Yup, you'll know them by their love.
And, in related news, Barry Arrington loves to label those who disagree with him as liars, while providing this gem: "The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the most reliably documented events in all of human history."
Yup, more reliably documented than the Battle of Waterloo, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, the assassination of Lincoln, the invasion of Normandy, the sinking of the Titanic, ...
You'll know them by their honesty.
No reply.
No reply after three months.
Or six months. (Just an auto-reply.)
Isn't this just typical of creationists? Make wild claims and refuse to back them up when challenged.
What is a "species" anyway? If you listen to Darwinblather, you’d never think to ask.
Right you are, Denyse! If evolutionary biologists studied speciation, there would be articles and books about it in the scientific literature, written by prominent Darwinists (and even some philosophers!). But of course, there are no such things. (Don't follow those links, Denyse!)
In short, no one knows.
In short, Denyse doesn't know. I can guarantee she never read Coyne's book.
Look, I (O’Leary for News) am not saying speciation doesn’t occur. I guess so, but don’t really care.
What Denyse O'Leary doesn't know could fill several large stadiums.
Really, I wish anyone who wants to prattle on and on about the deficiencies of Darwinism would take, at the very least, undergraduate courses on the theory of computation and artificial intelligence. It would save a lot of electrons being wasted the way Barham does.
It starts badly, with a claim that the "Darwinian consensus" (whatever that means) is "gradual[ly] crumbling" and that the "official explanation" (no kidding -- like a 9/11 truther, he really says that) "of the nature of living things---and therefore of human beings---that we've all been led to believe in for the past 60 or 70 years turns out to be dead wrong in some essential respects."
Yeah, yeah. We've heard that for more than a hundred years; it's what Glenn Morton called the "longest-running falsehood in creationism".
"The machine metaphor was a mistake---organisms are not machines, they are intelligent agents."
This is precisely the kind of silliness that a good course on the theory of computation could avoid. Why does he think that a machine cannot be an "intelligent agent"?
"For one thing, it [Darwinism] meant that all purpose is an illusion, even in ourselves, which is absurd. We know that is not true from the direct evidence of our own experience."
No, the biological theory of evolution does not mean that "all purpose is an illusion". Trouble results from using the vague word "purpose", which means many things to different people. It is not a concept that has a precise scientific definition (what are the units of "purpose"?), although Barham tries to provide one: he says, "Purpose is the idea that something happens, not because it must tout court, according to physical law, but rather because it must conditionally, in order for something else to happen." Well, that's not what most people mean by purpose, but even so, practically any computer program would exhibit purpose under Barham's definition. And nature is filled with objects that can serve as a basis for computation, including DNA and sandpiles. There is simply no logical barrier at all to computing devices arising through natural processes.
There are a few philosophers who have something interesting to say about evolution, but Barham is not one of them.
Reason #1: The journal's URL, as provided on some papers they have published, is given incorrectly: it says "http://www.ripublication.com/ijmr.htm", but the correct URL is "http://www.ripublication.com/irph/ijmr.htm". You have to be particularly incompetent to run a journal which cannot publish its own URL correctly.
Reason #2: The journal's listing of their editorial board contains spelling errors, lists at least one editor twice, and contains not a single person in the countries where mathematics research is strongest (e.g., USA, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Russia, Italy, Australia). Also, no e-mail for any of the editors is given.
Reason #3: Recently they published this paper: Ali Abtan, "A New Theorem for the Prime Counting Function in Number Theory", in Volume 7 (2015). Containing ungrammatical and false claims like "So till now their is no formula for the prime counting function π(x) as you see from the end of 18th century till now" (completely ignoring the work of Meissel, Lehmer, Lagarias, Miller, Odlyzko, and others), this paper is a mess. Understanding why the paper is silly is a bit more involved, so I'll start by explaining one aspect of what makes a paper good.
A general principle about theorems is that they should be (within reason) as general as possible. For example, if you prove that if some property of a specific set S holds, then before publishing it you should think about what more general property S has that makes it possible to get the result. Here's a specific example: recently I saw a reddit post that pointed out that every prime p greater than or equal to 5 can be expressed as p = (24n+1)½, for some integer n. This is totally uninteresting, but the reason why it's uninteresting is that this property has basically nothing to do with primes at all! Rather, it is trivial fact that every number q that is relatively prime to 6 has the property that q2 ≡ 1 (mod 24), a fact that can instantly be verified by computing (6k+1)2 and (6k+5)2 and observing that k(k+1) is always even. Since every prime greater than or equal to 5 is relatively prime to 6, the result follows immediately. But, I emphasize again, the result is really about numbers relatively prime to 6, not primes. It captures basically nothing interesting about primes at all.
Now, in Abtan's paper, what is the silliness? He states the following formula for the prime-counting function π(x), which is the number of primes ≤ x. (For example, π(10) = 4.)
π(x) = (Σ2≤p≤x p + Σ2≤n<x π(n))/X.
Now, as stated, this formula contains two silly features. First, X is undefined; it should be x. (Where were the editors or referees for this paper?!?) Second, the formula is manifestly incorrect when x is not an integer (for example, try x = 2.5). So we shouldn't use x, because among mathematicians, x usually implies a real-valued variable. Let's use N instead.
With these two corrections, the formula becomes correct:
π(N) = (Σ2≤p≤N p + Σ2≤n<N π(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.
Let's overlook the fact that the formula is completely useless for computing prime numbers or π(N), and instead focus on the formula itself. Remember the principle: try to figure out the class of sequences for which such a formula might hold. Well, let's try some interesting but completely unrelated sequence, like the squares. Instead of π(N), we might define sqrt(N), the number of positive integer squares ≤ N. Does a similar formula hold?
Yes! In fact, more or less exactly the same formula holds:
sqrt(N) = (Σ1≤i2≤N i2 + Σ1≤n<N sqrt(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.
How can this be? Well, the obvious answer is that Abtan's formula (for which he gave a long and complicated induction proof) has nothing to do with primes at all!
Let us generalize Abtan's formula and give a very, very simple proof of it. (It is often the case that if you generalize a theorem properly, it becomes easier to prove than a specific case might be.)
To generalize it, let S be any set of positive integers. S could be the prime numbers, or the positive square integers, or anything else. Let πS(n) denote the number of elements of S that are ≤ n. Then we claim that
πS(N) = (Σ1≤s≤N and s ∈ S s + Σ1≤n<N πS(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.
This has an easy proof by diagram! To see it, draw a histogram of the function πS(n) from n = 1 to N. For example, for the primes and N = 12, this would look like
The total number of red boxes is clearly Σ1≤n≤N πS(n).
Now consider the rectangle bounded by the lines x = 0, x = N, y = 0, and y = πS(N):
The total number of boxes here is clearly NπS(N).
How about the boxes in the rectangle which are not colored in red? Well, the top row is all blank boxes until the first prime hit in this row, which is 11. So there are 10 boxes. In the next row, there are all blanks until the first prime hit, which is 7. So there are 6 boxes. And so forth. So the total number of white boxes is Σ2≤p≤N (p - 1) (or, more generally, Σ1≤s≤N and s ∈ S (s - 1).) Thus we have proved
NπS(N) = Σ1≤s≤N and s ∈ S (s - 1) + Σ1≤n≤N πS(n).
