Fundamentalist Anti-Science

Modern Genesis fundamentalism is a 20^th & 21^th century construction

 I want to showcase the following quote from a young earthist I shall call “Joe Smith”

 Answers in Genesis doesn't "hate science," many of them ARE scientists. They just hate to see science being used to make up stories about the past when no scientists were there, as an alternative to the plain, simple understanding of Genesis and many other passages in the Bible. Yes, you can be a Christian and believe in Christ while believing in billions of years and life evolving from microbes, but you can't honestly get the billions of years of gradual evolution from reading the Bible, and once you start re-interpreting things because of the claims of "experts" who can't actually PROVE those claims, where do you stop?

This is a fine example encapsulating several fundamentalist habits of mind. I want to unpack the fallacies crammed into this short statement which are in fact symptoms of an anti-science philosophy. The detailed breakdown of Joe Smith's statement can be found here: I don’t think there is anything in this breakdown I haven’t already said before but it brings together in one place several lines of criticism of fundamentalist anti-science.

ADDENDUM 21/05/2019

Here is a very interesting and useful post on Panda's thumb about someone called David MacMillan who was brought up as a young earthist and was very challenged by the star light problem. After much study he realised that no sensible fundamentalist solutions existed and therefore young earthism simply didn't stack up scientifically.  The full story can be read here:

https://medium.com/@davidstarlingm/path-across-the-stars-e8dbf93e4405

Two young earthists contribute to the discussion thread on Panda's Thumb (a Floyd Lee and a Robert Byers) but their contributions are incoherent and more or less simply assert that "God did it, just like that!" and therefore who are we to ask too many questions of an omnipotent God? Ironically their "anti-science" responses which appeal to brute omnipotent authority actually run counter to the many fraught attempts of other young earthists to rationalise the star light conundrum within a young earthist scientific framework  It only goes to show the disarray among young earthists over the question; for it seems that so far none of the attempts by young earthist "scientists" to fix the problem has become the stock answer reached for by the rank and file. 

One final question remains, however, about which I don't yet know the answer. Did MacMillan lose his faith? 

The Quest: Deep Water

Here is some long overdue autobiographical background to this web site and blog. 

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As far back as I can remember I have been enthralled by the mystery and meaning of conscious existence:  It has always seemed to me a most peculiar, remarkable and unjustifiable state of affairs to suddenly find oneself with a level of consciousness complex enough to be able to probe its own existence. It is a mystery which demands attention; but how does one meaningfully present a “solution” to such a mystery when in the final analysis all one can do by way of "explanation" is describe, categorise and offer up inexplicable brute facts? Explanatory narratives which compress the apparent complexities of our world into succinct principles are themselves no more than contingent descriptions that beg the question of absolute origins.  

As a rather solitary child at infant school I used to walk around the playground by myself quite convinced that the other children were evidencing no conscious self-awareness. Those other children were so taken up with one another socially that none showed any evidence that they were, like myself, startled by their own existence and none appeared to be asking any questions. Solitary figures are rare; either that or they are so egocentric they don't notice one another. So, I came to believe that I alone was consciously aware. But how and why was I here with the power to ponder self and the organized and regular pattens that presented themselves to the senses? From a relatively early age these thoughts propelled me on the lifelong quest for meaning & purpose.  This quest started with a deep interest in the physical sciences, but it soon became apparent that these sciences only describe; that is, as it is often couched, they give us the "How", but not the "Why?", if indeed the "Why?" is an intelligible question in this context. Some might say "No" it is not intelligible, but I was banking on my deeper intuitions which answered "Yes" to the intelligibility of that question: After all, the complexities of my conscious cognition were a fundamental existential feature without which the meaning of reality is lost altogether; so, if conscious thought is fundamental to the Cosmos then the question "Why" becomes meaningful.  

With my tendency toward an introverted and egocentric reclusiveness, it took me some time to recognise that all those others, too, had a full complement of consciousness. Although I am no longer a self-centred solipsist I am, however, left with the feeling that the so called “material world” has no substantive existence independent of mind. My view has been and still is that my own conscious patterns and the patterns of consciousness of other beings are the touchstone of reality. In our normal mode of consciousness those patterns are for the most part controlled by a perfect registration between sensations and a systematic and ruthlessly rational mathematical logic, all of which facilitate the definition of mathematical materialism: “Materialism” is just a name for highly rational patterns with a faultless registration.*¹  It is this rationality which facilitates the definition of coherent material objects. This is cognitive positivism.

