Top 4 Creationist Arguments

Creationism has millions of adherents, countless think tanks, and has been around for centuries. By now it should have an unbeatable combo of irrefutable knockout arguments, right?

Damn straight. Hold on to your pants, folks, 'cos you're about to be rocked by Creationism's Greatest Hits, the creme de la creme of anti-evolution arguments.

#1: Complexity!!!1!

The universe is beautiful! But it's also really confusing. So God must have made it. I mean, you couldn't make a universe could you? So there.

In other news, God made Windows Vista.

#2: But... you know... God.

He is God, you guys.

#3: Eeeew, monkeys!

They're right, you know. Monkeys are pretty gross. What with throwin' the poop and shit.

#4: Lalalalalalala!

...There's actually no way to argue with that one. These guys are good!

I don't know about you guys, but I find all of this really persuasive. If only evolution had arguments like this on its side! All we've got is stupid crap like evidence.

And more evidence.

And even more evidence.

And... well, you know.

How can we possibly compete?

Most Astounding Fact

When reading through my blogroll, as is my wont, I found this video at Bad Astronomy, of Neil deGrasse Tyson telling us what he thinks the most astounding fact about our universe is:

The fact? That we are all made of stars.

It's a powerful fact; a beautiful, moving fact. It's also a fact that recently caught Miley Cyrus a fair amount of flak when she called Lawrence Krauss's way of putting it "beautiful".

But I don't think it's a very astounding fact - that is, not to me at least. Of course, I have a skewed perception: I've known it for as long as I can remember. It's one of the perks of being raised by a mother who read Carl Sagan books to her kids instead of Dick and Jane. Next to "billions and billions", his most famous line must be "we're made of star stuff". (It took about 2 seconds to find on YouTube!)

Anyway, Tyson puts it very well and I think it's a great video. It makes me look forward to the new Cosmos sequel he'll be hosting. But this is my blog, after all, and if you think I'm going to get through a whole post without making it all about me, me, me... well, you'd be overestimating my self-control. =P

So what is the fact about the universe that I find the most astounding? Well, I'm glad you asked.

Googolplexity

Like a lot of kids, I went through the phase when superlatives were the coolest things ever. Dinosaurs, the biggest land creatures ever! Jupiter, so huge the Great Red Spot could swallow the Earth whole and still have room for afters! Absolute zero, where everything just stops! Any kid who's been through this is surely aware of the stupidly huge number googol (one followed by a hundred zeroes) and its bigger brother, googolplex (one followed by a googol zeroes). Like the fact that we're all star stuff, or the continent of Pangaea, googol and googolplex are quite familiar faces to anyone who was a kid like me.

Which makes the hidden power of googolplex all the more astounding.

Googolplex is so freaking big that it's literally impossible to write out in long form - the number of zeroes wouldn't fit in the universe. ...Well, let me put a finer point on that: it's impossible to write out in base ten; just declare a "base googolplex" by fiat and you can write it out as 1. That would be sort of unfair, though, wouldn't it? But it's good that I brought up bases (or radices, for the verbose), since the subject is an essential part of the astounding fact I'm on my way to imparting.

Your computer, for instance, uses base two (more popularly known as binary). The number we sensible people would write as 255 is 11111111 in binary. But even programmers like me, who "talk" to computers on a routine basis, don't often handle a lot of binary. No, base sixteen, "hexadecimal", is the most common way programmers look at raw data. Since hexadecimal needs 16 distinct symbols, and our damn ten-fingered ancestors didn't have the decency to furnish us with that many numerals, we have to borrow a few letters that don't really want to be there (much like your sister when playing Rock Band 3), and 255 looks like FF. (The saddest cases amongst us, when we encounter "fffffff" in forum posts and YouTube comments, will obsessively convert to decimal numbers. We (*koff* they, I mean they) also get bonus points if we remember to factorial when it's exclaimed.)

So any data on a computer can be expressed in good ol' decimal, as well. It's not convenient for programmers, for a number of reasons, but it can be done. So, technically, any string of data - a program, a file, even (of course) a song or video - is just a really big number; this is just the corollary of the trivial observation that any number can be stored as a string of data on a computer.

So, what kind of program would googol be? No, it wouldn't be Google's source code (seriously, dude, that's a terrible guess). One followed by a hundred zeroes doesn't represent enough bytes of data even to store this blog post! Even a hexadecimal number with a hundred zeroes (which would represent a significantly greater value than googol, considering hexadecimal 100 is equal to decimal 256) could only represent about 50 bytes.

But what about a googolplex? It's got a googol zeroes! I mean, that's got to be enough digits to fit a program in, right? Well, I hope so - even if we considered all the storage devices ever manufactured by humanity altogether, we wouldn't even come within ten orders of magnitude of needing a googol zeroes to represent the data. Remember, we can't even write a googol zeroes in the universe.

So, googolplex is big. Yawn. Anyone can look at a 1TB hard drive on their desk (or Radio Shack if they're unlucky enough to lack one) and be briefly titillated at the thought of how many floppy disks it replaces. (Hint: more than you can carry.) Big numbers can be reduced to mewling kittens simply by giving them names; hell, even infinity can be tamed by giving it a name and a wiggly little symbol. But the thing about a number, when thought of as a string of data, is that by counting down from it to 0 (or by counting up from 0 to it, which makes a bit more intuitive sense when imagining the process) systematically traverses every permutation of data that can possibly be represented by the number of zeroes it has. Try it; count to 100 - there are only 100 possible 2-digit numbers (counting 00, of course).

