NAID: The Thumbs Down and the Thumbs Up

 

I think this is what they mean by a "trigger"

I've complained about North American Intelligent Design (NAID) culture on many an occasion; in particular their unnecessarily a priori anti-evolutionism and anti-Junk DNA posturing founded on their dualist God-of-the-Gaps philosophy: Viz: "either God did it or evilution did it". NAID pundits like Casey Luskin will of course try and deny this, but Luskin is not the kind of guy I find very competent. But worse than Luskin's philosophical faux pas' is that NAID culture, following its sometimes off-hand treatment by academia, has fallen into the embrace of far right nationalists & "libertarians": We can find, for example, an article on their website which supports the Trumpist commandeering of museums to preach the far right gospel of unwokeness. (See also here). In the US Christian culture is being politically corrupted from within. The late Charlie Kirk is to my mind a typical case of a politically corrupted Christian. So, it's thumbs down to all that Philosophical dualism and to Casey Luskin, but most of all to those far right political bedmates determined to cancel anything which to them smacks of "woke".  

Trump Commandeering policy at work

But having said all that I can get behind Intelligent Design in the abstract and would call myself an intelligent design creationist along with the late Sir John Polkinghorne. In this post I'm going to mention some articles on the Evolution News/Science & Culture website where I can give them a thumbs up for a change. 

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The Thumbs Up

1.  Death by Intelligent Design? A Biological Enigma | Science and Culture Today

This article is by Eric Hedin. I have criticized Hedin before as a NAIDer who has succumbed to dualism but in this post he makes some very worthy remarks (in my view).  He points out that given the biological world's potential ability to breed exponentially such a superpower makes death in a world of limited space and resources a necessity; he even applies this to human populations - an idea that would certainly not go down well with Biblical literalists of a fundamentalist frame of mind. What he doesn't say however is that the breeding/death contention is very much part of the evolutionary dynamic. For a discussion of this contention see my generalized evolutionary equation and the question of  islands of functionality. 

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution by (Naked) Chance?

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution and Islands of functionality

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution: Naked Chance?

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Mathematics of the Spongeam.

Quantum Non-Linearity: On Structuralism and the Spongeam

Quantum Non-Linearity: Necessary Conditions for Evolution: The Spongeam

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2. Farewell to John Searle, Philosopher of Mind and Language | Science and Culture Today

This is a tribute to the late philosopher John Searle who made it clear to the world that there is a difference between conscious cognition and the formal computational simulation of the amazing molecular processes which give organic minds their consciousness and therefore their first person perspective. Those irrational "rationalists" who are spooked by the subject of consciousness and the irreducible first person perspective will likely continue to maintain their consciousness-doesn't-exist stance(*1); they do this by conflating the difference between third and first person linguistic usage and also conflating the structure of formal models and the actual subject of a formal simulation. 

This tribute to Searle by Science and Culture was well deserved. 

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3. French Authors Say Science Points to God; Scientists Listen | Science and Culture Today

This interesting article by Denise O'Leary starts with a mention of a book by two French authors titled "God, the Science, the Evidence". This book apparently takes a favorable view toward theism. Denise goes on to consider what may be a more sympathetic shift among some scholars toward theism. The article does, however, betray  hints of NAID's anti-evolution God-of-the-Gaps philosophy(*2) and displays no cognizance of the One Big Gap everywhere and everywhen necessarily left by descriptive science's elegant compressed mathematical formalisms.

What particularly interested me was this quote from Denise's article:

For one thing, materialism is, as philosopher Edward Feser points out, a snake that eats its own tail. If our minds are merely illusions or brain noise, why should we believe anything?

That reminded me of the following post of mine on unstable self-reference: 

Quantum Non-Linearity: HOW TO KNOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW IT

Denise finishes by suggesting that materialism may be reborn as panpsychism - she might (or might not) be right.

