The Postmodernism Translator

James T. Kirk using the Postmodernism Translator to learn deep thoughts from the French.

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry was having trouble with a paragraph from postmodern scholar Bruno Latour. I happen to speak postmodern, so the table below gives Latour's sentences on the left and my liberal translation on the right.

Latour

Tanner

In religious talk, there is indeed a leap of faith, but this is not an acrobatic salto mortale in order to do even better than reference with more daring and risky means, it is a somersault yes, but one which aims at jumping, dancing toward the present and the close, to redirect attention away from indifference and habituation, to prepare oneself to be seized again by this presence that breaks the usual, habituated passage of time. As to knowledge, it is not a direct grasp of the plain and the visible against all beliefs in authority, but an extraordinarily daring, complex, and intricate confidence in chains of nested transformations of documents that, through many different types of proofs, lead toward new types of visions that force us to break away from the intuitions and prejudices of common sense. Belief is simply immaterial for any religious speech-act; knowledge is not an accurate way to characterize scientific activity. We might move forward a bit, if we were calling “faith” the movement that brings us to the close and to the present, and retaining the word “belief" for this necessary mixture of confidence and diffidence with which we need to assess all the things we cannot see directly. Then the difference between science and religion would not be found in the different mental competencies brought to bear on two different realms—“belief ” applied to vague spiritual matters, “knowledge” to directly observable things—but in the same broad set of competences applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions. The first chain leads toward what is invisible because it is simply too far and too counterintuitive to be directly grasped—namely, science; the second chain, the religious one, also leads to the invisible but what it reaches is not invisible because it would be hidden, encrypted, and far, but simply because it is difficult to renew.

Religious people take "leaps of faith" [in talking about the substance of belief]. But it's not just fancy, meaningless talk, and it's not trying for mere poetry or emotion. Instead, it attempts to articulate the wonder and extra-ordinariness of the present moment, of its present-ness. Where the events of our lives could be seen indifferently and as mundane happenings, in a religious frame the events are grand and worthy of amazement. Religious knowledge--that is, feeling sure that God exists, is watching, and is at work--is not like knowing in everyday life. It is, rather, a heroic assertion and a point of view that finds new and beautiful ways, every day, to confirm that assertion. The assertion, perspective, and continual connecting of the two make the knower a supremely open-minded learner. Religious belief therefore transcends ordinary speech. Language cannot convey the complexity of what the religious seeker is actually doing and learning in active seeking. Neither is the word knowledge appropriate to the learning done by anyone who actively looks at and in the world. Current discussions of religion and science might progress if we all shared a more nuanced understanding of the difference between "faith" and "belief." The more nuanced understanding would help locate the real difference between science and religion: the different cognitive skills and ideological commitments each brings to bear in inquiry. Science and religion are, in other words, different ways of knowing and and of advocating for personally held values. Science orients the thinker to the invisible reality that only mathematics and high-powered instrumentation can access. That reality is far from us and behaves in ways we often find counter-intuitive. Religion also orients the thinker to the invisible, but this invisible reality is the now, the unique present. It's here and close, but only momentary and unrepeatable.

Latour's prose is dense, but not inscrutable. Unfortunately, it's hard to be overly impressed with the logic of his grand--and beautiful--claims for what religion is, does, and knows.

For Latour, to be religious, to think in the religious mode, is to elevate oneself and the now. One is introspective and amazed to be part of a singular narrative in time. Every facet of one's life now is imbued with higher meaning and purpose. And exercise of religious thinking is equally noble and equally important compared to the exercise of scientific techniques.

His aspirations and dancing prose notwithstanding, Latour ultimately fails to make his case. Religious thinking and talk, by his characterization, are little more than very deep navel gazing. They are solipsistic exercises, the dramatic cry of one unable to escape time, and thereby death. In Latour's ornamented formulation, religious introspection re-states William Saroyan's famous quote: "Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case." Religion is the fantasy invoked to come to grips with the fact that no exception will be made.

The Why Evolution Is True crowd notes, as I do, the rhetorical game Latour is playing: "science" is the standard, and Latour wants to bring religion up to or--even better--past the standard. Science has a presumed preeminence and authority he wants conferred also to religion.

It's a silly game, and unnecessary. Religion can be very beautiful. It can make one introspective, and it can yield breathtaking insights into one's life and one's moment. It can help one question common sense and one's own prejudices.

But religion really isn't like science and today bears no relation to it. There's no basis for comparing the two.

Religion is not about truth or knowledge, even self-knowledge. Rather, religion is about understanding, about feeling rationally justified to hold a certain view. The key here, as far as I can tell, is "feeling rational." We're not talking about pure rationality but emotional sanctification with the idea that one is intellectually attuned to forces at work in the universe.

Religion taps into an enticing fantasy, the fantasy of somehow knowing something. But it's just a fantasy. It isn't true, not in the sense of modelling, observing, or schematizing a phenomenon.

I wish people could be OK with that, with the fact that religion isn't true. After all, they can still go to church. They can still pray. They can still observe the rituals and special days. They can still read holy books and discuss teachings. They can still imagine heaven. They can still contemplate hell.They can still fantasize about knowing, all by themselves, deep secrets of the universe.

Religion does not need to be true for people to be interested in it, inspired by it, educated by it, moved by it. But it needs to be true if people are going to learn about the universe and about people.

And it's not true, so let's not ask it to be, and let's not try to extract knowledge where there is none to be had.

In the end, Latour's prose and point are ineffectual because they misguidedly inflate religion into areas it cannot influence. A reformed postmodernist myself, I hope my prose and my arguments are more compelling than his indulgent apology for the unsubstantive.

At Last, What Intelligent Design Theory Advocates!

 
Over at the Intelligent Design site Uncommon Descent, a commenter called Jerad has been asking what ID theory advocates for the origin of life and development of species.

His requests are often polite and specific:

I am not asking you for the designer’s name or address, just your idea about the methods and timing. We know quite a lot about the people who built Stonehenge: what they ate, some of their rituals, stuff you can’t get from just studying Stonehenge itself. There are lots of good books about prehistoric Britain if you’re interested. AND we do ask: why did they build Stonehenge? When? In stages or all at once? Why? Always WHY?? It’s what science does. Asks questions.

You asked me a few weeks ago about finding Stonehenge on Mars and I said: you bet I’d think it was designed. And then I’d immediately start asking those questions and looking for answers and more evidence. I couldn’t just let the deign inference sit there and be happy. I’d start digging. Quite literally in that instance in fact. I’d do some archaeology and look for the designer’s trash heap. I’d ramp up SETI trying to find a signal. I’d try and date the structure. I’d hypothesise (based on careful examination of the thing) about construction techniques. If someone left a Stonehenge on Mars I’d bet they left some other traces and evidence.

Here's a second statement clarifying what Jerad wants to know about ID:

I won’t ask about the designer but, surely, a core part of ID is when; when did the designer intervene. That at least should be answerable. That is the core difference isn’t it: Darwinism says: the ‘gaps’ were bridged by natural, observable processes. ID says: the designer bridged those gaps with knowledge and abilities we extrapolate from our own currently inadequate abilities. BUT, you haven’t said which gaps or when.

Although in that thread none of the ID proponents sketches out the narrative for origin of life and development of species, the comments give enough for a reconstruction. Here, then, is my summary of ID's theory of life:

Intelligent Design is a theory of common design. At some point in the distant past, an intelligent being released one or more organismic "seeds" on earth. Each seed presumably had been designed by this being--although I am not sure we can assume this--and introduced to earth for the purpose of living here. Although each seed is crafted to give rise to organisms with common features--such as teeth, eyes, brains, and so forth--they all represent different life forms. Some seeds are for plants or plant types. Some are for humans, some are for ostriches, some are for bears, some are for ants, some are for salamanders, some are for swordfish. And so on.  The evidence of design is found at the microbiological level, where cells and cell processes indicate that they should have resulted only from a prior engineering and manufacturing process. The cells and processes of living organisms must have been planned by a being, then assembled and finished into an integrated whole. These integrated wholes were used to seed the earth with life. Without these seeds, earth would have remained forever a lifeless planet of water and rock. Following the initial seeding, the organisms reproduced. Generation after generation, they grew in number and established various ecological balances in diverging populations across the planet. These balances shifted according to climate changes, as well as according to the dynamics of different populations growing, strengthening, migrating in or out, or contracting disease. Today, many of these populations are identified as species and subspecies, and various relationships among the species can be shown scientifically. Current biology mistakenly views the relationships between species as the result of (1) common descent and (2) evolution via natural selection. Current biology errs because the level of microbiological complexity required for life to appear on earth could not have happened without an intelligent being placing seeds here. Therefore, common design better explains all of the evidence.

