In the subject book, Francis Collins, the head of the government side of the Human Genome project attempts to "provide evidence for belief". While I enjoyed the book quite a bit, if you are looking for "evidence of God", Collins pretty much just defers to C S Lewis on the actual discussion of "The Moral Law" which is the cornerstone of his "evidence". I'm still in the "belief and unbelief are equal leaps of faith" camp, but the point is that there is logic for either case and nothing in science, philosophy, or religion are going to "rationally prove" the case in this universe. Either God or chaos decided that our existence wasn't going to give us that rational proof in this universe.
The question of the book is: "In this modern era of cosmology, evolution and the human genome, is there still the possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual worldviews?" His answer is very much "yes", as is mine. "Whether we call it by name or not, all of us have arrived at a certain worldview. It helps us make sense of the world around us, provides us with an ethical framework, and guides our decisions about the future." Seems obvious.
He lists 3 responses to the Anthropic Principle: (that the universe is uniqely tuned to give rise to humans, or as really good atheists put it "we are here because we are here"):
1). There are essentially an infinite number of universes (the "multiverse theory"), so "we had to be here", all possibilities are. (a current atheist favorite that they had to come up with fairly quickly)
2). We are just ultimately and incredibly lucky ... a string of many known and likely many unknown 10 to the - many 10's and even at least low hundreds of decimal place improbabilites all worked out in our favor. We won the cosmic lottery. No way to prove that the winning lottery ticket for the next 300 million Powerball WON'T blow into your house window. In fact, it would be nearly a dead certainty stacked against the odds that you would be here at all.
3). God did it.
Actually, in the ebb and flow of human history, this hasn't really changed much. We just have a few more specific numbers for just how high the odds against our random existence really are.
After some time wading through angry atheist tracts, the thing I liked best about this book was the tone and humility of the author and a lot less "intellectual grandstanding" than Gould even though this guy is clearly extremely intelligent and accomplished. He seems to be far more interested in his reader understanding the issues and his points than in being impressed with the authors intelligence.
A lot of time is spent on the problems of Creationism and Intelligent Design. I generally agree with his assessment that they cause more trouble than they are worth. I find "fundamental literalists" to almost always be quite brittle and quickly become uncomfortable and judgmental or both when issues of origin and science are discussed. However, I think Collin's fails to understand what I would see as the "the appearance of age problem". God could create the universe as I write this using whatever methods he chooses--how that happens to "look to us" is interesting TO US, but doesn't have anything to do with his "somehow trying to fool us". From a divine perspective, it is all "just stuff"(matter, or the appearance of matter), not of any great importance. The hope we have is that he has chosen to provide us with a "soul in his image" ... no doubt with less fidelity than a low res cartoon, but promised to be eternal.
Sit back, try to focus on the NOW, being as opposed to doing, "say thanks"--there may be more "proof" available than logic would indicate. God wants to know you, shut off your monkey brain and LET HIM!
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Wonderful Life
I finally slogged my way through the last of what is certainly a very worthy text on the Burgess Shale, the Cambrian Explosion, and the proper way to understand contingency in evolution, by Stephen Jay Gould titled "Wonderful Life". Yes, the title pays homage to the Frank Kapra movie "It's a Wonderful Life" because the angel shows Jimmy Stewart's (George Baily) what the town would be like if he had never been born. Gould attempts a bit of that conjecture, but mostly he just points out how very likely it is that humans would have never happened in any "roll of the tape".
Gould is considered by many to have been the foremost expert on Darwinian evolution of the late 20th century (he is recently deceased), and his expertise shows through in the book. He writes well, but feels that a huge amount of detail on personalities, latin names and classification jargon is required to tell the story. I disagree; the book, while significant, borders on the unreadable to all but someone VERY interested in paleontology, evolution studies, and minutia of Gould's ways of thinking of the people involved in science.
The actual message is very simple; If one would "rewind the tape of evolution" (he says that a lot) to the point of the Burgess Shale and start again the odds that any of the rewinds would result in human consciousness are infinitesimal. Darwin, Charles Walcott, and most every textbook have an erroneous idea of the "cone of increasing diversity" in evolution that leads by "design" to man. I give Gould credit for not harping on the relationship (although it is mentioned) that Walcott still believed in a "designer" (God), so that influenced his thinking that "evolution was part of the mechanism", and therefore "directed". A more apt description might be "the wastebasket of evolution" and the "graveyard of creative destruction" as much of the massive diversity of the early Cambrian simply ceases to exist, and it the reasons for the destructed and the selected are unknowable to us, and probably much more "contingency" than "order".
The book drives home the point that there isn't any such "assumption of progress" or even idea that "progress" means getting to something like humans. Gould's "watchmaker" is not only blind, but purposeless. There is no thought that "a watch" is a worthy outcome. Gould seems to think that life showing up was "inevitable" (oddly, he provides no scientific basis for that, and nobody has gotten close to creating even the simplest of life in the lab).
