Wow, but this is awful. Don’t watch it unless you’re feeling masochistic.
It’s a snotty, arrogant punk kid filmed in annoying style claiming that he has disproven atheism and that all science is based on theology. I think he might be something like a freshman philosophy major who has just discovered the problem of induction.
The problem of induction is a real one, all right; we can’t logically support one of the fundamental tools of science, the idea of making general inferences from specific observations. You might think, well, it’s worked so far and we’ve got all these successful instances of science deriving useful principles from data, but that’s an example of inductive reasoning itself, and you’re trying to demonstrate that that kind of reasoning is valid, so you can’t use induction to prove induction. It’s an interesting philosophical problem, it has more or less stumped greater thinkers than me for hundreds of years, and no, I sure don’t have an answer.
One reason that the video is so awful is that here is this hugely difficult problem, and snotty punk kid is offering ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS for a solution. Uh, right. Imagine, I’m sitting here with the solution to a well-known thorny and fundamental problem in philosophy … and I’ve just been waiting for an arrogant Christian to offer me one week’s pay to publish it. Did you know I also have the protein folding problem solved, and I’ll publish it as soon as the church down the street gives me a plate of cookies? Here’s a greater inducement: publish your solution to the problem of induction right here in the comments, and I guarantee that you’ll be able to stop by any philosophy department at any university in the world and the faculty will line up to buy you a beer. That will add up, you know.
The acclaim as a philosophical god among scholars might also be worth something.
The other reason it is annoying is that the snotty punk kid is babbling out some rather fatuous logic of his own; he’s demanding that others accomplish an extremely sophisticated philosophical task, while exhibiting no awareness of his own inane reasoning and unexamined epistemology. One general assumption of scientific induction is that we live in a lawful universe (an assumption that we cannot demonstrate inductively, as already said). What young master Snottypunk does to get around the problem for himself is to declare by simple fiat that he has a different assumption, that there is a divine lawgiver, who enforces the lawfulness of the universe, and that the source of his information is the book of Genesis.
It’s a cheat. He has absolutely no logical, philosophical justification for this divine precondition he has pulled out of his butt, but then he turns around and thinks that he’s got atheists over a barrel and demands that they justify the use of induction without Jesus. What? Why can’t I just invent an accidentally linear seam in the fabric of the 18th dimension that imposes regularity in our dimension by subspace resonance? It’s total nonsense, but it’s a justification that’s on a par with waving your hands over an ancient Hebrew sky-god. How about if I pretend there is a subatomic particle (or maybe a sub-quantum force; does it matter?) called the Regulon that compels lawful behavior in other particles/forces. Again, it’s pseudoscientific magical BS, but it’s as good as Snottypunk’s excuse. I know! A variant on the anthropic principle—the universe is lawful, because if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to speculate about why induction seems to work.
I don’t think any of my explanations will convince any philosopher anywhere to buy me even a single beer, but oh, well.
The challenge this kid is offering is a pretentious joke. He has even less of a philosophy background than I do—he’s got a bachelor’s degree in religious studies, and he’s a typical Texas son of Republican privilege, full of himself and stuffed to the snoot with unquestioned arrogance. His name is Kelly Tripplehorn, and I thought I’d heard of him before … and I have. Behold the deep thoughts of Mr Tripplehorn.
You know, even if you do solve the problem of induction, I wouldn’t trust that pompous weasel to cough up. At least I’ll buy you that beer, though, so don’t hold back.
A thousand dollars is kind of paltry, and I don’t like beer. Now if someone was offering a pony….
Do you think I can get $1,000 for “We take induction to be axiomatic, so that we can get interesting work done”?
Deal. You give us the solution to the problem of induction, and we’ll pass the hat around here and come up with enough cash to buy abeja a pony.
I hope I don’t have to get into a bidding war with the real philosophers at scienceblogs over this…
No, and no ponies for that, either.
Saying Zeus is the source of all regularity also isn’t acceptable.
I’m only a philosopher in training, but I’ll buy you a beer to hear your solution to the problem of induction. Hell, I’ll buy you dinner just to thank you for fighting the good fight. I’d say you’re on the side of the angels, but that seems somehow wrong.
What a tool! It’s like he read the premise behind Karl Popper’s philosophy, but didn’t bother to read the suggested resolutions to the problems. The uniformity of nature is not a stumbling block of any sort. To the pragmatist, the uncertainty involved in an induction is handled with the requirement that assertions be made falsifiable. To the positivist, the problem is one that is so small as to be dismissed out of hand. Wittgenstein once noted that the world must be stable to a certain degree, as evidenced by our ability to count. Rescher noted that the evident cognitive systemizability of the world necessitates an ontological stability.
In either case, we don’t need to invoke a creator to account for the stability of natural laws. We need only invoke our ability to think — that is evidence enough that the universe is stable enough to admit some kind of reasonable description.
Incidentially, that fork did not fall at exactly 9.78m/s^2, and for any number of reasons. For starters, that’s because 9.8m/s^2 is an acceleration, not a velocity (watch your units, chucklehead). For another, the Earth’s gravity is not uniform. Varying density in the crust beneath your feet can cause measurable distortions in that kind of thing. The Pikes Peak batholith, for example, is massive enough that satellites have to adjust their orbits when passing near it. What kind of rock is this guy on that he can say he knows exactly how fast that thing is going to fall? For another thing, that’s a plastic fork. It has a large surface area without much mass. So, sure, the Earth’s gravity will try to make it accelerate at 9.8m/s^2, but the rate at which it falls is another question altogether.
And, by the way, we know his fork statement is wrong because of SCIENCE!
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of the problem of induction , which, however, this comment is not large enough to contain.
Well, we could also invoke Popper in this instance, who proposed essentially that the problem of induction was a non-problem because induction itself was a fictitious concept.
From my own view, I don’t see why there is an overarching problem of induction and not a corollary for deduction. The same logic applies. The validity of deduction cannot itself be deduced (i.e., it cannot recursively prove itself).
I take a Quinean view myself, which I understand to essentially be that neither inductive nor deductive logic are concrete, but provisional, tentative and subject to change with experience. Presupposing certain truths as axiomatic and immutable and then deducing conclusions from them is really more the domain of theology than science.
Isn’t the fact that we get useful, practical results from induction proof enough? It’s at least proof that it’s useful, just because we can’t figure out how we got from 1 to 2 strikes me as just a variation on Zeno’s paradox.
See, anyone can do navel gazing.
That’s the kind of kid who can piss away a family fortune in a couple of years, unless his parents were smart enough to tie it all up in a family trust that pays him an allowance.
-jcr
I think JJ’s comment is beer-worthy. Not pony-worthy, but a nice beer. Maybe a Chimay, because there’s a nice symmetry in celebrating the short-comings of the religious with one of their finest achievements.
After reading PZ, I decided not to watch the video. But I did go to the video on YouTube to see if there were any video responses. There were two (so far: AtheistPaladin and some philosophy major) and I watched them both. They both ripped him just as bad as PZ and both had ratings of 4-5 stars. Mr. “Tripplehorn‘s” rating: 1 star. Maybe there’s hope for YouTube yet.
I assume that since my fork has always fallen w/o supernatural intervention that it will always fall w/o supernatural intervention.
I don’t understand what Kelly Tripplehorn wants. What exactly must one do in order to get $ 1,000 dollars from him? On his company’s website, it says this:
“All you need to do in order to collect your $1,000 is get your non-theistic answer published (concerning your epistemological warrant for your inductive inference) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, under its heading The Problem of Induction.”
The Standford Encylopedia of Philosophy won’t be publishing anything under the heading The Problem of Induction. So, no one is going to be winning 1,000 dollars. But if Tripplehorn would write down exactly what he wants done, I might try to do what he is asking for. Does he write it down any place? Or is there any place in the video when he says exactly what he wants?
I’ll gladly send Tripplehorn $100 if he promises to use it to buy a tripod (and a tie!). That motion-sickness camera shot really only belongs in a Serious Documentary, and any random moody TV cop show.
You can either take it to its logical conclusion (ala Hume), or turn to pragmatism/instrumentalism.
I’m not masochistic enough to watch the video, but these things usually boil down to unrealistic notions of what it means to “prove” something in the real world.
The central problem of philosophy since Thales has been to reconcile mathematical certainty with an empirical world. The mathematical notion of proof was one of the great leaps forward in imagination, perhaps even as a singular event. It also led philosophers on what must be the longest wild octopus chase in history.
Uh, I think the real reason why this Christian moron was fired was because he was stealing all of the markers out of the supply closet to sniff them.
Smug git.
He’s so sure that he’s backed science into a corner.
Anyway, doesn’t he know that there aren’t any true atheists left now that the ‘atheist’s worst nightmare’ (aka the banana) has convinced every last one of us to accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior?
Oh, but hey, it wasn’t so bad for him, poor Kelly, that affair with the unfortunate email. It made him become born again!
http://i53network.org/Home_Page.html
George Berkeley came up with a much better version of this argument a couple of hundred years ago… If God’s not a liar, then induction is justified, because our perceptions are signs that stand for other signs. (Fire is a sign of heat: God’s promise that if you stick your hand in you’ll get burned.)
I guess the biggest problem with it remains the same, even with the haphazard presentation: it offers a very contentious postulate (the existence of a God who is no liar) to justify a much less contentious one (induction can give us some (imperfect) knowledge about how the future will go.)
Congratuations, kiddo. I recommend you not send this video along with your application if you’re trying to get into a graduate program in philosophy.
Tripplehorn says (1:53) “while induction certainly does not prove God, much less Christianity, it does though disprove nontheism.” Hmm. I’m pretty sure that the disproof of nontheism might require some kind of god as a counterexample. Perhaps this boy is just too clever for me and has found a way around the excluded middle, or Tripplehorn knows of some “third way” between God and non-God. Cool.
I have to admit that Tripplehorn has neatly solved one type of induction problem: He has mastered the skill of inducing nausea. (No doubt his former girlfriend had previously detected this skill of his.)
What happens if I try to invoke Eris as the source of the stability of natural laws?
OK, I’m game — I’m no longer a working scientist (experimental particle astrophysics — try saying that at a party!) — but I am a science teacher (high school physics).
As I say to my students, the beauty of science is that it doesn’t make any assumptions. We need not assume that nature is uniform. In fact, probably the most exciting thing that can happen to a physicist is if a fork suddenly flies straight up — that gives us something to try and figure out. Science will do with a flying fork exactly the same thing it does with a falling fork — attempt to explain it and fit it into a framework. If the framework isn’t known, perfect — full employment forever! If it can be proven that such a framework doesn’t exist (as with the proofs that local hidden variables are inconsistent with what we observe in quantum mechanics), great — we’ve got at least the beginnings of a framework.
