Doctor Carson has strange ideas about science, even for a Republican:
“So now you’re gonna have this big explosion and everything becomes perfectly organized and when you ask them about it they say, ‘Well we can explain this, based on probability theory because if there’s enough big explosions, over a long period of time, billions and billions of years, one of them will be the perfect explosion,” continued Carson. “So I say what you’re telling me is if I blow a hurricane through a junkyard enough times over billions and billions of years, eventually after one of those hurricanes there will be a 747 fully loaded and ready to fly.”
Carson added that he believed the big bang was “even more ridiculous” because there is order to the universe.
[….]Later, Carson said he personally believed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was encouraged by the devil.
“I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary, and it has become what is scientifically, politically correct,” said Carson.
His Big Bang stuff is positively Hubbinsian.
Jeffro
Someone should ask him flat out if the Devil put dinosaur bones in the ground, to lead us away from God. He won’t say no.
Brachiator
And this would probably make Carson’s head explode:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/darwin-letter-i-do-not-believe-in-the-bible/
Of course, Darwin did not explicitly state whether he had any sympathy for the Devil, but as you know, a rolling stone gathers a big bang.
schrodinger's cat
I cannot believe what an idiot Carson is. Someone should ask him if he believes in a geocentric solar system.
I encourage him to test Newton’s Law of Gravitation, from the top of a tall building.
Betty Cracker
It doesn’t bother me so much that he doesn’t believe in accepted theories about the origins of the universe, even if he does use dumb, irrelevant cliches to explain his doubt.
But it bothers me mightily that a medical doctor thinks evolution is of the devil. That indicates a fundamental inability to grasp eighth grade science. I wouldn’t let someone who made such a stupid statement saw MY head open…
boatboy_srq
If the US intends to return to its backwater, agrarian roots, and abdicate all leadership in scientific advancement, Carson certainly is the guy to lead the country there. Makes you wonder how he uses/used medical tech if the principles behind it are all such eeeevil things.
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator:
That’s delicious.
MattF
Ben Carson believes that what Ben Carson says is true. Which, by itself, disqualifies him from any job that requires rational thought.
boatboy_srq
@Betty Cracker: I can believe it. Same with attorneys who can’t grasp the Constitution. The basic learning is buried or forced out by so much intensive postsecondary learning that the elementary stuff gets forgotten. I still wouldn’t be happy having him operate on me or anyone I value, but I can understand the disconnect. I’d be much more concerned with how he makes use of medical devices of Satanic origin (X-ray equipment, for example).
Rayl
What do you expect from an MD. The most frequent question from pre-med students is “Do I have to know this for the exam”?
evap
Makes you wonder how he passed college Biology, which he must have done in order to get into medical school. Not to mention college Physics and Chemistry!
shell
“You must be a loonie.”
lamh36
OT, but since we’re talking about Black folk in the sciences…cam we talk about me for a second :-)
So my supervisor is stepping down. He’s decided to become just a regular hourly tech and he’s gonna scale back.
So there will be a post up for Microbiology supervisor! 5+ years Micro, Mycology experience, 3+ years Supervisor experience.. essentially other than the supervisor experience …it was tailor written for me and based on my talks with him…it was in purpose! I am literally the only person in the lab who has Mycology experience!
Ya know see, I’ve never really aspired to being a supervisor. And man this place would literally drive u crazy right now with all the moving. From convo I’ve had with this Supervisor, I know if I applied I’d have a good chance at it…
It’ll be a while before the official announcement comes so I have time to think about it, but man..I love working the bench…and ya know I’m a bit of a crank…and can be kinda blunt with folk…
Ugh!
RSA
The well-educated creationists I bump into online most often tend to be medical doctors or engineers. It’s weird, because I don’t expect it.
MattF
I am astonished to note that Tom Friedman has an interesting op-ed today, connecting the political atmosphere in Israel at the time of Rabin’s assassination to present-day US politics. No link, because, because, because… but it’s worth reading.
RSA
@lamh36: Good luck! If you apply.
xenos
Was it “Dr. Wu” or “Dr. Woo”?
I suppose either fits this loon.
Amir Khalid
@Jeffro:
I thought the theory was that God put them dino bones in the ground, to test man’s faith. Of course, that doesn’t make sense either, since a God who would plant false evidence isn’t a good person by the standards He sets for humans.
Paul in KY
@schrodinger’s cat: If he jumps off, to make it an actual test, he needs to drop an orange as he jumps.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@lamh36: I’m glad your hard work is appreciated. Good luck, whatever you decide to do.
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: He’s lying his ass off. I’m sure he knows Darwin’s theory is right, it’s just that he can’t say that because all his potential primary voters don’t want to hear that.
Roger Moore
@evap:
Memorize and regurgitate. That’s how most premeds I’ve known have dealt with that kind of thing. It’s possible to remember enough to pass the exam without actually believing any of it. I suppose it’s also possible that he used to understand and believe it but has come to hold his religious beliefs more seriously and decided to give up on science instead.
encephalopath
The 747 and the hurricane or watch parts shaken up in a bag: those are both stock misdirection techniques creationists use to muddy the waters over evolution.
Evolution doesn’t claim that complex creatures or systems spontaneously appear fully formed.
Carson is intentionally leaving out the mechanism of self replication and the iterative nature of evolutionary changes.
He is just lying, and he knows it.
Amir Khalid
@evap:
I think they compartmentalise: the science goes in this box, the creationist woo-woo goes in that one.
Paul in KY
@lamh36: If there’s more money, and the job won’t drive you nuts, I’d take it.
Need the change in the capital of capitalism (the USA).
xenos
@RSA: the worst pseudoscientist are often engineers and MDS.
They are just not able to accept authorities outside their own professions.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Well, as I recall, St. Hubbins gave that answer because he was heavily sedated. I don’t know what Carson’s excuse is.
catclub
@boatboy_srq:
I would have no problem. He is obviously gifted as a surgeon. If you are under the knife, you probably will not bring up politics. and I am CERTAIN that the OR staff knows not to bring up politics. So no problem.
Germy Shoemangler
@encephalopath:
Another stock reply is “Evolution… remember, it’s just a theory!”
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
I have also noticed what poster RSA has seen.
Especially among my Texas friends and even some relatives, if they are very religious, they find a way to carve out a special section in which evolution can be denied.
But then again, no matter how educated and worldly a person might be, they can easily create islands of irrationality, whether it is anti-vaxxer crap, 911 denial, belief in fad diets, homeopathy, and any other variety of flim flam that works for them.
Another Holocene Human
@evap: You haven’t been around enough evolution denialists. Basically they acknowledge that evolution exists in every example you can observe in the field and the lab. They rename it “microevolution” and then stand on their claim that evolution over millions of years couldn’t possibly have happened.
Because.
Reasons.
Origuy
@lamh36: If you decide to apply, have a talk with the person who was your supervisor about the aspects of the job you aren’t strong on. Ask about management training to hone your people skills and whatever bureaucratic processes you’ll need to know about. Since he’ll still be in the lab, you should be able to use him as a resource.
scav
@Betty Cracker: Give enough idiots like him scalpels and anethecitized patients lying about before them and eventually a bloodied body will continue to live. Profit! Chickens!
I mean, bloodletting, leaches and the four humors are rock-solid classics of medical tradition: all hail tradition!
WaterGirl
@lamh36: Apply. Apply. Apply. You can always turn it down if it’s offered to you and you decide you don’t want it.
You will surely learn more about the position if you do apply. Maybe you could have an arrangement where you still get to work the bench, or you’ll find out that it’s mostly bullshit and paperwork.
Also, I am a big believer that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you; the goal is to figure out if it’s a good match. So I would be really honest in the interview, if I were you, and talk about the fact that you are very straightforward and direct and you wonder whether that would be a benefit or a detriment in the supervisory position.
I would also ask if you mostly like the people you are working with – the ones you would report to and the ones you would be supervising. If the answer is yes, I say go for it!
Another Holocene Human
Some of them actually don’t doubt evolution at all. They just disbelieve abiogenesis and CALL it evolution.
Equivocation is a favorite of the apologists and denialists.
Germy Shoemangler
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/
Interesting essay by Dr. Novella on how creationists are deceptive
Creationists are an endless source of material for skeptical analysis. The reason for this is that modern creationism is what I call “sophisticated nonsense.” It is an elaborate system of motivated reasoning crafted to defend a particular religious view.
The energy, time, and resources that some creationists put into this endeavor is astounding, resulting in a mountain of false claims, half-truths, misdirections, unsound arguments, and misinterpretations.
Creationists are engaged in science denial – denying evolutionary science. The purpose of denial is doubt and confusion, so they don’t have to create and defend a coherent explanation of the origins of life on Earth. They don’t have to provide an explanation for all the available evidence. All they have to do is muddy the waters as much as possible.
This behavior is absolutely clear when you examine their arguments and their methods. One of the hallmarks of creationist arguments is that they don’t change, or they change only slowly and minimally. They continue to use arguments that have been demolished decades ago. That is a sure sign of intellectual dishonesty – even when corrected on a factual error, they don’t seem to care. They continue to spread the misinformation.
Redshift
This stuff (including the tornado-747 take) is just standard creationist claptrap. Whether he believes it or not, he’s just lazily grabbed stuff he knows the evangelicals will eat up.
Another Holocene Human
Also, Ben Carson is revealing not so much that he doesn’t understand astrophysics (well, how many people do, really) but that he misunderstands the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It also shows he’s been reading creationist drivel because being misleading about the 2nd Law is basically their favorite game.
What has greater entropy, life or non-life? On the planetary scale? If you said non-life, you are wrong, please go back to high school and try again.
I’m surprised he didn’t reach for that old closed system/open system equivocation. They love that one.
Another Holocene Human
@Germy Shoemangler: AKA the “Gish gallop”.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
I doubt that fundamentalists would agree with you on that point for a couple of reasons:
1) It includes us judging God rather than the other way around, which they would reject categorically. Our role is to do as God says, not to think about what he’s telling us.
2) It’s an unfair judgment. God might have planted evidence, but He also revealed the truth to us through His words (i.e. the Bible). He obviously wants us to trust His words rather than indulging in the vanity of following our senses. God has been known to give people tests (e.g. Abraham being commanded to sacrifice Isaac), so it’s not out of character for him to do it to all of us as a group.
SoupCatcher
If Dr. Carson was a product of the Seventh-Day Adventist education system, this wouldn’t surprise me at all (speaking as someone who was schooled in that system from kindergarten up to my undergraduate degree in engineering).
However, that’s not his background at all. I believe he is a product of public schooling.
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: I did some science training and some engineering training. Now I’ve known some brilliant engineers who were good at science too and basically not like this, but it’s perfectly possible to make it through engineering school without learning one drop of a scientific outlook and completely unprepared (and more fundamentally, uninterested) to apply the scientific method to anything.
