There is a long tradition of Bayes theorem being used in discussions about the probability of God. I've never been very keen on using Bayes to "prove" God's existence: I expressed my reservations in this short paper where I discussed the use of Bayes Theorem by Christians Roger Forster and Paul Marsden in their book Reason and Faith. In this connection, however, I noticed this post by Christian Blogger James Knight where once again we see God and Bayes appearing together.
Well, in this instance I didn't want to get embroiled with the subject of God and Bayes, but in my correspondence with James I picked up on a technical issue which obliquely impinged upon his post.
The theorem that interested me can be expressed as follows....
If
P(A) < P(A|B)
....then it follows that....
P(B) < P(B|A)
....where P(A) and P(B) are the unconditional probabilities of A and B respectively and P(A|B) and P(B|A) are the respective conditional probabilities of A and B.
As per my practice in my paper on randomness I'm going to use Venn diagrams. But Such an approach implicitly assumes my frequentist interpretation of probability, an interpretation I won't attempt to justify here.
In terms of a Venn diagram the relationship of A and B will in general look something like this....
Here the area labelled A represents the set of possible cases with property A and the area B represents the set of possible cases with property B. This Venn diagram is imagined to reside in a large domain of a total number of possible cases of T.
Now, if N(A) = number of cases with property A, then the unconditional probability of A is given by P(A) where...
P(A) = N(A) / T
If the number of cases with property B is N(B) and the number of cases where B and A overlap is expressed as N(A|B) = N(B|A), then the probability of A given B, P(A|B), equates to....
P(A|B) = N(A|B) / N(B)
Now we postulate that:
P(A) < P(A|B)
Expressed in frequentist terms we can write that as.....
N(A) / T < N(A|B) / N(B).
We now multiply both sides of this inequality by N(B) and this gives......
N(A) N(B) / T < N(A|B)
Now divide both sides of the latter inequality by N(A) and this returns.
N(B) / T < N(A|B) / N(A)
But N(A|B) = N(B|A) and so the above inequality becomes....
N(B) / T < N(B|A) / N(A)
Expressed in terms of probabilities the latter inequality can be written as.....
P(B) < P(B|A)
....and this inequality has thus been proved from our first postulate which was...
P(A) < P(A|B)
In other words:
P(B) < P(B|A) => P(A) < P(A|B).
*****
James was concerned that the apparent symmetry of this result is contrary to his intuition that the general case is far from symmetric. However this intuition of asymmetry is backed up by the following special case where we have....
From this diagram we see that B=>A (i.e. B implies A with certainty). But clearly given A the probability of B, depending the relatives sizes of the two sets A and B, may be quite low. This may be the kind of asymmetry that James is thinking of.
I ran the story below 18 years ago in 2006, back in the days before I had formed a conceptual framework for dealing with conspiracy theorism. The story is in fact my tongue-in-cheek retelling of the "Philadelphia Experiment" as told by Anti-gravity aficionado, Tim Ventura. Well, I call him an "Anti-gravity aficionado" because that was then when he ran a websitre called "American Anti-Gravity": Since, Tim's actually moved on, enhanced the gravitas of his image by wearing a tie & suit rather than T-shirts and now has a YouTube channel where he interviews investigators and technologists who work on, to put it nicely, risky avant-garde science; that is, science at the boundaries of the accepted mainstream; some might call it "fringe-science", still others would call it pseudo-science! It's risky because professional dabblers in these borderline paranormal connections are putting their reputations and careers at risk
Tim Ventura's original telling of the "Philadelphia Experiment" can be found here. I have to confess that the only Ventura interview I've watched was the one with Kevin Knuth whose fair-minded reasonableness actually did impress me.
Some years time ago, whilst I was working as a programmer, a software engineer who was aware of my physics background approached me and asked if I knew anything about LCR circuits. The outcome of the ensuing conversation was that I promised I would give him some information on the theory of these circuits, and subsequently I provided him with a couple of sheets of equations. He never did tell me just why he wanted this information. I knew him to be accomplished in both hardware and software engineering and I guessed he was engaged on some private hardware project. In time he left the company, but that was not the last I heard of him. Some years later I happened across an engineering magazine containing an article where he was being hailed as an inventor of a new device. The device? - A dimmer switch for fluorescent lighting. That’s a bit like managing to invent a tin of stripped paint. The magazine article claimed that my friend had been told that such a device was against the laws of physics.
Although I don’t think there really was any contravention of the laws of physics here, this engineer's attitude is in many ways typical of his class. He now has a consultancy and in his publicity material we read of: “ ….our radical and positive attitude. Where others might say ‘it's not possible’, we'll take up the challenge to inquire, improve and innovate.” As a theorist I like to keep an eye on the practical inventors; if anyone is going to test the laws of physics to breaking point it’s the engineers and inventors – their eye is on what they can actually achieve and not on what the laws of physics tells them they can’t do. They tinker around until they get what they want or stumble across something new, and if they manage to achieve this by dispensing with the laws of physics, so be it!
Perpetual motion has long been an interest of engineers and inventors, and the modern version of the perpetual motion aficionado can found amongst the “zero-point energy” web sites. The “zero-point energy” enthusiasts are not actually striving for perpetual motion as such, for their hope is now grounded in fundamental physics and they are seeking to harvest an inexhaustible supply of free energy by extracting it from the quantum fluctuations of space. These web sites are not for the girls – they don’t present sensitive green schemes that modestly gather energy from nature’s gentler and familiar forces of wind, wave and water, but instead these are very masculine projects that aim to hunt down and wrench energy from nature by exposing her deepest secrets. It is a boys story of daring do, a venture into the unknown for treasure, exceeding great treasure. And it’s not all amateurs: Professor Martin Fleishmann of cold fusion fame probably fits into this category.
