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A Sturm's Eye View, Guaranteed
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Ideas! Some of them are Contagious!
A journal of sorts to record Jonathan Sturm's (and others') thoughts and observations on things worth thinking about. Feedback welcome, but be aware that unless you prominently say you want your communication kept private, I may publish it. |
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Saturday, 16 July 2005
Robert Thompson wrote:
Remove me.
You should have made your list opt-in rather than spamming people and forcing them to take action to be removed.
Robert Bruce Thompson
thompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
http://forums.ttgnet.com/ikonboard.cgi
To which The Git replied:
Robert, you are removed.
Note that spamming, the sending of unsolicited commercial emails, requires more than the single condition of unsolicited; spam is also sent for commercial gain. There is no detectable commercial gain from my website; rather the reverse as you almost certainly know.
You received the email because you had sent me (unsolicited) email regarding my website's content. From this I assumed that you (and a number of others) might like to know that the 15 month hiatus had ended given that you were sufficiently interested to email me in the past.
FWIW, this email was in response to a number of correspondents who sent me unsolicited email asking when, or if, I was going to start writing again. Without those requests it's unlikely I would have taken up the Diatribe again. Happily, you are only the second recipient to object to this; several dozen have expressed their gratitude over the six weeks this email has been going out.
Finally, I most certainly did not forced you to do anything. There is, I admit, a vanishingly small probability that someone calling himself The Pompous Git pointed a gun at you and forced you to send me the email to which I am replying. If so, it most certainly wasn't the real Pompous Git who remains happily ensconced on the opposite side of the planet.
May The Force be with You ;-)
Jonathan
PS I hope that Barbara and the dogs are well...
This is a mystery. A little over a year ago, about a week after St Patrick's Day as it happens, The Git received a vitriolic email from a long-standing friend. The email accused The Git of sending spam on the topic of St Patrick's Day. The Git had sent his now ex-friend an email on St Pat's, but it had nothing to do with St Patrick; it concerned an aspect of US politics that The Git had thought might interest the recipients. The ex-friend had apparently deleted the email without reading it! Quite how he could divine that the contents were spam remains a mystery. And in The Git's experience, spam never contains a valid return email address.
It's not as though The Git was suggesting that either Robert, or Tim have dicks that are too small, or anything like that...
The Git wasn't as clear in his intent in the previous Diatribe as he might have been. The Received View of Evolution (Neo-Darwinism) has profound problems. While the Creation "Scientists" criticise those problems, that doesn't make other critics Creation "Scientists" any more than a dislike of red meat makes someone a vegetarian. The problems of Neo-Darwinism need to be addressed as scientific problems, rather than the problem of which faith system you choose. The Git has been taken to task for quoting Richard Dawkins in this, yet he and his ilk are the very source of this problem of a false dichotomy. It is simply not good enough to claim that science is unique in its ruthless honesty and then arbitrarily attack those who don't share your philosophical beliefs as "ignorant, stupid or insane".
Here's a (not exhaustive) list of philosophical positions:
Huxley described how he came to originate the term 'agnostic' as follows:
When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain "gnosis" -- had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion. [...]
So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic". It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. [emphasis The Git's]
[and]
That it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.
This evades a rather refractory problem; that logic and rationality cannot be satisfactorily grounded. In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett refers to "our almost second-rate rationality". Rather than explicate this here, The Git is putting it on the backburner for later -- perhaps in a week, or so.
Believing in the reality of transcendental knowledge. That is, knowledge based on abstract general reasoning; determined on theoretic or a priori principles. Opposed to agnostic. [From the Oxford English Dictionary]
One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God. [From the Oxford English Dictionary]
One who acknowledges the existence of a God upon the testimony of reason, but rejects revealed religion. [From the Oxford English Dictionary]
Clearly, there are more than just two directly opposed philosophical positions. Many believe the Creation "Science" position to be incoherent. By pointing out the incoherence of the Atheist/Materialist position, The Git is not trying to provide support for the Creation "Science" position! Nor is he attempting to discredit science. It is one of the stated purposes of science to eliminate incoherence "to make observations that compel the story to be changed or expanded".
