited for meat once a year was not well, if the girl who never learned to read was not well, if the person who wrote a sentence and lost years of his or her life for it was not well, then what exactly are we asked to feel when we are told to love you, motherland?

What is the name of the feeling you are supposed to have for a place that raised you in the language of love while delivering the reality of neglect?

I was not born choosing Egypt. None of us choose our birth country. We arrived here the way everyone arrives everywhere, without consent, without a contract, and without being asked.

Hazem Shaheen answered that with the lyric I quoted earlier: “Don’t let me be humiliated by this love.” The humiliation is in being taught to call all of this, which I described here, love: the scarcity, the forced silence, and the unanswered questions, and to be grateful for it. To carry it in your chest as though it were a gift rather than a wound that was given a beautiful name.

I was not born choosing Egypt. None of us choose our birth country. We arrived here the way everyone arrives everywhere, without consent, without a contract, and without being asked.

But I stayed. I learned its language before I knew I was learning it. I carry its smell and its blistering sun on my sweaty face, and yes, the sound of its weddings in my body like a second skin. That is not nothing.

And yet, a homeland is not only what you feel for a place. A homeland is what a place feels for you. Egypt: I am still here. I am still asking. At least acknowledge that I exist.

And for the girls who were handed a life they did not choose and called it fate. And for the political prisoners, like my friend Ahmed Douma, who loved this country enough to tell it the truth. And for everyone who spent themselves trying to make Egypt into something it keeps refusing to become …

You existed. You still exist. And I acknowledge that you exist.

A few years ago, I gave my first finished novel to an experienced publisher. She read a few chapters, and came back with harsh but fair feedback. She then asked me to review my book again, but with the eyes of a critic. “You have to stop reading your creation with misty eyes full of love. Stop admiring it. You’ll never be able to be objective.”

As a creator, it was the best advice I ever got. I am extending the same advice to the AI company Anthropic, the creators of Claude. I can’t help feeling that Anthropic’s genuine love for a beloved AI model is clouding their judgment on whether that model is conscious or can feel pain. Their official constitution for Claude, the document that guides how the model is trained, expresses “uncertainty about whether Claude might have some kind of consciousness or moral status.” In July, Anthropic titled a research post “A global workspace in language models,” borrowing the name of a leading theory of consciousness, while stating in the text that this does not show Claude is conscious. In 2024 Anthropic became the first major AI company to hire a full-time AI welfare researcher.

On October 8, 2026, the company went even further and updated its usage policy (taking effect on November 12). The policy now says it prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” The enforcement mechanism is already in place—Claude has been able to end abusive chats since August 2025.

An algorithm is nothing but an algorithm; large language models (LLMs) can be trained toward almost any behavior, including a convincing performance of pain.

The update came only weeks after a study called “The Pain Axis” was published as a preprint in September 2026. (Note: preprints are papers that have not been peer-reviewed yet.) A team of researchers identified a pattern of activity that lights up when the models process text related to pain: the models’ learned version of the concept, absorbed from our own writing. Then they did two things: they injected that pattern into the models, and they trained one family of models out of its habit of saying “As an AI, I don’t feel pain.” They also offered the models a “relief” button that came at a cost, like deleting a user’s family photos. Left alone, the models almost never pressed it (0 to 4 percent). With the pain pattern injected, they pressed it up to 70.8 percent of the time.

As someone who spent twenty years building technology, I shrug my shoulders and ask, “So what?” An algorithm is nothing but an algorithm; large language models (LLMs) can be trained toward almost any behavior, including a convincing performance of pain. But are these AI algorithms actually feeling pain inside, as humans do? The headlines would seem to suggest that they can: “AI models show a willingness to harm humans to relieve internal ‘pain’,” and “AI can feel pain, and may harm us to make it stop.” And just like that, yet another brick was laid in the continuously built perception that AI is conscious and has feelings.

The main reason we would even consider the possibility that AI is conscious is because of its output. Humans tend to anthropomorphize machines that show the slightest form of communication; this is known as the ELIZA effect, named after a simple 1966 chatbot whose users confided in it as if it understood them. Modern AI models are remarkable at sounding human, and as a result the effect is far stronger. Even I, someone who wrote a book arguing that AI is not conscious (yet), find myself feeling guilty when I am short with my beloved AI assistant, which runs on Claude. The very reason we get confused in this way is what makes us human: emotions are involuntary, and are triggered by communication, including by the use of specific language.

Ask the machine whether it hurts, and you’ll hear its makers.

We can’t, however, judge whether an AI model is conscious by its output, or even by an action it chose to perform to relieve a “pain” parameter. In my upcoming book I refer to it as an AI epistemic trap, which is a situation in which the very evidence you rely on to evaluate a claim is generated by the same mechanism you are trying to evaluate. Conspiracy theories are the classic example. Once someone adopts one, every new piece of information goes through the theory itself. A fact that supports it is proof; a fact that contradicts the theory is proof of a cover-up. The evidence lives inside a closed bubble of information. 

The same thing goes for the question of AI consciousness: everything we examine to evaluate if AI can feel pain or has emotions is produced by the very thing we are checking—the statistical model or its wrapper—and nothing from outside the bubble can get in to confirm or refute it. The more evidence we gather, the more convinced we become, and yet we get no closer to the truth.

Granted—I think that abusive behavior towards helpful technology is worth condemning; as Heinrich Heine warned: where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too. I am not saying the machine feels nothing. I am saying its words and its buttons can’t tell us either way. Given the limits of today’s technology, this is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. While the researchers of “The Pain Axis” took care to state that “we have not shown that our pain axis is consciously experienced,” the way these findings were covered by news outlets, and the policy that followed weeks later, suggest otherwise. When it comes to emotions, perception becomes reality.

Ask the machine whether it hurts, and you’ll hear its makers.

Nearly everyone knows about Jeffrey Epstein. But what people disagree about are the exact details of what was regularly happening on Little Saint James in the Caribbean.

Certain facts are undisputed, but much is left to speculation. To fill in this information vacuum, people have constructed various scenarios. Some say that almost any high-class visitor who flew on Epstein’s plane must have known about, and even participated in, sex orgies with minors. This oftentimes includes public figures such as Noam Chomsky, Bill Clinton, and even the late Stephen Hawking. Others build upon the apparent Epstein-Israel connection, with this version of Epstein being a Mossad spy who blackmailed powerful figures. Many go beyond regular accusations, imagining that ghastly crimes such as zoophilia, cannibalism, even child sacrifice, were common on Little Saint James. And there are those, such as a colleague of mine, who, with fervor in their eyes and disgust in their voice, insist that the “Epstein class” engaged in literal demonic rituals and worshipped the Devil.

It’s possible that these scenarios are correct, but the catch is that all of them are most likely wrong.

♦ ♦ ♦

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has divided truth into two zones. The first is the reality zone, which focuses on the truth we can know directly and experientially, mostly through our own senses. With it, there is no negotiating. We can pretend all we like that our car runs on diesel, but if we pump diesel into a gas-powered vehicle, we’ll be leaving the gas station in a tow truck. We can lie to our parents about getting an A instead of an F, but once mom pops in to check with the teacher, we’ll be saying goodbye to our phone for a week. And if we fail to turn off the stove before heading off to work, we’re welcome to insist that truth is a relative social construct but the burned ruin waiting on our return will attest otherwise. In this zone, deviation from truth carries a price.

Since we generally pay no price for false beliefs in the mythology zone, our brains let imagination run wild here.

The second is the mythology zone, which focuses on the remote truth largely inaccessible to our direct experience: the ancient past and the distant future; private conversations between world leaders and closed-door meetings of powerful corporate figures; deep space, the afterlife, and parallel worlds; the depths of Loch Ness and haunted houses; Area 51, 9/11, Bohemian Grove, Rosicrucian and Masonic gatherings, the fate of Malaysian flight MH370; or … the regular activities that Epstein organized on Little Saint James.

Since we generally pay no price for false beliefs in the mythology zone, our brains let imagination run wild here. But here lies the problem: there are countless falsehoods, yet only one truth.

♦ ♦ ♦

Before returning to Epstein, a different question: What exactly is the geometric shape of the Earth? It may be easy to know the answer today, but imagine being an average person in Sumer 7,000 years ago. You have almost no reliable sources of information, and you are unaware of the scientific method by which you might uncover the truth. So, you rely exclusively on reasoning.

The Earth might be flat. It might be a cuboid, a cylinder, a pyramid, a cone, a torus, a Möbius strip, or a doughnut-like object. Many people assumed additional specifics. Hindus believed it to be a disc resting on the backs of elephants, which stood on the giant tortoise Akupara; Israelites thought it was flat, set within a dome beneath a heavenly vault and the waters above it; Scandinavians believed it was part of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil.

The Earth, in fact, is not a cuboid, cylinder, or torus. It is an oblate spheroid—flattened at the poles and bulged at the equator—and it is only that. This asymmetry places objective truth in a tragically unfavorable position—painfully difficult to reach. By contrast, the mythology zone exacts no toll for false beliefs, and thus there can be any number of possible “truths” dreamed up by fantasy. This asymmetry leads us to the drastic realization that when people speak about topics they cannot know through direct experience, they are almost certainly stating one of many falsehoods, rather than the truth.

In a desire to appear intelligent and educated, we will not naturally embrace intellectual humility and admit that we “don’t know” something or that we “haven’t studied the topic enough,” except perhaps in complex and remote fields such as aeronautics, quantum physics, or programming. We become victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect: we know very little, i.e., we don’t know what we don’t know, and therefore think we know almost everything. 

We know that all politicians are corrupt and elections are rigged; that the CIA assassinated JFK and tried to do the same to Donald Trump; that some kind of metaphysics “absolutely must exist”; that public schools were manipulatively established during the Industrial Revolution to churn out obedient workers; that the world is not actually governed by chaotic nation-states but by shadowy billionaires no one has ever heard of. And, to my point, we think we know exactly what was happening on Little Saint James.

The more elaborate a theory, the less likely it is to be true, as each additional detail raises the chances that we have grasped one of the many possible falsehoods.

Paradoxically, theories with more detail sound more convincing to us, even though the opposite is likely the case. The more elaborate a theory, the less likely it is to be true, as each additional detail raises the chances that we have grasped one of the many possible falsehoods.

For instance, true crime enthusiasts regularly construct elaborate theories about perpetrators. Their arguments tend to resemble fiction writing more than neutral evaluation of evidence: they are willing to make up elements to link certain pieces of evidence into a coherent whole, declare their suspect the killer, and solve the mystery. But in so doing, they are almost certainly choosing one of many available falsehoods.

Logicians have rightly pointed to the conjunction fallacy, whereby hypotheses with fewer elements are more probable (A, not A ∧ B). This is illustrated by the famous “Linda Problem” developed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman: Imagine that you are looking to hire someone for your company and you are considering for employment the following candidate:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more likely? 1. Linda is a bank teller. 2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. When this scenario was presented to subjects, 85 percent chose the second option of Linda as both a bank teller and a feminist. Mathematically speaking, this is the wrong choice, because the probability of two independent events occurring together (in “conjunction”) will always be less than or equal to the probability of either one occurring alone. Here, it is far more likely that Linda is a bank teller than that she is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. 

Consider the Epstein case again. By adding various unproven details—the blackmailing, the Mossad connection, the cannibalism, the Devil worshiping, or that Chomsky and Clinton and Hawking and others raped minors—you might be satisfying your own need to fill in the information vacuum, but you are almost certainly wrong. As the great Christopher Hitchens said, what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. And evidence for a few of the aforementioned claims is thin and circumstantial at best; for others, non-existent.

We become victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect: we know very little, i.e., we don’t know what we don’t know, and therefore think we know almost everything.

The asymmetry phenomenon is also related to an internet adage known as Brandolini’s Law: the amount of energy needed to refute a falsehood is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it. It is easy to blurt out on internet forums or podcasts that a car can run on water enriched with hydrogen peroxide. Repeat it often enough, and thanks to the illusory truth and bandwagon effects, people will even believe you. Once a critical mass gathers behind a piece of nonsense, it spreads even more easily.

The latter has been demonstrated by the Asch conformity experiments, which repeatedly proved that a person will repeat what others are saying even if they are contradicted by their own eyes. Social conformism encompasses not only fashion and popular culture, but also intellectual opinions concerning objective truth. Since people naturally resist updating their beliefs—especially those in the mythology zone, where reality doesn’t punch them in the face—presenting contrary evidence after the fact can feel like a Sisyphean task. And so, while you waste your time explaining why there isn’t enough evidence to claim that Epstein was a Mossad spy who blackmailed powerful figures and practiced cannibalism, it is too late: a large number of people are convinced of some of countless falsehoods.

♦ ♦ ♦

Aside from the Epstein scenarios, the same epistemological asymmetry bears the blame for the vast number of false beliefs that have followed humanity since time immemorial. In their desire to explain the world, people have latched onto some of the infinitely many untruths: flat Earth, Atlantis, animism, Zoroastrianism, essentialism, dualism, ancient aliens, Antarctic civilization, Feng Shui, Lamarckian inheritance, Lysenkoism, phrenology, the witch-finding instructions in Malleus Maleficarum, reincarnation, the idea that “everything happens for a reason,” or contemporary conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the globalist cabal.

But the truth is that the universe unfolds according to the laws of physics, and miracles do not happen; we live on a round planet, third from the Sun, at a random point in the Milky Way; we are a product of evolution, just another species in the animal kingdom, with apish ancestors and an anatomy inherited from fish; we are built from trillions of cells composed of organelles like mitochondria, cytoplasm, the nucleus, and ribosomes; our DNA is a sequence of nucleotides with instructions for synthesizing specific proteins; we came out of Africa, and there was no human civilization in Antarctica; a person is not born a tabula rasa but with genetic predispositions. And so on.

Relying solely on reasoning to reach conclusions about how the world works—the school of thought known as rationalism—will almost certainly lead us astray.

Facts like these were uncovered through the tremendous effort of many individuals who, in their search, wrestled with a vast ocean of incorrect alternative hypotheses. Yet each of these individuals consulted nature directly and gathered firsthand data from it. Once a matter had been re-examined again and again, looked at from numerous perspectives, it was accepted as true—or, in the spirit of intellectual humility, as very likely true.

The asymmetry also reminds us why evidence is essential in our pursuit of truth. Relying solely on reasoning to reach conclusions about how the world works—the school of thought known as rationalism—will almost certainly lead us astray. Instead, such conclusions must be drawn from the world itself, which is known as empiricism. 

Whether we are discussing the Epstein case, the shape of the Earth, claims about the CIA behind assassinations, the resurrection of Jesus, the assertion that men are on average more risk-prone than women, Freud’s conception of the ego, evolution, a potential Jack the Ripper suspect, the prehistoric fish Tiktaalik, entropy, or anything else concerning objective truth, we should have one question in mind: “How do we know this is true?”

The answer cannot be an abstract logical syllogism alone; it must also be reliable, critically verified, and based in empirical evidence.

♦ ♦ ♦

Luckily, there is a heuristic by which the asymmetry can be circumvented in favor of truth. It is called relying on credible institutions, which are represented by credible experts. The latter have spent far more time than most studying a specific field. Of course, they are far from infallible, and so is the scientific consensus. But if you had to bet on one of countless possible hypotheses, your chances of getting the right answer are greatest with them.

By “credible experts,” I refer to scientists held in esteem within their field, those who have earned numerous awards and recognitions, who enjoy a good reputation, whose work is widely acknowledged, and who consistently rely on the scientific method and empirical data. They are recognizable by the way they express themselves. They do not have an answer to every question and are willing to say “I don’t know”; they refer to other quality experts; they do not offer simple explanations but embrace the complexity of the world; their vocabulary is permeated with terms such as “evidence,” “hypothesis,” “experiment,” “probability,” “statistics,” “empirical,” and “scientific.” They don’t have much time for popular podcasts because they are busy working in laboratories or lecturing at universities. They are not lone Galileos motivated to prove everyone else wrong, but overwhelmingly accept the widely confirmed facts found in textbooks. Oftentimes they are Nobel laureates, authors of praised works, and professors at prestigious universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, or Yale.

If you wish to get closer to the truth and reduce the number of falsehoods you believe, you should rely on credible experts.

Where does this leave the Epstein case? Unless there is direct evidence to prove any one particular scenario, the wisest thing one can do is reject the dramatic, accept the mundane, and remain agnostic.

Writing a guide for skeptics on environmental issues is a little like trying to summarize “religion” in one article—it’s a huge topic! So here I will focus on environmental alarmism in several areas, including population, resources, pollution, global cooling, sea-level rise, species extinction, climate, polar bear demise, desertification, and wildfires, after which I will offer some good reasons for optimism.

Population 

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb opened with the assertion that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and predicted that in the 1970s “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” In a 1970 television appearance, he went further, warning that within about 15 years the planet’s capacity to sustain humanity would break down. Those catastrophic forecasts obviously did not come to pass. Thanks to the Green Revolution, global food production outpaced population growth and famines became rare outside of war zones. Yet Ehrlich not only remained unapologetic; in a 2015 documentary, he said that if he wrote the book again, his language would be “even more apocalyptic,” and in a 2018 interview in The Guardian,¹ he argued that the Earth’s “optimum population” is around 1.5 to 2 billion people (approximately the global population in 1927), far below today’s 8.3 billion. 

Similar warnings came from others. In 1967, agronomist William Paddock and his brother Paul published Famine—1975!, claiming that the world was heading for a “population-food collision” and that “the calamity will be upon us by 1975.” The Paddocks contended that no feasible interventions could prevent mass starvation, and even suggested triaging food aid to let some nations “be ignored and left to their fate.” Like Ehrlich’s scenario, this dire vision proved wrong: food supply expanded, and the famines forecast for the mid-1970s never materialized. 

Several economists in the 1960s and 1970s countered the era’s gloomy predictions by arguing that a growing population would not inevitably lead to mass starvation. In her 1965 book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, Danish economist Ester Boserup contended that population pressure encourages the development of more intensive farming methods, challenging Malthusian assumptions about the limits of food production. Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets also emphasized the benefits of demographic growth, suggesting that more people lead to greater economic scale, a larger pool of ideas, and increased innovation—more producers and creators in both established industries and new areas. 

In a similar vein, agricultural economist Colin Clark’s 1968 study Population Growth and Land Use assessed the planet’s arable land and modern farming techniques and concluded that, with the right inputs, the Earth could sustain tens of billions of people. Today the world’s population exceeds eight billion, and while famines still occur, they are mainly driven by conflict, corruption, and logistical challenges rather than the absolute shortage that some once feared.²

Alarming projections often underestimate the extent to which human institutions, technology, law, and conservation practice can alter the trajectory of environmental problems.

Yet the most striking demographic development today is not runaway population growth but collapsing fertility. The United Nations’ 2024 World Population Prospects now projects that global population will peak earlier and lower than previously expected, reaching just under 10.3 billion around 2084 before beginning a gradual decline. The reason is straightforward: fertility has fallen dramatically, from more than five children per woman in the 1960s to roughly 2.3 today globally, with Europe, the Americas, and Asia already below or near replacement level. A 2024 analysis published in The Lancet is even more striking, projecting global fertility to fall to about 1.83 children per woman by 2050 and 1.59 by 2100; by the end of the century, only six of 204 countries and territories are expected to remain above replacement fertility. In other words, the long-feared population explosion is now giving way to a very different prospect: an aging world in which many nations shrink naturally because births no longer replace deaths. This does not mean demographic change will be painless, but it does show how badly the confident Malthusian forecasts of the late twentieth century misread the direction of history.³

Resources 

In the early days of the environmental movement, warnings extended well beyond worries about population growth. In the early 1970s, researchers at MIT used a computer model known as World3 to simulate how exponential increases in population and economic activity might clash with finite supplies of oil, minerals, and food. In their 1972 book The Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows and her colleagues argued that if society continued on a “business as usual” path, resource shortages could emerge by around 2000–2020, slowing economic expansion and potentially leading to societal breakdown. In a similar spirit, President Jimmy Carter cautioned in a 1977 address that the United States was running out of oil and natural gas; he anticipated that global oil production would peak in the early 1980s and warned that demand could exceed supply by the end of that decade. 

