Perhaps this will be a mistake I can only look back on some day and fret. Perhaps not. Before we begin a little back story to smooth out the worry lines of my dear readership.
I have been invited to a bible study, 12 weeks long, one of which was already passed. The first class was an intro to the author, Hugo Ross and his role as an author, astronomer and allegedly valid source of information. I have decided to attend in part to see just what kind of stuff is being handed around, but also because it will be an interesting experience and provide some conversational fodder for me and the inlaws.
Note that Natalie's parents will be in attendance as well.
The book that outlines the framework for the series is listed in the post title with the byline "A testable model approach to end the creation/evolution wars"
Already my skeptic senses are tingling. Mixing and mashing science and religion together is a bit like flavoring mashed potatoes with light sweet crude. I know the hydrocarbons are similar to those in butter but the taste...well it leaves much to be desired.
The dorsal jacket proclaims that the author's intent is to show that any claim for creation/formation must be verifiable/falsifiable to be considered. Already the alarm bells are growing deafening as the jacket further asserts striking harmony between bleeding edge scientific research and biblical accounts of creation. Hmmm. The conclusion is that creation (the same 'creation' part of creationism) is a testable scientific theory that can advance human knowledge as well spark a resurgence in the scientific enterprise.
Funny, I wonder what has kept science thriving and humming along for the past few hundred years.
At any rate I am sure to encounter some face palm phrases and diabolical doublethink but I am going to try and keep an open mind about the ideas put forward. After all I would love to see the reconciliation of believers and atheists, if I wasn't curious I would not be reading the book nor attending the classes. Let's begin with the introduction.
************************
Introduction - Sifting fact from fiction
We start off admirably neutral with some examples of hysteria from the War of the World's broadcast and how people flew off the handle because they thought it was real. I get it. We establish that although the event was fictional people had very strong reactions because they thought it was real.
Segment - The Two Hundred Year's War - begins by saying that the 'war' of science and faith has raged for 200 years now and that opposing sides hold contradictory beliefs. I would argue that intelligent humanists have existed since the days of the greeks and probably existed long before that (as long as religion I will wager) However I mention this because it's not a war just because ideas are clashing. Science marches forth like a juggernaut and people try to slow it down and trip it up whenever it raises a foot to their faith.
Next segment 'about the book' makes something of a faux pas in the scientific world. Quoting Aristotle is always dangerous but in this case especially so. The quoted segment is "everything must be affirmed or denied, and that a thing cannot be and not be." Well, tell that to Schroedinger's cat. This is a worrisome quote because right of the bat we see indifference or ignorance of quantum mechanics.
The next few paragraphs state an intention of promoting dialog and discussion rather than screeds from opposing sides. I am happy to hear that at least. The author then touches on how we can seperate factual information from farcical nonsense. Basically you gather data, analyze it using various tests and from the observations we should be able to predict future outcomes based on what we infer. It's the scientific method in a nutshell but the author goes on to plug the Reason To Believe or RTB creation model.
I am at present unfamiliar with the RTB creation model but again I cannot ignore the skepticism tingle crawling down my spine. Presupposition is the enemy of good science and since the model conforms not to an independently verifiable source but to a preexisting bit of scripture I can only express concern. However, mind open, lights on and fingers at the ready.
The segment ends with a summary of the rest of the book which I'll not relist here. I decided to forego jumping into the chapters and instead want to look a bit deeper at the author himself.
So I did some google work.
Wikipedia
Bio at RTB
Other books
Now those three links represent a huge quantum of information so I will condense a few key points to remark on.
Mr. Ross is an old-earth creationist. This label speaks volumes but in the interest of not pigeon- holing anyone. He seems to believe (and brace yourself for cognitive dissonance, crank yer mental inertial dampeners up) that beliefs should hold up to evidence in a falsifiable and verifiable. That's good. However one can only wonder how sincere this wish is given the conclusions he draws.
Just flipping through the booklist we begin to see a lot of apologetics and a lot of science-confirms-the-words-of-biblical-scripture type of stuff. This is worrisome though at this point I have no delved into the meat of the book in question.
I would like to point out some positives however. The man seems to have a decent understanding of some scientific principles and a flexible yet firm disregard when it comes to marrying them to scripture. There are few deal breakers that I will consider for premature withdrawl or outright antagonism but the following points cannot be dismissed by any reasonable person.
