Archive for July, 2008

July 30th, 2008

Free Thinking: Anathema to Muslims and the CCC

PZ Myers has posted a follow-up to the amazing Cracker Desecration controversy.

An organization of the Catholic leadership has now condemned my actions. This is sad news: it’s clear that at least this tier of the Catholic hierarchy is as deranged as the wackaloons flooding my mailbox.

We find the actions of University of Minnesota (Morris) Professor Paul Myers reprehensible, inexcusable, and unconstitutional. His flagrant display of irreverence by profaning a consecrated Host from a Catholic church goes beyond the limit of academic freedom and free speech.

Hmmm. Who is the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy to decide the limits of freedom? Flagrant irreverence towards a cracker ought to be fair game, I should think…and that’s all this action was: irreverence. You cannot demand that all members of a pluralist society be reverent towards any random humdrum article that a guy in a dress declares holy.

The same Bill of Rights which protect freedom of speech also protect freedom of religion. The Founding Fathers did not envision a freedom FROM religion, rather a freedom OF religion. In other words, our nation’s constitution protects the rights of ALL religions, not one and not just a few.

Man, that is a tired old argument — usually you see that fine-grained parsing of the words of the bill of rights from right-wing sources, trying to distort the meaning. Do they really think a bunch of high-minded Enlightenment dudes dedicated to the principle of liberty were thinking, “We need a clause here that could be used to compel people to be a member of a church—we’ll just give them the freedom to choose which church they’ll be forced to join”? That’s insane. I am free of religion. I am free to make that choice, just as everyone is free to choose to be Catholic.

And my personal choice not to believe in the silliness of religion is not an infringement on the rights of any religion.

The freedom of religion means that no one has the right to attack, malign or grossly offend a faith tradition they personally do not have membership or ascribe allegiance.

This is the funniest statement in the whole declaration.

Freedom of speech means I do have the right to malign and make fun of any religion I want. I can’t interfere with your right to practice your religion, but that hasn’t happened — all I’ve done is laugh at you.

That last clause, though…do they seriously believe that only Catholics are allowed to criticize Catholics, and that this restriction is enshrined in the constitution? That’s a fine catch, that catch-22. So only Catholics can malign the faith, but if they do, then they can be kicked out of the faith, which means they can’t criticize it anymore. That sounds like a ripe piece of theological logic to me.

Be sure and read the comments following the above post.  They illustrate that many of us see through this nonsensical attempt to impose religious attitudes on our entire society.

The CCC is reacting no differently than the Muslims who cannot abide cartoons of Muhammad or other instances of blasphemy:

Taslima Nasreen is not alone in receiving death threats for her challenge to the authority of religion and of the state. Nor are Muslims the only ones invoking ‘blasphemy’. The Prime Minister of Mauritius bowed to pressure and banned The Rape of Sita, Lindsey Collen’s book about sexual violence against women, after Hindu fundamentalists objected to the title. While Sita is a very common woman’s name in Mauritius, it is also the name of the revered wife of the god-king Rama in the Hindu epic Ramayana, who symbolises the ideal Hindu wife – pure, chaste and virtuous. The Prime Minister declared that the book was ‘blasphemous’ and an ‘outrage against public and religious morality’. He also called on the Commissioner of Police to take action against the author. Lindsey Collen continues to demand her full rights as a citizen and has made full use of police services to investigate the threats she is receiving.

Persecution and harassment of Lindsey Collen and Taslima Nasreen by Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists respectively is an obvious attempt to suppress the individual’s right to criticise religious beliefs and practices. Their cases highlight the way in which even secular authorities will use religion to silence dissenting voices by invoking the blasphemy law to censor women who oppose the Government. Secular authorities are willingly sacrificing basic human rights to pander to fundamentalist forces.

