Gizmotron

An archivist at the Schenectady Museum and Suits-Bueche Planetarium in New York state was curious about some vaguely-labeled film canisters in the basement. The films inside had been recorded on a pallophotophone and, oddly, there aren't any more around on which to play the recordings. He managed to get two engineers interested in figuring them out. One of them managed to build -- from scratch, over two years -- a working pallophotophone.

That by itself is extremely cool. What is even cooler is that when they listened to them, they heard a speech delivered by Thomas Edison. It was broadcast live in 1929 when Edison was 82 years old, he shared the stage with President Hoover and Henry Ford, and you can listen to it here. There were other gems as well, but the fact that we can hear Edison's voice over 80 years later makes me feel like a time-traveler.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Trust, but verify

As a follow-up to James' article in the Spectator several months ago, Beyond Necessity has a blogpost up on the pro-Islam bias at Wikipedia, with a particular focus on Avicenna. Via Bill Vallicella.

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"The alien who lives among you", part 1

Update (Oct. 17, 2014): I temporarily removed the content of this post because it has some similarities with an article I wrote that was published in an academic journal about a year ago. Even though a blogpost probably doesn't count as having previously published the material, I took the content of this post offline in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety, with the intention of restoring it after a year had passed. Since it's been a year, the original post is below.
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There have been some interesting recent reports that two moons of the outer planets may have some form of life. Titan, which orbits Saturn, is often cited as a potential life-site because it meets one of the necessary conditions for life (high nitrogen content). The recent claims are that acetylene is rare on Titan's surface, and that hydrogen may be flowing down to the surface and disappearing. Both hydrogen and acetylene could theoretically be "consumed" by some primitive form of life on the surface, so their absence may be indicative of such processes actually taking place. More interesting (to me at least) is the unusual suggestion that Io may have some form of life, despite its proximity to Jupiter and its magnetosphere. The suggestion is that it might live deep under the surface, although it seems purely speculative to me.

Some say (and many more think) that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would essentially refute Christianity, since it would show that we don't need to appeal to God to explain our origins, or because it would contradict certain Christian doctrines about humanity's importance to God. Unfortunately it can be difficult to refute because it's difficult to find out what the actual argument is. Any attempt to address it, therefore, runs the distinct possibility of attacking a strawman. Nevertheless, I shall soldier on.

As far as I can tell, the argument is something along these lines:

a) If life or the remains of life are found beyond the earth,
b) then life would be a common phenomenon.
c) Therefore, it would be the product of natural processes.
d) Therefore, life would not be the product of supernatural process(es) or agent(s).

Two other conclusions are often drawn, although it's not clear whether they are drawn from b), c), or d). They are:

e) Therefore, the Christian claim that human beings are especially important to God is highly implausible.
f) Therefore, the Christian claim that God was incarnated as a human being (as opposed to one of the other myriad forms of life) is likewise highly implausible.

Now the philosophically minded will notice that this is a spectacularly poor argument. f) does not follow from a), b), c), d), e), or their conjunction; e), likewise, does not follow from a) through d); d) does not follow from c); c) does not follow from b); and b) does not follow from a). I'll go over each of these alleged inferences in turn, with the first below. For now I'll just point to how this charge fits into the metanarrative that science and Christianity are at odds with each other, and this because science is slowly but surely refuting Christianity. This is the conflict thesis -- James calls it the conflict myth -- and it is almost entirely rejected by historians of science.

So, first, does a) lead to b)? If we find life elsewhere in the universe, will it imply that life is a common phenomenon? Well, if we're talking about our solar system, the answer is no. Take Mars for example. Finding life or the remains of life on Mars would not indicate that life is common, for the simple reason that over the last few billion years, at least a hundred million tons of Earth has been dumped on Mars, most (not all) due to meteor collisions sending Earth material out into the solar system. The odds that none of it contained any biological material is remote in the extreme, although much of it would probably have been broken down by radiation. Hugh Ross has been predicting since at least the late 1980s that the remains of life will inevitably be discovered on Mars simply due to this cross-contamination. And this is true for virtually all possible life-sites in the solar system, including the moons around the outer planets: any biological material we find would be better explained as having its origin on Earth.

