Fancy a World Cruise? No Planks!

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.

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

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.

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.

William “Atheist’s Bane” Craig Shoots Down Another One.

Lawrence Krauss bails out over PZ Myer's blog

Looking at PZ Myers blog down beat posts here and here it seems that the atheists have “lost” another debate with William Lane Craig. OK I’ll accept that debate isn't the ideal medium in which to settle such profound questions as atheism or theism: Smart footwork and tactics may prevail over content. For example, there is the scatter shot tactic whereby one interlocutor fires off a myriad “small targets” in the form of a set superficial claims. Unless the opposing interlocutor has the information at his finger tips and fleetness of foot to intercept and refute each point in turn the impression may be left that he has lost ground. The YEC community, in particular, is adept at assembling a magazine of superficial and ultimately ineffectual points ready to blast off in one big firework display that awes and/or intimidates the simple minded.

I haven’t looked at the debate yet, but let me guess in advance where the atheists fall down: It’s their insistence that “evidence” is everything. No it isn’t; any more than one constructs and learns a language on the basis of the verbal evidence alone: A language can’t be learnt unless one has the preset mental categories and whatnot ready to act as “place holders” for the incoming data. Likewise we have little hope of understanding this Cosmos unless we have the mental prerequisites in place ready to theorize successfully about the data.

Of course, we can then turn the science of observation and theory onto our own mental faculties, but that leads to self referencing issues and atheists in my experience don’t like self-referencing because it’s too philosophical and slippery and it is remarkably free of "empirical handles" (of the "test tube precipitation" standard). But you can bet your bottom dollar that someone as smart as Craig has self-reference off pat and that gives him an edge.

Beyond Our Ken. On Mature Creation. Summing up

The YEC Cosmology: an unintelligible pastiche.

This is the summing up part of my previous posts in this series. The other parts can be found as follows: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In the first part of this series we saw how Ken Ham much prefers to talk about a “mature creation” or a “fully functioning creation” rather than a creation with the “appearance of age”. According to Ken age cannot be determined from an object. However, this nuancing is a piece of evasive chicanery on behalf of the “Answers in Genesis” supremo, because when all is said and done it becomes clear that Ken and AiG are forced to acknowledge that there is such a thing as an “appearance of history” if not an “appearance of age” and this leads to conflicts, contradictions even, within the YEC movement. For Ken and his friends want the imprimatur of doing some science and so when an object displays blatant evidence of having a history they are obliged to explain it - in terms of history, of course. History is a sequence of events and the structure of many objects - such as the layers we see in archeological and geological sedimentation, like the leaves of diary – are difficult to interpret in any other way than as a sequential assembly spaced out over time. YECs will, in many cases, admit this interpretation but it is then down to the YEC theorist to squeeze that sequence into less than 6000 years. For example, YECs have tried to cobble together “naturalistic” cosmological histories that avoid the “bogus history” accesses of some of the early YECs who claimed that star light was created en-route. They also admit that continental drift is a real phenomenon although of course they require it to take place much faster than in mainstream drift theory; similarly, for the cooling of magma intrusions and the formation of lake varves. All this is amounts to a getting away from naive “God made it just like that” beliefs.

An excursion into the science of origins has forced AiG theorists to make informal decisions as to which objects are historical (that is, objects which display evidence of having a historical sequence in their formation) and which objects are a-historical (that is objects which display no evidence of having a history): If AiG are to remain committed to a rational and coherent world they are obliged to explain historical objects, whereas a-historical objects can be claimed to have been created “as is” without violation of evidence of historical sequencing. In making such strenuous efforts to explain the evidence of star light, continental drift, magma intrusions and the like, AiG has effectively cut across Ken’s views: They are admitting that objects do betray at least evidence of history if not an evidence of age. AiG are courting a very basic contradiction within their organization: On the one hand they will deny the evidences of age and yet on the other AiG theorists are busting a gut to explain how blatant evidences of history are consistent with a 6000 year time scale. Their denial that there is such a thing as an “appearance of age” is a piece of self-deceiving sophistry that is belied by their efforts to mobilize AiG technical resources to explain historical objects. Yes, AiG certainly do care about an “appearance of history” in spite of what they may tell you. They care enough about it to have banned Adam’s belly button at AiG!

The AiG policy of making informal decisions about which objects show evidence of an historical sequence that needs interpretation and which do not, is particularly difficult to implement in cosmology. The trouble is AiG only has 6000 years to play with – in fact, probably a lot less than that in many cases. This creates big problems in the heavens where huge objects like galaxies have dimensions thousands of light years across. As we saw in the last part in this series ultra-fundamentalist John Byl betrays the problems his fellow YECs are facing. For example, Byl points out that galaxies appear to have distant parts apparently in gravitational interaction, but with only light speed signaling being available it is difficult to account for these objects without recourse to bogus history theory. But Byl tells his fellow YECs to relax and face the inevitable; some measure of bogus history theory will simply just have to be accepted by YECs, says Byl – it’s the only way to do it and besides its perfectly moral for God to create in this way: For, says Byl, God is using the heavens to justifiabley deceive unbelieving scientists into believing in an old Cosmos. According to Byl the whole cosmic shooting match is an intended sham and scientists have only got themselves to blame for not seeing through it. Byle’s vision is of an incoherent and irrational postmodern universe that ultimately undermines science. His religious devotion to his sect’s belief in a 6000 year old cosmos overrides all other consideration to the point of irrationality.