However, my favourite cutting edge engineer-inventor web sites, for obvious reasons, are the antigravity sites. If there is such a thing as gravitational anomalies that break the mold of current gravitational theory then these men stand a good chance of finding them. Prominent among the antigravity workers is Tim Ventura. Dubbed as “The Linus Torvalds of Antigravity” he is the designer and constructor of the high voltage lifters popular amongst garage-based inventors (See leading picture accompanying this post). These ‘lifters’ are reckoned by some to demonstrate an antigravity effect, although it has to be said that the physics of these lifters looks suspiciously like the well-known ion wind effect rather than a true gravitational anomaly.
As well as constructing lifters Ventura spends a lot of time researching the background of antigravity, and he mixes with some colourful characters and tells some very colourful stories. One story he reports is so fantastic that it has provided material for film producers. It is a story of intrigue, misunderstood geniuses, secret Nazi projects, heroic refugee scientists, cover-ups, governmental conspiracies, sci-fi technology, flying saucers, you name it. It’s the physics version of The DaVinci Code, an admixture of all the ingredients of block-buster cinema. Does real life ever bring together all this in one convenient concentrate? It does in Tim's stories.
***
The story starts with that now legendary theoretical genius, Einstein. After developing his space-time curvature theory of gravity Einstein went on to attempt the development of a unified field theory that would incorporate electromagnetism; this much is well known. It is also well known that this had the effect of marginalizing Einstein from the mainstream of physics as the new kids on the block went on to develop quantum theory, a theory toward which Einstein expressed diffidence. Hence, the picture of Einstein in his later years is that of solitary genius working by himself into old age on a now forgotten project, a project that many today would regard as the work of a has-been. It is at this point that Ventura’s less substantiated narrative takes over. Taking up the testimony of some of his mysterious contacts Ventura hints that Einstein’s efforts to create a unified field theory were at least partly successful and when he escaped Nazi Germany and fled to America Einstein left a colleague in Germany who handed over the details of this theory to the Third Reich. The Nazis set up a research park under SS chief, Hans Kammler (pictured) where they endeavored to make use of Einstein’s unified field theory to develop new superiority weapons. Like "The DaVinci Code" Ventura’s story has real sites that you can actually visit and ponder the mystery. The research park is in Poland and you can enter its dank underground workshops. Above these workshops on the surface is a strange concrete construction (pictured), which, provided you have flying-saucers in mind, looks suggestively like a flying-saucer launch pad. In fact it looks like a modern-day Stonehenge and thereby accrues all the associated mystique of that much debated ancient structure.
The Nazis, it seems, did not succeed in bringing about a practical result. Instead the research park was overrun by the Russians, but not before one of the top scientists escaped to America. This scientist then provided vital input toward secret American military projects of which the most notorious was the infamous Philadelphia Experiment.
So, what was the Philadelphia Experiment? It was an experiment that, like all promethium tamperings with the fundamentals of nature, went horribly wrong. It was intended that via an application of Einstein’s unified field theory rays of light would be bent round an object in such a way as to give it a cloak of invisibility. However, instead of merely providing a cloak of invisibility the experiment succeeded in teleporting the test object! And what was the test object? Was it an experimentally controlled carefully quantified block of metal? No. Was it a fly that accidentally got trapped in the apparatus? No. Was it a laboratory rat? No. Was it a tank? No. Was it some brave volunteer? No. It was nothing less than a whole battleship, crew and all! (USS Eldridge – pictured) Today there is a cast of colorful characters flitting in and out of the shade who are supposed to have some sort of connection with and/or knowledge of this experiment and know a lot more than they are letting on. Tim Ventura, of course, has had contact with some of these actors and like a modern day Tintin he is helping to bust the Governmental cover up and conspiracy surrounding the experiment.
I like Tim Ventura; he’s ambitious, he’s bright, he’s freelance, he’s fair-minded and he thinks big, but he has, perhaps, taken the male hankering after the Boys own adventure just a little too far. I recommend Tim's site, if like me, you find fiction rather tame compared to stuff that adds an extra twist by inextricably tangling fact with, let’s just say, some creative interpretations (a bit like the Jack the Ripper Dairies!) and thus presents the investigator with the interesting challenge of trying to extract the true story. Unfortunately, although I am a gravity investigator myself, I can’t come anywhere near matching this kind of drama, and this may be why I have to tell you about other people's adventures rather than my own. The story of my own encounter with the romantic force of gravity is utterly commonplace and banal. That story would include those holidays spent on the beach at the Norfolk seaside resort of Hemsby as I reflected on the problem of gravity, a problem that I increasingly felt was coming my way. Whilst the Children played in sand and sea I, between sips of tea from a vacuum flask, spent many hours with binoculars looking out to sea, pondering with amazement the bulging curvature of the planet Earth that becomes so apparent when good binoculars are used. I have always found that sight breath taking. To see the Earth as a planet from a height of just a few feet above sea level added a palpability to Arthur C Clarke’s technically competent 2001 trilogy of interplanetary travel, a trilogy I read through on more than one occasion during those Hemsby beach holidays. That’s about as near I got to intrigue and high adventure during my forays into Gravitational theory. Boring? No doubt, but then I can only tell it as it is.