But we still have to answer the question — does science require a framework? No, not at all. Science does not, can not, and never will offer truth. Science can only offer humankinds best approximation of the truth of the physical world. Since we acknowledge already, at the very start, that science has no truth, we need not worry about why it has not proven truth.
Science is but a bunch of sticks put together by humans that allow us to reach a little bit further into the air. To say that this edifice is not built on bedrock is ridiculous, since that is plain to all who look. You might as well criticize water for being wet.
But here, I can just sense the rebuttal — why then do scientists say that some ideas, some people, are just plain wrong? I had a student’s mother complain about how something’s wrong with scientists — if they are so open minded, why can’t they acknowledge the possiblity that biblical creation really happened?
The answer, of course is that while science
doesn’t know everything, it does know something. It knows that there is a framework (evolution, both cosmic and biological) that explains just about everything we have observed, and makes predictions that point out more possibilities. Creation, on the other hand, creates a framework that conflicts with many observed facts, and predicts nothing more. While evolution may be wrong (and I’m sure that it is, in niggling details here and there), creation is most definitly wrong.
Oh, and the other reason scientists get snappy when somebody asks them to admit the possibility of biblical creation? Because we are damn tired of hearing and rejecting the same old tired arguments from people that don’t listen to ours.
(Sorry I didn’t focus on more of the philosophical jargon, but damn it, I’m a working teacher / was a working scientist — I don’t have time to learn a new language.)
Damn, I totally missed that, Zeno! This kid has been chatting up Graham Priest! Or…
Wait…
Is this Alvin Plantinga with a snot-nosed-kid mask?
I guess there are two versions of this video on YouTube and I came across this almost beautiful response earlier in the day.
spudbeach,
You really do need something like a principle of uniformity of nature in order to even engage in scientific enquiry. Without it, upon seeing a fork fly straight up, all you’d have is another event that wouldn’t necessarily tell you anything about anything but that very event.
If you’re interested in the problem of induction, Bernecker and Dretske’s book “Knowledge” has a few good readings, including my favorite, Reichenbach’s pragmatic justification of induction. (Basically: we have an interest in predicting the future. If any method will allow us to do this, induction will, because if any other method worked (tea-leaves, chicken entrails, even counter-induction), we would be able to induct on it.)
Wow! If only this punk were my Philosophy of Induction professor. Imagine how that class would go.
I’m not sure the problem of induction is a real problem myself, but I won’t get into that here. If it were a real problem, however, it’s of obvious note that theism doesn’t solve it. After all, where do religious “truths” come from? “Divine revelations.” And how do we distinguish “divine revelations” from run of the mill hallucinations? By induction, of course — a theist will tell you that certain revelations are so amazing that it is UNLIKELY to be hallucination. That’s an induction. Theism is based on induction itself, so of course it is nonsense to turn it around and say induction is based on theism. If that were philosophically acceptable, we might as well cut out the theism middle-man and say induction is self-justified.
Ah, dang. That last “student” should be “punk”. Well, I imagine y’all got the gist of it.
Induction is a great topic for philosophy– but less so for religion. ‘Goddidit’ doesn’t work any better on this gap than it does on others. There are a couple of constructive responses that haven’t yet wound up in the trash– one elegant line is to throw the challenge back at Hume: He essentially criticized induction for failing to be deductive. But inductive reasoning may be deductive after all, once we have adopted the right view of just what the reasoning involves: If the conclusion (after seeing so many green emeralds) is not ‘all emeralds are green’ but ‘it’s rational to accept (for now) that all emeralds are green’, and we have an account of rational acceptance (including a characterization of the relevant epistemic goals) that supports this conclusion, then the practical decision to accept the inductively supported conclusion is perfectly justified as the conclusion (practical result if you prefer) of a practical syllogism… W. Sellars’ Induction as Vindication (a tough read) adopts a form of this approach that I particularly like, but there are others exploring this kind of line.
Perhaps physics isn’t the centerpiece of his presentation, but given that he apparently doesn’t know the difference between velocity and acceleration (he thinks objects “fall toward the ground at 9.78 meters per second squared”), I’m not sure how much trust I should put in his dissertation about “modern science.”
Then there’s the fact that Mr. Tripplehorn’s a twittering tool. Since this clip involves him talking out of his asshole from begining to end, modern science and the uniformity of toolery imply that everything he’s ever said has been both conceived behind and expelled from his asshole, and that this pattern will hold as long as he owns an asshole and produces videos. By God.
Wow – from Reins post:
http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/tripplehorn.asp
This kid made snopes! He’s like DaveScot Junior!
He needs to go back to the harassment. He was better at it.
I live in the eternal now, where the present always resembles the present, so the problems of induction don’t concern me.
Serious question here:
Doesn’t the problem of induction sort of fall away once Einstein figured out that time is part of the fabric of the universe, and that physical laws don’t happen *in” time, but rather time is merely an aspect of those laws? I find it rather meaningless to say that we can’t supposed the laws of the past are the same as the laws of the future, since time itself is one of those very laws.
Spud, I think that science needs some kind of stability. The pragmatist Rescher says:
Now, of course you would be right to look for a reason for that fork to fly off of the table. The reason you would look in the first place is that you would judge it, based on your long experience of a stable world, to be peculiar and in need of an explanation. You would also expect, by that very stability, an explanation to exist.
Beyond a certain degree of stability, though, I don’t think anything else is required — certainly not the absolute stability our sweaty armchair philosopher in the video seems to want. That the world will probably be mostly the same is enough. Yeah, the kid doesn’t think so and flounders around with a probability argument for a bit, but look: the functionality of probability necessitates a certain degree of uniformity. Probability seems to work. Thus, the universe is very probably stable, and will very probably remain that way. That’s all science needs.
What is, “If you cannot dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bullshit ?”
No I am sorry, it was, “Get your parents to ruin their lives with a few quick phone calls”
Dennis:
Why should I require a belief that I will be able to explain events and connect them? That’s like saying that I have to have a belief in a car before I can make a wheel. Why can’t I just do my best, in the hope that it will be useful, but without any certain knowledge or even belief that it will?
Perhaps our difference of opinion lies in what we think science is. I think of science as a human endeavor that has proven to be useful and fun in the past, and that may prove to be useful in the future. Humans can do all sorts of things for any reason or no reason at all.
Now, to take the results of that endeavor and label it science and endow it with authority is, in my book, going to far. To give science a “seal of approval” would require that we do things like assume that there is uniformity, and that scientific laws will be the same today as they are tomorrow, and the same there as they are here. I’m not willing to take that step. I merely claim that science is fun and potentially useful. If others want to take say “there is no way that bridge could fall down”, I just reply “at least according to our understanding of the universe”, and let it be just one more test.
(P.S.: I feel like we’re both on the same side here, and should be enjoying this discussion over a pint somewhere. If PZ is buying, I’m there!)
I came up with an airtight solution to The Problem of Induction, but then on a whim, God decided to make things different, and he turned my solution into a grasshopper. Goddammit!
Uh… the kid’s a Presuppositionalist. The argument he’s giving is essentially the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (TAG). There’s no making sense with these people.
“Uh… the kid’s a Presuppositionalist.”
Are you assuming this? Or do you know the guy?
Oh, and induction is basically used as an expression of statistics, as science itself is an expression of the same…
I don’t see any problem with induction. It’s just something you give philosophers to keep them busy while scientists get on with the business of trying to work out what make the Universe tick.
No. General Relativity is a scientific theory like any other. It is constantly being put to the test. Just because it’s predictions have held up to experimental testing every time so far doesn’t mean that GR won’t fail tomorrow. You still need induction.
I think all of you are missing the obvious here. The principle of induction, in the literal sense he seems to be using, is false. This leads immediately to the following little syllogism: If (1) Christianity implies “induction”, and (2) “induction” is false, then Christianity must therefore be false!
See? All you need to do is use a little deductive logic and you have a tidy little disproof of Christianity.
A Proof of Induction?
Here’s your proof of induction. I’m a math major, not a philosopher, so I can’t speak for the stuff at the beginning and the end, but the math part in the middle checks out! Only problem is, it uses the Axiom of Choice, and that usually seems to introduce more questions than it answers, plus it’s a nonconstructive proof, so not all that practical when it comes to actually APPLYING it.
(‘Course, I’ve been known to say that math is a religion, so maybe this proof invokes Jesus after all!)
“You still need induction.”
Of course we need induction. But I don’t see how the *problem* of induction exists, since it seems to beg the question. The basic problem for induction is that we can’t simply assume that past conditions will persist in the future. But now we know that “past” and “future” are far more complex and subtle problems than Hume did. Past and future are mere properties of a closed system – they are the way we simply percieve the laws of the universe, just the same we we observe gravity or electromegnetism. Our conception of the universe actually requires that the future is the same as the past, because if not they wouldn’t mean what we think they do.
The opposite of uniformitarianism is illogical and contradicts the evidence.
If you can’t use logic to support the induction of science, doesn’t that indicate a problem with logic, not with science?
Why is logic presumed to be “superior” to empiricism? Given the well-known problems with axiomatic systems it seems like the reverse is true.
Maybe I am missing something other than my car keys, here. Has induction ever been used as a proof of anything? I can use it to make a reasonable assumption, and if further evidence is needed I can make a testable hypothesis out of that which I induce.
Long ago on the radio I heard (sorry Mr. Salem) an engineer claim that we could use the principle of uniformity to prove that an old earth, and thereby evolution, is impossible. “If you dig deeply enough.” said Mr. Engineer to the witless host, “you will find that the Sun is shrinking. Using the Law of Uniformity, simple math projects that the rate of the sun shrinking projected back in time would mean that only 400 million years ago the Sun would be as large as the Earth’s orbit. No life could possibly survive such conditions. Most people don’t know this, you know, you just have to know where to dig to get the facts.”
So, from my understanding of what he is claiming, he is laying a red herring in front of atheism. I don’t need induction to prove that they sun will rise in the morning, I can use it to make a prediction with a very high level of confidence. And I don’t need to believe in God to achieve that level of confidence.
So, my question is: Why don’t these guys take at least one class on statistical methodology or experimental design before they spout off with this stupid stuff?
Oh, and I am sure that we can look forward to a Senator Tripplehorn from the great state of Texas sometime in the next 20 years or so.
Sorry, this will be my last post here tonight.
