Five things to expect when the Pope visits England

I suppose it is too much to ask that the cultural barbarians now at the gates mind their manners. I guess it would sort of defeat the purpose of being a cultural barbarian. And just in case you were wondering what the purpose of cultural barbarism is, I'll just pause to point out that it is to bring down Western civilization by opposing anything that might contribute to preserving it.

One of these things, of course, is Christianity, and the primary species of Christianity is Catholicism.

Here is Philip Lawler on five things to expect when the Pope visits England.

HT: Insight Scoop

The Failure of Enlightenment Morality, Part CLVII

Adam Gurri has another interesting post on the question of how you can justify morality. He argues against those who believe that in order to have a coherent view of morality, you must believe in God:

They [the people who say this] assume that the existence of God and of morality are logically linked to one another, that morality requires a "bases" or justification of some sort which only God can properly fill the role of ... Belief in the existence of right and wrong and belief in the existence of the divine are two entirely logically distinct concepts ... As a nonrationalist, I see no logical inconsistency in the fact that I don't believe in a divinity but do believe in morality. Nor do I see any logical consistency with any of the other combinations of beliefs on those two topics.

But then he says that he has a problem with the application of reason to the question at all:

They assume that human beliefs are or ought to be logically consistent ... In fact, logic is irrelevant to whether or not I believe in either God or morality. Belief is not arrived at through reason. This isn't a bad thing. In fact, it is impossible for logic to give us a reason to believe in anything.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what he is saying here in regard to the role of reason in moral discourse. If logic is "irrelevant to whether or not I believe in either God or morality," then why should anyone find his point that there is "no logical inconsistency in the fact that I don't believe in a divinity but do believe in morality" persuasive? If logic is not operative in the discussion of the relation between God and morality, then why is the absence of logical inconsistency in a position on this relation commendable?

I agree that "any reason for believing must begin with some non-logical premise," but only because everything must begin with some non-logical premise, including logic itself, which is founded on non-logical foundations. The law of contradiction, for example cannot itself be proven without employing what it is trying to prove. This is the whole idea behind first principles: there are some things you have to accept as axiomatic in order to think at all. But to conclude from this that you can't use reason to resolve important problems is what Chesterton called the "suicide of thought." If logical consistency is not to be the arbiter of whether one's position is a good one or not--in ethics or anything else--then what is? In fact, Gurri employs it to defend his position on morality--even if his position is that logical consistency doesn't matter.

He says that morality is "a part of human nature." I don't see how this addresses the problem of how any moral statement can be considered authoritative over human behavior. On the other hand, I know he has written about his dependence on Hume and Adam Smith. I suspect that Hume's replacement of reason as the relevant feature of human nature with the passions is what is lurking in the background here: morality is what we feel to be right. In taking this position, he seems to be counting on the existence of some set of perennial sentiments that characterize humans, and there are indeed many sentiments that do seem universal across cultures and throughout history (C. S. Lewis' "tao"). On these the Humean theory is unproblematic. But, of course, there are many other things which we would today consider to be unquestionably good (basic human rights) or unquestionably bad (slavery) that Humean ethics simply cannot make sense of, since people have had different sentiments about them over time.

He has jumped out of the rationalist pan and into the emotivist fire.

There were things that Hume took for granted as being "moral" according to his system of ethics based on the passions--just as Kant took many of the same things for granted in his ethics based on reason, like the sanctity of marriage and of keeping your promises--that came into question later.

I share a dissatisfaction with the common Protestant view of ethics. But that isn't the only theistic view of morality. There is the older, classical view in which there is a recognition that there is a divergence between man-as-he-is and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos (i. e., man as he should be), and that the laws or rules of morality consisted in those things that got him from the former to the latter. A classical theist believes that the author of that telos is the best authority to go to to determine what these rules for realizing one's telos are.

The problem with the Humean view of ethics (based on the passions)--as well as the Kantian view (based on the intellect) and the Kierkegaardian view (based on the will)--is ironically tied to the very Protestantism that many secularists now find themselves in conflict with on issues like this. Protestantism, in swallowing the nominalism of William of Occam, denied the existence of a telos inherent in human nature. There is no "man-as-he-should-be"; there is only "man-as-he-is." And therefore there is no need for rules to get him from what he is to what he should be.