-oOo-
Now, from the San Diego Union Tribune:
QUESTION: How do you define science? Is intelligent design science?
Science is a mental activity consisting of observation and experimentation, synthesized by interpretation. The interpretation consists of developing a story that is consistent with the results of observation and experimentation. The key concept that distinguishes science from nonscience is that if new observations and experiments contradict the story, the story must be changed to accommodate them.
The challenge of science -- the fun of science -- is to make observations that compel the story to be changed or expanded. A story is not science if it is not open to testing -- to change -- by further observation and experimentation. Observations and experiments must be independently verified, or verifiable.
A story does not become science just because some authority or committee tells it or says it is science. It doesn't matter who makes the observation or runs the experiment, if others observe the same thing or get the same result from the experiment, the story must be consistent with those results.
"Intelligent design" is science only if it's a story that can be tested by observation and experimentation. Is there any observation we can make or experiment we can do whose results would be one way if "intelligent design" is true, another way if it is false? I don't know of any, but maybe somebody can. If so, that person has not yet come forth.
In any case, even if God -- or someone claiming to be God -- were to emerge in a puff of smoke on the floor of the Senate and claim to have created the universe, that story would not be science unless there were some independent means of testing that claim through observation and experimentation.
-- Phil Unitt, ornithologist,
San Diego Natural History Museum
The key statement here is "even if God -- or someone claiming to be God -- were to emerge in a puff of smoke on the floor of the Senate and claim to have created the universe, that story would not be science unless there were some independent means of testing that claim through observation and experimentation." The creation story told by the materialist atheists is that blind chance created the universe from nothing. Blind chance is metaphysically indistinguishable from God in this instance. There is no known experiment to test whether blind chance created the universe, or God.
Despite this, the events ascribed to the Big Bang are testable and have been found wanting. The theory postulates an age of 15 billion years to the universe. Astronomers estimate that at least 30 billion years would be required to achieve its current structure. The age distribution over time of galaxies also do not match that predicted by Big Bang Theory. Halton Arp points out that BBT places our observation point at the centre of the visible universe. While the Big Bang theory is scientific, its inability to make accurate predictions falsify the theory. The reason that it survives must surely be for metaphysical reasons.
-oOo-
Think of Einstein's theory of general relativity, a wonderful hypothesis with huge implications. Hundreds of tests have been proposed, and many of them have been carried out, sometimes at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. So far, Einstein's theory has stood up, but physicists are all convinced that his remarkable insight will eventually form only a part of a larger theory, and that this larger theory will be a better fit to the observations.
Intelligent design is not science, because it only goes partway through this process and leaves out the most important part. Advocates of intelligent design have observed the world, and have proposed the hypothesis that some vast intelligence must have created it because the world (or at least some portion of it) is too complicated to have arisen through natural processes.
This is their hypothesis, and it is in principle testable. For example, one could look for messages or other evidence for the existence of a vast intelligence (see Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" for a fictional example).
Or, in the case of evolution, one could search for sudden discontinuities in the history of life, in which a new structure or function has arisen without any previous history and no relationship to structures or functions in other related organisms. (Such new structures have not yet been found, by the way.)
But the intelligent designers have proposed no such experiments. Their hypothesis is therefore not subject to modification, much less eventual abandonment. As a consequence, intelligent design and its parent belief, creationism, are not science.
-- Christopher Wills,
professor of biology, UCSD
Funny how Professor Wills uses Einstein, an IDer, for his scientific example :-) Wills says: "in the case of evolution, one could search for sudden discontinuities in the history of life, in which a new structure or function has arisen without any previous history and no relationship to structures or functions in other related organisms. (Such new structures have not yet been found, by the way.) " This is simply false. Approximately 4 billion years ago, life supposedly arose from the chance conjunction of molecules obeying the normal laws of physics and chemistry. Prior to that point in time, there was no previous history of life. Is this not a sudden discontinuity in the history of life?