This is the nice version of Abtan's formula. To get his formula, just add πS(N) to the left sum and subtract it from the right, then divide by N, to get
πS(N) = (Σ1≤s≤N and s ∈ S s + Σ1≤n<N πS(n))/N.
So we see that Abtan's formula has nothing to do with primes at all, really.
Any competent referee would have seen this immediately. Congratulations, IJMR. You're officially a Silly Journal™.
You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so I can't say much about it, other than it reminded me a little of one of the very few modern computer games I've played, "Myst". There were lots of red herrings and false paths to follow, more than I would have expected.
If you enjoy problem-solving, you might enjoy this; if you enjoy computer games (I don't, particularly), probably even more. Only about 20% of all teams competing manage to escape. We got out with about 1 minute and 50 seconds to spare. Everybody contributed significantly to the solution; we would not have gotten out if any one of us had not been there, but we also had a bit of luck.
This was a lot of fun, and our team size of four was close to optimal. Fewer, and you just don't have enough bodies to follow all the possible routes. Larger, and the number of people make it hard to coordinate and put together disparate clues.
If I had one suggestion to the owners, it would be to discard the very chintzy little reward you get for solving the puzzle, and replace it with something like a $5 gift card good for one of their alternate adventures.
Yield for Pedestrians...and Moose!We're not the only ones using the bike lanes sometimes...
Posted by The Alaska Life on Wednesday, February 12, 2014
It looks like fun! Give it a try.
Needless to say, it hasn't.
By the terms of our bet, I was to pay him $1000 if it appeared, whereas he only has to pay me $500 because it hasn't.
Rafee, I'm prepared to accept my money now. You can contact me for payment instructions.
And Michael Chan, MPP for Markham-Unionville and Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and International Trade, isn't the first politician to use libel to try to shut down criticism. Brian Mulroney famously threatened a suit against the Canadian government itself. Unbelievably, he actually got the government to back down and pay him a $2 million settlement.
The US has the right approach here. The bar for public figures like Chan and Mulroney should be set extremely high. Otherwise, we get what we have in Canada: libel chill makes investigative journalists too scared to take on powerful figures.
Then read this this comment by Barry Arrington on the article. Arrington does nothing but sneer, saying the atheists in the article exhibit "gobsmacking stupidity", have a "lack of intellectual honesty" and "[spout] self-contradicting pseudo-profundities".
But he doesn't give a single example of what he thinks is wrong!
On a more personal note, who would you rather have lunch with? Arrington, or the genuine humans depicted in Buzzfeed, full of modesty, joy, sorrow, intellectual curiosity, and love?
I absolutely love this video by J. P. Moreland, a fourth-rate philosopher and ID advocate who teaches at a fifth-rate Bible college (Biola University, which gets its name from "Bible Institute of Los Angeles", the more honest name they used for many years).
I can't think of a better example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the kind of "Christian thought" that gave us both intelligent design and the "evolutionary argument against naturalism". Biola also hosted the conference that resulted in Mere Creation, a volume that included one of the most laughable mathematical articles ever, written by (you guessed it) David Berlinski.
As you watch the video, keep in mind that "Biola holds to the key doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, the idea that the original writings of the Bible were without error with regard to both theological and non-theological matters. As a final guarantee of strict adherence to its theological worldview, the university requires every faculty member, when first hired and again upon application for tenure, to submit their understanding of and complete agreement with each item of the doctrinal and teaching statements to the Talbot School of Theology for evaluation." [wikipedia]
Moreland seems to think that philosophy, and specifically Christian philosophy, holds the key to understanding the mind.
In this short video, how many misunderstandings and silly assertions can you find? Here is a brief list:
Here are some brief comments:
Similarly, you're never going to see Jonathan McLatchie or J. T. Bridges being interviewed by an actual science program. The only way they can get airtime is in religious forums like this. So much for the pretense that ID is actually about science.
Here are some excerpts from a speech Clingman made on the floor of the Senate, January 18 1860, as reported in the Wilmington Journal, February 2 1860, page 4:
"If the negro were in fact in all other respects like the white man, his blackness would have been of no more consequence than the difference between black and red hair or light and dark eyes. The feeling against him grows out of the fact that he is in all respects different from the white man and inferior...
"...Omnipotence has made a difference between the white man and the negro..."
"When, sir, some twelve years ago I, in discussion, threw out suggestions about the difference of the races, I was denounced as one who attributed injustice to Almighty God in alleging that He had made the negroes inferior..."
"For the inequality of the negro Providence is responsible, as He is for the entire creation which surrounds us. When human laws are in accordance with the system of nature they are wise; but if in oppositien [sic] to it they are productive only of mischief..."
"Hitherto they [the Abolitionists] have enlisted the sympathies and feelings of the North by falsely assuming that the negro and white man have in all respects the same nature. Let the inequality which the Creator has made be recognised, and their systems fall to the ground..."
"But we are asked how we will go about making a revolution or dissolving the Union ? ..."
You can read the whole thing yourself. To summarize: Clingman viewed the equality of black man and white man as absurd; that this inequality was ordained by his god and "the system of nature"; that only "mischief" could result from ignoring this; and that if the North persisted in its absurd views then revolution might be the consequence (although Clingman concluded that this would probably not happen).
Now go read Barry Arrington on gay marriage at the pro-intelligent-design blog. (What Barry's bigotry has to do with intelligent design is, as usual, unclear.) The similarity between Arrington's rhetoric and Clingman's is astonishing. (One difference is that Arrington misrepresents the truth, as when he states "Every time the people have voted on the “right” to same-sex marriage they have rejected it by fairly wide margins." Perhaps Arrington thinks the good inhabitants of Maine are not people. But why should a lawyer be aware of legislative history?)
Some people claim the debate between evolution and intelligent design is about science. It's not. All the science is on the evolution side. The debate arises almost entirely from a medieval, ignorant, and uninformed view of the world that has more in common with 1860's North Carolina than it does with a modern secular democracy.
I checked some other youtube videos of similar size, but these were not blocked (despite what it says here), and furthermore, the error message I got was different from when I tried to download a podcast that was too big. It suggested I should contact Amtrak by e-mail if I thought something was blocked unfairly, so I did that. They promised a response within 24 hours but, not surprisingly, it's been 24 hours and I've received no explanation.
So, what's going on, Amtrak?
This is not surprising at all to moose aficionados.
For one thing, the Christian doctrine of grace is really reprehensible. "Grace" means that humans are "depraved" because of Adam's fall, that they cannot rationally respond to an offer of "salvation" from Christ, so the Christian god actually overrides man's will so he will "repent" and "be saved", and that Christ's offer is meant for the "elect", which is independent of one's moral character or good works. To the extent that this nonsense is meaningful, it is evidently quite sick: it denigrates human beings as worthless wretches, and it allows those who believe they are among the "elect" to feel superior to everyone else.
For another, the song was written by a slave trader, John Newton, who underwent a religious conversion after a life-threatening storm at sea (but nevertheless continued in the slave trade for several years afterwards). How this became a civil rights anthem is anyone's guess, but it seems wildly inappropriate.
Far better, in my opinion, is "We Shall Overcome", which is both lyrically and melodically superior.