First, spudbeach, you can say that’s how science is going, but then science isn’t a tool, it’s a game… and why should we be spending all this money/our lives on a game? No, science isn’t mere stamp-collecting of events and then seeking patterns after the fact. Prediction is the name of the game, and if there’s no reason to suppose we’re getting true predictions, then there’s no reason (other than shits and giggles) to engage in the enterprise of science.
Second, DamnYankees, you’re putting your cart before your horse. Einstein’s theory of relativity is based on inductive inferences from observed events, to which we applied a mathematical model that accounts for them. If induction weren’t justified, then all we’d have is an interesting model for describing past events, but we wouldn’t be able to draw any conclusions about what this might tell us about the future, or what it tells us about The Fundamental Structure of Reality(TM).
Induction can’t give you proof.
The discipline of statistics covers how much you should still rely on induction after you have counterexamples, and deals with having no counterexamples yet as a limiting case. Also, if you decide something by induction and you find that it’s right 99% of the time, but later it seems to be right more like 98% of the time, statistics gives you an estimate based on sample sizes whether the original estimate of 99% was right or whether things have changed.
There’s no question that induction is undependable, and statistics is concerned with just how undependable it is in particular cases.
We use unreliable induction because our best alternatives — believing things based on our esthetic judgement of how beautiful it would be if we were right, or on intuition unconnected with experience — are even less reliable.
Couldn’t help notice the “Cornelius van Til” at the beginning, and thus catch a stinky whiff of presuppositionalism. I make a guess that some readers of Pharyngula might not be familiar with such things (though I might well be wrong about that.)
Typically presupper debates go about like this (link to 51 page, 3 year old, but still hilarious thread on iidb.org):
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=87833
I don’t see why everyone is so hung up on the problem of induction. Deduction has the exact same problem. Try and prove deduction without begging the question! Hurf hurf durf~~
Susan, I didn’t find that paper to be particularly helpful. Mathematical induction is not the thing in question here, as that is highly empirical. Induction is an immediate consequence of the integers and, as the paper pointed out, if we assume the Well-Ordering Principle, we can extend the idea of mathematical induction to things other than the integers (that’s exactly where the Axiom of Choice was used — the author needed a well-ordering to establish an induction on sets other than the integers). I don’t regard that as a problem. Constructive proof is always better, but I don’t regard it as being necessary for the establishment of a result.
The problem is not the mathematics, but the use of the mathematics. As soon as we’re making recourse to mathematics, we’ve made the assumption that they’re giving a reasonable description of the system in question. That itself is making implicit appeal to the stability of the world around us. Not to mention that the highly idealized sets in that paper likely have little bearing to the real world.
Anyway, the point is that mathematical induction is a valid and provable procedure. It’s the bearing that it has to the real-world that is questionable.
I said:
I meant:
Dennis:
“[I]f there’s no reason to suppose we’re getting true predictions, then there’s no reason (other than shits and giggles) to engage in the enterprise of science.”
Two remarks:
1: I can’t think of a reason to study particle astrophysics other than shits and giggles. Absolutely, positively, no practical use.
2. “True” is not the same as “as good as we can”. We can never get truth, only our best approximation of the truth. Think of bayesian statistics — the true underlying parameters are forever unknown, but with enough data, we can bet better and better estimates. We need not require “truth” to be useful.
as a “quantum solipsist” I can only ask “who’s up for a
new game of African Dodger?”…
Rien:
Not quite correct. From Tripplehorn’s website
Obviously the “holy spirit” did not prevent him from writing his embarrassing e-mail on June 3, 2003.
Thus, if he was born again at all, he was born again as an arrogant, stupid, self-righteous moron who doesn’t accept responsibilities for his doing. And now he is blaming Jesus for his stupidity:
Let’s hope Jesus will break him down again. He already filed for non-profit status. Thus, there is a good chance for him to become Hovind II.
That’s some shocking, uhh, non-reasoning there. But everyone knows that. And the camera work – eeeek! But, for crying out loud, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?!
First of all, he’s kind of quote-mining the entry on induction, which can be found here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2006/entries/induction-problem/
(I don’t know how to do linkies, sorry).
The author of the entry (John Vickers) doesn’t conclude that induction is unjustifiable (and the section on the eeevil atheist Hume is only the second of seven sections). In fact, the last paragraph of the entry discusses what the author considers the most promising approaches: evolutionary and naturalised epistemology.
Secondly, the Stanford Encyclopedia isn’t in the business of conducting or adjudicating competitions for solving longstanding philosophical problems. It’s a project to create a comprehensive reference resource for advanced students and professionals in philosophy. Submissions for entries are generally only by invitation of the editors; unsolicited submission is only considered from professional philosophers who have published in the relevant field. Entries are supposed to be neutral, and provide a comprehensive overview of the topic.
(In any case, noone’s going to get very far emailing solutions to the Problem of Induction to the webmaster).
I get the feeling this guy does not comprehend much of what he is exposed to.
From the git’s website, looks like you can make considerably more than $1K
The i53 Network is prepared to give anyone $5,300 who can explain his non-Christian worldview without contradicting himself in the process. This task for the non-Christian is going to be an exceptionally difficult one since the Triune God has not created any alternative truths for the nonbeliever to use. Therefore, all non-Christians who argue for their nonexistent truth will inevitably find their belief structure and the objective truth at odds with one another
Since it’s impossible to win, I wonder why they don’t offer $53 million.
And apparently truth itself didn’t exist prior to 0AD. Weird.
Exactly. A deduction is only as good as the premises that went into it. The deduction will only have a bearing on the real world if those premises were true, in some sense. If we want to pull our deductions out of the world of axiomatics and mathematics, we need some way of judging those premises to be true. But they can’t be axioms anymore. So, they’re either deductions or inferences. Supposing they’re deductions, you just follow the trail of deductions all the way back to some primitives and OH NO — you have some assumptions. How, for example, is the deduction that, if all fires are hot, then putting my hand in a fire will result in a burn helpful or applicable unless that “all fires are hot” statement is somehow physically meaningful? In real life, away from the context of axiomatics, I have to induce, first, that all fires are hot before I can deduce that sticking my hand in one will burn me.
Applied deduction suffers from exactly the same problem as applied induction.
You see, the universe is like spaghetti. If you go to the store and buy a box of the stuff, you’ll see that all the strands are essentially the same as one another. If you shook the box up, you wouldn’t be able to keep track of any of them. Similarly, the different parts of the universe are essentially the same. Things that work in one part also work in another part, and this is true across both time and space. This truth is revealed to us when we are told that everything is touched by His Noodly Appendage. This means that everything is endowed with the properties of spaghetti, including the above consistency. Without His Noodly Goodness, induction would fail.
Hoo boy, where to start with this guy.
Where does the bible even state that God created the laws which govern the universe, much less that he made them immutable?
Plus the fact there’s an influential group that contends that the laws of physics don’t always hold — they’re called CHRISTIANS.
I love the high production values on the video. He’s just a little rich weasel spending Daddy’s money on his own pet stupidities. I can’t *imagine* how much this guy must’ve gotten beaten up in school.
Dustin @60:
Actually, it’s more than a problem with “applied” deduction – the problem of deduction is not really about knowing whether your premises are true. It’s about how you can prove that a given form of inference, for example Modus Ponens, is deductively valid.
How do I prove that, if “p” and “if p then q” are true, it’s impossible for “q” to be false? Any argument which references the equivalence and inference rules of a system (e.g., pointing out the Classical Logic equivalence of “if p then q” and “not-p or q” then using Disjunctive Syllogism) is question-begging. (How do we know that DS is a valid inference?) Perhaps we could use induction – all previous instances of MP have been valid. But that’s not satisfactory either.
There’s some really interesting philosophical literature on this. Damned if I can find any students who think it’s cool.
Perhaps this incident illustrates one of the differences between peer-reviewed journals and youtube.
Peer review is very effective at stopping people who have similar revelations from publishing them and making complete fools of themselves in public.
Youtube on the other hand appears to partly revolve around people making complete fools of themselves.
The problem of induction goes away when you consider the problem of non-induction. People tend to phrase non-induction as small variations on what’s currently true- “the fork might rise instead of falling”, but apparently forks, and we, otherwise continue to exist as usual. This isn’t non-induction, it’s partial induction; you’re assuming a regularity in the universe (“things will change, but not by much”) which leads you back to induction again.
If you really refuse induction, you have no reason to suppose that forks, or you, will exist in a moment’s time. Nor indeed that time will continue to pass. If you deny induction you have nothing.
You mean we’re still in the fishbowl.
I am a professionally trained logician and do some work as a logician, and I can tell from the first minute this guy doesn’t know jack-shit about deductive logic. First off he defines dedictive logic as reasoning from the general to the specific. This is manifestly false. There are many examples of deductive inferences that move from the specific to the general: “Hansen is a spy. Therefore there is a spy” and “My car is red. Therefore it’s red or blue” are obvious examples. There are also many examples in modal logic, which is also deductive. And the whole specific/general issue hardly arises in propositional logic, the most basic form of deductive logic.
Furthermore, this dude uses “assume” ambiguously. He uses it sometimes as a synonym for “infer” and other times to mean “take on as the basis for further reasoning”. Logicians use “assume” only in the latter sense.
Jennie, I still think it’s a problem of application. In a purely formal context, one wouldn’t even set out to prove the modus ponens of SL — it’s an axiom, isn’t it? I’m not sure the kinds of proofs of something like the disjunctive syllogism by way of the rules of SL would be question-begging — we’d just be appealing to the axioms we’d assumed. In a formal context, that’s no different from simply assuming ZFC or the axioms of Euclidean Geometry (well, I don’t think that Euclidean Geometry is a first-order logic, but they’re the same aside from that).
The problem comes from attempting to apply deduction to the world. That’s when we could call proof of DS by appeal to the inferential rules of SL question-begging.
Sparc #57: Aha, there seems to be a problem with causality here… among other problems.
Me be thinkin’ that many in here arguing about induction, do not know what the effin’ hell is meant by induction…
Whoops! You suggested using DS to establish modus ponens. That would most certainly be question-begging, since I’m pretty sure that you need to modus ponens to establish the disjunctive syllogism (which is not, as I remember, an axiom, but a derived rule in SL).
Still, I stand by my suggestion: As an axiom, the modus ponens is part and parcel of SL. From pure formalism, that’s not a problem at all — the problem creeps in when we try to apply it.
Dustin:
OK, yes, I see what you’re getting at.
As you say, within any logic system the inference rules are given.
The problem arises when we try to decide what inference rules should be built in if we are trying to model The One True Logic (or the One True Logic for a given purpose), or if we are applying an inference rule in our reasoning.
Disjunctive Syllogism, Addition, etc. are disputed as valid rules of inference precisely because some logicians think they are not always truth-preserving – hence the development of nonclassical logics. The question is then how we show that any rule is in fact deductively valid.
I feel like it would be far MORE likely for the fork to fly up if God did exist. After all, isn’t the reason God can perform miracles is that he’s unconstrained by the laws of nature? The laws of nature this tool says God made so that they NEVER change? Does that mean even God can’t/won’t change them? That’s a really really stupid argument. Oh, wait… all his arguments were stupid.
The problem with induction is solved if you don’t enlist in the first place.
Ok. Pay up.
mtraven, nitpicking, but the jackass in question mentions the “Triune God”, and that entity did not exist as dogma until centuries after 0 A.D.
Did anyone else notice that in his breakup letter to Michele, the smug git can’t even spell “hypocrite” correctly? The guy needs to get over himself big time!
The proof of induction is found in this xkcd cartoon.
I do not have the philosophical background address the problem of induction, but there were a few things that jumped out at me from this video (beyond the annoying MTVish camera work).
1) “This fork will fall at 9.78 m/s^2.” No. It will ACCELERATE at 9.78 m/s^2. Take the time to learn the difference between acceleration and velocity.
2) “All fire is hot, therefore that fire is hot.” Isn’t this example of deductive reasoning dependent on induction? How do you know that all fire is hot? You haven’t experienced every fire. You must first determine inductively that all fire is hot to make the statement that THAT fire is hot. Of course, this isn’t a problem for the “God did it” crew… or is it? He must be forgetting the story of Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego (Daniel 2:6-26) who were tossed into a blazing furnace, only to emerge unharmed. God himself shows time and again that he changes the laws of the universe to create miracles. Therefore, even the Christian scientist cannot depend on induction since God may choose to change the laws of nature at any moment.
3) “Why is it that you believe your race car in the next few seconds will not spontaneously turn into a horse?” Obviously, he’s never read anything by Douglas Adams.
OEJ
Dustin,
What that paper addresses is not mathematical induction — the author is modeling induction in the scientific sense via a mathematical function. It’s actually a really interesting interpretation of a mathematical result which might otherwise seem unexciting.
This challenge is bull,
He poses the problem of induction as a problem for atheism. while his whole believe system is based on a lack of induction. In his believe system the sun can stand still for several hours without causing any problems, corpses rise up from the death after three days and donkeys, snakes talk.
How is that induction? Induction would challenge his believe system, not my atheism.
Exclusively deductive reasoning seems to put the cart before the horse.
Example:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
It follows that Socrates is mortal.
Don’t you have to induce what mortal is first? How does a universality like “All men are mortal” pop into existence without an understanding of specifically what a man is, or what it is to be mortal?
To be honest, if I had solved the problem of induction, I would go to Las Vegas, wait until there were 7 reds in a row on the roulette wheel and then deduce all sorts of things from the regularity of that sequence.
I would get a lot more than 1000 dollars.
I’m hoping this appears on Uncommon Descent. I would post it there myself, but they might suspect my motives.
It looks like they’re called presupper debates because, by the time it’s finished, that’s the only meal of the day left.
Bob
Beepbeepitsme:
Deductive validity follows from the form of the inference, not the meaning of the words; in this case we know that the syllogism “Everything that is S is P; x is S; therefore x is P.” Substitute any predicates for S and P, and any object for x, and you have a valid argument.
Deductive validity tells us that, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. Whether the premises are in fact true is another matter (if they are, the argument is sound, not just valid).
You don’t need to know the meaning of the words, or if the sentences they form are true, to know that the inference is valid. In fact, an invalid argument can have true premises and a true conclusion – but the conclusion won’t follow from the premises.
(To be a bit more on topic – in the case of inductive reasoning, we speak about the degree of support the premises give to the conclusion.)
Well, that’s eight minutes I’d like back.
“If you can’t use logic to support the induction of science, doesn’t that indicate a problem with logic, not with science?”
On the whole, I’d have to second that. I find it a bit strange that, in the face of reams of evidence to the contrary, there seems to be a tendency to suggest that vague, philosophical conceits posses the ability to trump the common experience of reality.
Reality defies logic routinely and trivially. That doesn’t impune reality- it merely calls into question the universal utility of pure logic as the ultimate explanatory mechanism for truth. Yes, it has its uses- as does,say, pure mathematics. But where logic and reality diverge, reality should surely hold sway.
It seems a bit like arguing the idea that since no circle that can ever be observed will ever actually posses the strict mathematical traits of a “perfect circle,”- and since irrational numbers cant be defined as the ratio of any real numbers- that somehow pi is meaningless, unless we appeal to the actual existence of some platonic circle that exists somewhere, out in the ether. Or in the mind of God.
Which is transparently nonsensical. Regardless of whether we can point out a concrete, real world example pi=r<2>,pi is useful- even though the universe in which it can actually be measured as a physical reality will never exist.
On the same hand- logic is useful, as a way to order thoughts. But the universe where the more abstract formulations of logic hold sway over reality? I just don’t see that happening, outside of fiction.
Two perhaps irrelevant points from previous commentators:
1] “just because we can’t figure out how we got from 1 to 2(comment #9)
and:
2] “as with the proofs that local hidden variables are inconsistent with what we observe in quantum mechanics”
(comment #23)
1] We can. Bertrand Russel did this, with Whithead, if I remebember correctly.
Also, J.H.Conway has shown that you can construct the whole of mathematics, just starting from the empty set (!)
2] Correct – BUT – there are, nonetheless, hidden variables, or hidden equations, or hidden forces acting in QM.
Otherwise we would not get the tresults we do from what I might call the “slow” double-slit experiment.
Feed photons, one-at-a-time through a double slit.
By the time you’ve put 5000 through, you’ve got an interference pattern.
Put 50 through, and it looks as though it is random, and each photon is going through a definite slit.
There is a major unsolved problem here ……
Ha ha. Is this guy serious? He thinks everything will work tomorrow like it did yesterday because “God said so?” Please. According to the Bible, God made the Sun stand still while the Israelites were fighting a battle (Joshua 10:12-13), three days of darkness in Egypt (Exodus 10:22), etc. Do Christians really have certainty that the Sun will rise tomorrow when God supposedly stopped the Sun in the past? When God willingly violates nature as claimed, then Christians cannot use Induction.
I just posted this on his youtube comments.
“Your argument seems to go: without God, we cannot know for certain that physical laws will hold throughout the universe (the problem of induction). Science *assumes* that they do.
To which I would reply, yes. From the (lack of) evidence, God probably doesn’t exist. And science is indeed founded entirely on an assumption. (That hasn’t made it any less useful, though.)”
“Presupposing certain truths as axiomatic and immutable and then deducing conclusions from them is really more the domain of theology than science.”
What garbage! Evolution specifially denies a non naturalistic explaination, stating there can be no intervention for outside forces divine or otherwise only chance can be to blame. How can you say that is not a presupposed truth that us deemed axiomatic and immutable? And are there conclusions drawn about evidence based on that assuption? YES! So if you take that statement above as true… Well you can’t say its a matter of theology (simply becuase of a lack of a god lol) but as the whole system is based on faith that there is no non naturalistic possible explaination then it clearly is a matter of religion. There is no evidence for the basis for that claim, therefore it is simply a matter or faith and hence evolution is far more religion than science as it does not deal with observable facts but just blind faith.
If this kid believes in the principle of induction (and uses Genesis to prove it!), I suppose he does not believe in miracles, or in the power of prayer, or in the tales of the Bible, or in an all-powerful god, …
‘Here is the basic problem…’
You said it, mate.
All philosophical debate aside —
He himself thinks he has a solution for the “problem of induction”. So I would love to see someone post a YouTube counter-challenge for him to get his wonderful solution published by the same authority he mentions in his challenge.
Nathan: which observable fact do you think science doesn’t deal with?
I’m looking for a science career, and it’d be sweet to get in on the ground floor of some cool new thing.
Nathan, supernatural explanations are not ruled out as an arbitrary axiom, but rather are not employed because they are unparsimonious – especially in light of the fact that we already know about simple, natural mechanisms that are perfectly capable of explaining the diversity of life on earth.
KarmaPolice:
That sounds perfectly reasonable compared to a belief that “Goddidit” is a divine warrant to be waved at serious philosophical problems and that theology contributes anything to science. This inanity is just as annoying an effigy of logic as the DI’s Paleyism, but Tripplehorn isn’t even good at that.
His design inference is apparently based on the observations that computer games are designed, some of them contain cars that don’t turn into horses, and the universe contains cars that don’t turn into horses. Obviously, then, the universe is designed. I guess that “Goddidit” warrant of his is strong enough not only to prove induction, but also a stronger form where even really stupid attempts at induction work. At least the peanut butter video didn’t go on and on like this guy.
That reminds me of the Platonic “Theory of Forms”, which to me seems to take plausible-sounding ideas rather too far. Still, Socrates would have slapped down the lazy thinking Tripplehorn’s exhibiting.
P.S. I’ll have to read that math carefully when it’s not the wee hours, but whether or not it applies to real-world induction it presents a surprising mathematical conclusion. It runs counter to my intuition, but then I took a while to get used to everyday things like the Monty Hall Problem.
Please explain though: WHY are you giving this ignorant clown, who is just regurgitating something from a philosophy 101 course that he doesn’t even understand, so much undeserved attention?!! Are you people just nuts too, or what? What’s the point? This fellow intended to get attention by talking absolute nonsense an you are giving it to him in spades. WTF??
This is bizarre. I don’t understand.
Dear YouTube, to whom it concerns,
The stoopid! Please stop it! It burns!
We’d rather not hear
From this kid cavalier
Till he listens to grownups and learns.
…
—PhaWRONGula
Ahh,, that’s better!! Thanks Virge for posting that link to your magnificent blog. Now, all those comments and your immeasurably vast readership is obviously well-deserved. That’s much more encouraging and inspires a greater sense of hope for pessimists like myself.
I luv the email that he wrote to his ex-gfriend. its almost the funniest thing ive seen, hes so sassy. i am looking forward to seeing more sassy emails to his ex-gfriends in the future. :)
Sigh. This loon has gotten too much attention already. Why are y’all giving him more?
I was reminded of “Loose Change” while watching this. The same smug arrogance, same style of pseudoscience (“I have people with [irrelevant] degrees in engineering that will verify my claims!” is how the Loose Change guy tried to prove his claims Not one structural engineer.).
