A Future Metaphysics

Project Capua Suspended

2011-12-13T08:37:00.002-05:00

After evaluating last week's interactions, I'm more convinced than ever that my experimental philosophy project is worth doing, but I'm convinced it can't be done on a blog. A blog tends to produce "star-shaped" interactions (which means all the commenters interact with the poster at the center) or "bi-polar" interactions (in which two commenters engage in a verbal dogfight). Project Capua can't work unless the participants develop a "spirograph" pattern of interactions, and I don't see a way to get there from here.

I'd love to try this again sometime, but I think we'd all need to spend at least week together to lay the foundation for the conversation we could have.

Project Capua: Day 3

2011-12-09T07:06:00.002-05:00

Exercise 3:

Is this a unicorn? Why or why not?

Project Capua: Day 2

2011-12-08T07:05:00.005-05:00

As we learned yesterday, words trigger many different memories in different minds. The linguistic hypothesis we are testing in this project is that a "word" is the unique location in cognitive space (the hyperdimensional phase space created by every neuron of every hearer and/or reader of that word). If the hypothesis is correct, then "banana" can connote Harry Chapin songs, knock-knock jokes, and innocent Russian children biting through their bitter peels.

Today we'll use the word "rhubarb" to explore another aspect of cognitive space. (I am indebted to Nick Barden, a student at Patrick Henry College, for the discovery of "rhubarbiness.") "Banana" evokes a host of different experiences that generally don't conflict with each other. "Rhubarb," by contrast, tends to evoke contradictory responses. Some people love rhubarb. Some people hate it.

We all know the subjective differences between people. Tastes differ--but does that mean that "everything is relative"? Is there an objective truth about rhubarb?

In our hypothesis, there is an objective truth about something as subjective as rhubarb. If each word is a unique point in the shared cognitive space of every hearer/reader, the contradictory individual opinions about rhubarb tell us something important about that point in cognitive space. In a metaphorical sense, "rhubarb" lies somewhere between the individual observers who collectively make up the logosphere.

The most familiar analogy for this feature is binocular vision. Two eyeballs gather information about an object from slightly different perspectives which is joined within the vision center of the brain as a three-dimensional scene. The closer the object is to the observer, the more different the two perspectives become. If the object is brought right up to a person's nose, the left eye may not see a single thing that is the same as what the right eye sees.

"Rhubarbiness," using this analogy, means that something is so "close" to different observers that they "see" substantially different images.

Exercise 2:

What is your opinion of rhubarb?
Pick another word that seems "rhubarby" and explain why.

Project Capua: Day 1

2011-12-07T07:29:00.002-05:00

Welcome to our first exercise! If you're in a hurry, scroll down to the last paragraph and follow the directions there. If you want to know why you're doing this, read on!

Project Capua is based on a linguistic hypothesis and a metaphysical methodology. The linguistic hypothesis is that words enable the neurons in individual human brains to form a larger network. The participants in the project don't need to understand the new technology of neural networks, but there are a few terms that we'll be using throughout the project that are based on neural network theory.

For purposes of this project, cognitive space means a multi-dimensional phase space composed of every neuron in an interconnected whole. In a system composed of just two neurons, the cognitive space would be a square. Three neurons form a cube. Adding more neurons adds more dimensions, The average human brain has about 100 billion neurons,creating a hyperdimensional phase space.

How "big" is a hundred-billion dimensional phase space? If every neuron can fire at varying rates from 0 to 10, it has a volume of ten to the hundred billionth power. How big is that? Well, the observable universe is about 15 billion light years across (on the order of 10^26 meters) and an electron is 10^-15 meters across. That means you could line up this many electrons in a row across the universe:

100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Cube that (10^41 ^3) and you get 10 to the 123rd power. That's how many electrons you can cram into our observable universe. By contrast, you can cram 10 to the 100,000,000,000 power different cognitive states into your brain. Cognitive space is much bigger than space/time!

The linguistic hypothesis behind this project is that words activate the cognitive space of each reader or hearer. For purposes of this project, the word "word" means a unique point in the phase space created by all the neurons in each brain of every reader or hearer.

When I type the word "banana," every neuron in the brain of each reader of this blog is affected to some degree. For most Americans, "banana" conjures up the same basic image of a yellowish green fruit with a little blue sticker on the shelf of the local supermarket, but each one of us adds our own personal experience. I can't say "banana" without humming a Harry Chapin tune. You may remember your grandmother's banana-nut muffins. A political refugee from El Salvador may shudder at the memory of slithering through a field of young banana plants with the death squads hot at her heels.

Exercise 1: Introduce yourself and share a personal experience with bananas.

Project Capua: Introduction

2011-12-06T11:12:00.002-05:00

Welcome to Project Capua, an experiment in linguistics and metaphysics.

Why experiment? Philosophers at Yale put it this way:

Experimental philosophy, called x-phi for short, is a new philosophical movement that supplements the traditional tools of analytic philosophy with the scientific methods of cognitive science. So experimental philosophers actually go out and run systematic experiments aimed at understanding how people ordinarily think about the issues at the foundation of the philosophical discussion.

Why Capua? This project is inspired by the Siege of Capua in 1098, where St. Anselm of Canterbury met with Muslim soldiers serving under the Norman lord of Sicily. (The Normans conquered Sicily about the same time they conquered England, and Anselm was temporarily in exile because of a church/state dispute with his own Norman king back in Britain.) The Saracen troops had heard reports of Anselm's deep spirituality and were eager to talk theology with him.

We don't know what St. Anselm and the Saracens talked about, but we can imagine--beacuse imagination may well be the core of what they talked about. Anselm defined God as "that being greater than which nothing can be imagined." It's important to be precise here: Wikipedia misquotes Anselm as calling God "the greatest possible being we can conceive."

If Anselm thought God was whatever he imagined, his discussion with the Saracens would have broken down pretty quickly. The two sides would have staked out antithetical positions: "God is One!" "No, God is Three!" "No, God is One!" But if God is that being Who is greater than our imagination, the discussion would be very different.

Imagine Anselm saying something like this:

Muslims say that Allah is one, and Christians call God three. Buddhists seek nirvana more like zero while Hindus worship 330,000,000 deities. Perhaps we are all making the same mistake--using the created category of numbers to count the Uncreated.

This kind of answer is what George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have referred to as a "synthesis." Project Capua is designed to explore the contours of our collective imagination in the spirit of St. Anselm.

Experimental Philosophy Project

2011-12-05T09:34:00.002-05:00

Experimental Philosophy is an interesting new approach to an ancient discipline. Most "X-Phi" is done using surveys (similar to psychology), but I'm getting ready for an applied metaphysics project at this site in a few days.

I'm looking for a team of about six VERY different people to participate. I won't disclose the details (because I don't want to skew my test group through selection bias) but I can say this much--it will be an exercise in communication and imagination.

If you might be interested in participating, comment below.

Quantum Consciousness

2011-11-30T18:01:00.002-05:00

I'll be blogging on this topic soon. Use the comments section to beat me to it!

Separating Space from Heaven

2011-11-15T07:07:00.004-05:00

Rabbis and Christian theologians alike have noted the absence of the word "good" on the second day of Creation, but have not agreed on why it is not there. The text of Genesis 1:6-8 is facially consistent with a scenario in which the four space/time dimensions "blew out" as the result of the actions of cosmic intelligences.

And God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. (Gen. 1:6-8.)

Picture four out of twelve dimensions shattering, with ten times the mass of our observable universe hurtling out into space and time in all directions. Picture the horror and the grief of those intelligences unshaken at the center. This tragedy would separate what we call "Heaven" from what we know as the material universe--and nobody could ever call it "good."

Trapped in Time and Space

2011-11-14T08:15:00.002-05:00

Those of us who were born into time and space think of it as natural. We accept the laws of physics as not only given, but as good--they enable carbon atoms to exist and join into complex chains that make biology possible. But humans may well suffer from a four-dimensional provincialism that can't imagine the horrible limits space and time would impose on a being from before the Big Bang.

Imagine a multidimensional sphere one Planck length across which contains at least ten times the mass of our observable universe. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would permit any particle to move at any speed from 0 to the speed of light anywhere within these boundaries--so the constraints of physics as you and I know them would not apply within this hypersphere. If intelligent beings emerged within this sphere, they would appear as gods or angels to us.

Now imagine the perfect symmetry of that sphere distended for some reason. Perhaps a hundred trillion angels choose to follow a single leader leader in one orbit and their combined mass creates a bulge in hyperspace. Let that orbit expand until it exceeds the Planck length and their perfect freedom becomes constrained at Heisenberg's limit. If nothing pulls them back, the bulge could turn into a blow-out--the universe's first environmental disaster.

What happens to a hundred trillion intelligences hurled out of Heaven into space?

Applied Metaphysics

2011-06-30T06:55:00.002-04:00

Want to test your metaphysics? Turn it into a novel--or a series. I'm working on that here.

Decision-Making with Fractal Futures

2011-02-28T15:19:00.003-05:00

IF we live in a "multiverse" (which, for purposes of this blog, means a universe with branching timelines) human decision-making becomes a logical exercise with some interesting implications for people who still believe in a "monoverse" (a universe with only one timeline).

In a multiverse, one may assume that EVERY possible future will become actual. This means "you" will experience an accident EVERY time you drive your car. I put "you" in quotes because "you" also won't have an accident--some of your timelines arrive safely at your destination while others end very badly.

Would you rather be wearing your seatbelt when they pull you from the wreckage of your car? It won't help you much in the timeline where you die on impact. It won't help in the timeline where the car rolls over and you might have been thrown free if you weren't strapped in. But it will help in a lot of accidents--in fact, it might save your life.

So here's what makes a multiverse interesting: you only get to climb into the car once. All the timelines start the same way. You either buckle your seatbelt or you don't--and you will be glad (or sad) you did (or didn't) in every foreseeable scenario.

A rational decision-maker in a multiverse should act in such a way as to minimize regret. If he doesn't buckle his seatbelt, he will be thrown free of his car just before it explodes in one timeline, but will be paralyzed from the neck down in another. Traffic statistics show that the sum total of sorrows will be lower if he buckles his seatbelt.

I'm not dead yet!

2011-02-24T10:24:00.000-05:00

Despite 13 months of silence, the rumors of my passing are exaggerated.

A Fractal Future

2010-12-28T07:54:00.004-05:00

Humans spend much of the present pondering the future. Christians have a branch of theology for the subject (eschatology, the "doctrine of the last things"). As a general rule, our beliefs about the future influence our choices in the present, and, conversely, our choices in the present contribute to the outcomes in the future.

Our instinctive understanding of time tempts the average human to try to "figure out the future." Some people lean towards fatalism ("I guess I'm destined to fail") while others try to outwit fate ("I won't meet Death in the marketplace!"). Either way, they react to some particular picture of the future.

Einstein's conception of time made him reject ancient Judaism and much of twentieth century science. Einstein believed the universe was governed by iron laws that determined every outcome from the beginning, and therefore rejected the notion of a personal God who judged men for their choices. He famously disagreed with Niels Bohr over quantum physics, insisting that "God does not play dice with the universe." It was his second great blunder (the other was his admitted "fudging" his own calculations to eliminate the evidence for an expanding universe well before Edwin Hubbell discovered that galaxies are flying away from each other).

Einstein thought of time as a fixed line out of an infinite past into an infinite future. Aristotle had a different idea--he did not believe in "the future," as such. He discussed the truth value of the statement, "There will be a sea-battle tomorrow" and concluded that a statement about the future has no truth value. Today's "Open Theists" enlarge upon Aristotle's position--they say that God knows everything that is, but does not know the future, because "the future" does not exist.

David Deutsch goes to the opposite extreme: in The Fabric of Reality, he argues that every possible future exists. Einstein's time is a one-dimensional line, Deutsch sees time expanding into a two-dimensional plane of possibilities. (Deutsch might argue that all time's branches form a multidimensional hypersolid.)

I'd like to suggest another option--a fractal future. In this model, some but not all futures become actual. I'll try to explain the implications of this in a later post.

What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Bethlehem?

2010-12-27T07:39:00.003-05:00

In the darkening dawn of the 20th century, William Butler Yeats wrote, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Yeats' Second Coming glimpsed a nightmarish "rough beast, its hour come round at last" slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. As we move into the 21st century, my fear is that the "center" is getting too strong--there seems to be no limit to what technology and government can do.

Computers can only get so fast, but quantum computing harnesses parallel timelines to do things that just aren't possible in a Newtonian universe. A fully-functioning quantum computer should break the barriers between relativity and quantum physics, and should also be able to bioengineer proteins from scratch. Given today's pace of progress, I expect decent quantum computers to be operational by 2025, yielding a whole new generation of technology by 2045.

Technology isn't the only thing that changes. There's a pace of progress in human relationships, too. I'm not aware of any "Moore's Law" for human interconnectedness, but we've gone from writing to printing to telegraph to radio to television to internet to blogs to Facebook to Twitter over time. Communications move further and faster. The news cycle has gone from monthly magazines to weekly papers to the nightly newscast to 24/7 cable to a constant feed to the Blackberry.

Yeats heard the winds of chaos scattering the ashes of Europe after World War I. Today an invisible web is twining its tentacles around a shrinking world. Who knows what the future holds?

Who's Who in ClimaTALKogy

2010-03-23T09:59:00.002-04:00

PaleoCLAMatology

2010-03-12T10:04:00.004-05:00

There’s some hot new actual SCIENCE that can tell us a lot about temperature over the last millenium.

I’m talking about what I can't resist calling “paleoCLAMatology," a lovely new method of detecting not just the climate, but the WEATHER over the last two thousand years. Clams live in shallow water and build their shells using the minerals and other elements that are in the water. One of the elements that goes into a clamshell is oxygen, and the ratio of oxygen isotopes dissolved in water varies linearly with the temperature of the water. Heavy oxygen (O-18) is more prevalent in colder water.

By slicing ancient clamshells with a microtome and sending those slices through a mass spectrometer, scientists can read the O-18 concentrations down to week-by-week precision. Preliminary results using clams from a bay in Iceland show clear evidence of both the “Medieval Warming Period” (MWP) and a “Roman Warm Period” (RWP).

That doesn't resolve the debate about the MWP--proponents of the man-made global warming theory don't pretend it never happened. They just believe it was a localized phenomenon that affected northern Europe but not the planet as a whole. Clams from Iceland can’t rebut that argument–but “clamatology” can be used on shells from anywhere. We finally have a methodology that gives us fine-grained information about the temperature of shallow waters anywhere we’d like to look–there are LOTS of clams out there!

Note: shallow-water temperature measurements are NOT the same as surface temperature measurements, so we’ll have to do some new modeling to see how air temperature relates to shallow seas. I think it’s promising work in its own right–a huge amount of heat is stored in the top layer of the ocean, and it’s hard to model planetary climate just by looking at proxies of inland air temperature.

So–is there ANYBODY here who isn’t happy to get a new scientific tool that gives us more information about reality? If so, speak out–I’d like to know who can be unhappy about ancient clamshells!

Answering George Monbiot

2010-03-11T07:18:00.002-05:00

George Monbiot asks, in today's Telegraph, "What would it take to persuade you" that humans are causing global warming? He assumes that the answer for most skeptics is nothing. That assumption certainly misses the mark for me. I think I could be convinced that humans are causing global warming if people would address my growing list of concerns.

