Intelligent Universe

2008-07-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

God Would Be Dead, if He Existed in the First Place (Part III)

William Lane Craig continues:

The teleological argument. The old design argument remains as robust today as ever...

Wait...you're serious? Let me laugh even harder. We have a theory--biological evolution by natural selection--that explains how complex features with a superficial appearance of "design" can and do develop naturally, without any Cosmic Architects with glowing golden drafting calipers in their hands. It explains why we share genes with puffer fish, but far more genes with chimpanzees, how eyes develop, and so on. It has an immense quantity of evidence in its favor, from a range of scientific fields like genetics, biology, paleontology, anatomy, and physics (radiometric dating). I'll leave it to the folks at TalkOrigins.org to eviscerate the "robust" design argument in greater detail. Craig doesn't try to wield debunked arguments about bacterial flagella "motors." Instead, he turns to the latest fashion in Goddidit invisible Imperial apparel:

But the cutting edge of the discussion focuses on the recently discovered, remarkable fine-tuning of the cosmos for life. This finetuning [sic] is of two sorts. First, when the laws of nature are expressed as mathematical equations, they contain certain constants, such as the gravitational constant. The mathematical values of these constants are not determined by the laws of nature. Second, there are certain arbitrary quantities that are just part of the initial conditions of the universe--for example, the amount of entropy.

These constants and quantities fall into an extraordinarily narrow range of life-permitting values. Were these constants and qualities to be altered by less than a hair's breadth, the life-permitting balance would be destroyed, and life would not exist. [emphasis in original]

A couple things to point out here. First of all, as an argument for any sort of anthropomorphic personal, supernatural deity, this approach is self-refuting.

1. A proposed Cosmological Fine-Tuner (CFT) is a product of a Universe like this one, or it is not.

2. If the CFT(s) are products of a Universe like this one, they are bound by the same physical principles we are, and are therefore not supernatural.

3. If the CFT(s) are native to some other sort of dimension or state that is significantly different from our Universe, then the conditions of our Universe are not necessary for the existence of intelligent life.

4. If there is more than one possible way for intelligent life to exist, then Cosmological Fine-Tuning is not necessary to explain the existence of intelligent life.

Second, even if our Universe were fine-tuned, how sure can we be that it is fine-tuned "for life"--by which Craig and the I.D. crowd mean: for us? Is it not possible that beings capable of designing and creating Universes to their desired specifications might have other goals in mind than the creation of human beings, and garnering human worship and obedience?

We could be like some little patch of mildew growing on the wall of one of the tunnels in the Large Hadron Collider saying, "See? This place is suitable for our type of life! If it was much hotter or colder, or lacked air, we could not live here. Therefore, this place was built as a home for us!

One way to avoid that sort of foolish hubris is to consider the Form Follows Function argument:

1. Beings capable of designing and creating a Universe to their desired specifications would be far more efficacious in the fields of design and construction than we are.

2. It is possible that such beings could create Universes for purposes we cannot imagine, as mildew cannot imagine the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider.

3. Given premise (1) we should expect that a designed Universe should efficiently fulfill its function.

4. Nearly all of this Universe would be instantly fatal to a human being without special protective gear (e.g. a spacesuit) and inhospitable to human settlement.

5. Nearly all of this Universe is physically inaccessible to human beings, and almost certain to remain so indefinitely.

6. Therefore, this Universe was not designed to be a residence for human beings.

Nutshell: Humans can exist in less than 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of Universe. A Cosmic Designer seeking to create a home for intelligent beings could have created a far more efficient Universe for this purpose than the Universe we see. For example, a gigantic computer with minds stored in it Matrix-style. Or, the Designers could have created sapient robot space probes, for whom a far greater portion of the Cosmos as we know it would be habitable, instead of humans like us.

Or, Universe could have been made, say, as a Ziplock bag to store dark energy for later use, and we're like barnacles convinced the ship exists for our sake. As to why our Universe is the way it is, I'm willing to hang a question mark on that and give people much smarter than I am in the field of cosmology, who also have the right equpment for the job (things like space telescopes and giant particle accelerators) a chance to figure it out. This isn't blind faith. People smarter than I am in other fields have answered all sorts of questions I could not have figured out on my own. Like, "How can we make a car that works?"

2008-07-18T20:51:00.000-07:00

Crady's Wager

We've all heard of Pascal's Wager. Here's a little bet for the kind of people who actually think Pascal's Wager is an argument:

Step 1: Read the Book of Job. Notice that Job is "covered" according to the promises made by Yahweh in the Old Covenant. He is described by Yahweh as an "upright" man. He worships Yahweh as he requires, makes the required offerings needed to cover "sin," etc., and is protected by Yahweh in accordance with the promises Yahweh made in the Old Covenant.

Step 2: Notice also that Satan is able to get Yahweh to break his end of the Old Covenant by making a simple bet: "Job's a mercenary. He only worships you because you protect him and grant him prosperity. If you destroy all he has and torment him for no reason, he'll curse you to your face." Yahweh takes that bet without hesitation.

Step 3: "Hello, God? I see how wonderfully devout and faithful these Christians of yours are. But you know what? I bet you they're just mercenaries. They worship you because they're sure they've got some wondrous and beautiful eternal hereafter waiting for them. I bet you that if you tossed them into Hell and saved the atheists or Buddhists instead, that they'd curse you to your face!"

Christians: We know from Yahweh's past behavior, which has been enshrined in his magic holy-book, that he is more than willing to break his promises and subject his most devout worshipers to horrible suffering when presented with a challenge of this sort. He's even willing to kill--witness the demise of Job's family.

Therefore, you no longer have any guarantee of entering Heaven when you die. Now, you are most likely bound for Hell. Will you still worship Yahweh? Will you love him as you twist in the flames of Hellfire?

2008-07-17T20:02:00.001-07:00

God Would Be Dead, if He Existed in the First Place (Part II)

Christianity Today offers its next example of believers' "intellectual muscle:"

The kalam cosmological argument. This version of the argument has a rich Islamic heritage. Stuart Hackett, David Oderberg, Mark Nowacki, and I have defended the kalam argument.

I find it rather amusing that despite this argument's origins and "rich Islamic heritage," that Craig only cites Westerners as its notable advocates. Not one respected Imam?

Its formulation is simple:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Premise (1) certainly seems more plausibly true than its denial. The idea that things can pop into being without a cause is worse than magic.

What could people like Mr. Craig possibly have against magic? It's their proposed causal mechanism! Also, as I understand it, the physicists tell us that virtual particles "pop into being without a cause" all the time. Weird, but apparently true. And while we're talking about things "just being there" without a cause, what about Mr. Craig's invisible super-person?

Craig goes on to attack the idea of an eternal Universe (or, presumably, series of Universes in a Multiverse). He drags out the usual argument from infinite regress:

Philosophically, the idea of an infinite past seems absurd. If the universe never had a beginning, then the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. Not only is this a very paradoxical idea, but it also raises the problem: How could the present event ever arrive if an infinite number of prior events had to elapse first?

This is like saying you can never get to the number 4 because you would have to count up from an infinity of negative numbers (or, if you want to stay positive, the infinitude of tiny decimals lower than 1 but bigger than 0) in order to reach it. "Infinity" is an abstraction. No matter how far back you go to pick your starting point, you can only land on some particular event (or number), resulting in a finite number of events (or numbers), however large.

Also, it is never a good idea to assert as impossible something to which your own proposal is vulnerable. Craig's chosen "cause" is a personal, anthropomorphic, thinking mind. If we decide to be charitable enough to grant Craig the possibility of a disembodied mind with no physical substrate, then the only possible substance his god can have is its thoughts, emotional states, and other elements of mentation. Which means, such a mind would have to be thinking, feeling, and so on, because without mental states it would be indistinguishable from nothing. Which means: Craig's god must have a continuous series of thoughts, emotions, experiences, etc.. If this entity itself has no beginning, then we're right back to the paradox of infinite regress.

If we have a choice between an infinite regress of real events in a real Universe (or Multiverse), vs. an infinite regress of disembodied thoughts without anything to do the thinking, the former is the more elegant and parsimonious option. Craig goes on to argue that Big Bang cosmology mandates that our Universe has a beginning, and is therefore caused. Then he makes the usual quantum leap:

It follows that there must be a transcendent cause that brought the universe into being, a cause that, as we have seen, is plausibly timeless, spaceless, immaterial, and personal.

What, exactly, is "plausible" about that? Look at the first three "attributes." They're all negations. Without time, without extension in space, without material/energetic substance. They are descriptors of non-existence. His final attribute, "personal," is incompatible with the others, by any meaningful definition of the word "personal." Craig's god is the ultimate Nowhere Man: made of nothing, existing in no place and at no time. Aside from his wish to call this non-entity a "person," his position is indistinguishable from atheism.

As human beings, we have a great deal of experience with "persons." "Persons" can only be known as such within a context of time. For example, without time, you would not be able to read the words of this blog in succession, or hear them if they were read to you. You would not be able to think about them, or relate the experience of reading them to the experience of feeding your pet earlier in the day. You would not be able to do or think anything at all, since such an act would create a temporal division between "before" the thought or act and "after" it.

In order for Craig's god to design Universe, it would need to actually engage in the act of designing, i.e., of purposeful thought toward setting cosmological constants or visualizing the mechanism of a flagellar motor. In the absence of time, there could be no time "before" "god" had a design for Universe, or a time "after" it had a design and was ready to start building, or a time when it set to work.

A "god" bereft of temporal succession would be as impotent as the character pictured on the 356th frame of a movie film sitting in its canister. It doesn't matter how big a superhero the character might be. Without the temporal sequence, he can't save the day. There's no "day" to save. And, without the ability to think its thoughts in time, there would be no thoughts, and thus no disembodied mind.

Craig began his article by sneering at the lack of "intellectual muscle" present in the "New Atheist" books, yet he fails to respond to a powerful argument advanced by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. This is the argument Dawkins refers to as "the Ultimate Boeing 747 Argument."[1]

Evolution is difficult to grasp intuitively, because we see complex things like life forms, and find it difficult to imagine how they could have come to exist without a guiding intelligence to design them. Complex life forms are wildly improbable, like having a tornado go through a junkyard and leave a newly-assembled Boeing 747 in its wake. Darwin's great discovery was of a non-random organizing principle, "natural selection," that provides a mechanism for life to gradually "climb Mt. Improbable" (another Dawkins analogy) by conserving small changes that work while weeding out changes that don't, over a very, very long period of time.

In the case of Craig's god, we are supposed to have a "person" even more complex than humans and all of our Universe put together. In the Christian belief system, there are said to be many angels and demons, but only one god. That means that it is far more probable that a given disembodied mind would be an angel or demon, rather than a god. And if the god is supposed to possess a certain type of personality (as opposed to all other possible personalities), then it follows that the specific set of thougts, emotions, values, psychological attributes, etc. that comprises god is highly improbable.

If we take into account all of the gods worshiped by all human cultures, then add in all of the possible gods that could be worshiped by all of the alien cultures that could exist within a hundred billion galaxies of over a hundred billion stars each, we have an enormous set of potential disembodied minds to work from. There are billions of distinct individual human minds on this one planet alone.

In a nutshell, Craig's god would be a unique, and highly improbable complex being. If you had a roulette wheel that contained a slot for every possible mind that could exist, the odds of spinning it and hitting on William Lane Craig's preferred version of the Christian deity[2] are virtually nil.

Add to this the immense degree of complexity that a sapient, humanlike mind represents (much less a vastly superhuman mind), as compared with, say, a "timeless, spaceless, immaterial" equivalent of a paramecium. Whichever way you slice it, a god like William Lane Craig's or Grand Ayatollah Sistani's would be the "ultimate Boeing 747." Its existence would be more improbable (as a function of its complexity and the uniqueness of its attributes of consciousness) than our Universe and everything in it. The "god hypothesis" is the explanatory equivalent of a cure worse than the disease.