Moreover, the Anthropic Principle places severe limitations on what conditions must be met in order for life to exist on a planetary body. It must have a particular axial tilt, magnetic field, a moon of a particular size and distance, must orbit a particular type of star of a particular age at a particular distance, etc. There are several dozen such conditions. The only body that meets these conditions in the solar system is the Earth. There are sometimes sensationalistic claims that Mars might have had liquid water on its surface at some point in the past and so might have harbored life (since the presence of liquid water is one of the necessary preconditions). But this ignores the multiple other conditions that are not met by Mars or any other potential life sites in the solar system.

But what about beyond the solar system? What if we find life on planets orbiting other stars? Wouldn't that prove that life is ubiquitous in the universe? Again, the Anthropic Principle puts severe limitations on how many places in the universe could naturally support life. So, for example, the planet has to be in a spiral galaxy (not a common type of galaxy), and be between spiral arms. In any other place within any other type of galaxy there would be too much stellar radiation to allow life. Additionally, it has to exist in a very particular stellar neighborhood: nearby white dwarf binary stars which have lost some of their stellar material to interstellar space (this is the only natural source of fluorine, which is necessary for life); near enough to past supernovae to obtain the necessary heavy elements produced, but not so near as to receive too much radiation from them; etc. The point being that, even if we do find life elsewhere in the universe, it wouldn't contradict the Anthropic Principle's claim (which is recognized by all the relevant scientists) that most places are hostile to life, and so there are relatively few potential life sites in the universe. Indeed, when factoring all of the necessary preconditions into the equation, the odds of another planet anywhere in the universe being naturally capable of supporting advanced life is zero. Part of the problem here is whether we're talking about simple life forms or complex, perhaps complex enough to be intelligent and have a civilization. The more complex the life form, the more anthropic coincidences must be met in order for it to exist. Conversely, simple forms of life do not have to meet as many requirements, but it's still no walk in the park. The most popular book addressing this issue is Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by geologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee. They argue that while simple forms of life may be common in the universe, advanced life almost certainly is not.

Of course, some may continue to ask, what if we find that other forms of life are everywhere in the universe? Wouldn't that refute the claims being made here? Well, the discovery that life is ubiquitous in the universe would certainly refute the claim that life is not ubiquitous. In the same way, the discovery that E does not equal mc² would refute the claim that it does, and the discovery that earth is at the center of the universe would refute the claims that it's not. So it's not a very interesting line of argument. But, ignoring that, if we find other forms of life out there, the anthropic coincidences should certainly be looked at again to see if they merely represented a failure of imagination. Perhaps our conception of "life" was too narrow. But if, after looking at them, they still hold, then the occurrence of advanced life would have to be fit into the claim that the odds of there being a planet capable of supporting advanced life anywhere in the universe is too remote to be considered a realistic possibility. But that will be the subject of the next post.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

The Destruction of the Temple of Artemis

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World but almost nothing is left of it today. So, the question of who destroyed it is an interesting one. Luckily, we have an explicit historical source that tells us the answer. It is in Jordanes’ History of the Goths composed around 550AD. He tells us (20:107), that in about 259AD, “Respa, Veduc and Thuruar, leaders of the Goths, took ship and sailed across the strait of the Hellespont to Asia. There they laid waste many populous cities and set fire to the renowned temple of Diana at Ephesus, which, as we said before, the Amazons built.” Jordanes’ work comes with a health warning because the beginning is pure legend (not to mention his claim that the Amazons built the Temple). However, it is generally felt to be reliable when it deals with encounters between the Goths and Romans from the third century AD.

After the Goths destroyed the Temple of Artemis, it was quarried by the local inhabitants for its valuable marble and very little is left today. Bits of it have been found in local buildings and Justinian took much of the statuary that survived to his time back to Constantinople.

So why is the destruction of this Temple blamed on Christians? John Romer said as much in his television series in 1994 on the Seven Wonders and Charles Freeman continues to peddle the myth today. Let’s look at where it comes from.