An extract from Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" published in 1867
A friend of mine sent me this link to an article entitled "Christianity is Collapsing" by an atheist who is triumphant about the decline of Christianity in America as measured by statistics. These statistics are no surprise to me, of course, and any case we have a long term decline in the UK although it would be wrong to call it a "collapse" - that's hopeful rhetoric among some entrenched anti-Christians. Of particular interest to me is just how much some of the recent eccentric expressions of Christianity are bound up with this decline (Viz: extreme right-wing fundamentalism, young earthism, geocentrism, flat earthism, Christian conspiracy theorism, fideism, gnosticism, Covid denial, anti vaxxers, anti-climate change lobby, the Trump followers etc). Anyway here was my reply.
The overall stats are likely correct as it concurs with other stats I've heard about. Of course a vested interested atheist is going to use emotive terms like "collapse" to describe this trend, terms which really describe his hopes rather than what actually may come to pass in due course. These social trends tend to be chaotically cyclic as the relevant variables are coupled into non-linear feedback loops.
What is referred to as "Christianity" actually resolves into at least three groups; fundamentalist, non-fundamentalist evangelicals and liberal (Further sub divisions are possible, no doubt!*). Along with atheists we then have population flows between these groups plus kids growing up and identifying with one or the other group and people dying from all groups. What the net result and the true story is behind it all that would require a lot of stats studies to find out.
If there is some kind of polarising trend going on with a net loss from a broad church of Christian persuasions then as often happens in a period of crisis of confidence fundamentalism tends to consolidate itself and become more extreme & self assertive by way of reaction. Fundamentalists gain from anti-establishment & counter-cultural feelings and the disaffection which goes together with a puzzling social milieu. For example there has been a recent growth in flat earth Christian fundamentalism; they might well portray that small increase as a recovery and restoration of the true faith, congratulate themselves and see it as the start of a success story! They will also likely blame Christians who don't follow their particular brand of fundamentalism for the decline in Christianity (as does Ken Ham for example).
But just how can we measure the number of people these fundamentalist clowns, who see themselves as the epitome of true faith, are alienating, putting off and becoming hostile toward Christianity? They certainly put me off and I'm a Christian, so I guess they must also alienate a lot of people who might otherwise give at least a little space to the faith. There are some fundamentalist to atheist conversion testimonies out there telling us that young earthism and its scientific failure was their reason for converting to atheism.
America (on which the article in based) seems to be a very passionately polarising sort of country, especially at the moment; the extreme right, including the Christian right, are thoroughly disaffected from the establishment, culturally & politically. The consolidation of a cranky fundamentalism which is a disparate mix of young earthism, flat earthism, conspiracy theorism and all sorts of eccentricities is to my mind likely to be one of the factors behind the general cultural run-down of the faith and its alienation from the wider populace. But coupled feedback relationships abound in society and fundies of all brands will be reacting to the extremes of the opposite side; extreme and unreasonable anti-theists, Marxists & postmodernists also have a culpability here. The only good news is that such cybernetic couplings usually involve cycles. So wait for a swing back! Let's remember, for example, that atheism welcomes one to a potentially empty, nihilist, meaningless, purposeless, postmodern and random world! There will be a reaction to that!
Footnote
* I suppose you'd have to include Catholics in this mix among many others (e.g. Mormons)
The above video is a short clip of professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones foul-mouthing-off about Donald Trump, of whom he is "so sick". It's not surprising then that the video starts with this warning:
Warning: This video contains explicit langauge
The video goes on to tell us that:
Infowars Alex Jones has made millions of dollars by courting Trump's base.
In January of 2019, Jones told an interviewer that he was "sick" of Donald Trump.
On February 20, 2021, the Washington Post reported that federal investigators were probing the degree to which Jones and other extremists may have influenced those who stormed the Capitol building in Trump's name.
We then hear from Alex himself:
Part of me - the selfish part - wishes I'd never met Donald Trump, wishes I'd never met Roger Stone. Because unlike previous things I'd done that were game-changing, those were just time-space continuum reflections of the third big change I was gonna be involved in. And that was bringing Donald John Trump into [unintelligible]. Just let me say that again: that's an awesome - into office. Because this is - you guys asking really good questions - this is gonna be a really good thing. But I'm going to say it again in a minute [unintelligible]. It's the truth - I'm just going to say it - that I wish I never would've fucking met Trump. I wish it never would have happened. And it's not that the attacks that I've been through. I'm so sick of fucking Donald Trump man. God, I'm fucking sick of him. And I'm not doing this because it's like I'm kissing his fucking ass, you know, it's just like I'm sick of it.
Do it in a minute.....[That is, do the interview?]
Here's my interpretation of the Trump-Jones relationship.
Both Donald and Alex stood to gain from a cordial meeting: Donald could secure the support of Alex' followers and Alex could derive kudos and plausibility from Donald; it may also have helped Alex widen his own support base.
Notice that Alex is so convinced of how awesome is his work and egotistical enough to believe that it was him who help put Donald into office (That's what Alex means by "game changing"). Alex may or may not be right about that as far as my information goes: If you took away the Jones' vote I really don't know how it might have affected the 2016 election, an election that was after all a close run thing whatever Donald might claim. But whatever, Alex appears to believe that Donald owes him the presidency.
