Gender Bias in the Sciences & Skepticism

Every year various groups try to have promotional events to get more women involved, and the sciences do this a good amount. There are groups even for women, or a particular day is set to inspire women to get involved. CERN has done this, and I did a little bit to promote it.

But it looks like it will take a lot more than that to fix the big problems seen in STEM today: women still make up a smaller fraction of scientists, engineers and mathematicians than their percentage of the population. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has a new paper out: "Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students." The double-blinded study sent out applications for positions at universities which had equal qualifications, but the only difference was the gender of the names (a similar study had been done with using traditional vs. African names in the US and how that affected call-backs for job interviews). And the study found a significant bias against women. Moreover, the study asked the reviewers of the applications to rank the persons whose applications they examined, and it was clearly in favor of men.

There are some things that make this even more stark to me. For one, this bias existed not only for males that reviewed the applications, but women too! So, it seems the title of this article is correct, that the bias is subtle, though the effect is not. Apparently there is some level of unconscious bias against women, perhaps due to stereotypes in the culture, and it will affect decisions no matter the gender of the person. This also means that a woman saying there is no gender bias cannot be given greater credibility than a man as she is just a likely to be "infected" as anyone else. 

On the blog for Scientific American, several other good points are made, including how none of the people that gave women a lower score used sexist language. The bias was couched in reasonable (perhaps rationalized?) terms. Perhaps this should be obvious; almost no one wants to be called racist or sexist, so those people will not use racist or sexist language. Nonetheless, the deeds speak for themselves. This will also means it will be very hard to fix the problem as most won't realize there is one.

This is something I have been seeing in other groups, and it has been blowing up in the atheist community recently. There have been abject denials of a sexist problem at atheist conventions and the like, and even some claiming the need to defend the rights of men (boy, those words of privilege ring hollow for me). All the worse that when there is sexual harassment, it is the victim that gets much or all the blame. Almost a year ago I wrote in support of Rebecca Watson and the abuse she had received for her rather mild statement about how it is not in good form to make a pass on someone in a confined space at 4 in the morning after being silently in the background much of the night. But perhaps worse has been the back-lash about the lack of a sexual harassment policy at The Amazing Meeting (TAM), and the denial that there ever was a case of such harassment (the story of how this came to be known is detailed here.) The denial also came from D.J. Grothe, a great figure in the skeptic and atheist movement (current president of the James Randi Educational Foundation) and a gay man. So much how women can have circumspect reasons for seeing women as less qualified, even progressive men like D.J. can be in denial of the problems in his own movement.

The response in general has also been disheartening. The comments on blogs have been vicious, emails even more-so, and it has burned out many a good blogger. Natalie Reed, who talked mostly on transgender issues, basically discontinued to get involved in atheist topics because of the response she had gotten. Jen McCreight, a biologist with a PhD in genomics, also has been burned out from the comments and emails over months. Greta Christina also had been trying to get over the negativity, and Rebecca Watson must have some amazing stamina to continue what she does.

This is a problem that isn't going to go away by ignoring it, and it may get worse before it gets better, though Greta has been rather optimistic about this conversation even with its horrendous tone. The reddit universe is also going to be a hotbed of misogyny as seen in this example. And while the Atheism+ movement wants to fix this, there has been a major push-back in calling what they do "divisive." Such talk has caused many to fight against being a part of Atheism+, including Ronald Lindsay and John Loftus. But if saying we have a problem with sexism in the movement, shouldn't part of the solution be to make those that cause the problem aware and have them feel shame for being irrationally sexist? Do we really want to have such people in the movement just because they agree with us on atheism but otherwise they are misogynistic pigs? (Richard Carrier has interesting points here about the use of insult, and here about being for or against Atheism+.)

The SSA group I am in will actually talk about women and secularism tomorrow at our meeting. We may not figure everything out, but hopefully we can at least gets the facts out there and discuss them the best we can. In the mean time, what are your thoughts?

Ancient Aliens? My Presentation

Previously I had blogged about various evidences provided for ancient aliens, such as the Nazca Lines, the Baghdad battery, the Piri Re'is map, and the pyramids. I also gave a summary about the methodology of ancient astronaut proponents. But all this was to give some flavor of my presentation.

Quite fortunately, the video of my talk that I gave for the SSA at OSU is already up. You can watch it now.



UPDATE: Had trouble using the BSG opening bit, so here is the video re-edited to avoid that.


