Quantum Non-Linearity

Of Funnels, Pandeism, Simulations and Grace.

2012-02-15T02:56:00.009-12:00

The Thin End of the Cosmic Funnel***

(Picture from the Wikipedia page on the Big Bang)

In this post I want to reply to “Anonymous” who left a comment on my blog entry here. My blog is a pretty quiet backwater of the www, so when someone comes along with some intelligent comments it’s a big deal on this part of web and so worth showcasing. I actually think of my blogs more as a kind of “get-it-off-my-chest” quasi-private diary of thoughts and reactions to life. But if fair minded people stumble upon them and comment intelligently they’re more than welcome. It’s a bonus!

Anyway, let me first publish (again) Anonymous’ comment:

Tinkering, interruptions, call them what you will, but at the end of the day the question remains, has the deity of your conception sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe which from its initial state unfolds in accordance with the laws of physics thus established to bring about complexity, life, ultimately intelligent life, without need for any 'interruptions' of any kind? And let me raise the stakes a bit, is able to set forth a Universe in this manner which in its unfolding ends up exactly as the Universe we perceive today, in every particular? For this is precisely the capacity asserted to be that of the Creator in Pandeism.

But I would not wish to leave an incomplete sense of what Pandeism proposes. So here it is.

Pandeism proposes that prior to the existence of our Universe (or, in some sense 'outside' the existence of our Universe, for those who would limit the existence of linear time to being within such existence) there was an entity of, as supposed above, sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe of the scope and operation of our own. This entity had some rational motivation compelling it to set forth a Universe, perhaps because as a unitary being it could only learn the lessons of dichotomy by experiencing the existence of limited beings interacting with one another. And so, it set forth laws of physics designed to bring about the complexity which would ultimately create these beings, and it poured its energy into that which is now the energy of which our Universe is ultimately made. The laws of physics point to an end but are not determinative. Imagine a large funnel into which many small rubber balls are thrown against the wall; the balls may bounce randomly, unpredictably, but will ultimately end up going down then hole at the narrow end of the funnel. Just so, our laws of physics. No telling when or where exactly intelligent life will develop, or what form it will take, but the brilliantly constructed governing dynamics of our Universe make it highly likely that it will happen at some times and places.

And where is the Creator in all this? Well, it has become our Universe, so it's everywhere; it's power continually sustains all things in being, but it has not the need to 'interrupt' the obedience of every particle of energy in existence to the laws of physics which were well-enough made in the first place to bring about everything required to fulfill its initial motivation. Indeed, it would have an overriding incentive to not interrupt the natural development of things, which would be to not interrupt the natural development of things, and instead see how things unfold, how the true randoms play out, absent any intervention at all.

And what of man's millions of competing revelations and prophecies, visions, scriptures, oracles, miracles, spiritual emotions, supernatural feelings, ghosts, answered prayers, egrigores, and like beliefs? These are after all a constant across all cultures, even those whose take from them is completely opposite to their neighbors, suggesting either a deity doing a rather sloppy job of trying to communicate a single truth, or man doing a rather sloppy (and often self-serving) job of interpreting the unconscious manifestations of the mind of a deity not trying to communicate anything at all. For if, after all, our Creator became the Creation, then we are all fragments of it, and some talented few of us may in our own minds touch some small portion of the incomprehensibly vast and complex mind which underlies all things for however long our Universe is set to bounce around before it ends up down the funnel.

Hi Mr. Anonymous (Or Ms. Anonymous?)

I like your metaphor of a funnel: It gives us a good picture of the blend of law and disorder* that constitutes our physical regime as we understand it. However, we really need to turn the funnel round to get a closer approximation to our Cosmos where the Second Law of Thermodynamics rules OK. In effect the universe is coming out of a funnel and not being pushed into it; but in its “early” stages it is still in the narrow neck of the funnel where there are relatively (and I stress “relatively”) few states available to it. This inverted funnel metaphor gives us one way of picturing why the second law is consistent with self organization: The “neck” of the funnel may be constrictive enough to ensure that of the states available in this neck the class of life bearing states is proportionately large enough to give them a realistic probability of making a showing. Although I’m actually equivocal about this possibility, the inverted funnel metaphor is one way of picturing why, in spite of the claims of those who should know better such as Granville Sewell, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, in and of itself, not inconsistent with evolution. But I digress from the real thrust of your comment.

OK, so let’s assume that living structures have a realistic probability of forming given our Cosmic law and disorder regime. That is, expressed mathematically Prob(Life|Physics) has a significant value for realistic Cosmic times. But given these circumstances what I don’t see is why pandeism follows from this; after all, as I have expressed many times before on this blog the law and disorder logic implicit in expressions like Prob(life|Physics) really only amounts to sophisticated descriptive statements from which one infers the likely patterns of cosmic behavior. It is conceivable that the Cosmos could have other patterns of behavior such as the inclusion of many irregular one-off exception events (= “the miraculous”?) making it intractable to the epistemology of law and disorder science, a science whose efficacy depends very much on a strict coherence. Why then should a Cosmos rich in irregularity be any less subject to a pandeist interpretation than the intelligible cosmos we are used to? What difference does the mathematical category of the cosmic behavioral patterns make?

But then again I think I can see where you are coming from. When anyone talks about Deity, particularly transcendent Deity, and its relation to the Cosmos, they have little choice but to talk about it using imaginative metaphorical models that have their origins in this-world-experience. In this connection I can see from the way you write that you intuitively invest far more in the notion of physical law than just a device of mathematical description. Viz:

“….of physics designed to bring about the complexity which would ultimately create these beings, and it poured its energy into that which is now the energy of which our Universe is ultimately made” …. And …….. the obedience of every particle of energy in existence to the laws of physics which were well-enough made in the first place to bring about everything required to fulfill its initial motivation."

You have made an intuitive leap here from physical laws as descriptive devices (which is about as far as the physicist can or should go) to physical laws as some kind of quasi-divine dynamic that is truly creative. Well, may be; who knows how Deity can delegate its energies, but we can’t make much progress on this theology using empirical science: The mathematical category of the patterns of cosmic behavior doesn’t in and of itself reveal much about an ex nihilo creative dynamic. In fact I would go as far as to say that the laws of physics are meaningless unless reified on some kind of ontological substrate, a substrate upon which observation and test can be made; that is, “physical law” is secondary to the primary matrix on which it is reified. Using a Marxist turn of phrase: Physical Law is the secondary mathematical superstructure raised upon a primary ontological foundation.

The “prescriptive” (as opposed to the merely “descriptive”) notion of physical law as a proactive creative dynamic is a very metaphysical, exotic and debatable notion that resides deep in the psyche of Western man. In fact it is intriguing to note that some atheists take it for granted that physical law constitutes a creative dynamic of quasi-divine status transcending the ontology which it appears to “control”. For example Stephen Hawking is somewhat overawed by the apparent “something for nothing” properties of gravity. But as the joke goes, when Hawking claimed that all he needed was gravity and no God, the Almighty said in reply “Go and get your own gravity Hawking!”

What then is at the bottom of this crypto-deist intuition that physical law is autonomous to such an extent that it is itself some kind of self-managing creative/controlling dynamic? I would suggest that this belief has its source in metaphors taken from the world of our everyday experience; I have given more detail in this post. I would therefore put it to you Mr. Anonymous that the pandeism you have expressed and which through physical law finds such a compelling reason to equate deity and the Cosmos, is based on this-world-metaphors.

However, having said that Mr. Anonymous, let me say that the first set of comments you left me gave me an issue I’m still very much chewing over. I was struck by your suggestion that perhaps Deity has the motive of creating a universal simulation because the outcome is unknown; after all, if Deity is pure Mind then perhaps like ourselves it passes from states of unknowing to knowing as it thinks through and explores the implications of certain problems in algorithmic logic. A corollary of this seems to be that the Cosmos is in some sense Deity – or at least the thoughts of Deity and therefore we have here a hint of pandesim.

But even if we take that latter suggestion on board it is still far too strong an identification to equate the Cosmos with Deity and Deity with the cosmos. By way of illustration let’s use the metaphor of a computer running a software simulation, a metaphor of which you said in the comments section here you liked. Let us note the paradox inherent in computer simulations: The simulation is in one sense part of the computer and yet in another sense it is very much other than the computer; the computer has a deeper and “firmer” reality than the simulation and significantly the simulation at no time has a life of its own; the software can’t run itself – the computer must be always there sustaining the simulation. Moreover the computer has the power to interrupt the flow of “normalcy” at anytime either through a hardware or system software interrupt. (Hence my preference for the notion of “interruptions” rather than “interventions”). Also it is possible for the computer to hold meta-information about the simulation it is running, information that may not exist in the simulation itself.

This computer simulation, like much talk about God, is, after all, a metaphor and therefore likely to only capture a facet of the nature of Deity and its relation to creation. However I like this particular metaphor for two reasons: Firstly because it conveys the sheer contingency of the cosmos; no simulation has a logical necessity to exist; the internal logic of the simulation is descriptive of the simulation but it in no way delivers aseity or self explanation. And secondly I like it because the simulation metaphor conveys something of the paradox of the simultaneous eminence and immanence of the Godhead that seems to have been recognized in Acts 17:27-28.

I also quite like the author-book metaphor as it has some features in its favour. But I do take your point that this metaphor has the failing of leading to a problematical dichotomy between God’s vision and a separate created world. I have always been in favour of employing multiple metaphors about God in order to bring facets of His nature to the fore and I try to avoid the over interpretation and over selling of any particular metaphor.

You refer to the “The deity of my conception”. My guess is that the majority of people have a conception of deity somewhere in the corner of their minds. In fact there are probably nearly as many conceptions of God as there are people, although those conceptions will likely have a lot of overlap with one another. Exclusive use of proprietary pet metaphors in trying to express our ideas about God can lead to much grief. For example attempts to put the doctrine of the Trinity on a clearer footing by over interpreting and overselling a particular metaphor such as “modalism”, for example, quickly leads to shouts of “heresy” from others**. But in the face of human cognitive infirmity we really need to bear in mind some of the other attributes God might have. You talk about God setting up a cosmic simulation motivated by an experimental curiosity. But if we are to hazard such an anthropomorphic motive why not hazard other motives such as love of the objects created? In fact this affective attribute of God is largely the concern of the New Testament; such a Deity may well be gracious toward our cognitive infirmity as we attempt to conceive His nature. He may look upon our attempts to describe Him as might a Parent who sees His child drawing a stickman depiction of Him. The offspring of the Almighty may abuse one another over the state of their respective stick-man depictions of deity, but I suspect God Himself has a very different point of view of those attempts.

Thanks again Mr. Anonymous for turning up. In these days when brain dead bigotry and block-headed religiosity gets such an airing it’s nice to see some fair minded intelligence being applied. I’ve really benefitted from your input.

A Note on Science

What is the scientific status of the speculative ideas I have discussed above? Scientific testability comes in degrees: Roughly speaking the higher the level and the more significant the conjectured ontology becomes the less tractable it is to an elementary hypothesis testing epistemology. This leaves little choice but to proceed with a “post-facto interpolation method”; that is, joining the dots of experience with imaginary background sense making structures. See here for more details.

Foot notes:

* Law and Disorder is my short hand for patterns described by a combination of algorithms (or "functions") and Statistics.

** Here are some so-called Christian “heresies” (re: the Godhead) as listed by Reachout Trust, Ministry to the Cults: Aphthartodocetism, Monophysitism, Apollinarianism, Alogi, Arianism, Docetism, Ebionitism, Encratite, Eutychainism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, Monarchianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism, Montanism, Nestorianism, Pelagianism, Sebellianism. The criterion used to identify these attempts at grappling with the nature of God as “heresy” sometimes involves a splitting of hairs that would probably make most of us “heretics”. God help us!

*** The funnel like shape of space-time here is only meant to be symbolic of the funnel like shape of the disorder vs. time graph

On God Concepts

2012-02-09T09:42:00.007-12:00

The Blank Slate Atheist is a rarity, even in the secular West.

I have remarked before on the fact that many Westerners hold in their minds a conception of God regardless of whether or not they actually believe in God. This is really no surprise given that ideas about God float around in the conceptual ether of our social interactions. In spite of secularization in Western society it is all but impossible not to pick up “God concepts”. As Cornelius Hunter has very succinctly and effectively put it:

It is perhaps one of the great enigmas in religious thought that one can profess to be an agnostic, skeptic, or even atheist regarding belief in God yet still hold strong opinions about God.

This phenomenon is particularly pertinent to atheism; so often the atheist mind set clearly demonstrates that belief in God is something different from beliefs about God. Now it is possible, I suppose, to declare that God is such an incoherent concept that the statement “God exists” is meaningless – this is what one might call “intelligibility atheism”. However, it is not often one comes across intelligibility atheists; as a rule the rank and file atheist zealout is uncomfortable with “intelligibility atheism” because it’s likely to be too philosophical a gambit for the aficionado of scientism. It is more likely that one will cross the path of the “evidential atheist”; that is, the atheist who declares “There is no evidence for God”; from which it follows that such atheists presumably hold in their minds beliefs about God with sufficient clarity for them to make a comparison between their experience and their theoretic notion of God and on that empirical basis declare God’s existence to be unlikely. Theology, then, is in principle both the domain of the atheist and the theist. In fact I have touched on this subject in the following posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/11/larry-morans-atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/09/crypto-deism.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/god-theology-evidence-and-observation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/02/atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/10/mr-deism-speaks-out.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/05/atheist-atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/03/atheist-theology.html

Anyway, in this connection I was fascinated by the comment of someone signing in as “Anonymous” in the comment thread of this post of mine. I have to say that I’m not at all clear where “Anonymous” is coming from and in spite of a request to clarify his position he has not obliged me. Is he promoting pandeism, the subject of his post? Is he an anti-evolutionist? Is he an atheist? Or is he simply non-committal? I don’t know! But it doesn’t matter. What he has written is necessarily so concept laden that there is far and away enough there for me to get a secure purchase on his comment in my next post. Crypto-deism here we come. Watch this space....

Here’s the comment from Anonymous:

But I would not wish to leave an incomplete sense of what Pandeism proposes. So here it is.

Watchman, What is Left of the Night?

2012-01-31T12:57:00.001-12:00

Here is another song by Francesco Guccini with translation from the Italian (interleaved) supplied by my brother-in-law Jonathan Benison.

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell
Watchman, what is left of the night?
Watchman, why you don't answer my questions?
Watchman, why am I lost in a silent, red, stony desert?
Watchman, why the darkness is only broken by the lightening of my rage?
Watchman, why you don't let me in?
Don't you know that I can only hear weak echoes from the past?
Watchman, do you really know when the day will break?
Watchman, is your answer too big for my heart?
[based on Isaiah 21:11-12]

La notte è quieta senza rumore, c'è solo il suono che fa il silenzio
e l' aria calda porta il sapore di stelle e assenzio,
le dita sfiorano le pietre calme calde d' un sole, memoria o mito,
il buio ha preso con se le palme, sembra che il giorno non sia esistito...

The night is quiet without a noise, there is only the sound of silence
and the warm air brings the taste of stars and wormwood,
the fingers skim over the calm stones warmed by a sun, memory or myth,
the darkness took with it the palms, looks like the day has never existed...

Io, la vedetta, l'illuminato, guardiano eterno di non so cosa
cerco, innocente o perchè ho peccato, la luna ombrosa
e aspetto immobile che si spanda l'onda di tuono che seguirà
al lampo secco di una domanda, la voce d'uomo che chiederà:
Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell ...

I, the watchman, the enlightened, eternal warden of something I do not know,
I seek, innocent or because I sinned, the shady moon
and I wait immobile for the thunder wave to spread in the wake
of a lightning sharp question, the voice of a man who will ask:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?

Sono da secoli o da un momento fermo in un vuoto in cui tutto tace,
non so più dire da quanto sento angoscia o pace,
coi sensi tesi fuori dal tempo, fuori dal mondo sto ad aspettare
che in un sussurro di voci o vento qualcuno venga per domandare...

I have been standing for centuries or for just a moment in an emptiness where everything is still,
I cannot say since when I feel anguish or peace,
with my senses on edge, out of time, out of the world, I keep waiting in case
within a whisper of voices or of the wind, somebody will come to ask...

(Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell ...)
e li avverto, radi come le dita, ma sento voci, sento un brusìo
e sento d' essere l' infinita eco di Dio
e dopo, innumeri come sabbia, ansiosa e anonima oscurità,
ma voce sola di fede o rabbia, notturno grido che chiederà:

and I am aware of them, sparse like fingers, but I hear voices, I hear a buzz
and I feel I am the infinite echo of God
and afterwards, uncountable like grains of sand, anxious and anonymous darkness,
but only a voice of faith or rage, a cry in the night asking:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?

La notte, udite, sta per finire, ma il giorno ancora non è arrivato,
sembra che il tempo nel suo fluire resti inchiodato...
Ma io veglio sempre, perciò insistete, voi lo potete, ridomandate,
tornate ancora se lo volete, non vi stancate...

Listen, the night is about to finish, but the day is still not here,
it’s as if time flowed no more but had become stuck ...
But I’m always on the lookout, so you must insist, you can do it, ask again,
come back again if you want, do not tire of it ...

Cadranno i secoli, gli dei e le dee, cadranno torri, cadranno regni
e resteranno di uomini e di idee, polvere e segni,
ma ora capisco il mio non capire, che una risposta non ci sarà,
che la risposta sull'avvenire è in una voce che chiederà:

Centuries will fall, the gods and the goddesses, towers will fall down, kingdoms will fall
and the remains of men and ideas will be dust and signs,
but now I understand my non understanding, that there will be no answer,
that the answer to the future is in a voice that will ask:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?
Francesco Guccini

With thanks to Marco Zuliani in California for the translation (modified here)
http://marcozuliani.blogspot.com/2008/07/shomr-ma-mi-llailah-shomr-ma-mi-lell.html

From the album “GUCCINI” (1983)

Unintelligent Design

2012-01-30T09:50:00.039-12:00

Chemist Professor John C Walton **(above) may believe in Homunculus Intelligent Design and Seventh Day Adventism ….but at least he doesn't believe in Yogic flying unlike physicist Professor John Hagelin (below)....

….so things can be as bad as all that.

I recently reviewed a video on this post at Uncommon Descent. It is a lecture by Professor John C Walton, a Research Chemist at St Andrews University (Scotland’s first university founded 1413). The video is entitled “56 minutes that may change your life”. However, it follows a pattern I’m all too familiar with.

Much is made, too much in fact, of the improbability of the spontaneous appearance of life’s essential biopolymers; the figures Prof Walton shows us might leave the heads of the scientifically illiterate spinning, but few scientists, as the good professor well knows, seriously suggest that abiogenesis was resourced by such extremely improbable events. Putting it mathematically, most evolutionists realize that the probability we are interested in is a conditional probability like Prob(Life|R) where R is a given physical regime, conjectured pre-conditions that favour life’s generation in a realistic time. (True R, may not exist physically or even exist mathematically; in which case the version of Intelligent Design promulgated at UD should be at least given some space.)

In response to these improbabilities Prof Walton goes on to tell us that there is active research in the area of self organization Viz a) Attempts have or are being made to discover “laws of chemical affinity” which predispose matter toward the formation of certain amino acid configurations b) Computer simulations are being constructed which attempt to simulate models of abiogenesis. Regarding research of this kind the professor rightly emphasizes that it is necessarily resourced by human intelligence in order to a) contrive suitable chemical environments or b) contrive the algorithms controlling the patterns of bits and bytes needed to simulate something that at least looks just a little bit like abiogenesis. In both cases preconditions are being diligently sought for that have a realistic chance of generating the required configurations and structures.

Well, as I have already said this sort of stuff is all too familiar to me and I can only respond by banging on about the same old thing: The selection of a physical regime that has a realistic probability of generating life (if indeed such has a mathematical existence) is very likely to be a task that is computationally complex in the extreme; i.e. finding such a regime amongst all the possible spurious cases is no small search. Even if we assume that a life generating physical regime has actually already been found for us in the form of our own Cosmos we may then face yet another problem: The generation of life using our cosmic regime could conceivably be a computationally irreducible task; that is, the only way of checking that our Cosmos has a realistic chance of creating life is to run the whole damn show, right down to the last atom in order to verify that it does what we think it does; there may be no shorter algorithmic way of performing the task. If so then this task, too, is well beyond our current technology and we are thrown back onto the fossil record which, needless to say, may be too incomplete to be unequivocal in its testimony.

Unfortunately Prof Walton doesn’t explore these crucial issues in any depth; this may be because he is either unaware of them, or he understands that this is the hard problem where little progress has been made. However, given his religious background I suspect that it is more likely that the good professor is driven by an unstated conclusion; namely, the conclusion that life was created with what I refer to as the Homunculus Intelligent Design model ; that is, that ~~God~~ an intelligent agent descended upon the Earth at some point(s) in the past and tinkered with molecular configurations, thus directly imposing ~~Divine fiat~~ the agent's will on matter like some super-human molecular engineer. Like many in the de facto “Intelligent Design” community I suspect the good professor may well have signed up as one of the patrons of anti-evolutionism. Many theists see homunculus ID as the only option because the only other theistic position they can conceive is deism.

Nevertheless Prof Walton does hold out one interesting idea that I’m taking away with me. He provided evidence that the Earth’s atmosphere has always been an oxidizing one, especially during the early OOL stages – an environment that is very unlikely to favour the delicate chemistry that the formation of biopolymers requires. If this idea was developed it would certainly cut across the notion that life was generated on Earth in small incremental stages: A highly oxidizing environment is likely to tear apart biopolymers nearly as surely as would the interior of the Sun; that is, at least with life as we know it.

However, I’ll keep my options open, as this sort of argument could be subject to revision. Even so, as a “prepared to take the risk” theist, I can myself can live with the concept that somehow the configurations of life have been very directly imposed on matter ~~by God~~ by some intelligent agent; after all the alternative of selecting the right life generating physical regime looks to be at least equally as computationally complex (in fact, perhaps a lot more computationally complex). So if I’m asked to accept that the right life generating physical regime is a given then perhaps I can just as easily accept highly improbable molecular configurations as a given. However, there is one stickler of a aside effect in homunculus ID that is unfortunate; we have to kiss goodbye to much epistemological tractability and with it much of the coherent rational readability of our cosmos, especially in relation to natural history. There is also an irony here. If life is a consequence of the selection of the right physical regime then this would likely represent the solution of a computational problem requiring a level of intelligence well in advance of what is needed to carry out Homunculus ID. In fact, in comparison Homunculus ID looks distinctly “Unintelligent" in design”!

As for UD poster V J Torley’s 56 minutes that may change your life I think we can forget it. Unfortunately for me the video has done precisely the opposite: It has simply meant that I have had to cover the same old ground for the umpteenth time and express the same old gripes I have with the Homunculus ID community.

Notes.
According to the British Centre for Science Education John Walton shared a platform with extreme fundamentalist John Mackay in Oct 2007. (See here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/JohnWalton) As for some of the rather unsavory accounts surrounding John Mackay see here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/JohnMackay and here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/MargaretBuchanan.

31/1/12: The articles from BCSE linked to above are worth perusing. John MacKay is one of those persons whose religion marches worryingly close to some kind of mental illness of the ego and yet whose air of brazenness and utter confidence in his own pronouncements succeeds in confidence tricking the gullible. MacKay was Ken Ham's business partner in the early days of Ken's foray into the "Creation" trade, and MacKay is implicated in an acrimonious dispute between Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International (apparently settled in 2009). Overall, as I'm "in religion" the whole thing gives me the creeps; this may be because I have to confess to having actually witnessed something of this sort first hand more than once, at least in embryo. I would certainly not want to meet MacKay in a dark alley, or even Ken Ham for that matter. They both come over as rather muculant characters whose chief strength is the conviction of their tongues. I trust that Professor Walton was unaware who he was hobnobbing with.

Footnote
** Oops! Sorry folks, he doesn't have a wiki page!

The De-facto “Darwin vs. God” Paradigm

2012-01-28T00:55:00.006-12:00

The Natural History Museum, Romanesque cum Gothic cathedral of natural history, designed by Alfred Waterhouse. The black figure of the Victorian naturalist Richard Owen has gone, replaced by the white enthroned figure of Darwin which now occupies the central landing of the escalia; the "high altar" of the building; rather appropriate perhaps; don't forget that the engine of evolution entails death! (“search, reject and select”)

I was interested to see a report in the February "Christianity" magazine on Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech promoting Christianity and the project of sending Bibles into schools. In response the National Secular Society Spokesman Terry Sanderson said:

“…if Mr Gove (the governments education secretary) intends to go ahead with this, will he please ensure that a copy of “On the origins of Species” is sent out on Darwin day”

The subtext here is, of course, the “Darwin vs. God” paradigm; namely, that if you’ve got Darwin you don’t need God and if you’ve got God you don’t need Darwin; in short either “God did it” or “Darwin did it” and that is the view of the secularist–anti evolutionist axis of polarization.

As I’ve tried to indicate this axis of polarization is a false dichotomy : If anything “Darwinism” compounds the problems of improbability that prompts thoughts of Intelligent Design. How ironic.

God is pictured as a kindly old bearded gentleman all in white, seated on a throne surrounded by light and who lives upon high.

(Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimshannon/3823248802/)

Conspiracy Theorist’s Corner.

2012-01-27T11:23:00.002-12:00

Picture from: http://naturalplane.blogspot.com/2010/12/fortean-alternative-news-conspiracy.html

I’ve long been aware that the fundamentalist whipping boys have a deep seated affinity with conspiracy theory, but I would, nonetheless, find it difficult to point to the “chapter and verse” where I picked up this observation. Ken Ham, however, has recently obliged me. In a blog post dated Jan 20th and entitled “Deadly Disclosures goes epub” Ham enthuses over the novels written by a fellow Christian Fundamentalist. The novels depict a world that is ranged against (fundamentalist) Christians in hidden and malign conspiracies. Wonderful captivating stuff in Ken’s opinion.

But think about it; the fundamentalist is almost inevitably going to be draw to conspiracy theory:

Firstly the whole scientific establishment is “against” them, although to be fair that establishment actually (and rightly) by and large ignores them.

Secondly, the evidence and theory against fundamentalist “science” is so coherent and the world wide scientific establishment forms such a united front that the only way fundamentalists can explain the highly systematic “error” of the establishment is to attribute it to some background malign will, either in the establishment itself or to some dark presence pulling the strings and skewing human epistemological assumptions. In one sense all this is a telling “own goal” by the fundamentalists because it is an admission that the establishment’s evidence and conclusions are coordinated and coherent enough to only allow those with a conspiracy theorist’s frame of mind to dismiss it. (Compare the fundamentalist’s anti-science)

Thirdly there is much self-kudos to be gained in seeing oneself as part of a holy remnant that is heroically and gloriously holding out against the goliath of a huge worldwide conspiracy; one fancies oneself to be important enough for that conspiracy to have one personally in its gun-sights; literally in the case of Ken’s favourite novel writer who glorifies the fundamentalist’s marginalized lot.

