Tim Ventura, Anti-Gravity, and The Philadelphia Experiment

The Fascinating World of Fringe Science

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. 

Other relevant links:

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Anti Gravity Road Show. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: An Identified Lying Object? (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Bizarre Case of Bob Lazar. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

***

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.

Evolution by (Naked) Chance?

The equation above is the mathematical metaphor I use to understand & discuss conventional evolution. The value of Y represents the population of a particular organic configuration at a point in configuration space.  Configuration space is a multidimensional space of many dimensions. The left-hand side of the equation represents the rate of change of Y at the relevant point.  The first term on the right-hand side is a multidimensional diffusion term: For this reason, I use the House Operator (which is simply a multidimensional version of the three-dimensional Del operator). The second term on the right-hand side represents either a multiplying or decaying population at a point in configuration space: The decay or growth function V will vary over the multidimensional space, and perhaps even with time. Strictly speaking the diffusion constant A could also be a function of time and space.  I discuss this equation further here: 

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Mathematics of the Spongeam. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: On Structuralism and the Spongeam (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution: Naked Chance? (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

The equation has the potential to hide many informational complexities in the factors A and V. My use of this equation is not to imply that I've committed myself to conventional evolution, but I'll be using it to discuss a post by biochemist and evangelical atheist Larry Moran. This post can be found here: Sandwalk: Evolution by chance.

Moran starts by quoting evolutionist Jerry Coyne:

JERRY COYNE: This brings up the most widespread misunderstanding about Darwinism: the idea that, in evolution, "everything happens by chance" (also stated as "everything happens by accident"). This common claim is flatly wrong. No evolutionist—and certainly not Darwin—ever argued that natural selection is based on chance ....

 True, the raw materials for evolution—the variations between individuals—are indeed produced by chance mutations. These mutations occur willy-nilly, regardless of whether they are good or bad for the individual. But it is the filtering of that variation by natural selection that produces natural selection, and natural selection is manifestly not random. (p. 119)

 MY COMMENT:  No problems in the foregoing as far as I'm concerned. Let me echo this: Natural selection is not random: It effectively provides an envelope of constraint on the random walk of evolutionary diffusion. This constraint is represented by the population term VY in my equation above; in some parts of configuration space organisms die out and in other parts the population increases. The factor V describes mathematically a set of interconnected channels in configuration space along which the random diffusion is channeled - this is what I refer to as the spongeam. This factor acts as a constraint which by definition means that the evolutionary dynamic isn't random: it is a highly constrained process which results in some walks dying out and some being allowed through. But as we will go onto to see other forms of evolution that Larry Moran pins his hopes on are also not freely-random in the sense that they act without constraint. 

LARRY MORAN COMMENTS: It's extremely important to notice that Coyne is referring to NATURAL SELECTION (or Dawinism) in this passage. Natural selection is not random or accidental, according to Coyne. This passage is followed just a few pages later by a section titled "Evolution Without Selection."

JERRY COYNE: Let's take a brief digression here, because it's important to appreciate that natural selection isn't the only process of evolutionary change. Most biologists define evolution as a change in the proportion of alleles (different forms of a gene) in the population.

[Coyne then describes an example of random genetic drift and continues ...] Both drift and selection produce the genetic change that we recognize as evolution. But there's an important difference. Drift is a random process, while selection is the antithesis of randomness. Genetic drift can change the frequencies of alleles regardless of how useful they are to their carrier. Selection, on the other hand, always gets rid of harmful alleles and raises the frequencies of beneficial ones. (pp. 122-123)

Larry then quotes Richard Dawkins' response to Jerry (my emphases): 

RICHARD DAWKINS: Coyne is right to identify the most widespread misunderstanding about Darwinism as 'the idea that, in evolution, 'everything happens by chance' ... This common claim is flatly wrong.' Not only is it flatly wrong, it is obviously wrong, transparently wrong, even to the meanest intelligence (a phrase that has me actively restraining myself). If evolution worked by chance, it obviously couldn't work at all. (p. 427) 

I think Richard is essentially right but Larry's intuitive instincts rebel: 

LARRY MORAN COMMENTS: That last sentence is jarring to many scientists, including me. I think that the Dawkins' statement is 'obviously wrong' and 'transparently wrong' because, as Coyne pointed out, evolution by random genetic drift can occur by chance. [Let's not quibble about the meanings of 'random' and 'chance." That's a red herring in this context.] Clearly, evolution can work by chance so why does Dawkins say it can't?

 It's not because Dawkins is unaware of random genetic drift and Neutral Theory. The explanation (I think) is that Dawkins restricts his definition of evolution to evolution by natural selection. From his perspective, the fixation of alleles by random genetic drift doesn't count as real evolution because it doesn't produce adaptations. That's the view that he described in The Extended Phenotype back in 1982 and the view that he has implicitly supported over the past few decades [Richard Dawkins' View of Random Genetic Drift].

 This is one of the reasons why we refer to Dawkins as an adaptationist and it's one of the reasons why so many of today's evolutionary biologists—especially those who study evolution at the molecular level—reject the Dawkins' view of evolution in favor of a more pluralistic approach.

MY COMMENT: Coyne and Dawkins are absolutely right: This sentence by Dawkins says it all: If evolution worked by chance, it obviously couldn't work at all. (p. 427). Moreover, the antithesis of this, namely that evolution is pure, undressed chance, is clearly false: Not only is it flatly wrong, it is obviously wrong, transparently wrong, even to the meanest intelligence. 