So I have to admit that when President Obama sang "Amazing Grace" at the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, I was not particularly moved at all. However, I certainly recognize that, for the community he was addressing, the song has strong resonance. But "We Shall Overcome" would have been a much better choice.
And even worse was Obama's remarks on religion:
"Blinded by hatred, [the killer] failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood — the power of God’s grace... This whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace. The grace of the families who lost loved ones; the grace that Reverend Pinckney would preach about in his sermons; the grace described in one of my favorite hymnals, the one we all know — Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God."
I'm sorry, Mr. President, I think "grace" is one of the most repulsive of all Christian beliefs.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." -- Robert Ingersoll
But in a better world, the rich would walk, while the poor would ride moose.
Guess what will really happen? The same thing that happened in Canada.
Nothing at all, except that a small segment of the population will now have the protections usually associated with marriage. And the opponents will, in twenty or thirty years, be seen as archaic as opponents of interracial marriage do today.
Sharkey cast doubt on the "emotionally aware" claim. The robot is not really emotionally aware, Sharkey claimed; rather, it's just using an algorithm to detect emotion in humans and respond appropriately.
I wonder just how Prof. Sharkey thinks people detect emotion in other humans? If not an algorithm, what does he think is going on in the brain? Is it magic?
I'm always amused to hear people -- even computer experts like Sharkey -- complain that computers can't "really" do something, whether it be compose music, or write poetry, or detect emotion. But these naysayers never seem to explain what it would mean to "really" do these things. It's like complaining that airplanes don't "really" fly because they don't flap their wings the way birds do.
Here is yet more evidence. This ridiculous "pledge" against gay marriage was signed by two major figures of the intelligent design movement: Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt.
Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt are both senior fellows of the Discovery Institute, the principal propaganda arm of the intelligent design movement. Neither of them, of course, has any advanced scientific training. That lack of knowledge doesn't prevent them from writing, at great length, about the supposed flaws of evolution, and the virtues of intelligent design.
Denialism is a principle part of the worldview of the signers. When they write things like
Judge Leon Bazile wrote, when he upheld Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." Is the congruence between Bazile's decision and the statement that Richards and Witt signed not completely obvious to everyone?
Denialism of social change like gay marriage and denialism of scientific theories like evolution are just two sides of the same coin. Both are essentially rooted in mindless adherence to religious dogma and the fear that if one does not adhere to the same principles, then chaos is the result. They were wrong about Loving and they're wrong today.
Hat tip: RM.
The cowardly "Timaeus", an academic who is not brave enough to use his real name, takes issue with Larry Moran's blog because "I couldn’t find a single article on evolutionary theory [by Larry] in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject for over 10 years into the past. For someone who has so many opinions on evolution, and voices them so loudly in non-professionally-controlled environments such as blog sites, you are surprisingly absent from the professional discussions. Perhaps you can explain the inverse relationship between your popular involvement in debates over evolution and your visibility in the technical books and articles on the subject of evolution."
Timaeus goes on to say "Larry Moran is a nobody in evolutionary theory, a biochemistry teacher at Toronto with an interest in evolutionary theory who is convinced he knows more about it than almost everyone else on the planet, but with no track record to corroborate that opinion."
"That’s the problem with the internet age. Through web sites and blogs, it gives people the ability to be prominent, and many readers assume that prominence equals importance."
It's true that Larry seems to have done most of his research work in the 1980's and 1990's. Without much work, I found articles by Larry in famous journals like Molecular and Cellular Biology, Journal of Cell Biology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), and Developmental Biology. Since then, he's been involved with Principles of Biochemistry, a major textbook. As anyone who's worked on a textbook like this knows, it's an incredible time sink. Larry deserves our appreciation and thanks for devoting himself so selflessly to biological education.
Science is often a young person's game. Many scientists do their best work in their 20's and 30's. Later on they often go into administration, or write textbooks. Larry is not much different from many scientists in this regard.
Timaeus seems to think you have to do research in evolutionary theory in order to discuss it. That's sort of like saying that you have to do research in analysis in order to discuss freshman calculus. Pretty much any mathematician can differentiate and integrate; it's a basic tool of many fields. Similarly, evolution underlies much of modern biology. Most biologists will have had advanced training in the theory of evolution. Creationists and ID advocates typically have misunderstandings at a very basic level, and that's what Larry is correcting.
Timaeus claims "It seems to be merely his [Larry's] own private judgment that he knows more about evolutionary mechanisms than anyone else, that he thinks more clearly than anyone else, etc.". Later he says "But Moran apparently takes himself quite seriously as an evolutionary theorist". And later, "why does this guy think he is so important a figure in modern evolutionary theory". Who says Larry knows more about evolutionary mechanisms than anyone else? Where did he ever say he was "an evolutionary theorist"? Where did Larry ever say he is "so important a figure"? Timaeus seems to have just made that all up.
Timaeus seems to not understand what a blog is. He says "[Larry] could not write in that style in an academic journal of evolutionary theory. Any article written in that style would be rejected. So would any book, if written for a serious academic scientific publisher." But a blog is not an academic journal or a book; it's often just an outlet for things that interest the blogger. Timaeus seems not to understand that.
Furthermore, Timaeus doesn't apply the same standards to Uncommon Descent. Does Timaeus think the ravings of Barry Arrington, Denyse O'Leary, and William Dembski on that blog could be published in an academic journal? Does Timaeus remember the fart noises that Dembski so delighted in? Or the time Barry Arrington cited a fake quote that he attributed to Margaret Sanger? Did Timaeus offer a word of objection to these (which are just two of dozens and dozens of similar examples)?
Timaeus huffs that "[Science] does not belong in the arena of culture war and popular rhetoric. It belongs in the arena of sober professional discussion." Actually, popular science has existed for a very long time. Famous scientists like Einstein and Watson and Sagan all wrote popular books. As for "culture war", surely it is the creationists and ID advocates who have spent most of their time in culture war and popular rhetoric, and hardly any time at all in research. For evidence, all you have to do is look at Bio-complexity, the flagship ID journal. Here it is June, and they don't even have a single article posted yet for 2015. Last year they published a total of 4.
Timaeus sneers, "But it is interesting that often the people who are the most dismissive of the views of others are those with the least scientific accomplishment themselves — or those who at one time had accomplishments themselves, but as they have become older have tended to “coast” and involve themselves more in popular book-writing, blogging, flashy stage debates, etc. (e.g., Dawkins, Coyne, Ken Miller)."
Let's see: Denyse O'Leary writes endlessly about "Darwinism", which she dismisses as "publicly funded nonsense". What scientific accomplishments does she have?
Barry Arrington writes about information theory, but doesn't understand it at all. What scientific accomplishments does he have?
David Klinghoffer does the same. What scientific accomplishments does he have?
I don't see Timaeus offering any criticism at all of these folks. And this is the same Timaeus who says "You are so partisan it’s disgusting." Timaeus, you're a hypocrite.
(By the way, Timaeus, Dawkins is 74. Coyne is 65. Moran is about 67, I think. Maybe Timaeus will still be producing good research at those ages, but not everybody can. I'm 57 and I definitely feel like I'm slowing down. But calling it "coasting" is really offensive. A little charity is called for.)
