Tag theology

Science, Theology, and Information

Creationists like to ask where the information for evolution comes from. I thought I’d turn that question around a bit.

Back when I studied information science in college, the instructor said that the information content of a message is a measure of surprise. That is, if you’re trying to communicate as tersely as possible (because you’re trying to minimize your bandwidth usage, or because you’re being charged by the word, or whatever) you shouldn’t waste precious bits describing high-probability events. If you’re playing hangman or Wheel of Fortune, it’s less surprising to learn that the word contains an E or a T, than to learn that it contains a Y or a Z. And if someone told you that the (English) word is composed of Latin letters, you’d wonder why they were wasting your time.

So if information is a measure of surprise, then being surprised means that you’re learning something. And in this respect, science certainly delivers. A quick search yielded examples like:

“The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination,” said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.

“We were surprised to find that subtle modification of only two amino acids in this very large protein can prevent the onset of disease.

The investigators were however surprised to find that the the degree of modifications on the histones continued to be about the same.

Speaking by phone from Japan, Kawaoka said he was surprised how effective T-705 was against avian influenza and how superior it proved to Tamiflu.

So the $64,000 question is, are creationists, Intelligent Design researchers, or theologians ever surprised by their work? How often do they say things like “A year ago, I would have bet you $100 that the answer was X, but after checking, it turns out that the answer is Y. Who knew?”

I can’t think of any such instances. Nor have I been able to find any. And if they aren’t surprised, are they really learning anything?

Now, one could argue that theologians have been at it for so long that all the big discoveries have been made, all the important conclusions arrived at, and new discoveries are so minor or so few and far between that they don’t make the news anymore.

But the cumulative sum of all these discoveries should be considerable. And someone who got them all in quick succession should certainly be surprised. That is to say, theology students and seminarians. What are they surprised to learn?

If Bart Ehrman and Daniel Dennett are to be trusted, by and large seminary students are surprised to learn just how little evidence there is to support the notion that the Bible was inspired by God; that many of the epistles are likely forgeries; that politics played a huge role in how the Bible was put together. That is, information from history, archeology, literary analysis, and the like.

Surprising things that they don’t learn, on the other hand (as far as I know) are things like “Well, that one-god-in-three-persons thing you learned is fine for Sunday school, but it turns out that there are 4.129486… persons. We’re still working on figuring out whether that number is rational or irrational.” Or experiments showing how brain damage affects the soul. Or sonograms and MRIs showing how and when the soul enters and leaves the body, and how that affects debates about abortion and euthanasia. Or “if we compare religions from around the world, we see this pattern that shows that Jesus also appeared in Australia and South America.”

Again, maybe they do learn these things. But if so, I’ve never heard of them, even they’re the sort of thing you’d think would crop up when theists accuse people like Dawkins of ignoring sophisticated theology.

So again, I have to ask: if theologians aren’t surprised, how can they be said to learn anything?

Some Meta-Arguments Against God, Part 2

Lack of good apologetics

As with direct evidence, theists have had thousands of years to figure out what their gods are like, what they want, how they operate, and so forth. And yet, there are no good apologetics or arguments for any god’s existence. Most of them rely on false dichotomies, or faulty reasoning, or faulty assumptions, or are otherwise flawed.

In fact, one of the most popular apologetic arguments, Pascal’s wager explicitly begins with the premise that the existence or nonexistence of God cannot be known. This is not an argument that you pull out if there’s direct evidence of the truth of your claim. And yet, it comes up all the time.

In fact, many bad arguments keep coming back over and over. There appears to be no mechanism (selective pressure, if you will) for getting rid of bad arguments.

One running theme that I’ve noticed is that a lot of apologetic claims are not arguments for a god, but rather excuses for the lack of evidence, or excuses to reinforce someone’s failing belief. “You need to have faith” is just “trust me” in fancy clothes. “God doesn’t want to show himself for fear of undermining our free will” isn’t an argument, it’s an excuse for the absence of evidence. In fact, so is the whole “faith is a good thing” constellation of memes (which people don’t believe anyway, but we’ll address that later).

The world of apologetics is littered with arguments that, in any other context, would be relegated to the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps the most famous of these is Tertullian’s “Credo quia absurdum” — “I believe it because it is absurd”. Whether you take that as “I believe weird things” or as “The apostles wouldn’t have tried so hard to convince us of something that wasn’t true”, it still doesn’t belong on anyone’s top 10 list.

“I can feel Jesus in my heart” is just “dude, I’m telling you, I saw it!”. It’s something you resort to when you don’t have anything better.

“God works through people” just means that people do remarkable things. It’s not an argument for the existence of a god, it’s another excuse for the absence of evidence.

Now, people will say that esteemed theologians don’t use bad arguments like “well, just look at the trees and the birds and stuff”, and that’s mostly true. However, their arguments tend to be flawed in other ways. C.S. Lewis’s famous trilemma, Liar, Lunatic or Lord ignores possibilities like “Legend” (which also fits the alliteration). This is an elementary logical flaw that Lewis himself, if not one of his early reviewers, should have spotted.

Alvin Plantinga has come up with a version of the ontological argument for the existence of God, which relies on certain properties of modal logic. I don’t claim to understand it. On the other hand, presumably a lot of philosophers do, and I’m not hearing a lot of conversion stories about philosophers converting to Plantinga’s brand of theism.

In fact, that’s a running theme: there are simple arguments that people cite when asked why they believe in gods, all of which are wrong. And then there are the sophisticated complex arguments, but no one is convinced by those. It’s almost as if the complex arguments are just excuses to believe; if they sound complicated enough, you can pretend that they’re sound, and rest assured that somewhere out there, someone has a good justification for your faith.

Poe’s Law Strikes Again

I’m going to perform a magic trick for you. Think of a card, any card. Got it? Okay, now click on the awesome magic hat of awesome magic stupendousness:

Top hat

Ta-da! I told you I was going to do a magic trick, but I gave you two for the price of one: not only did the hat turn into your card, I also made your card look just like the hat! Isn’t that amazing?!

“No,” I hear you mutter, “what would be amazing would be if someone with a double-digit age actually fell for that.”

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The Mozart Argument

Over at Dangerous Idea, Victor Reppert links to the lecture notes for a talk by Alvin Plantinga listing half a dozen (or so) arguments for the existence of God.

Down in the comments, someone asks why atheists snigger at Plantinga.

To answer that question, scroll down Plantinga’s talk to “(U) The Mozart Argument”. As far as I can tell, it’s basically:

  1. I like Mozart’s music
  2. If evolution had taken a different course, Metallica’s music would have been considered beautiful
  3. But it’s not
  4. Therefore, God exists

As Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, “That’s an argument?” To answer the commenter’s question, the reason I have such a low opinion of Plantinga is that any time I read him, he’s in one of two modes: 1) full-on obscurantism and bafflegab, or 2) tripe like the above.

Obviously, just because I don’t understand something doesn’t imply that it’s meaningless. Maybe if I put in the time to understand high-falutin’ Plantinga, it would make sense. But bullshit-drivel Plantinga makes me seriously doubt that possibility. If I may steal a line from Sam Clemens (only steal from the best!), it ain’t the parts of Plantinga that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.