So, let's count to googolplex. 1, 2, 3, 4... Well, let's just imagine we kept going. By time we finish, we'll have traveled through every possible permutation of data capable of being represented by the intermediate numbers. Sure, at first we'll have "boring" numbers like 8, 13, and 42. But by the time we reach 10,000, we'll have every 4-digit PIN ever used. And by 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 we'll have every possible 8-digit alphanumeric password.

Does that number seem large? Yeah? Does it fit in the universe? Okay, then. Just to keep things in perspective. We've got a long way to go.

Before "long", we've got the digital representation of every novel ever written. Or that will be written. Or even could be written. And every possible combination of the first half of one with the second half of another. Also, every novel possible with increasingly bizarre typos. Not to mention the overwhelming proportion of total nonsense. (In fact, we'll get to this milestone much quicker if we don't use ASCII encoding, which wastes a whole byte per letter. That's 256 combinations where only about three dozen are really needed!)

Lost amongst those novels? Your autobiography. Detailed and accurate to a degree even you wouldn't be able to achieve. Also, your autobiography if you'd lived a thousand years ago, or a thousand hence. Alternate yous that commit unspeakable atrocities or perform amazing feats. Accounts of your journeys to Mars and beyond.

You'd have the Library of Babel on steroids.

The concept is so mind-numbing, I've known people to flat-out disbelieve it upon their first encounter with it. But it's ineluctable; it's even demonstrable to an extent (the 4-digit PINs are an example). It's simply a fascinating fact about large numbers.

But we're still not done. That's just text; we've got so much further to go. Before long, we've got mp3's of every possible song. Digital video of all possible movies. Hell, digital video of everything that's ever happened in history. Always, remember, with a disproportionate heap of total garble, of course.

Long before we hit a googolplex, we'd have danced throughout the total cultural output of humanity. Indeed, of all the sentient species in the universe. Embedded in the ever-ticking stream of numbers would be videos of alien worlds. Real ones - and fake ones. Alpha Centauri Idol? It's in there.

Let that sink in. If you're like me, you probably can't. You could literally spend the rest of your lifetime - and our universe's - and you'd still never be able to list the things that you'd create simply by counting to googolplex. All that did, does, will, or can exist. Lurking beneath the surface of a humble number - a number most of us meet as children, throwing our arms wide and saying, "I bet it's this big!", and quickly forget, relegating it to the bin of cool science-y superlatives with the blue whales and blue giants.

Of course, you could never actually undertake this extraordinary performance. Any computer that could display the results wouldn't fit in the universe (more so if you wanted to store them!) and sifting the Harry Potters from the Graxfasczzaxses would be impossible.

But that's not the point. The point - the astounding fact, that promised astounding fact - is that this journey, this parade of numbers, can be easily imagined. Like infinity, we've tamed it with a name - googolplex. And though none of us will ever see the destination, we can all of us embark on it effortlessly. 1, 2, 3, 4...

One simple rule, maybe the simplest possible rule: Add One. Two little symbols: "+1". And from it? Everything, with the full force of what those ten letters can possibly convey.

Is it any wonder that, knowing a fact like that, another little rule like "copy me" could have created us?

And after all of this? That's just googolplex's zeroes. The amount it represents is huger still - after all, "100" only has two zeroes. And it's not even the biggest number humans have had the chutzpah to name. There are numbers mathematicians kick around that are so much larger than googolplex that the conventional notation that makes short work of it - 10^(10^100) - can't express them. Like googolplex's zeroes, these numbers would have too many exponents to fit in the universe.

...610, 611, 612, 613, 614, 615, 616...

P.S.

Going back to Neil Tyson's fact for a moment, Starts With A Bang! posted about it, too, and at the head of the post was a cool quotation from Richard Feynman:

Is no one inspired by our present picture of the Universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.

Well, sadly Feynman is dead, but I like to think we're now living in the dawn of that appreciative age he dreamed of. This blog's very title is a fragment of poetry I wrote, inspired by the picture of the universe revealed by science. In fact, my "About Me" box says I'm a songwriter (though it's something I never really post about, since I'm in a stage of my life where it's taking a backseat to programming), and well over half of my songs are inspired by science. It's without a doubt my greatest muse. Maybe I'll stop playing Sonic long enough to post some eventually. =P

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

So I check my Twitter feed to find that Christopher Hitchens has died.

I shall miss his courageous voice. Even as - if I may put it so brutally - a sick old man, his appearance at the debates and speaking engagements he so gamely persisted in was like nothing so much as a burning sun that had assumed the guise of a man.

With his voice alone, whether spoken or written, he could make you feel as though whipped by a hurricane, or tickled by the gentlest breeze. He was a testament to the explosive power that simple honesty, directness, and steadfast adherence to the principles of freedom, equality, and truth can lend to mere words.

Today I mourn the loss of a fellow mammal, and a personal hero. May his memes long persist.

Wright is Wrong

Some folks get their jollies by watching competitive sports. Not me, though - I insist on being weird. When I want to watch a competition where one side gets soundly beaten, I watch debates. The latest of these was between Sam Harris and Robert Wright. (Watch it on YouTube.)

Now, both Harris and Wright are technically atheists, but they disagree on the details. Wright agrees with Harris that religion is wrong, but parts ways with him when it comes to religion being bad. It's Wright's contention that religion is always neutral in any situation, neither bad nor good. He claims that the bad that Harris would attribute to religion is actually caused by other factors: cultural, political, socioeconomic, etc. He even goes so far as to characterise the the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a "land dispute".