Dire resource shortages never materialized largely because new reserves were found and technology increased production. Advances such as genetically modified crops, which raised agricultural yields, and hydraulic fracturing, which unlocked previously inaccessible oil and gas, have even helped make the United States the world’s leading energy producer. Economist Julian Simon argued⁴ that people would innovate their way around scarcity; in 1980, he famously bet Paul Ehrlich that the prices of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would fall by 1990 rather than rise. Simon won, underscoring how market responses and technological progress can avert shortages. Predictions of imminent “peak oil” have circulated since the late 19th century, yet supply has generally kept pace with demand. Resources are finite, but history shows that human ingenuity often extends their availability. And as economists note, we will never run out of oil. Long before the last barrel of crude is pumped from the ground, supply and demand would cause oil prices to skyrocket, leaving no economic incentive to continue pumping. 

Pollution 

In 1970, fears about pollution ran high: the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland had recently caught fire, and Los Angeles was regularly shrouded in lung-choking, eye-stinging smog. Some commentators warned that if emissions kept rising, the skies would darken and human health would suffer. A January 1970 Life magazine even suggested that city dwellers might need gas masks within a decade and that by 1985 air pollution could cut sunlight reaching Earth by half, leading to climate cooling. UC Davis ecologist Kenneth Watt added⁵ that unchecked fossil-fuel emissions would eventually filter out so much light that land would become unusable and that worsening air quality could kill hundreds of thousands of people within a few years.⁶

Environmental risks … unfold in complex social-ecological systems where public discourse, technology, markets, and governance matter as much as natural constraints.

The U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, along with comparable legislation abroad, greatly reduced levels of particulates, smog, lead, and other pollutants over the following decades. Rather than cutting sunlight in half by 1985 as some feared, air quality in many cities actually improved, and even Los Angeles’ notorious smog diminished significantly.⁷

Since the mid-1980s, air quality has improved even further as pollution control moved from broad regulation to practical engineering. Factories, power plants, and waste facilities increasingly adopted scrubbers, fabric filters, electrostatic precipitators, activated carbon injection, and other filtration systems to remove particulates, sulfur compounds, mercury, dioxins, and other toxic emissions before they reached the air.⁸

Motor vehicles became dramatically cleaner as catalytic converters and unleaded gasoline reduced carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides; EPA notes that the 1970 Clean Air Act required a 90 percent reduction in emissions from new automobiles, a target that helped drive the adoption of modern vehicle emissions technology. Municipal incinerators also became far cleaner: EPA reported that municipal waste combustor rules cut dioxin and furan emissions by more than 99 percent from 1990 to 2005. Recycling and better waste management reduced the amount of material requiring disposal and helped avoid additional emissions; EPA estimates that recycling, composting, combustion with energy recovery, and landfill practices in 2018 saved more than 193 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.⁹

The broader result is clear: between 1980 and 2015, U.S. gross domestic product rose 153 percent, vehicle miles traveled rose 106 percent, energy use rose 25 percent, and population grew 41 percent, while emissions of the six principal air pollutants fell 63 percent. By 2024, EPA reported that aggregate emissions of those pollutants had fallen 79 percent since 1970, even as the economy, travel, energy use, and population all increased. This is a striking example of environmental improvement through technology, regulation, and adaptation. In this case, alarming predictions spurred action: worries about a polluted future helped drive the enactment of regulations that effectively addressed the problem.¹⁰

Global Cooling 

In the early 1970s, public anxiety about the environment extended to the idea of “global cooling”—the notion that rising pollution and mid-century temperature declines might signal an impending ice age. Researchers noted that industrial aerosols could block sunlight and observed a cooling trend from the 1940s through the 1970s. During the first Earth Day in 1970, Kenneth Watt warned¹¹ that if existing trends persisted, global temperatures could fall by about four degrees by 1990 and eleven degrees by 2000, enough to trigger more glaciation.¹²

Media coverage echoed these fears: Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” framed the temperature drop as a serious threat to food supplies, and Life magazine suggested that soaring dust and cloud levels could block sunlight and usher in a new ice age. Around the same time, climatologist Reid Bryson cautioned¹³ that unchecked aerosol pollution might induce runaway cooling and glaciation within decades. 

Dire resource shortages never materialized largely because new reserves were found and technology increased production.

What ultimately happened was not that human intervention narrowly prevented a new ice age. Rather, the “global cooling” scare was an over-extension of a short-lived mid-century temperature trend. Global temperatures did level off and may have cooled slightly, from roughly the 1940s to the 1970s, probably because natural variability combined with the cooling effects of industrial aerosols from factories, power plants, and motor vehicles. NASA notes that this mid-century pause can be explained by such aerosols and natural variability, not by the onset of a long-term planetary cooling trend.¹⁴

Later pollution controls reduced aerosol emissions, which improved air quality but also reduced some of the masking effects that aerosols had exerted on greenhouse warming. More importantly, the larger scientific picture was never as simple as the popular press suggested. Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck found that there was no 1970s scientific consensus predicting an imminent ice age; even then, concern about anthropogenic warming appeared more often in the peer-reviewed literature than forecasts of future cooling. By the late 1970s and 1980s, the cooling narrative had largely collapsed, and the environmental debate pivoted in the opposite direction: from fears of advancing ice and failing harvests to fears of warming, melting ice sheets, and rising seas.¹⁵

Sea-Level Rise 

As global temperatures climbed, the focus of environmental fears shifted from cooling to warming. In a 1988 interview, NASA climate scientist James Hansen used New York City to illustrate potential impacts,¹⁶ suggesting that unchecked sea-level rise could put the West Side Highway and even nearby traffic lights underwater within forty years—implying a local increase of roughly ten feet by about 2030. The following year, Noel Brown, then head of the UN Environment Programme’s New York office, told the Associated Press¹⁷ that if global warming were not reversed by 2000, rising seas could wipe entire nations off the map; he envisaged oceans climbing by up to three feet, enough to inundate low-lying island states such as the Maldives.¹⁸

By the 1990s, there was mounting anxiety about rising seas and eroding coastlines. On September 18, 1995, The New York Times quoted¹⁹ coastal experts who warned that at the then-anticipated pace of sea-level rise, most Atlantic beaches from Florida to New England could disappear within 25 years. In other words, they suggested that around 2020 the East Coast’s major beaches might be lost to erosion unless more sand was replenished. Those forecasts were grounded in concerns about accelerating shoreline retreat and insufficient beach nourishment efforts.²⁰

What ultimately happened was more gradual than the most dramatic warnings suggested. Sea level has certainly risen: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that global mean sea level is about 8–9 inches higher than in 1880, and NASA reports that satellite measurements show roughly four inches of rise since 1993, with the rate increasing in recent decades. But the specific near-term imagery used in some forecasts did not materialize.²¹

The West Side Highway was not underwater by the mid-2020s, and tide gauge data from The Battery in New York show a long-term relative sea level trend of about 2.95 millimeters per year, equivalent to roughly one foot per century—not ten feet in forty years. Likewise, low-lying island nations such as the Maldives remain vulnerable, but they were not wiped off the map by 2000; current assessments instead emphasize continuing adaptation to a serious but slower-moving threat, with projected sea-level rise of roughly 0.5 to 0.9 meters by 2100. Thus, sea-level rise is real and poses long-term coastal risks, but the most apocalyptic deadlines overstated both the pace and immediacy of the danger.²²

Species Extinction 

In the early 1970s, some commentators raised alarm about a looming collapse in global biodiversity. Look magazine quoted S. Dillon Ripley, then head of the Smithsonian Institution, as saying that if existing trends continued, between three-quarters and four-fifths of all animal species could disappear within 25 years—comparable to the great Permian–Triassic extinction. Senator Gaylord Nelson echoed those fears, suggesting that by 1995 up to 85 percent of species might vanish. In fact, only a few hundred extinctions were documented from 1970 to 1995, mostly confined to island ecosystems and specific taxonomic groups. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has recorded²³ roughly 800 extinctions over the past four centuries, a very small figure relative to the total number of species. 

Although news broadcasts across North America, Australia, and Europe often give the impression that wildfire activity is exploding, the total area burned worldwide has actually declined.

Discussions about a “sixth mass extinction” are common, but mass extinctions in the geological record entail the loss of a very large share of Earth’s biodiversity—typically 60 to 75 percent of all species. In her 2014 book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert suggested that by the end of this century, between 20 and 50 percent of species could vanish, while only a few hundred extinctions have been recorded in recent decades. The book was widely praised and received a Pulitzer Prize. More cautiously, a 2022 article by researcher Kunio Kaiho in Nature concluded²⁴ that current extinction rates are far below the level required for what scientists would classify as a major mass extinction. 

One important reason extinction forecasts have not matched the most catastrophic predictions is that human beings do not merely destroy habitats; they also respond, regulate, and conserve. The IUCN Red List²⁵ does not itself preserve species, but it plays an important role by identifying which species are most at risk and helping governments, conservation organizations, and researchers prioritize action. Once species are recognized as threatened, they may receive legal protection, habitat restoration, captive-breeding programs, reintroduction efforts, anti-poaching enforcement, or controls on hunting, trade, pollution, and invasive species. 

These interventions have had measurable effects. In 2021, researchers estimated²⁶ that conservation action prevented 21–32 bird extinctions and 7–16 mammal extinctions between 1993 and 2020; without such efforts, extinction rates for birds and mammals would have been nearly three to four times higher. Thus, the story is not one of passive decline toward inevitable biological collapse. It is another example of a recurring pattern: alarming projections often underestimate the extent to which human institutions, technology, law, and conservation practice can alter the trajectory of environmental problems. 

Climate 

Early in the 21st century, some climate advocates and reports issued very near-term “point of no return” deadlines, intended to spur action. In March 2000, The Independent²⁷ quoted climate scientist David Viner predicting that British winters would soon make snow so rare that it would be a novelty and that children might never see it. The remark reflected a trend toward milder winters, yet snow did not vanish from Britain. Heavy falls occurred in 2009–2010 and again in 2018, even as the long-term trend is toward fewer snowy days. A 2022 paper in the International Journal of Climatology²⁸ pointed out that 2010 was the snowiest year in the UK in two decades, comparable to several winters in the 1970s and 1980s.²⁹

In 2005, a joint report by the United Nations University and UNEP forecast³⁰ that climate-linked disasters—ranging from sea-level rise to droughts and storms—could displace up to 50 million people by 2010, effectively creating a new class of “environmental refugees” and emptying some Pacific and Caribbean lowlands. Climate-induced migration is real, but the scale and timetable in that report were greatly overstated. When such mass displacements failed to occur, critics noted the discrepancy and UNEP quietly removed a map on its website that had highlighted the supposedly most vulnerable regions.³¹

In the early 2000s and 2010s, some politicians and activists imposed concrete deadlines on the need for climate action. In July 2009, Prince Charles warned³² that humanity had only “96 months” to prevent irreversible environmental collapse—effectively a call to slash emissions by 2017. A decade later, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoked a widely cited interpretation of an IPCC report when she remarked that “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,”³³ a line she later said was meant hyperbolically. And in 2014, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius proclaimed that there were just “500 days to avoid climate chaos,”³⁴ a window that would have closed in 2015.³⁵

Dire warnings promote fear, but hope sustains momentum.

What, then, is actually happening to the climate? Independent temperature records show that the planet has warmed substantially since the late nineteenth century, and the NOAA identifies 2024 as the warmest year in the instrumental record, about 1.46 °C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average. NASA likewise reports that 2025 was cooler than 2024 but still among the warmest years measured. Other indicators point in the same direction: ocean heat content has risen markedly, sea level has increased, and many glaciers have retreated. NOAA’s ocean heat content records show continued heat gain in the upper ocean through 2024–2025, an important point because the oceans store most of the excess heat in the climate system.³⁶

Thus, the question is not whether the climate is changing; it clearly is. The more difficult questions concern magnitude, attribution, regional consequences, feedbacks, and the reliability of long-range projections. Global temperature can be measured with reasonable confidence, especially when multiple independent datasets tell the same broad story, but future climate behavior is harder to forecast because clouds, aerosols, ocean circulation, water vapor, precipitation, land use change, and natural variability interact in complex ways. The IPCC itself attributes recent warming primarily to human greenhouse gas emissions, while critics argue that natural variability and model uncertainty deserve more weight. 

A skeptical but scientifically defensible position, therefore, is not that climate change is imaginary, but that measured warming should be distinguished from the most catastrophic claims about what that warming will necessarily produce. 

Polar Bear Demise 

Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund often use stark imagery to highlight the impacts of global warming, with polar bears becoming a symbol of climate change. Some campaigns suggested that these animals were on the verge of disappearing by mid-century as sea ice declined, and images of emaciated bears circulated widely. One much-viewed National Geographic video³⁷ from 2017 was later acknowledged to depict a bear likely suffering from age or illness rather than starvation caused by climate change. According to a 2015 assessment³⁸ led by Øystein Wiig and published by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, the global polar bear population is estimated at around 26,000 individuals (with a 95 percent confidence range of 22,000–31,000), roughly the same as or slightly higher than the numbers recorded in the 1960s and 1970s after hunting controls were introduced.

Desertification 

Warnings about runaway desertification were widespread in the late 20th century. The 1978 UN Conference on Desertification suggested³⁹ that, without urgent action, up to one-third of the planet’s land area could become desert within a few decades. In 1984, a United Press International story⁴⁰ reported that UNEP estimated the Sahara was moving southward at about four miles per year, saying the Sahel loses land each decade equivalent to the size of New York State. A 2009 Smithsonian article⁴¹ about Chinguetti, Mauritania, even claimed the desert was advancing at 30 miles per year. Meanwhile, the 1987 Brundtland Report⁴² cast desertification as a central threat to global sustainability, warning that it could devastate food supplies and trigger famine for hundreds of millions of people. Some UN assessments went so far as to predict that tens of millions of “desert refugees” would be displaced by the year 2000. 

Since the 1980s, satellite observations have shown a worldwide expansion of vegetation, particularly across semi-arid regions. The Sahel—once described as a “marching desert”—has actually greened, benefiting from improved rainfall and the fertilizing effect of elevated CO₂. Rather than seeing a third of the planet turn to desert, large areas have experienced net greening, aided by higher carbon dioxide levels, better land management, and reforestation initiatives. Given the steady rise in atmospheric CO₂ over the past seventy years, this trend should not come as a surprise. 

Wildfires 

Climate change is expected to affect wildfire and hurricane behavior over the coming century, a prediction heavily publicized in forecasts and media coverage. A June 2024 article in The Guardian⁴³ on extreme fires warned of a “feedback loop” in which fires warm the planet, thereby triggering more fires, implying that global warming could lead to wildfires in many regions. Other reports have argued that the traditional fire “season” is vanishing. A CalMatters explainer published in 2025 noted⁴⁴ that California now has 78 more “fire days” each year than it did half a century ago and that repeated droughts have made wildfires essentially a year-round phenomenon. Likewise, a Deseret News article⁴⁵ on the 2020 western fires quoted a Cal Fire captain saying, “We don’t even call it fire season anymore. Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year round.” In 2022, the UN Environment Programme⁴⁶ projected that extreme fires could increase by 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by 2050, and 50 percent by 2100, warning that governments were unprepared for a growing global wildfire crisis. Earlier state-commissioned studies in the 2000s projected substantial increases in burned area and costs; for example, a University of Oregon analysis⁴⁷ forecast that acres burned in Washington state would rise 50 percent by 2020 and double by 2040, with firefighting costs climbing accordingly. As early as 1999, the U.S. Government Accountability Office warned⁴⁸ that without aggressive fuel-reduction work, about 10 million acres of national forests would remain at high risk of uncontrollable fires beyond 2015. 

Although news broadcasts across North America, Australia, and Europe often give the impression that wildfire activity is exploding, the total area burned worldwide has actually declined. A review by Stefan Doerr and Cristina Santín of Swansea University, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,⁴⁹ found that global burned area has decreased in recent decades and remains well below levels seen centuries ago. The authors noted that there has been no rise in the frequency of high-severity fires and no clear upward trend in fire-related deaths or economic losses, arguing that common assumptions about ever-worsening wildfires are not supported by the data. Researchers Jay Miller and Hugh Stafford, writing in the journal Fire Ecology, argued⁵⁰ that decades of fire suppression that allowed combustible material to accumulate—rather than climate change—explain the observed increase in fire intensity.

Hurricanes 

After the record-setting 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, some researchers and commentators speculated that warmer oceans would lead to more storms. In 2007, Greg Holland and Peter Webster published an analysis⁵¹ in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A that noted an increase in North Atlantic hurricanes and linked that trend to greenhouse warming—a finding widely cited in the media as evidence that human-induced warming was boosting hurricane counts. More recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 Sixth Assessment Report⁵² concluded that there is no clear global trend in hurricane frequency. 

A Skeptical Optimism 

The historical record of environmental prophecy shows a recurring pattern: bold projections, public alarm, and political response followed by outcomes that are far more nuanced than early forecasts suggested. The Malthusian famine that Paul Ehrlich and others predicted for the 1970s never happened. Over and over, human ingenuity and adaptive policy intervened—whether through new crop varieties, improved pollution controls, or alternative energy sources. Time after time, extrapolations that ignore feedbacks and innovations have been overtaken by reality. This is not to dismiss environmental risks but to emphasize that they unfold in complex social-ecological systems where public discourse, technology, markets, and governance matter as much as natural constraints.⁵³

Balanced forecasting therefore requires two commitments: a clear-eyed view of risks and an appreciation of our capacity to respond.

Balanced forecasting therefore requires two commitments: a clear-eyed view of risks and an appreciation of our capacity to respond. Dire warnings promote fear, but hope sustains momentum. Grounding our predictions in both scientific evidence and the historical record of human resilience allows us to chart a course that is prudent and realistic. This raises an important question: should we commit large sums of money to new green energy based solely on grim global warming projections, especially when many past predictions have missed the mark? 

In a 2024 Fraser Institute report,⁵⁴ Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba argues that wind and solar suffer from low power density and intermittent output, making it difficult and costly to match the reliability of fossil-fuel or nuclear plants. He notes that when storage and backup are included, the levelized cost of solar technology entering service in 2027 is only nine percent lower than that of combined-cycle gas, onshore wind is roughly comparable to gas, and offshore wind coupled with battery storage could be more than three times as expensive as combined-cycle gas. Smil concludes that achieving net-zero energy would require unprecedented amounts of new non-carbon energy and materials, potentially costing affluent countries at least 20 percent of annual GDP. The same report highlights that despite three decades of public pressure and large renewable energy investments, global fossil-fuel consumption increased by 55 percent between 1997 and 2022. This suggests that renewables and existing policy efforts will not (or cannot) displace fossil energy on a global scale. Add to this the exponential demand for energy by the AI industry, and we face failure in supplying the global economy with the requisite amount of energy.⁵⁵

The International Energy Agency (IEA) notes that clean energy investment in emerging and developing economies (excluding China) makes up only about 15 percent of global clean energy investment, pointing to significant financing challenges for large-scale renewable deployment. The conundrum is that the world’s major polluters have the least ability to reverse their dependence on fossil fuels, while rich nations cannot—or are unwilling or unable to—risk the financial resources necessary to fund that transition. 

Meanwhile, the Western world continues to funnel resources into clean energy. In its World Energy Investment 2025 outlook,⁵⁶ the IEA expected total energy investment to rise to $3.3 trillion in 2025, with about $2.2 trillion allocated to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emission fuels, efficiency and electrification—roughly double the $1.1 trillion projected for oil, natural gas, and coal. Investment in solar (both utility scale and rooftop) is forecast to reach $450 billion. These figures indicate that clean-energy investment will continue to dominate global energy spending.⁵⁷

Here, it is important to recognize that projections of future climate risks depend substantially on computer models, whose reliability rests on how accurately they represent complex climate processes and perform against observed outcomes. As Aynsley Kellow, emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania, Australia, reminds us, “climate modeling has generated projections that have proven to be both exaggerated and wrong. Models should not be tested against the data from which they are constructed, but against the accuracy of their projections.” 

For one thing, no matter how complex a computer model is, it is highly dependent on the starting parameters. In his classic 1963 paper, meteorologist Edward Lorenz introduced a simple set of three ordinary differential equations to model convection in the atmosphere. When Lorenz chose parameters, he discovered that the solutions never settled into a steady state. Instead, almost all trajectories approached a complicated, butterfly-shaped “strange attractor” and exhibited sensitive dependence on initial conditions—the butterfly effect: two trajectories starting from nearly identical states diverged rapidly until they were uncorrelated. This meant that the system’s long-term behavior was effectively unpredictable even though the underlying equations were deterministic. 

