drive by religious criticism
(16:59:57) angela.stone24: I think you contradicted yourself regarding the bible. As you have never read the bible in it’s entirity, you can not go on to say that the only people that believe in it, have not read it or are insane. Just because you have read Richard dawkins the god delusion does not make you an expert!
(17:00:19) me: an expert on what, exactly?
(17:02:32) angela.stone24: It might be your opinion but it’s not fact
(17:01:06) me: *what*, exactly?
(17:03:59) angela.stone24: I’m just saying I read your blog and was surprised to see that you had written so much on a subject matter you know little about
(17:02:32) me: What exactly is it I know little about?
she stopped replying here. She also left the comment ‘verbal poo’ on the entry.
the joys of passive aggressive criticism!
“you’re wrong but I’m not going to tell you why!”
bonus points for misuse of the word contradiction.
I am going to defend my statements now, but this is a little difficult as you refused to clarify what exactly you were saying, so if I misrepresent your view then I am sorry, but you have yourself to blame. It’s also possible that being an atheist I am just not allowed to be right about anything, which also seems to be a common opinion, in which case see the recent xkcd:
boy: “I find atheists just as annoying as fundamentalist christians”
girl: “well the important thing is you’ve found a way to feel superior to both”.
I did not actually say that anyone who believes in the bible has not read it or is insane, I said anyone who ‘defends’ it. I left it undefined as to what ‘defends’ means, but to clarify, I meant anyone who regards it as having any kind of real-life implications. It is a piece of literature, or rather a collection of literature, and you are free to enjoy it as so. The insanity or ignorance comes in to play when you decide that it’s a holy document. Some sections of the bible diverge significantly from mainstream Christianity, I do not have to read the whole of it to recognise this. Therefore if you are a christian who believes the bible is a holy document, either you have not read it and are blissfully unaware of the incongruence between it and modern Christianity, or you genuinely believe that women are second class citizens, that it’s okay to flood the entire world, to bomb cities, to set the world alight, that incest is perfectly okay but homosexuality is terrible, etc. If this describes you, I think it is fair to say your brain is not working at optimum.
The previous attack focussed on the old testament. This may seem unfair; the old and new testament are quite distinct and it becomes a bit more ‘real life’ in the new testament. But it’s not unfair: for one thing the old testament is very relevant to Judaism and is therefore a valid target by itself. Even considering only Christianity, the whole point of a holy text is that it’s been largely untouched by human hands and represents a deity’s voice or will. If you as a person take half of your religion’s holy text* and say “I don’t like this, so I’ll ignore it” then you do not have a leg to stand on concerning the validity of your beliefs! You have made yourself your own god, you have granted yourself the power to decide what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. And that’s a wonderful advance on accepting everything because an ancient book says it’s true, but in an orthogonal sense it’s a regression if you start insisting there’s some kind of divine purpose in your perceptions because you fail to realise that you’ve rejected god.
Even if we totally reject the old testament, what’s left isn’t really a shining beacon of hope and purity. 2 Peter refers to Lot as a ‘righteous man’, yep, that’s the very same Lot who offered his two daughters to a horny crowd and then made them pregnant himself. Righteous indeed! Ephesians 5:22-23 says that a woman is owned by her husband. Revelation makes god out to be the same sadistic maniac as he was in the old testament, George Bush on steroids. In John, Jesus comes across a blind man and explains his blindness: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” — how many years did he have to deal with a huge disability (especially in those times!) just so that god could use him in a demonstration? Even Jesus comes up less than stellar in his opinions on women in Matthew.
In short: the new testament is still just as ridiculous. But feel free to tell me it it’s only my opinion that a woman shouldn’t be the property of her husband, and not fact. As a historical artefact it’s a sad reminder that our nice society is a very modern invention. As a holy text it’s alarming and dangerous, or at least it would be if anyone truly thought it was a holy text.
There still remains a not unconvincing argument stemming from the supposition that Jesus was a real person. He might well have been. I am entirely agnostic on the issue. The argument runs something like: as he existed and had a dedicated band of follows isn’t it likely he was the real deal? The answer is not really. There are no shortage of cults who manage to recruit small bands of dedicated followers. It is hard to understand the psychology of the ring-leader but it suffices that they manage to influence people like Jesus did and they are certainly not holy. Charles Manson for example. People will believe anything; even today, when we have the benefits of modern technology, historical lessons, and a generally high level of education such that we should know better, people still think Uri Gellar bent spoons with his mind, other people think Derek Acorah is a real psychic. In America a man called ‘Peter Popoff’ makes vast sums of money by being a faith healer who channels his knowledge of people’s illnesses from God even after he was publically shown (by James Randi) to be a fraud whose god was his wife on a radio transmitter. Most people believe anything, and the apostles, assuming they really existed, and those who initially assembled the new testament, demand no special assumptions of super-human infallibility.
edit: The final plausible apologist argument one may arrive at is something like “but so many people believe in it, there must have been something in it originally to convince so many people”. This does not stand up: the vast majority of the world is religious in some form and any one person’s beliefs are incompatible with the majority of others’. Many people believe in Islam but there is a greater number of christians, jews, hindus, sikhs, etc, who don’t. Many people believe in Christianity but there is a greater number of muslims, jews, hindus, sikhs, etc, who don’t. We can see arithmetically that the majority of the religious community cannot be right, so with nothing else to go on, their opinion is no more valid than a Pastafarian’s. In short: you can’t invoke proof by democracy because the democracy says you’re wrong.
but you can’t take anything I say seriously because obviously I’ve read Dawkins so my opinions are meaningless as I have lost the power to create a logically consistent plausible argument, instead all I can do is repeat verbatim what I read in the god delusion. I’m sure someone who hasn’t read Dawkins can tell us how that works; I cannot because I have read Dawkins and therefore I have no thinking abilities of my own.
tl;dr1: I don’t have to be a bible expert to make a logically sound argument
tl;dr2: the only bible i’m interested in is the perry bible fellowship: http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF016-Eden.jpg
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* It’s actually more like 3/4
the god delusion chapter i don’t know anymore
I MUST SAY, towards the end, TGD really picks up. There’s a very interesting section on the bible and some other stuff.
I never realised how hilariously stupid the bible is. I went to church when I was young (I don’t know why but my parents thought it was a good idea) and I went to a christian school (again, I don’t know why. Dad doesn’t believe in god. Mum does but she believes anything if you say it with a straight face.). I have no real memories of anything religious, except I remember once in the classroom there was the topic of religion and a couple of girls sheepishly admitted that for a joke they had been trying to summon spirits. My 25 year old female teacher’s face turned an unhealthy shade of grey and quietly said “I think the best thing to do would be to ask the lord for forgiveness”. This seems so bizarre now that a grown adult would say something so silly.
This is the extent of my religious memories. It may be that it was never a big deal, or it may be that it was so common that it was totally indistinct from the rest of my 8 year old self’s school life. I think it was probably a lot more common but it was just a fact of live and not remarkable. I seem to recall I believed most of the religious stuff because the smart adults seemed to think it was true, but then I went to a faith agnostic (aha) secondary school and sometime between then and university it must have passed off. I don’t recall having strong views until a few years ago but I remember making the odd anti religious comment on guitar forums when I was 16 or so in response to the largely American population using it as a way to justify homophobia.
Despite supposedly having a religious upbringing (supposedly — also remember this is Church Of England, not cathlofascism), I don’t seem to know much about the religion. My first real experience with the bible was a few weeks ago when I found one to help solve a crossword clue. Unfortunately I didn’t find the answer (or the light). I was mildly entertained by the letters from (some guy) to (some other guy) towards the end, and I was intrigued by the family tree showing about 50 generations and wondered how their records were so good, or whether someone just made it up. I look forward 2000 years and see people piecing together Turin son of Hurin’s family tree along with the letters page from the Telegraph and then making a holy document from it. “They say he slayed a dragon then slept with his sister, you know”. It has all the makings of a bible tale.
I didn’t know that there are two stories in the old testament which describe a man harbouring someone and everyone knocking on his door demanding access to this person, and he says “well I can’t let you do that, but here, rape my virgin daughters instead”. There’s also the great story of Lot and his daughters who decided they wanted to learn the ways of the world, so the older one got their dad drunk and got him to make her pregnant. Then the next night the younger one decided she wanted to get in on the game and did the same thing. As well as being drunk, Lot was also lonely because his wife was turned into a pillar of salt (no explanation is offered for this).
Hilarious! It’s kind of obvious now why most children in religious settings are exposed only very selectively to the Bible. It’s a repulsive and pointless text which can only be defended by those who have not read it and the insane. Even if this god does exist, it is completely impossible to ‘love’ him, because he’s a vindictive arsehole with no moral integrity. Anyone who does claim to love him either has not studied him, or is simply a coward who does so because they genuinely believe they’ll go to hell after they die if they don’t profess allegiance to god. It’s all so artificial and human. Every oppressive tyrannical machine ever has employed this tactic of ‘support us or have unpleasant things happen!’. God as described by Christianity is roughly on the same level of moral integrity as Hitler. Although he’s a bit clever to promise rewards only posthumously. Imagine if your boss said “oh by the way, we’re only going to pay you after you die from now on”.
The self centred arrogant smugness of the extremist Christian who has ‘accepted’ god is difficult to comprehend. In our local newspaper’s letters page last week, the resident nutcase wrote a baffling* letter complaining about the number of people who were ‘christian’ but didn’t go to church, then he complained that people who did go to church only thought about god on Sundays so they were all going to hell but he was okay because he was ‘true’. If he was a black metal fan he’d be kvlt. If he was an emo kid he’d be genuinely slitting his wrists instead of colouring them in with a red felt tip pen. But he’s a christian so I’m not sure what you’d call him other than a moron. There was no point to it other than to say “look at meeeeee!, I’m saved and you’re nooooot!”. Isn’t pride a sin?
Slight topic shift:
One of the big arguments for god (non-christian) is that he is needed to explain the universe. The glaring flaw to this is that if god can create the universe, he needs just as big an explanation for his own existence so there is no compelling reason to suppose the existence of god if his only purpose is to solve the problem of existence in general. Or rather, we notice that big planets are attracted to each other so we introduce gravity. This answers some questions, raises others, but generally works. It’s a marked improvement on saying there are super strong elephants pulling invisible strings.
Religious people just don’t understand this though. I think the reason for this is that in their own minds, god has always been a plausibility and there’s no additional complexity or problems in supposing his existence. They’ve already accepted his existence, so where’s the problem?
But HAVE THEY REALLY? That’s the thing. Some people have. Ohers probably haven’t. They introduce god as a quick and easy way to explain existence. They may or may not truly believe in him, but they no longer need to justify his existence or creation because he’s ‘out of scope’, he’s outside of the problem definition in which they are interested. They’re never going to meet him. They might *believe* in him but he’s not a physical reality for them. There’s a big difference in psychological perception between the universe and god. We live in the universe and we see it every day. We do not see god every day.
It reminds me of a Discworld book (possibly Pyramids) which is set in the Discworldian equivalent of ancient egypt. The son of a pharaoh visits Ankh Morpork and everyone is impressed that his father is a god (pharaohs were gods… “I don’t wanna die, I’m a god, why can’t I live onnnnnn?”). But he personally remarks on the difficulty of believing in his god: it is hard to believe in someone you see every day at the breakfast table. The perception is simply different. Something you see every day is definitely there and must have been created. Something you ‘believe in’ but do not ever see is fundamentally different. For this reason, to a naive or lazy thinker, god is subject to a much lower level of scrutiny before the belief is justified
The problem for these people is not: “Why do we exist?”
The problem is: “Why do the things we can see exist?”
So they introduce god. God explains why what we see exists; because god made it. At this point, all questions have been answered. There is no longer anything in the universe which we can see to exist which has not been explained. The problem is solved.
Analogy time: you’re writing a computer program and you finish it (yay). Your program probably has bugs, some of which may be big security problems. You can either accept they exist and start looking for them and fixing them, or you can take the view that there’s no problem until someone else finds one. One approach shows an interest in getting to the RIGHT solution, the other one shows a definite absence of such interest, favouring the easiest and most lazy solution. You are welcome to the go with the second one, but intelligent people won’t use your software. Just like intelligent people won’t accept your explanation of the universe.
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*Most of his letters are baffling. My guess is he’s about 90 and senile. He does not seem to appreciate the finer points of logic, punctuation, or in some cases, sentences as a whole. Someone else, after being called ‘unclear’ by him, criticised his writing by referring to them as an arcane code. I think this is being generous to the organisational skill he has in arranging text on paper.
When I first read one of his letters I thought he was writing a parody of some other letter I missed. It was badly spelt, needed very a liberal interpretation of his syntax to become comprehensible and was just silly in general. It was only the fact that he writes in every week with some kind of religiously motivated outrage that convinced me he was serious. A few weeks ago the topic of Noah’s ark came up and he defended the practical implausibility by “haven’t you ever heard of a zoo? they manage to stop all the animals eating each other there”. He sometimes fights with the other resident Christian, who doesn’t take the bible quite so literally. She is I think embarrassed by him but in reality they’re both as ridiculous as each other. At least he bases his belief on something. She bases her belief on a text she acknowledges is ridiculous.
THE GOD DELUSION CHAPTER 4
(Why there is almost certainly no god)
okay so the thing is that I am finding now that I don’t disagree with the book much at all any more. BUT I started off being heavily critical so in the interests of continuing: Dawkins seems to put a lot of emphasis on god being simple or complex. He says that if god designed the universe he would have to be very complex (fair enough), and such a being isn’t just going to spring out of nowhere. I think this is a big flaw because it’s worse than speculation to start asserting how exactly complexity may manifest itself when you detach it from our physical laws.
I personally feel a stronger argument is to just say when somebody asserts that god did this or that that “you can’t possibly know that and there’s no evidence for it”. It doesn’t totally disprove them, which seems to be Dawkins’s aim, but there are so many possibilities that the chance of them having the right one, especially as it involves creating a magic man in the sky who’s immune to and entirely outside of all known science and reason, is statistically negligible.
Personally I think the multiverse hypothesis makes a lot of sense: we already know that one universe may exist, unless you invoke god as the only way to create a universe and define that he only wanted one then the idea that there may be others seems very plausible. Supposedly this particular one is very well tweaked to support life but I don’t think this is a complete analysis: the vast vast VAAAAST majority of the universe is empty space. Even just looking at the parts that aren’t, anything that supports life as we know it are insanely rare. The only reason they exist at all is because the universe is so damn big; if it was ‘only’ a lightyear cubed then we probably wouldn’t have any habitable locations at all.
This universe seems consistent with a multiverse hypothesis that has some mechanism to spit out a lot of basically randomly made up universes (at least pseudorandom as far as support of life goes): this universe’s support of life is neither too perfect to make the idea that it came from a random unintelligent process statistically implausible, nor is it so hostile that the fact that life has come about necessitates some kind of overseer to overcome the improbability. Much like the wonders brought by evolution, it’s there, it does the job and to a naive observer it may look designed, but look at the situation a bit more fairly and you see it’s far from perfect and more likely an irrelevant consequence of something else.
the god delusion chapter 3
Continuing my exciting following of the God Delusion, chapter 3 concerns common arguments for god’s existence and rebuttals. I quite liked this chapter, although anyone with an interest in the subject will already have heard the main arguments listed here.
The most interesting of these arguments are the ontological proofs, which are clever mathematical/logical (I’ll treat these two words as interchangeable in this entry) arguments which proceed as follows:
1) Imagine a super perfect who cannot be any more super-perfect
2) Suppose said god does not exist
3) Said god would be even more perfect if he did exist
(3) contradicts (1), meaning (2) lead to a contradiction so it must be false. Therefore god must exist.
Dawkins ridicules this a bit, which I find pretty weak, because he can’t actually find a flaw in it. If you study maths at all you’ll see proofs like this all the time, it’s a perfectly valid proof and technique, although Dawkins seems to dismiss it as immature. Even so, this proof isn’t awfully convincing. I think the problem with this particular one, which makes it distinct from ones we are happy to see as valid, is that we are granting a mathematical proof the power to tell us things about our world. This is not what they are supposed to do. They are supposed to tell us things about a mathematical system. Many people think that maths is somehow woven into the fabric of the universe, but I think this is just a fairly naive Platonist interpretation.
The result (god does exist) is actually contradicted again by the fact that being ‘perfect’ in every way is impossible. One cannot be perfectly evil and perfectly good, and if you’re not both, you’re not perfect. Nobody claims god is perfectly evil (of course), but they do claim he is omniscient and omnipotent, and these two properties seem necessary for perfection. These two properties also imply a contradiction: if god is omniscient he already knows the course of the universe which means he cannot later change it, which means he is not omnipotent (as mentioned in the book). As does perfectly merciful and perfectly just: just implies punishing everyone as they deserve, merciful implies being a bit soft and not (as mentioned on Wikipedia). The fact that our system apparently allows two contradictory theorems shows that there’s something a bit wrong. [Or actually that's being a bit generous. Since overall perfection is contradictory and the above argument depends upon it, the argument is vacuous anyway. Although you can loosen your definition of perfection]
I think the actual fallacy in these arguments is in the word ‘imagine’. If you imagine a god who does not exist then you’re not imagining the best god possible. I can imagine an elephant that flies, but that doesn’t bring it into existence, not even if I set up an argument analogous to the above where its nonexistence is contradictory … imagine a super perfect elephant, suppose elephant lacks the ability to fly, uh oh then it’s not perfect so it must be able to fly, now suppose the elephant doesn’t exist, uh oh then it’s not perfect so it must exist. So where’s my flying elephant? Just for geographical clarity I can define that ‘being in my room’ is necessary for perfection. And yet still no flying elephant. An exercise to the over-enthusiastic reader is to investigate what happens when you want to introduce a second god who’s better than the first.
And this basically highlights why this stuff works in maths and not in real life: because maths is pretty much imaginary. We can imagine something, whether it’s the number 14, the square root of minus one, a circle or a universal Turing machine, as long as we can define it in words or symbols, it ‘exists’ as much as it needs to for it to be a valid, usable mathematical entity. That doesn’t mean it really physically exists or that it needs to; you can argue that ’14′ exists by giving me 14 apples if you want1 but you will find it more difficult to show that (-1)1/2 exists because it’s a nonsensical operation on anything we can show physically (yet we can handle it just fine in maths), and you would definitely have trouble physically showing a number greater than the number of atoms in the universe2 really exists, but it would still be perfectly valid to use it. My flying elephant is imaginary so it exists and is usable as far as the proof is concerned, but the proof is not able to reach out and effect a flying elephant into the real world.
Therefore a proof like this can assert the existence of something and be entirely correct logically, but have no link to real life, hence you have to be a bit sceptical when someone uses supposedly infallible reasoning to ‘prove’ some less than obvious statement about the universe without worrying about empirical evidence; it’s a clear sign they have a naive view of maths/logic.
I believe this also addresses Gödel’s stronger and more rigorous ontological proof, but it’s a bit cryptic and I haven’t sat down and gone through it.
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1. I’d say this was rather missing the point, but we define natural numbers in terms of sets so maybe not. Although technically numbers are defined in terms the empty set so maybe it is. Actually this was a really big problem: what is a number? we have all these things and we never said what they actually were. How can our maths be truly rigorous if we’ve not addressed what these things are? The solution is bizarre, clever, and thoroughly brilliant, we define them in terms of NOTHINGS:
0 = {} [the brackets denote a set, and its contents are separated by commas. In this case, there is nothing between the brackets because the set is empty and we call it the empty set]
n+1 = n U {n} [the joining together of n and the set containing n,
e.g. {0, 1} U {2, 3} = {0, 1, 2, 3} ]
so,
0 = {}
1 = {} U {{}} = {{}} = {0}
2 = {{}} U {{{}}} = {{}, {{}}} = {0, 1}
3 = {{}, {{}}} U { {{}, {{}}} } = {{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}} = {0, 1, 2}
and so on. Obviously it’s easier if you start substituting in the numbers rather than keeping the indecipherable lists of brackets, but I thought it was interesting to highlight that each natural number is defined by clever arrangements of nothing. This should convince you that maths is something quite separate from real life.
