That’s right, it’s 7 April, which is Paul Nelson Day! I figure I’l have an appropriately wild and festive celebration today by sitting home alone and grading papers. I’m planning to have an orange for lunch — I hope I’m not being too exuberant.
I thought I’d look and see what Nelson is up to nowadays. He’s still writing for the Discovery Institute, he’s working on another book, On Common Descent, which I doubt that I’ll bother to read, and no, he’s never come up with an adequate justification for the concept of “ontological depth”, which he claimed to have been studying empirically.
Just yesterday, though, he posted an essay expressing his gratitude to an atheist philosophy professor, Adolf Grünbaum, in which he is thankful for the methodological rigor of his training. That’s nice. I don’t think it took, though.
He gives an example of what he considers a flawed argument by Grünbaum.
An example: one day in class, Grünbaum was arguing that religious opinions followed geography and ancestry. One was much likelier to believe in the existence of Brahma and Vishnu, for instance, if one were born on the Indian subcontinent, and raised by Hindu parents, than, say, being born in Lincoln, Nebraska — which is true.
That fact is also irrelevant, however, to the entirely separate question “Do Brahma and Vishnu exist?” Moreover, as I explained to Grünbaum, my Jewish brother-in-law Avner, a theist, was raised in Montreal by atheistic, Stalinist parents who intended that Avner should also be an atheist who adored the USSR. But he didn’t adore the USSR. And he most certainly believed in God.
The statistical religious-belief-follows-geography-and-parentage argument Grünbaum was making, however, allowed for occasional outliers such as Avner — meaning that Grünbaum’s position possessed no predictive strength. The holes in his net of social statistics let any human counterexample swim right on through. Thus, Grünbaum’s argument said nothing definitive in any particular case, and since every human being is a particular case — that’s you, me, Avner, Grünbaum (who celebrated his bar mitzvah in a conservative Cologne synagogue), Stalin (raised as a believer who sang in church choirs and was educated in a Russian Orthodox seminary in Tiflis) — the argument just wasn’t very good, by Grünbaum’s own standards. One will believe in the God of one’s hometown and parents, except when one doesn’t. And therefore we’re back to square zero. Does God exist or not? Birthplace and parentage are irrelevant.
But Grünbaum was correct! He wasn’t making a deterministic argument that everyone born in India is somehow compelled by geography to believe in Brahma — obviously absurd because there are Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and atheist Indians — and I doubt that he was trying to directly demonstrate God’s nonexistence, if he was as brilliant as Nelson makes him out to be. It’s also clearly not an absolute, fixed rule, so that Nelson can list a few exceptions is irrelevant.
This is an argument about epistemology: how do human beings know anything about the nature of the god they worship? What Grünbaum was pointing out is that our concept of god isn’t produced by an objective analysis of observable facts about nature, but is the result of influences from culture, community, family, personal subjective experience. Contrary to the beliefs of the Discovery Institute cultists, there is no god who left a distinctive and unambiguous signature on every living thing, and the basis of their belief in an Intelligent Designer is built entirely on bias, ignorance, misinformation, and superstition. Grünbaum was asking his students to question how they know what they think they know about deities, and to recognize that it’s mostly a product of local tradition, not divine revelation or measurable data.
I can believe that Nelson’s brother-in-law Avner was raised as an atheist and later became a believer, but that fact says nothing about how he came to believe, and trotting it out as if it somehow refutes Grünbaum is the real lazy thinking here. I rather doubt that Avner was floating all of his life in a total atheist void when suddenly, in a flash of insight, the entirety of Judaism manifested itself in his mind, and he woke from his godless dream in which the faith came to him to find, to his surprise, that an entire worldwide community of Jewish folk had independently come to all the same conclusions.
Oh, well. It’s part of the tradition of Paul Nelson Day that Paul Nelson will pop his head out of his burrow and make a nonsensical declaration that he cannot possibly defend. Yay.
Dang. I just realized that I don’t have any waffles in the house for the traditional Paul Nelson Day meal, and I’m supposed to stay-in-place and shouldn’t run off to the grocery store to get some.
The mildly deranged penguin suggests sending him a SARS-CoV-2 plushie, gift-wrapped using pages from On the Origin of Species. For example, GIANTmicrobes’ Coronavirus COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2):
I don’t think they do the suggested wrapping, and he’ll probably completely miss the point, (or something similarly deluded).
Uh, Waffles are something you make, not something you buy (unless it is in a restaurant): https://www.marthastewart.com/338522/waffles
Remember, creationists want you to believe that waffles are something mysteriously created, instead of an excellent do-it-yourself project!
Make pancakes, but spread some hex-nuts on the surface of the pan before cooking. Allow time for hex-nuts to heat up to pan temperature.
Pluck metal out of pancakes before eating.
Voila!
@Crip Dyke:
That is bloody brilliant! :) LOL.
Pluck metal out of pancakes before eating — Yeah, that gooey dough sauce just ruins the taste of freshly grilled metal.
The mildly deranged penguin points out a good way to make waffles is to use a Rudewordian. They also make great beer (when not busy climbing the local mountains or solving mysterious murders on steam trains).
Yeah, I used to make waffles, so I know how (although the hex nut trick is a new one). I don’t know where our waffle iron is, though, or even if we still have one! We have a tiny kitchen with lots and lots of cupboards, and Mary files things away by entirely mysterious rules, and she’s not here to tell me if it is someplace obscure that I’d otherwise never think to check.
I know where things are in my office. Anywhere else in the house, I am lost, and I am afraid to disrupt Mary’s filing system.
If one were absolutely convinced of the existence of supernatural beings, then I suppose you could use Grunbaum’s statistical approach (I’m not going to figure out how to make an umlaut) as evidence of pantheism. As in, various deities and groups of deities have divvied up the world between themselves and taken over divine oversight of different geographical areas.
Anyway, that idea makes a lot more sense than the idea that there’s only one deity who has negligently allowed various false understandings of its existence to flourish all over the place without attempting to correct them. I don’t believe in any gods, but if I did, I’d be a polytheist for sure. This world looks like a place that was designed by committee.
I’m not going to figure out how to make an umlaut — Off-topic, but there are at least three different ways. In no particular order:
(1) Search for one on the web, then copy-and-paste it.
(2) Use the HTML entity (i.e.,type this, including the leading ampersand and trailing semicolon),
ü(ü) orÜ(Ü). (Amazingly, I got this right the first time!)(3) Some mixture of keys (depends on operating system, input method, and other software details; whether your left earlobe is bigger than your right earlobe; and possibly also on the phase-of-the-moon).
Keyboard doesn’t actually matter — for example, I’m using a keyboard laid out as a French QZERTY but configured as an English QWERTY. However, e.g., on some kit, such as smartphones running Android, a long press of the appropriate key will present a menu of “alternative” similar characters.
qweėęēêèéërtyÿuūùûüúiìįíîïīoõøōœòôöóp
aãåāàáâäæsšßśdfghjklł
zżžźxcčçćvbnñńm
.
Yes, I’m bored.
PZ, you’re uncharacteristically tolerant today. Did your spiders cheer you up?
“The statistical ….. argument ….. allowed for occasional outliers … — meaning that [this] position possessed no predictive strength.”
Of course with IDiots like Nelson you never know, but this is exceptionially stupid or dishonest or both. He basically says that when throwing loaded dice you can’t make any prediction regarding the outcomes.
Statistics doe not apply to individuals.
(Minor correction to me@9) French AZERTY keyboard