In addressing the kalam argument, we are left with the possibility of either an infinite regress of causes, or some sort of irreducible starting point. Arguably, the infinite regress of causes (IRoC) makes more sense than the irreducible starting point (ISP). With the IRoC, each cause/effect relationship is an example of the sort of cause/effect relationships with which we are familiar. It does not require anything exotic and unknowable.

That our universe began with a Big Bang and is causally disconnected with anything on the other side of the Big Bang singularity actually makes the IRoC model even more plausible. Instead of the analogy of an infinite regress of numbers, we have an infinite regress of distinct sets (Big Bang cosmoses, with ours as a "daughter universe"), each caused by, but temporally separate from, its predecessor. In the numerical analogy, it would be something like:

(1, 2, 3, 4)(5, 6, 7, 8)(9, 10, 11, 12). Each "set" is itself finite (thus, no infinite regress problem), but has its "transcendent cause" in another cosmos that is spatially and temporally disconnected from it. Since each cosmos is its own island of space and time, there is no unbroken chain to infinity to worry about. Once you pick any specific reference frame (such as "here and now") to count backward from, you're in a finite set, and you can count back to the beginning of that set and no further. Each universe is basically a familiar sort of entity whose behavior is something we can model mathematically. Thus, even if there's an infinite number of them, this view has the parsimony of not introducing any novel entities.

The introduction of a "first cause" requires the introduction of something fundamentally different from all that is know. Then we're left with the question, "what made the first cause cause the second?" If this "first cause" was in some sort of timeless, eternal stasis until it sparked the Big Bang, how did it break free of its stasis? If the "first cause" started causing at a particular point (the Big Bang), then what caused it to change its state from non-causal to causal?
And what caused that? Etc..

NOTES:

1. Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp. 113-114

2. There are, of course, numerous different conceptions of what the god of Christianity is like.

2008-07-17T15:36:00.001-07:00

God Would Be Dead, If He Existed in the First Place (Part I)

The July issue of Christianity Today features an article entitled "God is Not Dead Yet" by William Lane Craig, claiming a major revolution in philosophical argumentation over the existence of a god.

You might think from the recent spate of atheist best-sellers that belief in God has become intellectually indefensible for thinking people today. But a look at these books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchins, among others, quickly reveals that the so-called New Atheism lacks intellectual muscle. It is blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It reflects the scientism of a bygone generation rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

The turning point probably came in 1967, with the publication of Alvin Plantinga's God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God. In Plantinga's train has followed a host of Christian philosophers, writing in scholarly journals and participating in professional conferences with the finest academic presses... Atheism, though perhaps still the dominant viewpoint at the American university, is a philosophy in retreat.

This all sounds quite impressive. From this, we could almost expect to see Christian philosophers lining up to receive their Nobel Prizes for the discovery of a super-intelligent non-human life form, and completely overhauling the science of cosmic origins. At the very least, we would expect the article to contain new, revolutionary arguments for a god's existence that are compelling enough to make atheists seriously reconsider their position.

Instead, Craig just serves up the same old arguments we've all seen before: the Cosmological Argument, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Moral Argument, and the Ontological Argument. Each argument is preceded by an ejaculation of name-dropping, listing ostensibly credible intellectuals who subscribe to it.[1] Despite his fulsome praise for Plantinga, he doesn't even cite Plantinga's "revolutionary" argument, which will be addressed at the conclusion of this series.

So let's have a look at the vaunted "sophisticated" Christianity we atheists are supposed to be blissfully ignorant of. The arguments cited here (with the exception of Plantinga's argument) are taken directly from the article in Christianity Today, with the name-drop paragraphs omitted. All quotations are from the article, unless otherwise specified.

The cosmological argument.

1. Everything that exists has an explanation for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.

2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.

3. The universe exists.

4. Therefore, the explanation of the universe's existence is God.

Like all of these "sophisticated" arguments for Christianity, this one rests on a giant non-sequitur. We find it here in premise #2. There is simply no reason to leap from "the universe has an explanation for its existence" to "that explanation is the deity who got mad at a talking snake in the Book of Genesis." I think we can be confident that Christians would not accept this argument as convincing if we altered premise #2 to state, "...that explanation is Amun-Re."

The existence of a god is the issue at hand, so merely asserting it as the explanation of Universe's existence as a premise is begging the question. Craig tries to defend premise #2 as follows:

Premise (2) might at first appear controversial, but it is in fact synonymous with the usual atheist claim that if God does not exist, then the universe has no explanation of its existence.

I've read a number of books arguing the case for atheism, including The God Delusion, The End of Faith, and God is not Great (the "New Atheist" bestsellers Craig refers to at the beginning of his article) and I do not recall encountering this "usual" claim. Atheists discuss possible explanations for Universe's existence all the time (e.g. the Big Bang theory, M-Theory, Lee Smolin's hypothesis of cosmic natural selection, etc.). If atheists did make such a claim, it would be a non-sequitur. The non-existence of the Christian deity would not eliminate other deities, or other sorts of possible explanations for Universe's existence.

Besides, (2) is quote plausible in its own right. For an external cause of the universe must be beyond space and time and therefore cannot be physical or material.

Non sequitur. Multiverse cosmologies describing ways a Universe (self-contained Big Bang cosmos) like ours could emerge as a "daughter universe" causally disconnected from its "mother universe" (such as Lee Smolin's hypothesis of universe-creation via black holes) or M-Theory do propose physical explanations for the existence of what we now call "the universe." These theories are certainly debatable and may well be wrong, but they use mechanisms of physics we know something about, and mathematical tools that have worked quite well for us in the past.

Contrast this with the "A super-big invisible magic person did it" theory, which employs nothing but the inherently unknowable. Consider the track record of "invisible magic person" (IMP) theories. Until very recently in historical terms, all of humanity was convinced that invisible magic persons were responsible for virtually all phenomena of nature, from weather to disease to human and animal fertility. Where the IMPs once controlled the entire territory of human experience, the advance of science has routed them time and time again. Today, IMPs can only hide within the Big Bang singularity. And now science is drawing up the most powerful siege engine ever created, the Large Hadron Collider, to assail that final redoubt. On the basis of history alone, we should be wary of clutching at an IMP explanation for anything.

Now there are only two kinds of things that fit that description: either abstract objects, like numbers, or else an intelligent mind.

Not so. I can think of at least one other possibility off the top of my head: a generalized operational principle, like "triangles are self-bracing," or "natural selection."

But abstract objects are causally impotent. The number 7, for example, can't cause anything.

Generalized operational principles can be "causative." For example, if you start making shapes at random from gum drops and tooth picks, test them for stability, keep the more stable structures and destroy the unstable structures, you will inevitably end up with a bunch of triangulated shapes. The triangle is the only self-bracing polygon, so shapes based on triangles will be more stable than shapes based on squares or other polygons. "Triangles are self-bracing."

The process of destroying the unstable shapes and keeping the stable shapes is natural selection. No matter how randomly the shapes are built, those two principles will leave you with triangle-based shapes, especially if you continue the process for multiple generations, basing succeeding shapes on small modifications of surviving shapes from the previous generation. Thus, the two generalized operating principles have "caused" a non-random result (triangulated shapes) to emerge from a random process of assembly.

What sort of generalized operational principle would it take to "cause" a Universe like ours to exist? "'Nothing' is unstable."

Therefore, it follows that the explanation of the universe is an external, transcendent, personal mind that created the universe--which is what most people have traditionally meant by "God."

Fail. First of all, an abstract "mind" is as causally impotent as an abstract number. If it were otherwise, magic would work. A "brain in a vat" cannot affect reality merely by thinking, feeling, wishing, repeating incantations to itself, etc.. I can wish day and night for Abigail at ERV to fall in love with me, but that won't cause it to happen. I'd have a better chance by doing something materialistic, like sending her flowers. Our minds are causal because they're connected, physically to physical interfaces (our heads and bodies) that can act in Universe. Mental acts alone are not causal in reality.

Second, a "mind" isn't a floating abstraction "beyond space and time." Our minds (the only ones we have any experience with) are emergent properties of the massively interconnected neurons of our brains. If that system is altered, say, by alcohol or Alzheimer's, the "mind" is also altered. The concept of a disembodied "mind" of "God" is not only causally impotent, it is nonsensical.

Third, this last sentence of Craig's is a devious intellectual smuggling operation. Let's look at it again:

Therefore, it follows that the explanation of the universe is an external, transcendent, personal mind that created the universe--which is what most people have traditionally meant by "God."

He lists a whole set of attributes for his proposed "God" that he just takes as given. His "God" is singular, external, transcendent, and personal. Where does he get these proposed attributes? They're "what most people have traditionally meant by 'God.'" Most people--in the West, since the Middle Ages. Other cultures have proposed deities that are immanent in Nature rather than external, plural rather than singular, and sometimes impersonal rather than personal (e.g. Brahman, the Tao).

Why should we assume automatically that gods, if they exist, are anything like what we humans imagine them to be? The Universe revealed to us by modern science has certainly come as a shock, comparing it with ancient cosmologies. Even the "sophisticated" Christian philosopher would have to admit that the divine, whatever it may be (if it exists at all) is an extremely subtle phenomenon, since it has not been detected by our most sensitive instrumentation. On what basis should we assume that ancient peoples, who were completely in error concerning the things we can reliably discern with our scientific instrumentation (e.g. the size and workings of the physical cosmos) would be spot on with regards to some transcendent something-or-other existing beyond all space and time? That's just nonsense on stilts!

Craig and other Christian apologists wielding these "sophisticated" arguments are counting on us to just let them sneak by with the unspoken and unvalidated premise that "the Christian God = the only possible sort of god." The vast panoply of human religious and spiritual thought completely destroys this premise. Without it, all of the "sophisticated" arguments fail to accomplish their goal of establishing Christianity (and not every other religion) as a rational viewpoint.

For example, even if the Cosmological Argument above were irrefutable in all its steps, there is no reason to assume only one transcendent Mind, or to assume that it's male, (i.e. the Christian God rather than the Goddess of the Minoans), that it has multiple personality disorder (the Trinity), that it ghost-writes books like the Bible or the Quran, or that the Bible, rather than the Quran, the Vedas, or the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, is the (only) book that it ghost-wrote.

Watch for this smuggled premise in each of the other arguments as this series progresses.

NOTES:

1. In his introduction the Teleological Argument, Craig spurts out the name of William Dembski, which calls into question his ability to pick credible sources.

2007-12-07T03:14:00.000-07:00

Why Are Atheists So Angry?

A response to Dinesh D'Souza's post, "Why Are Atheists So Angry."

Dinesh, you say "angry" like it's a bad thing. Is that so? Is anger really a sign of moral failing as you imply?

If so, why is it that Christians and the authors of Scripture so often wax eloquent about the "wrath of God"?

Let's say you had a dog that got into the garbage, or did something else worthy of punishment. In response, you rig up a system by which you can keep the dog continually in agony without killing him. And let's say that for ten years you listen to the dog's howls of torment with teeth gritted in fury thinking, 'You deserve it, you bastard!' before your wrath is sated and you can put the dog out of its misery.

You'd have to be awfully mad at that dog to do that, wouldn't you? Most likely, anger and vindictiveness like that is not something you would really be capable of. You or nearly any human being, save for the sort a sane society would have to keep trussed up like Hannibal Lechter in "Silence of the Lambs."

Now, the canonical Gospels portray Jesus (that great icon of peace and mercy) as claiming that God will torture people in fire *forever* for failing to have the proper set of beliefs. After Gandhi has screamed in agony for ten trillion years for the crime of believing in the wrong deities, King Tutankhamun for having been born a few centuries before Yahweh decided to start any of his One True Religions, etc., the nightmare is only just beginning.

Yahweh will continue to hear the cries of the damned with teeth gritted in fury thinking, 'You deserve it, you bastards!'...forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. If the New Testament is to be believed, the creator of hundreds of billions of galaxies will never, ever be at peace in his own heart (or equivalent thereof), for all eternity.