As for doctors, all the research doctors I knew were smarter than I was; I would have done well to crib off their physics homework. All the clinical doctor track people I knew were begging me for help on EZ-Fizzicks-For-Pre-Med-Majors homework. So … there’s that.
JC
I know how much various intelligent design questions are mocked – especially when intelligent design is used to then justify a religious book written by multiple authors, in old times, with lots of crazy stuff in this book – as somehow this book is ‘true’.
These are two separate arguments however.
That ‘the Bible is literally true’, is a laughable argument, idiotic and ludicrous.
But it is simply wrong to treat any intelligent design argument, as an argument on the level of ‘the Bible is literally true’.
From a scientific point of view, the way the universe came into existence, the ‘just right’, conditions that have to be, to create a universe that works, the fact that, from what we’ve determined, there are weightless, formless, mathematical ideas that seem to govern the universe – which have only, as far as we know, been thought of in human minds –
It may well be wrong – but the deep, multi-layered order that underlies having a universe that works – it’s not a stupid thought, that this deep order reflects a deeper intelligence undergirding the universe.
Now, that intelligence, that order, may be the Flying Spaghetti Monster, may be the some crazy computer consciousness, may be the Matrix – who knows?
But I do hate how atheists pour contempt on the view of – ‘wow, there is an incredible order to the universe – if there was just one single variable off, the universe wouldn’t exist. If these mathematical laws of the universe weren’t constant, and fixed, the universe would have fallen apart. If there weren’t a seeming disposition of the atoms, molecules, to form into more coherent and complex orderings, leading to organisms and then higher organisms, in the right conditions – maybe there is an unknowable intelligence underlying the whole thing”.
To think that, is a fairly natural inference.
To infer that ‘it is just that way, and random’, is itself, simply an inference.
At the very least – be agnostic!!
“Well, these perfectly ordered and harmonious laws that had to be just so, to the infinitesimal degree, in order to produce a working universe – hey, that’s cool! But I think it’s totally random.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong – maybe there is an intelligence underlying everything – how the heck would we know either way?
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: Yes, like when they quote the Bible on “hold fast to what is good” and in their minds Bible = Good = accept it all. I mean, what if that verse is saying, hey, you tried it, and it’s not working out. Stop doing that.
Their heads don’t explode because they have made them impervious to contrary ideas.
Ben Cisco
If you will allow me to go OT for just a second…
Mrs. Cisco has a surgery date. I want to thank all the Juicers for their advice, support, and well wishes. I wound up having a quiet but intense conversation with several of of her providers, and we came to an understanding.
Roger Moore
@Germy Shoemangler:
The same thing is true of other schools of denial. Climate change deniers will do exactly the same thing. They have a whole series of steps- it isn’t happening, it isn’t anthropogenic, we can’t fix it, etc.- that they can fall back on if/when they’re presented with evidence that disproves their assertions. But they’ll go right back to making the same assertions the next time they argue as if they have never conceded they were wrong. Doing that should get anyone shunned from polite society, and certainly get any kind of media platform they have taken away.
Another Holocene Human
@JC: Yeah, you are wrong. That whole post was a case study in fallacious thinking.
Think about it that way: if one variable were off, we wouldn’t be here having this dorm-room-at-2-am caliber philosophical conversation.
And then … nothing.
The fact that we’re here to ask this question establishes, well, nothing.
Paul in KY
@Germy Shoemangler: I guess Creationist Arguments would be inclined not to change :-)
Another Holocene Human
@Ben Cisco: I missed all of that, but sending the two of you best wishes.
Anoniminous
@lamh36:
Here’s something to contemplate while you are thinking.
How to Build a Motivated Research Group.
Paul in KY
@Ben Cisco: Best wishes for Mrs. Cisco (and you)!
gene108
OT: I went home for lunch because I need to swing by my local post office to get a new set of mailbox keys.
I flipped on MSNBC just to see what cable news is up to.
They had a bit about Hillary’s e-mails. They state there are more damaging revelations from the WaPo that states the reason her e-mails are public does not match her earlier statements, worse for her the FBI has retrieved previously deleted e-mails and maybe some of these e-mails will implicate her in the “scandals” that are dogging her like Benghazi.
I generally tune out the media, but damn do they really have it in for her.
If I only got info from the MSM, I think I’d have a different view of the world.
Anoniminous
@Germy Shoemangler:
Biology rests on the Theory of the Cell and the Theory of Evolution. Deny one and you’ve denied the entire science.
JC
@Another Holocene Human: And sometimes the butler did do it.
Yes, I understand the fallacy here. But sometimes you can infer there is a watchmaker, and sometimes you can’t.
However – Your comparison is apples and oranges.
I’m not abstracting to “if I didn’t read Balloon Juice at this particular time and date, then this conversation wouldn’t have happened.”
At any rate, you aren’t really engaging with me, except to be dismissive, so enjoy that.
Oatler.
On last night’s Colbert interview Trump said he thought the new guy on Meet the Press was alright. Trump knows when he’s got an obsequious cocksucker at his service. The other Republicans can be confident any bullshit they spout will not be challenged by “the press”.
Germy Shoemangler
Call of the Freaks
Also, am I the only one here convinced that Dr. Ben self-medicates before debates and TV appearances? Writing his own script for (at the very least) beta-blockers or something stronger, a sedative. Nobody looks and sounds that sleepy without assistance.
PurpleGirl
@Ben Cisco: Best wishes for both of you.
ETA: The BJ hive mind is incredibly supportive and a great resource.
Cacti
To get his MD, Ben Carson had to pass courses in microbiology, biochemistry, and immunology.
There’s no chance that he doesn’t accept scientific principles of organic evolution. The modern practice of medicine wouldn’t exist without them.
It’s just sad that he chooses to play stupid to raise his political profile in the GOP.
rk
Leaving aside Carson, I find it really hard to wrap my mind around the fact that everything in the Universe was condensed into a single point smaller than the size of a period on a page. Which does not mean that I don’t believe it. I believe it because lots of scientists have found proof that this is how it happened. But for me it’s believing without understanding. It sounds so improbable. Of course there’s no answer to what was there before the big bang? And what did the Universe expand into? If everything was condensed into a single point then what was the location of that point?
I also don’t understand Christian resistance to the big bang theory, or their problem with Darwin. I mean how hard is it to say that God is responsible for the big bang. It’s not like they have to ever prove anything which is what faith is all about.
Having said that, Carson is of course an idiot. Hard to believe that a biologist would say stuff like this. Evolution is a big part of biological studies. I bet he never wrote any of this nonsense on his evolutionary biology tests.
WaterGirl
@Ben Cisco: Excellent! I knew you would figure out a way to handle the situation and get your wife what she needs. So happy for you about that, and best wishes for the upcoming surgery.
Betty Cracker
@lamh36: Only you can know for sure whether you would be good at supervising others and enjoy that kind of work. It sounds like you know full well that it’s an entirely different kettle of fish than what you’re doing now, and kudos to you for knowing that — lots of people don’t.
One of the thousands of things that bug the crap out of me about corporate America is the assumption that if you’re good at job X, you’d be good at supervising people engaged in doing job X. Sometimes it’s true, but often it’s not.
Myself, I am very good at my particular job, but until I went solo nearly 10 years ago, I had to fight tooth and nail to keep corporate managers from forcing me into new roles that entailed supervising others. I tried it enough times to know that I suck at it and hate doing it. But that’s just me — you could be a terrific supervisor. Good luck, whatever you decide!
WaterGirl
@Oatler.: I’m not quite understanding what you are saying here. Could you expand on it a bit? thanks
Betty Cracker
@JC: To me, that argument sounds like a golfer marveling over the fact that of all the thousands of blades of grass, his drive deposited his ball on THAT one. Well, it had to land somewhere…
villageidiocy
I come from a family that works around a lot of physicians, though aren’t physicians themselves, I personally know a lot of people with advanced degrees in the biological sciences, but also are not physicians. My opinion is medical doctors are, for the most part, the biology version of engineers.They are very well trained technicians. With a sharp memory, good skills to look up what they don’t know, and a good bedside manner, they can be very effective. But they aren’t scientists and don’t have to understand fundamental organizing principles in their bones (such as evolution and the origin of the cosmos) in order to be competent.
What surgeons do need is an ego that allows them to open the skull of another human being with the confidence they will probably do more good than harm. So on ego alone I suppose he’s qualified to be president.
Germy Shoemangler
@Betty Cracker: That’s what happened to me. Thirty years ago I had a job I liked. Then I was talked into becoming a manager, and hated every minute of it.
Another Holocene Human
@JC: If you understand the fallacy, then what are you saying that is different? You like to talk, so explain it to me. Break it down.
Elie
His shtick is auto-focused ideology. Really. He takes narcissism one better. He just makes up his own universe with its own rules where he is the center.
I am convinced that there was a reason that he left (or was influenced) out of the practice of medicine. The guy is a megalomaniac and pathological narcissist. You just have to let him talk and his confabulations will be more manifest. Like most with this narcissistic pathology, he will not know when to shut up because his “mind blindness” prevents him from seeing how others see and hear him. And he doesn’t care. There is only one reality: his own.
He has an interesting condition. The great neuro-psychiatrist Oliver Sachs might have provided some insights on him. Not sure if he would be formally considered to be “mentally ill”, but he is quite deranged. As I said, the more he talks the more exposed his very unusual views will be. How scary it will seem that he was allowed to muck around in children’s brains…
henqiguai
@boatboy_srq (#5):
Surgeons are mechanics; you don’t necessarily need great and insightful understanding of a lot of high-order science to cut—even a neurosurgeon.
But I’m cynical.
Haydnseek
@Amir Khalid: I have had people tell me that liberal atheists put those bones in the ground as part of the ongoing persecution of their exact flavor of christianism. They only look like they’re millions of years old because satan has the power to cloud the minds of so-called scientists, resulting in their unholy statements regarding the age of the bones. Really.
Another Holocene Human
@villageidiocy: A touch of psychopathy doesn’t hurt either.
More than a touch, bring on the malpractice lawyers. And sometimes, the district attorneys.
Roger Moore
@rk:
It’s not Christians in general who have a problem with those things, only ones who believe the Bible is literally true. You can’t square a literal interpretation of Genesis with scientific theories of the origin of the universe or of life.
scav
@Elie: Speaking of which, consider all the ‘Merkan Catholics lecturing the pontiff about what is or is not proper Catholicism. All of space and time and theology bends to the exceptional American will.
burnspbesq
@lamh36:
Completely understand what you’re saying about moving into management, but … Unless your organization has a “senior scientist” type position, management is where the $ is. And unless you have to sell your soul to get it, more money is nearly always better than less.
Whatever you decide, good luck with it.
JC
@Betty Cracker: Do you really think these are similar?
A hundred thousand blades of grass, and one randomly driven ball hits that blade of grass at this one point – is comparable to a simple happenstance, that a big bang from a single point, just happened to create a universe of matter that obeys mathematical laws, that has existed and continues to exist, for billions of years?
I don’t really think this is an apples to apples comparison.
But again, this is back to the infinite monkeys theory, writing Shakespeare.
But even that isn’t correct. In this case, the laws have to continue to exist and be harmonious, for billions of years.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, but I don’t see how this is apples to apples.
low-tech cyclist
@Brachiator:
Gimme shelter!!
burnspbesq
He’s just an ordinary guy.
Brachiator
@lamh36:
Good luck if you apply for it.
And I kinda get the impression that if you want it and think that you could do the job, you may want to let the appropriate folks know before any official announcement is made.
Another Holocene Human
@Elie: I’m not seeing it. This is bog standard, insert-head-directly-in-ass right wing American Christian apologetics. This world is full of true believers who are convinced that any chink in the armor will bring down the whole edifice (it probably will, belief systems that rigid can’t deal with contradictions or ambiguity) so they believe and spout ridiculous things to avoid cognitive dissonance. Avoiding cog dis is a very strong human motivation.
There’s no reason to believe his beliefs aren’t sincere. Unlike Hucksterbee.
Or, in the end, you might be right. I just haven’t seen any indication he’s not a Buy-Bull Believin’ Christer stamped from the Auld Mould.
jl
@lamh36: Congratulations on getting an opportunity. But life is short, so make sure you do what you want. I agree with some of the commenters above, if you have some qualifications that are essential for the supervisor position, but there are aspects of the job you don’t like, apply, learn more about the job and negotiate like hell to get whatever is best for you. But don’t get let yourself get pushed into something that you will not like and is not the best for you.
Paul in KY
@rk: The point was much smaller than an atom.
Another Holocene Human
@scav: What is proper Catholicism?
(In St John’s Passion, Jesus says: What is truth?)
Another Holocene Human
@burnspbesq:
Yeah, sure. No soul selling was involved, but after 5 years of a promotion I convinced myself to go for, I went for a demotion. Couldn’t take the stress. FUCK the money. (Except money stress, that sucks. But not as bad as the job stress did.)
Heliopause
Not really, it’s a standard issue Design argument that a large percentage of Americans agree with. Also, a majority of democrats believe in either Creationism or Guided Evolution.
jayjaybear
It LITERALLY terrifies me that this man is a brain surgeon, and what that means about our national stock of physicians and surgeons…
Elie
@villageidiocy:
I agree that docs are more engineers than scientists, but you still have to accept basic tenets of science to open up someone’s skull and even know what you are looking at and how it works. The biochemistry that is imbedded in the structures and functions are based on real science that is testable. A person like this guy who seems to have tenuous beliefs around astrophysics and other scientific theory is a scary and incompetent to me… like where does the line exist where his ideology goes off fact based science grid and into his own narcissist fantasy universe? Are the elements in the periodic chart suddenly going to be suspect? I am sorry. What does the devil have to do with how we and other species evolved over time? Why is that evil? In that context, what about creation and the biology of this planet should be rejected?
I wouldn’t let him touch the lowliest skunk.
jl
@Another Holocene Human:
Pontius Pilate asked ‘What is truth?”
John 18
37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.
Paul in KY
@JC: The matter was all there within the point. Nothing fundamental was ‘created’, it was all just released into the sphere of the universe as it expanded out.
scav
@Another Holocene Human:
TPM
undoubtedly with a dash of fuck the planet, atmosphere and climate ommitted as too obvious for words, besides the character limit must be met.
Anoniminous
@JC:
Mathematics is True but not necessarily Accurate. Otherwise the Universe would be simultaneously Euclidean and Non-Euclidean. And see: String Theory, lack of experimental verification of
Oatler.
@WaterGirl: Chuck Todd sucks. Conservative dicks, I mean.
Betty Cracker
@JC: I agree that the scenarios aren’t apples-to-apples; it’s the marveling over the results strikes me as similar.
trollhattan
@burnspbesq:
Also, too, crazy and shy, loves to rock and roll, a hot dog makes him lose control — What a wild duet!
Elie
@Another Holocene Human:
..just have to let him keep talking.
I believe that his nice disposition might also disappear at some point, if the questioning persists.
Yes, he is a christianist of sorts… but its not just that…
Kristine
@lamh36: Not to put a damper on anything because it sounds like a great opportunity…but would you be supervising people with whom you used to work alongside? Some folks are fine with that, but some aren’t, and they could make your life difficult.
Just asking because I know folks who encountered those problems at my old company.
Haydnseek
@JC: It’s not an either/or question. God is, or it isn’t. It’s a matter of probability. Zero evidence of a magical creator. You can’t say that this magical creator definitively doesn’t exist , basic logic – Bertrand Russell’s flying teapot- but the probability is so vanishingly small that the agnostic position simply falls apart.
grumpy realist
@JC: Evolution, m’dear. Quite possible that we are in a universe that was budded off another one.
Your argument is like saying because you drew a Royal Flush in poker, you have proven the existence of the Poker Fairy.
The improbability of an event happening is irrelevant after the event has occurred.
Elizabelle
@Jeffro:
Wasn’t that on the National Lampoon parody? Prayboy (re Jerry Falwell). “God’s Little Jokes.” re fossils
Something like that … using teh Google now, with its winsome little first day of fall squirrel …
Germy Shoemangler
The world is full of beautiful things
The world is full of beautiful things
Butterfly wings, fairy tale kings
And each new day undoubtedly brings
Still more beautiful things
The world abounds with many delights
Magical sights, fanciful flights
And those who dream on beautiful nights
Dream of beautiful things
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@JC:
It’s a fairly natural inference, but it’s one that rests on a statistical fallacy. You cannot work backwards from an observation that the observed outcome was extremely unlikely to an assumption that it can’t be the result of random chance. In the case of the laws of physics, all possible outcomes were extremely likely. There is no set of physical laws possible that wouldn’t be equally open to the same argument.
On top of that, we cannot say that this is the only universe that has ever come into existence. For all we know, a near infinite number of them has, though it’s impossible to define what “other universes” in this context even means, given that we have no way to observe them, and they by definition stand outside of time, which is an element of our universe.
The other problem is that positing an intelligence guiding the universe does not actually solve any of the problems that cause people to postulate it. It only pushes those problems back a step. If you think that the universe is too complex and too dependent upon specific outcomes to be the product of random chance, how does postulating an entity that not only understands every bit of that complexity but can direct it alleviate those problems? It doesn’t seem any less unlikely than the outcome driving the postulation. And you then have to address the question of where that intelligence came from and how it came into existence, putting you right back where you started.
Elizabelle
@lamh36: Go for it, grrrrl.
If it’s not a good fit, you can re-evaluate later. But maybe you will find some management bones in your body, and blunt is good if it’s blunt-competent.
Doug!
@lamh36:
I think managing/supervising is worthwhile, even thought it’s a pain. That’s been my experience since moving into a supervising/managing role. And I think following politics is good preparation for it.
Andrey
@JC: We don’t know anything about the probabilities involved, and we don’t know anything about how “harmonious” the universe is compared to the alternatives.
Maybe there’s some underlying fundamental that requires all possible universes to follow this pattern – without being a conscious force of any kind.
Maybe there really were countless quadrillions of alternate universes that happened in parallel, or “before” ours, or might happen “after” ours, which don’t have the conditions that we consider “finely tuned”.
Maybe what we consider “finely tuned” is actually an incredibly hostile, degenerate, barren universe; maybe in thousands of other configurations, the vastness of empty space that occupies 99.99…% of our universe would be filled with joyful sentience of a complexity level that we can’t begin to comprehend.
Without knowing anything about the alternatives, it’s meaningless to say that we are unexpectedly lucky.
Jeffro
@Germy Shoemangler:
So true.
I’ve told several of my religious friends and relatives, “Why don’t you just say/believe ‘God created the process of evolution and set it in motion?’ I don’t have any argument against that, and we’ll both be happy.” Works, too.
jl
@Elie: At a certain level of practical application, science is reduced to algorithms and protocols. I teach to health professionals and engineers, in addition to academics. A lot of the applied people aren’t interested much in understanding things from first principles, though some are just as much as the academic students.
I’ve had medical students tell me that they are smarter than the PhD students because they can work problems quicker and make fewer ‘mistakes’ at presentations. A few of them have a point, there are certainly very smart and profound people who go into applied science. But often, the medical, pharmacy and nursing students mistake polished and well ordered bullet points for understanding the material.
My personal view is that some subjects simply cannot be mastered if you cannot work from first principles, and understand both the power of doing that, and also how much is left unexplained or fundamental puzzles papered over when you try to systematize knowledge and turn it into a logical machine that cranks out truth. Statistics and economics are both messy, and compared to other fields, pretty crappy, applied sciences, but you cannot really accomplish much if you are not willing to put some time into understanding how the algorithms and protocols are justified (or not really justified) by understanding first principles. And IMHO, professional students who take the ‘do I really need to know this?’, or ‘just give me the formula’ really flounder at those two subjects.
Carson’s attitude does not surprise me at all. I see it often in professional students. And I think they can do perfectly fine if they stay within fairly narrow confines in their work. People like Carson can function as brilliant and accomplished and even very innovative people within their professions. When they step outside of that, they can sound like cranks.
I think something went weird inside Carson’s head sometime ago. But I can see how he could have been a brilliant, innovative and accomplished surgeon.
jl
@Elie:
Comment in moderation for a naughty word. Try again:
: At a certain level of practical application, science is reduced to algorithms and protocols. I teach to health professionals and engineers, in addition to academics. A lot of the applied people aren’t interested much in understanding things from first principles, though some are just as much as the academic students.
I’ve had medical students tell me that they are smarter than the PhD students because they can work problems quicker and make fewer ‘mistakes’ at presentations. A few of them have a point, there are certainly very smart and profound people who go into applied science. But often, the medical, ph * rm * seee and nursing students mistake polished and well ordered bullet points for understanding the material.
My personal view is that some subjects simply cannot be mastered if you cannot work from first principles, and understand both the power of doing that, and also how much is left unexplained or fundamental puzzles papered over when you try to systematize knowledge and turn it into a logical machine that cranks out truth. Statistics and economics are both messy, and compared to other fields, pretty crappy, applied sciences, but you cannot really accomplish much if you are not willing to put some time into understanding how the algorithms and protocols are justified (or not really justified) by understanding first principles. And IMHO, professional students who take the ‘do I really need to know this?’, or ‘just give me the formula’ really flounder at those two subjects.