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4. Materialism Is Bad for Science | Science and Culture Today

This is another interesting post by Denise O'Leary. She rightly takes geneticist Richard Lewontin to task for his closed mindedness toward epigenetics. Well, I'm not going to get into that fracas - it could go either as far as I'm concerned, but where I would agree with Denise is that in her quote from Lewontin it seems that Lewontin was or is an unscientific bigot who is of the opinion that when a theory is well established he is right to ignore data and experience which might just point to the need to refine and/or update the theory.  Lewontin's attitude is on a par with the geocentric establishment who persecuted Galileo in favour of the established Ptolemaic theory.  True, the established theory with its ad-hoc epicycles fitted quite well with the data, but the vested interests of the establishment meant that they were captive to the theoretical status quo and unable to pay attention to its limitation or entertain other possibilities, least of all a paradigm shift.  

The foregoing doesn't necessarily relate to hardened materialism: It's really all about how rigor mortis can plague established science if conservative bigotry, status jealousy and vested interest get their way. Nevertheless I can see how Lewontin's bigotry will also readily port to God-denying materialism.

Footnotes

*1 There is clearly a lot of background processing going on in the mind that is unconscious just as in a computer game there is a lot of background computing well beyond what is on the screen. But this fact is insufficient reason to dismiss consciousness.

*2  See for example this post on Science and Culture....

From John West, a Concise Explanation of Evolution’s Toxicity | Science and Culture Today

Where we read this comment re. "evilution"...

For one thing, it degrades any idea of human beings holding a unique status in nature, bearing God’s image. For another, as an unguided, purposeless process, it undercuts any idea that an intelligent creator planned or cared about the course of life’s history. But rather, finally, it teaches that the actual creator or sculptor of life is “mass death,” in the form of natural selection.

Compare here...

Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID Part IV: Evolution: Creation on Steriods

And I repeat: None of this means I have any intellectual commitment to standard evolution, but I know a bogus argument when I see one; the writer of the linked to article has swallowed the atheist mind-set on evolution. Also, compare Eric Hedin in my first point of this post.

Classic Dualism

Courtesy of the Faraday Institute

I'm part of a Facebook group called Evangelicals for Evolutionary Creation. This is not to say that I've committed myself to standard Evolutionary thinking, but I feel that this group are worthy thinkers to keep an eye on. However, somebody put the following comment on their FB feed....

So I’m getting toward the end of Origins by the Haarsmas. A question arises, if abiogenesis is true, how does this not prove that life can happen without God? This kind of concerns me and it seems to be an open question in evolutionary creationism.

I believe that "Haarsmas" is a reference to Deborah Haarsma, the current president of Biologos, the Christian evolutionary creation organisation. I didn't comment on this statement as the Evolutionary Creation people are more than capable of critiquing such a breathtakingly naive perspective, a perspective with widespread appeal among both Christians and atheists. On this view it's a binary choice: "Either God did it or evolution did it"

I've no doubt said something like the following many times before: Since the enlightenment Western science has merely shown us that the cosmos is sufficiently organized for us to form succinct mathematical statements describing its dynamics. As many Christians fully understand, those descriptions in and of themselves only tell us about the "how?" of the cosmos and not the "why?" - but the "why?" is only a meaningful question if one first accepts that sentience, intelligence and purpose are a priori features of existence.

 If  anything this strange mathematical descriptive elegance only compounds the enigma of the cosmos and tells us little about absolute origins; that is, the ultimate gap, a gap that descriptive science is logically incapable of filling and if pressed simply leaves us with an elegant-descriptions-all-the-way-down regress. In fact, since we have no logically obliging reason for the continued existence of the contingencies of our cosmic reality that ultimate gap is everywhere and everywhen. 

And yet the dualistic view expressed by the above quote is the common default: That is "either God did it or cosmic processes did it"; the underlying assumption of this perspective is that somehow the enigma of cosmic organization has a logical self sufficiency which at best only leaves room for the God of deism or at worst no God at all. Such a perspective might have its origins in the early enlightenment/industrial era when it started to become much clearer that mechanisms (such as a steam regulator & automata) could be developed which meant that machines looked after their own running. The popularist conclusion was that the cosmos must be that kind of mechanism. Such mechanisms appeared not to need any prayerful ritualistic support or mystical input of any kind to continue. On this perspective sacredness seems to have been purged from what was now thought of as a self sustaining profane cosmos. 