I hope the account above accurately reflects the theory. I expect I have the broad outlines but am off in particulars. I appreciate correction. Nevertheless, it's important to have an articulated ID theory because I, for one, am not satisfied with the following:

When we see a known adequate process that leads to reliable signs, we have every good reason to infer that like causes like, and to hold that in the teeth of any and all contrary metaphysical speculations and doctrines that do not have that sort of empirical warrant. In other worlds [sic], we are well within our scientific rights to insist on the credibility of inductive generalisation on signs that reliably point to known adequate cause.

That is what design theory is about, and it is why in the end, once people realise what is at stake in rejecting it — driving the proverbial stake through the heart of scientific methods and empirical reasoning — it will prevail.

The above defends ID, claiming it makes reasonable extrapolations from observed reality. It also attacks modern science for being driven by unsupported assumptions about reality. For all I know, these arguments have merit; unfortunately, they do not answer the questions people want science to address: What actually happened way back then? How did it occur? What were the conditions and how else might things have turned out?

It is not enough to claim only "I infer design" because to infer design is to invoke a narrative. If X is the result of design, then some designer made X and brought X into being at a certain point in time. What's more, design implies intent: to some degree, X fulfills the designer's intentions both for what X is and what X does. It's not enough, then, to conclude design without also articulating the designer, the designer's purposes, and the historical conditions under which the design first appeared. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that design cannot be offered or accepted as a serious hypothesis unless it affirms a designer, argues purposes, and establishes historical conditions and parameters.

Because ID proponents tend not to provide the sorts of details that Jerad asks for, ID continually comes across as incomplete and pallid criticism. From the thread I link to, anyone might question how much experience Jerad has with the biological data. Nevertheless, one clearly sees that his position is one that encompasses a totality of known data. ID rests on almost pure induction and seeks--seemingly--to keep design from being entirely ruled out.

*  *  *  *  *

Years ago, as a theist starting to buy into the arguments for atheism, I looked to Intelligent Design for a reasonable alternative to atheism. I thought ID might give good reasons to think our world was not without God or gods.

But Intelligent Design failed right away. I realized quickly that it would not give me what I wanted, which was a plausible, clear, evidence-based explanation of the world--including reasons for keeping the idea of God/gods. After all, if there were a good reason to think intentional design was part of life's origins, then there was also good reason to think God could have been the designer.

Unfortunately, ID's proponents, sites, and books provided no scientific development of the theory. Few people, least of all biologists, were applying ID to a full range of data from fossils, genetics, biogeography, morpohology, and so on. One could not enroll in a biology program at a university and study with an ID theorist. One could not open an academic biological journal and read about current findings in ID.

I saw, then, that ID was marginal and almost completely static. In its efforts not to identify explicitly with religion and creationism, it offered no definite theory of anything. It argued that "Darwinism" had failed and that "materialism" had thoroughly corrupted the practice of modern science. But it gave no explanation or narrative of the first design processes and subsequent processes.

Well, now we have an explanation and narrative. Once it's properly tweaked by ID advocates, we can have a real basis for assessing which accounts of life on earth best fit all the data. One final takeaway, then, is that ID postulates not a simple creationism. In the end, it is creationism and an argument that creationism can be rationally and scientifically warranted.

I suspect that people who buy into ID do so because they want to hold onto creationism. Sure, I suppose there is reason to dislike or be unimpressed with evolutionary science, but I find it hard to believe that one accepts ID simply because one is anti-evolution. No, I think one accepts ID out of rational necessity: these are people who know the Bible falls short of truth, who despise the middling ground of agnosticism, and who are repulsed by atheism.

These are, I imagine, some very conflicted conservatives--people whose intellects are at war with their values.

The Jews Are a Race, Geneticist Says

Bar Refaeli: She's my race.

Harry Ostrer is a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. His new book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, argues that Jews exhibit a distinctive genetic signature that is central to Jewish identity. Jews are, in other words, a race of people.

Personally, I am not surprised at this because insularity seems to be a common historical factor across Jewish populations worldwide. Yet, the book aims partly to counteract a general uneasiness with the concept of "race." In particular, Ostrer seems to argue against a view that racial differences are purely social constructions. Yes, Ostrer says, human beings are 99.9 percent similar, but that 0.1 percent difference is important because that's where Jewish distinction emerges in physical features, ancestral origins, genealogies, communities, traits, and shared identification.

I have no problem with the notion of race as "population" and "region of ancestral origin." The problem with race is the problem of using it to express ideas that some human populations are superior or inferior. Ostrter seems to be operating in a post-racial sense of race, where we can talk about race without making it a human competition.

I also think there's no need to attach religious significance to the racial homogeneity of the Jews. It's not as if biological relatedness tells us anything about the patriarchs, the Bible, or God. If the Jews are a race, they are one of many races and sub-races. Humanity is internally diverse. The Jews, too, are racially diverse, and this is perhaps the most interesting and valuable lesson of the subject.

The genetics of the Jewish people (or peoples?) are fascinating. I highly recommend Razib Khan's assessment of a 2010 paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The paper, in which Ostrer has an author credit, demonstrated "that European/Syrian and Middle Eastern Jews represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters woven together by shared IBD [identity by descent] genetic threads" (see figure, right).

The paper is very detailed, and Khan does a nice job explaining it. Let me first quote from the paper, where its findings are summarized:

The Middle Eastern populations were formed by Jews in the Babylonian and Persian empires who are thought to have remained geographically continuous in those locales. In contrast, the other Jewish populations were formed more recently from Jews who migrated or were expelled from Palestine and from individuals who were converted to Judaism during Hellenic-Hasmonean times, when proselytism was a common Jewish practice. During Greco-Roman times, recorded mass conversions led to 6 million people practicing Judaism in Roman times or up to 10% of the population of the Roman Empire. Thus, the genetic proximity of these European/Syrian Jewish populations, including Ashkenazi Jews, to each other and to French, Northern Italian, and Sardinian populations favors the idea of non-Semitic Mediterranean ancestry in the formation of the European/Syrian Jewish groups and is incompatible with theories that Ashkenazi Jews are for the most part the direct lineal descendants of converted Khazars or Slavs. The genetic proximity of Ashkenazi Jews to southern European populations has been observed in several other recent studies.The paper here challenges the hypothesis, based on an historical interpretation, that Ashkenazi Jews descend from eastern Europeans and Eurasians who converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages. The paper's genetic findings indicate that Semitic Jews gained massive Greco-Roman converts much earlier.

The early history matters greatly, and Khan neatly encapsulates the paper's cultural and historical assessment:

In the time of Augustus Jews were divided between different sects and persuasions, and there was a welter of diversity. Additionally, in the marketplace of Roman religion Jews were a moderately entrepreneurial group. The dynasty of Herod himself was of convert origin. There was a wide spectrum of Jewish religious practice and belief, from the near monastic isolation of the Essenes, to the engaged but separatist Pharisees, and finally to the wide range of more syncretistic practices which fall under the rubric of “Hellenistic Judaism.” Many scholars assert that it was from the last sector which Christianity finally arose as a Jewish sect, and that Christianity eventually absorbed all the other forms of Hellenistic Judaism. Judaism of the Pharisees, which became Rabbinical Judaism, and more recently Judaism qua Judaism, was shaped in large part by having to accommodate and placate the dominant Christian and Islamic religious cultures in which it was integrated by the early medieval period. Conversion to Judaism from Christianity or Islam was often a capital crime (though conversion from Christianity to Judaism was not forbidden in Muslim lands, while presumably conversion from Islam to Judaism in Christian lands would not have been, though few Muslims lived in Christian lands). So after 500 A.D. it seems that what may have occurred was that a Jewish Diaspora characterized by geographically determined genetic diversity, despite some common original Levantine origin, was genetically isolated from surrounding populations. This explains why there seems relatively little influx of Slavic genes into the Ashkenazim despite their long sojourn within Poland-Lithuania and later the Russian Empire. In contrast, the Roman Jewish community was already large in the days of Julius Caesar, and presumably intermarried with the urban proletariat of diverse origins. In an ironic twist these data suggest that modern Jews, in particular the Ashkenazim, but to a lesser extent the Sephardim as well, share common ancestry with gentile Europeans due to the unconstrained character of the pagan Greco-Roman world which Jews were to a great extent strident critics of.