The commenters on that post at Uncommon Descent aren't much better. Mapou (that is, Louis Savain), says "The shrill tone of people like Moran, Coyne and Dawkins is a sign of desperation. This culture did not exist 20 years ago." What? Has Savain never read any Duane Gish? The anti-evolutionists have been shrill for at least 90 years; I own a book by Louis T. More published in 1925 that sounds just like ID creationists today.
Timaeus says, "I’m not happy to listen to self-appointed referees laying down the law, week after week, in column after column, regarding who is ignorant, who is wrong, etc., in areas in which their own expertise has not been demonstrated." Then why does he read Larry's blog? No one's forcing Timaeus to listen.
Timaeus goes on to say, "I’m not against genuine academic discussions about evolution, policed by traditional academic rules; but the blogosphere has created a new, in-between kind of debate over evolution, led by scientists who are taking time off from their day jobs to become internet stars and gain internet followings, and who seem to think that their pronouncements on these academically unchecked sites have the same epistemological status as the conclusions of a well-executed research program. I really dislike this trend. It blurs the distinction between serious academic discussion and bar-room conversation in what is to me a dangerous way. Larry Moran, Jeffrey Shallit, P.Z. Myers, and others are guilty of this."
Oh, goody, I get criticized, too. Hey Timaeus, I've got news for you: I'm not an "internet star". My little blog hardly gets any readers at all; Uncommon Descent and Pharyngula both get many more hits than I do. I've never claimed anything like "[my] pronouncements on these academically unchecked sites have the same epistemological status as the conclusions of a well-executed research program"; you're just making that shit up. As for P. Z. Myers, one reason why people read him is that he's a damn good writer. Read his essay "Niobrara" for a sample. Hell, if I could write that well, I'd probably have more readers.
Timaeus says, "but there may be some less partisan people out there who just assumed that Larry was someone like Mayr or Ayala or Gould". Geez, you'd have to be a real moron to assume that Larry was on the same par as Mayr or Gould. Anybody who spent five minutes looking could see that his specialty is biochemistry and not evolution. Timaeus should give Larry's readers more credit; maybe they're not as stupid as Timaeus seems to think they are.
How something is being said is very important. Arrogance and abrasiveness, dismissiveness and name-calling, get in the way of genuine conversation. This is why Matzke, Shallit, Moran, Myers, Abbie Smith, etc. have made evolution/design conversations worse rather than better. Oh, great, I get another mention! Apparently I've made "evolution/design conversations worse rather than better". Timaeus makes no mention of the long article in Synthese I wrote with Elsberry in which we showed why Dembski's use of information theory is nonsense. But then, hardly any ID creationists have taken notice of that article or my other work on the subject. It took Dembski three years to admit a fundamental flaw in one of his calculations. What do you think, Timaeus? Is Dembski making the conversation worse or better? How about Dembski and the fart noises?
As for name-calling, just read Uncommon Descent. Evolutionists are routinely labeled as racist, as ignorant, as deluded, as "tax-funded" fools, and so forth. Clean up your own stable, first. It really reeks.
Timaeus says to a commenter, "If you are an evolutionary biologist, why can’t you tell us who you are and where you work? Not being an ID proponent, you can’t possibly lose your job, grants, career, etc. if your employer knows your real name (which is unfortunately the case for myself and several others here)."
Oh, right, the usual ID paranoia. I really, really doubt that Timaeus is in any danger by outing himself as an ID creationist. Sure, people will laugh at him the way we laugh at academics who engage in 9/11 conspiracy theories or global warming denial. But it seems very, very unlikely he would be in any danger of losing his job.
Timaeus sneers, "It is perhaps a certain provincialism derived from your experience (or more likely hearsay knowledge) of certain American research universities or university departments, where there are professors hired solely to do research, which causes you to make this error. You imagine that Toronto is something like that. But in most countries outside of the USA (and even in the USA at many if not most universities) the job teaching/research is a package deal. You don’t switch from one function to the other; you do both."
Actually, Timaeus is wrong. Generally speaking (but not always) professors are expected to do teaching and scholarly work, not necessarily just research. Writing and updating a major biochemistry textbook certainly falls under the kind of scholarly work professors are expected to do.
Finally, to answer one more of Timaeus' questions, why don't most famous evolutionary biologists get involved in attacking ID? For the same reason most famous mathematicians don't get involved in attacking Cantor crackpots, or famous computer scientists don't get involved with those who think Turing's proof of unsolvability is wrong: they have better things to do. They are happy to leave these quixotic quests to those few of us who are fascinated by cranks and pathological thought.
He was for many years an important force in the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), the Canadian version of the ACLU. I strongly recommend his book Uncivil Obedience.
Hartnett says, "If you say evolution happens, it is disingenuous, because you really mean that natural selection and mutations happen. This is part of operational biological science. But Darwinian goo-to-you evolution does not happen!"
This is misleading in a number of ways. First, that's not what is meant by "evolution happens". Evolution is caused by many different kinds of processes, including sexual selection, genetic drift, founder effects, and others not mentioned by Hartnett. Second, biological evolution is generally understood to include claims like common descent.
By "goo-to-you evolution does not happen", it sounds like Hartnett is claiming that we do not see 3.5 billion years of evolution taking place in 5 minutes. But this, of course, is a ridiculous straw man. We don't see mountains rising 3000 meters today either, but that doesn't mean that the theory of plate tectonics is somehow invalidated. Many aspects of science involve looking at past events that are not always easy to duplicate, and trying to understand how they took place.
Hartnett feels persecuted: "Last year I gave a lecture at my university “8 Reasons Why Evolution is Foolish” and after the event I got all sorts of negative comments coming back through my line manager. Apparently geologists and biologists (read ‘evolutionists’) complained to the Dean of the Faculty of Science, that I was even asking questions, let alone criticizing the science, in areas of biology, geology, cosmology etc., and that it looks bad for the university. It only looks bad because I was questioning their religion of science, not operational, experimental science."
Look, if you can't stand criticism, why are you in science? Criticism, even harsh criticism, is a standard part of the scientific process. Hasn't Hartnett ever attended a science conference? And if you think you're critiquing evolution by bringing up long-debunked arguments like "circular reasoning" is used to date fossils, then you're not doing science, you're just being an idiot. When you say "Information comes from an intelligent mind, not by random processes", you're just demonstrating that you know nothing at all about information theory.
Hartnett shouldn't wonder why he gets no respect for his anti-evolution rants. It's because his arguments are worthless, ignorant, and have been debunked long ago. That's not the behavior of a scientist; it's the behavior of a religious fundamentalist. Big surprise.
Why anyone would give this supercilious dolt 1500 words in a major newspaper to attack atheists is also beyond me.
Nevertheless, that's what the National Post just did.
Bigotry against religious denominations is not generally tolerated. But bigotry against atheists gets 1500 words. As a thought experiment, what major newspaper in North America would publish a column entitled "The shabby, shallow world of the militant Jew"?
