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

Monday, March 21, 2011

To Fly in the Teeth of The Evidence II

I notice that PZ Myers has recently posted the video below. PZ and his "raiders" are no doubt having a jolly good chuckle.

I first posted briefly on this subject here. These Young Earth Creationists really have succeeded in making fools of themselves. OK so we can laugh, but don't forget that about 40% (last figure I heard) of Americans are supposed to believe in this YEC stuff. I am wondering what impact this forcing of science into a preconceived YEC mold has on American science. It's a little worrying that America is the leader of the Western World. Is this one of the signs that The West is History? No laughing matter really.

The underlying fundamentalist malaise seems to be one of priding itself in demonstrating faith via a kind of fideist based self flagellation of the intellect. The more one makes an unnecessary fool of oneself in the name of faith the greater the sense of spiritual achievement. Bit by bit one is broken into assenting to increasingly bizarre and irrational beliefs/practices and before long one finds oneself on all fours barking like a dog and yet being proud of it - or should I say "pretending to be proud of it with a teeth gritting faith". This is thought of as being what "fools for Christ" and "Kingdom thinking" is all about; namely, suspending the rational mind in favour of the opinions of some jumped up religious wallah who thinks he is in touch with God. The resultant "group think" creates a peer pressure which helps ensure nobody dare dissent as that would be regarded as the thin end of the Satanic wedge. Everyone is minding everyone else's faith and keeping it in line with the group status-quo.

At least somebody around here really likes ham.

3 comments:

Arni Zachariassen said...: I hate defending creationists, but the central claim of the video can quite easily be evaded. You don't have to say that special creation requires that sabre tooth tigers were created with sabre teeth. You can say, pointing to the story of the fall where both humans underwent physical change and became mortal and the earth and plants changed too, that all animals who gave up vegetarianism grew their teeth. Surely that's not as big a physical change as going from immortality to mortality. It's reading in to the text, yes, but that's not something creationists have anything against doing.
Good blog, by the way.; 12:36 PM, March 21, 2011
Arni Zachariassen said...: I hate defending creationists, but the central claim of the video can quite easily be evaded. You don't have to say that special creation requires that sabre tooth tigers were created with sabre teeth. You can say, pointing to the story of the fall where both humans underwent physical change and became mortal and the earth and plants changed too, that all animals who gave up vegetarianism grew their teeth. Surely that's not as big a physical change as going from immortality to mortality. It's reading in to the text, yes, but that's not something creationists have anything against doing.
Good blog, by the way.; 9:47 PM, March 21, 2011
Timothy V Reeves said...: I haven’t been able to find out what Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis are saying now-a-days about the origins of the ostensive carnivorous adaptations (which doesn’t include just teeth) of cats, tyrannosaurs etc. According to the book “Reason and Faith” (Forster and Marston 1989 – two anti-YEC authors) Henry Morris proposed that carnivorous animals developed their adaptations by a very rapid kind of evolution after the fall, which seems a remarkable claim for an anti-evolutionist like Morris. (See pages 345 and 379 of the said book).

But that was then: Since the days of Henry Morris and his book “The Genesis Flood”( circa 1965) things have changed at AiG. For example “The Genesis Flood” proposes that the Cosmos may be in the region of 10,000+ years old. This figure gave Whitcomb and Morris a little more room for speculation and maneuver as it includes a large slab of mainstream prehistory (~5000+ years). In fact 10,000 years, of course, takes us back to the end of the Ice Age which from a YEC perspective could plausibly be construed as being bound up with the flood without them needing to disrupt the Cenozoic dating of the “Recent” period.

I’m not sure when it happened but clearly this more flexible time scale has since been rejected by AiG in favour of the tighter 6000+ year chronology. So far I have been unable to discover if today’s AiG believe that carnivores, with all their blatantly physiological adaptation to predation, were created “as is” or propose that they fundamentally changed after the fall. If you have news of what AiG actually believe on this score please let me know. Trouble is, given that history goes back ~5000 years, as always, poor old AiG don’t have much time to play with,; 4:03 AM, April 07, 2011

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

Monday, March 21, 2011

To Fly in the Teeth of The Evidence II

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION