And Slaters Go Plop

“I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk. Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.”

(Link)

[Update]
And prompted by a commenter’s mention of Dawkins’ “hysterical arguments” here is a recent lecture of his on the topic of religion. A comment which (if you watch the video) amply demonstrates Blake’s Law in action. Blake’s Law follows The Courtier’s Reply in the article linked to above. A coincidence or delicious irony?

[Update #2]

The Cosmological Argument has a number of variations but I will only deal with the one employed by William Lane Craig in his recent debate with Bill Cooke.

Here is a transcript of Craig’s version of the cosmological argument:

So, why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

We can summarise our argument thus far as follows:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

Now, as the cause of time and space, this being must be an uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial being of unfathomable power.

Moreover, it must be personal as well.

Why? Because this cause must be beyond space and time therefore it cannot be physical or material.

Now there are only two kinds of things that fit that description; either abstract objects like numbers or else an intelligent, un-bodied mind.

But abstract objects can’t cause anything and therefore it follows that the cause of the universe is a transcendent, personal mind.

The big bang is based on the observation that we can see that everything in the observable universe is moving away from everything else which would lead to the conclusion that, if you wound the clock back, things would inevitably be closer together. A lot closer together. With this hypothesis in mind many different disciplines in science attempted to see if the predictions formed by this hypothesis would turn out to be true. And so far they’ve found overwhelming evidence to support the claim.

Clever people in clever coats are able to model the initial conditions of the universe and show that specific transformations probably happened at specific times and that, to the best of our knowledge, the universe as we know it is 13.73 billion years old give or take about 130 million years. So far no one has found a way to gather any information beyond this point and so questions as to what happened before then (which might actually be a non-valid question as we established in the post on infinity) are speculative at best. No one knows.

Now let’s address Craig’s main arguments.

He uses a simple logical proposition-proposition-conclusion to show that the universe must be caused and then, on that conclusion, goes on to show that this cause-er must be God.

Logical conclusions work when the preceding propositions are sound. And it’s the propositions that cause Craig’s argument to fall short. Without sound propositions your conclusion - no matter how appealing it sounds - has no foundation.

We know that the universe does some very strange things at the scale of the very big and the very small. Quantum physics has taught us that things can be in two places at once. No one understands why or how but we can observe it time and time again. I can imagine a similar argument to Craig’s one here where one of the propositions is “1. Nothing can be in two places at once.”. This would have been a perfectly common sense argument only a few years ago but now we have to take a step back and concede that not everything in the universe conforms to the everyday properties we observe as humans.

We live in a “middle earth” where we have a fairly good grasp on how things interact with each other at our level but we lack the ability to make head or tail of what happens outside of the zone we’ve evolved to understand. At the moment, at least.

In short, the answer to Craig’s first two propositions is “we don’t know” and that appealing to common sense at the same time as positing a supernatural and outside-of-space-and-time cause seems to be a bit of a double-standard. If God is allowed to be an uncaused-cause then why not just move the peg back one step and posit that the universe is allowed to be an uncaused-cause? At least we can observe that the universe exists.

As discussed in my previous post there are lots of interesting explanations for how the universe may have possibly come about and for the properties of time (and therefore causality) but no one knows yet what really happened. And it’s quite possible that we may never know.

The rest of Craig’s arguments shouldn’t need to be discussed because his propositions have already been shown to have fallen short of establishing a need for a God as an ultimate cause but they’re quite funny so I’ll briefly cover them.

He then goes on to make some crazy leaps and hops to try to give this ultimate cause a God-like personality. “Moreover, it must be personal as well”, what? I can see what he’s trying to do here by tying forcing a false dichotomy on us of having to choose between numbers or a mind but he’s either woefully behind on his understanding of developments in neuroscience or he’s being deliberately disingenuous.

One of the last bastions of dualism is in the question of the mind. And this is kind of understandable because it certainly feels like “we” are somehow disembodied. That our essence is somehow more than can be cooked up using meat and chemicals alone. But the more we learn about the workings of the mind in humans and observe traits we thought were unique to humans in other species the more it’s looking like dualism is to neuroscience as Thor is to thunder; a shortcut and an economical way of explaining things but not to be taken seriously.

Even assuming that there must be a cause and forcing us to choose between numbers or a mind as the cause I’d have to contend that there is more compelling arguments currently for numbers (i.e. mathematics) as the driving force behind the universe than of a disembodied mind.

Craig’s goal was to show that the concept of God is not a delusion and the cosmological argument doesn’t add any weight (either for or against) here. If you are already convinced that God exists you’ll like the grand-sounding scientific words and the nice 1, 2, 3 steps but you’ll be no nearer the truth with this argument. It’s built on false propositions, gives you false choices, is inconsistent in its appeals for common sense and ignores just about all recent scientific discoveries.

If God doesn’t exist then belief in God is a delusion and if God exists then belief is not a delusion. Craig’s argument adds nothing to this question and if Cooke had bothered to engage at all neither would his. I suspect that the answer to the moot is the same as “Is the invisible pink unicorn a delusion?”. You can’t prove it either way and it’s one of a billion possible but meaningless questions.

God seems to exist only where evidence is hard to find. When a naturalistic explanation is found the next generation of believers will take the science on board and scoff at their ignorant predecessors for believing that God was explanation for lightening, conception, creation (and, now, evolution) or our minds. Perhaps one day God will need to be moved on from his current position at the start of the universe but I think it’s a pretty safe place for him in the meantime. If you are happy to live with that then good for you but stop just making stuff up and pretending it’s real. I’ll await more evidence.

(For another take on Craig’s arguments take a look at Ian’s blog).

While I’m waiting for the YouTube videos to be posted so I can get my facts straight with regard to the debate between William Lane Craig and Bill Cooke I thought I might address the issue of the concept of infinity.

Craig introduced the cosmological argument with the notion of infinity and the fact that atheists will argue that the universe is infinite. I’d just like to put my atheistic hand up at this point and say that I’d tend to go with the ‘finite universe’ personally at this stage. I know people (both theists and atheists) who fall on either side of this argument and so this assertion was a little disappointing. This was posited right before he moved on to the Big Bang so perhaps it was an attempt to portray atheists as non-scientific.

The fact of the matter is no one knows whether the universe is infinite or not. Get used to this phrase because I’m probably going to use it a few times over the next few entries. There is stuff we don’t know; the more we find out the more we realise just how little we really do know. Making up explanations may feel satisfying but it’s not going to get us any closer to the truth.

Back to the issue of infinity. Craig argues that the concept of infinity is an absurdity in terms of logic because, for example, if you minus four from infinity you are left with infinity. And I tend to agree in principle. But there is a problem with how he’s come to this conclusion because he’s used a finite number in relation to an infinite one.

Because whenever we talk about infinity we refer to it in finite units (like time or numbers or oranges) we think that because we can just add or subtract one more as we might do in the real world that it logically follows that we could continue to do so if we had unlimited time, numbers or oranges. Which might be a bit of a circular reasoning because we’re giving ourselves infinity to prove that infinity exists.

Another angle is that if infinity in relation to time is defined as “for the full extent of time” and time can in fact be created then it would also be reasonable to define infinity as from the creation of time to its destruction.

Einstein came up with some theories where mass is equivalent to energy (and vice-versa… I can cope with this one) and - head-hurtingly - where time is equivalent to space (and vice-versa… aaaarrgh! What?!). I don’t even know what to make of this so if anyone has a succinct way of explaining the concept of “spacetime” please feel free to enlighten me.

Hawking has a nice little analogy about the limits of a dimension which I’ll see if I can completely mungle:

If a two-dimensional critter were sliding around on the face of our planet and were asked what’s south of New Zealand it would list Stewart Island (technically incorrect but we’ll leave it be because it’s just a two-dimensional critter) and then Antarctica and, finally, the South Pole. We can almost sense its outrage and confusion when we tell them they can’t go any further south than the South Pole but the fact is, within these dimensions there really is no “South of the South Pole”. Now shift the question up a dimension or two. When I ask you what happened before World War 2 you will list a number of events that occur back in time along the time axis (i.e. just like the “south” axis) until you get to a point where time starts or comes into being. Yes, we are outraged and confused when we are told that there is no such thing as “before time” because everywhere we look we can see a before, a cause. But the truth is that you can’t continue to use the word “before” once we’ve hit this point.