Genetics, culture, history: all are intertwined. The lesson is that to call a human population a race is not--or should not be--tantamount to calling them a different species of human. We all know, however, that race has often been used precisely to separate and politicize groups of people. Postmodernist analyses of race focus on the ways race is politicized and used to political ends. The political, politicized race is often the fiction pointed to by postmodernists. I am, like many, a postmodernist about the interpretations, not about the facts. Now, a postmodernist might snidely question how/whether one separates interpretations from facts--and it is an interesting philosophical discussion that may amount to little else than sophistry--but the clear target is interpretation.

I would be interested to read informed challenges to Ostrer's thesis.

Footnote: The image of model Bar Rafaeli and the caption are an ironic--and attempted humorous--comment on the racial politics I discuss in this post.

Feser on the Soul

Philosopher Eward Feser explains what a soul is, but not successfully, I'm afraid.

His analysis begins with de rigueur Aristotelian-Thomistic tap dancing on the nature of things. He then locates human beings between animals and angels, evidently seeing no need to consider whether angels exist outside of human fantasy. After this, we get to human beings. Feser defines human beings by their powers to reason:

A human being is by nature a rational animal. That is to say, a human being is something which by its nature exercises both the animal powers of nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, appetite, and locomotion, and the intellectual and volitional powers possessed by angels.

Unfortunately, Feser does not address whether studies of animal intelligence have any bearing on the last statement. For instance, ring-tailed lemurs apparently have some math abilities, and dogs are pretty smart, too. For another instance, bottlenose dolphins may experience a sense of self. For a third instance, we may have reason to think animals and humans share a similar "free will." If these instances carry any merit, perhaps we should say human beings are more rational animals or more broadly rational animals. In any case, we should be careful not to assume an absolute distinction between humans and animals in terms of intellect and volition--and we still have no evidence of angels.

Yet, without a very clear demarcation between animals and humans, it becomes difficult to isolate the essentially human soul--as opposed to the animal or vegetative souls. That difficulty, in turn, should push us to question the usefulness of the idea of a human essence, and so too a human soul. For me, a serious red flag has already been raised in the simple fact that Feser takes too much time to get to the concept of the soul. He might explain that the concept is poorly understood popularly and even by religious experts and Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers, but this would only suggest that the concept is itself problematic.

Let's look at how Feser tries to back into the idea of the soul from human intellect and volition. He begins to isolate the soul by figuratively lopping off the human body:

a human being can be damaged to such an extent that it completely loses the organs of its animal and vegetative powers, and thus cannot exercise them at all -- to such an extent that only its intellectual and volitional powers remain. But those intellectual and volitional aspects of human nature, precisely because they are immaterial and thus do not depend on any corruptible material organ, cannot themselves perish, any more than they can in the case of an angel -- though they would be impaired given that the human intellect’s normal source of data is the sense organs, which are material, and given that its activity is normally carried out in conjunction with imagination, which is also material.

Feser asserts the immateriality of the "intellectual and volitional aspects of human nature," but I cannot see the basis for the assertion--outside of assuming dualism. Yet human intellect and volition have clear ties to the functioning of the human brain, primarily. Were the brain to become non-functional, that person’s intellectual and volitional powers would cease. They would become ultimately immaterial, so immaterial as not to exist!

Feser seems to be saying that the soul, human intellectual and volitional power, is what the brain does; it is the sign of what people essentially are. Feser also insists the soul is like a material aspect of a person. For him, a person has eyes, arms, legs, hair, lungs, and a soul. It's dualism, again, but I don't get it. This is like saying a ball has both a spherical shape and motion. It's like taking an effect--intellectual and volitional power, motion--and asserting that it causes or determines the thing--a person or a ball, respectively. I thought we had grown up from the kind of thinking where we just made shit up without having to reference reality.

So, if Feser's answer is the best there is--which I am not claiming--on what a soul is, then I remain unconvinced that it is anything mysterious or outside of what we normally understand as nature.

Why Are the Faithful Crowing About the CERN "Faster than Light" Story?

From MSNBC: "The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso experiment sends muon neutrinos through a tunnel at the French-Swiss border in the direction of a detector in Italy, more than 450 miles away."

The story is here.

I've seen a few posts from the religious and anti-science folk (here and here, for instance). They seem to be dancing at the possibility that Einstein/relativity was wrong.

To me, such celebration is wildly inappropriate. However "wrong"--is this word even applicable?--Einstein/relativity may be, the idea of a creator and personal god is not likely to be strengthened by improved knowledge of the physical universe.

Isn't such a potentially major updating of our understanding an indication that science is not rigid and dogmatic, as religious doctrine tends to be?

Finally, doesn't the story demonstrate that we gain new knowledge not from religion but from the sciences?

The news is certainly eye-popping and interesting, but I'll wait until independent observers have duplicated the findings before getting too excited.

Carroll on Doing Science

Sean Carroll

Very interesting. Physicist Sean Carroll visits Uncommon Descent to explain the scientific method and why it leads to the conclusion that the universe does not need gods. I particularly appreciate this prefatory bit, where Carroll smartly distinguishes the practice of science from other types of intellectual, philosophical, and emotional pursuit:

I will be taking one thing for granted: that what we’re interested in doing here is science. There are many kinds of consideration that may lead people to theism or atheism that have nothing whatsoever to do with science; likewise, one may believe that there are ways of understanding the natural world that go beyond the methods of science. I have nothing to say about that right now; that’s a higher-level discussion. I’m just going to presume that we all agree that we’re trying to be the best scientists we can possibly be, and ask what that means.

On the laws of science, Carroll says:

Vincent asks “How can rules exist in the absence of a mind?” That is simply not a question that science is concerned with. Science wants to know how we can boil the behavior of nature down to the simplest possible rules. You might want more than that; but then you’re not doing science. He also asks why we should believe that the rules should continue to hold tomorrow, simply because they have held in the past. Again, that’s what science does. Imagining that the same basic laws will continue to hold provides a simpler fit to the data we have than imagining (for no good reason) that they will change. If you are personally unsatisfied with that attitude, that’s fine; but your dissatisfaction is not a scientific matter.

Then look at this point on openness:

This is probably the most important point I have to make, and follows directly on the issue of “laws” just addressed. There is a way of trying to understand the world that might roughly be called “scholastic,” which sits down and tries to reason about how the world should be. The great success of science over the last five hundred years has been made possible by throwing out that kind of thinking in favor of a different model. Namely: we think of every possible way the world could be, and then we go out and look at the world to see which is the simplest description that fits the data. Science insists that we be open to all possibilities, and let the data decide which is true.

Suppose that you are convinced that laws of nature could not exist without a guiding intelligence that formulated them and sustains them. That’s fine for you, but it’s a deeply unscientific attitude. The scientific attitude is: “We observe that there are regularities in nature. We might imagine that they are formulated and sustained by a guiding intelligence, or that they simply exist on their own. Let’s go collect data to determine which idea is a more parsimonious fit to reality.”

And let me offer one final quote from Carroll, this time on clarity:

The problem is simple: God isn’t expressed in the form of equations. There is no clear and unambiguous map from God to a particular set of laws of physics, or a particular configuration of the universe. If there were, we would be using that map to make predictions. What does God have to say about supersymmetry, or the mass of the Higgs boson, or the amplitude of gravitational-wave perturbations of the cosmic microwave background? If we claim that God “explains” the known laws of physics, the same method of explanation should work for the unknown laws. It’s not going to happen.

All in all, Carroll does a nice job of modeling clear thinking, clear writing, and intellectual honesty.

