(no subject)
Jun. 11th, 2012 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretHere, 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 04:11 pm (UTC)Please stop trying to stick Christian dogma into my religion. Evolution (not necessarily Darwinian evolution, but evolution nonetheless) and the concept of change in living things over time has been accepted by Jewish commentators for at least 1,000 years. It's time you got involved with the discussion. The idea that living things are invariant in form over time is a medieval catholic dogma. It does not belong in Judaism.
Also, please stop referring to yourself as a "scientist." Scientists use evidence, not rhetoric.
Love,
Me
(you can forward this to the guy if you want)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 04:24 pm (UTC)It wasn't really an appropriate setting for me to get into a shouting match in front of sixty people. You know I don't mind getting into a shouting match in front of sixty people, but not when doing so would embarrass people I respect. But I did go up to him afterward and as respectfully as I could confront him with the badness of his arguments. And I did then review my objections with the host Rabbi, for whose sake I did not get into said shouting match, so that hopefully in the future he will get less incompetent anti-science lecturers.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 04:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 08:11 pm (UTC)Of course, it took a whole lot of random chances, in the past, for it to get to the scorpion-state at which it exists today. In many instances, things did not go the way they needed to in order to evolve a scorpion. In many instances, they went the way they needed to in order to evolve a koala, or an octopus, or a mockingbird. It's also a million to one that you pull out any one specific blue marble. The marbles may as well be a million different colors, and the #FF0000 one is a scorpion and the #CE527F one is a clownfish...wait, I lost track of my point.
Oh, yes, the point was this: BAD MATH.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 08:29 pm (UTC)He was arguing that the scorpion was optimized as a 'perfect hunter' that never missed, that the red marble was not just a more desirable result than a blue one but that it was the best possible result. I'm not an expert at scorpions, but as an expert at optimization I can tell you there are lots of different ways one could have optimized that scorpion. Evidence of design is not evidence of perfection, and evidence of optimization is not evidence of intelligent design.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 09:38 pm (UTC)Don't know much about scorpions, but I'd be shocked if they weren't as much of a mix of "kludge" and "brilliant" as anything else is. With the necessary know-how and the ability to start with a blank slate, one could probably build a better scorpion than the ones that evolution has built.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-12 05:20 am (UTC)I agree with you, though, as a non-expert at scorpions who can't imagine there aren't things that could be improved.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-12 04:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-12 04:21 am (UTC)There are different formulations of it, and different people interpret it in different ways. Some physicists think that the universe seems 'tuned' in some way to accommodate human life. There have been analyses that show that if any of the fundamental constants of the universe were different, if, for example, the speed of light was lower or the force of gravity was higher, life couldn't exist.
Some say this is just tautological- the very fact that we exist to observe the universe means that it's the kind of universe we can exist in and wonder why it exists as it does. This is called the Weak Anthropic Principle and it's pretty uncontroversial because it doesn't actually say anything. But as we learn more about the universe, as we start to get in some ways a better understanding of the rules governing the universe, people are starting to wonder at a deeper level than that why the rules are what they are, and that leads to a variety of different Strong Anthropic Principles, which make bolder assertions about the relationship of the tuning of the fundamental constants and the existence of life. Multiverse theories are one way to deal with this: There are many universes, and we happen to be in a universe that supports life. Another hypothesis is that there is some deeper mathematical relationship between the constants that will make sense when we know more physics and will explain why the universe is the way it is. And yet another explanation is that the universe has been tuned in this way by some external mechanism.
The Wikipedia article on the topic isn't bad, though kind of abstruse if you don't know cosmology.
I don't know if any of this made sense to you.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-12 04:49 am (UTC)But now I see this, and I have a bit more to add. Or, rather, Douglas Adams does.
So at its heart, the anthropic principle is the observation that the universe is compatible with people being in it. It's easy for a physicist to imagine a universe where intelligent life couldn't exist, but that is not this universe.
Which Mr. Adams says is very much like a puddle admiring how well the hole its in fits it - every nook and cranny fitting it perfectly, in fact - and therefore assuming that the hole must have been made specifically to fit the puddle.
The truth, of course, is exactly the opposite. And related to your bag of one million marbles. We are as we are because we grew to fit the world in which we found ourselves.
The galaxy has billions of stars. And if you look out between those stars, there are thousands of galaxies filling every tiny little patch of sky. The odds may be a billion to one against life developing on a planet around any given star, but given a million billion stars, it'll happen at least once. And it will happen in a place in which it's possible to happen. And it will grow to make use of the things that are available there, and to live in the environments which exist there.
Life as we know it requires certain things. The right amount of light and heat, the right rotational speed, a lot of water, the fact that ice floats, the fact that magnetism is much more powerful than gravity, the versatility of carbon bonding, etc. If you change the rules, life as we know it won't exist. But maybe life as we don't know it will. And in a universe with those rules, that strange life will likewise assume that the world had to have been created just for it.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-12 05:13 am (UTC)Some say this is just tautological- the very fact that we exist to observe the universe means that it's the kind of universe we can exist in and wonder why it exists as it does.
The more I study the subject, though, the more I think there's more to it than that. There are a number of very complicated recent discoveries in astrophysics and information theory that i don't understand but which seem to suggest a more complicated relationship than that between the fundamental constants and the self-organization of information required for life.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-12 05:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-12 02:06 pm (UTC)The Anthropic Principle is one of those calculations on the philosophical/mathematical borderlines, like the Fermi Paradox. It's hard to know how seriously to take it because it's hard to deconstruct your own assumptions well enough to know how far to trust the calculations. As
That notwithstanding, I think it's not hard even for a layperson to see how this relates to questions about the design of the universe and whether it was intentional. The fact that this is a growing question among physicists in spite of the fact that physicists are broadly speaking the most likely group of scientists to be atheists signals a mystery that at present science can't offer any good answers.