Hence the failure of the whole Enlightenment attempt to ground morality in anything whatsoever. As Alastair MacIntyre has eloquently pointed out in his seminal After Virtue, once you have rejected the classical view of inherent nature and purpose in things--and the classical Thomistic synthesis based on it, you foreclose any possibility of any justification of morality at all.

It's all a crap shoot.

John Henry Newman receives his due at last

John Henry Newman is to be beatified by Pope Benedict this weekend during his visit to England. Newman was a model of sound sense and intellectual strength. In books such as The Idea of the University and as well as his collected sermons, Newman manned the barricades of Western civilization in its defense against the cultural barbarians.

And Apologia Pro Vita Sua, his impassioned defense of his conversion to Catholicism that was a response to the overly harsh criticisms of those he left behind in the Anglican Church, was a classic of intellectual apologetics.

You wonder why it took so long.

Hawking's Fatal Conceit: Is science even capable of showing that God is out of a job?

The core problem with Stephen Hawking's claim in his new book The Grand Design that recent scientific advances are getting closer to answering the "big" philosophical questions like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is that these "big" questions are not scientific questions in the first place. It may sell a lot of books to say what Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow are saying, but it doesn't make much real sense.

The first clue that we are dealing with two entirely different kinds of questions is the equivocation in terminology that Hawking has employed.

Hawking and Mlodinow have made several claims, one of which is that it is scientifically possible for "universes" to have "appeared spontaneously from nothing." And from this some people have even concluded that the fundamental question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" has been answered.

But for starters, just because you have discovered that something is possible, you have not thereby discovered why it exists. In fact, everything that we encounter in life we know is possible, since it, in fact, exists, and everything that exists must obviously be possible. But we do not by that mere fact know why these things exist: that is another question entirely. Excerpts from Hawking's book seem to indicate that, whether or not he thinks the question has been answered, he does at least think it is scientifically answerable.

The confusion starts with Hawking's use of terminology. What exactly does "universe" mean for Hawking, and what does "nothing" mean when he says it is possible for the universe to come from nothing? Is he using these terms the way philosophers use them--or for that matter the way the rest of us do?

When most of us use the term "universe" we mean it as the Oxford Dictionary defines it: "all existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos." Hawking however uses an equivocation. For him there is more then one universe. So when he says "universe" he does not mean "all existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos." As physicist Stephen Barr, writing in First Things, points out:

For physicists (as opposed to theologians and metaphysicians) the concept of the universe does not refer to “all there is” or the “totality of things.” It refers to a single, self-contained physical structure, comprising a “spacetime manifold” and particles and other things moving around in that spacetime.

... we need to keep in mind the special way in which physicists use the concept of “universe,” for these various universes are really features of a single overarching physical system—call it a “system of universes”.

The second terminological problem has to do with the word "nothing." Does Hawking actually mean "nothing" as the negation of "something"? Does he really mean the absence of any thing, as he must know most of us hear it when he uses the term? Barr again:

The answer is no. First of all, one isn’t starting from “nothing.” The “no-universe state” as meant in these speculative scenarios is not nothing, it is a very definite something: it is one particular quantum state among many of an intricate rule-governed system. This no-universe state has specific properties and potentialities defined by a system of mathematical laws.

Barr uses the analogy of a bank account with no money in it. It is itself empty: it has nothing in it. But the account itself exists, within the existing banking system. So in one sense you could say the account is "nothing" because it has nothing in it. It contains no value. But if, the next day, a thousand dollars is credited to the account, was it something from nothing? And if the bank account is "nothing," then how could it be there to receive the thousand dollars?

Obviously, therefore, the “nothing” that Hawking makes part of his theory of the creation of our universe is not nothing in a metaphysical sense. The “no-universe” of his speculations is like the “no-dollars” in my account. It exists within the framework of a complex overarching system with specific rules. So we can see that, if true, the way of thinking put forward by Hawking does not threaten the classical doctrine of creation out of nothing.