Carson’s attitude does not surprise me at all. I see it often in professional students. And I think they can do perfectly fine if they stay within fairly narrow confines in their work. People like Carson can function as brilliant and accomplished and even very innovative people within their professions. When they step outside of that, they can sound like cranks.
I think something went weird inside Carson’s head some time ago. But I can see how he could have been a brilliant, innovative and accomplished surgeon.
Brachiator
@henqiguai:
This is quite funny. It reminds me of the old British class prejudice where a physician was a gentleman and so a higher class than a surgeon.
The physician presumably understood philosophy and tradition, while the surgeon dealt with the (ugh) physical body. Of course, it took more smarts to understand the body and biological processes, make accurate diagnoses and know where and how to operate, while physicians could be frauds who simply spouted received wisdom and prescribed useless medicines as remedy for ailments. Physicians later caught up, but some of the old biases remain.
Germy Shoemangler
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: You said exactly what I couldn’t put into words.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@rk:
There was no “before the universe.” Time itself is an artifact of the universe. That’s part of why the possibility of their having been other universes runs into a problem of trying figure out what that even means. I realize that doesn’t help you much.
As for the location of that point, it was right here, for every possible value of “here.” The universe isn’t expanding into anything; it’s just creating more space.
The universe is finite but unbounded. The best analogy of it is to think of a two dimensional universe, but rather than being a flat plane, think of it as the surface of a sphere. To its inhabitants, the universe will appear perfectly flat, and yet if they continue far enough in a straight line, they’ll end up right back where they started.
People misunderstand the analogy of the universe to a balloon as you blow it up. In the analogy, the universe isn’t the interior of the balloon filled with air; it’s the surface of the balloon, which stretches as it expands.
Jeffro
@Elizabelle:
I think the first 200 results are all Alice In Chains-related…so, enjoy! (somewhere is there is the nutters’ theory, though)
Germy Shoemangler
@Doug!: [debate question]:
Every time a troll appears on balloon-juice (right to rise, a guy, srv) many commenters insist it’s you having fun. Mr. Doug! are you prepared here and today to tell our audience that you are NOT those people?
Joel
@jayjaybear: Medicine is, essentially, a trade. One that requires an incredible amount of training, but essentially a trade. While many doctors are scientifically minded — and some are even scientists — that’s not really a requirement of being a good, or even excellent, medical practitioner.
BlueNC
@lamh36: I assume it comes with extra $$$? Are the $$$ worth the aggravation?
From a career standpoint, supervisory experience is a plus. Sounds as though you could try it, and then go back to tech if you hate being a supervisor? What would be the downside then?
Paul in KY
@Andrey: Now I feel bad about not being in one of those cool universes.
Obama!!!
Dmbeaster
@JC:
This is basically bs. If you change variables, you just have a different universe. There is nothing magical about the order that we observe. We are in wonderment about its existence, but that says more about us than it says about creation. You can imagine both more complex and ordered laws for existence or a more disordered system. We project onto it our own desires for it to all to satisfy our evolutionary programming to see and find order.
Jeffro
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Yes! And can I just give a shout-out to Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s COSMOS at this point? Because that did more for my understanding of the universe (and my kids’, too) than a stack of Stephen Hawking books on top of tortoises all the way down.
Germy Shoemangler
@Paul in KY: I blame him completely.
Paul in KY
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: IMO, the universe did expand into something. That ‘something’ does/did allow matter to travel faster than the speed of light, as our universe did for a brief period of time very early in it’s existence.
Obviously, we will never know what that something is/was.
Germy Shoemangler
God created the universe in six days, and was arrested on the seventh.
Germy Shoemangler
And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart
You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely night dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
But that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a song
Beside a garden wall
When stars are bright
You are in my arms
The nightingale tells his fairy tale
A paradise where roses bloom
Though I dream in vain
In my heart it will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of love’s refrain
Stardust (Hoagy Carmichael &Mitchell Parish)
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Ben Cisco:
I haven’t been around as much lately and missed the story, but both you and Mrs. Cisco have my best wishes for her easy and safe recovery.
Roger Moore
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
It’s turtles all the way down.
Dmbeaster
@Paul in KY: No. The theory is that there was no matter at that point of existence – just energy. Matter “precipitates” out of energy as it cools with expansion.
Brachiator
@Germy Shoemangler:
Proof that God is black.
Germy Shoemangler
@Brachiator: Yes, a black woman.
I was raised catholic, and left when I was still a teenager. Today I’d call myself an atheist. But if there IS a supreme being, I’m sure She is a black woman.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Brachiator:
There’s something to it, though. It’s a different skill set between, say, properly diagnosing and treating diabetes and piecing a shattered ankle back together. Surgery requires a much more mechanical mind (being able to picture in 3D how the pieces fit together and what to replace missing/too broken pieces with) than other kinds of medicine.
Betty Cracker
@Andrey: Just so, and well said.
Jeffro
Semi OT, since we are speaking of GOPers who are crazy and high: an excellent take on how a government shutdown is all part of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign strategy:
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/23/ted_cruzs_diabolical_shutdown_strategy_why_the_gop_senator_wants_to_watch_the_world_burn/
schrodinger's cat
@JC: You can predict the trajectory of a comet (one of Carson’s arguments for intelligent design) if you know freshman level physics i.e. Newton’s Laws and gravity. Its not a proof of intelligent design.
Germy Shoemangler
@Jeffro:
I wonder if it will backfire on Mr. Cruz. It might work if he were more… beloved by colleagues and repub voters. But he is profoundly unlikeable.
jl
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
The Multiverse(!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
I don’t know enough physics to have any idea about what the physicists idea of the multiverse is.
But the idea of a multiverse introduced into philosophy and logic by (I think) David Lewis is a goofy gimmick to get rid of infinite regress problems in certain fields of logic.
Paul in KY
@Dmbeaster: Doesn’t change fact that the universe expanded (time/energy/plasma) faster than speed of light during the ‘inflation’ phase. ‘Energy’ within the universe cannot travel faster than speed of light.
C.V. Danes
And to think, this guy made a living digging around in people’s brains.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I used to joke with my dentist that he probably feels right at home in a hardware store. He also has to know a fair amount of engineering to make sure that the changes to the teeth made when drilling does not throw a jaw out of alignment.
I also remember an interview with a podiatrist that emphasized that the best at this practice had to understand mechanics, how the body worked and moved.
But a doctor and a surgeon both have to understand the human body and what is medically appropriate. Both have to know how to do a proper diagnosis. Whether the resultant recommendation is medication or surgery is still dependent on knowledge and understanding. And there is the extra technical knowledge that a surgeon has to make.
And of course, in the history of Western medicine, doctors were hobbled not only by a received tradition that was just wrong (the humors theory of the body), but were prohibited from doing autopsies and other practical examinations of the body.
But you’re right about the mechanical skill a surgeon needs. I didn’t know much about Carson before his jump into politics, but I get a sense that his ability to see and work in 3 dimensions actually provided some insight into surgical procedures and also understanding of how the brain works.
Belafon
@rk:
They need God to fit in their heads.
schrodinger's cat
Just because you can’t understand how something works doesn’t prove the existence of God. In the past people attributed everything from seasons to tides, as the work of God, now we know better. So just because we don’t have all the answers about the Big Bang doesn’t mean its God’s handiwork.
Dmbeaster
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I understand the current thinking is the the universe is infinite, and the big bang was a “point” only as to the observable universe. Otherwise, it was itself infinite, but we will never be able to experience any of that since it will never be observable.
The key concept is that the inherent expansion of the universe continually increases with distance – it is not literally motion so is not bound by the speed of light with regard to the apparent speed that it flies away from us. At the edge of what we could possibly see, the recession rate approaches and exceeds the speed of light. Hence the concept the “observable universe” which is all that we can measure or experience.
Another way to grasp this is the fact that the universe appears uniform in all directions for as far as we can see and measure. Either we are coincidentally at the center of creation by the big bang, or we are looking at that portion of creation that constitutes the observable universe, and there are infinite dimensions beyond that which will never be observable or measurable.
Another way to see this is imagine the universe from the point of view of the most distant observable galaxies – say 10 billion light years out on opposite sides of our observable universe. Each of those has their own observable universe, and neither will ever see the other.
The farthest objects we can observe have, in the intervening billions of years while that light traveled to us, have receded an enormous distance further from us, and we will never observe the light they are emitting now as the expansion of the universe has moved that object out of our observable universe.
The universe is not expanding into a void – it is already everywhere under these understandings.
schrodinger's cat
The physical proof of the Big Bang theory is the existence of cosmic background radiation
JC
@Another Holocene Human:
Well, again, two points:
a. The argument that the Bible is literal, or in any way indicative of anything other than creation myths, is a different argument than an intelligent design argument.
b. There should be more sympathy for the naive intelligent design argument, when looking at this amazing universe. You can think it is wrong, of course, but as has been said earlier, ‘the whole universe came into being in a milli-second from a point much smaller than the point of the period at the end of this sentence”, is itself, wildly improbable. The universe is stranger than we can suppose. And a lot of science proves the universe crazier than we even thought, and more interconnected than we initially think. So have some sympathy for those who see this extraordinary universe, and think it may come from a larger intelligence.
C.V. Danes
@JC: There is no galactic overlord. Life, wherever it exists, is just a manifistation of the laws of physics and chemistry. Nothing more, nothing less.
jl
@Brachiator:
I agree to some extent. There is a certain simplicity to surgery. I remember a some residents joking around, and one said “Surgery is simple: get rid of the end stage organ, you get rid of the end stage disease”.
Also interesting to note the pecking order in humor: ‘orthopods’ (orthopedic surgeons) often joked about as mechanics and thoughtless sports jocks who just need to know some physics calculations to do their work, and leave all the medicine to ‘real’ doctors.
JC
@Paul in KY: That itself is pretty wild, right?
raven
Let The Mystery Be
Some say that they’re comin’ back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I’ll just let the mystery be
schrodinger's cat
@jl: There is a many worlds interpretation of Schrodinger’s cat!
JC
@Betty Cracker: Well, I marvel over well-built movies – much less this well built universe. But then, I majored in theater and philosophy, so there is that.
Paul in KY
@Belafon: Also, they hate that evolution means that 4,000,000 generations ago your direct ancestor looked like a stoat.
kdaug
Got yer perfect explosion right here, Doc. Care to palpitate?
Brachiator
@jl:
Wow. This is quite funny. I will look at the Wiki link, but I think some of the “best” discussions of the multiverse come from comic book fans, since the multiverse is a regular plot device.
Paul in KY
@Dmbeaster: I see other scientific papers that say it is finite, just getting bigger every second at speed of light & right now roughly 50 billion light years across. Essentially/practically infinite, but not technically so.
