Creating

I remain puzzled by the view, usually an unclearly defined one, that 'evolution' was or is God's 'method' of creating.

It's an odd method, I must say.

The creation is God exhibiting who he is: it is an act of love and it brings life. These are the impetus and outcome of God acting. He acts in love to bring life, or rather relationship.

But, to turn around and say that death, which is the single dominating feature of evolution (the less fit die while the fit survive and innovate...allegedly innovate to transmogrify 'kinds'), is the engine of creation is perverse to say the least. Death is anti-creation and anti-love.

The proponents of this bizarre theology had better get their explaining skates on.

Colemak Genesis 1:1

Slip over here to read Genesis 1:1 written on the home row of the Colemak keyboard.

Institutional Child Abuse by Church Organisations

There's only one word for the cruel and depraved self indulgent perversion that church bodies have connived at. It's here.

Yehuda is dead

I think that there should be an essay set for all Christians. It would be to respond to and/or reflect upon the death of Yehuda. It is captured in the essay My little brother, Yehuda Nattan Yudkowsky, is dead.

This young man was only 19, and his older brother posted on his website...follow the link.

Death is confronting. Having attended funerals of many relatives, including my parents, aged from 11 to 80, I know the dull weight of loss that death entials: the permanence. Eliezer captures it in his essay.

But there are a few things that are said about death, by Christians, and by Eliezer, that are both unhelpful and inaccurate: the former because of the latter.

They revolve around God willing death. God doesn't will death. It is a consequence of living in rejection of him and that we live in a world that is disjoined from God. Not his world any longer, but ours. Fellowship, family denied. We wrested from him. Death is the end of relationship with all the implicative vastness that this implies.

Yeshua wept because death was not of him, but contrary to him, the creator. His world was not like this! The warning to Adam was that the knowledge was not a thing to be sought, but a thing that would be experienced. The sentence in Gensis 2:17 is recursive. Yeshua stepped through death to undo it; because what is finally real is not material, but person-al.

University Goddess

Universities the seat of rationalism?
Sign at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia
Not that surprising, I suppose, because this university teaches...wait for it...chiropractic...witch-doctoring!!

 

Life? It means...molecules

And they think that evolution is not a religion:

“It now seems that modern evolutionary biology can answer not merely the chicken-and-egg conundrum but that it can also give some sort of objective and factually well-founded answer to the ultimate question: ‘Why are we here?’ (something to be especially welcomed, many would say, given the sort of fantastic nonsense which has been used to answer this question in the past). Today we can answer this question with brutal frankness: we are here to reproduce ourselves; we are providing a temporary home for our genes; life is ultimately only a very complex process of transmission of genetic information to future generations which is itself only a complex biochemical concomitant of the resurfacing of our planet brought about ultimately by nuclear fusion in the sun and nuclear fission in the interior of the earth.”

(Badcock, C.R., ‘The Problem of Altruism: Freudian-Darwinian Solutions’, Basil Blackwell, London, 1986, p. 25.)

What evolution is about

Darwin's god hits the mark:

Evolution is not about science. It’s about God.

Much as Darwin's biographer thought.

It's just a list

It is always both amusing and perplexing when commentators claim, against common knowledge of Hebrew poetic conventions, that Genesis 1 is 'poetry'; it is clearly not (see also Kugel's work and Barrick's review).

Most evidently, it is a delimited list, more akin to a modern computer database structure than anything else: it has repeated segments, we would call them fields: each record has marker fields, end of record fields and a count field surrounding the data field.

Nothing to do with poetry.

Indeed, it is much like the counted list in Numbers 7, and nothing like symbolic language at all

Not that fundamentalist 6 day nonsense!

One of the fascinating things about Alpha course discussions is that they so frequently end up at the question of origins; no surprise, after all, as this is the dominating question: its answer tells us who we are.

In a recent Alpha course that I attended we spent our final meeting with, yet again, someone making reference to origins: "Did God create, or did we evolve?"