The essential core of life is the genome. The genome is concentrated information about how to build a cell and its replication apparatus. It's a fact of information theory that maximum information correlates with maximal randomness. But the genome is not just any old randomness, it is highly specific randomness. The question arises then: Can highly specific randomness arise as a "guaranteed product of a deterministic, mechanical, law-like process, like a primordial soup left to the familiar laws of physics and chemistry? No it couldn't. No known law of nature could achieve this." [Paul Davies in "The Fifth Miracle"]. A similar argument applies to NeoDarwinian evolution.
-oOo-
(Intelligent design) postulates the existence of a hypothetical and abstract entity, lacking any physical concrete presence, unobservable and impossible to experiment with in order to explain biological structures and processes whose origin can be perfectly explained by the simple rules of natural selection. It is based on the acceptance of the existence of a completely unnecessary conjecture -- that of a supernatural "intelligent designer" -- and violates one of the most basic principles of scientific philosophy, the principle of parsimony, which states that natural effects should be explained through natural causes and that unnecessary hypotheses should be discarded when trying to understand the way the natural world works.
-- Exequiel Ezcurra,
director of scientific research,
San Diego Natural History Museum
This is simply a misstatement of William of Ockham's Principle of Parsimony: "entia non sunt multiplicanda preaeter necessitatem", or "entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity". Note that William wasn't a scientist, he was a theologian and logician. While it is a vague statement, some of us have always taken it to mean that you weaken an argument when you add unnecessary auxiliary assumptions. William of Ockham assumed that the Christian God existed. Exequiel Ezcurra assumes "biological structures and processes... can be perfectly explained by the simple rules of natural selection". Not yet they can't; not by a long shot; it's assumed that they can. The Christian God "perfectly explains the origin of "biological structures and processes", but requires the assumption that the Christian God exists. Neither assumption has been demonstrated.
-oOo-
If proponents of intelligent design (ID) wish their hypothesis to be treated as a science, then they must be prepared to generate experiments that will prove ID incorrect and teach their students how to disprove ID. If an "intelligent designer" is equated with "God," then, if they are true scientists, they must now spend their time trying to disprove the existence of God. I am not sure if the proponents of ID are prepared to go down that route -- training a classroom of students to design experiments that rule out the existence of God. Yet, if they wish to add ID to the scientific curriculum, that is precisely what they must be prepared to do. Those experiments would then take their place with all the other experiments designed to rule out any hypothesis, in other words, to show that the null hypothesis (the idea that events and phenomena are dictated solely by chance) cannot be rejected.
-- Dr. Evan Snyder,
neurologist and director of the Stem Cells and Regeneration Program at The Burnham Institute
With some substitutions: If proponents of Neo-Darwinism wish their hypothesis to be treated as a science, then they must be prepared to generate experiments that will prove Neo-Darwinism incorrect and teach their students how to disprove Neo-Darwinism. If an "atheist/materialist" is equated with "belief in the non-existence of God", then, if they are true scientists, they must now spend their time trying to prove the existence of God. I am not sure if the proponents of Neo-Darwinism are prepared to go down that route... :-)
-oOo-
QUESTION: A central tenet of intelligent design is that some aspects of life are "irreducibly complex." That is, certain biological systems are so complicated that they could not have evolved incrementally through random mutation and natural selection. Your response.
One cited example, among many, is how life began on Earth. Although we still do not fully understand the origin of life from a scientific point-of-view, research continues to provide vital information about the possible processes that may or may not have been involved.
There is optimism that science will eventually provide an understanding of at least the basic processes. Intelligent design claims that the processes involved are scientifically unknowable and thus must be explained by a supernatural or extraterrestrial creator.
This is akin to the widely held 19th century theory of panspermia that life on Earth began from a spore or seed from outer space. Scientific research subsequently demonstrated that panaspermia [sic] was not a testable and verifiable scientific theory and the same applies to intelligent design today.
-- Jeffrey Bada,
marine chemist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
The Git would love to know why panspermia is not a testable idea! Especially when the tests that have been done have given positive results! See Brig Klyce's Cosmic Ancestry website.
-oOo-
How can anyone say that something is irreducibly complex, thus evolution impossible? How do they know? Could it not just escape our present state of understanding? Weren't phenomena such as how inheritance takes place thought to be unfathomable not long ago?
