Pre-Creation (How Good Can God Be?)

I want to consider whatever there was, in the theist conception, prior to creation.  Note: I use the term "prior to" deliberately rather than the term "before", because creation probably implies a beginning of time, in which case there would be no "before" (such as we could understand it).

The idea, as I understand it, is that it is impossible for there to be an infinitely long causal chain back into the past and that, within this universe, all effects (without exception) are preceded by a cause.  Note: I am not interested in Aristotelian "causes" here, which are presented as answers to a "why" question such that considering them would be equivocation.  I very much mean a cause as in the combination of pre-existing conditions and some sort of force acting on something.

The notion of pre-existing conditions and a force acting on something is taken to show that while there must have been some "first cause", that "first cause" could not have come from within this universe.  Note: I am not implying a "first cause" from "outside" the universe, since at this point, notionally, the universe does not (yet, see first note) exist.

This "first cause", it is then claimed, must be a creator god.  Note: I am not implying that this is a specific god, one that maybe has the name "God" or one that Adam and Moses chatted with, so I have no intention to capitalise the term when I use it.

It is further claimed, by most theists, that this creator god is extremely, maximally or all-: powerful, knowing and good.  Some go further, saying that this god is perfect.  I know that, when challenged, some theists suggest a less extreme version of a god, in order to avoid certain problems, but I strongly suspect that in private such theists relax back into believing the full deal.  Let's just say that this hypothetical creator god is, at a minimum, powerful and knowledgeable enough to create this universe and then consider how good such a creator god could be, given that it started with the most rasus of all possible tabulæ rasæ.  Note: This is a questionable metaphor because "rasus" indicates that the "tabula" [slate] has been "scraped" clean, implying that the slate had been in a different state earlier, but I'm just trying to say in an oblique way that this creator has the blankest of all blank canvases before it, that there is nothing before it but potential, and perhaps not even potential, since any potential that exists supposedly exists, as yet unmanifested, within the creator god and that creator god has not yet created anything yet that could be "before" it.

One final, or rather first, thing.  In our understanding of physics, time could have started just prior to the big bang, but it doesn't necessarily have to have started just then.  In the hypothetical that I am considering right now, however, to all extents and purposes time does start with “creation” - because otherwise the causal chain would extend further back, and we're specifically looking at when the chain starts.  I'm willing to accept that the creator god could create time first, with nothing else (so no matter or energy and no space in which to put it), and use the fruit of that initial creative act to "spend time" considering what move to make next.  I'm not saying that a creator god needs to do that, but we're going to consider decision making on the part of the creator god and, as far as we understand it, decision making takes time.

So, we have the creator god.  Nothing is created.  The creator god is sufficiently perfect as to make a universe of some kind.  Is this creator god good?

It seems that we can only tell by employing an awkward, circular definition of good, saying that this creator god is good because it does creator god stuff and creator god stuff (namely creation) is, by definition, good, or good by consideration of what actions this creator god takes - judging it by its fruits, you could say.

But then we come to suffering.  Suffering is, in itself, a bad thing.  I doubt that anyone would argue that suffering, in itself, is a good thing.  It is certainly possible that, if on balance there is more good than bad that accrues from a certain act, then that act can be considered "good" even if it resulted in suffering (in some sort of "the ends justify the means" sort of way).  However, at this point in our hypothetical history, there is nothing and there is, therefore, no suffering at all.

What justification would this creator god have for changing from that primordial, zero-suffering state to a state in which, inevitably, sentient creatures would emerge and suffer, some horribly?  Note: I am not saying here that it's necessarily the case that the creator god should not have created at all, but rather emphasising the (hypothetical) fact that the creator god had an entirely blank canvas (albeit an entirely metaphorical one).  Nothing had yet been created, not even the physical laws of this universe, and the creator god had almost entirely unlimited options (remember that this is a sufficiently powerful and knowledgeable creator god, not an omnipotent or omniscient one).  The creator god could have created, for example, a single intelligent being with which to interact.  It might be argued that loneliness of that being might be an issue, but that is a post hoc quibble.  A deliberately created being, created by a sufficiently powerful and knowledgeable creator god with the sole purpose of interacting perfectly with its creator, would not suffer loneliness - it'd be in (sufficiently) perfect communion with the (sufficiently) perfect creator god.

Some apologists might miss the point (intentionally or not) and suggest that the creator god does not need to justify itself to lowly mortals like myself.  That may well be true, but such a tyrant god is not an inherently good god.  And in any event, I'm not arguing here that this hypothetical creator god does not exist, I am merely pondering on how good it could possibly be.

So, how good can it be?