Other examples of individuals experiencing harsh censorship, threats to life and accusations of blasphemy are Paul William Robert, a Canadian, who received death threats for writing a novel containing quotations from the Koran. He has gone into hiding after being stabbed by an unknown assailant. Increasing numbers of women in Algeria have been killed because of their association with secularist causes. Fundamentalists have vowed to target women who do not cover their heads in public, and two unveiled Algerian women, aged 19 and 20, were killed by gunmen while waiting at a bus stop. This is one case of hundreds of women’s deaths. Editors, journalists and publishers are also targets of attacks by religious fundamentalist groups worldwide.  (Source)

These Catholic and Muslim idiots want to put an end to dissenting voices.  They demand respect for their outdated and nonsensical superstitions.  It makes them crazy that they can’t outlaw “blasphemy” across the globe.

They are afraid.

They’re afraid of the light of reason.  They’re afraid that exposing the ridiculous nature of their beliefs will cause the faithful to question their religion.  Once that happens, people will come to the conclusion that they can think for themselves.  And that could easily spell the end of religious belief.

Religions thrive in the dark.  They employ mystery to keep the faithful enthralled.  Their extreme reactions in the face of dissent and disbelief expose their fear of free thinking.

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CategorySociety, Theology, islam | Comment3 Comments »

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July 6th, 2008

Mysteries of time, and the multiverse

A rather thought-provoking article in the L.A. Times:

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.

What’s the problem with time?

The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.

Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.

We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.

What does entropy have to do with all this?

The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.

The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.

You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.

Can you give me a simple explanation of entropy?

One way of explaining entropy is to say it’s the number of ways you can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don’t notice the change macroscopically.

If you mix milk into a cup of coffee, the more mixing that occurs, the more disordered the milk molecules become and the more entropy builds.

If all the milk was somehow separated from the coffee, that would be low entropy.

So what’s the problem?

If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that’s a very difficult fact to explain. . . .

There’s no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.

From a layman’s standpoint, it seems perfectly rational that things would start small and grow apart. You’re saying that’s wrong.

Many of my very smart colleagues say exactly the same thing. They say, “Why are you thinking about this? It just makes sense that the early universe was small and low-entropy.”

But I think that is just a prejudice: . . . Because it is like that in our universe, we tend to think it is naturally like that.

I don’t think there is an explanation for that in terms of our current understanding of physics. I’m just saying it’s not a fact that we should take for granted.

Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?

Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don’t observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.

I’m not saying this is true; I’m saying this is an idea worth thinking about.

Does God exist in a multiverse?

I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.

And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.

Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”

CategoryEducation, Science | CommentNo Comments »

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July 3rd, 2008

No rhyme or reason

{a reply in a Volconvo forum thread on intelligent design}

If “design”, whatever you mean by that, is an absolute state (everything that exists is designed by a designer) then the designer is not exempt. The designer would be a product of a design, which implies another, previous designer, and one before him and so on. Any implied “purpose” to this universe requires the one whose purpose is being expressed. The only way to avoid the infinite regression is to maintain that there is no purpose, no design, no rhyme, no reason, no philosophy to the universe. Stuff happens.

Darwin

We humans can think abstract thoughts. We don’t know if that’s unique to humans, but we can be sure we can do it. Purpose, design and all the rest are abstractions. They aren’t physical realities. You can’t buy me a package of purpose at the store. Being able to think abstractly has its benefits and its liabilities. One liability is our tendency to confuse the abstract with the tangible.

I see no reason to take ID or any variation of it seriously. It’s an idea that’s been poorly defended. It fails to validate. It isn’t credible.

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CategoryID/Creationism | Comment1 Comment »

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July 2nd, 2008

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

From Wired:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Einstein

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

The big target here isn’t advertising, though. It’s science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the “beautiful story” phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don’t know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about “dominant” and “recessive” genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton’s laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.

In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

Never before have such vast quantities of data been accessible to anyone anywhere.  Search is a far more useful tool than the scientific method for sorting through mountains of data.

Will correlation be enough?  Can it productively replace the scientific method?  Will the way we “do” science alter dramatically in the coming years?

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CategoryScience, Technology | CommentNo Comments »

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