Other than that "inevitability", even the development of the eukaryotic cell (the type we are made of, with the wall and structures in the cytoplasm) doesn't show up until 1.5 billion years ago. Gould suspects that this is another major league accident in planetary development that often wouldn't happen soon enough before sun depletion (something like 4 billion years) to give a decent chance at consciousness like ours. There is very little chance of the undirected, completely random evolutionary accident arriving at us (uh, "news at 11 I guess" ... this wasn't exactly a surprise).
I'm struck by how often very intelligent people find a flaw in one item that someone else had asserted for evidence of God, and immediately jump to the "SEE!, it isn't created!". Meanwhile, they almost always expand the odds against their own existence by some astronomical factor. Gould never provides an imagined "10 to some huge negative decimal" odds against humans showing up, but over and over he indicates how at MANY points in the random dance of evolution, if one "rewound the tape", there is no way we ever happen.
He brings up the "anthropic principle" that says "this is the universe we see, because we are here" as about the only possible explanation a dutiful atheist scientist can be left with. This explanation is pretty much "it is because it is", or "we did a lot of study, discovered that the odds against us defied explanation, so we decided that we are just here because we are".
Say you are on Death Row and I'm your lawyer. I come in and tell you that we have exhausted all appeals, but you will be released before you are executed because "I've never lost a capital case". Are you comfortable? Turns out that in the real world, I've never lost a capital case nor had one of my patients die in brain surgery! Therefore, by the sorts of odds of us being here in this universe, you ought to find me as a "reasonable choice" for a lawyer at a murder trial, or your brain surgeon if you need one! "We are here because we are" has just as much to suggest it as a wise answer philosophically.
I suppose if you are betting against God, then any explanation that lets you live without that concern is comforting. Gould allows us to stack yet another giant but unstated number against us being here on top of a stack from physics with the wonderful cosmological constant of 10 to the -120, not estimated by man, but DISCOVERED in the fabric of our universe saying, "It could be ANY number, none of the others allowing your existence.How do you like those apples?".
I find that simple premises in life tend to work best. The old "If you are in a game of chance and you don't know who the patsy is, it is probably you" has a lot of truth. That is also heavily related to "the house wins"-you just have to figure out who "the house" is. In Vegas, that is pretty easy, in the US, lots of folks would like you to believe "corporations", and I falsely went with that, thinking it was a good idea to "work for the house". Unfortunately, it is Lawyers. If you look closely at our system you find they are all the politicians, judges, and BOTH sides in any dispute. Take a look at John Edwards-oh, and BTW, how many Lawyers are running for President vs CEOs or even long term corporate employees? But I digress.
Lots of scientists and atheists seem to think that they can explain to God just how he can run his house. "If evolution doesn't look ordered to US, then it can't have INTELLIGENCE behind it"! Uh, and exactly what would it be that would give us the perspective to decide that as little more than pond scum orbiting on obscure rock on the outskirts of one obscure galaxy out of what we believe to be 100 billion galaxies in at least this universe?
If one wants to believe string theorists, that would be out of 10 to the 500 universes. Is even the definition of "intelligence" that simple? Isn't even defining what our yet not understood to ourselves consciousness does as "intelligence" in some universal sense a pinnacle of hubris WAY beyond the simple idea that the earth was the center of the universe? We have decided we KNOW the parameters within which an ultimate power can decide to create? We believe God wouldn't play dice, it looks random to us, ergo, there is no God.
I was glad to finally read a Gould book since I've heard a lot about him and seen him quoted by many atheists as a comforting; "See, he is a really smart piece mass of protein, he has done a lot of study and decided God didn't create life, so let's commit the unforgivable sin and maybe set up a website where teens can do it, because we are scientists and only think RATIONALLY".
Maybe so; if it happens that randomly generated protein arrived at the proper definition of "rational" then my hopes are in vain and life has the atheist desired lack of meaning. Strangely, it seems like other than really large odds against OUR existence, it is going to be hard to have any evidence for or against God.
Gould is considered by many to have been the foremost expert on Darwinian evolution of the late 20th century (he is recently deceased), and his expertise shows through in the book. He writes well, but feels that a huge amount of detail on personalities, latin names and classification jargon is required to tell the story. I disagree; the book, while significant, borders on the unreadable to all but someone VERY interested in paleontology, evolution studies, and minutia of Gould's ways of thinking of the people involved in science.
The actual message is very simple; If one would "rewind the tape of evolution" (he says that a lot) to the point of the Burgess Shale and start again the odds that any of the rewinds would result in human consciousness are infinitesimal. Darwin, Charles Walcott, and most every textbook have an erroneous idea of the "cone of increasing diversity" in evolution that leads by "design" to man. I give Gould credit for not harping on the relationship (although it is mentioned) that Walcott still believed in a "designer" (God), so that influenced his thinking that "evolution was part of the mechanism", and therefore "directed". A more apt description might be "the wastebasket of evolution" and the "graveyard of creative destruction" as much of the massive diversity of the early Cambrian simply ceases to exist, and it the reasons for the destructed and the selected are unknowable to us, and probably much more "contingency" than "order".
