(no subject)

Here, have a rant.

This Shabbos, we had a guest speaker at shul. He was a distinguished scientist and a Rabbi, and he gave a lecture with the subject being finding God in nature. It's a fairly unobjectionable topic on its face, I think. Sure, there are militant atheists who would object to it, but most of the reasonable atheists I know, as well as the vast majority of the theists I know, would find nothing to complain about in exploring that particular question.

Unfortunately, the learned gentleman decided that in order to do this he had to convince his audience that evolution is nonsense. He felt it was required to deduce God's presence by discounting any other explanation, which is unsatisfactory to start with because even if you were to manage it, God as we know God remains unfalsifiable. You cannot prove God using any kind of scientific reasoning.

And he used bad math to prove it. He threw an impressive slew of probabilities at the audience, numbers so large that they clearly overwhelmed the mostly non-science-oriented crowd for the talk. He talked about the probability of a deck of cards being dealt with four bridge players each getting every card in one suit- an extraordinarily improbable event. He mentioned other infinitesimal probabilities: the lottery, coin-flipping a la Rosencrantz, etc... And then he mentioned a calculated probability that a particular scorpion would develop as it did, which was by many factors more improbable than the lottery or the deck of cards examples. Then he said "At a certain point, probabilities become so small that we can consider them virtual impossibilities. Yet evolutionary theorists believe that this vanishingly small chance is what happened."

BAD MATH. If you're one of those people in the crowd who got cowed by the big numbers, let me break it down for you. I started my counterexample with this simple probability problem. I show you a bag. I pull a red marble out of it. What is the probability that the marble I pulled was red? There's an easy answer to this problem: Not enough information to solve. Until you know what was in the bag, you can't calculate the probability. Until you know what choices were being made in a probabilistic calculation, it's meaningless. Now, we don't know exactly what choices were made in the probabilistic calculation about that scorpion, but we know them in general terms: They're evolutionary choices. At a certain point, either the scorpion could develop a stinger or not develop a stinger. This wasn't the actual choice, most likely, but it's a good enough example. There were billions and billions of such choices down the line and each one had to go a certain way to get this scorpion. But if one of those choices had gone differently, we wouldn't get no evolution. We'd get a different evolutionary path and a different scorpion. Here, have another marbles in a bag example. I put a million marbles in a bag, and each is a different color. I pull out a red one. What was the probability that I pulled out a red one? A million to one. But one of those million-to-one events had to occur! This is not a disproof of evolution! The big probabilities make it hard to understand the mechanisms of evolution. They show that evolution has so many variables that we don't have any way to accurately model it. But they don't prove it impossible by any means.

I was talking about this with Maggie last night, because Maggie is awesome and thoughtful and great to talk to. And the frustrating thing about it isn't the bad math in itself, though we both agree that bad math is a great evil in itself. The problem is politics. The problem is that he's not convincing a room of people to believe bad math, he's convincing people to doubt evolutionary theorists, so that a roomful of people who the next time science in the classroom is under attack, may not jump to science's defense. And the worst part was that when I confronted the speaker afterward, he conceded my arguments and threw the anthropic principle back at me- a scientific problem that scientists at the moment have no answer for and which may in fact point toward the existence of God. I attended a panel conversation my senior year in college with Lee Smolins and a few other scientists I can't remember, and it was essentially a strategy session on how to argue against Creationists, and what I remember them saying was that the big argument coming up was going to be the anthropic principle, because none of them had an answer and even some atheistic physicists were coming around to some form of Strong Anthropic Principle. Why would you throw bad math at people when you have a good argument? The only reason I can think of is because you don't respect your audience, so you don't think it's worth your time. If you can convince people to rethink Creation by a Deity by using big numbers and bad math, why bother developing the harder, more subtle philosophical argument that is the anthropic principle? That laziness and contempt infuriates me.