The first persuasive argument for Christianity that I’ve seen

I was sent this link to an apologist defending Christianity against rationalist requests for evidence, and I was unimpressed — all he’s got is repeated claims that the Bible says Jesus was lord of the universe, which is not a good argument. I can also point to the Lord of the Rings, which says Gandalf was a powerful wizard, but that doesn’t even begin to support any claim that he actually existed.

But I read on, and it got weird. Read this, and somebody explain to me…is he arguing for or against Christianity?

As for the empirical and falsifiable evidence scientists and atheists demand, let’s just say it might never be found, at least not on this side of the grave. It may not even exist. And even if someone does find it, along with the missing link, it will probably be like nothing they ever expected.

But if you look up in the sky some cold winter’s night around the 25th of December, you just might catch a glimpse of it. No, it’s not the space shuttle, or a Russian spy satellite; nor is it an Iranian missile with a nuclear warhead or some other terrorist attack; it’s certainly not Louis Farrakhan’s mothership, or any other extraterrestrial spacecraft. Is it a myth? Is it science?

No — it’s Santa Claus! And if you don’t believe that well, you just ain’t trying. Or maybe what you really need is a little less science, and a little more myth.

OK, I give up. He has convinced me. Jesus is just as real as Santa Claus.

There’s plenty of time for evolution

This is a familiar creationist argument, stated in this case by a non-creationist:

Consider the replacement processes needed in order to change each of the resident genes at L loci in a more primitive genome into those of a more favorable, or advanced, gene. Suppose that at each such gene locus, the argument runs, the proportion of gene types (alleles) at that gene locus that are more favored than the primitive type is K−1. The probability that at all L loci a more favored gene type is obtained in one round of evolutionary “trials” is K−L, a vanishingly small amount. When trials are carried out sequentially over time, an exponentially large number of trials (of order KL) would be needed in order to carry out the complete transformation, and from this some have concluded that the evolution-by- mutation paradigm doesn’t work because of lack of time.

Basically, what creationists argue is that the evolution of new genes is linear and sequential — there is no history, no selection, it works entirely by random replacement of the whole shebang, hoping that in one dazzling bit of luck that the entire sequence clicks into the right sequence, and then it all works. If that were the way the process occurred, then they’d be right, and evolution would be absurdly improbable and would take an untenable length of time.

Another way to think of it is a bizarre version of the hangman guessing game, where one person thinks of a word, and the second person has to guess what it is. In the normal version of the game, the second person guesses letters one by one, and they’re placed in the appropriate spot. In the creationist version, you only get to guess a whole sequence of letters in each round, and you are only told if you are right or wrong, not which letters are in the correct position in the word. Not only does it become a really boring game, but it also becomes extremely unlikely that anyone can solve it in a reasonable amount of time.

Evolution does not work like that. It works in parallel, changing and testing each variant simultaneously in many individuals, and then selection for the most favorable subset of changes latches them in place, making the matching letters more likely to be fixed. Or, as the paper by Wilf and Ewens explains,

But a more appropriate model is the following. After guessing each of the letters, we are told which (if any) of the guessed letters are correct, and then those letters are retained. The second round of guessing is applied only for the incorrect letters that remain after this first round, and so forth. This procedure mimics the “in parallel” evolutionary process. The question concerns the statistics of the number of rounds needed to guess all of the letters of the word successfully.

That’s the question. If purely random changes would require a ridiculous length of time to match a target, proportional to KL, how long would it take if we actually use more reasonable, biologically relevant model? Wilf and Ewens state the model in mathematical terms and derive a theoretical answer, and you won’t be surprised that it’s significantly shorter; you might be impressed at how much shorter the operation would take.

Instead of a time proportional to KL, it will take a time proportional to K log L.

That’s very much shorter! To put some representative numbers on it, imagine a protein that is 300 amino acids long, made up of 20 possible amino acids, and I’m going to ask you to guess the sequence. Under the creationist model, you wouldn’t even want to play the game — it would take you on the order of 20300 trials to hit that one specific arrangement of amino acids. On the other hand, if you took a wild guess, writing down a random 300 amino acids, and I then told you which amino acids in which position were correct, you’d be able to progressively work out the exact sequence in only 20 log 300 trials, or around 50 guesses.

Notice that this is not a concrete estimate of the time it would take for something to evolve! It’s a grossly simplified version of the story: the example overstates the power of selection (amino acids won’t be locked in, but will only be less likely to change), and overstates the required accuracy of matching to a target (there would be more tolerance for variation), and the whole idea of meeting a specific target is not necessarily a good model. As a guide to short-circuiting the invalid assumptions of creationists, though, it’s handy to have a simple mathematical formula to remove that naive combinatorial model from the table.

Wilf HS, Ewens WJ (2010) There’s plenty of time for evolution. arXiv:1010.5178v1.