This isn't the first time Wright has argued for this position. I've seen him do it once before with Christopher Hitchens. It seems to be his "shtick". He even admits when challenged that the question of religion's neutrality is a hard one to answer; that he hasn't done enough research or gathered enough evidence to be firm in his conclusion; and that it's his "intuition" about it. This is starting to sound more and more like an a priori assumption to me. It's amazing the wriggling he'll do to defend it, as well. In the debate with Harris, Richard Dawkins happened to be in attendance. During the Q&A, he asked Wright (in so many words) whether the conflict in Northern Ireland would exist without the artificial religious labels that continue to fuel it. Wright's prevaricating answer suggested that the conflict grew out of an imbalance in the two groups' access to power. This didn't go a long way to answering Dawkins' question - the concept of being two distinct groups would never have existed in the first place if not for theological differences - but whatever.

Basically, any time someone gives an example of an evil in the world that is ostensibly caused by religion, Wright will dutifully trot out a rationalisation that conveniently absolves religion. As he's not religious himself, one wonders why he bothers - but one can uncharitably speculate. When Harris asked him why he's against criticising Islam, but not against criticising the comparable (and quasi-religious) situation in North Korea, he said "Well, what are they gonna do?" Perhaps Wright is being hypocritical. He's okay with stepping on an ant hill, but not knocking on a bee hive.

Anyway, it's not my intent to figure out why Wright argues for the neutrality of religion. It's my intent to refute it. You'd think Sam Harris could have done so amply in the debate, but he seemed a little off his game (though Sam Harris on a bad day is still a force to be reckoned with). Unfortunately, the conversation turned to Islam more often than not, and much time was wasted with Harris reiterating its dangers. "There's a reason why we're not all lying awake at night worrying about the Amish," he said, making a great point in his great quotable style. But he said nothing that began to cut through Wright's argument and kill it at its root.

Wright's clung-to position that "religion is always neutral" is twofold: when an example of an evil of religion is brought up that he can't quickly dismiss, he'll move the goalpost, shifting the meaning of neutral to mean that while religion actually can inspire bad after all, it also inspires enough good that it's on balance neutral again. Once more, of course, he says this is difficult to measure and that he doesn't have any concrete foundation for his claim. (One wonders, then, why he makes the debate circuit arguing such a shaky claim.)

Both claims of neutrality, however, are easily and quickly dismissed. It's a shame Harris didn't do so, because maybe we'd be spared further flogging of the idea by Wright in the future. Anyway, I'll tackle them.

First claim of religious neutrality: "Religion never inspires bad things, people do bad things anyway and use religion to defend them. Take religion away and they'll just justify the bad things with something else, such as bastardised science."

This seems like you could dismiss it easily by finding something bad that a holy book tells people to do, and find an example of people doing it. For example: Not treating gays equally. That's a foul thing to do, and it's caused by religion, right?

Well, it may or may not be (though I'd say that in most cases, yes, it is), but Wright's rejoinder would probably be something like, "Yes, but there are lots of religious people - even ones who follow the very same holy book - who don't do it. Therefore, the bigots are practising homophobia because of their culture or some other reason, and simply using "God's word" to justify their behaviour."

That's a pretty sneaky response, and it can send one reeling just long enough for the subject to be changed. And it works with pretty much any minority group.

Except one.

Atheists. Pray tell, without religion, how there could possibly be such a phenomenon as discrimination against atheists? This is at least evil that can't be explained away as due to "socioeconomic factors" and completely hamstrings the argument that religion itself generates no evil.

Second claim of religious neutrality: "Okay, you might have got me there. Maybe religion causes that. But it causes enough good to make up for it in the end!"

This second claim is so facile that one wonders who couldn't shred it, but here goes. Doing good after doing bad doesn't make one good, or even neutral. The guilt of having done bad remains. For example, if I murdered someone, and then donated one of my kidneys or lungs to save someone else, would I be "neutral"? No, I'd still be in gaol for having murdered someone! At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, Wright's claim is tantamount to saying that the Nazis were on balance neutral because, hey! they rebuilt Germany's economy while they were at it.

Unless I've grossly mischaracterised Wright's position, it's pretty clear that it's pathetically easy to take apart. Fortunately for him Harris was fixated on Islam for so much of the talk; because if the light of reason had fully shone on his silly notions, they would have been embarrassingly revealed as unclothed in logic or consideration.

Should Atheism Be Provisional?

There's been a minor dustup here in atheist town. The subject of "what could possibly convince us of the existence of god(s)" has bubbled to the fore again. The last time this was brought up by Greta Christina, I commented, saying that technologically advanced aliens would be a more parsimonious explanation for the types of evidence she suggested. (I didn't mention it at the time, but so would human beings with a new and highly advanced technology. There's nothing to say there won't someday be made a discovery on the level of splitting the atom that will give humans "godlike" powers. In other words, a heretofore unknown technology indistinguishable from magic doesn't have to be extraterrestrial in origin.)

Currently, the conversation is bouncing back and forth between P. Z. Myers (here, here, and here) and Jerry Coyne (here). Greta Christina has also made a follow-up post, clarifying her position and acknowledging the "aliens" angle.

While Coyne and Christina are taking a firm "provisionalist" stance (i.e. that their atheism is provisional and could in principle be overturned by new evidence), Myers takes the opposite view. He's basically saying that the concept of god is so wooly and useless that there can never be convincing evidence for it. This stance has drawn accusations that he's making irrational a priori assumptions, and that his atheism is just as faith-based as any religion.