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There's the common argument that this god wants to enter into a loving relationship with us all, and that this is a great gift, offered freely.  Nevertheless, this is satisfying a want on the part of the creator god, and any good that is associated with this offer comes only after our creation.  Therefore, we suffer (and I reckon we all suffer to a greater or lesser extent) to satisfy the wants of a creator god, even if we might subsequently get a boon that seems somewhat secondary (our happiness is subordinate to that of a vastly superior being, after all).  However, I am not considering the post-creation situation – I'm considering the pre-creation situation in which a creator god has the opportunity to decide between A) creation of sentient beings which would then be placed in a quandary, risking future eternal bliss or future eternal suffering (or permanent oblivion), while experiencing a poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives on the material plane; B); creation of sentient beings who would not then be placed in such a quandary and would not then experience poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives (on any plane) or, C) abstention from the creation of sentient beings altogether.

My thinking is that the creator god could be good.  But it would not be good if it chose option A.

On Intelligent Design and Penguins

Note: this has nothing to do with the Absence of Meaning.

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I noticed, at one point during my stay in Craig-Land, that there had been quite a few threads on intelligent design (ID).  Oddly enough, all had all been generated by theists, so I thought I'd shake things up a little by having a non-theist start up a thread on the topic.

As said, there were already a few threads: one on ID and complexity, one on ID and simplicity becoming complexity, one on the trouble with Darwin, one containing challenge to debate formally on the topic of design (with a focus on "design" as implying something other than necessity), one on ID and the watch and a stupid question (those were the theist’s words, not mine).

The examples brought up as evidence of design in these various threads included: the eye, the cardiovascular system, DNA, the flagellum, sandcastles and teeth.  There seems to be a set of specific staple examples that are brought up again and again in arguments for design - and even when a new item is brought up, such as teeth, which I don't recall being raised before, the shape of the argument always seems rather similar to all other versions: "this is a complex thing that appears to be useful only when fully constructed with no intermediate steps that I can identify, therefore design".  (Here's something on the evolution of teeth, so perhaps it's not such a new argument after all.)

What I wondered about was why the range of topics seemed (and continues to seem) so limited.  About that time, I had watched March of the Penguins (as narrated by god) and it occurred to me that there was an opportunity here for creationists (oops, I mean proponents of Intelligent Design [IDiots]) to argue for design via emperor penguins.  Think about it for a moment.

These birds mate and rear their young during winter in Antarctica.  To get to where they are going, they have to walk (despite being, primarily, aquatic birds that swim rather than flying, or walking) a very long distance.  When they have successfully navigated their way to their breeding ground, across largely featureless terrain, they have to survive the terrible cold of an Antarctic winter, without eating, for months on end.  When an egg is laid, it cannot touch the ice for more than the briefest moment or the chick within will die.  The penguin’s feet, therefore, must be able to not only withstand the cold of standing directly on ice and snow (for months!) but also to keep the egg warm.  The penguins must be able to transfer the egg from the mother's feet to the father's feet with sufficiently high probability of success that enough eggs survive to ensure that the next generation of penguins is viable.

All of these must line up.  The parents must have the capacity to store enough fat to last the winter, their feathers must provide good enough insulation to allow the birds to survive the long dark, their feet must be able to withstand ice below, they must be able to travel 100km across a difficult land surface (despite being aquatic birds with bodies best suited for swimming) and so on and so on.

Why is the amazing story of the emperor penguin almost never used to argue for intelligent design?  (Although, of course the story is occasionally used, as indicated in the wikipedia article on the film.)

Maybe it's because the habitation range of penguins, as a mirror image of that of creationists, is almost exclusively restricted to the Southern Hemisphere*?  (The exception there is the Galapagos penguin, and even then we’re only talking about those on the northernmost 20km of Isla Isabela, an island which is about 130km long north to south.  Occasionally there is a mix-up in the penguin version of GPS and some poor penguin ends up in the wrong hemisphere.)  The vast majority of creationists have never seen a penguin in the wild, not even the rare Australian ones like Ken Ham (from Queensland).  The few examples from New Zealand, like the Bananaman, Ray Comfort, are likely to have seen them though.

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* This is a bit of an exaggeration.  While Australia and New Zealand are not quite as heathen as, say, Sweden, they are at about the level of secularisation of France (slightly less heathen than the UK).  Other nations in the Southern Hemisphere however are significantly more religious (South Africa [more religious than the US], Chile and Argentina [about as religious as the US]) and are more likely to fall prey to creationism.  It’s odd that Australia and New Zealand should have produced so many creationists – and spawned not one, not two, but three creationist behemoths (Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International from Australia and Living Waters/The Way of the Master from New Zealand [link there is actually to The Way of the Mister, from Mr Deity, it's far more entertaining]).

Inference? What Inference?

From the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance.

Chapter 1, Book 1, War of the Worlds, HG Wells

I was curious, after listening to his appearance on Unbelievable, as to whether Luke Barnes would advertise it.  I wrote in Come on out, Luke!  Just admit it! about how I think that he should just come clean about being a theist (a Christian theist at that).  Earlier, in Luke Barnes Exposed, I wrote about how Barnes had stumbled in his interview with Luke Muehlhauser and basically admitted to being a theist and how his recent book basically confirms it (so it's a bit strange how he is so coy with Justin Brierley, but I guess he's got into the habit of maintaining the illusion of plausible deniability).  What I further noted was that the strange fact that Barnes doesn't mention his appearance on the Pale Blue Dot podcast, a fact that I ascribed to his stumbling admission to theism during that discussion.