The source of this legend is the Acts of John. This is a very late and inauthentic apocryphal book that claims to tell the life story of St John the Apostle after the end of the New Testament. Among many fantastic episodes is one in chapters 22 to 24 where St John converts the people of Ephesus to Christianity and they march off to tear down the Temple of Artemis. The Acts of John is normally dated to the third century and the inclusion of this episode in all likelihood means that it was written after the Temple had actually been burnt down by the Goths (who were, at this stage, still pagans). But the Acts do provide further evidence that the Temple really was destroyed during the third century. We can be absolutely certain it was not pulled down on the orders of St John around 100AD as the Acts pretends.

But there is another snippet in the sources that might illuminate how Christians got the blame. In his twentieth Oration, delivered in the early fifth century, Proclus of Constantinople is busy praising St John Chrysostom. Proclus, listing his achievements, says “In Ephesus, he despoiled the art of Midas.” This might be a reference to the cult objects of Artemis (the Temple was originally founded by the Lydian kings of which Midas was one) since even after the Temple was razed you would expect the cult to have soldiered on. Then again, it might not. That this was not a large scale operation is confirmed by Book 14 of Palladius’s Life of Chrysostom that covers his visit to Ephesus but makes no mention of the Temple.

Christians certainly destroyed several pagan temples and converted many others into churches. But not, it appears, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

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Gödel and Lucas

For those of you interested in this sort of thing, J. R. Lucas wrote "Minds, Machines and Gödel" and The Freedom of the Will several decades ago, in which he argued that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems would apply to any physical deterministic system. Any such system should have a Gödel sentence, which is basically the proposition, "This proposition is not provable within this system", which is true but not provable (if it were provable, then it would be false; and if it were false, it would be provable). Mechanistic systems cannot recognize their Gödel sentence as true, because they can only "comprehend" truth as a matter of provability. This is not the case for human beings: we can see that Gödel-type sentences would be true, even though they are inherently unprovable (within their respective systems). Therefore, human beings cannot be explained in purely physical, deterministic terms. Nor can any mere physical system, i.e. computers, be able to duplicate the functions of the human mind -- since they would not be able to recognize their Gödel sentences as true.

At his website, Lucas has most of his contributions to this debate, and the online journal Etica e Politica published several of the more important essays by both Lucas and his detractors. Interesting stuff.

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Copernicus Reburied

Lazy journalism alert!

It has been widely reported in the press this week that the reburial of Nicolas Copernicus in a rather grand tomb represents the Catholic Church "repenting" for branding him a heretic (The London Times) or it "making peace" with him (GMA News).

To be fair, GMA go on to note that the reason Copernicus was originally buried in an umarked tomb was because he was a bit of a nobdy at the time he died. And the fact that he was buried in Fromberg Cathedral at all shows he was a respected member of the community in full communiun with the Church.

Still, he's now very famous and gets a flashier resting place. Part of this is Polish nationalism. Copernicus is the second-best-known Pole in history (after John Paul II) and suggestions that he was actually German have not pleased patriots (see some very upset people on the Wikipedia discussion page). So the reburial is an assertion that he was Polish as much as being a respected servant of the Catholic Church. But none of that fits the science versus religion agenda of the media.

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The Problem of Evil and the Multiverse

I just finished reading Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief, and in the final chapter he addresses the problem of evil, and whether it constitutes a defeater for belief in God. One small point he made was very interesting: he suggested the multiverse can actually be employed to address the problem of evil in the same way that nontheists use it to address the problem of our universe having all of the precise properties necessary for the existence of life (which I've addressed here). Quoting Dennett's account of this in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Plantinga writes

One contemporary response is that possibly "there has been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have existed throughout all eternity." And given infinitely many universes, Daniel Dennett thinks, all the possible distributions of values over the cosmological constants would have been tried out (p. 179); as it happens, we find ourselves, naturally enough, in one of those universes where the constants are such as to allow the development of intelligent life. But then the probability of theism, given the whole array of worlds, isn't particularly high.

