How the profiteers who market Thermageddon offend against the principles of formal logic
Guest post by Monckton of Brenchley
LOGIC is the heartbeat of all true learning – the soul of the Classics, the Sciences and Religion. Once everyone studied the Classics, to know that in logic there is a difference between true and false; the Sciences, to discern where it lies; and Religion, to appreciate why it matters. Today, few study all three empires of the mind. Fewer study the ordered beauty of the logic at their heart.
Is Private Fraser’s proposition that “We’re a’ doomed!” logical? I say No. G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believe in anything.” The belief that Thermageddon will arise from our altering 1/3000th of the atmosphere in a century is in-your-face illogical, rooted in a dozen fallacies marked out by Aristotle as the commonest in human discourse.
“Consensus” is the New Religion’s central fallacy. Arguing blindly from consensus is the head-count fallacy, the argumentum ad populum. Al-Haytham, founder of the scientific method, wrote: “The seeker after truth does not put his faith in any mere consensus. Instead, he checks.”
Two surveys have purported to show 97% of climate scientists supporting the supposed “consensus”. In both, 97% agreed little more than that the world has warmed since 1950. So what? One involved just 79 scientists, hardly a scientific sample size. Neither was selected to eliminate bias. Neither asked whether manmade global warming was at all likely to prove catastrophic – a question expecting the answer “No.”
Claiming that the “consensus” is one of revered experts is the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appeal to authority. T.H. Huxley said in 1860, “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
Believers talk of a “consensus of evidence”. Yet evidence cannot hold opinions. Besides, there has been no global warming for 18 years; sea level has risen for eight years at just 1.3 in/century; notwithstanding Sandy, hurricane activity is at its least in the 33-year satellite record; ocean heat content is rising four and a half times more slowly than predicted; global sea-ice extent has changed little; Himalayan glaciers have not lost ice; and the U.N.’s 2005 prediction of 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010 was absurd. The evidence does not support catastrophism.
Believers say: “Only if we include a strong warming effect from CO2 can we explain the past 60 years’ warming. We know of no other reason.” This is the argumentum ad ignorantiam, the fundamental fallacy of argument from ignorance. Besides, natural variability is reason enough.
They say: “Global warming is accelerating, so we are to blame.” Even if warming were accelerating, this non sequitur is an instance of the argumentum ad causam falsam, the fallacy of arguing from a false cause. They go on to say: “CO2 concentration has risen; warming has occurred; the former caused the latter.” This is the post hoc ergo propter hoc sub-species of the same fallacy.
They say: “What about the cuddly polar bears?” This is the argumentum ad misericordiam, the fallacy of needless pity. There are five times as many polar bears as there were in the 1940s – hardly, as you may think, the profile of a species at imminent threat of extinction. No need to pity the bears, and they are not cuddly.
They say: “We tell the models there will be strong CO2- driven warming. And, yes, the models predict it.” This is the fallacy of arguing in circles, the argumentum ad petitionem principii, where the premise is the conclusion.
They say: “Global warming caused extra-tropical storm Sandy.” This inappropriate argument from the general to the particular is the argumentum a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid, the fallacy of accident. Individual extreme events cannot be ascribed to global warming.
They say: “Melting Arctic sea ice is a symptom of global warming.” This unsound argument from the particular to the general is the argumentum a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, the fallacy of converse accident. Arctic sea ice is melting, but the Antarctic has cooled for 30 years and the sea ice there is growing, so the decline in Arctic sea ice does not indicate a global problem.
They say: “Monckton says he’s a member of the House of Lords, but the Clerk says he isn’t, so he’s not credible.” This is the argumentum ad hominem, a shoddy sub- species of ignoratio elenchi, the fundamental red-herring fallacy of ignorance of how a true argument is conducted.
They say: “We don’t care what the truth is. We want more power, tax and regulation. Global warming is our pretext. If you disagree, we will haul you before the International Climate Court.” This is the nastiest of all logical fallacies: the argumentum ad baculum, the argument of force.
These numerous in-your-face illogicalities provoke four questions: Has the Earth warmed as predicted? If not, why not? What if I am wrong? And what if I am right?
Q1. Has the Earth warmed as predicted? In 1990 the IPCC predicted that the world would now be warming at 0.3 Cº/decade, and that by now more than 0.6 Cº warming would have occurred. The outturn was less than half that: just 0.14 Cº/decade and 0.3 Cº in all.
In 2008 leading modellers wrote:
“The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 years or more, suggesting that an absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the observed warming rate.”
Yet the linear trend on the Hadley/CRU monthly global temperature anomalies for the 18 years 1995-2012 shows no statistically-significant warming, even though the partial pressure of CO2 rose by about a tenth in that time.
The modellers’ own explicit criterion proves their scary predictions exaggerated. Their vaunted “consensus” was wrong. Global warming that was predicted for tomorrow but has not occurred for 18 years until today cannot have caused Sandy or Bopha yesterday, now, can it?
Q2: Why was the “consensus” wrong? Why do the models exaggerate? The climate-sensitivity equation says warming is the product of a forcing and a sensitivity parameter. Three problems: the modellers’ definition of forcing is illogical; their assumptions about the sensitivity parameter are not falsifiable; and their claims that their long-term predictions of doom are reliable are not only empirically disproven but theoretically insupportable.