However I must concede a measure of understanding of the fundamentalist’s reaction; in the face of marginalization increasingly paranoiac and extreme fantasies about being specially targeted are a perverse way of satisfying the ego. If you’ve backed yourself into a corner it’s tough when the whole world is apathetic about your self-proclaimed prophetic status. They will tell us about the persecution of Christ but then so will every other contrary religious sect between here and Salt Lake City.

Warning: The False Dichotomy Zone

2012-01-20T07:21:00.007-12:00

I see from this Guardian Web article that the anti-evolutionists have been barred from British schools.

The de facto “Intelligent Design” movement are partly responsible for trapping the creation debate in the false dichotomy of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. This has lead to the insinuation that if one is an evolutionist then one is in opposition to intelligent design creationism. The resultant effect has been to obscure important questions about the computational complexity of the class of physical regimes required to make evolution and/or OOL work. (see my last post) In this needlessly polarized debate anti-evolutionism has become too closely identified with theism and evolution too closely identified with atheism. Introducing “Intelligent Design”, so-called, into schools then, is very likely to automatically cast the creation debate into a dichotomized mold of “Evolution did it” versus “God did it” and science versus revelation – the kind of dichotomized paradigm we get from anti-science fundamentalists like Ken Ham

All this is very regretable because there are some worthy people naturally identified with the anti-evolutionist front such as William Dembski, Cornelius Hunter, Robert Sheldon, and Richard Johns who are nonetheless presenting interesting material in relation to evolutionary theory and who, in my opinion, should be given a fair hearing. Trouble is, the polarized and politicized state of the debate, for which the “ID” community share a measure of culpability, has made people like Dembski et al persona non grata in established scientific circles; understandablely enough Dembski et al have thrown their lot in with the disaffected anti academic establishment outlaws. For me the situation is exacerbated by some very partisan desperados who post on the blog "Uncommon Descent" such as Granville Sewell, Denise O‘Leary, and Gil Dodgen, persons who it would have been better if they had not have been let loose on the subject.

C of E physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne has described himself as an Intelligent Design creationist and yet because the appellation “Intelligent Design” has been blighted, abused and given partisan meaning he was forced to declare his hostility to the “Intelligent Design” community, a community who have become thoroughly identified with anti-evolutionism.

On balance, then, the misunderstandings over the term "Intelligent Design" leads me to support the policy that bars “Intelligent Design”, so called, from British schools. May that ban last as long as it takes for the polarized anti-evolutionists to come to their senses and change their philosophy. That philosophy has the effect of driving a wedge between evolution and intelligent design and between science and revelation. It is worth recalling here that the government which has ratified these measures is headed by David Cameron who identifies himself as a Christian: The source of these measures, then, is not necessarily anti-Christian unless we are predisposed to read it that way.

Unfinished Business.

2012-01-13T03:26:00.029-12:00

I was interested to read Larry Moran’s post about the “Top Ten Darwin and Design Science News Stories for 2011”. As ~~an over~~ a zealous evolutionist Larry is rather contemptuous about the whole Intelligent Design (ID) thing. What particularly piqued my interest, however, was that Richard Johns’ paper entitled “Self Organisation in Dynamical Systems: a Limiting Result” came in at number 10. The reason for my interest is that I looked at a preprint of this paper a few months back and remarked on it in the following blog posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/10/richard-johns-vs-larry-moran.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/11/self-organisation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/more-on-self-organisation.html

Richard Johns himself very kindly got back to me on my comments and his response can be seen in the above posts. As Richard didn’t respond to my response to his response I was left feeling that there was unfinished business here.

I very much regret the polarized quarrelling between the anti-evolution community (who appear to have picked up Johns’ work) and scientists like Larry Moran. I myself respect professionals like Johns and Moran and I don’t really want to fall out with either. So, whenever I approach a competent technical paper like that of Richard Johns' I don’t particularly feel that I’m on the side of anyone and therefore under no partisan obligation to either defend them or attack them. I’m a disinterested party whose main interest stems from a curiosity about the riddles and mysteries our world confronts us with, although it’s true that I’m having a serious romance with theism.

Although I don’t share his anti-evolutionism I do have one thing I have in common with an “ID” leader like William Dembski; namely, the understanding that in terms of absolute probabilities high improbabilities cannot be banished from our science: We may be able to arrive at high conditional probabilities such as Prob(Life|R₀) where R₀ is the class of life generating physical regimes, but this still leaves us with the enigma of the selection of a member from R₀, a selection which seems to mysteriously appear out of a huge range of mathematical possibilities thus imbuing it with an improbability beyond measure. R₀ has a rarity in platonic space which means its existential weighting is inexplicably skewed far in excess of its statistical weighting. For Dembski this fact leads to the conclusion (via his assumption of equal a-priori probabilities and his explanatory filter) that intelligence has selected our physical regime from R₀. Ironically the problem with the existence of a member taken from R₀ is best appreciated in the context of Multiverse theory: Multiverse theory attempts to place R₀ within a greater physical regime, call it R₁, whereby it is hoped that Prob(R₀|R₁) is high. But if pressed this quickly leads to a “Turtles all the way down” regressing series of the form of Prob(R₁|R₂),…...., Prob(R_n-1|R_n), ultimately leaving us with an enigmatic R_n whose probability, if it is not meaningless, appears to emerge from an incalculable number of possibilities.

But although I believe workers like Johns and Dembski have lessons for us I am not wholly uncritical of the anti-evolutionism that has so thoroughly got hold of the community who identify themselves under the rubric “Intelligent Design”; their anti-evolutionism, due to an impassioned and angry polarization, is now all but irrevocable as they cannot backtrack without loss of face before their evolutionist critics (but the vice versa is also true – polarization cuts both ways). This combative atmosphere is not conducive to self-criticism.

Richard Johns’ paper is a case in point. I could see no fault with the technicalities of his argument; the problems were more to do with the interpretation and use of his results and this interpretation and use is encouraged by the combative pressures the “ID” community is under. Richard uses a cellular automata system to draw his conclusions about limits on the dynamical generation of complex configurations (what he calls “irregular” patterns). He refers to a particular cellular automata program as a “dynamic system” which in turn I identify as the computational equivalent of a physical system taken from a subclass of physical regimes, R. In summary my criticisms were as follows:

a) The concept of complexity (or “irregularity”) used by Richard lumps together, biological complexity, fractal complexity, and the output of random number generators.

b) Richard’s limitative theorem states that a large maximally irregular object cannot appear by self organization in any dynamical system whose laws are local and invariant. But we know that there are such things as algorithms (which could be written in cellular automata form) able to generate fractal and disordered patterns in realistic times. These algorithmically generated configurations classify, on Richard’s’ definition, as large configurations approaching maximal irregularity. Therefore at first sight these latter facts appear to contradict Richard’s limitative theorem – or at least in the way he has stated it.

c) When one reads Richard’s paper one realizes that his limitative theorem is not as strong as it looks because one finds that what he really means is that a blindly selected dynamic system is, in terms of probability, very unlikely to be one that generates a specified subclass of complex configurations in realistic time. This conclusion is, I believe, correct; but if an outcome is improbable that is not to say that it is impossible.

d) If couched in terms of probability Richard’s limitative theorem is correct, but because the theorem is, in fact, referring to improbable outcomes we are lead to overlook the possibility that there may be members of a class R (although it may be a very small class) that have a realistic probability of generating a specified class of irregular configurations in a realistic time.

e) My conclusion is this: In drawing our attention to self organization as an improbable possibility the limitative theorem fails to rule out OOL and evolution as a mathematical possibility.

Richard has effectively hamstrung the possibility of self organization by demanding that the physical regime be chosen at random, “blind watchmaker” style (Thus making it very unlikely it be from the life generating class R₀). Hard-line anti-ID evolutionists like Richard "Blind Watchmaker" Dawkins would perhaps be inclined to concede this practice, thus, ironically, conniving with the anti-evolutionist community that OOL/evolution, by definition, is not resourced by the improbable pre-condition R₀. It is surely an irony that Richard’s over interpretation of his conclusion actually falls over if one assumes a creative intelligent agency is available; for in an ID context improbable and/or mathematically rare classes of conditions are the name of the game! If a small class of R exists which promotes the self-organisation of living structures then an intelligence with sufficient processing power and motive could presumably find that class...in other words the physical regime is not chosen at random!

In his response to my original post Richard commented as follows on the possibility of self organisation being an outcome of a carefully selected physical regime:

…..in that case, self-organisation theories of evolution will be in a difficult position. For they will then be committed to the claim that living organisms are algorithmically (and dynamically) simple. In other words, living organisms are like Pi, merely *appearing* to be complex, while in fact being generated by a very short program. (Vastly shorter than their genomes, for example.)

My reply was:

…..it is wrong to conclude that life must be algorithmically simple for this reason: The space of all possible (short text) algorithms, though a lot smaller than the space of all possible configurational objects, is still a very very large space as far as we humans are concerned. I suspect (and this is only a hunch) that not any old algorithm has the right Self Organising properties required to generate living things - in which case selecting the right algorithm is then a computationally complex task; that is, life is not algorithmically simple in absolute terms.

One more thing: Imagine that you were given the problem of PI in reverse; that is you were given the pattern of digits and yet had no clue as to what, if any, simple algorithm generated it. The hard problem then is to guess the algorithm – generating PI after you have found the algorithm is the easy problem. So to me life remains algorithmically complex even if it’s a product of SO.

That’s where the discussion ended. Once again the same lose end is left dangling; namely, the fact that in order to contrive a physical regime taken from the class R₀ favouring the self organization of life requires an extraordinary level of computational complexity to sift through the possibilities and secure a member from R₀. If OOL and evolution have occurred then it entails quite a “miracle”! Trouble is, the expression Prob(Life|R₀) seems to have the effect of obscuring that “miracle”. As a consequence many evolutionists and anti-evolutionists continue to inappropriately caricature the development of life as a putatively “blind” process; hence humunclus ID is an abomination to zealous atheists but the darling of anti-evolutionists.

Musical Inrterlude: Classix Nouveaux: Forever and a Day

2011-12-31T11:29:00.000-12:00

The Wrong Sort of Scratching

2011-12-27T06:49:00.005-12:00

(Click to enlarge)

The above illustration was posted by Prof Larry Moran in a blog post where he makes special note of the Cambrian Conundrum. What is the Cambrian Conundrum? Let me explain:

The blue profile in the illustration plots the graph of the very sudden rise in the diversity of phyla at the start of the Cambrian era (Phylum: a category of organisms with the same basic body plan). This sudden diversification was also accompanied by a parallel prolific diversification of classes (a class is a subdivision within a phylum) as shown by the yellow profile.

Shown as an overlay on the two aforementioned graphs is the “tree of life” as deduced from genetic molecular sequence analysis together with an assumed rate of mutation. Larry points out that the molecular tree of life fits in very well with the tree of life as determined from morphological analysis. But there is one big and obvious problem here: The molecular tree of life appears to show no obvious relation to the phyla and class profiles, profiles that are determined by observation on the fossil record. Why doesn’t the fossil record concur with the tree of life as constructed from molecular sequence analysis? How is it that this tree of life extends for hundreds of millions of years before the Cambrian and yet there is little in the way of fossil evidence prior to the Cambrian?

As a diehard evolutionist Larry is a good sport in being candid about this problem as he well knows that anti-evolutionists are attracted to this sort of thing like flies to an open wound. A couple of his correspondents give a stab at trying to explain this apparent inconsistency in evolutionary theory: One (schenk) suggests that chemical conditions prior to the Cambrian didn’t favour preservation: The other (nwrickert) submits the very interesting idea that the gene pool had developed to a point where the potential for sequence crossovers constituted a kind of “recombinant DNA laboratory” paving the way for a combinatorial explosion that gave organisms the DNA language needed to match a rapidly changing environment. I must admit I find this latter idea very appealing; it’s a special case of the more general idea that some “non-linear” bio-tech threshold was crossed at the start of the Cambrian ushering in a tremendous potential for change and development – in fact we see something similar with human society; farming, writing, industry, microchips and other technological changes entailed the crossing of thresholds that opened up huge vistas of possibility once the initial invention had made an appearance; these vistas were then rapidly explored resulting in rapid change.

But be that as it may, the fact is that there is an important lesson here for evolutionary theory. Evolution is a theory of a very complex object – namely, the history life. As such it has many degrees of freedom and adjustable variables. This implicit flexibility helps “rescue” evolution in the face of the sort of conundrum we have just looked at by allowing an adjustment of its many degrees of freedom until a fit to the dots of observation is achieved. But evolution’s strength in theoretical flexibility is also its weakness: Like some sprawling battle front evolution is vulnerable to myriad different kinds of attack on its many varied claims. In fact evolution is interdisciplinary and high level enough an object to be tantamount to a world view perspective. With byzantine objects like evolution there exists a constant tension between their vulnerability to criticism and the measure of latitude that comes of realizing that their complex ontology is never going to return the standard of observational “verification” we might expect of simple objects like Hooke’s springs and Newton’s gravity. The balancing act needed here is not easy to keep in the polarized North American environment where anti-evilutionists and atheist zealots are clawing one another’s eyes out in order to win their noetic battles. If with an eye on fair play one endeavors to be generous to either side one is then in danger of having one’s eyes scratched out by the other side.

In this connection I was fascinated by this post on PZ Myers’ blog where he tells his readers about theologian Alister Mcgrath’s comparison between the sense making facility of the conjectured Higgs boson and the theist positing Deity as a world view level sense making object. PZ Myers agrees that the Higgs boson is a valid theoretical sense making construction, but he takes Mcgrath to task for not taking the next scientific step; namely, that of proposing a test for deity; after all, says PZ, a lot of money was spent in order to test for the existence of the Higgs Boson; shouldn’t theists do the same for God?

Well yes, I’ll concede the admirable sentiment behind PZ’s remark, but in doing so I make all due allowance for the ontology of the objects we are proposing to test; that ontology may make these objects less than voluntarily accessible and/or give them a complex of adjustable variables that compromises the value of any number of tests; this in turn will impact the epistemological standards we employ. You see, whilst we may accept that PZ Myers' demand for a test is fair enough, we nevertheless should acknowledge that voluntary high standard testing at will is not an option with many real objects of study; historical objects are a notorious case in point; in particular evolution.

After all, it is clear that an object like evolution cannot be tested at will; as we have seen the fossil data needed to test for the existence of the conjectured evolutionary cladogram beyond the Cambrian is not forthcoming; it might, of course, come to light at some future date but that is not something over which we have control. Moreover, the conjectured extended cladogram may in fact not exist at all, and its absence explained by adjusting the parameters of history’s many degrees of freedom. (As a couple of Larry’s correspondents do; feasibly and plausibly in my view). In doing so, however, we are not using evolutionary theory predictively but instead invoking its flexibility to make post facto sense of the observed situation. Provided this is carried out with all due caution and awareness this post hoc practice is in my view perfectly legitimate science in the face of an absence of other choices. (See here for more comment along these lines: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/11/science-and-imagination.html )

It would be nice, of course, if we could test at will, or be lucky enough to have the necessary test data involuntarily fall into our laps, but unfortunately life is not always like that, particularly when the objects we desire to test shade over into the high level objects that are the stuff of world views. On balance, then, I would say that Mcgrath’s treatment of theism as a post facto sense making construct is rational enough given the ontological nature of deity; although having said that many Christians would claim that the ultimate (anecdotal) test of theism is in the tasting (Ps 34:8).

World view construction is largely a post facto activity that sometimes boarders on myth construction not because this is a rational ideal, but simply because force of epistemic circumstances make it so. Toy town science practitioners might find difficulty in accepting this inconvenient fact and may even be inclined to scratch our eyes out for breaching their narrow jot and tittle view of rationality. But then the purveyors of toy scientism are not the only ones unprepared to give leeway in the face of epistemic challenges. The zealous anti-evolutionists are in no mood to give all due allowance to evolution’s measure of post-facto sense making science. This is particularly ironic given that many anti-evolutionists are theists and that theism itself is not exactly the epitome of readily testable science!

The Right kind of scatching: If you scratch my back I'll scratch yours.

Don’t Play this at Home:

2011-12-23T07:45:00.011-12:00

The obscenities in this video tear through the sentimental and schmaltzy fabric of Xmas with the sound of a low flying jet over a soft Kincaidian landscape. The message is that Santa gets all the accolades (and gets to look charitable to boot) whilst the beasts of burden (the reindeer) and the small men (elves, pixies and dwarfs) do all the work. Given that Santa is patron saint of Xmas capitalism, the video reminded me very sharply of the days when I used to read the stridently Marxist newspaper “Socialist Worker”. The video expresses that paper’s vision of society to a tee: In raucous and harsh tones it forever condemned middle class capitalist acquisitiveness at the expense of working class wealth producers. “Stuff the Bosses”, “Stuff the Tories!”, “Stuff the Royals!” were the kind of headlines that often graced the front page.

I myself, however, was as cynical toward this Marxist message as the Socialist “Workers” were to the society that sustained them in sufficient freedom to express their opinions. Theirs was a materialist version of an archetypical eschatology that promised worker salvation on the great and terrible day of Revolution. Thence on the workers would own the means of production ushering in a supposedly classless society where everyone’s interests coincided and therefore all would live in peace.

But as the video says: “What a croc of ****”. A successful society depends on differentiation and specialization, thus implying classes, thereby setting the scene for potential conflicts of interest. Potential conflicts of interest are a fundamental feature of social existence. The so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” is a cloud cuckoo land concept that in practice leads to an elite ruling class who stifle all debate and dissention under the pretext that in a (fictitious) “classeless” society no conflict would exist and therefore by definition dissenters are reactionaries.

How many times have we seen the failure of this sort of cloud cuckoo land social philosophy? The Christian cults and sects do exactly the same: They are so sure they have found the secret to a social and spiritual utopia where (wo)man is at one with fellow (wo)man. But they fail to get the right balance between positive and negative democracy; accordingly their uncompromising effort to usher in a new unified and free Christian community has exactly the opposite effect. Their zeal, conviction and misplaced confidence in the rightness of their proprietary vision of community betrays them and they end up creating a social nexus ten times more oppressive than what they aim to replace; a nexus where censorship and compulsion are the norm and imposed by a (self) righteous elite. As the video says: “What a croc of ****”. Oh the pathetic irony of it all!

No social restructuring of community and society will ever relieve us of the basic challenge we face day by day; namely, that of finding the strength of moral character to meet the demands of gainsaying self in favour of our neighbor. There is no uptopian society so structured that the moral choices we should make come effortlessly and naturally. This age old challenge is as much with us today as it always has been:

And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

Whether you believe the Christmas story is a myth or signifies deep ontological realities, the values and challenges it embodies are timeless and for all: It is a story of a double condescension by Deity: One: That of giving our contingent and suffering world the power to allow its emergence out of the platonic realm of possibility into reality. Two: Of that Deity giving up all to visit this graciously reified world and identifying with it to the point of death:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome[a] it.

9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Whether as a myth or as an “in fact” reality the Christmas story, in beauty, meaning, depth and grace, surpasses all.

Free Lunch: But Who's Paying?

2011-12-09T07:52:00.029-12:00

In a blog post dated 6th December and entitled “Adaptation by Directed Modification Rather than Selection” anti-evolutionist Cornelius Hunter, tells us about an interesting recent scientific paper (Feb 2010). This paper publishes evidence that breeding populations of cells very rapidly adapt to changes in environmental stress and then pass on the adaptations to descendents. Hunter interprets this rapid “learning” to be evidence of the presence of some kind of Lamarckian mechanism built into to cells.

(Aside: I’m not going to evaluate the paper Hunter refers to, or his opinion of it as I’m not a biologist. However, assuming for the moment that the paper Hunter quotes is evidence of the presence of Lamarckian or epigenetic mechanisms then the following question is prompted : Are these mechanisms reified in the form of some sophisticated molecular machinery or is there some transcendent law that acts on molecular matter to produce these effects and thus effectively adds to the canon of physics? )

Hunter is arguing, I think, that this evidence suggests the existence of some sophisticated biological mechanisms, currently unrecognised by the academic establishment, and these mechanisms explain natural history; in short these mechanisms explain evolution rather than are explained by it. That may (or may not) be the case as far as my knowledge of biology is concerned. I'm of the opinion, however, that even if evolution happened just like the academic establishment maintains, it nonetheless must be resourced by high sophistication in the transcendent physical canon that governs our universe. (Which is something I have said repeatedly on this blog). The choice is this: Either the mechanisms guiding evolution are reified in given molecular engineering (Hunter's suggestion, I think) or they are to be found in the transcendent physical canon in terms of the constants and laws that govern our universe.

In the polarized impassioned disputes that Hunter and other anti-evolutionists get themselves into with zealous atheists I find myself a rather disinterested party. It’s not that I’m disinterested in the engine of natural history - I’m very interested in fact; my disinterest is in the high stakes that some theists (particularly fundamentalists) and atheist zealots have vested in particular hoped for outcomes to the evolution debate. The basis for the rejection of standard evolution by theists like Hunter is that it appears to threaten God’s role as a homunculus intervener in natural history and therefore threatens faith; this, I suspect, drives the rationale for the vehement anti-evolutionism of many “Intelligent Design” supporters. They have taken to heart the atheist zealot billing of evolution as the unguided “blind watch maker”, an idea that takes no cognizance of the sophistication required to select the physical canon needed to service evolution and make it work; zealous atheists treat that canon as if it were a mathematical trivialism. In response anti-evolutionists have allowed through this portrayal of the physical canon as the blind direction-less director. In this vein Hunter talks about “undirected mutations” (see referenced post) and Jonathan McLatchie in this post on “Evolution News” is even clearer; he talks about:

“....the common scientific view that all life is explicable by mechanisms of unguided chance and necessity… The key point is that the mechanisms undergirding the evolution of life, according to Darwinism, are non-intelligent”.

This fanciful idea of “undirected chance & necessity” is at once the bogy of the God fearing anti-evolutionists and the darling of atheist zealots. On the one hand McLatchie’s fancied “necessity” threatens the role of a homunculus Intelligent Designer, but on the other hand atheist zealots appear to see no threat from a sophisticated logical contingency in the physical regime, a very particular form of contingency, in fact, that is required to give a realistic probability to evolution. This contingency raises unsettling questions for atheist zealots. (But the convoluted physical logic needed to drive evolution seems to have the effect of obscuring the presence of this contingency from the human mind; conditional necessity is easily conflated with absolute necessity) Because both sides have put down huge stakes on the table, the disinterested party such as myself has to factor this in when considering their arguments; frankly, this contentious polarised context is not conducive to trust.

However we try to cut it, one mathematical truism remains: If evolution has occurred, even in the manner maintained by the scientific establishment, then the algorithms able to generate our natural history are likely to be extraordinarily rare mathematical classes in the space of all possibilities. In which case the inappropriately named "necessity" that McLatchie fears is no necessity at all but instead exceedingly unique and contingent circumstances on which evolution is conditioned.

Humanly speaking it is not possible to purge our mathematical models of the rare & peculiar preconditions needed to confer on evolution a realistic probability; all sensible outcomes, it seems, eventually trace back to the startlingly unique conditions that, as far as we are concerned, constitute a free lunch from nowhere – and that’s true even in a universe generating multiverse (See here: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/05/middlebrow-atheism-part-5-final-part.html). Necessity and aseity are destined to ever elude our science. It is an irony that the anti-evolutionists, like the atheist zealots, do not make much of this fact.

STOP PRESS 14/12/2011
I found this cartoon on PZ Myers blog. Given the above material and a little modification it's perfect:

Two reasons to feel superior: What would life be like without the Schadenfreude of looking down on someone?

Not such a geeky waste of time after all.

2011-12-04T05:41:00.017-12:00

The above is a picture of a contraption I built in 1980 in order to amuse myself and at the same time make use of my old redundant Meccano set, a set that included electrical parts such as solenoids. I decided to build something that would generate a disordered binary sequence. More views of the machine, including the output results, can be seen on my facebook album here.

So how does it work? The lower story of the machine consists of an assembly of cogs and band drives which periodically operate various switches. These switches interact electrically to produce a complex combined sequence of 1s and 0s. This sequence is stored in 8 bit chunks in the one byte solenoid memory occupying the upper story. A long sequence of 1s and 0s is therefore generated byte by byte; these bytes have to be marked up one at a time by hand on graph paper in order to build up a long sequence.

Yes, it’s nineteenth century technology, but it worked and moreover there is a moral in the tale.

If we represent the nth switch in the machine by the binary variable “S_n” and imagine that this variable switches between 1 and 0 with a particular periodicity, then the whole machine carries out the following logical operation:

(S₁ + S₂ + S₃) . S₄

Where “+” designates an “OR” operation and “.” designates an “AND” operation. For example, if switches 1 & 2 are “on”, switch 3 is “off” and switch 4 is “on” we get:

(1 + 1 + 0) .1 = 1

One way of thinking about this operation is to think of the combined result of S₁, S₂, and S₃ to effectively select or “gate” the result of S₄; that is, if (S₁ + S₂ + S₃) generates a 1 then it allows through the binary pulses from S₄.

If S₁, S₂ , S₃ and S₄ all have different switching periods then the logical expression above results in a quite complex (i.e. disordered) sequence in itself, especially if the periodicities of the switches are expressed in real numbers with lots of decimal places. These inherent real number constants have the effect of helping to generate chaotic sequences, although under these circumstances alone the sequences generated would nevertheless still display a measure of periodicity and therefore would be far from maximum disorder. However, the secret of the machine’s ability to disrupt periodicity and generate high disorder doesn’t just depend on the use of “real numbers” but in fact resides in three features:

1) "Analogue" band drives were employed and their non integral ratios produced real number periodicities; this entails the likelihood that the differing periodicities of S₁, S₂, S₃ are not fully resolvable; that is in absolute terms the sequenced product of these three switches is a-periodic.

2) The other important feature of analogue band drives is that they have inevitable accuracy tolerances - unlike "digital" cogs which only produce exact integral ratios.

3) Compared to the other switches Switch 4 is made to switch on and off rapidly.

The result of these features means that the gating switches S₁, S₂, S₃ force a sampling of S₄that is both chaotic and inaccurate. The inherent inaccuracy in the periods of the gating switches is of comparable size to the distance between the pulses delivered by the rapid switching of S_4, giving rise to a probabilitistic hit or miss situation. The result; a very non-periodic disordered sequence. The “disordered” results can be seen in my facebook album.