And yes, that picture with Jill Tarter did include me. I had a great time working at the SETI Institute back in the day. Also, since she has retired, Gerry Harp is now the head of the institute's research, and he was my adviser when I worked with him as an REU student.

Remember, the SETI Institute is funded solely by private donations. Consider supporting their work. They are doing the archaeology of the future!

So, what are your thoughts?

Good Book on Ancient Astronauts

In the next couple of weeks, I will be giving a talk for the local Secular Student Alliance concerning how we go about trying to find extraterrestrials. A big part of that will be looking into the claims made on the History Channel about aliens in the past which have been rather under par for good history lately (and less lately). There are numerous good books and websites on the subject that undercuts the claims of ancient astronauts, from the Skeptic's dictionary to an older book by Ronald Story, The Space Gods Revealed.

But one of the most enjoyable ones has been Jason Colavito's The Cult of Alien Gods. It wonderfully goes through the literary sources of Erich von Daniken and his successors, but its major thesis is about how the ideas originate in the fictional works of American author H.P. Lovecraft. Colavito basically proves that Lovecraft is the source behind the works (mainly French) that would try to prove there were aliens in the distant past, and those were the sources utilized by von Daniken later on.

The book isn't a debunking book, though it does take the time occasionally the eviscerate the claims of von Daniken, Graham Hancock, and others. Another joy is that it also gives the historical background to Lovecraft's work (from the poetry of Poe to the Theosophical Society) as well as the cultural matrix that made the ancient astronaut ideas take off, especially in America.

You will learn not just about a pseudo-historical idea, but also about real history and literature. It does great work all around to make its thesis work and teach you many other things.

The only gripe I have is that it tends to blame a lot of this on postmodernism, which I find to be a weak thesis. There were crazy ideas like this before Derrida (Ignatius Donnelley was big in the 19th century with his Atlantis ideas), and most people are not reading 20th century philosophers or literary critics. It's more about what people want to believe (which Colavito notes), and the philosophical rationalizations are an afterthought for most, if they ever even consider it.

Try to get a copy of this book, and you will be able to see what is going on with the ancient astronauts as well as learn to appreciate the Cthulhu Mythos all the more. Well-researched and with end notes and sources (unlike some people...).

Physics and Intuition

Nicholas Covington over at SkepticBlogs has a post that relates to the borderlands of science and philosophy, intuition and its utility. His observations are done in light of some of the blog posts by Luke Muehlhauser (who more recently went to work at the Singularity Institute and the website Less Wrong).

Philosophers have long worked with what ideas we have in our heads, the primitive notions of things such as the reliability of the senses, our reasoning abilities, that other people have minds, etc. However, there is a continuing body of growing research that shows the limitations of our intuitions and our mental faculties (some I mentioned on my appearance on the Magic Sandwich Show). Nonetheless, Nick is correct that we ought not to go all-out against intuitions having epistemic value. Though we ought to be aware of its limitations (Nick mentions the Monty Hall Problem which drives first-year statistics students and normal people nuts.) Moreover, intuitions should not be beliefs that some have called properly basic, as they can and should be subject to scrutiny. Nick concludes that we have inductive reason to take them as probably true since they seem to work rather often.

But this leaves the question of when are our intuitions untrustworthy? Should be consider evolutionary history? Richard Dawkins had commented that perhaps because we evolved at the macroscopic level we did rather than nanoscopic (extremely small) or megascopic (extremely large) we may not have the mental faculties to understand modern physics like quantum mechanics and special relativity. This implies that we would be better adapted as Newtonian thinkers, since that is the world we live in; Newton's laws and principles correctly explain most everything material in our day-to-day world, the world our ancestors would have inhabited. So this implies a potential limitation on what we can understand and what we do understand.

Unfortunately, my own research in physics education shows that college students are not Newtonian thinkers, and this has been the conclusion of PER since at least the 1980s. For example, there are the interviews done by McCloskey et al. as summarized in Scientific American back in 1983. They noted that often students seem to have something like the medieval impetus view of motion.

For example, they asked the question of you walking at constant speed in a straight line while holding a ball out and shoulder level. If you continued on an the same speed and on the same path, and you dropped the ball, would you expect to see it fall behind you, in front of you, or at your feet? Before reading the conclusion, think about what the answer is to yourself.

Don't scroll down unless you have an answer.

Have a guess now?

Really?

OK, go ahead and read on.

Well, most of the people asked said the ball would fall behind them. 49% said it would fall over the exact spot the ball was let go, and a small percentage (6%) said it would actually travel backward. Only 45% accounted for the forward velocity of the ball when it was let go. And this was asked of college students, which means students with more education than the average in the US, let alone the world.