JC
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I appreciate this reply, thanks.
As it does seem to address where I’m coming from, and address the point.
And actually, the ‘many universes theorem’, actually would address the statistical improbability of this universe being so exquisitely designed.
If there are millions of universes being born and dying immediately, we just happened to be – by chance – in a universe that works well – lucky us.
Well, when I’m in a dream, and I try to investigate the nature of the dream – I can never find the dreamer, no matter how many experiments I do to find it – because I’m in the dream, and don’t recognize the dreamer.
So I get your point, but just because you can’t ‘find the background power/intelligence’, which created the dream, might have something to do with the tools you are using to find the background power/intelligence.
The tools we have to investigate find, simply may never be the tools that can find this.
Just as a counterpoint, I wanted to offer that.
catbirdman
@JC: What’s weird to me, given the importance of the universal constants you mentioned, is that many religious people require a “miracle” — i.e., an event that confounds the apparent order of the universe — as a component of their faith. The real miracle is the fact that the entire system holds together so well — that the sun doesn’t just blow up randomly, for example, but rather keeps us warm and gives us awesome sunrises and sunsets. Why is that so hard to appreciate on its own merits?
Paul in KY
@JC: Pretty freaky, I must say. Doesn’t make it any less so, though.
Germy Shoemangler
What is this business of the outcome of physics experiments determined by being observed? That’s something I’ve never understood.
Roger Moore
@jl:
That reminds me of a set of doctor jokes:
Q: How do you hide a dollar bill from a pathologist?
A: Pin it to a patient.
Q: How do you hide a dollar bill from an orthopedic surgeon?
A: Put it in a book.
Q: How do you hide a dollar bill from a plastic surgeon?
A: You can’t hide money from a plastic surgeon!
I’m sure there are more, but those are the only ones I’ve heard.
schrodinger's cat
@Ben Cisco: Good luck with everything!
MazeDancer
@lamh36:
Happiness in work is not to be given up lightly. You say you love the bench. The current supervisor wants to get back to same, it appears. Perhaps what you’re doing is great work to enjoy.
If supervising means not getting to do the interesting stuff while making sure your people have all they need to do what you’d wish you were doing, well, maybe money is not enough. Though, there is much to be learned and a great deal of growth available in being in charge. Such as growing in communications – like being clear without being curt. Clarity is good. But being blunt and cold does not usually prosper happy employees.
Don’t know about your field, but in other areas, be careful how you position yourself. Because if you mark yourself as “don’t want to be in the promotion stream”, well, then you never will be. And what if one day you do?
You can certainly not apply right now without labeling yourself as “no interest”, and nothing lost. And if anyone asks, just say wasn’t the right time, for many reasons, you’re enjoying the bench now, though someday, you will want to make that move.
Svensker
@C.V. Danes:
My goodness, you’re awfully sure of that assertion, aren’t you?
Roger Moore
@Germy Shoemangler:
It isn’t actually that hard to grasp. The key is that observing the system- and “observing” means taking a measurement of some type, not necessarily involving an intelligent observer- requires that you interact with the system, and that interaction necessarily changes the system.
Brachiator
@JC:
Nope. Sorry. You keep trying to jump from a universe that is amazing and strange and beyond our imagination to the idea that the universe was necessarily created by someone or something.
It simply does not follow.
Germy Shoemangler
@Roger Moore:
Maybe I’m being simplistic here, but my logic tells me that reality (everything “out there”) is fixed, and doesn’t care how I look at it or measure it. The results should be the same every time. But in quantum physics the observer plays a large role. What does outside reality have to do with my consciousness?
PurpleGirl
@Roger Moore: And they also ignore the competing theories in other books of the Old Testament. IIRC from my deacon’s classes, there is something like three genesis stories, and they are all different. For those insisting on a literal reading of the Bible, you can’t confuse them with the similarities in Babylonian genesis stories either., or other epics from the ancient middle east.
WaterGirl
Do any of you guys know who Andrea Zopp is? She’s apparently a democrat who is running against Tammy Duckworth for the Senate seat in Illinois.
MoveOn is surveying members in IL – asking whether we should endorse a candidate. They will apparently endorse whichever candidate gets 2/3 or more of the votes.
I have no idea who Andrea Zopp is, so I’m wondering if anybody here is familiar with her or has an opinion.
thanks in advance!
Belafon
@Germy Shoemangler:
Don’t confuse what you’re asking for with what physics does. Physics measures and makes predictions about the world. Hence, taking measurements. What is predicted in physics has to do with the observable world.
sharl
@raven: Yep, at some point in discussions like this I start to hear Iris Dement singing this inside my haid. I hope appropriately knowledgeable and well placed researchers won’t letting the mystery be, but things reach a point where I need to do that.
Belafon
@Germy Shoemangler: As for “Maybe I’m being simplistic here, but my logic tells me that reality (everything “out there”) is fixed”, what is fixed? The earth doesn’t stay in one place, the sun doesn’t, the Milky Way doesn’t. Neither do rivers, cars, people, atoms, or electrons. Your perceptions glosses over a lot of the smaller movement (if you’re temperature is > 0K atoms are vibrating for instance), and ignore the larger movements.
burnspbesq
@schrodinger’s cat:
But our current understanding doesn’t preclude the existence of anything God-like.
Germy Shoemangler
@Belafon: Well, you’re right.
Bill Hicks imagined a newscaster saying something positive about drugs:
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.”
Nutella
@JC:
You’re conflating two very different things here. Something strange is counter-intuitive and may or may not be improbable because weird/strange/hard-to-understand is not what improbable means.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Jesus Christ, no.
Carson may be a gifted surgeon, but he’s damned ignorant about some fairly well-known scientific principles. Sounds just like some of the folks in talk.origins.
It’s a head-scratcher how someone can get through med school and retain so little college-level biology, but I guess surgeons only really need to be experts in anatomy and their area of specialization, and the general biology stuff just fades over time.
FWIW, I don’t care what my surgeon’s religious or political beliefs are when it comes to surgery. The guy who pretty much rebuilt my wrist from scratch could have been a total froot-loop in daily life (he wasn’t AFAIK, but he could have been), but he was a damned good surgeon.
Woodrowfan
@Jeffro:
that’s generally what the mainline Protestant churches think. works for me. As a Christian I think creationism is an attempt to stuff God into a human-sized box, to reduce God to a human scale. Seems blasmophious to me.
Roger Moore
@Germy Shoemangler:
It’s not a question of consciousness, it’s a question of any measurement causing a physical perturbation to the system it’s measuring. You can’t measure the property of a system without interacting with it, and interacting with it changes the experiment relative to the one that you’re not interacting with.
WaterGirl
@Oatler.: got it! thanks (and i agree)
Andrey
@JC: “‘the whole universe came into being in a milli-second from a point much smaller than the point of the period at the end of this sentence”, is itself, wildly improbable.”
You keep asserting that, but you have no basis for it. In order to know that something is improbable, you have to know something about the probability distribution. But you don’t have that knowledge. What if, in an experiment that somehow produced universes over and over, 99% of them all result in the same conditions?
What I think you actually mean to say is that it is implausible – that is, that it is difficult to believe, or contrary to intuition. But just because something appears finely tuned does not mean it actually is. Just because something appears unlikely, or hard to believe, does not mean it is actually improbable.
Look at the solar system and discard your assumptions about gravity. What an astonishing coincidence that the paths of these thousands of objects, from huge planets to tiny asteroids, all happen to travel in neatly ordered circular and elliptical paths, always returning where they came from, tracing out a cycle of motion! If the paths are randomly chosen, the odds of this result are astronomically low! Improbable, yes? But it turns out that all this apparent precision is simply the outcome of a single interaction – gravity + moving object = orbit. How do you know that what you call an “improbable” universe isn’t just a completely predictable universe?
Andrey
@Germy Shoemangler: Your consciousness is irrelevant. When physicists talk about observers in quantum physics, they don’t mean humans. They mean instruments, devices. A photon detector is an “observer”. A thermometer is an “observer”.
trollhattan
@Woodrowfan:
Exactly. Faith is believing He is the creator, but you don’t get tell him how to conduct that creating. That’s strictly His call.
And now, the collection plate.
les
@JC:
Sorry, the “everything had to be just right to get us” argument is sorta true but trivial. It only matters if your underlying assumption is “us” is somehow a desired, predetermined outcome. So god wanted us so can’t be random, man!! And you might ask Ben if it really doesn’t matter which god…
Woodrowfan
@trollhattan:
We’d sing a hymn first. ;)
Yatsuno
@Ben Cisco: I missed the initial announcement of this, but as always much love and hope to you and your beloved Captain. Please keep us informed as you can of her progress and I hope all goes smoothly.
sempronia
@Roger Moore:
Here ya go:
… an orthopedic surgeon? Stick it to the EKG.
…an internist? Put it under the bandage.
…a general surgeon? Tape it to his kid’s forehead.
les
@JC:
The “gee if one thing changed along the way we wouldn’t be here” argument is sorta true but trivial; it only matters if you believe “we” are the intended, determined result of the development of the universe. Makes some people feel better, I guess.
raven
@sharl: Yea, sometimes I hear “we got nuthin to talk about anyway” too!
henqiguai
@Jeffro (#101):
Wasn’t this what Pope John Paul (something; the one before Ratzinger[sp]) said when he declared that evolution was quite compatible with (Catholic) church teachings? Basically, it was perfectly rational and acceptable to believe (a) God kicked off the universe to then operate according to a set of rational rules, including evolution as we currently understand it.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: The most common explanation is actually that all those dinosaur bones and hundreds of millions of years’ worth of geological strata were laid down in a period of days by the Flood of Noah. There were dinosaurs and stuff walking around on Earth in pre-Flood times. The Flood is the catchall explanation for a lot of things.
And radioactive dating methods and conventional geology are all wrong because argle bargle bargle. There’s a creative notion that carbon dating specifically is wrong because it depends on cosmic-ray exposure, and before the Flood the “waters of the firmament” existed as a cosmic-ray-blocking layer surrounding the Earth. Other types of radioactive dating are wrong because God messed with the laws of physics, or the assumptions about initial isotopic ratios are wrong in just the right way to get the answers they want.
There’s more nonsense. They argue that we can see stars that are more than 6000 light-years away because the speed of light was larger in pre-Flood times. There was a hilarious paper once that plotted historical variations in the measured speed of light, and plotted a curve going vaguely through them that had a vertical asymptote at 4004 BC.
Elizabelle
Watching the Pope’s entrance down the aisle at the National Shrine.
This must seem excessive, at heart, to him.
Rolling Stones: take note.
les
@JC:
They are comparable, unless you insist that the universe could not have “just happened.” Like all those folks who insist they’re so special that god has to have made them on purpose.