The sub-text was: "Whose explanation of who we are really counts?" That is: do we listen to the naturalists, or do we listen to the Bible? People normally don't see a common ground, because unreflective common sense is a good guide on this; there is no ground between doctrinaire naturalist fairy tales and the revelation of God. Paul reminds us quite pointedly of this and it is a modern day theologically ignorant conceit to think otherwise.

In the answer though, this question is usually interpreted as being: "Do we have to accept the Bible's fairy story?" But this misses the point; it is really a question of basic ontology: who we are is set by where we came from, "So tell me where we came from."

The credibility of any answer is measured by another implied question: "Is your basic ontology grounded: does it refer meaningfully to the world we are in, or does it float off in some deracinated fictive talk-fest?" Or, in other words: "Is your spirituality meaningfully connected with the life that I confront, or is it meaninglessly off in a different world to the one that constrains my life?"

That much is obvious, I would have thought, but the answer that comes back is usually obfuscating fluff as both being right (how can two things equally explain a concretely delineated origin when they are ontologically contradictory, and without overlapping explanatory connections?)

At my most recent Alpha group, we got into a tangle straight away when one person asked about the basis for belief in God. The answer was to be found for another person in contemplating the creation. And this is where it unravelled. Someone batted that back with "what about evolution?" Then we got into the old half-baked tail spin of what the Bible is and is not, and how we can, do and/or should read Genesis 1, etc. Certainly not as a credible account of events because...well...it's 'poetry' or 'picture language' or because of 'its genre', or it depends on 'how you read it' (of course). All reader response gunk. No one suggested that one might seek what the author's intent might have been, or what the literary signals were as to how to read it...nothing so objective was entertained, or how it is referenced throughout the Bible...why do scholarship, when you can play Prejudice? that great game that grown-ups love.

And so we are left with Christianity being rooted, not in love-acts of the creator that are brought to us in real-world terms, terms that we can make sense of and have meaning in the real world we live and move in; no, we have an image of what we don't know, that is subservient to naturalist dogma which itself serves to unseat the notion of a personal creator; furthermore, one that has a basic ontology that is incoherently materialist (or spooky spiritualist); not one to which person-hood, relationship and love are basic!

Wittgenstein's egg

Speaking at the dConstruct 2012 conference in Brighton, UK, science historian James Burke told the following story:

“Apparently, somebody once went up to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and remarked what a bunch of morons we Europeans must have been 900 years ago before Copernicus told us how the solar system worked... and to have thought what we were seeing up there was the sun going round the earth, when as anybody knows, the earth goes round the sun, and you don’t have to be Einstein to get that. To which Wittgenstein is said to have replied, as philosophers often will, ‘Yeah, yeah. But I wonder what it would’ve looked like up there if the sun had been going round the earth.’ The point being, of course, it would’ve looked exactly the same. What he was saying was that, in any given circumstance, you see what your version of things at the time tells you you’re seeing. If you’re an astronomer, and the contemporary paradigm says the universe is made of omelets, you build instruments to search for traces of intergalactic egg. And if you don’t find any: no problem. Instrument failure.”

And that's why evolutionists think its all sown up according to them!

How to read theories.

Some interesting remarks in Roberts and Pashler 2000 "How Persuasive is a Good Fit? A Comment on Theory Testing" in Psychological Review 107(2) 358-367.