While he may dote on the relative handful of people who managed to grovel before him in the proper way so as to become his little pets, he will still spend all of eternity seething with wrath at the majority of his children, whom he tortures unrelentingly.

Think about that for a moment. Think about the sheer magnitude of hate, anger, and sadism it would take for any being to want any other being to suffer so horribly, and keep right on suffering, forever.

Now, if you are going to worship a being whom you believe manifests anger and hate on this level and call this being the epitome of moral perfection, what basis could you possibly have for criticizing the anger of an atheist who merely writes commentary in a book?

You imply that atheists are hypocritical, since they cannot really believe God does not exist if they're so angry at him. The immediate flaw in this 'analysis' is that if atheists "really" believed in God (and did not choose to toady before him in hopes of currying his favor), their response would be one of stark terror, unless they had some expectation of being able to defeat God somehow. At the very least, we would expect "atheists-who-really-believe-in-god" to invest in a chariot of iron (Judges 1:19).

"Atheism" as an untrue denial by someone who actually believes in God would be silliness on the par of a capitalist in Stalin's Russia saying, "Bah! Stalin doesn't exist!"

That is, if we define "God" as some omnipotent super-spirit of the Universe. It is quite possible and rational to say that the Biblical God does exist--as an idea. People can hate ideas and the practical results of those ideas without agreeing that the ideas are true. In fact, it is more common for people to hate ideas they genuinely consider to be false. Or would you accuse the people who show up at Ku Klux Klan rallies to shout angrily at the Klansmen of being closet racists themselves?

As to the claim that the Biblical deity exists as anything other than an idea in people's heads:

You feel a stabbing pain in your side, and you think it could be appendicitis. Quick! What do you do?

A) Call the elders of the church so you can be healed by the prayer of faith (James 5:14-15)

B) Call 911 and have an ambulance take you to the hospital

If you chose "B," you are acting on the premise that the passage in James is inaccurate, that healing comes from science and reason and human effort, rather than the miraculous power of God. Oh, you can try to give God credit for the surgeon's skill afterwards (regardless of whether the surgeon was an atheist or a Hindu or some brand of Christian you consider to be heretical), but when push comes to shove, you trust in "the arm of man" rather than in God.

You live in the same godless Universe we do.

2006-09-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

They're Not "Fascists"

The time has come to debunk the neoconservatives' favorite propaganda term "Islamo-fascism," and the nuttiness and folly that derives from it. As despicable as fundamentalist Islamic ideology may be, it is not Nazism any more than it is Maoism or Stalinism. Ideologically, culturally, and organizationally, Al Qaeda and the Nazi Party could hardly be more different.

Ideology:

Nazism teaches that everything, including religion, should be an adjunct to the modern bureaucratic-industrial State, with the Fuhrer as the embodiment of the will of the Volk. Militant Islam rejects the State (as it has existed since the Treaty of Westphalia), favoring a society governed entirely by religion, via clerical rulers, and under Sharia law as revealed in the Koran. Islamist societies are organized along clan/tribal lines under a clerical judiciary. Nazism stands for "National Socialism." Radical Islam is neither National (bound inseparably to any State) nor "Socialist." Osama bin Laden is a mult-millinaire semi-capitalist, from a rich and decidedly non-socialist family and society.

The Fuhrerprinzip ("Fuhrer Principle") was an essential doctrine of Nazism. Radical Islam has no equivalent. It operates in decentralized cells, united by religious doctrine, rather than a centralized Party/State apparatus. Even Osama bin Laden is no Fuhrer, as he deferred meekly to Mullah Omar during the Taliban rule, and has no direct hierarchical control over the Islamic militant movement.

Another core doctrine of Nazism is the supremacy of the Aryan Master Race. Osama bin Laden would be hard-pressed to mobilize a single platoon of Tall Blond Brutes, much less a new Waffen SS. He would be utterly doomed if he tried to restrict Al Qaeda membership to non-Semites (Arabs are Semites) of Nordic extraction. Militant Islam transcends race. The movement includes Arabs, Persians (Iranians), blacks (Somalis, Sudanese), Asians (Fillipinos, Indonesians), and even a few whites.

Culture:

Nazism celebrated the State and the collective will of the German Volk. Think of the Nuremburg rallies. Islam arguably doesn't recognize the modern State at all. Apart from secular dictatorships Islamists want to overthrow, the nations of the Muslim world are governed according to sectarian, tribal and personal loyalties, rather than allegiance to the abstraction of the State. It is precisely the State-lessness of the Islamists that makes this a "different kind of war." When was the last time anyone saw an Al-Qaeda army marching in perfect unison under Roman-style standards bearing swastikas, to the sound of a Sieg-Heiling crowd?

Though Nazism taught that women had their "place" (Kirche, Kuche, Kinder--Church, Kitchen, Children), it still possessed a Western, even semi-Pagan acceptance of female sexuality. Have you ever seen that bizarre Nazi film of pretty, but nearly-identical, almost Borg-like young women in miniskirts exercising in perfect unison with hula hoops, showing off their lissome Aryan bodies? Not the sort of thing we'd see broadcast under the Taleban, or on Iranian National Television.

In terms of religion, the Third Reich was a mixture of Christianity and restored Germanic paganism, with the Christianity dominant (nobeliefs.com/Hitler1.htm) Radical Islam is...well...Islamic, isn't it?

Organization:

The Nazi Party and State were strictly centralized, top-down, hierarchical organizations. Once those centralized institutions were destroyed, the Nazi Party ceased to be a significant force on the world stage. The "Werewolves" (an attempted Nazi insurgency) never amounted to anything in post-WWII Germany. The Islamists have no Party or State apparatus. Even if we were to find and kill Osama bin Laden, fundamentalist Islam would continue to exist, if not get stronger as a result of his "martyrdom." OBL's power is derived from his status as a semi-mythic symbol of their movement, not his direct control of State military forces or Secret Police units.

From beginning to end, Nazism was organized around uniformed paramilitary and military units. Osama has not one single such unit to his name. He has no Brown Shirts, no Wermacht, no Luftwaffe, no Kriegsmarine. He has no Gestapo or SS. His forces are all irregulars, and currently control no significant territory.

If we must attempt to turn Islamic Fundamentalists into some other enemy from America's past, there is one they have a lot more in common with, in terms of their organization, equipment, tactics, etc.: The Viet Cong. But then, we have a good reason not to go around calling Osama bin Laden the next Ho Chi Minh, don't we? "Islamo-VC," anyone?

Since calling OBL and his ilk "Islamo-Fascists" is clearly absurd, why do it? Simple: it's propaganda. The Nazis are the one, single enemy in all world history that it's indisputably OK to hate. If we tried calling them "Islamo-Stalinists," there would be those who still think the Worker's Paradise was a good idea, poorly executed, who wouldn't be swayed. Call them Islamo-Kamikazes, and the War Party would be confronted with the internment of the Japanese and the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pick any other enemy the U.S. has waged war against, all the way back to the War of Independence ("Oh, come on, those stamp taxes weren't so bad!"), and you can find some people willing to empathize with the other side.

The Nazis though...well, all you have to do to portray Evil in a movie is dress it in a Nazi uniform (e.g. Star Wars, Indiana Jones). We'll overlook the firebombing of Dresden even as we wring hands over Hiroshima because the folks in Dresden were, well, Nazis. If we can slap a swastika on somebody, it's more than OK to kill them, and anyone who appears to support them, or who just happens to live within the blast radius of their hideout.

Furthermore, should anyone ever question the latest war do jour, the Administration can invoke the specter of Neville Chamberlain and label any critics as “appeasers.” And so, we get a spectacle of bizarre mutant Hitlers springing up all over the world whenever the US wants to start putting "steel on target."

Slobodan Milosovic, a Slavic "Hitler" whose tiny country was a client state of Russia.

Saddam Hussein, an Arab "Hitler" whose “Fourth Reich” was so poorly equipped, American forces could crush his “Wermacht” while suffering fewer casualties than in training operations of comparable scale.

Osama bin Laden, a “Hitler” leading his “Fourth Reich”...er, decentralized, non-State guerrilla insurgency...from a cave.

Hugo Chavez, whose tin-horn oil-funded socialist regime is no doubt poised to conquer the planet with its vast and technologically superior military-industrial complex.

President Ahmadinejad of Iran, certified nutjob whose virtually figurehead role is certainly a novel application of the Fuhrerprinzip.

Perhaps the only reason the U.S. never called Mohammad Aideed (that Somali warlord they were never able to catch) or the thugs in Rwanda "Hitler" is that A) the American government doesn't seem to care that much about oil-less African countries, and B) even the folks in Texas might not buy the idea of a black "Hitler."

Not one of these odd Boys From Brazil comes close to Adolf Hitler in terms of power or scale of criminality. To label every two-bit thug the U.S. government doesn’t like a new “Hitler” is an insult to the entire World War II generation. To every Londoner who kept a stiff upper lip while huddling in a bomb shelter during the Blitz…to everyone who endured shortages and rationing so that the economic output of their entire nation could be mobilized for the fight…to every man who stormed the beaches of Normandy or fought in the Battle of the Bulge, or faced Rommel in the desert, or the Russians who lost nearly 11 million people fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front.

2006-05-01T04:18:00.000-07:00

Return of the Qadoshin

In ancient times, the cultures of the Near East had priestesses who served in the temples of goddesses of fertility and pleasure, embodying the Goddess in sexual rites. These women were as highly-regarded in their day as other clergy are in ours. Their beauty, and the power they possessed to give pleasure and bring forth life were regarded as sacred.

The Hebrew word for these women is “Qadoshin,” meaning literally, “Holy Woman.” The ancient Hebrew priests and prophets hated these women and what they represented so much that they slaughtered them and anyone who honored them and worshipped the Goddess. Naturally, the word “Qadoshin” is translated “harlot” or “prostitute” in our English Bibles.

Thanks to the efforts of the ancient Hebrews and their Gentile successors, we now live in a world where a life-sized statue of a man being brutally tortured to death, with blood running down his emaciated flesh can be hung in a church for all to see, while a picture of a beautiful naked woman is universally regarded as “obscene.” Pictures of Iraqi bodies lying in pools of drying blood or torture from Abu Gharib elicit little more than a shrug. Janet Jackson’s breast, seen for a fraction of a second, brings forth howls of protest and a fine to the network of more than half a million dollars.

Can this be regarded as sane or healthy? What does this say about America as a society?

Fortunately, the Qadoshin is making a comeback. Maybe just in time to save the world. In 1997, photographer Eolake Stobblehouse created a website called Domai.com, featuring beautiful photographs of utterly lovely, naked women, along with articles about respect for women and adoration of beauty. This is not a porn site. You will find no painted, soulless creatures with gigantic mutant siliconized breasts engaged in uglified sex acts here. These are real, natural women who embody Goddess in all her rapturous majesty.

[Warning: If the sight of a beautiful naked woman frightens you, think twice before clicking the following links or visiting Domai.com. They could be drive you stark staring sane]

Can the Qadoshin still fill her holy office today? Consider this letter featured on the site:

Tonight ... tonight, I sure needed this.
Needed Ekattrina's set, needed Ekattrina ... Needed to "connect" with someone like her. Never guessing it, just knowing something was lacking. You know...?
Rainy night. Streets slick and whiny with wheels slishing outside my window. Just got home a bit ago from a party of people that looked like "death warmed over," you know...? People who acted like they were just going through the motions, people who acted ... Yes, people who *acted*. The faces and smiles they put on looked so false, like replications of faces they'd seen and thought they could get away with looking that way & tricking people into thinking they were sincere.
Well, it *was* a party where people were looking for people to impress, to make good connections with. I left early, slipped out. That kind of connection I can do without. And I knew I'd be of no help. So when I came home & logged on to your site, little did I expect to see someone with a smile so... so... rewarding, renewing, rejuvenating as Ekattrina's. Her unusually easy invitation of a smile, so accepting and without guile, without tease, only just an acceptance -- a willingness and pleasure at some inner thoughts playing across her eyes. The positions of her hands so unself-conscious and graceful, the slight tilting of her head. As if she were listening to me ramble ... Like I am right now.
...
That bright forest, that bright smile, those unforgettable eyes ... so assured and smiling even in their untold depths ... The camera "snapped" them together, rapping them in time and then sent them on the internet to the universe, all unknowing, all trusting. My eyes, at least, are where they've landed, caught for a moment. And it's the only thing I can do, to smile back...at her image, at you, through you, through the camera's small end of a telescope knowing it's certainly diminished in time & space but nonetheless hoping something like gratitude finds its way to her heart. Who knows but a thought like this might warm her heart somehow...
Who knows where her smile has ended, whether she smiles that way today... I only know that her smile in that brightly lit forest has brought a measure of spring's eternal hopes into this long winter night. She, Ekattrina, and Mikhail, and you, Eolake, have all given me something subtle, sure, but don't ever forget that it is enduring...

Think about that. This young woman, simply by being who she is, and allowing her beauty and spritual loveliness to be captured on film and unleashed on the Internet, was able to bring joy to a heartbroken man she will never meet. Is this not what a "minister" is supposed to do? Scroll back up to the top of this article, or behold her in all her glory if you dare. Can you look into those beautiful brown eyes and tell her that she is anything but holy, or that this magnificent joy-creating power of hers is "obscene?"

If you can't... If you are like me, and the sight of her brings a radiant sunrise of adoration in your heart, then you might want to consider defending her and everything she stands for. Domai.com has pioneered a movement toward restoring the sacredness of the feminine in our time. Who knows? Perhaps it can turn us away from the dominator culture's quest for "full-spectrum supremacy" in time to save us from ourselves.

2006-05-01T04:17:00.000-07:00

Towards Real Security from Nuclear Terrorism

Our present response to the threat of nuclear terrorism is a complete farce. And an incredibly dangerous one.

The recent brouhaha over the Dubai Ports World deal, along with all of the political posturing ignore a basic fact of physics. For the benefit of our esteemed political leadership, I will try to make this very, very simple: a nuclear bomb makes a really, really big explosion when it goes off.

What this means is that by the time any port worker--whether he’s from Dubai, or someplace Wholesome and American like Amarillo, Texas—can even see the ship a nuclear weapon is on, it is already too late. Too late for him to allow it in as part of a Nefarious Islamic Plot. Too late for him to Heroically Defend America by inspecting the container it’s in. Because, a nuclear bomb makes a really, really big explosion when it goes off.

A nuclear weapon does not need to reach the shore to destroy a major American port and cause incalculable damage to our economy and society. It need only reach the port itself, and go off before even the most vigilant Customs inspectors have a chance to find it and cut the red wire just as the timer reaches zero.

In the article linked above, Robert Pfriender offers a solution far too sensible for the political Establishment to take seriously. He proposes that offshore inspection facilities be built entirely with private funds, where every container coming to the United States will be physically opened and its contents inspected. The company (his) would earn its revenue from a small inspection fee per container. These inspection ports would be located far enough offshore that a nuclear explosion there would not seriously affect the American coast.

That this could be done at no cost to the government virtually insures Congress will not approve the plan. Pfriender would have done better to design it as a massively expensive pork-barrel project involving as many strategically chosen Congressional districts as possible. This is, after all, how we get a ‘reusable’ spacecraft that has to be virtually taken apart and rebuilt after each launch, which turns out to be far more expensive than expendable space vehicles, and a multi-million dollar high-tech fighter-jet with goodies like vectored thrust and the latest Stealth technology (the F-22) with no enemy to fight, unless the flying saucers come.

However, even Pfreinder’s proposal would not truly seal the door against nuclear terrorism. If every single shipping container coming into the United States were inspected by conscientious agents who could not be bribed or threatened, a nuclear weapon could still be smuggled into—or just close enough to—the United States on a private yacht, fishing trawler, or private airplane. Any terrorist network well-heeled enough to gain access to a nuclear warhead and the knowledge necessary to detonate it would be able to afford such a vehicle to transport it in.

Or, they could smuggle it across one of our borders, along with the millions of illegal immigrants and thousands of tons of drugs that make it across. In short: if terrorists get their hands on a nuclear weapon and the know-how to use it, they will find a way to get it into the US. It is neither possible nor desirable to create a Fortress America in which every vehicle attempting to enter the United States is boarded and searched.

What then can be done? A real program of nuclear security can be created, if it is based on a simple, practical principle: track the nuclear materials, not people and goods. In addition to avoiding the expensive, potentially totalitarian, and ultimately futile “solution” of comprehensively tracking people and goods, this approach goes to the root, focusing on the far easier task of monitoring a relatively small quantity of nuclear materials.

A Comprehensive Nuclear Security Program

A nuclear weapon detonated by terrorists in any major port would not only cause horrendous loss of life, it would cause incalculable damage to the world economy, and perhaps even to civilization itself as governments and peoples panic. The adoption of a comprehensive nuclear security program is no longer a matter of ‘national security.’ It is a matter of survival for the human race. Adoption of such a program will cost us some of our cherished illusions. Failure to adopt it could literally cost us the world.

Nuclear Warfare is in No One’s Interest

First, it must be emphasized that no one wins a nuclear war. No one. Islamic radicals might imagine that they could gain if a mushroom cloud sprouted over a major U.S. city. To disabuse themselves of this allusion, they should look at the massive carnage that has thus far resulted from the American reaction to 9-11, an event of almost infinitesimal magnitude compared to a nuclear attack.

The United States has 10,000 nuclear warheads at its disposal, and a significant portion of its politically-powerful elite who believe in an inevitable “Clash of Civilizations” between Islam and the West. Who would want to wager on the continuing existence of Mecca and Medina, or Tehran—or any major Muslim city from Algiers to Islamabad, in the wake of a nuclear attack on America?

Nor is it in the interest of the United States. We have no chance of controlling nuclear proliferation while we “modernize” our own nuclear arsenal to include new nuclear weapons designed not for deterrence but for preemptive use against non-nuclear adversaries. As long as it is our stated policy to consider the “nuclear option” as a way to deal with deeply-buried bunkers, we can only expect hostile nations to seek—and consider using—nuclear weapons of their own.

Nuclear warfare is no safer for the U.S. or the world now than it was during the Cold War. To achieve nuclear security, we must be willing to accept this fact, and impress its importance in our communications with other nations and non-state actors.

Complete, Global Accountability for Nuclear Weapons and Materials

If the United States is to have any chance of being secure from the threat of nuclear terrorism, we must seek a complete, transparent international accounting of every single nuclear weapon on Planet Earth. Yes, that means ours too, and those of friendly nations like Israel. Every nation must be able to have an equal degree of trust in the system. Every nation must be able to, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “trust, but verify.”

The credibility of the system must be such that any nation that refuses to participate, or attempts to hide any aspect of its nuclear capability will find itself completely isolated, and at the top of the “suspect list” should a nuclear terror incident take place. The system must be created in such a way that even “rogue” states like North Korea find it in their interests to join and participate.

In proposing such a system, the United States will have to take significant actions to establish its own credibility and seriousness:

· Repudiate the concept of “bunker buster” nukes.

· End the use of Depleted Uranium (DU) weaponry.

· Establish, as a Federal statute, a no-first strike policy.

· Provide a complete, comprehensive accounting of its own nuclear arsenal and other WMD to the nations of the world.

· End the policy of preemptive war based on claims of telepathy and precognition, i.e. in “response” to another nation’s alleged “intent” to build or use WMD.

· Initiate a unilateral program of nuclear disarmament aimed at cutting our nuclear arsenal in half, in advance of further disarmament negotiations with other nations.

· Require Israel to disclose the nature and extent of its nuclear arsenal as a condition of continued U.S. aid and support.

From this moral high ground, the U.S. will be in a position to seek the international cooperation necessary to make global nuclear security possible. At present and for the foreseeable future, the only entity on Earth capable of creating nuclear weapons is a State. The only way a terrorist will be able to acquire a nuclear weapon, is from a State. Therefore, every State must be required to provide a full accounting of its nuclear arsenal, including regular and surprise on-site inspections and remote camera monitoring of every nuclear weapon.

Furthermore, the extraction, refining, and enrichment of nuclear materials must likewise be subject to comprehensive, internationally transparent monitoring.

Global Nuclear Disarmament

Since it is easier to monitor and guard, say, 200 nuclear weapons than 10,000, it is in the interest of every nation to foster and participate in a global nuclear disarmament initiative. This initiative will be designed to limit the arsenals of the major nuclear powers to a small number still sufficient for mutual deterrence (say, one or two hundred warheads each) and the smaller nuclear powers such as North Korea, Pakistan, and Israel to a lesser number such as ten warheads each.

Gaining universal agreement for such a program will not be easy. This is why it is of the utmost importance for the United States to acquire the moral high ground and credibility needed to pressure holdout nations with widespread international backing.

Swords to Plowshares

As a further incentive to nuclear disarmament, the United States should foster large-scale development of peaceful uses for nuclear energy. As the world nears (if it has not already reached) Peak Oil, new sources of energy will be needed to meet rising global energy demand. Industrial-scale facilities for “impoverishing” weapons-grade nuclear material (transforming it into fuel-grade material unsuitable for weapons) should be constructed and put into use.

Creation of new, modern breeder-reactor nuclear power plants in the developed world, as well as in the energy-hungry, rapidly-expanding economies of India and China should be promoted. Nuclear-powered desalination plants to turn seawater into fresh water for irrigation should also be created to help increase food production in arid regions, such as Africa.

Nuclear Rocketry

Nuclear-thermal rockets generate a specific impulse twice that of chemical rockets. With this extra power, nuclear rockets can be made much more robust than chemical rockets and still offer huge advantages in power and performance. With nuclear-thermal rockets, trips to Mars and the asteroids would take weeks instead of years.

Such expanded space-exploration capability would offer not only access to the vast resources of the solar system and the ability to undertake large-scale projects such as solar power satellites and “space mirrors” designed to reduce global warming by reflecting sunlight away from Earth, it would give us the ability to divert a "dinosaur killer" asteroid away from our planet.

Furthermore, exceptionally-robust nuclear-thermal rockets could be used to propel dangerous-but-unusable nuclear waste on ballistic trajectories toward the Sun. While some may blanch at the idea of putting nuclear materials aboard a rocket, the risk of launch would be temporary. Once away from the Earth and headed for the Sun, nuclear waste would never threaten us again, ever.

If a sufficiently robust and safe nuclear-thermal rocket cannot be designed, nuclear energy could still be used to power a laser or microwave-powered ground-based launch system that would launch vehicles with no on-board nuclear power systems.

As a source of energy after Peak Oil and a key to practical human access to the Solar System, nuclear materials become a valuable resource wasted in nuclear warheads. Therefore, powerful economic and social incentives are created to reduce nuclear arsenals to the minimum necessary. For non-nuclear powers, nuclear weapons would be seen for what they really are: a wasteful and potentially dangerous folly.

Some estimates suggest that the world’s supply weapons-grade plutonium could be depleted in 50 years were it employed as a major energy source in response to Peak Oil. Adding a robust, widespread program of space exploration and settlement using nuclear-thermal rockets could accelerate this process. Which would be a Good Thing. Weapons-grade nuclear materials are a resource that should be depleted, as soon as possible.

In place of nuclear terror, the world could have a new Renaissance and Age of Exploration, and rising standards of living fueled by nuclear energy until renewable energy sources are ready to fill Earth’s energy needs. Rush Limbaugh has famously said that the only way to get rid of nuclear weapons is to use them [1]. Then let’s use them—for energy and rocket thrust, not our extermination. A future of hope for all humanity that by its very promise, could also help to “drain the swamp” of hopelessness and nihilism in which terrorist ideology breeds.

NOTES:

1. This is one of Limbaugh’s “Undeniable Truths of Life,” a claim on his part that (conventional) nuclear disarmament proposals are impractical. However, conventional disarmament proposals which call for destruction of nuclear weapons followed by costly and risky disposal of radioactive material, offer economic disincentives rather than the economic incentives proposed here.