However, I am surprised that that Carroll's post has not generated more discussion at UD than it has: only about 23 responses in 24 hours. Over at Sean's site, commenter Tyro assesses the general quality of those responses:

Most of the responses totally ignore everything Sean wrote and just try to pipe up with logical arguments, weird semantic arguments, or conspiracy theories. Very few seemed to think that anything in Sean’s piece actually applied to them. One of the weirdest responses was from DonaldM who says that, when talking about simplicity, Sean was really talking about the simplest naturalistic explanation even though DM actually quotes Sean when he explicitly considers God.

We Can Explain Ancient Miracles

If only you believe like I believe, baby, we’d get by.
If only you believe in miracles, baby, so would I.

If you actually believe in miracles, as opposed to nominally believing in them, then you don't really believe in reality.


I hear this awful claim often enough to be annoyed by it:

Scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries spent much time rationalizing and attempting to explain the miracles of Jesus. These miracles cannot be removed or explained away. They are fundamental to the message as perceived by the audience of Jesus. As people of the 21st century believe in science, people then believed in magic. Although contemporary people may not accept that such miracles occurred, the age in which Jesus lived believed in miracles. The miracles have a progressive character, from curing Peter's mother-in-law of a fever to bringing a girl back from the dead. The miracles prompted people to deal with the question of God and he was speaking through this prophet or whether Jesus was a false prophet. In the narrative of the Gospel of Mark, these miracles are essential to authenticating the message of Jesus. [emphasis added]

A fair parsing of the above is to understand it not as a defense of miracles per se or as an affirmation of Jesus as god or demigod, but rather as an assertion that miracles are constitutive content of Jesus message. A real Jesus who didn't perform miracles was not Jesus, in other words. 

However, I want to focus on a different but also fair reading, the annoying reading. This is the one that blithely accepts miracles in the case of Jesus (though never, to my knowledge, in non-Christian contexts) and devotedly affirms Jesus as a singularly special personage. It is true, as the claim above suggests, that even today some modern scholars try to rationalize and explain the miracles of Jesus.

My point is that the explanations fall flat not because miracles are beyond explanation but rather because the most likely explanation is rarely considered, that the miracles are invented. The miracles are embellished. They are fabricated.

And the invention is indeed fundamental to the larger message. Jesus's miracles authenticate the divine claims about him. Similarly, the miracles of Sinai, manna, plagues, the parting of the waters--all these validate and justify the claims people make about the Torah and the Judaism they say is based on Torah. They are not lies but fantasies of the truth.

Nevertheless, although we today try to be careful in defining truth and fantasy, we can always find claims presented as fact that are badly, baldly incorrect. For example, our quote above states incorrectly that "As people of the 21st century believe in science, people then [in the time of Jesus] believed in magic." We people today do not believe in science. We do not claim that people with scientific powers can violate laws of nature, wipe out nations in response to our supplication, or save us the final fate of all organisms. We do not believe that science belongs exclusively to a hereditary cabal of social elites. We do not believe that people can walk into the wilderness and acquire full-blown scientific powers, as from a burning bush, that decipher the invisible yet perceptible patterns of a universe in motion. We cannot, therefore, allow a facile equation between the mindsets of people in the first and twenty-first centuries. 

Neither can we presumptively grant special status to the miracles of Jesus or the Torah because miracles abound in the religions of the world:

• Muslims consider the Koran itself to be a miracle.
• Muslims also point to the miracles of Mohamed's splitting of the moon, his journey to Jerusalem, and his ascension to heaven.
• The Buddha is reported to have created a golden bridge in the air, using only his mind. He walked up and down the bridge for a week.
• The Buddha also is said to have produced flames from the upper part of his body and streams of water from the lower part of his body, alternating this, and doing similarly between the left and right sides of his body. This is the "twin miracle."
• In Hinduism, Sathya Sai Baba produces ash for skeptical onlookers as a symbol of his divinity. Sri Ramakrishna proved his divinity to Swami Vivekananda by touching him on the chest, thereby revealing the true nature of the universe to him
• Also in Hinduism are the miracles of Sri Krishna, ranging from instances in his childhood in which his mother, Yashoda, saw the whole of creation in his mouth, to the revealing of his true nature to Arjuna during the Mahabharata.

To accept the existence of bona-fide miracles is to require a level of credence to all miracle claims. You cannot blithely state that the miracles of Exodus are true but not the miracles of Jesus. You cannot argue that the miracles of Jesus are true but not the miracles of Mohamed. You cannot say that the miracles of Exodus and Jesus are true but not those of the Buddha. And so on....

Thus: if you believe, really believe, in miracles, then you disbelieve in reality. To believe in miracles is to hypothesize that normal reality can at any time be fundamentally altered: the sun can stop, the dead can become alive again, the world can be made to act like a single living thing, and so on.

In this light, perhaps it should be unsurprising that people declare with puffed-out chests that the miracles of [insert religious figure here] cannot be explained through reason or science or common sense or whatever. People don't like the boredom and lack of drama that is most of reality most of the time. Miracles are sexier, more dramatic, more conducive to our natural solipsism.

Writer William Saroyan famously said, "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case." The miracle apologists suffer from adopting this line of thinking seriously. They live and move in reality throughout their days and yet steadfastly believe that reality can be excepted in the case of how they wish it would be.

The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Descent

Alas, poor designer! I knew him, but not in the biblical sense.

Hamlet, prince of Den-blog:

To comment, or not to comment, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of SIWOTI;
Or to make Keystrokes against a Network of troubles,
And by opposing end them

GEM of TKI continues to make inane statements as he rails against a world that has thrown off the shackles of his fifteenth century religious values. Mad prince that I am, eternally lingering in Uncommon Descent's moderation prison for bad sorts, I nevertheless respond:

GEM [you say],

It is time that we expose the evolutionary materialistic, question-begging ideological straight-jacket being imposed on science, and it is time that we exposed the inexcusable, slanderous bigotry of those who are projecting what they know or should know are false accusations of theocratic tyrannical intent.

Who exactly is “we”?

And to this comment [of yours]:

FYI LT, I had to put myself on the line literally to deal with Communists, DOUBLE SHAME ON YOU for making me have to say that explicitly!

What a cheap and cowardly thing for you to write--knowing full well that whatever response I write will be moderated out and never appear here (as an earlier comment of mine seems to have done)--that I have “made” you say anything!

No, sir, I have not “made” you do anything. You are the author of your own behavior.

Don’t blame me because your watchmaker analogies ultimately fail and people generally don’t take them seriously.

Don’t blame me for the “tyrannical” perception that gets attached to religions and sects and groups.

I laid out a case for why your signs post was wrongheaded on several levels. You distort Peirce: that’s a fact. You employ a nuanced but ultimately flawed analogy: that’s a fact. You use biased language to steer the reader to the conclusion you want: that’s a fact. You consider no alternative scenarios or possible objections in your post: that’s a fact.

You say I’m tossing out red herrings, straw men, and ad hominems. Honestly, would you please grow up? Deal with the arguments instead of crying foul all the time. If you want to play basketball with me, you are occasionally going to get fouled. Deal with it and move on, maybe consider whether you want to get out of the game.

One way to deal with it is this: revise your post on signs. In over 20 years of writing and publishing, I can tell you I have learned that every criticism on a piece has value and should lead to a change.

I anticipate you will bring up that time earlier when you got offended, probably rightly, at an indirect Torquemada snipe I had made. Yes, I indeed changed a bit of what I had originally written, although I kept the central snipe [N.B. that snipe itself was but a small part of the larger point being made.] as it was for reasons I explained. I understand you didn’t and don’t like the reasons, but that’s the end of the line. I sought to understand your points, I incorporated that feedback and made the changes I felt best represented the truth.

So, instead of taking cheap shots at me when my voice will never be heard at UD (I’m tempted to dare you to publish this post in a timely manner, if ever), why don’t you revise and improve your signs post. I would really like that. I genuinely think that there’s a contribution to be made by that post of yours–it’s just not fully cooked yet.

I think you make people like me out to be the boogeyman at least as much as you think we do it to you. Perhaps we all can simmer down. I’m asking you to reconsider and revise your signs post because I think it would improve the thing. Take the advice or reject it, no problem to me.