The theory of evolution "appears to have successfully captured many of the patterns in the...data. This success [is] the main support for the theory"

[I've inserted the 'ToE' reference, and they go on to write]:

Why the Use of Good Fits as Evidence Is Wrong

This type of argument has three serious problems. First, what the theory predicts—how much it constrains the fitted data—is unclear. Theorists who use good fits as evidence seem to reason as follows: If our theory is correct, it will be able to fit the data; our theory fits the data; therefore it is more likely that our theory is correct. However, if a theory does not constrain possible outcomes, the fit is meaningless. [emp mine]

A prediction is a statement of what a theory does and does not allow. When a theory has adjustable parameters, a particular fit is only one example of what it allows. To know what a theory predicts for a particular measurement, one needs to know all of what it allows (what else it can fit) and all of what it does not allow (what it cannot fit). For example, suppose two measures are positively correlated, and it is shown that a certain theory can produce such a relation—that is, can fit the data. This does not show that the theory predicts the correlation. A theory predicts such a relation only if it cannot fit other possible relations between the two measures (zero correlation or negative correlation), and this is not shown by fitting a positive correlation.

When a theory does constrain possible outcomes, it is necessary to know by how much. The more constraint—the narrower the prediction—the more impressive a confirmation of the constraint (e.g., Meehl 1997). Without knowing how much a theory constrains possible outcomes, you cannot know how impressed to be when observation and theory are consistent.

...

That a theory fits data does not show how firmly the data rule out outcomes inconsistent with the theory; without this information, you cannot know how impressed to be that theory and observation are consistent.

Well, from this, I have a fair reason to be not very impressed at all with the theory of evolution!


Incidentally, the Meehl reference is a good read:

Meehl, P. E. (1997). The problem is epistemology, not statistics: Replace significance tests by confidence intervals and quantify accuracy of risky numerical predictions. In L. L. Harlow, S. A. Mulaik and J. H. Steiger (Eds.), What if there were no significance tests? (pp. 393-425). Mahwah, NK: Erlbuam.

Burden of proof

Darwin wrote:

…If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

He's got it round the wrong way. What he, and evolutionists in general, have to demonstrate is that it could plausibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications. That might be the hypothesis; it only needs a counter to undo it, but lack of a biochemically plausible pathway renders it a work of literature, not science; and fiction at that.

And all we have is stories such as Dawkins concocts pointing to all sorts of creatures with all sorts of eyes. But that tells us nothing and is certainly not science.

Theological Death

It can be remarkable, the lengths that some theologians will go to avoid a theological impasse.
Here's a good one: when God foretold that sin would lead to death, he was talking, not about a literal death (because in this theologian's view, death had always been a part of the world), or even a 'spirital' death, but a 'theological' death.
That takes the cake! It is the last refuge of the theological scoundrel.
We don't know what a theological death is...unless its not getting published, of course...but to retreat to this distance from the real world, you are not making a study of God, but a study of make-believe.
But even to think that the impact of death could be restricted as 'spiritual' death, to save theistic evolutionary ideas, it fails to deal with the depth of death in the Bible.
The Bible understands death as being completely other than good: the 'last enemy'
And this is the clue to the irrationality of claiming that 'a bit of death is OK' but 'more is not'. That is, God would make a very good creation with 'a bit of death' just sufficient to enable evolution to operate, it would seem; without impairing the 'very goodness' he'd declared early on.
So, on this premise, God could give headway to the last enemy in his very good creation.
Irrational, to say the least, and a misunderstanding of death itself. Death is the end of relationship. It is anti-love and a dis-representation of God. To include it in a creation in harmony with God is to fracture God, at best; in fact it makes the Bible, and not just the creation account, incoherent. Death an integral part of life? No; death, by any definition, is not a part of life; but its end and its undoing. Nor is it part of God. Death represents the very antithesis of God. To think that it could exist in a non-fallen world is to think in 'crazy talk'.

Religious vision

‘Darwin’s vision of nature was, I believe, fundamentally a religious vision.’

James Moore (Darwin's biographer)

Truth, but not as you know it!

Dr. Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC, said,

“What Darwin showed in his work on evolution and natural selection is that we don’t need to invoke any supernatural force or power to account for the development of life through time on earth.”

At an Alpha meeting question time I recently attended, one of the course members asked about Adam and Eve...clearly wanting to know if we believed that they had existed, or how we took them.
One of our Bible teachers, a learned and godly man whom I'll call Joe, gave a multi-pronged reply that I'll summarise and comment on here.