I have searched for answers in physics, programming, philosophy, psychology, history, the paranormal and above all in Christianity; the latter, to my mind, supplies the nearest to what could be called the meaning of life*². Huge continents of mystery remain, however, but as it turns out this is a very good thing; engaging mystery has become the staple of my mind; without it life would be incredibly dull; with it life becomes an exciting adventure! My web site articles and blog are, as it were, a kind of diary of an explorer who loves dabbling in mystery and logging his thoughts on the subject.  But it’s a good thing that the journey excites me more than the destinations because one can so easily find oneself going down blind alleys or round in circles! For me the exercise is a case of unburdening myself of a cognitive load; without this unburdening process I think I'd have to be committed!

I cannot make claim to being a “writer” per se anymore than an explorer who keeps a scrappy log of his explorations can be called a writer: After all, a true writer is trying to make a connection with an audience. True writing is a social exercise which seeks, above all, communion and community status. A log writer is just writing notes to himself; all part of a rather self-contained perhaps even egocentric enterprise.

It might seem strange that my "explorer's log", which appears on the very public world-wide-web, is only secondarily about currying favour with a readership. Readership and followership are about making social connection and seeking to be coupled into a community. Trouble is, I’m under-motivated when it comes to this kind of thing and I’m not any good at it anyway. No surprise then that my readership is minimal.

So why do I, nevertheless, write publicly? Actually, as it turns out, this is all about defence. If I didn’t have a public presence people would think I do nothing with my time and that I’m just another senior citizen put out to grass with time on his hands and on standby waiting for someone to find him something to do. But even more pertinent, especially if one is involved in Christianity, one finds the world to be full of self-promoting doctrinaire gurus whose gullible followers see them as God’s gift to end all disputes at an authoritarian stroke. When these conceited peacocks and dandies, with their wake of partisan followers, flit across one’s line of sight demanding obeisance it is wise to have one’s six guns loaded and at the ready. So, if you have something immediately to shoot back at these organ grinders and their monkeys, if they should appear, it is one way to keep them at bay. And when they have gone away crying crocodile tears that you’ve lost your salvation because you have paid no more attention to their works as they have to yours, you can then get on with the business of exploring without further interruption.

Exploration is an art form: One’s travels and one’s record of it have a personal aesthetic value.  I am reminded of theologian Don Cupitt’s Artist Theologian concept. None of my writings are primarily for reading by others, although it’s a nice bonus if people take an interest; but then I don’t think I personally can handle too much public attention. The hazard with social linkage is that it attracts further social linkage and as with internet web sites, social linkage is probably governed by a power law: If this (probably) non-linear feedback effect takes off it is possible to find oneself with a large audience and tempted to play to the gallery and therefore tempted by group think. One is then in danger of being compromised. 

Byron

A true explorer can’t live for the accolades that social coupling brings. But in my particular case I can’t expect people to take an interest anyway; for me the journey has been long, meandering, sometimes very tedious and not really very ground breaking; therefore my explorations have to be their own reward. But if I stopped exploring it wouldn’t be long before the men in white had to come and take me away! 

On the subject of exploring the good book says this:

25 And God is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man 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. 27 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. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring. Acts 17:25-28 (See also Hebrews 11:6, Ps 53:2)

Let's take it away then!!

APPENDIX

The video below (Deep Water 2006) is an interesting case study in the psychology of ambition, exploration, and adventuring; it warns of the psychological hazards. In many ways it is a sad story, but salutary. Comparing and contrasting Donald Crowhurst with Bernard Moitessier is an illuminating exercise. Both were very gifted but their motivations were different. In the latter-day writings of Donald Crowhurst we see a man who was desperately trying to restore his ego in the face of his very public catastrophic failure. He was attempting to make sense of the contradictions in his life via his writings, if rather incoherently and the only way out it seems was into delusion. Crowhurst was betrayed by his vested interest in social connection & accolade and that set him up for a fall. Moitessier, on the other hand, was a philosophical loner who loved his work above the social accolades, accolades about which he was ambivalent. He was, however, neglectful of his family as a result. Both men, in the final  analysis, found themselves struggling with their egos in different ways. This is why Phil 2:1-11 is so relevant to the human predicament and, I believe, to the very meaning of life.

I believe I have some empathy with the struggles of both Crowhurst and Moitessier. I can empathise with Moitessier's diffidence toward crowds and attention (Not a fault of Crowhurst's!) but I also empathise with Crowhurst's ambitious, hair-brained and pretentious plan! After all, I thought I was in with a chance with a theory of gravity! But I at least completed the course, after a fashion, and did not put all else at risk!

Footnotes:

*1 But what about those distant galaxies and times when there were no human observers? That’s an issue for another time!

*2 I’m thinking in particular of Philippians 2:1-11 which indicates that getting community right and getting the right balance between human relationship and status is very close to the meaning of life. Ironic really as my aptitude in this area is rather limited and it hasn’t been my main goal in life; God has made it all about us, but we in turn must make it all about Him. We make it all about God by making it all about others.  