So, I wondered, would he advertise, on his blog Letters to Nature, his appearance on Unbelievable in which he as introduced as a christian (twice)?

The answer is no.  No mention of it at all.  No mention of it coming up (despite it being recorded a week before being published) and no mention of it having happened (at time of writing, in the middle of week following - but he does seem to have mentioned it three weeks after I initially posted this article, that is a month after the episode was published).

I did notice, however, that Luke has written a piece on Sean Carroll's new book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.  Interesting, I thought, since Justin Brierley suggested that Carroll would be invited onto Unbelievable later in the year to go head to head with Barnes.  What a fortunate co-incidence!  (Note that while the episode was taped before Barnes' post went up, presumably the piece was written before, even though that too went up online the same day that Barnes posted about it, and Brierley may well have been oblivious.)

So, was this to be another arxiv paper, like his attack on Stenger?  No, this time it was going to be published by Inference: International Review of Science.

It was at this point that faint alarm bells started going off and I felt a jolt of adrenaline, that frisson that one feels at the beginning of a hunt.  Something wasn't quite right about this.  What was this journal that I had never heard of before?  And why does the word "inference" shoot up warnings for me?  And why does Barnes hasten to say that he did not choose the title?  Ah, it's called Good God!  Not a good start.

So I wandered over and looked at the About page (linked above).  Hm, interesting:

Although the editors have every intention of appealing to experts for advice, Inference is not a peer-reviewed journal.

We have no ideological, political, or religious agendas whatsoever.

So, it's a review, and/or a journal, but not a peer-reviewed journal.  And methinks they do protest too much (with questionable grammar) about their lack of agenda.  Why do they need to protest at all?  Taking a look at another open access on-line only journal (albeit peer reviewed), Science Advances (from AAAS), there's no mention of ideology, theology or agenda.  The word "ideology" does appear on their Statement on Scientific Transparency, Disclosure, and Responsibility, but in the context of unwelcome politicised and ideology-based intrusions into science.  There seems to be no need to declare that they are free of agenda.  Perhaps the intent, by the editors of Inference, is to imply that other journals are not free of agenda.

That word, "inference".  It still bothers me.

So, who are these people?  These editors who took Barnes' words and placed it below their own rubric, Good God!?  And who else has been published in this august journal?

Scanning down the list of editors, one name leaps out.  Contributing Editor, David Berlinski.  Early in the life of this journal, Jeffrey Shallit expressed misgivings about the Berlinski name appearing in the twitter feed associated with a new science journal, Mischa and Claire, and intuited that their father David was somehow involved (despite there not being any details of the editorial board available at that time).

So, Berlinski is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a contributing editor to the journal that Barnes decides as the vehicle for his review of Sean Carroll's new book.  Interesting.  What about other authors?  There's Michael Denton, of course, another senior fellow from the Discovery Institute.  Then there's Arthur Cody, about whom I could find very little, but who wrote a piece against materialism.  And Tyler Hampton … tennis coach?  The apologist's go-to man for the BGV, Vilenkin, is there, writing about the beginning of the universe.  Interesting indeed.

It can't be said that every single article has intelligent design leanings, but … it's still an interesting choice by Barnes.  We have more information to work with though.  Barnes highlighted three articles that he noted as contributing to his decision.  There was Vilenkin's article as mentioned above and what appears to be a perfectly normal article by Jean-Pierre Luminet on the notion of a Holographic Universe.

There's also a reference to an article by Gregory Chaitin, although it's unclear which one since he's written for Inference three times - I could point at An Algorithmic God, but it's possible that Chaitin did not choose the name and it's not the most recent article by him published at Inference.  The most recent is Doing Mathematics Differently which starts with two quotes from Leibniz.  Both are from Philosophical Essays, but they are strangely out of order and one is a fragment:

And if someone traced a continuous line which is sometimes straight, sometimes circular, and sometimes of another nature, it is possible to find a notion, or rule, or equation common to all the points of this line, in virtue of which these very changes must occur. For example, there is no face whose contours are not part of a geometric line and cannot be traced in one stroke by a certain regular movement. But, when a rule is extremely complex, what is in conformity with it passes for irregular.

Thus, one can say, in whatever manner God might have created the world, it would always have been regular and in accordance with a certain general order. But God has chosen the most perfect world, that is, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena, as might be a line in geometry whose construction is easy and whose properties and effects are extremely remarkable and widespread. I use these comparisons to sketch an imperfect likeness of divine Wisdom and to point out something that can at least elevate our minds to conceive in some way what cannot be sufficiently expressed. But I do not claim to explain in this way the great mystery upon which the entire universe depends.