Look at it as a promising sign of the rapidly accelerating senility of religion

Last week, the CNN Belief blog published some transparently inane pseudoscience from Oprah.com; this week, it’s publishing some awesomely trivial tripe about where your dog goes after death (how does the author know they go to heaven? He dug up some Bible verses, of course.)

This is amazingly bad stuff. It’s as if there is some sneering, mocking atheist who has been put in charge of CNN’s religion section, and she gets up every morning on a quest to find whatever will make religion look profoundly stupid…and she succeeds three minutes after going to work, and spends the rest of the day sipping lattes and cocktails while writing scenarios for her nightly Dungeons & Dragons game.

There is a danger to thinking this way, though: pretty soon you’re wondering if Pope Ratzi isn’t actually some godless antitheist mole for the Global Atheist Conspiracy, because he’s doing such a good job of making Catholicism look evil, and every silly expression of faith begins to look like an intentional effort to discredit themselves. Either the world is dominated by a lot of atheist weirdos who get off on making everyone else look ridiculous, or religion really is this goofy. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so I’m going to have to favor the latter.

Mommy, why is there a War on Christmas?

You’ve probably been wondering. Who in their right mind would declare war on a family holiday? Who would be crazy enough to think such a thing was actually happening? You might have the impression that it’s all a delusion erupting from the fevered brain of blowhard Bill O’Reilly, but it goes deeper than that, back to the 1950s, when the Cold War fostered a whole generation of destructive nuts. Here’s a lovely summary of the history of the War on Christmas, which finds its roots in paranoia about Communists:

In 1959, the John Birch Society, a far-right organization that sees anti-American and communist conspiracies in just about everything, released a pamphlet called “There Goes Christmas!” written by Hubert Kregeloh. The pamphlet claimed, “One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to take Christ out of Christmas — to denude the event of its religious meaning.” The John Birch Society believed the UN was being used to crush religious belief:

The UN fanatics launched their assault on Christmas in 1958, but too late to get very far before the holy day was at hand. They are already busy, however, at this very moment, on efforts to poison the 1959 Christmas season with their high-pressure propaganda. What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.

These “UN symbols and emblems” were simply secular Christmas decorations that did not employ religious imagery, decorations that had been around for some time. The pamphlet claimed this was a plot to destroy Christianity and called on patriotic Americans to boycott any stores that displayed such decorations. No one took this very seriously in 1959 — this was, after all, the John Birch Society. The conspiracy theory did not catch on. But it was to come back a few decades later.

Oh, but that brings back Christmas memories…I had a crazy uncle who was in the John Birch Society, and it didn’t take much to get him ranting about how the UN was a Commie Plot. Christmas was presents and tinsel and butter cookies and ol’ Henry handing out JBS tracts and explaining how the Africans were a servile race.

Speaking of race, there’s also the odious Steve Sailer and VDARE explaining how it’s a Jewish conspiracy. But then, Jews, Commies, they’re all the same, right?

The paranoid psychoses are getting ripe over on the other side, and have been putrefying for over 50 years. We’re at the stage now where if a Jew, Commie, or Atheist doesn’t say “Merry Christmas”, it’s a sign that they’re out to destroy the holiday by outlawing it; and if they do say “Merry Christmas”, it’s a sign that they’re out to destroy the holiday by subverting it. No matter what we do, we stomp on Christmas!

Russian philosophy

I find myself wrestling with the meaning in this story of an epic struggle of worldviews.

A dispute over the existence of God between four Russians drunk on a litre of pure alcohol resulted in the death of two of the drinking buddies, news agencies reported on Monday.

The disagreement began at the weekend when the female house owner, her son, a male roommate and undisclosed male relative drank the litre of pure alcohol, “which they downed with snow,” a police investigator told RIA Novosti.

First, I’m wondering whether downing 250mL of 190 proof alcohol improves one’s philosophy, or renders it incomprehensible. That’s only an interesting question because most philosophy is incomprehensible even when sober. I’d do the experiment, except I’ve often worked with beakers full of lab alcohol, and no way are they at all tempting.

The second big question is about the outcome: the story explains that the son knifed the other two men to death, but it doesn’t mention what his position on the existence of gods was.

So did the atheist win, or the believer?

Does it even matter in a grim cold universe, where we’re all doomed to eke out a futile existence until we die, where we’re either meaningless sputterings of a few pounds of electrified meat, or the serfs of immense beings who will snuff us out painfully, slowly, eternally and with casual disregard if we fail to properly praise them incessantly? Does anything matter? The snow falls. It will cover us all.

Pass the lab alcohol, tovarisch. Budem zdorovy.

Episode CXXXXIII: Strange tides

Yarr, ye scurvy dogs sailin’ on the Flying Dutchman thread — it’s the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, On Stranger Tides.

Hang on there, though : On Stranger Tides is a fantastic novel by Tim Powers, my favoritest pirate/zombie story of all time. What abominations will Disney be performing to warp a mad, wild standalone novel that doesn’t have any of the characters of the franchise into a continuation? Powers approves, at least, although that may mean he’s just overjoyed to be about to be rolling in money.