The book drives home the point that there isn't any such "assumption of progress" or even idea that "progress" means getting to something like humans. Gould's "watchmaker" is not only blind, but purposeless. There is no thought that "a watch" is a worthy outcome. Gould seems to think that life showing up was "inevitable" (oddly, he provides no scientific basis for that, and nobody has gotten close to creating even the simplest of life in the lab).
Other than that "inevitability", even the development of the eukaryotic cell (the type we are made of, with the wall and structures in the cytoplasm) doesn't show up until 1.5 billion years ago. Gould suspects that this is another major league accident in planetary development that often wouldn't happen soon enough before sun depletion (something like 4 billion years) to give a decent chance at consciousness like ours. There is very little chance of the undirected, completely random evolutionary accident arriving at us (uh, "news at 11 I guess" ... this wasn't exactly a surprise).
I'm struck by how often very intelligent people find a flaw in one item that someone else had asserted for evidence of God, and immediately jump to the "SEE!, it isn't created!". Meanwhile, they almost always expand the odds against their own existence by some astronomical factor. Gould never provides an imagined "10 to some huge negative decimal" odds against humans showing up, but over and over he indicates how at MANY points in the random dance of evolution, if one "rewound the tape", there is no way we ever happen.
He brings up the "anthropic principle" that says "this is the universe we see, because we are here" as about the only possible explanation a dutiful atheist scientist can be left with. This explanation is pretty much "it is because it is", or "we did a lot of study, discovered that the odds against us defied explanation, so we decided that we are just here because we are".
Say you are on Death Row and I'm your lawyer. I come in and tell you that we have exhausted all appeals, but you will be released before you are executed because "I've never lost a capital case". Are you comfortable? Turns out that in the real world, I've never lost a capital case nor had one of my patients die in brain surgery! Therefore, by the sorts of odds of us being here in this universe, you ought to find me as a "reasonable choice" for a lawyer at a murder trial, or your brain surgeon if you need one! "We are here because we are" has just as much to suggest it as a wise answer philosophically.
I suppose if you are betting against God, then any explanation that lets you live without that concern is comforting. Gould allows us to stack yet another giant but unstated number against us being here on top of a stack from physics with the wonderful cosmological constant of 10 to the -120, not estimated by man, but DISCOVERED in the fabric of our universe saying, "It could be ANY number, none of the others allowing your existence.How do you like those apples?".
I find that simple premises in life tend to work best. The old "If you are in a game of chance and you don't know who the patsy is, it is probably you" has a lot of truth. That is also heavily related to "the house wins"-you just have to figure out who "the house" is. In Vegas, that is pretty easy, in the US, lots of folks would like you to believe "corporations", and I falsely went with that, thinking it was a good idea to "work for the house". Unfortunately, it is Lawyers. If you look closely at our system you find they are all the politicians, judges, and BOTH sides in any dispute. Take a look at John Edwards-oh, and BTW, how many Lawyers are running for President vs CEOs or even long term corporate employees? But I digress.
Lots of scientists and atheists seem to think that they can explain to God just how he can run his house. "If evolution doesn't look ordered to US, then it can't have INTELLIGENCE behind it"! Uh, and exactly what would it be that would give us the perspective to decide that as little more than pond scum orbiting on obscure rock on the outskirts of one obscure galaxy out of what we believe to be 100 billion galaxies in at least this universe?
If one wants to believe string theorists, that would be out of 10 to the 500 universes. Is even the definition of "intelligence" that simple? Isn't even defining what our yet not understood to ourselves consciousness does as "intelligence" in some universal sense a pinnacle of hubris WAY beyond the simple idea that the earth was the center of the universe? We have decided we KNOW the parameters within which an ultimate power can decide to create? We believe God wouldn't play dice, it looks random to us, ergo, there is no God.
I was glad to finally read a Gould book since I've heard a lot about him and seen him quoted by many atheists as a comforting; "See, he is a really smart piece mass of protein, he has done a lot of study and decided God didn't create life, so let's commit the unforgivable sin and maybe set up a website where teens can do it, because we are scientists and only think RATIONALLY".
Maybe so; if it happens that randomly generated protein arrived at the proper definition of "rational" then my hopes are in vain and life has the atheist desired lack of meaning. Strangely, it seems like other than really large odds against OUR existence, it is going to be hard to have any evidence for or against God.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Consilience
Wilson has the vision that it COULD all be linked together so that we would truly understand our universe. He strongly laments the "post modernist" view that "all points of view are equally valid" - not surprising for a scientist. He seems much more willing to entertain the potential for divinity than many scientists, even though for himself, he is a materialist. He DOES seem to realize at least part of the horror of a universe where there is no transcendence, but he sees the risks of transcendence as too high -- mostly on the environmental front. He sums up the materialist vs transcendent views as "The uncomfortable truth is the the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure".
That is an interesting statement in that I would question whether any human will acquire a "full measure" of EITHER of those areas separately either. However, to come to a conclusion of what that which completely transcends the physical can do, seems a bit presumptuous. Man is so quick to set limits on what it is that God can do, it is good God has us around to lock those limits in on infinite power since we are so "intelligent" (just ask us). While we seem good at providing limits for the infinite, it is strange that we seem less inclined to limit ourselves.