... the cosmological theories put forward by Hawking do not bear upon larger questions that motivate classical views of creation out of nothing. Non-scientists are quick to ask the obvious questions. Why a system obeying quantum mechanics, M-theory, superstring theory, or whatever laws of physics that make scientific speculations possible in the first place? Why not no system at all, with no laws at all, no anything, just blank non-being?

Physics, by its very nature, cannot answer these questions.

For Hawking to equivocate in his use of these terms in relation to how others outside physics use them is not necessarily a problem when he is talking to other physicists, but when he goes before the public and fails to note that he is using them in a different way, it would seem he bears some of the responsibility for the confusion that might ensue--and which, in fact, has ensued. And the problem is made worse when you consider that Hawking himself uses these terms in equivocal ways in his own books. In the excerpts that have been published of his new book, he uses the term one way, and in his book A Brief History of Time, he uses it in quite another.

In fact, Barr points out that Hawking himself once seemed to understand the limitations of physics and understood that, by its very nature, it cannot answer the questions he seems now to think it can, citing this quote from Hawking in Brief History of Time:

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.

I think Barr slightly overstates the case here. This quote comes from the conclusion of the book, where you can see the seeds of Hawking's confused view of physics and philosophy. There, Hawking does say that the "why" questions are the province of philosophers, but then he goes on to argue that because philosophers have not been able to keep up with the advances in science and mathematics, physicists--and everyone else--now get to answer philosophical questions. He says, "However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists." He then cites Wittgenstein as an example of a philosopher who limited philosophy to analyzing language rather than answering the big questions. "What a comedown," he says, "from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!"

"Traditionally these are questions for philosophy," says Hawking, "but philosophy is dead."

Huh? In what sense is philosophy "dead"? And how would Hawking know? The only way you could say that philosophy is "dead" is to say either that the questions it asks have been answered or that no one is trying to answer them anymore. But you can't say either. Hawking himself believes that the questions of philosophy are still unanswered, and thinks that physics can answer them. And anyone who thinks there is no one trying to answer them apparently haven't noticed that there are still quite a few philosophers around.

Actually, there is one more way that you can say philosophy is "dead," and it has to do with the philosopher Hawking mentions: Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein didn't "give up" on the big questions, as Hawking seems to imply. Wittgenstein didn't view the role of philosophy as answering the big questions. He believed that there were no big questions to answer--or rather that the big questions were a linguistic illusion. The big questions were simply a product of a linguistic misunderstanding. Once we understood language ("relieved our mental cramp," he called it), we would understand that the big questions were not really questions, and didn't therefore need to be answered.

In other words, many modern philosophers like Wittgenstein simply stopped engaging in philosophy and chose instead to engage in the analysis of language, calling it philosophy. This kind of analytic philosophy certainly dominated professional philosophy in the 20th century, but real philosophy has been reasserting itself for the last 50 years or so and is doing just fine, thank you, despite the declarations of its death by people like Hawking.

In fact, it is interesting that, in arguing that science had become "too technical and mathematical for philosophers," Hawking would cite Wittgenstein, since Wittgenstein would be one of the great counter-examples to his case. Wittgenstein was a formidable mathematician. In fact, he was a crucial influence on Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and much of his earlier work concerned the foundations of mathematics. His first three lectures at Cambridge when he was elected professor there (decades after, ironically, he had had a crucial part in founding the first great school of 20th century philosophy, logical positivism, and then single-handedly founding the second great school of 2oth century philosophy, ordinary language philosophy) were on mathematics.

And it doesn't help Hawking's case either to consider that there were philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead writing books exploring the fundamental ground of mathematics like the Principia. In fact, the single case of Whitehead is enough to throw much of Hawking's case against philosophy into doubt.

Whitehead, a mathematician who taught and wrote extensively on mathematics, physics, and the philosophy of science, and who was a Fellow of the Royal Society--and who, in fact, was sitting in the audience when the Astronomer Royal announced the results of the experiment on the solar eclipse that showed that light rays bent when they passed by the sun, as Einstein predicted--even articulated a rival theory to Einstein's relativity. It was not successful, but there isn't much of a question that he understand the major discoveries in physics of the 20th century--both relativity and quantum theory.