But the realization that such mechanisms were so startingly sophisticated enough to beg the question of their design seems to have been lost on many people: One such person in our modern era is (atheist?) theologian Don Cupitt of the Sea of Faith movement. Also, blowhard atheist Richard Carrier is of this ilk. Carrier is so convinced by the sophistry of his flawed view of probability and randomness that he believes probability to be logically sufficient to fill in the God-gap.  And yet Carrier succeeded in identifying that our cosmic context lacks some logically self-sufficient kernel, although Carrier's erroneous concept of probability doesn't provide that kernel. 

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It is surely ironic that the self same virtuoso cosmic organization which for some fills in the God-gap and does away with God actually intensifies the nagging enigma of the absolute origins question; the contingent particularity of that organization is amazing. In fact as I have shown, evolution itself (if it has occurred) is effectively creationism on steroids.  And yet it is the underlying dualism of God vs evolution that much of the North America Intelligent Design movement (NAID) trades on. They will deny it of course, but whenever they open their mouths it is easy to see that they are exploiting the popularist God-of-the-gaps "Intelligence vs blind natural forces" dichotomy. To attack standard evolution on the scientific basis that the evidence is insufficient is one thing but to attack it on the basis of a half-cocked dualist philosophy is quite another - and I put it to the NAID community that although they affect to claim theirs is a scientific dispute their ulterior reasoning is in fact based on the popular appeal of their philosophical dualism, whatever they might claim. That appeal, however, is understandable I suppose because the above quote from a Facebook page is in fact the tip of a huge market iceberg of popularist thinking which the NAID's dichotomized explanations address and by which they make their money, trade and continue in mutual backslapping. For more on NAID see here, here and here.

NOTE: Luskin's God-of-the-Gaps paradigm

As I've made it clear before I don't think much of NAID theorist Casey Luskin's competence as an apologist for Intelligent Design. This post on Evolution News, which describes Luskin's views, cements his reputation as a God-or-of-the-Gaps apologist.  As I've said above I have no intellectual commitment to standard evolutionary theory, but what is clear, evolution or no evolution, one cannot get away from the question of intelligent design. That Luskin is so anti-evolution, a priori, is evidence that he still thinks subliminally in dualist and atheist categories in so far as he believes it to be  a choice between "blind natural forces vs intelligent design"..... where he interprets evolution atheistically in terms of "blind natural forces". Ergo, Luskin is a God-of-the-Gaps apologist whatever he claims. 

Relevant Links

Quantum Non-Linearity: From Spears to Aircraft

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution and Computation

The Cosmological Argument

But perhaps the ultimate cause mentioned here

 is another universe?

The weak point in this argument is the "must be God" assertion
which no doubt could be challenged.

As I said at the beginning of this post I've never been very convinced by  some of the traditional arguments for God's existence. In this connection my friend James Knight posted this blog on the Cosmological Argument. In commenting on his post I explained briefly to James why I have a reserved opinion on the Cosmological Argument....

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I suppose it started in the 1970s when I became enamoured of idea that the best we can do in science is describe the patterns of the world. In particular I focused on the subject of randomness as a particular form of pattern that was difficult if not impossible to describe algorithmically. Causation, then, becomes a problematic notion with randomness. As the Cosmological argument makes use of the notion of causation this argument loses it's intelligibility somewhat.

That's not to say that the Cosmological Argument does not express something deeply intuitively true and compelling

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The above explains why I was so obsessed with randomness at an early stage and why I was so determined to crack the question of randomness. (I'm sure professional mathematicians have done a better job, but my PDF on the subject was good enough for my purposes) 

If we are intellectually looking for God it is ironic that blowhard atheist Richard Carrier should identify the area where to start looking; namely, that God is the mysterious logical necessity left when one subtracts out all apparently contingent things. Richard wrongly identifies his logical necessity as probability and randomness. In doing so he appears to misunderstand the ontology of probability.