2. Assume this is finite. Even if it’s not, it is sufficient that the statement would be correct if the number was finite.
the boring delusion
you know, I’m not so sure I like this God Delusion book. I’ve read the first two chapters. Here are my notes so far.
1) Dawkins seems to place a lot of faith in the intellect of the average (wo)?man. He seems to believe that an absence of religion will suddenly right every problem that religion causes. I posit that this is not true! A religion is a mindset, the god and precise beliefs are rather unimportant. There’s an intrinsic human desire in there which will need more than a well reasoned argument to stamp out. God is a symptom, not the overall problem. He would accuse me of being condescending to the average man, but I would say he is too if he believes everyone’s an intelligent person who’s got taken in by a single silly idea. It’s deeper than that. Your overconfidence is your weakness. Your faith in your freinds is yours. etc. And plenty of people have a god without being problematic.
2) He seems to spend a lot of time worrying about the views of respectable dead and living figures. An argument from authority isn’t convincing or interesting whether he’s setting one up or trying to attack one. And it’s all a bit Americanised, Thomas Jefferson this and that … who cares. And he even used the word ‘pedophile’, which is what, a foot fetishist? I expect a little more from an Oxford professor. If there’s a ‘gotten’ I’ll scream.
3) He seems dead set on making god into a scientific hypothesis, which is all very well but it’s just plain not, at least not the god that most people believe in, who happens to be several billion subtly different gods. If you want to be able to have a reasonable chance of falsifying the idea if it’s not right (which is necessary for it being a scientific hypothesis) you have to work with a very well defined god, but if you try this you’ll find people are very happy to broaden their definition until their god is different to the one you’re working with, and they will do this until it becomes unfalsifiable. Some will happily start from that point. He doesn’t seem to address this, but if someone makes their god unfalsifiable then it’s plainly not a hypothesis. At worst making god in a broad sense into a hypothesis requires a straw man.
And I just don’t see what it achieves or why he possibly sacrifices some integrity for it. I don’t think failure to set up god as a falsifiable hypothesis in any way weakens his overall case or strengthens religion’s. An unfalsifiable claim is ‘not even wrong’; being wrong would be a step up. It’s just meaningless and probably doesn’t deserve serious consideration and certainly no one can convincingly claim to have more idea about it than anyone else. This is a perfectly effective attack. Even though I agree with the overall point he would attack me for saying that the question of god, when it comes down to it, is it outside of science and likely to remain so forever. I don’t really see what attacking my point of view achieves as I don’t feel exactly wowed by his insight on the matter.
I think the problem is that Dawkins wants to disprove god, which is not a practical aim, and he would be better off sacrificing some level of certainty of his conclusion for a stronger argument, which simply amounts to “there is no evidence for god”. Some people might not find that convincing reason to lack belief in god, but then you invoke Russell’s teapot and we have a winner. The conclusion is equivalent, the argument is stronger, although the book is shorter.
4) in chapter two he attacks agnosticism by invoking ‘probablity’, although it’s not frequentist probablity, it’s subjective probablity, which is actually a measure of personal confidence, which changes the tone of everything but he doesn’t bother to mention that. I’m still not sure if he has a problem with someone saying they’re agnostic or not. I think his point was that agnosticism is an incredibly imprecise word and it describes a broad range of opinions so it’s better to avoid it unless you really see no reason to lean towards yes or no, but it’s a really confusing read.
Overall so far this book has smidgens of interest but in general it’s been dull dull dull.