I’m sure you have advice for me and “those of my ilk.” Well, let’s have it.

LT (Monday, 21 Feb 2011, 11:45 am EST)

I'll lay odds my comment never appears--but I have been wrong before on this subject, usually right after I post publicly about it.

But let's return to the central problem, the one that we really ought to examine. GEM says this to another commenter:

Have you a credible explanation of how not only language and algorithms, but also co-ordinated encoding, transmitting and decoding then applying mechanisms originated by chance plus necessity, backed up with empirical observational support?

Yes, we have credible explanation for how language and algorithms, et cetera, originated: evolution. Evolution explains this. Indeed, the PBS science program Nova recently aired a segment in which a chemist showed how life could have evolved from non-life, and life means language and algorithms and everything else GEM is concerned with.

Program Description
Where did the very first living thing on Earth come from? Scientists have long argued that billions of years ago, life emerged on its own--but no one knows exactly how. Now, in a landmark discovery, chemist John Sutherland has created the conditions in which the building blocks of RNA, one of the key molecules of life and the probable precursor to DNA, assemble themselves naturally.

So, GEM, I have a credible explanation that demonstrates how life, language, etc., could have originated. Now it's your turn: please show me the experiment that re-creates what the designer actually did to bring language and algorithms into existence. I trust you will simply answer my request instead of attempting to discredit Professor Sutherland's experiment.

Finally, I can hardly imagine what would divest GEM of his bad analogy:

intelligent beings:communication systems::intelligent designer:cellular communication systems

Perhaps if he sees the analogy in this form, he will begin to come to his senses. I don't doubt that he'll want to tweak what I have above, which is fine.

I truly hope UD gets some bona fide biologists, chemists, and cosmologists on their team. Lawyers, engineers, journalists, philosophers and such won't cut it forever.

Origins of Life: I Did Not Know That

Many miles away....

I love to learn something new. From Larry Moran's Sandwalk blog, we get a brief explanation of the Metabolism First hypothesis of the origin of life on Earth.

In this scenario, the first steps involved the establishment of simple oxidation-reduction reactions across a "membrane" using inorganic molecules. Once this supply of energy was in place the first pathways led to synthesis of simple organic molecules like acetate and glycine.

The MF hypothesis (see here also) is contrasted with the better-known but less reasonable Primordial Soup hypothesis:

According to this widely believed scenario, life originated in a soup of organic molecules that supplied most of the molecules of metabolism such as glucose and amino acids (and nucleotides?). Presumably once life got underway these molecules were used up and only then did metabolic pathways evolve to synthesize these molecules.

Moran ends with an appeal for healthy skepticism

The real problem is not that metabolism firstists such as Bill Martin are right and soupists are wrong—although that's a very real possibility. The problem is that most scientists are not thinking critically about the origin of life. There are several possibilities and none of them are particularly convincing. However, the Primordial Soup Hypothesis has a number of glaring weaknesses that need to be addressed honestly and it doesn't do anyone any good if scientists sweep these weaknesses under the rug.

And many miles away, something crawls to the surface of a dark Scottish loch, almost singing "What about 'God did it!' That's a hypothesis, too."

Get back to the lake, fucker!

Around the Web

Lots of great news and information around today:

• A healthy proportion of students at American colleges and universities aren't gaining much knowledge in the first two years. Let the blame games begin. [But see here for another take.]
• The tree octopus fabrication shows that people may give too much credence to websites.
• Roger Rosenblatt gives four reasons to write.
• Jerry Coyne talks about the green heron, a tool-using bird.
• How to bind a 10,000 page book.
• The Shroud of Turin: Yes, it's a fucking fake. Don't miss the litigious commenter.
• On the Colbert Report, Sean Dorrance Kelly advises us to embrace "the polytheistic pantheon of Homeric literature."

It Takes More Than Just Having an Explanation

Old Philosopher

I am no philosopher. I don't want to be one. As I've recently indicated, I have not been impressed with the philosophical chops of Vincent Torley.

Yet there is some good philosophy of religion out there, and one philosopher who supports the theistic position is Paul Herrick. Herrick has a very interesting article defending the cosmological argument against another philosopher, Keith Parsons, who is an atheist.

Herrick argues that belief in God remains reasonable despite the apparent success of science in explaining the universe. Although I genuinely appreciate the argument and the various inroads Herrick takes to develop and support his points, I think his argument ultimately fails for three reasons:

1. To my mind, the creator deity described by Herrick bears little resemblance to the god(s) of the Torah, the Christian Gospels, the Qur’an, Hindu texts and so on. Although Herrick argues that the God of philosophical theism created this universe out of love, his cosmological theism seems at odds with the berserker deities of holy books. The Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament both depict gods with the all-too-human fits of passion, jealously, and rage.
2. Philosophical theism is, as Herrick admits, not a scientific explanation. But Herrick’s article attempts to use philosophical theism to explain something that is primarily within scientific jurisdiction. The best explanation will be a scientific one. Non-scientific explanations, although interesting, will always be too speculative for extended consideration.
3. Herrick’s position rests on a simple distinction. His philosophical theism, he says, “makes rational sense of the existence of the material universe.” Atheism and scientific materialism do not provide a satisfying explanation for this existence. And yet…what if we were to ask Herrick, “Your rational explanation: is it true?” His answer would be, “I’m not sure. I don’t know.” Thus, in the end, Herrick's rational explanation is no better than the scientific explanation which does not make full and complete sense of the material universe. Plus, even the most apparently rational explanations require validation—no matter how “satisfying” some people seem to think these explanations are prima facie. The choice is, then, between a rational explanation without validation and a scientific explanation that is incomplete.

To lead me toward accepting his argument, Herrick would have had to have provided some reason to think that the Creator God of his article was the same as the God of whatever religion. I don't think we can just assume they are the same. Herrick also would have needed to justify his approach, as in explaining why a philosophical explanation would suffice for the scientific question of the origins of the universe. Finally, Herrick would have had to defend the idea that any rational explanation was better than an incomplete-yet-scientifically-justified explanation.

Although I disagree with its conclusion, I heartily recommend Herrick's article. Were I a philosopher, I would want to be able to put together an argument as well as Herrick has.

I Don't Believe in Bibles: The A-Bible-ist

"I don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in me. Yoko and me."

I'm probably more of an a-Bible-ist than an Atheist.

Rejecting gods, after all, is fairly trivial. The important realization is that the Bible is not authoritative as a moral, historical, or "spiritual" work. It's not a hard realization to come to, if one is willing to explore the issues honestly, but it can be a difficult realization to accept because acceptance has implications in one's views of most everything in the world, including oneself.

Those of you not from a Jewish background need to understand that the Jewish Bible is not the Christian Bible. The Jewish Bible includes the Torah, the books of the prophets, the other writings, and the Oral Torah. Christian and Islamic traditions have a different conception of the Bible's books, their order, and their significance. These latter traditions also reject the authority of Oral Torah. For modern Jews, however, Bible and Talmud emanate from the same authoritative time and space--Mount Sinai. Some others include the mystical writings of the Zohar as a third set of instructions given directly from Sinai.

I accept none of this, as I came to recognize and accept that the Bible (whether Jewish or Christian) was inconsistent, unreliable, and often contemptible. To be fair, I find there to be much beauty and wisdom in the Bible, too. Nevertheless, we as a society are ill-served by allowing the myths surrounding the Bible to stand uncorrected. The Bible isn't from God, it's not of "divine inspiration," it's neither inerrant nor infallible, and it's not a paragon of morality.

I have written before about the impossibilities in the Bible. I have talked a bit about its moral insufficiency. I have talked about textual inconsistencies. Today, I want to provide guidance for more information on the Bible's failed prophecies, scientific inaccuracies, and historical inaccuracies.

1. Failed Prophecies
First of all, as the people at TalkOrigins explain, predictions of the future can be fulfilled in many ways:

1. Retrodiction. The "prophecy" can be written or modified after the events fulfilling it have already occurred.
2. Vagueness. The prophecy can be worded in such a way that people can interpret any outcome as a fulfillment. Nostradomus's prophecies are all of this type. Vagueness works particularly well when people are religiously motivated to believe the prophecies.
3. Inevitability. The prophecy can predict something that is almost sure to happen, such as the collapse of a city. Since nothing lasts forever, the city is sure to fall someday. If it has not, it can be said that according to prophecy, it will.
4. Denial. One can claim that the fulfilling events occurred even if they have not. Or, more commonly, one can forget that the prophecy was ever made.
5. Self-fulfillment. A person can act deliberately to satisfy a known prophecy.