However, in the power stakes Alex was by far the weaker partner in the mutual back scratching relationship. Donald, once in power, had no further need of Alex and so he retuned no further favours and I guess largely ignored Alex. When Alex met Donald he gave something away, namely he sealed the approval of his support base for Trump and he wanted a pay back for what he perceived as helping to deliver the Trump presidency; but he didn't get satisfaction. Alex now regrets his meeting with Donald who he feels failed to return the compliment.
It's likely that Trump has never believed the insane fantasy world that Jones' peddles (in fact does Jones himself believe it?) but what the hell, he had got from Jones what he wanted. Moreover, Trump also had the QAnon conspiracy theorists on his side. Their boundless flattery, their lionisation of him and the heroic role they gave Trump in their delusional world must have satisfied even the planet sized ego of Donald J Trump. For Trump Jones was a useful idiot, for a while. But Jones felt he had been dumped and he was angry, very angry by the look of it; so angry that he had to calm down before he could start the interview. Unless Trump deigns to toss Jones a few more crumbs Jones won't be "kissing [Trump's] fucking ass" any more! I don't suppose Donald will miss that given the number of his supporters who appear to be queuing up to "kiss his fucking ass"!
Note 1: I haven't yet heard that any conspiracy theorists are claiming the above video to be a deep fake!
I was intrigued by this post on Uncommon Descent which seems to be veering toward. an idealist philosophy. My own take on the nature of reality tends toward Berkeleyian idealism in so far as reality is a meaningless concept without an up and running mind (chiefly God's mind). But it is announced on UD as if this is a startling revelation when in fact its old hat! Is it a coincidence that my post here has recently had 8 hits?
The UD supremo, Barry Arrington whose performance hasn't impressed me (see here and here) comments that he thinks a solipsistic philosophy is entailed when in fact it certainly isn't: As a man of the cloth Berkleley could hardly have been a solipsist!
This post on UD may actually be a step in the right direction because as a rule, encouraged by the likes of Arrington, the de facto IDists tend toward a naive mind vs matter materialism and this is all part of their spurious a natural forces vs God intelligent agency dichotomy.
For more of my views on idealism see this specific post:
This is the third part of a series where I have been following young earthist attempts at solving their star light problem. Part 3 is well over due: I published part 1 in July 2017 and part 2 in July 2018. I have to confess that I feel that refuting these clowns clever people wastes so much time and therefore my motivation is not high given that I could be doing stuff that's more interesting and constructive.
I've been using the Answers in Genesis Star Light page to follow their (lack of) progress. See the following link for the AiG Star Light page.
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/
I had intended in this part to look at John Hartnett's star light "solution" which tries to build on Jason Lisle's sequential creation model of ever decreasing concentric creation circles with the Earth at the centre of this concentric sequence*. However, I've recently come across an AiG article by Danny Faulkner, Ken Ham's very tame astronomer. This article charts the (lack of) progress by young earthists on the star light question and lists the very disparate salient "solutions" to date....so I thought I had better take a look at this stock taking exercise. From Faulkner's list of "solutions" it appears that his own proposal is still among the latest and AiG favoured answers (see part 2) and it has picked up the name "Dasha". See here:
Faulkner tries to put the best possible complexion on the catalogue of disparate and desperate failed endeavours: Viz: Young earthists have lots of irons in the fire with more to come so perhaps one day someone will come up trumps. In his own words Faulkner concludes:
When all is said and done, this
alleged problem of distant starlight does not seem as problematic for the
biblical creationist. Researchers have several options that can solve this
problem, so it is not a problem for a young universe. Furthermore, we want to
encourage researchers currently working on these projects.
But from a big-picture
standpoint, no one outside of God completely understands all the aspects of
light (or time for that matter). It acts as a particle and in other instances
acts as a wave, but we simply cannot test both at the same time. This dual behavior
is still an underlying mystery in science that is simply accepted in practice.
The more light is studied, the more questions we have, rather than answers.
Such things are similar in the
theological world with the deity of Christ (fully man and fully God). Even the
Trinity is a unique yet accepted mystery (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one God
but three persons). And in science, there is the “triple point” of water, where
at one temperature and pressure, water is solid, liquid, and gas at the same time.
Light is truly unique in its
makeup and properties, and with further study perhaps we can be “enlightened”
to understand this issue in more detail. Regarding the distant starlight issue,
there are plenty of models that have some promising elements to solve this
alleged problem, and we would leave open future models that have not been
developed yet (and we would also leave open the miraculous).
But as we consider the
light-travel-time problem, we frequently overlook the immensity of the creation
itself. The sudden appearance of space, time, matter, and energy is a
remarkable and truly miraculous event. This is something that we humans cannot
comprehend at all. Compared to creation, the light-travel-time problem is not
very big at all.
This is basically the kind of distracting bafflegab which seems to be effective on Faulkner's science challenged audience, an audience who are by and large so dependent on AiG's gurus. In essence Faulkner's conclusion amounts to this: We don't understand God and the Trinity and we don't understand light and light is so mysterious anyway. But never mind your young earthist science gurus have the matter in hand and have got plenty of promising (but mutually contradictory!) irons in the fire and there may be many more irons to come. And in the last resort we can scrub all that and fall back on the miraculous. Star light is not really a very big problem at all. So just keep hanging on in there! As I have remarked in part 2 I have not been very impressed by Faulkner's work. See part 2 for my reasons. His best work seems to be that of disproving flat earth theory.**
Faulkner, like other young earthists, uses the technique of distraction to redirect attention away from these failed models by claiming that young earthism's star light problem is on a par with Big Bang's horizon problem:
The Secularists Have the Same
Sort of Problem. The opposition rarely realizes
that they have a starlight problem, too. In the big-bang model, there is the
“Horizon Problem,” a variant of the light-travel-time problem.4 This is based
on the exchange of starlight/electromagnetic radiation to make the universe a
constant temperature. In the supposed big bang, the
light could not have been exchanged and the universe was expected to have many
variations of temperature, but this was not the case when measured. Such
problems cause many to struggle with the bigbang model, and rightly so.
