UPDATE: I’ve received an apologetic post from Mr. Eastman, which he tried to post on the picture page, where nobody would see it. I’ve therefore put it here for the record:
Dear Jerry : I am very sorry I wrote on a blog without thinking in a reactive manner>
I did not want to enter into the fray in public and now it has happened. I honor and respect your work in evolution. I accept evolution and always have since grade school.
I have after my unfortunate entry into this matter read a book by a Biblical scholar recommended by Francis S Collins that states there is nothing scientific in Genesis and one should not attempt to state so. It is ancient literature and not science. After reconsideration I retract the published comment and ask you to take it down and accept my apology and understand that I am struggling to personally come to terms with this issue and am in this matter just a human being living on planet earth like you/ but have no academic expertise in science and only an MA in Biblical studies from a Catholic University and an MA in Spanish from a state university/I am a humble instructor getting back in a few minutes to correcting INT Spanish exams
I am very sorry I questioned your Hebrew soul. It was wrong of me. I happen to like reading Biblical Hebrew, but it may not appeal to you. I happen to be repelled by the violent passages in the Hebrew Bible but am inspired by the Vision of Isaiah of a world of Justice and Peace ( Shalom). I feel closer to the viewpoint of John Haught than yours but don’t wish to disparage you as a human being. I would rather have an honest , ethical atheist on a town council than a raving fundamentalist…but most Americans are somewhere in the middle.. I lean Liberal Left in politics..I am sorry this matter is so polarizing now in our country and was hurt the way people lit into me for my comments/I wish to live in a scientifically enlightened country with good health care for ALL ..The soul (if it exists// and I believe it does) will never be found under a microscope.. I agree to disagree and wish to be civil. sir. we differ on religion,, I accept that you want to rid America of it..I don’t .. though I worry about cries for war in the name of G-d.( I believe in a G-d of Justice ,Peace and Love) I look to Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Martin Buber who favored a bi national state with civic equality for Jews and Arabs in Israel.. but that’s another question . Again I wish you well and may cooler heads and hearts prevail and please accept my most humble apology.
Best regards, Jeffrey Eastman
Needless to say, I am not taking down his initial published statement. I will, however, accept his apology and expect to hear no more creationist-tinged criticism from this instructor at Appalacian State University.
_______________
Excuse the quality of this video (I rarely take movies with my digital camera), but it does show a panorama of the Appalachians from near the top of Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina. Shortly after I took this, the mists closed in and we couldn’t see anything. But the view of the verdant hills was stupendous.
This was taken on my trip to North Carolina to speak at Appalachian State.
And the pushback from my visit continues. There’s a letter from an ASU student at the High Country Press, and this comment on someone’s website from Jeffrey Eastman, a lecturer at that University. Sadly, none of my opponents, like this benighted gentlemen, had the courage to stand up and address me in person.
Yes, Mr. Eastman, don’t bother writing that letter; I doubt I’ll find my lost Hebrew soul.
WTF??? The scientific accuracy of Genesis? When does it say grass is ‘created’ – oh yes, the ‘third’ day, a day before the sun!
PS If anyone sees Jerry’s lost soul, pop it in a bottle & post it to Chicago.
My thought, exactly. Unbelievable in an academic; is this guy really an academic at a University, and not even in a Divinity Dept? Only the latter could get away with such nonsense.
Not only is he an academic, he teaches (Spanish) language and literature!
Something you would have NEVER guessed, reading what he wrote (above).
DANG, all the errors and complete lack of punctuation! It hurts my eyes.
If this guy doesn’t even know that you don’t use ‘s to form a plural (Darwinist’s), then I fear for his students.
I honestly can’t see the language accuracy in Eastman letter #1.*
[Thanks for the LOLs!]
* Ordinarily that wouldn’t say a lot. As a Swede I would be easily fooled.
But that letter is the usual creationist fare. It is as badly written as the ideas are poorly thought out.