The thing that would MOST convince me that humans are causing global warming would be to see the "green" movement advocate nuclear power. Nukes are the most obvious solution to CO2 emissions, yet the people who CLAIM to be most passionate about "saving the planet" refuse to take nuclear power seriously. Without that evidence of their good faith, I have to evaluate the science on my own.

My amateur exploration of the science has produced more questions than answers. Here's what it would take to convince ME:

(1) A clear acknowledgment of the diminishing impact of increasing CO2. Putting more paint on a window that has been painted over doesn't decrease the amount of light that gets through it. Doubling the CO2 in an atmosphere that already absorbs most of the spectra that CO2 affects doesn't double the amount of energy that gets trapped.

(2) A clear list of the SECONDARY effects that are supposed to amplify the CO2 effects. I've heard how water vapor and methane are supposed to rise as the planet warms, resulting in a second round of forcing. What other gases are we talking about?

(3) A clear acknowledgment of the impact of solar variability on weather cycles. I don't trust any model that can't explain why ice caps on Mars are retreating.

(4) A clear list of testable predictions made by any climate model--and an equally clear list of anomalies. I don't expect any model to be perfect. I do expect its flaws to be clearly identified!

(5) A clear recognition of the man-made impact on surface temperatures which is unrelated to CO2. Matched-pairs analysis of neighboring measurement stations shows that even a low human population density has a positive impact on temperature--an effect that CANNOT be caused by CO2, since neighboring stations are breathing the same air. This confounding variable MUST be addressed before any temperature dataset can be deemed reliable.

This may seem like a lot to ask, but it's our planet that's at stake.

How to Get Enough Computing Power for Climate Modeling

2010-03-10T10:01:00.008-05:00

The Bishop Hill blog posted notes from Professor Tim Palmer, who recently gave a lecture on the computational challenges of weather and/or climate modeling. He asks:

How much resolution is needed to capture climate change details? For example, convective instabilities (~km scale) aren't included in climate models; should they be? Does higher resolution reduce uncertainty? There’s no good theory for estimating how well climate simulations converge with increasing resolution. Even worse, the equations themselves change with finer resolution as new features have to be included...

He answers his own question with an obvious truth: "We need bigger computers." But that raises a new question: where do we get them?

The answer, I suggest, is right in front of our noses--quite literally. We already have enough computing power on our desks or in our laptops. Climate modeling is probably the perfect application for a worldwide network of personal computers.

It's not like can't be done--it already has been! Oxford University networked 3.5 personal million computers back in 2002 to find a cure for anthrax. Dr. Graham Richards' Screensaver Lifesaver" project was a huge success, and it seems like it could be replicated.

I envision "screensaver" software that runs on an all-volunteer network of PCs in their idle time. Assign every station a point on the global grid and give it access to "live" meteorological measurements from as many observation stations as possible. Then, using a set of competing climate models (more on that later!), have each station generate the data each climate model would predict for the area around its unique grid point. As more people volunteer their computers for the project, make the grid increasingly fine.

The primary point of this network would be test competing climate models. To that end, any person would be invited to turn their theory about the weather into an algorithm that could run on this system. The network could test out any number of theoretical models, so I would make the "model building" component an essentially "open source" system, with just enough editorial control to keep hackers from implanting malware in the system.

It would seem appropriate to require every climate modeler to disclose his or her algorithm (but not the source code). An "open source" system of this sort should make the results of every model accessible to all researchers at all times. That would allow the maximum number of researchers to learn from other people's successes--and failures.

How to Tell a Fake Scientist

2010-03-09T09:43:00.002-05:00

I love these graphics from JoNova:

Real Scientist

Fake Scientist

Adding Paint to a Windowpane

2010-02-18T08:38:00.002-05:00

I used to think I understood global warming. CO2 is a "greenhouse gas" because it is transparent to visible but absorbs infrared. Light passes through the atmosphere and hits the ground, where it re-radiates as infrared. CO2 in the atmosphere keeps it from radiating back out into space, and--voila!--the Earth gets warmer.

That's true as far as it goes--but does that mean that more CO2 means more warmth? The graph above shows why that is a very important question. Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is like putting more paint on a windowpane--once you've absorbed the infrared radiation coming up from the ground, you can't absorb much more of it.

The claims that increasing CO2 will lead to increasing temperatures are based on hypothetical "feedback" effects, such as "warmer air evaporates more water, which is also a greenhouse gas." But that argument would seem to work for any kind of warming--solar flares, volcanic eruptions, and so forth.

Testing New Comments

2010-02-17T08:08:00.000-05:00

Housekeeping here... I've installed "IntenseDebate" for the comment section.

(Wishful thinking, I know--but it looks like a nice feature.)

No Taxation with Radiation Act of 2010

2010-02-14T08:38:00.002-05:00

Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Here's a modest proposal for change.

Executive Overview: fast-track nuclear power plant construction by

giving the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission exclusive regulatory power over plants that choose to operate under the provisions of this act,
giving a single "rocket docket" court exclusive original jurisdiction over all nuclear claims,
creating a ten-mile tax-free zone around all operational nuclear power plants and a tax-free zone in each county that agrees to and is approved to accept nuclear waste, and
providing for tax-free nuclear bonds and a $10,000 guarantee for individual investors.

I. The name of this Act is the "No Taxation with Radiation Act of 2010."

II. All current and proposed nuclear power plants in the United States may elect whether to operate under the provisions of this Act [hereafter, "Federal Plants"]. Plants that choose not to operate under the Act shall be subject to all relevant state and local laws but shall be exempt from all requirements of this Act other than national security regulations promulgated by the Department of Defense. Federal Plants are hereby exempt from all state and local environmental, labor, and public utility laws and regulations.

III. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission [hereafter, "NRC"] shall promulgate comprehensive and exclusive regulations for the construction, operation, and decommission of Federal Plants. The DOE shall issue all necessary permits for the construction, operation, and decommissioning of Federal plants.

IV. The United States Department of Defense [hereafter, "DOD"] shall promulgate national security regulations to ensure the safety of all nuclear power plants, nuclear materials, and nuclear waste, whether or not the nuclear power plant elects to operate under the provisions of this Act.

V. One new federal district court shall be established at [Kansas City, Missouri] with exclusive original jurisdiction over all challenges to the construction, operation, or decommissioning of a Federal Plant. This court shall be provided with enough judges and staff to decide the average case within one month or less. Appeals shall be made to the D.C. Court of Appeals.

VI. Federal Plants are hereby authorized to sell tax-free construction bonds. The United States Treasury shall guarantee each individual investor the first $10,000 of investments in such bonds for any given Federal Plant. Corporate investors, including money market funds, shall not receive guarantees.

VII. Federal Plants may elect to opt out of this program if their State (or tribe, if the plant is located on a Native American reservation) enacts a specific procedure for doing so.

VIII. All individuals with a primary residence within ten miles of an operational nuclear power plant that was constructed as a Federal Plant shall be exempt from personal federal income tax, whether or not the plant opts out of the federal program at a later date. All individuals with a primary residence in a county that agrees to and is approved to accept nuclear waste shall be exempt from personal federal income tax.

Post-Normal Science

2010-02-10T08:00:00.002-05:00

I've just discovered "Post-Normal Science" [hereafter, "PNS'], thanks to this essay by Jerome Ravetz at WattsUpWithThat. On the one hand, it's a lovely discovery--I finally have the categories I need to describe the politico-scientific maelstrom of Global Warming. Wikipedia defines it thus:

Post-Normal Science is a concept developed by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, attempting to characterise a methodology of inquiry that is appropriate for cases where "facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent". It is primarily seen in the context of the debate over global warming and other similar, long-term issues where we possess less information than we would like.

On the one hand, we desperately need a well-thought out, mutually agreed-upon approach to such cases. On the other hand, Ravetz seems to be working hard to justify action in the absence of certainty--and since his primary example of post-normal science is the global warming debate, it's hard to tell whether PNS is a real step forward in the sociology of science or just another skirmish in the global warming wars.

Ravetz makes one suggestion that seems very useful--he calls for an "extended peer review system" that includes all "stakeholders" in the process, whether or not they share the dominant scientific paradigm. This is a timely suggestion, given the growing power of the "blogosphere." A mob of "bloggers in pajamas" exposed forged political documents in 2004 and quickly picked apart the mass of "Climategate" emails. This "Army of Davids" (to use Glenn Reynolds' phrase) is here to stay. We may as well build them into any future plans for science and public policy!

No Taxation with Radiation Act of 2010

2010-02-07T08:30:00.010-05:00

Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Here's a modest proposal for change.

Executive Overview: fast-track nuclear power plant construction by

giving the US Department of Energy exclusive regulatory power over plants that choose to operate under the provisions of this act,
giving a single "rocket docket" court exclusive original jurisdiction over all nuclear claims,
creating a ten-mile tax-free zone around all operational nuclear power plants and a tax-free zone in each county that agrees to and is approved to accept nuclear waste, and
providing for tax-free nuclear bonds and a $10,000 guarantee for individual investors.

I. The name of this Act is the "Climate Change Security Act of 2010."

II. All current and proposed nuclear power plants in the United States may elect whether to operate under the provisions of this Act [hereafter, "CCSA Plants"]. Plants that choose not to operate under the Act shall be subject to all relevant state and local laws but shall be exempt from all requirements of this Act other than the national security regulations promulgated by the Department of Defense. CCSA Plants are hereby exempt from all state and local environmental, labor, and public utility laws and regulations.

III. The United States Department of Energy [hereafter, "DOE"] shall promulgate comprehensive regulations for the construction, operation, and decommission of CCSA Plants. The DOE shall issue all necessary permits for the construction, operation, and decommissioning of CCSA plants.

IV. The United States Department of Defense [hereafter, "DOD"] shall promulgate national security regulations to ensure the safety of all nuclear power plants, nuclear materials, and nuclear waste, whether or not the nuclear power plant elects to operate under the provisions of this Act.

V. One new federal district court shall be established at [Kansas City, Missouri] with exclusive original jurisdiction over all challenges to the construction, operation, or decommissioning of a CCSA Plant. This CCSA Court shall be provided with enough judges and staff to decide the average case within one month or less. Appeals from the CCSA Court shall be made to the D.C. Court of Appeals.

VI. CCSA Plants are hereby authorized to sell tax-free construction bonds [herefter, "CCSA Bonds"]. The United States Treasury shall guarantee individual investors the first $10,000 of investments in CCSA Bonds.

VII. All individuals with a primary residence within ten miles of an operational nuclear power plant that was constructed under the CCSA shall be exempt from personal federal income tax. All individuals with a primary residence in a county that agrees to and is approved to accept nuclear waste shall be exempt from personal federal income tax.

VIII. CCSA Plants may elect to opt out of the CCSA if their State enacts a specific procedure for doing so. Opting out of the CCSA shall not affect the federal income tax liability of persons within a ten miles radius.

Global Warming and Global Politics

2010-02-06T11:31:00.004-05:00

China Daily, the offical English language paper of the People's Republic of China, has published an article that urges scientists to critically review the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Given that China Daily is pretty much a house organ for the Communist Party, I take this as a major development. India has already dumped the IPCC and is setting up its own alternative. With populations of 1,284M and 1,045M respectively, China and India account for 34% of all humans. The IPCC has lost the confidence of one third of the planet.

Russia is a major oil producing nation with a history of "not playing nicely with the other children." A number of skeptics have drawn attention to the questionable data from Siberia. At least one Moscow-based think tank argues that the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia has skewed the Siberian data. Given Russia's past, pride, and petroleum, it may well follow India's lead in the near future.

Global warming is not a hot topic in the United States right now. With 41 Republican Senators ready to block any unpopular proposals from the Obama administration, the prospect for environmental "change we can believe in" is low. While we can expect plenty of official pronouncements from the US over the next ten months, there is close to zero chance of the kind of action that "warmists" have been urging.

The British media has finally caught on to the "Climategate" scandal and major papers are switching from "warmist" to "skeptical" positions overnight. Polls show that British belief in global warming has plummeted over the last few months.

Based on these facts and current trends, I think the prospects for meaningful international limits on CO2 emissions are fast dropping to zero. I never thought a command-and-control approach to greenhouse gases would really work, but now I think it won't even be tried.

That doesn't mean that "warmists" must sit by while a planet full of morons cooks itself to death. It just means that people who truly believe in man-made global warming must adjust their approach. The free market drives human behavior at least as much as governmental control does. It's time for a free market solution.

The fast track to carbon neutrality is nuclear power. We've had the basic technology since 1942. Prudent capitalists are not investing in nuclear power in the US at present because our legal system allows environmental activists to prevent new plants from getting the permits they need to operate. Those laws would have to change to make a new generation of nuclear plants feasible--but "warmists" should be willing to change those laws to save the planet, while most "skeptics" have been eager to change them all along.

A State of Uncertainty: My Current Thoughts on Climate

2010-02-05T08:42:00.003-05:00

We live in interesting times. Global warming has become an issue that appears to demand action--but it's an issue that dramatically depends on a very complex kind of science that very few people can master. To make things worse, some of the people who claim to understand the issue disagree about it in the most fundamental ways. That leaves the average 21st century person in a position a little like the average 16th century European, trying to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism with their eternal soul at stake.

I've judged a number of formal debates, and I like to analyze this problem in debate terms. The four "stock issues" of a formal debate are:

Topicality
Significance
Inherency
Solvency

Topicality is the definition of terms. The global warming debate involves some surprisingly slippery terminology. I've noticed a shift from "global warming" to "climate change" without any explanation. I'm going to define the term under debate as "catastrophic increase in atmospheric heat produced by human activities."

Significance: I define "global warming" as "catastropic increase in atmospheric heat" to nail down the second stock issue in debate. Anything less than a "catastrophic" increase is not a significant harm. "Lukewarmists" believe that human activity affects the climate, but not enough to worry about.

Inherency: In formal debate, the party advocating change must show that the significant harm can't be solved without adopting the kind of change that they propose. They have to show that the "harm" is "inherent" to the status quo--until we change the way things are, we can't escape the problem.

Solvency: The affirmative team in any debate has to persuade the audience that their proposed solution will actually solve the problem--without creating more problems that are even worse.

Scoring this debate

In any formal debate, the party advocating change bears the burden of proving all four stock issues. I've defined the terms to my own satisfaction, so I'll give the "warmists" the topicality issue. I have yet to be persuaded on any of the remaining three issues.

So far, I'm not persuaded that there is a significant harm. I've heard a lot of horror stories about how bad things could be, but some of those claims aren't well supported by the evidence. At present, I'd call myself a "lukewarmist." I think that human activity is causing some increase in atmospheric heat, but I am not persuaded that the rise in CO2 is more likely than not to cause a catastrophe.

I'm completely unpersuaded by the inherency arguments. The "warmists" seem to be arguing that humans must immediately apply governmental caps to CO2 emissions. Why not argue for a crash program to construct nuclear power plants? I think that putting massive amounts of cheap, clean, green, safe energy on the grid would reduce CO2 emissions more quickly and more reliably than any amount of coercive control.