Modellers define forcing as the net down-minus-up flux of radiation at the tropopause, with surface temperature fixed. Yet forcings change surface temperature. So the definition offends against the fundamental postulate of logic that a proposition and its converse cannot coexist. No surprise, then, that since 1995 the IPCC has had to cut its estimate of the CO2 forcing by 15%. The “consensus” disagrees with itself. Note in passing that the CO2 forcing function is logarithmic: each further molecule causes less warming than those before it. Diminishing returns apply.
Direct warming is little more than 1 Cº per CO2 doubling, well within natural variability. It is not a crisis. So the modellers introduce amplifying or “positive” temperature feedbacks, which, they hope, triple the direct warming from CO2. Yet this dubious hypothesis is not Popper- falsifiable, so it is not logic and not science. Not one of the imagined feedbacks is either empirically measurable or theoretically determinable by any reliable method. As an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, I have justifiably excoriated its net-positive feedbacks as guesswork – uneducated guesswork at that.
For there is a very powerful theoretical reason why the modellers’ guess that feedbacks triple direct warming is erroneous. The closed-loop feedback gain implicit in the IPCC’s climate-sensitivity interval 3.3[2.0, 4.5] Cº per CO2 doubling falls on the interval 0.62[0.42, 0.74]. However, process engineers building electronic circuits, who invented feedback mathematics, tell us any loop gain much above zero is far too near the singularity – at a loop gain of 1 – in the feedback-amplification function.
At high gain, the geological record would show violent oscillations between extremes of warming and cooling. Yet for 64 million years the Earth’s surface temperature has fluctuated by only 3%, or 8 Cº, either side of the long- run mean. These fluctuations can give us an ice-planet at one moment and a hothouse Earth the next, but they are altogether inconsistent with a loop gain anywhere near as close to the singularity as modellers’ estimates imply.
Surface temperature changes little, for homoeostatic conditions prevail. The atmosphere’s lower bound, the ocean, is a vast heat-sink 1100 times denser than the air: one reason why 3000 bathythermographs deployed in 2006 have detected no significant ocean warming. The atmosphere’s upper bound is outer space, to which any excess heat radiates harmlessly away. Homoeostasis, then, is what we should expect, and it is what we get. Thus the climatic loop gain cannot much exceed zero, so the warming at CO2 doubling will be a harmless 1 Cº.
Yet the overriding difficulty in trying to model the climate is that it behaves as a chaotic object. We can never measure the values of its millions of defining parameters at any chosen moment to a sufficient precision to permit reliable projection of the bifurcations, or Sandy-like departures from an apparently steady state, that are inherent in the evolution of all objects that behave chaotically. Therefore, reliable, very-long-term modelling of future climate states is unattainable a priori.
The IPCC tries to overcome this actually insuperable Lorenz constraint on modelling by estimating climate sensitivity via a probability-density function. Yet PDFs require more, not less, information than simple estimates flanked by error-whiskers, and are still less likely to be reliable. The modellers are guessing. Their guesses have been proven wrong. Yet they continue to demand our acquiescence in an imagined (and imaginary) consensus.
Q3: What if I am wrong? If so, we must travel from physics to economics. Pretend, ad argumentum, that the IPCC’s central estimate of 2.8 Cº warming by 2100 is true, and that Stern was right to say that the cost of failing to prevent warming of that order this century will be about 1.5% of GDP. Then, at the minimum 5% market inter-temporal discount rate, the cost of trying to abate this decade’s predicted warming of 0.15 Cº by typical CO2-mitigation schemes as cost-ineffective as Australia’s carbon tax would be 48 times greater than the cost of later adaptation. At a zero discount rate, the cost of acting now exceeds that of adapting in the future 36 times over.
How so? Australia emits just 1.2% of Man’s CO2, of which Ms. Gillard aims to cut 5% this decade, abating 0.06% of global emissions by 2020. Then CO2 concentration will fall from a predicted 410 μatm to 409.988 μatm. In turn predicted temperature will fall by 0.00006 Cº. But the cost will be $130 billion ($2 quadrillion/Cº). Abating the
0.15 Cº warming predicted for this decade would thus cost $317 trillion, or $45,000/head worldwide, or 59% of global GDP. Mitigation measures inexpensive enough to be affordable will thus be ineffective: measures expensive enough to be effective will be unaffordable. Since the premium vastly exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure. That is a precautionary principle worthy of the name.
Q4: What if I am right? When I am proven right, the Climate Change Department will be swept away; Britain’s annual deficit will fall by a fifth; the bat-blatting, bird- blending windmills that scar our green and pleasant land will go; the world will refocus on real environmental problems like deforestation on land, overfishing at sea and pollution of the air; the U.N.’s ambition to turn itself into a grim, global dictatorship with overriding powers of taxation and economic and environmental intervention will be thwarted; and the aim of science to supplant true religion as the world’s new, dismal, cheerless credo will be deservedly, decisively, definitively defeated.
Any who say “I believe” are not scientists, for true scientists say “I wonder”. We require – nay, we demand – more awe and greater curiosity from our scientists, and less political “correctness” and co-ordinated credulity.
To the global classe politique, the placemen, bureaucrats, academics, scientists, journalists and enviros who have profiteered at our expense by peddling Thermageddon, I say this. The science is in; the truth is out; Al Gore is through; the game is up; and the scare is over.