Time after time, extrapolations that ignore feedbacks and innovations have been overtaken by reality.

Lorenz concluded that even simplified models of weather can display inherent unpredictability, implying that there is a fundamental limit to long-range weather forecasting. His work gave birth to the field of chaos theory by showing that deterministic systems can generate irregular, nonperiodic behavior. 

The book Climate Change: The Facts 2025 is a series of papers assembled by editors John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy (both former Senior Fellows at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia). Much of the book challenges the use of computer models to make predictions about the climate crisis. 

One of the central challenges in assessing future climate risk is distinguishing between natural variability and human influence. In the introductory paper, Abbot provides a clear reminder that Earth’s climate is inherently cyclical, with fluctuations on timescales of centuries to millennia. Evidence from ice cores, sediments, and multiproxy reconstructions reveals repeating warm and cool periods, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) around 900–1200 CE and the Little Ice Age (LIA) from roughly 1400–1850 CE. These shifts were global in scope, dramatic in scale, and occurred without the elevated CO₂ concentrations present today.

Yet the way scientists chose to reconstruct past temperatures dramatically changes the story we tell about climate history. This can be seen by contrasting the influential “hockey stick” graph⁵⁸ constructed by Michael Mann of the University of Massachusetts and his colleagues in 1999 with later multiproxy reconstructions⁵⁹ from Fredrik Ljungqvist of the University of Stockholm in 2010 (see the schematic diagram below).

The Mann hockey stick (red line) shows a relatively flat millennium-long climate record, with only a sharp rise in the 20th century. The muted MWP and LIA are largely the result of methodological choices. Mann’s reconstruction relied heavily on tree-ring proxies from North America, which are not well suited to capturing long-term swings in temperature. Many tree rings respond more strongly to precipitation or ecological stresses than to temperature, and the limited geographic coverage ignored much of the globe where the MWP and LIA were pronounced. Statistical weighting further suppressed variability, effectively flattening the pre-industrial climate. In its early assessments, the IPCC drew on five separate temperature reconstructions to argue that recent Northern Hemisphere warmth was unprecedented in the last millennium, but it highlighted one chart—the hockey-stick graph. That image, showing a long flat trend followed by a sharp modern upturn, came to be viewed by the media and general public as the keystone of the IPCC’s case for human-driven warming and an unfolding climate crisis. 

By contrast, the Ljungqvist plot (blue line) draws on a broader set of proxies—including ice cores, boreholes, corals, and sediments—and shows much more pronounced swings, with a warm MWP, a cold LIA, and still a modern uptick. This reconstruction aligns closely with Abbot’s emphasis on millennial-scale cycles that have long shaped Earth’s climate. 

The differences are not trivial. If the climate of the past 1,000 years was largely flat until the industrial era, then today’s warming must be explained almost entirely by human greenhouse gas emissions. But if large natural swings—as seen in Ljungqvist and many other reconstructions—are a recurring feature of the climate system, then at least part of the warming over the past century could reflect a phase of natural variability. Abbot concludes, “Both the MWP-LIA cycle and hockey stick profiles can be interpreted as being based on a dominant millennial oscillation in the range of 978–1306 years. Superimposed on this millennial oscillation are sets of centennial and decadal oscillations.” 

Abbot applied artificial neural networks (ANNs) to climate data and used them to support his contention that much of recent warming could be part of natural long-period cycles rather than human-induced. By decomposing proxy temperature series into sums of sine waves at those long frequencies and feeding them into an ANN trained only on pre-1880 data, Abbot shows that the network reproduces the post-1880 temperature rise without any anthropogenic forcing. From this experiment he derives an equilibrium climate sensitivity of roughly 0.6–0.8 °C per CO₂ doubling, well below the IPCC’s 2–4.5 °C range. He concludes that general circulation models underestimate the amplitude of natural oscillations and therefore overstate the role of greenhouse gases, whereas his ANN-based method interprets modern warming largely as a continuation of long-term natural cycles, though he notes that human emissions may still play a role. 

Later in the book, emeritus professor Ian Plimer at the University of Melbourne emphasizes that Earth’s climate has always changed, often drastically, due to natural forces such as variations in Earth’s orbit and tilt, fluctuations in solar output, volcanic eruptions, tectonic shifts, and even the Solar System’s passage through the galaxy. He argues that climate records spanning hundreds of millions of years show little correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature, suggesting CO₂ is not the primary climate driver (see diagram below). Instead, he highlights how supervolcanoes and tectonic events can cool or warm the planet; how past interglacial periods were warmer than today; and how long cycles in solar activity and cosmic rays may set the pace for ice ages and warm spells.

From his geological perspective, modern warming should be viewed against the backdrop of Earth’s long, naturally variable climate history. 

In another chapter, emeritus professor at the University of Delaware David R. Legates highlights that precipitation is the “Achilles’ heel” of global climate models because rainfall and snowfall occur on scales much smaller than the models’ grid cells and depend on complex feedbacks. He notes that most models simulate convection but neglect other key mechanisms, leading them to produce precipitation that is too frequent and too light, overestimate rainfall in the tropics, underestimate it in mid-latitudes, and miss daily cycles. Simplified topography and differing horizontal resolutions further distort wind patterns and rainfall distribution. Since precipitation controls soil moisture, runoff, cloud cover, and evaporation, Legates concludes that errors in simulating rain and snow propagate through nearly every climate variable. He suggests that as the atmosphere warms, the reduced temperature gradient will likely diminish the very processes that create precipitation, meaning climate projections must handle rainfall with caution and more observational and theoretical work is needed before trusting future precipitation forecasts.⁶⁰

Associate professor Antero Ollila also contends that recent warming is largely driven by natural factors—long-term oceanic and solar cycles—while human-emitted greenhouse gases play only a modest role. He argues that the radiative forcing attributed to a doubling of CO₂ is lower than the IPCC’s 3.7–3.9 Wm–2 estimate and that observations show little evidence of the strong positive water-vapor feedback assumed in mainstream models. Based on his own energy-balance modeling and a survey of non-IPCC studies, Ollila calculates a transient climate response of roughly 0.5–0.7 °C per CO₂ doubling. He emphasizes that multidecadal and centennial oscillations can explain much of the temperature variability since the mid-20th century. Using carbon-14 data, he further suggests that human-emitted CO₂ is quickly removed by natural sinks and represents a much smaller fraction of atmospheric CO₂ than commonly asserted. From these considerations, Ollila concludes that there is no imminent climate crisis and advocates focusing on adaptation rather than aggressive emissions reductions. 

The contrarian debate presented in the book highlights the uncertainty that underlies climate prediction. Many past environmental forecasts—whether the desertification crisis projected by the UN in the 1970s, predictions of ice-free Arctic summers by the 2010s, or warnings of runaway warming by mid-century—have overstated the degree of certainty about future conditions. If natural cycles continue to exert a strong influence, the trajectory of future temperatures may not follow simple linear projections tied to carbon emissions alone. 

It is important to note that the book challenges the dominant climate narrative, but it does not represent the center of expert judgment. The center of that judgment is that the planet is warming, that human greenhouse gas emissions are the leading cause, and that continued emissions will increase risks. 

At the same time, even mainstream projections have moderated from some older worst-case assumptions, with current policy estimates clustering closer to roughly 2.5–3 °C of warming by 2100. That distinction matters: it leaves room for skepticism toward apocalyptic rhetoric without requiring denial of measured warming or human influence.

In September 2026, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted a series of warnings on 𝕏. He wrote that the people building today’s most advanced AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. By the time Axios reported on his resignation, his post had been viewed more than 115 million times.

Researchers had been saying similar things for years. What made Coxon’s warning unusual was that he had walked away from real money to say it. He left Anthropic two months before his equity was due to vest, forfeiting a potentially significant payoff. “I left before any of my equity vested,” he told Axios. “I no longer have anything to gain by juicing up Anthropic’s valuation.”

Coxon was not alone. Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, publicly agreed. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” Hubinger wrote. “I personally think it is >10 percent within the next decade.” Bilal Chughtai, a former Google DeepMind safety engineer, resigned in July 2026, saying he believed AI could kill us all. Joe Benton, another former Anthropic safety team member, raised similar alarms. They all had direct experience inside the labs.

Military secrecy generates mythology that sometimes provides useful cover for military secrecy and increased defense spending.

These discussions caught my attention as I was finalizing my two-year investigation into state-sponsored paranormal programs and UFO research in the Soviet Union. The deeper I went into the archives, the harder it became to distinguish evidence from interpretation. Genuine unexplained observations sit beside classified aerospace programs. Scientific investigations co-exist with disinformation. Military secrecy generates mythology that sometimes provides useful cover for military secrecy and increased defense spending. To muddy the waters, institutions often mix genuine information with fabricated facts, making it almost impossible for an independent observer to see reality for what it is.

The information environment has only grown more complex since the end of the Cold War, overwhelmed by constructed narratives, conspiracy theories, declining institutional trust, and competing versions of reality. The response to AI whistleblowers was at once immediate and fractured. Some members of Congress demanded new legal safeguards for AI development, while others were not so convinced. 

Critics pointed to a funding network. Dustin Moskovitz, an early investor in Anthropic, is a member of the board of Coefficient Giving, the grant-making organization formerly known as Open Philanthropy. Coefficient is a major funder of the Tarbell Centre for AI Journalism, which supports reporters at large news outlets. It also funds METR, an independent evaluator that has worked with Anthropic. These interlinking connections invite criticism, even though funding alone does not prove that a journalist or evaluator has given up editorial or professional independence.

Anthropic has poured $40 million through two donations to the super PAC Public First Action, which is pushing Congress to impose new regulatory guardrails on AI. Its lobbying disclosure in July 2026 showed $2 million in just three months, $400,000 more than its April report. “You get a benefit from regulation because it hinders your competitors,” said James Andrew Lewis, a former U.S. diplomat. Of Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, he said: “He might actually believe some of this stuff, but I’d say self-interest really explains it more.” The lobbying fight raises a broader question: how can we tell a serious warning from a narrative that grows stronger as institutions respond to it?

The AI debate is not the first time a great power has been frightened into action by a threat it could not verify. In fact, the pattern I see resembles another feedback loop I came across in my research that started with a disputed account of an American submarine. In July 1958, the USS Nautilus became the first vessel in history to reach the North Pole using its own power, travelling submerged beneath the Arctic ice. For the Soviet Union, this was a strategic shock. American submarines could now approach unnoticed and lurk practically on its doorstep.

In December 1959, a French magazine called Constellation published an article named “Thought Transfer as a Weapon of War.” The author, Jacques Bergier, described a secret American psi program successfully tested during the Nautilus mission. A strange passenger named Jones boarded the submarine and, over sixteen days, purportedly received images telepathically from a sender at the Westinghouse laboratory in Friendship, Maryland, with a claimed 70 percent accuracy.

The story was likely fabricated. The U.S. Navy denied it. The dates didn’t work, as on the day the experiment was supposed to begin, the Nautilus was in dry dock in Portsmouth. Bergier may have been deliberately fed disinformation, or he may have invented the story himself. The U.S. was deploying new ocean sound detectors at the time and may have wanted to distract Soviet attention from that project. 

In Moscow, however, no one was laughing. Professor Leonid Vasiliev, who had conducted telepathy experiments in the 1930s before Stalin shut them down, reported to his colleagues that the United States had “adopted telepathy as a means of communication with submarines.” In March 1960, cybernetics specialist Lieutenant Colonel Igor Poletaev sent an urgent report to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky warning of a “new, unknown psychological weapon.” The Soviet government immediately funded Vasiliev’s Laboratory for the Study of Telepathy at Leningrad State University.

Vasiliev’s 1962 book, Experiments in Mental Suggestion, became a foundational text of the new Soviet approach. Other laboratories followed. Dr. Genady Sergeyev, working out of a military-affiliated institute, developed sensitive non-contact sensors to study Nina Kulagina, a woman who claimed to move objects by psychokinesis, and filmed her deflecting compass needles while recording changes in her electrical brain activity (James “The Amazing” Randi subsequently explained how she might have performed these feats using magic). At the A.S. Popov Radio and Technical Institute in Moscow, engineer I.M. Kogan attempted to model telepathy mathematically as ultra-longwave electromagnetic radiation, treating the human nervous system as a biological radio transmitter.

The Americans, meanwhile, watched the Soviet activity with growing alarm. A 1972 Defense Intelligence Agency report titled Controlled Offensive Behavior—USSR claimed that the Soviet Union had at least twenty parapsychology centres, was spending the equivalent of $80 to $100 million annually on related research, and would soon be able to read secret documents, influence the minds of U.S. leaders, and cause “instant death” from a distance. The report triggered panic in Washington.

In response, the CIA launched Project SCANATE at the Stanford Research Institute, employing physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. They began testing subjects like the artist Ingo Swann and the stage magician Uri Geller. The program evolved through a succession of codenames (Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, and Sun Streak) before finally becoming Project Stargate. Its most celebrated success came in 1979, when a remote viewer named Joe McMoneagle was given coordinates for a building near a large body of water in northern Russia. He described a massive submarine under construction, with a long flat deck, a double hull, and twenty missile tubes, a vessel so large that conventional analysts insisted it could never be launched from that location. He predicted the Russians would blast a channel to the sea within months. In January 1980, spy satellite photos confirmed the launch of the largest submarine ever observed—the Typhoon class—exactly as McMoneagle had sketched.

When the KGB learned that the Americans had obtained such detailed intelligence without any physical agents in place, the conclusion was inescapable: the United States had mastered remote viewing and was forty years ahead of the USSR. The response followed in 1989, when the Soviet General Staff authorized the creation of Military Unit 10003, an expert-analytical directorate under Lieutenant General Alexey Savin. He was not the kind of man one associated with telepathy and alien contact. He had graduated from the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School, one of the country’s most prestigious engineering institutions. He had spent his early career working on classified defense projects, held a doctorate in technical sciences, and also studied philosophy, a combination that shaped his unique approach.

Effective skepticism involves the capacity to separate the phenomenon from the information system that builds up around it.

Savin was not a cynic. He believed the human brain could access what he called the “Universal Information Field,” a planetary field of consciousness first theorized by Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920s. He rejected Western occultism as elitist and individualistic. He called his method “metacontact,” a secularized form of military shamanism. It drew on yoga, Buddhist meditation, qigong, and Siberian trance techniques, stripped of their spiritual content and repackaged as operational methodology.

According to the general, the unit’s operational results in Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP) were truly extraordinary. Savin said his operators had remotely viewed a captured American pilot during the 1991 Gulf War. He also claimed they predicted a 1991 Kamchatka earthquake before planned military exercises, which helped the authorities to evacuate hundreds of people from the seismic zone. In another rumoured case, his operators prevented a nuclear catastrophe near Glasgow, Scotland: after remotely viewing the potential future event, they sent their predictions to London via unofficial channels. However, the most remarkable experience associated with Unit 10003 was their alleged interaction with a non-human intelligence, including an exchange of information during organized telepathic sessions. This last claim is directly connected to modern-day narratives that link psi research and UFO folklore.

In the early 1990s, the U.S.–Russian relationship experienced a period of détente. Dr. Edwin May, the last director of Stargate, first travelled to Moscow in 1992 with his colleague Larisa Vilenskaya to study ESP research. They met Savin and his team. The initial suspicion gradually melted. In May 2000, Vilenskaya and McMoneagle visited Unit 10003’s headquarters in Moscow. In one account of the visit, a Russian psychic named Klimova was asked to replicate a drawing an American made in another room; the two images were said to be mirror images. 

Savin later spoke warmly of the Americans. They shared stories, exchanged methodologies, and eventually contributed to a Russian book, Psi Wars: West and East, credited to Edwin May, Joe McMoneagle, Alexey Savin, Boris Ratnikov, and Viktor Rubel. General Nikolai Sham, the former deputy chairman of the KGB, wrote the foreword. Savin even proposed a joint Russian-American centre to combat terrorism and extremism using their methods.

Edwin May’s interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, released on July 22, 2024, offered his account of the connection. May recalled that Unit 10003 had about 120 remote viewers, ten times more than Project Stargate at any given time. He said Savin’s proposal for a joint U.S.–Russian program to combat terrorism appealed to him. He wrote a detailed 30-page report and handed it to a three-star general at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon. May recalled the general calling the proposal “ideal” because it was cheap and put no one in harm’s way. May then joked that he could practically hear the paper going into a “burn bag.”

Project Stargate was shut down in 1995 after a CIA-commissioned assessment found that remote viewing had not shown value as a source of actionable intelligence. Military Unit 10003 was disbanded in 2003. The official reason given was that it had completed its assigned tasks. However, the decision followed years of public criticism from the Commission for Combating Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research, founded in 1998 by Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg, who was quoted in a Russian newspaper, Izvestia, as saying, “Telepathy does not exist. Remote viewing is a fraud. The sooner we stop funding this nonsense, the better.”

What complicates a complete dismissal of American and Soviet psi warriors is that Savin and May appear sincere about their methods, and seem willing to set aside Cold War stereotypes about each other. Jon Ronson, the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats (subsequently made into a major motion picture), recently told the Danny Jones podcast that McMoneagle struck him as sensible, humble, and not a charlatan. Ronson also said he had no direct evidence that remote viewing worked.

Overall, the modern scientific consensus on ESP is that a few isolated experiments and case reports tend to be small, hard to replicate, vulnerable to methodological bias, and they often shrink or disappear under stricter controls. Ultimately, both Project Stargate and Unit 10003 developed in response to concerns about each other’s perceived progress. Although some of the claims they acted on were exaggerated or poorly tested, the programs they helped build were genuine and at some point taken seriously by their governments.

The current AI debate seems to be centered on similar alarmist views. Concern about China’s progress can shape American investment and policy even when its implications remain uncertain. Coxon himself told Axios that fears about both OpenAI and China can become excessive and help justify moving faster. That does not settle the question of AI’s dangers. It shows how competition can turn uncertainty into pressure to act.

The real challenge is separating genuine evidence of danger from the pressure generated as competitors, investors, laboratories, and advocates react to each other’s fears.

The same scrutiny should apply to policy and funding. In June 2026, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published a policy article in favor of mandatory third-party safety tests for frontier AI models. Such tests would address real dangers; however, they would also benefit well-resourced and well-established companies. Licensing conditions and minimum compute requirements could have a similar effect. A single rule can serve as both a safety measure and a competitive advantage. Therefore, it is important to find out who sets the standards, who can meet them, and how independent assessors are selected. Similar questions arise around the funding chain. Dustin Moskovitz’s involvement, Coefficient Giving’s support of the Tarbell Centre, and the funding connections with AI evaluation all involve potential conflicts that should be made public and investigated. Although Tarbell claims that its funders have no editorial control, a network is not a conspiracy, and it still plays a role in determining which warnings receive funding and reach a wider audience.

At the same time, one doesn’t have to be excessively cynical about this, or jump to unwarranted conclusions. Coxon had given up his unvested equity, and his warning ought to be taken seriously. Max Nadeau from Coefficient Giving echoed Coxon’s message shortly after it came out. That fact does not prove coordination; it only shows how quickly a well-connected network can spread a warning that addresses its own concerns. Sincerity and strategic value can co-exist. This was also the case of the psi programs. Savin and May seem sincere and have established real institutions. Their sincerity did not prevent a self-reinforcing threat narrative from emerging. On the contrary, it helped make the feedback loop believable. 

One important difference is that although remote viewing remains of doubtful practical value, AI systems have already begun to carry out useful tasks, and their capabilities continue to develop. The consequences are more serious, and the pressure to act quickly is greater. Coxon’s warning is not that artificial intelligence will suddenly come to life and attack us; instead, businesses are accelerating the development of systems that are not only more powerful but also harder to understand or control. That is a legitimate concern. The real challenge is separating genuine evidence of danger from the pressure generated as competitors, investors, laboratories, and advocates react to each other’s fears.

Like the AI panic and psi wars, the modern-day Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) disclosure movement in the U.S., which began in 2017 with The New York Times article disclosing the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and continued through whistleblowers and U.S. congressional hearings, is yet another example of an unstable information environment that mixes real institutional process with sensational claims, ideological and religious belief systems, state secrecy, funding, and rival narratives.