These days, we are whittling away quite blissfully at the complexity of biology. For example, we have learned that "horizontal" transmission of whole packets of genes between species happened before and happens now. This means that evolution doesn't depend just on the accumulation of single mutations but that organisms can change wholesale. An example is the plague bacillus, which appears to have arisen by such a mechanism some 100,000 years ago.
It makes simple sense: How would you build a highly complex vehicle that can be driven, flown and navigated underwater? Would you start from scratch with some steel ingots, or would you use parts from existing cars, planes and submarines?
-- Moselio Schaechter,
adjunct professor of biology, SDSU
Someone who obviously never heard of Kurt Gödel! Gregory Chaitin:
My attempt to understand Gödel's proof took over my life, and almost half a century later, I have just Finished writing a little book of my own. It's my own version of Nagel and Newman's Gödel's Proof, in which everything is done completely differently. The only thing the two books have in common is their common goal of providing an auto-critique of mathematical methods and the fact that they are both small books.
Why did I have to completely rewrite Nagel and Newman? Because their exposition and Gödel's original 1931 proof are both based on the two self-referential paradoxes: "This statement is false" and "This statement is unprovable." [See the appendix on "Gödel's Proof."]
My approach is completely different. It's based on measuring information and on showing that some mathematical facts have no redundancy and cannot be compressed into any mathematical theory because these facts are too complicated, in fact, infinitely complex. This new approach suggests that what Gödel originally discovered was just the tip of the iceberg and that the problem is much bigger than most people think. And, amazingly enough, I have recently discovered that these ideas can be traced back to G. W. Leibniz in the late 17th century.
Irreducible complexity exists; live with it! Of course reducible complexity also exists: pi and Euler's number, for example, are complex (that is random, information-rich numbers) that are reducible to simple algorithms. What the Atheist/Materialists must do is demonstrate that life's complexity is reducible to simple algorithms. This has not been done and The Git eagerly looks forward to any such demonstration. [See below in Sources/Resources]
Finally, the example given of building "a highly complex vehicle that can be driven, flown and navigated underwater" from scratch versus using existing parts is an argument against NeoDarwinism.
-oOo-
A very simple experiment performed decades ago showed that when a mixture of simple chemicals was placed in a closed chamber and energy was added, the building blocks of life (amino acids) spontaneously formed. The conditions of this experiment mimicked the state of the primordial planet billions of years ago.
Thus, the building blocks of life can easily be made through natural processes, and have been available for hundreds of millions to billions of years. It is not hard to conceive that, over this extended time, chance events and selective environmental pressure would create the remarkable and beautifully diverse forms of life we have today.
-- Dr. Mark Tuszynski,
neurologist/neuroscientist, UCSD
Tuszynski states: "The conditions of this experiment mimicked the state of the primordial planet billions of years ago." This is patently false. The assumed primordial atmosphere consisted of mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Urey and Miller chose the gasses ammonia, methane and hydrogen, even though methane is a breakdown product in life processes, and by the time life started on Earth, all the hydrogen would have escaped Earth's gravitational field. [Thomas Gold's suggestion that methane and crude oil are abiotic products from deep-Earth chemistry has been met with considerable resistance by mainstream scientists.]
Yes, electricity passed through the ammonia, methane and hydrogen mixture produced amino acids. It would be surprising if they weren't produced since they represented an increase in entropy for the system. The next step, the spontaneous linking of amino acids into chains while in aqueous solution, didn't happen; quite simply because this requires a decrease in entropy that in turn seems to require a living system to achieve.
-oOo-
Infectious diseases have been a selective pressure on our species ever since people originated in Africa. The best understood example of this pressure is malaria. Malaria is transmitted by the bite of a mosquito that injects a parasite into the blood and the parasite lives inside the host's red blood cells.
Amazingly, we have made adaptations that make the red blood cells less hospitable to malaria parasites. These changes in our proteins generally have a cost to us, but when they keep people alive long enough to procreate in the midst of a malarial environment, then the mutations are preserved in nature. This accounts for most of the variants in hemoglobin structure.
