Penn Jillette Defines Respect

 
Here's an excerpt from an article in Saturday's Toronto Star [Penn Jillette and the gospel of disbelief ]. I agree with Penn Jillette about the meaning of "respect." This point about respect and confrontation comes up in a discussion on John Wilkins' blog [Tone Wars]. Penn may be impressed by how many people get it but I'm more impressed by how many people don't.

If you know Penn & Teller — the famed magicians, humourists and debunkers, stars of the cable series Bullshit! — you know, broadly speaking, what to expect from their long-running show in Las Vegas and their appearance Wednesday at Massey Hall. If not, you might be surprised by Penn Jillette: first of all by how positively evangelical a man can be about atheism, and secondly by how happy he is to clash with genuinely who fervently disagree.

“We get a lot of people coming up to us after shows and saying ‘I’m a Christian but I really enjoy your passion,’ ” Jillette, 55, says on the phone from Sin City, where Penn & Teller’s show has been running at the Rio Hotel for nine years.

“There’s a big difference between tolerance and respect. Tolerance is you saying something crazy and me smiling and saying ‘that’s nice.’ Respect is when you say something crazy and I say ‘you’re out of your f---ing mind.’ Direct confrontation, direct conversation is real respect. And it’s amazing how many people get that.”

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[Hat Tip: Canadian Atheist]

Saturday Morning Cartoons

 
This one is from Pharyngula. PZ Myers thinks this guy is nuts. I think he's just trying to be funny.

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God Plays Bridge

 
The creationists tell us that anything in biology with a probability of 10^-39 or less is impossible [see God Designed My Great-Grandparents].

That's a very tiny number. Let's see just what kind of probabilities we're dealing with.

Imagine four people sitting down to play a hand of bridge. They shuffle the deck and deal out 13 cards to each player. The probability that the particular hand would be dealt is very low because the total number of possible hands is 51!/13! = 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000. Let's round this off to a probability of 0.2 × 10^-28.

Assuming that there have been at least 100,000,000 bridge players and that they've played at least 2000 hands of bridge, that represents a total of 5 × 10¹⁰ separate hands of bridge. The probability that all of these particular hands would have been dealt in a particular time and place is 10^-39. That's equivalent to the total number of bacteria and it's the kind of probability that makes creationists think of God.

I wonder if God plays bridge? If he does, I wonder if he ever loses since he can control the deal?¹

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1. Sounds like a good plot for a Mr. Deity video.

God Designed My Great-Grandparents

On the thread Impossible Molecular Machines we are being treated to a lesson in probabilities from several creationists. Here's an example of a comment from Livingstone Morford.

By Darwinism I mean the notion that everything we observe in the biological world are purely the result of stochastic processes, and I am critical of that notion.

On a different topic, I might add that intelligent design proponents need only demonstrate that the odds of a particular biochemical system evolving are 10^-40 or less in order for intelligent design to be a more adequate explanation for the origin of such a biochemical system. This is because there have been no more than 10^39 bacterial cells in the history of life on earth.

Speaking of stochastic processes, the average number of sperm contributed by a man in a mating process is 100,000,000 (10⁸). That means that every single human is the product of a single sperm cell uniting with a single egg cell and the probability that one particular sperm was successful is 10^-8.

This probability of existence applies to each of my great-grandparents.

Johann Betker was born in 1859 in Volhynia in the western part of Ukraine. The probability that he was produced from a particular sperm cell is 10^-8. His future wife, Amalie Schmuland, was born in 1868, also in Volynia. This was also an improbable event from the point of view of sperm selection. The probability that BOTH of my grandparents were born is (at least): 10^-8 × 10^-8 = 10^-16.

The same probabilities apply to Thomas Keys Foster born 1852 in country Tyrone, Ireland and his wife Eliza Ann Job born 1852 in country Tyrone. Their two births were very lucky with a total probability of only 10^-16. Now, if you combine all four of these great-grandparents you end up with a probability of 10^-32. Add in the other four great-grandparents and you end up with the total probability that all eight of these individuals would be born = 10^-64. (The real probabilities are much, much lower when you take the eggs into account.)

Since this total probability is a lot less than the total number of bacteria that have ever existed, it follows that God must have intervened somewhere. Two of my great-grandparents must have been designed by God. I wonder which two it was? My bet is that it wasn't any of the four mentioned above because they were all born outside of Canada. It was probably the two grand-parents who were born in Canada 'cause God likes Canadians.

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Michael Egnor Answers the Questions

 
I treid to answer Michael Egnor's questions as best I could [A Quiz for Atheists from a Creationist]. Now Egnor has answered his own questions at: What I Really Believe.¹

Some Sandwalk readers will be delighted to discover that Egnor refers to Aristotle in support of his beliefs, proving that Aristotle is good for something!