But Christian old earthists don't have to subscribe to Big Bang and inflationary theories which attempt to solve the horizon question: Just as an example: It is possible for an old Cosmos Christian creationist to simply postulate that the background microwave uniformity we see in the heavens is simply a consequence of a God ordained boundary condition on creation i.e. an initial dense quasi-uniformity - a consequence if the cosmos is initially randomly but densely distributed. The horizon problem doesn't exist in an old-cosmos-random-boundary-condition model and of course in this old cosmos model star light arrival isn't a problem. But for the young earthist the star light issue remains serious and as I have remarked before it is a very basic problem, one that even a naive naked eye astronomer becomes aware of when (s)he looks up and sees the Andromeda galaxy. Big bang problems apart, the young earthist star light conundrum remains outstanding even for the local universe let alone for more distant parts: How did the light from Andromeda traverse 2 million light years of space? The young earthist star light problem exists for local objects as close as Andromeda where the horizon question isn't an issue. One doesn't have to have any views on the exact nature of the "t ~ 0" creation to understand the young eathist's headache. In drawing attention to the difficulties with inflationary theory Faulkner seems to forget the old adage that two wrongs don't make a right.
Anyway I'll leave it at that for moment. In the meantime to make up for the deficiencies in young earthist thinking Ken Ham will no doubt persist with his religious bullying and continue to intimidate, misrepresent and smear all those Christians and people he disagrees with. See here, here, and here, He will also continue to convey a distorted view of young earthist history. See here.
Postscript
There is one aspect of the young earthist's efforts that I can applaud and this is the whole rationale behind their strenuous attempts to solve their star light problem; that is, most them accept that positing an in-transit-creation of light messages transgresses creative integrity. Danny Faulkner puts it like this:
The reason many do not accept the
light in transit idea is that starlight contains a tremendous amount of
detailed information about stars. For instance, stars have been known to blow
up into supernovas like SN 1987a. Had this merely been starlight in transit,
then what we saw would not have represented a star or a supernova, but instead
merely light arriving at our eye to appear as a star and then a supernova. In
other words, the star that was observed before the supernova could not have
come from the actual star. If the light in transit idea is correct, then the
light was encoded on the way to earth to make it look like an actual star. In
that case, the supernova itself did not really happen but amounted to an
illusion, sort of like a movie.
Many have suggested that if this
were the case, then most stars are not stars. The implication is that God would
be deceptively leading us to believe they were stars, when in fact they are
illusions of stars. The idea of light in transit was widely popular among
creationists for some time, but now many reject this idea because it seems far
too deceptive. Footnotes: * Hartnett's work here is somewhat of a departure: Usually young earthists clear the ground and start over again with a new solution that branches out into a completely different direction. ** But see here where Faulkner comes out on the side of establishment science regarding the distribution of quasars and the expanding universe.
...trouble is I can't help but laugh. I have said it before and I say it again: As PZ Myers, the cleverly sarcastic, cynical and abrasive atheist confronts and comments on some of the cheerfully weirdest fish who float around on the web, I find a sublime form of comedy. I sometimes wonder if the anti-theist Myers is in a kind of hell already and is having paraded before him, for his utmost torment, some of the most annoying, frustrating and crankiest characters the world has ever produced. An endemic crackpotism seems to be part of the human predicament and Myers has a particularly low tolerance for it: Anticipating and watching his reaction and reading his comments as he is tortured by the latest extreme wackaloon who flits across the line of sight is some of the best humor I can think of. Perhaps I'm just sadistic.
Two of his latest stories don't disappoint (See here and here). Firstly there is the ever vile and utterly debased Alex Jones with a line of conspiracy theorism only rivaled and exceeded for crankiness by the deranged David Ike. Myers latest blog on Jones tells us that Facebook wants to crack down on fake news and yet is allowing Jones to remain on Facebook peddling his line in baroque fantasy. Quoting Myers:
Which one of these InfoWars claims can’t be demonstrated to be false? How stupid are the people at Facebook?
I would like to know which of these Mark Zuckerberg thinks might be true. I want to see his personal testimonial for each and every one of them, or I’m calling shenanigans on the frauds at Facebook.
I was aware of some of the daft delusions listed above, but not all of them. Nice to have a list for the record. Thanks PZ! Well, I might agree with Facebook actually; if you crack down on people like Jones you may be playing into their hands. That's the dilemma. In someways Jones, who professes a Christian faith, is a caricature of the fundamentalist Christian witness which has a tendency toward conspiratorial fantasy and a sense of being surrounded by total & utmost depravity. For example, Jones gross and fantastic stories are reflected by Kent Hovind and the like. See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqcV5acuYic
And of course Ken Ham does not mince his words when it comes to accusing even "fellow" Christians of heinous sin. See here.