I think this unfair. Personally, I mildly disagree with Myers - I think I should be openminded to the possibility that there might be some kind of evidence that could convince me of god(s), even if I can't imagine what it is. However, calling his position irrational and faith-based is totally uncalled for and off target.

Even the most hardline sceptic has beliefs that cannot - even in principle - be overturned. For one example, there's no possible evidence that you could ever show me that would convince me that I don't exist (or that the universe doesn't exist, etc). As sceptical as I am, that's something that I will always believe, no matter what. Is it an irrational position taken on blind faith? No, it's just an extreme example of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." There are just some claims that verge on infinitely extraordinary, and no one can muster infinite evidence.

Perhaps the nonexistence of god(s) is in the same category as the existence of the universe. Totally unassailable at this point, considering the overwhelming and persistent evidence.

In principle, I'd side with the "provisionalists", but I don't think Myers' position is ridiculous on the face of it. He makes (characteristically) good points.

Aliens vs. God

At AlterNet, Greta Christina has outlined 6 (Unlikely) Developments That Could Convince [Her] To Believe in God, with the intent to show that atheists are willing to specifiy exactly what evidence would be sufficient to change their mind - something most religious folks are loath to do.

It's a great article, and I'm behind it all the way. There is, however, one thing that I think bears more thought: How would we know any given proof of God wasn't the work of godlike aliens?

Greta Christina writes,

If I saw an unambiguous message from God, I would be persuaded of his existence. If I saw writing suddenly appear in the sky, in letters a hundred feet high, saying "I Am God, I Exist, Here Is What I Want You To Do" -- and if that writing were seen by every human being, written in whatever language they understand, comprehended in the same way by everyone who saw it -- I would be persuaded that God existed. I'd be puzzled as to why he'd waited this long -- why he'd decided to do it in 2010 and not at any other time in human history -- but I'd still believe.

She then anticipates the heckler's gibe of, "Aliens!":

(And for the record: Yes, it's possible that this could happen without God. It could hypothetically, for instance, be accomplished by a highly technologically advanced alien species. But I don't think that would be the simplest explanation. If this phenomenon happened, "God" would, in my opinion, be a simpler explanation than "aliens" -- and unless I saw good evidence that the writing was done by aliens, God would be the provisional conclusion I would come to.)

She says that she thinks God would be a simpler explanation. I'm not so sure; it seems to me that aliens are a more parsimonious explanation, seeing as how - also according to the laws of parsimony* - we assume aliens extremely likely to exist, while God is extremely unlikely to exist.

*To maintain that aliens do not exist requires the extra assumption that either there is something special about Earth in particular, or that the origin of life is so unlikely that it only occured once in the universe - a proposition that is as of yet unsupported.

Think of it like this: If a human being from ancient Egypt saw a television set, they would assume it was magic. They would not know that such technology could even exist, and the idea of magic, which is commonplace to them, would seem like a much simpler explanation.

The real problem with God being a parsimonious explanation is this, as she touches on in the article:

I'd be puzzled as to why he'd waited this long -- why he'd decided to do it in 2010 and not at any other time in human history -- but I'd still believe.

This is the crux of the issue. In order for God to be a workable theory, we'd have to explain why he only seems to exist now, and not (as is claimed by believers) since the beginning of time. What could account for the absense of evidence of God up to this point? Explaining this would, it seems to me, require a bevy of assumptions and rationalisations that may equal, if not exceed, those necessary for the "aliens" hypothesis.

It's a safe bet that any aliens visiting us will be highly advanced. It's also a pretty safe bet that they would have studied humanity long enough to know that posing as God would be a great way to conquer humans, or at the very least get some yuks.

Yes, this assumes things about the aliens' intentions, but no more or less than the rationalisations of God's intentions for revealing himself suddenly. The old line, "we can't know the mind of God" can't be resorted to - that's not the kind of reasoning we infidels like to use. =P

If I see a fat man in a red suit fly overhead in a sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer, the first thing to assume as a proper sceptic isn't Santa Claus. I think the fact that concepts such as Santa Claus, or God, have been around a long time and are intuitive to people doesn't make them parsimonious at all. In fact, the exact opposite is true. The fact that they've existed for so long without confirmation makes them some of the most unlikely explanations possible.

And finally, their status as fiction is another - and devastating - hit against them. The likelihood of something someone came up with being real is as likely as me beginning to quote verbatim from a book I've never read - and that has yet to be written. In fact, the only way for these fictions (of God, Santa Claus, or anything else) to reflect reality at all is if there is some mechanism - such as revelation - that could relay the information of reality into the visions or writings of man. It can't just appear there - any more than monkeys can recreate Shakespeare by randomly beating on a typewriter for a trillion times the universe's age.

Of course, revelation can't be posited as the mechanism, because it can be shown - quite easily - to be bunk. If it wasn't, all religions would be the same (or at least agree on the basic facts). Of course, they don't - they can't even agree on the number of Gods there are.

With such good reasons to disbelieve the existence of God, seriously suggesting "aliens with the intent to deceive" isn't intellectually dishonest, or the shying away from proof of God by a dogmatic atheist. It would be the sound, sceptical, scientific thing to do.

Only when these other explanations were falsified would I accept God as the provisional explanation for such phenomenon as Greta Christina describes.

Atheism: Weak or Strong?