“You can always tell a Swede..
..but you cannot tell him a lot!”
Variously, “Swede” becomes some other nationality (e.g., “German”, “Norwegian”, “Italian”) but I have the t-shirt with “Swede”.
My grandpa from Sävsjö became a US citizen one hundred years ago, May 13 1913.
Ha, yes, I assume language difficulties can be read that way. They certainly seem to be behind some of US perceptions about Swedes, Poles, et cetera, many who were poor immigrants with little in the way of language training.
We pawn it off on the Norwegians, naturally. A Norwegian is the kind of person who wants his dentist to drill some extra because he can get lucky – Norway is filled with oil, don’tcha know.
Ha, Ha!
My Dad (Niels Nielsen; he had a Danish father & a Norwegian mother) had a bumper sticker on his golf cart that read, “Columbus had a Norwegian navigator.”
The order is my favorite counter to Genesis just needing to be interpretted. If you want to say that “God created the sun” means “God coalesced the sun out of pre-existent material from previous exploded stars by use of gravity”, well, it’s pushing it, but it is a legitimate summation of the above.
But there’s no kind of metaphor wherein “On the third day” means “Sometime after the fourth day”.
Not that I haven’t heard apologists try. Only once though, because it’s such a losing battle. Apparently, God didn’t create the sun on the fourth day, he just ‘revealed’ it. No I have no idea what that means, since the story is told from the perspective of someone all knowing. It could only mean that he revealed it to the Earth… which means the plants still didn’t have sunlight.
I use the order incompatibility between the two creation stories of Genesis 1&2. How can anything in this whole set of religious texts been taken as “accurate” or even worthwhile to read after that start?
I gave up after “In the beginning there was the word”. Nice bad Greek whoever translated that – logos means “word” and “order”. I’m pretty sure “order” was what should have been translated but some lazy monk or someone sucked at his Greek!
Or perhaps they purposefully used the ambiguity to prop up the christianist Paul’s texts on “logos” as some sort of principle. I don’t know the historical context there though.
Then, God “rested”. As mentioned by Bill Maher in one of his videos online, this is the most absurd part of the whole sequence.
What exactly did a God deplete, so that “rest” was required?
Well, I think the order problem is overshadowed by the problem of the definition of “beginning”.
If you have a 6-day period you’re talking about, what constitutes “beginning”? Is it Monday morning? Monday afternoon? Is Tuesday morning still OK?
If “in the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth” is correct, you’d have to define “beginning” as Thursday evening to be close to correct from a scientific point of view.
Science tells us that the solar system wasn’t formed until Thursday afternoon of this fictive 6-day period. Late Thursday afternoon at that.
Ain’t “the beginning”.
So, the bible is demonstrably wrong three words in. Not a great start.
A guy I went to high school with posted this on Facebook a while ago:
“Herbert Spencer, a world renown non-Christian scientist-evolutionist, discovered the categories of the knowable. He determined that everything that exists fits into one of five categories: Time, Force, Action, Space, & Matter”. He was hailed for his discovery.
In Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning,” that’s TIME, “God,” that’s FORCE, “created,” that’s ACTION, “the heavens,” that’s SPACE, “the earth,” that’s MATTER.
Everything that Herbert Spencer discovered in 1903, or before that, was in the first verse of Scripture. The Bible says that God created everything, and in saying that, the Bible gives us all the categories that exist. And He did this out of and from nothing and He did it in six days!”
I replied that Genesis also says that the earth was formed and plants were created before the sun, moon and stars.
His reply was: “God can create things in any order he wants.”. I didn’t know what else to do apart from do a massive facepalm.
If god can do whatever he wants, then what’s the use of logic and rational thinking? *grrrr*
Oh, and I forgot to say…he told me that I was reading the Bible out of context (which was why I was seeing contradictions in the Bible), and that I should learn the “inductive Bible study method”. Apparently this method will help me read the bood gook correctly!
