Regruntled.com

Pastor Rick Warren’s selection for the Inaugural Invocation makes him fair game for ridicule.  From The Purpose-driven Life:

… Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood, God irrigated the earth from the ground up.

Right.  There’s no such thing as physics.  Evaporation and condensation are just theories.  Water molecules do whatever God tells them to do.  Teach the controversy!

There is a toolbox of programming techniques inspired by evolution, variously called evolutionary algorithms or genetic algorithms.  The techniques mimic evolution and borrow a lot of the terminology.  The basic idea is to make a bunch of guesses (a population) as to the solution of a problem, and see how well the guesses work (apply a fitness function).  Then you throw out the bad guesses and keep the good ones (natural selection).  You combine some of the old guesses into new ones (reproduction) and make a few random changes (mutations).  Lather, rinse, repeat.  As you do this over and over again (multiple generations), the guesses get better and better.

The picture shows an antenna that NASA developed using an evolutionary algorithm.  The bent-paper-clip shape is the result of trial and error and natural selection, not theory and calculation.

The Biologic Institute argues that the participation of the programmers constitutes “guidance” to the evolutionary algorithm, and that, by analogy, if an evolutionary algorithm requires guidance by programmers, then evolution in nature also requires some sort of guidance or intelligent design.

I’d like to make a couple of points here.  First, if the algorithms work, the Creationists will argue that the differences between evolution and evolutionary algorithms imply that evolution doesn’t work.  On the other hand, if the algorithms don’t work, the Creationists will argue that the similarities between evolution and evolutionary algorithms imply that  evolution doesn’t work.  Creationists are not intellectually serious people.

Second, NASA was trying to design an antenna, not settle a theological question.  There is a tradeoff between the cleverness of a program and the time it takes to run it.  If you want an answer tomorrow morning and you have a hundred computers that you can use overnight, you need a clever program.  If you have 10,000 computers and can wait a few weeks, not so much.  If you’re Mother Nature and you can experiment on  a million organisms for a million generations, maybe survival is all the guidance you need.

In a comment to my post on Placebo logic, reader CET mentions double-blind studies on the effects of prayer.  The “double-blind” means that the subjects (hospital patients) did not know whether they were being prayed for.  This factors out any placebo effects, as opposed to people praying for themselves.  There have been a number of such studies, with mixed results.  Here are two examples:

• Byrd, 1988, showed a statistically significant effect.
• Aviles, 2001, showed no statistically significant effect.

A cautious conclusion would be that the effect of intercessory prayer, if it exists at all, is at the limits of statistical detectability.  The placebo effect, on the other hand, is so strong that it is possible to measure the difference in effect between expensive placebos and inexpensive placebos.

After several thousand years of experience with prayer, one would think that the basic effectiveness would have been established long ago, and we would have moved on to more interesting questions, such as whether invoking one of the saints is more effective than praying directly to God.

A survey from Baylor University finds that believers in the supernatural are less likely to believe in the paranormal, and vice versa:

The Baylor Survey found that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead and astrology.

The ISR researchers found that conservative religious Americans are far less likely to believe in the occult and paranormal than are other Americans, with self-identified theological liberals and the irreligious far more likely than other Americans to believe.

It’s as if we have only so many superstitious brain cells, and if we fill them up with one kind of superstition, we crowd out other kinds of superstition.  I’m not sure whether that’s good news or bad.

I was working on one of those programming problems that’s easy enough to solve if you don’t mind running your computer for a billion years to get the answer, and I wondered: how much processing power does God have?  Does He have infinitely many cores running at infinitely many gigahertz?  Does He have infinite RAM and infinite disk space?

The traditional ideas about God predate computers, so omniscience doesn’t include infinite processing power.  In the case of my programming problem, God would magically know the answer without having to do the calculations.  Intelligent Design, a modern notion, does seem to require some processing power.  Design implies figuring out the consequences of design choices.  If One magically knows the answer in advance, there’s no design going on.  In the case of the fine-tuned universe argument, we would have:

And so God considered all possible combinations of values for Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant, and the speed of light, and ran trillion-year simulations of each combination, and chose the values we see today.

Instead of:

And God said, Let there be light.  And there was light.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that 21% of atheists believe in God.  According to the Washington Post:

A belief in God or a higher spirit is pervasive. Even Americans who describe themselves as atheist or agnostic have a robust sense of a higher power: Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit, and more than half of those who call themselves agnostic expressed a similar conviction.

What’s really going on here?  Pew is interviewing people who aren’t very smart.  These are people who don’t understand the questions but answer anyway, or who label themselves without understanding what the labels mean.  People who aren’t qualified to have opinions on whether it’s raining, much less the Big Questions. 

Remember, their votes count just as much as yours..

I’d love to see a Youtube of that sermon!

Reader jde pointed out that Reason and Faith have co-existed quite nicely since ancient times.  He’s right, if by Reason we mean Rationalism.  There is a long tradition of Reason in the service of Faith, say approximately Augustine through Descartes.  We can see a faint reflection of Rationalism today in Intelligent Design.

However, if by Reason we mean Empiricism and scientific method, say Hume forwards, then Faith and Reason are opposed.  The conflict is epistemological;  we can accept revealed truth, or we can follow the evidence, but if they disagree, we have to choose one or the other.

Mitt Romney, in his much-anticipated speech on religion, invoked the memory of the Founders. As a rhetorical gimmick, this is a slam dunk. In EVERY country, EVERY politician invokes the memory of the leaders of the last successful revolution. It’s practically a pre-requisite for public life. Let’s take a look at what the Founders really believed.

The Founders, for the most part, were not Christians at all, they were Deists. (Deism is out of style these days, but a reasonable modern equivalent would be Unitarian Universalism.) The US did not have a Christian president until 1829, when Andrew Jackson took office, half a century after Independence.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote the Jefferson Bible, which praises Jesus as a moral teacher, but never mentions the miracles or the Resurrection. For a Christian, the Resurrection is not exactly a minor detail.

Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, one of the most anti-religious books of all time. The backlash against this book has been cited as one of the causes of the Second Great Awakening, the religious revival that led, among other things, to Mormonism!

For a Mormon politician to invoke the memory of the Founders in a speech on religion is just a little bit hilarious. Good politics, bad history.

The recent revelation in the National Intelligence Estimate that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has had some interesting effects. The obvious conclusion is that our information was wrong, so we need to stop the saber-rattling and re-evaluate our policy. Duhhh. But Dubya says “… the NIE doesn’t do anything to change my opinion …”

I listened to the Democratic debate on NPR. The candidates took turns sound-biting each other. “You said this, you said that.” A logical response would be “I said that based on the information I had at the time, and the information was wrong”. But no, everyone says “what you think I said is not what I actually meant. In spite of having bad information, I’ve been right about Iran all along.” I’m paraphrasing, but I am not making this up.

I’m coining a new word: “back-spinning”, spinning a new interpretation of an earlier statement in the light of new information.

I’ll give another example of back-spinning: Day-Age Creationism. This is less topical, so maybe we can be more objective about it. Genesis is full of phrases like “and the evening and the morning were the first day”. For three thousand years, Biblical scholars thought “day” meant “24 hours”. It was not until AFTER science established that the earth was more than 6,000 years old that creationists advanced the theory that “day” really meant “age”, an indefinite time period. How convenient. In other words, when Moses wrote “day”, he really meant “age”. In spite of not having the slightest clue about astronomy or geology, Moses was right all along!