There's really no point fisking this crap in detail; it's already been done a million times before, since Conrad Black literally has not a single original word to say. I'll just point out a few things:
"militant atheist": as I've said before, it's a good bet that if you hear somebody repeat this cliché, you're dealing with a propagandist or shoddy thinker. Black repeats the cliché several times. People like Peter Singer and Richard Rorty are derided as "vocal atheistic militants", but then what is the term for John Lennox, the glowing subject of the column? Is he not a "vocal Christian militant"? (And who the heck is the "David Hawking" that Black refers to?)
"Dr. Lennox is one of the world’s most eminent mathematicians": No, I'm sorry, he's not. This is a typical example of credential inflation, one of the favorite tools of creationists and propagandists. You should not be surprised to see Conrad Black use it.
Dr. Lennox is certainly a good group theorist, but "one of the world's most eminent mathematicians" is a gross exaggeration that, I dare say, even the good Dr. Lennox himself would disavow. Dr. Lennox has not won the Fields medal. Dr. Lennox has not won the Cole Prize in Algebra, Dr. Lennox's field. As far as I can see, Dr. Lennox has not won any mathematical prizes at all. According to MathSciNet, the main reviewing journal in mathematics, Dr. Lennox has published 70 works since 1970, or about 1.6 papers per year. This is a good, but not outstanding record. His papers have received a total of 292 citations. (By contrast, MathSciNet says I have published 182 papers since 1975, which have received a total of 1125 citations. And I want to emphasize that I am certainly not "one of the world's most eminent mathematicians".)
All this pompous protestation aside, Black is on the losing end of this debate. More and more young people are rejecting the bogus claims of organized religion. Christianity and Islam cannot survive in their present form; it's only a matter of time. Either they will dominate the world through totalitarianism, or evolve closer to Deism, or they will slowly vanish.
Same ground rules as before: "..." represents my best rendering of an actual quote by Prof. Lennox. '...' (single quotes) is a paraphrase. * denotes a claim that is particularly misleading or egregiously wrong; the more stars, the worse the claim. Comments in brackets [like this] are my rejoinders.
*** "mockery is not an argument and doesn't do credit to the person doing the mocking." [Really? I need a new irony meter here, because the one I have just went SPROING. In Lennox talk #1, mockery was one of his main rhetorical tools! And it was dealt out by Prof. Lennox with relish. Somebody needs to check out the mote in their own eye. Oh, and for the record, I have nothing against mockery, just hypocrisy: "a horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms" is one of my favorite quotes.]
"creation of the universe is not an exception to known laws." [Wait a second, I thought it was the theists who were always saying things like "it's impossible that the universe could come from nothing". But what is creation "ex nihilo" then? And how about the Christian god supposedly "speaking" the Universe into being? That's not an exception to known laws?]
"Nature is largely but not absolutely uniform." [Actually, nature is not uniform in many ways. For example, conditions on the Earth today are not at all like the way they were 4.4 billion years ago, shortly after it formed. Vague prattle like "Nature is largely uniform" is basically content-free because it is so imprecise; anything you like could be an exception. If you want to assert uniformity, do it in a specific way: say, for example, "The speed of light in a vaccuum is a constant." Then at least you get something potentially testable and falsifiable. Of course, none of this supports Lennox's claims about miracles.]
"Hume denies the cause and effect relationships behind science." [Who cares? "Cause" and "effect" are just vague philosophical prattle. Open up a physics textbook and you won't find these words in the index. Instead you find things like "force", "mass", "acceleration", etc.]
"On both sides of the fence there are professors who accept miracles and those who reject them." [Yes, but that is true about almost any issue you can name. I'd bet if you surveyed members of the National Academy of Science, the vast majority reject miracles.]
** "Antony Flew was the world's leading interpreter of David Hume. He came to believe in a deistic god on the basis of the semiotic nature of DNA." [Yes, in his dotage, philosopher Flew became a deist. He had no training in biology or mathematics and accepted the claims of intelligent design advocates, apparently without seriously investigating their accuracy. There have also been serious questions about his possible mental deterioriation during this time. More telling is the fact that the overwhelming majority of evolutionary and molecular biologists, and biochemists, find nothing supernatural in the "semiotic nature of DNA". Who the heck thinks what Flew thought is an important consideration? Oh, and did you catch the credential inflation there for Flew? Check it out yourself: this article on Hume doesn't mention Flew even once.]
Lennox discusses Hume in relationship to miracles. [But Lennox apparently misses the single strongest argument by Hume, which is that miracles must be extremely improbable, but the fallibility of human testimony is extremely probable.]
* "Joseph knew where babies came from .. it took powerful pressure from God to change Joseph's mind." [By far the most rational explanation for Mary's alleged pregnancy is that she slept with a man. If it was not Joseph, and she claimed to be a virgin, as the story supposedly goes, then it seems likely she lied and slept with someone else. Attributing her infidelity to "God raped me" is an ingenious excuse, but not one any 21st century spouse is likely to accept. Christians need to rule out this obvious possibility before believing in a miracle. How can they do that? The evidence (if the events even took place) is 2000 years gone. But even if we accept the Christian account, we are led to accept two extremely unattractive things: first, that Mary was, for all intents and purposes, raped by the Christian god. Second, that this god has the ability to force people to believe anything he wants by exercising his will. So how can the Christian claim that any knowledge is reliable, when one's beliefs can be warped by their god's pressure?]
"If I put $100 yesterday in a drawer in my hotel, and another $100 this morning, and I come back in the evening and find $50, I don't say the laws of arithmetic have been violated; I say the laws of Canada have been violated. The drawer is not a closed system. The laws of arithmetic can't prevent someone putting their hand in a drawer." [This joke, and variations on it, is repeated in nearly every talk I've seen by Lennox. I still don't understand the point. The "laws" of arithmetic have little in common with the "laws" of nature, as Lennox understands well. "Laws" of arithmetic are consequences of axioms. "Laws" of nature are simply descriptions of our current understanding of nature and are subject to revision, particularly at very large or very small scales. It's up to Lennox to provide evidence that an incorporeal being exists, that it has the power to influence events, and so forth. Jokes like this make people laugh, but they have nothing to do with the evidentiary burden Lennox has.]
"C. S. Lewis said, `If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born.'" [Can the "spermatozoon" spontaneously appear on its own without violating conservation of mass?]
At this point, the talk ended and there were some questions. They were not very good.
Q: "Why are there more theists among physicists than among biologists". A: 'the big bang and fine tuning. Creationists are not taken seriously. Biology hasn't experienced the same revolution that physics has.' [Hasn't experienced the same revolution? Where has Lennox been for the last 60 years? DNA? Sequencing of genomes? Evolutionary development? The neutral theory? Hox genes? Horizontal transfer?]
"Christianity is an evidence-based faith." [No comment necessary.]
After the talk, I tried to ask a question. Despite the fact that the room was not terribly large, the organizers did not allow people to stand up and ask questions. I feel confident that this was to weed out inconvenient questions. Instead, you had to text a question or hand it in on a piece of paper. My question was the following: "Joseph of Cupertino was a 17th century priest who could levitate and fly, according to attestations by numerous witnesses. Do you accept that he could actually fly and levitate? Why or why not? Why do we not see flying priests today?"