The second post by Myers informs us that the Turkish Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar has been arrested by the Turkish authorities. Oktar is a rabid anti-evolutionist who appears to mercilessly crib much of his material from US creationism. Oktar doesn't have a large eye catching exhibit like Ken Ham's ark-shaped shed. No, Oktar has another way of catching eyes with a different kind of shape but nevertheless with the emphasis remaining on bows and stern: Viz:
Accompanying Oktar in this picture are, let's call them Oktar's "educational assistants". They help present his anti-evolution programs. When I watched one of Oktar's videos these assistants don't come over as people of independent conviction and frankly these videos are embarrassing and disturbing to watch. Bearing the scars of cosmetic surgery Oktar's "kittens" look like Barbi clones. They move and speak in an highly orchestrated and contrived way; they come over as awkward self-conscious bad actors who are performing under orders. Oktar makes a point of speaking highly of women, but is there more to this than a man speaking highly of the treasures he owns? These women have been turned into sheer ornamentation and yet they must, of course, have their own inclinations, ambitions and aspirations which, no doubt, have been corrupted and exploited by Oktar. I would cry buckets if one of these girls was my daughter.
Leader of
Islamic creationist cult Adnan Oktar and 235 of his followers have been
detained with dawn raids in 5 provinces in Turkey.
"The
British deep state has ordered the operation; I am not upset but
surprised" said Oktar in an interview to Cumhuriyet during his detention.
....there is also this:
dokuz8 NEWS
@dokuz8_EN
Adnan Oktar
was asked why he was detained while being taken to health inspection at Haseki
Training & Research Hospital, "A game of the English
deep-state"
I'm not
quite sure why Oktar should think the UK "deep state" should be
involved, unless it's something to do with Darwin being an upper crust English
country gent. It may also be because the UK, along with France presided over the
demise of the Ottoman empire.
Now compare Oktar's
words with this: On Alex Jones' wiki page Jones is reported as follows:
In March 2018, Brennan Gilmore,
who shared a video he captured of a car hitting anti-racism protesters at the
2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, filed a lawsuit against Jones and six others. According to the lawsuit, Jones said that Gilmore
was acting as part of a false flag operation conducted by disgruntled
government "deep state" employees in furtherance of a coup against
President Trump. Gilmore alleges he has been receiving death threats from
Jones' audience.
Here we have two conspiracy theorists, one Christian and the other Islamic who share a similar paranoid theory about a "deep state". Remember also that Donald Trump hasn't exactly discouraged this line of thinking with his talk of the "swamp" he is going to drain. It is no surprise that Trump and Jones have engaged in mutual support. That Trumpism, Farageism and the appeal to an almost xenophobic nationalism have gained traction is, I suppose, evidence of a more general malaise, a malaise that in some quarters is far more extreme than even conceived by Trump and Farage. To the xenophobic paranoid conspiracy theorist the whole social system is knit together and controlled by covert malign intelligences (See relevant link I give at the end).
We seem to be living in times when a pathological tribal xenophobia is fertile ground for the fantasy narratives promulgated by the likes of Kent Hovind, Steve Anderson, Ken Ham, David Wolfe, William Tapley and various flat Earth fundamentalists and newagers, not to mention Jones and Oktar; it is noticeable that these are all men with a lucrative public power base to satisfy, a power base that competes to a lesser or greater extent with the state. They no longer trust that state and in fact see it as conspiring to pull one over on them and their followers. However, I believe it's not a safe policy to screw down on their delusions with censorship, for if anything the resulting sense of persecution helps justify their distrust and adds credence to their baroque delusions. Baroque these delusions may be but in whatever doctrinal dress they come, whether Christian, Islamic or new age they nevertheless have at their heart a simple us vs them tribalism which catches the disaffected and alienated mood of the day. This malaise can, I believe, eat away at civilization and bring the apocalypse for entirely different reasons:
Answers in Genesis' David Menton writes: "It’s no wonder that for centuries
artists have been at a loss to portray just what the first couple’s abdominal
region looked like—did they or did they not have a belly button? You will note
that artists generally avoided the whole issue by conveniently covering their
midsections with nearby foliage". And as the picture above shows the tradition continues at AiG!
Recently an article appeared on the Christian fundamentalist web site Answers in Genesis entitled Creation and the Appearance of Age by
David Menton. According to an editor’s note this article was first published in
the St.
Louis MetroVoice 5, no. 8 in August 1995. The article is therefore 22 years
old and evidence that the same tropes go round and round in fundamentalist
circles without needing a great deal of modification. The reason why the same well worn arguments and articles are sufficient for a fundamentalist ministry is
because they are not trying to convince the academic elite – which they’ve written off as a satanically
inspired conspiracy – but rather they
are selling their ideas to an uncritical technically challenged audience who
can’t, won’t or don’t have time to think things through for themselves. As long
as this audience can see some semblance of plausibility, technicality and
academic authority in the articles coming out of a fundamentalist ministry
those articles have done their job and sold themselves.
I’ve seen it many times: The paranoid assumption of hard-line
fundamentalism is that Christians are in an unrelentingly evil, totally depraved
world where every activity that doesn’t fall within the scope of some favoured fundamentalist
faction is suspect and cannot be trusted – even other
Christians who are outside that faction; in fact especially other Christians
outside that faction. A fine example of this institutionalized paranoia is AiG’s boss Ken Ham: Christian opponents
of Ham’s word are condemned by him as heretics following man’s word rather than
God’s word (because
effectively Ham equates his word with God’s Word). In this context of irrational
suspicion it is no surprise that fundamentalism is fertile ground for conspiracy theorism and some
fundamentalists are actually moving into flat earth theory with its need to adopt a
very strong form of conspiracy theorism to make such a theory work – this is an extremum outcome of the social paranoia that drives fundamentalism. In flat earth fundamentalism
we have a subculture who are rejecting some very basic established science, science worked out at least 2500 years ago.