If you've read my blog, you probably know by now that I'm an atheist - I display the "Scarlet A" prominently and proudly, for one thing.

I often hear discussion about the definition of the term 'atheist', usually contrasting it against a bemusing array of other terms like 'agnostic', 'non-theist', and so on. My most recent encounter with this subject was when I watched the video 3.1 Atheism: Definitions by a YouTuber called Evid3nc3. (By the way, everyone should watch his riveting series of videos, Why I am no longer a Christian.)

In the video, the distinction is made between atheism in the "weak" and "strong" senses. Put simply, an atheist in the strong sense "believes that there is/are no God(s)" while an atheist in the weak sense "lacks a belief in God(s)". In the video, Evid3nc3 also says that it's been his experience that most atheists will either readily admit or concede after a little pressing that they are atheists in the weak sense. This has been my experience, too.

So which am I? Well, I don't think that the distinction between the two senses actually exists. The whole deal smacks of sophistry to me. Of course, I'm willing to be shown that I'm mistaken, but let me make my case.

First, though, let's get some other definitions straight.

• By "God" I mean the personal, interventionist deities described by almost all of the world's religions. The deistic and pantheistic ideas of God are not to be considered, nor the fatuous "Generation, Organisation, Delivery" mumbo-jumbo spouted by Deepak Chopra. If one wishes to name their dog, "God" and then claim that "God" exists, they are begging to be expansively ignored.
• By "believe" I mean exactly what is usually implied, "to accept as true". In this sense, everyone must have beliefs; atheists are not exempt. "Believe" is not to be conflated with "take on faith".

So every atheist believes "that there is/are no God(s)", myself included, which makes us atheists in the strong sense. I can show this with an example.

• I have seen plenty of evidence that suggests Harry Potter is a fictional character.
• I am convinced by said evidence.
• I believe (accept as true) that Harry Potter is a fictional character.
• The status "fictional" is mutually exclusive with the status "factual".
• If I believe that Harry Potter is fictional, then I must believe that Harry Potter is not factual.
• Therefore I believe Harry Potter doesn't exist (waggish exceptions such as people who happen to be named Harry Potter, "Harry Potter" as a concept, et al excluded).
• To say that I don't believe "there is no Harry Potter" but instead suggest that I "lack a belief in Harry Potter" is semantic hair-splitting of the grossest category.

Replace "Harry Potter" with the name of any religion's God and you'll see the point I'm making.

The distinction between "weak" and "strong" atheism is, it seems to me, meaningless at this point. However, there is a sense in which it might still be useful, if we recast strong atheism as "knowing that there is/are no God(s)". Replace "believe" with "know", and you've got something that, on the face of it, seems a lot more unreasonable, unyielding, and much more similar to the faith of theistic thinking.

Theists, or at least most of them, will claim to "know" God is real. Atheists, who often come to their lack of faith through critical thinking, will usually be reluctant to claim to "know" anything. Many of them (such as I) also have a great love for the scientific method and logical thought, and understand that all conclusions are provisional.

Therefore it's not unusual to hear an argument proceed somewhat like this:

Theist: "Blah blah, Jesus, blah blah, God, etc."
Atheist: "God doesn't exist!"
Theist: "Oh yeah? Well, how do you know? He might!"
Atheist: "Well, I don't know. You're right; he might indeed - "
Theist: "Ah hah!" stops listening

The score is Theist: 1, Atheist: 0, at least in the theist's eyes. The atheist's allegiance to the central tenets of science, bet-hedging and open-mindedness, has totally hamstrung his or her argument from the getgo.

However, if the atheist instead responded by saying, "I know for sure that God isn't real, and I can prove it," gasps would be drawn all round, even from atheists. Even someone as "strident" as Richard Dawkins would never dream of such a rejoinder.

But would the atheist be wrong to respond in such a way? I'm not so sure that he or she would be. While I'm aware of the importance of the scientific method, and love it as much as Richard Dawkins does, we need to realise what is meant by words like "know" and "prove".

Scientists will often point out that it's impossible to truly "know" anything. They're right of course, by the strictest and most rigourous standards of science. There is an infinitude of unfalsifiable assertions, such as "we're all in the Matrix", or "the world was conjured into being five minutes ago by the Flying Spaghetti Monster".

So if we can't truly "know" anything, why have the word at all? Take "proof" for example. It's impossible to positively prove anything, except perhaps in mathematics and logic. But would it not be a grievous assault on the language to totally eschew the word apart from those contexts? I consider it fair to use these words sans caveat, because if they mean anything at all then their implicated limitations must be intrinsic to them.

This is why it is generally agreed that when we say "we know something and can prove it" that we can only do so within the realm of our limits to do so, shackled as we are to the peculiars of reality. If someone asks for your name, and after your ready answer were to ask you how you knew and if you could prove it, you wouldn't dream for a nanosecond to say, "Well, I don't really know, and it's simply impossible to prove."

Dawkins will often say that we need to stop automatically privileging religion. His cheeky quote, "But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef?" is brilliant. But as much as I admire him, I have to accuse him (and countless other atheists) of paying only lip-service to this concept (at least in some situations). Because when it comes to the question of God's existance, the crux of atheism itself, the steely resolve becomes spongey. To privilege that question so highly, that it must always be met with hems and haws and a mountain of caveats is ridiculous.

The germane thing to remember here is that most atheists are as sure about the non-existance of God(s) as they are about any other certainty in their lives. It would be nice if they could start acting like it. We have to abide by the rules of reason - not even the tiniest slip is laudable - but this self-imposed inability to claim to know doesn't seem that reasonable to me.

