Thursday, August 6, 2026
Monday, August 3, 2026
When Dreams, Mysterious Voices or Apparitions Save or Help People
Let us look at some cases in which an apparition or dream or mysterious voice seemed to be of some great help to someone.
The part in red in the headline below makes a remarkable claim that Durkins escaped some construction disaster killing three others, because Durkins was "warned in a dream."
You can read the full newspaper account below:
The account below is found on page 341 of the July 16, 1927 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here. We read of lost Antarctic explorers who seemed to be saved from death by an apparition.
"Sir -The interesting communication from Captain H. W. Seton-Karr in your issue of 25th June, in which he states that when lost in the Alps, his party of three all saw the figures of two men who could not have been ordinary human beings, and who appear to have guided them into safety, reminds one of the similar experience of Sir Ernest Shackleton when he made his wonderful march across the glaciers of the island of South Georgia.
An account of the incident is given by Mr. Charles T. Spedding in his 'Reminiscences of Transatlantic Travellers ' (p.200). Shackleton, who was his intimate friend, having described to him his amazing experience. After the wreck of his ship, the 'Endurance,' in the Antarctic, Sir Ernest, with six companions, left Whale Island in an open boat, and after a stormy voyage of 750 miles, during which they suffered terribly, they reached the island of South Georgia on the side opposite to the whaling station, the only inhabited spot.
Though weakened and exhausted by exposure and privations, Sir Ernest with two of his companions set out to cross the trackless show-covered interior. Finally, in the darkness of night, when they had lost all sense of direction and practically abandoned hope, Shackleton saw a man ahead of him. He thought it must be Worsley, one of his companions, and ordered him to come back to his station behind (they were roped together), but Worsley answered him from the rear, which he had not quitted. They staggered on, blindly following the unknown figure, and finally arrived at the whaling station.
South Georgia has never been crossed either before or since. After Shackleton’s exploit a well-equipped party tried to cross it in the summer, but failed. Shackleton’s party succeeded in crossing when exhausted by starvation and exposure, clothed in rags in the darkness of winter, and the accomplishment of this apparently impossible task seems to be well explained by Shackleton's belief that he received spirit guidance.
Yours, etc.,
A. Campbell Holms"
A check of the book and page number provided matches the account above.
The account below appeared in 1897. We read of a daughter who has a dream of a recently deceased grandfather telling her of the location of buried treasure. After discussing the dream the next morning, she is told by someone else that she had a similar dream. A search finds just such a treasure, one amounting to $17,000, which at that time was worth much more than $50,000 is worth today.
Below is an account claiming someone was saved from danger by an apparition of his dead wife who warned him of the danger:
You can read the full account here (although you may want to skip it because the text gets faded and rather hard to read):
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86071985/1907-12-21/ed-1/seq-7/
Below is a newspaper account of a woman saved by a dream:
Below is a strange account of a man who regained his hearing because of a dream:
You can read the account here:
Below is a newspaper account of a woman who was aided by a dream:
Caught by a Dream
"Mrs. George Bauder, whose husband deserted her at Quiney last September, has found him through a dream, and he is now in jail at Chicago as the result. Mrs. Bauder applied to Justice Hall for a warrant. She said that she had come here to hunt for her husband, but could find 110 trace of him. On Wednesday night she dreamed she saw- him at work in a bicycle' factory near an immense building. The next day she recognized Tattersalls as the building and Bauder was found at the factory and arrested.—Jf. Y. Evening Journal."
You can read the account here:
Below is an account of a man being led by a dream to the right location of an oil well:
DREAM LEADS TO FIND.
"FINDLAY, 0., May 8. —It is reported here that a good oil well in Senaca county was located by a dream. The well is the property of the Sun Oil company and is on the Joseph Shannon farm. It was drilled to a depth of 150 feet in the sand and then shot. A good flow of oil resulted... Mr. Shannon became convinced through a dream that oil would be found in large quantities at the location of the new well, and it appears his dream will become a reality."
You can read the account here:
At the link below we have an account of a man who found a source of minable gold after searching at the spot suggested by a dream he had:
The account below appeared on page 251 of the April 1913 edition of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, which you can go directly to by using the link here. We read of a child (Norah Tappen) who had lost knowledge of her vanished father, until she was pointed in the right direction by a dream appearance of her deceased mother. Click on the image to read it better.