As with Loose Change, I had to stop it about a quarter of the way in. :
#99 I’m not sure if I can apply Induction or deduction here but I’m willing to bet a thousand dollars that there will be many more ex-girlfriends that he will be writing. Then again he might be able to have his parents call their parents, what a twit.
PZ, I’ve skimmed the comments and looked at the youtube replies. I think Mr. SnottyPunk inadvertently did a great thing. He got you to say “or maybe a sub-quantum force; does it matter?” That alone should be worth a Pulitzer and might inspire Noble work in physics or cosmology someday.
Nobel that is. Dang my ornery spell checker. It prints what I type, knowing perfectly well what I mean.
I have a problem.
Call it the “Why Does God Only Talk to the Crazy Idiots” problem.
Like Jerry Falwell. Or Deanna Laney.
Let’s solve that one.
Here’s a list of the other people he/she/it has spoken to:
http://www.amiannoying.com/collection.aspx?collection=1023
It ain’t pretty.
What a big fat load of merde de taureau. He ought to be aware that the god he believes in can always work a miracle and thus falsify his inductions.
Thus, when he drops his fork, it could fly upward, and as he gets perplexed over that, he might hear deep booming laughter coming out of the sky.
And as to playing a car-race computer game and feeling confident that his car will not become a horse, I would not put it above some computer-game writer to put in some “Easter Egg” that will make your car become a horse. Which would not be much weirder than some of the things I’ve seen in computer games.
The fundidiot who was one half of the “Does God Exist?” debate at our local uni a few months back used pretty much this same Humean argument. I could tell the poseur knew less philosophy than I do (which is to say: Should Keep Mouth Shut On Subject In Public Places). Basically, “God Fixes Induction” is just another version of “Magic Man Did It”.
As to Tripplehorn’s checkered history: this “Jesus humbled me to make me great for him” schtick is just the Evangelical version of “entered a rehab program” — a way to get back in the good graces of your community, without actually ceasing to be an asshole.
And personally, I find a high-fiber diet to be excellent grounds for regularity ;-).
“What happens if I try to invoke Eris as the source of the stability of natural laws?”
Greyface gives you a cookie.
i’m a bit drunk, and i’ve never heard of induction before and i can’t quite get my head around it – but i think i see the point you make at least…
but i got two minutes into his speech and it was already causing the logical processors of my brain to melt down… (nooooo! make it stop!)
i mean come on, what is it with these people?! a two-year-old could see through the errors of this argument!
“How about if I pretend there is a subatomic particle (or maybe a sub-quantum force; does it matter?) called the Regulon…”
That would be the Jeebon – Jack Chick’s alternate to the gluon. It holdeth all things together.
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp
I’ve seen a couple comments here taking this kid to task for saying that the fork falls at x m/s^2 instead of that it falls with an acceleration of x m/s^2. I’d always thought that using “at” in this context was accepted as a shorthand; after all, the units involving a time-squared factor implies that the speaker knows what quantity he or she’s talking about. In fact, it seems reasonable, in informal conversation at least, to follow the word “at” with something that remains constant–here, acceleration. Anything else would involve speaking in terms of a time variable, which often would defeat the purpose of informal conversation.
I think carping at him on this point is a bit of a cheap shot; there’s enough stupidity in the rest of the video to go around.
This guy makes a good argument for pantheism.I don’t believe that is what he was after.Without consulting a sacred text you will come up with pantheism every time.May the New Age wierdos devour him.
Perhaps one could paraphrase Euler’s argument to Diderot. “Sir, (a-b^n)/n=x, so where is your Jesus in that.” Diderot fled, I suspect Mr. Tripplehorn might as well.
Actually that might be a good test. SUch an ernest young man could be supplied with some spark of divine wisdom to demonstrate the solution to just one of thoe nasty “never been proven” math problems. It would be a proof, provided through an idiot, that could be examined and applauded. A caution. It could be faked if he actually studied higher math, but that possibility is a remote one in the real world.
The camera effect is reminiscent of Marshall Applewhite in his Heaven’s Gate film. Is god going to send Tripplehorn a special invitation too?
Isn’t Metamucil the source of all regularity?
Woodwose,
I’m afraid you have the anecdote backwards. Euler employed mathematical obfuscation (the Dembski dazzler?) to confound the atheist, encyclopedist: “Sir, (a-b^n)/n=x, hence God exists–reply!”
Cheers.
The Russians have a great expression for this occasion: “He heard the bell, but he doesn’t know where it came from.”
Assuming God exists *is* a fallacy of induction that is even greater than predicting provisional trajectories based on emperical evidence.
Assuming God exists *is* a fallacy of induction that is even greater than predicting provisional trajectories based on emperical evidence.
I think I’ve heard this guy’s argument somewhere before, only better stated…
Frink: “Yes, over here, m-hay, m-hayven… in Episode BF12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Appaloosa, yet in the very next scene my dear, you’re clearly atop a winged Arabian! Please do explain it!”
Lucy Lawless: “Uh, yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that… a wizard did it.”
Frink: “Yes, alright, yes, in episode AG04–”
Lucy Lawless: “Wizard!”
Frink: “Oh, for glavin out loud…”
At least Kent Hovind had the class to offer $250,000 for a successful proof (of scientific evidence of evolution) even if the challenge was rigged.
I expect Kelly Tripplehorn wants to promote himself into the vacancy left by Kent Hovind’s involuntary withdrawal from public life. Mr Tripplehorn seems to have aimed low, and missed.
Of course, the REAL problem with HIS solution to induction is that his “Christian God” can interfere and break the system. Ask God real hard, and that fork won’t fall. Assuming God is listening and willing to partake in that tomfoolery. God may promise to make the world regular, but miracles require that promise to be broken. What is a omnipresent omnipotent being suppose to do?
This is not the kind of kid who got beaten up in school. They don’t go to public schools.
This is the class of kid who pay bullies to beat up the kids they don’t like in grade school, and by the time they get to law school, who richly reward those willing to shun people they don’t like. This stuff happens, folks. Don’t laugh it off. Money is power.
“I could make a phone call and have your life absolutely ruined”
It’s not the ones stupid enough to be caught who do the most damage.
Mr. Smug’s God must have decreed that mankind would not invent the space shuttle, and experience a sunrise approximately every 90 minutes, or go to the moon and not experience a sunrise for a period of several days. Mr. Smug’s God must also have decreed that mankind would never take silverware into orbit, or walk on other planetary bodies, where the gravitational acceleration of said silverware would differ significantly from the value Mr. Smug quotes in his video.
I mean, this is just David Hume regurgitated. Hume was the man who posed the induction problem that Popper claimed to solve. He was a friend of Adam Smith, a luminary of the Scottish and was notorious in his day (late 18th century)as a professed atheist! He definitely did not see the induction problem as a proof of the existence of God! And why, Mr Tripplehorn, should it be? Ans since when has the Stanford Encyclopedia become the Binle of philosophy?
Indeed, the regularity of nature drove many of Hume’s contemporaries to Deism because if nature is uniform, God is only needed as a Creator (well, there goes Christ, Mohammed & their friends at the top!). The realisation that uniform nature can be cruel and pointless drove more to agnosticism. How can that be a proof of God’s existence? There are many needy students who should take him on for $1000 – but does anyone really think he will pay up?
Tripplehorn’s solution is no more than an argument from authority, a classical type of inductive argument.
God is an authority on P
God told me x about P
So, x is true
Not sure how this leaves him in a better position than science.
Regarding a few comments here that express disdain at the degree of attention Tripplehorn has received: It is precisely by the petty and inexperienced dogmatists that hatred and ignorance are propogated. If it is not them we challenge, then whom? To whom do we devote attention–to those who can already engage us in fair, honest intellectual debate?
Just two rather amusing things:
First, if someone asked me why I don’t suspect that my car will turn into a horse, I certainly would say that I have never seen a car turn into a horse. He mentions a video game precisely because we know a video game is designed, but in fact, a car might very well turn into a horse in a video game.
Second, a belief in a deity controlling the laws of nature does not change the possibility that those laws might change tomorrow. In fact, believing in miracles asserts just that. The Earth rotates at a rate that causes the Sun to appear to move across the sky once per day at a predictable rate, but I seem to recall a statement in the Old Testament that on at least one occasion it did not do so. It is the belief in a God controlling the laws of nature that allows a belief in changeable physical laws. Rejecting that idea of God allows a belief, unjustifiable as it may be, that the laws of nature stay the same. Xians who don’t believe that nature can operate differently from one day to the next are wasting their time when they pray to be cured of some disease. (Of course they are wasting their time anyway, but that’s beside the point.)
Not everything that is true is logical, and not all logical fallacies are false.
Christ needed to break me down before he was able to build me up again, and he certainly did a glorious job of reducing me to nothing.
This is my favorite part: you see, it wasn’t his idea to behave like a spoiled, cocky, ego-trpping little asshole. In fact, that whole stunt was pure Jesus. In fact, the Young Master Tripplehorn is just a tool… in the Lord’s vast, myserious plan. Jesus is just building up the storyline… for when President Tripplehorn leads the American troops to victory over Mexico, while riding on the back of a coconut-eating T-rex.
It’s totally not his fault he did those things; Jesus made him do it. It was his idea all along.
As far as induction goes, this really is a non-argument. Who says science is ever supposed to be absolute, or that induction works all the time? We do the best with what we have available at any given time to create working models, and when we are able to, we replace them with better ones as our knowledge of the natural world improves.
His major premise is false: “the first two chapters of Genesis inform me that God created the world with order and uniformity.” This premise is not stated in the source text and I see no valid grounds for inducing it from the source text. No valid conclusions necessarily follow from a false premise.
I watched one-fourth of it before I felt like clawing my eyes out. Do I get a pony ride at least?
What a sweetheart of a guy!
“In the end, all I can say is that people love me and people hate you. You should observe me and take a few notes on how to make real friends. Other than you tieing this one other person, I have never had such little respect for a human being in my life. I don’t even have to tell you why because in my very accurate analysis that most everyone else agrees with, if you were to agree with my analyis about your character than my whole entire analysis would be wrong. Your inflamed ego has left you so blind and so impotent that you can nto even recognize the most obvious flaws in yourself. “
O.K. Here’s the exact challenge that Trippelhorn has made: “My company is ready to offer anyone $1000 if they can explain how they are able to account for modern science without invoking god to do so.”
He doesn’t go on to say anything like, “Watch this video for the details and parameters” nor does he say anything like, “The money will go to the first person who can explain.”