What is going on here? Some have noted the students had a general model for how things move. One of the things most people have in their minds is that without a force things don't move. There is also the notion of a force in the direction which tends to weaken with time (like the impetus dissipating as the object traveled). More recent research argues against most people having a complete model in their minds of how things work, and Andrea diSessa's idea of p-prims tries to account for what is going on with a collection of primitive ideas about physics (physics primitive ==> p-prims). What the correct model is, I cannot say.

However, the question of where these intuitions come from is one that currently needs more research, and I am glad to be working on that currently. I shan't say too much of what I have done until publication, but what I can say I did at the AAPT meeting last month. And what I did reveal is that students claim to actually feel the sorts of forces that may account for these anomalies from reality, but those forces simply are not real. At the intuitive level, we seem to believe we are pushed around in ways that simply are not true and at variance to Newtonian (let alone modern physical ) mechanics.

This indicates that Dawkins is wrong about our adaptability to understanding the Newtonian world--we don't even get that right. Perhaps that should be no surprise since it took near 2000 years of science to come up with Newton's physics (starting with Aristotle, and then on from there). Physics teachers also have come to learn that the correct ideas are hard to get into their students, and they tend to revert to incorrect views. On the other hand, we tend not to have strong convictions about things at the extremely small level or at super-fast speeds, so perhaps the theories of special relativity and quantum mechanics are easier to learn, if not necessarily understand, since we don't experience this realm and cannot fall back onto our beliefs of what happened last time.

All this would also imply that we should be very cautious using the intuitions we build up at the level we live and project them into realms we have no experience. If our experience will betray us about moving in a circle, why think they are unquestionable with things beyond our current comprehension, such as the state of the universe before the Big Bang?

I see science as progressing by testing our intuitions and seeing that they fail, and in the process building up new intuitions via the scientific method, thus creating a coherent, tested theory. It has at least been working pretty well.

So when are intuitions trustworthy? Perhaps the best rule of thumb (which is all an intuition can be) is that intuitions are useful in situations you have had significant experience. You don't need to bring out a piece of paper and a calculator to see if a train is about to hit you based its distance and speed; you can tell you need to move, else you won't be there to analyze your intuitions!

However, this would be extremely limiting to thought experiments that philosophers use all the time. How to deal with this? That is another avenue of research that needs exploration, and I know there are people on the case. In the mean time, I have a gut feeling that this won't convince everyone to give up their gut beliefs about how the world works, from politics to morality. Oh, so much work ahead.

The Secular and Feminist Movement

There has been a crazy-level of rage in the Internet by those that think feminist issues should not be part of organized atheism or skepticism, and talking about it is divisive. And it has been grinding away at the best women in movement because of stupidity and/or bigotry. But if history has anything to say about it, the two movements are strongly intertwined.

Here is a great talk by Annie Laurie Gaylor about the history of women in the freethought movement for centuries.



It seems to be a fact that led many women to fight for their rights also lead them to rail against religion. And for many of the same reasons modern atheists attack theism. I think that is enough to show that the goals of feminism are entwined with that of skeptics and atheists. So we need to stop the bigotry.

Here is a talk that also shows some idea of what needs to be done by Pamela Gay (who is a believer but a great asset to the skeptical world).



Update: Pamela put up an annotated version of her talk.

Let's get things right!

The Star of Bethlehem & Zeitgeist - Video

As practice in my video editing and to make the material more viewable, I now have made my previous blog posts about the Star of Bethlehem and its treatment in the film Zeitgeist into a short YouTube video.

 

Hope you enjoy!

A New Skeptic Blog Site

I was very happy to be invited to post at Debunking Christianity a bit ago about my research on the Star of Bethlehem, and the comments there were interesting. It's also a high-traffic site, so that certainly helped get what I have done noticed.

But now it looks like DC is moving in with a bunch of new roommates at Skeptic Blogs. 

I imagine this was inspired by when DC was at Freethought blogs, but because of some internal disagreements (of which there have been a number of public ones recently) that partnership ended. Nonetheless, there is a lot to be said for having a network of blogs working together for a similar goal. And their goals are something I can get behind.

We seek to collectively provide a positive set of voices on behalf of science, reason, and skepticism. We take aim at critically examining the basis of religious faiths, their holy books, claims of miracles, and of the paranormal, without neglecting the adverse cultural impact they have on us. We will do so from a diverse set of perspectives and disciplines of learning.