Also, whales and birds created before land vertebrates.
Never mind a parsing of the “facts” listed in Genesis and how well they comport with reality.
It’s a story about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard.
If what you get after reading Genesis is that it has some bearing on reality, you’re doin’ it rong — whether the “it” in question is basic literary analysis or recognition of reality.
Pro tip: any piece of fiction can be parsed and sliced and diced to discover “profound hidden truths.” Hell, if I was bored enough, I’m sure I could turn “This Little Piggy Went to Market” into either an erudite exposition of supply-side economics or a scathing critique of the same — your choice. Pay me enough and I’ll turn it into a grand metaphor for anything you like.
Cheers,
b&
“Pay me enough and I’ll turn it into a grand metaphor for anything you like.”
What’s your price? L
That depends…what’m’I bid?
b&
“weeee” – all the way home!
Hmmm…never was into water sports.
Make it “whee,” though, and we might have a starting point….
b&
Nice video. Disturbing post by Eastman
I find it even more disturbing when apparently nice and gentle people like Eastman can’t think straight than if he was over-the-top nuts. Obviously Eastman thinks atheism is contagious (everyone, please stay away from Lewontin, you could catch atheism too!) and not brought about by thinking how useless religious ‘answers’ are.
The presupposition Eastman’s god is real is the problem here not atheists asking for evidence for such existence. That bit of Eastman’s broke my irony meter.
“can’t think straight..” ???
Ha! You mistake the first line of defense as an inability to dig a decent trench.
The =real= fortress they are protecting is their personal, eternal existence. This lack of “straight” thinking is merely a strategic blocking action.
One is assaulting their personal eternity if one begins to assail “religion”. Therein lies the personal, emotional reasons that otherwise reasonable persons take unreasonable positions:
eternal, blissful existence in a future perpetual party with all those who have died,
versus
meaningless, short, nasty, biological brevity, with an added dash of staggering injustice.
The plates of Nephi already contain all the scientific accuracy one could possibly endure.
With his choice of reading material, Eastman is doomed to remain ignorant of the fact and scientific theory of evolution. Poor sod.
I’m wondering if you have responded elsewhere, Jerry, to John Leonard’s irritating questions.
Waste of time; I’d have to write a screed. If he’s read my book and can’t understand the evidence, there’s no point to it. And if I spent my time answering all these people, I wouldn’t get anything done. (The answers are in my book, anyway.)
Professor Coyne, why, oh why, can I not buy your book on Kindle from Australia?
Is it because Amazon think we are living on planet X and are not actually human (like that NRA nut job when told about our change in gun laws meant no mass shootings since Port Arthur)?
Loved the panaroma. Maybe the following (Yo-Yo Ma, Appalachia Waltz) will serve to calm me down after Eastman’s letter; I thought it was spring but now I find it’s silly season again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajkgNEO_Yeg
You could hire a dozen screen writers to come up with a script for a movie about an over-the-top stereotypical god botherer, and not a one of them could have done better than the real life Jeffrey Eastman did in that comment. Human imagination truly is no match for reality.
It is just so pathetic, frustrating and tiresome, in short so human, that the vast majority of people who do not accept evolution have never studied it, and do not understand even the basic outlines of the theory. They don’t need to because they already know that it directly contradicts their religious world view, and that alone is sufficient cause for them to reject it.
See my remark on “eternity” above.
No one will get far contradicting a person who is clinging to the promise of an eternal existence. They won’t hear a single thing that even begins to erode their promise of immortality.
This is common passive-aggressive emotional reasoning I often found (and still find) active in the Christian mind. Christian belief works to calm individual anxiety about the randomness of existence. It is the necessity supporting the embrace of authority inherent in the religion. Scientific epistemology with its acceptance of doubt is anathema to the religious mind because it only validates the randomness the religious mind is trying to avoid. Both authors can only make things personal in a passive way and would never address their concerns face to face because that would make them deal with the randomness, in disagreement, their faith empowers them to avoid. I witnessed this unique form of cowardice over time and it led me to doubt the character-building qualities Christianity asserted. The pattern seeking Christians propose has a very specific end-game, to feel safe amidst doubt, and anything to upset that safe feeling will be met with defensiveness.