The question is not whether philosophers have kept up with physics and mathematics over the last 150 years: many of them have. The question is whether physicists like Hawking have kept up with events of 2500 years ago. The great Greek philosophers would have seen right through Hawking's idea that you can answer philosophical questions through the tools of something like modern science.

And this is indeed Hawking's project. Hawking clearly thinks that, when a complete theory of everything is found--the theory that Einstein searched for in vain, the "grand design of the universe," the "single theory that explains everything"--it will, despite the fact that it is still a theory of the physical world, be able to answer philosophical questions. He pointed his readers in this direction at the end of A Brief History of Time:

However, if we do discover a complete theory, ... then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.

Of course, we can all take part in that discussion already to the extent that we are all philosophers, albeit amateur ones. The question is, can we do it as scientists. He recapitulates the current situation in his new book:

Over twenty years ago I wrote A Brief History of Time, to try to explain where the universe came from, and where it is going. But that book left some important questions unanswered. Why is there a universe--why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why are the laws of nature what they are? Did the universe need a designer and creator?

It was Einstein’s dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein’s day hadn’t made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a realistic goal. And by the time I had begun writing A Brief History of Time, there were still several key advances that had not yet been made that would prevent us from fulfilling Einstein’s dream. But in recent years the development of M-theory, the top-down approach to cosmology, and new observations such as those made by satellites like NASA’s COBE and WMAP, have brought us closer than ever to that single theory, and to being able to answer those deepest of questions. [Emphasis added]

Now one important thing to note here is that he still doesn't claim, as media reports indicate he has--that we have such a theory yet. He only claims we are closer to such a theory. But it is the claim that such findings bear on the big question--which presupposes that it is even possible to gain the answers to philosophical questions through science--that should be (and really is) at the core of the debate. The question isn't whether God is out of a job. The question is whether science could ever even conceivably prove such a thing.

If it can't, if it is by it's nature unsuited to answer such questions, then the fact that we are "closer than ever" to a unified theory of the physical world (the entire thing, not just whichever universe we happen to inhabit) gets us no closer at all to answering these nonscientific, philosophical questions. If it can't answer these questions, then all the attention Hawking is getting to his new book--which contains ideas that are apparently not that new at all ("The idea that Hawking is now touting is not new—in fact, within the fast-moving world of modern physics it is fairly old."--Barr)--is the result not of anything warranting the attention, but simply of hype.

There are plenty of scientists who want to exclude certain views because they fall outside the realm of what they consider science. Religion is a good example of this. They relegate these things (like God) to the meaningless or irrelevant--even though the most they can logically say about them is that they are nonscientific. They want the right to exclude things from the meaningful, but there are others, like Hawking, who want the right to appropriate the nonscientific into the realm of the scientific if it suits their purposes. Answering the "why" questions of philosophy are a perfect example of this.

In one moment, they will say that "why" questions are irrelevant or meaningless because they are not scientific, and in the next moment they are saying--as Hawking now says--they can answer the "why" questions scientifically--that somehow if you can accumulate enough answers to the "what" or the "how" questions, you have the answer to a "why" question. But you can have all the answers to "what" or "how" questions you like, and they will never amount to the answer to a "why" question. It would be like saying you had accumulated enough dogs to amount to a tree, or that you had finally grown enough grass in your yard to constitute a cat.

Sir James Jeans, in his book Physics and Philosophy, pointed out:

The tools of science are observation and experiment; the tools of philosophy are discussion and contemplation. It is still for science to discover the patterns of events, and for philosophy to try to interpret it when found.

Jeans identified three differences between physics and philosophy: differences of language, differences of idiom, and differences in method. They are different, and the difference makes a difference. Science can't refute philosophical ideas; it can only refute other scientific ideas--as his has done time and again and will doubtless continue to do.

It's the kind of thing you would think a smart guy like Hawking would know.

Deepak Chopra: Stephen Hawking validates "everything I knew..."