The folks at the Society for Psychical Research in London and the American Society for Psychical Research were very diligent about following up on important-sounding stories such as these, which seem to suggest evidence of life after death. In this case someone at the American Society for Psychical Research followed up by sending letters of inquiry to the police. As shown on the page here and the next page, a police sergeant replied by giving an account corroborating testimony of Norah Tappen. Below is part of what he wrote:
The account below of being saved by a mysterious voice is told by the very successful movie actor James Cagney.
You can read the account here:
On page 403 of the July 1, 1922 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we hear a second-hand account of a mysterious voice keeping James Coates alive in a perilous situation by saying, "Lie still!" Better evidence on that page is found in the first-hand account by Walter Jones of a seance he attended a few weeks earlier with the noted medium Etta Wriedt. Jones describes hearing voices of three of his deceased relatives, and says that Wriedt could not have known anything about them.
Below is a newspaper account from 1913 of a person who got a great benefit from a dream:
Below we have a newspaper account from 1908 of a woman who gets a $1000 inheritance (then worth several times more than the same sum today) after she gets three different times a dream that her mother had left her such an inheritance.
We read below of a women who was warned by a dream of a theft which soon occurred. Having had the dream, the women prevented a loss of $200 that would otherwise have occurred.
You can read the account below:
Friday, July 31, 2026
"Stuff Piles Up" Fails to Explain Stupendous Biology Systems
Mark Rober's Crunchlabs is a TV show available on Netflix. It is a reality TV show that I would guess was inspired by the long-running TV show MythBusters. The MythBusters show would involve various informal experiments performed by two experimenters interested in doing weird experiments that would make good television footage. Mark Rober's Crunchlabs takes a similar approach. One of the Season 1 episodes is entitled "World's Largest Jello Pool."
We see a swimming pool filled with red jello, the gelatin product that forms a semi-solid substance. We are told that this is 30,000 pounds of jello. We see (at the 4:55 mark) an experiment in which small children without any attached rope are jumping onto the swimming pool of jello. It seems like a reckless stunt that might have caused one of the children to be injured, or possibly even drown. The pool of jello is a dark fluid, making it hard to see where a child is in the pool if the child is submerged in the jello. We seem to not see or hear about any precautions taken to prevent injury or death to the children involved in this experiment. We are told the swimming pool of jello is the first ever constructed, so how could the people doing this TV show have had any confidence that their experiment would not cause death or injury to a small child? At one point (the 7:14) the host says that when he dived into the swimming pool of jello, the jello filled up his ears; and who knows what risk would be involved in filling up an ear (filled with delicate components) with semi-solid gelatin material.
Similarly, in a Season 1 episode entitled "Unbeatable Rock Paper Scissors Robot" we see a 10-year-old child skateboarding on some super-slippery surface of 3.5 million BB pellets, which the host describes (at the 2:13 mark) as "the most slippery surface I've ever stood on." At the 3:16 mark the child makes a high-speed skateboard fall and says, "I think I broke all my bones." Why endanger a child for such a stunt?
For much of the time in the show, host Mark Rober talks way too fast, so fast that many viewers will not be able to understand what he is saying.
Another episode in Season 1 of the show is entitled "Octopus vs. Underwater Maze." At the 10:16 mark in the show we get what we call "a very simplified version of a tree of life." Rober tells us, "These kind of diagrams show you how all life is related and what evolved from what." No, they sure do not. "Tree of life" diagrams are visual depictions of scientist speculations about an ancestry of one type of living creature and another.
Such "tree of life" diagrams are called cladograms. A scientific paper says this:
"Since the early 1990s, cladograms have found their way into high school biology textbooks, yet we know little about their effectiveness as interpretive and instructional tools in biology education. In this article we document the frequency and types of cladograms found in 31 textbooks, and classify and survey the other types of evolutionary diagrams used in the texts. Although cladograms comprised approximately 72 percent of the diagrams overall, we found virtually no attempt to explain their structure and theoretical underpinnings."