Moral of the Tale.

The way disorder is generated in the above model reminds me very much of an idea mooted by Michael Frayn in his book “The Human Touch”. He suggests that quantum uncertainty is a result of the muddled and chaotic macroscopic world attempting to sample the precise periodicities of the microscopic world. In my model the macroscopic world is represented by the logical operation (S₁ + S₂ + S₃) which is chaotic and inaccurate. The microscopic world is represented by the high frequency pulsing of S₄ with its implied small “wavenumber”.

Frayn’s idea is a very neat idea and it is reminiscent of the quantum decoherence interpretation of the random jumps of the state vector, which as I have said here, is also a very neat idea. I must admit I’m very tempted by both ideas and they shouldn’t be discarded lightly. But, and here’s the inevitable “But"; as Roger Penrose points out decoherence does not easily explain the jumps of the state vector entailed by null results, (if indeed the state vector does jump under these circumstances) Secondly – and this is my own idea – the quantum wave calculus looks too much like an imaginary number version of probability calculus for us to discard the notion that those random jumps are actually absolute and not just a product of deterministic chaos. No wonder, then, that I gave my high frequency switch its own uncertainty; a static commutator with an electric current picked up by a rotating flailing sprung head. (See below)

High frequency switching is achieved by a static commutator and a rotating sprung pick up head.

Nounema, Elementa, Cognita and Consciousness

2011-11-29T04:24:00.027-12:00

Ontological discontinuity: Consciousness interrupts the comatose state with a start.

As promised in a previous post I want to look in more detail at a passage taken from one PZ Myers’ blog posts. This passage was a response by Myers to a flurry of comments on his blog by a group of fundamentalists who said they knew why the universe is rational. Over to PZ:

Their primary approach is to assert that because logic exists, god exists, and therefore any attempt to apply reason to a problem is evidence for god. They are unable to justify their premise, however, so it’s a silly game they’re playing — there is no reason to assume an anthropic being was necessary to conjure logic into existence or even that any kind of intelligence was required, any more than we could argue that intelligence is required to start an avalanche. Small fluctuations can lead to large scale changes in that example, so there’s no logical barrier to the idea that unintelligent processes seed universes that expand with internally consistent rules (and universes seeded with illogical rules, if that were possible, wouldn’t exist and definitely wouldn’t be populated with intelligent beings contemplating the laws of their universe).

Like all mathematics logic “exists” only as a platonic object until its configurations and operations are formally reified in our world by some medium such as natural processes, machinery, or thoughts. The kind of logic that is being referred to in the above passage, at least by Myers himself, is that whose existence is of the reified kind; viz: Myers talks about what is “necessary to conjure logic into existence”. So, what, then, is necessary to give logic a physically reified ontology? In answer Myers appears to allude to the inflationary multiverse; here an infinite physical production line generates small bubble universes with randomly chosen physical regimes and these expand into full blown universes (if their randomly selected regimes allow). But even if we accept this speculative cosmology the universe generator itself is a remarkable logical construction that begs an explanation. As I have pointed out many times before, attempts to “explain” exhaustively leads to a “turtles all the way down” regress; each explanation will contain contingent conditions which are explained by another explanatory object which in turn will contain contingent conditions… and so on.

The reason for this regress is that we explain our observations by embedding them in a narrative that describes a larger context. That embracing narrative itself can be “explained” by embedding it in yet a larger contextualising narrative … and so on, and this leads to a nesting of contexts within contexts to the nth degree. In the mathematical physical sciences the explanatory contexts/naratives most usually employ some blend of algorithmics and statistics (or “Law & Disorder”). But be that as it may, it is not always practically possible to use these mathematically descriptive objects even if we think that a phenomenon is ultimately generated by law and disorder principles; after all, practitioners in biology, history and sociology use narrative intense descriptions that don’t readily reduce to algorithmics and statistics.

An understanding of the ultimately descriptive & contingent nature of scientific explanatory objects leads us to appreciate this: Our explanations can never account for what we observe in terms of absolute necessity but only in terms of a conditional necessity; that is, our observations are only necessary if certain postulated conditions hold. For example: The observed motions of the planets are necessary if Newton’s laws hold. Of course, these postulated conditions, without a 'turtles all the way down' regress, have no necessity in and of themselves – they could “poof” out of existence at any time or any place without any logical violation. Therefore “creation” is not something that just occurred a long while ago at the Big Bang; “creation”, as far as we are concerned, occurs everywhere and everywhen in as much as the cosmos’ sustained existence issues out of a logical void of unnecessity everywhere and everywhen. A Grand Logical Hiatus accompanies us at all places and times and therefore constitutes a generalized form of ex nihilo creation. Ex-nihilo creation, in the logical sense, then, is a present tense continuous process. For the scientifically illiterate the explanations of science are a kind of modern magic that has replaced the divine magic of creation and therefore in their minds it serves the same magical role of divinity. But for those of us who have seen through the trick of science and understand that our scientific explanations can never deliver asiety, the realization dawns that in an absolute sense our explanatory powers are no further forward than they were in the Stone Age; all we have succeeded in doing since then is come up with some sophisticated tools of description.

In trying to explain the existence of a rational universe Myers hints at the weak anthropic principle: Thoroughly illogical universes (=disordered universes?) would not support sentient beings, therefore sentient beings must expect to exist in and observe a rational context. Sentience, then, implies a rational universe – I wouldn’t disagree with Myers on this score. But, does a rational universe imply sentience? An affirmative answer to that question is not an obvious truism; conceivably universes both irrational and rational could exist apart from an indigenous sentience. In fact, it is likely that there are far flung reaches of space and time that have or did have a rational state without the presence of an indigenous sentience to observe them. (Our cosmos, if it is more than just a deceptive façade of perception, gives every appearance of being a realm of noumena.) So, if and when science is done with a full description of a rational universe do we simply have to accept this description as a brute fact for which there can be no meaningful answers to questions that try to probe deeper? Welcome to what Paul Davis calls the “absurd universe”, the universe that “just is” and let’s have no further questions please, because further questions are unintelligible to the descriptive logical methods of science!

The descriptive nature of science’s logical constructs, by themselves, are destined to lead us to an absurd universe. From a human point of view this feels most unsatisfactory; our intuitions (or least many people’s intuitions) tell us that there must be some deeper reason “why” things are as they. These inquiring intuitions remain unsatiated in a strictly descriptive explanatory paradigm (although some people may not feel these intuitive questions to be particularly compelling; they therefore remain incurious and phlegmatic about them – perhaps they don’t have the necessary brain structure that prompts these questions). The classic response to this impasse is to claim that science is an activity which only provides answers to questions of “How?” but does not attempt to answer the question “Why?”; when asked on a cosmic scale the latter question is the domain of theology.

In this post Myers’ discusses this “Why vs. How” dichotomy in connection with a particular example; namely, very regular holes which appeared in a straight line down his street. In an ironic twist Myers shows that he fully appreciates Dembski’s explanatory filter; he quickly eliminates natural causes for the holes and concludes that they are due to human agency. As Myers himself admits, this agency entails intents and purposes; that is, human motivational factors which are taken for granted as givens in this context. If in a social context a feature can be shown to be an outcome of these givens then it is often considered to be sufficiently “explained”. But human intents and purposes are hardly elemental stuff; they are complex high level cognita and a far cry from “law and disorder” explanations which merely describe patterns of elementa that can be tokenised with simple bits and bytes. In contrast to the flat meaningless descriptions of the mathematical physical sciences which only answer the question “How?”, answers to the question “Why?” posit as their starting point the intricacies of the sentient world where intents, purposes and above all, meaning, in the deepest sense of the word, are conferred upon that which is “explained”. But there’s a catch: Although this kind of explanation satisfies the human need for meaning, its presumed starting point is the contingent complexity of sentience. In contrast law and disorder explanations reduce the logical complexity of the objects one needs to accept as givens, perhaps making it easier to take them on board as simply axiomatic (although in doing so they fail to satisfy intuitive questions about intents and purposes). But a world explicated in terms of intents & purposes satisfies the longing for meaning (although in doing so posits the complexities of sentience). In summary: What law and disorder explanations gain in logical simplicity they lose in meaning; what explanations based on intents and purposes gain in meaning they lose in logical complexity. But there is one thing going for a-priori complexity that an absurd logical simplicity doesn’t have; you’re not going to find asiety in the elemental; it’s too simple for that; the only other place to look for asiety is in the a-priori complex.

Given the very human background where questions about intents and purposes find meaning and satisfaction, it is natural to ask if the otherwise irreducible absurdity of the descriptions of the physical sciences can be addressed in a similar way: Do the brute fact contingencies necessarily present in scientific descriptions of “How?” have humanly meaningful significance in terms of intents and purposes? Myers at least shows he understands the question:

Similarly, if there was a god busily poofing the entirety of the cosmos into existence, that’s an awful lot of evidence that can be examined for motive…are we to instead believe it is so incoherent that we can discern no possible purpose behind all this data?

But although he understands the question, Myers finds no ultimate meaning in the cosmos in terms of intents and purposes:

When people try to argue that science can’t answer “why” questions, what they’re actually saying is that they don’t like the answer they get — there is no why! There is no purpose or intent! — and are actually trying to say that the only valid answer they’ll accept is one that names an intelligence and gives it a motive. That is, they want an answer that names a god as an ultimate cause, and a description that doesn’t include agency doesn’t meet their presuppositions.

For Myers, then, all explanation must ultimately reduce to the flat descriptive answers to the question “How?” rather than “Why?”; including, one presumes, the existence of human sentience which science conjectures to be an outcome conditioned on our particular regime of law and disorder. For Myers, answers about the outer most explanatory context to the cosmos must reduce to physical science’s flat descriptive absurd explanations. But I have more than a sneaky feeling that Myers would not like it any other way: Looking at the passion and anger with which he advocates his position one wonders if answers to “How?” are the only kind of explanation he can handle. In fact I’m sure I have read somewhere on his blog where he says something to the effect that if a sentience existed that was totalising enough to be the outer most explanatory frame of our cosmos (i.e. God) he would consider it his duty to oppose this cosmic “tyrant”. I think we have to leave PZ Myers to stew in his own mindset. I can hardly blame him if for some reason he doesn’t have or hasn’t come to terms with the strong instinctual questions about “Why?”, questions which embrace the whole cosmic set up, universe generator and all. Perhaps to him meaningless descriptions of patterns of elementa may be completely intellectually satisfying; I can’t hold that against him. But having said that I have to admit that many other people, myself included, have nagging instinctual questions about “Why?”; questions that can only be answered if one assumes the complex world of cognita as a starting point. And these questions are not just about minor affairs in one small corner of the universe, such as why my local authority are digging perfectly cylindrical holes; rather these questions frame the whole universe generating caboodle. Unless those questions are satiated the universe, as PZ Myers will no doubt maintain, is an unintelligible incoherent and meaningless absurdity. But in this sea of insentient absurdity we find an amazing anomaly; conscious cognition, the very thing that has constructed this absurd paradigm of the comatose!

Granville Sewell; Still Getting it Wrong.

2011-11-17T06:25:00.006-12:00

I see from this post on Uncommon Descent that Granville Sewell still thinks the Second Law of Thermodynamics is necessarily contradicted by evolution. He still fails to see that thermodynamic “disorder” is a measure of “statistical weight” (denoted by Z) and does not strongly entail the patterned “irregularity” such as we see generated by random sources. As such an increase in the statistical weight of a system is an insufficient mathematical index to eliminate the evolutionary development of the complex ordered structures we call life; for it is conceivable that the declared/ordained constraints on physical systems are sufficient to create a bottle neck in the value of Z(t) at some time t giving the states containing living structures a disproportionately large representation and accordingly a realistic probability at t. Sewell would do better to try and wrap his mind round the function Z(t) to see whether or not evolution has a realistic chance. I have discussed this matter several times before on this blog.

This is not to say that the engine of evolutionary change as currently understood actually works. In fact as I have said before I have intuitive doubts about the current understanding of evolution; it’s just that Granville Sewell is repeatedly challenging conventional evolution with a duff argument.

See:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/05/darwin-bicentenary-part-20-does.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/10/darwin-bicentenary-part-27-mystery-of.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/11/darwin-bicententary-part-28-mystery-of.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/12/darwin-bicententary-part-30-mystery-of.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/02/thermodynamics-and-evolution-again.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/06/dembski-mcintosh-and-evilution.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/07/idiot-proofing-thermodynamics.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/11/self-organisation.html

You can't win can you?

U-Turn on Junk DNA at Uncommon Descent?

2011-11-11T23:00:00.002-12:00

An interesting turn of events at Uncommon Descent

In this post on “Sandwalk” Larry Moran provides a link to a comment thread on Uncommon Descent where he has been discussing Junk DNA. The anti-evolutionist Intelligent Design community represented by UD by and large believe their version of ID predicts that Junk DNA does not exist. They arrive at this prediction, I think, because they cannot conceive why an intelligent designer would be so untidy (or incompetent) as to leave redundant genetic code lying about in the genome. But then again perhaps an intelligent designer has some very intelligent (or perhaps even dumb) motives that we don’t understand for leaving this code in his genetic program.

As I said in my series on Intelligent Design predictions I do not think that ID provides a firm basis for hard predictions, primarily because it is in the nature of intelligence, especially alien intelligence, to possess personality traits and foibles that give a large measure of inscrutability to its behavior: Viz: How can we be so sure of the motives, methods and purposes of an alien genetic engineer as to know whether or not he/she/it might want redundant genetic code lying around? There are all sorts of reasons that the imagination can invent which could account for junk DNA within an ID framework. Well, what do you know, Larry tells us about someone he has met on the UD thread who can think of some reasons why ID might be consistent with junk DNA. Here’s how Larry tells it:

The new version [of ID] goes like this .....

1. You can have junk DNA because physical constraints and design compromises prevented a perfect design.

2. Due to genetic entropy the originally designed genomes might have degenerated.

3. Junk DNA could have been put in the genome by the intelligent designer as preparation for future creations.

4. Some of the junk DNA is redundant functional DNA that's present in case a gene breaks down.

This new version of intelligent design is not in conflict with the presence of large amounts of junk in our genome.

Here we see a consequence of the fact that an alien intelligence is an entity with so many degrees of freedom regarding its purposes and methods that prediction is all but impossible; with sufficient imagination a very broad spectrum of explanation can be retrospectively fitted to any accepted data. ID has more the character of a post-facto sense making paradigm than it is hard science.

Science and the Imagination

2011-11-09T00:52:00.020-12:00

Head in the Clouds: Flights of the imagination can and do work, but not always.

PZ Myers and the overwhelming ~~mobbing~~ voting power of his ranks of ~~raiders~~ readers have wrecked many a web poll; although truth be told, many of those polls aren’t worth the server space they occupy because they are simply contrived to solicit the result the pollster is looking for. Even so, it’s fitting that PZ and his marauding hordes should experience an unwelcome raid of their own: Recently a flurry of comments orchestrated, according to PZ, by fundamentalist Eric Hovind hit PZ’s mail box and his blog in what PZ referred to as a zombie invasion! Why is it I find this all too human tribal scrapping so funny? Is it subliminal expression of an aloof and smug superiority? But then that would also apply to viewers of all TV comedies whose humour depends on showcasing the foibles and idiosyncrasies of human nature.

Anyway, according to PZ the fundamentalist “zombies” have been filling his comment section with Bible quotes and one-liner quips. Viz:

Their primary approach is to assert that because logic exists, god exists, and therefore any attempt to apply reason to a problem is evidence for god.

PZ’s response is as follows:

They are unable to justify their premise, however, so it’s a silly game they’re playing — there is no reason to assume an anthropic being was necessary to conjure logic into existence or even that any kind of intelligence was required, any more than we could argue that intelligence is required to start an avalanche. Small fluctuations can lead to large scale changes in that example, so there’s no logical barrier to the idea that unintelligent processes seed universes that expand with internally consistent rules (and universes seeded with illogical rules, if that were possible, wouldn’t exist and definitely wouldn’t be populated with intelligent beings contemplating the laws of their universe).

So, a fundamentalist invasion has prompted PZ to get a little reflexive and that can’t be bad: The self reference entailed by careful observation and analysis of science itself is not something that I have noticed to be conspicuous amongst the kind of atheist PZ represents. But here we have it at last; some reflection on why science and its logical handmaidens are so efficacious.

But more about that in a later post. In this earlier blog post we also find PZ getting a little reflexive in answer to a theologian who points out the difficulties in applying classic science to history. In response PZ starts by criticizing the naive “You weren’t there” quip that we frequently hear from Ken Ham and his AiG friends as they attempt to undermine the historical sciences in favour of what they categorize as “operational science”: that is, science which deals exclusively with present-tense-continuous processes. I largely agree with PZ on this matter: All science, in an absolute sense, is historical and unrepeatable in as much as hypothesis testing inevitably has to be documented and repeatability is inevitably compromised by the impossibility of exactly replicating test conditions; an underlying simple uniformity and symmetry has to be assumed to make any progress in any science. "Operational science", then, is isomorphic with history. Conversely, history is isomorphic with "operational science", for whilst history itself is not a present-tense-continuous process the evidential trace it leaves behind is, nonetheless, present-tense-continuous.

I would certainly by at one with PZ in regarding Ken Ham and his AiG cronies as anti-science bigots who are busily subverting and corrupting science. This anti-science bigotry is seen nowhere clearer than in their attempts to debunk the historical sciences with this childish quip about “Not being there”, a quip that in the final analysis makes a mockery of the whole of science by attacking the common assumption on which it is based; namely that the world is rational and readable. There is an across-the-board congruity in the use of scientific epistemology and therefore the “You weren’t there” quip has the potential to sabotage all science at source, historical and otherwise. In fact, ironically Ham’s much loved and overworked quip even hamstrings the historical basis of the Christian faith; “We weren’t there” at the resurrection or when the Bible was written therefore, according to Ham, we have no right to makes claims about Divine choreography.

However, in his post PZ is reacting to a theologian who is an entirely different kettle of fish to the nincompoops we see at Answers in Genesis and PZ gives it brief but serious consideration:

I agree that not every thing in the universe is scientifically verifiable or repeatable, but this cavalier attitude towards history is reprehensible. Yes, there are history laboratories: there are historians who do archaeology, chemistry, biology, astronomy and all kinds of hard sciences to confirm and test historical claims. The provenance and authenticity of documents is a major historical interest.

A discrete historical event may not be repeatable, but it is amenable to confirmation and validation. The source information can be independently verified. Multiple approaches can be taken to test a claim. Did Caesar invade Gaul? It only happened once, you don’t get to repeat the invasion, and no one alive was there, after all. But we can look at the archaeology of France, we can see the linguistic evidence, we’ve got documents from the time, and every time someone digs up a Roman cache from the first century BCE we are getting more information on the event.

I do consider it scientifically tractable. Evidence-based, empirical study and logical analysis are right there at the heart of the discipline of history.

I wouldn’t say I especially disagree with PZ’s points above, but his brevity makes it look too easy. The objects of our study differ in complexity, repeatability, accessibility, predictability and what not; they are by no means all equally scientifically tractable. Theorizing about and testing simple low-level physical objects like springs and even molecules is a far cry from testing theories about high level objects like, say, whole societies, especially societies in the distance past. Questions like “Who was Jack the Ripper” or “What happened to Lord Lucan” may never be answered no matter how hard we investigate. Unlike simple physical objects, historical objects have far more degrees of freedom and yet fewer degrees of freedom that we can voluntarily adjust in order to test them. Historical research is very dependent on the fortuitous: Purposeful documentary and archeological searches may reveal nothing; in fact sitting back and waiting for documents and artifacts to emerge may be as proactive as it gets and anecdotal evidence the best you’ve got. Moreover, if one has ever listened to the interpretations of an able and imaginative historian like Simon Schama one observes someone who first makes a very human connection with his subjects of study and then allows his historical imagination to trip along at a rate of knots as he reads history in a way which leaves the snail’s pace physical scientist’s head spinning. And yet in the final analysis I’m sure even someone like Schama would subject their highly imaginative constructions to the light of new documents and artifacts; but only if they should, perchance, come to light.

Clearly, then, not all science, if science it can be called, proceeds in the philosophically classic fashion of data collection, theory synthesis, prediction, and proactive hypothesis testing. In fact high level science may be less predictive than it is post-dictive; that is, it employs after-the-fact sense making structures that are used as frameworks to interpret situations rather than predict them; the success of these post-dictive frameworks may be based on a rather less than objective judgment about the ease with which they can assimilate the accepted data protocols arising out of observation. For example, if evolutionary history really is a story of randomly fortuitous events being locked into place by some kind of physical ratchet then we certainly are not going to be able to predict everything about that history; it is more likely that we will make observations on the fossil record (if we are lucky enough for it to be preserved) and then retrospectively try to make evolutionary sense of that record. Not that evolution is the only theory that has a heavy retrospective element: Homunculus Intelligent design , in my opinion, is even less a hard science than evolution. The general rule here seems to be this: We may not always be able to predict the dots of observation, but instead find ourselves trying to fit prefabricated sense making theoretical structures to the dots of observation after they have been experienced.

However, as I have said in my sidebar, if “science” is defined very generally as any activity that makes comparison between theory and experience and attempts to reconcile them, then science as an epistemological method covers a very wide class of knowledge acquisition if not the whole of analytic activity; it’s just that the theory vs. experience contention does not always proceed along the straight path of classic science; namely, data collection, theory synthesis, prediction, proactive hypothesis testing, data collection, re-synthesis etc. As the objects we deal with get increasingly high level and their lack of amenability compromises rigorous formal methods, science imperceptibly shades over into subjective post-facto sense making interpretations; anyone who has tried to follow the Jack the Ripper history knows what I mean.

But it gets even worse than this: When it comes to attempts to form a totalizing world view bog standard spring extending and test tube precipitating science goes out of the window completely. Let me be frank; in my opinion there simply isn’t enough data out there to form a totalizing world view with the same standards of rigour that one can apply to simple objects like springs and molecules. World view synthesis is a hit and miss, seat of the pants, edgy affair, an activity for those who like dangling by their finger tips from precipices. World view synthesis is big on imagination and small on data simply because the objects posited in world view synthesis are large and complex in the extreme, making the available relevant data look like a very small window indeed. In fact at the extreme end world views are not far removed from mythology; that is, stories which help one cope with and make a human connection with an otherwise humanly incoherent and complex cosmos. None of this is say that the synthesis of a valid world view isn’t possible; there is the freedom to engage in world view synthesis (at least in democratic Countries) and give it one’s best shot. But the caveat remains: It is simply not possible to form such a world view that is beyond reasonable doubt; the relevant data samples are too few and far between. As my agnostic brother-in-law Jon Benison has observed when commenting on this sort thing; much of it is based on hunches and guesses (of varying degrees of plausibility). But, nevertheless, if providence wills, hunches and guesses can pay off; therein lies my personal hope.

But there is also the freedom to conscientiously dissent. I’m not a postmodernist myself but I would agree with the postmodern sentiment that implicates grand rationales as a tool in authoritarianism and oppression. But I say that not because I think there aren’t any valid grand rationales, but rather because claims to the effect that a particular grand rationale is self evident and compellingly true are likely to be bogus. In particular, fundamentalists are very sure they have a clear conception of “God’s Word”, a Word which they believe can be read plainly with little need for interpretative subtleties; so plainly, in fact, that they are sure everyone else can actually see it their way but is not admitting it and therefore must have bad consciences if they dissent. Fundamentalists are loathe to acknowledge that their interpretations of scripture are open to honest analysis and challenge; such challenges are apt to be regarded by fundamentalists as at best sinister and at worst Satanic. But in my view conscientious dissent and clear conscience agnosticism are authentic positions because no world view is beyond reasonable doubt; at least beyond the oppresive confines of some of the cloying sub-cultures that promulgate them.

Given the difficulty in establishing world views it is no surprise that many Christians have resorted to a “mythos” rather than a “logos” response; that is, they have resorted to the inner revelations of a kind of gnostic version of Christianity in order to protect themselves from analytical challenge. They think of themselves as bypassing the cut and thrust of analysis and argument with talk of “knowing Jesus in my heart” and special “Holy Spirit” insight. In my experience the touchy-feely ethos of contemporary mythos-centric spirituality can be intense and cloying with great pressure on one to make constant checks on the existential quality of one’s faith and whether one feels near to God. But the fact is, an intuitive sense of God’s/Jesus’ presence, in the final analysis, itself classifies as an experiential sample (and an experience that is by no means common to all Christians), a data point, as it were, that a Christian world view attempts to explain and assimilate.

We are, as I have already suggested, free to dissent from world view synthesis and remain as agnostics with a clear conscience. But if we do it leaves us with little assurance except in the simple elemental objects with which spring-extending and test-tube-precipitating science deals. But if the views I have expressed in my sidebar are correct then very little is left that is not empirical in the sense that it can be investigated with a generalized albeit informal version of science: All our notions must face up to and wrestle with our day to day experience. All human theoretical ideas face the challenge of empirical life whether those challenges are simple protocol statements coming out of a formal experiment, the contents of old parchments, or broad sweep observations about a suffering world which impact our view on the nature and existence of God. In this very general sense science is an all embracing activity, an activity in which even our theological flights of the imagination are put to the test.

Larry Moran's Strong Theological Opinions

2011-11-07T06:30:00.006-12:00

I had to catch this one in passing: In a post entitled: "Science and Religion: Are they compatible?" (Sandwalk, 4 November), dyed in the wool atheist Larry Moran writes:

I'm getting pretty disgusted with those "sophisticated" theologians who hide behind fuzzy notions of religion when you know damn well they believe in a personal god who intervenes in the world. Haught has been playing this game for decades. Either he's a deist—in which case he should come right out and admit it—or he believes in a personal god who does things that possibly conflict with science—in which case he should have the courage to defend his beliefs.

So, atheist Larry is quite sure that a personal God entails "intervention" and that if you don't believe this you must be a deist. Well, I don't accept the concept of a God who "intervenes" and yet I'm not a deist. In anycase given that we seem to be in the middle of a chaotic reality that is sensitive to quantum disorder how ever do you distinguish between a "natural event" and an "intervention event"? It just can't be done.

I can't speak for the "sophisticated" theologians Larry is talking about, but this is a typical case of being made to choose between a false dichotomy - Viz: One is supposed to think of God as occasionally intervening in the cosmos and when He does it's possibly in conflict with science and you are then liable to be accused of superstition; either that or else one must be a deist; which one is it to be?

As I have quoted Cornelius Hunter as saying: (See here)

It is perhaps one of the great enigmas in religious thought that one can profess to be an agnostic, skeptic, or even atheist regarding belief in God yet still hold strong opinions about God.