I think I can get behind that. And I'll have to spend some time reading A Tippling Philosopher there, not least because the author was the one that invited my post at DC.

I'd check out.

More on the Star and Zeitgeist

Since my last post about how the Star of Bethlehem has been interpreted by Acharya S and in the Internet film Zeitgeist, there has been some predictable backlash from those that defend the position. Very natural, and hopefully dialogue can happen. A response on Freethought Nation was posted on in the comments, and I responded there. I wanted to direct those at the forum the response came from, but it seems registration to that forum is currently not possible. Not sure why, but it seems that if I make my response here they will notice. And perhaps they can hook me up to their system. We'll see.

Nonetheless, the response was actually not too productive a start and avoided pretty much all my substantive points. So my response can to trod through the mud first. I am accused of not being studied enough in the subject matter and other inadequacies on my part. The only error I made was thinking that Acharya's first name was Dorothy, which is apparently incorrect (she has not made her first name public). I changed that in my blog post, but beside that, no error has been pointed out on my part.

The author of the attacking post also took a look at my article about the Star and significantly misunderstood its purpose. I did not look at older mythology because the subject of the matter was how the Star was interpreted especially in a scientific context. It was not about where the story really came from, beside giving the current view of mainstream scholars. And while my article has been referenced by the Apologia Archive (as a critique of the version of the Star by Rick Lawson), I am in fact not a Christian trying to defend the faith. My purpose also wasn't to attack religious belief but to give a history of how the Star had been understood and how modernist attempts to make it something naturalistic is outside the mainstream.

But let's get to the post I wish to respond to.


Let me work backward about what is said. Firstly, I actually do read Greek and Latin, as I did take college courses so I could conduct the research I have published. (My Hebrew is far to weak to talk about.) Moreover, my paper on the Star of Bethlehem was cited extensively earlier in that forum, so you can see that I have studied theological literature and the interpretation of the Star for the last 2000 years. Since that made it through peer-review among those that are theologically mindful, that should give me a bit of credit about when I speak of things related to the subject. And unfortunately, that is more than can be said for Acharya. I bet she could get some things published, and I would be very interested to see her do so. I bet she would move conversations in interesting ways. Let me know if that happens.

Now, this attack on Richard Carrier's criticism is ultimately beside the point of what I said about the Star (and Carrier said nothing of it either). It's also a bit disturbing that the poster linked to Acharya's response to Carrier, but not to Carrier's re-response, which I did post in my blog. And unfortunately, Carrier's points were not refuted by Acharya, though Carrier did make a correct or two (a sign of a good scholar: someone that fixes their mistakes rather than doubles-down).

Now, getting to actual criticism of me: for my response, I did not depend on anyone except Acharya for her position. I pointed to the link on the Star from her, which was based on her book Christ in Egypt, so the accusation has no grounding. Next, my use of the term 'astrology' is apropos if it is not limited to the meaning of horoscopes. Astrology is broadly about learning from the stars, and it is an offshoot of star worship. The ideas of astrology are certainly part of at least some religions, especially notable in the artifacts of Mithraism. And this is why I did not say "astrology as we know it today" (emphasis original) as the poster presents; if words have to be literally put into my mouth to make my statements false, then I am in pretty good standing. Admittedly, I could have been clearer and considered the misconceptions this would bring up, so I will try to not make that mistake in the future.

A later posted also made hay about the difference between horoscopic predictions and astrotheology, about how refuting one doesn't refute the other. And since I did not attack horoscopes but only said how the thesis depended on the interpretation of the sky (the basic essence of astrology), it is an attack that has nothing to do with what I have said.

As for using old scholarship to justify her stance: when it comes to the webpage she was for the Star, that is in fact true. Her only footnote is to an encyclopedia from 1915. Her other internal citations are rarely from someone in Egyptology. J. Gwyn Griffiths was an Irish poet, Barbara Walker is trained as a journalist. There is also a citation from a long-dead French philosopher, Simone Weil. And it is really odd to attack people for pointing out her reliance on old scholarship because in the introduction to Suns of God (which I own and have read) she defends her use of old scholarship. That doesn't mean all her sources are old and out of date, but the ones she needs the most for this thesis are.