Deciding whether an object is truly a-historical is extraordinarily difficult given that form in our cosmos so often betrays evidence that is not easily interpreted as anything other than a sign of a sequential assembly. In fact the general AiG concept of a “fully functioning creation” is itself suggestive of history. For the physical algorithms of a functioning creation, when plainly interpreted, are easy to read as evidence of a cosmos that has existed as far back in time as the algorithm can be extended. But, and this is the important point, not all algorithms can be extended indefinitely into the past any more than halting algorithms can be indefinitely extended into the future: In the attempt to reverse an algorithm a point may be reached beyond which the behavior of the algorithm is undefined. At that point we really do have an object which is truly a-historical and has no bogus history that has to be brushed under the carpet; such an object can be created "as is" with creative integrity remaining intact. The alternative is that we follow the AiG line and simply wait on their decisional fiat as to what is a-historical and therefore can be created ex nihilo, and what is historical and therefore demands an historical theory in order to preserve the integrity of creation science.

But let me at least hand it to them: AiG are busting a gut to be scientific and as a result they are getting embroiled in some deep and difficult questions. To some extent I’ll give them credit for it; they are trying to be consistent. But I fancy you will find YECs out there who feel very uneasy about this engagement with science – these are Christians who sense the crypto-gnostic sentiment that authentic spirituality is naturally adverse to science of any kind because it is “man’s knowledge” and therefore profane. The fideists won’t like it: “ …the creationists have fallen into the trap of being Greeks looking for Wisdom and trying to compete wisdom vs. wisdom” I read on one Christian web site. As if to echo the fideist sentiments of Gnostic Christianity, John Byl, in his book “God and Cosmos” says:

In conclusion, while it is clear that various creationist cosmologies can be constructed, it must be acknowledged that most of these models are rather ad hoc, have not been worked out in much detail and often have few distinctive observational implications. As such they are unlikely to convince skeptics (You bet – ed) …..Almost all creationist models ultimately draw upon the concept of mature creation. While this notion may be logically, observationally and theologically unassailable (because God is allowed to deceive us in Byl’s view – ed) it does have one notable scientific deficiency. It offers very little in the way of detailed explanation for specific features of astronomical observation, other than affirming that that is just how God made things. In that sense Big-Bang cosmology, with all its shortcomings, at least attempts to develop a coherent explanation of many observational features. (p 201)

That is the nearest admission I’ve seen from a YEC that the “God did it, just like that” paradigm ultimately undermines the integrity, coherence, and intelligibility of the observational world; even to the point that it can be regarded as a form of divine deception. It is also an admission that Big Bang Theory is a lot better than YEC cosmologies, although he goes on the imply that modern Big Bang theory has “illusory explanatory powers” and is therefore effectively a simulacrum. He also talks about “divinely revealed facts” and yet fails to see that his undermining of the coherency and intelligibility of the cosmos ultimately undermines the integrity of all revelation whether that revelation is based on an interpretation of Biblical writ or the interpretation of any other part of the observed creation.

But like all YECs Byl’s religious egotism prevents him from identifying the nest of wood boring weevils in his own wood pile – namely, his sect’s interpretation of Genesis 1 which he presumes to call “the supremacy of God’s Word”. To hold close to their breast an insidious incoherence is the challenge that a teeth gritting faith sets before itself. It is the badge of an ostentatious piety that they shout from the roof tops. To sectarian minds this is taken as a sign that sets them apart as God’s privileged remnant.

Middlebrow Atheism. Part 4

Continuing my series on naïve atheism:

Video Item 07: Cosmic “Fine Tuning” is not necessarily as fine as theists think. It is conceivable that other very different environments could host (generate?) life. For example it is now thought that the goldilocks zone in the solar system is not the only possible environment for life: Tidal forces on Europa, Jupiter’s satellite, could produce the “black smoker” environment needed to sustain life well outside the goldilocks zone. Similarly, how do we know that changes in the “fine tuning” constants can’t produce a life permitting universe? Alan Guth says he is not impressed by the fine tuning coincidences: We have no way to deduce from a suite of laws whether or not life will occur.

My Comment: The video is at its best and most subtle on this point. There is a significant issue here.

We’ve seen from previous posts in this series that it is very unlikely the laws of physics are merely an artifact of a selective human perspective on a huge maximally disordered super-universe. In fact it looks as though our cosmos is intrinsically constrained to favour order, for whatever reason. Alan Guth says on the video that he has no idea why the laws of physics are what they are, but whatever they are it is clear that those laws support life. In fact the least we can say is this:

1. The laws of physics provide a construction kit of fundamental parts which, given a suitable environment, permit the assembly of complex ordered self perpetuating configurations.