I'm getting pretty disgusted with those naive (a)theologians who hide behind fuzzy notions of religion when you know damn well their theological categories are well and truly screwed up. Moran has been playing this game for decades. Either he's pretending he's not dabbling in theology — in which case he should come right out and admit it—or, as Hunter has said, he holds strong opinions about God — in which case he should have the courage to defend his beliefs before he slags off those who do not necessarily fall into his theological boxes.

Good News from Ken Ham.

2011-10-27T23:45:00.008-12:00

Yogic Flying: Defying gravity with no evidential support

In a blog post dated October 26th and entitled “It’s Rare – It’s a Creationist Seminary” Ken Ham talks about his chance to speak at a Baptist Theological seminary that enthusiastically supports Answers in Genesis’ Young Earthism (= “Creationism” in Ken’s mind). The good news is, of course, Ken’s admission that Young Earthism is a rarity amongst seminaries:

Sad to say, the overwhelming majority of seminaries in this nation do not have a faculty that all take an ardent stand on a literal Genesis as they do at Mid America Baptist Theological Seminary. I certainly felt at home among friends! …. What a difference there would be in the churches across this nation if more seminaries took the biblical stand like this one does, training pastors and missionaries who do not compromise God’s Word. However, so many Christian leaders today do compromise—with devastating effects in churches as the authority of God’s Word is undermined by such compromise.

That’s good news and a much needed salve for my growing unease, paranoia even, about the state of American intellectual life; having accused Americans of being paranoiac I think I’m going that way myself! The trouble is, fundamentalist buffoons like Harold Camping, William Tapley, The geocentrists, The Flat Earthers, Answers in Genesis etc get more than their fair share of publicity because everyone likes a clown. But truth be told most theological seminaries in America are intellectually serious institutions; that’s good news and I’m much relieved.

Now, onto another subject. There was one little reference in Ken’s post that piqued my interest: Ken said:

The president also told me they would not employ a professor who does not accept the six literal days of creation and a young earth/universe. How refreshing!

Note the reference to “young earth/universe”. Jason Lisle’s attempt to solve the YEC star light problem has failed. That throws AiG back on Russ Humphreys’ gravitational well theory (an earlier theory). Unlike Lisle who mangles physics Humphreys at least respects current physics if not astrophysics. Trouble is, whilst Humphrey’s theory supports the idea of a young Earth, it requires an old universe. This is because the very localised geocentric gravitational well that Humphreys posits would only slow time down in the near neighbourhood of the Earth*, but not in the universe at large; beyond 6000 light years from Earth the physical clocks in the rest of the universe clock up millions, if not billions of years worth of ticks. In short then, Humphrey’s theory is at odds with Ken’s “young universe” and thus beyond our Ken!

Foot note: *Humphreys’ Earth centred gravitational well would seriously distort the shape of our galaxy; I’m not aware that this has been observed.

AiG are having a big problem with Gravity…..

….Ken’s Ark will only float on land because of it….

….AiG’s Dr. Jason Lisle PhD doesn’t believe in it….

…..and AiG’s Dr. Russ Humphreys PhD is still struggling with it….

............Perhaps they ought to consult this guy, particle physicist and yogic flier Professor John Hagelin PhD, who thinks he can defy it.

Intelligent Design’s Big Issue

2011-10-21T05:26:00.018-12:00

Interesting is this post on Uncommon Descent quoting Origin Of Life researcher, Jack Szotsk, as saying “ We’re half way there”. At this optimistic outlook I couldn’t help but quip in the comments:

I think I’ve heard about this kind of “half way there” before: Viz: “We want to get to 10^40 Mev. We can currently do 10^20 Mev so we must be half way there”. Exponentials; who’d have them?

After all, in the past I have been rather prey to optimistic visions of the future state of science and technology, so a measure of skepticism about that kind of claim is in order I feel.

But in spite that, as I think I have made sufficiently clear, this blog is sympathetic to the conjecture that cosmic physics is the very rare precondition (i.e. a high information condition) which considerably enhances the chances of life arising via some kind of evolution: Conceivably there exists in platonic space systems of succinct mathematical functions (although presumably an extreme rarity) which limit the possible histories available to physical systems to such an extent that the class of life generating histories has a statistical weight high enough to confer upon life a realistic probability. If this is the case it is certainly wrong to caricature the products of evolution, as Cornelius Hunter has done, (see “Darwin’s God” blogspot, entry dated Oct 19th) as follows:

…Everyone knows biology is full of complicated designs, but evolutionists think it arose spontaneously, as a result of the play of natural laws. In other words it happened to happen. First there was nothing, then there was something, then that something became very complicated. All this just happened to happen.

If evolution has happened, indeed if it is mathematically possible, it is an injustice to describe its efficacy in the language of the fortuitous (as does Hunter), for it is likely that very rare preconditions (in terms of the selected physical laws and boundary conditions) would have to be selected for it to work.

Having said that, however, I have to admit to intuitive doubts about conventional evolution. As an illustration: The rules of chess considerably limit the number of game histories that can occur, but if one were to move the pieces on a chess board at random but within those rules I doubt if the result would be a game worth watching. In this connection Hunter may have something for us worth taking to heart: In this blog post I give Hunter credit for giving us a feel for the exponential problems that evolution has to solve if it is to work. It is certainly not immediately clear that even our very constraining physics eliminates those exponential intractabilities.

So, does standard physics require something extra for life to develop? Is that extra something so called “Intelligent Design”? No, because it seems that ID, the way it is currently defined by William Dembski, is almost unavoidable: As I have so often tried to make clear, the conditions that lead some people to identify the existence of ID are very difficult if not impossible to avoid in the positing of physical models. The rarity of those conditions, such as the selection of those conjectured life generating laws, have the effect of triggering Dembski’s design detection criterion (That is Dembski “Explanatory filter”). I myself long ago reached the point of accepting that the a priori existence of very rare/unique conditions is an unavoidable truism in the physical sciences, whether those conditions be generating functions, boundary conditions or just brute fact configurations. The physical sciences have an inevitable incompleteness about them, an ultimate embedded logical hiatus that cannot be banished. More likely than not people fail to see this, because they conflate conditional probabilities with absolute probabilities; conditional probabilities may be relatively high, but absolute probabilities, if one is to accept the principle of equal a-priori probabilities (Assuming those probabilities are definable and quantifiable) are extremely low. Ergo, the concept of ID which metaphysically hooks on to the pervasive Logical Hiatus and improbability in physical models is less an ancillary extra needed to help the world go round, than it is an ever present substrate in the day to day running of the world.

The difficulty of excluding rarity/uniqueness/improbablity from proposed physical models means that if one were to simply define ID to exist whenever extreme rarity/uniqueness/improbability is encountered ID almost becomes a logical truism. The question then is less whether ID exists, and more a question of how ID expresses itself in terms of just which rare preconditions have been selected for in our cosmos.

Few writers and correspondents on Uncommon Descent would go along with the young Earth buffoonery we see at “Answers in Genesis”. Most UDers (and hope I am right) would at least accept Earth’s story as it is currently told by academia, if not the Darwinian mechanisms that are thought to govern it. Thus evolution in the trivial sense that life on Earth has changed over billions of years, is accepted by most UDers. (It is no surprise, to hear AiG’s buffoon in chief, Ken Ham, claiming that William Dembski is a theistic evolutionist.)

The big question, then, is just what physical regime describes the patterns of natural history. Did the selection agency give us a unique/rare system of law and disorder that generates the right configurations or did that agency simply grant existence to (living) configurations that no elegant system of law and disorder could generate in anything like a realistic time? Is natural history, in the final analysis, a narrative intense pattern of change that simply cannot be described as the execution of short time algorithms?

"What those deistical chumps don't realise is that I not only have to design it, but sustain it as well. And don't give me any of this 'turtles all the way down' stuff"**

** This "turtles all the way down" references alludes to the regress I speak about in the following blog posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/05/middlebrow-atheism-part-5-final-part.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/05/does-intelligent-design-make-testable.html

I notice that in this blog post on Uncommon Descent Barry Arrington has also picked up on this regress

"Auschwitz" by Francesco Guccini

2011-10-16T04:40:00.001-12:00

Here's another song by Francesco Guccini with compelling (disturbing even) lyrics, as translated by my brother in law Jonathan Benison.

I’ve died – died with hundreds
I’m dead – I was a baby
Up the chimney, I went up in smoke
And now, I’m in the wind

At Auschwitz, it was snowing
The smoke rose up slowly
In the cold, cold of winter
And now, I’m in the wind
And now, I’m in the wind

At Auschwitz, so many people
All held in one great silence
It’s strange – still I’m unable
To smile – here in the wind

I ask, how is it that a man
Can kill his fellow man
And yet, we’re in our millions
Here in the wind – dust in the wind
Just dust, out here in the wind

Still thunders the cannon
And yet still it hungers
Blood – the beast that is man
And still, we’re carried by the wind

I ask, when will it be
That man will have learned
To live without killing
And the wind will find its peace
And the wind will find its peace
And the wind will find its peace

Italian lyrics:

Auschwitz

Son morto con altri cento, son morto ch'ero bambino:
passato per il camino, e adesso sono nel vento.
Ad Auschwitz c'era la neve: il fumo saliva lento
nel freddo giorno d'inverno e adesso sono nel vento.
Ad Auschwitz tante persone, ma un solo grande silenzio;
è strano: non riesco ancora a sorridere qui nel vento.
Io chiedo come può l'uomo uccidere un suo fratello,
eppure siamo a milioni in polvere qui nel vento.
Ancora tuona il cannone, ancora non è contento
di sangue la belva umana, e ancora ci porta il vento.
Io chiedo quando sarà che l'uomo potrà imparare
a vivere senza ammazzare, e il vento si poserà.

From: http://www.frascolla.org/FG/01.asp#t5

The song appears on Guccini’s album “FOLK BEAT N.1” (1967)

The Self Referencing Nature of Conscious Cognition

2011-10-15T00:03:00.003-12:00

I was very interested to read this blog post by up and coming theologian Arni Zachariassen (his blog is recommended reading, a much needed antidote to dull witted fundagelicalism). His brief post is about the limitations of scientific “reductionism”; it contrasts the scientific description of life’s experience with the compelling qualia of the individual’s subjective perspective. For example, the scientific description of music in terms of wave mechanics and neural effects at first sight seems to have little in common with the parallel story of its impact articulated in terms of the consciousness of the listener with all its deep existential connotations.

Seemingly, then, we have a discontinuity between two apparently incommensurable worlds: a) The third person accounts of science expressed in formal tokens and sharable in the public domain, accounts which “reduce” sentience to an ontology of unfeeling elementa, such as atoms, coordinates, fields etc. This world of elementa is set against b) the first person ontology of conscious cognita; a world of apparent privacy and even scientific inaccessibility. In the polarized paradigm of a contemporary milieu that is apt to see logos and mythos as irreconcilable there is a tendency for the aficionados of these contrasting perspectives to deny the reality of the other: Naive materialism which places so much store by the formal descriptive tokens of science will, of course, find no sentience in elementa and is therefore tempted to deny the reality of consciousness. The existentialists claim that life’s mysterious experiences are all we really can know and that there is no common sharable objective reality out there.

It is truism, however, that from a third person perspective human beings, their pleasures, their feelings, and their thoughts etc can only ever be seen as “physical objects”; that is, as a complex configuration of behavioral traits which when looked at under the microscope resolve into complex patterns of interacting physical elementa. As a physics fan I’m quite partial to the idea that a full third person description of human behavior ultimately “reduces” to physics; that is, that there is point by point map between first person cognita and the third person elementa of physics. I may even be prepared to go as far as to say that humans, from the third person perspective, are highly sophisticated computational devices. (Although, perhaps, incorporating some exotic elements such as sensitivity to quantum events and some of Penrose’s ideas on incomputability). But even if such a mathematical reduction is possible it would have little impact on another inescapable truism, a truism that is apparent even in the reductionist’s vision: For the existence of the third person perspective necessarily carries with it, albeit implicitly, the fact that a reductive third person mathematical description must be instantiated with the observational protocols of a first person perspective . As I have said elsewhere , the third person mathematical description is, in the final analysis, an account of how the first person, in a self referencing act, describes itself. This self referencing act is reminiscent of those programming languages whose compiler is written in the self same language it compiles.

In his book “The Rediscovery of the Mind” the philosopher John Searle expresses the view that the first person perspective of the conscious thinking agent must be regarded as an irreducible feature of the cosmos . I agree. Clearly we do not think of one another in terms of those third person accounts which “reduce” human beings to configurations of interacting elementa. Instead our innate ability to empathise enables us to project into the minds of other persons the qualia of conscious cognition. This is the foundation stone of morality: For if we could only think of other sentient beings as conglomerations of elementa we would have become sociopaths.

I have written on this subject before. See: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/10/neurological-problem.html http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/08/here-we-go-round-again-hearthead.html http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-consciousness.html

Removing the teeth in the face of the evidence

2011-10-12T04:26:00.005-12:00

According to YECs the entire cat family (of course!) also all had an "original diet of plants" - see the following link on the Jaguar for example: www.answersingenesis.org/articles/zoo/jaguar. YEC handling of complex carnivorous adaptations is to biology as their handling of star light is to physics. In both cases the elephant in the room is a 6000 year time scale that simply can't accommodate the number of events needed to accomplish the history of change required; Viz: Change in the position of the photons for starlight and change in functionality in the case of carnivores. (Note: Some YECs have suggested that carnivorous adaptations evolved in some way after the fall)

Further Note: These two issues also have in common the fact that they are simple enough for "yer average" Joe & Josephine Pugh to appreciate the difficulties they raise for YEC. Most people understand what a limited value of c means for YEC and most people can see that jaguars are rather over-engineered for a life-style of running down and catching the the odd leafy shrub or lush pasture.

“Letter” by Francesco Guccini

2011-10-10T22:40:00.002-12:00

(See also here)

Translation:

The cherry-tree in the garden has come into bloom with the new sunshine
The neighbourhood is soon filled with snow from the poplars and with words.
At one o’clock on the dot the clatter of plates reaches the ears
The TVs’ thunderous rumble meets the unfazed indifference of the cats;
As you can see, everything’s normal in this pointless sarabande
But blowing through this unchanging pattern of life is the whiff of a question,
The prickly presence of an eternal doubt, what’s past seething like an ants’ nest,
Troubling those who leave it till winter to wish it were summer again.

The streets are coming back to life, a perfect finishing touch to the world,
Mother and daughter brazenly parade the same face and round bottom,
Identical in the head, no history, challenging everything, no limits,
Their strutting briefly outdone by the wailing of swallows and children;
As you can see, nothing out of the ordinary in this cumulus of life and death,
But, sobering thought, I’m not unhappy stuck in this rut of wishes and fate,
This over-shiny net, these goals we dream up for ourselves,
This unquenchable thirst, of those who hold back, unwilling to fly.

Slowly the roses wither, clusters of fruit appear on the apple-trees,
High up, clouds pass silently through the strips of cobalt-blue sky;
I lie stretched out on the fantastic green-grass plane of my past
But just-like-that age dispels all I believed and have not been;
As you can tell, everything’s just fine in this world free of worries,
As life skimmed past me, I correctly discussed the set topics,
My enthusiasms never lasted long, lots of philosophising stances,
A life of amusing encounters turned tragic, some too close for comfort, some not close enough.

But the times gone by, who will return them to me? Who’ll give me back the seasons
Of glass and sand, who can bring back rage and gestures, women and songs,
The lost friends, books I devoured, the simple enjoyment of appetites,
The healthy thirst of the parched, the blind faith in poor myths?
As you can see, everything’s as usual, just that time is pressing and the suspicion arises
That it’s not a big deal to be weary and breathless at the end of a race,
To be anxious as people are the day after, or sad at the end of a match,
No big deal the slow aimless unfolding of this thing that you call life.

Translated by Jonathan Benison

Italian text :here

Crypto-Deism

2011-09-30T23:30:00.018-12:00

America, Masons, Deism,Conspiracy Theories, Fundamentalism and Paranoia

America, nowadays, is a nervous if not rather frightened country (See my last blog entry, http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/09/witchs-brew-from-townhallcom.html). The US are going through a tough time when many Americans have become paranoid about all manner of dogs, real and imagined, who are out to get them; from actual Islamic terrorists to florid tales about conspiratorial groups within the US government itself. Given this malaise it is no surprise that certain motifs - such as global warming theories - are listed as subversive of the American way of life and provoke passionate responses. Such reactions, if they boarder on the obsessive compulsive, are not good news for us in the West who look to the US for firm and confident leadership in science, technology, culture, politics, commerce and even in Christianity. Instead the Country seems to be tearing itself apart with all sorts of spiteful polarised arguments.

Another of those ideas regarded as subversive, especially amongst America’s considerable Christian fundamentalist population, is of course evolution or “Darwinism” as they refer to it. For Christian fundamentalists the question of the origins of life is seen through a “God did it” versus “Darwinism did it” dichotomy. The Christian anti-evolutionists see the two as mutually exclusive and this, as I have suggested before on this blog, is down to a subliminal deistical mindset which is over-awed by the putative creative and sustaining vitality of “naturalism” and therefore sees it as a threatening pretender to God’s sovereign role. For if “Darwinism did it” then that is regarded as a challenge to the claim that “God did it”. If God didn’t do it that means naturalism did it. If naturalism can do it, that means we don’t need God to do it. If we don’t need God to do it that makes His presence, perhaps even his very existence, superfluous. Thus for many American Christians “Darwinism” challenges the very basis of their faith.

In a blog entry dated 19th September 2011 anti-darwinist blogger Cornelius Hunter (See the “Darwin’s God" blogspot) paints the perfect picture of classic deism where“Natural laws” are putatively able to do God’s work for him thus giving him his redundancy papers. In fact this kind of deism, if followed to its natural conclusion, is in danger of taking God out of the picture altogether and handing Him His “God is Dead” certificate: Here are some pertinent extracts from Hunter’s article:

The view that God should work according to natural laws rather than direct providence has always been attractive to religious believers. These believers prefer a more distant God for many reasons. For instance, is it not obvious that God would not have directly created such an evil world? Instead, God must have created the laws and went away. Like Aristotle’s Prime Mover, God is removed from the evil and not culpable. But there are several other theological traditions that argue just as strongly against divine intervention, and for creation by natural law. One is that the world, especially the lowly things of the world, are beneath God’s dignity.

In the era of modern science the infra dignitatem argument, orinfra dig for short, traces at least back to the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century. The idea was that God would not, as the Anglican botanist John Ray put it, “set his own hand as it were to every work, and immediately do all the meanest and trifling’st things himself drudgingly, without making use of any inferior or subordinate Minister.”

The subordinate minister or agent was Plastic Nature which, unlike the Creator, was not infallible or irresistible. Instead, Plastic Nature had to contend with the ineptitude of matter. The results were those “errors and bungles” of nature.

Such gnostic tendencies by no means ceased with the seventeenth century. Indeed, this view seemed to have a divine sanction. After all, to control the world exclusively through natural laws—God’s secondary causes—required an even greater God. In 1794 Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin wrote this Gnostic-sounding vision of how natural history should be viewed: “The world itself might have been generated, rather than created; ….”

Divine providence could engage in the noble activity of impressing laws upon matter, but not grovel in the muck of nature

Alfred Wallace agreed. Evolution’s cofounder argued that the universe was self-regulating according to its general laws and in no need of continual supervision and rearrangement of details. “As a matter of feeling and religion,” concluded Wallace, “I hold this to be a far higher conception of the Creator of the Universe than that which may be called the ‘continual interference hypothesis’.”

Darwin, for his part, was keen to the implications of this modern gnosticism. If God was not intimately involved in the world, then was He involved at all?

Likewise, it was reasonable for Darwin to argue that complex organs were not likely shaped by God because that would mean he works as man does. (This latter statement appears to be motivated by a humunclus view of ID – see http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/09/does-intelligent-design-make-testable.html )

In his post Hunter puts these deistical ideas into the minds of Victorians who he claims had a Gnostic-like religious rationale for putting a distance between God and a world full of suffering and evil. These Victorians, according to Hunter, favoured the idea of evolutionary and “naturalistic” mechanisms being responsible for a morally sub-standard creation, because it got God off the hook for the evil and suffering in the world; basically a maneuver very similar to the Gnostic attempt to solve the problem of suffering and evil with a theological kludge which puts creation into the hands of a demiurge.

Now, I myself can’t speak for Victorians, but Hunter is clearly portraying them as promoting a distant and unconnected God, a God that is not exactly the epitome of the incarnate God of the Cross who closely identifies with His creation. Hunter’s subtext here is that because these spiritually suspect Victorians used and needed evolution as a kind of gnostic rationale for suffering and evil, therefore “evolution” is concomitantly discredited. But Hunter’s argument is only compelling for those who implicitly accept the force of the deistical notion that “naturalism” implies a disconnected if not absentee God. Ergo, Hunter is a crypto-deist.

Before proceeding I must make it clear that I have no strong commitment to conventional evolution and I would even go so far as to say that I’m very interested in the kind of criticisms Hunter makes of standard evolutionary theory. But if evolution is to be ultimately rejected it must be rejected for the right reasons: The crypto-deism that Hunter subliminally espouses is not one of those reasons.

It is irony is that many a Christian believer is subliminally impressed by the logic of deism and its challenge to their faith. That they (subconsciously) accept the underlying categories of deism is seen in their reaction to it: If “naturalism” renders God redundant they respond by re-employing God in acts of “super naturalism” ; that is they bring Him back in to the show by allowing Him to intervene in the workings of nature from time to time; the bigger the “intervention” the better it is. For if the creation of life is to be regarded as a kind of macro “intervention” that fails to fit into a Darwinian natural law framework then it leaves a conspicuous logical hiatus readily filled with God’s interventional role, a role which for many is the rationale for His existence and the underwriter of faith. But my thesis is that many anti-evolutionists have in fact swallowed the concept of deism and its concomitant concept of “naturalism”; for the only way they can think of challenging the sovereignty of “naturalism” is by holding onto to the concept of divine “interventions” in the face of what they take for granted as the otherwise autonomous “natural” processes. For the Christian crypto-deist the existence of those “interventions” is important, if not critical, to faith. Evolution is thought of as a non-interventional process whose efficacy to generate form and pattern must be challenged at all costs. In this context “generation” and absolute creation are conflated; there is a failure here to see that the concept of "pattern" doesn't just apply to a configuration that is an end result but also to a configuration that is spread over time in the form of a process of generation.

At the heart of this reaction to the putative autonomous creativity of “natural mechanism” is, I suggest, a profound misunderstanding about just what science is uncovering. Science is not uncovering autonomous mechanisms and processes, but rather the amenability of the patterns of nature to be described using two kinds of mathematical object, namely, algorithms and statistics, (or “law and disorder” as I call it). That we find the patterns of nature to be amenable to mathematical description does not mean nature runs itself any more than computer algorithms can run themselves – such algorithms need the constant sustaining presence of a computational substrate to run. (A similar sustaining immersive presence of God may be alluded to in Acts 19:27b-29). Algorithms and statistics ostensively make nature more knowable but that says little about the metaphysical question of whether or not that that entails less need for some transcendent supporting substrate. If nature does contain those one-off discontinuities in pattern such as water being transmuted into wine, this interruption in the flow of normalcy would be no more an “intervention” than a hardware interrupt in the execution of a program. So called “naturalism”, (that is the reign of law of disorder) has less to do with absolute creation than it does a description of the patterns of what is already created. (I’m using the running of an algorithm as a metaphor here, but some people are taking it more literally! See here: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2007/02/time-travel.html )

In any case if the unknowability of the “miraculous” one-off somehow prompts us to feel the presence of God more keenly, then even should our world be exclusively a story of law and disorder it is still subject to the unknowable and the singular. Viz: The laws of our world are non-linear and therefore the patterns they generate are highly sensitive to the least significant decimal places of real numbers, numbers whose information in the decimal depths is inaccessible to human kind. Moreover it may well be that quantum randomness is absolute in sense that it generates patterns that are not amenable to humanly manageable short time algorithms. Thus as far as we are concerned the cosmos is open ended, the receptacle of one-off providences, even under so called “naturalism” .

In sum then I don’t see why the tainting of evolution with Victorian religious motives and deistical assumptions has any necessary effect on its truth or falsehood. In some ways Hunter typifies the nervous anti-evilutionist who obsesses about the apparent threat evolution poses to his faith. Although his blog contains many thoughtful challenges to evolution it is largely the domain of anti-theory and on the actual history of life he has little to say.

End Note: I don't want to be entirely negative about Hunter. He often makes some good points. Here's one of them taken from the post I've considered above: It is perhaps one of the great enigmas in religious thought that one can profess to be an agnostic, skeptic, or even atheist regarding belief in God yet still hold strong opinions about God. Very true I feel.

Witch's Brew from Townhall.com

2011-09-27T02:21:00.015-12:00

...plus, one Mayan end of the world prediction, a page or two from Revelation, Islamic terrorism, Haitian Earthquake, US tornadoes, Wikileaks upstarts, Japanese tsunamis, Super Volcanoes, North Korean H bombs, the Sun going Super Nova...... With that mixture of unconnected scare stories you won't want for an apocalypse.

The email below was been sent to me twice from what appears to be my "Townhall.com" account. "Townhall.com" is a right of right wing American Web sight. Now, I'm not exactly a follower of the "Zilch Government, Mega Big Business" philosophy, but I've signed up with them because I'm interested in hearing what the've got to say. But even by "Tea Party" standards the "Government Conspiracy" theory hawked below looks to be so extreme I am wondering if it is some kind of spoof based on an application "Poe's Law". I have to admit that I'm completely at a loss as to whether it's serious or not. But what the hell, it will definitely sell; threat of apocalypse sells books so why let authenticity get in the way of big business? The story exploits humanity's deeply entrenched superstitious and apocalyptic fears and taps into the 2012 survival guide market. It reminds me of the witch's brew in Macbeth; every scary rumour and morsel from urban folklore is thrown into a fearful brew, from Mayan end of the world predictions, through Islamophobia, to scientifc patter about Solar instability. After reading it you'll be hallucinating all sorts of frightening monsters from the id. Needless to say the author of the story wants us to read his four volume post-apocalypse survival guide which he will post to us if we send him a dollar or two; why let the End Of The World get in the way of a nifty Big Business plan? I'll be purchasing my copies after 21st December 2012 when I can get a knock down stock clearance discount - I suggest everyone does the same; why let the End Of The World get in the way of a good business head?

STOP PRESS 28/9/11
The 21st December 2012 profiteers are making hay while the sun shines: See:

http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/blog/article/260614/mexican-film-claims-proof-of-aliens.html

Dear Fellow American, The US government has been lying to you. I wish I could say that the government was just keeping the secret because they’re incompetent… But no one can miss how vital this secret is. In fact, this secret could literally save millions of innocent American lives… Or spell near-certain death for thousands of families. Please don’t think I say this to scare you; this is reality.