To those scientists who aim to end the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, I say this. Logic stands implacable in your path. We will never let you have your new Dark Age.
To men of goodwill, lovers of logic, I say this. It is our faculty of reason, the greatest of the soul’s three powers, that marks us out from the beasts and brings us closest in likeness to our Creator, the Lord of Life and Light. We will never let the light of Reason be snuffed out.
Do not go gentle to that last goodnight – Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
– – – – – – – –
Bruckner8,
Again, show me your ‘a priori’ justification that I and people like me require belief (aka faith). You are implying that it is a metaphysical requirement of human beings to ‘believe’ or ‘have faith’, qua human beings. Where did you acquire that ‘a priori’ knowledge? Show me the source. Is your source faith or belief? It appears so.
Your self-proclaimed omniscience in that regard is strong evidence that you are profoundly belief or faith based, but that implies nothing about people who are not like you.
Goodnight, cocktail hour is starting soon. Catch tomorrow morning.
John
michaelwiseguy says:
January 6, 2013 at 2:16 pm
…
The mainstream media is stuck on stupid and people are not tuning into them anymore.
…
People are figuring out they don’t like to be lied to.
I’m holding out hope. Do you also think they will become concerned about the other 7/8’s of the problem – being responsible for their own education?
Since religion has entered the discussion, I personally prefer to deal with Christians and Jews rather than one who makes up his own morals. Such people often have none. They are present in academe and government in droves and, evidenced by the lies and distortions they so effortlessly effuse, their lack of ethics is clear and I believe it is a large part of the problem. For myself, I maintain my Christian credentials and practice Judeo/Christian ethics. What reservations I may or may not have about resurrection or virgin birth are nobody’s business but my own.
why not distinguish between “religion” and “poltical abuse of religion”?
Because they are (historically and practically) indistinguishable?
Also, your analogy is a false one anyway. Political abuse of science is the discovery that you can hit harder with a big piece of wood than you can with your bare hands and conquering territory with your newly invented club, in the very brief interval you have before your opponents discover that there is a lot of wood around and they can use clubs too. Science is simply a systematic and moderately reliable process for extending human knowledge, and personally I think we are better off for knowledge, that the more we know and understand the better informed our decision making will be compared to the horrible errors we make in its absence. If you, on the other hand, feel that we would be better off back in the dark ages or worse, living as simple animals in the forest, well…
Let’s just assume for a moment that religion in general is actually untrue, that there is, in fact, no God. In that case every single decision that every single human has ever made throughout their entire life for all recorded history, on the basis of the assumption that there is a God, or Gods, or Gods and Saints and Devils or an entire supernatural pantheon with its own history at war and involving humans in their intrigues, has had a pretty glaring false premise at its very root.
I don’t just mean “political” decisions, although every decision involving more than one person is in some sense political — I mean supernatural beliefs have dictated when people go to bed and when they rise, how they spend time throughout every day, how they have disposed of their limited wealth. It has dominated their fears, their hopes, their dreams. It has unified people (for good and for ill), it has torn them apart. For most of recorded history in most countries of the world, there has been little differentiation between the religious and secular powers, and only rarely has one appeared to move, for a time, counter to the other (becoming as a consequence historically noteworthy in the process). The mere fact that I can refer to “religious powers” illustrates the fallacy of believing that religion and politics are separable — whence powers if not from the polis, the people?
Perhaps it is just me, but I personally think that humans are at our best when we do not base the arguments that guide all of our decisions everyday on false premises, or assign an improbably great degree of belief to a proposition more or less without evidence. It’s not that sometimes those decisions won’t work out all right — people are pretty good at making even wrong things work, sort of kind of, and sometimes you just plain get lucky. But they certainly aren’t the decisions that might have been made if one was better informed.
If you knew — knew for certain — that there was no God, would you continue to donate money to a Church, to spend a significant fraction of your life in Church hearing tiresome lectures on silly antique myths and singing songs and chanting things? Remember, the assumption is that you know that it is all malarky, really. If that is too much of a stretch, would you choose to spend the rest of your life participating in the daily and weekly religious rituals in — pick any religion that is not your own. Praying to Mecca five times a day? Sacrificing small animals at a stone altar and then burning them? The reason you don’t do that now is because you think that is silly, that rules in the Bible requiring this sort of thing are silly antique myths and rituals that people got all wrong (besides being pointlessly cruel and wasteful).
If you knew for certain that there was no life after death, that this one life was all you will ever get as “you”, that death is a permanent and irreversible condition (all of which are scientifically quite true, of course, based on an incredible volume of science and evidence) would you choose to spend it quite the same way you might spend it if you thought that however sucky your life was now, it would all be made better (or worse!) after you die?
The problem with looking to religion as an answer to “why it matters” is — what if it is a false — but easy — answer? Accepting it uncritically all but eliminates any possibility of constructive work on answering the question the hard way.
Everybody who is religious who isn’t a latter day ecumenical pantheist who thinks all religions are true is an atheist — in all religions but one. Given N religions, I’m simply 1/N more atheistic than a religious person typically is, where N is a large if not unbounded number.
On the other hand, we do not speak of “scientific powers”, and scientific organizations that wield any actual political power are at the very least a historically recent invention if not even now more fantasy than reality. The American Physical Society is not known for its political clout.