I fundamentally disagree with the solvency arguments. The proposals on the table are pathetic! How can we save the planet from runaway CO2-induced heating unless we deal with the vast amounts of CO2 being released by the teeming billions of the developing world? The most advanced societies could cut their carbon emissions to zero but the levels of CO2 would continue to rise for generations under every current plan. To make matters worse, the most likely results of cap-and-tax type regimes would be a global recession and/or depression, resulting in even-deeper poverty in the developing and underdeveloped nations. That means more soot, more smoke, more deforestation around the word. Poverty is a cause of CO2 emissions, not a cure.

My own position

I would agree that we have a "global warming crisis," but I see it is a human crisis of collective decision-making--a political crisis, at the moment, not an environmental crisis. The human race has been presented with a problem that it must solve, one way or another, just as Europe was presented with the problem of Protestantism in 1517. How are we going to handle it?

I believe that "warmists" and "skeptics" can and should agree on an immediate course of action to reduce CO2 emissions. A crash course in nuclear power is the best solution to this political crisis. Warmists can sleep at night, knowing that we are finally DOING something that could eliminate the need for fossil fuels altogether. Skeptics would enjoy the benefits of cheap, clean, plentiful energy that doesn't depend on foreign (and often hostile) governments. The planet would be a safer and more peaceful place, whether or not the weather is warming.

I'd love to know if there's something I'm missing here. Feel free to straighten out my thinking in the comments!

Death of a Dream

2010-01-23T12:49:00.002-05:00

I have long daydreamed about building a electro-magnetic catapault in the Ecuadorian Andes. Went off to do the math this morning and realized that it would need to accelerate its payload to Mach 34 to achieve escape velocity. I can't think of ANY way to break the sound barrier 34 times over on rail system--which pretty much kills the concept.

(Maybe if the railway were airless and a REALLY BIG laser blasted the atmosphere out of the way at the upper end?)

No. I think the giant slingshot approach is dead.

Genetic Improbabilities in Genesis

2010-01-21T07:21:00.002-05:00

I'm open to the possibility that the chromosomes of Jesus mattered. This is not a current topic in science or theology, since most Christian theologians since the early 1900s have either embraced science and ignored Scripture (the "modernists") or embraced Scripture and ignored science (the "fundamentalists").

IF the genes of Jesus matter, then the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are a series of improbable events with clear genetic consequences.

Noah's Flood and Ancient DNA

2010-01-04T15:23:00.001-05:00

This breakthrough may allow us to see whether Europe was colonized by refugees from a Black Sea flood.

Freedom of Speech and Religion

2010-01-02T07:12:00.004-05:00

The man who drew this survived an attack by an axe-wielding terrorist today. He and his five-year-old granddaughter hid in the house until Danish police arrived and shot their Somali attacker in the leg.

This blog is primarily devoted to science and the truths beyond science. Our ability to discover more about reality depends on our ability to share the information we have. There is exactly one ultimate reality out there, and we aren't going to discover it by attacking cartoonists with axes.

It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, so I'm lighting my candle with this image of freedom, today.

The Neuroscience of Science

2009-12-29T11:28:00.002-05:00

This article is important.

According to Dunbar, even after scientists had generated their “error” multiple times — it was a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up. “Given the amount of unexpected data in science, it’s just not feasible to pursue everything,” Dunbar says. “People have to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often choose badly.” And so the result was tossed aside, filed in a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had discovered a new fact, but they called it a failure.

Among other keepers in this article: have Jewish thinkers been so successful be so cuccessful because they have been on the outside?

Reviewing the Bidding on Climate Change

2009-12-19T21:02:00.002-05:00

After a few weeks to look over the current state of the science, let's take a look at what's clear and what's confusing:

Science and Politics

Politics and passion are a big part of the story. It's hard to find anybody who will talk about the science of global warming without taking sides or going on the attack. Ask an honest question and you're labeled a "denier" by people who really ought to know better!
There seems to be clear evidence of pressuring editors and manipulating the peer review process.
A recurring complaint is that climatology research depends very heavily on statistics, but the authors of papers lack real expertise in that field.

The Greenhouse Effect

What I thought I knew for sure has been shaken. I believed that everybody agreed that CO2 contributes to some degree of global warming--but that people disagreed on how MUCH it contributed. Now I realize that my basic assumptions about the "greenhouse effect" mechanism were flawed, at best. I can't explain exactly why more CO2 means more heat.
Some people claim that ALL the temperature readings can be explained by a combination of natural solar cycles. Others argue that the solar cycles do a better job of predicting temperatures than the "radiative forcing model" of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Surface Temperature Measurements

I also thought I knew that global temperatures had gone up quite significantly in the decades leading up to 2000. Now I'm questioning some of that rise--I'm not confident that the surface measurements haven't been "cherry-picked." I'm not saying there hasn't been some rise--but I'd like to double-check how they selected the data they use to compute it.
I'm increasingly aware of "divergences" between the land-based surface measurements and other sources of data. Tree rings haven't been matching up to northern hemisphere temperature readings since the 1960s, for some reason. Satellite readings show a divergence from surface measurements--with a larger difference from land-based readings.

Thinking About Greenhouse Gases

2009-12-16T16:55:00.004-05:00

Why, exactly, does more CO2 in the atmosphere result in more trapped heat?

If CO2 were essentially transparent to infrared waves, I can see why more CO2 would trap more infrared--doubling any transparent gas would double the "dimming" effect of that gas.

But I thought the heat-trapping effect of CO2 came from its absorption spectrum. CO2 is NOT transparent to all wavelengths of infrared radiation. In those wavelengths, CO2 acts like paint, not air. Putting two coats of paint on a window doesn't block twice as much light as one coat of paint.

It's like water--light can't travel very far through water. There's NO visible light a half mile down. Going twice as deep doesn't make it any darker.

So my new question is: which wavelengths of CO2 are only PARTIALLY absorbed by atmospheric CO2?

Statistics 101

2009-12-12T15:03:00.001-05:00

Well, maybe a little more advanced that 101. I could follow the recipe but can't do the math on my own. However, it's nice to see someone who can.

Iowahawk reconstructs proxies.

Looking at NIWA

2009-12-07T20:50:00.004-05:00

I have been repeatedly asked to weigh in on back-and-forth claims regarding NIWA, New Zealand's National Insitute of Water and Atmospheric Research. This is flattering--I've always wanted SOMEBODY to ask my opinion on something I know nothing about. But it does mean I now need to do some research. I may as well do it here where I can invite comments from people who may actually know stuff.

WHAT IS NIWA?

First of all, NIWA is into aquaculture--a subject that I'm dreaming about in my spare time. Anything I may have to say that is critical about specific programs and people should NOT be construed to think I oppose NIWA as a whole, any more than critical statements I might make about NASA should suggest that I've ever been anything but a radical NASA fan. But this post is about a current controversy, not decades of fine service to humanity.

NIWA operates the National Climate Database, which I will refer to as CliFlo, which does the following:

The climate database holds data from about 6500 climate stations which have been operating for various periods since the earliest observations were made in the year 1850. The database continues to receive data from over 600 stations that are currently operating.

CliFlo returns raw data and statistical summaries. Raw data include ten minute, hourly and daily frequencies. Statistical data include about eighty different types of monthly and annual statistics and six types of thirty−year normals.

Clearly, this is the kind of raw data that makes a big difference in determining whether our global temperature measurements are valid. I can understand why people would want to make sure that thermometers are properly placed. The questions are (a) who decides what constitutes "proper placement" and (b) how much access do skeptics have to the raw data?

Before I say ANYTHING one way or the other on this issue--I'd prefer a world in which all raw data is always available. That would allow "deniers" to manipulate the data if they want to, but it would make it easy for mainstream scientists to present their arguments rebutting such claims. It makes for a messy and noisy process, but it's consistent with our deep commitments to the scientific method.

The CliFLo data has an end user license agreement which I have read and agree with. Looks pretty straightforward. The user control panel allows for curl requests, which I've used in various PHP routines. I'll have to think about whether I really want to sign up, log in, and start playing with datasets... but it's probably a good way to come up to speed on all this.

WHY IS NIWA UNDER FIRE?

It seems that the controversy is the result of NIWA's attempt to "stitch together" surface measurements over time. The ideal results would come from a thermometer that stays in the same location under unchanged circumstances forever, but humans keep spreading out and changing things. That means that building a long-term database of surface measurements is going to require some judgment calls.

If you're confident of your climatology, you can make those adjustments pretty confidently. That enables you to create much longer-term databases, which give you more reason to trust your climatology. Which is great--as long as you're right.

One of the problems I'm most concerned about is the "Urban Heat Island" (UHI) problem, which IPCC has dismissed as a problem on the basis of a paper by Wang, who was subsequently investigated for fraud and cleared in a very questionable, private, non-standard academic proceeding. If UHI is a real problem, our surface temperature measurements could be way off. If NIWA relies on Wang's research to ignore much of the effect of urban heat, there's bound to be a clash over their probe placements.

How does NIWA address this placement question? According to this press release:

NIWA’s analysis of measured temperatures uses internationally accepted techniques, including making adjustments for changes such as movement of measurement sites. For example, in Wellington, early temperature measurements were made near sea level, but in 1928 the measurement site was moved from Thorndon (3 metres above sea level) to Kelburn (125 m above sea level). The Kelburn site is on average 0.8°C cooler than Thorndon, because of the extra height above sea level.

My guess is that these "internationally accepted techniques" for probe placement are exactly where the controversy lies. NIWA feels completely justified in doing what everybody else agrees is proper. NIWA's critics are skeptical about the underlying science of AGW, and are really challenging the "internationally accepted techniques" themselves.

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THIS MAKE?

NIWA has raw data (presumably available on the CliFlo site) that apparently yields this chart:

NIWA's "processed" data produces a different picture from the same data:

Obviously, skeptics are going to need more than a "trust me on this" when the raw data shows a flat line and the "processed" data shows global warming.

HOW DO WE RESPOND TO THIS?

I don't think I can persuade true AGW believers that the internationally accepted adjustment standards are flawed, and I'm not even going to try to persuade "deniers" to trust NIWA. How about if we look around for some other evidence to resolve this impasse?

One historical measurement that gets around the UHI problem is to use proxy measurements that let us look at pristine areas over long time periods. Sediment cores, stalagmites, and tree-rings allow us to compare apples to apples over long periods. Tree rings are NOT more accurate than direct surface measurements, but they aren't subject to the problems that concern me.

I'm looking for New Zealand paleoclimatology papers. It's going to be hard to find what I need from the free stuff online. I'm not able to get the full papers, just the abstracts--and a lot of what really matters is in the paper, not the abstract. Here's what I've found so far:

Paleoclimatic Change in the Last 1,000 Years, G.N. Park (some evidence of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, which IPCC tends to treat as a European anomaly. No unambiguous evidence to support warming in New Zealand in the last hundred years, but some evidence to support it.)

New Zealand climate over the last 500 years reconstructed from Libocedrus bidwillii Hook. f. tree-ring chronologies, Jonathan G. Palmer. (Can't see any specifics in what I can find online, but the author notes that his results are compatible with a temperature seriesderived from oxygen isotope ratios in NewZealand stalagmites.)

2009-12-07T20:37:00.002-05:00

Just when I thought the CRU folks might actually stuff the genie back in the bottle, we get this spectacularly stupid claim:

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he believed the theft of the emails was not the work of amateur climate sceptics.

“It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” he told The Times.

“If you look at that mass of emails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data but it’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random at all.

“This is 13 years of data and it’s not a job of amateurs.”

No--it wasn't the job of amateurs. There's every reason to believe the files and emails were assembled by trained professionals--on staff at the CRU, in response to a legitimate freedom of information act request.

The STUPID part of this claim is that it's so sensational that everybody who has been trying to ignore it now has to find a whole new reason to stifle the story. We're down to two irresistable memes--it's either "Deep Throat" or "Boris and Natasha." And when you make rash accusations about nuclear-armed oil-producing states who have a serious dog in the Copenhagen fight, you're making a serious PR error.

Digging into "Freedom of Information"

2009-12-07T12:33:00.006-05:00

I'm trying to figure out from internal clues whether the FOIA.zip file at the heart of "Climategate" was hacked or leaked. A close analysis of the directory structure and vestigial email headers supports the theory that the .zip file was assembled in response to a freedom of information act request.

Here's the letter rejecting Steve McIntyre's FOI request:

ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION REGULATIONS 2004 – INFORMATION REQUEST (Our ref: FOI_09-44; EIR_09-03)

Pursuant to Mr. Palmer’s letter of 21 September 2009 to you regarding the handling of your appeal of 24 July to our response of the same date in regards your FOI request of 26 June 2009, I have undertaken a review of the contents of our file and have spoken with Mr. Palmer and other relevant staff involved in this matter.

According to McIntyre's blog post on this topic, the files in the FOIA.zip file go up to the day before the FOI request was refused. This comprehensive network analysis of the emails and other documents supports the hypothesis that the files were gathered pursuant to a FOI request.

Tracking back through the Internet, I find plenty of correspondence about Steve McIntyre's FOI requests. Here's one from July 24, 2009, documenting his request and CRU's rejection. The internal naming conventions revealed in this correspondence with CRU is "FOI_09-44," which certainly fits with somebody at CRU assembling a file named "FOI-something."

An Internet search for all documents containing "FOI_99" turns up lots of correspondence with CRU, and includes direct references to the relevant law--the British "Freedom of Information Act." That suggests that the original directory structure might easily have been FOIA, meaning there is no internal evidence to suggest the FOIA.zip file came from anywhere but CRU's own official files.

The timing of the dates of emails in the directory helps track down where the file came from. Files were being added to the directory up until 2:17 pm on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009, the day before the rejection decision was made on Friday, Nov. 13, 2009. The FOIA.zip file first appeared on the Internet on Nov. 17, 2009. Given the size and nature of the FOIA.zip file, it seems likely that CRU staff were compiling the directory in response to one or more requests for information.

Somewhere during the five days between Nov. 12 and Nov. 17, somebody grabbed the file. If the contents of the directory seemed directly relevant to Steve McIntyre's FOI_99-44 request, it would seem like the file could have been grabbed at any time during those five or six days. If, on the other hand, the directory covers a lot more than just the files that would be assembled in response to FOI_99-44, then is makes more sense to assume the file was copied off on Nov. 12 or Nov. 13 by someone who was involved in either compiling the directory or in rejecting the request.

BUT--just to make things MUCH more interesting, the BBC got a copy of SOMETHING a full six weeks before the FOIA.zip file went rogue on November 17. That makes it very hard for me to think we're dealing with a hacker rather than a leaker.

Measuring the Measurements

2009-12-07T07:10:00.003-05:00

This graph is one of the reasons I'm getting more skeptical about the Global Warming claims. Look at the lines in the graph. The bottom lines clearly show what used to be known as the "Medieval Warm Period" and the "Little Ice Age." The top lines show what people call the "Hockey Stick." In the run-up to the present, all the lines converge on a sharp up-slope.

If all the data is equally good, it makes sense to average things out and get a mild roller-coaster effect. If some of the data is unreliable, it makes sense to throw it out. I'm troubled by the possibility that researchers are motivated to find new lines of evidence that "eliminate" the Medieval Warm Period, but are not equally motivated to find evidence that confirms it. I'm suspicious that journals and grant agencies may call evidence of the MWP "old news," unworthy of grants or print, while evidence against it is "hot" and deserves fast-track treatment.