I'll aim to be brief, as its all been well rehearsed before, for example, in my posts on Pahl's similar comments.

At the risk of over-simplifying, Joe told us:

1. I believe that God is creator
2. Genesis is picture language, like the picture language of other ANE origins accounts but tells us truth
3. When you compare Genesis 1 to other texts in the Bible, you can see that it is picture language
4. Science tells us 'how' but not 'why'. Genesis tells us 'why'.
5. The Bible is not a book of science
6. The order of events is wrong: light comes before the sun.

 Comments

1. If the content of the only direct reference to God being creator is denied, then I wonder how Joe sustains his belief that God is creator. All the biblical references to God's chief credential as creator rely on Genesis 1, and can only work coherently if Genesis 1 is grounded and shares the same event frame with those references and our own experience of the world. The alternative is that it is a story disconnected from the real and throws into question what the real is...not much different from paganism with identical epistemological challenges.

It strains credibility that God can not or would not describe his creation in terms that authenticate it in the world that resulted. There seems to be a disconnect that God created the world, but the terms of the creation account have no real connection with that very world. Absurd is the word.

2. 'Picture language' means 'imagery', I suppose, but I wonder if the authors of the pagan tripe such as Enuma Elish regarded their work as imagery. Even a rough comparison of EE and G1 shows a huge divergence; the main one that EE is a theogony, it presupposes a cosmos, and not creation out of nothing. We have to wonder what sort of world it is about, then. Moreover, it has evil as a part of the world in the 'creation phase'. This would line up with evolutionary dogma, but not the creation in G1. The difference is vast, and unbridgable. A more plausible relation between the two is that EE is a corrupted derivation of G1, rather than the other way. But then, if G1 is merely a competing story, how would an account of what did not happen persuade anyone? 'Your story...my story'; both just stories. It's like trying to stop a tank with a picture of a rocket!

3. The claim of G1 being imagery fares poorly with other passages in the Bible. It is nothing like the imagery in Ezekiel and Revelation, for example. The ordered, sequenced and delimited event segments in G1 are more like the lists that occur in other passages; Numbers 7 springs to mind.

4. The why only emerges from the how, and in this case the asserted 'how' is at odds with the 'why'. Any attempt to sever the two relies on a pagan ontology and not a biblical one, and stems more from an external philosophical idealism than the concrete-realism of the Bible and its unified approach to reality. Indeed, the flowering of modern science was brought by the approach to the Bible, and indeed the world, that the 'how' and the 'why' are intimately connected; as is sensible. To split them apart means that you reference an alternative real world to the one you are in where different aspects of the unified world we live in can only be explicated by their locus in different 'fields' of being. In fact, can't be done!

5. The Bible is the account of relations between God and his creation, specifically man, and God's work to restore us to fellowship with him. The creation is the essential and definitive starting point and it shows who God is, as loving author of creation, who we are, in this created world, and that relations are grounded in what really happened, not in some disconnected fantasy that attaches to nothing. It also teaches that the material world is ontologically continuous with God's effecting word.
But, where the Bible touches the physical world it is relevantly accurate, because it is about what really happened!

6. Light is produced by the sun, not created by it. Energy is basic to the material world and it is unsurprising that it was created early. Perhaps the order that G1 is relating is that first a basic 'stuff' was created, then it was energised. So, I read the creation of light as the formation of the general energy field: perhaps including the known forces: the strong and the weak atomic forces, gravity and electromagnetic forces; all of which must have prior existence for production of light by a particular body.

Mousetrap yanking

A friend's response to McDonald's mousetraps, kindly e-mailed to me:

Didn’t think much of the mouse traps but, probably, 25 years ago, would have really enjoyed the pot you smoked in order to dream up such nonsense.