And while I'm here let me say that I am also unimpressed with Anselm's ontological argument for the necessary existence of God. But I concede that if God is that mysterious logical necessity which Richard Carrier identifies then in that sense the ontology of God makes His existence a necessity. But I suspect that for finite beings like ourselves the true ontological argument for God involves infinities and is likely to be beyond our understanding. However, there is nothing wrong in trying to develop an ontological argument; you never know what you might come up with.

For me God is the kind of explanation one uses abductively; that is, it is the best explanation I can think of which makes human sense of an otherwise senseless cosmos. It gives us the "why"* (rather than the mere scientific descriptive "how") of those astonishing empirical features of our cosmos such as its high organisation, the human compulsion for meaning, purpose & justice and the existence of conscious cognition as the cornerstone of both empirical science and morality. Theism is the crucial intellectual component of a worldview which makes rational sense of our scientific observations on a cosmos which otherwise is entirely absurd. In the beginning God.... (See also Hebrews 11:6ff)

Footnote

* The kind of "Why?" I'm thinking of here only makes sense in a context where sentience is an a priori feature. 

Bayes and God

 

Bayes: A man of the cloth

There is a long tradition of Bayes theorem being used in discussions about the probability of God. I've never been very keen on using Bayes to "prove" God's existence: I expressed my reservations in this short paper where I discussed the use of Bayes Theorem by Christians Roger Forster and Paul Marsden in their book Reason and Faith. In this connection, however, I noticed this post by Christian Blogger James Knight where once again we see God and Bayes appearing together. 

Well, in this instance I didn't want to get embroiled with the subject of God and Bayes, but in my correspondence with James I picked up on a technical issue which obliquely impinged upon his post. 

The theorem that interested me can be expressed as follows....

If 

                                                                        P(A) < P(A|B)

....then it follows that....

                                                                  P(B) < P(B|A)

....where P(A) and P(B) are the unconditional probabilities of A and B respectively and P(A|B) and P(B|A) are the respective conditional probabilities of A and B.

As per my practice in my paper on randomness I'm going to use Venn diagrams. But Such an approach implicitly assumes my frequentist interpretation of probability, an interpretation I won't attempt to justify here. 

In terms of a Venn diagram the relationship of A and B will in general look something like this....

Here the area labelled A represents the set of possible cases with property A and the area B represents the set of possible cases with  property B. This Venn diagram is imagined to reside in a large domain of a total number of possible cases of T.

Now, if N(A) = number of cases with property A, then the unconditional probability of A is given by P(A) where... 

                                                                            P(A) = N(A) / T

If the number of cases with property B is N(B) and the number of cases where B and A overlap is expressed as  N(A|B) = N(B|A), then the probability of A given B, P(A|B), equates to....

                                                                     P(A|B) = N(A|B) / N(B)

Now we postulate that:

                                                                            P(A) < P(A|B)

 Expressed in frequentist terms we can write that as.....

                                                                   N(A) / T  < N(A|B) / N(B).

We now multiply both sides of this inequality by N(B) and this gives......

                                                                    N(A) N(B) / T  < N(A|B)

Now divide both sides of the latter inequality by N(A) and this returns.

                                                                N(B) / T  < N(A|B) / N(A)

But N(A|B) = N(B|A) and so the above inequality becomes....

                                                                N(B) / T  < N(B|A) / N(A)

Expressed in terms of probabilities the latter inequality can be written as.....

                                                                        P(B) < P(B|A)

....and this inequality has thus been proved from our first postulate which was... 

                                                                            P(A) < P(A|B)

In other words:

                                                        P(B) < P(B|A)  =>   P(A) < P(A|B).

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James was concerned that the apparent symmetry of this result is contrary to his intuition that the general case is far from symmetric. However this intuition of asymmetry is backed up by the following special case where we have....

From this diagram we see that B=>A (i.e. B implies A with certainty). But clearly given A the probability of B, depending the relatives sizes of the two sets A and B, may be quite low. This may be the kind of asymmetry that James is thinking of. 