So... I know for sure that God isn't real. And I can prove it.

Only a Theory?

I began my last post with this sentence:

Sadly, there are those who deny the fact of evolution....

Before I even leave the starting gate, many creationist readers will have already snorted in disgust and stopped reading, merely because of my use of the word "fact", instead of "theory". Why did I not use the word "theory"? To be perfectly honest, I used "fact" because Richard Dawkins does, and I admire his forthrightness. But I had a deeper reason, too - and I think it is the same reason that Dawkins chooses to use "fact" as well (and it's not because we happen to believe in its veracity).

It is because the word "theory" causes unnecessary confusion.

What is a theory?

Many would here quote definitions from major dictionaries, trying to make a point about how "theory" has been watered down with a second connotation. I'm not going to, because others have already done the job admirably. Anyone who doesn't know the distinction between the two meanings has only to spend one or two minutes in the culture of evolution and its deniers to learn it.

Instead, I'm going to point something out that should be obvious, but apparently isn't to some. A theory is manmade. It is similar to a book, a song, or even a religion. It is a group of cohesive ideas, knowledge, and descriptions about a subject. But it is made of language, and doesn't actually exist in the strong sense.

However, theories are usually about things that exist (but not always). The things a theory is about, and the theory itself, are discrete. One should not be confused with the other. This is not an overly subtle point - it's about as obvious as saying that we should not confuse the dark side of the moon*, and the Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon.

* which, like the night side of the Earth, is not always the same side, unless you take "dark" to mean "unseen until mankind launched probes".

Is evolution a theory?

Well, yes, if you are being colloquial or elliptical. The word "evolution" is popularly used to refer to what should more properly be called the "modern evolutionary synthesis". It is also used to refer to Darwin's theory of natural selection. It is shorthand, though, and whenever one uses a shorthand term, things can get confusing. For instance, if you took "evolution" to mean Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characters, "evolution" would be false. So, I wouldn't strictly call "evolution" a theory, anymore than I would call "light" a theory. There are theories about evolution, and about light, but evolution is a process and light is... well, ask a physicist.

By a quirk of language and history, the theory of evolution has come to be called simply "evolution". This has not happened in other cases, such as with light or gravity. But evolution is a process, which either happens or doesn't, in the real world.

You would never hear someone say, "Evolution isn't a fact! It's a word!" But the "only a theory" argument amounts to about as much. This is why I didn't say "theory". Theories are incomplete, and some, like Lamarck's, are demonstrably false. Even Intelligent Design is a theory of evolution, and I deny it.

Evolution is a fact of history. Those who take advantage of the "theory" canard have either not learnt enough about the subject or are being willfully obscurantist. I like to think the former, because then the problem is remediable.

The History Deniers

Sadly, there are those who deny the fact of evolution - 130 million of them in the US alone, according to a recent Gallup poll. These "history deniers" (an apt designation I'll borrow from Richard Dawkins) remain unconvinced by the veritable mountain of evidence for evolution, a mountain which grows day by day. Recent books, such as Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True or Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth - though triumphs of reason and lucidity - will hardly make a dent in the legions of the history deniers, the "unsinkable rubber ducks" (to borrow James Randi's delightful phrase). It will take a greater concerted effort than just a couple of bestsellers to turn the tide, and it's up to us laypeople to do our bit, too.

Hence this edition of Pernicious Fallacies. In it, I shall be addressing dyed-in-the-wool creationists - the persuasion that believe that the Earth was created in 6 days less than 10,000 years ago, and that all modern species of animal, including humans, were created in their present form before God took His well-deserved day off. I shall not be addressing the more "sophisticated" proponents of ID (Intelligent Design), who actually believe in evolution, albeit a gimped kind of evolution, helped along at crucial junctures by a God who was apparently too lame to get it right in the first place. Whatever percentage of you are already down with Darwin, feel free to stop reading now.

From Wolf to Poodle

Yes, I'm bringing up the tired old dog breeding argument. I'm fully aware of the creationist counterargument, but bear with me, because I have a twist on it.

Selective breeding of animals with the intent to exaggerate desired traits over successive generations, or "artificial selection", is well known and well documented. Even history deniers comfortable with dismissing the fossil, molecular, and distributional evidence for natural selection would think twice before denying the comparatively recent historical evidence for artificial selection. A good example of what artificial selection can achieve in a short span of time is the modern banana. Though there are those who believe the banana was designed by the Almighty Himself, I'd like to think these people are embarrassments even to creationists.

At the core of it, all Darwin and modern Darwinists are claiming is that Nature, as well as Man, can act as a selective breeder, through the non-random survival (and more specifically, reproductive success) of individuals, and that this "natural selection" is responsible for all the diverse life we see around us.

Where creationists have trouble is with that last bit. The difference between breeds of dog, or cabbage, while oftentimes spectacular, pales in comparison to the difference between a dog and giraffe, a cabbage and a tree, or even a human and an ape. Thus they find it hard to imagine these tiny gradations ever leading to all the diversity of life we see around us, from the tiniest microbe to the blue whale. Evolutionists, when trying to help them see how this could in fact be the case, often say something like, "if you can turn a wolf into a poodle in a few centuries, imagine what great change could be wrought in a billion years!" A billion years. It's no wonder the evolutionists find it so easy to accept a single-celled organism giving rise to all life on Earth, no matter how complex it appears - look at the time they have to work with! But creationists, sadly, haven't the luxury. They don't have more than a hundred centuries to work with - and it's a bit confining, but it's what they're stuck with.