He makes a good comment on the state of knowledge and information in the world; "We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it and make important choices wisely". I think he is right on that at some level, and he also points out in the book how important it is to place the information into context with other knowledge, and even make it into a "story". He does seem to have some real insight into human nature.
He waits until the very end of the book to get into environmental doom and gloom. He sees us as rushing headlong to destruction of the planet, and has decided that "somehow" man needs to "morally" pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and see vast control on development and technology as "the only moral thing to do".
A neat trick for a strict materialist to come up with, apparently a new form of human brain will somehow "evolve" and suddenly operate with this "environmental moral imperative" in the next few decades? It seems unlikely to me that randomness should have bequeathed us with this function, and in a materialist universe we are just going to have to wait around for a few million years of "survival of the fittest" and hope that the right kind of "morals" for environmentalism randomly fall out the back end of the random process.
If such doesn't happen, that must mean that "the right kind of morals" just didn't randomly arise at "the right time" and the great roulette wheel of randomness will just keep spinning along without us. Small loss in a cold godless universe!
It is nice to see that even strict materialists have "hope" -- I'm thinking that he may want to invest more in lottery tickets with his faith in the great god of the dice. It seems so strange that a random process would generate a brain that questions the outcome of the random process (the existing state of the world), yet somehow believes that one of the outputs of that random process (us) is somehow responsible -- and soon to be "morally mandated" to "fix it".
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
God and Science
An uplifting little gift for the Easter season. I'm always willing to look at both sides, but I'm looking forward to reading his book a lot more than "The God Delusion" and "The End of Faith". I HOPE that he bears a lot less hatred and false certainty than the other two authors. From just the synopsis, it looks like it may be a very worthy work. I never really mind reading "the other side", and often there are some interesting points, but it is often a bit sad to be exposed to the level of hopelessness there.
 clipped from www.cnn.com
As the British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, "Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative."
|
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Anthropic Principle
I got to hear Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind talk on the subject on MPR via the net. Yet another great feature of the modern world, the net allows us to listen to what we want to when we want to.
I have blogged on his recent book and as I said, really enjoyed it, as I did his talk on the radio. What struck me as I listened was something from "Change or Die", a short little somewhat self-helpish / business sort of book that I picked up and read through recently that ties back to "Frames", ala a series of posts that I made on a George Lakoff book back in December '05 and January '06.
We humans run around with tiny time-delayed models in our heads that are less reliable because everything even manages to be perceived in those models must be filtered through a set of "frames", which are "meta-models" that tell us what conclusions are the most "beneficial" for us to "jump to". "News at 11", all experience is SUBJECTIVE, and "meaning" is even MORE biased!
It is completely unsurprising that a physicist that seems it as a "grave weakness" to "fall into" belief in God and realizes that we are even wired naturally to believe in a "higher power" would seek out nearly ANY explanation to justify how we could just "happen" to live in a Goldilocks universe "tuned" to 10 to the -120th accuracy to allow us to exist.
The "Anthropic Principle" is essentially Descartes "I think therefore I am" writ large. "We are here and able to comprehend the universe, therefore it is obvious it would have all the parameters for us to be here".
How about folks like me that believe that God DOES exist?
It is certainly an open issue if a finite brain can even "imagine the transcendent", but **IF** we have any hopes of escaping the "frame" of physical reality, the path would seem to have to lie in that direction. Our ability to have pure thought, mathematics, religion, love and I'd even argue boolean logic and computer programs takes us as close as we can come in this life to "slipping the surly bonds and touching the face of God". To even attempt to envision escape from the models, frames and incompleteness of the material world seems to me to give a HOPE for a "better perspective".
I have blogged on his recent book and as I said, really enjoyed it, as I did his talk on the radio. What struck me as I listened was something from "Change or Die", a short little somewhat self-helpish / business sort of book that I picked up and read through recently that ties back to "Frames", ala a series of posts that I made on a George Lakoff book back in December '05 and January '06.
We humans run around with tiny time-delayed models in our heads that are less reliable because everything even manages to be perceived in those models must be filtered through a set of "frames", which are "meta-models" that tell us what conclusions are the most "beneficial" for us to "jump to". "News at 11", all experience is SUBJECTIVE, and "meaning" is even MORE biased!
It is completely unsurprising that a physicist that seems it as a "grave weakness" to "fall into" belief in God and realizes that we are even wired naturally to believe in a "higher power" would seek out nearly ANY explanation to justify how we could just "happen" to live in a Goldilocks universe "tuned" to 10 to the -120th accuracy to allow us to exist.
The "Anthropic Principle" is essentially Descartes "I think therefore I am" writ large. "We are here and able to comprehend the universe, therefore it is obvious it would have all the parameters for us to be here".
How about folks like me that believe that God DOES exist?