Most Sandwalk readers will be interested in this ...

That's what I believe. Note that these beliefs are entirely compatible with modern science; in fact, classical philosophy and classical theism is the source for modern science, which only originated in civilizations that embraced this classical view of the world. Some enlightenment philosophers moved away from some aspects of classical philosophy (e.g. final causes), but classical philosopohy and classical theism remain the foundation of Western Civilization and of modern science.

Many of you are modern scientists. How many think that classical theism is important in your work? How about classical philosophy?

Really? No one thinks that? Where do the IDiots come up with these ideas?

More and more scientists, philosophers, and theists are recognizing that science and theism are incompatible. That sort of makes it hard to claim that classical theism remains the foundation of modern science, doesn't it?

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1. Comments aren't allowed on Evolution News & Views so you can leave comments for Michael here.

Jesus and Mo Read Sandwalk

 
Jesus and Mo

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HuffPost Heatlh?

 
I don't read the Huffington Post but Orac over at Respectful Insolence does. He notes that it is about to start a new section called HuffPost Health. Here's how it's going to work.

HuffPost Health will be a clear and balanced resource to provide a comprehensive view of the state of health and health news in a given day. It will provide a forum for intelligent discourse and divergent but respectful points of view. HuffPost Health will empower you with state of the art information you can use to make informed and intelligent decisions that affect your life in meaningful ways.

In this spirit, HuffPost Health's articles and videos will include the best of evidence-based allopathic Western medicine (including drugs and surgery), lifestyle and functional medicine (including nutrition, fitness, stress management, supplements, and love and support), mind/body medicine (including mental and emotional health), women's and men's health issues, and integrative medicine (including complementary and alternative medicine).

I bet you can hardly wait! Neither can Orac 'cause "there'll be a lot of new blogging material." More importantly, Orac notes that HuffPost Health might soon become a handy source of all quackery: HuffPost Health: A soon-to-be one-stop shop for quackery. We're going to need something like this once the Oprah Show and Larry King Live go off the air.

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Taste Receptors on Your Lung Cells

 
The cells of your lungs express the same bitter taste receptor that is presence in the cells of your tongue (Deshpande et al., 2010). What's the reason for having these receptors in your lungs.

PZ Myers explains the concept of evolution by accident: Lungs with taste, or lungs with a fortuitous receptor?.

This is a very important concept and I'm delighted that PZ is promoting it. Adaptationists will not be happy. For more on this idea see: Evolution by Accident.

For more information about taste receptors see: Theme: A Sense of Smell/

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Deshpande, D.A., Wang, W.C.H., McIlmoyle, E.L., Robinett, K.S., Schillinger, R.M., An, S,S,, Sham, J.S.K., Liggett, S.B. (2010) Bitter taste receptors on airway smooth muscle bronchodilate by localized calcium signaling and reverse obstruction. Nature Medicine. Published online October 24, 2010. [PubMed] [doi:10.1038/nm.2237]

Happy Creation Day!

 
The world was created 6013 years ago on October 23, 4004 BCE. We don't know for sure who did it. Lucky for them, because a lot of people are really angry about the sloppy job.

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Saturday Morning Cartoons

 

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"Impossible" Molecular Machines

Someone named vjtorley just posted a list of things that would falsify his faith in Intelligent Design Creationism [The 10^(-120) challenge, or: The fairies at the bottom of the garden].

Normally this wouldn't be very interesting because the IDiots almost always set up impossible criteria reflecting their fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. This posting is no exception but I was intrigued by one of the items on the list.

2. An empirical or mathematical demonstration that the probability of the emergence of any of the irreducibly complex structures listed on this page, as a result of non-foresighted processes (“random mutations plus natural selection”) is greater than 10^(-120).

The link under "this page" is to an article by Casey Luskin from last June [Molecular Machines in the Cell]. He lists a whole bunch of molecular machines and claims that these structures pose a real problem for science.

Here's the list. Judge for yourselves whether they make you believe in God.

Molecular machines are highly complex and in many cases we are just beginning to understand their inner workings. As a result, while we know that many complex molecular machines exist, to date only a few have been studied sufficiently by biologists so that they have directly tested for irreducible complexity through genetic knockout experiments or mutational sensitivity tests. What follows is a non-exhaustive list briefly describing 40 molecular machines identified in the scientific literature. The first section will cover molecular machines that scientists have argued show irreducible complexity. The second section will discuss molecular machines that may be irreducibly complex, but have not been studied in enough detail yet by biochemists to make a conclusive argument.


