The Church of Google has some hilarious “proofs” (omniscience, omnipresence, etc.), prayers and commandments. Of course, it’s all a preposterous spoof, unlike Scientology or Mormonism. Right.
Here we are, on Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, in one of the most Special countries in the modern world. That’s Special as in Special Education and Special Olympics. Look at the chart above. Spain, Italy, Ireland, Austria… extremely Catholic, historically. Or Denmark, Sweden, Norway… extremely Lutheran. Can you say Protestant Work Ethic? I knew you could. The Catholics and Lutherans have this stuff figured out.
And Muslim Turkey… I don’t even know what Turkey’s doing on this list, unless it’s to keep the USA from being in last place. I suppose one can argue that most of Istanbul is in Europe, and therefore Turkey has one foot in the modern world. Hurray! An arguably modern country that’s even more Special than we are!
You just can’t make this stuff up:
The goal of Project Pterosaur is to mount an expedition to locate and bring back to the United States living specimens of pterosaurs or their fertile eggs, which will be displayed in a Pterosaur Rookery that will be the center piece of the planned Fellowship Creation Science Museum and Research Institute (FCSMRI). Furthermore, the rookery facility will establish a breeding colony of pterosaurs in order to produce specimens that could then be put on display by other regional institutions or church groups.
The underlying logic seems to go something like this:
I was watching the coverage of the rescue on the news. It was all there, right in front of me, the flotation devices, the life rafts, the rescue boats, the people throwing life preservers, the ambulances, the paramedics, the stretchers… I didn’t see a single thing that required a supernatural explanation.
Some reports focus on the landing rather than the rescue, and dispense the factoid that “no one ever successfully ditched a plane before.” Well, not exactly. Wikipedia lists some emergency water landings with 100% survival rates. Let’s give credit where credit is due. God was not Sullenberger’s copilot. The copilot was a man named Skiles. Invoking supernatural assistance denies Sullenberger and Skiles full credit for their outstanding achievement.
On the other hand, for geese to knock out both engines at exactly the same time… that sounds pretty unlikely. Too unlikely to be the result of blind chance. I think it’s evidence of Design. Yeah, sure, blame it on the geese. But Who created geese? And why did He have to make them such big honking birds? I’m not about to second-guess Infinite Wisdom. I can only trust that if a miracle knocked that plane out of the sky, there was a good reason for it.
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:
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.
