Skeptophilia — a closeted semi-believer?

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I have Skeptophilia, a blog by Gordon Bonnet, on my blogroll, and he's been here for several years. It's generally good stuff, but at times, more than once, I've wondered how skeptical he is on some things.

For example, I think he wants to believe that there's "life out there" and so sets the bar lower on Drake Equation issues. On something else, he linked uncritically to a guy in Houston, a pastor or similar but not a Ph.D. archaeologist from an accredited university, who claims to have found a curse tablet at Mount Ebal that had the name of Yahweh on it dated to circa 1200 BCE. (More here on how much of a circular reasoning fail it is, in a generally good r/AcademicBiblical piece except the one fundagelical there.) In another post, he claims that a coin in the name of otherwise generally unattested Roman emperor Sponson is legit, when it's nowhere near settled among numismatists. I blogged together about both, then separately about his claim about extinct gomphotheres and distribution of some trees in North America.

And, on my other site, I recently noted (He's "Tales of Whoa" on Twitter) that his willingness to believe humans are hardwired to know the difference between happy and sad music was based on a survey of dubious scientific value, if any. Given that he's an avid amateur musician, he should have noted my caveats about Western vs non-Western, as well as pre-Baroque, or even more, pre-Renaissance vs modern major-minor Western music. As a retired AP science teacher, he should have noted the small sample size and other issues.  (I've since updated that blog post of mine based on a new one of his where he seems to at least indirectly undercut himself.)

And, now, there's his post two weeks ago about ChatGPT threatening to replace pastors' sermons. First, as someone who's a PK with a graduate divinity degree, this ignores that many a pastor has been preaching out of either sermon books or online equivalents for decades if not centuries. Second, pastors and priests and rabbis, at least in denominations where they work full time, do much more than lead religious services.

Anyway, there's this from that post:

To make my own stance clear right from the get-go, I'm what the philosophers call a de facto atheist -- I'm not a hundred percent sure there's no higher power (mostly because I'm not a hundred percent sure of anything), but the complete lack of hard evidence tilts me in the direction of disbelief. As far as spiritual concerns, like the existence of a soul (or at least "something more" than our physical being), I'm an agnostic. There is a great deal of weird shit out there that might be explainable by virtue of some sort of non-materialistic model -- but it might just as well have to do with a combination of our own flawed cognitive processes and incomplete understanding of science. (If you have five minutes, watch this video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about why quantum wackiness doesn't support the existence of souls. I'm not as convinced as she is, but wherever you're starting, belief-wise, it'll get you thinking.)

Really?

He's interesting enough in many ways that I have no plans de-blogroll him, but I wouldn't add him over at my philosophy and critical thinking blog.

As for Sabine? I DID de-blogroll her, after she went on a rant about climate scientists being too alarmist.

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Update, July 28: His piece on David Grusch and his UFO testimony says he's a closeted semi-believer here, too. The obvious answer is the simple one: They didn't see it. In cases like radar screens and pursuit aircraft, they saw UFOs that are that — unidentified. (The bogeys were probably later "de-identified" with more scrutiny.) As for the rest of his claims? Simple answer is that he's lying, for one or more of related psychological reasons that usually drive such things.