Urban Heat Islands

2009-12-04T13:25:00.002-05:00

The more I look into the questionable foundations of climatology, the more nervous I get. One BIG assumption in the data for the last 60 years or so has been that "urban heat islands" are not artificially raising the measured temperatures. The urban heat island problem is pretty easy to understand: if you take the temperature of downtown Boston, you'll get a warming reading than if you take the same reading at Walden Pond (same latitude but a lot less people).

When you aggregate temperature readings from thousands of stations scattered all over the globe, you want to make sure that you are measuring the heat of the planet, not just the increased heat from islands of furnaces and air conditioners (both of which make things hotter, due to the miracle of the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

This article goes into a long email correspondence with one scientist inside the Climate Research Unit (CRU) who was clearly uncomfortable with the evidence other scientists relied on to discount the Urban Heat Island problem. You have to read all the way to the bottom to see his point, but its a good one.

Subverting Science

2009-12-04T12:20:00.002-05:00

When a big televangelist gets caught with a hooker, priests and pastors are dismayed and immediately repudiate that sin. What happens when a scientist sins against the scientific method and peer review process?

Here's a specific claim by someone who is carefully following one thread of Climategate:

the Wahl and Ammann paper as finally published online on 31 August 2007...was in fact published in 2007, is nothing like the draft seen by the Expert Reviewers, and accordingly should not be referred to in the IPCC 2007 report released in May 2007? Instead the IPCC should have reflected the published peer-reviewed literature and concluded that the 2001 IPCC hockey stick was statistically invalid.

David Holland, the author of this quote filed a freedom of information request,asking (as far as I can tell) for information relating to the publication of this paper. Two days later, UEA Director Prof Phil Jones asked Professor Michael Mann (lead author of the "hockey stick") to tell his ex student Ammann to delete these emails. According to Holland, this is what leaked email 1212063122 is about.

There's something VERY suspicious about asking anyone to ask anyone else to delete emails that have been requested under a Freedom of Information Act request. Watergate was just a "third rate burglary" that toppled a president. Climategate could turn out to be even bigger.

Is Global Warming Man-made or Mann-made?

2009-12-04T08:52:00.006-05:00

In my opinion, the "hockey stick chart" is the dominant icon of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) debate. It was produced by Michael Mann of Penn State in 2001 and relied on by a number of prominent scientists and government agencies, but was challenged and eventually abandoned.

What intrigues me about the hockey stick chart is its reliance on temperatures since 1960 and on other measurements (such as ice cores and tree rings) prior to that. The correlation between tree ring data and measured temperatures is fundamental to this model, which makes the following graph of tree rings and temperatures somewhat sensational:

Insofar as the "hockey stick" represents what people are debating when they talk about "Global Warming," I'd say it's definitely "Mann-made."

What is HADCRUT3?

2009-12-03T18:35:00.002-05:00

Hide the Decline

2009-12-02T14:56:00.003-05:00

I've been hearing this phrase a lot (it now comes with its own music video), but a picture is worth a thousand words:

This particular picture comes from a discussion of the whole "decline" issue at ClimateAudit.com. The black line is the measured width of tree rings. The red line is the reported global temperature. The "decline" begins around 1960. As you can see, it shows a big difference between what the tree rings say and the weather experts report.

I can't explain WHY there is such a difference... but it sure reduces my confidence in ancient temperature reconstructions. If we can't match global temperatures to tree rings in the last fifty years (when we were actually able to check the correlations), why should we believe anything anybody says about temperatures hundreds of years ago?

Climategate's Commenters

2009-12-01T09:29:00.003-05:00

Scanning the mainstream media articles on the East Anglia emails, I've been surprised at the makeup of the comments. They are OVERWHELMINGLY skeptical (of anthropogenic global warming), no matter how left-leaning the publication may be. Why should this be so?

My guess is that those who believe in man-made global warming have precious little to say about the Climate Research Unit (CRU) files, so they aren't even trying to defend them. The skeptics have been scorned and shunned for a LONG time, so they've got a LOT to say. The comments section of major papers has no way to "balance" a situation like this, so you wind up with a journalist reporting on a story, followed by a ton of people piling on.

It adds up to an interesting corrective to the way media works. It looks like a dissenting minority no longer needs to think in terms of "taking back" the media to get their voice heard, even when the sociological structures are overwhelmingly in favor of one position.

Humans and Science

2009-11-30T12:26:00.002-05:00

The Volokh Conspiracy is one of the best law blogs around, and this post does a beautiful job of bringing what we know about changing human behavior to bear on the global warming problem. You can talk all day long about the science of global warming, but unless you know something about the science of human action, you're never going to get result. Here's the gist:

I’m not asking about climate science here, I’m asking about collective action problems in international law and policy. How is this exercise different from previous failures? Even if new states are persuaded to say yes on paper, on what grounds does anyone think that these commitments will be fulfilled this time, particularly given the record of Kyoto? The article linked here from the AP talks about “momentum building” and “legally binding agreements.” What does that mean and how? Legally binding to prevent defection down the road, how? This is not an attempt to get snarky, but complete puzzlement on my part. How is this different from earlier attempts?

I've been vocal about pursuing supply-side fixes to the global warming question. I don't think humans have the political tools we would need to keep developing nations from using fossil fuels if that is the cheapest available source of energy. That leaves us with the option of building better mousetraps with a lower carbon footprint.

Nothing beats nuclear power for a free-market means of cutting the carbon footprint. I'm all for nukes, whether global warming is a man-made crisis, a politically-driven fraud, a statistical blip, or a solar cycle. We've got the technology to provide cheap, clean, safe electricity anywhere on earth. Let's do it!

The Intelligence of the Blogosphere

2009-11-04T08:36:00.002-05:00

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit linked to this Harvard blogger who included Instapundit in his research on the interconnectedness of blogs, as shown in this chart:

The new science of artificial "neural networks" suggests that one can model the blogosphere (or any human community) as a neural network. Each blogger has a set of regular inputs (like the dendrites on a neuron) and a single output (like the axon). "Learning" occurs as synapses form and/or break between dendrites and neurons (and/or strengthen and weaken), with the "intelligence" of the system emerging as a result of interconnected nodes.

There's no real question whether the blogosphere (and other networks of communicators, such as the traditional media) is a neural network--the more interesting question is "how intelligent is it?"

That turns out to be a remarkably easy question to explore. Politics divides the blogosphere neatly into left and right sides, and both sides of the blogosphere are constantly making predictions. Those predictions get tested every election cycle. That means researchers should be able to:

map out the general structure of the neural network on both sides,

collect pre-election predictions,

compare those to public opinion polls (as a "baseline"), and

compare the "spread" between predictions and polls to the actual results.

A neural network built around the axis of the DailyKos/DemocraticUnderground/FireDogLake blogs might prove to be more "intelligent" than the competing net that includes Drudge/Instapundit/RedState, or it might not. As a matter of pure science, I'd love to know which is better.

And, as a political junkie, I'd love to add all the "intelligence" I can find to my own side!

A Single Human Ancestor

2009-09-02T15:42:00.004-04:00

Every blue-eyed human is descended from a single ancestor who lived 6,000-10,000 years ago, says the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen. (Nobody knows blue eyes like those Scandinavians!)

This finding might be consistent with the Ryan-Pitman Black Sea Flood theory. The time frame is about the same (Ryan and Pitman claim that Mediterranean waters broke through the Bosporus and flooded the Black Sea around 5500 BC.) That's 7,500 years ago--easily within the blue-eyed time frame. A sudden diaspora of blue-eyed Black Sea farmers would explain why blue eyes are so prevalent in Europe without resorting to a "survival of the fittest" model that says that a blue-eyed babe is really that much more attractive than a brown-eyed girl.

If there were blue-eyed farmers around the Black Sea in 5500 BC, one should be able to track where they went from there, using a combination of mitochondrial DNA and the unique gene for blue eyes. Ryan and Pitman use clues like agriculture and Indo-European vocabulary to support their thesis, but these genetic markers might help to confirm or disprove their theory.

It's about time!

2009-09-02T13:01:00.002-04:00

Which environmental agency handles this one?

Anselm's Method of Metaphysics

2009-08-31T08:26:00.002-04:00

Metaphysics deals with "the questions science must ask but cannot answer." Philosophy gave up the quest for metaphysics around 1799, but modern physics took up the slack around 1905 and has only dived deeper into the unanswerables since. Those titans of science, Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr, wrestled with the fundamental nature of the universe in the 1930s by means of "thought experiments" that explored the implications of quantum physics. Einstein's motive and his method both fit with something Anselm of Canterbury laid out nine centuries earlier.

Anselm of Canterbury made two great contributions to Christian thought. In Cur Deus Homo, he explicated the "substitutionary theory of the Atonement" which is foundational to all Catholic and most Protestant teaching on the reason for Christ's death. He is more famous for his "ontological proof of the existence of God," which begins with a definition of God as "that being greater than which nothing can be imagined." It is that definition of God that makes it possible to harness the human imagination in pursuit of truths that lie beyond the bounds of science.

Note that Anselm does not define God to be "the greatest being that can be imagined." That would be blasphemy--an infinite God can never fit within a finite mind! Anselm's definition does not enable us to prove that any particular idea about God is true--but it does provide evidence that some idea about God is false. When one compares two speculative ideas about God, the less glorious one is not "that being greater than which nothing can be imagined." Using Anselm's method, that being is therefore not God.

Thus, for example, one could posit that the universe spontaneously emerged out of nothing by a fluke of physics or that it was all arbitrarily created by a flying spaghetti monster. Anselm's method would rule out the Pastafarian doctrine in favor of the more secular answer. While there may be no scientific way to prove that the universe was not created by a touch of His Noodly Appendage, this metaphysical method provides a definite (albeit non-scientific) answer.

Albert Einstein is the clearest example of a modern scientist who relied on this approach on a regular basis. Einstein's "religion" did not include a traditional belief in a conscious, personal God, but his reverence for Nature itself is well known. Every collection of Einstein quotes shows his "spiritual" emphasis. Here are just a few examples:

"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
"God is subtle but he is not malicious."
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."

Einstein routinely dismissed those interpretations of the universe that seemed less "beautiful" than others. He famously rejected the (subsequently proven) claim that quantum effects were truly random by insisting, "God does not play dice with the universe." His "biggest blunder" was when he inserted a "fudge factor" into his equations which otherwise showed that the entire universe was expanding. Einstein's aesthetic preference for a "steady-state universe" kept him from predicting the expansion of the universe before the astronomer, Edwin Hubble, reported that all other galaxies seemed to be moving away from ours.

Einstein's "blunders" highlight the weakness of this metaphysical method. "Greater" and "lesser" are subjective terms that import human value judgments into a discussion of the universe. Einstein preferred "defined" over "undefined" and "static" over "expanding," and these preferences directed his science.

Whether or not it tells us anything about the universe, this method of metaphysics should help thinkers clarify their own values. Einstein rejected the faith of his Hebrew fathers. The Torah said that God created the universe out of nothing and judged humans for their choices; Einstein believed the universe was eternal and that moral judgments were meaningless in a fully-determined universe. Einstein's metaphysics led him to make what proved to be mistakes about science, but those mistakes enable us reevaluate Einstein's values. In hindsight, Einstein got his science wrong because he had his values wrong.

In light of Anselm's definition and Einstein's example, I propose the following method of metaphysics:

Pick some fact that is more-or-less explained by the "standard model" of current science.
Generate a "speculative model" which explains this fact in some alternative manner at least as well as the standard model.
Define at least one "human value" which makes the speculative model "greater."
Make a "metaphysical claim" that the speculative model is "greater" than the standard model in terms of at least one human value.
Permit others to critique this metaphysical claim by falsifying the science or by articulating countervailing values in which the standard model is "greater."
If the speculative model can be falsified, return to step 2.
If the standard model is "greater" in some ways and the speculative model is "greater" in others, focus on what these value differences reveal about human beings.
If the speculative model is in all ways "greater" than the standard model and accounts for all the facts, focus on what this reveals about reality. Metaphysics would say, at this point, that the standard model is wrong, and would encourage science to develop new ways to falsify it.

Future Bits

2009-08-27T13:57:00.002-04:00

If you could get information from the future for $1000 per bit per day:

which bits would you buy?
how would it change society?
would the human race remain the same?

Not that I have such information for sale. (Yet.)

Biocentrism?

2009-08-25T16:38:00.003-04:00

I finally managed to be persuaded that I so completely misunderstood quantum physics that I should just drop the whole topic when this came out:

Now what? Am I required to read it before I'm allowed to drop this topic forever, or can I just assume that they are wrong, too?

What Difference Would Life in Space Make?

2009-08-18T11:44:00.004-04:00

They've now officially identified an amino acid, glycine, in the tail of Comet Wild-2. That's one small step for man, one giant leap towards figuring out where humans fall on the cosmic game of Life. It will be a while, I suppose, before we find more conclusive proof of life--or the absence of it--beyond Earth, but I'd like to ask what difference such a finding would make while there's still time to do it blind.

A lot of Christians have trouble reconciling a "jot and tittle literal" understanding of Genesis with the latest scientific evidence. One way to resolve the problem is to raise doubts about Darwin. Until we develop a time machine that can run the tape backwards, there's no way to prove God didn't create the heavens and the earth with an "apparent age" of "billions of years" even though they all came into being exactly 6,000 years (or so) ago.

Would single-celled life in outer space would shake Young Earth Creationism? I can't see why it should. The Bible says God created the heavens and the earth--it doesn't say anything about what He chose to do on other planets. Intelligent life on other planets would raise more interesting issues--but I'm persuaded by the Fermi Paradox that we won't discover intelligent life on other planets for a LONG time.

So I don't think finding single-celled life in outer space would shake a Young Earth Creationist one way or the other.

How about an ardent Darwinist? If we found life with a completely different chemical structure, the Darwinist could and should say that this disproves the Intelligent Design hypothesis. After all, if life can arise independently and repeatedly by chance, how hard can it be? The ID argument is that the statistical odds make it impossible to take "mere time and chance" seriously as an explanation for the appearance of biology.

If we found life in space with the same essential chemical structure that we find here on Earth, the Darwinist would have to do a little adjusting. Finding DNA-based life with left-handed amino acids in space would well-nigh prove that life as we know it didn't originate on Earth. I wouldn't expect that to fundamentally change the Darwinist paradigm, but I would hope some people would take back a few of the nasty things they've said about panspermia over the years. (I'm not holding my breath.)

What would really throw everybody for a loop would be finding pollen grains from flowering plants. There's a "jot and tittle literal" reading of Genesis 1 that predicts that, but it's so fantastically unlikely to be the case that I'm not even going to explain what it is. I'll just say that if we find pollen grains out past Pluto--past the heliopause, rather--then it will be time to read Genesis 1 in a whole new way.

Embarrassing Allies and Worthy Opponents

2009-08-17T14:14:00.000-04:00

Michael Ruse provides some excellent examples for Sean Carroll's "Grid of Disputation." In "Why I Think the New Atheists Are a Bloody Disaster," Ruse explains why he thinks arch-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins are doing more harm than good to the skeptic's cause.