I Molecular Machines that Scientists Have Argued Show Irreducible Complexity

1. Bacterial Flagellum
2. Eukaryotic Cilium
3. Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases (aaRS)
4. Blood clotting cascade
5. Ribosome
6. Antibodies and the Adaptive Immune System

II. Additional Molecular Machines

7. Spliceosome
8. F0F1 ATP Synthase
9. Bacteriorhdopsin
10. Myosin
11. Kinesin Motor
12. Tim/Tom Systems
13. Calcium Pump
14. Cytochrome C Oxidase
15. Proteosome
16. Cohesin
17. Condensin
18. ClpX
19. Immunological Synapse
20. Glideosome
21. Kex2
22. Hsp70
23. Hsp60
24. Protein Kinase C
25. SecYEG PreProtein Translocation Channel
26. Hemoglobin
27. T4 DNA Packaging Motor
28. Smc5/Smc6
29. Cytplasmic Dynein
30. Mitotic Spindle Machine
31. DNA Polymerase
32. RNA Polymerase
33. Kinetochore
34. MRX Complex
35. Apoptosome / Caspase
36. Type III Secretory System
37. Type II Secretion Apparatus
38. Helicase/Topoisomerase Machine
39. RNA degradasome
40. Photosynthetic system

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BioLogos vs Discovery Institute—CANCELLED

 
With breathless anticipation I awaited the showdown between BioLogos and the Discovery Institute at the upcoming conference in Texas this weekend. Here's the teaser from the Disco website [Showdown in Austin].

Next week the Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science becomes the God and evolution showdown in Austin, as the question of whether faith in God can co-exist with Darwinian evolution will be discussed and debated with people of faith on all different points of the spectrum. CSC Director Stephen Meyer will be presenting, as will CSC fellows Bill Dembski, Doug Axe, Richard Sternberg, Paul Nelson, Jack Collins, Walter Bradley, Bruce Gordon, and Ray Bohlin.

Imagine, all those people of faith from the Discovery Institute arguing that God and evolution are incompatible. And all those theistic evolutionists from BioLogos arguing that science and religion are perfectly compatible. The mind boggles.

Unfortunately, the great debate has been cancelled at the last minute. I guess Francis Collins was too busy to attend. Maybe they should have invited me to take on the Intelligent Design Creationists and the other creationists who call themselves Theistic Evolutionists?¹

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1. They would need reinforcements in order to make it a fair fight.

Leibnizian Cosmological Arguments

 
An atheist reader send me this argument for the existence of God: Leibnizian Cosmological Arguments. It's from Alexander R. Pruss of Baylor University in Texas, USA.

Here's the guts of the argument ...

The basic Leibnizian argument has the following steps:
(1) Every contingent fact has an explanation.
(2) There is a contingent fact that includes all other contingent facts.
(3) Therefore, there is an explanation of this fact.
(4) This explanation must involve a necessary being.
(5) This necessary being is God.

My first reaction whenever I see arguments like this is to look for evidence that supports the claim.¹ I'm not very interested in arguments that hinge on the definition of words and on things that may or may not be real. What is the actual evidence that this God really exists?

What is a "contingent fact" and why should I believe that every one of them has an explanation? The article by Alexander R. Pruss tries to convince me that this belief is related to something called the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and that it is self-evident. If it's not self-evident to me, then the author tries to show that my worldview is inconsistent—in fact, I can't even believe in evolution unless I accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason and hence, that every contingent fact has an explanation! Who knew?

To me, this just seems like silly sophistry.

Similarly, I don't see any reason to believe that there is a contingent fact (whatever that is) that contains all other contingent facts. What's the point?

Even if I'm willing to consider steps 1,2, and 3 why should I conclude that something called a "necessary being" is part of the explanation?

The god of the cosmological argument is an imaginary god who exists only in the minds of philosophers. There is no connection between that imaginary "necessary being" and a god who actually does anything. If someone wants to believe in the cosmological "necessary being" then that's fine with me as long as they don't try to attribute anything else to that "necessary being" other than satisfying some unprovable premises about contingent facts.

I don't see any reason why I should believe in this "necessary being." More importantly, I don't see how I could possibly distinguish between people who believe in the cosmological "necessary being" and those who don't, if that's the only difference between them. But let's not kid ourselves. There aren't any living theists who just stop when they get to point #5.

The cosmological arguments are just rhetorical devices for satisfying theists who have acquired a belief in God for entirely different reasons. Nobody, including theists, arrives at a belief in a Christian god—or any other personal god—via the cosmological argument. To a non believer, the entire argument looks silly no matter how much you dress it up in philosophical finery. This is not proof of the existence of god so much as post hoc rationalization for believers.

Here's an example of the kind of reasoning you see in this "sophisticated" essay. Remember that Pruss is trying to convince us that you must accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason and that principle leads automatically to the conclusion that "Every contingent fact has an explanation."