It is possible to incorporate the genetic drift scenario into my mathematical metaphor: In genetic drift the value of V is zero. In the part of configuration space where V = 0 random walk gets a free hand as parts of the organic configuration (i.e. the DNA) drift at random, where in this region of configuration space the incremental changes of the walk do not immediately impact the growth or decay of the population value Y. But this unconstrained random walk cannot persist indefinitely: As is obvious and transparent to most people (like Coyne and Dawkins) the statistical weight of disorder is so great that unconstrained random walk, given enough time, will break down the highly organised complexity needed for self-maintaining, self-perpetuating structures to be viable. In order to prevent this a value of V other than zero must kick in at some point to maintain organization.  Chance certainly operates in evolution, but it is never naked chance, it is always dressed chance; that is, random walk constrained by V; even neutral drift is ultimately constrained by V.  So, whether or not Coyne and Dawkins accept that evolution can happen when V is neutral, they remain right about evolution never being a fully random walk process. Anyone without prior prejudice can see that.

TAKE HOME LESSONS

Larry Moran is an evangelical atheist, and this is the motivation for his preference for over-playing the role of randomness. Random distributions, by definition, do not favour particular configurations. As I've said in this blog before randomness spreads the butter of probability as evenly over the contingencies as the constraints on a system allow. As such random distributions appear to lack any sign of a targeted design intention; design intentionality, by definition, has goals and targets and therefore has preferences for certain kinds of contingency. So given that it is impossible to eliminate the contingency implicit in the question "why is there something rather than nothing?",  the next best thing for an atheist to do is to deny there is any selective contingency, (selective contingency is a feature we tend to associate with sentient intentionality) and instead opt for the "all contingences are present" view - a preference that has its ultimate expression in multiverse theories. 

But in the end Larry's mission fails: Evolution, as is conventionally understood, whilst not necessarily a strictly adaptationist process, nevertheless is far from being naked chance: Rather, it is dressed chance in that for evolution to work random walk must take place within an envelope of constraints encapsulated in the term V, and which ensures that the configurational organization required for self-maintenance & self-perpetuation is maintained. It is an irony that both fundamentalist Christians and some atheists should join with one voice in up-playing evolution's random element: In fact they do so for the same motive - that is, a desire to bill evolution as a random and Godless "natural process". If (repeat if) evolution as conventionally understood explains natural history it would, of course, trace its effectiveness back to God's creative organizing power implicit in V and therefore it does no justice to describe evolution as a "natural process". Genesis 1 with its talk of "separations" is an account of God's organizing power. 

Given that the evolutionary process as conventionally understood is a parallel computation and that the lifetime of the cosmos is relatively short, then for evolution to work it demands the input of a high level of starting information. This initial information (embodied in V) gives evolution its requisite high conditional probability.  See here:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Breaking Through the Information Barrier in Natural History Part 4 (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

As a rule fundamentalist Christians are completely unaware of this information argument and persist in up-playing the "naked randomness" line. 

***

Larry Moran has also backed another horse which he thinks supports his philosophy; that is, he is utterly committed to the existence of junk DNA. In this respect he has set himself against the de-facto Intelligent Design movement which is utterly committed to the opposite proposition; namely, that intelligently designed life wouldn't contain junk DNA. Both commitments are utterly misplaced. 

If life has been intelligently designed by direct intervention, who knows, that intelligence may wish to keep redundant DNA in the genome for inscrutable reasons, just as programmer might want to keep past edits in his code. Or, on the other hand, perhaps that Designer has a very tidy mind and likes to clean up His code. Who knows! Alternatively, the random twists and turns of diffusional evolution may leave junk DNA in the genome. But then some evolutionists may claim that the survivalist rigours of evolutionary pressures would select out this unnecessary & wasteful molecular overhead. So, the conclusion is that the absence or presence of junk DNA could occur for both direct intelligent intervention and via evolutionary processes. Therefore the absence or presence of junk DNA is not strong evidence for either Larry Moran's brand of atheism or the de facto IDist's brand of Intelligent Design.

The Compulsion of Conspiracy Theorism

 (This post also appeared on my Views, News and Pews blog, but to complete the collection on Quantum Non-Linearity I add it here as well)

                                        

I have recently compiled this analysis of an article by end-times pundit Wilfred Hahn. Below I've copied in the introduction to my analysis. 

1.     Introduction

      This document is best read in conjunction with my document here where I explore some of the pratfalls of conspiracy theorism. 

Conspiracy theorism is a pernicious evil that wracks democratic society; it undermines confidence and plays into the hands of tricksters and would-be-dictators who are looking for the disillusioned, the angry, the disaffected, the traumatised and the paranoid as an easy-sell for their concocted rumours of conspiracy & blame in order to justify a power grab. The cut & thrust and the open contensions natural to an accountable democracy exacerbates the insecurity of those targeted by would-be-despots who perceive democratic debate and its rancour as a sign of weakness and failure.

Of course, in societies where dictatorship has been successfully installed (e.g. Putin’s Russia) there is sufficient autocratic media control to block all conspiracies theories but the one put out by the protection racketeers in charge. In totalitarian and authoritarian states government may be headed by a demagogue figure who is portrayed as the only truth teller.

In this document I look at a web article by Christian end-times pundit Wilfred Hahn.  He consciously avoids fanciful conspiracy theories peddled by web enabled theorists. These theorists join the dots of social history into ramifying plots hatched by hidden nefarious operators who are said to be the evil geniuses behind current affairs. Hahn’s overall thesis is that an integrated economic system facilitated by enhanced technology, social integration and a world market makes the idea of international centralized social control by an anti-Christ an all too plausible scenario. I would not disagree with this conclusion.

But as we shall see, although Hahn identifies no specific baroque conspiracy behind current affairs he nevertheless informs us that the history of progress is a product of a conspiracy intended to bring about an anti-Christ power grab. He therefore inadvertently plays into the hand of conspiracy theorists by leaving the edges of the map blank and making statements to the effect that “Here be Monsters”. Therefore the active imaginations of the disillusioned, the angry, the disaffected, the traumatised and the paranoid are encouraged to fill in those spaces with fanciful entities which explain and make sense of their fears and anger: Such will take their eyes off up & coming world-dictators and instead they will focus on the fanciful intrigue imagined to be going on behind the scenes. All this will play into the hands of an antichrist.

It’s with reluctance that I relate my anticipation that many Christians are well set up to be duped by up-and-coming dictators who use conspiracy theories to exploit Christian diffidence about the democratic West where freedom of expression & choice is a prime moral value.  It is ironic that reformation Christianity opened the way to a sequence of events that ultimately gave Western populations the choice to accept or reject the core message of Christianity. This very freedom of choice was built into Christianity along with many other aspects of the democratic West where the concept that community serves the individual (and vice versa) along with the freedom to dissent still has a very strong hold on Western minds. The irony was that Christ’s take-it-or-leave-it presentation of Himself turned out to contain the seeds of the possible demise of core Christianity in the West.

As a reaction against the marginalisation and decay of core Christianity in the West it seems that some Christians consequently find common ground with potential dictators and will support a dictators cause as the price for the restoration of their traditional authoritarian view of society. (e.g Hitler, Trump and Putin). In any case many of those Christians come from sects with a culture that has a high view of demagogic leadership and may even seek to bring about a Christian social authoritarianism bordering on dominionism.  My guess is that Christianity will become debatable ground during the end times; by that I mean demagogues will claim to be working for Christianity.

Faulkner on Young Earthism's Biggest Problem

Biblical literalist organisation Answers in Genesis' tame  astronomer Danny Faulkner has recently put together an article  entitled "Seeing Stars in a Young Universe".  The article is written for a lay audience and promotes Faulkner's "solution" to the problem of how stars millions of light years away can be seen in the night sky given the literalist's 6000 year old universe. Faulkner's solution simply amounts to the assertion that God gave light signals a miraculously fast travel time during the creation week and that this miraculous speed allowed the signals to arrive at their destinations. This solution at least acknowledges the problem of creative integrity; namely, that those signals we get from distant stars weren't deceptively created en route to give us false information about a ghost cosmos that never really existed. I'll hand it to Faulkner that he is making a gallant attempt to address an  important question: Does God value integrity of creation?  But alas, there are big problems with his solution which I discuss in my three part series entitled "YOUNG EARTHISM'S BIGGEST PROBLEM". In particular there is a problem with super novae. See these links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/07/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/07/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2020/02/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html

This series was going to have a forth part where I was to consider John Hartnett's work that tries to build on Jason Lisle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention(ASC) model. I have to confess that nowadays I'm rather under-motivated in this respect as I have already spent far too much time studying the popularist articles that young earthist gurus put out largely aimed at their lay following. Even the so-called technical articles are there to reassure their patrons that young earthist gurus have the situation under control. But after giving young earthism much consideration, frankly I feel that further effort on Hartnett's work is not the most profitable way to spend my time. Moreover, it seems that at "Answers in Genesis" Faulkner's ideas are preferred to Lisle's can of worms. (See also links above).

Faulkner strikes me as a nice bloke, unlike his boss Ken Ham who is a raving authoritarian, Trump voting, simple minded, QAnon courting, spiritual bully. (See here, here and here for a small sample of this fundamentalist's behavior, and my own experience of being bullied by Ken here). Faulkner has worked hard to refute the outbreak of flat earthism among Biblical literalists (...what one might call the logic of late fundamentalism!). He also has a way of taking the astronomical problems of young earthism seriously rather than writing them off by cliche-surfing the canned canard's of fundamentalist thinking (See here). 

But let me finish this post by referencing and criticizing something I've criticized before. In his recent star-light article Faulkner writes:

We need to recognize that God used many processes during creation week that are different from processes today. He didn’t make Adam instantaneously out of nothing, but instead formed him from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). God used a similar process to make the land and flying animals (Genesis 2:19). And he caused the plants to grow rapidly out of the ground on day three (Genesis 1:11–12). In other words, God rapidly and miraculously matured many things during creation week. It seems both logical and theologically consistent that, in a similar manner, God could have rapidly “matured” the universe, bringing the light from distant objects to the earth in a way similar to trees instantly sprouting and rising to full height.

In addition to creating the physical universe during creation week, God also created the laws that govern it. What if these laws were not in full effect until the end of that week, as we see when God created mature plants, land animals, and the first two humans?

Instead of bringing starlight to earth according to physical laws, God could have miraculously solved the light travel time problem on day four, before putting the laws that govern light travel into effect. After all, nearly everything about creation was miraculous.

Faulkner has left us with a major paradox here: If one accepts for the sake of argument that many of the processes during the creation "week" are different from the processes of today and that the laws governing creation were not in full effect until the end of that "week" then the upshot is a conundrum. Viz: The definition of physical time is defined by those laws. So if those laws were in the process of being settled during the creation "week" how then do we measure that week in terms of days? Can we then be so dogmatic about that the creation "day" of Genesis 1 being 86,400 seconds given that the second is defined in terms of physical law? Or is Faulkner trying to tell us that the measure of time is transcendent to the universe? Genesis 1:3 talks of the creation of light, so that could, I suppose, be the standard by which time is measured during the "week". But then Faulkner ruins it for himself by refuting it as a possible standard with his talk of miraculously fast light signals during the creation "week". But "fast" with respect to what standard? If God "rapidly" matured the universe during the creation week and we use, say, light speed as the standard to define the tick of the cosmic clock then we are back to a universe billions of years old!

But having said all that let me at least concede that if all young earthists were either a Faulkner or a Paul Nelson or a Sal Cordover I wouldn't have half the problems I do with abrasive bigots like Ken Ham (and Kent Hovind). But then it seems that the literalist movement needs personalities like Ham and Hovind to bully people into line. 

The Riddle of The Sphinx

"It chanced that the face was toward me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile  on its lips. It was greatly weather worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease." The Time Machine by H. G. Wells 

 I once watched a lecture by historian Tom Holland where he expressed his view that Western culture is saturated in Christian values, even when it is at its most secular. He contrasted these values with those of the classical world of pre-New Testament civilizations such as Greece and Rome. Western secularism thinks of itself as having outgrown the "superstitious" beliefs of core Christianity, beliefs which affirm Jesus as a co-equal member of the Trinity & the Resurrected Savior of a humankind mired in Sin. But according to Holland even in the absence of this supernatural kernel, faith in Christ's teaching about humanity's moral duties still informs Western thinking. 

In a similar vein I was intrigued to see an article in the June 2022 edition of Premier Christianity magazine by a Glen Scrivener. In this article Scrivener picks up on a theme similar to Holland's and runs with it; in fact he has written a book on the subject called "The Air We Breathe", the same title of his Christianity article. The book got a good review in the same copy of Christianity. 

In his article Scrivener lists the values of equality, compassion, consent, science, freedom and progress as ostensibly an axiomatic part of Western moral mores. These mores all have their roots in what he calls "The Jesus Revolution". Above all, concern for the poor, the weak and the victimized, a stance which at least gets lip-service in Western humanist thought, was very much part of Christ's teachings.   

However, we should bear in mind that there was a long gestation-period before these Christian values  surfaced substantially into social discourse and subverted the status quo.  It was only during the slow demise of the aristocracy and serfdom that we start hearing that familiar "freedom and human rights" language (e.g. The 1381 peasants revolt) and see a drive to advance science (e.g. Francis Bacon). But having said that we nevertheless find Christian values embedded in Western history going a long way back before the peasants revolt and Bacon: That very peculiar tendency of Christianity to glorify courage and service in the face of vulnerability was there all along: e.g. Many of the churches of Norwich celebrate martyrs who like Jesus himself submitted themselves to those who would kill them for their faith. Examples  are  St, Edmund, St. Peter, St. Clement, St. Laurence, St Stephen and St John all of whom have at least one ancient church in Norwich memorializing their life and heroic deaths. A sacrificial life is the epitome of heroism in the Christian play book and these churches glorifying sacrifice come right out of the depths of the aristocratic middle ages. Christ's teaching had so sunk into the consciousness of the war-like Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Danes and Normans et. al. that they started to perceive a romantic heroism in a life of serene vulnerability.***

Humanly speaking it's a strange paradox that Christianity celebrated submission unto death  This was surely a revolution and an inversion of the old might is right ethos that dominated civilizations such as Egypt, Assyria and Rome; these civilizations glorified, above all, victory in war and in the building of empires, their despotic rulers claiming a large slice of the glory. Set that against Philippians 2:1-11

But when contemplating Holland's and Scrivener's theses we should also bear in mind that many latter day interpretations of Christianity are regressive and repressive and have become the receptacles of ugly attitudes and false beliefs such as European empire building, fundamentalism, brutal certitudes, anti-science thinking, young earthism, flat earthism, fideism, gnosticism, heavy shepherding, spiritual intimidation & abuse, demagogic leaders, conspiracy theorism, Christian dominionism and the like. Our understanding of the effects of "The Jesus Revolution" must have built-in qualifiers: Typically of the human predicament, progress is a backwards and forwards motion, a zigzagging to and fro somewhere between the good, the bad and the ugly.

But then Christianity itself has an explanation for this very mixed picture: Human beings, Christian and otherwise are moral shades of grey and always face the challenges and uncertainties of an imperfect epistemology: But that's why Christ came; He came to not only reveal Himself but to also save us from the ultimate consequences of human sin. But without that supernatural centre around which those important values of humility, serenity, meekness and service orbit, the way to hell is paved with good intentions: The French revolution and Marxism all made claim to laudable Christian humanist values about liberty, fraternity and equality but human beings are apt to corrupt those values beyond recognition. As Sir Kenneth Clark said in an episode of his epic "Civilization"* series, the leaders of the French revolution....

              ....suffered from the most terrible of all delusions: They believed themselves to be virtuous. 

...and may I add believed themselves to be the sole supplier of veracity, the only truth tellers. Such attitudes, it seems, can be found among those with triumphalist visions of utter certitude: From Marxists, through Christian sects, to Islamic fundamentalists** they see themselves as the last word for mankind,  But Scrivener, as a good Christian should be, is well aware of the failings that also plague churches: "I could go on. Criticisms of the church abound and many of them are entirely valid", he says. But he then says that such criticisms are actually using Christ's moral compass as the standard against which a flawed church is measured.  I feel that Scrivener and Holland are very much on the right track.....Christianity has had a very humanizing effect on us very flawed humans. Christ's teachings not only act like salt & light halting the rot somewhat but also, in places, reverses that rot. 