It is certainly an open issue if a finite brain can even "imagine the transcendent", but **IF** we have any hopes of escaping the "frame" of physical reality, the path would seem to have to lie in that direction. Our ability to have pure thought, mathematics, religion, love and I'd even argue boolean logic and computer programs takes us as close as we can come in this life to "slipping the surly bonds and touching the face of God". To even attempt to envision escape from the models, frames and incompleteness of the material world seems to me to give a HOPE for a "better perspective".
Saturday, February 03, 2007
The Great Divorce
Having to suffer through Dawkins for the good of Christendom was a bit of a burden, and I felt that I owed my soul a bit of C. S. Lewis, so I dug out "The Great Divorce" that I had first read out west in like the late '90s, and had ended up thinking of and quoting rather badly to others at times. It is a very short little fable, 125 not very dense pages, and well worth the time.
It is a Lewis vision of heaven, hell, earth, and maybe purgatory. "Hell or purgatory" are a somewhat "always nearly dark city" that spreads on to what seems like infinity when you are there, but is really only like a little crack in the "ground" when you are in heaven. You can "get on a bus" and go up to the outskirts of heaven, but in order to enter, you have to accept both sovereignty and grace of God. There is just "no other way" ... without it your soul isn't strong enough exist in the light of ultimate truth.
There are a number of little vignettes when the authors character encounters various souls that are "visiting". One is the classic hard-bitten realist that "has seen it all before" and "knows the score".
How well that captures so many. It is always "the folks in charge", "the big shots". They were given the gift of life, but they abdicated the honor of being responsible for living it to some mysterious "them". Few things are sadder, and Lewis captures the sadness of the inability to move to even a positive eternity because of a life lived not wanting to be "anyone's patsy".
This little gem is worth pulling out of context:
Apparently, he ran into Dawkins making a visit (according to physics, it is possible that everything that happens is happening all the time and always has been).
It is a tiny book, well worth just picking up and reading. Two of the characters that I especially love are the book-ends of one a moralist, who can't enter heaven because a guy that he knew as a drunken murderer is forgiven and there. The other is a liberal minister that just won't accept the ultimate truth and reality of God. He believes that those that "honestly disagree" have to be saved as well.
Were our society just "balanced", rather than a secular cultural wasteland, C. S. Lewis would be one of those names held up very highly. Another name that I realize that Dawkins somehow failed to mention is that of Donald Knuth, who wrote a book "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" That oddly enough, I seem to have, and read before I started blogging. Perhaps I need to return to this, and of course such things can always be borrowed. For those of you NOT of exactly the computer scientist persuasion, Donald Knuth is the author of The Art Of Computer Programming which is as close as there is to a "Bible" in computer science.
Somehow Dawkins failed to mention him while denigrating the idea that one could really be "scientist" and believe in God.
It is a Lewis vision of heaven, hell, earth, and maybe purgatory. "Hell or purgatory" are a somewhat "always nearly dark city" that spreads on to what seems like infinity when you are there, but is really only like a little crack in the "ground" when you are in heaven. You can "get on a bus" and go up to the outskirts of heaven, but in order to enter, you have to accept both sovereignty and grace of God. There is just "no other way" ... without it your soul isn't strong enough exist in the light of ultimate truth.
There are a number of little vignettes when the authors character encounters various souls that are "visiting". One is the classic hard-bitten realist that "has seen it all before" and "knows the score".
"Anyway," said the ghost, "who wants to be rescued? What the hell would there be to DO here?"
"Or there?" said I.
"Quite," said the ghost. "They've got you either way".
"What would you like ot do if you had your choice?" I asked.
"There you go!" said the ghost with a certain trimph. "Asking ME to make a plan. It's up to the Management to find something that doesn't bore us, isn't it? It's theri job. Why should we do it for them? That's just where the parsons and the moralists have got the thing upside down. They keep on asking US to alter ourselves. But if the people who run the show are so clever and so powerful, why don't THEY find something to suit their public?".
How well that captures so many. It is always "the folks in charge", "the big shots". They were given the gift of life, but they abdicated the honor of being responsible for living it to some mysterious "them". Few things are sadder, and Lewis captures the sadness of the inability to move to even a positive eternity because of a life lived not wanting to be "anyone's patsy".
This little gem is worth pulling out of context:
"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words; "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven". There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy-that is to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends."
Apparently, he ran into Dawkins making a visit (according to physics, it is possible that everything that happens is happening all the time and always has been).
There were materialistic Ghosts who informed the immortals that they were deluded: there was no life after death, and this whole country was a hallucination."
It is a tiny book, well worth just picking up and reading. Two of the characters that I especially love are the book-ends of one a moralist, who can't enter heaven because a guy that he knew as a drunken murderer is forgiven and there. The other is a liberal minister that just won't accept the ultimate truth and reality of God. He believes that those that "honestly disagree" have to be saved as well.
Were our society just "balanced", rather than a secular cultural wasteland, C. S. Lewis would be one of those names held up very highly. Another name that I realize that Dawkins somehow failed to mention is that of Donald Knuth, who wrote a book "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" That oddly enough, I seem to have, and read before I started blogging. Perhaps I need to return to this, and of course such things can always be borrowed. For those of you NOT of exactly the computer scientist persuasion, Donald Knuth is the author of The Art Of Computer Programming which is as close as there is to a "Bible" in computer science.
