A Skeptical Human | Anton Dybal

Medicare-For-All, rather than being "unaffordable", would actually save trillions of dollars over the next decade, according to several studies—and that's while providing *all* Americans with comprehensive healthcare. Here I take a deep dive into the data on this question, especially focusing on the widely-cited Mercatus Center study by Charles Blahous, outlining its many flaws and inaccuracies. I also examine physician support levels for single-payer healthcare, and finally debunk the common misconception that money spent on healthcare via tax dollars would be *on top* of our current spending—rather than a more affordable substitute.

There is no good reason to believe that "ghost hunters" encounter or detect anything paranormal. Their equipment can be triggered by many different things in the environment including power lines, cell phones, or radio towers. Their audio recordings often sound nothing like what they claim to hear, and saying you feel spooky sensations proves nothing to the person at home. Ghost-hunters go into their investigations biased—expecting to encounter ghosts—and their entertainment-driven shows are incentivized to exaggerate or outright lie to viewers. Many characteristics of "haunted houses" in fact have very straightforward, naturalistic explanations.

Creationists are simply wrong when they claim that genetic mutations are never beneficial. Many such mutations have been observed that provide new enzymatic functions, protection against predators, and immunity against disease. Beneficial mutations are also much more commonplace than creationists make them out to be, with studies finding that 1 to 6% of mutations are advantageous. The statistics used by creationists to support an astronomically lower number come from deeply flawed analyses. Contrary to what they claim, beneficial mutations can and do increase overall fitness—in the wild and the laboratory—and such mutations accumulate over time via this little thing called "natural selection."

It's often argued that guns don't kill people; people kill people—and in the absence of access to firearms, criminals and killers will simply switch to other tools to get the job done. While yes, guns don't take it upon themselves to go out and kill, they to make it much easier to kill to a degree that other weapons don't compare to. While many miscellaneous objects can be used as a weapon, it wouldn't make sense to ban them because they have beneficial primary functions. Pointing to killers making the switch from guns to knives undermines the argument that gun control would be ineffective.

After a mass shooting, conservatives will argue that more good guys with guns are needed to prevent such events from occurring in the future. They also claim that over 90% of mass shootings take place in gun-free zones. Here I explain the many problems with these arguments.

Climate change deniers make many false claims about carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. These include the idea that CO2 has a limited or negligible impact on global warming—or even has the net effect of cooling our planet. Some also claim that the greenhouse effect would violate the laws of physics. Others make the assertion that the small quantities of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere couldn't possibly cause significant worldwide temperature changes. As I show here, every single one of these arguments are incorrect.

Climate-change deniers are mistaken when they claim that factors other than our greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, whether they point to Milankovitch cycles, the Sun or volcanic eruptions. The data clearly shows that the predominant cause of current warming trends are manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

William Lane Craig argues that objective reality cannot exist without God. As I argue here, this isn't evidence that a God exists; it's merely an appeal to undesirable consequences. The many horrific godly actions described in the Bible also make clear that such a God's moral viewpoints wouldn't be worth following even if he did exist, and such atrocities don't match up with Craig's description of God as "perfectly good, loving and kind."

You can't describe religious morality as "objective" if it allows for Christians to disagree with each other on every single moral question while also citing scripture to support their viewpoints. Finally, without God, people can still use reason and empathy to decide right from wrong, and despite this process being imperfect, moral progress *is* made over time.

There is no good reason to believe that the molten material seen dripping on 9/11 and found in the debris piles was melted steel generated in thermitic reactions during a controlled demolition. Aluminum from the airplanes and buildings makes much more sense, as it can glow bright orange at the temperatures present in building fires.

No testing ever confirmed the presence of molten steel, and the WTC "meteorites" contain visible chunks of still-solid steel. Building fires are more than capable of deforming steel beams, whereas neither thermite nor explosives would act in this way. Finally, high surface temperatures can't be used to infer the presence of below-ground pools of molten steel, and the shifting nature of these hot-spots indicates that fires were responsible.

Conservatives argue that within the United States, gun control has been ineffective and counter-productive, citing Washington D.C. and Chicago as their key examples. Their portrayal of the data on this question is very misleading and inaccurate, and as I show here, nationwide data on the subject makes very clear that the stricter a state's gun laws, the lower its rate of gun homicides, gun suicides, and mass shootings.