Then there are the contents of the issue of Inference that sit alongside Barnes' piece.  Two are notable.

First there's a "Critical Essay" by David Berlinski & Juan Uriagereka, The Recovery of Case.

This initially appeals to the linguist and grammarian in me, especially as a person who continues to use the words "that" and "which", both of which are often dropped in modern English and are thus easily confused.  However, I noted an odd slide towards the end, when their examples stopped being so quirky and quaintly awkward and took on a different flavour.  Regarding the awkwardness, the authors provide an example of a complementiser in the sentence "Trottweiler prefers for Agnes to keep quiet" instead of the more natural sounding "Trottweiller prefers that Agnes keep quiet".  The thing here is (that) for isn't a complementiser in the example, it's a preposition and it seems to have been backwards engineered into a sentence which just seems wrong.  The preposition for is the only one associated with the noun "preference".  I think a far better example of for, as a complementizer, would be in a sentence where for is used instead of because, "we all sang him a nice song for he's a jolly good fellow" but even then, it would be less awkward to simply use because.

The last two examples in the article aren't as quirky, instead they dip into the bible, there's something there about Sampson and Delilah and then one about Cain and Able.   That's not the main issue though.  The main issue is hidden at the end of the third last paragraph where the authors ask "if human beings are notable in their possession of Universal Grammar, what explains the acquisition of Universal Grammar by the human species?"

Michael Denton has an answer - it's not evolution (posted at a Discovery Institute web-site, although that might not be immediately obvious, you have to go to the bottom of the right hand bar to see their logo).  So, despite a promising start, this is merely an attempt to promote intelligent design.  No surprises there given that it's co-written by a senior fellow of the Design Institute.

Then there is an "Experimental Review" by James Tour, Two Experiments in Abiogenesis.

James Tour is a synthetic organic chemist who is notable for being a "scientific dissenter from Darwinism" and who signed a petition to that effect for the Discovery Institute.  It's interesting that he should be deployed to comment on a couple of experiments with implications with regard to abiogenesis.

What I am not suggesting is that Inference is a journal that is literally awash in Intelligent Design propaganda (by which I mean metaphorically awash).  Not at all.  What I am suggesting is that Inference is a journal that acts as a platform on which high-brow Intelligent Design propaganda can sit side by side with mainstream science.  Another journal which is peer-reviewed, and does not have an editorial board that includes a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, would be reluctant to publish the propaganda, but Inference seems to have no problems with publishing mainstream stuff that comes their way - because it aids their cause.

So, that word - inference - what was bothering me about it?  Two things really.  There's the common apologetic claim that they are using "inference to the best explanation", which sounds all scientific, except that it tends to stop at the first step (rather than going on to attempt falsification, prediction or hypothesis testing).  But inference in itself isn't a bad thing.  We all make inferences pretty much all the time.

I think what bothered me slightly and now bothers me somewhat more is the initially tenuous link to the Design Inference, a book by William Dembski - formally of, you guessed it, the Discovery Institute.  (His retirement from the institute and the ID community was only announced a couple of weeks ago, but his work on an ID book implies that he is not entirely retired.)

In earlier articles, I have written about Barnes' and his Templeton temptation.  That's bad enough, so I do hope that we are not about to see him fall into even worse company with the ID crowd.  There are plenty of other journals out there that Barnes could have sought out for publication.  Why did he choose this one?

Prediction that creationists will crawl out of the woodwork

I predict (and have done so publically) that creationists will be particularly excited by an announcement that research on cockroaches in Australia indicate that evolution is (to an extent) predictable.  Of course I mean old universe, big-bang accepting creationists, not young earth creationists for whom this research might be less appealing.  I go further to suggest that this excitement on their part will be characterised by a deep lack of understanding as to how evolution works.

The research has looked at the genetics of a type of burrowing cockroach.  The ancient cockroaches that came to Australia about 20 million years ago had a similar diet to your average rural cockroach today (the German or American ones), they would forage on the forest floor among the fallen leaves.  The forest conditions would protect them from the sun.

As the rain forest retreated from Australia and the continent dried out, there was less protection from the sun and burrowing became a valuable strategy.  The processes of evolution resulted in speciation and we ended up with an Australian cockroach that burrows up to a metre below the surface.

What the research shows is that this speciation didn't happen just once, it happened maybe as many as nine times.  Now, the question is – what specific misunderstanding is a creationist going to bring to this issue?

I predict that it will be this, the notion that Dr Lo is talking about evolution happening multiple times from one species to one other species (which he isn't).

Think of this way, there is a rainforest cockroach and a dry scrub cockroach and only the latter must be able to burrow to survive.  Initially there is little or no scrub at all, so there is only the rainforest cockroach, then the rainforest retreats.  But the retreat isn't singular and total, it happens in stages, the rainforest retreats a bit, then a bit more and so on.

