I'm sorry,

but this is hilarious.


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Craig vs. Dennett

Here is audio of a debate of sorts between William Lane Craig and Daniel Dennett (if that doesn't work for you, try it from here). Craig spends 45 minutes going over three theistic arguments in some detail: Leibnizian cosmological arguments, kalām cosmological arguments, and anthropic principle teleological arguments. Dennett responds for about 10 minutes. He seems impressed by Craig's presentation, but objects that our intuitions (about causality for example) when taken to these conclusions, cease to be intuitive. I'm not sure that's really relevant though, since the exposition of an intuition is never as obvious and clear as the intuition itself. At any rate, it's obviously more plausible to affirm the principle of causality than to deny it.

He also objects to the claim that abstract objects do not stand in causal relations. He suggests they can in a sense, but the sense he describes is clearly formal causal relations. The claim is that they cannot stand in efficient causal relations, and so cannot be appealed to as efficient causes.

It ends with a couple of minutes of commentary by "Alister" who I assume is Alister McGrath since Craig's CV includes "In Defense of Theistic Arguments" in the just-published The Future of Atheism: Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett in Dialogue.


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The Encyclopaedia Britannica hits rock botton

I had been told that the Encyclopaedia Britannica - assailed by the behemoth of Wikipedia and encroached upon by Microsoft Encarta – had gone downhill. Having perused it’s article on the Neo-Platonist mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria I can see the dismal evidence with my own eyes. It reads:

Theodosius I, Roman emperor in the East from 379 to 392 and then emperor in both the East and West until 395, initiated an official policy of intolerance to paganism and Arianismin 380. In 391, in reply to Theophilus, the bishop of Alexandria, he gave permission to destroy Egyptian religious institutions. Christian mobs obliged by destroying the Library of Alexandria, the Temple of Serapis, and other pagan monuments.

That old chestnut again. It continues, describing Hypatia's death at the hands of a Christian mob in 415.

The existence of any strictly philosophical works by her [Hypatia] is unknown. Indeed, her philosophy was more scholarly and scientific in its interest and less mystical and intransigently pagan than the Neoplatonism taught in other schools. Nevertheless, statements attributed to her, such as “Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all” and “To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing,” must have incensed Cyril, who in turn incensed the mob.

The quotes are indeed attributed to Hypatia. The problem is that these statements only appeared for the first time in a book published in 1908 by Elbert Hubbard (an eccentric author of fanciful legend) called 'Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers'. Hubbard was a salesman and freelance newspaperman who reinvented himself as a publisher and author by founding his own press. Inspired by the Charles Kingsley epic on the same subject he penned a highly fictionalised essay on Hypatia which was interwoven with his own comment and satire. Hubbard also made up such details as her height, weight (five feet nine inches, one hundred thirty-five pounds) and invented several quotes which happen to be the ones above cited in the Britannica article. Hubbard has Hypatia saying:

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth--often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable."

Unbelievably when Lynn Osen's wrote her "Women in Mathematics" she accepted Hubbard's invented stories about Hypatia as fact and included them in her book. Hence one finds them sprinkled over the internet as primary source material.

So to recap, what the article written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica is trying to argue is this. Statements made up by Elbert Hubbard in the early 20th century and attributed to Hypatia must somehow have echoed back in time (presumably through some kind of quantum leap) and got through to Bishop Cyril in Alexandria, thus incensing him to whip up the mob that killed Hypatia. I have stood up for Britannica in the past but now I think I would sooner trust Wikipedia. At least there I can edit the mistakes out.

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Science Made Stupid

Here's a website that has an abridged form of the book Science Made Stupid. If you haven't heard of it before, it really lives up to its name.

Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane complexities. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science. Today, all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is available to anyone.

Read the whole thing.


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He Is

John's gospel was the last of the canonical gospels written, and has the clearest statements of Jesus' divinity. Some people use this to argue that the claim that Jesus was (and is) God Incarnate was not present in the early Church, but developed over time. Much is made of John's "I am" statements ("εγω ειμι" in Greek), where Jesus uses God's name to describe himself.