That is not to argue that advanced science does not confer technological advantage in the resolution of political problems both violent and non-violent, only that science itself has with the recent and regrettable exception of climate science — lacked any sort of political organization that made ex cathedra pronouncements supporting a particular political policy, and even there it can only do so in a debatable way (which is what this site is all about).
I am an agnostic. I take no offence at Monckton of Bencley for writing as a professed Christian on any subject he wants, but I do find it annoying that so many people take offence, even at the mere mention of religion as the time-honoured way of trying to establish “why it matters.” Science itself does not answer the question, “Why does science matter?”. And it does not answer the question “Does it matter that science does not answer that question?” Does this mean that those questions are nonsensical, and that trying to make sense of possible answers is beneath contempt?
Kurt Gödel, certainly one of the greatest logicians and mathematicians of all time, tried his hand at proving the existence of God. He did not publish his proof, probably because he did not want to incur the scorn of the censorious atheistic bien-pensants in Academia. It seems to me that the atheistic knee-jerk reactions to “religion” and “Creator” in the comments to Monckton’s post are if not sufficient then at least highly persuasive evidence for the truth of the thesis that atheism is indeed a censorious religion (albeit, as it proudly proclaims, not a true one).
I find it difficult to believe that, as you type a reply on a keyboard that instantly publishes your words to a vast audience in the (dare I presume) heated or air-conditioned comfort of an enclosed and electrically lighted room, enjoying (we might reasonably hope) good health resulting from treatments more sophisticated than the casting out of demons and sacrifice of small animals, that you really believe it necessary to search hard for an answer to the question “Why does science matter?” It is fun. It is profitable. It improves our lives. If you think science (and the products of scientific endeavor) doesn’t matter, try living now without it.
Kurt Godel didn’t publish his proof (if he ever found one) because it was wrong. The point of Einstein’s quote up above is that one cannot prove mathematically one single thing about the observable universe! Inference is not proof. This includes proving why mathematical proofs and reasoning and formulas often appear to work to describe it (so that we infer that inference often works). David Hume did an admirable job of proving that the question of God cannot be answered or proven by pure reason or by any series of observations, although of course it can be answered any way you like by simply begging the question in your unprovable axioms.
Indeed, mathematics as a process for reasoning from unprovable axioms/propositions to conclusions/theorems has consistency problems enough of its own, many of them due to Godel. I strongly recommend Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline if this sort of thing interests you. Or Polya’s work on inductive reasoning in mathematics. Or (as already commended above) E. T. Jaynes book Probability Theory, the Logic of Science.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
January 6, 2013 at 1:45 pm
“When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believe in anything.”
Surely no more absurd statement was ever made as an introduction to an essay on logic.
Shirley, there may not have been a more succinct description of the last two thousand years’ history. Cheers to Christopher Monckton, who also boldly professes that Jesus Christ is his lord. The man’s got guts.
Surely there is no more certain way to offend any individual who reads the essay who has, as I have, ceased to believe in Christianity.
You probably are offended by the buttons on his coat, too.
> Now it is common for trolls to distract from the subject of an article by Lord Monckton by
> promoting the religion of atheism. Several have already tried it on this thread.
The question to be asked is whether Chris Monckton was being deliberately
provocative in introducing religion into his piece when there was absolutely
no need or reason to do so. Please, desist !
Phil’s Dad says:
January 6, 2013 at 7:28 pm
For the benefit of Pat Ravasiowho asked “the most basic of questions:” on January 6, 2013 at 10:45 am
A lot of really good stuff. Well done!
rgb
Try dribbling a 50/50 mix of light oil and surfactant behind your boat next time you’re out fishing and watch the smooth spread — I’d love to duplicate Franklin’s experiment myself but one would probably be arrested nowadays if one did that on a Clapham pond.
It’s actually rather illegal to do that here, too. Oil and gasoline do make it into the water from motors but actively dumping it into the water is against the law. But I’m certain I’ll be around sometime when my motor leaks or there is some other large source of oil around. And I’ll keep my eyes open for what you describe, never fear.
rgb
Guest post by Monckton of Brenchley: “Besides, there has been no global warming for 18 years; … Global warming that was predicted for tomorrow but has not occurred for 18 years until today …”
==========================================================
It is funny, but 2 weeks ago Christopher repeatedly said “16 years” (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/25/bethlehem-and-the-rat-hole-problem/). I really like the rate the “global warming” is retreating at! In 2 weeks we will have “no global warming for 20 years”, this is a positive development. What we really need are just 2 more years and we will have no warming ever happened.
John Whitman says:
January 6, 2013 at 12:49 pm
Christopher Monckton,
…
Have you considered … the possibility of CAGWists having a more central philosophic root which is unscientific in the Aristotelian sense and which gives rise to and contains the reason they consistently commit all the fallacies you mentioned.
Have you considered that good men, out of the goodness of their hearts, bring forth good things, and that evil men, out of the evilness of their hearts, bring forth evil things?
rgbatduke says:
January 6, 2013 at 2:28 pm
“Atheism takes equal amounts of faith as Theism. They are both based on a “belief” that a diety exists or not. “I do [or not] believe in [this or that deity]. [optionally: because…]”
No, but your argument here is perfect for illustrating why you are wrong.