So, very roughly speaking, a rainforest cockroach can become a dry scrub cockroach.  Naively we might think that this is a once off and as the rainforest retreats the range of the dry scrub cockroach merely expands while the range of the rainforest cockroach contracts.  What Dr Lo is saying is that this is not necessarily the case.  The rainforest cockroaches living in an area which is becoming dry scrub can evolve into a dry scrub cockroach again.  Naively (again) this might be thought of as a repeat of the same evolution that has happened before, that the population of dry scrub cockroaches (DSC) can be increased in two ways: the normal way with DSC birth rate exceeding the DSC death rate die, and by rainforest cockroaches (RFCs) evolving into DSCs.

You can imagine a male DSC meeting a sexy new female DSC at the border between old scrub and newly ex-rainforest.  The male leaps into a standard chat-up routine: "Well, hello there gorgeous, I've not seen you around before!"  And she replies with: "Uh, hello, no you wouldn't have, I've just evolved."

Of course that's not how it works.  Dr Lo was not doing his research on one species of burrowing cockroach (the DSC) and one species of wood-feeding cockroach (the RFC).  His research involved 25 different species.

He's merely talking about how living things evolve to fill niches.  This phenomenon is well known and is highlighted by the similarity in body types between tenrecs on Madagasca and many other types of animals in the rest of the world.

Here's a tenrec:

And here's a hedgehog:

These two creatures fill the same niche and look quite similar, but they haven't merged into the same species.

In the same way, wood-feeding rainforest cockroaches may well have been put under evolutionary pressure multiple times and thus evolved strategies to survive the disappearance of their rainforest – and a clearly successful strategy is to burrow.  So there will be a range of species of burrowing cockroaches – those that evolved out of other burrowing cockroaches which had, at some time in the past, evolved out of rainforest cockroaches and those that evolved "directly" from rainforest cockroaches.  I write "directly" because a transitional process like evolution doesn't really have direct paths of evolution from one species to another, each individual in the process is its own path and species don't change in one generation.

So, basically, I think that some creationists are going to trip over what is in effect a category error.  Because we lump a whole bunch of species together as "burrowing cockroaches", they'll consider this to be an example of one species arising out of multiple speciation events – as if things were evolving according to some master plan.  People who understand evolutionary processes much better than me will try patiently to explain, but their explanations will fall on deaf ears and the creationists will unilaterally declare another victory.

The subtle distinction between "believe" and "believe in"

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone going on about "believing in evolution", well … let's just say that I could afford quite a few hot dinners.  Despite being well-fed, however, I'd still be grumpy about the lack of understanding about how "believe" differs from "believe in".

It is probably a largely semantic issue - what do we really mean by believe?

For me, a belief is related simply to the state of considering something to be true.  I believe that I am sitting on a chair (in part because I am sitting on a chair).  For a theist (the sort of person most likely to err and say that others "believe in evolution") belief can mean something more, so that it involves an act of will, perhaps even the overcoming of doubt (often caused by evidence that shows that supports the notion that a specific belief is false).

Sometimes an atheist like myself will use "believe" in a slightly different way, so as to imply doubt - not doubt that has been overcome, but doubt that remains.  So I might say that I believe my football team will win on the weekend, because I don't know that they will and I'm a little more confident that I would be if I just said that I hope that they will win.  But I am nevertheless aware that there's an element of hope in there - you know, like wishful thinking.

I think that this can lead us atheists, at times, to misconstrue how a theist thinks about belief.  We tend to see this form of belief as lying a lot closer to hoping (or dreading if we are less optimistic) while I think that theists see it as being a lot closer to knowing (perhaps some theist or ex-theist could shed light on this).  If so, then there's an element of magical thinking, similar to those life-coaches who rattle off such nonsense as "if you truly believe it, it will come true".

"Believing in" something is quite a different concept to "believing" it.  Say I was listening to the coach of my football team as he described how the team planned to make the finals next season, that they've all been working very hard, making sacrifices and putting the "I" in "team".  To say that I don't "believe" the coach is to say that I think he's lying - they haven't been working hard enough, not enough sacrifices have been made and there's no "I" in "team".  To say that I don't "believe in" the coach is to say one of (at least) three things.

Firstly, I could be saying that I don't have any confidence in him, that I don't think his plans are sufficient to get my team through next season or something like that.

Secondly, I could be implying that I don't think that the idea of coaching is a good one, suggesting that it would be better if all the members of the team just did their own thing and turned up on the day and tried their best (an approach which I heartily recommend to all competitors in the league).

Alternatively, I could be saying that I don't believe that he exists.  This would of course be ridiculous, he's right there, giving a speech that I am listening to.  It would of course be quite different if I didn't believe in the coach that you were listening to, if I could neither hear nor see him.

If we talk about "believing in evolution" then strictly speaking, we know it happens - because we breed dogs, and cats, and sheep, and pigeons ... we can force them to evolve.  Not even a creationist could argue against that (well ... a somewhat mythical beast, the rational creationist, couldn't argue against that).  The sort people making the claim along the lines of "atheists believe in evolution" are actually referring to the theory of evolution.  Does the theory of evolution exist?  Well, yes, it does.  No-one is contesting that, as far as I know, not even the creationists.

