Music of the day

"Your Ex-Lover is Dead" by Stars

I've been having one of those weeks where I seem be misplacing and forgetting everything. I had to replace my gas cap because I forgot to put it back on. I've left my lights on three times. I misplaced my keys, and I left my wallet at a friends.

More importantly, after Amazon sent me a second copy of Jenn Reese's "Jade Tiger" (the first one was not delivered or was delivered to the wrong residence), I seem to have misplaced it as well. I had just barely gotten started on Thursday when I either left it at court or somewhere in the office....

Along with "Jade Tiger", I was also reading "The Language of God" by Francis Collins. Collins was the head of the government's efforts to sequence the human genome, and he is an active Christian. He wrote this book to refute claims that science and religious belief are at odds with each other. I don't think it was written intentionally as a response to "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, since it actually came out a few months earlier, but it does provide something of a ocntrast. I could have read "The God Delusion", but I thought it would be a bit like preaching to the choir, whereas "The Language of God" would be a challenge to my beliefs.

I haven't finished "The God Delusion" yet, because it is sitting somewhere in the same place as Jenn Reese's "Jade Tiger", but I had originally planned on writing a review this weekend, and since I am a bit bored (since I don't have any books to read), I thought I would take a stab at the portion I had finished already.

I felt like there were some pretty clear flaws in the arguments Collins put forth. Now Collins is a pretty smart guy at the top of his field. Me, I'm a bottom of the barrel attorney, and my opponents amaze me with their brillance every day. But I gotta say, I see what I see, and what I see is some flawed arguments. I probably read more than Mr. Collins

Collins says that the biggest thing converting him from agnostic to a believer was an argument from C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" about humanity as the "moral animal". Humans are the only ones who know right from wrong. Who feel guilt when we do something wrong, or so the argument goes. Our sense of right and wrong is more than an evolved instinct, it is an awareness of a universal set of rules about behavior, and the source of those rules is God.

Well, this seems wrong on three levels. First, I'm not sure on the basic premise that only humans feel guilt. Dogs sure know how to act guilty. Maybe, it's just their anticipation of punishment though. I thought it was pretty well settled now that the fundamental difference between humans and animals is language. Language allows us to transmit culture, something that animals can only do in a very primative fashion. To the extent that we have established moral laws, they are things that have evolved as a result of cultural transmission. Second, I'm not sure that all humans do have the same sense of right and wrong. Even within my culture, I find myself disagreeing with others about all sorts of moral issues - abortion for example, much less people from other cultures, a large number of whom feel that flying an airplane into a skyscraper is morally right. Third, even if there things that we can say all agree on morally, I don't see how it requires an external God. Couldn't there be certain rules that are necessary for groups of people to interact efficiently? Does the fact that wings on birds, on bats, and on insects have certain qualities in common require the existence of God, or is just that aerodynamic principles require them?

Second, Collins argues that the low probability of the universe forming in such a way that stars and planets exist demonstrates that there must have been an intelligent mind behind it all. I'm not a physicist so this explanation will probably be a bit crude, but the way Collins explains it, the universe at the Big Bang contained just the correct amount more matter than anti-matter to result in the formation of the universe as we see it. Much less and everything would have been anhilated. Much more and the mass would have caused it all to collapse before it got started. So there has to be an intelligent force behind it or intelligent life could never have developed.

The first problem with that little theory is set up in the last sentence of the prior paragraph. Ok, so intelligent life could only form where there are planets and stars. Isn't God supposed to be intelligent? If he or she is already there without planets and stars, doesn't that sort of contradict itself?

God as the reason for the Big Bang raises more questions in mind than it answers. Where did God come from? The standard answer is - he always was. Just because we can't figure out the rules that were in place before the Big Bang, doesn't mean there weren't any. Instead of "There was an intelligent being that did", why can't we say instead "There were other rules that did it"? Rules before and rules afterwards: that's more consistent than no rules and super intelligent being before, then rules afterwards.

The whole notion of some sort of super intelligent being that created everything raises an enormous number of questions in my mind. First of all the notion of intelligence itself. My "intelligence" is created by trillions of neurons in my head, interconnected by dendrites and organized into a specialized structure. I have short term and long term memory. I have reasoning processes that work in a certain way. Some of these things we can partially simulate on a computer. Would God's intelligence work the same way? The standard answer is "He is all knowing and all seeing." Well, where does that information come from? How does the alleged "improbability" of the Big Bang necesarily imply that? "Because only a being of that magnitude could have created the universe?" Really? I thought scientists had figured out how much energy was involved. Wouldn't this being only need to have enough power to do that? Why does it imply more?

The notion of God behind The Big Bang doesn't satisfy Occam's Razor (pick the simplest explanation), it satisfies the human desire for agency. I've discussed this before. It's a natural tendancy to look for a human agent for any perceived activity first. Stare at the clouds and see how many faces you see. The Man in the moon. Other human activity is the most important thing in our enviroment. The thing is more likely to require our conscious attention and conscious response. So naturally, it's the default trigger in our heads when we need an explanation. It's not the simplest explanation though. An all knowing and powerful being raises more questions than it answers. It's the most satisfying answer for our instincts though.

Collins tries to answer the question "Why do bad things happen to good people"? His answer is that adversity creates strength. That without adversity we would all be vapid pleasure seekers. Problem with that is it isnt' true. Sometimes adversity doesn't teach us, it just kills us without us even being aware that something bad is happening. Think volcano or tsunami or earthquake. One second a person is there, the next they are gone. No warning. Just death. Not people inflicted death either. Just nature at work.

Some people respond by saying that it is impossible to know the mind of God. To which, if there is such a God, I answer I would have to agree. What seems pointless to us may indeed have a point, but if we have no way of knowing what that point is then the idea that there is a God is meaningless. "God is love" they respond. Oh yeah? Then why do earthquakes and tsunami's happen? It's impossible to know, isn't it?

For me the discovery of the inverse collarly to Pascal's wager was what sealed the deal. According to the wager, if the believer is right, they are going to heaven, and an atheist is going to hell. If on the other hand if the atheist is right, then both the atheist and the believer end up in the same place, so it makes more sense to believe. However, if the mind of God is unknowable, and then neither hypothesis might be correct. It might be instead that the atheist being sent to heaven and the believer is sent to hell because God has set it up so that it up all the evidence points towards atheism and therefore God will reward those who come to the correct conclusion based on what is available. Or maybe the God who sends earthquakes and tsunami's to destroy people with no warning is just a mean, nasty S.O.B. who enjoys a good laugh at other's expense. There is nothing to give more weight to any of these theories.

So maybe I'll find the book at some point this week along with Jenn's "Jade Tiger" and give Mr. Collins a few more stabs at my brain. More fun to me to do it this way.