Deepak Chopra, the New Age guru who engages in physical and emotional healing through meditation, was on Larry King Live last night with the coauthor of Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, in which the celebrity physicist argues that God is no longer needed to explain the universe:

I found it validating everything I knew from my own experience of wisdom traditions and perennial philosophies ... It's validated everything...

Deepak Chopra and Stephen Hawking. The universe is now in balance.

Would it be bad to be marooned on a desert island if you had all your books?

Living in Tahiti in a house filled with books. That must be what Heaven is like.

William Zinsser, at the American Scholar, writes about having visited James Norman Hall's widow in Tahiti. Hall and Charles Nordhoff had written numerous books of adventure in the South Seas, most notably Mutiny on the Bounty. Zinsser describes Hall's library, which Sarah, his widow, kept after his death, and wonders what will be the consequence for such things in the digital age:

Today I sometimes think of that library, assembled on a faraway speck of land by an American boy from Colfax, Iowa (population 1,749), because no such library will ever be assembled again. The world’s knowledge has been digitized, its literature is fast being Kindled. Does any architect still design a house with a “library”? Does any interior decorator advise a client to decorate a wall with bookshelves? Does any carpenter remember how to build a bookcase?

Book-lined rooms were part of our shared domestic landscape. To walk into a house with books was an unspoken promise of conversation that would jump beyond the events of the day. Brightly colored book jackets, waving for attention, were also good companions, a linear museum of handsome typography and graphic design through the decades.

Read the rest here.

If you're going to be Hawking a theory of the origin on the universe, you better do it right

The New York Times reviews Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design:

The real news about “The Grand Design,” however, isn’t Mr. Hawking’s supposed jettisoning of God, information that will surprise no one who has followed his work closely. The real news about “The Grand Design” is how disappointingly tinny and inelegant it is. The spare and earnest voice that Mr. Hawking employed with such appeal in “A Brief History of Time” has been replaced here by one that is alternately condescending, as if he were Mr. Rogers explaining rain clouds to toddlers, and impenetrable.

Read the rest here.

Is Stephen Hawkings argument against creation more valid in any of the other dimensions?

Pierre-Simon Laplace is reputed to have told Napoleon, after the emperor asked why he had not mentioned God in one of his scientific treatises, "I had no need of that hypothesis." Celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking is now being lauded by anti-religious scientists for saying basically the same thing. In a new article in the Wall Street Journal (excerpted from his book released today) Hawking says that it is possible to explain the beginning of the universe without God having created it.

But in order to do this there is a hypothesis Hawking does need: that there are multiple universes.

The argument in Hawking's article is far from lucid, and one assumes that the argument in his book is couched in clearer terms, but he seems to argue that if you assume certain cosmological theories, then we don't need God to explain how the universe got here, since these theories would account for it. We don't need God to explain the universe because we can explain it without God.

But exactly how is this to be done?

No one except physicists should do anything but fear to tread on matters as mathematically complicated as what Hawking only hints at in the Journal article. But he is offering his argument in public, in an organ of opinion directed at the intelligent non-scientific laymen, and therefore we should expect that he has an argument understandable to the public to make.

So let's try to make sense of this--and by the way, I'm perfectly open to correction on this, but it will have to come from someone who states the argument better than Hawking.

As best one can tell, Hawking seems to argue that if you assume there are multiple other universes than our own, then an explanation of how the universe got here without God is possible. And if there is a possible explanation of how the universe got here without God, then we need not bother about God.

What Hawking never explains is why the theory that there are multiple universes is any more rational an explanation than that God created the universe. Nor does he explain why one possibility necessarily excludes the other.

Let's grant him for the sake of argument that multiverse theory is a possible explanation. Why is it a better explanation than the God hypothesis, if the God hypothesis is also a possible explanation? Why choose the former over the latter? John Lennox makes somewhat the same point:

He asks us to choose between God and the laws of physics, as if they were necessarily in mutual conflict.

But contrary to what Hawking claims, physical laws can never provide a complete explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions.

What Hawking appears to have done is to confuse law with agency. His call on us to choose between God and physics is a bit like someone demanding that we choose between aeronautical engineer Sir Frank Whittle and the laws of physics to explain the jet engine.