Horrific Predictions

For 2012…

From: Maxwell Swart – Independent American Researcher
Date: Friday 9/16/11

Dear Fellow American,

The US government has been lying to you.

I wish I could say that the government was just keeping the secret because they’re incompetent…

But no one can miss how vital this secret is.

In fact, this secret could literally save millions of innocent American lives…

Or spell near-certain death for thousands of families.

Please don’t think I say this to scare you; this is reality.

The worst part is…

We’ve made it easy for them to lie to us.

Click Here To Get The Inside Scoop On The Horrific Predictions The Government Has Been Hiding!

You and I have been ignoring the fact our loved ones are in grave danger. Pretending this “President” isn’t ruining our country, military and economy. Pretending it’ll just “blow over.”

But you’ve had that sinking feeling…

You know there is something very wrong here.

I can relate to that.

It was tough for me to admit it, but our homeland is in a precarious position.

As hard as it is to imagine, our great nation could literally be wiped-out – by an enemy we don’t even have on the radar.

You see, right now our biggest threat isn’t the Taliban, Islamic radicals, North Korea or even a deadly disease from Africa.

Our biggest danger, is also something we can’t live without…

The sun could kill us.

Click here to read the time sensitive predictions made on the fate of the US in 2012…

Oddly enough, there’s more here than pure scientific discoveries…

For The First Time In

Modern History, Science, Religion,

& Common Sense Agree…

Strangely enough multiple unrelated sources are pointing to something big:

The Mayan Calendar drops off completely
Current events have started sounding an awful lot like Revelation
Now NASA picks up potential for the sun to go haywire and decimate our nation.

Bottom line?

Something is very wrong. Sure, here in the US we’re still reasonably safe – but for how long?

Take a good look at the world. In 2010 alone we’ve had:

The Haitian earthquake killing over 220,000 – not to mention more massive earthquakes than the world has seen in the past few centuries…
A dramatic increase in tornadoes in the US…
Wikileaks jeopardizing our relationship with practically every country on the map…
North Korea gearing up to attempt a nuclear Armageddon…
Islamic Jihadists in Sweden…

Just turn on CNN & I’m sure you’ll have more.

The painful reality is… we’re spiraling downward.

The even more painful reality is…

If you haven’t started preparing for 2012 you could be sealing your family’s fate.

Again, this isn’t fear mongering. Here’s why:

I HATE to think of my fellow Americans harmed, and I pray that your wife and children stay safe.

Which is exactly why I’ve got to be honest with you about the dangers of 2012.

No one likes to imagine your starving neighbors rioting. Beating down your front door to steal any food you were smart enough to stockpile…
It’s a nightmare to imagine yourself losing everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve… The home your family was raised in, the nest-egg you scrimped and scraped to save.
Worst of all is the thought of our noble nation being torn apart from the inside. Torn apart by widespread fear and panic. Brother turning against brother.

Trust me, you don’t want to be forced to rely on strangers for your next meal.

Or even worse – the government…

But don’t take my word for it. Ask the Katrina survivors what it was like…

Not showering for days. Having no place to go but FEMA refugee camps, and being treated like dead weight…

Click Here to learn exactly how to protect yourself & your family from the horrific predictions of 2012…

You see, the reality here is not pretty. And the government knows it. But…

The Government Does NOT Want

This Information Becoming Public!

Since the Wikileaks fiasco, the electronic arm of the FBI has been on the prowl to shut down any and every website that might have “potentially harmful” information.

While I applaud them for prosecuting that good-for-nothing cyber-spy Assange, the sad truth is they’re going to tackle anything they see as a threat.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, but, this administration sees American pride and truth as a threat.

Now, I’m not going to lie down and give up without a fight, but, I’m not sure how much longer this information will be available…

Click here to read the time sensitive predictions made on the fate of the US in 2012…

Please do not procrastinate! Without this knowledge you and your family are wide open to serious danger that you absolutely must prepare for.

Sincerely,

Maxwell Swart

P.S. NASA has made some of the biggest discoveries in human history. Don’t let their earth shattering secret that could save our nation stay hidden!

P.P.S. You’re not going to get any scientific mumbo-jumbo here – just exactly what you need to save your family, and possibly your country.

Click Here to learn exactly how to protect yourself & your family from the horrific predictions of 2012…

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Failed YEC Star Light “Solution” One Year On

2011-09-22T10:25:00.011-12:00

Jason Lisle – A Clever-Dick Ahead of the Game?

On September 22nd of last year “Answers in Genesis” published yet another attempt to solve a very basic problem that has bugged Young Earth Creationism since its 1960s recrudescence amongst Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists – namely, the problem of how star light arrives on our Earthly doorstep given that few people disagree (even YECs) that those stars have distances measured in thousands, millions and even billions of light years. The author of this latest YEC “solution” is AiG blogger Jason Lisle. Lisle’s theory uses the fact that issues of repeatability and uniformity make it difficult to measure the one way speed of light with scientific rigor, whereas the two way speed of light can be measured with much greater experimental strictness. In 1963 the theoretical physicist W. F. Edwards showed that the results of special relativity still apply even if the speed of light in one direction is different from that in the opposite direction; in fact it is possible, without compromising special relativity, to arbitrarily define the speed of light as infinite in one direction and ½ x c in the opposite direction – as long as the “there and back” journey returns an average speed of c, special relativity still works, it seems. Thus, it is possible to define an anisotropic speed of light without any apparent observational knock on effect.

The star light problem is not only a very difficult problem for YECs, but it is also a very clear problem, a problem that even your average fundamentalist rube with little understanding or respect for institutionalized science can appreciate; go out on a starry night and look at the Milky Way and one has on one’s hands an elementary observation that appears to refute Young Earth Creationism, regardless of the veracity (or otherwise) of Big Bang Theory or Evolution. Given the seemingly intractable nature of this elementary difficulty with YEC it is easy to imagine how the slightest hint of a possibility that the speed of light, if only one direction, might be infinite would ping on a bulb in Jason Lisle’s fundamentalist head.

And so Lisle developed his “Solution” of the YEC star light problem: To be consistent with his reading of the Bible Lisle postulates that all the distant heavenly bodies, with appropriate words of magic from God himself, were “spoken into existence” around 6000 years ago “just like that” (as the comedian Tommy Cooper used to say). Because Lisle thinks (wrongly) he can define the speed of light to have an all but infinite value toward the Earth he can claim that we see the stars more or less as they are now.

But this theory has a major flaw, a flaw that neither Lisle nor his AiG reviewers spotted: My understanding is that Lisle could not postulate this geocentric anisotropy in the speed light without introducing space-time distortions that would constitute a gravitational field. Therefore what he thinks of as just a mathematical maneuver involving the setting of the one-way speed of light by convention is in actual fact a statement that has physical content, content that in all likelihood violates observation. My more detailed criticism of this theory can be seen in this blog entry .

Since the publication of Lisle’s paper things, as far as I can tell, have been quiet at AiG regarding the gravitational field problem, although a few months ago my blog was briefly linked to from AiG’s administration pages. However, outside of AiG many are now aware of the failings of Lisle’s “solution” to YEC's biggest and yet simplest conundrum. This page on rationalwiki has, amongst many other comments and links, a link to my blog post refuting Lisle’s paper and this talk page on the same site takes a quote from my post. If you want to see further atheist comments on Lisle follow the links to “Sensuous Curmudgeon” on the former of the two rationalwiki web pages I have linked to. More views on Lisle from an atheist platform (including a quote from my blog post) can be seen on the provocatively named web site Why won’t God heal amputees? ( a valid question in my view)

Amongst scientifically literate Christians the reaction to Lisle is also scathing. I don’t think my particular issue with Lisle is the only line of criticism that one can take; in fact this web page at GeoChristain contains a comment by GeoChristian himself where he mentions other issues that need consideration, such as Maxwell’s equations, stellar aberration and interference. However, off the top of my head I’m not so sure that even these phenomena could be used to detect a systematic skew in the speed of light in one direction alone. The point about the Edwards space time is that it is possible to get rid of the skew in the speed of light with the appropriate coordinate transformation; that’s what makes such a skew simply a convention. But as soon as the light speed skew varies from place to place one gets a gravitational field that cannot be eliminated with a coordination transformation; under these conditions GeoChristian’s points are probably valid. However GeoChristain also writes: "Finally, I wish I could take credit for this, but I didn’t really bother studying Lisle’s nutcasery beyond the point where it was obviously wrong, but someone did, and it turns out that Lisle’s variable speed of light would require a gravitational field oriented across the universe toward the Earth, one that could quite easily be noticed if it actually existed". So clearly he is also aware of the gravitational problem

****

Now, when it comes to YECs I don’t always want to have to play “hard cop” with them; after all deep time, like deep space, can be very intimidating and demeaning to small creatures such as ourselves, creatures whose deep seated sense of self importance is violated when we hear that we are just a small scratch at the end of huge tracts of time utterly devoid of human effect and endeavor; the temptation to restore one’s self esteem by shrinking time until one sees oneself as a big fish in a small pond is overwhelming for those whose religion presents them with a naive view of humanity’s cosmic significance. Likewise deep space also has the effect of belittling our presence and therefore one can understand the motivation (if not the science) behind the latest clutch of geocentric Christian fundamentalists who are denying Copernicus and whose beliefs restore the physical importance of the Earth by placing it at the stationary centre of a universe that rotates around the Earth all in one day. In the vast theatre of space and time the human act is as if something very much smaller than a microbe alighted on the huge stage of a very long drama. And yet Christian theism’s perspective on humanity is that humankind actually does have a centre stage significance in the cosmic drama. In the light of this Christian paradox it is understandable that a naive religious egotism often instinctively rebels against the humbling dimensions of space-time with some kind of outright denial, a denial that is seen both at AiG and amongst Christian geocentrists.

I also try to be understanding of the skepticism one finds amongst reasonable atheists; after all, the notion of a complex transcendent entity like God is barely tractable to the imaginative discourses of theology let alone a science that is largely geared up for dealing with relatively simple objects that manifest themselves in patterns of law and disorder amenable to mathematical treatment. This highfalutin entity, of which Christian theism claims to be the self explaining source of a contingent cosmos, is only known to His followers through a mixture of intuition, subjective epiphany, personal anecdote, historical imagination and some philosophy. Therefore when atheists say there is little or no evidence for God it is presumptuous to bad-mouth them from an assumed position of epistemic arrogance; the reasonable atheists have at least a prima-fascie case (although I believe it to be a case I must ultimately reject). I say this as a Christian theist who realizes that a reciprocating mutual respect is not going to be an option with the likes of the acerbic PZ Myers of this world.

But, bad-mouthing, at least of the pietistic kind, is the consummate skill of Ken Ham at AiG; when he is not slagging off well-meaning liberal-left atheists he is accusing scientifically literate Christians of transgressing and compromising on his bigoted reading of “The Word of God”; Ham does his level best to impugn the consciences and motives of Christians who don’t accept the divine authority of his opinions. Given the cognitive fragility of the theist’s case it hardly helps if yet another botched attempt to the solve the YEC star light problem is seen, once again, to proceed against a background of doctrinaire, overbearing and spiritually egotistical Christian partisans. Perhaps I should close ranks with AiG on the basis that Christians should stick together, but this is impossible, because as a traitorous heretic in the eyes of AiG I’m likely to be regarded as worthy of an even lower place in hell than PZ Myers. Not that that worries me as the grace in Christ more than matches the bullheaded and sectarian pronouncements of some of His querulous followers. However, in trying to sum up the reflection of this affair on both Christian “heretics” like myself and the Flintstone fundamentalists, Jason Lisle has in fact taken the words right out of my mouth: “HOW EMBARRASSING!”

Does Intelligent Design Make Testable Predictions? Part 3: Homunculus ID

2011-09-01T06:39:00.025-12:00

Parts 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here respectively. The “ID predictions” I have been looking at appeared in this post on Uncommon Descent. The predictions examined in this part all pertain to Biology and Paleontology, subjects outside my own area of training and interest. Therefore my comments will be rather brief and may not do justice to the subject, although this gives me an excuse to quickly wind up this series.

As I have said before on this blog my general view is that unless we have a-priori information about the nature of the designer, then in its most abstracted form, few substantive predictions can be made from ID After all, it seems that at the back of most ID supporter’s minds is an intelligent entity whose genus is so different in substance to ourselves that it renders unreliable all attempts to anticipate that entity’s methods and motives. In particular, if we are dealing with the standard concept of Deity then we are talking about something transcending the human realm and which is not only the ultimate source and sustainer of biological configurations but also of the fundamental physical regime supporting those configurations. It is this transcendence which raises questions over the biocentric concept of ID we see on UD: UD correspondents usually have a low view of the laws of physics and believe those laws do not provide sufficiently improbable preconditions (i.e. preconditions with adequate information content) to explain the absolute improbability of biological configurations. But if Deity has selected those laws then who knows what level of computational complexity Deity is capable of rising to in order to find and pull out of the limitless tracts of platonic space a very rare kind of physical regime; namely, a regime with a sufficiently high probability of generating life (assuming such a regime has at least a mathematical existence). Therefore even evolution, as a configuration generating process, can be interpreted as having its origins in ID. All in all then, without some a priori theological revelation about the specific nature of the designer, the making of specific predictions from abstract ID is a very chancy business.

As I have already said, the ID supporters who contribute to UD are in the main not convinced that our cosmic physical regime possesses a sufficiently high probability of generating life. They may claim that this is an a-posteriori opinion based on empiricism, but I’m not so sure about that; I suspect cultural, philosophical and metaphysical reasons also figure. For example, militant atheism is very enamored with the concept of a life generating physical regime and this has had the effect of spiritually blighting evolutionary ideas. Moreover, latent deism in our culture favours the notion that like a well oiled clock rational physical regimes run all by themselves, rendering redundant a supporting diety. Therefore in a reactionary move against militant atheism some IDers, I feel, prefer a much more overt involvement of ID than carefully chosen physics. They are therefore working to an almost homunculus view of ID: They envisage a designer very much in the anthropomorphic mold as a kind of molecular engineer or DNA programmer who is tinkering with the given machinery of nature and almost on a par with an alien technological player who is inside the cosmos rather than transcending it.

However, I’ll hand it to the UDers; if this homunculus view of ID is assumed then it does at least suggest vaguely perceived expectations about the molecular configurations we call life, expectations which, if realized, are difficult to make sense of in the context of bog standard evolutionary theory. This biologically hacking homunculus, one might expect, would leave traces behind that do not sit well with evolutionary theory, but that is about as strong as I can put it because I don’t think we are talking hard science predictions here. In fact homunculus ID “predictions” are more akin to the kind of retrodictions historians make as they call on that important resource of understanding they refer to as the “historical imagination”. However, once established evolutionary theory has been dumped a form of prediction by negation can be carried out and perhaps even positive predictions can be made on the basis that we are dealing with a biological hacker rather than a cleverly chosen generating system. For example, we might expect a hacker to clean up his code every now and then and thus predict that junk DNA is unlikely to exist. But then again even this prediction is not absolutely assured – a hacker might well want to keep a record of his past efforts and simply “comment out” historical code. Who knows? After all, by definition intelligence is personality and personality is intelligence. Therefore it is likely that a Creative intelligence will have those atypical idiosyncrasies and foibles that make personality difficult to predict.

Most of the following predictions have their basis in anti-evolutionary and homunculus expectations and really are a way of saying “We don’t believe Darwinism did it”. However, if some of these predictions are correct they would present conundrums for standard evolutionary views. But frankly I see them as less predictions than a set of stated obstacles to evolutionary ideas; when I surveyed this list I was unsure whether I was dealing with authentic “predictions” or simply a wish list of hoped for observations that would give the evolutionists of the scientific establishment a hard life!

ID Prediction 05: ID predicts an increase in evidence for the non-adequacy of the DNA-centric view of living systems.

My Comment: Possibly; a hacking molecular engineer is free to build significant synergy into the biological contexts that use DNA simply as one resource amongst many others. This would be one in the eye for evolutionary theory where the story of the mutating “selfish” replicator is exclusively center stage.

ID prediction 06: ID predicts that complex molecular convergence will happen routinely.

My Comment: Possibly; a molecular engineer is not bound by the strict nesting of the “Tree of Life” concept and has no need to reinvent the wheel each time; useful complex molecular mechanisms can be co-opted for use right across a spectrum of otherwise seemingly unrelated organisms.

IID prediction 07: ID predicts the presence of irreducible complexity with respect to macromolecular systems and organelles.

My Comment: Possibly: Our molecular engineer is not bound by the incremental change of evolution that requires structures to be reducibly complex; presumably he can and does implement great leaps of the imagination. The trouble with IC is that it is difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt: The presence of IC may only be apparent; a human perspective effect of only seeing the end result of a complex and convoluted history of change that defies human imagination to reconstruct.

ID prediction 08: ID predicts that the prevalence of functional protein folds with respect to combinatorial sequence space will be extremely small.

My Comment: The frequency of functional protein folds is not a consequence of the ID hypothesis but a consequence of our physical regime. If it turns out that functional protein folds are too few and far between for standard evolutionary processes to search them out, then evolutionists would have to think again. Needless to say this would not be a problem for a very intelligent designer who can presumably locate functional protein folds. This is not so much a prediction but a much desired show stopper for evolution which if true would enable the homunculus IDers to shout “I told you so!” and then usher in their homunculus.

ID prediction 09: ID predicts that evolutionary pathways to new protein functions will require multiple co-ordinated non-adaptive mutations (more so than likely to be achieved by a random process).

My Comment: Possibly; basically this is a molecular restatement of IC: Presumably our homunculus designer is intelligent enough to create structures that can only be arrived at by large inventive leaps of the imagination.

ID prediction 10: ID predicts that DNA, which was once considered to be junk, will turn out to be functional after all.

My Comment: Difficult to tell: Junk DNA may be an idiosyncratic artifact of the designer’s methods; he might want to keep evidence of his experiments.

ID prediction 11: ID predicts delicate optimisation and fine-tuning with respect to many features associated with biological systems.

My Comment: Quite Possibly: One might expect a homunculus designer to have pride in his work and have a desire to hone his creations to an optimum. But then whether evolution is efficacious enough to do the same is unknown to me.

ID prediction 12: ID predicts that organisms will exhibit in-built systems which promote evolvability (e.g. front loading).

My Comment: Possibly; are they referring to “front loading” in terms of on board genetic code waiting in the wings? But then if evolution works, it could only do so as a consequence of the selection of the right systems constituting the physical regime; in that sense even bog standard evolution is “front loaded” – although ironically neither militant atheists nor homunculus IDers are very clear about this fact.

ID prediction 13: ID predicts the observed pattern of the fossil record whereby morphological disparity precedes diversity.

My Commment: I don’t see why this is a specific prediction of homunculus ID; it seems also to be an expectation of standard evolution.

ID prediction 14: ID predicts saltational, or abrupt, appearance of new life forms without transitional precursors.

My Comment: Possibly; this prediction presumably maps to our homunculus designer’s ability to implement his leaps of imagination.

Final Comments

I’m uncomfortable with homunculus ID because it appears to give God an ancillary role in His creation rather than a totalizing role; it has a tendency to contrast the Creator over and against a contingent physical regime, as if that regime’s ability to generate form and pattern somehow answers the question of aseity. As a consequence homunculus ID actually favours atheism should homunculus ID's scientific program become bankrupt. Another fact that makes me feel uncomfortable with homunculus ID is that intelligence, at least intelligence as we understand it, actually generates its artifacts using a form of generalized evolution: Human intelligence is capable of only limited intellectual leaps – for example, a Neolithic culture could not invent a jet fighter – the latter can only be an end product of a progression of many incremental innovative steps involving the co-option of many fortuitous developments along the way, both cultural and technological. And yet this process culminating in a highly sophisticated artifact is a product of both limited human foresight and limited intelligence and entails a convoluted route of trial and error that doesn’t necessarily have those sophisticated end products in sight: Ergo, the complex artifacts of our technological societies were not purposely strived for early on in the history of man; and yet that early history contains vital precursors for the sophisticated artifacts of industrial society.

It is a truism that baring the existence of magic certain structures can only come about as the end product of a sequence of stages. This necessary sequential assembly implies that these structures have a lower limit computational complexity as measured in terms of the number of necessary precursor stages required to arrive at them. Intelligence itself (with an eye on some of Penrose’s ideas) may not be thoroughly computational, but one can use computational ideas to elucidate the complexity of the products of intelligence just as one can do so for the products of evolution. Taking these ideas of complexity together with the evolutionary nature of human technical and cultural development, homunculus ID must, in the final analysis, conceive its concept of intelligence in generalized evolutionary terms. In any case a general evolutionary experimental method of search, reject and select is implicated in the operation of intelligence as we understand it. Therefore if homunculus ID becomes associated with too strong an anti-evolutionary platform its thinking will harbor deep internal contradictions.

Prediction by Negation

2011-08-19T23:09:00.010-12:00

Evolution as a sense making structure joins many of the dots of observation (at least in a post-dictive sense), but my opinion about just where it lies between plausible conjecture and “fact” is reserved. (Although this reserve may be down to me having neither stake nor expertise in biology and paleontology). Therefore I’m prepared to give some space to the anti-evolutionists one finds on Uncommon Descent. And yet in spite of that I find myself frustrated by what I consider to be the unsatisfactory treatment of the intelligent design question on this web site. This post by Barry Arrington is an example of why I think the concept of intelligent design is being mishandled by the out and out anti-evolutionists. In this post we read:

……the [Intelligent Design] hypothesis is, in principle, falsifiable. All it would take is even one instance of CSI or IC being observed to arise through chance or mechanical necessity or a combination of the two. Such an observation would blow the ID project out of the water.

… in fact it would do no such thing, because in its most abstract form the ID hypothesis is not a basis from which falsifiable statements can readily be made.

What Arrington refers to as “mechanical necessity” is not “necessity” at all, at least in the absolute sense. The outputs from mathematical functions/algorithms (Which I assume is what Arrington inappropriately calls “mechanical necessity”) are at most conditional necessities; that is, conditional on the selection of the particular mathematical functions/algorithms employed. Therefore information is implicit in such functions in as much as they are contingencies and not necessities. If “CSI” was ever found to have a realistic probability of output from the operation of such functions, then that information would be implicit in the selection of the appropriate functions. Ergo, the Intelligent Design question would then shift from the pattern itself to the selection of the pattern generating mechanisms. One would think from the way Arrington is talking that “chance and necessity” (sic) are logically self sufficient processes that answer the problems of Aseity and design. Further consideration of whether or not mathematical functions can generate complex organization can be found in the following links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/11/self-organisation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/11/luddites-and-evolution-machine.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/anti-evolution-vs-intelligent-design.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/beware-luddites-at-work.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/evolution-not-wanted-dead-or-alive.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/more-on-self-organisation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/blind-alleys.html

The difficulty in making predictions from ID stems from the fact that in most cases the posited creating intelligence is far too alien for us to be sure of its motives and methods; in particular the intelligence is usually envisaged to be a divine entity with omni-powers, transcending the physical status quo. Presumably such an entity would have “chance and necessity” (sic) at its beck and call. Attempting to anticipate just how such a hyper-alien entity operates is likely to prove unreliable. Separated from a specific theology of this Sublime Creator, ID in its most abstract form is all but irrefutable.

But what Arrington really means is that if an example of CSI was found to be sourced in a physical regime it would falsify anti-evolutionist expectations: ID has a more readily scientifically amenable content if it contains an implicit denial of evolution. In fact in North America "ID" is all but synonymous with "anti-evolutionism" and so called “ID predictions” are in many cases simply the negation of evilutionary predictions (I’m taking up the question of ID predictions in my “Can ID make predictions?” series). The implicit concept of ID most Uncommon Dissenters are working to seems to be that of a tinkering genetic engineer/programmer whose methods and motives are very anthropomorphic.

Prediction by Negation; "Oh no it isn't!"

A Study in Cognitive Dissonance

2011-07-29T01:36:00.006-12:00

The church in the 1950s; the lull before the storm.

I want to wind up my recent theme of the Christian YEC phenomenon with some thoughts on “Why it’s where it’s at”.

1. Cognitive dissonance theory has an important bearing here I feel: Utter failure is difficult to face fairly and squarely. Therefore, if a failed notion has been backed to the hilt then it will not be easily relinquished; so rather than admit to a futile conceptual investment, auxiliary adjustments are made and ad hoc hypothesis are constructed in order to account for the apparent failure and save the investment. In fact rather than bin a cherished idea quite farfetched and fanciful ideas may be entertained: For example in order to save YEC fundamentalists postulate that the world wide science community is working to a common set of false assumptions that colours their view to such an the extent that something tantamount to conspiracy theory has to posited. Some of the responses to cognitive dissonance remind me of that fable where the Sun and the Wind tried in turn to get a man to remove his coat. The Wind blew hard but the man wrapped his coat round himself all the more tightly. The Wind, nevertheless, was so convinced of his power to remove coats that he was sure that his failure was because he was simply not blowing hard enough; so he redoubled his efforts in order to get the result he expected. I have seen this “must blow harder” effect right across the conceptual spectrum; from left and right wing political parties who think they are not getting enough votes because people need more political extremism, to fundamentalists who, dismayed by their reception, put it down to them not being holy or vehement enough in their faith. The result: Failure only reinforces the very reason for failure and in face of this failure vociferousness, outlandishness and separation only intensifies. Marginalized groups derive self validation from the strength and contrariness of their promulgation of the irrational.

2. YEC History: The following is my digest of YEC history as depicted in the book “The Biblical Flood” by Christian geologist Davis A. Young (BTW: Young believes in an old Earth): With the discovery of the New World in the 16th century, a fresh understanding of the distribution of flora and fauna started to put strains on the belief that Noah’s Ark received and housed samples of organisms from all parts of the globe. In consequence some scholars mooted the idea that the flood in the book of Genesis was not global. The difficulties in relating an increasing understanding of biology and geology to a universal flood intensified until by the mid nineteenth century large numbers of scholars, both conservative Christians and otherwise, no longer advocated the notion of a global flood; in particular, it became clear that the great thickness of rock found on the surface of the Earth, with their very complex histories of deposition, intrusion, uplift, folding, erosion and re-deposition, could not be explained as a product of a yearlong global flood, but would require a lot more time than a mere 6000 years to form. Hence, by the mid nineteenth century few serious scholars entertained a Young Earth. This situation persisted up until the 1960s, although throughout this period a small number of advocates of global flood theory and a young Earth did exist, but they were either Sola Scriptura ("scripture alone") ultras that ignored geological and biological data or were those who used this data very selectively. One example of the latter is the seventh day Adventist George McCready Price (1873-1963) who, prompted by prophetess Ellen G White, wrote several books on geology. His works were a foundation stone for what was to eventually become modern flood geology. By the early 20th century conservative Christian scholars had been pushed to the margins of academia and had lost much of their “cultural prestige” (as Davis eloquently puts it). They reacted to this marginalization by disconnecting themselves from mainstream academia. Thus, evangelical and conservative Christians were well placed to give a sympathetic reception to Whitcomb and Morris’ 1961 book “The Genesis Flood”, a book that resurrected Price’s flood geology. Up until the 1960s flood geology and Young Earth had bumped along the bottom, but since the 60s flood geology and its dubious accompanying motif of “mature creation” has all but become the de-facto point of view amongst fundamentalist Christians ever since and many evangelicals have followed suit.