But having acknowledged that Christianity is where the meaning of life, the universe and everything is found, I must qualify this by admitting that the intellectual degeneracy found in many Christian sub-cultures is self-undermining: Who needs atheists to undermine the faith when there are plenty of Christian fundamentalists doing just fine without them! (See here, here, here, here, and here ). I have to confess that having discovered  Christianity and concluding that it contained the meaning of life, only to be confronted by countless plastic fundamentalist clowns, real doubts began to set in: Another reason why defense, particularly of my faith, became all important!

Science and the Multiverse

Just one imaginative vision of how the multiverse might 'look'

The de-facto Intelligent Design (ID) community are, in the main, a much nicer bunch of people to get on with (and more intelligent - see William Dembski for example) than the fundamentalist young earthists (for examples of the latter see here, here, here and here). Unfortunately the mutual hate-in that exists between the left of centre evolutionary academic establishment and the academic out-on-a-limb IDists has fueled polarisation which has probably pushed the IDists toward the political right-wing and even into the open arms of that lying demagogue Donald Trump, a man who is quite capable of whipping up suspicion, paranoia, hatred and fear in order to bolster his presidency.^*1

ID doesn't necessarily contradict evolution as top flight IDist William Dembski admits. Conversely, sophisticated atheists like Joe Felsenstein and PZ Myers have effectively  made it clear that evolution  requires a presumed background of transcendent organisation from which to work. (See here, here and here). I therefore see common ground between IDists like Dembski and atheists like Felsenstein and Myers, although of course they would disagree sharply about the ultimate origins of the necessary a priori information needed to drive evolution. Moreover, in these days when fear of the unknown along with tribal, racial, cultural and religious fault lines are exaggerated and exploited by the likes of Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Ken Ham, we are very unlikely to see people unifying around common ground.

The upshot of all this is that I probably automatically find myself on the opposing side to the IDists even though I would agree that the universe only makes sense if we posit complex sentient intelligence as a given (More about that in a later post). As I have explained elsewhere my concept of intelligent creation differs markedly from the IDist's explanatory filter based conclusions. But in spite of this, I am now pleased to announce that I actually agree with something posted by Barry Arrington, the supremo of the Intelligent Design web site Uncommon Descent (This certainly has not always been the case with Barry! See here). In this particular instance Arrington is posting on the subject of the scientific status (or otherwise!) of the multiverse as an explanatory device; his post is entitled The Multiverse is Anti-Scientific.

Unless those many posited universes of the multiverse interact with our own in someway, thereby providing the potential to make testable predictions, I believe Arrington is right to question the scientific status of an otherwise untestable theory. In fact it's arguable that the universes of the multiverse shouldn't interact with our universe by definition and therefore by definition can never be observed!  I suppose, however, it could be argued that if the multiverse is a prediction of an otherwise successfully tested cosmogony then this would be evidence in favour of the multiverse. But then it could be claimed that the theory is being used for an unwarranted and untestable extrapolation into the unknown and should be made more mathematically succinct by recasting the theory so that it did not require the extravagant elaboration of infinite amounts of conjectured reality. In the absence of any interaction with our universe the multiverse is not predictive but only serves as a narrative retrospectively applied in a way which for some people, repeat for some people, constitutes a sense making cosmic myth which is sympathetic to their a priori world view (See this post for more on the epistemic point being made here).

So, without being a genuinely testable science, as Arrinton's colleague Denise O'leary has also pointed out, we are then left judging the content of a multiverse theory purely on the basis of what feels right. But, of course, what feels right will be very subjective and/or worldview sensitive - see here where I did a post on this matter. In the positing of these subliminal universes beyond all detection the subjective deciding factor is, I believe, to do with a sensed need for symmetry: Viz: This symmetry is imposed by generalising the cosmological principle so that each case taken from a very wide range of platonic possibilities is posited as having been reified into a universe. That is, no universe taken from a well defined range of possible universes is specially favoured with reification since a hyper-symmetric uniformity reigns over all conceived possibilities in so far as each of these possibilities is posited as reified. To some people of an atheist persuasion this makes complete and utter sense. But it doesn't make sense to me and neither does it to Arrington; for some people symmetry has no god-like status in the intellectual canon. For others, meaning and purpose trump symmetry when it comes to making sense of the universe, although trying to apply these complex anthropic ideas to cosmology don't readily yield simple mathematical rules.