In other circumstances we could invoke Occam's Razor, a popular scientific principle: that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." The principle is stated more simply as the idea that the simplest theory is the best one. But if you want to make the argument that multiverse theory is more simple than the God hypothesis, then you're going to have to explain why the God hypothesis is simple enough to be readily understandable to the general public, whereas multiverse theory is so complicated that only trained physicists seem to really understand it--and even that is somewhat questionable, since it would require an understanding of multiverse theory to verify whether anyone else does, in fact, properly understands it.

So the first problem with Hawking's conclusion--that God is not required to explain the universe--is that Hawking so far is having a hard time explaining himself. If Hawking is going to convince the rest of us that he can explain the universe, then he should at least be able to explain the theories he says explain the universe, and he hasn't sufficiently done that yet (at least not in the public pronouncements he has so far made. Maybe the book can accomplish this).

The second problem is that, as we have said, there are a lot of questions about whether multiverse theory is any less fantastic than the God theory. As another physicist, Paul Davies, points out:

The multiverse comes with a lot of baggage, such as an overarching space and time to host all those bangs, a universe-generating mechanism to trigger them, physical fields to populate the universes with material stuff, and a selection of forces to make things happen. Cosmologists embrace these features by envisaging sweeping "meta-laws" that pervade the multiverse and spawn specific bylaws on a universe-by-universe basis. The meta-laws themselves remain unexplained – eternal, immutable transcendent entities that just happen to exist and must simply be accepted as given. In that respect the meta-laws have a similar status to an unexplained transcendent god.

The third problem is the status of multiverse theory as science. In fact, all of the things we are told science should do--be observable, testable, and have predictive power--are absent to a large degree from multiverse theory. In other words, there not only a questions at to whether this scientific theory can explain God away, but there is a debate about whether the theory is even scientific. Once all the purported advantages of science are no long possessed by a scientific theory, then why are we to prefer the scientific theory of the origin of things any better than the religious theory of the origin of things?

Writing before the Hawking comments made the news, Adam Frank, an astrophysicist and science journalist pointed out:

The core problem is that, as of this writing, there is no experimental evidence that hidden dimensions or alternate universe exist. Proponents will justifiably point to the rich theoretical insights that a field like String Theory has provided. They also rightly argue that Einstein's relativity seemed overly mathematical and abstract when it was first introduced and took time before people figured out how to test its veracity. These are valid points but it seems to me there is more at work here than simply technical abstraction. There is an unspoken metaphysics in the new theories that manifests itself as shift in the focus of science. That shift needs to be brought out in the open as part of the debate lest we end up in a very dead end. As Unger says "When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain."

I think I would have to agree. There might, indeed, be a multiverse and I like alternative universes as much as the next science fiction groupie. But I wonder how long we should wait before a field yields real, experimentally verifiable fruit. It may well be that String Theory's hidden dimension's are real. Still how much effort do we put into explorations based on the potentially unobservable while shifting away from the tradition of exploring only the actual? More importantly what do we make of the ontological status of theories that need what might be permanently hidden to explain what is always visible?

What happened to all the pro-science putties who jump your case about your religious beliefs because they are not falsifiable? Stephen Hawking has to merely hiccup, and they all go scurrying away.

In fact, the whole way in which these kinds of theories are used brings up important questions. If you read around a bit on this, what you find is that you have scientists concocting an explanation of something, and simply concocting however many other logically prior assumptions it takes to make that explanation plausible. For example, Frank points out that one of the theories employed to explain quantum gravity was string theory. But, it turns only, string theory cannot do this in a world of only three dimensions. But it could be explained with an additional seven dimensions--ten in all. Do we therefore automatically accept that there are ten dimensions? What if string theory is just wrong? Then what happens to the dimensions that string theory required to explain quantum gravity? And at what point do the required assumptions become so preposterous that scientists simply decide to abandon string theory and wait for another explanation to come along?

Or maybe just accept--at least on a tentative basis--the Oldest Theory about how the universe got here?

Physics comes to its conclusion largely through mathematical abstraction, and it may be for reasons like above that Einstein said in 1921, "Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality."