If I believe in fairies, I indeed have to give a reason for that belief or be thought a fool. I believe in fairies because I’ve got pictures of them dancing. I believe in fairies because I read fairy stories as a child and felt that they must be true. I believe in fairies because I keep one as a pet. In other words, one has to have some specific evidence for fairies in order to reasonably believe in them. We would consider the first and third reasons as being a lot better than the middle one, for example.”
rgbatduke – no, you are religious. If you accept an expanding universe, you accept singularity. Ergo, you accept all the matter in the universe came from nothingness. And don’t go to string theory or multiverses – even you would agree they are more unlikely than likely
Child’s play. We’ve had no “global warming” in 1000 years.
richardscourtney;
I was NOT ‘taking sides’.
The evangelical atheists destroyed the recent thread at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/25/bethlehem-and-the-rat-hole-problem/
where I tried to set an example by refusing to engage with them
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well thanks for taking the position you have, and for setting the example. Unfortunately I think the thread is well off the tracks at this point. Some of the responses to Pat Ravasio were stellar, I learned a lot from a couple of them, sadly she will learn nothing, she’s repeating the precise same questions and assertions that she has already asked in other threads.
I much enjoy theological discussions, but have long since learned showing people what their own biblical text actually says (or doesn’t say) (or that older versions say something different than current versions) is just a good way to get people seriously riled really really fast. So I choose carefully who I have those discussions with, and have long since learned that a public forum is not a good place to seek them out.
Before Marx and Engels, Atheism was called Narcissism. Worship of self. Cain suffered from it, as did Lucifer. It is the oldest and most basic religion.
If you say there is no God, by the rules of logic, you have just declared yourself to be God, able to make such a statement. Sorry, that’s a more implausible tale than the one that declares a Just and Loving God would make His will clearly known to the people He created by way of the written and spoken word.
Sigh. No, atheism was never called Narcissism. You’re just making that up.
There is absolutely no logical equivalence of the assertion that there is (probably) no God to the assertion that you yourself are God. In fact, that is what we in the actual business of logic call an inconsistent statement, a basic contradiction. Let’s write it out in good old symbolic logic shall we?
Not A, therefore A
which is logically equivalent to A and Not A, the fundamental contradiction.
One cannot assert that God does not exist and thereby also be asserting that God exists (and is you). That’s simple muddled nonsense. The correct statement is that there is no God including me, and even a positive atheist would generally only say there is probably no God, not state it as a certainty. I myself say it even more compactly — there is no reliable evidence that there is a God.
Now I’m perfectly happy to believe in a tale that a Just and Loving God (all capitalized, of course) would make His will clearly known to me by way of the written or spoken word. If such an entity exists, He’s got my address, and I’m happy to meet with him in person to talk things over at any time. Time and space are no barrier, of course, and with omnipresence, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence right now is as good a time as any.
Oh, you meant by way of one particular set of the many dissimilar sets of the words written by people several thousand years ago and constantly rewritten and mistranslated across the thousands of years in between, all claiming to convey the truth about God, often pretending that there words are “Gods own words”?
Back to logic again. People aren’t God, right? You just said so. So I am surely justified in doubting the words of any man claiming to speak for God, the one being in all the Universe that is surely capable of speaking for Itself — if it exists at all, or cares to speak. And given that It can Create Whole Universes, it seems silly to think that it has to be particularly subtle in Its communication or rely on ancient texts for it. I’m fairly certain I’m not God, and even I can manage to communicate better than that.
rgb
Michael Moon says:
January 6, 2013 at 12:18 pm
…
The cost of energy determines prosperity. Energy sources have been sought since time immemorial, and continue to be sought.
…People never choose poverty!
They chose Obama, didn’t they? Or were those not people?
I learn more reading a single article by Monckton than any book I’ve ever read. What a brilliant guy, how does one get that smart really? And luckily for us, there are still brilliant guys like Monckton around who have the courage to fight tyranny and oppression in this world. Our world needs more Moncktons, and a lot less “nobel prize winners” like Al Gore and Michael E. Mann.
rgbatduke – no, you are religious. If you accept an expanding universe, you accept singularity. Ergo, you accept all the matter in the universe came from nothingness. And don’t go to string theory or multiverses – even you would agree they are more unlikely than likely
Ah, well, I’m glad we got that sorted out then. I was clearly confused about my own beliefs and I’m so glad you could help me.
Now, would you care to comment on this “nothingness” the Universe supposedly came from? Even in my newly enlightened religious state, I’m having difficulty with it. Would that be nothingness without any God, or nothingness with a God? Because I have to say, nothingness with a God sounds more like somethingness, wouldn’t you say?
Since we have agreed that I accept (at least provisionally, as far as the powerfully augmented eye can see) an expanding Universe and am therefore clearly religious about physics and mathematics and reason if nothing else, can you explain to me how God isn’t something and yet is capable of things like sentience, action, choice, design, starting off Big Bangs out of nothingness — all things that seem to involve a remarkably high degree of material complexity and organization (not to mention time, and space and energy) — not to mention various Amazing Powers to make an entire Universe poof into existence out of nowhere with just the right rules to work out to become (in very small part) me some 14 billion years later. And all planned!
If we ever get nothingness and nowhere and notime sorted out, then we can tackle the proposition that it is somehow “more unlikely than likely” that string theory or multiverses are correct. I wasn’t aware until you helped me that this was my position.
But you must be right. I’ve written an entire novel on the multiverse concept, and it is certainly a fictional novel. So I must not believe it.