1) The universe is about 14 billion years old
2) The earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
3) Life arose on this planet or was carried here from the immediate solar vicinity.
4) Since it began life has evolved through natural selection and mutation.
5) The dominant theories governing physics, biology and chemistry cannot be suspended, reversed or altered to suit any biblical assertion whatsoever.
6) This is a restatement of point 5, miracles can never supplant naturalistic observations for the explanation of key events throughout history regardless of source, date or popularity.
The next post will cover Chapters 1-3 and the first meeting I attend will relate to those chapters.
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
But we can win!!!! We have to keep fighting so we can WIN!!!
As requested from my one and very possibly only reader Matt:
"After stumbling upon ~6 web pages in a row talking about how people that don't believe in evolution are stupid I got an idea for your blog. You can write about how it doesn't fucking matter because either way it isn't going help us shoot lightning bolts out of our asses any sooner. Such a silly point pisses people on any side off so much that to a neutral observer (Galapagos style) they all look like crazy fish people. Its pretty damn funny. That said, argue about something that matters, like nano-bots or cloning..."
Fair enough.
Before I begin I would like to document that I have coined the term 'Cycrobe' to describe a nano-scale cybernetic or silicon based micro robot or hybrid organism. Someone else may have thought they came up with this term before now but I have documents proving that I in fact first used this phrase in 2002 so BOOYAH!!!
That being said I wish to address the not yet stirred ethical stew pot regarding the cloning of humans and nano-bot augmentation.
I am sick to death of people freaking out about human clones! Probably the worst argument I have ever heard is 'man I don't wanna walk down the street one day and run into my clone!'
Here's the good news: If you're stupid enough to worry about that, you're never going to be cloned because planet earth is doing just dandy when it comes to paranoid assholes. That being said what's the problem. Human cloning has been going on for millenia.
Ever heard of identical twins? Two people with exactly the same DNA!!! Or triplets, the horror!
That's human cloning. Whether it happens by accident or by intention doesn't matter. It's not even a moral question, its all about information.
Stem cells, embryonic or not, are basically tiny protoplasmic hard drives chock full of humany goodness (assuming we're talking about human stem cells.) The problem, and I may have stated this before, is that people are looking for truth in their lives.
Most people, and I believe this to be true irrespective of their beliefs, would say that truth is an abolute and unwavering standard by which to gauge the universe and more specifically their role in it. I say to that 'what a bunch of crap.'
Truth is the Newtonian physics of philosophy. In common every day life it suits us just perfectly. High school physics wouldn't be the same without it. Newtonian physics are demonstrably true on a certain scale. However zoom out to look at the solar system and you find a different story. When astronomy was coming into its own there was an unusual variance with Mercury's orbit that could not be justified. It was a tiny variation, almost miniscule but it was still WRONG according to Newton's laws.
Einstein and quantum physics filled in the gaps but that doesn't mean we can retrofit newtonian physics to fill in the gaps. We need a new model if we're going to include things so far beyond ordinary terrestrial variables.
When you increase (or decrease) density, gravity, temperature, distance time or speed beyond conventional or earth bound limitations you see a weakening of Newtonian equations. You also lose the ability to conceptualize accurately how the universe appears. Think of the solar system.
Just hang the sun and drop in Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Pluto, I still say you're a planet but for the sake of argument fuck off for the time being. You're probably imagining something where you see the sun and all the planets together right?
Wrong!
The solar system is HUGE and this better explained HERE than I care to elaborate. If you don't click the link Here's the highlight. Imagine the sun is a bowling ball and earth is a peppercorn. At solar scale that peppercorn is what...3 feet, 5 feet away tops right? Try about 108 feet away.
Pluto is some half a mile out and all that is just a pittance, 5 mere light hours. The hypothetical
Oort cloud
May stretch out over 1000 times that or roughly one light year. If the earth were a peppercorn and pluto has an average distance from the sun of about half a mile than a light year would be comparable on that scale to 500 miles. Multiply that out by 4.2 (number of light years to proxima centauri) and we get 2,100 miles. That is when we shrink the entire earth to the size of a peppercorn.
To understate: That's quite a haul.