I don’t know if analogies that include the concept of dimensions are any more valid than the keep-adding-an-orange ones. Perhaps our concept of “dimensions” are just another way our minds have to package information about the real world in an attempt to comprehend it.

I don’t know if time unfolded out of the beginning of the universe but as incomprehensible as it seems to me I can see from the example of my two-dimensional critter that my incomprehension doesn’t necessarily make the idea wrong.

For me, the concept of infinity is either:

• A trick of the mind that doesn’t ever map against reality. Perhaps our mind can conceive of infinity because our mind is self-referencing.
• A way of describing the extent of a dimension (like “south” or “before”) that can actually have a start and an end.
• That the universe is, in fact, infinite and that my mind is incapable of comprehending it beyond describing it in terms of finite units.
• Something else altogether… [insert your reasoning here].

For the sake of argument I’m more than happy to go with Craig on this one; the universe is finite. (Until I see further evidence - always a good disclaimer to add to questions of this nature).

Last night Dale and I went to see a debate between Bill Cooke and William Lane Craig. The moot was “Is God A Delusion?”.

Craig (arguing the negative) was given the first 20 minutes in which to make his case. Cooke followed but didn’t engage any of the points that Craig raised and, while entertaining at times, didn’t really do a very good job of it from a debating sense. I’m no expert mind you. But without challenging Craig’s assertions he allowed them to stand and I felt that Craig’s performance as a debater far exceeded that of Bill Cooke’s.

Over the last few years I’ve become reasonably familiar with the arguments Craig used in his opening and have decided to give them the respect they deserve by going over them one by one in the next few entries. Below is a summary of Craig’s arguments:

1. The Cosmological Argument
   This is the argument that everything that begins must have a cause. The universe began so it must have a cause and that cause is God.
2. The Teleological Argument
   This is the argument that God must exist because the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life. A slight change in some of the constants in nature would mean that the universe wouldn’t sustain life.
3. The Argument from Moral Objectivity
   Here it is argued that objective morals are impossible without the existence of a God. If a moral can be shown to be objective rather than subjective then the best explanation is that of a moral law-giver outside of nature. We all agree that raping children is objectively wrong => God exists.
4. The teachings and miracles of Jesus Christ The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
5. God can be immediately known and experienced
   These last two are the weaker of his arguments but they go towards strengthening the first three arguments which, if proven, would suggest that the God of Christianity is in fact the God of the universe.

I hope I’ve done justice to Craig’s five main points by way of overview. I’ll go into each one in more detail in future entries and introduce Craig’s propositions and conclusions at the same time. In the meantime you can see a good overview of these and some of the other arguments for the existence of God over on that fount of all infallible knowledge; Wikipedia.

(Also, I’m only going by memory here and waiting for the videos to become available on YouTube so I can properly represent William Lane Craig’s arguments before going into them further. If I’ve remembered incorrectly please feel free to chime in.)

(From chick.com)

Last year a study was performed by Sam Harris, Sameer A. Sheth and Mark S. Cohen where they used fMRI to observe the physical responses of the brain when a person was provided with statements that were taken to be true, false or otherwise. They found that different areas of the brain showed activity depending on how the subject perceived the statement.

Here is the abstract of the original study:

Objective: The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. When one accepts a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. The purpose of this study was to differentiate belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at the level of the brain.
Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 14 adults while they judged written statements to be “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), or “undecidable” (uncertainty). To characterize belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in a content-independent manner, we included statements from a wide range of categories: autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual.
Results: The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia.
Interpretation: Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex and the caudate. Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as “true” or its rejection as “false” appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions may actually disgust us.

Oliver Sacks, in a review of the study said,

Harris et al. note that reactions of assent are significantly prompter than those of dissent or uncertainty. This they take to support “Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true,” an almost reflexive, if provisional, assent, to be followed by a more deliberate weighing and assessment. Human beings, in other words, are wired to “accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise.” This seems to us to ring true.
The most provocative suggestion made by Harris et al. relates to their finding that all reactions of assent or acceptance (or belief, if one prefers) are neurophysiologically identical, whether propositional judgments are made in the highly charged realm of ethical or religious issues or the seemingly neutral realm of arithmetical statements. If such results can be duplicated, Harris et al. will have made a fascinating discovery.