One quote to note:

Most importantly, the new atheists are doing terrible damage to the fight to keep Creationism out of the schools. The First Amendment does not ban the teaching of bad science in publicly funded schools. It bans the teaching of religion. That is why it is crucial to argue that Creationism, including its side kick IDT, is religion and not just bad science. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If teaching "God exists" is teaching religion - and it is - then why is teaching "God does not exist" not teaching religion? Obviously it is teaching religion. But if science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment. Perhaps indeed teaching Darwinism is implicitly teaching atheism. This is the claim of the new atheists. If this is so, then we shall have to live with it and rethink our strategy about Creationism and the schools. [Emphasis supplied.]

Ruse makes good points. I'm happy to call him a "worthy adversary."

The Grid of Disputation

2009-08-16T08:55:00.000-04:00

Sean Carroll, at Cosmic Variance, has produced a lovely graphic he calls the "Grid of Disputation." (HT to Ken at Open Parachute for spotting this one.)

This box-of-four makes it easy to sort out who says what on a blog. If they agree with you AND are rational, they are "friends." If they agree with you but commit some crime against reason, they are "embarrassing allies." If they disagree with you and don't make sense, they're "crackpots." And if they disagree with you yet are sensible, they are "worthy opponents."

I love this little grid, although I don't view the "worthy opponents" category quite the way Sean does. It's the people who don't agree with me who do make sense who are most likely to teach me something I don't know.

That reminds me of one of the standard refrains from our homeschool years. When a child would make a mistake on math or some other subject, they tended to be discouraged by their error. I would always say, "This is an exciting moment! LEARNING is about to occur!" You can't learn what you already know, and you can't learn until you realize there's something you don't know already. It takes a mistake (or a disagreement) to get to the place where more knowledge can appear.

So--I think I might change Sean's grid to read "Potential teachers" where it now says "Worthy opponents."

Delighting in Disagreement

2009-08-15T16:52:00.001-04:00

If you think in terms of a hyperdimensional phase space defined by every human neuron (which I call "human cognitive space"), there's something marvelous about a disagreement.

It's like parallax, in astronomy. Most stars are so far away that we can't directly measure their distance. Some stars are close enough, though, that we can detect a tiny shift across the background sky as the Earth orbits around the sun. If we measure the exact position of a star in January and find it has slightly in July, we can triangulate and calculate how far away it is.

I visualize a disagreement as a rectangle defined by two corners. The further apart the upper left corner is from the bottom right of such a rectangle, the bigger the area. That's a good thing, in cognitive space. The area inside the rectangle is one might discover something new!

Vocabulary and Vantage Point in Genesis

2009-08-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

This blog is devoted to questions science must ask but cannot answer, but I have one little question about the Bible which is more grammatical than theological. It has to do with the perspective of the narrator in two passages in Genesis.

Genesis 1 tells about six days of creation. Genesis 7:19 tells how the waters of Noah's flood covered all the high hills and mountains under the sky. The original observer of the events in Genesis 1 could not have been a human being, since humans weren't created until day 6. The original observer in Genesis 7 could easily have been a human; either Noah or a member of his family.

By contrast, the passage from Genesis 6:9-9:29 is a story that is all about human beings. Although God speaks in this story, it is only and always to Noah. There's nothing in this text that needed to come from any other source than Noah himself except the very last sentence, which says that Noah died. For purposes of this argument, I'm going to assume that Genesis 7 is not fiction, but is instead an oral tradition passed down from Noah himself to some scribe at a much later date.

Here's the question: should we interpret these two passages as stories told by a human observer from a particular frame of reference, or as the report of an "omniscient observer" who sees all and knows all? To be specific, are the "days" in Genesis defined by the sunrise and sunset on planet Earth? And are "all the high hills and mountains under the sky" the mountains that Noah could see out to his horizon, or everything an angel could observe, including Mount Everest?

If we assume both passages were narrated by an angel, we should treat them both the same way. An angel who can see every mountain under the Earth's atmosphere may or may not use the term "day" to mean 24 hours. The "angel only" model of Genesis would lead one to predict a world-wide Flood but does not necessitate a young earth.

If we assume both passages were narrated by a human, the Genesis 1 account must be "poetic," to put it nicely. By its terms, there weren't any humans around for the first five days. That means we should look for a regional flood and take the "six days of Creation" as poetry, symbolism, or just plain fraud.

If we assume Genesis 1 originally came from a non-human source, we should look for a word-for-word correlation with what human science can detect about the origins of the universe, Earth, and life... but not within a human frame of reference.

If Genesis 7 began as an oral report by a faithful human witness, we shouldn't require Mt. Everest to be covered with water. If it was Noah telling the story, then "All the mountains under the sky" literally meant "every mountain Noah could see." It takes at least an angelic narrator to provide a reliable first-hand report of a global flood.

I don't have any problem with the text of Genesis. I do believe that people who take strong positions about the meaning of that text should be willing to explicitly state their assumptions. In this case, it seems like Young Earth Creationists who believe in a world-wide flood assume that the super-human narrator of Genesis 1 spoke from a human frame of reference, while the arguably human narrator of Genesis 7 reported things that only an angel (or better) could know.

Blogs and Brains

2009-08-14T11:22:00.000-04:00

If the notion of a "human cognitive space" (the phase space formed by every human neuron) makes any sense at all, then it should be obvious that new technologies affect it. Writing, printing, the telegraph, and the Internet have all changed history. I suspect it's because they each reshaped human cognitive space.

We're now in a phase where technological changes are reshaping that space almost daily. Facebook is so out of date. Twitter is in. Or is it? Did I miss the latest big new thing? Cognitive space used to change about the speed of continental drift. Now we're on a roller coaster.

This article calls for changes to the way blogs work to keep up with the new shared stream of consciousness. Om Malik wants to combine the speed of Twitter with the depth of blogs. I don't know whether we'll go that direction, but the fact that one can suggest such a thing reveals how much more change is possible.

What would a fully-wired human race look like?

Multiversal Utilitarianism

2009-08-13T22:41:00.000-04:00

Open Parachute skips lightly from epistemology to ethics. What fun they're having in New Zealand! There's no way I'm going to float the following on that forum... they're moving too fast to annoy them with new ideas. But the discussion reminds me of the unresolved riddle of ethics in a multiverse.

In The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch argues that life as we know it is best explained by Hugh Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Deutsch says that every possible world is real; by which he means that every real choice you face leads you down two different timelines. You hear the Gospel at a revival meeting and you feel a strange stirring. In Deutsch's model, one "you" goes up front to the altar and ends up gloriously saved, while the other rejects the invitation and goes out to a life of crime.

Deutsch's theory gets a little exotic--he not only argues that every common-sense timeline is real, but every physically-possible timeline is real. Given the weirdness of quantum mechanics, that's a LOT of timelines, including ones (according to Deutsch) where people fly around on brooms playing Quidditch. It's not the laws of physics change in such Harry Potter universes--it's just that there's a statistical possibility that every atom in the broom will go up at the same moment. Over and over. All the way through a Quidditch tournament!

That's an extreme position, but it opens up another possibility that Deutsch seems not to have thought about. Frank Tippler has a different take on quantum mechanics. In The Omega Point, Tippler argues that there is only one timeline but that it must maintain an "observer" forever, and will therefore at some point produce a super-scientific race that is able to reconstruct human minds through technology. I'm not persuaded by Tippler's reasoning, but I'm impressed by his imagination--and the super-scientific resurrection technology he describes would appear to be a whole lot easier to produce than a well-played Quidditch match. So it only seems fair to add Tippler's resurrection technology to Deutsch's multiverse.

Which brings us to the ethical issue. It would seem to me that any rational "Fabric of Reality" fan should make a utilitarian calculation designed to maximiz his personal happiness over all possible worlds. He needs to balance his short-term pleasures in this life against the knowledge that he must certainly endure an eternal conscious existence in a future resurrection. To make things more complex, it won't be just one resurrection. He must assume that Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists all have their own super-technological worlds where he will be raised to face their form of judgment.

If you only have one life to live here and now, how do you prepare yourself for a hundred different hells? Deutch doesn't. (My attempt to raise this question on the Fabric of Reality yahoo group met with the thundering silence it deserved.) But the beauty of a thought experiment is that it generates interesting new insights without ever having to shop for lab equipment.

If you knew you had to face the judgment of every possible creed and cult and endure eternal conscious torment if they didn't like the choices you make today, how would you live?

My own answer is sincere, but probably won't satisfy any readers. I'd rather follow Jesus, even if I knew that I would be tormented for it forever, than any other option. This is not just because most of the other major religions give Jesus a pass (although they do), but because I think I might be able to face an endless eternity of agony if I did it for Him.

What is Knowledge?

2009-08-13T21:24:00.000-04:00

I've been delighting in meeting new people on the other side of the world. Open Parachute and MandM are a couple of New Zealand blogs that seem to maintain a surprisingly intelligent level of discourse. Open Parachute is an atheist/non-theist site and MandM is run by a Christian couple.

There's a hot thread happening on Open Parachute right now. It started with a book review but it has turned into a discussion of the nature of knowledge. I'm not expecting that many pearls of wisdom to start flying (if they do, watch out for pigs!), but it's a pleasure to hang out with people who debate the nature of knowledge for the fun of it.

I have nothing to contribute to the debate right now, so I'm retreating to a neutral corner to think about the physical basis of human knowledge. I'm more-or-less committed to the concept that human knowledge has a physical basis. All my ideas have a physical component to them--there's a certain number of neurons in some particular state. I'm not saying that's what knowledge "is," but every idea in every human brain has a physical aspect.

I'm interested in abstracting this physical aspect of human knowledge out of its biological, neurological context. It would seem that a fully-developed-technology could replicate the entire neural network of a living human brain in a medium besides protoplasm. I've long thought that one could represent electronic neural nets as a multi-dimensional phase space. (I use the term "hyperdimensional" to refer to any phase space big enough to include a separate dimension for each of about 100,000,000,000 neurons.) Just to make things interesting, I see no reason to limit my hyperdimensional space to any single human brain. Two heads are better than one--and a phase space of 200,000,000,000 neurons makes just as much sense as a phase space for one hundred billion.

But why stop there? My real interest is in the phase space composed of every human neuron out there. The topology of that space should be filled with fascinating features. What does the word "banana" look like, when you say it to the whole human race? There are so many neurons firing all at once--neurons associated with "sweet," "yellow," "shopping cart," "colonial exploiters," "fruit flies," and a million other connotations. The whole human experience of a "banana," put all together, is different from any actual banana, just as it is different from any individual's understanding of the word--yet each individual has a real understanding of a real fruit.

I can't visualize a phase space with 600,000,000,000,000,000,000 (six hundred quintillion) dimensions, of course, so I just imagine little dots in outer space. Each time somebody interacts with a banana, I light up a little spot in space. As more and more people interact with more and more bananas (banana splits, banana peels, banana boats, etc., etc.) more dots light up. I picture these dots beginning to cluster. Eventually, there should be enough data points that one could say, "This cluster is 'banana' in human conceptual space."

"Banana" is a trivial example, of course. Nobody needs to go through this much work to talk about bananas. The concept of conceptual space gets more interesting when we move on to words like "beauty," "justice," "truth," "love," or "God." Would a hyperdimensional map of these terms produce a meaningful pattern, the way "banana" does--or would it be a chaotic smear with no distinct features?

Wood, Hay, and Stubble

2009-08-13T13:08:00.000-04:00

What if...

Jesus really rose from the dead and is really coming back to judge the Earth
And some scientific genius could prove that everything the Bible says and promises is true?

Should that person:

Use every effort to spread the good news (like the Apostle Paul) or
Seal up the vision (like the prophet Daniel)?

The parable of Lazarus suggests that scientific proof won't convert people. The rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his brothers of the coming judgment, but Abraham said, "If they won't listen to Moses and the prophets, they won't listen to one risen from the dead."

That throws a bucket of cold water on a Christian's urge to find the scientific answers to the riddles of Creation. Even if you could answer every question the skeptics raise, you wouldn't change their minds. In the meantime, you're bound to hunt down a lot of dead ends and bark up a lot of wrong trees. Why go to all that effort if it doesn't save souls and can't add to what the Bible already says? It's like teaching a pig to whistle--it doesn't work, and it annoys the pig.

My personal reasons for digging into science are not to convince others. I ask questions because I can't not. I am curiously made--and I was made curious! But being curious and imaginative doesn't make me right. My brain tells me that every new idea I come up with is 99.99% likely to be wrong (at least!). My Bible tells me all my own ideas will be burned up on the Day of Judgment, along with all the other wood, hay, and stubble.

A Kindred Spirit

2009-08-12T13:32:00.000-04:00

Frank Wilczek won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum chromodynamics. I love his take on life and science.

Evolution should not be taught in State Schools: A Defence of Plantinga Part II | MandM

2009-07-01T10:25:00.000-04:00

Evolution should not be taught in State Schools: A Defence of Plantinga Part II | MandM

One Step Closer to Multiple Futures

2009-06-29T13:40:00.000-04:00

My best example of a truly metaphysical question is, "How many futures are there?" The logical possibilities are "0," "1," "several," or "all." I'm undecided between "1" and "several." Some very smart people have just built a gadget that may help me decide between those two answers:

Researchers at Yale have succeeded in producing the first working solid-state quantum processor.

Quantum computers have the potential to do things conventional computers just can't do. The best current application for quantum computing would be cryptography--a lot of modern codes and ciphers rely on "keys" that can't be cracked without computers bigger than the solar system that would require more power than the sun puts out in a year. (We're talking about some serious computational requirements!) A working quantum computer could crack those codes in an instant. That's because they use an infinite number of timelines to produce measurable results in the here and now.

Each "qbit" in a quantum computer supposedly exists in all possible quantum states at the same time, as if all that little box contains "all the possible worlds" for the qbits inside it. That makes a quantum computer the ultimate "parallel processor."

If humans can ever get quantum computers to work, it may lead to a new view of our entire universe. The new physics of the 17th century paved the way for the Deistic concept of a "clockwork universe" where God created the world, wound it up, and walked off. The new biology of the 19th century enabled people to believe in an evolutionary universe where enough time and chance "just happened" to produce intelligent life.

If quantum computing works, the new information science of the 21st century could lead to a view of the whole universe as a quantum computer programmed to produce its own "observer." Some people will see that as a vindication of the "intelligent design" hypothesis. Others will say it proves "intelligent design" false. (The fact that people will predictably argue both sides makes me question whether the universe has produced any actual "intelligence" yet!)

Imagination Stretcher

2009-04-13T17:54:00.000-04:00

I hate to think of myself as narrow-minded and parochial, but every so often I run across something that makes me realize I don't get out enough. Here's an example...

21% of Atheists Believe in God

2009-04-08T10:12:00.000-04:00

Or so they tell pollsters. Tip of the hat to HotAir.com.

And I thought Christians were mixed up!

Newton's Metaphysics

2009-03-26T07:32:00.000-04:00

Many students of science know that Isaac Newton wrote more about the interpretation of biblical prophecy than he did about physics. This quote comes from the third chapter of the second part of his "Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John":

'Tis therefore a part of this Prophecy, that it should not be understood before the last age of the world; and therefore it makes for the credit of the Prophecy, that it is not yet understood. But if the last age, the age of opening these things, be now approaching, as by the great successes of late Interpreters it seems to be, we have more encouragement than ever to look into these things. If the general preaching of the Gospel be approaching, it is to us and our posterity that those words mainly belong:

In the time of the end the wise shall understand, but none of the wicked shall understand. (Dan. 12:4, 10)

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this Prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein. (Rev. 1:3)

The folly of Interpreters has been, to foretel times and things by this Prophecy, as if God designed to make them Prophets. By this rashness they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the Prophecy also into contempt.