There are no prophecies in the Bible that cannot easily fit into one or more of those categories.

For much more on biblical prophecy failure, see Farrell Till's illuminating article, "Prophecies: Imaginary and Unfulfilled." Till is an interesting guy. He has more articles on the subject of prophecy here.

2. Scientific Inaccuracies
As religious apologists are wont to tell us, the Bible is not a science book. Of course, they immediately turn around and tell us it is a reliable source of scientific information.

Exhibit A: The Bible is not a science book, yet it is scientifically accurate. We are not aware of any scientific evidence that contradicts the Bible. We have listed statements on this page that are consistent with known scientific facts. Many of them were listed in the Bible hundreds or even thousands of years before being recorded elsewhere.

Exhibit B: Though the Bible is not a science book, when it touches on scientific matters it is either completely accurate or non-contradictory, and often demonstrates remarkable fore-knowledge. There are many scientific facts mentioned in the Bible that were not understood by man until centuries after the Bible was written.

Exhibit C: The Bible is not a science text-book. Nonetheless, whatever the Scriptures mention is always scientific. Notice these accurate Bible statements: "It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants are as grasshoppers" (Isa.40:22). This verse clearly shows that the earth is round, even though man did not "discover" this fact by himself centuries later after this was written. "He [God]...hangeth the earth upon nothing" (Job 26:7). The earth is held in orbit around the sun by the law of gravity. but it is not fastened to anything material. Notice the truth in this biblical statement: "through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen [the physical universe] were not made of things which do appear" (Heb 11:3). In plain language, this verse says that God created the physical, material, tangible, nonphysical essence--out of spirit or spirit essence.

The amazing fore-knowledge of the Bible just ain't so when examined honestly. A case in point is that "circle of the earth" bit, which refers to the horizon and not to the idea of a spherical earth. Besides, the Bible makes plenty of mistakes. For a good, albeit cursory, assessment of the Bible's scientific errors, see RationalWiki. Also see "Was the Bible's Cosmology Ahead of Its Time?"

3. Historical Inaccuracies
No one, not even me, would be surprised if we were to learn that some--many, even--named characters in the Bible corresponded to real people. In fact, I'm sure many events are based on historical happenings. Nevertheless, the Bible is inaccurate in several places. I recommend visiting The Scripture Project for a review of these.

Some notables:

• Daniel 1:1--The third year of the reign of Jehoiakim would be 606 BCE, at which time Nebuchadnezzar was not yet king of Babylon. It was 597 BCE that Nebuchadnezzar invaded Jerusalem for the first time (without actually destroying it). By that time Jehohiakim was dead and his son, Jehoiachin, was ruling. (From TSP)
• Deuteronomy 7:1--These nations [i.e., the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites] were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Exodus 12:37 and Numbers 1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! (From TSP)
• James 5:17--Three and a half years without rain? Hmm....
• Joshua 8:28--forever, huh?

What's the point? The point is that there are many other books out there, and many of them are more deserving of time, reflection, and commentary than the Bible. There's no need to fetishize one book or one narrative. Our lives and our minds are too precious and too short to be invested in the cultic outgrowths of Bibical interpretation.


As for me, I don't believe in any book. I just believe in my prerogative to read and love as many as I choose and as many as I am able.

Everybody's Talkin'

Communication processes, whether signaling or responding to signals, are most everywhere that life is. For example, plants seem to have their own form of internet:

Ren Sen Zeng and colleagues at South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, grew pairs of tomato plants in pots. The team allowed some pairs to form mycorrhizal networks between their roots. Plants connected this way can exchange nutrients and water, staving off the effects of drought. But Zeng wanted to know if the networks had any other function.

The team sprayed one plant in each pair with Alternaria solani, a fungus which causes early blight. Sixty-five hours later, they infected the second plant and observed how well it coped.

Plants sharing a mycorrhizal network were less likely to develop the blight, and when they did, symptoms were milder. They were also more likely to activate defensive genes and enzymes (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013324).

The first plant was signalling to its neighbour, Zeng says, and he has dubbed mycorrhizae "the internet of plant communities".

Why should we be surprised, then, if plants have intelligence, too?

Many of us know that animals communicate, but we might not appreciate the diversity of information that such communications can convey. For example, according to one researcher, the chirps and calls of American prairie dogs are actually a very sophisticated form of communication:

During his analysis, [Northern Arizona University researcher Con] Slobodchikoff noticed something: Even though the human call was consistently different from the other calls, there was still significant variation between the individual human calls. He began to wonder whether the little rodents could possibly be describing their predators — not just differentiating hawk from human, but actually saying something about the particular human or coyote or hawk that was approaching.

So he devised a test. He had four (human) volunteers walk through a prairie dog village, and he dressed all the humans exactly the same — except for their shirts. Each volunteer walked through the community four times: once in a blue shirt, once in a yellow, once in green and once in gray.

He found, to his delight, that the calls broke down into groups based on the color of the volunteer's shirt. "I was astounded," says Slobodchikoff. But what astounded him even more, was that further analysis revealed that the calls also clustered based on other characteristics, like the height of the human. "Essentially they were saying, 'Here comes the tall human in the blue,' versus, 'Here comes the short human in the yellow,' " says Slobodchikoff.

The video below has Slobodchikoff talking about prairie dog communication as true language:

Human beings, of course, are capable of true language. Perhaps the best account of how human language developed is put forth by W. Tecumseh Fitch:

[Charles] Darwin's model for language evolution, "musical protolanguage," suitably updated, provides a compelling fit to both the phenomenology of modern music and language, and to a wealth of comparative data. By placing vocal control at the centre of his model, Darwin availed himself of the rich comparative database of other species who have independently evolved complex vocal imitation, and he thus explains two of the features of human language that set if off most sharply from nonhuman primate communication systems: vocal learning and cultural transmission. The biggest missing piece in Darwin's model, as I see it, is a reasonable explanation of phrasal semantics (and the aspects of syntax that go with it), but this gap was filled by Jespersen by 1922. Together, these hypotheses provide one of the leading models of language evolution available today (for an enthusiastic book-length exploration see Mithen, 2005), and one that has been repeatedly re-discovered by later scholars (e.g., Brown, 2000; Livingstone, 1973; Richman, 1993). While many aspects of what has now become a family of models remain to be explored empirically (the issues surrounding sexual, kin and group-selection remain particularly unclear), this is a model worthy of detailed consideration and elaboration today. Most importantly, Darwin's model makes numerous testable empirical predictions (for example about the partially overlapping nature of the brain mechanisms underlying music and spoken language, and their genetic basis) that can be answered in the coming decades.

Human language, explained as an evolved capability, demonstrates the continuity and connection of homo sapiens with all other life forms on Earth. Indeed, in both language and intelligence, life forms seem to lie upon a continuum; as far as I can tell, there's no radical break between us and the rest of life on our planet. What's more, this seems like a good thing to me.

I don't like the suggestion, often voiced in religious teachings, that animals and plants exist specifically for the benefit and enjoyment of human beings. Plant and animal communication argues against this viewpoint.

Another, related suggestion also voiced in religious teaching is that human beings are caretakers and stewards of the world. Sounds benign, right? Sounds like the resulting actions would be generally good: care and respect for animals and plants, responsible use of energy and food, lower-harm disposal of waste.

Yet, historically we have never been unable to find reasons to use our status as caretakers and stewards to advance our own interests alone. The caretaker/steward perspective is horribly anthropocentric and arrogant. It allows us to walk into any home we want, whenever we want.

If we fancy ourselves moral and we actually care about living things, we can do a better job of codifying the limits of our power with regard to plants and animals. We can, if we like, just say "fuck nature" and do as we please. That's certainly an option and perhaps a tick better than being killing caretakers.

Civil Discourse, Sidelights, and Theistic Argumentation

Can we please get back to what we were talking about before?