So, if we all give him answers to how we are able to account for modern science (whatever that means), we can bankrupt this snot-nosed kid’s ‘company’.
And Franceco Franco,
We are picking on the twerp because it gives us a laugh and a sense of smug superiority!
;o)
Pffft. Kelly is a girl’s name. And for goodness’ sake, buy a tie.
Has this idiot ever read his Bible.
Job 38
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand…..Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this. “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings? Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years!….. Do you know the laws of the heavens?’
God taunts man that man does not understand the universe.
God taunts man that he cannot comprehend the laws of the Heavens.
What bizarre behaviour by a god who created a universe whose laws he intended us to understand!
Videos I Want to See on YouTube #141: Charles S. Peirce and Karl Popper rising from the grave to take turns beating Kelly Tripplehorn with a baseball bat.
Oh, and did anyone else notice that his e-mail address is “tripplehorny”? What a clown.
What about the evolutionary justification for induction? That is, an evolutionary explanation for our awareness of the uniformity of nature? (Apologies if this already appeared in the comments and I missed it.)
There is a clear reproductive advantage in recognizing and acting on the uniformity of nature. Therefore it’s reasonable to expect that we are hardwired to expect uniformities in nature via natural selection (see baby studies where this has been observed). (Even more interesting: we are also apparently hardwired to expect animate objects to be less uniform in their behavior: the so-called “innate theory of mind”. My cat makes this distinction.) Induction is simply the formalization of our innate ability to recognize regularities. Since only some things in nature are regular and some of them intermittently, induction is often wrong and so (as has been pointed out in previous comments) induction cannot have the force of logical certainty.
Somehow I don’t think I’ll get $1000 for an evolutinary justification of induction from Mr. Trippelhorn.
I can’t help but point out that Christians are as likely to be mistaken about the uniformity of the world as anyone else. Some of the regularities of the world, e.g. inertia aka Newton’s first law, took thousands of years to discover, and were discovered by a guy who was threatened with torture for putting his observations above church dogma (well, OK, his gratuitously insulting the pope didn’t help).
Anyone else notice Trippelhorn’s sleight of hand towards the end there when he switched from “non-theist” to “evolutionist”? I guess he’s decided the multitudes of Christians who believe in evolution are not really Christian.
It’s also interesting that Trippelhorn makes several theological errors in his presentation, but those have been covered in previous comments.
Have to say, Mr. Trippelhorn certainly sparked an good discussion. But my God, what an idiot. And arrogant jerk. And poorly educated theologian.
Steve, the worst Jesus freaks are generally the worst-educated theologians (*cough*Phelps*cough*).
Actually.. The real problem with the very concept is frame of reference. Assuming we could derive a reference point that wasn’t *predicated* on a lawful universe in the first place, would it appear lawful when examined from that reference? Think of it like strange attractors in fractal math. The actually path is random, but some secondary factors instill a generally non-random result. A Serpinsky Gasket for example. As something derived as a result of the attractor(s), we are not in any position to observe if or even by what degree it “is” lawful. We simply presume it is, since we, as one of the ants on the point moving randomly around the attractor, can only see the effect of that attractor, not the randomness underlying the actual path.
Its like higher dimensions. It might be possible at some point to derive a mathematical model that fills in some gaps we have and which includes 4+n dimensions, but that’s not likely to suddenly give us the ability to *see* anything other than the original 4. Worse, some mathmaticians working with multidimensional geometry have shown that its technically possible to generate the same apparent geometry in fewer dimensions that what it “seems” like exist. So, we could derive a 32 dimensional model that is actually foldable into a 16 dimensional one, using some geometric tricks, for example. It may be more practical to use the 32 dimensional model, but not actually accurate, if some of these guys are right about how that would work.
Point being. The whole argument is like someone standing on the bottom of a mountain proclaiming, “The edge of the world is a wall.”, arguing with some guy on a radio who is sitting on top of the mountain and is going, “No, the edge just sort of drops off, I can see it.”, and neither having a damn clue, without additional information that just isn’t available to them from “either” perspective. You can make measurements that imply round instead, but you have to get “outside” the world to observe it directly. Same could be true here. The problem being, not even this nut can come up with a useful way to get “outside” the universe and take a look to see if we are talking walls or edges.
Aero wrote:Nobel that is. Dang my ornery spell checker. It prints what I type, knowing perfectly well what I mean.
I thought you were talking about me and my recent discoveries in physics that I was about to announce to the world via YouTube in the form of a $1000 challenge to PROVE me wrong!
So our universe behaves according to induction because The Bible contains a quote that this guy interprets to mean what he wants it to mean.
Great. So what chapter and verse of The Bible contains God’s proof that the universe he belongs to doesn’t glitch in some way that subsequently alters our universe?
It seems silly to try to prove that induction is “valid”, since it is provably invalid, and conclusions reached by informal inductive reasoning are merely generalizations that are often refuted by counterexamples. There are formalizations such as statistical inference and Solomonoff induction that are rigorous up to what they claim to be able to do, and at that level, I think the properties of inductive reasoning are understood at a deep level, though perhaps not perfectly. I’ll leave it to philosophers to decide if there are any open questions.
I think even informal inductive reasoning is hugely valuable as a heuristic and will often point you in the direction of the truth when used to generate hypotheses that are later subjected to deductive reasoning. (Read Polya’s How to Solve It if you don’t believe that heuristics can help you in deriving deductively reasoned mathematical truth.) Of course, in empirical science, the hypotheses are generally subjected to an ongoing series of tests. The failure to refute a hypothesis over a such a series, combined with the lack of a more parsimonious explanation, is what makes it a scientific fact. But I think this is more a matter of definition than any kind of equivalence between a fact in this sense and truth in the mathematical or philosophical sense.
Finally, we apply generalizations not because they guarantee the truth but because they work well on average. Humans may fancy themselves truth-seeking creatures, but we are basically survival-oriented problem solving creatures. Beliefs that work well enough or do little enough harm can be held. There is a correlation between these beliefs and the truth, but the idea that we possess any rigorous program for finding the truth is more an article of faith than anything else, and is in fact refutable even with respect to formal logic.
He follows the path of the Spirit of Truth. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juWG03BOn5k
kurage: Have you read C.S. Peirce’s article “The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”? (Text available at: http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/CSPgod.htm)
Also of interest: “Evolutionary Love”
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/evolove/evolove.htm
First Peirce link: http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/CSPgod.htm
Christians believe that there’s a miracle quota. That’s how they can simultaneously explain a uniform universe and events that fundamentally oppose that uniformity.
If there were too many miracles, the universe would be completely meaningless due to its chaotic nature. If there were no miracles, there wouldn’t be a god (since God is actively involved throughout the entire Bible).
Now that’s what I call rational thinking!
Clearly, we are not the intended primary audience of Prince Charming’s video (i.e. secularists with some scientific credentials who are familiar with inductive reasoning.) The “edgy” outdated video gimmicks, the overuse of fifty-cent words he clearly doesn’t fully grasp, the faulty science, the appalling logic, and the triumphant religious slogans all point to a different demographic. Indeed, this is obviously intended as a means to endear him to the Jesus-loving armchair philosophers of the NASCAR crowd. He obviously is laying the groundwork to become a Right-Wing religious pundit, and rise to his perceived birthright: an influential position within the Republican Party…
Thankfully, with an arrogant little punk like this, trouble is never far away. In a few years, he will probably have another scandal — he will be caught with his hand in the cookie jar either by the IRS or by SEC, or maybe he will just publicly disgrace himself in the bathroom of a local Chuck E. Cheese. We have heard the last of Kelly Trippelhorn.
Sorry. That should read “We haven’t heard the last of Kelly Trippelhorn.”
I just got around to checking out this guys website and was sickened by his “I’m more humble than thou” rant on the front page so I sent him the following email:
Of course, I seriously doubt it’ll have any effect – water, ducks’ backs, that kind of thing.
What can one say, this guy’s $1,000 are safe. After all, his reasoning derives the first couple of chapters in the Book of Genesis and who could possibly contradict them? Clearly, we are all just piles of dust animated by the breath of an all knowing supernatural being who created the world in seven days. I mean, doesn’t that sound so much more believable than the scientifically derived theory of evolution?
Erm, well, no!
What, as someone else has already remarked, a tool!
Somone made the comment that stanford university did not publish anything under the heading, the problem of induction, well they do. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/
Get published there, successfully justifying your inductive inference, and you will recieve 1,000.
Many of your comments were thoughtful, and i appreciate them.
Yours
Kelly
Kelly Tripplehorn, if after reading the comments here you can still say:
then I don’t think you’ve taken many of the comments to heart. The point is that your publicity stunt has no actual substance.
As several people have pointed out, there is a big problem with order and uniformity in the universe depending upon the system.
If you follow this man’s arguments to their “logical” conclusion, he is making a case for multiple gods, not one.
There would need to be one god for approaching the speed of light, one god for quantum mechanics, one god for black holes, one god for the surface of the earth, one god for the center of the earth, one god for outer space, etc. And depending on how you define “uniformity” maybe even gods for the bottom of the sea and the tops of mountains. This is starting to sound familiar…
The “solution” isn’t even novel. It is basically Plantinga’s and all those guys who claim that one needs theism to guarantee order in the universe, and to answer the Leibniz-Heidegger pseudoquestion (“why is there something rather than nothing?”) and the rest.
spudbeach: Unfortunately, there’s a pretty good case that you’re mistaken about the “no assumptions” thing. Lawfulness is one of them – you simply cannot do science if you allow miracles to intervene and disrupt patterns.
Dennis: See above.
AL: Actually, no, at least not according to the theist. They will claim that they see certain truths “by the light of faith” or some other crazy sense. It too is “self-justifying”, but runs into massive consilience problems with other things in metaphysics, evolutionary biology and much else.
Susan B.: I’ll look that over sometime, but at first glance it looks like it might be related to work by a much more sensible Kelly, namely Kevin Kelly at CMU.
mtraven: Why am I reminded of Descartes’ insistence that God could have made 2+2=3 and that sort of thing?
Dustin: While I agree with most of what you say about axioms – I would add that one has to assume for the sake of your argument that axioms are unrevisable; these days, axiomatics does not assume that. (And this is one way out of the puzzle, of course.)
Jennie: I’m no longer (or not at present) a philosophy student, but I find it cool. Need a PhD student and have lots of funding? :)
G. Tingey: The heck he has, since that contradicts the incompleteness theorems.
wrg: I think Plato himself would have been slapped down by the historical Socrates about the forms. (Remember that Aristotle at least testifies that Socrates himself was not a Platonist in that sense.)