The results of this original study have led to questions of whether religious faith ‘looks’ different than belief at the level of the brain and Harris is preparing for another study that will also use fMRI to observe the physical aspects of belief and faith.

In an attempt to find questions that will best suit the upcomming study Harris has set up four surveys and is looking for people who have opinions either way regarding Christianity to participate. If you are a Christian or an atheist/agnostic and you want to help them identify the most appropriate stimuli for the study you can complete one or more of the following surveys:

• Belief Survey A
• Belief Survey B
• Belief Survey C
• Belief Survey D

Each one has around 100 questions. I did C and it didn’t take too long.

Recently Michael Shermer received an angry letter from a Jew who’d seen the film Expelled. He discussed the issue with Richard Dawkins and they decided to write an open letter in the hopes of setting the record straight for anyone else misled by Ben Stein and the deceptive film makers. Read on.

Dear Mr J

Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein’s mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.

1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don’t think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer.

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!

Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I’ll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.

(more…)

I’ve just purchased three new books and flipped open one of them, Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I’m greeted with the following introduction:

One November morning in 2004, Theo van Gogh got up to go to work at his film production company in Amsterdam. He took out his old black bicycle and headed down a main road. Waiting in a doorway was a Moroccan man with a handgun and two butcher knives.

As Theo cycled down the Linnaeusstratt, Muhammad Bouyeri approached. He pulled out his gun and shot Theo several times. Theo fell off his bike and lurched across the road, then collapsed. Bouyeri followed. Theo begged, “Can’t we talk about this?” but Bouyeri shot him four more times. Then he took out one of his butcher knives and sawed into Theo’s throat. With the other knife, he stabbed a five-page letter onto Theo’s chest.

The letter was addressed to me.

I can see that this book is going to be very hard to put down.

I have a theory based on a number of observations and I want to give it a name. My observations are that there are things that lifeforms do to their environments that leave traces that wouldn’t otherwise naturally occur. I propose that we might be able to detect similar effects on other planets and deduce that there are lifeforms at work and that we might, if we are careful and/or very lucky, find evidence of previously unknown lifeforms here on our planet.

I’ve come up with a name for this theory. I’m calling it Intelligent Design.

We can define what ID is and what it isn’t. We can come up with ways we can test hypotheses. If we find evidence that points towards (or away from) an example of intelligent design we can publish papers in reputable scientific journals. When we find gaps in scientific knowledge in other areas we won’t even think about using this as an argument for Intelligent Design - we’ll have to come up with evidence that points toward our theories and not just away from others.

Unfortunately there are some people who are currently misusing the label of Intelligent Design and they will have to go back to using the old term for their beliefs: creationism. If they have some useful contributions to make they’re more than welcome to join in as they are for any of the other sciences but, just like in the other sciences, they are going to have to leave their non-science behind at the door.

Right, now that that’s dealt with. Onwards and upwards!

[edit: Over at NeuroLogicia, Dr Steven Novella clearly hasn't been informed of the recent changes I've made to the term 'Intelligent Design' but he provides a fairly lucid account of why the proponents of the old term weren't being particularly scientific in their approach that's well worth a read.]

There is a parable in the Bible that goes something along the lines of “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.

Originally written in Greek, the word for ‘camel’ is κάμηλον. Interestingly, the Greek word for ‘rope’ is κάμιλον.

κάμηλον
κάμιλον

See the similarity? I’m thinking that the word ‘rope’ makes sense in the context of difficult things to thread through the eye of a needle. Especially because things like ropes (i.e. thread) can go through the eye of a needle.

I remember hearing an explanation for this long ago that the ‘eye of the needle’ was actually a gate in the wall of a city and that the camels entering this gate would have to shuffle through on their knees - a nice analogy of humility - but now I’m wondering if someone just made this up in order to cover for what is an odd-ball parable because of a mistranslation.

Any Greek scholars out there? Is this odd parable the result of a simple mistranslation?