Curiously, a few minutes ago I would have said that it isn’t likely or unlikely for some multiverse hypothesis to be correct — if there are multiple disjoint spacetime continua that are adiabatically disconnected (share no information) then we will never know, so the question is fundamentally unanswerable. That doesn’t mean (note well) that the question itself is meaningless — I understand it perfectly well, in fact — just that one cannot in principle ever answer it. I’m rather a religious believer in the objective reality of somethingness, so if it is in fact an existential truth that there are indeed multiple Universes then whether or not I know it or can observe them it would be rather silly to assert that they definitely do not exist — or vice versa.
If there are multiverses that are in fact coupled — quantum bundles of universes, that sort of thing (which is the basis of my story, it being a bit boring to write about a world where the Lord of the Rings Universe really exists as a parallel Universe, only you can’t get there from here or ever prove it — then perhaps we might one day be able to demonstrate this, but in the meantime the question is more science fiction or fantasy than something to believe or disbelieve in very strongly, with the usual rational default: Lack of belief pending positive evidence!
Regarding string theory — it is really quite a surprise to learn that I reject string theory either a priori or on the basis of evidence. I would have sworn that actually considered to be a plausible hypothesis in general, albeit with a fair ways to go before it is positively proven, with moderate explanatory power. Of course, some of my very smart acquaintances are string theorists and perhaps you have correctly read my heart — rather than offend them I pretend to accept their absurd religion.
Now if you really want to know what I religiously believe about the Big Bang, string theory, cosmic eggs, time before time, all you have to do is ask. If you’d prefer to read my mind, on the other hand, well, try not to wrinkle the pages or bend the spine, and put it back on the shelf when you’re finished.
rgb
Perhaps we can sum it up: Watch out for argumentum ad coprum tauri.
Child’s play. We’ve had no “global warming” in 1000 years.
And over 8000 years, it’s gotten rather chilly. Over 5 million years, it’s gotten downright frigid.
I wonder if it is time to go homesteading in Antarctica yet? No? A bit premature?
😉
rgb
Perhaps we can sum it up: Watch out for argumentum ad coprum tauri.
LOL. You should send that one into the folks that maintain the logical fallacy bingo game, along with argumentum ad Latinum gloriosum, arguments based on fancy Latin phrases.
I may have to steal it for my book.
rgb
Since religion has entered the discussion, I personally prefer to deal with Christians and Jews rather than one who makes up his own morals. Such people often have none.
Christians and Jews often have none. Equally often, according to actual measurements — crime rates are not strongly differentiated by religious belief. And non-religious people do not “make up their own morals” any more than you do. The learn them exactly the same way that you do, by living in a society that rewards moral behavior, mostly, and by rationally looking at moral rules without the supernatural trimmings. But fearmongering is a standard practice of at least some of the religious — without religion, everybody will just do whatever they want! Horrors! Because it is clearly only religion and the fear of God that causes people to do things they do not want to do or behave in an altruistic manner.
The subtext is also that they’ll also do whatever anybody wants them to do, as long as they can justify it somehow in scripture, and that’s pretty easy. Want to bring back slavery? The Bible is your friend. Want to wipe out an enemy to the last man, woman and child? Hey, Moses did it. Why shouldn’t we? Tired of drug company profits? Plenty of opportunities in faith healing. Who needs Crestor?
rgb
rgbatduke says:
January 6, 2013 at 8:54 pm
Your seemingly humble reply prompts me to respond.
Sigh. No, atheism was never called Narcissism. You’re just making that up.
I just called it that, therefore it has been 😉 If Atheism hasn’t been known that way, it should be, as there is no essential difference. Here’s why:
There is absolutely no logical equivalence of the assertion that there is (probably) no God to the assertion that you yourself are God.
One cannot accurately say whether something does or doesn’t exist without defining it. If one says a supreme being doesn’t exist, he’s defined the supreme being. That makes him bigger than, superior to the supreme being. Hence, he is the supreme being.
In other words, the thing accurately and completely defined is smaller than the thing that defines it. God is inferior to you, you must be God instead. In other centuries, this thinking was called Narcissism. Teenagers exhibit the same behavior, but many adults grow out of it. Arrogance is another word commonly employed to describe the situation.
In fact, that is what we in the actual business of logic call an inconsistent statement, a basic contradiction.
You said it yourself.
I myself say it even more compactly — there is no reliable evidence that there is a God.
I’ll let the entire creation speak for itself, it seems a pretty reliable witness so far. If haply you should genuinely desire to know the supreme being, and He exists and loves, I’m sure He’ll make Himself known to you, in a manner you can understand.
Not my job to provide the evidence. Don’t want the job. Anyone who claims to have it is the blind leading the blind. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, it is not at all difficult. A child can understand it.
The evidence is overwhelming.
If such an entity exists, He’s got my address, and I’m happy to meet with him in person to talk things over at any time.
If that was not sarcastic, keep your eyes open for a visit. You may have to wait, but not because He’s too busy. Never known Him to fail humble people.
Oh, you meant by way of one particular set of the many dissimilar sets of the words written by people several thousand years ago and constantly rewritten and mistranslated across the thousands of years in between, all claiming to convey the truth about God, often pretending that there words are “Gods own words”?
Now you are just making stuff up.