Oh, I have no doubts that christianity can be very successful at character building.
Yes of course. Fictive characters.
Fictive or de-fictive, it is still hard to build character on a text lauding genocide et cetera.
True moderate members would plead for the texts to be removed from the sects. Alas.
Good one, I hadn’t thought of that one.
I first thought, builds character, but bad character not good. (examples, characters that think millions dying from AIDS instead of changing a silly doctrine is righteous, or characters that you wouldn’t want to leave your kids with for fear of mental or physical abuse)
Second thought was, builds the kind of character that is easy to maintain authority over.
Key word: “cowardice”.
It is at the root of all current religious beliefs. A fear of not being immortal, and surrounded by like mortals who die and are then gone for good, fini, whether six hours, six days, six years, or 106 years old.
Aztecs? Mebbee not such cowards.
Thanks for sharing, Jerry ! Btw, is the video for your talk up on Youtube by now? Checked a couple of days ago but no luck…
So Jeremiah Miller, a senior in college, doesn’t know how to spell “yolk,” and the High Country Press doesn’t notice…
I’m seeing a pattern.
A language professor who apostrophises plurals; and the Hebrew’s crap, too.
If you do look for your lost Hebrew soul, Dr. Coyne, for god’s sake, don’t do it on the Sabbath! God fukken hates that!!!11!
And never say his (G-d’s) name!
Jehovah!
b&
If your Lost Hebrew Soul (LHS) ended up in a little green lizard, I think Kink has it.
I realize there’s a relaxed standard of prose for blog comments, but surely a *language professor* would at least attempt to write correct English, instead of stream-of-consciousness. Sloppy writing gives the impression of sloppy thinking (in this case of course, accurately).
He teaches Spanish: obviously there is no punctuation in Spanish…or something
His credentials appear to be in Spanish and Biblical Studies. It’s a good thing they don’t let him teach biology.
No-one expected that.
/@
Just for fun, I posted this in the comments to the letter:
I was responding to another commenter who was saying how Tyson thinks we should be more gentle with the religious.
I have never understood why Collins used the three frozen waterfalls example to teach the concept of the Trinity. How many people have seen three frozen waterfalls together? It’s best to use a more common example. If you ask me, the author of Silence of the Lambs did a much better job in his novel. He used Three in One Household Oil. Sure, it comes in one can, but inside that can there are actually three different kinds of oil. Do you get it now? All of the novel’s inmates in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (even “Multiple Miggs”), found that example mush easier to understand than Collin’s example.
Others in this comment thread have noted Eastman’s lame “ideas”, and I concur.
And, I find it equally disturbing that a university faculty member hasn’t mastered grammar and punctuation. Yikes. L
Oh, dear, I am a product of Dick Lewontin in his Chicago days. I greatly admired his atheism in his grad school evolution course but I took an evolution course from Lynn H. Throckmorton that turned me to atheism. I asked Throckmorton if he missed purpose in evolution. He suggested I wait until the end of the course to talk about this problem. I had read Teilhard de Chardin which my father (student of Whitehead) gave me. At the end of the course, I had nothing to say except that gods were worthless in evolution. 10 years later, I gave up on free will when I discovered the awful crap that philosophers spouted on this difficult issue.
Yesterday I found some spare capital letters lying around the house. I’ve put them in the mail to Mr. Eastman as we’ve agreed a swap for his surplus full stops and apostrophes.
Best thing since the Bosnian vowel drop of 1996.
There is something unsettling thinking about Eastman seething in the audience but saying nothing and then writing his comments on someone else’s site. Passive aggressive indeed.