Thus creationists accept (as they must) that artificial selection works, but only up to a point. "You can create variations of dogs and cabbages with the process," they'll concede, "but you'll never make a new species. Only God can do that." There's always the matter of the definition of "species", which began as scientific terminology and should remain thus, and should not be used to mean "groups of animals so obviously different I can tell them apart". But let's leave that to the side, as it really doesn't matter for our purposes here.

Creationist's Evolution

So let's, just for the sake of argument, concede the point. The Earth is only 10,000 years old (you could concievably buy that many candles for its birthday, whereas 4.6 billion would really put you out, so that's something at least), and you can't make a new species using evolution. So as a creationist, you accept artificial selection, and with a few logical leaps accept (let's say) natural selection as a comparable agency with comparable effects. It would then follow that all modern animals are at least as different from their ancestors in the days of Genesis as modern dogs are from the archetypal wolf. Or would it necessarily follow? To be sure, there are still wolves - certainly not the same wolves from the dawn of time (none live that long, of course), but a branch of descendants that differ very little from the archetypal wolf (God's wolf, if you like). So, would it follow then that at least most modern animals are as different from their original forms as a poodle is from a wolf, while some percentage have somehow managed to remain unchanged (conveniently for us, as we could use them as near examples of what the "Adam and Eve" of that animal species might have been like)?

This "creationist's evolution" I have led you to is not what I believe, of course, but it is reasonable within the framework of creationism. It would even help answer some prickly questions about God and creationism. For one, God would only have to have made a template for each animal species, an animal "Adam and Eve" as I put it. This template of His would then be subject to explosive variation at the hands of either Nature, or meddlesome Man, it matters little which. This would shed some light on God's apparent pre-occupation with beetles. Furthermore, it would make Noah's job a heck of a lot easier. A couple of spiders on the Ark might be bearable, but two of each of the 40,000 spider species?

I have made these points in an attempt to outline a kind of evolution in which a creationist might be comfortable believing. I wanted to make "evolution" less of a dirty word - it just means change over time, people. Unlike "atheist" or even "humanist" it doesn't have an inbuilt denial of God, or even of a Young Earth. It might be unpalatable to true Darwinists like me, but it could be useful for opening a dialogue, finding some common ground. After all, a denial of "change over time" is harder for a creationist to muster, especially with domesticated animals staring them in the face. This merry chase of "creationist evolution" is meant to divest the mere word "evolution" from the uncomfortable, monkey-laden specifics of Darwin's theory that creationists so revile.

But is even this Godly evolution inoffensive to the creationist? Or is even this ecumenical fiction I have constructed - no worse than most theological musings - still going to ruffle some staunch feathers? It might at that, because of something called "Platonic Essentialism".

Master Tapes, Signal Noise, and Wikipedia

It was argued by Plato that, for everything that exists, there is an ideal example (perhaps existent somewhere, perhaps not), an "essence". Every triangle, it might be said, is but an imperfect approximation of the "perfect triangle", drawn by fallible human hands on stone, papyrus, or today made of tiny pixels on a screen. In the same way, might there be an "essence" of every animal species, and every member of the species is but an imperfect approximation, cast from the essential mould? In the terms of our "creationist's evolution", these "essences" would be the animal Adams and Eves, the original ancestral archetypes of all future animals. Every animal born in the species would, instead of copying their own parents, copy instead the archetype, cast by God and therefore perfect.

We can here use the analogy of "master tapes". When (back in the day of VHS and audio cassette) a company produced thousands of tapes for the public to buy, each tape was a copy of a master tape (or, I imagine more rarely, a set of master tapes). It wouldn't have been wise to copy a second copy of the master tape, and then make a third copy by copying the second copy, and so on down the line. By the time you reached the thousandth copy, the picture (or sound) would have deteriorated far too much to be useful.

I must digress here briefly for the benefit of evolutionists. This "copied tape" argument is sometimes leveled against evolution as evidence against it. A thousandth generation VHS is mush - so how can a thousandth generation rabbit be anything but mush, if evolution is true? The answer is that VHS technology is analog, and the signal noise introduced with every generation is faithfully reproduced in the next. But DNA, the replicator upon which life depends, is digital, and signal noise doesn't accumulate quickly enough to reduce the message to mush. Certainly errors occur, as they do with our manmade digital devices, but they occur much more seldomly. At this diminished rate (characteristic of a digital process) the errors - mutations - don't build up, at least not in the same way. What do I mean by this?

Think of it like Wikipedia. Imagine any Wikipedia article of your choice as a gene pool, and any edits that are made to it as mutations. Anytime a deleterious edit is made (vandalism, misinformation, etc), it is promptly removed, reverting the article to its pure state. In the same way, if an individual bears a mutant offspring whose mutation has a harmful effect on the offspring's survival or reproductive success, that mutation is in effect removed from the gene pool. Unlike the signal noise on a VHS, the mutation will never reach a successive generation because it isn't as good at getting there. If a Wikipedia edit is constructive, however, it will not be promptly removed. Instead, it will persist. In the same way, any mutation, no matter how rare, if it has a positive effect, will persist. (We can ignore the specifics of neutral mutations, which - while well understood - complicate the analogy.) Even if in any given generation the vast majority of mutations do not have any positive effect, over time, the only effects that remain will be the positive (or neutral) ones. Negative, harmful edits (or mutations) simply cannot persist for long at all.