Dismaying as this data is I find it hopeful that should we ever feel up to the challenge if we can achieve speeds of a tenth a light year and outfit ships capable of hibernating people then space travel would not be fantasy. It would probably be a shit load cheaper to just download some brains and haul over some embryoes to a new system if we're going to colonize. We'll let the singularity sort that one out.
Does this relate at all to truth versus information? Perhaps it does and perhaps it does not. Truth is a human concept it's like 'good information with a guarantee that the information is good.' That is fine and well but what does it really mean?
I am operating under the assumption that this post will never be addressed by an omniscient being who can prove me wrong but here goes. Human understanding will always be imperfect. Our intuitive understanding of the world, our ability to be objective and the simple existence of human emotion virtually guarantee that almost any statement or 'truth' is bound to be skewed or incomplete.
Following Neal Stephenson's particle logic we can safely state that statements of more complexity will contain greater quantities of uncertainty. Consider: The sky is blue.
It's a pretty simple statement but is it true? The atmosphere itself is transparent so no the sky isn't blue. However the reason the sky appears to be blue is that our atmosphere scatters light in the shorter wavelengths within the visible spectrum. Therefore when you look up there's a damn good reason to think the sky is blue because that's what it appears to be. However your photoreceptors aren't perfect and we see blue better than violet.
Without delving wholeheartedly into post modernity I'll leave it there. So, is it truth that the sky is blue or not? My honest answer is that truth does not matter. Uncertainty is like gravity, it's everywhere in the universe. Furthermore what we consider 'truth' changes depending on our level of understanding. If we didn't detect electromagnetic radiation on a very narrow range of spectra then the question would be meaningless. However I shudder to think of the effect purely scientific nomenclature would have on art, literature and entertainment...(imagine a thought bubble.
Roses reflect light near 700nm
violets reflect light near 400nm...
Ghastly isn't it. So, I propose that we abandon the whole notion of truth and trade it in, as we did for newtonian physics with general relativity and quantum mechanics and instead we concern ourselves with pure information. Surely there are cons but consider the pros. Nay consider the sympathetic friend phenomenon.
Even if your best friend and you analyze to death the reasons why your girlfriend booted you that will not bring her back. Similarly whatever logical rube goldberg devices you can mentally construct to fit your world view it will not change the parts of the universe not influenced by human opinion. For the record that includes space, time and all inanimate matter dark or otherwise.
So there it is.
Anywho that's my post for the day. I apologize if it degenerated into incoherence sooner than usual but I've had a lot on my mind lately.
"After stumbling upon ~6 web pages in a row talking about how people that don't believe in evolution are stupid I got an idea for your blog. You can write about how it doesn't fucking matter because either way it isn't going help us shoot lightning bolts out of our asses any sooner. Such a silly point pisses people on any side off so much that to a neutral observer (Galapagos style) they all look like crazy fish people. Its pretty damn funny. That said, argue about something that matters, like nano-bots or cloning..."
Fair enough.
Before I begin I would like to document that I have coined the term 'Cycrobe' to describe a nano-scale cybernetic or silicon based micro robot or hybrid organism. Someone else may have thought they came up with this term before now but I have documents proving that I in fact first used this phrase in 2002 so BOOYAH!!!
That being said I wish to address the not yet stirred ethical stew pot regarding the cloning of humans and nano-bot augmentation.
I am sick to death of people freaking out about human clones! Probably the worst argument I have ever heard is 'man I don't wanna walk down the street one day and run into my clone!'
Here's the good news: If you're stupid enough to worry about that, you're never going to be cloned because planet earth is doing just dandy when it comes to paranoid assholes. That being said what's the problem. Human cloning has been going on for millenia.
Ever heard of identical twins? Two people with exactly the same DNA!!! Or triplets, the horror!
That's human cloning. Whether it happens by accident or by intention doesn't matter. It's not even a moral question, its all about information.
Stem cells, embryonic or not, are basically tiny protoplasmic hard drives chock full of humany goodness (assuming we're talking about human stem cells.) The problem, and I may have stated this before, is that people are looking for truth in their lives.
Most people, and I believe this to be true irrespective of their beliefs, would say that truth is an abolute and unwavering standard by which to gauge the universe and more specifically their role in it. I say to that 'what a bunch of crap.'
