SCEPTICAL JAYDON

 "This, to me, is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics would believe on their own. If you wake up tomorrow thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think pretty much the same about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic." - Sam Harris. Yesterday, I read about the death of a certain Kayode Badru on social media. Mr Badru had allegedly died in Gbagada General Hospital after he was inadvertently set ablaze during a prayer session in a Celestial Church of Christ. According to reports, Mr Badru had been soaked in inflammable perfume "from hair to toe" and had candles lit around him when he caught fire and got burnt.  This unfortunate incident happens just a few days after the tragic murder of Iniubong 'Hiny' Umoren, a young fresh graduate who was only looking f...

  A dog chasing its own tail. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Circular reasoning is a well-known informal fallacy that takes the form "A is true because B, which is true because A." It assumes to be true that which ought to be demonstrated to be true by the argument. It is bad reasoning because it's not very good reasoning. (See what I did there?) It is a shortcut hack that can be very appealing to people who have a deeply ingrained commitment to the truth of the belief they are expressing. One of the commonest examples of circular logic in pop conversations is when religious people claim the Bible is true (or is the inerrant, infallible word of God) because the Bible itself says so, thus assuming that the Bible is true upfront. This is not very good reasoning because it assumes to be true (that the Bible is true) that which ought to be demonstrated to be true (that the Bible is true).  A recent  thread on Twitter aimed to show that this well-acclaimed logical fallacy is,...

It's January 1st of 2021. And I'm almost sure you read that with a sigh. Of course, the sigh itself would be based upon an illusion. One of my former mentors said, back in 2010, that "time is a continuum." It was the first time I had come across that quote, and it has stuck with me ever since.  The concept of years is a useful fiction. Yet, there is a sense in which a sigh of relief is warranted at the thought of 2020 being over. As everyone knows all too well, 2020 was a very crazy year indeed. More people died last year than in the previous one , and the COVID-19 pandemic plunged the entire world into recession . And notably in Nigeria, there were the #EndSARS protests, climaxing in that tragic night when our own government, who swore to protect us, opened fire on unarmed and unaggressive citizens demanding change in the country. "Chaotic" doesn't begin to capture the year.  Due to this, there is probably not so much optimism for a lot of people going...

In my opinion, we think about intelligence the wrong way. I think we confuse intelligence with being highly knowledgeable or well-read. While being highly knowledgeable is a sign of intelligence, I think the main (or best) marker of intelligence is problem-solving ability. Being knowledgeable or polymathic, in my opinion, doesn't count for much if the knowledge doesn't translate into innovative, pragmatic problem-solving in the real world. And I'm not talking about making scientific discoveries or technological invention; problem-solving could involve something as little as spotting a flaw in an argument and being able to prescribe a novel way of correcting that flaw or being able to find a pragmatic, conciliatory way of settling a social dispute. Of course, much of problem-solving involves being sufficiently knowledgeable about the ontology of the problem and, maybe, even its historicity; so in a sense, intelligence is not separable from having vast knowledge. But what re...

Nigeria has been going through a turbulent couple of weeks with the #EndSARS protests. The youths have been on the streets fighting for their rights to exist and to be governed properly and incorruptibly by the country's leaders. The Nigerian Army have been widely reported by local media, international media, and tonnes of eyewitnesses to have opened fire on innocent unarmed protesters at several locations across the two weeks as well, the most significant being the truly tragic events of around 7 p.m. at the Lekki toll gate on Tuesday night (20th October). A highly religious country, roughly 47% of Nigerians, predominantly in the South, believe in the Christian God of the Bible. Indeed, during the protests, people speaking in tongues at protest venues was a common sight. It is very clear that the Christian God of the Bible (simply "God" hereafter) is thought to be omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), omnibenevolent (all-loving or all-caring), perfectly fr...

The problem of evil is perhaps the most pressing problem for believers in an omnipotent and all-loving God. It was one of my own reasons for leaving Christianity (number 6 on my list ). There are many versions of it, and there are also lots of responses to those versions. But in my view, there is a version of the argument that I have not heard anyone put forward as of yet and which I think has some cogent force against certain schools of Christian thought. Allow me to explain.  Christianity holds that God created the world as "very good" (Genesis 1:31). This is often taken to mean that the world was in as perfect a state as God could have made it. In addition, it is often taken to mean that what we would call natural evil  was not a part of God's original creation. There was no suffering or pain, and the suffering in the world came in later as a consequence of sin. Adam (I'll use this name as a collective term for Adam and Eve) sinned and brought death into the world ...

I often get asked by some parents how best they could teach their children the theory of evolution. The first step to teaching any theory, of course, is to understand it enough to do so. So it is important for parents to take some time to actually study the theory and understand it properly. However, in this article, I have constructed a little chit-chat between a dad and his daughter in which he attempts to explain the theory to her in as simple a way as possible. Parents may need to use pictures and other forms of visual aid and may consider purchasing resources that help their children learn about it in a fun and informative way.   Daughter : Hey, daddy. Dad : Hellooo, beautiful! How was school today? Daughter : Not bad. Just a bunch of new stuff in elementary science and math. Dad : Tell me about it. Daughter : Well, my teacher said something about how humans came to be . She said that science teaches that humans came from chimpanzees. Dad : Oh, really? Is that wh...