I’m sorry.
the god dullusion might have been a better title.
i’m sorry
ON THE INTERNET
somebody said… in trying to suggest that DNA conflicted with information theory and therefore couldn’t have evolved because DNA is a “4-bit (A, C, G, T) code”. Honestly I don’t know *anything* about DNA and I don’t know much about information theory besides a few basics, but you don’t have to know much information theory to know that a 4-bit code isn’t the same as a quaternary code, and if you are confusing the two I’m going to come out and say you don’t know anything about information theory and shouldn’t be trying to pass yourself off as an expert! (also it would only take 2 bits to store each codeword)
It is like with people who argue that climate change is not happening. They go on and on and quite frequently throw out lots of scientific buzzwords and they can get very persistent and/or aggressive. Okay, but just because you argue with fervour doesn’t mean you’re right. You can’t pick at a random detail until you get to a level low enough that people aren’t sure how it works, then say “this disproves everything!” when there’s a tonne of evidence the other way and it really does just look like a detail that hasn’t been filled in yet. People who come up with these things never seem to have PhDs in biology or climatology, and they never publish rigorously argued scientific papers. It’s always “some guy on the internet who claims to be an expert said…”. I don’t see how you can deny climate change is happening without doing quite a lot of research, by which I don’t mean reading Wikipedia, I mean getting hold of a few gigabytes of data and running your own statistical tests on it. Have you done that? no? well shut up then. Honestly, I’m a climate-change sceptic but I am so because I am sceptical of the scientific integrity of some work on the subject, I don’t pretend that this has any bearing on whether or not it’s actually happening, though.
Now back to DNA.
Here is the web-page of the man responsible for popularising these DNA arguments
http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/iidb.htm
His argument, which is regurgitated by different people, but I think he came up with it originally, boils down to (in his own words):
1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism.
2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information.
3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.
You can introduce any code you like (including DNA!) to disprove point 2, but the argument is ‘poisonous’ in that any counter-example you find is immediately tainted; the argument is constructed such that you can find a counter-example, then the argument can say “well that must have been designed too!”, or you can use the fact it wasn’t designed to reject it as being analogous. Uh-oh do I spot some CIRCULAR LOGIC here, I THINK I DO. In fact the argument is flawed because ‘conscious mind’ is too broad an abstraction; we don’t know any codes designed by pigs or dogs or dolphins or antelopes, the only codes we know of that have come from a conscious mind are from HUMAN minds. Therefore DNA was designed by a human? Don’t think so.
The problem is that some people with a familiarity with, but not a deep understanding of, mathematics (Perry Marshall is an engineer [so he claims], go figure) think that making an argument like this is sensible. They create an abstract logical system within which they make a logical ‘proof’, and they are correct WITHIN THIS SYSTEM. It often makes sense to do this, but you have to be careful to make your abstract logical system reflect real life as closely as is practical. Then you might well have a predictive mechanism, but it’s limited to being a predictive mechanism because of the problem of induction, it is not something that necessarily tells you truths.
But that is not what Perry Mason has done; not only is his system circular and thus unconvincing as a model of anything, he has then supposed that it is absolutely made of the stuff that defines real life and therefore any conclusion it throws out is unquestionably correct. Mathematical proof doesn’t work in real life, anyone who thinks it does either doesn’t understand maths or they don’t understand real life. Possibly both.
Going a bit deeper into the idea of a code… the problem is that a code is a mathematical entity, which means it’s a human-built abstraction. This particular abstraction encompasses many things and excludes others quite arbitrarily based on the opinion of the reader. The light from a star can be said to ‘encode’ the distance of the star from the viewer. A rock can be said to encode its age, which can be decoded via carbon dating. Are these things codes? Yes but no. They literally are, but you wouldn’t usually classify them so. Semantically the word ‘code’ is a bit more complex than that. Obvious codes are everywhere: telephones, television, CDs, etc, all somehow convert data from one form to another. This page is viewable now only through tonnes of codes, from HTML right at the top to your CPU’s instruction set at the bottom. These things are all unquestionably examples of ‘codes’.
For Perry’s argument to hold, it must selectively reject light from a star, and pretty much every other natural phenomena you can think of, as being a code, while still allowing telephones and CDs and so on. The difference between these two ideas, which makes somebody think of the latter but not the former as a code, is design and intent1. Step 2 says a “conscious mind”, what it really means is somebody designed it and intended it to transmit messages; it doesn’t happen just because it happens, i.e. as an apparently unintended consequence of the nature of the universe, and that the decoding process actually produces a useful message to the decoder; something they CARE about.