Somehow Dawkins failed to mention him while denigrating the idea that one could really be "scientist" and believe in God.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Race Doesn't Exist
It showed up in the paper last week, and I heard a segment on MPR. You may think that there is such a thing as racial difference between humans, but according to the current politically correct view, that would make you a racist. You just have to get your mind right.
The following captured from the MN Science Museum Exhibit Site.
There you have it! You probably think that Kevin Garnett looks differently from Brett Favre for reasons of race, but that just shows that you are prone to racist imposed stereotypes! There is no such thing as race in the real world, it is all a "social construct"!
Kevin Garnett is an oppressed minority, forced to live off $15 Million a year do to the oppressive constructs of our racially charged society!
The following captured from the MN Science Museum Exhibit Site.
Everyday Experience of Race
Race is embedded in virtually all aspects of American life. Explore social and personal experiences of race in familiar settings such as home and neighborhood, health and medicine, and education and schools. Discover that race and racism is not inside our heads, but in fact is built into our laws, traditions, and institutions.
The Science of Human Variation
Racial and ethnic categories, which have changed over time, are human-made. We now know that human beings are more alike genetically than any other living species. Scientifically, no one gene, or any set of genes, can support the idea of race. This section focuses on what current science knows about human variation and our species' history.
History of the Idea of Race
Race has not always existed. Sorting people by physical differences is a recent invention, only a few hundred years old. Discover how the development of the idea of race is closely linked to the early development of the United States.
There you have it! You probably think that Kevin Garnett looks differently from Brett Favre for reasons of race, but that just shows that you are prone to racist imposed stereotypes! There is no such thing as race in the real world, it is all a "social construct"!
Kevin Garnett is an oppressed minority, forced to live off $15 Million a year do to the oppressive constructs of our racially charged society!
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
The Cosmic Landscape
This book by Leonard Susskind is a very well written and very honest account by an accomplished physicist. He subtitles it "string theory and the illusion of intelligent design", but in many ways it is a half-time speech to encourage the weakening physicists to not lose hope, and hold on to their faith that there is no intelligence behind the universe, no matter how grim it may look for the proponents of randomness.
You can tell that there is some bitter disappointment with a few developments of recent years. The worst is that "Einsteins blunder", the cosmological constant, which he added as a "fudge factor" to general relativity since he envisioned the universe as static. When Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding it was assumed that the constant was zero, and Einstein called giving it a value his "greatest mistake". Unfortunately for the "random crowd", it turns out that it needs to have a value for us to exist, and that value has to be tuned to an accuracy of 10 to the -120. If you believe that would happen randomly, then you are either a regular player of the lottery or a nervous atheist physicist.
It isn't as if this is the only "Goldilocks feature" (not too this, not too that, but JUST right) of our universe. There is the Higgs field, the strong and weak force balances and a host of others. Prior to the late '90s most physicists felt that string theory was going to give them the "grand unified theory of everything" that would allow them to definitively declare that no "watchmaker was needed" (ie. No God or Intelligent Design), but the accuracy of 10 to the -120 was too much for many of them--they either refuse to accept the dead end of string theory as providing the kind of "lack of dependence on special conditions" that would indicate to them that "it just happened", or apparently quietly pray in their closets to prevent guys like Susskind, or worse yet, Dawkins from finding them out.
As Susskind points out on page 355, lest someone think that scientists are "open minded"; "Because as scientists we understand that there is a compelling human need to believe - the need to be comforted - that easily clouds peoples judgment. It is all too easy to fall into the seductive trap of a comforting fairy tale. So we resist, to the death, all explanations of the world based on anything but the Laws of Physics, mathematics, and probability."
Such is the stuff of faith, and indeed, that core decision as to the origin of the universe; intelligent, purposeful, and meaningful? Or random, purposeless and meaningless? is at the core of how humans relate to life, truth and each other. I would argue that a core feature of the human mind, the need for CLOSURE, which drives the need for FUNDAMENTALISM may even be a bigger factor than the random/intelligent divide, one which I intend to go into in the future as I begin to deal with "The God Delusion" by Dawkins.
Susskind's, Dawkins and all atheist positions are fundamentalist ... like the baptists I grew up with, or like the folks that flew into the twin towers. Christ brings freedom if you will have it -- he saves by Grace, allows (even demands!) loving your enemies, and beats up on the fundamentalists of the day -- the Scribes and Pharisees with joyous abandon. Fundamentalists are so fun to argue with since they are so rigid and prone to get unhinged when they find their views questioned in ways they have difficulty defending. Even the religious ones actually have no "higher power", because they fervently believe that "it is all obvious with a FEW easy to understand "facts"" ... just like the scientific or "liberal" fundamentalists. "A small matter of education" and you can be a fundamentalist too!