Well said.
However, I still haven’t found an explanation of where the induction is in science. Induction is allowed as a method for generating hypotheses, not for testing them, so it doesn’t need to work at all.
Forget that. Calculate the rotation speed, orbit speed etc. of the Earth and deduce from that the testable hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, and that if you’re in a space shuttle the sun rises every 1 1/2 hours.
The hypothesis that the laws of physics are more or less constant is testable, and it is constantly being tested. Induction has been used to generate that hypothesis; it cannot be and is not used to test it. I don’t see where the problem is.
Oh, we probably can. The problem is just that when we get the truth, we can’t find out whether what we have found is in fact the truth. That would comparing it to the truth, which in turn we don’t know.
I take chemistry to tell me that whatever burns in that particular fire produces heat when reacting with oxygen. That is a deduction (from, ultimately, quantum physics), not an induction. What have I missed? That I should have assumed the ignorance of 600 BC?
Hmm. Either we make an argumentum ad lapidem — reality is that in which argumenta ad lapidem work. Or…
…we just say we can’t prove it and consider it a falsifiable hypothesis. =8-)
Oh, thanks for confirming my suspicions on how impugn is pronounced. I’ve only ever encountered the word in writing.
I deduce he is a Sith:
“Only the Sith deal in absolutes.”
Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie! Always good. :-)
Well said.
However, I still haven’t found an explanation of where the induction is in science. Induction is allowed as a method for generating hypotheses, not for testing them, so it doesn’t need to work at all.
Forget that. Calculate the rotation speed, orbit speed etc. of the Earth and deduce from that the testable hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, and that if you’re in a space shuttle the sun rises every 1 1/2 hours.
The hypothesis that the laws of physics are more or less constant is testable, and it is constantly being tested. Induction has been used to generate that hypothesis; it cannot be and is not used to test it. I don’t see where the problem is.
Oh, we probably can. The problem is just that when we get the truth, we can’t find out whether what we have found is in fact the truth. That would comparing it to the truth, which in turn we don’t know.
I take chemistry to tell me that whatever burns in that particular fire produces heat when reacting with oxygen. That is a deduction (from, ultimately, quantum physics), not an induction. What have I missed? That I should have assumed the ignorance of 600 BC?
Hmm. Either we make an argumentum ad lapidem — reality is that in which argumenta ad lapidem work. Or…
…we just say we can’t prove it and consider it a falsifiable hypothesis. =8-)
Oh, thanks for confirming my suspicions on how impugn is pronounced. I’ve only ever encountered the word in writing.
I deduce he is a Sith:
“Only the Sith deal in absolutes.”
Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie! Always good. :-)
Not if you allow that to happen too often, no.
Not if you allow that to happen too often, no.
“We will give you [dramatic pause] ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS!”
Shades of Dr Evil. Great stuff, thanks for the link PZ.
Yes, there is. The evolution of behavior and intelligence provides that explanation. Intelligence would only be advantageous in a world which is amenable to thought, and the world is only amenable to thought if it isn’t wildly unstable.
What an obfuscated way of attempting to make ‘Goddidit’ mainstream science. I’ll take experiment and observation as probabilistic predictors over assuming a suspiciously absent deity and arbitrary assignment of phenomena to said deity any time. We in Science have done well enough without invoking the sky dude to bother dealing with small minded people like you, Kelly. In Science we do not start from assuming the conclusion (i.e., sky dude exists) and then try to shoehorn selected data to prove it (the proof is that gravity is always turned on), like so-called Creation Scientists. In Science we continually attempt to divest ourselves of dogma, not disingenuously promote it.
Darn theists. All this time they’ve been arguing that we need the existence of gods in order to explain miracles. Now we need gods to explain the absence of miracles.
I wish they’d make up their mind, or switch to some more honest and interesting religion that has the gods duking it out. Like Marduk vs. Tiamat.
That’d rock. The Babylonians at least had ritual orgies, didn’t they?
The odd thing is that, upon reading the outline of the proof, it’s actually not as surprising as it first seems. It’s a measure theoretic proof, and very much in keeping with the “almost all” types of results one encounters with measure theory (such as my favorite, almost all continuous functions are nowhere differentiable).
I definitely feel this paper deserves a bit more attention in terms of addressing the problem of induction, though I can think of some possible objections to the mathematical model chosen.
I have a couple of half-baked thoughts on the uniform/non-uniform universe assumption.
The first is just why shouldn’t the laws of physics be uniform? A universe with a lot of exceptional cases would have a longer formal specification than a uniform one, so in terms of parsimony you would prefer the uniform one. I don’t think there is an absolutely rigorous reason to prefer one universe to another, but by the same token, I don’t see why you’d expect a “lawless” non-uniform universe and be surprised to find one that isn’t.
The second is that none of this needs to be a great concern if you treat all your beliefs as working assumptions rather than “the truth.” That’s of course kind of a cartoon of the scientific outlook and most of us probably do want say that something is really true and not just the most parsimonious model consistent with experience. But the “working assumption” approach really isn’t that hard to internalize. I can honestly say that I approach my big decisions with the knowledge that I might not be right, but I have to act on my best judgment. Maybe this would be unsatisfactory if I thought I had the option available of really knowing the truth. But this is so far removed from reality that I’m content with the fact that I might be wrong and need to correct my beliefs on an on-going basis.
My third thought is that even non-uniform systems tend to look uniform when viewed at a certain level of aggregation. The universe certainly doesn’t have to be deterministic to appear orderly at some scale. Given enough exceptional cases, even these should begin to fall into categories and given you a rough stochastic model. Of course, it is possible to have a series of entirely unprecedented and surprising events, but it seems like a weird default expectation to have about the universe.
Finally, if the laws of physics weren’t at least locally uniform, it would be impossible to have self-replicating systems, which would make life, and therefore sentient life, impossible. So any system observed by sentient beings embedded within it is at least locally uniform. If a non-uniform spacetime could exist somewhere, we wouldn’t be there to see it. This does not explain why the universe we observe outside of earth appears uniform, I admit. This is where I would tie it back to working assumptions. Until we find glaring non-uniformities, it is more fruitful to assume uniformity. But if we find a non-uniformity, this will simply be another phenomenon to attempt (possibly unsuccessfully) to understand. It doesn’t contradict the validity of assuming uniformity before finding any such contradiction.
He’s a privileged brat that probably has a media start-up that is going nowhere.
Don’t give him any attention. Hope he ends up in rehab like GDUB.
I wrote in to Stanford proposing that the answer to the question was Buddhism- equally unlikely, equally religious, equally foolish as Tripplehorn’s own answer, but -in fact- a NON-THEISTIC answer that justifies uniformitarianism(as there are no gods in Buddhism). It even has an old religious text -the Abhidharma- backing it up.
Standford wrote me back and said they had never heard of Kelly Tripplehorn, and that if he had asked them to participate in this little challenge of his, they would have turned him down.
I find it interesting how he calls for all nontheists to be excommunicated out of modern science, and how he calls science “our science,” meaning that it belongs to Christians. What a bigot.
Also, on their website, they have a bogus $5,300 challenge that is so chocked full of rules that it is simply laughable. For example:
Neat.
I’d love to find out that Stanford had never heard of Dinesh D’Souza.
Tripplehorn or no Tripplehorn, the challenge has spawned a very interesting and informative thread. Thanks, everyone.
…to collect your $5,300 you will be expected to predict the future and read people’s minds with 100% accuracy.
All that, for only $5300? Isn’t that the sort of thing that will get you a cool million from James Randi?
“Hope he ends up in rehab like GDUB.”
I hope he doesn’t do anything like GW, because we know where his trajectory led him.
It is likely that one of the many comments before mine has pointed this out, but the more the merrier.
Science and induction don’t make anything completely certain, but they do allow for a theory. A theory, not to be mistaken for a hypothesis, is a model that all the known evidence points to. A theory has an element of falsifiability, which means that if any evidence to the contrary were discovered, the theory would have to be thrown out or changed, and people would have no problem doing so.
The theistic cultures of the world do not accept falsifiability, but instead tend to ignore or throw out evidence, usually by handful of means. They may either a) put the one who discovered the evidence in a bad light, b) ask how the evidence disproves God(s) and then embellish the fact that it does not conclusively, or c) try to put social pressures so that it won’t spread. There may be other methods. All of them are the equivalent of happily changing the topic of a conversation when you are lying to avoid the lie being discovered.
If the examples and statements in the video were discussed rather than just stated, they can be shown to be completely silly reasons to show that God(s) exist. Let us go in order.
First, the example of a child touching a fire and deducing that all fire is hot is excellent. It perfectly shows the value of inductive reasoning. A child that induces that fires are hot will keep a safe distance from all fires, keeping that child safe from burns and potentially death. Whether 100% sure of the absoluteness of the induction or not, the video has already shown that it has a purpose.
Next, it was stated that science has to assume that induction is proof. As I mentioned earlier, science does not assume it true, but uses an induction because no evidence has been found to the contrary. The information found from the induction, whether completely true or not, is a building block for other discoveries. The fact that individual working cases of the theories developed from scientific discoveries exist cannot be disputed. In effect, when a theory is shown to work in all known cases of its implementation, it becomes a new starting point for other inductive reasoning. Whether they are complete proof or not is not important as long as advancements are made.
Let us use the fork example to explain falsifiability. You can drop the fork as much as you want, but in reality, no one, scientist, philosopher, nor monkey have any reason to believe it will not fall. Though it cannot be formally proven through induction, we have no reason to believe it will not fall. If anyone had ever seen a fork not fall, then we will then start to believe there is a chance it will not drop, but until then, just thinking there is a chance it won’t fall and dropping it repeatedly is an illustration of the popular definition of insanity: doing something over and over and expecting a different result. Without that different result, nor evidence of it, you may as well, for the purpose of moving on with your life, accept that the fork will always fall at the acceleration constant of gravity when on Earth.
The car not turning into a horse example also shows the value of induction without it having to be a certainty. A player of the racing game that has never met the programmer knows the programmer exists since he understands the process of creating a video game, has evidence of what exactly programmers do, and can even find the programmer if he so wished by going to the company and asking. Without meeting the programmer, the player has no clue as to the programmer’s sense of humor so he cannot expect his car to not turn into a horse at first, but after playing the game through a bit, the player gets a feel for the virtual world and what to expect based on experience. Whether you want to admit it or not, that is how life and the mind work. If you had read the bible as it is now, but the world worked on different principles than that of those described in the book, you would take it as fiction, right? Just like reading Harry Potter. You do not believe in magic, do you? Well, why not? You are using induction. Once again, induction needs an exception to the rule to be completely discarded, so unless you have seen magic, you do not believe in it.