The organizers asked my question but changed the wording to omit "Joseph of Cupertino" (which I don't appreciate at all). In response, Prof. Lennox said that he accepted the miracles of the Bible because they had a semiotic content or symbolism or subtext of meaning that fits with the message of the Bible, but flying priests would be a miracle that lacks this subtext, so he doesn't believe in them. But this is silly. I can easily make up a story, say, "The flying priest reminds witnesses of He who ascended to Heaven after the Resurrection." Who is to say whether that is a sufficient symbolism or explanation?
"Of course miracles are still happening today." Lennox tells the story of meeting a Russian on a train and giving him a Russian bible, for which the man was very grateful. He seemed to think this was a miraculous event. But given that (a) Lennox is a professional evangelist (b) Lennox speaks several languages, including Russian and (c) Lennox travels a lot, isn't the probability that he would have a Bible in the language of someone he would meet rather high? Lennox evidently has an extremely low standard for miracles.
All in all, this was a pretty poor performance. Only someone with a pre-existing faith in miracles could be swayed by the weakness of Lennox's arguments.
For another take on this talk by Lennox, see Jeff Orchard's blog
This time it's the utterly moronic Ben Carson, who drools as follows:
"It was ... it was ... I think it was Stalin who said, `Give me your children for three years and I will have them for life.' The point being that it's relatively easy at that inflection point to indoctrinate people and to change their way of thinking for the rest of their lives."
Stalin apparently never said anything like this. Crazed right-wingers usually attribute a similar sentiment to Lenin, but even that is quite dubious. As Boller and George write in their book They Never Said It, "it is doubtful that Lenin ever made the remark... The remark about children, with appropriate adaptations of course, has been attributed to Adolf Hitler as well as to Lenin, and to Catholic Church leaders as well. But there is no evidence that any of them made the statement, and its provenance remains uncertain."
Now that Carson has attributed it to Stalin, I'm sure wingnuts will be doing the same thing over and over in the years ahead. They don't care anything about truth; all they care is whether the quote (fake or not) supports their worldview.
"He [Dawkins] was discussing the question and saying in his book, that the historical existence of Jesus is in dispute among scholars. The only authority he cited to prove his point was a professor --- that's what he said --- Professor G. A. Wells of London. He didn't tell us that Wells is a professor of German. He didn't contact any ancient historian, and therefore made a colossal faux pas in his book, and that undermines my confidence. Because, you see, ancient history is a discipline where we can check, and if people claim to be interested in evidence, then to do that kind of thing is simply inexcusable. That's the point I'm making."
(By the way, I don't know how Prof. Lennox knows with certainty that Dawkins "didn't contact any ancient historian".)
It's true that denying the historical existence of Jesus is a minority view, one that Wells himself has apparently retreated from. Of course, Wells is not wrong because he's a professor of German; logically, arguments should be judged on their merits, not on the qualifications of the person making them. But it is perfectly reasonable -- and we do it all the time -- to view with skepticism strong claims in area A made by a person qualified in area B. I am glad that Lennox is so devoted to the truth.
But now let's listen to Prof. Lennox again at 30:00:
"Prominent German thinker Jurgen Habermas, who calls himself a methodological atheist, says that Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy: the benchmarks of Western civilization. "To this day we have no other options: we continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
This is a bogus quote, as I've documented before. I now repeat the relevant portions from that blog post of mine:
This quotation is phony, but is very popular among Christians.
Its origins have been carefully traced by Thomas Gregersen, who writes:
But this is a misquotation! The reference is an interview with Jürgen Habermas that Eduardo Mendieta made in 1999. It is published in English with the title "A Conversation About God and the World" in Habermas's book "Time of Transitions" (Polity Press, 2006).
What Habermas actually says in this interview is:
"Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an auonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct heir of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk (p. 150f)."
The misquote rewrites Habermas's statement and changes its meaning:
(1) Habermas talks about the historical origin of egalitarian universalism - not the foundation of human rights today.
(2) Habermas mentions both Judaism and Christianity - not only Christianity.
(3) Habermas says that there is no alternative to this legacy ("Erbe" in German) - not that we have no alternative to Christianity.
[end of Gregersen]
If I may paraphrase the distinguished Professor Lennox:
"Because, you see, modern philosophy is a discipline where we can check, and if people claim to be interested in evidence, then to do that kind of thing is simply inexcusable. That's the point I'm making."
If you missed the talk, you can get practically the same experience by watching Lennox's videos on Youtube. Lennox used the same examples, the same stories, and the same jokes, often word for word. In particular I recommend
Lennox's main rhetorical tools consisted of jokes, anecdotes, ridiculing his opponents as stupid, dishonest, or both, and appeals to emotion. There was very little science or mathematics or logic or reason involved. I go to the Pascal lectures as often as I can in the hopes that someday someone will present some good arguments for Christianity, but thus far I have always been disappointed.
"Militant atheism": [Lennox started with this cliché, which I've discussed before. It's a good bet that if you hear somebody say "militant atheist" you're dealing with a propagandist or shoddy thinker.]
* 'Peter Higgs (atheist) and Bill Phillips (Christian) both won Nobel prizes in physics, so science can't be incompatible with religion': [This does not follow at all. When we say 'science is incompatible with religion' we don't mean that no scientist holds religious beliefs; we mean that the beliefs themselves are at odds. People hold all sorts of inconsistent beliefs. After all, Lennox argues elsewhere that Christianity decries violence, despite the fact that there are thousands of examples of Christians committing violent acts, from the Crusades to the present day.]
"Science is Christianity's gift to the world; it arose from belief in the rationality of God": [I think this is an unreasonable extrapolation. After all, we can trace the roots of modern science to the ancient Greeks, such as Archimedes, and some say the first modern scientists were actually Muslims such as Ibn al-Haytham. If Christianity were solely responsible for modern science, then why did it take 1600 years of Christianity for it to start?]
"Atheism is a delusion: a persistent false belief despite countervailing evidence" [No evidence provided for this assertion]
He repeats his familiar jokes; the person who met him at University and said, "Do you believe in God? Oh, of course you do -- you're Irish"; his riposte to the remark that "Religion is for people who are afraid of the dark" is "Atheism is for people who are afraid of the Light". [As I remarked before, a lot of Lennox's schtick consists of his recounting his bon mots and relating how much the audience (or the Internet) appreciated them. The man definitely has an ego.]
"Germany's leading psychiatrist, Manfred Lutz": [Another typical creationist ploy: credential inflation. Everybody who agrees with them is "eminent", "world famous", "world-class", etc. ]
'Atheism is just a projection, to never be held responsible for bad conduct': [Except that atheists are sometimes more ethical than theists. See, for example, R. E. Smith, G. Wheeler, and E. Diener, Faith without works: Jesus people, resistance to temptation, and altruism, J. Applied Social Psychology 5 (1975), 320-330.]
"Atheists are confused about who God is." 'When Michael Shermer showed me a list of gods and said I was atheist with respect to them', Lennox thought, "What spectacular intellectual ignorance! He obviously knows nothing about the gods of the Ancient Near East"; 'they were descended from the heavens and earth, but the Christian god created the heavens and earth': [Another typical Lennox ploy: all the people he argues against are 'ignorant', 'deluded', etc. Much of his schtick consists in stories about how stupid everyone else is and how smart Lennox is. For my part, I think Shermer's point is quite good. There are, after all, other monotheisms, and I suppose Lennox does not adhere to them. The fact that the Christian god has some supposedly unique attributes does not detract from Shermer's point; every god has some unique attributes not shared by others.]