The design of God was much otherwise. He gave this and the Prophecies of the Old Testament, not to gratify men's curiosities by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own Providence, not the Interpreters, be then manifested thereby to the world. For the event of things predicted many ages before, will then be a convincing argument that the world is governed by providence....

There is already so much of the Prophecy fulfilled, that as many as will take pains in this study, may see sufficient instances of God's providence: but then the signal revolutions predicted by all the holy Prophets, will at once both turn mens eyes upon considering the predictions, and plainly interpret them. Till then we must content ourselves with interpreting what hath been already fulfilled.

Newton had a clear concept of the purpose of prophecy. He had what Thomas Kuhn would call a "paradigm" that motivated and directed his efforts.

Prediction, Power, and Proof

2009-03-12T07:42:00.000-04:00

Isaiah 48:3-5 says:

The former things I declared of old;
they went out from my mouth and I announced them;
then suddenly I did them and they came to pass.
Because I know that you are obstinate,
and your neck is an iron sinew
and your forehead brass,
I declared them to you from of old,
before they came to pass I announced them to you,
lest you should say, "My idol did them,
my carved image and my metal image commanded them."

The heart of the scientific method consists of forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, doing an experiment, and seeing whether the prediction is fulfilled--or not. Without fulfilled prediction, science has no proofs.

As Isaiah shows, this doesn't just apply to science. He insists that God's power is revealed through predictive prophecy. This isn't just an Old Testament thing. The Apostle Paul relied upon the power of God to prove his message. In I Cor. 2:3-5 he said:

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

Paul and Isaiah (and the rest of the prophets and apostles) commanded their hearers to respond with faith, but not with blind faith. Time after time, the Bible stories show an individual who (1) believes in a God of power and then (2) takes a risk based on that faith. When that risk is visibly rewarded, others see and (often) believe. Ideally, their belief results in them stepping out in faith, too, leading to more result--and more believers.

One particularly dramatic example of this cycle was when Peter got out of the boat and walked across the water towards Jesus. Matthew 14:27-33 tells the story, beginning with a boat full of weary disciples in the middle of a stormy lake late at night. Something unusual approached them across the surface of the water, and they panicked.

Jesus spoke to them, saying, “Take heart; it is I.

And Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”

He said, “Come.”

So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, “Lord, save me.”

Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

There's a lot to be said for this cycle of "risky faith rewarded." Although it has a tendency to make the believer look and feel like an idiot, it's safer, in its way, than playing it safe. If there really is a God who answers prayers and fulfills prophecies, why not act like it? And if there isn't such a God, why say there is? Wouldn't it be better to get out of your boat, sink, flounder back to safety, and then go back to fishing? Peter spent the rest of his life talking about his crucified Lord and died, crucified himself, for all his pains. That makes perfect sense for a man who walked on water--but it's not a wise career path unless you've met the Living God.

On a broader scale, this cycle has the potential to slowly fill the earth up with believers if there really is a God of power. And if there isn't such a God, the Darwinian consequences of taking major risks should soon wipe out these faith-filled fools.

If you love Truth and believe in God, get out of your boat and try walking on water!

Faith and Dogma

2009-03-11T09:16:00.000-04:00

Faith in the most generic sense means "trusting in something outside yourself." That kind of faith is part of what makes humans different from animals--we can learn from others' mistakes instead of repeating them for ourselves. When we trust what others say, we can stand on the shoulders of their experience--dwarves on the shoulders of giants.

That's one kind of faith, but the New Testament uses the word in a more specific sense. The "faith" that Jesus talks about involves much more than merely trusting other people. Consider Mark 11:

As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.”

And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”

This kind of faith is hard to argue with. The Protestants who say they're saved by faith would impress their Catholic brethren more if they tossed a few mountains into the sea while they were at it. The secular materialist who scoffs at "faith" would scoff a little less if fig trees shriveled up around him.

The problem is, this kind of faith is rare, even though Jesus commands and demands it. The various branches of Christianity think they're going to Heaven because they believe the right doctrines, and the other branches are going to Hell because they believe the wrong ones. New Testament "faith" means more than merely mental assent to human propositions.

I'm not Catholic, but I'm not so sure that all the Protestants who confidently claim to be "saved by faith" are standing on solid ground. According to Christian theology, the redemption of a sinful soul is the greatest miracle imaginable. It only took God's word to make the heavens and the earth. It took the death of His own Son to save a sinner.

If your faith doesn't shrivel fig trees, what makes you think you're going to Heaven?

What Is Faith?

2009-03-10T08:03:00.000-04:00

Fred at La Nouvelle Theologie asks, "What is faith?"

That's one of the really big questions--much bigger than any answer I can give. But it's one of the questions that needs to be asked, and ought to be answered, so here are some pieces of the puzzle.

Faith consists of belief without proof. Hebrews 11:1-2 calls faith "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." That doesn't mean that the content of faith must be absurd, paradoxical, or unreasonable. It doesn't even mean that it can't be proved. Most of your neighbors believe the earth is round and circles the sun, not because they have worked out the proof for themselves, but because they have been told this by every credible source. It is faith, not reason, that makes them believe.
Faith is essential to scientific progress. Learning by trial and error or direct experimentation is possible and valuable, but it's very slow. Western civilization has advanced as far as it has, not by the radical skepticism of Descartes or the nihilism of Nietzsche, but by "dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants," as Isaac Newton put it. Life is too short and the universe is too big for any one person to work out any scientific discipline from first principles and then move on to make new contributions.
Faith is essential to biblical Christianity. Hebrews 11:6 says, "Without faith it is impossible to please [God], for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek Him." Mysticism and some variations of liberal theology may be able to cultivate a religion based on immediate intuition and/or emotion without any faith in any propositional statements about God, but the religion taught and practiced in the Bible demands belief in what God and His messengers have said.

Faith is not opposed to reason, but it is the opposite the kind of skepticism that has to figure out everything for itself.

Myth, Magic, or Medicine?

2009-03-07T07:19:00.001-05:00

Methodological naturalists don't wonder about miracles. They write off anything that looks like fulfilled prophecy or answered prayer as "coincidence." They dismiss anything that seems to be a miracle as fraud or myth. That's makes it easy to maintain their precommitments to a merely material world, but it's their metaphysics, not good science, that explains such behavior.

What happens when a methodological naturalist encounters some data point that doesn't fit his preconceptions? The objective scientist of our cultural ideal would stop, look, and listen. He (or she) would furrow his (or her) studious brow, roll up the immaculate sleeves of his (or her) venerable lab coat, and subject his (or her) previously held theories to revision in light of new evidence. But, as Thomas Kuhn explained in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that's hardly ever what happens.

Consider how "science" deals with just one uncooperative example. Isaiah 38:1-6 says:

In those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came to him, and said to him, “Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you shall die, you shall not recover.” Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord and said, “Please, O Lord, remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly. Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah: "Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the Lord, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will add fifteen years to your life. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria, and will defend this city.

The methodological naturalist deftly deals with this report by just saying, "It never happened." Denial tends to be our first line of defense. This doesn't prove methodological naturalism to be wrong, but it ought to raise an eyebrow.

Methodological naturalists generally dismiss the Bible stories as naive credulity. The problem with that approach is that these tales weren't told by idiots. The prophet Isaiah was a Hebrew noble who wrote one of antiquity's loftiest works. The story is rich in specific details that make it sound more like history and less like myth. Isaiah took a cake of figs and applied it to the boil that was killing the king, which seems to have made a difference. Hezekiah did get well, and he lived for fifteen years.

The next defense is "mere coincidence." So what if Hezekiah lived, the naturalist asks. For every good guess there are a million failures that fall on their face. In this model, Isaiah just got lucky.

That's hard to square with the rest of the story. Hezekiah was no fool. He wanted proof of Isaiah's prophecy, and he got it. Hezekiah asked for a sign that he would get well, and the sun's shadow went backwards ten steps.

That leaves two more avenues of escape for the pre-committed naturalist. Either the whole story was a myth, or Isaiah was a fraud. There are problems with both answers. A moving shadow is not what you'd expect from a myth--in a made-up story, a great dragon would appear in the sky, or God might speak out loud. A shadow seems too mundane for any myth.

The moving shadow would make sense if Isaiah was a fraud--it's the kind of hoax an illusionist might contrive with mirrors. But nothing in the rest of Isaiah's record suggests he was anything like that kind of "court magician." Nothing in the story itself demands such proof--when Hezekiah asked for proof that he would get well, Isaiah could have just as easily told him to "wait and see."

Is this the best that naturalism can do? Not even remotely! It is possible to take Isaiah seriously without giving up on science. A "naturalistic" explanation fits the facts as well as any other. An experienced doctor might argue that the poultice of figs and the moving shadow were both essential means to the same cure. Hezekiah had a "boil" which wasn't getting better. The Hebrew term isn't specific enough to know what that meant, but any infection was a serious problem before the discovery of antibiotics. To make things worse, he had turned his face to the wall and wept bitterly--that's a biblical term for what we might call "terminal depression."

Isaiah directly addressed the physical and the psychological aspects of Hezekiah's condition. The fig plaster had some effect on the infection in the boil--perhaps enough to give Hezekiah a fighting chance at life. But that doesn't do much good unless the patient is willing to fight. Isaiah's promise (plus the shadow on the steps) could have helped Hezekiah find the faith he needed to struggle back from the brink.

What does this tell us about the shadow on the steps? Nothing--except that we don't have to dismiss it as myth, discount it as a hoax, or reverse the rotation of the planet. The Bible says the shadow went backwards on the steps and Hezekiah got better. This passage in Isaiah would be good history and sound theology with or without a "scientific explanation." Maybe both things happened by the unmediated intervention of God. Maybe both had natural explanations--the osmotic pressure of a sugary paste, an unusual formation of the clouds. The story shows God's glory either way.

Which brings me to my point: the believing Christian can accomodate science more easily than the methodological naturalist can accommodate history. Twenty-first century Christians can't evade the laws of physics, so they must adjust their paradigm or isolate themselves from the broader culture. Modern materialists, by contrast, ignore any evidence they don't like. In the short run, that gives materialism an edge--but truth outperforms popularity in the long run. Any future metaphysics that deserves the name of science will take all the available evidence seriously, not just the part that fits our preconceptions.

Methodological Naturalism

2009-03-07T07:07:00.000-05:00

Alvin Platinga is both a respected living philosopher and a committed Christian. I'll use his definition of methodological naturalism:

The philosophical doctrine of methodological naturalism holds that, for any study of the world to qualify as "scientific," it cannot refer to God's creative activity (or any sort of divine activity). The methods of science, it is claimed, "give us no purchase" on theological propositions--even if the latter are true--and theology therefore cannot influence scientific explanation or theory justification. Thus, science is said to be religiously neutral, if only because science and religion are, by their very natures, epistemically distinct.

Methodological naturalism is the most consistent example of a modern metaphysics. Immanuel Kant ended pre-modern metaphysics with his Critique of Pure Reason. (In case you missed the joke, the title of this blog comes from his work, A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science.) Kant essentially divided reality into two parts--the "phenomenal" aspect of things, which can be seen and touched and measured, and the "noumenal" aspect, involving the "thing in itself" rather than its observable categories. Since Kant, modernism has ignored the noumenal and devoted itself exclusively to the phenomenal world.

The methodological naturalists treat "God" as a non-concept, an "ERROR" that corrupts every function that references that cell in their secular spreadsheet. Any future metaphysics will have to do better that if it claims the legacy of Kant. Kant treated "God" and "free will" as fundamental albeit unproveable principles that were essential to his version of "practical reason."

The Physics of Choice

2009-02-25T08:25:00.000-05:00

As quantum mechanics has become more refined, the physicists are increasingly clear--and increasingly divided--about the ultimate physics behind human choice. There are three dramatically different ways of understanding what happens when we "choose." It all depends whether we live in a:

"block universe,"
"random universe," or
"multiverse."

In a "block universe," a single timeline proceeds inexorably into the future, predetermined by precise laws. In such a universe, "choice" is a psychological state, not a physical event. We feel like we are "choosing" when we set a date or pick a mate, but all our acts are predetermined by matter in motion. Einstein was the last great champion of this view, which came under fire as quantum physics revealed the limits of classical mechanics. Heisenberg and others showed that there was a degree of uncertainty in all our measurements. Einstein did not argue with the limits of our ability to measure, but hoped that the seemingly random events of quantum physics were really determined at some deeper level by "hidden variables" that we cannot measure. Subsequent experiments tend to show Einstein wrong. Bell's Theorem holds that quantum events really aren't determined by any constraints we can identify or imagine, and that theorem has been supported by sophisticated tests. So the block universe as Einstein imagined it is largely out of favor.

In a "random universe," quantum events "determine" what happens at each "observation." There is only one timeline, but it twists and turns its way through the fourth dimension for no identifiable reason. Humans are not bound by the iron laws of physics to do whatever their molecules make them do. In this model, a human brain might be such a sensitive device that events on the quantum scale make the difference between decisions. When Julius Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon to attack Rome, he cried, "The die is cast!" Perhaps he should have said, "The quantum has fluctuated!"

In a multiverse, there isn't just one timeline. Every possible "branch" in time actually happens. David Deutsch articulated this position in The Fabric of Reality. If an event falls within the range of quantum possibilities, Deutsch argues, then it really happens--and he has a broad view of the range of quantum possibilities. It is possible for every atom in your body to move up at the same time--so you could levititate, despite the laws of gravity. In Deutsch's model, that means there are timelines where you do levitate. In fact, there are timelines where you levitate for hours on end--or levitate in groups--or levitate in groups on brooms chasing the snitch in a quiddich match.

Choice in a multiverse is real--every branch of the timeline is a true choice. But a multiverse disturbs our sense of self--if every choice I make results in two timelines, which is the "real me"? Is it the one typing this article, or the one who is playing quiddich?

The Metaphysics of Prophecy

2009-02-22T08:32:00.000-05:00

"Prophecy" is a metaphysically rich concept. Predictive prophecy flies in the face of classical physics, with majojr implications for the fundamental philosophical categories of freedom, causation, and the nature of knowledge.

There's a vast range of New Age and other postmodern discussion of prophecy, but I'm not aware of any objective discussion of the metaphysics that would make prophecy meaningful. It seems more like a visceral rejection of modern materialism in favor of a world more rich in meaning. You can just about sum up the intellectual underpinnings of all this in a bumper sticker: "Magic Happens."

The postmodernists are reacting to old-fashioned modernism, best represented by the methodological naturalists who believe that prophecy is a hoax. Fulfilled prophecies rarely persuade a true materialist--no matter how precise the prediction, they are precommitted to rule it a coincidence or "con." To the modern mind, "prophecy" is either intentionally false or worse than false--mere nonsense. For the truly secular thinker, prophecy is Macbeth's "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Theological liberals are "modernists" who aren't as committed to pure materialism as the methodolical naturalists, but liberal metaphysics also rules out any predictive power to prophecy. They view biblical prophecy exclusively as "forthtelling," not "foretelling"--revealing the character of God, not the future. Prophecy is God talking about Himself, not about the world.