The sentiment of symmetry would be equally satisfied, if not in actual fact better satisfied, if nothing existed at all! For in such a case all platonic possibilities would be treated equitably in so far as  none of them would have any reality thus avoiding the awkward question of why a very particular cosmos has been singled out for preferential existential treatment. But given the existence of our universe the hi-symmetry fans are faced with the question of why at least something actually exists and, it seems, quite unnecessarily so! That something - namely, our cosmos -  appears to be of a very contingent kind and on the face of it quite unjustifiably favoured for existential status. Now, for some people this special existential status is disquieting and smacks too much of unjustifiable (intelligent) selection. Hence to restore the idea of symmetry and universal mediocrity across the board there is for them only one thing for it; that is, to go to the opposite extreme and posit that every conceivable thing exists; or at least postulate that the probability of existence of every conceivable thing is uniformly smeared across platonic space. Taking this sentiment of symmetry and uniformity to its extreme conclusion we soon find ourselves knocking at the door of Max Tegmark's extravagant mathematical universe: This (unscientific) "theory" posits that every mathematical construction has some kind of existential reification*. It's very tempting to suspect that the underlying motive for proposing such an idea is that it undermines any awkward questions about the apparent contingent asymmetry of our universe, an observation which might lead to the mooting of divine selection and/or intelligent contrivance. After all, in our culture the divine is seen as a personal sentience and therefore (as is the wont of personality) generally having an inscrutable bias toward certain preferences which in turn leads to very particular choices and, accordingly, a very contingent creation. As I have remarked before, intelligent beings have a tendency for bias, interest and focus toward order. (See here and see the epilogue here)

It is very unlikely that even a multiverse is an absolutely random affair: If we were part of a huge multiverse of absolute randomness we would expect our own cosmos to be observably and very rapidly dissolving into disorder a lot faster than is required by the second law of thermodynamics. This dissolution would, of course, eventually kill us off as observers, but there would be a large number of possible scenarios where we would be hanging around long enough to see it happening; these scenarios are much larger in number than the number of possible cases where we have an apparently ordered and stable existence, such as we see in our universe.  Since we don't see this rapid decay happening it follows that it is very likely that even the multiverse, if it exists,  isn't absolutely random and therefore itself has a relatively narrow "symmetry breaking" contingency!

Fundamentalist young earthists often claim that they see the same data as the science establishment but simply have a different worldview and therefore interpret that data according to the fundamentalist worldview with equal plausibility: Not true! Young earthism leads to silly and irrational thinking and also undermines God's creative integrity (See here, for example). However, the  principle "same data, different interpretation" does apply when it comes to the choice between belief in the high symmetry of the multiverse or belief in the specially selected contingency of the observable cosmos. This is because by its very nature the multiverse doesn't readily throw up testable predictions and therefore it is just one way of stitching together a dot-joining myth which for some people makes sense of reality.

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APPENDIX I

If you are a hard core fan of symmetry as a "theory of everything" then there are at least two ways of applying this philosophical prejudice to one's view of the cosmos. The simple way is to do a "Max Tegmark" and simply posit the systematic existence of everything; that is, each mathematically possible world is somehow reified once and once only^*2.

Another way of preserving symmetry is to posit that each and every platonic possibility has an equal probability of existence. But this leaves us with some questions that are not easily answered: What is the value of the probability of the existence of a universe and what theory assigns these probabilities? What is the number of probabilistic trials which have brought the reified universes into existence? What is the size of the set of platonic possibilities from which the trials are taken?  These questions themselves suggest the existence of a particular stochastic model which addresses them and this raises the meta question of why this particular model is favoured for reification.

If universes are being selected at random from a platonic but denumerable set of size T then the probability of the selection of a particular universe will be 1/T; in fact the probability of a cosmos being selected n times will be (1/T)ⁿ. So this probabilistic scenario implies that there is a small chance of a cosmos being selected more than once. Clearly as T goes to infinity the probability of a particular universe making any appearance at all will be infinitesimal. But if the number of trials N goes to infinity as T goes to infinity then the probability of the appearance of a particular universe could be finite, although of indefinite value.

But whether it is intelligible to posit the reality of other universes which neither have observers nor can be observed is, as far as I'm concerned, moot. I have always had positivistic leanings myself and find such an idea  difficult to swallow  But more about that another time.

APPENDIX II

On Symmetry

Footnotes:
*1 See for example this post on Dembski's blog where he identifies with ultra-right winger Tommy Robinson whose book has been banned from various book sellers. He also links to articles on the banning of Milo Yiannopolous from entering Australia and (presumably sympathetically) to Brietbart material on transgender issues and Jacob Wohl. Dembski has been roughly treated by "left wingers" for his ID work so it is no surprise why he finds it easier to identify with these people. So even without me doing anything or even disagreeing with Dembski's core thesis I find myself on the opposite side.

*2 I'm passing over here the considerable conceptual problems Tegmark's proposal raises, not least how to actually define, without self referencing inconsistency, the class of mathematical structures available to his hypothesis.