We could ask a similar question: "do atheists believe in creationism?"  Strictly speaking, we do, because creationism exists.  We sort of wish it didn't because it rots people's minds, but wishing something doesn't make it true.

Then there are the other meanings of "believe in".

Do we "believe in" natural evolution meaning that we think it is a good idea?  Well, no, I don’t think so.  Instead, we tend to avoid it.  After all, we don't look on dispassionately as our children fail to evolve quickly enough to counter the latest version of the influenza virus.  We don't let women die in childbirth because their hips aren't wide enough.  We don't let myopic people die out (imagine making them drive without glasses for the sake of evolution …)

Or do we have confidence in evolution, in the same way as we might have confidence in and thus believe in the coach? Since evolution is not goal oriented, this doesn't really seem applicable.  There might be some people who have some bizarre faith that, if we don't come to grips with climate change, everything will be alright because we'll just evolve gills.  Such people don't comprehend how evolution tends to viciously prune its metaphorical tree of failed experiments, to the extent that something like 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct (being aware that species are designated by humans, really there are only as many species as we are collectively aware of, so this estimate is based on some rather rubbery assumptions).  If humans manage to be part of screwing the environment up so badly that we can't live in it, we won't magically adapt - we'll just die out, like most of the dinosaurs did as the Earth's climate changed on them over a period of 175 million years.

So, we don't believe that evolution is necessarily good, nor that it necessarily aligns with our goat of ongoing survival as a species.  Therefore, we don't "believe in" evolution in either of those senses.

But, given careful definitions of the terms "believe", "evolution" and "is true", almost every single one of us does believe that evolution is true.

Barnes and the Templeton

While doing research for Luke Barnes and his Fine-Tuning with WLC, I came across another interesting titbit.  My complaint in the referenced article is that Barnes’ arguments are being used by what could be called “old universe creationists” or “big bang creationists”.  The example of this happening, rather unsurprisingly given the rubric, involves William Lane Craig (WLC).  However, the phenomenon of using Barnes’ work to support an apologetics-style argument for god is not restricted to our old friend WLC.

            

Eric Hatfield of The Way 21st Century uses Barnes, for example, as does Eric Hatfield (aka UnkleE) of Is there a God? (blog), Barry K Arrington of Uncommon Descent, Dr Jonathan D. Sarfati from Creation Ministries International, Dr Quirino Sugon Jr. from Monk’s Hobbit (Rebuilding the Faith and Nation) – and yes that is his real name, I’m not making this up – and Ashly Camp of True Origin (in his list of “1342 Articles Supporting Biblical Creation” – of which Barnes wrote two).

And then there are his mentions in the news.  Barnes was recently happy to note that one of his images was used in a quite reasonable article at The Economist.  And he was actually quoted in one at Inside Science.  He mentions this on his blog, but I didn’t find my way to the article via that particular mention (which I only found when I went looking for it).  I found it (via a search engine, I hasten to point out) at Uncommon Descent, a website dedicated to serving the “Intelligent Design Community”.

Remember that my concern is that some people might be entering academia with the intent of supporting forms of creationism.  Luke Barnes may or may not be one of them, but he certainly doesn’t seem to put any effort into explaining his position in such a way as to prevent misuse of his conclusions (and this might be because he considers the god conclusion not to be misuse – or maybe another reason that I’ll get to below).

Uncommon Descent is maintained by a Christian bankruptcy lawyer, Barry K Arrington, and has an article on pretzels – or rather the “pretzels people make of themselves to deny fine-tuning of the universe for life”.  It is in this article that Barnes is mentioned.  This article just happened to be the one that popped up when I was snooping around, trying to ascertain whether Barnes had links to creationists.  However, the folks at Uncommon Descent have mentioned Barnes quite a few times, with one contributor (Salvador Cordova) even professing to be a fan.

                                                                        

This is a rabbit-hole that is worth ducking down for a moment.

When waxing lyrical about Barnes, Cordova mentioned something that Barnes wrote in response to something Rob Sheldon wrote that was the subject of an article at Uncommon Descent.  (It’s rather difficult to establish whether Sheldon is a contributor to Uncommon Descent or just someone they quote regularly.  On this page, however, he is listed among friends of Intelligent Design and on this page it appears that he has an MA in Religion, which he got before his PhD in Physics.)

Cordova quoted Rod Sheldon on the topic of curvature of the universe and the content, to me as a non-expert, appears to be rather uncontroversial.  Sheldon just says that the universe looks remarkably flat when triangulation is carried out using sufficiently distant objects (bright ones, like quasars and galaxies) and that some observations suggest features of the universe for which Dark Matter has subsequently been theorised to explain.  If anything is particularly controversial in what Sheldon has to say, noting that he says it all in rather layman-like terms, it is the suggestion that inflation creates more problems than it solves – but Barnes doesn’t even mention this in his response.  However, it’s not really the content of Barnes’ reply that interests me, nor whether Sheldon’s comments are truly worth worrying about.  In modern parlance, it’s not the data but the metadata that is interesting.