3. My reading of the situation is as follows: The remarkable recrudescence of YEC since the 1960s is in part caused by the marginalization of conservative Christianity as an intellectual force at the beginning of the 20th century. However, this marginalization in and of itself is not enough to explain the relative success of YEC amongst evangelicals because YEC remained a minority conservative view until the 1960s; something happened in the 60s to tip the balance. Up until the 1960s Western nations at least nominally identified themselves as Christian, but during the 1960 there were very open cultural challenges to the dominating Christian social gloss. Prior to the 1960s conservative Christians could at least feel they identified with the overall social ethos and rationale of their societies and this made it much easier for them to identify with the established science of their society. For example, see this blog post on my church blog where it is apparent that the prewar minister of my church took for granted the science of the day. Since the 1960s, however, conservative Christians have not only been academically marginalized but also culturally marginalized. A subculture can perhaps live with academic marginalization, but cultural marginalization has such strong overtones of devaluation and loss of social status that it creates fertile ground for an extreme fundamentalist reaction amongst conservative Christians. YEC is, I submit, one of those extreme responses. Alienated from many aspects of society the average conservative Christian uses YEC to protest against the slighting of his cherished values by defecting to a very vocal counter culture.

4. At the bottom of fundamentalist contrariness is cognitive dissonance. The fundamentalist reaffirms his dignity by engaging in proactive responses, the very vehemence and outrageousness of which are taken as evidence of vitality and authenticity. Weird gnostic practices (Like the Toronto Blessing) and weird beliefs (like YEC) are, in fundamentalist eyes, de-facto signs of spiritual life. My recent interest in Ken Ham is because he is a fine example of an extremism that is a product of a faith under stress. He is so extreme that even an outspoken evangelical like William Dembski becomes a target for strong accusations of spiritual compromise and sin (see my last blog post). In a blog post dated July 19th 2011 Ham displays the classic response to cognitive dissonance: In his view the reason for failure is because YEC isn’t being pushed hard enough:

Actually, the real scientific research conducted for our book Already Gone clearly illustrates that generations of young people brought up in the church are leaving the church, and one of the main reasons is the hypocrisy of being told to believe the Bible but also told to reinterpret the Bible particularly in Genesis because of millions of years.

Very significantly, geocentrist Gerardus Bouw expresses a very similar reaction to cognitive dissonance, except, of course, that in Bouw’s view the reason for failure is down to the hypocrisy of people like Ken Ham in not pushing a geocentric reading of scripture! Viz:

One of the arguments that creationists (i.e. YECs) use against geocentrists is that geocentricity destroys the credibility of the creationist in the eyes of unbelievers like these two men. What makes them hard to win to the creationist cause is that they clearly see the hypocrisy. ..... Indeed, on a personal note, it was people like Danny Faulkner and Hugh Ross who converted me to atheism in my teen years. ……Evolutionists, atheists, and agnostics in the know can easily shame creationists on the issue of geocentricity by simply pointing out the hypocrisy of their insistence that the days in Genesis 1 are literal while the rising and setting of the sun is not. Likewise, to insist that the rising of the sun is figurative while the rising of the Son is literal is also hypocrisy. Given that the geocentric model is pure physics, mathematically tractable, and realistic, and consistent with Scripture, we conclude that the creationist’s desire to reject it can only be for the sole purpose of appearing intellectual and acceptable to the world, which desire is enmity with God (James 4:4)

For Bouw and Ham respectively geocentricity and YEC are not part of the problem but part of the solution and therefore they are both going to blow all the more hard.

5. The day I walked into Norwich Central Baptist church’s building I was fascinated by the stained glass windows on the back wall (As pictured above) and I wondered what they were trying to tell me: For today’s culturally alienated church these windows are meaningless, so why would Christians of the early 1950s create such windows? It has since become clear to me that these windows celebrate the civic connections of a church that was yet to be culturally marginalized; these were Christians at ease with themselves and who by and large felt at one with the ethos of their society. They didn’t know cognitive dissonance and the strength of the cultural stresses faced by the church today. But nevertheless there was a hint of disquiet amongst them; there was that sense of tension one gets just before a storm. (see http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2009/12/christmas-1939.html)

Evidence of Ham’s Religious Extremism

2011-07-23T00:22:00.000-12:00

In connection with my recent theme of YEC disdain for Christian academics, I note a blog post by Ken Ham dated July 20th and titled “Radio host Hank Hanegraaff supports evolutionary old earth proponent”. In the post Ham expresses his antipathy to William Dembski and Hank Hanegraaff who hosted Dembski on one of his shows. Recall that Dembksi and Hanegraaff are evangelicals who believe in the inerrancy of scripture. Therefore they are supposed to both have much in common with Ham as far as core faith is concerned. The following quotes from Ham's post are, however, evidence of his sectarian extremism and tells us what really counts as core faith with Ham – namely, YEC. (By the Way: I don’t go along with Dembski’s somewhat bizarre view of the fall).

Just to remind you, I have featured him in a previous blog post in which I indicated what Dr. Dembski has stated in his book The End of Christianity. Here are just a couple of outlandish statements from his book……

At our Apologetics Mega Conference this week, I showed video excerpts of Dr. Dembski and quotes from his books and other writings. I gave the conference attendees numerous examples of Christian academics who compromise God’s Word in Genesis; these Christian academics are sadly influencing the next generation of Christians with their teaching that undermines biblical authority.

It is so sad that such compromise with evolution and millions of years—and such an outlandish idea that God took animals and made them into Adam and Eve and gave them amnesia so they would not remember all the death and suffering in the world they once lived in—is being promoted by such a well-known radio personality. While I appreciate that Hank Hanegraaff had me on his radio program many years ago, I need to point out now that such outright compromise is undermining the authority of God’s Word.

I urge people to voice their opposition to Hank Hanegraaff and his promotion of this shocking compromise of the Bible, as he has pushed man’s religion of millions of years and evolution and has reinterpreted the clear teaching of Scripture in Genesis. Now, Hanegraaff has previously published a book against biological evolution, so it is perplexing to see him now promoting a man like Dr. Dembski who accepts many evolutionary ideas (Dr. Dembski is really promoting a type of “theistic evolution”)—and Hanegraaff is also accepting of death and millions of years of history before the Fall.

Even though there are many Southern Baptist leaders who are standing up for biblical authority (including a literal Genesis) in their seminaries, how disappointing it is that Dr. Dembski holds a position at one of the premier Southern Baptist seminaries in the country.

Interesting to see Ham identifying Dembski as a Theistic Evolutionist. I wonder what they would think of that on Uncommon Descent?

The Faith Test

2011-07-12T23:09:00.005-12:00

...he's just passed!

A belief in Young Earth Creationism is one thing; to turn it into faith test material is quite another; but that is precisely what Ken Ham and his followers are doing. Ken’s new book (written with Greg Hall), “Already Compromised”, is very tellingly subtitled “Christian Colleges took a test on the state of their faith and the final exam is in”. Of course, we know what that means: If you don’t accept Ham’s view of creation, you’ve failed the test. But here’s the good news: Reading Ken’s blog posts it looks as though the majority of colleges tested didn’t pass his exam.

In a post blog post dated June 14 and entitled “Publish or Perish” Ken spills the beans: I’ve highlighted the important bits in bold.

“With so many Christian academics in our Christian colleges compromising with evolution and millions of years, many people have asked me why it is so”.

“I do believe the publish or perish syndrome, together with academic pride and peer pressure, really (sadly) explain much of this compromise so rife in Christian circles"

“…compromise is so rife through the leadership in so many churches”

In a blog post dated June 28 Ken publishes a letter from a mother who read “Already Compromised”. Once again the picture she paints for YEC is down beat, to say the least:

“Though I was already aware that there is a lot off compromise of Biblical truths I had no idea that it was to this extent. I saddens, shocks and angers me all at the same time”

"Based on the research in your book, it appears to me that there is a severe case of intellectual schizophrenia on Christian college campuses today! Presidents, professors, and the other faculty claim to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, yet turn around and say that they disagree with key Biblical truths or that they embrace evolution, which is completely contrary to the Bible!"

"One of the most disturbing things I see from your book is that those who seem to be the most passionate and committed to this battle are the evolutionists! They are fully engaged, and honestly, I think our apathy emboldens them even more! I expected that they control the secular academic arena, but was shocked to see that even in “Christian” colleges, they are gaining more and more ground!"

The review of “Already Compromised” in the AiG book store is also encouraging: This review says of the book: “You find the answers to questions about each school’s purpose, and the stance on the inerrancy of scripture, origins and age of the Earth, and many more” ….and…. “The findings are shocking.”

I won’t be reading the book because these quotes tell me all I need know – Ken’s YEC crusade has not had much effect and if anything Christians are moving away from YEC. It’s telling that Ken’s correspondent had no idea of the extent of the problem for YEC; that’s probably a sign of how fundamentalist communities tend to quarantine themselves from the surrounding culture – and for good reason; without that insulation they would easily become “subverted” by outside ideas.

However, there is, as they say, no room for complacency. In painting a very bleak picture Ken and Co are doing what they do best and that is appealing to some very basic instincts; anger, fear and above all fear of the unknown. It is these primeval emotions that fundamentalists instinctively know how to exploit; they threaten non-fundamentalists using some of the most deep seated fears known to man, and these fears revolve around one’s unknown standing before God and one’s eternal destiny. As we know from Jones Town and various other religious sects, these fears can prove to be stronger than even the fear of death itself.

For Ken and Co, YEC is a battleground for the very spiritual life of the church and therefore they have huge emotional stakes in the matter and a concomitant determination. This becomes clear when we read the blog posts I have quoted. In Ken’s view non-YEC Christians are, needless say, compromised, especially, it seems, “Christian academics”, who, I guess, are AiG’s main antagonist and competitor in their crusade. For Ken rejection of YEC is a spiritual failing that he puts down to such things as “academic pride and peer pressure” and “indoctrination from colleges”. Whilst Christian academics largely stand against Ken's YEC publicity machine he will do all he can to portray them as hopelessly compromised by their institutional connections.

Ken knows how to rally his troops and raise the genie of jingoism and self righteous anger: This is evidenced by his correspondent saying:

“…the battle that is raging ….. young people whose faith is on the line and who have not been adequately equipped for the attack [against YEC I presume] that they will face, not only from the world but now even from those trusted to teach them Biblical truths….. I am angered by those who claim to trust God’s word and follow Jesus, who rely more on man’s fallible word and who are leading young people astray in the proves…. Thank you for reminding me of the craftiness of the deceiver”.

Fundamentalists don’t address the intellect but they sure know how to manipulate the emotions; they make no bones about who they think is deceiving you if you reject their message.

Ken’s correspondent goes on to tell us about the “simple” solution: “…now even Christian colleges fail to produce disciples! There must be a return to the simple, yet profound task of making disciples!” The method of making disciples is likely to be authoritarians and patriarchal. As the AiG book review page says “A common theme is that those in Administration [in Christian colleges] do not really know what is being taught, and little is being done to weed out unorthodox and errant teaching.” And boy, do these people know how to “weed out unorthodox and errant teaching”! In that reference alone is a microcosm of spiritual spin, fear and subtle emotional bullying.

Make no mistake, Ham and those he stands for are determined spiritual empire builders. They will not agree to disagree with Christians who don’t follow YEC; they will not leave them alone to make up their own mind about an issue moderate Christians regard as a non-core faith question, but will treat them as targets for spiritual duress. With huge business, political and social kudos interests at stake these fundamentalists are determined to convert an “erring” church to their views.

Subverting Science

2011-06-27T09:28:00.000-12:00

I have just published the following comment on Network Norwich and Norfolk: (See here)

As I have already indicated, I do not accept YEC attempts to make a fundamental distinction between sciences which they try to undermine with the quip “You weren’t there” and those present tense continuous sciences like physics. Since all information arrives at our observational door via circuitous routes in space and time the “You weren’t there” quip could be damagingly applied across the board and, if pressed, subvert the whole domain of science and history.

In this connection the following blog post of mine may be of interest:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/cloistered-academics-vs-punks.html

The above post links to a post on atheist PZ Myers’ blog where he criticizes to the “You weren’t there” philosophy. The exact circumstances involve Myers criticizing an eleven year old girl who had been taught to parrot this quip by YEC ministries. Myers writes a gentle open letter to the eleven year old.

Myers letter is in my opinion very reasonable; he completely understands that the “You weren’t there” philosophy undermines not just the historical sciences, but the whole of science. (In fact ultimately it even undermines the Bible) PZ Myers is basically assuming the world to be rational and coherent and it is on the basis of that assumption that “You weren’t there” nihilism is prevented from frustrating all science. Where I would disagree with Myers is that the coherent ontology that permits science to prosper is taken for granted by him as axiomatic; for him the highly coordinated patterns of a rational cosmos are just descriptive brute facts of nature; end of story. However, I would want to push the boat out further and suggest that the coherent patterning in nature is not just descriptive but prescriptive, with all the connotations of a guiding a-priori complex intelligence that the term “prescriptive” entails (i.e. God)

My main reason for bringing this up is that in spite of disagreeing with Myers on ultimate origins I’m entirely at one with him on the assumption of the intelligibility of our world, an intelligibility that is undermined by a thoroughgoing application of “You weren’t there” nihilism. Hence I support Myers’ stand against implicit YEC nihilism. What I would like to point out is that in spite of Myers reasonable and gentle open letter to an eleven year old the YEC response to Myers was all but hysterical, triggering off a frenzy of spiritual recrimination. He was accused of all sorts of heinous sins such as “viciously attacking a little girl”, and being “an instrument of Satan” amongst other self righteous fulminations.

Although I differ with Myers’ on many things, in this instance I believe he has been unfairly treated by those who profess to be Christians. My own opinion is that those professing Christians should apologize to Myers for their treatment of him. This, I suppose, is too much to ask, but the least they could do is engage dispassionately with his perfectly reasonable argument rather than unfairly assassinating his character.

Cloistered Academics vs. Christian Punks

2011-06-24T23:33:00.005-12:00

The Irony of a Cloistered Academia

I have recently been hammering it out with a couple Young Earth Creationists on Network Norwich (See the discussion thread found here). One of the issues I touched on was the YEC claim that because “we were not there” we are unable to disprove the YEC view that the cosmos was created a mere 6000 odd years ago. Here is an edited version of what I wrote in response to this view:

Science and repeatability: We need to get this straight as a matter of principle: No experiment is ever exactly repeatable as in principle it may be subtly modified by the effects of time, place and circumstance. Interestingly, Jason Lisle of AiG exploits this fact with his Anisotropic Synchrony Convention “solution” for the start light problem and yet here is a YEC telling us that experiments are for all practical purposes repeatable! All experiments are ultimately plagued by the “You weren’t there” syndrome and the “water under the bridge” effect of time passing. If YECs can grasp this they might have a little more humility about so called “operational science” which only differs from evolutionary science in degree and not in fundamental quality.

The canard about us not being a witness to something actually applies to every theoretical construction we conceive; not just ancient history, but to the whole of science. Viz: I wasn’t present for the testing of the laws of physics so how then do I know they are valid? We weren’t present at the writing of the Bible so perhaps its makeup had nothing to do with God’s choreography of events. The “You weren’t there” argument, if pressed, ultimately erodes our confidence in the whole of God’s revelation. Fundamentalist attempts to distinguish between “operational science” and history is an arbitrary construction that tries to stop the nihilist rot, but ultimately fundamentalism subverts science by undermining the information which the grace of providence has pleased to send us from the cosmos. (See: "Beyond Our Ken")

The motive behind the “You weren’t there” argument is to undermine the historical sciences. But the YECs want to have their cake and eat it; they won’t challenge physics (Unless you’re AiG's Jason Lisle, or a geocentrist) because that would really make them look silly and so they attempt to make an artificial and sharp demarcation between testable science and untestable science.

Interestingly enough PZ Myers tackles this same issue in response to Ken Ham congratulating a child for using the “You weren’t there” quip that Ken’s ministry teaches its following to use. PZ Myers’ excellent response, for which I’ll give him full marks, can be read here. Also of interest is PZ’s post here which makes the likely point that the Bible’s perspective (at least in the early OT) is in fact one of a flat earth and a geocentric cosmology. This perspective is valid for arcadian man but industrial age ultra-literalists have used it to delude themselves and marshal a gathering of gullible “punk” followers by exploiting the latter’s disaffection with the agnosticism of an ironically cloistered academic establishment.

It is very appropriate that Ken Ham relates the story of a child challenging the scientific establishment with the quip that his Ministry had taught the child, for really it is a child’s argument; one that’s easy to remember and understand and yet one that can leave even scientifically literate adults baffled for a moment as they grope for a simple one-liner riposte. As is so often the case children’s questions probe things that adults have long taken for granted and forgotten why they know them, but as soon as a little thought is applied the question crumbles at the touch. That this “you weren’t there” argument is so easily and uncritically swallowed by AiG’s gullible clientele is far from a recommendation for the mentality of that organization’s following. It reveals that shrewd fundamentalist ministries like AiG are based on a financial platform supported by largely scientifically illiterate punks who are disaffected with the profane academic establishment. AiG’s high profile has little to do with academic expertise, but instead exploits what the academic establishment refuses give, and that is faith.

STOP PRESS 26/06/11
In this post PZ Myers tells us about to Ken Ham’s response to the above matter. Without engaging PZ’s very reasonable criticism of the “you weren’t there” quip, Ken and his correspondents put a very dark spin on the matter. They achieve this by piling on the emotive anti-superlatives: “Atheist attack”, “vile blogs” “shake their fist at God”, “an attack of the enemy”, “viciously attacking a little girl”, “instrument of Satan”. “How low they can go?”

And yet there is no attempt to engage PZ’s points and instead we get a tirade of deep, deep (self) righteous indignation. However, this response is not unexpected for it is inextricably bound up with their world view which tells them “If you are not with us you are against us; if you are against us you are against God, and if you are against God you must be evil”. The consequence is that these people have a very dark view of those not with them. Even Christians are treated with a deep suspicion if they don’t follow the YEC line and they will genuinely believe that such Christians are engaged in some kind of deep seated sin and compromise with Satan. I know because I have met many Christian sect members in my time; they look at you sullenly unable to establish normal cordial human relations with outsiders because they see them as at best apostate and at worst Satan’s scheming minions. I myself have been accused by the members of these sorts of sect as a “lover of lies”. No surprise really because they just cannot conceive that somebody can reject their position and still have a good conscience. They see the behavior of outsiders in a jaundiced light and therefore readily read the slightest criticisms as an ad hominem attack. They have no compunction about implicating outsiders in heinous sin and yet they will put on a great show of (self) righteous indignation at trivial name-calling. The resulting outlook on the world is a kind of pathological group think; for any reasonable and sane person could hardly construe PZ’s response as “viciously attacking a little girl”.

Polarisation passion feeds. Passion polarisation breeds. Polarisation is passion's cause, for crusade and holy wars.

“Church in England Spiritually Dead” According to Ham.

2011-06-08T05:16:00.009-12:00

Ken Ham: Flying in the Teeth of the Evidence

Ken Ham has obviously read James Knight’s latest Network Norwich & Norfolk’s article. Ken quotes a large chunk of it on his blog here. Ken is a little upset about James calling AiG a “cult”. Ken is also not very complimentary about state of the church in England, or even in America for that matter:

Oh, by the way, look at the state of the church in England: it is all but spiritually dead. I’ve ministered in England about 15 times now and have met with countless church leaders there. I’ve seen for myself that this once-Christianized nation is pagan. Most of the next generation doesn’t even believe in God. Yes, that is the outcome of this heretical teaching, which sadly not only pervades the church in England but is also infecting the church now in the USA. Sadly, academics like Peter Enns and those from Calvin College (and others as quoted in the Christianity Today article) are leading generations of church leaders to undermine the authority of the Word instead of standing uncompromisingly upon it as we must do!

As far as I’m aware the church in England is far from spiritually dead; what Ken means, of course, is that a church rates as all but spiritually dead, or at least compromised by heresy, if it doesn’t accept YEC teaching and ministry. Thus, as far as Ken is concerned that puts the great majority of the English church well beyond the pale of God's pleasure! No wonder he sees the English church as dead; so very little of it swallows AiG's flintstone travesty of palaeontology, hook line and sinker. And am I glad: The last thing we want in this country is an expensive outsized wooden toy boat dominating the shore of an undersized ornamental lake; it would be an affront to both atheist and Christian scientists in this country. It is this sort of doctrinaire sectarian perspective by Ken and AiG that ticks one of my cult check boxes.

As I’ve said before I have a reserved view toward evolution and I have a lot of respect for many of the anti-evolutionist correspondents on Uncommon Descent. I can even understand how your average Joe and Josephine Pugh, puzzled and confused by the times they are in, are looking for something that narrows the domain of cognizance thereby taking the strain off their creaking epistemic resources. For them a literal interpretation of early Genesis provides a myth that makes sense of reality and suits them just fine; at the very least it cuts down the vertiginous time dimension to anthropic proportions, if not the agoraphobic spatial dimensions of the cosmos.

I have to say that in spite of being potentially sympathetic I have a great deal of trouble trying to summon up respect for AiG and what it stands for with its “Our Word is God’s Word” ethos. But the rampart “dead cert” fundamentalism of AiG is not the only problem I have: Frankly, when it comes to technical subjects commentators like Beyond Our Ken Ham lack competence and aptitude. Give me William Dembski, or Hugh Ross any day – but not Ken Ham. Ken’s expensive Theme Park projects are just a little too kitschy and sentimental for me. Ken really needs to sort out his PR even in America before he brings his anti-science circus and far right Christian extremism over the pond.

2001 SPACED OUT ODYSSEY

2011-06-01T23:16:00.004-12:00

The following post is an essay I wrote on Postmodernism in 2001

Singularly Askew: "It was an incomprehensible interlacing of bars and tubes, oddly awry, heeling over into the black shadows as if to elude our scrutiny" (From an early version of H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine")

The following contains some of my thoughts and reflections on the subject of postmodernism. The contents are not a summarised compilation of the enormous amount of data on this subject, but really represent some back of the envelope theorizing as I search for the kind of underlying, unifying, simplifying and universal principles that are anathema to extreme postmodernism itself. Theorising is a risky business, especially with something like postmodernism which, with its tolerance of contradiction, fragmentary discourses, irrationality, schizophrenic analyses, and extreme pragmatism, affects to defy all categories by its very definition. Postmodern philosophers dislike any attempt to categorise their philosophy and may be highly evasive about just what they believe, and, in fact, may prefer to be thought of as believing nothing at all.

The Rational Cosmos

I am a great believer in the inherent grand rationality of our world, a rationality that makes that world comprehensible and controllable, thus providing the foundation for all forms of rational philosophy, mathematics, high science, and technology. It is with a certain amount of affection that I look back to the time when these things started to take a firm root in Western Civilisation. Although there are precursors, it is the period called the "enlightenment", (roughly the 18th Century) which is usually regarded as the time when Western Civilisation started to exploit the deeply rooted cosmic order for all it was worth, giving extra impetus to commercial and industrial growth. Since then mathematics, science, and technology have burgeoned to become the hallmarks of modernism and the fuel of industrialisation and there seems to have been no looking back. Or has there? Nerds and techno freaks might feel at home and in control with science and technology but not everyone does. For many, especially the postmodernists, the apparently grandiose and obliging truths of mathematics and rigorous science are intimidating and may even be regarded as an oppressive form of chauvinistic intellectual imperialism. As a professor of humanities has remarked: "Humbled by the mathematical language of science, I become speechless and relapse into my tribal dialect ...." (*1)

A Long history of disaffection

It seems to be a historical fact that Western culture goes through periodic times of crisis in confidence, times when doubts about the trappings of modernism and where it is going start to advance like the glaciers of the ice ages. Although separated by relatively warmer "interglacials", periods of disenchantment, like the glaciers themselves, may never disappear completely. These fluctuations in our cultural weather system can be traced throughout modern times; in fact crises of confidence seem to surface even during the enlightenment itself. Moreover, since the 18th century one could draw attention to various historical waypoints in support of a theory of waxing and waning confidence. I won't describe them in any detail here but merely name them: Nietzsch's nihilism, the collapse in confidence at the end of the nineteenth century, the "Dada" art coming out of World War 1, the extreme anthropocentrism of existentialism, relativism, gnosticism, and so-called postmodernism. In many of these cases one can hear the same echoes: A self undermining scepticism, a disaffection with high rationality and the powers that be, a turning to mysticism, irrationalism, and anthropocentrism, an emphasis on the "inner voice", a glorification of juvenility and sometimes insanity. One could characterise these things as a complex cluster of symptoms caused by a kind of recurring social nervous break down of varying severity.

When did it start?

In one sense it may true to say that "postmodernism" is better called "paramodernism" as it seems to be a manifestation of a concomitant of modernism; a disaffection with the latter that waxes and wanes and perhaps never disappears completely. Postmodernism may, in fact, really be an emerging into consciousness, (through popularisation and commodification) of things that have been there on and off for a long time; a new manifestation of an old problem. However, I suppose that postmodernism slowly emerged as a philosophy with a name and conscious identity from about the sixties and seventies onward as various academics and intellectual commentators, like Focault, Lyotard, Derrida, Buadrillard (these are the names that hit you first - definitely a French connection there) articulated and crystallised its key ideas. The central paradox presented by postmodern intellectuals is that they are theorists who have generated a grand and general theory asserting that one cannot annunciate grand and general theories! In so doing they have done what they do best, namely, contradict themselves. But contradiction is precisely what extreme postmodernism affects to live with. One commentator remarks on two postmodern analysts (Deleuze and Guattari) for whom the schizophrenic in their "scheme of things becomes some kind of ideal model of human behaviour"(*2). Insanity is a recurring theme in extreme postmodernist expressions. I find it difficult to answer the question as to whether philosophical postmodernism grew out of more general “postmodern” social trends or whether it helped fuel those trends; most likely some sort of feedback relation couples them and the two probably go hand in hand. One thing to note however; postmodernism is not pandemic; many people, especially those who have large stakes in the technocratic complex, are quite happy with the enlightenment paradigm, thank you very much.