Speaking of such cladogram "trees of life," another scientific paper says, " There is much evidence that even professional biologists lack a true understanding of phylogenetic trees (Morrison 2013). "
If you do a Google image search for "tree of life," you will find dozens of different diagrams which do not agree with each other. A common characteristic of such diagrams is the existence of many unlabeled nodes. Below is a modified version of what I get when I ask the Google Gemini AI to produce a "tree of life" diagram. I'll omit the left part, so that it is easier to read. The diagram is pretty worthless in terms of explaining any evolutionary relationships, because of all the unlabeled nodes. I have placed yellow X marks to point out places where we have an unlabeled node, typically one that corresponds to no species ever discovered.
Such unlabeled nodes can be called "missing links." When a "tree of life" has as many missing links as we see in the one above, the diagram fails to convincingly substantiate claims of common descent. The "tree of life" shown in the TV show entitled "Octopus vs. Underwater Maze" (at the 10:16 mark) also has very many unlabeled nodes that correspond to missing links.
The show then gives us some reasoning trying to support ideas of common descent. We are told that there are 7 vertebrae in the necks of humans, giraffe, elephants, whales mice, lions, horses and bats. We are told "that's a clue they all share a common ancestor." No, it's merely a structural similarity in some mammals; and some other mammals such as sloths and manatees have a different number of neck vertebrae. All automobiles have four wheels, but all automobiles do not have a common ancestor.
The chart below shows how many vertebrae exist in the types of organisms mentioned. The numbers in each colored bar show how many vertebrae of a particular type exist for an organism of a particular type. The number 7 is found in all the red bars. But the numbers found in the yellow bars differ (ranging from 3 to 15); the numbers found in the orange bars differ (ranging from 1 to 20); the numbers found in the green bars differ (ranging from 1 to 7); the numbers found in the blue bars differ (ranging from 4 or less to 28).
So what went on in the TV show was data cherry-picking. Overall the data on vertebrae numbers in these animals fails to strongly suggest any idea of common descent. But if you cherry-pick data by only telling people about the number of neck vertebrae, it may sound like "a clue they all share a common ancestor."
We then have in the TV show a visual showing the arm bones of humans, bats, chickens, turtles and dolphins. They look very different, as you can see in the diagram below.
But with some arbitrary color-coding not corresponding to colors in nature, the TV show (around the 10:49 mark) suggests some similarity, giving us a diagram looking like the one below:
At the 10:54 mark the host tells us, "It's wild what tiny beneficial mutations and millions of generations can produce." That's the standard Darwinist story, a "stuff piles up" explanation appealing to accumulation. But it makes no sense, because those tiny mutations would almost always not have been beneficial when they occurred; so they would not have been preserved and proliferated by any "natural selection" effect. To credibly explain dazzling biology wonders resembling products of purposeful engineering, you need a theory of organization, not a mere theory of accumulation.
At the core of Darwinism is a fallacy we may call property misattribution. The fallacy consists of attributing to "tiny mutations" a property of advantageousness that such mutations would almost never have by themselves. I can explain the fallacy with a little story involving alphabet cards, cards that each have only one letter of the alphabet printed on them.
On his birthday a cruel person gave blind Will a deck of cards, each of which had a letter of the alphabet printed on it. "I will now spell out a message that is very helpful," said Will. "How will you do that?" asked his puzzled mother, knowing that blind Will could not see. "It's so easy," said Will. "I will just divide the cards into two piles, putting the helpful cards in one pile, and the cards that are not helpful in another pile. Then it will be easy to spell out a helpful message, by using only the cards from the pile of helpful cards."
Will has made an error in logic, committing a fallacy of property misattribution. Individual letters do not have any property of being helpful or beneficial or advantageous. You can use the letters to spell out a message that is helpful or beneficial or advantageous, a message such as "Remember to look both ways when crossing the street." But that useful result does not arise until there is a special arrangement of letters. The helpfulness or advantageousness only arises "late in the game," once such a special arrangement has occurred.
Darwinist theorists make a similar error. They assume that great wonders of biological innovation are accumulations of random mutations, with each tiny mutation being preserved by a blind, mindless process of so-called "natural selection" because the mutation was beneficial. But if there are 100 or 1000 tiny mutations needed for some very complex biological innovation requiring a special arrangement of many parts, it would not be that each mutation (or that most of the mutations) would be beneficial when they occurred. So no "survival of the fittest" or "natural selection" effect could explain the preservation and proliferation of such tiny mutations if they occurred in some individuals, before a requirements threshold was met. The requirements threshold would only be reached "very late in the game," when there had occurred a sufficient arrangement of parts to produce the useful function (an arrangement enormously unlikely to ever occur by chance).