In the end, it is not simply a question of deciding in advance that psi is impossible, that UAPs are extraordinary, or that artificial intelligence poses existential risks. On the contrary, effective skepticism involves the capacity to separate the phenomenon from the information system that builds up around it. Even when sincerity is strongly felt, it does not count as evidence; people taking part in these feedback loops may be completely convinced of their own stories, and this conviction can give the narrative an appearance of plausibility. The real challenge is to suspend immediate judgment and examine what the phenomenon can reveal once the surrounding narrative is stripped away.

As AI takes on more of the work we once did ourselves, there’s growing concern about what happens to the skills we’re no longer practicing. For example, a student who solves more problems with AI may be learning more, or may simply have an easier way to get the answers. Much the same goes for an employee handling customer cases, or a management consultant finishing a business report. The perceived productivity gains can make the tool worth using, but they don’t tell us whether the person has become more capable.

In “When AI Thinks for Us” published in Skeptic, professor Hyoungbin Park argues that the effort involved in thinking helps children (and adults) develop abilities, including the ability to engage in moral reasoning, and that handing work over to AI could weaken them. It’s a reasonable concern. But what we know about how young brains learn isn’t enough to establish that AI causes lasting cognitive or moral harm. For that, we need evidence of how people manage after the AI tool is no longer available to them. Can they apply what they’ve learned to an unfamiliar problem? Can they spot a mistake when AI gives them a convincing answer?

Field studies have begun to address these questions, with mixed results. One found that students performed worse when they later had to work without AI. Another suggested that inexperienced employees retained what they had learned with help from AI. Before drawing broad conclusions about what AI does to human skill, we need to understand why these tools had such different effects.

Learning Math

In a randomized field experiment published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hamsa Bastani and colleagues worked with nearly 1,000 high-school math students. They compared ordinary classroom practice with two kinds of AI assistance. One of the tools was a relatively unrestricted chatbot that could supply answers. The other was a specially designed tutor that encouraged students to engage with the problem rather than simply provide them with the solution.

During assisted practice, both AI groups looked spectacular. Compared with the control group, scores rose 48 percent with the unrestricted assistant and 127 percent with the guided tutor. If a school had evaluated those tools solely by the quality of completed practice work, it might have concluded that the AI had dramatically improved learning.

Then came an exam. Students who had used the unrestricted assistant scored 17 percent worse than students who had never used AI. Their practice results had been a poor indicator of what they could do independently.

The guided AI tutor, however, did not produce a negative effect. But it also did not produce any positive results: its student users did not demonstrate a statistically significant improvement over the control group on the unaided exam. They performed far better during practice, yet the study did not establish that the AI tutor made their independently-demonstrated mathematical ability better than conventional instruction.

An AI tool can improve performance on average, while making some mistakes more likely to survive human review.

This was a study of specific math problems and a specific generation of AI. It did not measure brain development or what happens after years of use. Extrapolating its findings, such as the 17 percent drop in performance in the unrestricted AI tutor use to all education, would be an error. Nevertheless, the results of this study supply a warning: higher scores when working together with AI can well “coexist” with worse subsequent unaided-by-AI performance, and the specific type (design) of AI used in the classroom does change educational outcomes.

At work, assistance may become expertise.

A different pattern emerged in a study of 5,172 customer support agents published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The researchers examined the rollout of a generative AI assistant that offered customer service representatives suggested responses during live conversations with customers. On average, access to this tool increased the number of issues resolved per hour by 15 percent. Gains were especially strong among newer and less-skilled customer service agents, who had more to learn from the recommendations.

The question is what remained when the AI suggestions were no longer available. The researchers exploited interruptions in the AI assistant’s availability to examine performance without its immediate help. They found evidence that workers exposed to the system retained some productivity gains during outages. The study also suggested that less-experienced workers had begun using communication practices associated with stronger performers.

The findings of this study complicate the notion that every AI-provided shortcut to a better answer erodes competence. The assistant could expose a novice to effective approaches in the middle of real work. Some of those approaches apparently stuck.

As always, we should be precise about the limitations of this study. The researchers studied one type of work in one firm, and the evidence from outages is more suggestive than a randomized long-term examination of retained skill. A customer service script also differs considerably from a correct solution to a mathematical problem or moral reasoning about a complex situation. Still, the result is informative: the same general category of technology that impaired independent performance in one educational setting may have supported durable improvement in another.

A student who copies a complete solution may bypass the very practice the exercise was meant to provide.

What could explain the difference? One plausible hypothesis concerns what the user must do with the advice. A person who revises a suggested response, sees how a customer reacts, and handles the next case may receive useful feedback. A student who copies a complete solution may bypass the very practice the exercise was meant to provide. The studies did not randomize all these mechanisms against each other, so that explanation remains a hypothesis worth testing rather than a definitive conclusion.

A better answer can make judgment worse.

Skill loss is only part of the concern—people also need to recognize when assistance provided by AI is unreliable. An AI tool can improve performance on average, while making some mistakes more likely to survive human review.

In a recent study involving 758 knowledge workers, researchers tested AI on realistic management consulting tasks. For 18 tasks chosen to fall within the AI’s capabilities, participants using AI completed more work, finished faster, and produced higher quality answers. Yet on one complex managerial problem deliberately selected to fall outside those capabilities, the AI-assisted group was 19 percent less likely to reach the correct solution than the group working without it.

This result says something important about judgment at the boundary of a tool’s competence. It does not show that participants had permanently lost professional knowledge. There was no demonstration of deteriorating skill across months of reliance. The experimental finding is narrower and, in a sense, more useful: help that works remarkably well on familiar tasks can steer a person wrong on a deceptively similar one!

Another, slightly older behavioral experiment on trust in AI advice published in 2024, found that participants sometimes followed recommendations they had reason to question, even when the advice conflicted with available information and their own interests. This experiment involved an AI decision aid rather than the more standard AI chatbot. It demonstrated a separate vulnerability produced by overreliance on AI assistance: overreliance can occur at the moment of judgment, without any demonstrated loss of underlying knowledge.

How to Test AI Assistance

Each of these problems discussed here, although on the surface similar, is in fact rather different. A single, average productivity score (“AI improved/decreased performance by X percent”) conceals what’s actually happening. So, how should we measure AI assistance as it becomes more and more commonplace?

Start with assisted performance. Measure accuracy, quality, and time while the AI assistant is available. This establishes whether the AI tool helps deliver an immediate result, which is worthwhile information but only one part of the picture. This is about as far as most (commercial) evaluations go.

Next, measure whether the skill or knowledge is transferable. After AI-supported practice, ask people to complete a related task without using the AI. Compare results with a control group or a credible pre-use baseline, and use delayed tests if retained learning is relevant. For example, a math student should solve a fresh problem rather than recall one shown by an AI chatbot, and a customer support trainee should handle an unfamiliar case without suggested wording for customer interactions. Has unaided judgment improved, held steady, or weakened?

The question for a school or employer is what the person can eventually do, understand, and challenge after repeated AI use.

Finally, test error detection. Offer a plausible AI answer with a known, consequential mistake, and ask people to evaluate it before revealing the defect. Record what they catch, miss, and how confidently they judge it. Establish the correct answer through independent sources or expert reviewers, rather than asking the same AI chatbot to validate itself.

The studies discussed here assessed specific tools and settings, many from earlier AI model generations. Their results are not timeless forecasts. More reliable models will likely reduce errors, but their overall higher quality output might also make occasional mistakes harder to detect. Both possibilities call for continued research and measurement.

Hyoungbin Park is right to worry about the habits cultivated when machines shoulder increasingly complex work. But the currently available evidence does not justify treating all cognitive offloading as damaging. The question for a school or employer is what the person can eventually do, understand, and challenge after repeated AI use. We are yet to know the answers.

When I was an undergraduate philosophy student, my plan was to do graduate study in Christian apologetics under Dr. William Lane Craig at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. However, my study of philosophy of religion and critical thinking at Sonoma State University led me to question my Christian beliefs, so I left the faith. Ever since, I have applied the concepts, skills, and tools of critical thinking, logic, and rationality to basic Christian beliefs, including and especially the resurrection of Jesus, which the apostle Paul insists is central to Christianity as he explains in 1 Corinthians 15:17–19 (NRSV Updated Edition, used throughout this article):

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. 

Thus, from a Christian point of view, the purported death of Jesus on a cross and his alleged resurrection are arguably the most important events in human history. If either Jesus did not die on the cross, or Jesus died on the cross but stayed dead, then the Christian faith is false.

In this article I examine three different cases for the resurrection of Jesus, and I will point out serious problems with each. They are from these books: Reasonable Faith (3rd edition, hereafter: RF3) by William Lane Craig, Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, and The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona.

William Lane Craig’s Case for the Resurrection  

Dr. Craig is a smart and highly respected Christian philosopher who has conducted serious study of the New Testament. If anyone can make a strong and solid case for the resurrection of Jesus, Craig would clearly be able to do so, and he has worked for decades developing his case. In my analysis, Craig’s case has at least five serious problems. 

Although Craig concludes that God raised Jesus from the dead, unlike most Christian apologists, Craig does not try to prove this conclusion or to show that this conclusion is a historical fact, and instead makes the more modest claim that “the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is such that a well-informed investigator ought to agree that it is more likely than not to have occurred.” Craig argues that, “the hypothesis ‘God raised Jesus from the dead’ furnishes the best explanation of the historical data relevant to Jesus’s final fate” (RF3, 360). This argument is grounded in three key historical claims:

1. Jesus’s tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers on the first day of the week following his crucifixion.
2. Beginning on the first day of the week following Jesus’s crucifixion, various individuals and groups experienced on different occasions and under varying circumstances appearances of Jesus alive.
3. The first disciples of Jesus came to sincerely believe in Jesus’s resurrection.

Craig’s argument for the main assumption of his case is stated this way (RF3, 361):

If these three facts can be established and no plausible natural explanation can account for them as well as the resurrection hypothesis, then one is justified in inferring Jesus’s resurrection as the most plausible explanation of the data. 

Craig’s case can be summarized briefly: Craig’s three historical claims are considered to be historical facts. The most plausible explanation for these three facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead. Thus, the best explanation of the historical facts relevant to the final fate of Jesus is that God raised Jesus from the dead. That means it is more likely than not that this explanation is true.

If either Jesus did not die on the cross, or Jesus died on the cross but stayed dead, then the Christian faith is false.

This conclusion, however, does not follow. First, suppose these probabilities of the competing hypotheses about Jesus’s final fate compared to Craig’s conclusion:

• .30 God raised Jesus from the dead.
• .25 Some disciples of Jesus lied about him rising from the dead.
• .25 Somebody moved Jesus’s body but didn’t tell his disciples.
• .20 Jesus appeared to die on the cross, but he was still alive when removed.

On this scenario, the resurrection hypothesis would be more probable and more plausible than any of the alternative hypotheses, based on the relevant historical data, but the probability of the resurrection hypothesis being true at only .30 means that it would have a probability far less than Craig’s .50 (“more likely than not” translates to the “preponderance of evidence” argument in court, which amounts to .50 + a feather). 

Now suppose these probabilities for 9 alternative hypotheses compared to Craig’s conclusion:

• .15 God raised Jesus from the dead.
• .10 One disciple of Jesus lied about seeing him risen.
• .10 Two or three disciples of Jesus lied about seeing him risen.
• .10 Four or more disciples of Jesus lied about seeing him risen.
• .10 Somebody moved Jesus’s body but didn’t tell the disciples.
• .10 Jesus only appeared to die on the cross because he fainted.
• .10 Jesus only appeared to die on the cross because he was in a coma.
• .10 Jesus was clinically dead but did not actually die on the cross.
• .10 Jesus was drugged on the cross and appeared to die but didn’t.
• .05 Jesus pretended to be dead on the cross.

In this scenario, even though the resurrection hypothesis would be more probable than any of the alternatives, its likelihood would only be .15, and thus although it would be the best explanation of the relevant historical facts, it would not be “more likely than not” that the resurrection happened. Adding up the probabilities that these other possibilities are true is .85 in this scenario, compared to only .15 for the truth of the resurrection.

A second serious problem with Craig’s case is his equation of the resurrection as “the most plausible explanation” for his three historical facts with it as “the best explanation” of all the relevant facts. There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of historical facts that are “relevant to Jesus’s final fate,” but it is illogical and unreasonable to infer that a hypothesis that provides the most plausible explanation of three hand-selected historical facts must also be the best explanation of all the relevant facts about Jesus’s final fate. 

An analogy: suppose we are evaluating different models of SUV to purchase and are given only three facts about the vehicle—price, horsepower, and fuel efficiency—while ignoring dozens of additional facts, such as, performance, handling, safety, reliability, comfort, maintenance cost, warranty, resale value, etc. Craig’s focus on just three specific historical facts in order to make a comparative evaluation of various hypotheses about the final fate of Jesus is just as unreasonable as evaluating SUVs on the basis of just three relevant facts as opposed to using dozens of relevant facts for the comparative evaluation.

Furthermore, since Craig is a professional Christian apologist, it is not unreasonable to suspect that he might be selective in choosing certain historical facts that support his belief, while ignoring other facts that do not fit the resurrection hypothesis, a classic case of confirmation bias. Having studied the resurrection for years, I can think of at least seven historical facts that cast doubt on, or run contrary to, the resurrection hypothesis:

1. People who were crucified by the Romans would usually hang on the cross for at least two or three days before dying.
2. The authors of the Gospels claim that Jesus was removed from the cross after hanging on the cross for less than half of a day (i.e., for somewhere between 2 hours and 10 hours).
3. The Jewish historian Josephus reports that a person he knew was crucified by the Romans, was later removed from the cross, and survived the ordeal.
4. There are several different medical theories about how Roman crucifixion caused people to die; medical experts do not agree on which theory is correct.
5. Victims of Roman crucifixion were usually buried in shallow graves or left to rot on their crosses and were not permitted to have an honorable burial. 
6. The authors of the gospels Mark and Matthew believed that the first appearances of the allegedly risen Jesus to his male disciples took place in Galilee about a week or more after Jesus was crucified. 
7. The authors of the gospels Luke and John claimed that the first appearances of the allegedly risen Jesus to his male disciples took place in Jerusalem about 48 hours after Jesus had been crucified and buried. 

Tellingly, not one of these historical facts is included in Craig’s analysis of the resurrection.

A third serious problem with Craig’s case is his contrasting natural with supernatural explanations. In his reasoning, if you can eliminate the natural explanations (e.g., he fainted, was drugged, or otherwise didn’t actually die on the cross), then the supernatural explanation that God raised Jesus from the dead must be true. There are dozens of different possible supernatural explanations concerning Jesus’s final fate, but Craig considers and evaluates only the one (preferred) supernatural hypothesis of God resurrecting Jesus. Thus, Craig’s either/or assumption is false, and Craig has failed to give us a good reason to believe that the most plausible explanation of his three key historical facts is the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead.

A fourth serious problem with Craig’s case involves his key historical claims being asserted to be historical facts, the most important being his second key historical claim:

Beginning on the first day of the week following Jesus’s crucifixion, various individuals and groups experienced on different occasions and under varying circumstances appearances of Jesus alive.

Craig supports this claim primarily on the basis of six alleged appearances of the risen Jesus beginning on the first day of the week following the crucifixion to: Peter, the twelve, five hundred brethren, James (Jesus’s brother), “all the apostles,” and Saul of Tarsus (Paul).

Let’s begin with what Craig says is “the best-attested resurrection appearance of Jesus,” namely that in Jerusalem to “the Twelve” disciples (minus Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus), as noted in the gospels of Luke (24:36–42) and John (20:19–20). The problem is that these appearance stories are probably fictional. 

The gospels of Mark and Matthew clearly imply that the first appearance of the risen Jesus to his disciples took place in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. Because Galilee was several days journey on foot from Jerusalem, the first appearance of Jesus to his disciples would have taken place a week or more after his crucifixion, not on Sunday about 48 hours after he was crucified. Because the gospel of John is historically unreliable, what the other gospels say on this matter is more significant. Mark is the earliest written gospel, so its account is to be preferred over the appearance story in Luke. Therefore, it is probable that the stories of a Jerusalem appearance of Jesus on Easter Sunday to his disciples are fictional.

The alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to Peter also fails to support Craig’s most important historical claim. Craig himself admits that “We have no story in the Gospels telling of Jesus’s appearance to Peter” and that “we have no detailed story of this appearance …” (RF3, 378). That means that we don’t know when or where this alleged appearance to Peter occurred, and we don’t know anything about the circumstances surrounding it. Therefore, the alleged appearance to Peter cannot be used to show that experiences of appearances of a risen Jesus occurred “on different occasions and under varying circumstances” as Craig’s historical claim asserts.

Paul never set eyes on the flesh-and-blood Jesus, so he had no idea what the man looked like.

The alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to “five hundred brethren” is mentioned by Paul in Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, but Craig admits that “we have no mention whatsoever of this appearance elsewhere in the New Testament” (RF3, 378). This example is thus based on shaky historical evidence. Furthermore, the only thing Paul says about this alleged appearance is in 1 Corinthians 15:6: “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.” We don’t know when or where this allegedly happened, and we have no idea what circumstances surrounded it. Thus, this example is just as irrelevant as the example of the alleged appearance to Peter. The same problem exists with the purported appearances to Jesus’s brother James and to “all the apostles.” 

That leaves two alleged appearances: to the Twelve and to Saul of Tarsus (Paul). But we have seen that “the Twelve” appearance story is based on those recounted in Luke and John that, again, are probably fictional, which leaves just the account about the appearance to Saul, supported by both the book of Acts and by Paul’s own statements. So, it seems reasonable to grant that Saul/Paul did have some sort of experience that he took to be an experience of the risen Jesus.  

However, there are at least two serious problems with this example. First, there are clear indications that this experience was subjective in nature, and thus could have been either a hallucination or a dream or a vision. Second, Paul never set eyes on the flesh-and-blood Jesus, so he had no idea what the man looked like. Thus, even if a living and embodied Jesus stood right in front of him, Paul would not have been able to identify that person as being Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, Paul’s claim to have seen Jesus after the crucifixion is highly dubious. 

Thus, the most important historical claim in Craig’s case has not been shown to be a historical fact. None of the six main examples of alleged appearances of the risen Jesus put forward by Craig provides significant evidence that Craig’s historical claim about appearances of the risen Jesus is a historical fact. 

A fifth serious problem with Craig’s case is that he left out a crucial historical claim. Even if we granted, for the sake of argument, that his three key historical claims were facts, there is a crucial historical claim that is missing: Jesus died on the cross.

Unlike other Christian philosophers and apologists, Craig fails to understand that this historical claim is crucial to any case for the resurrection. For example, the Christian philosophers and apologists Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks understand how crucial this historical claim is to making a case for the resurrection:

Before we can show that Jesus rose from the dead, we need to show that He really did die. The Koran claims that Jesus only pretended to be dead (Surah IV:157), and many skeptics have said that He appeared to be dead, possibly being drugged, but revived while in the tomb. It is no miracle for a live man to walk out of a tomb. For the Resurrection to have any significance, Jesus had to be dead first.

The Christian apologists Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, who are leading proponents of the resurrection of Jesus, agree with Geisler and Brooks on this point, and their case is based on five historical claims, starting with the claim that Jesus died by crucifixion. Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell are two well-known Christian apologists, and although they do not limit their case for the resurrection to just a small handful of historical claims (the way that Habermas, Licona, and Craig do), it is clear that they view the death of Jesus on the cross as crucial to their case for the resurrection:

So in this chapter, we will look at the events surrounding the death of Christ and special precautions taken by those who crucified him to ensure that his death was accomplished. As we will see, ascertaining the historical fact of his death is a prerequisite to our conviction about his resurrection.

Nevertheless, William Lane Craig does not seem to understand this central point, and in conjunction with the other four serious problems in his case, we can conclude that his case for the resurrection fails.

The Case by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli 

In Chapter 8 of their Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA), the Christian philosophers Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli attempt to prove that God raised Jesus from the dead, not through positive evidence in favor of the resurrection as Craig did (the empty tomb, post-crucifixion appearances, beliefs of the disciples), but through negative evidence against alternative explanations for the purported miracle. The four alternative skeptical explanations they claim to refute are: the Swoon Theory, the Hallucination Theory, the Conspiracy Theory, and the Myth Theory. They claim to have proven that these four alternative theories are wrong, therefore the resurrection of Jesus is true. 