What is Postmodernism?

Academics may have given it name and an identity but it is impossible to catalogue all the cultural vernacular that goes under the heading of postmodernism in folk philosophy, much of which is a mere hint and flavour of the postmodern ethos, and often amount to benign stylistic renditions of a more extreme philosophy. The core ideas of philosophical postmodernism seem to revolve around the belief that one can no longer believe in all-embracing theoretical generalisations (or "grand narratives" as some postmodern intellectuals call it), so typical of modernism, whether it is in connection with morality, politics, theology, sociology or science etc. For the postmodernist the cosmos is too complex, irrational and hostile a place to allow itself to be encapsulated into a few succinct universal principles amenable to human understanding. In contrast the postmodern concept of truth is thoroughly pragmatic and the breath taking theoretical vistas sought for by the "enlightenment project" are replaced with fragmentary disposable ideas that one can hold as long as they are useful or desirable. Thus, hard postmodernism is deeply suspicious of anything thing that has pretensions of being an over arching timeless truth and the universality of the majestic Christian message would certainly fall into this category. Side by side with the loss of belief in a deeply rational cosmos is the demise of any optimistic utopian vision or a belief in incremental historical progress - surely no surprise as both require control and control requires a benign and deeply rational world; the hard postmodernist believes in neither, and probably has a deep seated guilt complex about the whole notion of control; may be because in our world it is here that things have so often gone wrong; a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing and the steward so easily becomes the control freak in search of hegemony. The postmodernist, therefore, has little faith in the authorities.

How these core philosophical ideas of postmodernism relate to the wider social nexus is debatable and it is at this point one could spend years studying the subject. There is a postmodern take on everything, whether it is science, literature, theatre or art etc., and there is claim and counter claim as to what ranks as "postmodern". Tracing all the connections, associations and allusions requires an expert. Typical of the postmodern mindset is the attitude to "simulation". Postmodernism blurs the distinction between reality and the "simulations" of the media (e.g. films, stories, computer games etc.). In fact the postmodernist Buadrillard claimed that the Gulf war, (a war we saw through the lens of target cameras, thus making it resemble a computer game), was a simulation. This was really a provocative way of saying that the media is so pervasive and real that its products now constitute a reality in their own right. There is grain of truth here: We see so much of our world through the media that distinguishing between simulation and reality can be difficult. For example, some people claim the moon landings were simulations. The televised O. J. Simpson case became its media representation. For many who saw the televised attack on the World Trade Centre the immediate impact was of something as unreal as a science fiction film. In postmodernism appearances count for a lot and any effort to get round the superficial interfaces of our world to a deeper, universal and obliging logic is not taken seriously. Appearances don't deceive the hard postmodernist because he believes there is no deeper meaning to be deceived about. For the postmodernist meaning is subjective and everyone lives in their own private world of meaning unable to fully communicate; least of all with language because its ambiguities allow each to interpret it differently. And the postmodernist is unlikely to have much regard for "high tech" theoretical tools like probability, randomness, information theory, association networks etc. which help address the paradoxes of communication and language.

Postmodern cultural products tend to focus on the irrational, the chaotic, the inconsistent, the bizarre, the nihilistic, the retrograde, the bleak or the hostile. If you see buildings mixing and matching a variety of clashing architectural styles (sometimes called pastiches) then you are probably looking at a postmodern design. Media productions and writings that jumble styles, time and space, allow fact to intrude upon fiction and vice versa, are also postmodern as are productions where performance and reality are mixed (e.g. the Jerry Springer show). Films that otherwise accept the logical rationality of our world but which have a bleak moral and social outlook (e.g. Terminator, and Alien) are also postmodern; gone is the idea that evolution, social and biological, is a progressive process in favour of humanity. Postmodernism also has a fascination with "self referencing" scenarios; e.g. a person plays himself in media productions; to what extent does his "real" persona become the role he plays and should he feed that back into the role? i.e. should he play himself playing himself ? The postmodernist is fascinated with such logical conundrums because they seem (superficially) to transcend all logical analysis, reinforcing his faith in an unknowable confused world resistant to human understanding, a world of shear appearance where simulation and reality blend together into a depthless world that Baudrillard calls the "hyper reality".

Like other philosophies the general ethos of postmodernism is imbibed and exhaled by the populace and makes itself felt in a drift toward a variety of preferences, attitudes and styles. In particular, postmodern minds are receptive to consumerism, mixing and matching, transience, hyper reality, and a disconnected hotchpotch of ideas and perceptions. But the hard postmodernism of the philosophers must be distinguished from "soft" postmodernism; the term "postmodern" has been mobilised as a kind of catch-all category describing the general trends of the social milieu including anything which seems to capture the mood of postmodernism. e.g. brainstorming, fuzzy logic, eclecticism, chaos theory, proliferation of choice, quantum mechanics, theories of historical retrogression etc, etc, all of which really amount to a sophistication of concept or method but which do not strictly fall outside the rational paradigm. The term is also used rather loosely to label any movement in society that expunges some of the crass optimism of modernism, and modernist assumptions of an incremental progressive historical drift. In fact, the prefix "post" is often used when the preliminary "hype" that may greet new and modern ideas gives way to sobriety and reality: For example, with the demise of the "dot coms" one might say that we are now in a "post.com" period. In fact I have heard claims we are now passing into a "post-postmodern" period. That's no surprise to me; postmodernism has not only been "bandwagoned" and hyped, but it also suffers from the very ills it diagnoses and has logical limits on how far it can be developed.

Whilst one must always be aware of the operation of social feedback loops much of the immediate responsibility for the philosophical state of our society is down to its intellectual leaders who through sins of omission fail to give a lead or through sins of commission lead in the wrong direction. Those who control the media are usually influenced by the philosophies of the day, and they in turn may be found supplying the fragments of postmodern texts and narratives by which the average person can dress and justify a life style of extreme pragmatism, individualism and a world of private meaning. But hard postmodernism has one last devastating message: With its thorough going scepticism of any deep rationality or benevolence in order to things, postmodernism leaves humanity wide open to the ultimate dissolution of the personality; for it must even question whether we are mistaken about the very concept of individuality and personal identity. Hard postmodern is so deeply logically flawed and cognitively unstable that its whole structure slips and slides toward a chaotic metamorphosis as it undermines even its own implication of individualism and the distinction between the sane and the insane is then ultimately lost.

The Causes

On the causes of Western postmodernism the following are probably relevant:

1) Big anonymous machine like societies committed to investment and growth leading to communal fragmentation, and heartless change. Inequalities and exploitation. Many high and unfilled expectations. Demystification of authority.

2) The own goals of hi-tech society: Ecological stress. Control freak approach to the environment (probably a sign of insecurity). Warfare on an industrial scale. Nuclear energy gave us fear in the form of the bomb but never generated the promised "too cheap to meter" energy etc, etc.

3) A deep alienation from the highly analytical approach of science and technology. Science has revealed things difficult to make anthropic sense of: Cosmic history. The spectre of machine intelligence and alien life forms. Cosmic sizes. Atomism. A paradoxical blend of randomness and determinism. An exclusively "emergent paradigm" that disregards context, contingency and providence.

4) Physics, the science of fundamentals, is passing into a very abstruse and difficult stage, barely understood even by its intelligentsia, thus helping to consolidate the notion of an incomprehensible cosmos.

5) Science and technology has a relatively high proportion of nerds and techno freaks. That these social inadequates have one over on the rest of the population is often more than the socially competent can bear.

6) There are profound and unanswered questions over goals, purpose and meaning that the "emergent paradigm" of contemporary folk philosophy cannot address, and indeed may regard as meaningless.

7) Counter Reactions: A strong affirmation of the exclusively human: e.g. emotion, irrationality, sensuality. Affirmations of otherness: gnosticism, new age, “cargo” cults. Clutching at any hints of the supernatural. Alternative versions of history (e.g. Atlantis), medicine, and science.

8) Scepticism is a healthy enlightenment attitude in as far as it is an urge to test, demonstrate and prove, but if pressed too far it is like a digestive system that in its lust for food starts to digest itself.

No doubt much could be made of these lines of inquiry and more. However, once alienation and disaffection sets in, for whatever reason, there seems to be no philosophical backstop to halt it. By way of illustration there is one theme above (8) that I would like to pick up briefly.

The 2001 Syndrome

Ever since enlightenment times questions have been raised about how, without God, we have any right at all to expect a secure authoritative foundation to epistemology and ontology ( = know-how) whether it be in connection with science, social order or morality: Without God as underwriter, why should we be favoured with know-how beyond what is immediate, pragmatic and needed for short term survival? Attempts to place human know-how on a firm footing without the assumption of a Divine underwriter often resemble that famous self referencing problem we see when a dog chases its own tail. One might chase up the foundations of human know-how in order to secure its place in the museum of human achievement, but the cognitive and epistemic mechanisms doing the chasing are the very things being chased. If man seeks to secure a logically self-sufficient agnostic foundation to epistemology and ontology such a target may be unreachable because the very foundation sought for must be secured with that self same foundation. To the thoroughgoing scepticism of extreme postmodernism this is further evidence that there is no absolute foundation at all; a conclusion that is itself contradictory. The fact is that there will always be inherent instabilities and deep contradictions in human cognition whilst it affects to adopt a thoroughgoing scepticism either about its own make-up or of the world of which it is part. Those contradictions may remain hidden for a while but from time to time will resurface in recurring crises of confidence.

To me, extreme postmodernism smacks of machines gone wrong; human machines stuck in a vicious self-referencing feedback loop: 2001 with its pathological HAL9000 has arrived. One might construe this as the just deserts for the abuse of providence by a self-congratulatory modernism that credits its socio-technological successes to anything but providence. As the proud "control freakery" of modernism seeks to put the foundations of human affairs on a Godless base it soon finds there is no such base and runs into self-referencing problems. Loss of faith in the deeply coherent structure of cosmic rationality may be a consequence. To the extreme postmodernist life is a simulation, an interface that can change as quickly and irrationally as the TV screen of the channel surfer. The perception is that the players and entities in this skin deep world have bit parts with no extensive background history or story that can be exhaustively tested and probed. But to me exactly the opposite is true; our world has the touch and feel of reality precisely because its coherent, consistent and replete rationality cannot be faulted by any test known to man. As such it can be likened to the kind of machine intelligence proposed by Alan Turing; that is, as a player that performs flawlessly and rationally under all conceivable probes, interrogations and tests (*3). Likewise, the players in our world whether they be sentient or material are not fakes, facades and bit parts; they do not have a mere "appearance of history" but have full blown life stories; they are not mere interfaces but have real mechanisms behind the facade. Thus, in every sense they go beyond appearance. Any self-conscious being knows what I mean.

If postmodernism serves any useful purpose at all it may do so as a vehicle for raising questions where there should be questions and sometimes one gets the feeling that the term “postmodernism” is used simply to refer to “modernism with humility”. But we must not forget that the kernel of philosophical postmodernism is its contradictory "antifoundational" philosophy and this antifoundationalism becomes apparent in the evasive shifting answers postmodernists give as to what they believe because to do so is to admit some kind of absolute foundation. Scepticism in measure is healthy; after all it was good old-fashioned enlightenment scepticism that brought me to faith. But the absolute scepticism of extreme postmodernism ultimately destroys itself in an unstable feedback loop.

It is fundamental to human nature to attempt to understand the world of which it is part. Even postmodernism comes to its own perverse, nihilistic and anarchistic conclusions. However, one cannot take for granted that the complexities of the Cosmos can be encapsulated in relatively few simple principles. Encapsulation of human know-how is a kind of data compression and this can happen only if, firstly, there is something about cosmic data allowing it to be so compressed, and, secondly, there are the cognitive resources available to compress it. But in a graceless world neither contingency need be granted. The giveness of these contingencies is dependent on the grace of providence and we can only exploit them if we are willing to accept that grace.

T.V. Reeves November 2001

*1 See reference 2, page xi

*2 See reference 1, page 7

*3 Alan Turing, Bletchley Park computer pioneer, suggested that the condition for true machine intelligence would be fulfilled if a machine can converse at an indistinguishably human level. Without commenting on the sufficiency on Turing`s condition, it serves as a useful illustration of what is meant by "in depth rationality"; that is, as something which can never be revealed as a facade by all the conceivable the tests and probes available to finite beings.

References

1. The Icon critical dictionary of Postmodern Thought: Editor Stuart Sim. Icon 1998

A compilation of essays on the cultural effects of postmodernism. Includes a useful index of terms.

2. The Enlightenment. Norman Hampson: Penguin 1976

Records and analyses some less well known aspects of the enlightenment.

3. Introduction to H.G Wells' Time machine: Jonathan Benison, Cideb 1994.

Benison cites the "irrationalism of the Decadent era of the 1890s"

4. At the Edge of History/Passages about Earth: William Irwin Thompson. Lindisfarne press 1990

An eloquent critical appraisal of technocratic society.

5. How to know you know you know it. Knotes by T.V.Reeves 1993. Unpublished

A short study on "self reference" in human knowledge.
(See here for the latter reference http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html)

Does Intelligent Design Make Testable Predictions? Part 2

2011-05-24T04:56:00.008-12:00

Could ID predict this scenario? If it happened would the explanatory filter fail to detect ID?

In the first part of this series I expressed doubt about Intelligent Design’s ability to make hard predictions; after all, ID covers a large range of opinions from Sir John Polkinghorne’s fruitful evolutionism to Beyond our Ken Ham’s mature creation, a creation created “just like that” 6000 years ago. It seems that ID can be used to underwrite so many creation scenarios that its predictive content is seriously compromised. I say this as an ID creationist myself, so I am not saying it from an anti-ID stance. In fact I say it because I am anxious to make all due allowance for the problems of prediction that arise naturally from an ontology that starts with the assumption of some complex presumably self-explaining entity whose nature is very alien to human kind; hardly a sound basis for successful prediction - and we thought predicting human behaviour was difficult enough. So perhaps the lack of predictability in ID is less a bug than it is an expected feature of the ontology it posits. Let’s face it, ID is going to struggle to be hard science.

So where does this leave the predictions in Uncommon Descent’s post here? Well, ID does become a harder science if, as seems to be the case in the community UD represents, ID is de-facto anti-evolutionism. A de-facto anti-evolutionism is liable to contradict certain evolutionary scenarios and will presumably impact expected biological and paleontological observations. But even if we assume an anti-evolutionary position that still leaves us with an open ended range of ID candidates running from Old Earth Creationism to fundamentalist views like that of Beyond our Ken Ham. Anti-evolutionists, then, will claim that they know what hasn’t happened, but they have no consensus on what has happened and consequently they are going to be vague about just what they expect the fossil record to reveal; all they know is that it’s not going to reveal evolution, at least as currently understood. Nevertheless, when ID slips over into anti-evolutionism it at least appears to be saying something with a little more content than “God did it – somehow”.

Anyway, without further ado here are the first four predictions in UD’s list, each followed by my own comment. I was hoping to get through all predictions in one post, but as there are a total of 14 predictions it looks as though it’s going to be a long hot summer.

ID Prediction 01: ID predicts that the Universe had a beginning.

My Comment: I can’t see why this follows. In his book “The Intelligent Universe” Sir Fred Hoyle moots the idea that life is intelligently designed and yet as a lifelong supporter of Steady State Theory he obviously didn’t think his version of ID implied a universe with a beginning. Neither do I see this as a prediction of ID in its most abstracted form. However, I agree that it is a prediction of mainstream Christian Theism; but Christian theism isn’t ID in its most abstracted form.

ID Prediction 02: ID predicts an increase (and not a decrease), as science progresses, in the number of finely-tuned parameters pertinent to the laws and constants of physics.

My Comment: I have a feeling that this prediction arises out of a misconception I have occasionally seen on UD that physical laws can’t carry information: The naive argument runs as follows: Laws equate to “necessity” and therefore the patterns they generate have a probability of 1. A probability of 1 entails zero information. The upshot is that many anti-evolutionists cannot see how the patterns implied by physical laws can be a receptacle of information. The only kind of information they recognize, then, are configurations that appear to have been patched in “by hand” rather than generated by physical laws. Moreover, Dembski’s explanatory filter, although valid in circumstances within the cosmic context, has the unfortunate side effect of making it look as though Law and Disorder causes obviate the need for Intelligent Design; the filter doesn’t readily raise the question of the Intelligent origin of Law and Disorder but instead invokes a regress whereby Law and Disorder generates Law and Disorder.

All in all this amounts to a double whammy against the efficacy of physical laws, for not only do they appear to be information-less, but the all important explanatory filter fails to explicitly acknowledge that laws themselves may be intelligently contrived. Thus, on UD there is tendency for only “hand patched” information to register on their radar as having ID origins. Hence in UD’s view the greater the level of overt hand patching the firmer the case for ID. Anti-evolutionists, then, expect more hand patched configuring rather than less. In my view high levels of “hand patching” does not necessarily follow from ID. If it really is possible to generate life using law and disorder, then given the level of Intelligence envisaged by ID creationists it follows that that intelligence is well able choose an elegant set of laws with a minimum of adjustable variables. Whether elegant laws can actually generate information I have considered on the following web pages:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/11/self-organisation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/12/darwin-bicentenary-part-29-dembski-and.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/03/darwin-bicentenary-15-critique-of.html

However, I must add a disclaimer: None of this necessarily means that Physical Law is the means by which a creative intelligence has introduced information into our world. The UDers may be right and life isn’t a product of law and disorder, but has, in fact, been directly patched in by Divine Intelligence in the form of a second creative dispensation – this is why I like to keep tabs on UD in case they come up with something; they just might. Unlike some people who call them “IDiots” I do have respect for their abilities.

ID prediction 03: ID predicts the presence of specified complexity in living systems.

My Comment: For something to have “specified complexity” two conditions must be met. Firstly, the object must be complex in configuration – this rules out highly ordered configurations like crystalline periodicities. Secondly, the object must be highly improbable - this rules out highly disordered configurations because high disorder, by virtue of its overwhelming representation in the space of possibilities, is, assuming equal a-priori probabilities, very probable. Hence objects with specified complexity are objects that are both complex and at the same time members of a very improbable class. In absolute terms it is clear that organic structures fulfill both these conditions – they are complex and yet ordered enough to be very far removed from absolute disorder. So in one sense the above “prediction” is less a prediction than it is a manifestly obvious feature of life. I must emphasise, however, that I have just said “in absolute terms” – that is, a la Fred Hoyle’s Junkyard Jumbo “explosion” where it is assumed that each and every possible configuration of elements is equally possible thus entailing an absolutely minute probability of a Jumbo Jet forming during an explosion.

But if as evolutionists are implying life is a product of the “self organization” implicit in the laws of physics, then in terms of conditional probabilities the probability of life is much greater than it would be in absolute terms. The probability of life conditioned on the Laws of Physics can be represented as Prob(Life|Laws of Physics). Evolutionists are effectively telling us that the value of Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) is great enough for there to be a realistic chance of the formation of life in the history of the universe. Thus, the “specified complexity” of life, given the Laws of Physics, is correspondingly reduced. Now, as far as the UD community is concerned, specified complexity is used to detect Intelligent Design; it is used in the explanatory filter to decide whether a configuration is a product of intelligence or law and disorder. The trouble is, as I have pointed out above, the explanatory filter does not explicitly acknowledge the present of intelligence if a configuration can be explained, with a reasonable probability, as the outcome of law and disorder. Hence, if Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) is sufficiently high UDers are liable to lose sight of a cosmic intelligence behind the universe. Consequently, they favour the view that Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) is extremely low, which is the mathematical way of expressing their strong anti-evolutionist line; that is, they maintain that the laws of physics are not a sufficient condition for life thus entailing the high specified complexity of organic structures even given the laws of physics.

In order to convert the conditional probability Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) into the absolute probability Prob(Life), we need to know Prob(Laws of Physics). Trouble is, we haven’t got a clue what this value is and in fact we have little idea how to calculate it, if indeed it is an intelligible concept. In spite of some speculations about how physical laws might change across a multiverse no quantification is currently possible because there is no known Law and Disorder regime that generates law and disorder regimes. However, we can perhaps get an inkling of an answer to this question if we remind ourselves of an important mathematical abstraction: Namely, of all possible platonic patterns of behavior the ordered behavior described by the laws of physics is clearly an extreme rarity. Hence on this basis, and assuming equal a-priori probabilities, Prob(Laws of Physics) looks to be very low. This implies that even if Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) is relatively high, then the absolute probability of life, Prob(Life), is very low. So as far as specified complexity is concerned life has a very low absolute probability whether or not it is implicit in the laws of physics. That means that the above UD “prediction” has more the character of a logical truism in as much as it is true whether we are evolutionists or not. Therefore this “prediction” does not necessarily express an anti-evolutionist view.

ID prediction 04: ID predicts that, as scientific research progresses, biological complexity will be seen to increase over time, and information will have a more and more central role in the governing of life’s operations.

My comment: By “increase over time” I think the author actually means human research time. If so then this seems a rather trivial prediction given that as far the extent of our knowledge about organisms is concerned the only way is up!

But I’m going to use this opportunity as an excuse to talk about an increase in organic complexity over paleontological time; a prediction that is not peculiar to anti-evolutionist ID but also follows if Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) has realistic values - that is, evolution itself predicts an increase in biological complexity over time. Let me explain.

It is clear that not all biological organisms are of equal complexity. Here I am not so much talking about configurational complexity but the more abstract computational complexity measured by computation time. For example, it is fairly self evident that metazoans must be preceded by precursor structures; very likely single cell organisms. Single cell organisms in turn will be preceded by basic chemical constituents. In short any organic structure is preceded by a minimum number of precursor conditions that follow in a strict stratified sequence. This stratified sequence forms a kind “critical path” in the manufacture of the structure. The longer this path, the more computationally complex the structure is because the minimum time needed to arrive at the structure is an increasing function of this sequence length.

If evolution is a kind of diffusion motion through configuration space then the precursor structures will necessarily be reached first. This diffusion motion causes a slow population growth in organic configuration space where the stratification sequence ensures that the “lower levels” will be populated before the “higher levels”. Thus it follows that biological complexity will be seen to increase over time. One way to think about this result is thermodynamically: The Earth is in a kind of morphological disequilibrium; as time increases the shuffling of happenstance entail a kind of diffusion motion which ensures the progressive population of morphological slots over time. Those morphological slots that require a sequence of morphological stages to be followed before they are arrived at will be populated later rather than sooner. The result is that biological complexity, computationally speaking, increases over time.

Religious Control Freaks

2011-05-20T10:41:00.004-12:00

Inquisitors Attempt to Gag Freedom of Speech at NN&N

Who is Trying to Censor My Post on NN&N? "Answers in Genesis" or The Mysterious XXX Brotherhood? It's looking like the latter at the moment.

A rabidly fundamentalist article has appeared on the Christian Web site Network Norwich and Norfolk (NN&N) . The article is by an Answers in Genesis rep and consists of the usual off the peg quip theology, backed up with spiritual threats implying Divine disleasure if the YEC view isn't believed. I posted a rebuttle, but unfortunately my main comment kept getting deleted by an anonymous "gremlin" user of the site who is presumbly not at all pleased with my contribution. I in turn keep reposting it. To help things a long a little I'm posting my NN&N comments here so that I can use them as reference material if needs be: The gremlin will attempt to influence the site wallahs at NN&N in order to get my stuff deleted permanently. It is a classic fundamentalist ploy to attempt to gag the opposition rather than engage it in reason.

My apologies but the following won't be very meaningful unless you have followed NN&N; I'm just using my blog to as web space.

*****

The “hermeneutic” that this YEC author refers to does not lead to easy or infallible interpretations as he should himself be well aware of. Moreover meta-statements made by an author clarifying meaning must themselves be interpreted by the interpreter. Thus we ourselves are always, repeat always, the weak link that stops us short of claiming to have an infallible grasp of God’s Word. This then ought to prevent us making audacious claims about a particular interpretation of scripture.

Re: The Historical Hermeneutic: This is particularly difficult to apply given that the contemporary mindset is certainly not identical to that of the Biblical writers. For example, it is unlikely that the early Biblical writers had any concept of the Earth as a globe and certainly not a spinning globe; their world view would be very geocentric. It is no surprise then that Answers in Genesis have clashed with Christian Geocentrists over the meaning of scripture. A sharp clash between AiG’s Danny Falkner and the Geocentrist scientist Gerardus Bouw can be seen here:

http://www.geocentricity.com/ba1/fresp/index.html

It is quite likely that the Greek concept of a spherical Earth didn’t figure much in the consciousness or interests of the Biblical writers and so perhaps it is not surprising that the Flat Earth society has, in times past, claimed their views to be based on “God’s Word”. See here:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm

Let us also recall in this connection the Witness Lee Brotherhood, who have made frequent recent visits to NN&N’s web pages. They follow the teaching of G.H. Pember’s Gap theory interpretation of Genesis 1 – an idea which I think you will find is strongly opposed by AiG. The Witness Lee Brotherhood believe that a Gap interpretation is all part of God’s “recovery” modus operandi. For them the concept of recovery is very much bound up with the end time restoration of the church as a brotherhood that blends into a spiritual elite. The Witness Lee brotherhood isn’t some uber-unorthodox cult: Their scriptural interpretations are largely mainstream evangelical although some idiosyncrasies such as the “recovery” doctrine do set them apart and guess what, they would likely view AiG as part of the unblended Christian “Babylon”.

One thing is clear; whether we are talking about AiG, Christian Geocentrists, Christian Flat-Earthers, the Recovery Brotherhood, or numerous other exclusive and devout religious sects, all are very pious, very vehement and utterly convinced that they are “taking God at his Word”. In fact I have even heard of some fundamentalist ultras who are dissatisfied with AiG’s compromise of mixing scripture with science. For them Sola Scriptura really means Sola Scriptura and they would rather drop all scientific dabblings (Something which is actually impossible to do) and they regard scientific creationists like AiG to “have fallen into the trap of being Greeks looking for Wisdom. and trying to compete wisdom v wisdom.” The overall effect of this plethora of conflicting claims by those who “take God at his Word” is to evacuate its apparent meaningfulness.

When I was first converted to Christianity I was given the YEC hard sell, a hard sell that carefully juxtaposed YEC philosophy with the phrases we can see in the above article such as: “Putting words into Gods mouth”, “Applying your opinion to scripture”, “Compromising God’s word”, “God means what he says”, “ignoring God’s word”, “believing atheistic systems” and threats of what might happen on Judgment day if you don’t take God at his word etc etc. All this was scary and intimidating and naturally enough focused the mind of the religious novice on his judgment before God if he didn’t consent to YEC. The truism that the reader inevitably supplies a fallible interpretation is paid lip service to; in practice man’s interpretations become identified to God’s truth; in practice man’s interpretations sneak past critical analysis and somehow appear to directly emerge from scripture without an act of interpretation; they thereby attempt to place themselves beyond critical scrutiny by claiming to have God’s direct authority.