Christians who still believe the Bible have more material to work with in thinking about prophecy. I haven't researched the theology of prophecy from an Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic perspective, so I will limit my comments to Protestantism.

There isn't a single Arminian view of prophecy. Wayne Grudem, a respected Reformed theologian, notes three different Arminian positions on prophecy:

God does not know the future
God knows the future but does not cause it
God knows all possible futures and knows people so well he knows what they will choose

The first of these three positions has now become the starting point of "Open Theism," which holds that God knows all things, but does not know the future because the "future" does not exist. This is a refreshingly clear metaphysical position, which flies in the face of most of the old theology and most of the new physics.

The second Arminian position makes prophecy nothing more than a preview of coming attractions. I call it the "periscope model" of prophecy. The eternal God looks ahead at what is coming and reports back to an earlier time about events in their future. In this model, prophecy reveals God's omniscience but not His omnipotence--He sees the future but does not cause it. That means that prophecy should be "graded" on its truth value--the more precise the report, the greater the glory to the One who reported it. Unsurprisingly, most dispensationalists operate within this model, devoting their energies to explaining how the Old Testament prophecies to Israel will be literally fulfilled after the end of the Church Age.

The third Arminian position brings an entire set of possible futures into focus, enriching our discussion of fate and freedom. In this model, prophecy reveals God's wisdom as well as His knowledge--the One who counted every hair upon our heads knows our hearts so well that He knows our free choices before we make them. This understanding of prophecy enables us to make sense of prophetic warnings that never come true, like Jonah's message to Ninevah. God isn't just a journalist reporting what is coming in the future; He is an actor in the drama Who shapes what is to come.

Calvinists don't tend to worry about the metaphysics of prophecy. God is absolutely sovereign over past, present, and future. He is neither a reporter nor an actor--He is the author of the story we are in. Prophecy has an esthetic dimension--it "foreshadows" what is coming, adding interest to the plot.

Of Dreams and Time

2009-02-17T07:57:00.000-05:00

The Bible tells of Joseph the dreamer, whose brothers envied him and kidnapped him and sold him into slavery. The story goes on to tell of Pharaoh the dreamer, who saw seven fat cows and seven skinny cows and put all Egypt under Joseph's rule. Joseph reveals the metaphysics behind it all in Genesis 45:5-8.

I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.... God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.

This tale doesn't fit the modern worldview. The "experts" agree that we live in a universe of time and space and matter and energy, governed by natural laws that leave no place for dreams or deities. The consensus is that God is dead and chance is king and dreams are just coincidence.

This means that science doesn't just conflict with the first few chapter of Genesis--modern materialism contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture from start to finish. It may be easier to pick a fight over whether the world was made in "six twenty-four hour days" or not, but the real question to be resolved is whether God acts within time and space. If He does, then something in our physics is either false or incomplete. If He doesn't, then the whole Bible is in error, not just a few verses here and there.

The biggest hole in modern physics has to do with time. Mainstream physics says there is just one timeline, and it is guided just by chance. Picture a single, kinky thread writhing through fifteen billion light-years of empty immensity--then have it accidentally wind up on the one small bit of all this void that isn't empty, and you've got the best that modern science has to offer to explain how we got here.

David Deutsch is a secular physicist, but not in the mainstream. His picture of the universe makes more sense to me--he fills the void with timelines until there isn't any emptiness left. If there is some small statistical chance that particles could come together into self-replicating structures, Deutsch's multiverse will find it. If every possible world exists, then this one does--and so does Harry Potter's. But that goes way too far for mainstream physics.

John Wheeler offered a different option. The man who coined the term "black hole" believed the future could cause the past. (That sounds bizarre to the ordinary layman, but so does the rest of quantum physics.) Wheeler's participatory anthropic principle sketched out a way for future minds to create their own past. In Wheeler's model, there is only one thread through fifteen billion light years of time and space, but it isn't "kinky." It marks the shortest possible path from pure possibility to actual intelligence.

The story of Joseph doesn't make sense in two of these three models (one "kinky" timeline, all possible timelines, or one "guided" timeline). In the mainstream model, dreams don't come true. The stories in Genesis are just that--stories, myths made up by later generations around some campfire. In Deutsch's multiverse, the story may be true but it doesn't mean anything. Sure, Pharaoh dreamed of seven fat cows and seven skinny cows--in this timeline. But he dreamed of six fat cows and thirteen tadpoles in another. If everything happens, nothing matters.

In a world where the future causes the past, however, dreams fit nicely into physics. The dreams are essential to the outcome. If the outcome comes first, the dreams help make it happen. The most astonishing coincidences aren't coincidences at all in a "participatory" universe.

All the Myriad Ways

2009-02-15T09:36:00.000-05:00

David Deutsch has written a book called The Fabric of Reality which constructs a unified theory of reality out of quantum physics, evolution, epistemology, and information theory. He picks up Hugh Everett's theory of a multiverse and runs with it. I'm impressed by his breadth of vision and the scope of his imagination, even though I disagree with his final outcome.

Metaphysics asks, "how many futures are there?" Deutsch offers a daring answer--all possible futures exist.

Deutsch's multiverse model has some attractive features. It provides a satisfying solution to the questions raised by the Intelligent Design movement. Intelligent Design argues that biological systems contain features that cannot be explained on the basis of mere time and chance. Deutsch provides infinitely more time and chance for evolution to play with--in his theory, the world we live in one of an uncountable infinity of parallel worlds. Not only does our improbable world exist, there are even greater improbabilities--worlds where monkeys type the text of Shakespeare. If it is physically possible, Deutsch says it exists.

Deutsch defines "physically possible" as "permitted by quantum physics," which means that all possible worlds exist. He envisions people playing quidditch in Harry Potter universes, where all the laws of physics still apply, but an endless string of improbabilities permits people to fly on brooms.

Deutsch is consistent about the implications of his theory--which tends to defeat his purpose. A Harry Potter universe just seems unthinkable. I'm not dismayed by the counter-intuitive nature of the concept, but there's more about Deutsch's model that makes it incompatible with humanity, whether or not it is scientifically sound.

The most profound counter to Deutsch is Larry Niven's classic short story, "All the Myriad Ways." As BookThink explains:

Larry Niven's story "All the Myriad Ways" features police detective Gene Trimble sitting at his desk and considering the implications of an escalating wave of senseless crimes and suicides that started soon after the Crosstime ships started traveling to alternate parallel worlds. The story ends with Trimble sitting at his desk and considering the business end of his service revolver. As written, the story has ten different, parallel endings, representative of the essentially infinite number of endings possible under the Everett Interpretation.

One of those endings, of course, is that Trimble pulls the trigger and kills himself--becoming just one more of the senseless suicides that started his investigation.

As physics goes, Deutsch's theory is mostly unobjectionable. Yet I don't see it catching on with the general public. It answers the question of "how we got here" but it tells us nothing (or way too much!) about where we are going.

If the general public believed what Deutsch says, I would predict a wave of senseless crimes and suicides--except among the "old-fashioned" religious believers who still clung to some outdated sense that there is a Higher Power who will hold them to account for their actions.

Deutsch's theory of multiversal quantum Darwinism, if it ever became widely accepted, could tempt so many people to kill themselves that the only people left to continue civilization would be fundamentalists who still believe in a God who punishes suicide.

The Problem with Time

2009-02-14T08:59:00.001-05:00

Many people have a problem with time--they don't think they have enough of it. That's odd, because time is the one commodity that is truly distributed equally: everybody gets exactly 60 seconds every minute. We don't all get the same number of years on earth, but if the Bible tells the truth, that hardly matters--everybody gets the same amount of time after the resurrection. (See John 5:28-29.)

There's more to time than too little of it. Time may be the most mysterious thing we experience directly. Scientists and theologians wrangle over questions that can't be fully solved without a better understanding of time.

Here are two trick questions about time:

Can the future cause the past? Laboratory experiments say yes.
Does "time out of mind" exist? The arrow of time says "not as we know it."

Here's a question that's still wide open: How many futures are there? Scientists disagree whether the correct answer is "1" or "all." Theologians are split between "0" and "1."

The scientists are split because classical and relativistic physics leave no room for what the rest of us think of as "free will." Einstein believed that every moment in time was fixed from the beginning--he envisioned all of space-time as a "block" that was cast in concrete by the laws of physics. Quantum physicists are divided between the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the "multiverse model," which says that every possible future is real, no matter how unlikely. So Albert Einstein would say there is one future, while Hugh Everett would say there are not merely an infinite number of futures, but that all possible futures exist.

Theologians haven't caught up to the new nuances in fundamental physics, but they have been debating what is really a question about the nature of the future since at least 1610. Calvinists and Arminians have been debating predestination and free will since then, while the Catholic debates go back even further.

The most current controversy over time is driven by the Open Theology movement, which has finally revealed that the free will debate is ultimately a question about the nature of time. Open theists say that God is omniscient, but He doesn't know the future--because there is no "future" to "know." (This puts them at odds with orthodox Arminians, who say God knows the future but doesn't cause it.)

I don't know of any scientist or theologian who thinks there might be more than one future but less than all possible futures--but it makes for some fascinating speculation. More on that later!

What Is Time?

2009-02-13T08:08:00.000-05:00

Kevin at After Existentialism, Light wants to celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday by buying this book for every Young Earth Creationist. I looked up some reviews on Amazon and was pleased with what I read:

Young's treatment of origins from a geological point of view is fully cognizant of the theological and doctrinal issues with which Evangelicals struggle and the need to bring science and Scripture into vibrant conversation. And as I said before, the tone is pastoral: the authors have no interest in winning a rhetorical battle. Rather, their wish is to provide a thorough assessment of the available evidence, evaluate young-Earth creationism, and encourage those who hold an Evangelical faith with a paradigm for holding the two worlds together.

I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on its content. But I can zero in on the word "paradigm" at the end of that quote--for that is a word that means a lot more than people seem to think.

Thomas Kuhn turned "paradigm" into a buzzword when he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. Here's Wikipedia's current entry on "paradigm shift":

A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error, or simply ignored and not dealt with (a principal argument Kuhn uses to reject Karl Popper's model of falsifiability as the key force involved in scientific change). Rather, according to Kuhn, anomalies have various levels of significance to the practitioners of science at the time....
When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis, according to Kuhn. During this crisis, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, are tried. Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gains its own new followers, and an intellectual "battle" takes place between the followers of the new paradigm and the hold-outs of the old paradigm.

Kuhn says that scientists have to have a paradigm to be scientists. In general, when a scientist discovers so many anomalies to his existing paradigm that he can't sleep with himself any longer, he doesn't just throw out his old paradigm to go look for a new one. A scientist without a paradigm isn't a scientist--he's just as likely to burn his lab coat and open a bicycle shop.

With all due respect for Young and Stearley, I don't expect God, Rocks, and Time to end the war. The battle between "fundamentalism" and "modernism" has been raging for more than a century, and even though it's Darwin's 200th birthday, there's no evidence that modernism is winning the war. To the secular mind, this just proves how blind and wicked fundamentalists are. They simply won't accept the evidence! To the fundamental mind, this just proves how blind and wicked secularists are. They simply won't believe God!

If there is a God, then He is the God of the evidence. That means that a believer cannot ignore the evidence forever. But if that God has revealed Himself to us in the Bible, then we can't ignore that evidence, either. Each approach has too many anomalies to satisfy a believer.

Which brings me back to the title of Young and Stearley's book, The Bible, Rocks, and Time. Modernists are willing to question the Bible; young earth creationists are willing to question the rocks. I'd like to suggest a third option--why not take a fresh look at time?

Singularity Alert

2009-02-03T10:17:00.000-05:00

Singularity University?

The Metaphysics of Scripture

2009-02-02T08:03:00.000-05:00

There seem to be countless ways of reconciling Scripture to the world we see around us. Just this morning I've skimmed articles on Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology (which differ as to whether Old Testament prophecies of Israel tell the future of Jews or Christians) and on Noah's Flood (was it a real, world-wide event or just God's "accommodation" of ancient Near Eastern myths?).

In the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was all the rage to limit Scripture to "religious" truth and leave the "real world" to science. In the 1800s, Schleiermacher handed "truth" over to science but gave religion the whole realm of "feeling." In the 1900s, the logical positivists argued that Nature gave us "facts," while Scripture gave us "values."

It is tempting to limit Scripture to the realm of "faith and practice," but that retreat is not strategic: with one google search I could click to the fierce egalitarian/complementarian or sexual orientation debates. Where now is the practice of monogamous marriage for life? Where now is the faith in the God who created one man and one woman and joined them in a type of Christ's union with His Bride? It seems like "faith" and "practice" and "values" are just as vulnerable to erosion as the age of the Earth or the extent of Noah's Flood.

I suspect that each of us places Scripture within some metaphysical framework (whether we recognize it or not, and that out metaphysics of Scripture drives our interpretation of it.

Said, Was, Saw

2009-01-31T08:10:00.000-05:00

God said:

"Let there be light,"
and there was light.
And God saw that the light was good.

In Genesis 1, God created the world by speaking. John 1 draws attention to the role of the Word in creation:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

The word and the world star in Creation, but there's another element in the story--"and God saw that the light was good."

God is omniscient--what does it mean for Him to "see"? Is this just an anthropomorphism? Is it just another way to say, "The light was good"? Or is God's seeing just as real as His saying?

I know just enough about quantum physics to get myself in trouble, but a passage like just begs for a quantum explanation. The scientists say that natural law and physical matter, by themselves, don't produce what we see around us. It takes an observation to collapse the wavefunction of the universe into any particular actuality.

In a quantum universe, God's seeing could be as just as real and effectual as His saying.

Rationalism, Empiricism, Subjectivism

2009-01-29T07:11:00.000-05:00

John M. Frame suggested a new framework for knowing what knowledge is in 1982. (This philosophical sub-discipline is called "epistemology.") He begins by listing three general types of epistemology throughout the history of philosophy:

The first tendency is rationalism or a_ priorism, which I shall define as the view that human knowledge presupposes certain principles known independently of sense-experience, principles by which, indeed, our knowledge of sense-experience is governed. The second tendency is empiricism, the view that human knowledge is based upon the data of sense-experience. Thirdly, there is subjectivism, the view that there is no "objective" truth, but only truth "for" the knowing subject, verified by criteria internal to the subject.

I tend towards empiricism, myself, with a healthy respect for rationalism, but I have long despised "subjectivism." Frame's description of subjectivism convicts me of intellectual snobbery:

Then comes the third member of the triad, human nature, which correlates with philosophical "subjectivity." Self-knowledge has always been philosophically difficult. As Hume and Wittgenstein especially have pointed out, the self is not one of the things we see as we look on the world. Yet it is through ourselves that we come to know everything else. All we know, we know through our own senses, reason, feelings, through what we are. And it is thus in knowing other things that we come to know the self. The self seems to be everywhere and nowhere. We know it, but only as we know other things.

Frame does not take two opposing principles and merge them into one synthesis, as Hegel would do with his dialectic. He affirms three different perspectives as co-equal--like the three dimensions of physical space.

My approach to knowledge, up until now, seems two-dimensional at best? Has my epistemology been just a cardboard cut-out with no subjective depth to it?