As far as I can tell this is actually part of a social malaise which extends
beyond Christian fundamentalists to
New Agers. I fear for civilisation. But I digress.
I’ve looked at the question of fundamentalism's “appearance of age” before. See these
posts:
I’ve also done a series on a related question; namely, the bogus dichotomy
mindlessly and endlessly repeated by Ken Ham that observational science is
fundamentally distinct from historical science. In support he often quotes
technology as an application of “observational science”. He clearly has never
had to do any substantial trouble shooting of problems of complex technological
artifacts where the observable records and traces left by the fleeting passage
of an artifact through history are important in the diagnosis of those problems. A
similar point applies to medical science as it attempts to diagnose organic
pathology. For my series on this false dichotomy, which is a core doctrine of Ken Ham's anti-science stance, see here:
Below I interleave quotes from Menton's article with my own comments. We read the following at the start of Menton’s article:
Why, I wonder, would God spend an
entire six days doing a miracle that would require of Him literally no time at
all? Think about it: How much time does a miracle take? How much time, for
example, did Jesus take for His first miracle when He changed water into the
finest quality wine (as judged by a professional steward) for the wedding at
Cana? The answer, of course, is no time at all—He told the servants to fill the
pots with water and serve it! Still, the Bible clearly reveals God took six
whole days to initially create everything to perfection; so, we must either
take God at His Word, or presume to stand in judgment of all Scripture.
MY COMMENT: No! We cannot conclude that miracles take no
time at all: It may seem from a human perspective that a miracle is absolutely
instantaneous but we really don’t know just how divisible time is; who knows
how many events are spread out over a period too small to register on human
time scales during, say, a water-into-wine
miracle? If we could zoom in on the time coordinate and see how God sees it,
a second could be an aeon in terms of the number events it contains as water
converts to wine.
But even if the miracle took no time at all there still remains the
question of divine time as measured
in terms of the complexity involved in the assembling of the event in God’s mind.
My guess is, however, that fundamentalists tend to subliminally view God as a
super magician who need only say “abracadabra” and stuff jumps into sight thus
consuming neither divine time nor divine thought. As one evangelical song has
it“[God] Spoke the stars into existence”.
The belief in a deity who just has to
speak high-level commands that don’t break down into a myriad lower level
activities is a fundamentalist trope. This is magic. That Menton probably has
this magical paradigm in mind, at least subliminally, is evident when he
writes:
Think of any one thing that our
omnipotent God might instantly create out of nothing by the power of His Word.
That is, sheer word power rather than thinking power creates things.
This is magic. Perhaps the theological lesson of Genesis' mythological six-day creation is that it tells us that God is not a lazy pagan magician who can just sit back and speak stuff into existence but a workman who assembles his creations.
Notice also the fundamentalist inquisitional tactic in the last sentence
of the quoted paragraph. Here Menton stuffs a straw-man confession into the
mouths of those who wouldn’t agree with him; namely, if you don’t agree with
Menton about those six literal days then you are presuming to stand in judgement
on the Almighty Himself. Fundamentalist paranoia means that they are unwilling
to accept that those who disagree with them do so with a clear conscience and don't see themselves as contradicting the Almighty. (This inquisitional tactic of using straw-man confessions has also been used by fundamentalist Jason Lisle)
The appearance of age in the
things that God created is a much-debated issue in contemporary Christian
scientific circles. Can God—or more accurately—would God create something that
at the very moment of its creation has the appearance of age? The short answer
to this question may be: How else? How, indeed, could God create anything that
did not appear to us to be aged (like a fine wine) at the moment of its
creation.
MY COMMENT: Written in 1994 this article is showing its
age, or should I say “maturity”? I think the AiG editorial staff who decided
to publish this article will find that there are young earthists nowadays who don’t
like the phrase “an appearance of age”
and prefer the vaguer “mature creation” as it has less connotation of God
building in misleading signs about age into His creation (But see
fundamentalist John Byl below).
Menton is wrong: It is possible
to conceive objects which have no "appearance of age" and/or are a-historical. Take for example a parameter
P which measures some aspect of an object where:
P = A T -1
…and where A is a constant and T measures time. Obviously, here P is the
reciprocal of time. If we use this equation then measuring P will immediately
give us calculable age. Of course using Menton’s philosophy this age could be
misleading because God could have created the object of this equation with a
particular value of P, just as he could, according to some fundamentalists, have
created star-light-in-transit. Thus the value of T calculated using the above
equation is then only an “apparent age” according to Menton. However, assuming that the values of T are not
just apparent, then we find that the object at T=0, on the basis of the above
equation, returns an infinity. That is, the object at T=0 is beyond human understanding and humanly speaking to assign an “apparent age” beyond the statement T=0 is
meaningless in this context. Ergo, Menton is wrong about not being able to
create an object without the “appearance of age”. Presumably God can create
such an object.
Another case in point is a Newtonian gravitational system of perfect
billiard ball spheres orbiting one another. This system returns no age at all;
it could have been there forever or it could have been created out of nothing
by God, yesterday; the object is timeless and it betrays no clues as to its
history – it is a-historical, it is ageless.
So in summary we find that some objects show signs of having a history and some
are a-historical. And of course it is likely that some objects are ambiguous and
difficult to fit in either category.
Think of any one thing that our
omnipotent God might instantly create out of nothing by the power of His Word.