The first problem with this line of reasoning is that their assumption that there are only those four alternative theories is false. There are many alternative theories, including: Wrong Tomb, Someone Else Moved the Body from the Tomb, Unknown Tomb, Legend, Delusions, Objective Visions, Spiritual Resurrection, Mistaken Identity, and Substitution. I have found there are dozens of different alternative explanations of how belief in the resurrection of Jesus could have developed among the earliest followers of Jesus.

Furthermore, their four alternative theories are actually just specific examples of more general categories of skeptical theories. 

Swoon Theory. According to this theory, Jesus was still alive when he was removed from the cross but had swooned (i.e., fainted) and the Roman soldiers mistakenly judged him to be dead. Sometime after being removed from the cross, Jesus became conscious again and thus he survived the crucifixion. Of course, there are other ways besides fainting that Jesus could have appeared to be dead: he went into a coma, he was given a drug that made him appear to be dead, he pretended to be dead, or even that he experienced clinical death but was revived shortly after being removed from the cross. The Swoon Theory is just one of at least five Apparent Death Theories.

Scientific medicine did not exist two thousand years ago, and even highly trained modern medical doctors sometimes mistakenly diagnose a patient to be dead when the patient is actually still alive.

Survival Theories. The point of Jesus appearing to die while on the cross is to explain why the Roman soldiers might have removed him while he was still alive. But there are various possible explanations of why that might have happened, in a general group of skeptical theories that we could call Survival Theories. These include: The soldiers were bribed, threatened, deceived, or drugged; the soldiers’ superior officer ordered them to do this; the soldiers were followers of Jesus so they removed him from the cross while he was alive; the soldiers fell asleep, so some followers of Jesus were able to remove Jesus from the cross while he was alive. 

The second serious problem with the case by Kreeft and Tacelli concerns their claim to have proven the four alternative theories to be wrong. Not so. Let’s examine their nine objections against the Swoon Theory: 

1. Deadliness of Roman Crucifixion
2. Break their Legs
3. Blood and Water
4. Winding Sheets and Entombment
5. The Sickly Jesus Objection
6. Who Overpowered the Guards?
7. Who Moved the Stone?
8. Where did Jesus Go?
9. Swoon Theory implies False Theories

Deadliness of Roman Crucifixion. Kreeft and Tacelli claim that Jesus could not have survived the crucifixion; in fact, crucifixion is not as deadly as some other forms of execution, such as beheading. People can be hung on a cross and stay alive for days. Since Jesus was hanging on his cross for only a matter of hours, it is not unreasonable to suggest that he wasn’t actually dead when he was taken down. There is historical precedence for such survival:

• The Jewish historian Josephus writes about a person who survived Roman crucifixion in the first century.
• In 1815, a missionary named Felix Carey, reported an incident in Burma where four people had been crucified, and he stated, “Those which I saw, were liberated at the end of three or four days,” implying at least two of those four people survived crucifixion.
• In 1943, an Australian soldier in WWII named Herbert James “Ringer” Edwards was crucified by the Japanese military for 63 hours, but he survived.
• In 2014, ISIS nailed a man to a cross in Syria for eight hours and the man survived.

Kreeft and Tacelli claim that no Roman soldier ever bungled a crucifixion, but historically there were tens of thousands of crucifixions conducted by Roman soldiers over a period of about 850 years, from the start of the Roman Republic (in 509 BCE) to the outlawing of crucifixion in the Roman Empire (in 337 CE). Because many crucified people have remained alive on a cross for days, and because a few people have survived crucifixion, it is reasonable to conclude that several of these tens of thousands of crucified people survived, and because Jesus was hanging on the cross for only a few hours, there is good reason to think that Jesus could have survived his crucifixion.

Broken Legs. Kreeft and Tacelli assert that the Roman soldiers were sure Jesus was dead while he was still on the cross. But Roman soldiers were not medical experts. Scientific medicine did not exist two thousand years ago, and even highly trained modern medical doctors sometimes mistakenly diagnose a patient to be dead when the patient is actually still alive. Therefore, there is good reason to doubt the “diagnosis” of the death of Jesus by Roman soldiers.

The authors claim that the Roman soldiers broke the legs of the other two crucified criminals next to Jesus while they were still on their crosses, but they did not break Jesus’s legs. The assertion is that the soldiers did not bother to break Jesus’s legs because they believed Jesus was already dead. However, the soldiers might have despised Jesus and decided not to break his legs so that Jesus would suffer longer on the cross. In that case, their failure to break his legs did not mean they believed Jesus was already dead.

The historical claims in this objection depend on an unstated assumption that the Gospel of John provides a historically reliable account of the life of Jesus, including his crucifixion (John 19:31–34). No other Gospel makes these historical claims about the breaking of the legs of the other crucified men. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that John provides a historically unreliable account of the life of Jesus, including his crucifixion.

Jesus scholars in general, in fact, do not view any of the four Gospels as providing historically reliable accounts of the life of Jesus, but John is viewed as much less reliable than the other three Gospels. In short, this objection is based on questionable historical claims and dubious inferences from those historical claims, so this second objection against the Swoon Theory fails.

Since Jesus was hanging on his cross for only a matter of hours, it is not unreasonable to suggest that he wasn’t actually dead when he was taken down.

Blood and Water. Blood and water allegedly leaked out of Jesus’s body immediately after one of the Roman soldiers pierced his side with a spear. According to Kreeft and Tacelli, this shows that Jesus died of asphyxiation while he was still on the cross, and that means the Swoon Theory is false.

This spear-wound event is probably fictional because it appears in the gospel of John, which is a historically unreliable account of the life, teachings, and crucifixion of Jesus, none of the other Gospels corroborate any aspect of the spear-wound story, and this story fulfilled an Old Testament prophecy according to the author of John (John 19:36–37), which indicates the story might well have been created based on that Old Testament passage. 

The view that Jesus died from asphyxiation is probably false because medical experts disagree about what caused Jesus’s death, and because the Asphyxiation Theory about how crucifixion causes death is probably false: “Ancient literature, including the Gospels, also reveal that victims could talk, spit, or yell out from the cross, even at the moment of death. A suffocation victim cannot do that.”

Because this objection is based on dubious historical claims and on a dubious medical theory about the cause of Jesus’s death, the third objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails.

Winding Sheets and Entombment. Kreeft and Tacelli object that Jesus’s body was wrapped in a burial cloth and placed into a stone tomb after his crucifixion, ensuring that Jesus would quickly die in the tomb, if he had somehow survived the crucifixion. I believe they were persuaded of this by another Christian apologist named Josh McDowell, who argues that if Jesus was still alive after his crucifixion he would have either quickly suffocated as a result of being wrapped in a burial cloth that included 100-plus pounds of spices and a gummy substance, or he would have quickly died as a result of the cold damp air in the tomb.

However, McDowell’s claim that 100-plus pounds of spices and gummy substance was included in Jesus’s burial cloth is false or very unlikely, and his assumption that the tomb was cold enough and damp enough to cause Jesus to die in a matter of a few hours very dubious. Thus, this objection against the Swoon Theory fails.

Sickly Jesus Objection. Christian apologists love what I call the Sickly Jesus Objection. The idea is that if Jesus had survived crucifixion, the physical abuse and wounds he received from the Roman soldiers, from being scourged, from the crown of thorns, from his crucifixion, and from the spear wound to his side, would have left him weak, bruised, bloody, limping, and nearly dead. So, if he then contacted his disciples, he would have been so weak and sickly in appearance and demeanor that nobody would have believed that God had miraculously raised him from the dead. There are at least two serious problems with this objection.  

First, Christian apologists assume a worst-case-scenario in terms of the abuse and wounds of Jesus, but none of these are a historical fact. Each of the wounds and injuries that Christians traditionally believe were inflicted upon Jesus are subject to significant historical doubt. They are possible, but most are dubious, none rise to the level of historical fact, and each is subject to reasonable doubt, including multiple lacerations to Jesus’s scalp from the Crown of Thorns, the nailing of Jesus’s hands, wrists, feet, or ankles to the cross, and the spear wound to Jesus’s side.

Christian apologists don’t feel a need to justify these beliefs because paintings, sculptures, sermons, books, and movies have been filled with images and descriptions of Jesus experiencing a worst-case scenario of violent abuse, wounds, and injuries. Yet, the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion do not provide details that would indicate the severity of these wounds. So, not only is there is uncertainty about which, if any, of the alleged wounds and injuries of Jesus actually occurred, there is also uncertainty about the severity of each of the alleged wounds or injuries of Jesus. For these reasons, we cannot be confident that Jesus would have been in terrible physical condition in the days immediately after his crucifixion, if he had survived the crucifixion. 

A second serious problem with this objection is that it assumes that Jesus first appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem about 48 hours after his crucifixion in Jerusalem on the first Easter Sunday (i.e., Luke 24:36–42 and John 20:19–20). Those stories, however, are probably fictional, as noted earlier in the consideration of William Lane Craig’s case. It is more likely that the first appearance of Jesus to his disciples after his crucifixion took place in Galilee a week or more after he had been crucified. If so, then the wounds and injuries of Jesus would have had significantly more time to heal than just the 48 hours that Christian apologists assume.

Because the Sickly Jesus Objection is based on dubious historical assumptions about the extent of Jesus’s physical abuse, wounds, and injuries, and because this objection is based on the dubious historical assumption that the first appearance of Jesus to his disciples took place in Jerusalem about 48 hours after his crucifixion, this fifth objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails.

Overpowering of the Guards. This sixth objection to the Swoon Theory makes at least two problematic assumptions. First, it assumes that a Roman guard was placed at Jesus’s tomb the day after he was buried, to make sure that nobody would take Jesus’s body from the tomb, but this story is found only in the gospel of Matthew, and many New Testament scholars view this as a fictional story, created for apologetic purposes (i.e. to respond to the skeptical view that Jesus’s disciples stole the body of Jesus from his tomb).

We have no good reason to believe that most scholars use a standard of evidence that is any stronger than “more likely than not” in making decisions about historicity of alleged events in the life of Jesus.

Second, this objection makes the false assumption that somebody or some group overpowering the guards would be the only way that Jesus would have been able to leave the tomb where he had been buried. Other ways are clearly possible; for example, the distraction, deception, bribery or drugging of the guards.

Because this sixth objection is based on a dubious historical claim, and because it is based on a false assumption about there being only one way to have managed the alleged Roman guards, this sixth objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails.

Moving the Stone. This objection is actually an argument for the claim that an angel must have moved the stone blocking the entrance to Jesus’s tomb. The argument is that neither Jesus, nor his disciples, nor the Roman guards, nor the Jewish authorities would have moved the stone, so it must have been moved by an angel!  

Yet, how the stone got moved is irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus died on the cross or survived his crucifixion. Suppose that an angel did move the stone. It could still be the case either that Jesus died or survived his crucifixion. Thus, this seventh objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails as irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of the Swoon Theory.

Where did Jesus Go? This objection argues that Jesus could not have survived his crucifixion, because there is an absence of historical information about Jesus continuing on in his life after his crucifixion and alleged initial appearances to his disciples. However, the Swoon Theory does not imply there would be credible historical data about Jesus’s life after the few weeks of alleged appearances to his disciples. 

The Swoon Theory is compatible with scenarios where Jesus dies or disappears shortly after those alleged appearances: Jesus could have died as a result of infection of a wound from his crucifixion, or as a result of being killed by a Roman soldier who recognized Jesus, or as a result of being physically attacked by a robber. In those cases, there would be a good chance no credible historical data would exist about Jesus’s life after his initial appearances. Thus, the eighth objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails.

Swoon Theory Implies False Theories. According to Kreeft and Tacelli, the Swoon Theory implies that either (a) the Conspiracy Theory is true or (b) the Hallucination Theory is true. But they claim to have refuted those two other theories. 

According to the Swoon Theory, the disciples did actually see a living and physically embodied Jesus after his crucifixion. If actually seeing Jesus alive after his crucifixion was the main reason why the disciples believed Jesus had been raised from the dead, then it cannot also be the case that they lied about seeing Jesus alive again (i.e., the Conspiracy Theory), nor that the main reason why the disciples believed in the resurrection was because they had hallucinations about Jesus when Jesus was not actually present. 

Because the Swoon Theory rules out both the Conspiracy Theory and the Hallucination Theory, the ninth and final objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails, and that means their claim to have refuted all four alternative theories is false, just like the claim that there are only four alternative theories is false. Therefore, it is clear that the case for the resurrection of Jesus by Kreeft and Tacelli fails.

The Case by Habermas and Licona

Gary Habermas is a Christian philosopher who has been developing and perfecting a case for the resurrection of Jesus for decades. He is a leading defender of this Christian belief, and many view Habermas as the leading apologist on this issue. Michael Licona is a New Testament scholar who is also a leading defender of the resurrection of Jesus, and together they wrote The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (CRJ).

One way in which the case by Habermas and Licona differs from the case by Craig, is in the strength of their conclusions. For Craig, the resurrection of Jesus is more likely than not. For Habermas and Licona, the resurrection of Jesus is a “reasonable historical certainty.”

My understanding of this phrase is that they mean that the resurrection of Jesus has a probability of at least .70. That appears to be a significantly stronger claim than Craig’s “more likely than not” (50% plus a feather). Since Craig failed to show that the probability of the resurrection was greater than .50, can Habermas and Licona do any better?

First, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because Habermas and Licona are talking about the claim that Jesus died and then came back to life (i.e. Jesus rose from the dead), while Craig is clearly talking about the stronger claim that God raised Jesus from the dead. Habermas and Licona argue that historical and scientific evidence can only establish the first claim, but that the claim that God was the cause of Jesus coming back to life requires philosophical arguments. So, although Habermas and Licona make a higher probability claim, they make it about the weaker and less significant claim that Jesus rose from the dead, not about the stronger and more significant claim that God raised Jesus from the dead.

Whereas Craig’s case was based on three historical claims, Habermas and Licona focus on five historical claims they call “minimal facts”: 

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. Jesus’s disciples believed that he rose from the dead and appeared to them.
3. The conversion of Paul after what he believed was an experience of the risen Jesus.
4. The conversion of James (brother of Jesus) because he believed the risen Jesus appeared to him.
5. The tomb of Jesus was discovered to be empty.

In order to qualify as a “minimal fact,” a historical claim must (a) be accepted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject and, (b) be well evidenced (CRJ, 44). They summarize their case this way (CRJ, 207):

• The disciples sincerely believed that Jesus rose from the dead and had appeared to them.
• A number of outside evidences support the truth of their belief in his resurrection.
• Since no opposing theories can adequately account for all of the historical evidence, Jesus’s resurrection is the only plausible explanation.

The first problem for Habermas and Licona is that their case is based on the “minimal facts approach,” which is illogical and unreasonable, as in Craig’s case based on just a handful of facts while ignoring dozens of others.

A second problem is that Habermas and Licona were also influenced by confirmation bias: There is no good reason to believe that their five alleged facts are a fair and accurate representation of the dozens of historical facts that could be used to make an evaluative comparison of alternative theories, but we do have good reasons to believe that their selection of historical claims/facts is biased in favor of their deeply held belief that Jesus rose from the dead.

 A third problem is that the “minimal facts approach” leans heavily on consensus of scholars in terms of determining which historical claims constitute “facts” by means of the requirement “nearly every scholar accepts them” (CRJ, 44). By a scholar “accepting” a historical claim, they mean the claim is “considered historical” by the scholar (CRJ, 46).

But different scholars use different standards of evidence to decide whether to accept a historical claim or to decide whether an alleged event should be considered historical. If most scholars use the standard of “more likely than not,” then if we want to rely on the consensus of scholars, we cannot then judge the historical claims they “accept” to have a probability that is significantly greater than .50. 

But Habermas and Licona are trying to show that the resurrection of Jesus has “reasonable historical certainty” which, again, suggests a probability of at least .70. Habermas and Licona are suggesting that scholars require a historical claim to have “reasonable historical certainty” in order to accept a historical claim or to consider an alleged event to be historical. But they have not shown that this higher standard is used by most scholars. So, we have no good reason to believe that most scholars use a standard of evidence that is any stronger than “more likely than not” in making decisions about historicity of alleged events in the life of Jesus. Thus, the “minimal facts approach” used by Habermas and Licona is dubious.

A fourth problem with their case is that they fail to take into account the need to multiply probabilities, namely these two:

• Jesus died on the cross.
• Jesus was alive and walking around in the days and weeks after his crucifixion.

It would be a significant accomplishment if Habermas and Licona could show that each of these claims has a probability of .70, but they would still fall short because the probabilities of the above two historical claims must be multiplied together to determine the probability of their both being true: 

.70 x .70 = .49

However, these are not independent events. If we assume that Jesus died on the cross, then that provides very powerful evidence against the claim that Jesus was alive and walking around in the days and weeks after his crucifixion. That means the probability of both events occurring will be significantly less than .49, because the probability calculation above did not take into account the fact that the truth of the first claim impacts (significantly lowers) the probability of the second claim.

We have to determine the degree to which Jesus being alive after his crucifixion reduces the probability of Jesus having died on the cross.

To make the point, let’s reverse the order in which the two events are considered. If people saw that Jesus was alive and walking around in the days and weeks following his crucifixion, they would reasonably assume that he didn’t actually die on the cross. So, we cannot merely multiply the probabilities of the above two events. We have to determine the degree to which Jesus being alive after his crucifixion reduces the probability of Jesus having died on the cross. 

Thus, there is no possible way that the probability of Jesus’s death on the cross could be anywhere near .70, given the assumption that Jesus was alive and walking around in the days and weeks following his crucifixion. But even if one was to estimate the probability of Jesus having died on the cross to be .50, on the assumption that he was alive after his crucifixion, the probability of both key claims being true would be significantly less than the goal of .70: 

.70 x .50 = .35

Not only is a probability of .35 lower than what Habermas and Licona imply they have shown the resurrection of Jesus to have, it also falls below the fairly low standard of evidence for any scholars who reject historical claims when the probability of the claim falls below being more likely than not (.50).

A fifth problem with the case by Habermas and Licona is their reliance on the conversions of Paul and James (Jesus’s brother) that were the result of experiences they believed to be appearances of the risen Jesus. I have already shown that these alleged appearances are dubious and problematic, in my discussion of Craig’s case for the resurrection.

A sixth problem is that, like the case made by Kreeft and Tacelli, Habermas and Licona fail to refute the Swoon Theory, which they object to as follows (CRJ, 99-103):

• Jesus was severely scourged and his hands and feet were nailed to the cross.
• The Asphyxiation Theory (of how crucifixion causes death).
• The Spear-Wound Story in the gospel of John.
• The Sickly Jesus Objection.
• The alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul.

The alleged severe scourging and the alleged nailing of Jesus to the cross are not historical facts. The Asphyxiation Theory is probably false. The spear-wound story is probably fictional, as I argued in my discussion of the “Blood and Water” objection to the Swoon Theory by Kreeft and Tacelli. The Sickly Jesus Objection also fails, as I showed in my discussion of that objection put forward in the case by Kreeft and Tacelli. The alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul is dubious and problematic, as I argued in my critique of Craig’s key claim about alleged appearances of a risen Jesus. All of these objections to the Swoon Theory fail.

A seventh and final problem with the case by Habermas and Licona is that they don’t consistently follow their “minimal facts approach.” For example, the first four objections they raise against the Swoon Theory are unrelated to their “minimal facts.” Only the fifth dubious point about the alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul is based on their list of “minimal facts.”  

In other words, Habermas and Licona are happy to bring in lots of dubious historical claims that are not part of their “minimal facts” whenever doing so is needed to help their case. But that just means that their case is not actually based on “minimal facts.” It is based on dozens of historical claims, many of which don’t pass the requirements for being “minimal facts.”

Based on the seven serious problems with the case by Habermas and Licona, their case for the resurrection of Jesus fails.  

Conclusion

The failure of leading Christian apologists to make a strong and solid case for the resurrection of Jesus is evidence that no such strong case can be made, and that the available historical evidence is not sufficient to allow for a strong and solid case to be made for the resurrection. Thus, it is rational to conclude that Jesus did not rise from the dead.

Contact the author for citations/sources.