If malaria in a tropical environment was the selective force that led to the prevalence of sickle cell anemia and thalessemia, are we to conclude that the intelligent designer used malaria for that purpose or that the designer overlooked malaria as a problem and there had to be a post-hoc fix to change the structure of red blood cells?
-- Dr. Joshua Fierer,
professor of medicine and pathology, UCSD
The Intelligent Designer may well have created the Universe (The Big Bang) and then sat back and watched. There is no necessity to assume that He/She/It continually fiddles with the basic design. Or that the Creator is necessarily benevolent; in Gnostic scripture, the Creator is an evil Demiurge called the Archon, or Yaldabaoth.
-oOo-
QUESTION: Many mainstream scientists have chosen to ignore or avoid the debate over intelligent design. Why?
Years ago, it was claimed that the Earth was the center of the universe. It was also claimed that the Earth was flat. Many scientists were persecuted and even killed because they presented evidence against these faith-based positions.
Debating intelligent design would be like debating someone who still insists that the Earth is flat, or that it is at the center of the universe, simply because he has not gone up in space in person and viewed the Earth and the solar system in person.
Since such positions would be based strictly on faith, there is little point in discussing them, let alone giving them undeserved legitimacy.
-- Dr. Ajit P. Varki,
professor of medicine, UCSD
The persecution and killing of scientists for their belief in scientific facts is a convenient fiction to justify the persecution of believers in Christianity. Only two Christian writers seem to have advocated a flat Earth: a 4th Century heretic, Lactantius, and an obscure 6th Century eccentric, Cosmas Indicopleustes. The latter remained in almost complete obscurity until his work was resurrected by the 19th Century American writer Washington Irving. Almost every educated person for several hundreds of years had known the earth to be spherical. Indeed, Eratosthenes used geometry to estimate the circumference and tilt of the Earth c. 240 BCE.
In his fictional History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), Irving wrote that flat-Earth churchmen had opposed Columbus on the grounds that he would fall off the edge of the Earth if he tried to sail across the Atlantic. In actuality, Columbus's opponents knew not only that the Earth is a sphere, but also approximately how big it is. There is some evidence that Columbus deliberately chose to emphasise the lowest possible size for Earth in order to make his voyage to India seem more feasible.
To paraphrase Varki, there seems little point discussing positions based on fiction; it only gives them undeserved legitimacy. Nor would it seem wise to debate with someone who appears to believe in the necessity of going into space to establish the sphericity of the Earth.
-oOo-
One should never debate such lunacy. It implies that there is something to debate. It only gives it legitimacy it does not deserve. The cry that teaching intelligent design in the science classroom should be permitted because of intellectual freedom is a red herring. We don't teach alchemy, astrology and witchcraft in the science classroom, because like intelligent design, they are not science. By the same token, all Americans, not just scientists, should speak out and complain when their schools are forced to allow such intellectual drivel into their schools.
-- J. David Archibald,
professor of biology, SDSU
Perhaps English, History, Philosophy and a few other legitimate intellectual disciplines are also no longer taught because "they are not science". Perhaps this is why so many scientists apparently have a very poor grasp of logic and rationality!
-oOo-
QUESTION: One key principle of intelligent design is the belief that there are questions about life and the universe that science cannot answer, now or in the future. Your response.
I have to admit that it is not that clear to me just what constitutes ID. Since I could find no research papers published in peer-reviewed scientific publications on the subject, I have had to rely on Internet sources. Most ID Web sites mention something about complexity, design and purpose and, using some form of legalese argumentation, conclude that because the natural world is so complex, it must have been created by an intelligent designer.
However, this is like resignedly saying, "I don't know!"
Do we really want our children to just accept that the natural world is too complex to understand, and that the idea of an intelligent designer is sufficient to satisfy our curiosity about such things as the structure and function of DNA, genes, cells and organisms? Do we also want our future scientists to be reluctant to tenaciously investigate the natural world no matter what discoveries and conclusions they reach and no matter what philosophical ideas of design and purpose are rejected?