Matt McIrvin
@henqiguai: The Catholic Church has basically had no problem with conventional evolutionary theory for a long time. It actually goes back to Pius XII in 1950, according to Wikipedia. They carve out an exception for the soul, though.
SoupCatcher
@Matt McIrvin:
Including my personal favorite: the flood caused the axial tilt of the earth.
I actually earned extra credit for one of my undergrad science classes for listening to a talk where the “scientist” tried to make that point. It was one of the first of my own cracks in the wall that Sara Robinson talks about in her excellent series on breaking through to authoritarian followers.
JC
@les: I was more talking the fine-tuning of the universe itself, without getting into an argument of human beings and evolution.
les
@JC:
I might have some sympathy, if the believers would leave me alone, stop trying to get their just-so stories into my kid’s science class, stop persecuting anyone who believes differently, stop trying to control women’s lives and bodies, stop insisting that only they know how to run the country, etc. I have sympathy of a sort for those who are terrified by reality or overwhelmed by the complexity of the world; but I don’t have to pretend they’re right or special.
les
@Matt McIrvin:
True; and until recently, they held the soul was “inserted” at birth. Which is why abortion hysteria is a recent thing for Catholics.
Nutella
@les:
Yeah, there are many things in this world that I don’t fully understand but I don’t go around trying to prevent other people from learning about them or acting on them based on their knowledge. Fundies do.
les
@JC:
Alla same thing. The argument is that without fine tuning, you don’t have us. Evolution of universe, evolution of life–all the same physics. Your argument is the universe “has to” be the way it is; but that’s only true if it had to include us.
Dmbeaster
@Germy Shoemangler: Its Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and is a result of the laws of quantum mechanics and only applies at the level. It arises from the nature of matter at the quantum level – that it behaves as a wave and a particle, and its existence, nature and behavior is basically statistical. The rule literally says you cannot know exactly both the position and speed (you can know one exactly). Like a lot of quantum laws, it makes no sense and defies explanation in terms we typically use. It is sometimes explained that the act of observation at the quantum level “interferes” with being able to make a precise measurement, but this is misleading because it suggests there is a certainty that we are just unable to measure. Instead, it means basic existence is “fuzzy” – it is more about the fundamentally weird nature of existence at the quantum level.
The classic experiment to verify the idea is the beaming of subatomic particles through a narrow slit located a significant distance from the source, and then striking a target just past the slit. They do not hit a narrow target area on the opposite side of the slit, but instead create a difraction pattern.
rikyrah
And Latinos will go for Marco, because????
Marco Rubio Rules Out Path to Citizenship During His Presidency
The Florida senator takes a position that could cost him Hispanic voters in a general election.
Sahil Kapur Sahil Kapur
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio has effectively ruled out granting lawful permanent residency to undocumented immigrants if he makes it to the White House, even for a second term.
Pressed by conservative host Sean Hannity during a Monday night interview on Fox News, the Florida senator said he’s open to a path to citizenship for people in the U.S. illegally, but only a decade or more after passage of bills to secure the border and modernize the legal immigration system.
“I don’t think it’s a decision you have to make on the front end. The first two things you have to do is stop illegal immigration, then second you have to modernize our legal immigration system, and then third you can have a debate about how to even legalize people to begin with,” Rubio said. “And then ultimately in 10 or 12 years you could have a broader debate about how has this worked out and should we allow some of them to apply for green cards and eventually citizenship
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-09-22/marco-rubio-rules-out-path-to-citizenship-during-his-presidency
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@encephalopath:
And Chemistry, even. Things combine from more disordered to more ordered all the time – it’s called Chemistry. If you take some H2 and some O2 and mix them together in a box, under common conditions, you’ll get water. Especially if you wait long enough. It takes a lot of energy to break that water back up into H2 and O2 again – it’s a more ordered, lower energy state. No violation of the laws of the thermodynamics, no guiding gremlins, no design, no alien intelligence, none of that is required. The Earth isn’t a closed system – the Universe is.
People also don’t appreciate how long billions of years is. And how, given enough time, even really, really, really, really, really, really improbable things can happen naturally.
And people also don’t appreciate how counter-intuitive quantum mechanics is. First there was nothing; then it exploded sounds like nonsense, but it really isn’t.
Carson should be smart enough to not talk about things that he doesn’t understand. But he apparently isn’t. I wonder how he’d react to a cosmologist telling him that he did neurosurgery all wrong… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
JC
@Dmbeaster: @les: I’m not insisting – all I’ve said is that the inference is understandable. I know that Christian creationists then plop their version of “God” into the discussion. All I’ve said is, when there is such an exquisitely fine-tuned universe, I at least, have to marvel, and not accept it as ‘but of course’.
@Andrey: Is this true however? Based on what we know of physical laws?
@Andrey: But this is my point – I don’t know. I’m agnostic.
Dmbeaster
@Paul in KY: it didn’t travel. Space itself inflated. The same is true today with regard to the expansion of the universe (though not as rapidly as inlation.).
If matter existed at the inception of the big bang, it would have crippling gravity and behave like a hellish black hole.
Matt McIrvin
@Germy Shoemangler: As others have said, you don’t actually need a conscious observer to affect the system in physical ways; you just need an external system (the “measuring apparatus”) whose state somehow gets correlated with some variable in the system being measured.
What that does is, it destroys any effects in the measured system that depend on it being in a certain superposition of different values of the measured quantity.
You could, if you wanted to, regard the measured system plus the measuring apparatus as now being in a larger superposition of states (like Schrödinger’s cat).
Except that in practice, the measuring apparatus is never perfectly isolated from the rest of the universe, and the whole world gets correlated with the measured value (after all, the measurement would be pointless if it didn’t, because nobody would ever be able to read it).
But that further “leakage” actually isn’t necessary just to have an effect on the measured system; it’s just necessary that the measured system become correlated with something external to it. If you now draw a little circle around just the measured system, and predict according to quantum mechanics what it will behave like after being measured, it turns out that the measured variable now behaves exactly like classical probability, as if it’s in some definite state or other but you just can’t predict which. All the freaky quantum superposition effects go away.
All this is a little abstract, I know. It’s so difficult to think about that professional physicists sometimes say ridiculous things about it.
Kay
Labor unions love the Pope, and is it any wonder? :)
scuffletuffle
@lamh36: Apply. You can always opt out if the job is offered. If you dont even try, you may have regrets later.
My 2 cents…
Heliopause
Whenever the Pope does something deemed important — visit the U.S., die — do you ever find yourself secretly wishing that something horrible would happen somewhere in the country — mass shooting, airplane crash, white girl goes missing — just so the news channels would vary their programming a tad?
JC
@Brachiator: Well, again, perhaps the works of Shakespeare that I’m reading, are by a group of monkeys pounding randomly on a keyboard over an infinite amount of time.
But if I run across the works of Shakespeare, I’m going to naturally think an author created it.
And the universe is as complex as Shakespeare, and works astoundingly well – so the inference can be wrong, but yes, I believe you should have more sympathy to this argument, though you think it’s wrong.
That’s up to you of course.
That is different from having sympathy trying to shoehorn in an argument for a particular religion, based on the same inference.
Dmbeaster
@Paul in KY: I would suspect those articles are talking about the size of the observable universe. Here is a simple explanation of the current thinking that it is infinite. It is based on whether the universe is “flat” as measured using the microwave background radiation. No one knows for certain.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@rk: Lots of physics is counter-intuitive.
It used to be that people thought that radio and light waves had to “ride on top” of something like the way water waves do. That something was the “luminiferous aether”. It had lots of peculiar properties to allow light to move the way it does and yet still let matter move through it. It turns out that careful experiments showed that the aether doesn’t exist. So what do radio and light waves ride on? They can be thought of riding on themselves. The electromagnetic field rides on the magnetic field, and vice-versa. Light waves aren’t like water waves, so thinking they’re kinda similar will lead you astray.
Similarly, one can think of “What exists outside of the universe?” or “Where in space did the universe begin?” as being malformed questions. The universe and space and time all formed at the same “time” so to speak. The recent work on “acceleration of expansion” and “dark energy” and so forth seems to indicate that not just the stuff in the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, but space itself is expanding at an increasing rate – they’re tied together.
The universe is a magical place – everywhere we look, things are richer with more detail than we imagined.
HTH a little.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who isn’t a cosmologist, but has an interest in this stuff.)
henqiguai
@Germy Shoemangler (#158):
A simple example is that in order to observe the experiment you must bombard the system under observation with photons; else you can’t see it. The very fact of those photons impinging your system impart a new momentum to the system, thus changing it from what you were originally testing and trying to observe.
Elizabelle
@Heliopause: I find the Pope coverage a welcome respite from all Trump! all the Time! and idjit commentors talking their paychecks. They were Trump!ing me to death.
Mind you, no longer a Catholic. But I look forward to anything PF has to say on climate change and income inequality. Those are our issues, and important ones, if we want a more sustainable society.
gelfling545
@Roger Moore: A friend of mine washed out of nursing school because, as the instructor said, “You think too much. You need to just do it.”
Roger Moore
@Dmbeaster:
Strictly speaking, it says that the product of the uncertainty of measurement of the position and momentum (or any two other quantities whose products give the same units, like energy and time) can’t be smaller than ħ/2. So you can measure the position with arbitrary (but not absolute) precision, but only at the cost of increasing uncertainty about momentum, and vice versa. For you to measure one of those quantities exactly, you would have to have absolutely no knowledge about the other.
gogol's wife
@JC:
Very interesting. I am thinking more and more that the problem is not belief but LACK OF DOUBT. Both the evangelical Christians and the atheists have no doubt that they are right. To me it’s just as scary from the one as from the other. No human being can say that they know without a doubt what the nature of the universe is. Lack of doubt leads to intolerance of others’ beliefs, whether from believers or from atheists.
Brachiator
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Of course, if you view light as particles instead of waves, then the issue of riding on or traveling through a medium is not an issue in the way it might be with waves.
Another example of physics being counter-intuitive.
gogol's wife
@Jeffro:
A lot of believers do say that.
mclaren
Perfectly organized?
The giraffe’s laryngeal nerve is 14 feet long. Doesn’t sound “perfectly organized” to me.
Trentrunner
@gogol’s wife: Relevant xkcd.
Brachiator
@gogol’s wife:
No. No. No. No. Absolutely wrong. You cannot reduce this to a variation of “both sides do it.”
I am a non-believer. But my motto is the title of an old Firesign Theater comedy album, “Everything You Know Is Wrong.”
I do not operate on unwavering faith, belief in the unknown. I will accept whatever is demonstrably proven. This is also how science at its best works.