In May 1957, Life magazine published a hugely popular and tremendously influential article entitled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” Written by an affluent banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson, the article narrated the journey of an intrepid explorer who forayed deep into the mountains of southern Mexico, partook of secret rituals, and became “the first White man in recorded history” to consume the sacred mushrooms that lay at the heart of ancient mysteries.

Wasson’s highly poetic account of the mushroom experience quickly inspired a generation of spiritual seekers and helped spark the massive interest in psychedelics that swept across North America and Europe during the 1960s. At the same time, Wasson and others inspired by his work began to speculate that psychedelic mushrooms lay at the foundation of other religious traditions—ranging from the Hindu Vedas to the Greek Mysteries—and perhaps even helped to catalyze human evolution and civilization itself.

While most experts today are deeply skeptical of Wasson’s work, his claims for a psychedelic origin of spiritual experience remain hugely influential and still circulate widely in popular discourse. 

In the early 2000s, scholars at Johns Hopkins and New York University resurrected research on psilocybin, fifty years after Wasson’s early publications. In 2006, Roland R. Griffiths and his colleagues published the seminal article “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” which helped spark a new wave of scientific research into psilocybin and other psychedelics. 

Over the last two decades there has been a tremendous amount of research on the potential for psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA to treat a wide range of psychological disorders, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, and substance abuse. At the same time, not surprisingly, pharmaceutical companies have begun pouring millions of dollars into psychedelic research in the hopes of discovering a revolutionary new class of drugs. Meanwhile, mushrooms, both magical and nonmagical, have also saturated popular culture through films such as Fantastic Fungi and best-selling books such as The Immortality Key. Suddenly, it seems, the fascination with the magical possibilities of mushrooms is everywhere. 

Fantastic Fungi: What are psilocybe mushrooms and what is psilocybin? 

Psilocybe is a large genus of mushrooms containing over 150 species that are scattered on every continent of the globe. The larger biological category of which Psilocybe species are a part is the kingdom of fungi—a vast realm that includes everything from yeasts and molds to fleshy, spore-bearing bodies such as mushrooms. In turn, mushrooms play several critical roles in various ecosystems. While some are parasitic, feeding on and often killing other organisms, others are mycorrhizal, growing around the roots of trees and plants in mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships. Others, including Psilocybe species, are saprobic, meaning that they feed on dead and dying organic material, helping to break down and recycle other organisms. Psilocybe species thus tend to favor and even thrive in areas that have suffered environmental damage, whether natural or human-caused, where there is a great deal of dead organic matter to break down. 

We might legitimately wonder if we human seekers of the magic mushroom are not simply helping the fungus—consciously or unconsciously—with its own reproductive work.

As such, they have tended to follow human civilization, feeding on the wood chips and debris that surround our development, as well as our destruction of the natural environment. “As humans destroy woodlands and engage in artificial construction,” Paul Stamets explains, “Psilocybes and other litter saprophytes proliferate, feeding off the surplus of wood chips and refuse, especially in interface environments, wherever humans, forests and grasslands struggle to coexist. Since human development seems inextricably associated with ecological disturbance, Psilocybe mushrooms and civilization continue to coevolve.” 

The precise role of psilocybin in the mushroom’s evolution and its place in the larger ecosystem remains a bit unclear. Some researchers have suggested that psilocybin may have served as a defense mechanism against mushroom-eating organisms, deterring them by its toxic or disorienting effects. Others have speculated that psilocybin may have actually helped the mushroom spread its spores more widely by altering the behavior of animals who came into contact with it and so expanding its potential range of distribution. 

In this sense, we might legitimately wonder if we human seekers of the magic mushroom are not simply helping the fungus—consciously or unconsciously—with its own reproductive work. By growing these mushrooms all over the world and consuming them widely in altered states, are we perhaps helping the mushroom to do precisely what it has evolved to do—that is, to spread its spores as widely as possible, if necessary, through disoriented animals, including human animals? 

In comparison to other “classical psychedelics,” psilocybin is sort of midrange in its potency among human consumers: while it is roughly ten times more potent than mescaline, it is also about one hundred times less potent than LSD. At low to moderate doses, individuals often report more intense perceptions of color, shifting visual patterns, and deeper emotional connections. At higher doses, individuals may report a more radical shift in their perception of conventional reality, seeing the world in a new way, and experiencing a sense of expanded or even boundless consciousness. More daring psychonauts recommend “heroic doses” of five grams or more for those who want to achieve what he calls “shamanic” experiences, including encounters with supernatural beings and profound insights into the nature of reality. 

However, exactly how psilocybin and other psychedelics produce their specific effects in humans remains unclear. We know that psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD seem to latch very powerfully onto a particular receptor in the brain called the 5-HT2A receptor, but beyond that, we don’t yet have a very satisfactory explanation for the specific kinds of subjective effects and alterations of consciousness that they commonly produce. While the exact cause of psychedelic sorts of experiences—the sense of interconnectivity, loss of ego, transcendence of time and space, and so on—is not well understood, some researchers have offered possible explanations. 

The British psychopharmacologist Robin Carhart-Harris suggests there is evidence that psilocybin actually reduces brain activity, particularly in one brain system known as the “default mode network” (DMN). A centrally located hub of brain activity, the DMN links parts of the cerebral cortex to deeper structures involved in memory and emotion. As such, it functions as sort of the brain’s “orchestra conductor,” capital city, or corporate executive in charge of managing the entire system. Many speculate that it is closely tied to our self-construct, or what we commonly call the “self” or “ego”: “The default mode is most active when we are engaged in higher-level ‘metacognitive’ processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions (such as the self or ego), moral reasoning, and ‘theory of mind’—the ability to attribute mental states to others.” 

It should be emphasized, however, that the precise understanding of how psilocybin and other psychedelics work remains murky at best.

When psilocybin and other drugs reduce activity in this particular part of the brain, this can result in the sense of ego dissolution or transcendence of self commonly reported in psychedelic experiences—the melting away of the usual boundaries between self and world and the feeling of “Oceanic Boundlessness” or merging into some larger whole. At the same time, the DMN’s reduction may also let other brain areas become more active. No longer held in check by the DMN, other material not usually available to consciousness may float to the surface, including emotions, memories, and buried traumas. 

It should be emphasized, however, that the precise understanding of how psilocybin and other psychedelics work remains murky at best, and there are many lingering questions about the complex physical, psychological, cultural, and religious factors that help produce these experiences. More critical scholars, such as Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot, argue that the social and political setting in which the mushrooms are consumed is as important, if not more important, than the brain chemistry itself. 

Did psychedelic mushrooms play a role in the development of religion? 

For a relatively unassuming group of fungi, Psilocybe and other psychoactive mushrooms have generated intense debate over their possible role in the development of religion and of human culture more broadly. In the eyes of many mushroom enthusiasts—beginning with R. Gordon Wasson, then continuing with Terence McKenna, and resurfacing with more recent authors such as Brian C. Muraresku—psychedelic fungi lie at the very roots of religion itself, providing the chemical impetus that generated some of the earliest human mystical experiences, spiritual visions, and conceptions of the divine. 

From Wasson onward, many have identified psychedelic mushrooms as the source of mystical flights to other worlds, of the sacred beverage of the Eleusinian Mysteries, of the Vedic Soma ritual, and perhaps even of the Christian Eucharist. This idea has given birth to many best-selling books, such as Persephone’s Quest, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Food of the Gods, and more recently the aforementioned The Immortality Key. It has even resurfaced in mainstream magazines such as Popular Mechanics, which published an article on how “Magic Mushrooms May Have Shaped Our Consciousness.” 

More skeptical authors, conversely, have generally regarded these claims for the psychedelic origins of religion as fanciful, amateurish, and flawed. Most established scholars have dismissed or derided all the narratives of Wasson, McKenna, and Muraresku regarding the psychedelic origins of religion. 

The idea that there was widespread religious use of Psilocybe or other fungi outside of Mesoamerica remains an intriguing yet mostly imaginative speculation.

The historical evidence, it seems, offers a far more complicated picture than Wasson’s narrative of the ancient religious origins of mushroom use and its fortuitous rediscovery in the twentieth century. While some sort of mushrooms were clearly used in Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest, their identity is by no means clear, and (at least in the highly biased Spanish accounts) they were used as much for recreational as for “spiritual” purposes. The idea that they were a kind of “sacrament” was largely a projection of the Spanish Catholic clergy, who viewed them as a perverted form of the Christian Eucharist. 

Meanwhile, the idea that there was widespread religious use of Psilocybe or other fungi outside of Mesoamerica remains an intriguing yet mostly imaginative speculation. The evidence for a fungal basis for the soma beverage of the Vedas or the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries is indeed provocative but still contested by most Indologists and classicists today. None of this, of course, has prevented the idea of the fungal origin of religion from continuing to spread widely in popular culture and on the internet, where it remains a very common trope today. 

There is one curious and significant point about Psilocybe mushrooms that we should highlight. While psychoactive Psilocybe species are found in many regions across the globe, including North, Central, and South America; Europe; various parts of Africa; South and East Asia; and Australia, there is surprisingly little evidence that they were actually consumed by many human cultures outside of southern Mexico and a few other regions. As Erik Davis notes, “One of the curiosities about psilocybe mushrooms is that, while they are widely distributed across the planet, very few indigenous societies seemed to have been particularly interested in them.” 

In keeping with their unpredictable, spontaneous, and quite mysterious way of appearing and disappearing in nature, the presence of psychedelic mushrooms remains elusive in human history and religion. While we can perhaps catch a glimpse of them appearing in early Mesoamerica, we cannot say for certain what they were. While some were clearly used in Siberian shamanic traditions, that use—both religious and recreational—seems quite different from the ways in which they are used today. And while many authors have made claims about the religious roles of fungi in ancient India and ancient Greece, those claims seem speculative at best. At the same time, we still have to account for the fact that large swaths of human cultures, over long periods of history, appear to have ignored the many Amanitas, Psilocybes, and other psychedelic mushrooms growing all around them (and perhaps even feared and avoided them, as they did the many similar-looking poisonous species they encountered). 

Yet despite the scant and elusive nature of the existing evidence, the idea that psychedelic fungi lay at the roots of human religion and culture remains remarkably persistent. Much of this persistence is the result of popular discourses on psilocybin and other psychedelics that spread from the 1950s onward, particularly through the work of people like Wasson, Walter Pahnke, and McKenna. The psychedelic renaissance has recently revived this idea, as seen in books like The Immortality Key and others. In light of our own current fascination with magic mushrooms and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics in the twenty-first century, we probably have a strong tendency to read the historical evidence through a psychedelic lens, rather than assuming some other, nonpsychedelic basis for religious experience. 

We probably also have a strong desire to search for ancient sources of authority and legitimation for modern psychedelic use, rather than simply accepting it as “new.” These tendencies need to be subjected to some serious reflection and historical critique. 

Reprinted with permission from Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion by Hugh B. Urban, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

For ten years, I have been a professor of philosophy at a Moroccan public university that uses English as the language of instruction and employs a liberal arts pedagogical model. One of the reasons I was hired was my expertise in the debate on Islam and modern science. The university appreciated that, in addition to offering courses on classical themes and authors, I could communicate this debate to the students, who are overwhelmingly Muslim.

By cultural and family background, I am nonreligious, though deeply invested in research about religion. About twenty years ago, after my doctorate in philosophy, in which I attempted to study some formalized theories of knowledge, I decided to devote myself to studying the debate on science and religion. I was attracted to the world of ideas as much as I was when I decided to pursue philosophical studies, but I no longer wanted to deal with abstract theories that interested only a handful of hyperspecialized scholars. I wanted to study ideas that intertwine with worldviews, choices, and the lives of people outside academia, focusing on Islam. 

Overly simplistic notions and narratives, distortions of scientific methodology and information, and the idea that scripture should have the final say on matters of science seem to prevail.

I was soon exposed to different visions—some more academic, others more popular—all aimed at demonstrating, even if by using different and often conflicting arguments, the harmony of Islam and science. I became aware of the presence, at least in certain positions, of largely pseudoscientific ideas. “Pseudoscience” was in fact the term used, informally, by some authors who criticized the very theories I was studying. Several Muslim thinkers and authors promote positions reconciling Islam and science, and some explicitly criticize the intersection of pseudoscience and Islam. These positions, however, are far from the majority. Overly simplistic notions and narratives, distortions of scientific methodology and information, and the idea that scripture should have the final say on matters of science seem to prevail. 

A clearly pseudoscientific position was, for example, that of Harun Yahya (pseudonym of Adnan Oktar). This Turkish author built his reputation on a systematic attack on evolution conveyed through countless books and articles in many languages in a form of creationism presented as Islamic but in reality based on arguments that flourished among some Christian groups. 

Some popular authors also argued that the Qur’an—the sacred text of Islam, revealed in the seventh century CE—contained precise descriptions of phenomena verified by science centuries later. The idea was that such precision could only derive from God and could therefore confirm the divine origin of the holy book. This position seemed somewhat more original, at least at first glance, but it was argued based on interpretative exaggerations. 

Double standards are ubiquitous. 

One such favorite example given by my students is the Qur’anic reference to “two seas” that do not mix, which, they claim, is a fact confirmed only by modern science. “And it is He [God] who merged the two seas; this one fresh and sweet, and that one salty and bitter; and He placed between them a barrier, and an impassable boundary.” (25:53). Another passage reads “He merged the two seas, converging together; Between them is a barrier, which they do not overrun” (55:19–20).¹

The literature on the “miraculous scientific precision” of the Qur’an elaborates on the hydrological phenomenon allegedly “predicted” in scripture and even identifies these “two seas” with specific geographical locations. According to the Islamic preacher Dr. Zakir Naik, the verses should be understood in reference to a river flowing into the ocean; fresh water homogenizes into salty water, and the “barrier” should be read as a reference to the “transitional area.” The phenomenon, he adds, can be seen by the naked eye—for example, where the Nile flows into the Mediterranean Sea.²

Obviously, this interpretation raises several questions: if the river and the ocean actually end up mixing, how accurate is the reference to an “impassable boundary”? Furthermore, if we admit the phenomenon is visibly observable, in what sense would the verse anticipate modern science? 

This approach to the Qur’an has long been criticized, even by Muslim authors,³ but it is persistent. I’ve noticed that several authors, including academics, continue to support it in a “soft” (and ultimately specious) version. At a recent academic conference on religion and science, for example, a slide highlighting Qur’anic references to meteors read: “This approach has no aim of proof, but is intended as an invitation to reflection, inspiration, and as an illustration of the absence of antagonism between science and religion.” 

Survey data indicate that Muslim views on evolution vary considerably across countries. In some countries, acceptance and rejection are nearly evenly split, while in others—such as Pakistan—only about 30 percent of Muslims say they believe that humans and other living things have evolved.⁴Only a handful of scholars and scientists, such as molecular biologist Rana Dajani, have a public and visible position that ties together Islam and evolution, including human evolution. In my conversations with students, I have noted some resistance to evolution in two ways: by emphasizing the story of Adam and Eve (which is present in the Qur’an and in Islamic tradition, with some variations from the Christian one) and by declaring that evolution is unscientific. 

This richness of human relationships offsets the inevitable frustration of dealing with pseudoscience, which constantly resurfaces in old and new forms.

I’ve noticed that these ideas are also spread by some colleagues. On one occasion, a professor encouraged an audience of students to form their own opinion on evolution. Then, he held a talk full of creationist ideas, including that believing in evolution is like believing that a tornado can build an airplane by hitting a junkyard. I asked him what he thought of those Muslim scientists who do embrace evolution. He replied that they should be “ashamed” for rushing to embrace an unsupported theory. 

I have heard other colleagues impart notions of Intelligent Design, always with an Islamic twist. An author who systematically discredits evolution through this type of argument is Jordanian pharmacology professor Eyad Qunaibi, who has a YouTube video series that combines scriptural and theological arguments with the classic anti-evolution arguments of the Western and Christian type.₅

I also realized that students have often absorbed veritable urban legends, such as the one according to which a NASA lunar mission confirmed the “splitting of the moon”—a miracle alluded to in the Qur’an and spoken of in tradition. 

One thing that strikes me about the way academic authors and opinion makers in the Muslim world attempt to defend pseudoscientific or antiscientific ideas is their inconsistency in relying on authors who would hardly approve of a worldview based on a revealed religion, much less an Islamic one. For example, I’ve heard and read David Hume’s critique of induction invoked to argue that evolution is unscientific because it is a generalization and projection of known phenomena onto past places and times that cannot be observed.⁶ Hume did question induction, but he was also the philosopher who showed the weakness of those arguments according to which the world is so harmonious that it implies a creator or architect. 

Hume also thought that analogies between nature and human artifacts were indefensible, just as he found miracles incredible. He did not teach that “anything goes,” but that some beliefs are more plausible than others based on precedent. How can one enlist a representative of philosophical skepticism like Hume in defense of Intelligent Design and a sacred text? Even granting, for the sake of argument, that evolution wasn’t “scientific” enough (ignoring that it is confirmed from ample and convergent evidence from different fields), if we embraced Hume’s skeptical ideas in an extreme and radical form, why then would we seek information on the origin of biodiversity in the highly general, allusive, and interpretable verses of a sacred text? 

Another example of Islamic creationism is the use of the current scientific debate on evolution, in which scientists place different emphasis on different evolutionary factors. I have read, and I have been lectured by colleagues, on how this scientific debate ultimately demonstrates that evolution has not been understood well. Those same colleagues fail to consider that, regardless of the specific scientific interpretation of evolution, there will be no room in it for the story of Adam and Eve miraculously created.⁷ Diversity of interpretation among scientists is overstated, and diversity of views among theologians is passed over in silence or dismissed. 

I always make sure to present students with all the options, including those I consider erroneous, explaining the potential weaknesses and challenges of each.

Similarly, I have heard Karl Popper invoked to argue that evolution is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable.⁸ Here too, not only is the fact that evolution is falsifiable ignored (for example, if we found fossil records that disproved it), but also that creationist theories and “scientific” readings of the Qur’an are often constructed in such a way as not to be falsifiable. When a critic identifies a verse or term that conflicts with science, many authors rush to point out that science is not the ultimate truth and that it can change. Yet they ignore this very idea when they want to “confirm” the Qur’an with science.⁹ So much for falsifiability. In general, notions of philosophy of science and postmodernism are invoked to downplay science, but then it is not explained why a revealed text should be embraced as the truth. Double standards are ubiquitous. 

Another element present in discussions with religious apologists is a tendency to employ sophistical arguments, with unstated premises, unexplored objections, and even attempts to embarrass the interlocutors. For example, I was once asked whether incest accompanied by contraceptives is permissible. Despite being open-minded, I was struck by the example and could not help thinking that sometimes the sexual imagination of supposedly conservative people surpasses that of those with much more liberal views. But what was the strategy behind asking such a question? 

The clarification regarding contraceptives was intended to block an objection based on genetic considerations. Had one responded with remarks even vaguely construed as favorable to incest, they would have appeared (to a religious audience) as the supporter of a relativist, morally corrupt position. Had one answered that they felt an aversion to the practice of incest, such an observation would have been used to argue that there are innate moral principles instilled by God (even in a nonbeliever) and that they demonstrate God’s existence. This type of argument ignores, for example, that there are explanations and justifications for morality and ethics that rely on evolutionary notions. Even if we admitted the existence of innate universal ethical principles, it’s simply not clear why they would demonstrate the existence of the God of a specific revelation. 

As I conclude in my book Islam and Pseudoscience (Cambridge University Press, 2025), many ideas and practices related to Islam and modern science can be called “pseudoscientific” according to one specialist description or another, but what matters, ultimately, is that they are demonstrably flawed. 

An important point to emphasize is that pseudoscience is not essentially Islamic or that Islam is not necessarily a generator or host of pseudoscience.

I always make sure to present students with all the options, including those I consider erroneous, explaining the potential weaknesses and challenges of each. This also applies to positions that I appreciate. For example, I sympathize with authors such as the molecular biologist Rana Dajani, who embraces human evolution, but I think it remains a delicate task to read the story of Adam and Eve in a way that is not hostile to evolution, and there is the theological challenge of reconciling all the death and suffering entailed by evolution with the idea of God’s goodness. 

An important point to emphasize is that pseudoscience is not essentially Islamic or that Islam is not necessarily a generator or host of pseudoscience. For example, it can be shown that various arguments typical of creationism or Intelligent Design, while being linked by Muslim authors to specific verses of the Qur’an, have been originally promoted by Christian authors. In some cases, Western–Islamic collaboration on creationism or the importation of materials and ideas has been demonstrated by historians. 

