Quantum Non-Linearity: To Fly in the Teeth of The Evidence

Thursday, March 03, 2011

To Fly in the Teeth of The Evidence

James Knight, who has well and truly slagged off the nonsense of Young Earth Creationism on his blog, got a comment from Henry Morris-Junior-Junior, the grandson of Henry Morris-senior-senior, one of the authors of the seminal YEC volume “The Genesis Flood”. In his own comment James points out that pathological factors are probably at the bottom of the thinking of YEC scientists. I pick up this theme up in my own comment on James’ blog, which I reproduce here:

Hi James,

One of the pathological factors you refer to may be vested interest – in fact to the tune of many millions of dollars of vested interest. Money has been poured into the Young Earth Project and you’re not going to easily convince those who have so much to lose financially, not to mention loss of face. With this emotional and financial investment at stake, it is likely to be an exercise in utter futility to attempt to open up a discussion with a fully paid up YEC clan member. They are desperate and perhaps even desperate and dangerous!

Moreover, Henry Morris-Junior-Junior is misleading us over the soundness of YEC research: e.g. We currently have two contradictory star light “solutions” on offer at AiG - the latest in a series of abortive “solutions” starting with Henry Morris-senior-senior’s mooting the concept of a virtual universe bathed in a sea of bogus light messages created en-route!. The latest “solutions” I’m thinking of are from Russ Humphreys and Jason Lisle respectively. The former has a theory which suggests that the distant galaxies are millions if not billions of years old and the latter has another theory which suggest they are only 6000 years old – quite a bit of community dissonance there I think.

In any case questions of both theology and science are invariably open ended and subject to possible revision as new data and new interpretations come to light. In the YEC community we see some quite drastic revisions going on (re: start light) which raises doubts over the soundness of their mental processes. But one thing the YECs just won’t do – no, make that “can’t do” - is revise their interpretation of the meaning of Genesis 1 & 2. On this issue they really have built themselves into a corner! For them it’s a desperate fight to the death with everything to lose! People this desperate just can’t do objective science because they are incapable of the dispassionate judgments needed in science. Best leave them to their own extremist devices and the applause of their ignorant followers, an applause which gives them the confidence and the feel good factor they so desperately need.

This desperado is in need of the feel good factor!

***

Laughing Stock

It is difficult to believe that YECs really do believe that the carnivorous bi-pedal dinosaurs were originally designed to be herbivorous, so I had a quick look on Answers in Genesis to see if I could find such an admission. The best I found was here where we read that “We know that both dinosaurs and humans were vegetarian in the beginning.” (Incidentally the AiG article I’ve just linked to admits that no humans remains have ever been found with dinosaur fossils and tries to explain this awkward fact away). In this connection it is also interesting to note that in their children’s section on animals AiG make the appalling claim that the following fauna were originally vegetarian: Tiger, cheetah, Jackal, great horned owl, peregrine falcon, boa constrictor, bald eagle, black tip reef shark and crocodile. (However I don’t understand why some of the sea going carnivores like the octopus and the blacktip reef shark weren’t given an “originally vegetarian” status)

Given the foregoing it is no wonder that AiG are a laughing stock. Set against the findings of AiG there is, I hardly need say, a wide scientific and international consensus across disparate and independently funded scientific communities between which there are often some healthy rivalries and arguments. In contrast AiG is part of a relatively tight knit religious community who will put this consensus down to the manipulation of Satan and therefore they a very ready to use religious intimidation and the threat of Divine displeasure to propagate their cause. - 05/03/11

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Thursday, March 03, 2011

To Fly in the Teeth of The Evidence

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION