Does God Exist?

 

I published the article below on my Noumena, Cognita and Dreams blog in July of 2007 under the heading Does God Exist?  I thought I'd look at the subject again and see how it fits in with my thoughts 15+ years later. I've made some small changes to the original text to try and clarify it, but more significantly I've also added my current thoughts in italics after each section. Since 2007 I have published articles on my websites that fill out many of the details. 

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Does God Exist?

I thought it at last time to bring together a summary of the reasons why, over the years, I have tended to answer that question with a ‘yes’. The following are just summaries of topics I have expanded further elsewhere. Although I have a backlog of scattered writings on this matter, this is the first time I have attempted bring to together the strands from a variety of fields into a summary. The list below is likely to expand, but this is how it stands at the moment. (...in the July of 2007)

1. Skepticism: A thoroughgoing and honest skepticism includes a skeptical attitude toward dogmatic atheism.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: One can't claim that in order to get to the truth skepticism is sufficiently regulated by the "observe and test" scientific method since this very epistemic has its own issues (See below for further comments on "observe and test" science). Skepticism can cut both ways and if pushed to the limit it becomes self-undermining. Hence....

2. Scepticism, if too thoroughgoing, leads to an evasive postmodern anti-foundationalism, or alternatively in a self-destructive self-referential loop that starts to doubt itself unless it acknowledges that there is, after all, such a thing as rational a-priori belief in something that is stable and knowable - whatever that "something" is.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: The argument I advance in this post (based on a 1993 article) sketches out the self-undermining effects of a skepticism pushed too far: Hence, one must have a foundational a-priori starting point, whether it is a belief in God or a belief in the logical self-sufficiency of space, time and matter. But for belief in the logical and absolute self-sufficiency of space, time and matter there is the following little detail to contend with....

3. The Contingency Conjecture: Computational theory tells us that although finite mathematical explanatory structures may (or may not) succeed in compressing cosmic variety into a few fundamental principles, it is not possible to compress those explanatory structures to nothing at all. Thus, a finite Cosmos can never be founded on logical necessity. Any cosmos we could think of would be a reification of a contingent platonic possibility. ‘Possibility’ rather than self-sufficient necessity is the most salient logical character of the Cosmos and therefore it is burdened with contingency. Hence, the hunt is on for Aseity, the self-entailing agent of creation.....

JAN 2023 COMMENT: Contrary to the simplistic notions of many Christian fundamentalists, computation can create information but only at a rate limited by this equation:

 I_c = S_min + log(T_min)

,,.where  I_c  is the information created by an algorithm of length S_min   executed for a step time of T_min and where T_min and  S_min  are jointly minimized. (See here  where I derive a similar expression) 

Christian fundamentalists have been misled by the "log" term above which tells us that information, for a parallel processor, is created only very slowly and this may convey the false impression that God's Created Cosmos can't create information. Consistent with Shannon's concept of information, we find that randomness contains the greatest level of information in that its generation requires either very large algorithms and/or long execution times. (See here for more). 

But the point being made above is that physical explanation, which necessarily conforms to algorithmic laws, can't start from zero information (i.e. nothing) and necessarily starts from a measure of contingent information; that is, a hard kernel of brute givenness (or "contingency"). Therefore, physical explanation can never be logically self-contained and self-explaining. Therefore, the relatively simple elements of physical explanation cannot have the property of Aseity. (See here  for more)

4. Aseity: Since the contingency conjecture tells us that the cosmos cannot explain itself and therefore its non-existence would entail no contradiction, then my conclusion is that our cosmos should not exist. Since our contingent world, both its physical laws and substance, do exist then somehow it has been created from a logical and informational vacuum. Since clearly the elemental simplicity of the objects of physics only describe rather than uncover fundamental causes and therefore cannot embody Aseity, my conjecture is that there is something infinite out there with the property of Aseity which both creates and sustains our contingent cosmos. (This is a reworking of the cosmological argument)

5. Exceptions to Occam’s Razor: Although the assumed a-priori organization of the cosmos makes it amenable to compressed explanatory structures, there is no logical guarantee that this should always be the case: a-priori complex entities can conceivably embed and explain simple elements. Hence Occam’s Razor cannot be used to challenge the a-priori complexity of a Deity.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: As I understand it now, Occam's Razor doesn't necessarily challenge explanations that are far more complex than the data they explain. However, the Razor still applies when complex objects are used to explain the elementary. Let me expand on this assertion as follows: 

OK, so it is not true that simple data elements always have their best explanation in simple explanatory objects. For example, the relatively simple facts of a crime scene find their explanation in the complex motives of human beings and the foibles of human society; here simple facts have their origins in complexity. 

The vast number of possibilities in platonic space means that it is always possible to increase the number of informational bits of one's explanation (i.e. increase the "entities") until one finds an object in platonic space big enough to fit the facts. But if the true explanation has n bits of information and one is prepared to contrive fallacious explanations which arbitrarily & randomly add bits of information until one can fit all the facts with m bits of information, then it is likely that m >> n. This follows because the number of explanatory objects available in platonic space for a given bit count increases exponentially with the number of bits. Therefore the likelihood is that a theorizer who is prepared to multiply entities willy-nilly will not likely discover the correct explanation employing n bits and will return a value of m much greater than n. Therefore explanations from complexity must be justified by sufficient evidence to rule out some of the spurious branching paths that the unwary theorizer may go down when "multiplying entities". 

The latter sketches out how I personally would go about formally proving Occam's Razor, but I'm sure professional philosophers of science have already dealt with the matter thoroughly.

6. Idealism: The idealism of Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and the implicit idealism of the logical and linguistic positivists compel us to acknowledge that the notion of non-sentient noumena is at the very least a deeply problematical concept as far as intelligibility is concerned. For these philosophers, the a-priori perceiving and thinking mind has a central place in their philosophy and this exposes the difficulty of conceiving reality without mind. This prompts one to wonder if sentience, and especially Divine sentience in all its complexity, is, in fact, a given and primary phenomenon. At the very least it looks as though it is meaningless to talk of noumena without invoking the concept of an up and running perceiving & experiencing sentience, for whenever we think about reality, we can only think of it in terms of how we experience it and the theorized organization of the patterns of behavior that experience is subject to. 

JAN 2023 COMMENT: At the very least the natural laws organize, describe and predict our experiences. But we intuitively feel that these laws are evidence of a world that goes beyond our experiences: Surely those distant galaxies we see in space aren't just images painted onto the backdrop of the sky? Belief in divine creative integrity suggests that they aren't bit parts just set up for their appearances and that the back-story of their logic is fully worked out somewhere. This mathematical logic must be reified on some kind of medium that has a substantial ontology. But the only way we can think about the inaccessible noumena of this medium is in terms of our experiences and the mathematical logic that control and organize those experiences. This conjectured medium is an unintelligible concept unless it has the potential to serve experience.

7. The Self-Referencing Nature of Consciousness Cognition: So, all attempts to “explain” conscious cognition using concepts like atoms, fields, computation and information are themselves, in the final analysis, artifacts of conscious cognition. In short the Mind can only be described in terms of its own mental artifacts (this is analogous to a computer language compiler being written using the very language it compiles). This necessarily self-referencing and self-explaining aspect of mind may be the human analogue of Divine Aseity.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See the prologue to my book "Gravity and Quantum non-linearity" where I first floated the idea of the self-referencing nature of conscious cognition. 

8. Simulated Universe Logic: This is the joker in the pack: Recently some philosophers have mooted the idea that we may be part of some kind of giant simulation, thus suggesting we are authored by a super background intelligence that looks suspiciously like a Deity! See my article titled Time Travel for this one.

9. The Declarative Universe: Well, if philosophers can moot such exotic ideas as the "simulated universe" then that invites me to try my hand at mooting exotica. In this connection let me note a suspicious looking similarity between my Thinknet AI project and the way quantum mechanics works, and this hints, once again, that intelligence/sentience is an a-priori feature our universe. The micro-structure of our world has isomorphisms with thought and computation. As a friend once suggested to me (circa 1978) our contingent world is like a giant thought being sustained by the vast mind of God. (My friend wasn’t a philosopher, but based his idea on Acts 17:28). 

When we think of computer simulations, we tend to think in terms of procedural algorithms following their determined path, but my own speculations suggest that the cosmic "simulation" is closer to the declarative programming model rather than the procedural model. Since the contingent cosmos has no logical reason for existing it can only ever be a "simulation"; for something that cannot exist of its own necessity "simulation" is as real as it gets. For us "simulation" IS our reality.

10. The Quantum Matrix: At the quantum mechanical level it really does look as though the cosmos is some kind of "simulation" that only goes as far as simulating just what is necessary for reality. This is apparent in so far as the envelops of Quantum Mechanics only become “particles” when macroscopic observation demands a result; at all other times those envelops merely measure possibility rather than actuality. The parts of the 'simulation' that are a mere computational overhead, but which are a necessary computational precursor of macroscopic output, are not themselves actualized. 

JAN 2023 COMMENT: What I'm trying to say here is that Quantum mechanics looks to be a computation in so far as we only have the potential to observe the parts that result in a macroscopic output: There is much that occurs at a quantum level which are not accompanied by a physical output and appear to have a computational role rather than the role of being a potentially observable macroscopic output. This view rejects the multiverse interpretation. The multiverse interpretation attempts do away with the implied asymmetry of a selective output by affirming that all parts of the quantum calculation have a literal existence. 

11. Chance: That great incompressible, randomness, is, it seems, at the heart of the quantum process; it looks as though the potentially observable macroscopic outputs are chosen at random and we have no knowledge of any background computation by which these random outputs are generated. Thus, the most complex and contingent thing we can think of, namely randomness, is posited as “just there”. Randomness, given time, is, in fact, ringing the changes on everything there possibly could be! It is far from being a trivial concept. What do they mean when they say the universe is “just chance”! Randomness is a case where the complex embeds and explains the simple (e.g. the simple binary outcomes of coin tossing are embedded in a complex sequence). Perhaps the vast information resources of contingent randomness point to that conjectured entity of infinite complexity which sustains our contingent world. Whatever that entity is, if it exists, there is one thing we can say about it: it is highly complex.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See my book on Disorder and Randomness for more details on the nature of randomness.

12. Evolution: Resourced by the vast information supplies of an a-priori randomness, current science conjectures that there has been enough time in our cosmos for those resources to innovate complex intelligent adaptive systems which, of course, being adaptive lock themselves in. However, whether these adaptive systems have been arrived at from the information content of random input or not, their self-sustaining character hints at something profound: that is, that in the vast platonic spaces of possibility there are self-sustaining structures, which although they do not have logical necessity, are nevertheless self-perpetuating once they have come into existence. Likewise, Aseity may be a form of self-sustenance arising from some kind of preexistent infinite complexity. The infinities of Aseity are beyond our ability to imagine in detail, but in the infinite platonic world of mathematics there may be an incredibly complex and infinite sentient configuration with such great powers of self-sustenance that its existence is guaranteed to be eternally ‘locked in’. (This paragraph is a reworking of the 'ontological argument’)

13. Evolution: For the process of evolution to work (if it works) so many contingent precursors are required, not least a good supply of a-priori randomness, that it is nowhere near the logically self-sufficient 'creator-less' process that some think it to be. I am making no comment here as to whether or not evolution has actually happened - I am just commenting on its contingent character.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: Although randomness can be used as a search mechanism, to do anything useful it needs to be constrained and channeled as per my metaphor of the spongeam, for example. The spongeam would supply the necessary conditional information implied by this conditional probability:

Prob of evolution = Prob ( Evolution | Physical Regime )

The absolute probability of evolution is all but zero even in a cosmos of our size. Therefore, it follows that if evolution has occurred, the information it needs must be found in the conditions I've labelled above as "physical regime". This necessarily contingent information then raises the question of intelligent design.  

14. Other Minds: I believe, (although I have to admit it is more hope than belief) that it is possible to describe the detail of the human mind in full using conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. But in affirming this one must be aware that any such explanation is self-referencing – it is using the conceptual artifacts of conscious cognition to explain conscious cognition. The formal structure of such explanations, even if they succeed in covering everything, are not the thing-in-itself, but rather one mind’s external view of another mind. ‘Other minds’ can only present themselves to us in terms our first-person experiences; the organization of those first-person experiences then allows them to be theoretically synthesized into conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. However, unlike "material noumena" which have a debatable existence (because the only thing we really can know is our experience & theories), we do at least know what it feels like to be another mind – in contrast we certainly don’t know what it is like to be, say, an atom - if indeed such a notion is intelligible and coherent.

In the light of the foregoing, it seems that regarding conscious cognition as irreducible noumena is a more coherent idea than so-called ‘material’ noumena. Along with Searle I agree that there is an irreducible first-person ontology in personhood. The third-person language of the formal sciences simply disguises the fact that the descriptive explanations of science are, in the final analysis, cognitive artifacts whose formulation conceals the implicit role of the first-person perspective required to formulate these explanations from cognita. So, if the first-person perspective of human personality is ultimately irreducible it is an ominous sign for those forms of atheism which try to place so much emphasis on those enigmatic "material" noumena. Therefore, if the existence of other minds is such a fundamental part of rationality it sets a precedent for mooting the notion of an over-arching divine mind. 

JAN 2023 COMMENT:  As I've already said, I first set out the self-referencing and self-affirming nature of mind in the introduction to my 2004 book Gravity and Quantum Non-linearity. 

For the nature of consciousness see also: 

Quantum Non-Linearity: Consciousness (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

15. Metaphysical World: Our Worldview, if we have one, is far too complex an object for our theories about it to be tested with any more than a few experiential samples here and there. That Worldview informs us about a world well beyond anything that can be fully tested in principle. Given these human sampling limitations complex objects like personality, society and God are not amenable to easy cognitive apprehension and have little chance of being “proved” with a small set of experiential samples. It is no surprise, then, that given the partiality of human experience and cognition, an entity like God (if such a being exists), whose prime posited attribute is that of complexity and/or personality, has a very debatable existence; that is, even if God exists we expect his reality to be difficult to humanly grasp and therefore Hebrews 11:1-3 & Hebrews 11:6 look, from the point of view of epistemic methodology, to be reasonable demands in these circumstances. 

16. Keyhole Science: Science, as the careful social formalization of the testing procedure, puts justifiable strictures and formal controls on our anecdotal experience and consequently reduces the keyhole of experiential sampling even further. Science’s “guilty until proved innocent” criterion is a strict filter that helps block spurious claims and as such science's cautious epistemic methodology is analogous to the precautionary strategies used in courts of law. However, as with legal courts, the unavoidable cost of the cautious epistemological method of science is that it is going to make heavy weather of complex domains, like politics, sociology, personality and above all theology; it also cannot easily cope with erratic, out-of-place experiences that come in ones and twos.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: The demand that every entity posited must submit to prediction and test procedures is all well and good for relatively simple, accessible and regular phenomena, but is unrealistic for many of the realities the human mind has to grapple with, realities that are neither easily accessible nor regular.  When faced with a complex world that for most of us presents itself through many social texts rather than carefully controlled laboratory observations, the approach is much more a case of the post-facto crafting of sense-making explanatory structures. However, this enforced resort to an on-the-hoof post-facto epistemology must be exercised with caution, tentativeness, self-criticism and humility - this is something the conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalists need to learn.  

On the subject of epistemology see more here:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Epistemology (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

17. Limits of Scientific Epistemology and Authority. For the man in the street (or the man in the field), science’s observational samples and theories reach him via social texts. The end result of scientific theorizing entails the passing into society of all-embracing grand theoretical structures which of necessity are highly textual. Hence, for the man in the street science is largely a textual phenomenon and not a laboratory or direct observation phenomenon. So, for the intelligent layman epistemology is mostly a matter of handling the texts of society. In fact for all of us knowledge about the grand sweep of the cosmos mostly reaches us through the texts signaled to us by society, and it is our cognitive processing (or lack of processing in some cases!) of these texts that is pivotal in forming and testing our Worldview. In this respect science texts have no special authority apart from their appeal to our general mental toolkit of perception and reason. The social texts of formal science must therefore take their place side by side with historical and theological texts.

18. The God Instinct: History suggests that there is an instinctual/intuitive human understanding that the cosmos doesn’t contain its own explanation (i.e. it doesn't have Aseity) and that it points to something sentient beyond itself (See for example Romans 1:19-20 and the history of human relations with the notion of Deity)

19. Theodicy: The existence of suffering and evil doesn’t so much challenge a belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient loving God, as it does leave us with an existential dilemma: Are we really prepared to say that God should not have dragged our flawed world out from among the myriad contingencies of the platonic realm because of its huge burden of suffering and evil? Are we prepared to forego our own existence, because that existence is inevitably bound up with suffering and evil?

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See the following link where I discussed the problem of suffering and evil in more detail, although I have to confess that I don't really have much worth saying about this big problem:

Views, News and Pews: Chaoskampf and The Problem of Suffering and Evil (viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com)

20. Generalised Copernicanism: It is sometimes suggested that Human Cosmic Insignificance is a clear sign of our unimportance in the cosmic scheme of things and therefore evidence that there is no loving personal God. However, if we regard the universe as some kind of massive computation, the huge size of the cosmos may be connected with the “computational byproducts” of an important end result. As a wonderful Jewish saying goes: “For a single rose a field of thorns was spared”.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See here where I discussed this point more fully.

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The above are rather general and speculative pointers that prompt me to at least give some thinking space to the notion that a highly complex entity with the property of Aseity sustains our contingent world much like a mind sustains a thought. Frankly, however, on the basis of the above alone the case for theism is no more obliging than the case for atheism. That’s always been my problem – I could no more convincingly rule in theism as I could rule it out. At best the points above provide a prima-facie case for theism. But even if I concluded that the above points convinced me of the existence of a deity, they reveal very little about the exact nature and motives of that deity; at best they point in that direction but provide no personal introduction. In fact, a personal introduction may be impossible because ‘God’, if that’s the right name to use of Aseity, may be an utterly alien and impersonal entity or principality. In that case it is likely that attempts to take the matter further would be fruitless. (However, one might wonder why an impersonal Aseity would sustain the high personality we find at the top of the complexity ladder. Moreover, one might expect complex human nature to reflect something of the complexity of Aseity)

If that’s where it all ended, I think I would be agnostic, unsure where to go next. Actually, to be honest, I think know where I would go next – probably into disbelief; or at least disbelief in the existence of a gracious personal God; as far as the latter is concerned absence of evidence is truly evidence of absence because it seems to me very likely that any gracious personal God would reveal Himself more clearly. Thus, in the absence of a clearer revelation my conclusion is that there is likely to be no gracious personal God. Agnosticism about the existence of a personal loving God is not a consistent position.

However, my approach has been as follows: If there is a loving personal God and, moreover, a God of Grace, that God is unlikely to leave us bereft of some kind of special revelation as to His nature. To cut a long story short I believe the Revelation of God I have sought for is that found in the Christ of the Bible, the only quality revelation I have discovered. Why I think that Jesus Christ is THE revelation of God would itself be the subject of another list, but I will leave that for another time. I have to admit that it has all been a bit of a gamble: “Go for it and see what happens: nothing ventured nothing gained”. Nonetheless, I believe that God graciously meets the sinful seeker where he is at, as did the father of the prodigal son. Moreover, once one has apprehended the Revelation in Christ, the rather general philosophical list above starts to provide insights into God’s glory, grace and day-by-day providence.

But there is one tremendous irony here. If I were to compile a list of reasons for not believing in the existence of God the items in that list would largely be drawn from the counter evidence provided by the behavior of many a fundamentalist Christian. In short, most of my intellectual time is spent protecting my faith, not from atheism, but from Christian sectarianism & cultism. Evolution and Creation? ....No problem, solve that one over breakfast! Suffering and Evil?....On that question I'm swimming but I'm just managing to stay afloat! Inter-Christian spiritual rivalries? .....Gulp! I'm now out of my depth! In a world of competing spiritual grandees a spiritual low ender like me is pretty much out of the picture! Reach for The Open Gospel....
(http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html)

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See also page 8 of my account of my visit to Jerusalem. 

I have to say that the contemporary challenge to faith set by crackpot versions of Christianity continues unabated as their insanity sinks to a new nadir of intellectual debauchery and craziness in movements such as flat earth Christianity, evangelical cultism, 6K year young earthism, gnostic revivalism, fideism, prosperity gospel, conspiracy theorism, dominionism,  the glorification of gun-law, far-right Christianity and a general anti-democratic & anti-science ethos that pervades them all. The ultra-traditionalist tendencies at the heart of some of these movements are personalized in characters like Rodney Howard-Brown, Kent Hovind, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Steve Bannon, Lauren Boebert, Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Vladimir Putin.  These people fear the open-endedness, open debates and uncertainties of liberal societies with their freedom to dissent & protest, along with their very public governing forums which display all the contradictions, corruptions, contentions, and tensions natural to human nature. As Sir Robert Walpole observed, it is "the natural state of human affairs."  

The far-right's perception that the open society is a conspiracy of the radical-left counterbalances the far-left's perception that liberal capitalism is a conspiracy of the owning classes. The logic of both far-left and far-right, whose radical politics seeks to overthrow the open society, would unintentionally lead to the locked-down quietus and unalterable "certainties" of dominion, autocracy and dictatorship.

A false dichtomy: Evolution vs Intelligent Design

Picture from: New Mexico evolution event scuttled after attack from Intelligent Design creationists - Genetic Literacy Project

I see that the de facto "Intelligent Design" website Uncommon Descent have started the new year off by promoting their standard false dichotomy whereby they paradigmatically and habitually perceive evolution and intelligent design as mutually excluding. Reading their website I have frequently come across the conception that it's a simple choice between "natural forces" and "intelligent design" . I read that as an incoherent "God vs nature" conception of creation. That makes no sense to me as a Christian: Nature has no natural or logical necessity to exist and therefore it is in fact a most unnatural thing, an object requiring miraculous creation by God. If then nature is itself supernatural in this sense, who knows what it is divinely provisioned to do. 

See here for UD's polarised paradigm:

 Evolution or Intelligent design: On which side is the evidence? – Uncommon Descent

It ought to be clear to them that if Evolution, as conventionally understood, is to work then itself demands a large level of initial information* that raises the question of Intelligent Design.

See:

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

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

...and in particular:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Dembski: “I’m not denying evolutionary gradualism, challenging common descent or Natural Selection” (!!!!) (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

None of this necessarily implies a tribal commitment to conventional evolutionary theory as an explanation of natural history. 

Footnote

* This initial information becomes apparent in this conditional probability equation:

Prob of evolution = Prob ( Evolution | Physical Regime )

The absolute probability of evolution is all but zero even in a cosmos of our size. Therefore, it follows that if conventional evolution has occurred the information it needs must be found in the conditions I've labeled above as "physical regime". 

ADDENDUM 7/02/2023

In a blog post dated 23 January and titled Did Simulating “Cosmic Evolution” Get Evolutionists Closer to the Origin of Life? Ken Ham discusses the relevance of research into whether the amino acid building blocks of life came from space.  In his post I found that I didn't strongly disagree with Ken on anything except when he finished on this note:

Life in all its incredible diversity, from microscopic bacteria and fungi to plants to animals to mankind, was created by God just 6,000 years ago. Those who reject God will go to all sorts of lengths to try to prove life arose by natural processes.

That's classic dualism: It forgets that those so-called "natural processes" were created by God himself and not an incompetent demiurge. Therefore, they are far from natural, and we shouldn't take it for granted that they are not capable of working miracles. What Ken doesn't understand is that the secular project is engaged in a futile attempt to show that the information content of the cosmos has no surprisal value at all and that the cosmos originates from an information base of zero. Now, that is a mathematically impossible task! If Ken understood that he need no longer worry about what those secularists are going to come up with: Whatever they come up with will effectively be some form of creation or other in that some blend of initial information and processing time has to be an assumed starting point.

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.