So I am surely justified in doubting the words of any man claiming to speak for God,
Absolutely. The more skeptical, the better, I think. Impossible to be too skeptical. But if God exists, and He is Love, He is going to have to make Himself known since He is apparently invisible.
the one being in all the Universe that is surely capable of speaking for Itself — if it exists at all, or cares to speak.
Indeed. That is why He instructed faithful men to write it down for Him, verbatim. He would have to think very highly of man to give it to him, and to entrust some of them with the dictation.
Given that is true, He now has two great witnesses of Himself: His creation which you can see, and His word which you can read and consider. Now you just have to find someone to help you learn to read it. I guarantee you you do not have the education to understand what you are reading, because hardly anyone has any knowledge of how to read it any more. That may be the crime of the ages. God’s people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.
Eventually, you’ll need the third witness, a gift He freely provides just for the purpose. In the first century, they had another, who is due to return hopefully soon, God raised him from the dead.
it seems silly to think that it has to be particularly subtle in Its communication or rely on ancient texts for it. I’m fairly certain I’m not God, and even I can manage to communicate better than that.
There is nothing subtle about it. It is written down. Black on white. No guesswork required. Incredibly thoughtful. You can buy your own copy, and read it yourself, thanks in part to Gutenberg.
Texts that are a few thousand years old are not ancient, if the planet is 4.5 billion years old. Why would a good thing need to be rewritten? You probably revise your stuff – He hasn’t had to: it was perfect to start with.
and even I can manage to communicate better than that
That’s just silly. The written word has stood the test of time.
That is what is becoming pervasive now, and it is no longer Science. It’s called government propaganda.
But there is no such thing as an agnostic. The question becomes: under what tenants do the scientists hold themselves accountable? Is one of the tenants that they hold themselves accountable to the other tenants? Not in the current breed.
OK, wow. I actually don’t understand any of this.
No, no, let me try. Science is no longer science, it is government propaganda. [So I should rename my physics textbooks “government propaganda I and II”. ] Check. Hmm, looks like I’ll be back to teaching government propaganda in a few days.
Second, there is no such thing as an agnostic. Presumably, if somebody claims to be agnostic, they are lying. If anybody claims to have seen or talked to an agnostic, they are mistaken. No agnostics. Check.
Then, something about scientists holding themselves accountable as renters (tenants) of some dwelling? Where one of the renters is, I dunno, accountable to the rest or vice versa? Is this some sort of bizarre metaphor? No, wait, you meant tenets! Now it is all clear. I’ll have to go look up the answer in a book on “The Tenets of the Scientific Method” — I’m trying to remember a tenet of accountability to other tenets in there, but damned if I can, so I’m guessing that the answer is no.
Then something about a breed? Breed of what, tenet? Scientist? Scientific method? I do agree, though, that there is no tenet of accountability of any N-1 of the N tenets in the Scientific Method, which is actually not composed of tenets in the usual sense of the term, to the remaining tenet, in the current breed of scientific method. You have to go back to religious assertions of “the following tenets are true because this tenet says so and also says you should be burned at the stake if you disagree” to get that kind of accountability.
If you’re referring to scientists in general as “they” in the sentence with all the tenants being held accountable for the scientific method (presumably by some authority capable of holding somebody accountable, the “science police” I guess) then sadly, no, this is not how science works. Nothing stops you, for example, from calling yourself a scientist. Or from creationists making non-verifiable scientific claims. Great science has been done by people with no formal degrees, and people with stacks of degrees have been dumb as a post, scientifically speaking. Nothing stops a scientist, credentialed or otherwise from being wrong, or being stupid, or being venal, or being lucky. Scientists are, in fact, human! Not machines, not space aliens, just people. Ideally, relatively smart and well-educated people, but there’s a large spread and in any given case is open for debate.
The amazing thing about “scientists” is that they informally form their own “police”, the most non-violent police force in the world. There is little reward for being right, little punishment for being wrong (although even less reward!). The punishment for being stupid (a.k.a. being wrong too often) is the same that it is for anybody — the police (other scientists) will stop listening to you much, if you never make sense when they do.
The punishment for being venal is probably wealth (nobody said life was fair) but not in science per se — you usually have to go over to the Dark Side — applications and engineering and patents and business or politics — for that.
What keeps scientists afloat is often the hope of being lucky, of discovering something that really matters, which even in the reward-poor world of science confers some limited honor and wealth. And everybody knows that fortune favors those who work their asses off, so most scientists (that I know) actually work pretty hard.
What is becoming pervasive now is illiteracy, both verbal and scientific. It’s so sad.
And now I bid you good night.
rgb
RGB, I think you mistake, or missview the argument of the assertion that atheism is a unscientific philosophy. The mystery of mysteries’ is both a how and a why question. I submit, that the how of “everything inclusive” is not knowable via the scientific method because of the first cause dilemma, but logically “it“ whatever “it” is, defined as a causeless cause of infinite energy existing beyond space and time, must be.
Logically some sort of infinite energy beyond space and time, something must exist. Now is that infinite energy, beyond space and time, logically demanded causeless cause, intelligent, kind, benevolent, loving etc, etc? Well that is a different question entirely, and due to the stated qualities of infinite energy beyond space and time, the means of knowing requires a different epistemology then anything within the scientific method, so yes to declare, I know God, is hubris, and by the way, not allowed within the Vedic, Judaic, or Christian tradition, although “knowing” the absolute is considered possible within a different context not dealt with here.