Truth is the Newtonian physics of philosophy. In common every day life it suits us just perfectly. High school physics wouldn't be the same without it. Newtonian physics are demonstrably true on a certain scale. However zoom out to look at the solar system and you find a different story. When astronomy was coming into its own there was an unusual variance with Mercury's orbit that could not be justified. It was a tiny variation, almost miniscule but it was still WRONG according to Newton's laws.
Einstein and quantum physics filled in the gaps but that doesn't mean we can retrofit newtonian physics to fill in the gaps. We need a new model if we're going to include things so far beyond ordinary terrestrial variables.
When you increase (or decrease) density, gravity, temperature, distance time or speed beyond conventional or earth bound limitations you see a weakening of Newtonian equations. You also lose the ability to conceptualize accurately how the universe appears. Think of the solar system.
Just hang the sun and drop in Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Pluto, I still say you're a planet but for the sake of argument fuck off for the time being. You're probably imagining something where you see the sun and all the planets together right?
Wrong!
The solar system is HUGE and this better explained HERE than I care to elaborate. If you don't click the link Here's the highlight. Imagine the sun is a bowling ball and earth is a peppercorn. At solar scale that peppercorn is what...3 feet, 5 feet away tops right? Try about 108 feet away.
Pluto is some half a mile out and all that is just a pittance, 5 mere light hours. The hypothetical
Oort cloud
May stretch out over 1000 times that or roughly one light year. If the earth were a peppercorn and pluto has an average distance from the sun of about half a mile than a light year would be comparable on that scale to 500 miles. Multiply that out by 4.2 (number of light years to proxima centauri) and we get 2,100 miles. That is when we shrink the entire earth to the size of a peppercorn.
To understate: That's quite a haul.
Dismaying as this data is I find it hopeful that should we ever feel up to the challenge if we can achieve speeds of a tenth a light year and outfit ships capable of hibernating people then space travel would not be fantasy. It would probably be a shit load cheaper to just download some brains and haul over some embryoes to a new system if we're going to colonize. We'll let the singularity sort that one out.
Does this relate at all to truth versus information? Perhaps it does and perhaps it does not. Truth is a human concept it's like 'good information with a guarantee that the information is good.' That is fine and well but what does it really mean?
I am operating under the assumption that this post will never be addressed by an omniscient being who can prove me wrong but here goes. Human understanding will always be imperfect. Our intuitive understanding of the world, our ability to be objective and the simple existence of human emotion virtually guarantee that almost any statement or 'truth' is bound to be skewed or incomplete.
Following Neal Stephenson's particle logic we can safely state that statements of more complexity will contain greater quantities of uncertainty. Consider: The sky is blue.
It's a pretty simple statement but is it true? The atmosphere itself is transparent so no the sky isn't blue. However the reason the sky appears to be blue is that our atmosphere scatters light in the shorter wavelengths within the visible spectrum. Therefore when you look up there's a damn good reason to think the sky is blue because that's what it appears to be. However your photoreceptors aren't perfect and we see blue better than violet.
Without delving wholeheartedly into post modernity I'll leave it there. So, is it truth that the sky is blue or not? My honest answer is that truth does not matter. Uncertainty is like gravity, it's everywhere in the universe. Furthermore what we consider 'truth' changes depending on our level of understanding. If we didn't detect electromagnetic radiation on a very narrow range of spectra then the question would be meaningless. However I shudder to think of the effect purely scientific nomenclature would have on art, literature and entertainment...(imagine a thought bubble.
Roses reflect light near 700nm
violets reflect light near 400nm...
Ghastly isn't it. So, I propose that we abandon the whole notion of truth and trade it in, as we did for newtonian physics with general relativity and quantum mechanics and instead we concern ourselves with pure information. Surely there are cons but consider the pros. Nay consider the sympathetic friend phenomenon.
Even if your best friend and you analyze to death the reasons why your girlfriend booted you that will not bring her back. Similarly whatever logical rube goldberg devices you can mentally construct to fit your world view it will not change the parts of the universe not influenced by human opinion. For the record that includes space, time and all inanimate matter dark or otherwise.
So there it is.
Anywho that's my post for the day. I apologize if it degenerated into incoherence sooner than usual but I've had a lot on my mind lately.
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