Finally, I would like to draw attention to one very profound observation that Scrivener makes. Viz:

The deepest clash between "belief" and a purely secular worldview does not occur between Christians and non-Christians. It occurs within the Western secularist, because the secularist is a believer too. They navigate their life by roughly the same stars we do - equality, compassion, consent and so on. On a daily basis, they walk according to these convictions, and yet as they look up to such supernatural values they insist that they are standing on purely natural ground. They claim to have a (practically) atheist account of the world, even as they live by (basically) Christian assumptions. 

Scrivener then goes on to make further observations that I would identify as the secular paradox: Viz: Christ's teachings so obviously give meaning and purpose to life and yet when they are seen through the lens of a purely secular interpretation of the cosmic perspective there seems to be an overwhelming disconnect: Where do those Western moral values we aspire to come from given the wider context of what to the secularist looks to be at first sight a huge impersonal universe apparently guided only by a ruthless survival ethic and which will eventually end in oblivion? There is an apparent mismatch of incommensurables here more stultify than the mismatch between gravitational theory and quantum mechanics.  Atheism teeters on the brink of the nihilist abyss..... This is the Riddle of the Sphinx for today's secular milieu.

Footnotes

* See the episode "The Fallacies of Hope"

** Critical Theory, which tries to trace (all?) human problems back to the observable conditions of the cultural, economic and political milieu, is likely to fall short of the mark if it fails to acknowledge that individuals, which are the seat of the first person conscious perspective, will naturally enough be tempted to look after self first under any circumstances.

*** It is possible that other religious leaders at one time or another preached similar values, but it seems that it is Jesus who is the almost exclusive source of these values in the modern world.

The State of Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary theory: A dog's diner of notions.  But then real life is a bit of a dog's diner!

Evolutionary theorists are ill at ease it seems - mostly with one another: In a post which appeared on evangelical atheist's blog, PZ Myers, he expresses his impatience at the "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis" movement. See here:

Not impressed by the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (freethoughtblogs.com)

This post by Myers was in response to a Guardian article entitled "Do we need a new theory of evolution?" .  This article starts with the headline paragraph:

A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have dismissed them as misguided careerists – and the conflict may determine the future of biology

....and goes on to say somewhat sensationally (My emphases on the use of emotive terms). 

Behind the current battle over evolution lies a broken dream. In the early 20th century, many biologists longed for a unifying theory that would enable their field to join physics and chemistry in the club of austere, mechanistic sciences that stripped the universe down to a set of elemental rules. Without such a theory, they feared that biology would remain a bundle of fractious sub-fields, from zoology to biochemistry, in which answering any question might require input and argument from scores of warring specialists.

...the stress, then, is on internal conflict. Myers' gripe with the article seems be this: Evolutionary theory, probably necessarily, is a complex stew of diverse theoretical elements and will likely remain so; in fact there may be yet more elements to be added to the theory to enhance its comprehensiveness: I think I agree; unlike physics I very much doubt evolutionary biology is going to reduce to those overarching grand narratives conveyed by elegant equations. Given this context Myers therefore sees the EES pundits as not necessarily being wrong but simply adding to the stew of ideas. Where the problem seems to lie is in the competitive contention that so frequently surrounds social status ladder climbing: May be because the EES aficionados are being a little too melodramatic they (whether intentionally or not) are effectively positioning themselves as heroic paradigm breaking revolutionaries and this apparent career move has stirred up hard feelings and controversy among traditionalists.  If you don't want to cause a storm of hard feelings one's social status is something best left to the judgment of others whose opinions effectively confers one's social status; DIY status conferment is certainly not advised; it will upset all sorts of people (see Luke 4:9-11).  But there is little one can do if conflicting communities confer on an individual entirely different status values....Jordan Peterson's following has raised him up to the heights of social glory which needless to say absolutely peeves PZ Myers and his associated community. 

Having said all that, however, according to Myers the article does partly redeem itself toward the end where we can read:

What Doolittle and like-minded scientists want is more radical: the death of grand theories entirely. They see such unifying projects as a mid-century – even modernist – conceit, that have no place in the postmodern era of science. The idea that there could be a coherent theory of evolution is “an artefact of how biology developed in the 20th century, probably useful at the time,” says Doolittle. “But not now.” Doing right by Darwin isn’t about venerating all his ideas, he says, but building on his insight that we can explain how present life forms came from past ones in radical new ways.

The computational biologist Eugene Koonin thinks people should get used to theories not fitting together. Unification is a mirage. “In my view there is no – can be no – single theory of evolution,” he told me. “There cannot be a single theory of everything. Even physicists do not have a theory of everything.”

People trained in physics and mathematics like myself are inclined to be instinctively be repelled by "postmodern" ideas of a patchwork of pragmatic little narratives that are here today and gone tomorrow.  Physicists are used to looking for and finding over-arching elegant theories that all but clear the theoretical board: Given the glorious highly progressive intellectual history surrounding Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac and Feynman et al, who can blame them? The expectation in physics therefore is that the apparent incommensurability between gravity and quantum mechanics will one day be fixed. 

But there is no reason why such should be true in biology. Biology, being a kind "natural" technology, may follow the model of own technology in that it consists of a complex of techniques and tools that are invoked in different connections.  But in spite of that there is no need to go all postmodern about this departure. Biology is still a rational system if rather more algorithmically complex than was at first hoped by the authors of the neo-Darwinian-synthesis.

***

As I've said several times before anyone who believes that the natural history of life to be spread over millions if not billions of years automatically accepts evolution in the trivial sense that life has changed and developed over that time, although via unspecified mechanisms. Natural history by itself leaves the engine driving evolutionary change unspecified. In fact even if one accepts the notion of common descent and that genetics is taken as evidence of the cladistic nesting of life forms developed from the "tree of life", the question remains as to the agency/processes/mechanisms that have generated this tree of life.  