2006-05-01T04:14:00.000-07:00

O, Print Me A Home...

Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California has developed a 3-D printing technology suitable for building large structures such as homes or commercial facilities. Called Contour Crafting, it could be used to create a single house or a whole neighborhood of houses in a single production run. Each house could have a different design, and all conduits for plumbing, wiring and air conditioning would be built...er, printed in.

As with current rapid prototyping technology, CC would build a home layer by layer from a variety of materials ranging from various ceramics to adobe. The goal is to be able to create a 2000 square-foot, one-story building in one day from a 3-D model in a computer. The system employs a robotic crane mounted on tracks similar to a container ship crane. It has enormous potential for saving lives and resources, while providing creatively-designed and affordable homes.

From the Contour Crafting website:

Every year in the United States, 400,000 workers are seriously injured or killed doing construction work. Construction work is dangerous and takes to high a toll on human life and human resources. Resulting litigation from work place injuries areincreasingly raising the overall costs of construction. Waste is also a major concern for conventional construction methods. Construction of a typical single family home generates a waste stream of 3 to 7 tons. Globally more than 40 percent of all raw materials are consumed in the construction process. Construction, in addition to wasting valuable resources, contributes significantly to environmentally harmful emissions.

Building a contour-crafted structure would create virtually no waste, and since it is a robotic production method, it would create no danger for workers. One "objection" to this process would be the loss of high-paying, if risky, construction jobs. However, combined with renewable energy and an efficient recycling and resource-utilization technology, CC could help usher in an "internet of things" in which "stuff" is free or nearly free, so that humans can be liberated from the job culture to engage in more creative and life-affirming things than "work."

2006-01-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

A Science of the Divine?

In an intriguing article, Stephen Kosslyn proposes as his most "dangerous" idea the proposal that God is both real and accessible to science:

Here's an idea that many academics may find unsettling and dangerous: God exists. And here's another idea that many religious people may find unsettling and dangerous: God is not supernatural, but rather part of the natural order.
Simply stating these ideas in the same breath invites them to scrape against each other, and sparks begin to fly. To avoid such conflict, Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that we should separate religion and science, treating them as distinct "magisteria." But science leads many of us to try to understand all that we encounter with a single, grand and glorious overarching framework. In this spirit, let me try to suggest one way in which the idea of a "supreme being" can fit into a scientific worldview. I offer the following not to advocate the ideas, but rather simply to illustrate one (certainly not the only) way that the concept of God can be approached scientifically.

1.0. First, here's the specific conception of God I want to explore: God is a "supreme being" that transcends space and time, permeates our world but also stands outside of it, and can intervene in our daily lives (partly in response to prayer).

To begin a science of the divine, we will need a workable concept of what a God/Goddess is, and to clear away some theological misunderstandings that have pitted science and religion against each other. Then we will need to ask what sort of tools and methodologies are available to would-be theologists [1] who seek to validate or falsify the existence of Deity/-ies and study/experience them to a greater degree, if It/They exist.

Here on Intelligent Universe, I have made initial explorations of two different concepts of "god," the "memetic" and the "cosmic." These two categories are not necessarily exhaustive, but they do seem to cover the two main types of gods found in human religions.

A "memetic god" exists as a "software persona" dwelling in a community of human hosts. It may be thought of as a human personality that has learned how to transmit itself from one human to another. Memetic gods think, act, and feel in recognizably human ways, and have human psychological needs and in some religions, physical needs to be met through sacrifices. An M-god can be recognized by its need for worshippers, and the importance to it of mechanisms for transferring it to other hosts, such as statues, oral traditions (myths), Scriptures, and so on.

A "cosmic" god is more abstract; inconceivably vast, "beyond human understanding," non-anthropomorphic, and linked either to the Cosmos or to some even greater "reality" that transcends Universe--or even renders it an illusion by comparison.

"Cosmic" gods are either impersonal, or their personalities consist of things such as “pure Awareness” “perfect Love” or other capitalized attributes that do not correspond exactly to their human counterparts. Examples of “cosmic” gods include the god of Deism, Brahmin from Hinduism, the god of Pantheism, Paul Tillich’s “Ground of Being,” and the “Cosmic” or “Christ Consciousness” of the New Age movement.

The gods of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) seem to be a hybrid of the two, combining super-cosmic scale and assertions of non-anthropomorphic nature [2] with decidedly human motivations and needs, such as their urgent need to be obeyed and praised by their human subjects, exhibited in demands and behaviors that exactly mirror those of human kings and dictators.

Another approach to the subject of gods is the idea that accelerating advancement of technology will make it possible for humans to create godlike levels of intelligence, immortality, and power for themselves [3]. This is a whole new spin on the cliché that “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” [4]

From this beginning, it may be possible to construct a genuine science of the divine. By “science,” I mean “a systematic effort to set in order the facts of experience,” which is not necessarily limited to the activities of people in lab coats with beakers and blackboards covered with equations, or the acceptance of caricatured assumptions such as “everything is the result of pointless, random collisions of material particles.” Forthcoming discussion will appear in the Comments section.

NOTES:

1. I use the term "theologist" to denote someone who studies gods in the same way a "biologist" studies life. In contrast, a "theologian" is someone whose job is to defend some particular orthodoxy against all comers. A "Christian theologian" cannot study the gods of ancient Egypt objectively any more than a "Muslim theologian" can objectively examine the Christian concept of God. A theologist is not bound this way, any more than a biologist is bound to consider only mammals as "true" life and all others (e.g. insects, fish, birds, plants) as "false" life.

2. Example: “’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,’” declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.’” --Isaiah 55:8-9

3. See Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near.

4. And Her.

2005-12-25T01:02:00.000-07:00

Air Power

A company called Magenn has developed a new type of wind turbine that solves many of the problems of conventional windmills. Theirs is a dirigible wind turbine that can float high above the ground, taking advantage of stronger winds at high altitude. Since the device is tethered rather than tower-mounted, it is far easier and less expensive to deploy than a high-powered conventional wind turbine.

2005-12-10T17:20:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Evolution

My own conclusion is that man has been given the capability to alter and accelerate the evolutionary transformation of the a priori physical environment that is to participate objectively, directly, and consciously in universal evolution and I assume that the great, complex integrity of omni-coordinate and inter-accommodative yet periodically unique and nonsimultaneously co-operative generalized principles, and their myriad of special case realizations, all of which we speak of as universe and may think intuitively of as God, is an intellectual invention system which counts on man’s employing these capabilities. If he does not do so consciously, events will transpire so that he functions subconsciously in the inexorable evolutionary transformations.

--R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation

The previous article, “ID Theory: A ‘Design’ for Failure” argued that the scientific contentions of “Intelligent Design” theory, even if proven true beyond doubt, do not accomplish their proponents’ aim of offering scientific support for the anthropomorphic deity of the Abrahamic religions and a system of human values based thereon.

What then are we to make of the panoply of elegance, beauty, and what looks very much like “design” in the world around us? Looking at the geodesic structures of viruses, diatoms and compound eyes, the Fibonacci spirals in Nautilus shells, pine cones and galaxies, or the fractal branching of trees, lightning bolts and river deltas, it is not hard to imagine we’re seeing the signature of a “Designer” or “Designers” written in elegant mathematics.

Evolutionary scientists maintain that all of the “design” in Nature can be traced to the workings of evolutionary mechanisms that need no help from any “outside” intelligence:

Behe's contention that each and every piece of a machine, mechanical or biochemical, must be assembled in its final form before anything useful can emerge is just plain wrong. Evolution produces complex biochemical machines by copying, modifying, and combining proteins previously used for other functions. Looking for examples? The systems in Behe's essay will do just fine.

He writes that in the absence of ‘almost any’ of its parts, the bacterial flagellum ‘does not work.’ But guess what? A small group of proteins from the flagellum does work without the rest of the machine -- it's used by many bacteria as a device for injecting poisons into other cells. Although the function performed by this small part when working alone is different, it nonetheless can be favored by natural selection.

The key proteins that clot blood fit this pattern, too. They're actually modified versions of proteins used in the digestive system. The elegant work of Russell Doolittle has shown how evolution duplicated, retargeted, and modified these proteins to produce the vertebrate blood-clotting system.”

-- Kenneth R. Miller

In other words, evolution is able to form complex systems by taking elements that work in other systems and adapting them, in concert with other elements, to function in entirely different ways, with each stage of the process being functional enough to enhance the survivability of the organism. Doesn’t that seem just a little bit…clever?

Isn’t the idea that a natural process can “recycle” a protein from the digestive system and convert it to the function of clotting blood without any help from an “outside” intelligence even more awe-inspiring and mind-boggling than the notion of a humanlike person doing it, no matter how “super” he may be?

The evolutionary process itself qualifies as an “Intelligent Designer.” What is “intelligence?” For the purposes of this essay, “intelligence” will be defined as “the ability to identify, integrate, and utilize information. We humans tend to operate on an anthropocentric mode that assumes that only humans (and perhaps super-human beings such as aliens or gods) are intelligent, and everything else is non-intelligent.

However, there is no reason to assume without proof that intelligence cannot exist on a broad spectrum of amplitude (how “intelligent” something is) and frequency (how fast information is processed). Let us consider the humble electron. It has a negative electric charge that enables it to “detect” the presence of other charges. If it detects another negative charge (e.g. an electron), both will react by moving away from each other. If it detects a positive charge, such as that of a proton, it will be drawn toward the source, joining with it to form a new entity, a hydrogen atom.

By itself, the electron has a very, very minimal ability to “identify, integrate, and utilize” a very simple information set—the presence or absence of electromagnetic charges. Likewise for its counterpart the proton. But if you get enough hydrogen atoms together, their mutual interactions (their ability to “detect” each other via electromagnetism and gravity, and “respond” by drawing together) will be sufficient to generate a vast cloud of gas collapsing on itself to form a star. By forming a star, the hydrogen is able to engage in a whole new form of interaction: fusion into helium, and then into a range of other, heavier elements as the star perishes in a supernova explosion.

These new heavy elements then gather together into new solar systems with planets, which eventually generate life, and that life evolves to greater intelligence until it is able to think about that ancient star that gave itself to forge the “stuff” that made the intelligences possible. In a sense, the star has become aware of itself.

At each stage, the material “identifies, integrates, and utilizes” information to self-organize, bootstrapping itself to “intelligence” of higher amplitude and frequency. The “intelligence” of Universe (such as that in the “hydrogen-atom network” that is a cloud of hydrogen gas) is not noticeable to us because we are operating at such a high frequency that it is a major scientific accomplishment on our part to discover that the hydrogen clouds are doing something as interesting as giving birth to stars.

Even unambiguously "intelligent designers"--humans--have taken to using evolutionary processes to design new technologies. Using computers programmed with evolutionary algorithms (also called genetic algorithms), scientists can not only demonstrate the workings of evolution by natural selection, they can put the process to practical use.

If we look at the ordinary sort of "intelligent design," say, an architect creating a bridge, we can see an evolutionary process at work. First, the architect considers the "environment"--the span that is to be crossed by the bridge, the amount of traffic it must bear, the resources available for construction, the nature of the land at each end of the bridge (basaltic rock, clay, granite bedrock under soil, etc.), and so forth.

Then, the architect will consider evolutionary ancestors: other types of successful bridges (suspension, wooden tressel, stone with arches, etc.). Then the architect starts sketching out possible designs and seeing how well they meet the design criteria (the "environment," which now includes the architect's aesthetic preferences). Modeling different bridge designs in his mind, on paper using physics equations, or using computer models, the architect will winnow out designs that won't work (those that cannot support the traffic volume, are too expensive to build, etc.) ultimately resulting in a final bridge design that gets built.

All of this can easily be seen as an evolutionary process. The major difference is that in "design," the evolutionary process of "mutation" (the addition of new information) and selection takes place in a "virtual" environment of a human mind (perhaps supplemented by the virtual environent of a computer simulation) instead of out in the world.

By looking at designed artifacts, it is possible to trace their evolutionary ancestry back to common ancestors. Automobiles can be traced back to the Model T, and to "primitive ancestors" like Henry Ford's quadricycle and the Stanley Steamer, which clearly show descent from other "species"--the horse-drawn wagon, the bicycle, the locomotive.

Though "design evolution" has a greater degree of flexibility than the biological variety (it can produce a mutant offspring of a wagon, bicycle, and a locomotive, while biological evolution cannot produce an offpsring of a horse, eagle, and a lizard to combine elements of the three), the process is the same. In "intelligent design" it is human ideas of structure, rather than genes, that evolve.

A Thought Experiment

Imagine a race of intelligent nano-scale organisms, about the size of virus particles. Being as small as they are, their quantum-molecular computer brains can process information millions of times faster than ours, since their thoughts need traverse only the tiniest distances.

Now, some of these creatures make their way to Earth, and take up residence in a neuron in someone’s brain. Eventually, they forget their origins, and come to think of the neuron as their world. But they begin a process of scientific discovery, and come to learn the astonishing fact that their neuron is not the Universe, but only one of billions. Then, with long-range scientific observations, they discover that, over a process of millions of their years, electrical charges move from neuron to neuron.

At first, these impulses seem totally random, obviously a ‘natural’ process. But a few microseconds—and many virus-years later—some of their scientists begin to suspect there’s some kind of order to the pulses. Taken alone, each appears random, but treated as a whole, they seem to form cohesive patterns incompatible with purely random chance.

Two theories spring up among the virus-people. One claims that the pattern the impulses seem to form must be the result of Intelligent Design. Therefore, there is a Super-Virus that resides in some dimension beyond the physical universe telling each neuron when to fire, according to His Divine Plan. The other school of thought teaches that the impulses are just an unguided, random product of ordinary chemical processes, and they produce a great volume of scientific data explaining how a neuron fires, showing how each aspect of the electrochemical reactions involved takes place without any need for an invisible Super-Virus to pull the strings.

Both “sides” are wrong in one sense, and right in another. Could this be our situation in relation to Universal evolutionary processes, with time-scales in the millions and billions of years?

A critic could argue that this sort of “cosmic intelligence” is not real intelligence because it is not self-reflective and volitional. Electrons don’t choose to combine with protons, nor do they perceive and reflect on the electrical charges in their environment the way we perceive and reflect on things in ours. However, our self-reflective consciousness appears to be an emergent property of networked interactions of…electrons, in our brains. [1] It could also be argued that we are the self-reflective, volitional aspect of “cosmic intelligence.” Furthermore, as "designers, we manifest the process of evolution in an accelerated, volitionally-directed form.

In the words of Buckminster Fuller:

We are quite possibly the most complex of the problem-solving challenges of the invention that is eternally regenerative Scenario Universe. In this way, each of us might be a department of the mind of what we might call God.

--R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics 2: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, p. 64 (311.14)

[1]Neuroscience has provided quite compelling evidence that consciousness is a function of the brain, and that alterations to our brain (via damage) or brain chemistry (through drugs or medication) can alter or even totally transform our consciousness. This article, though written by an author that favors "spirit" rather than the brain as the seat of consciousness, fairly presents the evidence of both sides. One problem for the notion of "spirit-based" consciousness that he does not address is that the concept of "spirit" remains undefined and un-verified

2005-12-08T13:04:00.000-07:00

ID Theory--A "Design" For Failure

“Intelligent Design” (ID) proposes that intelligence is necessary to explain the origins of life and Universe. Proponents claim that certain biological structures are “irreducibly complex”—that they had to be created all at once as functioning wholes, and could not have arisen by any possible evolutionary process from simpler structures.

Another angle on this is the concept of “specified complexity.” For example, if an astronomer receives a series of radio pulses that express the Fibonacci series, a list of the first 200 prime numbers, or pi calculated to a thousand digits coming from a star, the obvious conclusion would be that she is receiving a signal generated by an alien intelligence, rather than some odd natural radio source. This is because these numerical sequences can be “specified” in advance as an orderly pattern an intelligence would be inclined to send as an identifier, as opposed to “finding” a pattern after the fact, like the “scheme of Biblical prophecy” that was supposedly “encoded” in the chambers and corridors of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

ID proponents claim that both kinds of evidence for intelligent design can be found in nature, in complex structures like the flagella of bacteria or the intricate mechanisms of the cell. Evolutionists counter that all or most of these conundrums can be explained within current evolutionary theory. For a well-balanced presentation of both sides, click here.

Some of the largest—and least-discussed—problems with ID lie with its central explanatory mechanism: whatever intelligence(s) is/are responsible for the “design.”

In order for any explanatory mechanism to qualify as an answer to a question in science, it must at least be defined. For example, if a physicist wishes to propose an entity called the “electron” as the explanatory mechanism behind lightning bolts, static charges, and electrical current, he must, at the very least, be able to define what an electron is: what its properties are, including a mathematical description of how it fits with or supplants physics-as-known. Armed with this information, it becomes possible to devise experiments to detect “electrons” or falsify the claim of their existence.

What do ID theorists say about the source of design in Universe? If you read some of the articles on main ID websites, such as the Discovery Institute or the Intelligent Design Network it is clear that they propose “a non-physical intelligence” as their cause. Though they won’t come right out and say it, it’s fairly apparent from their literature Who they have in mind:

A little science estranges a man from God; a little more brings him back.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

Sooner or later everyone asks the question, “Where do we come from?” The answer carries profound, life-molding implications. Until this question is answered we cannot solve another fundamental question that is key to ethics, religion, and the meaning of life (if any): “Are we here for a purpose?”

There are two possible answers: the universe and life and its diversity—natural phenomena—are the product of 1) a combination of only natural laws and chance (the “naturalistic hypothesis)”; or 2) a combination of law, chance, and design—the activity of a mind or some form of intelligence that has the power to manipulate matter and energy (the “design hypothesis”). The latter produces purpose, the former does not.

--Harris Calvert

Here is where their problems begin. Even if we grant that the DNA molecule, bacterial flagella, eyes, etc. must have been designed, that in itself does nothing to prove that there is a single Designer, or that the Intelligence(s) responsible have any resemblance whatsoever to anything worshipped by any Earthy religion. Since most major design projects these days (such as a design for a new jet airliner) require a number of designers working together, it is as sensible—if not more so—to propose that there must be a pantheon of Designers responsible for life. An “Intelligent Design By Committee” theory could even be used to explain some of the flawed or useless “designs” found in nature, such as the vermiform appendix or a snake’s vestigial legs.

The Designer(s) cannot be shown to be "non-physical" just by looking at the designs. The Designers could have been alien genetic engineers, or the perhaps evolutionary process itself could be found to be "intelligent." Even in the case of the "finely tuned" cosmological constants that make this universe seem to be especially formed so as to be habitable, it is possible to hypothesize that our Universe was created by an incredibly advanced, billion-year-old supercivilization with motives and technologies as inconcievable to us as ours are to bacteria.

Furthermore, the very concept of "non-physical" (or "spiritual," to use the religious term) is, as of yet, entirely undefined. We may know what it's not--not matter/energy or anything else man can know and detect scienfically--but we have no information on what it is. Therefore, in scientific terms, it is not even possible to discuss a "non-physical" entity as a causal explanation until the Intelligent Design theorists can explain what they're talking about.

ID theorists (as well as the older "Scientific Creationist" movement) will reply that this is a "materialist bias." While some scientists are no doubt "biased" against religion and the supernatural, others have no problem going to church on Sunday. Science itself is not "biased" against religion any more than music theory is biased against quarks and asteroids. Science is the systematic study of the natural world and natural processes. The non-detectable, non-quantifiable, and unknowable-to-humans is, by definition, outside of the purview of science.

ID theorists have no way of determining from any “evidence for design” that the Designer(s) created us “for a purpose.” He/She/They could have done it to relieve boredom, express Him/Her/Themselves artistically, or for some utterly alien reason we cannot begin to fathom. We simply cannot know any of this by looking at bacteria, DNA molecules, or “fine-tuned” cosmological constants.

Given the existence of Ebola and hurricanes (both of which are exquisitely “designed” to do what they do), we could read the tea leaves of the Universe and conclude that life is not merely “without purpose,” but governed by one or more brutally sadistic deities whose intended purpose for at least some of us is to derive pleasure from watching us suffer.

In order for ID theorists to accomplish their goal of providing scientific support for Western monotheism and a "purpose" for our lives as defined in the holy books of the Abrahamic religions, they must do more than establish that some particular feature of the natural world is "designed." They must demonstrate that the design emanates from their particular Designer of choice, and that the "purpose" they believe He has imbued us with is an accurate reflection of His intentions. In short, ID theory as a prop for religion--even if its every scientific propositon were validated incontrovertibly--is nothing more than a giant non-sequitor.

Does this mean we're trapped in a dismal "materialist" Universe governed by pointless, random chance, with no possibility of valid ethics or a purpose to life? Not necessarily. Stay tuned.

2005-12-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

Open Source Hardware

A pair of new technological developments promise to unleash human creativity and revolutionize invention, prototyping, and manufacturing. Let's say you have an idea for a brilliant new invention, or an elegant design for an existing product, but you don't have the money or the space for a machine shop. No problem. To create your vision, you need only go down the street...or, in a future not too far away, just hit "print."

The Fab Lab

"When Makeda Stephenson compared flight simulator games sold in computer stores and didn't find anything she liked, she didn't stop there. The 13-year-old used a set of computer-controlled manufacturing tools at a community centre in Boston to make her own simulator - one that lets her 'fly' an airplane of her design over an alien planet born of her imagination.

In a room filled with computers and tabletop-size manufacturing equipment, Stephenson created a pilot's control yoke with motion sensors she fashioned from a melange of old electronic toys and parts. A computer program she wrote with help from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology guides the plane's movements on her computer screen.

She did it all through a teen learning program at one of seven so-called Fabrication Labs that MIT has established in places as distant as Norway and Ghana. Each lab has tool sets that, at about $US25,000 ($34,000), would be out of reach of most fledgling inventors."

Imagine her parents' delight when she came home and explained "what she did at school today!" Now, imagine the effect on human intelligence and achievement if every interested 13-year-old had access to this sort of learning-and-doing opportunity. While the $25,000 ($35,000 Aus.) price tag for such a Fab Lab may be out of reach of most hobbyists, it's not out of reach of a private or government school, big church, neighborhood group or civic organization.

An entrepreneur with some startup capital could operate one in a local shopping mall and rent time to the aforementioned schools, churches, civic and neighborhood groups, filling in any empty time slots by renting to interested artists, tinkerers, and craftspeople.

Deployed to the developing world, Fab Labs give people the ability to "bootstrap" their communities by creating needed technologies that either do not exist in useable-by-them form or are too expensive to order and deliver. Fab Labs in India made it possible for people to create a device to adjust the timing on the diesel engines their livelihood depend on, and for women to easily fabricate new pattern-stamps for their indigenous Chikan embroidery. Think of it as an "Industrial-Revolution-in-a-Box."

"'If you give people access to means to solve their own problems, it touches something very, very deep,' says Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT physicist and computer scientist who is among the movement's chief proponents. 'Somehow it goes back to nest-building, or mastering your own environment.

"'There's this deep thing inside that most people don't express that comes tumbling out when they get access to these tools,' he says."

For those of you who share a libertarian bent, or even an old-fashioned belief in self-reliance, go back and read those last two sentences again. There is the Design Science Revolution in a nutshell. You can quote Mises or Hayek at someone all day and not touch anything "very, very deep." Empower people with an artifact like this, and you reach beyond mere intellectual assent to pro-freedom ideas, down to the defining element of human nature that has existed at least since Homo habilis--man is a maker, the creative animal.

The beauty of this artifact-based revolution is that it goes far beyond mere politics. The "five triangles" that arise from unleashing human ingenuity on a mass scale will bring benefits we cannot even imagine. It has been said that only about a thousand people participated directly in creating the Rennaissance. Contemplate a modern techno-Rennaissance with a million, ten million, a billion participants.