For example, she cites NO primary sources for calling the belt of Orion the "Three Kings". None. In another of her writings she shows the symbol for Orion that has three loops, but there is nothing but speculation to say that three loops represent kings. Moreover, the heliacal rising of Sirius (Sothis) is first and foremost connected to the resurrection of Osiris and the flooding of the Nile. The rising sun was connected to Horus, but there is nothing connecting it to his birth, let alone on Dec 25. Again, Acharya has NO primary sources for that, only speculations. While she does cite proper Egyptologists from recent years, they are for points that do not support her substantive premises. This makes them window dressing: using good scholarship to disugise the reliance on bad. If she wants to improve her scholarship, she has to jettison ALL the bad, not lump it in with the good. Otherwise, how can a lay reader know the difference?

But let's get to the points I made that were not even attempted a refutation. It is a fact that Orion's belt had set below the horizon before sunrise on the winter solstice, so it cannot point to anything, let alone the sun. Since the hypothesis makes it integral that the belt of Orion point through Sirius to the morning Sun, that this point is false is utterly decisive. Perhaps you don't believe me about the astronomy? Well, here are a couple of screen shots to help. (I am using the planetarium software Stellarium 0.11.2)

This is a view of the night sky as seen on December 25, 5 BCE in Alexandria, Egypt (the view is very similar to that in Jerusalem). As can be seen, the belt is on the western, setting horizon, and the sun is not yet up. In fact, it is four hours away, as seen here.

Notice the time mark in both screen captures to see that four hours passed, and even Sirius is below the horizon (it set about three hours before sunrise). Try it out on your own planetarium software if you want (I also used a NASA database to get similar results). The fact is, the astronomy is wrong.

Perusing some of the other threads at Freethought Nation seem to indicate that, at least to the posters (don't know about Acharya herselt) this isn't a problem; so long as the best and Sirius pointed at the Sun before sunrise that is enough. But then that begs the question of why make December 25 so special? Any date after the heliacal rising of Sirius would have been more interesting as Orion and Sirius would have been directly over the Sun in the morning (though probably not visible due to the dawn's early light). But this would mean any time since late July would have been just as good or better than December 25. And if Orion need not be in the sky at sunrise, then any date would have the same alignment quality. The excuse then doesn't work and makes no date special.

One potential point to consider is how low the Sun gets in the sky. Because of the angle of the earth, the height the Sun gets in the sky during the day varies throughout the year. So this means the alignment between sun and Orion's belt is better on some days than others. But when is it best? Well, from what I can see, it is best some time in September or October.

So once again, nothing suggest that December 25 is special based on this hypothesis. But that assumes the hypothesis has anything else to back it up.

Let's also highlight a few more facts ignored:

• It is a fact that the Magi were not called Kings or numbered three until centuries later (other numbers include 12). If they were not called kings originally or three in number, then any alleged Egyptian comparison will not explain the original story, only later adaptations at best.
• It is a fact that Dec 25 was not celebrated as the birthday of Jesus until much later, and other dates nowhere near the solstices were proposed before Dec 25 came into use. (Also, it is NOT the case that only Dec 25 is celebrated as his birthday today; Armenian Christians still hold to another tradition, just as old, that Christ was born on Jan 6.) Again, you cannot explain the original story of Matthew with details that are not part of the Jesus story centuries after the fact.
• There is no primary evidence at all that says the stars of Orion's best were called king, and Acharya provided none.
• There is no primary evidence that Horus was born (or conceived) on Dec 25, and Acharya provided none.
• Related to this, the heliacal rising of Sirius happens no where near the summer solstice.
• And lastly, there is a far superior and well-supported position that explains things (and I hope to add to this scholarship in the near future).

When you have a hypothesis that doesn’t have very good evidence for it, and another with much better supported evidence, there is a particular way you should lean. Moreover, Jewish literature is far more likely to influence the early Christians than ancient Egyptian, so there is prior probability in favor of a Jewish background for the story than Egyptian. And no mumbling about my ineptitudes can change that.

Now unless Acharya (or anyone else) can address these points, then the hypothesis is very, very dead. The false astronomy is itself a deal-breaker.

The Star and Zeitgeist

While I have in prior writings and posts attacked naturalistic theories to explain the Star of Bethlehem as a historical, natural event, I also have encountered other approaches that have their own popularity. In a recent email, I was directed to the coverage of the Star in the Internet-distributed "documentary" Zeitgeist, which is filled with layers of conspiracy. The first third is an argument that Jesus didn't exist, and all of Christianity (and other religions?) is based on astrology or "astrotheology." This is largely the product of the self-published author D. M. Murdock, a.k.a. Acharya S.