What good is half an eye? No good at all -- you can't see with half an eye. What good is 100% of an eye? No good at all, unless that eye is part of a vision system requiring much more than just an eye, including different types of protein molecules (each requiring a special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids), an optic nerve, and a specialized region of the brain allowing vision.
The system that allows humans to hear is one of the many stupendous biology systems in the body, marvels of purposeful engineering which are often systems of systems of systems. In my post "Human Anatomy Structures and the Cell Types Each Requires" I detailed the cell types different body parts require. While writing that post, I was struck by how many different cell types are required for hearing. I listed all of these cell types as being involved in hearing:
Ceruminous gland cell, Planum semilunar epithelial cell, Organ of Corti interdental epithelial cell, Elastic cartilage chondrocyte, Inner pillar cells of organ of Corti, Outer pillar cells of the organ of Corti, Inner phalangeal cells of organ of Corti, Outer hair cells of vestibular system of ear, Inner hair cells of vestibular system of ear, Outer phalangeal cells of organ of Corti, Border cells of organ of Corti, Hensen's cells of organ of Corti
When you consider how every one of these cell types is itself an incredibly organized component consisting of many types of organelles that are themselves extremely organized components, you may realize the sky-high levels of organization required for hearing.
Mark Rober should study at length the extremely high organization of many parts or extremely complex components needed to achieve stupendous biology systems such as the hearing system, the vision system, the reproductive system and the blood circulation system; and he should also study how such systems require very many interdependent components, with components only becoming useful when most of the system exists. If he studies how a capability such as hearing requires the most fine-tuned arrangement of very many delicate and interdependent parts, he may be less likely to give fallacious biology explanations, and be less likely to be involved in some risky stunt such as one in which children dive into a swimming pool of jello gelatin, with the possibility of their ears getting filled with gelatin that may damage the intricate delicate fine-tuned mechanism required for good hearing.
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
How to Answer the Question "Do You Trust Science?"
Nowadays a person may try to get someone to "fall into the line" or conform by asking him, "Do you trust science?" A conversation may go like this:
John: Blah blah blah blah blah you're just some molecules bouncing around in a body blah blah blah blah blah blah you're just electricity firing around in a brain blah blah blah blah blah blah blah our species arose merely because of lucky random mutations blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Jane: I don't think so.
John: But you trust science, don't you?
Jane: Uh, well...I guess so.
John: Then you should agree with what I said!
Jane's answer to the "do you trust science" question was not a good answer. That question should be answered with an answer longer than a simple "yes" or "no."
What is meant by the word "science"? You get very different definitions when you look for the definition of that word in major dictionaries or other leading sources:
- The Merriam Webster dictionary defines science primarily as "knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method." It also offers a definition of "a particular area of scientific study."
- The Cambridge Dictionary defines science primarily as "(knowledge from) the careful study of the structure and behavior of the physical world, especially by watching, measuring, and doing experiments, and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities." Note that there is a very big difference between this definition and the Merriam Webster definition. The Merriam Webster definition spoke as if science meant only "knowledge" (making it sound like science is beyond question), but the Cambridge Dictionary definition says that science is also "theories" (things that may reasonably be questioned). Also the Cambridge Dictionary gives this secondary definition of "science": "the facts and opinions that are provided by scientists who have studied a particular subject or situation." Now we have a definition of something much different from pure knowledge. We may very reasonably be entitled to distrust opinions of scientists that are not facts or knowledge.
- Dictionary.com defines science primarily as "the systematic study of the nature and behaviour of the material and physical universe, based on observation, experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to describe these facts in general terms." This is an "activity" definition of science very different from the "knowledge" definition of science given by the Merriam Webster dictionary. This "activity" definition of science is no fluke. Other major sources have defined "science" in such a way, describing it not as knowledge but as the process of attempting to gather knowledge by systematic efforts based on observations and experiments. Clearly we may be entitled to doubt "science" if it is defined in such a way. Human beings are prone to error, particularly when they become members of belief communities where belief traditions arise; and scientists are members of such belief communities. As a wise old saying stated, "Error circles the globe while truth is still putting on its boots." Or as Murphy put, "If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong."