But, I suppose, I shouldn’t be so prematurely critical. Maybe if you could intelligently CREATE one of those mechanical devices and let me see how it actually works I might be impressed.

In the mean time, inhale some more mate.

Mousetrap stories

On his otherwise wonderful website, John McDonald says:

To poke fun at creationist Michael Behe's claim that a mousetrap is a good analogy for an "irreducibly complex" biochemical system, I have drawn mousetraps in several stages of reduced complexity.

Trouble is, the mousetraps are not Behe's mousetrap and therefore have nothing to say to his analogy; they are also unworkable in the real world, as far as I can see. They thus give the evolutionary game away in that evolution works well as a story, but that's about it! Its relation to the real world is yet to be established.
McDonald has to establish how Behe's mousetrap can be reduced and remain workable, not propose completely other mousetraps...designed, of course.
To continue Behe's line, what McDonald has to do is establish how complex biological sub-systems can come about incrementally as working systems incomplete compared to the final system.
This has to be established biochemically, not story-wise in Darwinian fashion. That is, Darwin, and his followers are great story tellers (Dawkins and his 'eye' story is typical, and as easily rebutted). Their fiction is wonderful. But they establish nothing.
So, McDonald has to give us, firstly, a plausible biochemical explanation of the incremental development of a complex subsystem. Then he has to plausibly place this within a functional organism. Of course, at step two he can only fail. The putative organisms aren't around.
But even if he could do this, he's only established what could happen; not what did happen. We're still in story-land.
Then, to give evolution any legs at all, he's got to show that it did happen. I can tell that he'll point to the geological record. But for this to work as an explanation, he's got to do more than the gross morphology hoodwinking that we're used to and talk biochemistry! There's more, though. He's also got to step outside the circular non-logic of proving evolution by assuming it, and prove that the geological record is more than a sorted collection of dead creatures.

Too many problems, John, and finally we only have the superficial flippancy we've become used to from doctrinaire physicalists.

Nevertheless, thanks for the Stats text. Its great.

How do I know who you are?

Quote from von Foerster's 1995 article Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics
(emphasis mine):

However, we do not need to go to Russell, Whitehead, Godel, or to other giants, to learn about in principle undecidable questions, we can easily find them all around.

 For instance, the question about the origin of the universe is one of those in principle undecidable questions: nobody was there to watch it. Moreover, this becomes apparent by the many different answers that are given to this question. Some say it was a single act of creation some 4 or 5,000 years ago; others say there was never a beginning and there will be never an end, because the universe is a system in perpetual dynamic equilibrium; then there are those who claim that approximately 10 or 20 billion years ago the universe came into being with a "Big Bang," whose faint remnants one is able to hear over large radio antennas; but I am inclined to trust most Chuang Tse's report, because he is the oldest and was therefore the closest to this event. He says:

Heaven does nothing; this nothing-doing is dignity;
Earth does nothing; this nothing-doing is rest;
From the union of these two nothing-doings arise all
action
And all things are brought forth.

I could go on and on with other examples, because I have not told you yet what the Burmese, the Australians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen, the Ibos, etc., would tell us about their origins. In other words, tell me how the universe came about, and I will tell you who you are.

Darwin blooper

A suprising place to find a Darwin quote:

On the Herding Cats project management blog.

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone - well Darwin wasn't connected with the reality of the times was he?

Trinity

During a discussion at a recent Alpha course session, someone gave an illustration of the Trinity using aspects of computing:

Using a typical business computer requires that three units of software work together: the application (e.g. word processor), the operating system (e.g. MacOS) and the bottom layer of code: firmware or microcode.

To use the word processor all three levels of software are involved: they all cooperate intimately; none works without the other; all three are completely unified in achieving a system outcome. All are totally 'software'; they all have 'software nature', but each has an independent identity, yet all work in harmony.

For the user, the work between the layers is invisible: they cannot tell which layer is doing what; but all work for the outcome.

Seemed pretty good to me. Software is a 'three in one' deal.