Creation, Probability and Something for Nothing? Part V

 Let's Carry on Carriering Part V

This is my continuing critique of an article by commercial historian and unquenchable blowhard Richard Carrier. In his article Richard believes he has used probability calculus to show that "No god [is] needed" to create a universe. Well, in this instance there is no need for me to argue either for or against atheism; for the purposes of this post it is sufficient for me to show that Richard's misunderstanding and mishandling of probability and randomness hamstrings his polemic completely.  In Part II I pointed out where his argument comes off the rails and from that point on he constructs a teetering house of cards. 

The other parts of this series can be found here....

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part I

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part II

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part III

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part IV

On the whole Richard started his article well. In the first part of this series we saw Richard defining what he referred to as Nothing; note the capitalized N. Richard tells us that this kind of Nothing is what you are left with when all mere logical contingencies have been removed and one is left with a bare minimum of logical truisms, truisms which can't be removed without logical contradiction. I had no problems with this proposal. I also agreed that many of the classical "proofs" for God's existence are very dubious to say the least.  But I noted that Richard said nothing about the actual content of this exotic and mysterious placeholder he calls "Nothing" and I went on to say that this omission allows theism to slip in by the back door. Richard might have attempted to lock and bolt the front door but he's left the back door wide open. However, for my current purposes there is no need for me here to smuggle in God using "back door theism" because my focus is on his foundational logical errors, errors which bring his house of cards crashing down, never mind that he's actually failed to even lock the front door.

Let me finish this opening section with this: As I might have said before, theism, particularly Christian theism, is at the very least a mythological world view which for me is the abductive narrative making a whole lot of retrospective sense of an otherwise very perplexing and meaningless world. Moreover, it provides compelling insights into the human predicament; for me personally it is a successful "Weltenschauung"  (world-view) which is actually more than mythology; it is mythology++. However, we must concede that world-views attempt to encompass and synthesize a very wide field of proprietary experience and unique personal histories and therefore Worldview analysis is a rather subjective and contentious business on which the agreement theorem hits the rocks.

Although I would recommend Christianity to atheists even if they are to regard it as only a compelling mythological world-view, I nevertheless respect and understand their perspective given the cosmic context which has developed in our consciousness since the enlightenment  ...although I have little sympathy with the kind of flawed and triumphalist polemic we get from Richard Carrier. 

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RICHARD: Probability of Something from Nothing. Proposition 8 holds that “when there is Nothing,” then “every possible number of universes that can appear has an equal probability of occurring,” and Proposition 9 holds that therefore “the probability of Nothing remaining nothing equals the ratio of one to n, where n is the largest logically possible number of universes that can appear.” We can therefore calculate limits on how likely it is that something would exist now, given the assumption that once upon a time there was Nothing—not a god or quantum fluctuation or anything else, but literally in fact Nothing.

MY COMMENT: I've already covered propositions 8 and 9 in part IV but I'll outline again Richard's two main embarrassments here. 

In the above Richard has assumed that if he is given a probability this implies he has in his hands an objective source capable of randomly creating outcomes. This is an error on at least two counts as we will see. I can, however, accept  this:

Proposition 8 holds that “when there is Nothing,” then “every possible number of universes that can appear has an equal probability of occurring,”

But then this doesn't follow:

Proposition 9 holds that therefore “the probability of Nothing remaining nothing equals the ratio of one to n, where n is the largest logically possible number of universes that can appear.”

As I remarked in the previous parts, probability is an intelligible concept only if one first assumes the existence of an observer who is able to form an enumerated (or denumerated) ratio of what are believed to be logical contingencies. That is, probability presupposes the existence of a self-aware observer cognitively sophisticated enough to express information in terms of Laplace's classical probability quotient. For example, in proposition 8 we really haven't got a clue as what this mysterious object or entity called Nothing is likely to create, if anything at all. Therefore Richard is right in suggesting that in the absence of any further information “every possible number of universes that can appear has an equal probability of occurring,” Well, as I know Richard himself realizes it's going to be quite an intellectual challenge denumerating all the possible universes in order to return a Laplacian probability ratio here, but the principle entailed is apparently coherent and comprehensible; for as far is our quantified ignorance is concerned we are left with a ratio of 1 to n where n is clearly some huge number. 