In the same way, then, a theist might agree that it is unlikely, given just what we know about our world, that there is such a person as God. But perhaps God has created countless worlds, in fact, all the worlds (all the universes) in which there is a substantial overall balance of good over evil. In some of these worlds there is no suffering and evil; in some a good deal; as it happens, we find ourselves in one of the worlds where there is a good deal. But the probability of theism, given the whole ensemble of worlds, isn't particularly low.

I suppose one could argue that it's ad hoc to propose a multiverse in order to deal with the problem of evil, but I don't see how it's any less ad hoc than proposing it to account for the anthropic coincidences.

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Gray Vs Grayling

The raison d'etre of a career in academia is to savage your opponents in print under the pretext of a book review, and thereby destroy their life's work within a few carefully worded paragraphs. Hence the spats that occur amongst the intelligencia are among the most entertaining reading.

Since things have been a bit quiet here recently, here is a synopsis of a recent argument conducted between the political philosopher John Gray and the philosopher and prominent humanist A.C Grayling. Some time ago, A.C Grayling attacked John Gray's book, 'Black Mass, Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia' in the pages of the 'New Humanist' (the mouthpiece of the 'Rationalist Association'). John Gray has now returned the favour with Graylings 'Ideas that Matter' in 'The National Interest' (the prominant conservative rag which published Fukyama's now infamous 'The End of History'). In it he writes:

From where, then, do modern liberal values derive? Why, from ancient Greece, of course. Retelling an old rationalist fairy tale, Grayling writes in the entry on justice, “the ancient Greeks were, as with so many things, the first to rate the possession of a sense of justice, and moreover one on which one acts, as a virtue.” Well, so much for the Hebrew prophets. Again, in the entry on Buddhism he asserts that “the Greeks assumed that we are individuals, and as such are ethical agents responsible for ourselves and what we do,” and created a “new ethics of civic, intellectual and moral virtue.” On the contrary, what is most striking about the ancient Greeks is that they had hardly any sense of the human individual as being independent of society, and having rights against it. After all, Socrates never contested the right of the Greek polis to put him to death.

Reading Grayling, it is hard to resist the impression that he believes Western civilization would be much improved if it did not include the Judeo-Christian inheritance. Absurd as it is, there is nothing new in such a claim. It is one of the most venerable clichés of Enlightenment thinking, and Ideas that Matter is a compendium of such dated prejudices.

Grayling has now authored a short reply in response, saying that:

I am delighted to have been reviewed at such length in The National Interest by John Gray, whom I was beginning to suspect of too impervious a dignity ever to respond to the repeated bashings I have had to give his views over the last several years.

Reading this, I am compelled to conclude there is only one way to decide the question of the relative success or failure of the enlightenment project and the contested source of western values and that's IN THE RING. Tickets go on sale next week.

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Causality and the Big Bang

Since Big Bang cosmology is the claim that matter, energy, space, and time all sprang into existence, it strikes many people as similar to the theistic doctrine of creation ex nihilo (and by "similar" I mean "identical"). So some philosophers and some cosmologists have tried to find ways of avoiding the theistic implications.

One of the most common is to claim that causality is a physical phenomenon; it describes what takes place within the universe. You can't apply it to the beginning of the physical universe. The idea here is that causality is a posteriori like the laws of physics or chemistry, not a priori like the laws of logic. As such, it only describes the conditions inside the universe and can't be applied to the beginning of the universe itself. This is the tack taken by some illustrious philosophers, such as Adolf Grünbaum and Quentin Smith

It's certainly true that causality is not a priori in the same way the laws of logic are. We simply can't imagine the law of non-contradiction failing to hold, but we can imagine causality failing to hold -- that is, we can imagine (form a mental picture of) something popping into existence without a cause. But it's incorrect to say that we discover causality the same way we discover the laws of physics, i.e. through observation. Causality is derived from our basic intuition that something does not come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit: out of nothing, nothing comes). To limit this intuition to physical processes would be a case of special pleading; there's no reason why it wouldn't apply to the beginning of the universe. Causality is not a physical principle, it's a metaphysical principle.