Susskind pumps up the weakened atheist position by an appeal to the messiness of string theory. He rises to the defense of randomness with the assertion that there are 10 to the 500 UNIVERSES in the "cosmic landscape", so it is really "easy" that we happen to be here. To "strengthen" his position, it looks like such a theory can never be tested, since our universe bubble is expanding near the speed of light, knowledge of the other universes is forever outside our "horizon". Susskind points out that his position is somehow superior to "the God hypothesis", even though apparently not testable, since as he states above, he is beyond that "human need to be comforted".
Apparently he finds the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient being, morally perfect, and beyond material understanding as somehow "comforting". I would imagine that his concept of God would not include the potential for such a thing as "judgment" or "sin", even though given the distance between ours and that of a being that may do fine tuning of the cosmological constant to 120 places of accuracy, it would seem that there would be a slight potential for "differences".
Susskind proudly proclaims with Laplace relative to the idea of God; "I have no need of this hypothesis". Much as he fails to explain why he finds himself beyond human need for "comfort", he fails to explain this leap. Apparently he hasn't figured out yet that he is mortal, and in that, Laplace and Einstein have clearly exceeded Lenny's understanding of their position in the universe. (they know the answer to God)
He DID write an excellent book that I would highly recommend to anyone that seeks to understand physics. He clearly believes that he has produced a work that will be "no comfort to the intelligent design crowd". That may be true in the sense that most of that crowd share Susskind's fundamentalism (just a small "type difference"), which is actually the most comforting of human delusions ... because fundamentalists believe that they know.
You can tell that there is some bitter disappointment with a few developments of recent years. The worst is that "Einsteins blunder", the cosmological constant, which he added as a "fudge factor" to general relativity since he envisioned the universe as static. When Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding it was assumed that the constant was zero, and Einstein called giving it a value his "greatest mistake". Unfortunately for the "random crowd", it turns out that it needs to have a value for us to exist, and that value has to be tuned to an accuracy of 10 to the -120. If you believe that would happen randomly, then you are either a regular player of the lottery or a nervous atheist physicist.
It isn't as if this is the only "Goldilocks feature" (not too this, not too that, but JUST right) of our universe. There is the Higgs field, the strong and weak force balances and a host of others. Prior to the late '90s most physicists felt that string theory was going to give them the "grand unified theory of everything" that would allow them to definitively declare that no "watchmaker was needed" (ie. No God or Intelligent Design), but the accuracy of 10 to the -120 was too much for many of them--they either refuse to accept the dead end of string theory as providing the kind of "lack of dependence on special conditions" that would indicate to them that "it just happened", or apparently quietly pray in their closets to prevent guys like Susskind, or worse yet, Dawkins from finding them out.
As Susskind points out on page 355, lest someone think that scientists are "open minded"; "Because as scientists we understand that there is a compelling human need to believe - the need to be comforted - that easily clouds peoples judgment. It is all too easy to fall into the seductive trap of a comforting fairy tale. So we resist, to the death, all explanations of the world based on anything but the Laws of Physics, mathematics, and probability."
Such is the stuff of faith, and indeed, that core decision as to the origin of the universe; intelligent, purposeful, and meaningful? Or random, purposeless and meaningless? is at the core of how humans relate to life, truth and each other. I would argue that a core feature of the human mind, the need for CLOSURE, which drives the need for FUNDAMENTALISM may even be a bigger factor than the random/intelligent divide, one which I intend to go into in the future as I begin to deal with "The God Delusion" by Dawkins.
Susskind's, Dawkins and all atheist positions are fundamentalist ... like the baptists I grew up with, or like the folks that flew into the twin towers. Christ brings freedom if you will have it -- he saves by Grace, allows (even demands!) loving your enemies, and beats up on the fundamentalists of the day -- the Scribes and Pharisees with joyous abandon. Fundamentalists are so fun to argue with since they are so rigid and prone to get unhinged when they find their views questioned in ways they have difficulty defending. Even the religious ones actually have no "higher power", because they fervently believe that "it is all obvious with a FEW easy to understand "facts"" ... just like the scientific or "liberal" fundamentalists. "A small matter of education" and you can be a fundamentalist too!
Susskind pumps up the weakened atheist position by an appeal to the messiness of string theory. He rises to the defense of randomness with the assertion that there are 10 to the 500 UNIVERSES in the "cosmic landscape", so it is really "easy" that we happen to be here. To "strengthen" his position, it looks like such a theory can never be tested, since our universe bubble is expanding near the speed of light, knowledge of the other universes is forever outside our "horizon". Susskind points out that his position is somehow superior to "the God hypothesis", even though apparently not testable, since as he states above, he is beyond that "human need to be comforted".
Apparently he finds the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient being, morally perfect, and beyond material understanding as somehow "comforting". I would imagine that his concept of God would not include the potential for such a thing as "judgment" or "sin", even though given the distance between ours and that of a being that may do fine tuning of the cosmological constant to 120 places of accuracy, it would seem that there would be a slight potential for "differences".