The little kerfuffle documented in the post and comments of "The Creationist Is/Ought" deserves reflection. I won't shy away from the charge of being a bit of a troublemaker, but I also think that GEM is being a baby.

My observations on the key events:

(1) Perhaps I jumped the gun at calling "censorship" at Uncommon Descent. Who knows, if I had not reached out to GEM and/or mentioned that my post had been in moderation for between 36-48 hours to that point, then maybe my post would have been released anyway. Maybe not. Speculation is a waste on this.

(2) Did I "slander" GEM with the comment about Torquemada? No, I don't believe so. Here's what I said:

The Creationist Is/Ought is an argumentative bait-and-switch. You think you're getting a straightforward argument but what you're getting is evangelism. The evangelism can be of the soft-shoe variety, as with Dembski, or it can be more of the Torquemada sort, as with a character called "GEM of The Kairos Initiative," who describes himself as "A Caribbean-based applied scientist, educator and strategic change/ transformation advocate and facilitator."

Now, I admit that it's an asshole-ish comment, and deliberately so. The comment says that GEM has the argumentative and persuasive style of a grand inquisitor. It's no compliment, and it's more than snarky. But I also think the comment bears truth. GEM displays both dogmatism and fanaticism. His flailing rhetorical attacks can be off-putting. I won't psychoanalyze GEM, but I suspect his Torquemada tantrum is partially the result of his seeing that there's something to the comparison.

(3) I also exacerbated things by teasing GEM in a later comment:

But be honest, have you ever wanted to burn someone at the stake?

I suppose if I had placed a smiley emoticon at the end, the comment might have been taken in a more jocular spirit.

(4) Is the Torquemada reference offensive? Well, GEM certainly wasn't amused and wanted both an apology and a retraction.

You will observe that the slanderous association with Torquemada and the later vulgar reference are still there, as is an accusatory comment about whether I have wanted to burn people at the stake.

Now, I think you will also see that at no point des LT respond seriously to my pointing out thsat torquemada’s behaviour was not even reasonably typical of Spanish Catholics att he time, including how two leading sints in Spain at the time, objected seriously, and how Las Casas actually projected God’s destructive judgement on Spain for her crimes in the New World. And, discussion of comparative difficulties worldview issues is not at all even remotely associated with thumbscrews, racks, and bundles of dry branches.

LT has yet to seriously account for such an invidious comparison, but instead has tried to make light of it.

(5) As an apology, I offered the following to GEM:

You say I “owe” you an apology for the association with Torquemada. Let me first clarify that I did not call you “Torquemada” nor did I associate you personally with him. What I did was liken your style of argumentation and persuasion to that of an infamous Inquisitor.

To be sure, this was a deliberately over-the-top comparison designed to dramatize my perception of your approach. It was supposed to be humorous but also to seem close enough to truth to get you to tone it down a bit.

Now, upon reflection, I apologize for making a hurtful statement and will try to restrain myself better in the future.

But GEM found this unsatisfactory. Apparently, he won't be happy unless I perform a rhetorical auto-de-fé.

(6) Do I retract the comment? Sure, why not? I hereby retract any statements I have made here or at Uncommon Descent which directly or indirectly associate the Internet character known as "GEM of TKI (or Gordon)" and the historical individual Tomás de Torquemada.

(7) Will I remove anything I've posted? No. I don't see the need. If people think I'm a dick, so be it.

(8) On vanishing comments here at this blog: I gotta admit that I don't know where this is coming from. When people submit comments, I get an email notification. I know from experience that if a comment is too long Blogger will give a message on it, but I have had long comments still get posted. As far as I know, the only way for comments that have been posted to "vanish" is for either me or the original poster to delete the comment manually. I have not deleted any comments. I don't screen comments. I do, however, have moderation turned on for OPs that are older than 10 days.

(9) All this Torquemada business was an uninteresting sidelight to what I actually wanted to have GEM discuss, namely his specific reasoning behind the thesis --

We live as contingent creatures amidst a world of other contingent creatures, in an observed cosmos that is evidently finely balanced at an operating point that allows for C-chemistry cell based, intelligent life.

Such a contingent cosmos implies a necessary being as its ultimate ground. That necessary being would be the ultimate reality. (emphasis added)

(10) Eventually, however, GEM gives the following as the chain of reasoning for his God conclusion:

a – The genetic code (yes, CODE, as in, LANGUAGE) based DNA [right arrow] mRNA [right arrow] Ribosome + tRNAs [right arrow] protein chaining process is precisely a case of discrete-state, code-based information system processing, i.e. instantiation not metaphor or analogy. (This, at length, LT had to concede.)

Let me point out that code and language are not necessarily equivalent, at least linguistically. To a linguist, and this is partially my training, codes typically represent languages and have no syntax or structure of their own.

True language, on the other hand, meets all of the following conditions: (i) it is a mode of communication; (ii) it has semanticity, in that its signals have meaning; (iii) it has a pragmatic function; (iv) it has interchangeability, which is the ability of participants to both send and receive messages; (v) it has cultural transmission, in that users can learn the language system from other users; (vi) it has arbitrariness, in that the form of the signals is not logically related to their meaning; (vii) it has discreteness, which is the property of having complex messages built up out of smaller parts; (viii) it has displacement, which is the ability of users to communicate about things not present in space or time; and (ix) it has productivity, which is the ability of users to produce and understand any number of messages, including messages never expressed before and expressing novel ideas.

GEM's use of code and language requires serious justification. Are these terms denotatively appropriate or are they human convention for nicely approximating a conception of how genetic processes function?

But if we are using the language of communication, then we need to ask what specifically acts as sender, what as message, what as receiver. GEM is trying to set up the idea that because we have a coded or linguistic process, then we must have a sentient being to conceive of the (coded or linguistic) message and input it into the sending source. But I tend to think the receiving source is more important in functional communication. Thus, we people can look at the top of a mountain and believe it resembles a human face (e.g., the Old Man of the Mountain), yet we need not consider it a non-human communication with representational status.

Now, however, we can address what many of us know: that there is such a thing as genetic code that performs real functions within living organisms. Yet the presence and function of a code is only part of the story. There is a historical dimension, and there is a biological dimension related to the receiving "decoder" that is related to that history. When we consider the parts, history, and functionality of genetic code processing in living organisms, I think that what we can trace back in time remains squarely in the natural. We don't need to imagine a "programmer" at some point in the dawn of life; we need to imagine a simple interaction where a second organelle emerges as a replication of the first, then replication with a difference, then structured replication, and phased replication. Of course, I'm neither a biologist nor a geneticist, but my point is that I find it much harder to imagine a scenario where God just poofs one or more life forms into existence. The God scenario short-circuits history and biology, and just leaves us to marvel at the code.

GEM continues:

b – Moreover, this digital information system is a key part of a self-replicating entity that also interacts with and acts on its environment, i.e the cell indeed instantiates the generic von Neumann type self-replicator.

c – Given the implied complexity and the fact that even so small a set of digital, coded, functionally specific information as 1,000 bits sits in a configuration space of 2^1,000 ~ 10^301, the whole observed cosmos of ~10^80 atoms across its lifespan and changing state every Planck time could not credibly undergo enough states to sample 1 in 10^150 of that space. That is, a random walk search of that config space rounds down to no search.

GEM's argument in Item C seems to amount to COMPLEXITY, therefore NO EVOLUTION. It appears to be an argument from personal incredulity based on the idea of teleology. That is, the result of the process is really unlikely and the chances of getting to that specific result are almost infinitesimal. Yet, this is post hoc thinking, if I've represented GEM correctly. And if so, notice how we are skipping over history, functionality, and the very real environmental ecology within which any cell must fight to exist. Item C also seems to switch venues from the biological (Items A and B) to the cosmos at a quantum level.

However, I must admit that I am not quite certain about what GEM is saying in Item C. The numbers and terms like "configuration space" are out of my daily ken. Moving on:

d – So, chance, the other source of highly contingent outcomes [natural selection filters simply cut off lower or non-functioning sub populations so, it does not create configurations] is not a credible explanation for such an information system. Intelligence routinely produces objects and systems that exceed this threshold, e.g. this post.