If we as a society answer "Yes," to these questions, then I suppose we are also willing to accept Faith Healing 101 as a legitimate course in medical schools.
-- Tom Demere,
paleontologist, San Diego Natural History Museum
What is wrong with saying: "I don't know"? Do we really want our children to just accept that despite the natural world's complexity, if some high priest of science claims we understand it, therefore it must be so? And what happens if, when tenaciously investigating the natural world, the discoveries and conclusions our children (or adults even) reach include ideas about design and purpose? Judging from a conversation The Git had with a biology/geology student the other day, nothing important happens. Unless that student happens to mention his recent conclusion to the likes of Demere, in which case he will be derided and ridiculed.
It's worth noting here that there's any number of ideas that were rubbished as "unscientific" in medicine that are now a part of the accepted canon. Many long years ago, a university professor of medicine admitted to The Git that by the end of his current students' careers, 40% of what he had taught them would have been discovered to be completely bogus. The problem was that at that time, nobody could tell the difference between the bogus and the effective.
-oOo-
I don't know of any working scientist who is ready to throw in the towel on any question regarding the life sciences or physical sciences. Certainly, historical events that were not witnessed can never be understood with absolute certainty, but that doesn't mean we can't study them, test hypotheses or construct the most likely interpretation of them.
Breakthroughs may not occur during one's lifetime, but the explosive rate of technological advances gives us hope that we will always progress in our understanding of life and existence.
-- Michael Mayer, associate
professor of biology, USD
And this is supposed to clarify the issues?
-oOo-
I believe this is basically a religious or faith question. It seems to me that many who support this notion of intelligent design are doing so to bolster their own religious beliefs, specifically that there is a God, a divine creator. They are disturbed and angry and frightened that what is central in their lives is not generally taught or even mentioned in public schools, and they might view science in general (and evolutionary theory specifically) as a threat, e.g., to a particular set of religious beliefs.
I do respect those who are searching for something beyond themselves, something meaningful in their lives. This is part of the human quest, to seek the mystery of existence. It is a noble and worthy goal.
But, it is also important to have clear and critical thinking, a means of checking ourselves, detecting bias against preconceived notions. There is a great deal of hokum out there. A few hundred years ago, the majority of people in the Western world believed in demons and regularly used them and other superstitious beliefs to justify their behavior and power over others.
I think it is possible to be both spiritual and a critical thinker: To use one's mind (the scientific method and common sense) in evaluating specific beliefs or claims or ideas, and yet to also seek that question of existence and continually embrace the wonder and awesome mystery of this world.
-- Michael Simpson,
professor of biology, SDSU
The Git rather thought that evidence for Intelligent Design was a conclusion that many reached after achieving a certain maturity of thought, rather than being "disturbed and angry and frightened". From Ockam's Razor:
Anthony Garrett: When I lived in Australia and was a member of the Committee of the Australian Skeptics, I was an atheist. Since then I have become a Christian. How then have my views changed on the hottest controversy involving science and theology: the theory of evolution? And make no mistake, it is still the hottest controversy. I am now involved with answering questions put by email to the Christians and Christian Students in Science website in the UK, and about half the questions are on this topic alone. The website address, by the way, is www.csis.org.uk
And from Christianity Today:
Why the World's Most Famous Atheist Now Believes in God
Antony Flew, one of the world's leading philosophers, has changed his mind about God. And he has agnostics worried.
Some are mystified and others are angry. Typical of many responses is this one skeptical blogger: "Sounds to me like an old man, confronted by the end of life, making one final desperate attempt at salvation." Richard Carrier of The Secular Web even accuses him of "willfully sloppy scholarship."
His pedigree in philosophy explains the recent media frenzy and controversy. Raised in a Christian home and son of a famous Methodist minister, Flew became an atheist at age 15. A student of Gilbert Ryle's at Oxford, Flew won the prestigious John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy. He has written 26 books, many of them classics like God and Philosophy and How to Think Straight. A 1949 lecture given to C. S. Lewis's Oxford Socratic Club became one of the most widely published essays in philosophy. The Times Literary Supplement said Flew fomented a change in both the theological and philosophical worlds.