For a fascinating discussion of this technology from Neil Gershenfeld, click here.

The 3-D Printer (the article in this link requires you to view an ad to access)

The 3-D Printer is an even more revolutionary development. It is a "printer" that produces three-dimensional artifacts by "laying down" one layer at a time. These devices already exist, and are used to "print" out designs from digital images so their creators can see and feel what they will be like in reality. Currently, this technology is very expensive. However, just like high-resolution laser printers that were once affordable only by print shops and can now be bought at Wal-Mart, 3-D printers are coming down in price. Combined with the new technology of "printing" circuits on paper or even cloth, it will be possible to "print out" a cell phone or coffeemaker.

The most obvious implication of this is that you will be able to create your own design for any artifact you can print, or download designs from the 'net. There is no reason, in principle, that you need be limited to small scale artifacts. Imagine logging on to the website of the local OmniMat, uploading a design for a car or washing machine you got from the 'net, paying a fee based on the amount of materials used plus profit for the OmniMat, and an industrial-sized 3-D printer starts spray-printing your artifact in layers of Liquid Metal.

This technology will provide benefits for the environment and savings in high fuel costs, since it will no longer be necessary to ship a cell phone or a Toyota all the way from Japan. Instead, only electrons need be transported. But what about all those "good manufacturing jobs" (and jobs in the shipping industry) that will be lost?

As the title of this post implies, these technologies offer us an age of "open source hardware" that provides the increased creativity, function, and reduced price (all the way down to "free") we find in open source software. Free software, information, stories, etc. we've all become used to, since these things can be replicated on the Internet at no cost. But free stuff? Isn't that impossible?

Remember, that all a 3-D printer needs to make something is the base materials, the equivalent of "ink" for a conventional printer. All that is needed to create a truly free (or nearly free) economy of "stuff" is a hypothetical device I'll call an Enzymatic Separator. An EnSep is basically a technological analog of a stomach, a device that breaks down garbage into its component parts the way a stomach breaks down a pizza into simpler molecules that can then be used to provide energy or be assembled into tissues.

There is no reason in principle why such a device could not be created. You already have a functional "1.0 version" in your gut. Developments in bioengineering and nanotechnology, or even advances in conventional recycling technology will make some form of "Enzymatic Separator" a reality. A "first step" called a thermal depolymerizer already exists, a device that can turn waste into oil.

Combine these technologies with renewable energy, and we have an economy in which "resources" and "energy" are free or close to it, and "stuff" can be printed out at the touch of a button. With "costs" reduced to such an extent, alot less "work" would be needed to be able to afford them. Humans could spend most or all of their "work" time in creative pursuits, furthering the "techno-Rennaissance" even more.

Buckminster Fuller envisioned a future in which humans would no longer have to "work for a living" because their needs would be provided by their "sun income" (their share of the sun energy that comes free to Earth every day). This suite of technologies may make that dream come true.

2005-12-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

A Design Science Revolution vs. the Other Kind

What is the best way to “change the world?” As the members of any activist group, left, right, libertarian, religious, secular, or other can testify, “reforming people” is no easy task. Consult the literature or Internet presence of any activist organization—regardless of its particular orientation—and you will hear the voices of frustration. Why won’t people “wake up” to what really matters (to the activists)? Why won’t they make the needed changes to society?

Most people are now and always have been more interested in securing access to the necessities and pleasures of life for themselves and their families than anything as abstract as “reforming society.” Revolutionaries and reformers frequently bemoan this “bourgeois” sentiment and try to change through guilt-tripping harangues, or even brute force. Yet, isn’t securing access to the good things of life for everyone the stated goal of most “reform” movements? Reformers of different stripes may differ on what those “good things” are (a society governed by Christian or Islamic moral values, a healthy biosphere, a secular, rational order freed from the bonds of superstition, access to various material and cultural values ranging from health care to jobs to leisure time), but all claim to advocate “the good life” in some form. And so, they find themselves attempting to “wake people up” from their individual pursuit of “the good life” to join the activist group in pursuit of…the good life.

When an ideology gains access to the levers of power and uses them to force the bourgeoisie to “wake up” and undertake the needed “reforms,” the results have ranged from the uniformly bad to the utterly horrifying. From Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, each killing people in the tens of millions, to the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs (neither of which has even come close to eliminating its target), no government-imposed “reform” can claim anything approaching unalloyed success, and many became outright atrocities.

The core premise of any political “reform” movement, regardless of its ideology, is that the activists “know better” than all those “other people” what they ought to be doing with their lives. The people need to “wake up,” but the activists, presumably, are already awake. It is easy to see how such a superior attitude (right or wrong) could invite resistance from the people, and abuse of power on the part of the “reformers.”

Another problem with any proposed reform calling for major changes in society is that people must be willing to face large-scale alterations in their lifestyle before they can find out if the reform will actually work or not. Naturally, this results in people ignoring, or actively resisting the reformers. Imposing the reforms by government fiat, as in Communist and Fascist societies resulted in a death toll well over a hundred million.

After being “tried” at such horrendous cost, the collectivist “reforms” proved to be a dismal failure. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the dream of a government-less freetopia of absolute liberty in which private enterprise provides all “state services” is one that will almost certainly never be tried, at least as long as its advocates’ strategy involves persuading 300 million Americans to rebuild their society from the ground up as an *experiment.*

Is there another way to create positive change in the world, one that can work far more effectively than political “reform,” while respecting the freedom of individuals and avoiding the disasters—and the dark temptations of power—inherent in the political process?

Imagine going back in time to 1895 and proposing the following series of “reforms:”

Workers should not live in tenements in cities, but in more spacious homes located outside the city in which they work.
People should commonly relocate to different cities or even different states every few years as they pursue new career opportunities and improvement of lifestyle.
The vast majority of the American population should be able to travel anywhere in the country within a few days, whether or not railroad links to and from these locations should prove profitable.
Teenagers should be able to travel more than a day’s ride on horseback away from their parents as a routine part of courtship and social activity with their peers.

What are the chances that you could gain a political consensus in favor of these reforms, to the point of funding the massive amount of railroad construction and subsidies necessary to make them possible? How long would you spend wishing that people would “wake up” to the value of “universal transportation?”

Though impossible to accomplish by government fiat or crusading advocacy, all were accomplished by one man who created two artifacts: Henry Ford, the assembly line, and the mass-produced, affordable automobile. Ford did not have to urge people to “wake up” from their bourgeois lives and adopt the reforms his creations generated. People went to work for him, and bought his cars in pursuit of their bourgeois lives. By the time the government got involved in a major way—creating the national freeway system—driving was already the true American national pastime.

Though it is possible to complain about various side-effects of the automobile revolution, the historical example is clear: create and market a technological artifact that provides services demonstrably superior to the status quo, and you can cause sweeping changes in society. This approach, called a “Design Science Revolution” has decisive advantages over the other kind:

It is not necessary for all of society to “change” in order to see if the Revolution will work. Each person trying the artifact can decide if it improves their lives or not.

The artifact itself is its own demonstration. No one need read weighty treatises by Marx or Ludwig von Mises and engage in debates over who is right. Failed Design Science Revolutions will be rejected long before they can cause destruction comparable to that caused by totalitarian “reforms” by governments.

The “revolution” is entirely non-coercive.

The “revolution” is self-supporting, even profitable for the “revolutionaries.” Henry Ford never had to ask for donations.

There is no need to scold people or try to get them to “wake up.”

The need for political involvement is minimal, confined to preventing the power-structure from banning the artifact. There is no need to worry that an activist group could grow into a bloated lobbying operation that depends on the continued existence of the problem for its existence and the high salaries of its officers.

There is, however, one major caveat that would-be Design Science Revolutionaries should keep in mind as they create their artifacts: the need to think comprehensively and make sure their artifact will not cause worse problems than it solves. This is best expressed in the following parable, a paraphrase of an anecdote by Buckminster Fuller:

“Draw a triangle in the sand,” the Teacher said. The Student took her staff and drew a triangle. “Now, how many triangles have you drawn?” “I have drawn one,” the Student replied.

“Not so,” said the Teacher, “you have drawn five.” The Student looked on, uncomprehending. “The first triangle is the area within the lines you have drawn. But the World is a sphere, so all of the area outside the lines is also a triangle. Now these triangles are ‘spherical’ triangles, being inscribed upon a spherical surface. The two I have mentioned, viewed from outside the sphere, are convex spherical triangles. But from the perspective of the inside of the sphere, there are two concave spherical triangles. And then, there are the lines themselves, the structure you have created, which divides the surface of the World into insides and outsides, thus creating the other four triangles.”

“But I only meant to create one triangle!” the Student protested. But the Teacher replied, “Even so, you are responsible for all five.”

Likewise, the creator of an artifact (“structure”) is responsible for all its effects, desired and undesired. Hence, the would-be Design Science Revolutionary must think in whole-system terms in order to best insure that their artifact helps to create the world they truly want. As in the parable, this means viewing the artifact and its effects from multiple, broad perspectives.

As a program of "reform," the Design Science Revolution represents the manifestation and application of intelligence to the challenges we face on Earth.

2005-11-28T08:21:00.000-07:00

An Expensive Symbiote

In the previous article, I referred to gods as a kind of "parasitic intelligence" that borrows the hardware of the human brain to "run" on, as well as the human body, to make their desires manifest in the world.

A good case could be made that "gods" are symbiotes rather than parasites, even if they do come at a high price. Gods have motivated humans to do a great deal of good in the world, from founding charitable institutions and hospitals to creating magnificent art, architecture, and music. The various "holy wars" and persecutions, from the genocides of the Hebrew Bible to the present War on Terror are the price we've had to pay.

Did the Gods Create Man?

In an article, "Minds, Memes, and Selves," Susan Blackmore presents an intriguing hypothesis that the brain "co-evolved" with memes, with the memes having a major role in making our brains into radiaclly oversized (compared to those of other mammals) idea-processing organs:

"Why are our brains so big? Yes, I know this is an old chestnut, and there are lots and lots of good answers to the question. But are they good enough? Let us not forget how mysterious this issue really is. Brains are notoriously expensive both to build and to run. They take up about 2% of the body's weight but use about 20% of its energy. Our brains are three times the size of the brains of apes of equivalent body size. Compared to other mammals our encephalisation quotient is even higher, up to about [brsize]25. On many measures of brain capacity humans stand out alone. Brains are also dangerous organs to give birth to. The fact that such intelligence has arisen in an animal that stands upright may or may not be a coincidence but it certainly adds to the problem. Our pelvises are not ideally suited for giving birth to huge brains---yet we do it. Why?

The mystery was deepened for me by thinking about the size of the biological advantage required for survival. I was fascinated to read about a study addressing the question of the fate of the Neanderthals. Zubrow used computer simulations to determine the effect of a slight competitive edge and concluded that a 2% advantage could eliminate a competing population in less than a [comp]millennium. If we only need such a tiny advantage why do we have such a large one?

...

I am going to propose an alternative based on memetic advantage.

Imagine early hominids who, for good biological reasons, gained the ability to imitate each other and to develop simple language. Once this step occurred memes could begin to spread. And also---once this step occurred the genes would no longer be able to stop the spread! Presumably the earliest memes would be useful ones, such as ways of making pots or knives, ways of catching or dismembering prey, and names for people, events and tools. Let us assume that some people would have slightly larger brains and that larger brains are better copiers. As more and more people began to pick up these early memes, the environment would change so that it became more and more necessary to have the skills in order to survive. So these slightly larger brained people would have an advantage. That, I propose, is how we got our big brains.
The process is related to the Baldwin Effect. I like to use Dennett's 'Tower of Generate and Test' again here.