Cordova posted the Sheldon piece on 30 January 2014.  Barnes posted his comprehensive response to that article on 1 February 2014.  The question this raises is why Barnes should be so interested in an article posted on a website dedicated to serving the Intelligent Design community?  Interested enough to read that article, presumably within a day of it being posted, and respond within two days.

Now I am of the impression that Arrington and his crew are loopy, and that almost certainly includes Sheldon.  I get that impression from their “About” page:

Uncommon Descent holds that…

Materialistic ideology has subverted the study of biological and cosmological origins so that the actual content of these sciences has become corrupted. The problem, therefore, is not merely that science is being used illegitimately to promote a materialistic worldview, but that this worldview is actively undermining scientific inquiry, leading to incorrect and unsupported conclusions about biological and cosmological origins. At the same time, intelligent design (ID) offers a promising scientific alternative to materialistic theories of biological and cosmological evolution — an alternative that is finding increasing theoretical and empirical support. Hence, ID needs to be vigorously developed as a scientific, intellectual, and cultural project.

However, their personal loopiness is irrelevant given that the mention of Barnes by Uncommon Descent (in the pretzel instance) was embedded in a quote taken from an article at “RealClearScience”.  RealClearScience is an organ of RealClearInvestors and Crest Media, who own RealClearPolitics and RealClearReligion and a few other closely linked news aggregators.  The RealClear group might also be a bit loopy, being dedicated to addressing the “bias in media against conservatives, religious conservatives, [and] Christian conservatives” – and noting that their science feed includes a recent blog listing “Great Theological Quotes on Science” – but they are mostly just aggregators, or perhaps “filters”, providing the sort of news that they think their target audience might like.  The article they aggregated in this case came from Inside Science, the same one that Luke Barnes mentions at his blog.  One could wonder why the folks at Uncommon Descent mentioned RealClearScience at all and didn’t just refer to the original article, but perhaps there are some kudos involved in mentioning an article that has made its way through the “anti-bias” filtering process.

Gabriel Popkin’s article at Inside Science is in reference to a paper by Ulf-G Meissner, “Anthropic considerations in nuclear physics”, which is available at either Science Bulletin (for which you might need a subscription) or arXiv (no login or subscription seems necessary).  The key tract in this article appears to be the one which describes the Anthropic Principle (take a deep breath before attempting to read this):

The Universe we live in is characterized by certain parameters that take specific values so that life on Earth is possible. For example, the age of the Universe must be large enough to allow for the formation of galaxies, stars and planets. On more microscopic scales, certain fundamental parameters of the Standard Model of the strong and electroweak interactions like the light quark masses or the electromagnetic fine structure constant must take values that allow for the formation of neutrons, protons and atomic nuclei. At present, we do not have a viable theory to predict the precise values of these constants, although string theory promises to do so in some distant future. Clearly, one can think of many universes, the multiverse, in which various fundamental parameters take different values leading to environments very different from ours. In that sense, our Universe has a preferred status, and this was the basis of the socalled anthropic principle (AP) invented by Carter. The AP states that “the observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so”. There are many variants of the AP, but this definition serves our purpose quite well. At first sight, one might think that it is a triviality, as the statement seems to be a tautology. However, we can move away from the philosophical level and ask whether the AP can have physical consequences that can be tested? This is indeed the case particularly in nuclear physics, as I will argue in this review. But it is worth mentioning that anthropic reasoning has been used in some well cited papers, I name here Weinberg’s work on the cosmological constant and Susskind’s exploration of the string theory landscape. The influence of the AP on string theory and particle physics has been reviewed recently in [A. N. Schellekens, Rev. Mod. Phys. 85, no. 4, 1491 (2013)]. But let us return to nuclear physics. A prime example of the AP is the so-called Hoyle state. In 1954, Hoyle made the prediction of an excited level in carbon-12 to allow for a sufficient production of heavy elements (12C, 16O,...) in stars. As the Hoyle state is crucial to the formation of the elements essential to life as we know it, this state has been nicknamed the “level of life”. See, however, [H. Kragh, Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 64, 721 (2010)] for a thorough historical discussion of the Hoyle state in view of the anthropic principle. Independent of these historical issues, the anthropic view of the Universe can be nicely shown using the example of the Hoyle state, more precisely, one can understand how the abstract principle can be turned into a physics question. The central issue is the closeness of the Hoyle state to the threshold of 4He+8Be that determines the resonance enhancement of carbon production. In Fig. 1 I show the possible response of this resonance condition to the change of some fundamental parameter, here called g. If for a wide range of this parameter, the resonance condition stays intact (left panel), more precisely, the absolute energies might shift but the Hoyle state stays close to the energy of 4He+8Be. In such a case, one can hardly speak of an anthropic selection. If on the other hand, the two levels split markedly for small changes in g as shown in the right panel, this would correspond to a truly anthropic fine-tuning. In Nature, we cannot investigate which of these scenarios is indeed fulfilled as all fundamental constants take specific values. However, with the powerful tool of computer simulations this has become possible and this issue will be discussed in the remaining part of the review.

