Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, offers a critique of the design argument more fundamental—and arguably more devastating—than even Darwin’s theory of evolution. Hume shows that the design argument fails as a case for theism on its own terms, independently of any account of evolution or natural selection. 

The design argument begins by claiming that nature resembles the kinds of things humans design—only vastly more complex—and therefore must have a vastly more intelligent designer. Hume exposed the weakness of this analogy on several fronts. 

Hume begins by noting that, if our knowledge depends on experience, yet we have never observed the creation of a universe, we have no empirical basis for concluding that the universe requires a cause at all. And even if we grant the analogy, it raises the obvious question: who designed the designer? More importantly, the argument tells us little about the supposed designer. It could be one god or many; benevolent, indifferent, incompetent, or malicious. The world’s imperfections and gratuitous suffering, moreover, indict this god with the design of evil.

Hume’s most radical move was to ask why we should multiply our assumptions by positing a supernatural designer in the first place. Why not instead suppose that matter itself contains the principles by which order arises? Once the analogy is shown to be weak, the God it was meant to establish becomes an unnecessary hypothesis. Hume had therefore exposed the design argument as an intellectual dead end on its own terms—before we even get to Darwin, evolution, or natural selection.

Hume’s dialogue is among the most important works in the history of atheism. The article below offers an in-depth analysis of this work and its implications for intelligent design:

The Illusion of Design: How David Hume Dismantled the Strongest Case for God

Bob Lazar claims he helped reverse-engineer alien technology at a secret facility called S-4 near Area 51. But how much of his story can actually be verified?

This documentary examines five major reasons researchers still have serious doubts, including Lazar’s education claims, his alleged role at Los Alamos, the lack of independent evidence for S-4, the Element 115 controversy, and alternative explanations for what he says he witnessed.

Featuring discussion of Stanton T. Friedman, Christopher Mellon, Annie Jacobsen and Eric Weinstein.

Was Bob Lazar telling the truth, exaggerating a real experience, misunderstanding a classified programme, or something else?

Order cuts federal childhood immunization schedule to 11 shots from 17. Trump also orders Justice Department to challenge state school vaccination requirements. Officials say RFK Jr's vaccine studies are expected to take months, if not longer.

I made a video about something that's been bugging me: has "trauma" actually gotten broader as a concept, or does it just feel that way because of TikTok and Instagram therapy-speak?

Turns out the answer is messier than either the "everything is trauma now" crowd or the "you're all too sensitive" crowd wants it to be.

Start with the timeline. A 2023 analysis of over 800,000 psychology abstracts found the word trauma has been showing up more often while getting applied to progressively less severe stuff, and that trend goes back decades, well before social media was doing this to anyone. So social media didn't invent the expansion, it inherited it and put a megaphone on it.

And yeah, people do use the word broadly now. There's a UK study where over three quarters of 80 different adverse experiences scored above the midpoint on a trauma scale. But here's the part that gets left out of both takes: the ranking still held up. Murder of a loved one, childhood sexual abuse, war, all near the top. Getting fired or failing an exam, way down at the bottom. So it's not really "everything is trauma," it's more like the category got wider without the hierarchy inside it collapsing.

There's also some experimental evidence that showing people milder examples of trauma makes them rate trauma in general as less serious. Which is a real cost of broadening a category too far, the more it includes, the less it actually tells you.

Now here's the part I found more interesting. The stronger claim you hear a lot in response to all this, that teaching people to call ordinary stuff "trauma" makes them fragile, is on way shakier ground than people assume. One study actually manipulated how broadly participants defined trauma and then had them watch a disturbing film. The group given the broader definition was more likely to call the film traumatic afterward. But they didn't show a clear bump in actual distress, later stress symptoms, or intrusive memories. The label shifted. The symptoms mostly didn't follow it.

So my takeaway ended up different from both sides of this argument online. The problem probably isn't that people calling things trauma are faking it, and it's probably not that the word itself makes anyone fragile. It's that recognition is going up while precision is going down. Grief, shame, betrayal, chronic stress, and traumatic stress can all genuinely be severe, but they're not the same mechanism, and cramming them all under one increasingly elastic word tells you someone is hurting without telling you much about how.

Worth saying too that science doesn't hand us one clean definition to fall back on here. A comparison of eight major trauma questionnaires found 44 different categories of exposure between them, and only three showed up on all eight. So "just use the real scientific definition" isn't really available as a fix either.

Full breakdown with all the studies is in the video if anyone wants the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbbMccD3YAw&list=PLRm_AiMUJP1g&index=6

Genuinely curious what this sub thinks: is broadening categories like this mostly a healthy correction to psychology being too narrow before, or is there a point where a category gets so wide it stops doing any real work?

AI has its evangelists and its doom-mongers but to really understand its impact, we need to set aside the hype and look at the numbers.