What is the basic idea? At about the time of the winter solstice, the three stars of Orion's belt point at the rising sun, pointing through Sirius. This alignment takes place then at about Dec 25. There are also connections between Sirius' heliacal rising (first rising at sunrise in a year) and the summer solstice alleged  Moreover, this was supposed to be celebrated and connected in ancient Egypt, thus making the Christians copy-cats. Thus the Star is fiction and based on Egyptian mythology, itself based on astronomy. Those details are best laid out by Acharya here.

Now, I am not the first to look critically at her claims concerning the Nativity of Jesus, and one place to look at a good examination is done by Richard Carrier here (and update here). Not only are there significant factual errors and unjustified assumptions, but there are good, scholarly-defended results that indicate a lack of historicity for these things (which I hope to detail in my future book on the subject). In particular, the stories of Daniel help explain a lot of the details of Jesus' birth story in Matthew, along with the Moses typology.

However, I haven't found so much detailing the problems with the Star story from Zeitgeist (and if someone finds some links, please share), so I will repost the message I sent back to an inquisitor (name redacted and the email improved for grammar and spelling.)

Hello XXX, 

Thank you for the email and the links. I am familiar with the work of the author you have linked and her interpretation of the Star. However, I think you should be cautious in using her as an authority on this. 

Consider her use of sources. Most all her secondary scholarship is at least a century old, a time when quality was much lower in scholarship. It's also a problem because her central point about the stars of Orion's belt called the Three kings by Egyptians has no support in the primary literature--actual ancient texts. It's also beside the point because Christians didn't refer to the Magi as kings until much later; same with their number three. That means the original story had nothing to do with three kings, thus unrelated to an alleged Egyptian myth. 

There are other details that go against the story in Matthew. While the Magi follow the Star, the belt of Orion leads Sirius. And while Sirius is a star as was Matthew's Star, the Magi are not stars. Why these differences if the Christians were following Egyptian precedent? 

There are also issues with the astronomy. The heliacal rising of Sirius is nowhere near the summer solstice, and the Egyptians cared rather little about solstices. Their agriculture didn't depend on the sun's position as other cultures but on the seasonal flooding of the Nile. (For example, the Maya didn't have seasons so they don't align their calendar with leap years as we do.) The claim about where the stars of Orion and Sirius point on the winter solstice is wrong. The belt has set by sunrise, and it's even worse with precession. 

Lastly, the connection to December 25 is a false lead because, again, the Christians didn't think Jesus was born on that day until centuries later and usually figured different days; Clement of Alexandria gives several guesses, and none are in December, let alone the solstice.
Thus, all the historical and mythological connections are not valid, the astronomy is wrong, and the match between the alleged myth and the Gospel story is poor. That's a big overall negative assessment. 

The much more popular account given by biblical scholars is citing Jewish literature which definitely influenced early Christianity, namely the Star Prophecy of Numbers 24:17. It was used by numerous Jews, including Josephus, rabbis in the Talmud, and the Qumran sect. This is the starting point I have been using in my research about the story, and I suggest the same for you own investigations. On the Nativity stories, the best book is still Raymond Brown's "Birth of the Messiah". I hope to have a future book to supplement Brown's work, but his book is magisterial. 

I hope this helps you. In the mean time, I strongly recommend you be careful about your authorities. See what their sources are, if they cite primary literature rather than old, secondary literature, and if their work has had peer review. It's the only way to have some confidence in the facts presented; otherwise, your have to check everything yourself, thus making the book a pointless read since it didn't inform you but for your own research. Save yourself the time and headache. 

Thanks again for your interest.

In summary, the astronomy is wrong, the astrology is wrong, the fit to Matthew's account is weak, and there are much better explanations. Obviously we have enough reason to be skeptical of the Zeitgeist version of the Star of Bethlehem, and it gives us reason to be skeptical of a lot more as well.

But does Numbers 24:17 explain the Star completely? I will have to say more on that later.

Edit: Apparently Acharya's first name is not "Dorothy", so I have adjusted the text above to reflect this.

Astrology: The Stars say NO

Recently I have tried to do some videos for YouTube, and video editing is hardly my forte. Nonetheless, I wanted to see if it was possible to use the medium to talk about things of interest to me. As a first experiment, I have posted this video about astrology:



Depending on traffic, I may expect to see a lot of interesting responses defending the divination process. This may lead to future video responses on my part. Even so, at least I picked an easy target for criticism that doesn't have the number of loyal followers as, say, creationists.

  

Looking forward to the fun!