Both modern science and established western religion happily concur that the universe originated out of nothing in an explosion some 15 billion years ago. Many scientists assert that no further explanation of the universe is necessary, since before the Big Bang there was no time, therefore there was no "before the Big Bang." Western religious philosophy takes the Big Bang to imply the existence of a creator outside of physical existence who set the whole thing in motion. Pope Pius XII said as much on 22 November 1951. This side of the Big Bang, the theory holds nothing for science and religion to disagree about. Not that this stops proponents from either side pretending there are fundamental disagreements. Science says that there was no God, just an immense amount of Good Luck that the laws of the universe just happen to be ideal for the establishment of life. Both modern science and established western religion assume a priori that they have an exclusive handle on The Truth.
Science also calls on Lady Luck for the establishment of life on Earth, and yet again, just for good measure, claim that any rerun of life on Earth would undoubtedly result in the non-emergence of humanity. The Git wonders how many scientists call on Lady Luck to this extent when running their lives.
Despite all the hubris, science fails to answer many questions, for example, why is there anything rather than nothing at all? The existence of the physical world is a remarkable fact that neither science nor philosophy have been able to reduce. The existence of purposeful life is a phenomenon of similar magnitude that science cannot reduce to "purposeless" laws. Scientists have never observed any act of supernatural intervention by God. If life is eternal and therefore had no beginning, there is no requirement for supernatural intervention by God. For Deists, Theists, Pantheists eternal life would be an unassailable miracle.
Brig Klyce's Cosmic Ancestry requires fewer unsupported auxiliary assumptions than belief in either God, or Blind Chance. This does not, of course, make Cosmic Ancestry true. Brig Klyce's version of Panspermia is, however, fully compatible with science. It amuses The Git no end when reading of fresh scientific discoveries, the Neo Darwinists expressing their surprise when they are unsurprising within the Cosmic Ancestry paradigm.
Physicist Paul Davies' books, The Fifth Miracle and The Mind of God are excellent reading for an understanding of many of the deeper issues in simple language.
There's a classic debate between Bertrand Russell and Eddie Copplestone broadcast on the BBC when The Git was a mere tadpole. Unfortunately, there appears to be no worthwhile link to it on the web at the moment. The Git only possesses a photocopy of the transcript.
James Lovelock's The Ages of GAIA: A Biography of Our Living Earth.
Darwin-at-Home is "a planetwide effort to create networked digital ecosystems. D@H teams strive toward an elusive goal: to observe lifelike evolutionary processes in virtual or robotic space. D@H platforms run distributed across a large pool of networked computers...," in the style of SETI@Home. This is a welcome attempt to prove what the Neo-Darwinists have always assumed needed no proof: highly specific randomness can arise as a guaranteed product of deterministic, mechanical, law-like processes.
And Cosmic Ancestry again.
The Git can notify you by email when a new post is ready. Just email him to be put on the list, or removed if you are on the list and don't want to be.
Thoughts for the week:
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known -- Carl Sagan
-oOo-
It takes a lot of hubris to imagine that we can ever reach the limits of our own intelligence; to think that we will ever be able to explain everything about the universe is absurd. For these reasons I am equally discomforted by religious faith and scientific atheism. -- James Lovelock
-oOo-
A research programme is said to be progressing as long as its theoretical growth anticipates its empirical growth, that is, as long as it keeps predicting novel facts with some success...; it is stagnating if its theoretical growth lags behind its empirical growth, that is, as long as it gives only post hoc explanations of either chance discoveries or of facts anticipated by, and discovered in, a rival programme. -- Imre Lakatos
-oOo-
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. -- Schopenhauer
-oOo-
One of the Big Secrets of Life: Things are Complicated.
Simple answers are always wrong. There's more to be learned about any situation. Everything interacts with everything else. Nothing works as planned. All rules have exceptions. It's a minor corollary of the Big Metasecret of Life: There are No Big Secrets! -- Mark Zimmermann
Current Listening:
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band-- Impossible Dream
Howard Werth -- 1/2 of 1 and 6 of t'other
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© Jonathan Sturm 2005