……Maybe you thought of a visible
star—depending on its distance from the earth, its light might appear to have
been traveling for over a billion years to reach your eyes. All of these things
would have the appearance of age and an ongoing process at the very moment of
their creation.
MY COMMENT: This
example betrays the dilemma that fundamentalists are in: Do they go the whole
hog with “mature creation” and postulate that star light was created in-transit? Or do they get out their pencils and paper and work out theories consistent
with a 6000 year time scale and yet which give a history to the star light
without having to posit a dubious in-transit creation?
As we have seen in posts on this blog AiG
fundamentalists have recently had a tendency to do their best to drop in-transit
star light creation and give starlight a genuine history of propagation of one
kind or another. However, these efforts have had limited success (See here,
here
and here).
A similar situation exists in regard to continental drift; a fanatical mature creationist
might claim that God created what geologists see as evidences of a history of
drift (such as sea floor magnetic patterns) “as we see them, just like that!”. But recently
there has been a theory submitted by a young earthist of “runaway” continental drift which attempts to fit all
the necessary intervening drifting events into a suitably short time scale. In
order to preserve the rational integrity of God’s creation some young earthists
are at least trying to do some science rather than short cut science with “mature
creation”.
So why do we have these strenuous efforts by fundamentalists who ignore Menton's assertion about the inevitability of the "appearance of age" and attempt to provide histories for objects that are clearly not a-historical? I think it's because they can sense the violation of rational integrity that bland acceptance of an "appearance of age" is liable to lead to.
The Genesis fundamentalist thus faces a difficult question: Which
observed evidences require an historical theory in order to maintain the
rational integrity of God’s work and which can be written off as simply “mature
creation”? Adam’s navel is a case in point. Of this matter Menton comments:
Also let’s not forget the
critically important placenta—its development in the womb necessarily precedes
that of the baby so that it can serve the function of a temporary lung, kidney,
liver, gut, and endocrine system until the baby develops its own. It’s no
wonder that for centuries artists have been at a loss to portray just what the
first couple’s abdominal region looked like—did they or did they not have a
belly button? (You will note that artists generally avoided the whole issue by
conveniently covering their midsections with nearby foliage.)
MY COMMENT: Ken Ham who, as I noted in my Beyond
Our Ken series, confidently claims
that Adam had no navel and yet accepts that the trees of Eden would have been
created with a bogus history of yearly growth rings. Menton, however, being a less bullish authority than
Ham, like the artists he speaks of, doesn’t know where to go on the navel question! (See also the picture at the head of this post which has been taken from one of Ken Ham's children's books)
This whole line of thinking gets
us into what is called a “first cause” problem. We live in a “cause and effect”
world, where every action causes a reaction and is itself the result of a
previous action. Everything appears to be an ongoing process for which we are
incapable of really grasping a beginning. This is all popularly expressed in
the age-old question: “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” If we say the
chicken, we will be asked from whence the chicken came; yet if we say the egg,
we will be asked from whence the egg—and so round and round we go. Somewhere,
there had to be a beginning to this cyclical process we call the chicken and
the egg
MY COMMENT: “First causism” has some issues which are
really off-topic in this context so I won’t talk about them here. (But see here). Menton tells us:Everything appears to be an
ongoing process for which we are incapable of really grasping a beginning. But
as my toy town models show there can exist systems/objects for which an antecedent
history is meaningless or is a-historical.
However, in the case of the chickens and egg, as in the question of
Adam’s navel, we find a set of observations where to deny a history violates
the creation’s rational integrity; to postulate a chicken or an egg first is
the biological equivalent of postulating in-transit start-light creation.
Menton concludes with:
We may conclude that the Lord is
captive to neither time nor process.
But God is captive to the Truth and Integrity. Therefore He creates a world with
rational integrity, not a world of belly buttons without placenta or tree rings
without a history of growth or star light without a history of travel. A truthful
God makes a creation of intellectual integrity. But if you are prepared to pass
up this integrity anything goes. For example, Whitcombe and Morris
in The Genesis Flood were quite happy with in-transit photon creation.
As I have said some objects are a-historical (such as two perfect
spheres in Newtonian orbits) and some have clear histories like star light,
sedimentary rocks, tree rings and Adam’s navel. Some objects are in between and
have an ambiguous history, such as an alcohol molecule which can be constructed
in the lab or by fermenting grapes. As
we saw in my “Beyond Our Ken” series fundamentalists
are having problems drawing the line. Some fundamentalists like John
Byl will claim that it is perfectly legitimate for God to create objects with an
appearance of having a bogus history and in any case Byl suggests that God may do
just that to deceive those evil scientists! But as a concession to rational integrity
fundamentalist Jason Lisle will claim that star light has traveled the whole distance
from its source along the radials leading to Earth, although Lisle has to concede that
in-transit photon and graviton creation is needed across non-radial paths. Ken
Ham thinks that Adam had no navel but believes the trees in the Garden of Eden were
created with rings thus having built into them a bogus history of growth and Sun spot minima.
We get poor quality articles
from Ken Ham’s organisation such as we see from David Menton and Danny
Faulkner and yet if one doesn't accept their dubious logic Ken Ham will spiritually
abuse detractors and spit
hell and hamnation in order to spiritually pressure acquiescence. This is the epistemic arrogance
of a brutal primitive spiritual logic that at one time sent people to the stake.
Postscript:
ZakDTV tells us about the lunatic fringe. I fear for civilisation!
.jpg)