Of course I wouldn't deny that there was development in the early Church's understanding of Jesus, but as a simple matter of historical fact, the belief that Jesus was God originates very early in the Church, prior to any of the New Testament's composition. This is acknowledged by the vast majority of scholars.

At any rate, the fact that John's gospel has the most and clearest statements of Jesus' divinity simply does not mean that the synoptic gospels do not contain any such statements. For example, Jesus does say "I am" at some incredibly poignant places in the synoptic gospels. Below is Mark's account of Jesus walking on the water, with the Greek phrase "εγω ειμι" replacing the English. Bear in mind that Mark was probably the first gospel written.

When evening came, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he was alone on land. He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. About the fourth watch of the night he went out to them, walking on the lake. He was about to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified.

Immediately he spoke to them and said, "Take courage! εγω ειμι. Don't be afraid." Then he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down. They were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.

The NIV translates the Greek as "It is I" here, as well as in the parallel description in Matthew 14, which concludes with his disciples worshiping him.

This is just one example; there are other interesting cases. Here are all the occurrences of εγω ειμι in the New Testament for your perusal.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Islamic Science and Wikipedia

I had an article in last week's Spectator Magazine called Did Al-Farabi Really Invent Sociology? This is one of the great historical questions to which the answer is No.

The article is now available free online. In passing, let me mention that I think delayed posting on the internet is the best balance between free content and the need to sell a magazine. As a writer, I obviously want my work available to all, but I also want the Spectator and other publications to stay in business.


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Science Fiction

I linked to this on my other blog this morning, and then thought the folks over here would appreciate it as well. Michael Flynn, SF author, discovered a "free association thought" website and proceeded to rip apart one of their essays on Christianity, science, and the Dark Ages. Well done sir.



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Three books

Sand in the Gears has an interesting challenge:

So, here’s what I’m asking. If you are a leftist, what three books do you believe would best persuade thoughtful people who disagree with you that they are in error? And if you are a conservative or libertarian, what three books do you recommend to thoughtful leftists? In each case, assume the reader is intelligent and educated. Assume as well that he has a life, which means you probably shouldn’t roll up in here with Mises’s Human Action. Unless you really want to.

A few responses have been made here, here, here, and here. He's obviously talking about politics, but I'd like to redirect it to religion. What three books would you recommend to people who disagree with your religious beliefs, whatever they are, and why? They can be academic or popular-level, but exclude the Bible and other holy books (that includes God's Philosophers). Leave your answers in the comments, at the Quodlibeta forum, or write a post on your own blog linking back here. I tentatively offer this as my list of popular-level books:

Six Modern Myths about Christianity and Western Civilization by Philip J. Sampson. Most people have many misconceptions about Christianity that keeps them from being able to consider it as a viable worldview. In this excellent and heavily footnoted book, Sampson goes over Galileo, Darwin, the environment, missionaries, the repression of the human body, and witches to effectively remove these as potential stumbling blocks.

Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli. There are plenty of good books on general apologetics, but I would choose this one because it has the most breadth of any other I've read, and because it is the most accessible.

The Son Rises by William Lane Craig. Again, there are plenty of books defending the resurrection, many of which are excellent. I would choose this one because Craig's argument is very simple and straightforward: there are several facts about Jesus' alleged resurrection that are accepted as demonstrably historical by the consensus of scholarship (his burial, the empty tomb, Jesus' post-mortem appearances, and the early belief in the resurrection) and the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead is the best explanation of them. By basing his arguments on facts that are acknowledged by the scholarly community, Craig is able to present a case based on premises that are not controversial. His conclusion, of course, is controversial, but he explains well why the resurrection is the best explanation of these four facts.