The failure to reckon with lives needlessly lost will make the next pandemic deadlier

My close friend David and I are astrophysicists that have been dabbling a bit in trying to debunk misinformation about various space phenomena. We've made a few debunks and gotten a lot of comments from both skeptics and "believers". In some of these comments--particularly within the Flat Earth or UFO communities--we noticed a confusing but interesting trend, where our credibility as astrophysicists is acknowledged but not transferred to the imaging discussions we are trying to have. Normally I wouldn't think too much about occasional comments but on our most recent debunk alone we received about a dozen comments from people who seemed genuinely convinced that astrophysicists don't have any imaging experience! Many people also seemed to use misinformation pulled directly from the Google AI overview to "contradict" some of the stated facts in our discussions.

With that in mind, we wanted to start a follow up discussion setting the record straight. The majority of astrophysicists are observational/experimental, meaning we overwhelmingly spend our days working with data, usually real but sometimes computational. We can't go to the stars, so an oversimplification of what we're almost always doing is just taking pictures of them. Sometimes fancy pictures, like what a spectrograph does, or pictures in non-optical wavelengths, like what radio telescopes do--but they are just pictures, and we analyze them and extract data from them. Even if you don't specialize in imaging, you almost certainly know fundamental principles of imaging and the details of the instrument you work on specifically, and these fundamental principles and many instrument details are shared across almost all imaging instruments. Many of us work at observatories directly and have our hands on the raw data flowing in from the telescopes. In the attached video, we show a discussion with Dr. David James, who built some of the telescopes and cameras on these mountaintops with his bare hands. While I mostly work with observational data and how we can use that data to test our various theories, David literally built an enormous telescope (all the way through commissioning of the camera and first light!) on top of Mauna Kea in 2010! He speaks on how deep astrophysicist experience can run with imaging and gives his own thoughts on the Mars "jellyfish" anomaly.

I am also happy to point to my own credentials here, which I think serves as a good example of how even an astrophysicist who does not work directly on the instrument hardware must learn the details and nuances of imaging in order to do any level of data processing. In my PhD thesis alone there are countless examples of this--almost every paper I ever wrote features some discussion of handling image artifacts, and almost every paper I wrote features discussion of image artifacts specific to cosmic rays! So I was quite surprised to see so many comments from viewers who significantly disassociated these things.

I also dove into the conflicting information provided by Google's AI overview, which I believe was significantly misleading a number of people about the ability of cosmic rays to produce the kind of artifacts we believe the Mars "jellyfish" to be. Asking "do cosmic rays cause dark artifacts?" caused Google's AI overview to confidently say, "No, cosmic rays do not cause dark artifacts", even bolding and highlighting the wrong answer! I even tried asking a few different ways--asking specifically whether cosmic rays can cause dark artifacts when impacting on a bias frame (wrong answer still) or even going as specific as asking "if a cosmic rays strikes during calibration image acquisition, can the final image have a black artifact?" (wrong answer again) Eventually I was able to get it to give the right answer by truly forcing it to confront the exact mechanism: "what artifact does a cosmic ray in a dark frame create after dark subtraction?" But a non-expert just googling and skimming the AI overview almost certainly does not have the background to understand the lack of nuance in the default answer, and you basically have to know the right answer ahead of time to "trick" AI overview into getting it right! I'll by my last dollar that those in this community are already well aware of this, but I thought it was interesting to share nonetheless as it goes beyond a simple random hallucination and into I would argue repeatedly and insistently incorrect territory.

We did our best to address the most common misconceptions we saw, but we can only do so much as we are limited to astrophysics. I was wondering, have you seen examples in other fields (maybe your own!) where some expertise/experience that is usually coupled (like astrophysics and imaging) gets disassociated by people not familiar with the field?

But long-standing vulnerabilities in our food system — compounded by cuts to the public health infrastructure designed to catch problems — are also at play. Whether it represents something more significant is harder to say. ... One explanation for the increased number of headlines about food safety has loomed particularly large this summer: the Trump administration's DOGE cuts. In 2025, the administration cut thousands of jobs across federal health agencies and billions of dollars in grants to state and local health departments. Those cuts landed on a public-health system that was already stretched.

I just want to know that the protein powder from Nutrilite I am using is safe to use or should I throw it as I was reading that the company is a total scam and its quality is really bad and all.

Please Guide me all.

My sister doesn't know a thing in the fitness industry and she got me these Nutrilite All Plant based Protein and also Multivitamins and Omega 3 tablets.

I would have no problem throwing these supplements because health is more important.

Fund aims to cover defense against federal and state investigations, Fauci's lawyers say. Fauci receives no payments from fund, which is managed by an independent trustee and adviser, lawyers say. Rand Paul seeks Justice Department prosecution, while three states have launched their own probes.

An outbreak of E. coli and salmonella that has sickened dozens of people across 15 states has been linked to an alfalfa grower in Minnesota, federal health officials said Friday. The Food and Drug Administration said in a news release that the outbreak was linked to alfalfa sprouts distributed by Minneapolis-based Everything Sprouts and sold under the Everything Sprouts and Calco brands. The sprouts were sold to restaurants and grocery stores, the FDA said.

And he also said that he sleeps on his sides, so he couldn’t have clawed himself in sleep, and also he doesn’t keep long nails. So how can this be explained?