In my mathematical "spongeam" metaphor of natural history I use the "potential" term "V" to represent what some might call the "fitness landscape" of evolution. This term could hide any number of informational factors ranging from the laws of physics, through teleological influences to ad-hoc divine patches, all factors (if present) we've yet to fully understand. If evolution is to work, the random agitations encapsulated in the diffusional term of my mathematical metaphor must be highly constrained by the information implicit in the term "V".

Myers may well be right about evolution being a kind of dogs dinner of processes. But to me he looks as though he's caught in the usual dualistic linguistic trap. Viz: if it can be said that "evolution did it" then that must imply "God didn't do it". If  all the ingredients thrown into the stew simply fall under the nomenclature of "evolution" that, for some, is enough to satisfy the metaphysical conclusion that "if evolution did it, God didn't do it".  Myers' thinking is as much trapped by the connotation of deism in the label "evolution" as is the thinking of the de facto IDists who simply reverse the sign of the conclusion: Viz "Evolution can't do it, therefore God did it". De facto ID has committed itself to the same connotative dualistic verbalism; they can't see that the very introduction of intelligent creation introduces a huge wild card which means that the possibilities open to intelligent action breathes new life into the possibilities open to the processes "evolution"; who can tell how a practically omnipotent omniscient intelligence can resource "evolution" informationally? The de facto IDists have also painted themselves into a corner with their commitment to the absence of Junk DNA; for in introducing the wild card of a super intelligence they really can't be sure what such an inscrutable & powerful intelligence would leave in or edit out of his DNA libraries. Although like John Polkinghorne I'm strictly speaking a Intelligent Design Creationist, I dissociate myself from the stuck-in-a-rut de facto ID right-wingers who are a faction within a politically polarized community. They can't see the implications of intelligent creation but have in fact unconsciously taken on board crypto-deist and dualist categories. With their politics and their philosophical categories, de facto IDists have walked down a blind alley.

***

Reading the Guardian article I was fascinated with the evolutionary ingredient called "plasticity".  Here's how the article described it:

Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are “much more content” living underwater, she says. But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles. Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them. Their entire appearance transformed. “They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land,” Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir “is adapting to land in a single generation”. He sounded almost proud of the fish.

The crucial thing about such observations, which challenge the traditional understanding of evolution, is that these sudden developments all come from the same underlying genes. The species’s genes aren’t being slowly honed, generation by generation. Rather, during its early development it has the potential to grow in a variety of ways, allowing it to survive in different situations.

Plasticity doesn’t invalidate the idea of gradual change through selection of small changes, but it offers another evolutionary system with its own logic working in concert. To some researchers, it may even hold the answers to the vexed question of biological novelties: the first eye, the first wing. “Plasticity is perhaps what sparks the rudimentary form of a novel trait,” says Pfennig.

If these observations aren't misconstrued then who knows what influence is being applied here to drive this rapid adaptive change. 

Dualist Examples

As I've said in my last post: 

Western Dualism was historically expressed as deism; this is the view that God is to his created world as the skilled human artisan is to the automata of the 18th century. In both cases the created object is thought to have an animus of it's own, an animus by which it is able to function autonomously: Sci-fi stories where the created object runs out of the control of its creator tap into this paradigm. When pushed too hard deism leads to a creation cut adrift from its Creator and eventually death of God secularism: Somehow it is supposed that the cosmos is sufficiently self-provisioned to create and run itself.

 ...this kind of thinking represents a cultural legacy whose effects can be found among both atheists and Christian theists.  It is a short step from deism to atheism. and the consequence is that some Christians see it as their duty to do all in their power refute any hint that so called "natural forces" have the efficacy to generate life, because for them such an efficacy can only mean "God didn't do it". See this for example:

DUALIST: What some of us find curious is that Christian evolutionists so seldom want to grasp the fact that the problem for most Christians is Darwinism, which is an explicitly materialist and naturalist theory of everything

(https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/biologos-hopes-to-calm-the-fears-of-ignorant-christians-about-evolution/)

MY COMMENT:  The above presents us with a "Darwinist" strawman frequently seen among anti-evolutionists; that is: an explicitly materialist and naturalist theory of everything . No! Real "Darwinism" does not claim to be a theory of everything except in the minds of some atheists and Christian theists who think alike on this question, But Darwinian-like processes, if they are to work at all, are necessarily provisioned by highly contingent conditions and information. Therefore "Darwinism" is far from a "natural process". And at least some of those "Christian evolutionists" the hack above refers to do grasp this fact. 

Although I'm not necessarily committed to standard theories of evolutionary mechanisms myself, I would never argue against evolution in the fashion presented above: Given that this quote comes from what claims to be an Intelligent Design stable I find it curious that this pundit does not want to grasp the facts of her glaring inconsistency: For although one might argue against evolution from a Biblical literalist standpoint, ID per se doesn't contradict evolution. This followers because effective evolutionary mechanisms require such a high degree of contingent input that this too is easily cast into the mold of Intelligent Design. 

Below we have another hack who also thrusts his misconceptions into the mouths of Christians who don't agree with him: 

DUALIST: So why aren’t the idea of the big bang and the creation account in Genesis compatible? Well, the big bang is based on the religion of naturalism, which assumes that the universe arose by natural processes. It’s a way of trying to explain everything without God. We should never take elements of a different religion and mix them in with Christianity and the Bible....(https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/universe-final-era/)

MY COMMENT:  Once again we see a crypto-atheist concept of "naturalism" being used as the strawman by which an attempt is made to spiritually intimidate Christians into accepting the misleading views of this author. Once again "natural forces" are wrongly portrayed as the automatic nemesis of a creator God; therefore, according to this author one must reject "the religion of naturalism" unconditionally.  It  is true that many an atheist thinks just like this author and believes that "natural processes... explain everything without God".  So here we have a Christian fundamentalist with an atheistic mindset skipping over the fact that it is logically impossible for natural processes to explain themselves: they can only ever be descriptive of natural history and therefore are bound to be the depository of a  high informational contingency.