Susskind proudly proclaims with Laplace relative to the idea of God; "I have no need of this hypothesis". Much as he fails to explain why he finds himself beyond human need for "comfort", he fails to explain this leap. Apparently he hasn't figured out yet that he is mortal, and in that, Laplace and Einstein have clearly exceeded Lenny's understanding of their position in the universe. (they know the answer to God)
He DID write an excellent book that I would highly recommend to anyone that seeks to understand physics. He clearly believes that he has produced a work that will be "no comfort to the intelligent design crowd". That may be true in the sense that most of that crowd share Susskind's fundamentalism (just a small "type difference"), which is actually the most comforting of human delusions ... because fundamentalists believe that they know.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Druyan, The Evils of Religion
I was forwarded a link http://www.csicop.org/si/2003-11/ann-druyan.html to an article by Ann Druyan, Karl Sagan’s second wife, on the evils of religion. It reminded me of a book that I read before Christmas; “The End of Faith”, by Sam Harris. A few quotes from Ann;
“I think we still have an acute case of post-Copernican-stress syndrome. We have not resolved the trauma of losing our infantile sense of centrality in the universe. And so as a society we lie to our children. We tell them a palliative story, almost to ensure that they will be infantile for all of their lives. Why? Is the notion that we die so unacceptable? Is the notion that we are tiny and the universe is vast too much of a blow to our shaky self-esteem?”
“The Bible says that the Earth is flat. The Bible says that we were created separately from the rest of life. If you look at it honestly, you have to give up these basic ideas, you have to admit that the Bible is not infallible, it's not the gospel truth of the creator of the universe. So what did we do? We made a corrupt treaty that resulted in a troubled peace: We built a wall inside ourselves. It made us sick. In our souls we cherished a myth that was rootless in nature. What we actually knew of nature we compartmentalized into a place that could not touch our souls. The churches agreed to stop torturing and murdering scientists. The scientists pretended that knowledge of the universe has no spiritual implications.”
“What I find disappointing about most religious beliefs is that they are a kind of statement of contempt for nature and reality. It's absurdly hubristic. It holds the myths of a few thousand years above nature's many billion-yeared journey. It says reality is inferior and less satisfying than the stories we make up.”
I won’t quote from Harris at this point, only point out that he is generally more militant. So what does an “infantile Christian” have to say about this?
For any formal theory in which basic arithmetical facts are provable, it's possible to construct an arithmetical statement which, if the theory is consistent, is true but not provable or refutable in the theory
In other words, “no complete formal theory of the universe from within the universe”. We are in a box, a box which seems to us to be a very big box, but there will never be any formal system (science) that completely describes the box, let alone describes the meaning of the box.
Second, Ann (and Harris) seem to want to have “souls”. They somehow “believe there is more”, they are just certain that they know what that “more” ISN’T. It ISN’T “God” in any of the senses of any of the existing Religions (well maybe Buddhism for Harris), but it clearly isn’t the Christian / Biblical description. They may claim to not have faith, but they actually have quite a lot of faith:
- They have a strong faith that there isn’t an afterlife that would have a penalty for unbelief. Pascal’s wager essentially says that if you want to “withhold judgment”, what you really need to do is all you can to be a believer. If you are wrong, you potentially forgo some questionable earthy pleasures of sin, but if right, you obtain eternal bliss. If you take the other choice, one had better be VERY sure (which you can’t be, scientifically), because failure to believe will earn eternal punishment.
- They have faith that what they think they observe is what they are actually observing. Movies like The Matrix or items from science fiction like the holodeck on Star Trek give clues that reality may or may not be what we think it is. Quantum mechanics tells us that “we can’t know what it is”. Is it energy (wave) or matter (particle) … apparently “both”, but potentially neither. A lot of the smugness of science comes from its success at making predictions of how things operate in “human scale”. At very small sizes, and very high speeds, the smugness becomes “uncertainty”. There is a lot of difference between being happy with the information science provides where it can provide, and making the jump to it being “ultimate knowledge”.
- They have faith that in their intellect and experience as superior to thousands of years of Judaic-Christian and other religious teaching, and their individual reality is superior to the experience of billions. They see their experience and knowledge as valid and one supposes “adult”, while the experience and knowledge of billions is “infantile”. It is the billions over thousands of years who are guilty of “hubris”? Could there be any emotion involved in that sort of judgement?
Humans can live without faith about as well as they live without oxygen. We may not know a lot, but we ought to be aware that we are very limited finite beings living in either an infinite, or effectively infinite from our perspective, universe. The “bridge” is faith … in our senses, in our minds, in the physics we think we see, and basically in “order”.
Science believers and religious believers have that core belief in “order” in common. If there is no order in the universe then there are no principals for science to discover. A core matter of faith is where that order came from. The complete materialist scientists like Druyan choose to believe that order was created by random accident, people with religious beliefs believe that order was created by purposeful intelligence (God).
Either position is in the final analysis a “leap of faith”, but much as Ann talks about what religious people “have to admit”, she may not quite be facing what she would “have to admit”. If all that we see springs from randomness.
Then what would a “value”, or “right and wrong” be? Nothing but a “myth”, or a “story we make up”. The only “moral principle” in that universe is the fittest survive, or might makes right. We have the freedom to pick which universe we live in, but don’t expect those that believe in a universe with no morals to advertise what the wages of picking their approach really are.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)