Again more of my innocence is lost in learning these folks see the Cambrian explosion as a God must’ve done it thing. I suspected they would. Sigh.
Nothing unsettling at all, old chap!
They’ve got the tanks, you’ve got the cavalry (almost wrote Calvary there!!)
You have to pick your battles, not show anything when you’re in a difficult position. Wait for later, when you and your horses are on the bluff, watching the armor clank below.
Throw a grenade from on high!
Oh Calvary would have been perfect!
Interesting comment in the Guardian on Christian home schooling and its effects.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/08/christian-home-schooling-dark-side
Seems “someone” (John Leonard) mixes some of his own mistakes with the usual creationist tropes:
An open comment to John Leonard, not from a biologist but from an astrobiology interested.
Q0, a question that is implied but not asked by Leonard:
– Is evolution speciation?
A0: No, speciation is an evolutionary mechanism. There are others. But if the main body of evolution is correct, so is speciation.
Q1:
– How does speciation work? Leonard implies speciation blocks cross-fertilization. Well, duh, that is the idea.
A1: Read “Why Evolution is True”. Oh, you have done that. Well, let me see, how about Wikipedia then:
“There are four geographic modes of speciation in nature, based on the extent to which speciating populations are isolated from one another: allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, and sympatric. Speciation may also be induced artificially, through animal husbandry, agriculture, or laboratory experiments. Observed examples of each kind of speciation are provided throughout.”
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation ]
Q2:
– How does stasis fit with darwinian “small but survivable”?
A2: It fits fine, even if it is arguable that “stasis” actually exists on all levels since molecular clocks tells us the genome changes at a predictable rate.
Q3:
– If there is examples of imperfect design which reject “an intelligent designer”, why doesn’t sophisticated design support it?
A3: It could, but it is already rejected.
Conversely, if evolution predicts both kinds, why is an alternate theory better? ID for example has no mechanism, so it certainly can’t substitute in the first place.
And Leonard finishes with the usual creationist tired trope of first life, meaning he won’t accept mathematics since it can’t explain how integers arose in the first place, or gravity since our theories can’t explain how mass arose, or his payday since his contracts doesn’t explain how money came about, et cetera ad infinitum.
So nicely done, Mr. Larsson!
Excellent stuff, and carefully laid out.
Your statement re mathematics and “can’t explain how integers arose in the first place” is 100% platinum. I will use it. Tack.
Thank you! And use away. Varsågod.
I suspect the truly religious think of mathematics as “god given”. But when they should be able to accept naturalistic evolution as easily, and pawn off their troubles with biology, the first cell population, on astrobiology (say).
We don’t see that happen, and I think Coyne et al has pegged the reason why. It is a “dig trenches” religious defense, specifically targeting biology.
Really, a much shorter response is available.
Dr. Coyne quite literally wrote the book on the subject of speciation. It’s called — aptly enough — Speciation.
For someone to challenge one of the worlds acknowledged experts in his own subject — well, that’s hubris.
I tried to post that comment on that web site.
Surprise, surprise…it’s “awaiting moderation”.
“The Cambrian Explosion still baffles Darwinist’s [sic] and well it should”
What I want is for a Creationist who trots out difficulties within science to man up and commit. Tell us that this issue is fundamental to his rejection of evolution. Tell us that this is a hill he’ll die on, so that when he’s found to have been wrong, he changes his mind.
They never do it. When their favorite conundrum (abiogenesis, Cambrian Explosion, consciousness, what caused the Big Bang, etc.) is solved, they discard it like a used tissue and pick up another one. Their argument distills down to “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, God.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2012/09/dont-move-the-goalposts-2/
I seriously would like to meet the “Darwinist” who is baffled by the Cambrian.
Name names please. I want his “Darwinist” membership card revoked.
I’d also send them The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity by Douglas Erwin and James Valentine.
I’ve noticed they don’t actually discard the defeated argument. They put it in their pocket and a little while later it is back in service.