I don’t think many people could disagree with that. It is patently obvious that self perpetuating configurations can exist under our regime of law and disorder (Those configurations are called “life”). The following assertions, however, are stronger, less obvious and more controversial:

2. Given a suitable environment the laws of physics imply the mathematical existence of a class of self perpetuating configurations forming a large connected region in configuration space – that is, any two configurations are separated by a series of incremental configurational changes which constitutes a path through configuration space where every point on that path is a self perpetuating structure.

3. The aforementioned region of configuration space contains some elementary configurations of realistic probability.

The latter two conditions are a requirement of evolution and for that reason they set alarm bells ringing amongst the anti-evolutionists; their commitment is to irreducible complexity which effectively negates assertions 2 and 3 above. Anti-evolutionists will, of course, accept that the cosmos is fined tuned to sustain life, but not that it is fine tuned to generate life. However, since most atheists are evolutionists I’m going to proceed by assuming these assertions are not problematical. I’m running with the atheist mindset here and seeing where it takes us. In order to get a handle on this matter I assume we are only dealing with physical laws covered by the Church-Turing thesis; that is, physical regimes whose functions can be rendered computationally. I also make the assumption that we are only dealing with suites of laws which can be specified using relatively few bits of information.

The video asks the question:

How do we know that changes in the fine tuning constants can’t produce a life permitting universe?

But why ask this question? What difference does its answer make to the atheist position? The answer to the latter questions is, I believe, answered in my last post on Cosmic Symmetry Viz: There is an implicit and instinctual theology at work here which intuits that if it can be shown our cosmos is not a particularly unique case then this helps support the atheist cause, or at least gives the theists a lot less to crow about. In contrast very special and singular conditions strengthen the theist case by giving the cosmos the touch and feel of intelligent contrivance. Hence if it can be shown that life sustaining/generating conditions are a consequence of most systems of physical laws, then it will be no surprise that our particular physics supports life and the problem of life’s existence seems less likely to be the result of intelligent selection.* On the other hand if amongst the possible suites of physical laws life supporting regimes are very rare then the case for intelligence selection (or a “put up job” as Paul Davies once put it) is intuitively strengthened. So, the pertinent question is this: Is our physical regime one of a very rare breed or is it in no way a special case amongst the possible systems of laws?

Trouble is, asking this question is one thing, answering it is quite another. In this connection Alan Guth makes a very apposite observation. He says that given a suite of physical laws nobody knows how to deduce whether or not life will exist as an outcome of those laws. In fact even given our own well known physical laws it is unlikely we could do this in advance. If evolution has occurred, I suspect that it is one of those computationally irreducible processes that Stephen Wolfram talks a lot about – that is, there is no shorter analytical way of showing that a given suite of laws implies evolution other than to simulate evolution in its entirety in a computation. If evolution is computationally irreducible it is no surprise then that Guth (or anyone else for that matter) has no idea how to do the calculation in a shorter number of steps than the process of evolution itself could do it. But it’s even worse than this: Above I have assumed that the suites of physical laws we are considering can be specified using relatively few bits of information; perhaps a few hundred Kbits of information. But even this relatively small number of bits creates a search space far too large to be humanly tractable; there are far too many suites of physical laws for us to find, let alone trial run to see if they generate life.

Given these difficulties it looks to me that the question of whether or not life supporting physical regimes are common place and passé is not going to be easy to answer; in fact it is probably, an intractable problem. So, my conclusion here is that no firm conclusions can be drawn on this subject; at least not at the moment. (But see footnote **)

However, the discussion so far does give us insight into human theological intuitions. If life is a result of the selection from a class of rare life supporting cases when all cases otherwise seem to be equally possible, this is usually taken to be grist to the mill by the ID theorist. By attempting to deny the very singular nature of a cosmic physical regime which clearly at least sustains life the video is effectively acknowledging that the ID theorist’s design detection algorithm has a certain persuasiveness about it; why else would they see the need to downplay the significance of life supporting conditions by proposing that other physical regimes might support life? I suspect that the atheists behind this video feel very uncomfortable with the idea that our universe may be fined tuned in the sense that it has been selected for reification from a remarkably unique class of life supporting scenerios. The atheist’s game here is to promote that idea that a life supporting cosmos is too common place to warrant the “fine tuning” epithet; in showing the need to classify “fine tuning” as “wrong” rather than “not even wrong” they are actually betraying how compelling “fine tuning” can be if and when we should stumble across it.

Footnotes:

* Although, of course, the problem of sheer existence remains open; that is, the old “why is there something rather than nothing?” type question.

**My guess is that if evolution is possible then the physical regimes that support it are very rare indeed. If this guess is correct and if life on planet Earth has evolved then it follows that our universe is governed by a very significant set of laws. This would mean that the cosmos is highly asymmetrical; that is amongst all the possible    physical regimes that seem to have an equal claim to existence our life supporting regime is the one that has, for some reason, been singled out for ontological reification.