Also of interest is that a paper by Luke Barnes is referenced in Meissner’s paper.

What is this hugely unwieldy paragraph actually saying?  One of the problems is that the author is not a native English speaker, so it’s possible that some wording can be a little off-kilter.  Like, for example, the first sentence which infers design intent.  The problem is that while I might be willing to accept that Meissner didn’t intend to make this inference, this largesse on my part doesn’t prevent those who want to read such inferences into scientific literature from doing so.

I’m certainly not the first person to react to this, for instance the Sensuous Curmudgeon has reacted to a different strand of this story, which came via PhysOrg.

What I find to be salient here is not so much that what Meissner is saying is wrong (if generously interpreted), but how it can be misused (if, shall we say, “creatively” interpreted).

What exactly is this anthropic principle that Meissner is talking about?  If you follow the link to Wikipedia or do a little digging on your own, you will find that there is not just the one anthropic principle.  There are at least two weak anthropic principles, at least two strong anthropic principles, a modified anthropic principle, the strong self-sampling assumption variant, the final anthropic principle, the participatory anthropic principle and the completely ridiculous anthropic principle.

It seems to me that we can look at the “anthropic-ness” of the universe in two basic ways.  The first is to do the same as Luke Barnes’ creationist friends (be they intentional friends of his or not) – look at the universe and say “wow, if things were only slightly different, then we would not exist” and then draw your preferred conclusions from that.  The second is to consider the fact that when we are trying to work out what happened in our cosmological or biological past, the only theories we can seriously entertain are those theories which don’t preclude our existence.  In other words the anthropic principle can be used as a filter to exclude those theories which would make the existence of intelligent life in this universe and the development of humans impossible (while noting that such a filter will not exclude theories in which such outcomes are only very highly unlikely rather than impossible).

It’d be great if Luke Barnes could clarify precisely what perspective he is taking on this issue, but it might affect his longer term aspirations.

And, you might wonder, what exactly might those aspirations be?  Well, in doing my research I began to notice something that kept cropping up with Barnes.  Templeton.  He has now attended at least two seminars funded by Templeton and he has repeatedly indicated a leaning towards Templeton winners – for example he refers to Martin Rees (2011) quite a bit and also Paul Davies (1995).  Of course, one could be generous and say that these are esteemed members of the scientific community working in Barnes’ area; Rees is an astronomer like Barnes and Davies is a physicist who is linked to cosmology.  It’d be a surprise if such Barnes never mentioned such notables, but they just seem to pop up quite a bit in Barnes’ world.

                                                                          

My suspicion, as ungracious as it might be, is that Barnes has hit on the idea of winning a Templeton prize.  This is, in fact, a great idea – even for a non-theist or atheist, so long as you have no self-respect – because the Templeton prize is intentionally more rewarding, at least financial terms, than the Nobel prize – and possibly much easier to win as a scientist.  All you need to do is ostentatiously support the efforts of apologists and theologians, while maintaining the mantle of serious scientist, all the better if you can look like you might be an unbeliever, and all that sweet, sweet cash could soon be flowing your way.

Of course, I don’t claim to know that this is Barnes’ plan.  But, if in the future he does win the prize, remember that you read it here first.

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Heading down another rabbit-hole, I also found it interesting that Barnes should take it upon himself to respond to Jeffrey Shallit after he (Shallit) wrote a piece criticising a creationist.  Less than four hours after the article was posted, Barnes was already responding in defence of Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr.  Another amazingly swift response.  Why so eager to leap in, Luke?

This was of course, not his first foray into biological creationism.

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I am now kicking myself that I did not post this article a week ago, or two weeks ago.  While I've had this on the boil, I've been regularly checking Barnes' site to see if he has posted links to his presentations at the Templeton-sponsored St. Thomas Summer Seminar in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology.

Today when I checked, however, I saw his latest post (15 September 2015) which encourages people to check out a piece written by his co-author, Geraint Lewis. Co-author of what, I hear you ask?

Presumably a paper, together with a third astronomer, Pascal Elahi, that will emerge from a grant titled Galaxy Formation and the Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life.

Ah, same old same old, I hear you say.  But no, that's not my point.  My point is that this grant, as detailed on their pages at the University of Sydney (Luke Barnes, Geraint Lewis and Pascal Elahi), is sourced from Templeton World Charity Foundation/Research Support.

Yes, that Templeton.

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Let me just add John Barrow to the list of people mentioned off-hand by Barnes  who have co-incidentally won a Templeton Prize.