Perhaps one could suggest that once we have the principle of causality via intuition, we can then establish it via observation and continue to believe it based on the latter. But it's not clear to me how causality could be falsified, or what would count as observation of causality not holding. At best you could say that you didn't observe a cause of an effect, but everyone would infer that the effect does in fact have a cause and we just didn't observe it. It's not like you could set up a scientific experiment to observe the absence of causality, since if the conditions you set up are sufficient to bring about the effect, then obviously the former caused the latter. As such, I think William Lane Craig's argument that causality has never been falsified is an empty claim. There are plenty of times where we observe an effect without a cause, but no amount of such experiences will ever convince a sane person that the effects didn't have a cause, merely that the causes weren't observed.

Or, perhaps one could simply deny the intuition. There are problems with this though: for one thing, science presupposes causality. If causality goes out the window, science goes with it. This is not only absurd and unacceptable, it's a conclusion I doubt nontheists would be willing to accept, since they (mistakenly) think science is on their side. For another thing, while causality is not a priori in the same way that the laws of logic are, it is still a precondition of thought. If causality did not hold, then there would not be an appropriate connection between our beliefs and their objects, such that we could never know if any of them are true. So it's not merely scientific knowledge that would be endangered; if we deny causality, then the possibility of any knowledge becomes impossible. So it's not like this intuition is just some random assertion.

But doesn't quantum physics posit virtual particles coming into existence without causes? This is a misunderstanding. As Craig writes,

... virtual particles do not literally come into existence spontaneously out of nothing. Rather the energy locked up in a vacuum fluctuates spontaneously in such a way as to convert into evanescent particles that return almost immediately to the vacuum. ... The microstructure of the quantum vacuum is a sea of continually forming and dissolving particles which borrow energy from the vacuum for their brief existence. A quantum vacuum is thus far from nothing, and vacuum fluctuations do not constitute an exception to the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Another suggestion might be that Hume denied causality. But ignoring the fact that Hume was not inerrant, this is another misunderstanding. Hume argued that just because we've observed a particular cause producing a particular effect in the past, we cannot know that the cause will produce the same effect. In other words, he argued that we can't infer an effect from a cause. Those who deny causality applies to the creation of the universe are claiming that we can't infer a cause from an effect -- that just because we observe that an effect has taken place, we can't claim that it was caused. This is radically different from what Hume was claiming, and Hume explicitly repudiates such an idea as absurd.

A final claim might be to suggest that applying causality to the Big Bang is just as problematic for the traditional theistic doctrine of creation. The doctrine, after all, is called creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) and the intuition is that ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing, nothing comes). But again, this is a misunderstanding. Creation ex nihilo is the claim that the universe didn't have a material cause -- that it wasn't constructed out of some pre-existent "stuff". This is certainly a radical claim and we should recognize it as such. But it doesn't deny that the universe has an efficient cause -- some entity or agent that brings about the effect -- since the claim is that God is the efficient cause of the universe. Those who deny that causality would apply to the beginning of the universe, however, are claiming that the universe had neither a material cause nor an efficient cause. So I simply put it to you, which of these two explanations is more plausible: that the universe's beginning has an efficient cause but no material cause, or that it has neither?

Now it's all well and good to say that applying causality to the beginning of the universe creates some philosophical issues, but the alternative is that it just popped into existence without any cause whatsoever. That people who portray themselves as skeptics would be willing to accept this shows that their skepticism is absurdly selective. If this is the the only way to avoid believing in God then there's just no contest.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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The tale of the two saints

Some time ago, in a discussion on Richard Carrier’s blog, the historian Charles Freeman mentioned the bizarre treatment of St Thomas Aquinas’s body following the saint’s death on the 7th of March 1274. A summery of it’s fate is related in the introduction to Aquinas’s selected writings (ed Ralph M. McInerny):

‘Thomas was buried for the first time before the high alter of the church of the Cistercian abbey in which he had died after a funeral Mass attended by members of his family as well as by fellow Dominicans and other non Cistercians. Because the sub prior at Fossanova was cured of blindness when he touched Thomas’s body and soon other miracles occurred, the Cistercians began to fear that the remains would be stolen and taken off to a Dominican resting place. As a result of this fear, the body was disinterred and reinterred at Fossanova several times during the next two years. Jealous of their treasure the monks took macabre precautions. They exhumed the corpse of Brother Thomas from it’s resting place, cut off the head and placed it in a hiding place in a corner of the chapel. The idea was that, even if the corpse were taken, the head would be theirs. His sister was given a hand, a finger of which was to describe a grisly trajectory of its own...By the time the canonisation process began in 1319 the corpse had been reduced to bones from which the flesh had been removed by boiling.’