Recently, for example, there was the announcement of what may be new early humans, based on a find in South Africa (and one of the discoverer’s is my nephew’s college professor! Yay!) These finds may force scientists to re-asses and to reject earlier ideas of human evolution. Fine. This is what science is supposed to do.
If they found Jesus’ body, would evangelical Christians cease to be believers?
RSA
@Ben Cisco: I don’t know the details, but best of luck.
MobiusKlein
@JC:
The difference between the Universe and the completed works of Shakespeare is that we, today, can look backwards in time, as we look at stars and galaxies farther & farther away, and see how the Universe came to it’s current state. The laws of physics tells us how those changes occur over time.
Looking at a Shakespeare manuscript gives you none of that. It’s not a dynamic, auto-changing thing.
PurpleGirl
@Germy Shoemangler: Bruce Jay Friedman, in his play Steambath, thought god was a Puerto Rican steambath attendant.
RSA
@gogol’s wife:
I don’t think this is true for atheists in general; they tend to divide up by degrees of certainty or uncertainty, in my experience.
Spinoza is my Co-pilot
@JC:
Here’s the thing about “intelligent design” — there’s nothing scientific about it, at all. It’s simply not testable, so it’s not in any sense a scientific theory. What’s the hypothesis? That there must be (or even may be) some grand and purposeful (and unimaginably-powerful) “intelligence” responsible for reality? OK, how would you test that? Intelligent design promoters pretend to be engaging is science. That’s why they’re mocked, as they should be.
No one who promotes “intelligent design” has an actual theory on how that would work. All they’ve done — as you have, briefly, here — is to take the real science done by real scientists and say, “Well, that looks suspiciously-purposeful to me, therefore God”. And don’t tell me it’s not “God”. There’s not an iota’s difference between an “Intelligent Designer” capable of creating all of reality, and “God”.
“Intelligent design” is not science, it’s philosophy. Or theology, actually. As a “scientific” notion it’s on a par with the famous cartoon with the blackboard crammed with equations and in the middle there’s a cleared space where “And then a miracle occurs” is written. Science is the equations, “intelligent design” is the unknowable, untestable “miracle”.
You know, it’s perfectly fine if anyone wants to look at reality (including through the lens of our multifarious scientific discoveries and theories) and say, “Man, it really seems to me that there has to be some God behind all this, it doesn’t make sense that it ‘just happened'”. Few in the “yeah, man, it probably just happened” camp would have a problem with that. We do think it’s unnecessary to postulate an untestable “creator” of existence, since there’s no good reason to suppose that reality can’t exist on its own, but God can (it could be “creator-turtles all the way down” I suppose, though really now…). But ok, interesting theological discourse, I guess, have at it if that’s your thing.
It’s when it moves beyond that and the attempt is made to shove this pretty amorphous theological concept into the realm of science that the problem is created, particularly when it’s used (as it most often is) to attack and disparage the theory of evolution.
You talk about mocking — that’s not a one-way street, you know. In fact, I’d say it’s much more the modus operandi of “intelligent design” promoters, and any mockery coming back the other way is mostly a response. It’s precisely what Carson is quoted in this post doing.
And thus he follows a long and disreputable line of “intelligent design” evolution-mockers. That’s pretty much the raison d’etre of most public “intelligent design” promoters. And thus it’s little more than creation “science” in a modern suit, with all the mendacity and outright nonsense (like Carson’s “hurricane-created 747”) endemic to that discredited approach to dealing with real science.
RSA
@Spinoza is my Co-pilot:
It’s not necessarily theology, even if that’s how it plays out in practice, though. For example, Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument could reasonably be interpreted as an intelligent design argument, without any theological elements. (Not that I find it convincing.)
Baud
I’m sad that I’ve missed most of this thread. Good stuff.
Mike J
@Spinoza is my Co-pilot:
So it’s like string theory?
schrodinger's cat
The easiest explanation to all this nonsense that Carson spouts is that he is high on something. Whenever I see him on TV he seems doped up and kinda sleepy. What has he been prescribing himself? It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
gogol's wife
@RSA:
Except on BJ.
Andrey
@JC: Which “this”? Which physical laws?
gogol's wife
And I see in the time it took me to drive home from work, the intolerant atheists have jumped in to prove me right.
Andrey
@Mike J: Many variants of string theory do have testable hypotheses. A lot of them suffer from the problem that we don’t currently have equipment capable of testing the hypothesis – usually due to energy limitations – but they’re not usually untestable-by-definition.
gogol's wife
@Brachiator:
Jesus had a body, so I don’t know what that would prove.
Baud
@Mike J:
Good example. I think a “scientific theory” is broader than theories that are immediately testable.
Baud
@gogol’s wife:
That the bodily resurrection never happened.
gogol's wife
@Baud:
The way people on BJ represent belief is just nothing that I recognize, so I have a hard time arguing with you guys. You just want to fixate on comic-book issues.
gogol's wife
@Trentrunner:
I don’t see why it’s relevant.
Baud
@gogol’s wife:
I don’t understand your comment. I was trying to respond to your question about why finding Jesus’s body would be significant to Christian theology.
schrodinger's cat
@gogol’s wife: Are you defending Ben Carson’s kooky physics? Or did I miss something in this long thread.
Spinoza is my Co-pilot
@gogol’s wife:
Quite the little strawman you’ve put together there, gogol’s wife. And some tasty “moral equivalency” to boot. Nice two-fer.
And you’re “scared” by atheists as much as by right-wing Christianists, I suppose, because that “no doubt-having” by both groups has potential real-life consequences of an ungood nature due to all that well-known and massive political power wielded by both groups to try to force the rest of us to live according to their precepts. Or maybe there’s some other reason. In any event, you have every right to be so scared of all the scary atheists, obviously.
I have no doubt about that.
les
@gogol’s wife:
No true scotsman strikes. But atheists are intolerant.
Spinoza is my Co-pilot
@RSA:
All right, then philosophy, sometimes. It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.
The Dude
I may know some people that were taught by Carson at JHU.
I’m frankly surprised his former students haven’t been more front and center in discussing what a loon Carson is. To a person, ex students describe Carson as a wildly talented yet comically self absorbed Jesus freak who spent much of their time together trying to get the surgeons-in-training to accept that God was literally working through them, period. We’re even talking uncomfortable pep talks during surgery. It all awkwardly culminates in a dinner party at the Carson home where he spends time showing off his collection of religious self-portraits. The best one is AA Jesus standing behind a smiling Carson, both subjects’ hands extended in a “join us” gesture. It is hung below a stained glass church window in the huge foyer. The stained glass appears to depict Dr. Carson as a saint.
RSA
@Spinoza is my Co-pilot:
And right, it’s not science.
Baud
@The Dude:
OMG. No wonder he’s doing so well in the GOP polls.
Brachiator
@gogol’s wife:
Mainstream Christianity maintains that Jesus bodily resurrected. Not that his spirit rose.
The myth is that they went to his tomb and his body was gone.
But let’s look at it more easily. With any scientific principle, there might be a test, discovery, observation, etc, which would invalidate the scientific theory.
Is there a similar set of circumstances that might invalidate any particular religion? And note that I don’t focus on Christianity.
Also, since there are so many religions, all with different rules, etc, which one is real? What is the point of trying to compare religion and science when you cannot even compare religion and religion? It is pointless to talk about belief vs science when belief can be many things.
Roger Moore
@Spinoza is my Co-pilot:
I would disagree slightly. I think it’s possible to come up with Intelligent Design theories that are scientific, in the sense that they produce testable predictions about the way the world works. But that’s not what anyone is doing because the world, especially the biological world, doesn’t look like something that was intelligently designed; it’s obviously a mishmash of stuff that wound up the way it is due to historical accidents.
Shakespeare
Oh that I were still alive to write thee down as an ass!
Alas, I am declin’d into the vale of years, just as the unknown authors before me whose tales I took as my own are also departed. For I did not create the works out of nothing, but simply added to things I had no hand in creating, that I found here on Earth when I arrived. Nor did I create the language I used to pass my own perspective on to thee in the future. And those authors before me in turn took inspiration from those who came before, and those who came before were begot by their parents, and their parents were begot in turn by people not quite like them, and before them they were some sort of tame shrew creature, and the shrew came from billions of years of creatures, and the creatures came from simpler creatures, and then back to inanimate matter…
Hath ye ever seen a crystal replicate itself in a plate? The ability to replicate belongs even to that which does not live. And evolution? Imagine ye a hill facing the sea. The wind blows and takes away the soil, and things slowly fall into the sea where they are dissolved; but i’faith, those rocks which don’t roll so well do not fall into the sea so quickly… ye hath what may be called a “natural selection” of rocks.
The planets themselves naturally form due to the gravitational attraction of matter. And so all the way back to the big bang, and no stage needing anything more than the initial conditions. No need for a God at all.
Ahh, but ye seem to think the inability to see thy own brain in thy midsummer dreams means there must be another brain, a “dreamer”, as opposed to the one in the dream. Which is simply an antic disposition, aye, a category error that those who claim the mantle of philosophers often fall into: They need to believe there is a direct link between ability to reason, or dream, and external reality… for if there is not, if the brain can simply persuade itself of anything as a matter of it’s own functioning, then the whole basis of philosophy is entertainment at best.
And yet the great minds of thy day know full well the brain is made of neural connections, and there be no reason why it can’t wire up the neuron to the memory of “Banana” with the neuron linked to “Terror” and give thee evil dreams of terrifying bananas chasing thee in the night. No such bananas exist; their identity is created by the brain in the present, tis not a revealed truth of the nature of the universe.
And if ye are so keen to imagine mysterious other entities when ye know tis thee that dreams, just because ye cannot see or cannot accept tis you doing it, then be it not more likely that if ye thinks the universe must have a creator just because thee cannot see it either, tis thee just making the same category mistake again? Tis just thee in love with thy own imagination and philosophy, rather than there being anything else out there that needed to create this world. Rock and crystal do not dream, but they lead to us all the same. And a Banana is still a banana even if it will never know that ’tis yellow, or had frightened someone in their dreams.
Thy philosophy, good sir, is a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
RSA
@Brachiator:
I once got in a long discussion with an evangelical Christian creationist, and I tried to contrast my attitude toward evidence and conclusions with his. I asked whether there was any evidence that would make him change his mind about evolution. He said that he could imagine that, and it would be a huge change for him, because it would imply that he was wrong in his belief in the resurrection of Jesus. I didn’t go any further along that path, but I thought it was interesting, sort of the flip side of the question you’re asking here.
With another creationist, the discussion dealt with how the world and human experience told him what God was like. (Basically, the watchmaker argument.) That was kind of interesting, too, because if you accept this idea for the sake of argument, you might speculate about God being a committee of people, not of equal competence, making mistakes, throwing out work and starting over, and so forth. The kind of experience we all have and generalize from.