Thus, in a digital process such as this, signal noise does accumulate, as in an analog process. The difference, however, is that instead of descending into formless mush, the "noise" that accumulates hardly deserves to be called "noise" at all. Mostly, they are improvements. Of course, this can only work if there is some outside force acting on the system. In the case of Wikipedia, it is a vast public, who only find constructive edits to be useful. In the case of DNA, it is the reproductive success of the bodies it builds. In any situation where there is no outside force, the "noise" really is noise, and not improvements at all, no matter how digital the process. One such example would be hereditary diseases in humans (and of course all animals). They all, without exception* (save those rare few that have newly mutated this generation, which cannot in good conscience be considered hereditary at all) present after the afflicted individual reaches reproductive age. Why is it that we are at such greater risk of so many health problems when we reach old age? Simply because we have already reproduced by then. Natural selection, like a finicky Wikipedia moderator, has swept up all the spills that kill us early. But those beyond its reach hang doggedly on, causing much misery.

* Actually, there can be some exceptions. For instance Haemophilia can be carried into future generations through the female line, only causing harm when it arrives in male bodies. But my general point - that a fatal gene that switches on at age 7 will be swept away by natural selection, whereas one that switches on at age 70 has a much higher chance of becoming frequent in the gene pool - stands.

So, now back to the "master tapes" and the archetypal animals. The Essentialist viewpoint would be that every mutation is necessarily deleterious, and that none should ever persist. Any deviation from "God's rabbit" would be an imperfect rabbit, and God would presumably not want his divine rabbity plan to be eventually lost in signal noise, even digital, naturally selected "noise" that resulted in a fully functioning animal thousands of years hence. It might be a great animal, fantastic at survival (it couldn't be around if it wasn't), but it wouldn't be rabbity enough for Him.

But we know from incontrovertible evidence, from centuries of artificial selection, oftentimes performed as direct experimentation, that animals don't copy some ideal "essence". They (and we, for we are animals) copy our parents. Anybody denying evolution, not just Darwinian evolution with all the trappings, but evolution of any kind, even the "what happens within a species stays within a species" kind of variation I suggested earlier, has to be able to show (or at least formulate some sort of reasonable argument for) why it has not happened. After all, if we can change a species by our own hand using artificial selection, how can we expect natural selection to have done absolutely nothing, even in 10,000 years?

Natural Selection - Friend or Foe?

Perhaps natural selection is not a creationist's enemy, but their friend. Perhaps natural selection can be invoked to explain how animals (and humans) remain the same today as they ever were (if we grant the creationists this viewpoint temporarily for the sake of argument), even in the face of all the mutation that must occur.

In fact, one of Darwin's contemporaries, Edward Blyth, suggested just such a thing. He suggested that natural selection, far from guiding the cumulative mutations toward evolutionary ends, instead strictly penalised any variation at all. So natural selection didn't work to improve, but merely to maintain the status quo.

I find it ironic - given that evolution (in the sense of "change over time") is undeniable, and practically a tautology - that the onus is on creationists to explain how in their view it in fact did not happen to any animal at all, until meddlesome humans began their breeding experiments. And that perhaps the only way to do so is to embrace the theory of natural selection itself, as a kind of universal janitor, mopping up any rabbits that aren't quite up to spec.

As it happens, though, this view of natural selection turns out to be false, and isn't worth clinging to. Why? Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which basically states that, in any closed system, entropy will always increase. Creationists should be familiar with the Second Law, since many of them love to claim that Darwin's theory violates it.

The Second Law

Of course, they are infantile to even suggest it. They should pause a moment before leveling such an accusation at evolutionists. Think what you are accusing us of! There is a famous quote by Arthur Eddington:

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

By this, Eddington is stressing just how important the Second Law is to scientists. Do creationists really believe that the entire scientific community believes in a theory that violates such a fundamental principle? Ask any scientist if a perpetual motion machine is possible, and they will tell you "No" without any hesitation. There is no way that evolution even comes close to violating the Second Law. How can we be sure? Because every reputable scientist alive supports it. It's iron clad. It would have been rejected with due scorn otherwise, and evolutionists would today be loonies in their garages with deely-bobber hats investigating crop circles and drawing pentagrams.

Blyth's theory, however, would violate it. Short of God's continual intervention, no force can stop the accumulation of mutations in DNA. Bad mutations die, good mutations survive. Eventually, the gene pool is full of nothing but the creme de la creme, a book of happy accidents. By chance, some mutations, no matter how few, are going to be better at surviving. Nothing will stop them from taking over. There is no grand industrial machinery checking rabbits against some ideal template. If DNA can change for the better, to take better advantage of its environment, it's going to. Like a ball rolling down hill, it has to happen. The energy and information necessary to keep everything adhering to some essence, eternally immutable like the Heavens of the ancients - where does it come from? The energy necessary for Darwinian evolution comes from the sun - the math can be done, nothing else is needed. But to be truly unchangeable - to not evolve - that would violate the Second Law.

So, is that what God does? Does he sit up there all day, making sure that everything matches His divine specifications? Even the theists can but guess.

I hope I've shown, in some small way, that evolution, whether complete with all the Neo-Darwinian trappings that I believe in or not, is ineluctable. The history deniers must answer to their own satisfaction how it can not be. You have built your own Ark, and you must deal with the consequences. This is evolution's foot in your door - can you really ignore it, no matter how dilute the form, any longer?