(Current totals: 11,507 entries with 1,212,649 comments.)

Martin Gaskell was not expelled

Gaskell is an astronomer who applied for a job at the University of Kentucky, and didn’t get it. This is not news. The great majority of the people who apply for jobs in the sciences don’t get them, even if they are well qualified — the rejected candidates know just to pick up and move on to the next application, because it is so routine.

Not Martin Gaskell, though. Gaskell is suing the university for not hiring him, which is amazing: when I was on the job market, I sent out at least one hundred applications, and ultimately got hired for one, so I guess that means I missed 99 potentially lucrative lawsuit opportunities. Dang. Is there a statute of limitations on civil suits?

Of course, Gaskell has a predisposition: he’s a devout Christian, so that persecution complex is rooted deeply. He claims he was denied the job because he’s an evangelical Christian. I say he’s just inventing rationalizations…something else his religion has made him very good at. And the newspapers are helping him out.

No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 — until his writings on evolution came to light.

Wrong. I’ll deny it. The leading candidate is the one you make an offer to — and the identity of that person varies throughout the review process. You can talk about a “leading candidate” when you look at just the cover letters and CVs; you’ll probably have a different “leading candidate” when you’ve had a chance to read through all the letters of recommendation; it’ll change again when you do the phone interviews; it’ll change again when you’ve had the on-campus interviews; and it’ll change again as the committee hashes over the discussions before making the final offer. This always happens. It’s ridiculous to complain that it was somehow unfair that facts emerged during a fact-finding process.

I’m in the middle (nearer the end, I’m pretty sure) of a job search to hire a new faculty member here at UMM, so I know whereof I speak. It doesn’t matter that Gaskell was well qualified for the job, since most of the applicants were probably well qualified; making a hiring commitment is a big deal that involves consideration of a great many factors, including subjective personal ones, so you simply can’t complain about individuals not getting the job. It’s fair to look for systematic bias, though, but Gaskell can’t make a case there. He claims he wasn’t hired because he’s a Christian.

I don’t believe it. There is no pattern of discrimination against the dominant religious group in the country, and Gaskell knows it. If you look at one of the documents he has written about his beliefs, scroll down to the very end, where you’ll find that Gaskell has a long list of religious organizations, like the ASA, the Affiliation of Christian Biologists, the Christian Engineering Society, etc., etc., etc. It seems that being a Christian is not considered a de facto strike against the possibility of being a scientist or engineer.

The fact that some Christians are in the sciences doesn’t argue against the fact that they could be under-represented, and face an unfair uphill struggle to get jobs. However, being a Christian is not like being a woman: it’s not something that is necessarily obvious in a job interview. We don’t ask candidates where they go to church, and if we find out, we don’t care (not even me, the arch-atheist, will bat an eye if you let slip that you attend). Gaskell will have to show that the search committee was opposed in even a vague sense to hiring a Christian, and he can’t do that. Why? Because there’s a great big fat loomin’ obvious Problem with a capital “P” splatted putridly in the pages of his CV, and all of the concern in hiring him was with that, not where he went to church.

Gaskell is an evolution-denier. He’s an old-earth creationist, a theistic evolutionist who looks favorably on Intelligent Design creationism.

It’s evident in his public defense of the Book of Genesis, in which he goes on and on with unlikely rationalizations for a metaphorical interpretation. This is a fellow who says, “It is true that there are significant scientific problems in evolutionary theory (a good thing or else many biologists and geologists would be out of a job) and that these problems are bigger than is usually made out in introductory geology/biology courses“, and then goes on to endorse Josh McDowell, Phillip Johnson, Harun Yahya, Hugh Ross, and the day-age interpretation of Genesis, as if they are somehow not afflicted with these “problems”.

There is a difference between accepting a theory that is incomplete, like evolution, and a set of wacky ideas that are contradicted by the available evidence, like these various flavors of creationism that Gaskell is favoring. That calls his ability to think scientifically into question, and that is legitimate grounds to abstain from hiring him.

The record shows that what people were discussing was not his religion alone, but the way his religion has affected his job as a scientist and communicator of science, and the effect of hiring someone with such dubious views in a state already trying to overcome the embarrassment of being home to the Creation “Museum”. These are valid concerns. It’s also a fact that when hiring, we want to have people whose skills we can respect as colleagues, and Gaskell was not in a good position that way. One of the faculty members who reviewed the case said it very well:

Another geology professor, Shelly Steiner, wrote that UK [University of Kentucky] should no more hire an astronomer skeptical of evolution than “a biologist who believed that the sun revolved around the Earth.”

That’s the bottom line. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that Gaskell was exceptionally competent in the very narrow domain of his astronomical work, but faculty don’t get hired to do only one thing, and Gaskell himself is quite clear that he isn’t going to confine himself to talking only about his field…and unfortunately, it’s also clear that he was a confused and ignorant boob about all the other subjects he was happy to lecture about.