On the ground floor are the Darwinian creatures. As these develop they change the environment in which they live, creating new selection pressures that lead to new design improvements. One result is larger brains capable of learning and the arrival of Skinnerian creatures. These again change their own environment, giving an advantage to the quicker learners. One aspect of quicker learning is internalisation---thinking before you act. So Popperian creatures are born and again change their environment so that better thinkers are at an advantage. Finally the ability to copy actions appears, giving rise to the Gregorian creatures and the birth of the new replicators---the memes. Creatures of this kind again change their environment so that those most able to adopt the memes are at an advantage.

Although the process is similar to all the previous ones, this last step is a big one. Note, most importantly, that it depends not on learning nor on cleverness per se but on the ability to imitate. A second replicator has now appeared that spreads at a fantastic rate and changes the environment as it goes.

An early hominid who was incapable of mastering any of the new techniques of tool making, speaking or hunting would be at some disadvantage, and the importance of this disadvantage would increase as the memes spread. In a population with few available memes, brain size would not be very important, in a population with lots of memes it would. It seems to me that this fundamental change in selection pressures, spreading at the rate of meme propagation, provides for the first time a plausible reason why our brains are totally out of line with all other brains on the planet. They have been meme-driven. One replicator has forced the moves of another."

Though she does not mention religion specifically as an important "brain-building" meme, it has historically been a major bond holding a community together and distinguishing it from neighboring communities. It motivates members of a community to take care of each other, and stand together against other communities. Such behaviors offer significant advantages for a group's survival.

If gods were a significant factor in the evolution of the human brain, we would expect that the brain would have co-evolved specialized abilities to experience and interact with them. That the brain is "wired for god" is the theory proposed by Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene D'Aquili, M.D., and Vince Rause, authors of Why God Won't Go Away. In a review written for Psychology Today, Michael Shermer describes the authors' core discovery:

"The most dramatic finding in the book, primarily (and admirably) written by journalist Vince Rause, concerns a portion of the brain the authors call the orientation association area (OAA). The OAA, say Newberg and D'Aquili, is largely responsible for helping us distinguish between ourselves and other things. People with damage to this part of the brain have problems navigating their way around a room: They actually cannot discriminate between their bodies and the furniture. The researchers discovered that during meditation and prayer, at the moment when the monks were at one with the universe and the nuns felt the presence of a universal spirit, there was reduced activity in the OAA. Like patients with damage to this brain area, their selves became indistinguishable from their nonselves. From these findings the authors conclude 'that spiritual experience, at its very root, is intimately interwoven with human biology. That biology, in some way, compels the spiritual urge.'"

Apocalypse Now--or Never

If our brains and our gods co-evolved, then there is one overriding fact about our predominant world religions that must be given urgent consideration: the gods worshipped by the vast majority of humankind evolved in an era where swords and catapults were the most formidable weapons available. In such an era, war provided great benefits for the victors: slaves, wealth, additional territory and livestock, and a fresh supply of new worshippers for the victors' gods.[*]
In our time, nuclear weapons have made war between major powers far too dangerous to contemplate waging. The greatest threat from nuclear proliferation is that the weapons could fall into the hands of "true believers" (such as the clerics ruling Iran, or a terrorist group) all too willing to use them, confident of the blissful afterlife they will recieve should they be destroyed in retaliation. As technology advances, genetic engineering and nanotechnology could be used to create world-wrecking weapons even more dangerous than nukes, especially since they would not require hard-to-get materials like enriched uranium. DNA is everywhere.

Furthermore, we now live in a world where it is virtually impossible to avoid contact with rival religious and secular belief systems. An ancient Hebrew or medieval Catholic could easily live their entire life without ever encountering someone who believed differently from themselves. Nowdays, an endless fountain of information about thousands of religions is just a google away. Widespread travel and mobility insures that most people in the developed world will get to live and work in close contact with people of different faiths from their own, or none.

War is no longer advantageous, even for the "victors" or their gods. The survival and flourishing of life on Earth depends on both our brains and our gods adapting to present realities. It's time for there to be no such thing as believers in foxholes, either.

*Ancient Pagan gods placed a lower priority on conversion of foreigners than the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). A victor's gods would absorb or merge with the panetheon of the defeated, either through marriage of a victor's god to a conquered goddess, or equating the gods of both, according to their mythic correspondences (the defeated culture's sun god is the same as the victor's sun god, etc.). The insistence of the Abrahamic deities that they are "the One True God" rules out any such accommodation.

2005-11-28T03:23:00.000-07:00

Is Religion a Computer Virus for the Brain?

http://home.btclick.com/scimah/memes.htm

"Among many anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, it has recently become fashionable to dismiss all religions as memes - parasitic mental processes which propagate in the same manner as chain letters [Dawkins 1989, Dennett 1995]. In this view, religious belief is a self-perpetuating delusion. A meme (rhymes with 'dream') may be defined as any self-referential belief system which contains within itself the instructions for its own propagation. Memes are often described as the cultural equivalents of computer viruses.

A meme carries exactly the same fear-driven psychological motivation as a chain letter - "If you propagate me then something nice will happen, if not then something horrible will happen". In order to justify themselves against attack by reason, memes place absolute reliance on faith, which is seen as being superior to reason. They also contain self-referential or circular claims to the truth such as "This meme says it is the divine truth. Since it is the divine truth whatever its says must be true. Therefore it must be divine truth because it says so and all competing memes must be the work of the Devil".

These two types of self-referential statement "propagate me" and "I am the only truth" provide the driving force for memes to invade the minds of their hosts. In addition, many memes contain the instructions "Help people who believe in this meme, attack people who do not". These commands being the ultimate cause of all religious hatred, wars, pogroms and persecutions throughout the centuries.

The general defining features of all memes can thus be seen to be self-referential 'closed-loop' type of circular statements, and a strong tendency towards hate and intolerance. The science of the study of memes, their internal structures and modes of propagation is known as memetics (by analogy to genetics - how biological entities propagate themselves).

More detailed analysis will usually show the following features:Like a virus or parasitic worm, a successful meme must perform two actions:- Ensure it takes up long-term residence in its host.- Bring about the conditions for its spread.

To establish itself in the mind of its host it will use some or all of the following mechanisms:

[1] Promise heaven for belief.

[2] Threaten eternal punishment in hell for disbelief.

[3] Boost the believers' egos by telling them they are 'chosen' or superior to believers in false memes.

[4] Disable the faculties of disbelief ('immune response') by claiming that faith is superior to reason.

[5] Establish itself as the One True Meme, usually by some sort of holy book containing a circular self-referential argument such as:

X is the one true meme. We know X is the one true meme because The Source of Universal Truth has approved X. We know The Source of Universal Truth has approved X, because X contains statements which say so. We know what X says is true because X is the one true meme.Once it has parasitised the mind of its host, a meme needs to propagate itself.

A successful meme will contain instructions for some or all of the following:

[6] Holy war - convert or kill all unbelievers.

[7] Intimidation and terrorism - threaten and discriminate against unbelievers.

[8] Enforced social isolation or even death to apostates. (An apostate is a host which has cured itself of a meme-infection. It is especially dangerous to the meme because it might pass on meme-resistance to others).

[9] Fecundism - encourage true believers to breed faster than believers in false memes.

[10] Censorship - prevent rival memes from reaching potential hosts (a theological doctrine known as 'Error has no rights').

[11] Disinformation - spread lies about rival memes. Demonise them - the bigger the lies the more likely they are to be believed. The disinformation may even include instructions for a meme to lie about itself!"

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This is a thought-provoking article, but I think there's more to religious memes than these simple "instructions." I think it is arguable that the "god(s)" of these religions represent a kind of "parasitic intelligence" that is able to "borrow" the processing capacity of the host brain to "think," "act" (via its hosts' bodies) and adapt to changing circumstances. For example, the Bible contains a considerable amount of information relating to the character and personality of Yahweh and/or Jesus, including stories (myths) showing how he acts, and a volume of propagandistic pronouncements, commandments, etc.

Taken together, this information is sufficient to enable the host brain to "run" a copy of the Yahweh persona, and through evangelism, transmit the Yahweh persona to others. When a Christian wears a "What Would Jesus Do" bracelet, this amounts to an instruction set:

1)Run Jesus Persona Program.

2) Consult its decisionmaking process.

3) Act in accordance with Jesus Persona Program's decision.

Through reading of the Bible, listening to sermons, etc., a Christian is able to build a model of Jesus' personality, values, etc. in their brain that is sufficient to "operate" their body as a secondary (or, arguably, primary, if the Christian is truly devout) personality, similar to what takes place in a person with "multiple personality disorder." The important distinction between an ordinary MPD persona and a "god" is that the "god" is copied in an entire community of hosts, rather than just one. The "god" is able to evolve on three levels:

1) Copying errors and "mutations." Since no two "believers" will have the exact same mental model of the god, the interaction of the different models within a community of god-hosts will provide the god with new information and adaptability just as mutations and variations of traits give a species new information and adaptability.

2) "Contradictions" in the software transmission system (e.g.the "scriptures" which are analogous to a CD-ROM). For example, it is easy to find in the Bible instructions for believers to be peaceful, loving, and submit to authorities or even aggressors ("Turn the other cheek"). It is also easy to find instructions to hate and make war (Entire books of the Hebrew Bible; "I came not to bring peace, but a sword," the doctrine of Hell, the Book of Revelation in the New Testament ). When the Yahweh-community possesses sufficient force, it is able to (and frequently has) repress rival memes. When theYahweh-community is faced with overwhelming force from rivals (as itwas in the era when Christianity was founded), it can switch to appeasement/adaptation and a devout pacifism that persuades the rivals of its moral superiority. Thus, in either case, the Yahweh meme is pre-adapted to survive. And, since both sets of protocols are preserved in "Holy Scripture," the community can switch strategies whenever it is advantageous, as Christianity did once Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. [*]

3) Conscious choice on the part of a host or hosts made while "running" the god-program. This can manifest in any number of ways. Whenever an ancient Hebrew prophet proclaimed "Thus saith theLord!" followed by a pronouncement relevant to a new situation (the appearance of Babylonian armies, etc.), he was "running" the god-program and giving it, through the use of his brain-hardware, the ability to think, feel, and react to the situation in real-time. Since a 'god' may be viewed as an actual, sentient program borrowing the brain-hardware of its hosts (and able to parallel-process to some extent as well via inter-communication between its hosts), it is far more resilient than a mere "dumb virus" (as described in the article) would be.

*This is a somewhat over-simplified description. During the Jewish Revolts against Roman rule, the Yahweh meme basically chose both stategies. The "warlike" path was represented by the rebels themselves, who fought to drive off the pagan Romans and establish a messianic Jewish theocracy. However, many Jews either benefited from Roman rule (the elites), or preferred a more tolerant, cosmopolitan approach than the strict fundamentalism of the rebels. The Romans exterminated the warlike Jews, leaving those willing to submit alive. This submit-to-the-Gentiles version was predominant in the Jewish community until after the Holocaust, which demonstrated that obediance to Gentile authorities and quiet endurance of persecution was no guarantee of survival. The result: a well-armed State of Israel that embodies a version of Judaism that is more than willing to fight.

The early Christian community may have experienced a similar evolutionary branching. Robert Eisenman's book James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls provides compelling evidence that the Jerusalem Church founded by Jesus and led by his brother James was a militant, populist sect aiming to expel Rome and restore the Davidic monarchy. According to Eisenman, this Church was closely tied to the Essenes (authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and the Jewish revolutionary movement in general.

It was rivalled by the pro-Roman Pauline sect that sought to abolish the Jewish law for Christians and welcome Gentiles into the Church without requiring them to become circumcised or adopt Jewish laws and customs. Eisenman proposes that James "the Just," brother to Jesus, and his successor to both leadership of the Church and the Davidic throne, was so revered by the Jewish revolutioonary movement that his martyrdom touched off the first Jewish Revolt in 66 C.E.

As with Judaism, Rome exterminated this early militant faction of Christianity, while the pacifist variant (Paul and his followers) survived...until Constantine provided the Christian version of the Yahweh Meme with Legions to enforce its will, beginning the era of Christian persecution of Pagans and "heretics" (i.e. mutant versions of the Meme).