"In the first line of Genesis, God creates spacetime" [Not true; it says nothing about the modern conception of spacetime. Another typical example of Christians taking credit for something undeserved.]
** "The more you know of the universe, the more you admire the genius of the God who did it." [Maybe Lennox admires the Christian god, but I don't. Any god that creates the rabies virus and the Trypanosoma brucei protozoan is obviously morally depraved.]
* 'When we see water boiling, and ask why, a scientist will explain about heat conduction and the boiling point of water, and so forth, but the real reason is because I want a cuppa tea' "Scientists can't admit personal agency and intentionality as an explanation." "Professors can't grasp it because they think the scientific explanation is the only one". [On the contrary, personal agency is used as an explanation in all sorts of scientific endeavors, such as archeology. It is rejected in biology because (a) we have no evidence of any 'person' that was involved in terrestrial biology before people existed and (b) we understand mechanisms such as mutation and selection that can explain the biological diversity we see. "Agency" as an explanation in the absence of evidence for an agent was addressed in an article of Wilkins and Elsberry, which Lennox could fruitfully read.]
"The question, who created God?, doesn't apply to an eternal God, it applies to created gods": [Misleading, because the question 'who created God?' is a rejoinder to the common Christian assertion that 'everything that exists has a cause'. If you can say the Christian god existed eternally, why not say the universe did so, too?]
* Lennox objected to the word "faith" used to mean "blind faith". He claimed the word had been "redefined" and this redefinition was a "willful and deliberate twisting" of the "real definition". [Well, tough, Prof. Lennox. Just go a dictionary and you'll read definition #2 of faith: "Strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof". That is not a "redefinition" or a "twisting", but just one of the ways the word can be used. If you object to words having different meanings, maybe you should brush up on your linguistics.]
* Lennox went on to equate the word "faith" with "belief system". He describes how he bested Peter Singer in a debate when Singer asserted that "atheism is not a faith" by replying, "Why, Peter, I thought you believed in it!" [It is foolishness to assert that a word with well-accepted multiple meanings must be used only one way. Lennox's equation of "faith" with "belief system" is merely one of the meanings of the word "faith"; in one dictionary, that would be definition 2.2: "A strongly held belief". Under definitions 1, 2, and 2.1, it is not correct to describe atheism as a "faith"; under definition 2.2, it might be. And even that is subject to debate, because atheism can more reasonably understood as a lack of belief in something, not a belief in something.]
* "Faith in Christianity is exactly the same as faith in science". [No, it isn't at all. This is a completely ridiculous claim. Christianity asserts all sorts of truth claims, like the existence of a supernatural deity, the effectiveness of prayer, and (for example) the fact that "true believers" can "drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them". I don't see many Christians testing these claims in a scientific fashion, and I certainly don't see Lennox testing this last one.]
'Einstein and Polkinghorne said that faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe is a prerequisite to do physics': [I don't agree. I don't think the universe is necessarily "rationally intelligible" and I don't think you need this assumption to do science. Rather, you attempt to find and describe regularities and often you fail.]
"All schools are faith schools because they're all based on a world view." [Word games. I already pointed out that this is true only under definition 2.2, not other definitions.]
"If the mind is the end result of a mindless unguided process, can you trust it?" [In fact, we don't trust it. Modern science has revealed numerous ways in which people make cognitive mistakes. More importantly, there is no reason that a mindless unguided process can't result in correct decision-making.]
*** "Two world-class philosophers, Alvin Plantinga and Thomas Nagel" have raised this point [above]. [Well, the high regard that Plantinga and Nagel are held in is itself very good evidence for something quite wrong in the academic practice of philosophy. If you can't find the errors and bogus assumptions in Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism", then you haven't tried very hard. (For the lazy, you can read the devastating critiques of Plantinga by "world-class philosophers" Paul Churchland and Geoff Childers and Feng Ye. I wonder if Lennox has read any of these.)]
* "You can't explain the semiotics of the words "roast chicken" in terms of paper and ink." [Well, no, but nobody would claim that you can.] "You need intelligence." [But "intelligence" isn't supernatural.] "The explanatory power of chemistry and physics doesn't extend to semiotics." [Asserted but not proved. For a detailed explanation of the meaning of "roast chicken", you need to understand the evolutionary history of humans and chickens and the social evolution of language and food and cooking. It doesn't have a one-line explanation.]
** "Whenever you see language you infer intelligence." 'You see "roast" in English and you infer intelligence. Then you see the 3.7 billion letters of DNA and you don't? What's wrong there?' [What's wrong is conflating natural language with DNA. DNA differs in many ways from natural language, one of the most important being the lack of compressibility. We know how DNA evolves through processes like mutation, selection, recombination, genetic drift, and so forth, so how its information is accumulated and changed is not that mysterious. Typical creationist ploy.]
"Information itself is not material. Information is not reducible to physics and chemistry." [Asserted but not proved. What is an example of information not in a physical medium?]
** "The default position in society is atheism and naturalism - you can do that in public if you want, but not Christianity" [Utterly ridiculous. While I write this I am watching an episode of the TV show "Chicago Fire" where a minister is saying things like "We're not operating on God's timetable, are we? We don't understand God's plan -- how can we? And let me tell you, this is where faith comes in. Faith can help us see His message in our lives." Until quite recently, you'd never see an atheist on TV depicted as sympathetically as this minister. Religion, and Christianity, absolutely pervades every aspect of society in North America. How many atheists are members of Congress? Or MP's in Canada? What national holiday is coming up here in Canada? But this is just the usual Christian trope about how they are victimized, persecuted, etc. by the evil secularists.]
'Scientists who are Christians' "have been silenced by their colleagues". [No real evidence provided. And isn't it just a little ironic that this claim is being made by a Christian evangelist who is being given space for three public religious lectures sponsored by a public university? The exact same claim was made four years ago by Mary Poplin in her Pascal lecture. Maybe the series should be retitled "The Christian Victimhood Lectures".]
"I believe in the full inspiration and authority of Scripture". [Well, then he's not acting as a scientist. Scientists don't believe in the full inspiration and authority of any book. In science, truth claims are subject to debate and can fall with the weight of evidence.]
* "The Big Bang ... was fiercely resisted ... the editor of Nature said that 'it'll give too much leverage to people who believe the Bible": [I am not an historian of physics, but as far as I can see, this is incorrect. In the 1950's and early 1960's there were at least two competing theories, the "steady-state" and "Big Bang" models, and there was evidence in support of both of these. The consensus slowlychanged in support of the Big Bang as new evidence emerged, but there were still holdouts. I see no evidence that it was "fiercely resisted". The "editor of Nature" referred to is John Maddox, and his editorial (behind paywall) never said anything like "it'll give too much leverage to people who believe the Bible". Here is what Maddox said (in part): "Creationists and those of similar persuasions seeking support for their opinions have ample justification in the doctrine of the Big Bang. That, they might say, is when (and how) the Universe was created. The reality of the event is accepted. The question of its cause, in the absence of time, is a matter for the imagination. Moderate creationists are no doubt content with that inference.