Now consider the following from the same post: 

DUALIST: Now, what many Christians don’t realize is that the big bang isn’t just a story about the origins of everything—it’s also a story with predictions for the future. In the most common model, the universe eventually reaches thermal equilibrium with zero energy available (a “heat death,” but it’s not hot as there’s no energy—so it becomes cold). But this is opposite of what the Bible states will happen in the future! 

Once again we see this author thrusting his strawman arguments into the mouths of Christians who disagree with his own flawed way of thinking. He's assumed the because atheists extrapolate the laws of physics willy-nilly into the future then so must Christians who accept the big bang. Now, one can understand why from an atheist standpoint there is little choice but to assume one can extrapolate physical laws into the far future; what else can they do? But unless one makes predictions to test hypotheses, far-flung predictions of this ilk are metaphysical because unlike the past we get no observational messages from the future. So unless we can go there ourselves such predictions cannot be tested. See here where I took this issue up with another fundamentalist.

Science and Religion Part II

(For Part 1 see here)

Did Lawrence Krauss really say that? Is Deism the thin end of the theist wedge?  Deism has been an exit point for faith, so perhaps it can also be an entry point? However, the second part of that statement looks as though it's there to keep the atheist gallery happy by signaling that Krauss  still has a gung-ho anti-religious stance. But I think he needs to brush up on just what theistic evolutionists are saying.

In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins tells us:

Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

 (The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable” p. 6)

This view, I submit, is evidence of the Western Dualist paradigm which sees so-called natural forces and God's creative action as two very distinct and mutually exclusive modes of creation: For Richard it was an exclusive-OR between the "natural forces" of Darwinian processes and the supernatural power of God. But since Richard is an atheist he therefore votes for the natural forces party.

Western Dualism was historically expressed as deism; this is the view that God is to his created world as the skilled human artisan is to the automata of the 18th century. In both cases the created object is thought to have an animus of it's own, an animus by which it is able to function autonomously: Sci-fi stories where the created object runs out of the control of its creator tap into this paradigm. When pushed too hard deism leads to a creation cut adrift from its Creator and eventually death of God secularism: Somehow it is supposed that the cosmos is sufficiently self-provisioned to create and run itself. But as I've pointed out before the material of the cosmos has no property of aseity: The simple logic of the mathematical elementa of physics can't be the source of aseity: That logic necessarily starts with brute-fact contingencies, not aseity. In contrast, God being infinitely complex, could hide aseity in that complexity although we would be hard put to it to understand the infinite logic of aseity. Hence it is written: And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. (Hebrews 11:6). That verse is the axiomatic cornerstone of a successful epistemology in that it provides the template for its natural analogue: Viz: anyone who comes to the cosmos must believe that it is organised, coherent and rational and that it rewards those who earnestly seek that rationality. Without this epistemic assumption we move dangerously close to the nihilist abyss. But axiomatic belief that nature conforms to intelligible and ordered patterns of behavior doesn't necessarily entail a belief in the autonomous animus of nature or the connected idea that  if "natural forces did it God didn't do it!". 

Is the axiomatic & metaphysical belief in the independent animus of nature right?  It seems that evangelical atheist PZ Myers thinks so; see the following comment which Myers posted in 2014. In this comment Myers is criticizing those evolutionists who seek common ground with "creationists" through theistic evolution, an approach Myers most definitely rejects...... 

Coyne also has some ire for the theistic evolutionist perspective, as well. So do I. I think it distorts the science in an ugly way. It’s effective with some soft creationists in the same way the approach I mentioned in the last paragraph works. You find common ground: “I believe in God, too!” Then, unfortunately, to bring them around to your side, what you then do is produce a mangled, false version of evolution — “It’s guided by a higher power!” — in order to get them to accept “evolution”. A gutless, mechanistically compromised version of evolution.

No thanks. Darwin’s great insight was that you don’t need an overseer guiding evolution — that local responses to the environment will produce efficient responses that will yield a pattern of descent and diversity and complexity. To replace “intent was unnecessary” with “God provided intent” does deep violence to the whole theory, and completely misses the point. (My emphases) 

And the point? The metaphysical idea of the animus of natural forces is clear here: Viz: you don’t need an overseer guiding evolution. The general notion here is that the physical laws are a kind of proactive guiding hand rather than a passive description of patterns of behavior sustained by God himself. 

But evolution as it is currently understood would not work without some kind of a priori information reservoir. See chapter 8 of this document where I discuss this question. It follows then that evolution isn't in fact a purely random process (something PZ Myers agrees with - see here). As such it displays a very constrained pattern of behavior; forget those claims about evolution being nothing but "randomness" because if standard evolution is to be viable any such randomness can only generate life if it is constrained within a very tight envelope defined by the natural physical regime - if this constraint didn't exist there would be no evolution. 

But for Myers the existence of those highly constrained patterns of behavior must mean that evolution has all it needs in terms of physical resources and therefore doesn't need any further input from deity.  Viz: Darwin’s great insight was that you don’t need an overseer guiding evolution.  For Myers somehow those very constrained patterns sustain themselves and have an intrinsic animus to do so. Well, that's understandable given his atheism; he's actually following in the footsteps of those deists who conceived that God was to nature's mechanisms as man was to his automata and therefore God can at least stand back if not take leave of absence altogether while nature performs according to its own inner drives. 