Whack-A-Mole is one description I’ve seen others use for the behaviour. Cutting off the heads of the Hydra would be another.
Everything old is new again. How convenient!
Please, not bell bottoms again?
Flairs! I loved flairs.
Levis came out with a line of flairs in 1971 or so. Oh, yeah, Doc Hipster!
“I, for one, don’t think anyone could withstand the pressures of a public office without the guidance of a higher power. That is perhaps why we’ve never had an atheist president”
He obviously has never heard of Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia. Apart from being female and unmarried but in a relationship, she is well known for her atheism. She leads a minority government and has been disrespectfully attacked in the media for her appearance and manner and her every utterance mercilessly dissected on a constant daily basis since she was elected nearly three years ago. And she hasn’t blinked.
The student letter writer can’t know if there has been an atheist president of the US, since admitted atheists cannot be elected. It seems that Lincoln may have been an atheist according to some who knew him best. Certainly he didn’t wear God on his sleeve the way some latter day presidents (Carter, Bush II)have done.
sub
Note: I’ve received an “apology” from Eastman, which he tried to post on the picture page, so I’ve added it as a note to the main post. See above.
Maybe he had a “waterfall” moment…
/@
Nothing like making an ass of yourself on a popular blog to inject a bit of reality into your life.
Oh, dear me! Did I write “blog?” Hmmmm, yep, I did. OK, well, I could edit it out or make an ass out of myself on a popular blog.
Rats! Did it again! OK, not a blog, not a blog, not a blog. Don’t say BLOG! I must be possessed by demons! Ha, ha, Darwin is dead! BWAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!
Wow.
That is truly nicer, I can’t say I liked all the details such as references and deferral to religion in respect to a science question, but it is much more fair. (Eg the question of the now obvious need to lower religiosity in US in order to fully and freely teach and educate the facts in biology.)
However, this comes over as declared ignorance:
That ship has sailed, and the non-existence of souls in contrast to minds were actually found under a microscope of sorts! It was the LHC accelerator observing physics on very small scales.
Since the LHC recent completion of the standard particles, we now know that there are no interactions that can constitute a soul on the substrate of a biochemically mindful (or not) brain.
The vacuum works that way, every interaction that isn’t expressly suppressed by symmetries or broken symmetries (laws) will happen and will be noticeable. But the extreme precision of quantum electrodynamics, 11 significant digits, means residual unaccounted for interactions are too weak to affect the brain.*
Can any putative residual interactions be used to “record” the workings of the mind in a “soul” memory? No, since again the power needed to store the data would be massive and noticeable. It would be on the order of what an extremely efficient biological machine already does.
“Souls” are old, perhaps pre-religious, folk psychology devices. But they (and their related reversal of “philosophical zombies”) have failed against observation, unless I am mistaken. If that is the peg that a religious wants to hang his religion on, it will fall to the ground.
Deism remains.
But as I have noted before, I’ll give it 1-2 decades before that too will be seen as intellectually indefensible. Already the Planck 4 year results pretty much excluded every other type of inflation except eternal by finding the requisite concave, flat potential description.
And in an eternal inflation multiverse the local physics, its laws of say the complicated standard particle sector, are mostly locally decided. Even if there would be only our universe it would be such. (Which now seems unlikely unless the Theory-Of-Everything quantum gravitists finally come up with something tangible. But string theory is to date more compatible with eternal inflation through the string landscape.)
Hence we have Krauss publishing books that even deists have problems with, predicting and observing (in as much as inflation is involved) something from nothing.
The gods-of-the-gap gap for deism is rapidly shrinking, same as the theist gap was when it still existed.
* I used to think, for reasons of an interesting and detailed model and observational paper, that neuronal tissue could be posed on the edge of chaos. Such a state would make long-distance signaling across the brain naturally emergent. (As in promoting signals that neither amplify nor deamplify irregardless of the exact details of the substrate.)