It is morally acceptable to redirect a speeding trolley from a track on which there are five people onto a track with only one person. On the other hand, it is not right to shoot one innocent person to save five. What is the morally relevant difference between the two cases? If we denied the PSR, then we could simply say: “Who cares? Both of these moral facts are just brute facts, with no explanation.” Why, indeed, suppose that there should be some explanation of the difference in moral evaluation if we accept the denial of the PSR, and hence accept that there can be facts with no explanation at all?

Almost all moral theorists accept the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral. But without the PSR, would we really have reason to accept that? We could simply suppose brute contingent facts. In this world, torture is wrong. In that world, exactly alike in every other respect, torture is a duty. Why? No reason, just contingent brute fact.

The denial of the PSR, thus, would bring much philosophical argumentation to a standstill.

An interesting thing about this argument is that it yields a PSR not just for contingent truths but also for necessary ones.

Quite frankly, I have no idea what he's talking about and nothing said here prompts me to try harder to understand the point. He lost me in the second sentence because I think it IS right to shoot one person to save five, if that's the only choice.

I've also seen many institutions and societies that condone torture. There was at least one American President who liked the idea and in the not-too-distant past torture was good sport in the Roman Catholic Church. What has this got to do with the Principle of Sufficient Reason?

Notice that up until now I haven't even mentioned the most obvious problem with the cosmological argument; namely, that it doesn't explain anything. If there's really a problem identifying the explanation of everything then what explains god? I know that theists everywhere have elaborate excuses to explain why god falls outside of the original premises of the cosmological argument but isn't it interesting that they never explicitly include them in the argument?

Take the five steps above. There should be another statement along the lines of "(4b) This necessary being does not require an explanation because it isn't a contingent fact. This doesn't violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason because I say so."

Man, those Courtier's of the Emperor sure are clever!

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1. Actually that's not quite true. My real first reaction is more like, "Holy shit! Are there really people who believe this nonsense!

A Quiz for Atheists from a Creationist

 
Michael Egnor seems to concede that the theists were unable to come up with a good reason for believing in supernatural beings when I challenged them a few weeks ago: A Challenge to Theists and their Accommodationist Supporters.

Now he wants to return the favor by challenging atheists: What Do New Atheists Actually Believe?. It's kind of a funny question because atheists don't actually believe in anything—at least nothing that's common to all atheists. We've just failed to be convinced that supernatural beings exist.

Anyway, here are the questions ...

I want to learn more about what New Atheists really believe. So I'm asking Moran a few questions, although other atheists (Myers, Coyne, Novella, Shallit, etc) are invited to reply on their blogs, and I will answer.

Here are the questions:

1) Why is there anything?

I don't know and I don't really care. I'm quite happy to think that something has always existed but I'm not troubled by the fact that our space-time may just be an accident.

2) What caused the Universe?

I don't know. In fact, I'm not even sure what you mean by "cause." I'm told by experts in the field of cosmology that there's no need to invoke a supernatural being to explain the origin of the universe but if you want to believe in a deist god then that's all right by me.

3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?

I don't know. That's not my field.

4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?

That's two questions! I don't know the answer to the first one because I've never studied Aristotle. From the sound of the question, I haven't missed anything. As for the second question, I can't answer because I don't know what you mean by "final cause."

5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?

Subjective experience seems to be what you perceive in your mind. I presume that's an epiphenomenon but it's a very pleasant one.

6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?

What? What?

7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)

I don't think there's any such thing as "Moral Law."

8) Why is there evil?

All animals exhibit a range of behaviors. Sometimes those behaviors are clearly beneficial to themselves, or the group, and sometimes they aren't. There's no rule that says every animal always has to act perfectly all the time. Some humans, for example, would restrict a woman's right to choose and would discriminate against gays and lesbians. I wish those people weren't evil but their behavior isn't a big surprise to me.

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Homology, Structural Homology, and Being a Little Bit Pregnant

Misuse of the word "homology" is one of my pet peeves.¹ I used to regularly complain about it on talkorigins and I still challenge our graduate students when they talk about "70% homology" or something that's "highly homologous." If you don't understand scientific terminology then it's very likely that you don't understand the concept either.

John Wilkins has pointed me to a couple of good articles² on the proper use of the word "homology': Distant homology and being a little pregnant and 2010 Homology High-Low Count.

The first article explains why the term "structural homology" should be banned from the scientific literature. The correct term is "structural similarity."

The meaning of homology is on my mind lately because I'm grading essays that critique Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution. Student have to pick one of the chapters and analyze the arguments used by Wells to attack evolution. One of the chapters is "Homology in Vertebrate Limbs" and it's one of the most difficult chapters because Wells highlights the frequent misuse of "homology" in the scientific literature.

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1. I have many. It's what happens when you get old.

2. I wonder if he's doing this on purpose—posting a list of provocative articles in the hopes that someone else will do all the work?