Why should you completely discount induction? Whether religious or not, our brains are wired to discern and accept patterns in the world. This ability has survival value as shown with the fire example. After all, if we did not accept the patterns we found, we would go crazy from the paranoia that at any second the sky will fall on us. The difference is that an atheist will not attribute a pattern to God(s), whereas as a theist will find a pattern and then realize it goes along with a holy scripture, and then take this as full evidence that that scripture is true in every way. This too, even though usually false due to confirmation bias, is an example of induction. Theists take individual cases and assume God(s) are the cause even when there is evidence of much more common phenomena being the cause. As the video showed, theists even may use known evidence and draw improper conclusions, which support their views and ignore others.
The bible says that God made the world in a uniform manner, but which came first, the world or the bible? The bible, whether correct or not, is therefore a very biased resource on the uniformity of the world, since the induction that the world is uniform came before the bible was written. What guarantee did people have before the bible that a fork would fall or that their horse would not turn into a car? Besides induction in and of itself, they do not really need one.
No, I cannot prove that ideas discovered by induction are completely true (except in math), but that does not mean that induction is not justified. For the child to induce that all fire is hot, he/she does not need to believe in a higher power. Does that mean the lesson learned is pointless? It is the same with science and induction.
Kelly,
Wow, I’m so glad you stopped by. So I’ve got to ask: why do you blame Jesus for you disgracing yourself and your family? He wanted to “break you down”? If Jesus is omnipotent, couldn’t he come up with a character building exercise that didn’t have to hurt so many other people? Why do you believe that Jesus made you behave in such an ugly way? Why do you need to use the whole “mysterious ways” gambit to explain why you brought so much shame on everybody around you? I dare say, if you think Jesus orchestrated this entire media circus just to teach you some after school lesson, he obviously failed to take you down the necessary number of pegs you probably really need.
Couldn’t there be a less magical, more humble explanation? For example, maybe there are some personal shortcomings that you need to work on, and that the content of that email outlined them fairly well. The things you wrote made you sound downright revolting — even sociopathic. That’s why you got into the trouble you did, not Jesus.
But how can this kid assume that his “logical God” is a logical God forever? Simply because his God has allegedly been “logical” in the past? How can he know that God won’t change His mind and break all of His so-called promises made in the Bible? Isn’t that the very assumption of induction via an induction assumption for which he shows so much derision?
He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
No, and he hasn’t learned a thing, either. ;-)
http://googlified.com/2007google-vs-god/
Google vs. God
He’s a privileged brat that probably has a media start-up that is going nowhere.
I don’t know. Alot of such companies often start around a kitchen table. His looks like it has already moved to the upstairs bedroom:
http://blog.i53network.com/2006/06/26/filing-for-i53s-nonprofit-status.aspx
Woohoo. Bbig deal when you have daddy’s cash and his friend’s pocket change.
go here to have some fun with faith heads.
http://googlified.com/2007google-vs-god/#comment-12116
Can a theist respond and blow his entire premise out of the water? And get the $1000? Promise to give the $100 in tithes to my church.
I can prove both induction and God without proof by difficulty or other a bong-headed verbal sleight of hand. As a programmer, I play God with software all the time.
First, against the theist, there must be non-uniformity for superreal events to occur, not superhuman, superreal. Sorry the word supernatural is loaded with a virtual concoction of unstated assumption and fly by the seat of your mood conclusions.
So superreal miracles must require non-uniformity or at least its possibility. Now real miracles can easily be being in the right place at the right time. If an insider tells you when a stock is going to come down and you need to get your cash out, does it mean he cause it to happen? Not necessarily, but it does mean he knows what he’s talking about.
Second, against the atheist, is the arbitrary nature of hues and sounds. Not the waves, not the electrical signal, not the progression from light to dark, low to high, but the vicarious experience. It is superficial to everything. Saying the brain does it is as convincing as saying God did it. The fact that I can see (different from detecting and making a mental note) proves something’s up.
So for the theist argument to work you would have to say the universe is a simulation. But then so is the video game. The part about laws in the game, however is ridiculous since there are no laws. There are useful subroutines that simulate the action, but unless you’re getting into first person shooters where actual calculations are done rather than “if car is out fuel you lose”, a claim of laws is rather silly. The closest thing to what a game programmer has to do is to imagine a flip book as a billboard and now imagine a guy putting up a different image 60+ times per second.
Fourth from the atheist corner there is the problem of chaos. Basically I define chaos as the land of feedback loops and equations which feed their own output back as input. So now the atheist has reason to claim non-uniformity is a rule in the universe’s operating code. As we all know predicting a chaotic process gets difficult and it only takes three gravitating bodies to induce chaos.
So after all this there remains: arbitrary, not difficult or amazing or meaningful, details expose that there is a reality beyond the veil of spacetime or whatever you want to call it.
But even non-uniformity and the chaos that produces it reduces to interactions between two bodies being interrupted by a third body. But can we consider two bodies as one discontinuous body? Sure just rewrite the laws from that point of view.
The conservation of energy or momentum is the balance sheet of the system. If there were no conservation a simple sneeze would cause an earthquake, but wait without any conservation law there would be no stopping the process. But without any conservation law there would be nothing to say when the process should start in the first place. At each point in the logic something has to say ok next step.
Induction is an observation, laws however do exist.
In the end, it’s up to us to decide if Ptolemy’s bizarre orbits are correct or General Relativity. Or better yet which one is more useful. Does James Bond have to do coordinate substitution while tied to a ferris wheel?
Hahahaha!
I e-mailed the editor of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy with my little idea and received this reply:
“Dear Kristine,
This page has been put up without consulting us in any way.
It may in fact be in violation of Stanford rules for the use
of its seal and logo, as the seal/logo implies this page
has Stanford’s official seal of approval.
We will try to get the author of the page to take it down.
All the best,
Yours,
Ed”
Whooo, Kelly Tripplehorn, in your face, dude! Better get working on your “No, I wasn’t told to take my site down” press release. You don’t want your ex Michelle and me cackling about you.
Inductive logic is more solidly based for a philosophical materialist than for a theist.
A person who eschews supernatural explanations says that matter and energy act as observed because of their properties and the overwhelming probability is that they will go on having the same properties and acting in the same way, with or without humans around to observe it.
A theist who believes in a god and reads in an infallible book that the universe exists at the pleasure of the god, who will one day unexpectedly end it, has reason to believe that the universe will not go on acting the same but might vanish at any moment. And there is no reason to believe that a god might not decide to change the properties of matter and energy. If the earth stands still and the oceans do not slop out of their beds mor continents slide off their foundations, then conservation of angular momentum is violated and induction has failed.
Hoist by his own “infallible” petard!
I read some of the other “challenges” on that site. One is for a non-theistic person to define their beliefs without contradicting themselves, results to be judged by an “impartial third party” (undefined). One of the rules is that you can’t win by sophistry. I take it that sophistry is defined as “logic that proves theists are chasing their own tails.”
(Until I watched the video I thought the twit was talking about electricity.)
Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that the burned cat never jumps on a hot stove again, but it never jumps on a cold one, either?
Wow, nicely played, Kristine!
Kristine: The most common source of jealousy on my part is a little twinge I feel when someone comes up with something so simple and effective that I can’t help but grit my teeth and think, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”
You just made me do that.
As a PhD student in philosophy, I must say the arguments above did not convince me the problem of induction had been definitely solved. They did make me laugh hard enough to consider seriously buying you a beer, though, PZ!
Greenhorn is more like it. Why do we need just one god to explain nature’s laws? Isn’t that already an extravagant generalization? We can have Poseidon keeping track of gravity, Hera electromagnetism, Ares strong nuclear forces (these are Republicans, remember), Aphrodite weak nuclear ones. They can do a little ‘forces of the universe’ dance on Mount Olympus to make it all magically gear together!
The argument is a mishmash in any case. If we take the video game analogy–there are law of nature, therefore there must be a law maker–then the argument is circular because the argument is inductive.
The only way to avoid that mistake is baldly to appeal to an authority that simply *tells* you. He tries to make that argument too (although again, in a way he conflates with the video game analogy, trying to have it both ways). But strangely, Genesis does not mention laws of nature. I wonder why that is?
I’m placing my bets on Regulon! Go Regulon!
*Bows*
Tripplehorn has triple horns on his head – but that’s okay, Kelly, in moments like these just remember that the sun will still come up tomorrow. ;-)
That creduloid apparantly experiences the problem of enunciation. Doesn’t he know how to present an email address verbally? I’m pretty sure he meant “Plato” but both times it sounded like he said “play-doh”. Maybe that was to make it even harder to win.
I usually solve the problem of induction by shielding my cables.
PaulC: The problem with your first point is that it seems to assume that the regularities of the universe are somehow “imposed” or “constrained” by how they might be expressible in a language. Or, slightly less of an imputation of idealism: what is the connection between ontological simplicity and semantic simplicity?
Kristine: This is where “the inner light” (and I don’t mean the wonderful episode of ST:TNG) and that comes in. For an example, see what Descartes says about why he thinks god won’t suddenly make 2+2=3.
Julius Scissor: But chaos (in the technical sense) is still ordered in the sense of containing objective patterns – the patterns are still there, just hard (very hard) to find out.
I just remembered another non-theist, practically untestable idea of how to explain life and existence and such: the multiverse. The idea is that there are an infinite amount of universes, each with something different from the others. In some versions of this idea, this difference could be as small as the location or velocity of a sub-atomic particle, or as large as a completely different set of physical constants or even the absence of physics. This means that most of the infinite worlds cannot hold life as we know it because the constants that are in our world are key for life to exist. We know that our universe can support life because, let’s face it, we are here.
This idea, as far as I know, is about as testable as God.
I’m late to this game, but I noticed something in his little rant. It has probably been mentioned already (I didn’t read all 180+ comments, sorry), but he uses “The Bible” as a reference. So he is using evidence!
(lets just ignore piddly little things like standards of evidence, just for the sake of argument)
So why does his use of evidence get a free pass out of the problem of induction? Just because he says it does? I don’t think so!
So, his declaration that his deity holds the universe together is subject, by the standards he is setting, to the same problem of induction that all of those pesky scientific assertions are subject to.
I prefered that email he sent to his ex
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
The video is down, and I was so looking forward to some self-flagulation…….
PZ is now officially a tease ^^
Regards,
Rhysz