The reason for choosing these three is because the first one clears the way, the second one explains the reasons for accepting Christianity in broad strokes, and the third gives a detailed (but not difficult) defense of one of Christianity's central claims. Obviously, there are many other subjects that I would like to cover -- Christianity and science, Christianity and culture, catalogues of worldviews, common objections to Christianity, etc. (I posted a longer list here) -- but if I had to limit it to three books, I would probably choose the above.


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Family Guy

Family Guy often makes me laugh, but I usually feel the need to shower afterwards. Their season opener deals with a couple of subjects Quodlibeteers will be familiar with: the multiverse and the claim that Christianity ushered in "dark ages of scientific repression." You can watch it here, it's pretty funny, but be warned: the language is R-rated at best, there's a lot of poop jokes, and it has one of the most tasteless things I've ever seen (and it's not the Flintstones bit).


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The Alien's Science Project

The popular science author John Gribbin has a new book out called ‘In Search of the Multiverse’. The blurb for it reads:

We once had to abandon the idea of earth being at the centre of the universe. Now, we need to confront an even more profound possibility: the universe itself might just be one universe among many. In Search of the Multiverse takes us on an extraordinary journey, examining the most fundamental questions in science. What are the boundaries of our universe? Can there be different physical laws from the ones we know? Are there in fact other universes? Do we really live in a multiverse?

This book is a search - the ultimate search - exploring the frontiers of reality. Ideas that were once science fiction have now come to dominate modern physics. And, as John Gribbin shows, there is increasing evidence that there really is more to the universe than we can see. Gribbin guides us through the different competing theories (there is more than one multiverse!) revealing what they have in common and what we can come to expect. He gives a brilliant tour of the current state of cosmology.

Of course, as readers of this blog are often reminded, abandoning the idea the earth is the centre of the universe was a pretty good thing, but I digress. Peter Woit at ‘Not Even Wrong’ is not impressed, remarking that:

Gribbin expounds at length the usual string theory anthropic landscape/multiverse ideology, carefully avoiding introducing any mention of the fact that there might be quite a few scientists skeptical about it.

Having conflated the anthropic principle and the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics, Gribbin builds up to his most powerful insight, that we are in a baby universe produced by a race of alien beings:

The intelligence required to do the job may be superior to ours, but it is a finite intelligence reasonably similar to our own, not an infinite and incomprehensible God. The most likely reason for such an intelligence to make universes is the same as the reason why people do things like climbing mountains or studying the nature of subatomic particles using accelerators like the LHC – because they can. A civilization that has the technology to make baby universes might find the temptation irresistible, while at the higher levels of universe design, if the superior intelligences are anything at all like us there would be an overwhelming temptation to improve upon the design of their own universes. This provides the best resolution yet to the puzzle Albert Einstein used to raise, that ‘the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.’ The Universe is comprehensible to the human mind because it was designed, at least to some extent, by intelligent beings with minds similar to our own. Fred Hoyle put it slightly differently. ‘The Universe,’ he used to say, ‘is a put-up job.’ I believe that he was right. But in order for that ‘put-up job’ to be understood, we need all the elements of this book.

Woit easily refutes this:

Personally, I think there’s an air-tight argument against this: any race of superior beings that produced a universe in which science descended into this level of nonsense would immediately wipe out their creation and start over. Since we’re still here, there can’t be such a race operating out there.

Except if the race of aliens are screwing with us, like a six year old forcing insects to fight in a jar.
In other news Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have been trying to calculate a number of possible universes in the multiverse based on quantum fluctuations in the early state of the universe. Their final number for this is that at least 10^10^10^7 universes out there. Unfortunately the human brain is ‘only capable of 10^10^16 configurations’ so calculating the probabilities is going to be a tad difficult.

In even more news theoretical physicists Holger Nielsen, from Denmark, and Masao Ninomiya, from Japan, have concluded that the discovery of the Higgs Boson could be so "abhorrent to nature" that it can "ripple backward through time" and stop the Large Hadron Collider before it could make one. He said that his theories may even provide a ‘model for God’ who ‘rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them’. Now there’s an example of science and religion working in tandem.

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