- Like dictionary.com, the American Heritage Dictionary (a leading American dictionary) gives as its primary definition of science an "activity" definition rather than a "body of knowledge" definition. It gives as its primary definition of science this definition: "the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena." It is notable that under this definition doing things such as ESP tests and doing tests with psychic mediums are just as much "science" as digging up fossils or observing with a telescope. It is also notable that by using the term "theoretical explanation" this definition reminds us of how scientist explanations are largely speculative or debatable.
What is a good description of "science" as it now exists? A good literature-centered description might be this: science is a mixture of very important truths and also dubious claims and bad errors, being advanced by economically and ideologically motivated individuals who tend to be members of conformist belief communities that keep repeating a mixture of facts, speculation, triumphal legends and belief traditions. A good activity-centered description of science might be this: the process of attempting to establish truth or understand reality by a systematic use of experiments, observations or theorizing, a process that is very difficult to do right, and very easy to do wrong.
Do you think I am exaggerating how ideological today's scientists tend to be? I recently got out from my local library seven books by mainstream scientists and doctors, which I read. (Over the past 13 years I have spent gigantic amounts of time reading, quoting and analyzing the writings of those who largely teach the exact opposite of what I believe, and this is proven by my extremely abundant links to their papers, articles and books, on this blog and another blog of mine. Conversely, most mainstream scientists seem to spend no time studying works of those who criticize their dogmas and no time studying the works of those who report spooky things inconsistent with such dogmas.) One of those books I got out from the library was by an evolutionary biologist who on his very first page told us that he would be teaching "the foundation of a worldview"; and we later learn in the book how this worldview has all kinds of metaphysical presumptions and atheist dogmas. Such "worldview warrior" scientists often are candid about how shaping and controlling your worldview is a key item of their agenda.
In another of the seven books I got out from the library a biologist mentioned one little thing and then said "And that's basically all there is to biochemistry." Eager to make biological life look very simple for the sake of selling an ideology, the biologist made the most absurd misstatement, rather like someone mentioning one type of thing and then saying, "And that's all there is to history." Biochemistry actually has oceans and oceans of the deepest complexities beyond the one thing that the biologist had mentioned. On another page, the same biologist tried to pretend as if anatomy does not even exist, by making this blundering statement: "My body is some 10 trillion cells. Period." No, actually, bodies have things larger than cells, such as tissues, organs, organ systems and useful appendages such as the hands I am using to write this post.
In a previous trip to the same library, I took out a very bad book ("Until the End of Time") by physicist Brian Greene in which he stated on page 125 the enormous falsehood that "you are a swarm of interacting particles." Human bodies actually have many levels of enormous organization that make them the exact opposite of "a swarm of interacting particles," a phrase suitable for describing a tornado or a Martian dust storm. Greene makes an equally false statement on page 237. Such "speak the exact opposite of the truth" falsehoods by Greene are ideologically motivated. Guys like Greene don't want you to understand the sky-high levels of organization in your body, because the better you understand that, the less likely you will be to believe in the dogma of unguided human origins. For decades Greene has peddled the groundless scientist fantasy that is string theory.
The visual below illustrates what a "hit and miss" affair science is:
So what is a good answer to give when asked, "Do you trust science?" It is not a one-word answer of "yes" or "no." A good answer might be something like this:
I trust that large portion of science which consists of well-observed things, and facts established by well-replicated "best practices" experiments using large study groups. I largely distrust the large portion of science which consists of shaky dogmas, belief traditions of scientist communities, and experimental work involving poor methods and badly designed experiments guilty of procedural sins such as the use of way-too-small study groups. I am also very concerned about the very high level of clickbait, hype and exaggeration in today's online science literature, where we very often read groundless boasts and the repetition of socially constructed triumphal legends.
Another good answer might be something like this:
I trust Science with a capital "S," defined as facts established by observations, well-designed experiments and systematic inquiry. I largely distrust much of science with a small "s," defined as the attempt to establish knowledge by observations, experiments and theorizing. The reason I largely distrust much of that is because humans are very erring creatures who seem to do things wrong as commonly as they do things right, particularly when they try to do grand things that are very hard to do. There are a vast number of ways to do things wrong when you try to do science, and a far fewer number of ways to do things right.
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