In his comment, Freeman also mentions that:

Then the story went around that you could find marks of sanctity inside a dead body. Clare of Montefalco's body was cut up in 1308 and sure enough ' a cross or an image of the crucified Christ' was found on her heart. Bynum goes on (p.323) ' By the fifteenth century inquisitors at canonization proceedings looked to autopsy evidence for proof of paramystical phenomena such as miraculous abstinence' .

Yet a similar - and if anything stranger- fate was to be met in the 20th century by the ‘secular saint’ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, that which has been related by Paul R Gregory in ‘Lenin’s Brain and other tales from the Soviet Archives’. After his death in 1924 Lenin's brain was removed as part of the autopsy and left to stew in formaldehyde for the next two years. It was then decided by Stalin and the Politburo that the organ should be studied to provide detailed scientific proof of the late leader’s genius.

The neurologist selected for this task was the German Oskar Vogt who proposed that Lenin’s brain be compared to other brains in his laboratory in Berlin. This transpired to be a problematic move for the communists. Having been sent a specimen of Lenin’s brain, the person charged with assessing his genius was now an independent scientist outside the grasp of communist censorship. More problematic were Vogt’s public lectures. Stetskii, the Russian Head of the culture and propaganda department of the central committee reported that:

‘Vogt’s presentations are of a questionable nature; he compares Lenin’s brain with those of criminals and assorted other persons. Professor Vogt has a mechanical theory of genius using an anatomic analysis based on the presence of a large number of giant cortical pyramidal cells’

Vogt had said in his initial reports that Lenin’s brain had shown a great number of ‘giant cells’ which he saw a sign of superior mental function. However as Stetskii reported, this made a mockery of Lenin’s brain since in the German encyclopaedia of mental illness, ‘a German authority (a professor Spielmaier) claims that such pyramidal cells are also characteristic of mental retardation’

In the event the research was transferred to the Moscow Brain Institute. The final report was published in 1936 and came to 153 pages. The brain of the great leader had been compared with ten average people and the brains of leading figures (including I.V Pavlov). It had shown an exceptional ‘high organisation..with an especially high functioning in the areas of speech, recognition and action’ and ‘with processes requiring great diversity and richness of cognitive powers, in other words with an exceptionally high functioning of the nervous system’. He had ratios of the temporal lobe to the total brain mass which were superior to those of the poet Mayakovsky and the physician philosopher Bogdanov. Somewhat amusingly (and perhaps typically) the report then ends with an impassioned appeal for more funding.

The report would not be publicised however, since by the time of it’s completion, Stalin was busily executing his prominent rivals. It would therefore have been imprudent to remind the public of the super-brained Lenin.

Odder still was the treatment of Lenin’s body. The original plan was to freeze it, but the body had begun to deteriorate while the super freezer was being built. Instead his corpse was embalmed and sealed in a glass sarcophagus. It now requires constant treatment and chemical baths every eighteen months to moisturise the features and keep spots of black mould from appearing on the face and hands. His blood, bodily fluids and internal organs were removed as part of the original process but his eyebrows, moustache and goatee remain intact, as do his genitals.

This is more than can be said for Napoleon’s. In 1972 what was alleged to have been his penis was infamously put up for auction at Christies, having supposedly been removed during his autopsy in 1821 and ended up in the personal effects of his friend Vignali. Newspaper reports of the Christies sale described the object as ‘something like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or shrivelled eel’, another described it as ‘one inch long and resembling a grape’. To add to the indignity, the alleged penis failed to reach it’s reserve price and was withdrawn.


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