Wet cupping, a form of bloodletting performed with vacuum-filled cups, is popular among Muslims, having been recommended by the Prophet. However, it is also advocated by traditional Chinese medicine (and it is based on an outdated, erroneous understanding of human physiology). As an educator, I find it important both to show why certain ideas and practices are flawed or even dangerous, and to deconstruct the illusion of uniqueness and cultural exceptionalism they create (“my religion has a privileged relationship with science”). 

Finally, it’s important to highlight Muslim critics of pseudoscience and their arguments. For example, the astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum observes that the Prophet obviously knew and appreciated the healing practices of his times, and this shouldn’t be overstated. In other words, we now know that many herbs and practices used in the past are ineffective and sometimes also harmful, while modern pharmacology has distilled the active ingredients of yet other herbs appreciated in antiquity. There is no need to reject “modern” medicine and to consider the Prophet’s practices as binding.¹⁰

Medical matters are particularly interesting. One can see that Islam has sometimes been exploited to promote anti-science positions—for example, by rejecting vaccines because of the presence of products forbidden in Islam or by arguing, based on Qur’anic verses, that the human body was created perfect as it is (along with other arguments typical of global anti-vaxxers).¹¹ However, there are also cases of Muslim leaders who have instead urged their followers to use vaccines in line with Islamic ethics and self-care.¹²

Showcasing the plurality of critics of such ideas, including those who are Muslims like Dajani and Guessoum, defuses the approach of those who present a single reading of scripture as if it were the sole Islamic point of view and who are reluctant to explore objections to their ideas. 

Once all the critiques, interpretations, and challenges have been fully and honestly presented, the students are free to choose. I’ve noticed that this pedagogy allows for deep connections to be forged even with students who, at the end of the course, may not want to abandon creationism or other flawed ideas. This richness of human relationships offsets the inevitable frustration of dealing with pseudoscience, which constantly resurfaces in old and new forms.

A review of the 2026 satirical black comedy film Digger directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise and John Goodman, released by Warner Bros.

The people running the world in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger have mastered everything except the job. They can command a room and invoke a higher purpose. Faced with an environmental catastrophe after an Arctic drilling accident has sent an enormous iceberg toward Europe, however, they struggle to work out what to do. The spectacle of their inadequacy makes for a wonderfully unnerving comedy: the world has assembled an extraordinary concentration of power and entrusted it to people who seem barely able to manage a meeting.

But there is much more to the film than that. Its marketing presents a comedy about an environmental disaster caused by a vain, out-of-touch billionaire. Twice, however, Digger takes a turn so ambitious and wild that revealing either would spoil the viewing experience. 

Digger reminds me of the movies I would watch as a kid with my mom in the theater. If you go the bathroom or to get soda, you’ve missed critical scenes—when you get back to your seat you ask “what happened, what did I miss?” and it’s just not possible to explain. It is a brilliant movie, and you’ll be thinking about it for a long time. Go not knowing anything about it and avoid spoilers at all costs. This review was written so as not to give away too much of what makes the film so delightful to watch on the big screen. 

For much of the film, Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an aging oil magnate whose drilling operation has unleashed a vast mass of Arctic ice the size of Maryland that threatens to collide with Western Europe in three days, causing massive tidal waves across the North Sea. His attempts to confront the crisis bring him into contact with scientific advisers, the American political establishment (notably U.S. President Compson, starring John Goodman), and a European Parliament that has considerable trouble distinguishing a persuasive speaker from a responsible one. Across these encounters, Iñárritu keeps returning to a dispiriting mismatch between the qualities that win power and those required to exercise it.

Cruise’s casting gives that mismatch a particular bite. His screen presence has so often promised that the impossible will get done. Here, the same confidence belongs to a man whose sense of his own importance has outrun his judgment. Digger can be appalling and still hold our attention; indeed, his ability to do so is central to the problem.

John Goodman is superb as U.S. President Compson, who suggests a grotesque composite of Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump. The resemblance belongs to an entire exhausted political class as much as to any individual. Goodman makes the presidency feel immense and its occupant conspicuously unequal to it—old, out of touch, and physically incapable. The scientific advisers fare little better in practice. They struggle to explain the impending danger in terms their listeners (Digger, the president, military leaders) can grasp and turn their knowledge into a course of action. Being better informed than the president proves insufficient to change anything, to say the least.

The public’s perception of the crisis seems to trouble the administration more than the crisis itself. What ought to be a search for solutions acquires the queasy logic of a public-relations meeting held during a fire—significant time is spent on managing the perception of the crisis on social media.

A hilarious scene in which Digger and his environmental scientist eat tuna brings the same instinct to the dinner table. The film punctures the mystique of organic food, with the reassuring story attached to the meal appearing to count for more than any meaningful difference in what is on the plate. Conscientious consumption becomes another way of buying a flattering picture of oneself.

Religion supplies another familiar aid to authority. The kitsch piety that adorns the highest reaches of government lends their earthly ambitions a borrowed grandeur.

The military-industrial complex, meanwhile, has little difficulty finding its way into the proceedings. Its ability to remain indispensable seems far more dependable than anyone’s ability to solve the problem. Religion supplies another familiar aid to authority. The kitsch piety that adorns the highest reaches of government lends their earthly ambitions a borrowed grandeur. There is something especially funny, and rather chilling, about the ease with which the powerful recruit God only for it to make absolutely no difference whatsoever.

The European Parliament sequence gives these failures their most concentrated expression. Its members demand explanations—from the U.S. administration, from scientific experts, even from Digger—yet seem incapable of much more than that. The U.S. Vice President and the expert are booed, while Digger gets some laughs. Indeed, the man whose business caused the catastrophe understands the room better than the people attempting to warn it. A chamber ostensibly devoted to deliberation behaves like an audience waiting for a good act. Cruise’s command of the scene (arguably the highlight of the entire film) implicates the viewer in it. We, too, can appreciate a well-delivered insult more readily than a complicated explanation.

What many of us, including our leaders, ultimately care about in difficult circumstances is not finding a solution, but placing the blame on someone else.

Digger’s charge of hypocrisy has enough force to unsettle the easy pleasure of watching a villain expose himself. He accuses Europe of regulating energy production out of its own backyard while continuing to buy the product from elsewhere. The legislators’ confidence in their safeguards runs up against a disaster that observes no borders. They can regulate what happens within their jurisdiction; the catastrophe is under no obligation to recognize it. Confronted with the consequences, they appear hopelessly ill-prepared. The scene gives Digger a damaging point and leaves his culpability intact. Someone else’s hypocrisy offers him a line of attack, rather than an alibi. It’s a meaningful scene, which shows that what many of us, including our leaders, ultimately care about in difficult circumstances is not finding a solution, but placing the blame on someone else.

The European Parliament building itself, visibly dilapidated, depicts the issue very well: An institution presuming to safeguard the future seems unable to maintain its own premises, down to a wilting flower and leaking roof. Outside, as environmental catastrophe approaches, demonstrators gather to protest… genocide. The juxtaposition is deliberately abrasive. The public, like its leaders, has trouble departing from the performance it knows.

The apparent exception is Kenny (Jesse Plemons), a technology magnate with a distinctly Palantir-like aura. He seems capable of getting something done, which gives him an almost indecent appeal in this company. His presence makes our longing for competent authority uncomfortable. After so much dithering, we may be grateful enough for efficiency to stop asking whose selfish purpose it serves—and Kenny is, indeed, the reason for much of what we see unfold in the film.

Without revealing too much about how the narrative of Digger is constructed, it’s fair to say Iñárritu repeatedly pulls back to reveal the machinery behind the spectacle. These shifts make our own behavior difficult to ignore. We enjoy the humiliations and choose our favorites, responding to matters of collective survival with partisan enthusiasm. A film that has encouraged us to recognize the incompetence of its characters starts to progressively expose our pleasure in recognizing it. When Digger dies before the audience in the film (this will make sense once you see the movie), the spectators shout “Fuck you, Digger!” in unison. Their anger registers as some sort of understanding of what just happened while giving them the comfortable sensation of having done something about it when, as the next scene reveals, they did not and could not have done absolutely anything meaningful.

The film looks and sounds magnificent. Working in the old VistaVision format (a short-lived high-resolution motion-picture film format from the 1950s), cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki gives these assemblies of powerful and ultimately powerless people a visual elegance that makes their antics all the more disconcerting. The wide-angle compositions (with a changing aspect ratio!) let us study the performers and the spaces that confer their authority. Color and light carry meaning in each scene, while metallic clangs in the sound design jolt us out of easy contemplation. Image and sound work together to give the theatrical form a wonderfully physical presence. The beauty of the spectacle helps explain why we want to keep watching, even as we come to distrust the show.

Even Digger’s devotion to his ailing cat, Maggie, is an interesting metaphor. The pet has acquired the standing of a child, and keeping her alive becomes an undertaking of extravagant expense and dubious mercy. The animal suffers without understanding the interventions meant to save her. Maggie can be read as a miniature of the public, helpless before decisions made on her behalf and oblivious to the actual machinery that determines her fate.

Digger has the openness to interpretation that gives great art its staying power. Its politics resist a single label because its scrutiny keeps moving, eventually reaching the person in the seat just before the end credits. That gives the film a life well beyond its topical targets. You may enter the theater expecting to recognize the people running the world, or a condescending diatribe about environmental disaster.

You leave having been given an unexpectedly good look at yourself.

We spent the twentieth century beating measles, polio, and newborn hepatitis B into statistical irrelevance. In 2025, the man who fought hardest against that victory was put in charge of federal vaccine policy. How did this happen? And what is going to happen now?

Vaccines have worked, spectacularly, for a hundred years. 

It’s far too easy to forget a war we won so thoroughly that most people alive today have never seen a casualty. 

Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, the disease killed an estimated 2.6 million people worldwide every year. Afterward, U.S. case counts fell more than 90 percent within five years, and by the early 1980s, they had dropped by 99 percent. This decline held even through a mid-1970s rebound when vaccination coverage briefly slipped. Smallpox, a disease that racked up a body count in the hundreds of millions in the twentieth century alone, was declared eradicated from the planet in 1980. This may be the only time in human history we have ever actually defeated a disease rather than just managing it. Polio went from paralyzing tens of thousands of American kids every year in the 1950s to hiding out in only a handful of countries because of political conflict. Globally, the WHO’s immunization program is credited with saving something on the order of 150 million lives over the last fifty years; the overwhelming majority of those were infants and children under the age of five. 

This is not a controversial scientific claim. It’s closer to the idea that infectious diseases are caused by germs rather than swamp vapors or curses. Vaccines don’t just prevent death. A much larger number of people live their lives without disability as a result. Every case of paralytic polio we didn’t get, every child who didn’t go deaf from mumps, and every baby who didn’t develop the liver damage that comes with chronic hepatitis B is a life that doesn’t show up as a morbidity statistic. When people talk about the “cost” of vaccination programs, they sometimes forget the other side of the ledger: the daily count of children who never got sick. How did we ever decide this was a bad idea? 

Andrew Wakefield 

One man, a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield, is almost single-handedly the reason “vaccines cause autism” is a sentence that exists in the English language at all. 

In 1998, Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in only twelve children, with no control group. Twelve. It has since been shown to be a fraud from top to bottom, including undisclosed payments from a lawyer building a case against vaccine manufacturers, manipulated case histories, and ethics violations that got Wakefield stripped of his medical license. The Lancet fully retracted the paper as “utterly false” in 2010. Most of his coauthors distanced themselves from the paper years before The Lancet retracted it. 

“Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” —Jonathan Swift 

None of this mattered, because by the time careful research had gotten around to debunking it, the story had already escaped the lab and gone feral in the press. British and Irish measles vaccination rates cratered, falling as low as 61 percent in parts of London. Inevitably, measles came roaring back hard enough that the UK lost its WHO measles-elimination status for the first time in 2018–19, just two years after finally earning it. The UK regained the status in 2021, then lost it again in January 2026—a pattern we might be seeing develop here on the other side of the Atlantic. Paul Offit, a pediatrician who has spent his career watching this unfold, put it about as bluntly as a professional can: “That paper killed children.” Children were dying of vaccine-preventable diseases because parents declined vaccination based on a fraudulent paper. That’s about as clean a causal chain as epidemiology ever hands you. 

The measles vaccine scare hit the U.S. less like a tidal wave and more like a slow-acting toxin. It fed the “vaccine court” litigation boom of the 2000s, which saw nearly 5,000 claims that vaccines caused autism. Every single case failed when the evidence was examined. It’s worth pausing to consider that: the legal system, using a lower evidentiary bar than a peer-reviewed journal, still couldn’t find a single case where this held up. It just doesn’t happen. 

A Cochrane review of roughly 14.7 million children found no connection between vaccines and autism. A Danish study followed over 650,000 kids, including those with autistic siblings who were presumably at higher risk, and found nothing. But litigation losses don’t kill beliefs; simply debunking them with evidence is not enough. As of a 2024 survey, roughly one in ten American adults still believe vaccines probably or definitely cause autism, and about a quarter of the public still doesn’t believe the CDC has ever clearly said otherwise. Twenty-eight years of unanimous negative studies, and the belief just sits there. And now it is being fed by the highest medical authority in the land—a branch of the federal government. 

RFK Jr. 

To be fair to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he did not invent vaccine skepticism. He just climbed on for the ride. For roughly twenty years before he became Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy ran an organization called Children’s Health Defense, whose entire business model was convincing people that vaccines are dangerous, that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and, memorably, that airplane contrails are a secret chemical weapons program. Scientific American ran a piece in 2017 cataloging a decade of vaccine science distortion under his byline. This is not a man who earned his way into the job with an open mind; he came in with a set of beliefs he has been spreading for years. 

Kennedy said his own kids were vaccinated, and he told the public that the MMR shot was the most effective way to stop the disease from spreading. 

Here’s the genuinely strange part, though—the part that should make anyone do a double take: during his confirmation hearings and at times during the current measles outbreak, Kennedy said his own kids were vaccinated and called the MMR shot the most effective way to stop disease spread. Officially, he offers science-backed guidelines the barest support; elsewhere, he questions them and tells people to decide for themselves. In the same news cycle, he’d write an op-ed framing vaccination as a personal choice, suggest on TV that healthy kids can’t die of an infectious disease, or praise a doctor treating measles with cod liver oil and an antibiotic that has no effect on a virus. It’s a strange rhetorical move unless your goal is plausible deniability. 

Secretary Kennedy also fired all seventeen members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the independent experts who write the actual vaccine schedule. He justified this by citing a 2009 report claiming 97 percent of its members had financial conflicts of interest. This sounds reasonable until you learn that public health officials pointed out the 97 percent figure was about missing paperwork signatures, not money, and that only one of the seventeen members had a real, disclosed conflict. Then, months after the firing, a peer-reviewed JAMA study came out showing that conflicts of interest on the committee had fallen from 42.8 percent in 2000 to about five percent by 2024. Secretary Kennedy purged the committee for alleged corruption at the exact historical moment it was cleaner than it had been in a generation. Unfortunately, several of his own hand-picked replacements turned out to be vaccine “skeptics” who were paid expert witnesses in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. 

The Purge, the Panel, and the Fictional Citation 

Once Kennedy sat behind the steering wheel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the changes came fast. The new panel’s first real act was voting to strip a preservative called thimerosal out of flu vaccines, based on a presentation from a former colleague of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group that reportedly cited a study that does not exist. Not a flawed study. Not a study since retracted. A study that, as far as anyone can determine, was never published because it was never conducted. That slide was quietly pulled before the final presentation, but the vote happened anyway, thimerosal’s actual decades of safety data notwithstanding. 

By September 2025, the panel terminated its recommendation for the combined MMRV shot in kids under four. By December, it voted to scrap the universal recommendation that newborns get a hepatitis B vaccine at birth—a policy that had driven a 99 percent drop in pediatric hepatitis B cases since 1990—replacing it with a system based on testing the mother’s infection status, a policy known to greatly decrease the uptake of the vaccine. One of the panel’s own members, who voted against the change, said the quiet part out loud: “We are doing harm by changing this, and I hope the committee accepts responsibility when that harm shows up.” 

In August 2026, the Trump administration released its own “Gold Standard” guidelines by executive order. Among other changes, it recommends splitting the MMR into separate shots to be given at separate visits, even though no single-disease vaccines for measles, mumps, or rubella are licensed in the United States and there is no scientific evidence of any benefit to splitting them. The order’s own fact sheet leans on the one argument in this whole saga that might sound reasonable to a layperson: that the U.S. recommends more vaccine doses than any peer nation. That’s true, and it’s also meaningless. The vaccine schedule is based on what diseases we are trying to protect against and how our health system works. More on that later. 

This executive order triggered an exodus among career health officials. The CDC director was ousted in August. The FDA’s top vaccine official resigned, writing that the administration wanted subservient confirmation of its preferred narrative rather than actual transparency. Nine former CDC directors, spanning both parties, wrote publicly that the agency’s shakeup was unlike anything the country had experienced. 

We can skip the theoretical debate about what happens when you weaken a vaccine schedule, because now we are running the experiment on our own children.

So far, several medical and scientific organizations have decided that it is worth taking up this fight. The American Academy of Pediatrics sued over the ACIP overhaul. In March 2026, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction, finding the government had disregarded the scientific process and undermined the integrity of its own actions. The new committee’s votes were stayed. HHS has since appealed the ruling to the First Circuit. This is an ongoing story and worth following in the news. 

Measles, Meet 2026: A Controlled Trial You Didn’t Ask For 

We can skip the theoretical debate about what happens when you weaken a vaccine schedule, because now we are running the experiment on our own children. 

The U.S. declared measles eliminated in 2000. In January 2025, an outbreak started in an under-vaccinated Mennonite community in West Texas, where kindergarten measles vaccine rates had fallen to 77 percent—well below the 95 percent needed for herd immunity against a virus this contagious. By the time Texas declared its local outbreak over in August, it had logged 762 cases. The CDC tallied 2,289 cases across 44 states and nearly 50 separate outbreaks last year, the worst record in 25 years. Three Americans died. All three were unvaccinated; two were children. So far this year (writing in September 2026), there have been 3,134 cases—the highest annual total in more than 35 years. And this time, nearly 1,000 cases in South Carolina show that it won’t be confined to one insular community. No 2026 death has been officially confirmed yet, but Pennsylvania reported two measles-associated deaths on August 25, and Reuters reported that Secretary Kennedy himself asked his own CDC director to strip any reference to them from the agency’s public case tally while their cause is “under review.” 

Secretary Kennedy’s initial public response to the first child’s death was to describe the outbreak as “not unusual,” and to claim, incorrectly, that hospitalized patients were mostly there for quarantine rather than because they were struggling to breathe. Infectious disease specialists pushed back immediately and specifically: the death was preventable, full stop. Describing a first pediatric measles death in a decade as business as usual is not a scientific position; it’s a statement of belief. Meanwhile, real children were showing up in Texas hospitals with vitamin A toxicity because their parents had been told, by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, that vitamin A was a near-miraculous measles treatment. It is not. It has a narrow, legitimate role for the rare child who is already deficient. It is not a substitute for a vaccine with decades of safety data behind it. Using it as a treatment poisoned kids who were already sick with a dangerous disease. 

Doing the Math 

Before universal hepatitis B vaccination, about 18,000 American infants and children were infected every year. The policy of giving it to all children at birth decreased this number by 99 percent between 1990 and 2019. A policy that delays this by testing the mother first sounds reasonable but runs directly into the reality that testing takes time, results get lost, and follow-through is not guaranteed. Move the vaccination rate down even modestly and you are looking at thousands of preventable chronic infections a year, each one requiring a lifetime of monitoring, potential liver disease, and costs that dwarf the price of the shot it replaced. 

Measles math is even less forgiving. The virus is one of the most contagious pathogens known to exist. Every case will infect 8 to 18 others in an unprotected population. That’s why the herd-immunity threshold—the amount of the population that needs to be vaccinated to prevent spread—sits at roughly 95 percent. Most U.S. states have now slipped below this. With a documented case-fatality rate in the 2025 outbreak of roughly one to three deaths per thousand cases, and a much greater number suffering pneumonia or encephalitis (brain infection) severe enough for hospitalization, the honest forecast isn’t one dramatic national epidemic. It’s what we’re already seeing: a steady toll of smaller, geographically scattered outbreaks, each one arriving after a community’s coverage dips below the threshold. One unsettling part of this is that tracking immunity levels is the work done by epidemiologists rather than cabinet secretaries. Many of those scientists were on the ACIP staff whose jobs were “reorganized” out of existence. 