"Luckily for the rest of us, moderate creationists' more impatient (and noisy) brethren seem more concerned to demonstrate that the whole world began just a few thousand years ago, which is why they have impaled themselves on the hook of trying to disprove the relatively recent (and terrestrial) geological record. But, in the long run, the impatient creationists will have to retreat to the Big Bang..."
I leave it to the reader of this blog to decide if Lennox has fairly summarized Maddox's view.]
About evolution: "the question is: can this mechanism do what is ascribed to it? No, at several different levels". "A child ought to be able to see that evolution cannot be responsible for the origin of life"; that claim is "a complete bamboozling fog". [Yet another implication by Lennox that his opponents are either stupid or dishonest. I don't know anybody that says that the first replicator arose by "evolution". Lennox claimed that Dawkins said this, but I couldn't find it in Dawkins' writings anywhere.]
*** "From the perspective of theoretical computer science, you'll see that natural processes cannot produce life." [Well, this at least is in my area of expertise. I am a theoretical computer scientist and I've followed the creation-evolution debate fairly closely. I do not know a single claim from theoretical computer science that has this implication. On the contrary, there are many results from the field of artificial life that imply the opposite. Just to name one paper, see Koza, J. R., Artificial life: Spontaneous emergence of self-replicating and evolutionary self-improving computer programs. In C. G. Langton (Ed.), Artificial life III, 1994, pp. 225–262.]
"Lawrence Krauss made a catastrophic mistake when discussed philosophy." "Stephen Hawking doesn't understand any philosophy". "Peter Atkins" said mathematics created the universe and Lennox responded "That was the stupidest thing I've ever heard." [Yes, all of Lennox's opponents are drooling morons, barely capable of reason. Christian charity in abundance!]
At this point the question and answer session began. [No live questions from the floor were permitted -- I suspect this was to avoid the embarrassment of tough questions from previous Pascal lectures. Instead, people had to submit questions via text. This is an excellent way to weed out tough questions, and indeed all the questions read were softballs.]
About existence of extraterrestrial life and its compatibility with the Bible: "Yes, it exists - it's God". [Oh, come on. Any reasonable person would understand the question is about the existence of life, similar to terrestrial life, existing on other planets. I dislike this kind of evasion.]
Self-creation of the universe is "logically false". [No, it isn't. Mathematical logic discusses the world of propositions, not physical events.]
* "A word-based creation is utterly profound. Hoyle was amazed that this was found in the Bible." [In the longstanding tradition of atheists and agnostics being "amazed" by claims by theists. I doubt very much that Lennox's account is accurate. No educated person in the Western world would be ignorant of John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Claiming Hoyle did not know this is absurd.]
"People become Christians and get peace": [proffered in support of the truth of Christianity. Sorry, but people get peace from all sorts of religions and philosophies, but that doesn't imply any of them are true.]
Quoting Andrew Sims: "The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best-kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally." [An evident exaggeration. Just google "spirituality and health" and you'll get 105,000,000 hits, including many articles in the scholarly literature on precisely this subject. By the way, among Christian sects, Mormons are particularly healthy. Does this suggest the truth of Mormonism?]
"You can come back in a year and find 500 people transformed by atheism and I'll give you 5000 people transformed by Christianity." [Well, considering atheists are outnumbered by Christians in Ireland, England, Canada, and the US, this should hardly be surprising.]
"Jesus claimed to die for people's sins and you can test that." [How? Design an experiment. Perform it. Publish your results. Then we'll talk.]
"The golden rule is found in all cultures, and you'd expect that if we were made in the image of God." [Doesn't follow; replace "golden rule" with "murder" and what conclusion do you get? BTW, you'd also expect it if it is a product of our evolutionary history. There is some evidence for this; see the work of primatologist Frans de Waal.]
*** "Christianity is not a merit-based faith, based on good deeds." [An evident misrepresentation, which refuses to acknowledge an old debate in Christianity: are Christians justified by faith alone or by faith plus works? Support for both views can be found in the Bible. To claim that Christianity is not based on good deeds, when substantial parts of the Christian world believe this, is intellectually dishonest. Perhaps Lennox would claim that those who disagree are not "true Christians", but this would be an example of the "No True Irishman" fallacy.]
I've commented in the past about the choice of speakers, which has ranged from the sublime (Donald Knuth) to the ridiculous (Mary Poplin, Malcolm Muggeridge, Charles Rice).
This year's speaker is somewhere in the middle. He's John Lennox, known to mathematicians for his work on group theory, and known to everyone else for his jolly but inept attempts to criticize atheists, which he's done in a number of books.
Prof. Lennox may be a good group theorist, but it appears he learned his information theory from intelligent design creationists. For example, in this YouTube video, at the 13:10 mark, he claims, "but unless we have a mechanism that actually creates information -- which we do not have -- there is no evidence that natural selection and mutation can create any significant information -- until we have that, it's simply an evolution of the gaps".
This, of course, is utter nonsense (but delivered smugly in a beautiful Irish accent). We certainly do know that mutation can create as much information as we want, and we know many examples that natural selection and mutation in concert together can create information-rich structures.
Lennox seemingly has virtually nothing original to say. Most of his schtick consists of quoting the usual suspects (Plantinga, Berlinski, McGrath), and boasting about how he bested this atheist or that one with a bon mot in a debate, which he recounts with relish.
I am completely unimpressed with Lennox's work outside group theory. But I can certainly understand why theists desperate to have someone with a Ph. D. tell them they are right would want to have him for a speaker.
Since I don't actually agree with that, I asked Professor Marks for some justification. He did not reply.
Three months later, I asked again. No reply (except auto-reply).
Now, six months later, I'm sending him another reminder.
Who thinks that he will ever send me a calculation justifying his claim?
This is Linda Li from The 4th International Conference on Civil Engineering and Urban Planning (CEUP2015) which will be held in Beijing, China, October 20-24.
Are you the author of the paper titled On lazy representations and sturmian graphs? Considering your research maybe relevant to our conference. We cordially invite you to share your new research at our conference.
No, you spamming morons. My paper on Sturmian graphs has absolutely nothing to do with civil engineering and urban planning.
The main purpose of this conference is to provide an international forum and platform for academicians and scientists to exchange ideas and discuss important aspects of Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering and Architecture and Urban Planning. The conference program will include keynote speech session, oral and poster presentation and one day tour in Beijing. The best presentations will get a smart phone reward.
Ooh, a smart phone reward! I must register immediately.
Accepted papers will be published by CRC Press / Balkema (Taylor & Francis Group) and the proceeding of the previous conference has been indexed by EI Compendex about two months after the conference.
Gee, what a surprise that Taylor & Francis is associated with these guys.
We are also calling for reviewers
Reviewer Benefits:
Refresh your knowledge
Gain some experience in that field
Free to tour around Beijing after the conference
Enjoy a discount for your conference registration fee
Be a potential candidate of Technical Program Committee for the next CEUP conference
If you are interested to be a reviewer of our conference, please send us your CV. Reviwers can publish their papers without publication fee in one Open Access journal Journal of Civil Engineering and Science.
Best regards
Linda Li
Secretary of CEUP2015
Website: www.ceupconf.org
Email: [email protected]
I hate stupid conference spammers.