To cut a long story short: As my faith, confidence and knowledge grew not only did I find YEC science wanting and their use of scripture suspect, I also became very disturbed by their implicitly threatening language which looked like an attempt to apply spiritual duress. Around the same time I had started researching the cults and the similarities were alarming. On a sectarian/cult scale of 1 to 10 I would put AiG at around 6+.

I see that same strident and intimidating tones from the author of the above article that I saw many years ago; the same threatening spiritual pretensions that implicitly masquerade as “God’s Word”. It’s sectarian and it’s cult like. Above all it’s all too conceitedly human; even fanatical. To think I was nearly rushed into speaking like that myself. Frankly I find the whole thing revolting.

NOTE: We must also be very mindful of RichardL’s excellent point about the genus of Biblical literature.

…...following on from these comments I would like to add that the "historical hermeneutic" has several related problematical issues/questions:

a) Historical context may be humanly unrecoverable. “Plain readings” are not necessarily the rule.

b) Translation/copying issues raise questions over the whereabouts of the “original word”.

c) Given that we are dealing with a Divine Omni-Agency, there is a measure of inscrutability as to how God might use his word: Conceivably he is well able to use the resources of a contemporary context (rather than the original context) to invest his word with new meanings in order to achieve his purposes.

d) Does the historical hermeneutic have the relevant Biblical meta-statements justifying its usage?

e) It is very likely that the general reader looks at the Bible unaware of the gulf in meanings that could exist by virtue of the separation of his context from the context of the writer. It is quite likely that general reader uses an informal “on the hoof” hermeneutic that often leads to meanings very differently from the original writer: Can such informal interpretations be detected and should they be rejected or accepted?

f) Use of the Holy Spirit’s name to underwrite a proprietary interpretation of the text begs the question.

There are other issues, but that will do for now.

The Choice is Yours

2011-05-11T08:04:00.003-12:00

Now here''s a guy who believes in freedom of choice: "My way or the damned way"

13/05/2011: After posting the above cartoon I was reminded of this post by Arni Zachariassen; the quote below taken from the post shows why. Caution! You're about to enter "Beyond our Ken Ham's" false dichotomy zone.

But if you repeatedly tell people that there’s only one way of doing Christianity and any deviation from that norm is compromise and a start down the slippery slope to abortion-loving, homosexual-marrying monkey atheism – well, you’re setting people up for the fall. Because any responsible higher education will relativise any theological position (that’s what higher education does), especially one the is founded upon science-denial, philosophical naivety and theological exclusivism. And if someone’s been told enough times that they have to choose between either that or the complete renunciation of the Christian faith? Let’s just say that the likelihood for apostasy is a lot higher.

Middlebrow Atheism. Part 5 (Final Part)

2011-05-10T01:23:00.004-12:00

If you don't seek you may not find

This is the final part of my “Middlebrow Atheism” series. The other parts can be found as follows:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/04/middlebrow-atheism-part-4.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/03/middlebrow-atheism-part-3.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/03/middlebrow-atheism-part-2.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/03/middlebrow-atheism-part-1.html

Video Item 08: That some theists require an extra miracle for the creation of life is an admission that the cosmos isn’t fine tuned enough.

My Comments: This criticism really applies to anti-evolutionists who believe that a second “creative dispensation” is required on top of physics. Although I have reservations about conventional evolutionary theory I personally prefer the “one creative dispensation” view. One issue I have with the two dispensations view is that it is liable to disconnect living things from their cosmic stage: The dimensions and parameters of the cosmos become details incidental to the organic dispensation. At least in standard evolutionary theory the existence of life is logically bound up with the wider cosmos. But even if standard evolution is wrong my guess is that whatever the history of life’s development may be, that history is intimately connected to the cosmos; life is some function of cosmic dimensions and cosmic parameters; for then the cosmos no longer seems a "waste of space" but a necessary accessory to life. (Robert Sheldon is an example of a anti-evolutionist who has some intriguingly radical theories on panspermia that do at least connect life’s history to cosmic conditions)

Video Item 09: Life is a happy by product of an environment rather than the environment being designed for life. For example, is the atmosphere designed for sky diving? Was the wind designed for wind surfing?

My Comments: This one comes under the heading of what Sir John Polkinghorne aptly describes as the “fruitfulness” of God’s creation. Given the particular physical regime that governs our cosmos, this then implies a configuration space consisting of all that is possible within the constraints of that regime. This configuration space is a static platonic object and the layout of the configurations in this space determines whether the “shufflings of happenstance” (Another phrase I have picked up from Polkinghorne) is conducive to the Polkinghorne’s “fruitfulness”. For example, clearly “technological configuration space” is so arranged as to allow the quantum of human intelligence, (which I represent by “i”), to traverse it successfully; for human intelligence is not great enough to jump the huge gap between the stone age and the jet age in one generation, but it can jump the smaller gaps between the islands of functionality in “technological configuration space” as evidenced by the succession of artifacts in technological history that have lead up to the development of jet aircraft. A jet aircraft is the result of a long historical development of many technological innovations that have occurred in a piecemeal fashion; a product of the shuffling of human happenstance. It is the arrangement of artifacts in technological configuration space that allows human intelligence to traverse it in small technological leaps. Those artifacts are arranged in configuration space in a way that allows the quantum of human intelligence, i, to migrate from one innovation to the next. If this wasn’t so then the making a jet aircraft would be as improbable as Fred Hoyle’s Junkyard Jumbo. So, in answer to video I regard the wind surfing and sky diving as part of the built-in technological fruitfulness of our physical regime, a fruitfulness that also includes wind turbines, and flying. My conjecture is that a randomly selected physical regime would be unlikely to possess this fruitfulness, and thus we are likely to be talking here of something with a high “specified complexity”.

However, whether or not the configuration space of living structures can also be fruitfully traversed by the random shufflings of happenstance is a moot point.

Video Item 10: Science investigates researches, explains and tests hypotheses. There is no comparable testing and investigation available for the God hypothesis. With contemporary Cosmological theory there is the possibility for real data and some chance of testing these theories unlike for God. Where is the derivation for God? Where’s the chance to test this hypothesis? Religion gives up and says “a magic man did it”

My Comments. As I have made clear already in this series, the hard sciences (physics in particular) use a pair of explanatory object types that I refer to as “Law and Disorder”. “Laws” are functions subject to the Church-Turing Thesis in that they are pattern generating functions that can be rendered computationally. “Disorder” are patterns that yield to statistical description. In the video Alan Guth says he has no idea why the laws of physics are what they are. That’s no surprise to me: There is, I believe, a fundamental reason why Guth must say this: For without getting into a “Turtles all the way down” regress where Law and Disorder explanation gets stuck in a kind of self referential loop, physics naturally comes to an end once full description has been achieved (i.e. a “Theory of Everything” as it is called). If we are going to ask why the laws of physics work, then that question, as far as physics is concerned, is meaningless. A science of the mathematically elemental can provide no deeper answer “why” than in the giving of an exhaustive descriptive account of the status quo. (If indeed such is actually possible)

Given the huge number of possible patterns that can exist it is clear that there is a very large class of pattern that are too ordered to be amenable to statistical treatment, and yet too complex to be rendered with mathematical functions in a realistic time using serial computation. There is, therefore, a large class of patterns that are in principle intractable to “Law and Disorder” science. Potentially, then, there are objects out there that are not tractable to science as we currently understand it. If such exist in our reality they would not be amenable to derivation and testing. Thus, contrary to the suggestion of the video scientific intractability is no reason to rule them out: Because something doesn’t yield to research, derivation and testing is not sufficient condition for its nonexistence. All we can do is thank our lucky bunny (I don’t know what atheists thank; “bunny” is all I could come up with) that so much of our world is apparently amenable to our finite science.

But an “in principle” scientific intractability is compounded by practical intractability. Given that our world is mathematically chaotic and subject to random quantum perturbations means that even if we assume Law and Disorder offers a full description of the world it yet remains beyond our practical powers to describe much of that world with anything other than ex post facto narrative. Further compounding the tractability problems of science is the fact that data is, humanly speaking, irretrievably lost in the mists of time. Thus the inaccessibility and complex contingency of history is open to the same criticisms the video levels against theism: In history there is little in the way of derivation and testing that parallels the theories of the hard physical sciences. In many cases there is no possibility of real data and a chance of a theory being testable. In between stumbling on the occasional fortuitously surviving text or archeological artifact, history remains dependent on the experienced historian’s imagination to fill in the gaps for us.

The video’s beguiling arguments are nearly as devastating to history as they are to God. It is naive to think that one can approach God, (or history for that matter) in the manner that one might approach the elemental Law and Disorder objects of the hard sciences. If anything God’s complexity and inaccessibility makes for a far more scientifically intractable object than even history. If God was subject to Law and Disorder research it wouldn’t be God; the object would be far too elemental for that. This, of course, doesn’t mean there is such an object as God; but if there is a God, the unimaginative mindset of the video producers, whose theology only seems to extend as far as "a magic man", obstructs any chance of seeking him let alone of finding him.

From one mankind he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27

Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Is 55:6

Alien, Very Alien, Intelligent Design

2011-05-08T01:29:00.009-12:00

Interesting is this post on Uncommon Descent which manifests a phenomenon I have become very familiar with; namely, anti-evolutionists attempting to form a cartel with atheist evolutionists on the basis of their mutual belief that “Darwinism” gives God his redundancy notice . “I don’t need that hypothesis” as the saying goes; as if God is a "Law & Disorder" hypothesis.

In fact, the anti-evolutionists may go as far as to express admiration and respect for atheists who candidly spell out the “materialistic” conclusions of “Darwinism”. I suspect the respect is one way, although I have sneaky suspicion that the new wave atheists don’t mind at all when theists also caricature evolution as a mindless process based on chance. In this article on the Christian web site Network Norwich and Norfolk James Knight notes that many new wave atheists started their life as Christians, thus hinting at some link between gnu atheism and Christianity. I added a comment to his article noting the apparent cartel forming behavior I have already mentioned and proposed that this may have something to do with the link. The cartel is used by fundamentalists to apply spiritual duress on Christian evolutionists: As James Knight says:

Yes we see a peculiar defense of fundamentalism take place, where, in order to dismiss theistic evolution they (the fundamentalists) put on a new-wave atheist's mask and quote their usual sound-bytes in the hope that theistic evolutionists will begin to stink of ‘Darwinism’, and qualify to the point of ex-communication.

***

It is an irony that one reason I can’t get evolutionary theory off my desk is precisely because of intelligent design. The engineering behind life is, within a little, not far from our intellectual reach. In contrast, evolution demands computational problems to be resolved that are way beyond both our intellects and our current computational technology. Above all, the problems of implementing an evolutionary system are all but impossible to resolve in realistic time via a purely stochastic system.

However, I'll grant that evolution cuts across many standard theological expectations: In the UD post I've linked to we find Denyse O’Leary saying:

Christian Darwinists struggle to convince Christians to jettison deeply held beliefs in order to embrace Darwin.

If evolution, or something similar to it, is the fruitful process that has generated the configurations of life then the “specified complexity” of its necessary preconditions are beyond human computation. The prerequisites of evolution, then, are evidence that we are dealing with a very alien form of intelligence. As the Good Book says (Is 55: 8-9)

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,”

declares the LORD.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Just how alien is clear from the context of the above verses (Is 55: 6-7)

Seek the LORD while he may be found;

call on him while he is near.

Let the wicked forsake his way

and the evil man his thoughts.

Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him,

and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

“Free pardons for all who turn….” violates the mindset of the “God will pay them back” mentality that pervades so much of man’s theology.

As I have said before: I have a reserved view of evolution, but we should not reject evolution for the wrong reasons: ID alone is not good enough reason for rejecting it, especially as we are dealing with such an alien intelligence.

Does Intelligent Design Creationism Make Testable Scientific Predictions? Part 1

2011-05-03T00:51:00.005-12:00

ID has the potential for too many googlies to be a hard science.

This post on Uncommon Descent (UD) is entitled “Does ID Make Testable Scientific Predictions?”. The post provides a list of ID predictions.

Before I look at this list in detail in part 2 here are some general comments:

Strictly speaking the phrase “Intelligent Design Creationism” covers a multitude of sins (the gnu atheists would certainly think of them as sins!). For example, Sir John Polkinghorne calls himself an Intelligent Design creationist, but Sir John is an evolutionist and in his view Divine intelligence is needed to set up and run a physical regime whose evolutionary fruitfulness is a sign of God’s providence.

I would also classify myself as an “Intelligent Design Creationist”, at least in the sense that Sir John understands it; for if evolution is to work, (i.e. it is fruitful) it must be resourced by the selection of some remarkable preconditions, effectively giving it the “specified complexity” that some ID theorists talk about. In other words evolution would require a considerable level of intelligence to contrive. However, I must admit to having some reservations about evolutionary theory and I respect the criticisms of evolution by some of the correspondents one finds on UD. But having said that I must say that I have not yet been able to get the concept of evolution off my “examination bench” and eliminate it from the enquiry.

On UD itself we find a very wide range of opinion on how life arose; views expressed run from Old Earth theistic evolution through evolution with an “intelligent assist”, to the occasional YEC contributor. The balance of opinion on UD may be skewed toward Old Earth, but most commentators are rabidly anti-evolution. This vehement anti-evolutionism is probably down to the polarizing effects of what has turned out to be a very acrimonious debate, even between fellow theists. An outcome of that polarization is that the phrase “Intelligent Design” now has the de-facto meaning of “anti-evolution”, the unspoken innuendo being that theistic evolutionists don’t accept intelligent design!

It is for this reason that people like John Polkinghorne and Biologos are unwilling to identify themselves with the so-called “ID” community that UD stands for. They may even be unwilling to use the phrase “Intelligent Design” to describe themselves. Meanings matter and today “ID” means “anti-evolution” and in the minds of Biologos it probably also means “anti-science”. Just as polarization has made it look as though theistic evolutionists are anti-ID, UD has been made to look like part of an “anti-science” community. Thus, as theistic evolutionists stand accused of promoting religious heresy, UD stands accused of promoting scientific heresy. In truth, neither charge stands, in my opinion.

Occasionally one reads a post on UD that bemoans the poor relations between the Biologos and UD, especially as it is clear that in the final analysis they must both support ID creationism in the truest sense of the words. The fault is on both sides: UD has some vociferous anti-evolutionist correspondents who caricature evolution as a blind, mindless process derisively referring to Biologos as compromising “Darwinists”. Biologos, who probably have some measure of kudos in the scientific establishment, don’t want to risk their scientific credibility by parleying with UD, who they probably look down on with haughty superiority as guilty of hobnobbing with superstitious anti-science rubes. The division between the communities respectively represented by Biologos and UD is down to passion and polarization and not a fundamental disagreement in the essential core belief in ID

The following preamble indicates that polarization has resulted in a distortion of the meaning of the phrase “Intelligent Design Creationism” and shifted its meaning toward anti-evolutionism and the fundamentalist end of the religious spectrum. This in turn has obscured the fact that “ID creationism”, in its truest sense, covers the full spectrum from Christian evolutionists to YECs.

Now, why do I say all this? What’s it got to do with ID predictions? This: What it shows is that as far as making predictions is concerned ID has got its work cut out: For if ID belief covers the full range from establishment evolutionists to Young Earth Creationism one can legitimately query if belief in ID materially effects one’s expectation about how the cosmos should look. In short, it seems that it is extremely difficult to make any predictions at all from an ID position. Naturally, if the world is designed by intelligence then it is clear that we are dealing with a very abstracted non-embodied intelligence and therefore in one sense a very alien intelligence whose purposes and works are likely to have a large measure of inscrutability. I say this as a supporter of ID.

For myself I much prefer the a softer, fuzzier, less hard science view of ID: ID is a philosophical, theological and perhaps even mythological/metaphorical backdrop structure with which one attempts to understand and make sense of the most general features of the world. Its main utility is less prediction than it is "joining the dots" of what we already know, with particular regard to origins (For reasons I have given in my “Middlebrow Atheism” series it is clear that standard science has no chance of making any ultimate human sense of origins) At the core of ID is the concept of a complex entity whose alien intelligence is unlikely to lend itself to the making of hard predictions. However, the question of whether UD have actually succeeded in making some predictions will have wait for part 2 of this post. I rather think you will find what UD call “ID predictions” are in actual fact “anti-evolutionist” expectations rather than ID predictions per se.

Fancy a World Cruise? No Planks!

2011-04-21T07:22:00.016-12:00

Sink or Swim? Probably both.

PZ Myers and his rabid raiders have found another target for their favourite pastime of lampooning the uber-crackpot schemes and ideas of Christian fundamentalists. The latest flight of fancy is the brain dump of Dutchman Johan Huibers who, like Ken Ham’s AiG, is building a full size ark, except that unlike Ken Ham Huibers is putting his beliefs (and perhaps his life) on the line. According to the The Dutch Daily News:

When completed, the full-size Noah's Ark will remain in Dordrecht until the middle of 2012, when Huibers then plans to take his ship around the world, beginning with London in time for the Olympic Games.

I’m not an expert in wooden boat construction but, the boat looks very flimsy, a kind of floating garden shed made of spindly pine posts and thin planks. (see this YouTube video). I don’t fancy Huibers’ chances in a heavy swell.

HMS Victory: A Floating Tree Trunk

Looking at the video I compared it with my visit to HMS victory (see above), a wooden boat with sides 2 feet thick which leaves one with the impression of it being made of whole oak tree trunks. In fact once inside the Victory it feels like being inside a tree trunk. However, at around 200 feet in length it is less than half the linear size of the Ark.

Victory Gun Deck.

It is well known that beam strength scales with the square of its thickness but weight scales with the cube of dimension. This means that as linear size increases weight goes up faster than strength. Hence, the bigger a wooden boat is the greater percentage of its interior must be devoted to wooden structure. So, it is not surprising that HMS victory employs such thickness of oak. In comparison the insides of Huibers’ Ark looks like a matchstick cathedral.

Huibers' Garden Shed Technology.

Note: Rumour has it that Huibers' boat actually has a steel substructure. Basically it's a wooden shack on a steel barge; a game of let's pretend, in a land of make believe, aptly symbolising fundamentalism. (What's the betting that Huibers will be in the iron ship towing his plank box around the world?)

Latest Gun Fight Debate: Craig vs. Harris.

2011-04-14T08:45:00.011-12:00

I recently posted a blog entry giving the final “score” in a William Lane Craig vs Lawrence Krauss debate, where indications were that Craig had “won”. To be fair, then, I must report on this debate between Craig and Sam Harris entitled "Is good from God". According to Arni Zachariassen “they came out about even”. PZ Myers, on the other hand, thinks, it was a “total rout” in favour of Harris; *Methinks PZ exaggerateth too much*. This vehemently expressed opinion might just have something to do with the fact that Myers is obviously very much in agreement with Harris whatever the outcome of the debate. Therefore he is naturally going to be swayed by notoriously fickle predictors. Viz: “Craig lost on style”, “Harris….spoke thoughtfully and with sincerity…” and “...on body language and tone, Harris is engaging you and speaking from the heart, while Craig is stiff, strident, and running through the well-worn grooves of repetitive theological rationalizations.” If you really hate someone like Myers hates Craig their manner alone is going to cause irritation and leave you wide open to auto suggestive misinterpretations of their style and body language.

The result of debates like this is no doubt very much in the eyes of the beholder, but I think on balance Arni’s cool opinion “they came out about even” wins the day for me. But there is also this: I don’t agree with the view that PZ attributes to Craig: “If we don't ground our moral beliefs in a God, then we do not have a sound foundation for our morality”. After all, the good book itself says:

(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares. (Romans 2:14-16)

So, although atheists (which I identify here with “gentiles”) may not be able to found a morality in an ontology of cosmic import, their hearts will provide a compelling witness as to what is right and they can, if they are inclined, successfully anchor their morality on this. (But anchoring a morality is one thing, following it is quite another; the latter may best prosper under Divine grace) My opinion, then, is that Craig should have “lost”. But the fact that Craig secured a “draw” when, in fact, he should have lost is a sign that he is a pretty smart operator!

No News is Good News

2011-04-09T08:04:00.005-12:00

The Good News is invisible to anti-evolutionists and anti-theists.

I’ve been talking with James Knight about why people find it so difficult to see that “law and disorder” science can never arrive at a final explanation in the deeper sense of providing aseity. There are probably several reasons for this, the “Luddite Effect” being one of them.

Other effects may have something to do with the abstruseness of scientific explanation which prevents people seeing what’s actually happening: The general “data compression” effect of physical explanation, if naively extrapolated, could wrongly be construed as showing that eventually it is possible to get something for nothing. Another possible effect making it look as though scientific explanation trivializes problems away may be down to the likely fact that human (and animal) perceptions are wired up to take most notice of interruptions in the status-quo i.e. a change is newsworthy, no change can be ignored. Thus no change in the status quo registers as "nothing there". We know, of course, that in an absolute sense something is there, something rather than nothing and we can see that reality entails an irreducible a logical discontinuity, the Grand Logical Hiatus as I call it. But it seems that people only see a discontinuity if it is plastered across the time axis as an explicit change in the temporal status quo. Change and difference is something which cries out for explanation, whereas it is tempting to feel that the uniform, the common place, and the boring, do not. Therefore if all change can be explained in terms of some sort of status quo such as unalterable Quantum Mechanical laws, then one might be tempted to think that the holy grail of science, a “complete explanation”, has been reached. However, what is more difficult to see is that even a static status quo has a discontinuity in "logical space" - discontinuities in time are easier to perceive than discontinuities in logical space.

The reason I raise this matter is not just because atheists like Richard Dawkins claim to be intellectually satisfied by scientific explanation and thus are responding to the array of factors I mention above. Ironically it is also the anti-evolutionists who think similarly; they too, I suggest, subliminally feel that evolution is in danger of providing intellectual satisfaction without God and thus as I have said before they cannot come to terms with evolution. This is something I have actually pointed out several times in this blog, but if you look here on Uncommon Descent you will find a fine example of it where you will read:

While there is little doubt about the desire of theistic evolutionists to maintain their commitment to theism, it is pertinent to ask what follows logically from the scientific acceptance of some forms of theistic evolution, especially those that claim that it must be understood within methodological naturalism where all evidence of God’s handiwork is excluded from science by definition……What follows logically is a silent God and a loud Darwin.

My guess is that what prompts this kind of response to “Darwinism” are the sort of effects I have identified above: Science has the psychological effect of masking the sheer unwarranted contingency of the cosmos; in particular evolution gives the impression that form and function are fully explained. And yet as I have said elsewhere, evolution, if it has occurred, is likely to require far from trivial mathematical preconditions. The trouble is that these preconditions are logically abstruse and not as “in yer face” as a God who poofs stuff into existence “as is, just like that”. These preconditions are likely to register as “no news” in the human psyche and therefore for the anti-evolutionists they are bad news.

Cut Me Some Slack.

2011-04-07T08:29:00.009-12:00

In this blog post atheist Larry Moran criticizes the Intelligent Design community for their negative evolution bashing and their failure to advance a positive science of Intelligent Design. He says:

Any objective view of the IDiot literature reveals that attacks on evolution constitute >99% of their activity. It's rare to find an article or book that presents a positive case for ~~a creator~~ design.

Given my experience of the anti-evolution movement I have to agree that that statement is a good approximation of the state of anti-evolutionist ID theory.

Larry Moran is responding to a blog post by Denise O’Leary on Uncommon Descent where she asks whether ID researchers are making positive progress:

That said, a legitimate question raised by thoughtful people is, why don’t ID-friendly researchers do positive research? Why do they just go on proving that Darwinism doesn’t work?

Guess who she blames for a lack of progress?......

I too look forward to the day that ID researchers are free to do positive work, but right now we are swamped in a Darwinism whose fraudulence is often unrecognized because it is so often ridiculous. . So, as with counterfeit money, the first goal is to demonstrate that much intellectual currency is bogus……So can good money ever drive out bad? Yes, but it is tough slogging.

“Darwinists” like Larry Moran, then, not only have to face a barrage of destructive criticism about their life’s work, but they also get the blame for ID theorist’s inability to do little else other than to engage in a science of negation. This, to my mind, is very unfair.

The lack of positive scientific progress amongst the anti-evolutionist community has, in my opinion, much more to do with the nature of Intelligent Design itself rather than “Darwinism”. 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so: For archeologists the existence of human beings that have long gone and done their stuff in the depths of time is a given: Archeology doesn’t seek to explain humanity; humanity is axiomatic in that discipline. Thus, given the highly complex and inscrutable causal agent that human culture is, it is no surprise that for archeologists artifacts such as Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, Avebury, Carnac and the like are going to be difficult to interpret and aspects of their purpose and methods of construction may forever remain a mystery, lost in the mists of time. In Theistic Design Theory it is God that is axiomatic and clearly we are postulating here a far more complex, mysterious, inaccessible and alien an object than even ancient human cultures. It follows, then, that if living things were directly engineered via some second creative dispensation over and above physics, it is likely that the exact processes involved will forever remain a mystery. Moreover, making predictions about what that Infinitely Strange Entity has done and for what purpose is also likely to be a very hazardous hit and miss affair: Who knows, He/She/It might even fancy splicing in a bit of “junk DNA” into the genome for inscrutable reasons; God, after all, moves in mysterious ways, as any faith worth its salt understands.

Therefore those who believe that life is a result of a second creative dispensation will just have to accept that like archeology it is in the nature of their discipline that that discipline is likely to make a lot less progress than even prehistoric archeology. It is therefore grossly unjust to blame evolutionists for the slow progress in ID.

I’ll confess that I am myself an Intelligent Design Creationist* and therefore I’m postulating the existence of an “Ultimate Origins” object (or entity) far more complex and in principle far more inaccessible, and therefore far more subject to the vagaries and foibles of imaginative construction than anything an evolutionist like Larry Moran might have to handle; he only deals in law and disorder. I have to deal with the Bible and as people who are in touch with reality know all too well, there are as many Bible interpretations as there are Christian sects.

So, I say, let’s leave Larry Moran and other gentleman atheists a little bit of slack shall we?

Footnote

* I actually favour a single dispensation creation paradigm (that is physics; but being a physics phanatic may make me a little biased, however) although I take the criticisms of sensible ID theorists like William Demsbki seriously and believe those criticisms need to be properly and dispassionately engaged.

Silbury Hill. Wiltshire, England.