Newsletter Designed
22nd June 2026
A few weeks ago, fellow Skeptics in the Pub member Tim and I went on a visit to an event run by a group in NZ called Thinking Matters. The event was an opportunity to meet and argue with an “atheist” - although in reality the atheist in question was Jonathan Noyes, a Christian from the US who used to be an atheist until his mid-20s. It was a really interesting evening, where the gimmick was that as soon as Jonathan put on his baseball cap he took on the persona of a slightly obnoxious but knowledgeable atheist. Apart from the occasional insult, using phrases like “ignorant goat herders” and “sky daddy”, he did a fairly good job of laying out some of the main reasons atheists have for not believing in God.
It was interesting to see the Christians in the room try to argue with this fake atheist, and unsurprising to hear just how unconvincing and ignorant most of their arguments were - like Paley’s argument that because a watch has a maker, so too does the universe. At one point one of the older gentlemen in the room started laughing out loud at Jonathan, after he’d said something about the beginning of the universe. It felt a bit weird, and Jonathan addressed it after he took off the hat at the end of the evening, reverting to his real Christian self. He explained to the crowd that Jesus calls people to be kind and loving, not mean and deriding - although it really left like this idea was falling on deaf ears.
In a couple of weeks, a few of us skeptics in Wellington will be going to another event run by Thinking Matters, the “premiere” of a new creationist movie called Universe Designed. If you’re interested in attending, look out for us at the Porirua event, or if you’re outside of Wellington look for one of the many other screenings around the country. The movie is free to watch, and bonus points if anyone is able to attend and then write a review for this newsletter.
In this week’s newsletter, there are no movie reviews. But we do have a group of weird and wonderful topics. Bronwyn starts us off strong with an article about a conspiracy circulating around the internet these days - the idea that Gifted children in the US were earmarked for special government focus, as part of a secret project called the GATE Program. I’ve written about the continual downgrading of Elon Musk’s plans to revolutionise land travel, from the lofty heights of the imagined HyperLoop to the sad reality of the Vegas Loop. Patrick gives us some details on why the worst of the climate models is being retired - a little bit of positive news for a change! Katrina has been very meta, and has used a flow state to write an article about flow states - what they are, and what they’re definitely not. And finally I’ve written a second article about Microsoft’s quantum chip, as they’ve just released a second version of the chip - although they’ve still not provided any good quality independent evidence that the chip is actually capable of operating as a quantum device.