Spinoza is my Co-pilot
@gogol’s wife:
You seem like generally a nice person around here, but I’m sorry to say you’re also quite thin-skinned. That “intolerance” thing? Motes and beams, dear, motes and beams.
We both, however (as most here) have no desire to see Ben Carson — or anyone like him — running our fair land. That’s far, far more important, I think.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spinoza is my Co-pilot: Let’s just say this is not the first discussion of this issue on this blog.
Brachiator
@RSA:
My mother was a teacher. For a while I had copies of old science text books which declared, with deep certainty, that our solar system was the only one with planets. Not just inhabitable planets. Just plain old planets. And there was scientific justification of why our solar system was unique.
Now of course, we can detect planets all over the place. You can’t shake a stick without falling over an exoplanet.
It doesn’t “shake my faith in science” when a theory is overthrown, or when new evidence or techniques (such as detecting the gravitational wobble of a planet orbiting a distant sun) leads to new insights.
But your conversation with the evangelical Christian is very interesting, along with the idea that accepting evolution would result in a major shake-up of his faith.
RK
The 747 analogy comes from Fred Hoyle, an English astronomer known for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. Hoyle compared
henqiguai
@gogol’s wife (@226):
Yes, but he rose from the grave in his body. When the Disciples opened his crypt it was not there. So “what would that prove”? That the Resurrection story was a
liemyth.ETA: Dammit, Baud…
trnc
@Amir Khalid:
Don’t forget that “God works in mysterious ways,” which really just a way to say, “I can’t explain this. Don’t ask me how I know all the stuff that God absolutely does want.”
Jeffro
@RSA:
Wouldn’t that be a decent definition of hell??
Spinoza is my Co-pilot
@Shakespeare: Damn, that was good.
‘Course, it’s by Shakespeare, so…
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@JC:
For someone who claims to have no personal position in this discussion, you’re not posting like it.
Random is a word that doesn’t apply to physical interactions. It applies to collections of things. Thermodynamics applies to collections of things. If you put two atoms of hydrogen together with an atom of oxygen, you don’t get a “random” something that has some astronomically improbable possibility of existing – you get a molecule of water. The characteristics of hydrogen and oxygen atoms make them form bonds and combine in a non-random manner.
Similarly, the behavior of the universe after it exploded from nothing isn’t “random”. It obeyed physical laws and once matter formed, it obeyed inorganic chemical laws, and once organic molecules formed, then it obeyed the laws of organic chemistry, and so forth. There’s still a lot we don’t yet understand those laws, but we will come very close eventually (if we don’t destroy humanity first).
Don’t let sophistry about astronomical odds or the “fine tuning” of the universe distract you from the fact that humans are able to explain an awful lot about the universe, life, etc., after only about 400 years of concerted effort. 400 years seems like a long time for us, but it isn’t really. Imagine a few thousand years. Then try to imagine a few million years. Then really try to imagine a few billion years.
The universe is flabbergastingly old. Lots of things can happen in such a long period of time. It doesn’t require a designer – and there’s no evidence for one (any more than there’s evidence for Russell’s Teapot).
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Shakespeare: Bravo!
Cheers,
Scott.
RK
What’s perplexing is that if something can’t come from nothing (not Krauss’ nothing) there must have originally been something, but from where? The idea of something self-existing, that transcends cause and effect, is difficult to grapple with.
Uncle Cosmo
As long as we’re talking about engineers & MDs & sogenannte “intelligent design,” let me lob this one into the disgustation:
{ rimshot }
Beth in VA
@lamh36: You should try it. People who want to be manager often are terrible to work for. You will be doing your fellow workers good because you’re not into the power struggle. Maybe you can manage things so that you still get bench time. Go for it!
trnc
@rk:
Probably because it sounds like exactly what it is – trying to wrap a patina of religion around newly discovered scientific knowledge. The mysteries of the universe are easy to explain any way you want when there’s no science to contradict those explanations, and faith is all about mystery. As soon as people start to realize that the moon doesn’t make it’s own light or that a world literally covered in water can’t dry out in 7 months, it becomes difficult to keep telling them to square all the circles.
trnc
@RSA:
That’s exactly what I thought after reading one of Dembski’s books. With all the focus on how much work it took and the comparison to other complex designs, I wondered why they insist on a single designer when all of the conclusions point far more strongly to a group.
RSA
@trnc:
You and I should start a religion. Maybe we could make some money at it.
J R in WV
@Ben Cisco:
Good luck Ben. Surgery is a big deal, if it’s more than taking off a wart or removing a cyst.
Obviously you guys have studied it, talked to the best experts you could round up, and made a well-informed decision.
Best of luck, Mrs. Cisco! Work hard to get better after the surgical work. If PT is involved, do the simple exercises they tell you to do. That works well no matter what the root of the problem is.
Thinking good thoughts for you both!
JR
Seanly
RE: dcotors & evolution – there was a story about one of the doctors who tried using baboon hearts in humans. He was asked why he used baboons instead of chimpanzees. He didn’t believe in evolution and was unaware that chimps were biologically closer to us.
redshirt
So, like, what if the Big Bang was actually a White Hole from a Black Hole in another Universe? So that all the Black Holes in are universe are White Holes in some other new universe?
Also, Jesus.
Paul in KY
@Dmbeaster: There was definitely energy, in form of plasma. That energy had to move FTL during the inflation phase, as complete universe was only size of a golf ball when this happened.
Paul in KY
@JC: I would think that if a monkey typed in 1/2 of one of Shakespeare’s plays and then typed ‘lkjglglsl;’fjn;l dv v v’ or something like that, I would give him/her a pass.
Paul in KY
@Dmbeaster: Thank you for that link. Do not agree that universe is ‘flat’, it is spherical, but acts differently than any spherical object in universe, due to there being no external mass to influence it (unlike any spherical object/explosion in our universe, which are affected by all the external masses surrounding said spherical objects/explosions).
Paul in KY
@The Dude: I am not surprised by this.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Paul in KY: Not exactly. Cornell:
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: Don’t know why the fuck evolution would preclude (necessarily) the resurrection of JC.
Paul in KY
@trnc: I told one nutwad ‘a lot of shit can happen in a billion years’.
Paul in KY
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: The edges contained energy. Had too, as complete universe was only size of a golf ball.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Paul in KY: This is a complex topic that can’t be reduced to a sentence or two.
What do you mean by “energy”? The dark energy theories say that spacetime itself contains energy (and that energy dominates the “stuff” in the universe).
Earlier you talked about “plasma”. That has a specific meaning these days (it’s a form of stuff like solid, liquid, gas are forms of stuff). A plasma is a collection of ions, electrons, etc., in an energetic state. A plasma doesn’t exist when electrons, atoms, ions and even light don’t yet exist.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jado
He thinks there is order in the universe? Really? Has anyone spoken to him about quantum theory and entropy vs gravity?
As far as I can tell, there is no rational sense behind the rules of this ‘verse. He be trippin.
Paul in KY
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: All the mass/stuff that emanated from the Big Bang & became matter once it cooled enough. Plus the other more exotic stuff. I used plasma as a handy word for that mass that was not yet atoms/light/ions, etc.
trnc
@RSA: If that religion could incorporate scarfing popcorn and Fat Tire ales while binging on netflix, you’re on.
JC
@Paul in KY: :)
JC
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Well, as was said above, you simply put the ‘ultimate mover, AS the laws, rather than looking at the system which maintains those laws. And this IS my point. These laws are so exquisitely refined to create a universe, it is easy to attribute this successful universe to a ‘designer’ of these laws.
Instead, you made the power – you make God, whatever, the laws themselves. And those laws, ‘just are’.
Which again, is curious, and ends up meaning – that abstract equations are the “Gods” of this universe. But those equations, as far as we know, have only been contemplated, thought up, discovered by sophisticated human minds.
“God” is a sophisticated equation – in this formulation.
If we were living in the Matrix – and the laws had been ‘designed’ by a very sophisticated computer – how would you go beyond the ‘equations for the virtual universe’, as created by the evil computers – to find out if the equations themselves had been designed?
JC
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Also, to be clear, from my perspective, if there is a designer, or a collective of designers, or something more mystical or Hindu-like, that life is a dream created for the ultimate creator who got bored, and is both part of and beyond the physical universe – ’embedded and deeper’, at the same time – there is no concept that any type of vast mysterious intelligence would give even a second, would give a millisecond of attention to one specific planet, or care in any way about being worshipped.
If I were to ascribe characteristics to a designer/group of people who designed, number one, I would be projecting. But to forge ahead, if anything ‘ this God liked variety, and liked beauty. And didn’t give a shit about suffering of the living beings, in it’s creation.
But again, it’s a philosophical exercise.
To repeat again – if the many worlds theorem is true, this is a moot point. Universes live and die, and we just happen to be in one that is stable.
But if there is one universe, then it is absolutely valid to wonder about the sociopathic artist, who created this universe. (sociopathic artist, because this particular artist loves beauty and variety, but doesn’t give a shit about the suffering of its conscious beings.)
Because this universe IS finely tuned, and is stable, to an amazing degree.
Paul in KY
@JC: These aren’t laws like we have ‘laws’. They are physical phenomena in this universe that always act in the same manner, thus we call them ‘laws’.
redshirt
@JC: Multiverse theories are extremely problematic in that it really predicts nothing and can’t be tested or proven true/false. It’s a cool theory, but it’s just ideas and mathematical theories at this point and most likely will always be.
I have no idea with positing the idea that maybe someone created this universe, but it certainly plays no part whatsoever in trying to understand and explain this universe.
For example, maybe our entire Universe is a computer simulation. Who knows? But would it matter if it were true?
Older
@lamh36: Go for it! It seems right for you, or maybe I mean you seem right for it. But do consider all the very good suggestions made by commenters above.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@JC: Please don’t take this personally, but I don’t like arguments like the one you’re presenting here.
Words have meanings. Redefining words doesn’t lead to understanding and clarity, it leads to confusion and misunderstanding.
Physical laws aren’t God.
Physical laws aren’t “exquisitely crafted”. They just are.
Science is a process and a way of investigation that will tell us about the universe and the laws that govern how things in it behave. Word games aren’t science. Word games won’t explain how the universe works. Word games won’t somehow prove the existence of God, or a designer, either.
Philosophy has an important place in human affairs. It can help us live better, more caring lives among our fellow creatures. But it won’t explain physical laws or the universe.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tehanu
@Jeffro:
The thing that bothers me is how small and petty the fundies’ God is. I have more respect for God — if She exists — than to think She would limit Herself to the tiny, limited little world they believe in. Isn’t God big enough to work in billions of years instead of a few thousand? Isn’t it more impressive to have invented life and given it the power to develop and grow, than to have simply plugged in a few living creatures as-is?