But for (non-deist) theists like myself, the origin and sustenance of those strange and very contingent laws of behavior can not be either self-created or self-sustaining; they require deity in constant attendance and therefore in that sense for Christian evolutionists God must be the ever-present and immanent "why" behind the "how". What justification does Myers have for claiming that theistic evolutionists have produced a mangled, false version of evolution..... a gutless, mechanistically compromised version of evolution.....To replace “intent was unnecessary” with “God provided intent” does deep violence to the whole theory, and completely misses the point? Just what violence is being done to the theory and what point is being missed?  Yes, to imagine that there is a God behind the scenes constantly creating, sustaining & managing natural patterns, patterns which have no aseity of their own will no doubt seem to Myers eccentric to the point of crankiness. But if he could humor the theistic evolutionists for a while he might then realize that their cranky extra-evolutionary obsession does no violence to the theory itself since it doesn't change the patterns of behavior or add anything observationally to them; they remain the same.  This also voids Krauss' criticism: There is no necessary internal inconsistency in theistic evolution because it doesn't necessarily change the observable evolutionary patterns of behavior. 

Theistic evolution is in fact a interpretation layered on top of the science and what does change is the intuitive opinion about the meaning of those patterns: Viz: For Myers his intuition is that we need look no further for explanation than in a very contingent natural pattern; for him those patterns are just brute facts and that is the end of the matter (See Bertrand Russell's opinion here which is analogous). But for theists like myself this leaves us with an empty and meaningless absurdity: In my opinion that absurdity can only be dispelled by the intuition that those patterns have an intentionality about them..... so it's all down to a difference in intuition. Although I have no strong commitment to affirming standard evolutionary mechanisms I find nothing absurd about theistic evolutionist's notion that God is the creative force in a standard evolutionary scenario. 

***

In a post on Panda's Thumb, mathematician Jason Rosenhouse tells us about his book entitled "The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism".  In his book he challenges anti-evolutionist's misuse of mathematical results such as the second law of thermodynamics, a law which fundamentalists and de-facto IDists never seem understand (Perhaps with one notable exception). But for reasons other than  his useful critique of anti-evolutionism the following paragraph by Rosenhouse is notable (In particular see the two sentences I've emboldened):

Sometimes the anti-evolutionists invoke a mathematical principle rather than carry out a calculation. They go on at length about the “No Free Lunch” (NFL) theorems, for example. These are legitimate mathematical results that establish the non-existence of a universally successful search algorithm. Dembski, sometimes with various coauthors, has argued that since evolution is in some way analogous to a combinatorial search, these theorems imply that any success that it has can only result from intelligent tailoring of nature’s fitness landscapes to the “algorithm” of natural selection. But once again the theorem plays only a rhetorical role in the argument. Since nature’s fitness landscapes arise ultimately from the laws of physics, Dembski and his collaborators are really just asking why the universe has just the properties it does. It’s a reasonable question, but it’s not one biologists need to worry about, and it’s not one to which the NFL theorems make any contribution toward answering.

(Note: What Rosenhouse refers to as the Fitness Landscape I refer to as  The Spongeam). 

Rosenhouse's comment at the end here is comparable to one made by mathematical biologist Joe Felsenstein (See below); namely, that the a priori information content demanded by standard model evolutionary mechanisms is found in the fitness landscape and this information in turn must be implicit in the physical regime. ID guru William Dembski drew attention to the fact that this a priori information must be present somewhere. But what Dembski did not show was that this information wasn't present in someway in the physical regime. He more or less admitted as such in this lecture.  De facto IDists misused NFL theory in that it was assumed by many of them with dualist habits of mind to imply that natural forces in the form of evolutionary mechanisms had been eliminated from the inquiry - in fact those proposed mechanisms were still very much part of the inquiry.  As Felsenstein said in a comment on this blog post of mine: 

If the laws of physics are what is responsible for fitness surfaces having "a huge amount of information" and being "very rare object[s]" then Dembski has not proven a need for Intelligent Design to be involved. I have not of course proven that ordinary physics and chemistry is responsible for the details of life -- the point is that Dembski has not proven that they aren't.

The question of direct Intelligent Design thus shifts from ad-hoc paranormal interventions to the origins of the contingent information implicit in the cosmic physical regime; it is this, according to Felsenstein, which has made standard evolutionary mechanisms  possible. As Felsenstein went on to say:

Biologists want to know whether normal evolutionary processes account for the adaptations we see in life. If they are told that our universe's laws of physics are special, biologists will probably decide to leave that debate to cosmologists, or maybe to theologians.

Now there's a challenge for the theologians! As with the quote from Lawrence Krauss we see a crack in the wall of atheism through which light is streaming!

So, the conclusion is that whether or not life has arisen via standard evolutionary mechanisms, either way we talking about Hard Creationism in so far as a huge reservoir of a priori contingent information is required to resource creation and in particular evolutionary mechanisms.  But the hardened atheist response is unlikely to concur even with Krauss's admission that because the universe is an amazing place then deism isn't an implausible postulate. To neutralize any amazement about cosmic contingency some kind of multiverse is often resorted to. Multiverse postulates are intended to reduce the surprisal value of our information rich universe to the level of trivial expectation by placing it in an all but infinite sea of pure randomness.

The Western deist response, which at least gives a starting role to God (but thence forth God is retired from the scene), partly has its origins in a reaction to the automata of the enlightenment. But for myself I think it likely that the information input from deity is on-going and not a once-for-all act.