However, even if that would be feasible it wouldn’t affect the majority of brain mechanisms.
Logically, a deistic god would still have to be a local god. Perhaps we are somebody else’s physics experiment or computer simulation or dream-with-a-dream or what-have-you. But the dreamer / programmer / physicist has no way of ruling out the possibility that she, herself, is similarly but a small part of something even bigger.
The deistic god’s ship sailed the same time Turing and Gödel came up with Halting and Incompleteness, respectively. So, multiply your estimate of its remaining lifespan by -4 and you’re spot on.
And, of course, at the same time, a deistic god is what Dennett and Dawkins describe as a “skyhook.” It’s entirely possible for such to exist, but there’s no way for it to spontaneously arise. For such de novo genesis, you need to start from the bottom, not the top — though, of course, once you’ve built your crane, you can then go ahead and use it elsewhere as a skyhook.
So, while there may well be some sort deistic explanation for our corner of existence — and, again, we have no way of absolutely ruling out such a possibility — we can be absolutely certain that any such deity’s own ultimate origins are entirely evolutionary in nature.
Cheers,
b&
Thanks for the response, in retrospect I think my comment needed a larger context.
– A local god.
I didn’t think of that. Good catch!
– Simulations.
I think (and I have made this claim before on WEIT), that increasing resolution in physics experiments would force a simulation to eventually show up as timing errors et cetera. Because of Bell tests telling us that quantum mechanics can’t cope with hidden variables.
So I don’t get that simulation idea and its popularity, I think it is a non-starter. Admittedly, I haven’t turned my analysis into an experiment. But the same goes for “simulators”. Those who throw the first handwave …
– Halting, Incompleteness.
Does the absence of omnipotence and omniscience affect deist claims of creating laws?
— Yes, if you want to make humans unavoidable consequences of our early universe.
— No, if you are “I take what I get” deist. Seems to me intellectual deists are much the later today, while say Miller is a bona fide creationist theist (humans as a result of targeted “quantum fluctuations”).
But again, obviously I hadn’t considered all the features of deism, so another good catch!
– Dawkin (and Dennetts) “God Delusions”.
OK, it is arguable what they make deism intellectually indefensible, but I can go with that too. They make every kind of god problematic, that’s for sure.
Those are legitimate concerns…but only if the simulation is both honest and being performed at something vaguely resembling a human scale.
The “outside” universe can be arbitrarily large and rich in resources, and its physics doesn’t even have to vaguely resemble ours. There’s no reason out entire universe couldn’t be a continuous simulation at finer-than-Planck-length-and-time resolution for the entirety of its baker’s dozen years — and even for such an incomprehensibly huge simulation to be but a minor subroutine on the “computer” “running” the “simulation.” Though, of course, at those kinds of scales it makes one realize that questions of the “ultimate” nature of reality get pretty silly; if such a “simulation” isn’t good enough to be considered real, for all reasonable uses of the word, then how is “real” reality any more “real”?
The other option, of course, is that you could be a brain in a vat or any of the variations on that theme, in which case the simulation only needs to fool you into not seeing the flaws.
Or it could be any combination of the two. Put on your tinfoil conspiracy theory hat and let your imagination run wild. Chances are excellent that there’s no way to actually disprove the conspiracy. Of course, the inevitable corollary is that you’re utterly powerless to do anything about something you can’t even theoretically detect, so worrying about any of this is worse than useless.
Cheers,
b&
Amendments:
– I would say that souls are “likely” pre-religious. Religions are on record for stealing what they could from previous culture, as indeed most culture is.
– It is “only our [one] universe” that is unlikely compared to several, with current observational constraints IMHO. Physicists like Krauss describe it, but I don’t know if they have come down on either side of what is most likely, or even if such a claim makes sense at this stage.
– Posing a system in a chaos regime or towards its edge makes it more amenable for small disturbances affecting it. That is why the *-ed addition.
How to Make a Solar Filter