The suggestion in this item is that if chance (coded here as natural selection) is not a credible explanation, then creationism wins by default. Of course, natural selection is not at all the whole of evolutionary processes, and I give an overview of evolution here. GEM then says:

e – Credibly, life is designed. [And by an intelligence, and in a cosmos that sits at a finely and complexly balanced operating point that facilitates such C-chemistry cell based life, i.e the cosmos is also credibly designed. Something very much like God is credible.]

Whoa, GEM has leaped far into "ought" territory here in Item E. What does "designed" mean; that is, what are the defining and the attendant properties of design? Can things be ordered and patterned without being designed? How did we get from the idea of very complex in Item C to the idea of "designed" here? GEM needs to show his math now: what else besides apparent complexity indicates (not implies) design? We are in no position at this point to deal with other terms such as "intelligence" and "God."

f – Of course, I raised the issue of an implication above. It turns out that LT up to the point where I corrected him, seems to have conflated the act of inferring — which is subjective — with the fact of implication. But, once we have some claim P, that cannot be true and another claim Q is false, then P = > Q, i.e. IF P is so, THEN Q must also be so. (For instance, if I am typing this post then I must be alive, intelligent, purposeful and able to speak and write English.)

GEM misses my point, I think. Implications rely on assumptions about P and Q, and these assumptions need to be examined along with the premise of implication. GEM's example, for instance, doesn't imagine that GEM actually may not know not a lick of English at all and is instead typing from an English exemplar. If GEM is merely copying a sheet of paper from another source, then a critical element of the implication is flawed. Similarly, GEM's claim that a contingent universe implies an intelligent creator cannot simply be accepted at face value. I'm not accepting the implication just yet because I'd like to "peek under the covers," as it were. And when we peek, we find some serious gaps and flaws, as I have already demonstrated above.

We go forward with GEM:

g – Of course, there is an “I” — a subject — who makes the inference just above; but, once it is well warranted, it is a fact that stands on its own merits. It is objectively true.

I'm not sure what these assertions of the "I" and objective truth are supposed to mean or do. It seems as though GEM is trying to suggest that his implication of a creator (or a credible creator) is objectively true. But the implication is unsupported and the assumption of objectivity is nonsensical at this point. In other words, GEM's inference is not "well warranted." He's trying to sneak in his inference as an objective truth, but it just doesn't work and he needs to accept this.

h – And, chains of thousands or millions of such implications are routinely used in math, science and technology, as well as management and daily life, so we just as routinely hang a lot more than our hats on implications and well-warranted inferences to such implications.

This unsupported assertion glosses over the fact that sitting around dreaming whether life is designed has little resemblance to the practical application of reasoning and implication. This item provides no support for the main argument.

i – To object to an implication because it is an implication or because a subject infers it — because one does not like where it points, is thus selective hyperskepticism: making a question-begging and inconsistent objection that would not be made in a materially similar case of comparable warrant where one agrees with the conclusion.

Sigh: Actually, I question the implication more than object to it. You, GEM, have the burden to show the implication is both valid and sound. So far your points have failed to meet this burden; this, unfortunately for you, is a fact.

j – Of course, the context of the objection was the inference from a contingent cosmos to a cause of that cosmos, and onward to the existence of a non-contingent, necessary being as the ultimate ground for the observed credibly contingent cosmos.

k – This brings to bear a now common objection to reasoning on cause and contingency. To that the classic, simple example of a fire is a sufficient counter:

1: A fire has a beginning, it needs to be sustained in existence [it needs fuel heat and oxidiser in an exothermic chain reaction], and it may go out.

2: A fire is contingent, i.e its beginning and existence depend on things beyond it. (There are circumstances on which it can and will exist, and there are circumstances where it cannot exist.)

3: That is it is caused, has sufficient factors that allow it to spring into existence, and has necessary factors that if absent will block its beginning or cut off its existence.

4: Such factors are termed: CAUSES.

5: A sufficient cluster of causal factors will trigger and sustain a fire, and absence or removal of a necessary factor will prevent its beginning or make it go out.

6: Just so, our observed cosmos credibly had a beginning, and has been sustained in existence to today. It is contingent, was caused, and is caused.

7: But, an actualised infinite regress of causes (as was pointed out above, cf 44) is absurd, so the chain of causes that led to our cosmos terminates.

8: Once we have a contingent cosmos, we have a root cause that is self-sufficient, i.e it is not contingent, does not depend on other causes, and cannot go out of existence due to want of a necessary causal factor.

9: We have just described what philosophers call, a necessary being.

10: The real issue is which candidate for this is the best, e.g. a wider deeper material cosmos out of which sub-cosmi bubble up from time to time at random, or an intelligent, purposeful designer.

The reasoning here is flawed when GEM tries to get from a fire on Earth to the very beginning of space-time in our universe. I think the points I make to tgpeeler are relevant as a response here to GEM's 10-point scenario:

Let me ask, though, whether you find terms such as “past,” “cause,” and “first” problematic in the context of the origins of the universe. Are these terms, as we are using them here, appropriate and applicable to the origins of the universe?

When it comes to our universe, we have a scientific case for claiming that we can explain it without having to go outside of it. For a very high-level, 101, explanation of what I’m saying see Sean Carroll’s video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCVqJw7T1WU.

One of the arguments I’ve made to Kairos is that when going “outside” our universe, we are hard-pressed to extrapolate from the present (e.g., as you say, “things are changing in the present”) to a past as far back as the very origins of our universe.

So, I think most everything that you or I could possibly say about a “first cause” would not only be uncertain, but I might wager it would be wrong (including this statement I just made). But now I’m speculating wildly, too.

I said before that we have a scientific case for the universe creating itself from nothing (I think this is close enough to the famous statement from Hawking’s recent book). I’m not saying it’s a great or even a good case; I’m only asserting that there is a case. This much I think is indisputable.

So, I have your case and I have Hawking’s case. I think the question at this point is how should reasonable people evaluate the two cases against each other (and other cases, as may be appropriate). Taking a neutral stance toward both cases, we need to know what criteria to apply in determining the quality of cases and the comparative evaluation.

My intuition is that this is as far as any of us can go.

GEM's banking on the infinite regress problem as a way to smuggle in the need for a designer (i.e., God). Most everything GEM talks about, from DNA codes to chains of implications, address what appears to be his need to posit a first cause.

GEM continues:

l – But already, we have reason to believe our cosmos is designed, so a designer is plainly the more credible cause; unpalatable though that may be to LT and ilk.

Unfortunately, we don't really have such reason to believe our cosmos is designed. GEM has given no definition of design and he has not really addressed competing theories in any detail, so how could they possibly be undercut?

m - Similarly, once we see that we are morally governed creatures, it is credible that we are under moral law and a Lawgiver

Assuming that we see and understand what "morally governed" means. Paley would be proud to see the watchmaker analogy coming in here. It's also credible, I think more credible, that as a matter of human convention we understand ourselves as morally governed creatures. GEM finishes with the expected claim:

n - The best overall candidate is a Creator-God who as to his character is good.

I disagree, and I don't think GEM or anyone else has shown it.

Ultimately, this whole mess amounts to this, an argument made by GEM:

The aggregate complexity and specific, functional organisation of that system scream design to all but those who are deafened by a priori commitments to denying what would overturn their comfortable, amoral materialism.

Design, he says, is obvious...except to people like me who are prejudiced against the idea. Surely, I have no good reason to doubt or question his conclusion of design. Certainly, I must maintain my skepticism because otherwise I would have to submit to God as my moral authority and thereby become a Christian practitioner.

This is, of course, hogwash. Whatever the case for design, it is speculative and only partially helpful. Mainly, design is an answer to a question we are not asking. GEM's argument has no persuasive force toward design. The argument is undoubtedly sensible, and that may be enough for some to set themselves in the design camp, but it's not really backed very well by data. GEM's best argument is the analogy with the fire in Item K. Finally, I bristle at GEM's use of the Argument from Psychology.

Look, I have no problem with living as commanded in the Torah if it's all true. I have no problem in principle with being a prayer guy, or a kippah guy, or a mitzvah guy. I don't even have a problem with accepting Jesus as my personal savior. Just make me forget everything I know about reasoning, history, language, and the way the universe works.