It isn't as if no one has tried to explain Hawking's thesis. Sean Carroll has taken a stab at it. "You don't need to go outside the universe to explain the universe," He says:

You could imagine an understanding of the universe--why it came into existence--without ever leaving the laws of nature--without ever invoking some divine, some supernatural being. The universe could just obey its own laws. It could be a natural, physical, real universe, obeying the laws of physics, and that can be a complete explanation of everything.

Well, the first and perhaps most obvious point is that just because you can imagine something does not make it true. You would think that would go without saying in a scientific discussion, but such is the allure of atheism.

Furthermore, if you invoke natural laws to explain the universe and then, based on your assumptions about those laws, start doing your atheist end zone dance celebrating your victory in explaining the universe, exactly how long does it take for you to realize that those laws themselves require an explanation?

The point apparently never occurred to Carroll. In fact, he goes further than Hawking seems himself to go: "The question 'Why is there something rather than nothing," he says, "has been answered."

It has? How exactly do you answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing by simply pointing to the something? C. S. Lewis once asked how someone, simply on the basis of studying nature, can say anything about what is beyond nature.

In fact, we seem to have here the perennial problem here of scientists making forays into philosophy without any actual expertise. The question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is simply not a scientific question.

It's a bad mistake to make, since science and philosophy are two entirely different universes.

Darwinism of the Gaps: Is Hausergate evidence that bad science is heritable?

Evolutionary psychologists will now have to be moved down to a lower branch on the credibility tree thanks to a scandal involving a Harvard professor famous for his research purporting to show that morality is merely a "survival instinct" that has developed over a long period of human evolution. Marc Hauser, the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, was found by a professional conduct committee of "scientific misconduct" for falsifying data that supported his thesis.

The penchant for trying to explain every human characteristic according to the Darwinian theory is something that has gotten too little attention. When theists try to explain something they don't think science explains, they are accused of engaging in the "God of the Gaps" thinking. What no one seems to have noticed, however, is the reverse tendency: "Darwinism of the Gaps."

Darwinism of the Gaps is the tendency to try to explain any area of human behavior they think theism shouldn't be able to explain by supplying a Darwinian or genetic explanation that, no matter how unlikely or counter-intuitive, is to be preferred over the religious explanation--even if the religious explanation is perfectly reasonable.

Morality, which makes perfect sense according to theism, is just one of these things to be explained by Darwinism, and the criteria these explanations are required to meet seems to be uniformly low. In fact, the only operative criterion seems to be that they exclude the theistic hypothesis.

Even though the scandal has caused a lot of fur to fly among the scientific community, one has to wonder why. What is wrong with falsifying data? Particularly when the whole point of the data which Mr. Hauser falsified was to show that nothing can truly be said to be wrong.

And where does this Harvard committee get off wagging their institutional finger at someone like Hauser? I mean, how long have they been around anyway? Maybe they just haven't been around long enough to have evolved the appropriate moral respect for the falsification of data.

According a Wall Street Journal exposé on the issue, this isn't the first time evolutionary psychology has had to be given time out:

Not so long ago, the initial bloom already was off evolutionary psychology. The field earned a bad name by appearing to justify all sorts of nasty, rapacious behaviors, including rape, as successful strategies for Darwinian competition. But the second wave of the discipline solved that PR problem by discovering that evolution favored those with a more progressive outlook. Mr. Hauser has been among those positing that our ancestors survived not by being ruthlessly selfish, but by cooperating, a legacy ingrained in our moral intuitions.

It is one of the ironies of modern scientific thought that that those most convinced that we got here through a process of the Survival of the Fittest, a process involving competition, would have become so enamored of a theory that posits the Survival of the Nicest, a process involving cooperation.

It's a testimony to the fervor with which they hold to their theory that they would cling to two completely contradictory theses in order to maintain the Darwinian Faith. The irony is particularly marked given the additional Darwinist tendency to accuse those of other faiths of being irrational.

Then again, maybe the penchant for offering contradictory explanations for the positions you hold is an evolved trait which favors the survival of Darwinists.

It's hard to tell.