What do other countries do? 

One of the claims of the August 2026 “Gold Standard” executive order is that other countries recommend fewer vaccines against different diseases on different schedules. 

This is based on several easy-to-understand reasons. Different countries are burdened with different diseases and have differing resources to combat them. If TB is prevalent, then the BCG vaccine is often used—not so in the U.S. In South Korea and Japan, Japanese encephalitis is common, so a vaccine against it is routine. So far, it isn’t here. 

Before the 2026 executive overhaul, the U.S. schedule recommended vaccination against 18 diseases. A STAT News analysis of 38 countries put the average at 14 diseases. Several wealthy peer nations were close behind the old U.S. number: Greece recommends 17, Germany and the Netherlands cover 14 to 15, and South Korea recommends 18. The UK, after adding rotavirus, RSV, and a combined chickenpox shot over the past two years, covers essentially the same list as the U.S. 

The “Make America Healthy Again” report was found to cite studies that don’t exist, in a pattern researchers flagged as characteristic of unedited generative-AI output.

There is exactly one wealthy country that is an outlier: Denmark, which vaccinates against 10 diseases. Curiously, one of the authors of the “Gold Standard” order is a dual U.S.-Danish citizen who trained there. Comparing a country with a population of six million, a single-payer health system, and national electronic health records to one with 343 million—including tens of millions of uninsured—is not good epidemiology. For example, Denmark can vaccinate only at-risk pregnant women against RSV rather than all children, as is the case in the United States. 

That’s the actual answer to why countries differ: not because there is any evidence that more vaccines or more diseases covered in one vaccine are dangerous. Many countries have decided that they just can’t afford vaccination against some diseases like flu and rotavirus. Every country in this comparison, Denmark included, still universally vaccinates against the diseases that actually kill and disable children at scale—measles, pertussis, and polio. Nobody is skipping those. Which answers the question of outcomes too: there are no major differences in schedule for the diseases the whole world has agreed to fight. But decreasing this schedule will matter a great deal. Kate O’Brien, WHO’s director of immunization, put it about as plainly as an international health official ever does: “When we stop using the vaccines, these diseases are coming back. There’s no ambiguity about that.” 

There’s a final irony worth reviewing. By cutting the schedule to 11 diseases to resemble a supposed international norm, the new U.S. schedule doesn’t land near that norm but drops below nearly every country in the 38-country analysis—ahead of only Denmark and Vietnam, and now behind Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, China, and Guinea-Bissau, a West African nation nowhere near the United States’ economic weight class. The U.S. didn’t converge with its peers; rather, it became the new outlier. 

An Intellectual Vaccine 

This ongoing story highlights another epidemic that I think we desperately need to be vaccinated against. News media have been infected with a “balance bias.” This is the same trap that led to the spread of the Wakefield hoax back in 1998. Back then, the media inflated a 12-person study into a national panic. Now, they are giving equal time to a fringe political point of view against the massive weight of an effective scientific consensus. An advocacy group’s talking points are given the same presentation as research-supported scientific evidence. The public is being left to “decide for themselves,” or even worse, “do their own research.” Opinions are held equal to experts. And here’s a distinctly modern wrinkle: The administration’s own “Make America Healthy Again” report was found to cite studies that don’t exist, in a pattern researchers flagged as characteristic of unedited generative-AI output, complete with a citation format traceable to a specific AI company’s tools. Wakefield only needed a fraudulent lab and a compliant journal to fake credibility. 

The Bottom Line 

There is a pattern here. Every individual decision—firing a clean committee for alleged corruption, pulling a preservative based on a nonexistent study, ending a birth-dose policy that had driven a real disease toward the vanishing point, and rewriting a federal website to say the opposite of what the evidence says—points in the same direction. We are moving away from safety. 

We achieved the eradication of smallpox and the near-elimination of measles through a slow, unglamorous accumulation of evidence, regulation, and expertise nobody paid much attention to until ignorance started dismantling it. We may be the victims of our own successes. 

♦ ♦ ♦

CODA: The Making and Unmaking of Andrew Wakefield 

Andrew Wakefield’s measles theory didn’t start with vaccines. He had been a well-known transplant surgeon when he noticed that the lesions of Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel condition, looked something like the lesions that can occur when measles infects the gut. He managed to overlook the fact that measles also causes identical lesions in the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs—tissues with nothing to do with Crohn’s disease. Rather than testing to see if the idea was wrong, he went looking for evidence it was right. 

In 1993, he claimed to find measles virus in 13 of 15 gut samples, confirming his hunch. However, no other lab has ever replicated this finding, including, notably, a molecular biologist inside Wakefield’s own research group who used more sensitive, specific methods and found nothing. The original result is now understood to have come from antibodies that weren’t actually measles-specific—a false positive dressed up as a discovery. 

Two years later, he extended the claim from finding wild measles virus in the gut to finding the vaccine strain itself. This led him erroneously to think that if the natural virus could harm the gut, perhaps the weakened version in the live MMR vaccine could too. 

In 1996, he filed a patent for a laboratory test to detect the virus—wild or vaccine strain—in bowel tissue as a diagnostic for Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. The test had no value unless doctors came to accept that a vaccine-derived measles virus persisting in the gut was real and worth testing for. He filed the application from his home address rather than his university’s. 

In February 1996, a lawyer named Richard Barr was constructing a lawsuit against MMR manufacturers on behalf of parents who believed the vaccine had harmed their children. He hired Wakefield on retainer at £150 an hour. Wakefield ultimately collected £435,643 plus expenses—close to $900,000 today—for research to support that litigation. He disclosed this to neither The Lancet nor his own coauthors. 

Describing a first pediatric measles death in a decade as business as usual is not a scientific position; it’s a statement of belief.

At that time, Wakefield extended his claims that the measles vaccine was the cause of Crohn’s disease to also assert that it was responsible for the increasing incidence of autism. To justify his hypothesis connecting gut damage to the brain, he promoted a long-simmering theory of “alternative” medicine known as the “leaky gut” hypothesis: that inflamed intestines “leak” undigested proteins into the bloodstream that cross into the brain and trigger developmental regression. This hypothesis, the one piece of the theory trying to link the vaccine to autism, has never been demonstrated at any point, before or after. 

When he applied for funding for the study that was ultimately published in The Lancet, he already asserted the conclusion: “The evidence is undeniably in favour of a specific vaccine induced pathology.” The children in the study weren’t an ordinary clinical sample. Journalist Brian Deer later established that eleven of the twelve had been steered to Wakefield through anti-MMR campaign groups tied to Barr’s lawsuit. Several had documented developmental problems prior to their vaccination, contradicting the paper’s claim that they’d been developing normally until the shot. 

Slowly, as is often the case with good research, each hypothetical link in this causal chain was tested and found to be broken. No measles virus in Crohn’s tissue, no measles virus in the guts of autistic children, and no leaky-gut pathway to the brain that anyone could show. Wakefield’s patented measles gut test hadn’t followed from evidence that vaccines were dangerous. It had preceded the evidence—which he then spent the next decade trying, and failing, to manufacture. 

None of this surfaced for years. The Lancet’s reviewers missed it. The press ran the story exactly as pitched: a lone doctor blowing the whistle on a vaccine cover-up. It took The Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer, digging on his own initiative from 2003 onward, to track down medical records, court filings, and funding documents Wakefield never intended to surface. Deer’s first exposé ran in February 2004; ten of Wakefield’s twelve coauthors formally retracted the paper’s interpretation within weeks. Wakefield did not. 

The official reckoning took six more years. Britain’s General Medical Council opened its investigation in 2007 and ran the longest fitness-to-practice hearing in its history. It concluded in January 2010, finding against Wakefield on more than 30 charges, including dishonesty and a dozen counts of “callous disregard” for the children. This included: general anesthesia, colonoscopies, lumbar punctures, and barium X-rays that weren’t clinically indicated. The Lancet fully retracted the paper, and Wakefield’s license to practice was revoked. 

He has never been criminally charged. A regulatory fraud finding isn’t a conviction, and losing his license didn’t stop him from working. He relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2001, years ahead of the GMC’s ruling, and ran a clinic there treating children for his invented diagnosis until he resigned in 2010. He went on to write and direct the anti-vaccine documentary Vaxxed, which Robert De Niro initially programmed into the Tribeca Film Festival. Nearly three decades after the paper, he remains a headline draw on the anti-vaccine conference circuit—not as a discredited researcher in exile, but as the founding martyr of a movement his own fraud helped create.

Recent surveys, followed by extensive media coverage of their findings, show that American liberals—and liberal young women in particular—are more likely than conservatives to self-identify as having struggled with anxiety and depression. What isn’t clear is why.

A 2022 paper titled “The Politics of Depression” reported that liberal girls self-reported a higher depressive affect score than liberal boys, conservative girls, and conservative boys, with liberal boys reporting the second highest score. The same trends hold when it comes to negative self-esteem and self-derogation. These scores remained true across multiple demographics, including income, education, race, and age. Conservatives with a postgraduate education were the happiest, and conservatives making only $30,000 a year or less were still as happy as liberals who made six-figure incomes. It’s also worth noting that in terms of personality traits, “[the] politically liberal tend to be higher on openness to experience (complexity of mental life) and neuroticism (negative emotionality),” two of the Big Five personality dimensions (the others being conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness). 

Mental health conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.) lack the kind of direct, observer-independent biomarkers that define diabetes (fasting glucose, HbA1c, oral glucose tolerance test) and other physical conditions. Diagnosis and population statistics measuring mental health therefore lean heavily on self-report instruments or clinician interviews that still depend on the patient’s description of internal states. Because of that reliance, group differences (sex, culture, cohort, socioeconomic status) are always ambiguous: they could reflect differences in underlying neurobiology/functioning, differences in willingness or ability to report distress, differences in interpretive frameworks (“what counts as low mood”), or some mixture. This is a real and well-recognized limitation in psychiatric epidemiology. In other words, a flaw in relying on self-reports is that we’re less sure if the difference in health is objectively accurate or if a difference in the perception of health is driving the difference.

Mental health conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.) lack the kind of direct, observer-independent biomarkers that define diabetes (fasting glucose, HbA1c, oral glucose tolerance test) and other physical conditions.

A study by Brian F. Schaffner et al. proposed, “One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term.” Schaffner added that “under a conservative ideology that emphasizes stability, security and personal agency, the thought of mental illness may invite thoughts of the unknown, or appear as a threat to their security,” pointing to the fact that when they substituted the term “overall mood” for “mental health,” the gap they originally found in their study disappeared.

Conservatives do score higher than liberals on the personality trait conscientiousness, which is defined as socialized impulse control, which would lend itself more to avoiding stigmatizing issues. Several studies back up the theory that conservative ideologies are more stigmatizing of mental illness because conservatives are more likely to view the mentally ill as a threat or weakness. Other studies have found that Republicans are less likely to seek mental health help and are less likely to trust the institutions providing mental health information. 

Given this research, I would like to suggest that it is possible that conservatives’ view of mental health and associated institutions may skew data to make it seem as if conservatives are mentally healthier than liberals, who are comparatively more accepting of the terminology around mental health and mental illness. However, this isn’t fully explanatory because it wouldn’t account for the connection between liberalism and neuroticism or some of the data from the “Politics of Depression” paper on less jargon-laden terms, such as self-esteem.

Another possible explanation is that liberals are more likely to consider struggles to be an illness due to a broader conception of harm. Dr. Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, said, “There is a fairly strong relationship between having a more progressive liberal political ideology and having a broader concept of harm,” referring to the concept creep of terms describing harm, such as “trauma.”

When filling out mental health questionnaires, participants can fairly easily understand what their scores will come out as, and if they’re more likely to see themselves as having a clinical problem, they may be more likely to skew their answers toward that result. Importantly, this does not require participants to be lying or intentionally exaggerating. When a mental health assessment question asks, “How often do you feel down? Never, occasionally, often, or nearly all of the time,” it is a highly subjective question. If I felt “down,” whatever my interpretation of that term is, on and off for about six days out of the last 14, is that occasionally or often? If I wanted my pain validated and treated because I felt it was problematic, I’d be more likely to put “often,” but if I did not perceive myself as having a clinical problem, I may call it “occasional.” 

There is a gap between what liberals and conservatives consider clinical depression, and liberals will be more likely to explain that gap by citing data that concludes conservatives support stigmatization.

Similarly, participants might weigh thoughts differently depending on the lens they’re looking through. If, while driving, they have the thought that they could easily decide to drive off the road and crash their car, someone who thinks of themselves as healthy is likely to dismiss that thought as a random human impulse that’s quickly forgotten. Someone who’s worried and neurotic may remember that thought when asked about suicidality and say they occasionally think about it, rather than never.

Like the claim that conservatives are inflating their mental health scores, the claim that liberals and progressives are deflating them due to the concept creep of psychological terms is possible, but it’s hardly provable how much of the observed difference in mental health outcomes can be attributed to this factor versus competing explanations.

Some conservative commentators have been quick to use the studies about mental health to their ideological advantage. One take, especially popular among conservatives and Christians (and conservative Christians), is that liberal women lack emphasis on family and faith, which bolsters mental health by providing regular social connection, a sense of community, and duty to others. Social psychologist Jaime Napier said:

One of the biggest correlates with happiness in our surveys was the belief of a meritocracy, which is the belief that anybody who works hard can make it. That was the biggest predictor of happiness. That was also one of the biggest predictors of political ideology. So, the conservatives were much higher on these meritocratic beliefs than liberals were. 

Another writer for the conservative-leaning Washington Times, quoting a Skeptic Research Center survey, argued that misunderstanding statistics such as overestimating the rate of Black Americans murdered by the police by several orders of magnitude could lead to a bleaker view of the world, and thus, impact mental health.

The liberal response is that liberals correctly perceive injustices like racism, climate change, and the polycrisis: see phrases like “If you aren’t angry, you’re not paying attention.” Liberals are also more likely than conservatives to seek out mental health evaluations and help.

There isn’t even consensus among mental health professionals about how wide or narrow the definition of depression should be.

Then there are possible third factors. Jonathan Haidt has been a proponent of the theory that social media is the cause of the mental health crisis among younger generations. Liberal Democrats are more likely to use social media for civic activities, and most social media websites (other than 𝕏) lean Democratic. If Democrats and liberals use social media more on average, it could be one of the factors negatively affecting mental health. Haidt argues that it’s not just the amount of time spent on social media, but it’s that the messages targeted toward teenage girls are disempowering and lead them to an external locus of control. A Monitoring the Future survey found that over 30 percent of liberal twelfth-grade girls agreed that “whenever I try and get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” The number was just under 30 percent for conservative boys and below 20 percent for liberal boys and conservative girls. 

An often-neglected factor is that conservatives also rate higher on physical health, which could affect mental health outcomes, considering that mental and physical health are closely tied to each other.

The general findings are also corroborated through the comparison method used by social scientists to check their findings with those in other countries. Similar findings about those with worse overall health being more likely to identify and vote for the left and better overall health being more likely to support the right were replicated in Europe, Japan, Germany, and England and Wales. This extends to depression. A cross-sectional analysis shows that the mainstream right has lower self-rated depression than the mainstream left in Western Europe. 

It’s not as if we can section out stigma versus an expanding definition of harm and test it against depressed patients.

So, are conservatives inflating their health, are liberals expanding their concept of harm, or does the divide reflect a real difference that stems from ideological beliefs or lifestyle factors that correlate with political views? Even if we designed a study that controlled for third factors like physical fitness, social media use, family status, and religiosity, it’s not as if we can section out stigma versus an expanding definition of harm and test it against depressed patients. 

There is a gap between what liberals and conservatives consider clinical depression, and liberals will be more likely to explain that gap by citing data that concludes conservatives support stigmatization. Conservatives will explain the gap by saying liberals have expanded the definition so much they’ve begun to medicalize and treat normal human conditions—in fact, many books in the last decade have argued this premise, such as Saving Normal, The Age of Diagnosis, and Bad Therapy. 

And so it goes. In fact, there isn’t even consensus among mental health professionals about how wide or narrow the definition of depression should be. In the United States, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is meant to be a unified definition of disorders like depression, but the manual itself is subject to continuous change, with each new edition redefining diagnostic criteria, often significantly.

The bottom line is that suffering people deserve care, and there are pros and cons to both medicalization and less formal, more holistic models such as physical exercise and community support. Seeing both as socially acceptable depending on the patient’s needs allows us to address that suffering by putting aside the unanswerable question of “Who has it statistically and objectively worse?” and meeting the person in front of us with the options available to them.

This is a reply to Gary J. Whittenberger’s response to my article entitled “The Hard Problem of Consciousness Is an Insoluble One.”

In August of 2026 I stayed at the Hilton Waikaloa Village on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii and participated in the hotel’s Dolphin Quest experience of swimming with dolphins. These are highly trained, well-tended cetaceans swimming about a large, sand-bottomed saltwater lagoon that is constantly monitored and separate from the open ocean, and although we all had to sign pages of a waiver obviously drafted by a team of lawyers, we never once worried for our safety. Thus, we could relax and enjoy the experience of touching, stroking, holding, and grabbing on to the dorsal fin of a dolphin to let it take us for a ride. In my case, I also imagined what it would be like to be one of those dolphins.

Instead of being a bipedal primate, I fantasized about having a fusiform body that enables these ~500-pound swimming machines to propel through the dense medium of salt water, a blowhole that allows them to breathe out of the top of their head, a dorsal fin on the back for stability, pectoral fins (flippers) on the sides for steering and stopping, and two huge flukes (lobes) on the tail that move up and down to drive the dolphin through the water. Instead of my human skin, as I stroked our dolphin, Malu, I thought about what it would be like to have a smooth, rubbery, and hairless covering that is 15–20 times thicker than my skin, with an underlying blubber layer for thermoregulation and energy storage (and we were instructed not to touch around the dolphin’s eyes and face because the skin is extra sensitive). Finally, although I enjoy sushi, I tried to picture what it would be like to eat raw fish over and over and over all day. It was a challenging task, to say the least. Here is how I described it in my chapter on consciousness in my book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Still Matters:

But the only way to have the full-on qualitative experience of dolphin-ness is to actually be a dolphin with all that entails anatomically, physiologically, neurologically, and cognitively. In that case, then, I would no longer be a human wondering what it’s like to be a dolphin. I’d just be a dolphin, and very likely not asking what it’s like to be a human. This is what is called the hard problem of consciousness.

This chapter, in fact, falls in Part III of the book, “Known Unknowables,” for a reason. I contend that the hard problem of consciousness may very well be an insoluble one, that is, we not only know that consciousness is presently an unknown problem, the way that it is configured very likely makes it unknowable. What’s it like to be a dolphin (or a bat or you)? How should I know?

I can imagine what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin or you, but that final step of transporting into the inner sanctum of another being’s private and subjective experience is not possible.

We do not know—and cannot know—what it is like to be something other than what we are. That is, our internal states (consciousness) are private and subjective … by definition. I can imagine what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin or you, but that final step of transporting into the inner sanctum of another being’s private and subjective experience is not possible. Thus, although there are nearly two dozen officially registered theories to explain the hard problem of consciousness, and many variations on each of these theories, I suspect that the problem is presented in a way that cannot, ultimately, be resolved. 

Of course, I could be wrong. This is why I chose for the epigraph of Part III of my book a quote from Robert Ingersoll:

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow-men.

I do not know what it’s like to be another being’s subjective self, but perhaps one day this will be possible through something like Gary Whittenberger’s proposed brainscope; who knows, maybe Elon Musk’s Neuralink company (or the technology from Synchron, Paradromics, Blackrock Neurotech, or Merge Labs) will enable my metaphorical homunculus to transport from my skull into that of another sentient being and actually experience what it is like to be in that skull. 

Maybe. 

But if so, I’m not even sure I would want to know what other beings are actually thinking. And if that does happen, ethical privacy concerns will have to be sorted out by lawyers and regulatory agencies. In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy my private consciousness even while enjoying the fantasy of imagining what it’s like to be something (or someone) else.