But there isn’t any obvious intent to DNA, because although it is necessary for life, there isn’t any obvious intent or purpose to life. If organic reproduction stopped working tomorrow we have no reason to suspect the universe would care. We would care, but we didn’t design it in the first place, so that’s not relevant. DNA does its job without any intelligent, conscious intervention whatsoever. If there’s no clear intent then we must reject the conclusion that god designed DNA (which follows from DNA being a code, and codes being designed), because DNA fails the definition for code.
The only way to introduce intent into DNA is to pre-suppose existence of a creator who designed life and designed DNA with intent to aid reproduction. Thus it must be taken as true that a creator exists before you even start the argument, but this is what your argument sets out to prove. This is called begging the question. You might as well have just said “god exists, FACT!”, because that’s all this argument amounts to.
Perry Marshall is an idiot and so is anyone else arguing this line of reasoning.
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1. For brevity (in vain), I omit to observe another distinction in that in obvious codes there involves an actual decoding process that occurs without humans consciously getting involved. We can see this also applies to non-obvious codes if we consider say planetary orbit, where the ‘decoding’ process has the effect of a planet following an orbit whether or not a human is there to interpret anything or to create an equation to describe it. Pretty much any deterministic physical cause and effect is a non-obvious code.
a rare display of tolerance
Today is the international everybody draw a picture of the prophet Mohammed day and I must say I am quite dismayed! I am all for religious intolerance, but this is just stupid.
You’re offending approximately two billion people and the only outcomes you are likely to effect are:
1) you’re going to make SOME western people laugh at the stupid over sensitive muslims,
2) you’re going to make A LOT of muslims deeply resentful of the stupid intolerant westerners.
This event was picked up by Slashdot, and when a non-tech issue is picked up by Slashdot you instantly see a massive increase in the number of stupid opinions on the event. Mostly they pertain to ‘free speech’. Americans enjoy the idea of free speech and freedom generally, but I don’t know if the average American is really as dumb as the average American Slashdotter or whether I have seen a very selective subset comprising only socially unaware people (quite possible) that gives me a polarised opinion.
As for drawing pictures of Mohammed, unless you live in a muslim country you already have the right to draw those pictures*. The only thing you stand to achieve by making a point of doing so is to offend, and this is counter-productive to your cause; you are showing exactly how free speech is a bad thing because you’ve shown that some people are not mature enough to use free speech responsibly and show respect for others.
It’s BIZARRE how so many people adopt a fanatic America yeah! attitude. The muslim fanatic thinks he’s justified to incite hatred vs America because an arcane, ancient book says so and the fundamentalist American finds this offensive and has to retaliate; he thinks he’s justified in inciting hatred vs muslims because an arcane, almost-ancient piece of paper says so. It’s easy to see how religions got going in the first place when you read some of the mindless American patriotism displayed on Slashdot.
I realise I’m probably putting too much weight on the opinion of the average Slashdotter, who has an IQ of 157 and believes himself to be above everyone else, but for some reason can’t see a world beyond P v ¬P.
Eventually fundamentalist muslims might die out in the same way christians did, but it’s not going to happen because a bunch of privileged, immature, middle class white Americans drew some crude, witless, offensive drawings with captions in English.
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*In the same way you have the right to go up to a wild bear and poke it with a stick. Yes the wild bear is not within its rights or the law when it rips your arms off, but it would be hard for an impartial observer to say that it was a surprising outcome. It’s not a rational or reasonable course of action by the bear because we didn’t necessarily mean it any harm, but we should be able to see that poking bears with sticks isn’t a necessary part of everyday life and if wild bears are strangely sensitive to being poked with sticks for reasons we deem silly maybe it’s best to just not poke them. It doesn’t mean that we should enact a mass protest against wild bears by having 100,000 people poke them with sticks in order to try to ‘cure’ them or to show them we’re not scared of them.