The Observer

2009-01-28T07:35:00.000-05:00

Perspectivalism has me looking for thirds to every old dichotomy. There is a perceiving subject for every fact/value distinction, and a moral actor who decides between deontology and teleology. Frame and Poythress articulate this triad as "subject, object, norm."

Who is this "subject"? Does the "subject" really make any difference to what we know and do? Is the "subject" important enough to sit side-by-side with physical reality and natural law?

Rene Descartes brought the "subject" into the center of this philosophy when he said, "I think, therefore I am." The observing self provided the first fact for Reason (the norm), which used it to deduce Reality (the object).

Descartes left the "subject" behind once he got his feet on the familiar ground of philosophy, but his younger contemporary Blaise Pascal had more interest in the "subject." Pascal, who said, "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing," is often claimed as a forefather of existentialism.

I'm not ready to write about existentialism yet--although I delight in the great "Christian existentialists" (Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky), I could never force myself to take existentialism itself seriously before Frame and Poythress showed me how. So let me jump to something that I actually believe in--quantum physics.

In the weird world of quantum physics, what we think of as "reality" is arguably less real than the observing self. Twenty-first century scientists believe the laws of physics govern time, space, matter, and energy, but this does not result in a single predictable world. Instead, physical realisty and natural law produce a "wavefunction of the universe" which includes all possible worlds. The "actual world" that you and I observe is a collapsed subset of that wavefunction. Most quantum physicists say the act of observation causes the wavefunction of possibility to collapse into any one actuality.

Who is this Observer? Does the subject matter? And should I master existentialism or quantum physics to find out?

I feel like Odysseus, sailing between Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the other.

But if Truth lies on the other side, I must sail on...

Law and Logos

2009-01-27T07:25:00.000-05:00

Perpectivalism opens up new ways of seeing everything. The fact/value distinction that used to irritate me now invites me to see more than I did before. As I meditate on the "is" and "ought" of things, the Word looms larger in my mind. (By "Word," I mean the "ought" of things, the Logos, the norm, the law.)

Imagine our universe without the Logos--take the laws of physics away from space, time, matter, and energy. The result is a blind, biblical Chaos, "without form and void." Chaos is not nothing--that is a pure and perfect zero, the elegance of an empty set. Chaos is indescribably different from nothing--but there are no words for a world without the Word.

But then, as any biblical inerrantist or physics geek knows:

Is, Ought, Am

2009-01-26T07:10:00.000-05:00

I went to worship yesterday morning pondering three perspectives. It was a mind-expanding experience! The hymns and sermon exploded with "is" and "ought" and "am." My brain raced to keep up with all the implications of each verb.

I caught one transcendent glimpse of something I never beheld before. Our text was Ephesians 4:22-24, which tells us to

put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Here's what I saw as I considered this from three perspectives.

Is: my old self belongs to my old life, but there is a new self created after the likeness of God.
Ought: that old way of life is corrupt and those desires are deceitful, but there is a new way of life that is righteous and holy.
Am: I am new-made, I am recreated, I am my Father's child, my Savior's love, the Spirit's home!

It was the third thought that took me off my guard and swept me off my feet. My mind is so trained to think about what is and what ought to be that the good news of who I am in Christ startled and delighted me.

Am, Is, Be

2009-01-25T09:51:00.000-05:00

Perspectivalism provides a live alternative to the three dead ends of modern ethics. John M. Frame explains how perspectivalism can operate as a "metaethics" that unites teleology, deontology, and existential ethics.

I first grasped the concept of perspectivalism as it applied to ethics, which seems to be a natural starting point for people who have struggled with the frustrating state of that discipline these days. Frame says:

Although I published my epistemology before my ethics, I developed the threefold scheme in ethics before applying it to epistemology. Ethics is its natural home, and I think the ethical applications of it are more easily understood than the applications to epistemological theory.

Here's Frame on the three schools of modern secular ethical theory:

1. Existential Ethics: Existential ethics is the view that ethics is essentially a matter of human inwardness, a matter of character and motive....
2. Teleological Ethics: ...The teleologist sets forth one relatively simple, objective goal for ethics which, he thinks, no human being can legitimately question. That goal is usually called “happiness” or “pleasure”...

3. Deontological Ethics: The third tendency is toward “deontological ethics,” or an ethic of duty.

Frame calls these different "perspectives," and labels them "self, world, and law." It seems to me that each of these perspectives has its own grammar--"I am," "it is," "you be!" To stretch the grammatical observation just a bit, one might even argue that each has its own grammatical mood: interrogative, indicative, and imperative.

It is easy to draw the analogy between the indicative mood, physical reality, and teleological ethics. Each is about "facts, "about what "is." It isn't hard to see the correlation between the imperative mood, the "logos," and deontological ethics. Each is about "values," what "ought to be."

Having got this far, symmetry begs us to explore the possible relationship between the interrogative mood, subjectivity, and existential ethics. In the interrogative mood, I ask "Am I?" instead of asserting "I am" (in the indicative) or commanding "Be!" (in the imperative).

There's something about that question--"Am I?"--that hints at depths to come.

What is Perspectivalism?

2009-01-24T08:12:00.000-05:00

What Is Perspectivalism?

"Perspectivalism" is a post-modern way of thinking about thinking that has been articulated by Vern Poythress and John M. Frame. Frame's brief Primer on Perspectivalism outlines the method.

Frame starts by observing that every (human) act of knowing takes place from some limited perspective. Recognizing this makes us more humble about the extent our own knowledge and more eager to increase it.

One way to increase our knowledge and our level of certainty is by supplementing our own perspectives with those of others. When our own resources fail us, we can consult friends, authorities, books, etc. We can travel to other places, visit people of other cultures. Even to get a good understanding of a tree, we need to walk around it, look at it from many angles.

It often happens that someone’s idea will seem ridiculous when we first encounter it; but when we try to understand where that person is coming from, what considerations have led him to his idea, then our evaluation of it changes. In such a case, we are trying to see the issue from his perspective, and that perspective enriches our own.

Perspectivalism Is Not Relativism

Perspectivalism seems safer than absolutism and wiser than relativism. Friedrich Nietzsche captured the core of relativism in The Will to Power:

There are many sorts of eyes. The sphinx too has eyes; consequently, there are many sorts of "truths," and consequently there is no truth. (Will to Power, section 540)

Perspectivalism does not confuse the blind stone eyes of the sphinx with the many sorts of eyes that really see.

Perspectivalism Is Not Absolutism

Perspectivalism is not absolutism because it does not confuse any (finite) individual's ideas with "Truth." This is not to say that Frame and Poythress deny the existence of absolute truth--they are both theology professors (Poythress is at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Frame is at Reformed Theological Seminary near Orlando). Perspectivalism distinguishes between the finite perspective of any created being with space and time, and the ultimate perspective of the Creator of space and time.

The Power of Perspectivalism

This humble but hopeful theory of knowledge could be a breakthrough in epistemology (which seems to have fallen on hard times recently). It could also provide a "grand unified theory" of ethics, by fusing deontology, teleology, and existential ethcs.

Every Good and Perfect Gift

2009-01-23T07:37:00.000-05:00

James tells us:

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

But Paul says:

To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.

The gift may be "good" and "perfect," but I am not. The Father may not change, but I do. How can a bad man get any good out of anything?

Objectively, the gift are good. Subjectively, I am bad. This would be the end of the story, but for the normative word of God, which reconciles the two:

"What God has made clean, do not call common."

God's imperative presents me with a choice--I can be impure, unbelieving, and disobedient, or I can step into His universe full of good gifts.

Come on now, little man...

2009-01-22T07:21:00.000-05:00

My pen name here is "Anselm's Apprentice." St. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, had the kind of God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion that I'm looking for.

Anselm had a passion to know God. He said:

Come on now little man, get away from your worldly occupations for a while, escape from your tumultuous thoughts. Lay aside your burdensome cares and put off your laborious exertions. Give yourself over to God for a little while, and rest for a while in Him. Enter into the cell of your mind, shut out everything except God and whatever helps you to seek Him once the door is shut. Speak now, my heart, and say to God, "I seek your face; your face, Lord, I seek."

Anselm's imagination took him past anything the Church had come up with in the ten centuries before him. He asked why God became a man and helped form the substitutionary theory of the Atonement (a foundation of Catholic and Protestant thinking ever since). He is best known for his "ontological proof of the existence of God," which depends expressly on "what can be imagined."

My passion is "imagination"--but is it the kind of God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated imagination Anselm had?

Don't Waste Your Life

2009-01-21T07:16:00.000-05:00

John Piper says that tragedy is when an couple retires to sail their 30 foot sloop, play softball, and collect shells on the beach. That's a tragedy because they have wasted their life. In Don't Waste Your Life, Piper begs us to seek better things.

Whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.

I know what I am passionate about. Since I was thirteen, I have been actively probing the edges of what humans can know--doing my first science project on relativity, taking nuclear physics in high school, diving into philosophy in college. I can't say that it has been a God-centered or Christ-exalting or Bible-saturated passion--much of it has been driven by my human cravings. I want people to be impressed at my knowledge or intelligence.

I know now that I felt rejected and self-pity tempted me to seek and show off knowledge. My heart said, "Someday they will see that I was right!" It took me a long time to realize how misguided that conviction was--there is a Day coming when every eye will see Jesus.

Any God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion will triumph on that Day.

Minds and Brains

2005-10-27T15:58:00.000-04:00

Juan Galiz-Menendez at A Critical Vision ponders reductionism and says:

No account or "theory" of mind/brain relations that is false to the rich, technicolor phenomenology of being a conscious agent -- a freedom in the world -- will be persuasive in the long run.

Any future metaphysics must unite what physics tells us about the world with what we already know about ourselves. A real theory of everything would have to encompass the "self" and "freedom" as well as quarks and quanta.

Monoverse, Polyverse, Omniverse

2005-10-27T11:21:00.000-04:00

Steve Luttrell wandered through and left three great comments to three different posts. One is a book recommendation, which I hope to get and review sometime. Another is an astute question about "observers," which is way over my head.

His third comment asks: "Are these the only two alternative possibilities? Do you really need a multiverse to overwhelm the small probability of life within each separate monoverse?" Then he apologizes for asking questions instead of providing answers.

I don't have answers either, but I have something that makes it a little easier to ask questions: a glossary. Here it is:

Monoverse: a reality where time has a beginning and is linear and physical constants are the same throughout space. By definition, there is only one monoverse.
Polyverse: a reality where time is linear but space may be discontinuous, with different physical constants in different regions. These different regions "bubble" off into separate monoverses. The number of bubbles may be finite or countably infinite.
Cycloverse: a reality were time is linear but space keeps collapsing and exploding again with new physical constants in each cycle. There is a countably infinite number of such cycles.
Omniverse: a reality where time branches into separate timelines at every quantum possibility. David Deutsch writes about this option in The Fabric of Reality. There is an uncountable infinity of timelines in an omniverse.

It should be impossible to directly detect what kind of a universe we live in, but the so-called "anthropic principle" provides some indirect evidence that is worth considering. Martin Rees explains the odds against having the physical constants that we do in Just Six Numbers. In my opinion, we can rule out a purely materialistic monoverse on statistical grounds.

A cycloverse or polyverse should randomly produce a space-time with the right physical constants for biological life. The "weak anthropic principle" would then be sufficient to explain why the universe seems to be "fine tuned" for our existence. If it weren't just right, we wouldn't be here to notice.

If the weak anthropic principle is sufficient to explain the observable evidence, then there is no reason to look to God or the omniverse for answers. But does the weak anthropic principle do the job?

The Participatory Anthropic Principle

2005-10-26T13:56:00.000-04:00

Science studies space, time, matter, and energy. Does it have a place for truth, love, beauty, or justice? Each of these depends upon “consciousness,” an “emergent property” of the material world. If intelligence here on Earth is just a statistical fluke in an otherwise lifeless universe, then categories like “beauty” or “justice” have no intrinsic meaning. In that kind of a universe, “meaning” is what humans impose on their surroundings, not something they discover within them.

Modern methodogical materialism takes the position that intelligence here on Earth is, in fact, just a statistical fluke. Our understanding of the laws of physics makes it possible, in theory, to spell out a chain of events from some kind of initial quantum fluctuation through a warm, wet pond somewhere in Earth’s pre-history to the first anthropoid who ever grunted, “I think, therefore I am!” The materialist believes that because such a sequence can be imagined, no other explanations are required.

But is this sound reasoning? If I take the latest Hollywood thriller, I can show you a single chain of events from the opening credits through the 90 mile-per-hour car chase on the wrong lane of a crowded freeway to the multi-billion dollar jackpot at the end. Is a mere unbroken sequence of events enough to prove the materialism?

John Wheeler (the physicist who coined the term “black hole”) proposed a “participatory anthropic principle” which makes the quantum concept of an “observation” even more basic than the physical realities of space, time, matter, and energy. In Wheeler’s model, an “observation” by a material being billions of years after the Big Bang that “caused” space, time, matter, and energy to exist in the first place.

Occam's Razor

2005-10-25T15:42:00.000-04:00

The debate (if it can be called that) about Intelligent Design is raging through cyberspace, but I can't find many people who are willing to look past this discussion to the next one. Buried deep within today's controversy is a bigger one that nobody wants to deal with. It is the clash between one invisible God and many invisible universes.

If today's materialists were willing to examine the evidence, they would have to admit that there are "gaps" in the materialistic explanation of what we see. These gaps include the following:

Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why is the universe as orderly as it is, instead of a chaotic fog of particles?
Why do the fundamental physical constants make carbon-based life possible?
How did the first self-replicating molecule take shape?

If we could find a satisfactory answer for each of those questions, materialism as we know it today might be intellectually satisfying. As it is, however, today's materialists must skip over the really big questions to get to the ones they have answers for.

The most satisfying materialistic answer that I have found is in the notion of a "multiverse." This theory proposes that there are countless alternate and/or parallel universes that we cannot detect, and that the sheer number of such universes overwhelms the improbability of life in a materialist monoverse.

But the notion of countless invisible universes forces us to take a good hard look at Occam's Razor, the rule of thumb that leads us to choose the simpler of any two competing theories. One should not "multiply the essences" needlessly, William of Ockham insisted, and so should choose the theory with less moving parts, so to speak.

But which theory is simpler: a materialistic multiverse, with countless invisible universes, or a theistic monoverse, with one invisible God?

A Theory of Everything

2005-10-25T09:57:00.000-04:00

When I was young, I wanted to discover the "Unified Field Theory." That was the Holy Grail of physics back in the day: a single set of equations that would link the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. Nowadays the physicist use a different phrase to describe their quest: they're looking for a "Theory of Everything.."

Or are they?

A real "theory of everything" would link what we know about time, space, matter, and energy to what we feel about truth, beauty, justice, and love.

The twentieth century offered "reductionism," which claims that "beauty" is the neurochemical response of several hundred billion specialized cells to certain stimuli; that "love" is just one gene's way of making a copy itself; "justice" is the set of mechanisms that the dominant class imposes on the oppressed; and "truth" is whatever can be tested in the lab.

Einstein said it best: "It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"

This blog is dedicated to the proposition that Einstein was right about this, as he was about so many other things...

Cogito Ergo Blog

2005-10-24T13:22:00.000-04:00

Truth
Beauty
Justice
Love

Do they exist? Do I?
If so, why?