But between the two propositions 8 & 9 there is a serious logical fallacy. The probability ratio of 1 to n pertains to an observer's subjective information level and not some potential creation dynamic which pertains to Nothing. Moreover, this probability is conditioned on our complete lack of knowledge as to which logical contingency of the n possibilities which Nothing, so called, will "choose" to create. Those apparent possibilities includes any number of n universes where n actually includes the "null" universe; that is, the universe with nothing in it. On this basis Nothing, so called, sounds like a pretty sophisticated object; don't you think Richard? (Arguing that with Nothing there is nothing to stop it creating something can be turned on its head: Viz: There is nothing to stop Nothing remaining as Nothing; this kind of polemic is just informal verbal sophistry!)

Well, we know that Nothing didn't create the null universe so on the basis of these informational conditions the probability of the creation of a particular universe,  which I shall call U_p, can be symbolized by:

Prob(U_p/E) = 1/(n-1)

....where E is the information condition that a universe is known to exist, although at this stage we don't know which particular universe exists. Now, assuming we know which universe of the n-1 possible universes has been created (because we can look out and observe it) then n = 1. Therefore on these updated informational conditions... 

Prob(P_u/E) = 1/1 = 1 !!!

...which only goes illustrate just how conditional probabilities are upon observer information. For the very reason that probability is a measure of observer ignorance it is an entirely incoherent move to then try to use it to impute a creative dynamic to an object such as Nothing of which we know very little.  Probability in and of itself is not a creative dynamic; rather it concerns our knowledge or lack of knowledge about the object in question. 

What is very clear is that whatever Prob(P_u/E) works out at we have no logical right to infer that Nothing will consequently generate universes at random....along such lines, I suspect, Richard is thinking. A quantified probability does not imply randomness, although the reverse is not true ....the patterns of randomness often entail probability because these patterns are so algorithmically complex that they are from a human angle, practically unknowable in succinct algorithmic terms. Therefore random outcomes can usually only be expressed in terms of probabilities (Unless we've got a book of randomly generated numbers which we've memorised!).

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RICHARD: Assume that only the numbers 0 to 100 exist, and therefore 100 is the largest logically possible number of universes that can appear. In that event, the probability that Nothing would remain Nothing (the probability of ex nihilo nihil) is 100 to 1 against. There being 101 numbers, including the zero, i.e. the continuation of nothing being the condition of there arising zero universes, and only one of those numbers constitutes remaining nothing, then there are 100 times more ways for Nothing to become something, than to remain nothing. And when there is Nothing, there is nothing to stop any of those other ways from materializing, nor does anything exist to cause any one of those ways to be more likely than any of the others.

It is therefore logically necessarily the case that, if we assume there was ever Nothing, the probability of ex nihilo nihil is less than 1%.

Of course, 100 is not the highest number. Go looking, you won’t find a highest number. It is in fact logically necessarily the case that no highest number exists. So really, the probability of ex nihilo nihil is literally infinitesimal—infinity to one against. One might complain that we don’t really know what that means. But it doesn’t matter, because we can graph the probability of ex nihilo nihil by method of exhaustion, and thus see that the probability vanishes to some value unimaginably close to zero.

MY COMMENT: Here we go again. Richard has projected his otherwise coherent probability examples onto the cosmos as if they entail a creation dynamic. This is very apparent in these sentences.....

In that event, the probability that Nothing would remain Nothing (the probability of ex nihilo nihil) is 100 to 1 against.

It is therefore logically necessarily the case that, if we assume there was ever Nothing, the probability of ex nihilo nihil is less than 1%.

So, according to Richard he can project what is in fact a purely subjective measure of information (i.e. probability) onto this mysterious big deal he calls Nothing and then come up with the conclusion that Nothing will very likely create a universe! This does not follow because those probabilities reside in his observer's head; those Laplacian ratios don't reside "out there". 