Should they ban Jeffrey Shallit for bone-headedness?

Jeffrey Shallit at Recursivity complains that he was banned at Doug Groothius' site for being "pugnacious" in making the following comment on a passage Grootius quoted from C. S. Lewis:

Lewis didn't know anything about evolution. He didn't understand that what he called "morality" is a fact about human evolution; that we are programmed by evolution and culture to regard certain behaviors of others as acceptable and other behaviors as less so. Once this is understood, Lewis's confusion simply vanishes.

I don't see what's pugnacious about it. On the other hand, maybe Groothius also has a policy against bone-headedness, in which case I could see how this might violate the policy.

How does Shallit know that Lewis knew nothing about evolution? Has he read Lewis's books to determine this? That can't be, since no one who has read Lewis's books could say such a ridiculous thing about morality.

But Lewis's statements about evolution were tempered with caution on the grounds that he wasn't a scientist. Shallit clearly has no interest in the similar caution about making forays into philosophy, where he clearly is out of his water.

He did, however, pen this poem:

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

In other words, Evolution (Lewis wryly capitalizes the word to indicate the religious fervor characteristic of its adherents) may be the thing that has brought about the complexity of things, but, by the admission of its own supporters, it has, by its very nature, no teleological principles, and therefore cannot be said to "progress," since progress, by definition, is the continuous movement toward some end.

Shallit, of course, thinks just such a thing.

Shallit is a computer scientist. And to someone who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The only question is why Shallit, who thinks morality is just behavior that has been "programmed" into us by evolution and culture, should have any moral objection to Groothius banning him from his blog.

Is it wrong? So what? Some of us have just broken out of Shallit's programmatic moral matrix. Once we have done that, he can have absolutely nothing to say.

And saying nothing would have made a whole lot more sense than what he did say.

The Devil's music as a means of worship?

Philosopher James Chastek relates an interesting anecdote about Jerry Lee Lewis having been kicked out of a Bible college for playing rock music. "He played a concert one night and":

The next morning, the dean of the school called both Lewis and Green [the MC of the concert- ed.] into his office to expel them both. Lewis said that Green shouldn’t be expelled because “he didn’t know what I was going to do.” Years later Green asked Lewis: “Are you still playing the devil’s music?” Lewis replied “Yes, I am. But you know it’s strange, the same music that they kicked me out of school for is the same kind of music they play in their churches today. The difference is, I know I am playing for the devil and they don’t.”

Goodness gracious. Read the rest here.

Family Foundation granted intervention in expanded gambling case

For Immediate Release
September 1, 2010

LEXINGTON, KY—An effort by Kentucky horse racing tracks to convince a judge to give them the okay to expand gambling by bringing slot-like "Instant Racing" machines to their tracks got a little more complicated today when The Family Foundation succeeded in entering the case. "This will give us a chance to make sure that both sides are presented in this case," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Foundation, of the judge's decision.

Franklin Circuit Court Judge Thomas Wingate made the ruling after listening to the arguments of The Family Foundation's attorney, Stan Cave, who faced a seeming army of lawyers representing various horse racing tracks and several state agencies, all of whom are trying to convince the court to give them his stamp of approval to expand gambling through Instant Racing. Cave convinced the judge to go ahead with his order to allow the intervention.

One of the points of contention was whether The Family Foundation would be allowed to engage in a legal process called "discovery," which would allow The Family Foundation to review documents from and to ask questions of those advocating Instant Racing. Attorneys for the state and the race tracks opposed allowing The Family Foundation to do that. Cave responded by pointing out that The Family Foundation had a right under the law to conduct pre-trial discovery from the proponents of Instant Racing and, to deprive it of that right, was to “tie its hands,” putting it at a disadvantage in the case.

"The horse tracks and the state are opposed to the discovery process," said Cothran, "which makes us wonder what they don't want discovered."

The family advocacy group had maintained that Instant Racing advocates were trying to use the court for political purposes and that the case was one-sided, since the only party was the race tracks. "The advocates of expanded gambling were the only horse in the race," said Cothran. "We consider it an important victory to have been allowed to intervene."

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