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RICHARD: We therefore do not need God to explain why there is something rather than nothing. There may also be something rather than nothing simply “because there just is.” There isn’t any actual basis for assuming “nothing” is the natural state of anything, or that there has ever really been nothing. We could honestly just as fairly ask why should there be nothing rather than something. No God is needed here. But even if we are to presume that there ever once was Nothing, we still need no further explanation of why then there is something. Because that there would be something is then as certain an outcome as makes all odds.

Formally:

·         If Proposition 1, then Proposition 2

·         If Proposition 2, then Proposition 3

·         If Proposition 3, then Proposition 4

·         If Proposition 4 and Proposition 1, then Propositions 5 and 7

·         If Proposition 5 and Proposition 1, then Proposition 6

·         If Propositions 5, 6, and 7, then Proposition 8

·         If Proposition 8, then Proposition 9

·         If Proposition 9 and Proposition 1, then the probability that Nothing would produce something is incalculably close to 100% and therefore effectively certain to occur.

   MY COMMENT:  Well OK let's run with the idea that "We do not need God to explain why there is something rather than nothing", whatever Richard means by "God" in this context. But according to Richard we do need two other things:

    Firstly, of course, we need this enigmatic entity called "Nothing". But all we know about Nothing is that it is the irreducible logical truism left when all logical contingencies/possibilities have been eliminated; according to this account trying conceive absolutely nothing is in fact a contradiction (I suspect that's true). That word "Nothing" however, is a place holder for what may well be a very exotic truism capable of creating who knows what.  Fair enough Richard, this point of yours has a good feel about it as far as I'm concerned.

    But secondly, Richard is asking us to accept his very logically dodgy maneuver involving the projection of subjective probabilities onto Nothing and then assuming that this is sufficient to give Nothing a dynamic with creative potential. Well yes, Nothing may well be sophisticated enough to be creative (in fact as a Christian I believe this entity is creative) but to suppose that human ignorance somehow projects that creative potential onto Nothing is not the way to argue the case! It's a bogus argument. And I say it yet again; probabilities pertain to a measure of observer ignorance and don't create anything.

  But if I'm understanding him aright Richard does have a fallback position which I can respect: He says above "There may also be something rather than nothing simply “because there just is.”. That is very reminiscent of this post of mine on Galen Strawson where I quote Strawson suggesting that the universe "just is"; that is, it's just brute fact and to hell with abductive mythologies like Christianity which bring sense, purpose and meaning. If you simply find it impossible to believe that some kind of personal God has created our kind of universe with its all too off-putting human predicaments and suffering, then I have sympathy with that response. But I'm not sympathetic with Richard's cack-handed logic pushed through with self-recommending claims about his intellectual authority. Self-praise is no recommendation.

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    As we've seen in the previous parts of this series the logic of Richard's list of connected propositions is OK up until about proposition 5 when his analysis really goes off the rails as he hits the question of probability and randomness. In the above Richard talks about not needing God. But whatever he means by God in this context, the creative potential he allocates to Nothing is startling to say the least and it looks suspiciously god-like. In particular if Nothing's creative powers extend to the capability of generating patterns of randomness that in itself is a pretty god-like trait: First and foremost random patterns are contingent - they have no logical obligation and there is no known logical contradiction entailed by their non-existence. Secondly, if we are talking algorithmic generation, randomness of varying degrees entails either very long and complex  algorithms or very large generation times or a combination of both.  In the ideal mathematical limit of pure randomness one or both of these two features extend to infinity.

    If Richard is trying to tell us that the creative source he calls Nothing is in fact a generator of genuinely random patterns then I think we are clear what Richard Carrier's god looks like. 

 

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.....to be continued...? 

    There are still some remaining paragraphs to consider in Richard Carrier's post but as far as the thrust of my criticism is concerned his closing passages will entail just more of the same kind of critique; that is, criticism of his fallacies revolving round his misconceptions about probability and randomness. So, I may or may not finish the series depending on how I feel and whether I consider it to be time well spent....I'll see.

   CAVEAT

   Disagreeing with Richard Carrier on the above issues should not be taken as a sign that I identify as being a member of some polar opposite tribe. For example, it is likely that I agree with him on many issues particularly when he is criticizing the hard-right.