There are no absolutes in relationship to science. I maintain that science is, in its essence, “cause and effect” .Every effect is proceeded by a prior cause. There can be no effect without a prior cause. All causes are themselves an effect. Cause and effect is a chain and it, with the arrow of time, moves in one direction. All causes and effects are quantifiable. In this sense, science to me is the study of how all things in the cosmos interact, and the laws that govern those interactions. Science is constrained to time, space and relativity. Science cannot contain absolutes. A primary tool of science is to use mathematics, one through any number, but never absolute infinity, which is not a number. I am referring to absolutes, and not the use of these terms within RELATIVE fields, often representing exponentially growing signals and negative exponents representing exponentially decreasing signals. I am not referring to time constants (decaying or growing) As such science can only see a part of the whole and must keep an open mind to new information.
This primary chain of cause and effect observations, (This is the road that connects all roads) upon which all deductive reason is based, has a self limiting paradox. Simply put, cause and effect cannot be an absolute eternal chain, otherwise one is stating that “everything inclusive” has no cause, it always was, which in and of itself defeats the laws of science and deductive reason applied to observation, and induces the well known paradox that if “everything inclusive “ always was, then everything that could have occurred, already would have, and in effect states the unscientific proposition that while every thing (relative things which can be quantified) in creation have a cause, everything inclusive has no cause, it just unscientifically is. The other side of this paradox is that (accepting the above problem as valid) if there was then a first cause, what ever that cause was had to have no cause and must be beyond the laws of cause and effect. Science, by it very nature, only deals with relativity, quantifying numbers and partial observations which can only see a part of the whole.
I heard a talk from a world renowned astrophysicist. Forgive my poor memory as I do not remember his name as I was working stand-by on a trade show, at the time I was working 80 plus hour weeks, dealing with many other issues, (attorneys, yuck) but the talk was riveting. He talked of this problem and said the math pointed to an impossibility of absolute infinite energy, not the defined time constant kind. He also referenced that all the laws of classic physics and quantum mechanics break down and lose there application. He said it , the singularity, comes from nothing, which he then defined as “no thing“, in essence still something that cannot be measured or quantified, but something which is. Wik The classical version of the Big Bang cosmological model of the universe contains a causal singularity at the start of time (t=0), where all time-like geodesics have no extensions into the past. Extrapolating backward to this hypothetical time 0 results in a universe of size 0 in all spatial dimensions, infinite density, infinite temperature, and infinite space-time curvature.
From him I first learned of the exact requirements needed in the fundamental forces to have a cosmos where things evolve and organize, instead of falling into rapid entropy. Going to the thought of multi verses does not, in my view, diminish this. Yes, one can say our goldilocks universal forces are like throwing paint on a wall, predicting before hand that some spots will be exactly one inch from their nearest neighboring spot, and then finding out that some few actually are, and then determining it false to pretend it is anything but random. But in the incredibly refined requirements of these fundamental forces, it is more like throwing a gallon of paint on a wall, and all the spots end up of the exact same size, shape and exactly the same distance from each other. That requires planning and intelligence, such as in the creation of an ink jet printing machine.
Additionally multiverses are just a theory, not an observation as is our universe. Furthermore, even if we are one of billions of multiverses, it is pure assumption that those universes have created random forces and they just fail, for all we know they all function just as ours does. The known observations do not fit random happenstance. The argument against the observation is based on theory, and purely speculative assumptions about that theory, IE, Theoretically multi verses could be real, theoretically this reality could be random (premise) and they could all fail, therefore our OBSERVATIONS of what appears to be incredibly unlikely intelligent manifestation in this universe, is random chance.(premise matches conclusion) It is a logic fail, .petitio principia. And finally multiverses, brane theory, cyclic big bang, all do nothing to address the already presented cause dilemma, they just regresses it further, what caused that universe, what caused the one before ours, etc.
Finally a brief statement on the implied Intelligent design of our universe. Many atheist scientist, upset with past travesties of mankind done in the name of religion, rebel at the word “God”, because of past abuse to control people. I however have made a very vague definition of God as a “eternal and infinite beyond time and space causeless cause. Science deals with phenomena, it takes a different tool for noumena. As such the scientist, realizing that “the 12 inch ruler of his (field two) mind can never measure infinity” can still use his cause effect tools to investigate field three indirectly. How? He can look in field two for a proxy report on the attributes of the infinite energy beyond time and space causeless cause. He can look for evidence of intelligence, and many other qualities. To search for the infinite directly, logically requires the conciseness to transcend field two. This is the field of religion. Science and religion are not in conflict. They operate on two different fields, phenomena, the area of science and noumena, the area of religion.
Centers for Disease Control;
That’s just silly. The written word has stood the test of time.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh pish. I promised myself not to get involved in these kinds of discussions, but it is late and I am judgment impaired. Stood the test of time? Have you bothered to compare old copies of the biblical texts to new ones?
The Hebrews escaped from Egypt across the Sea of Rushes
Joseph was hated by his brothers because he had a coat with short sleeves
(New Testament) Joseph was a “builder of houses” meaning that he was a stone mason
There’s at least 3 different versions of what Moses did to get water out of that rock, and that’s just the ones I know of anecdotaly, I’ve never researched it.
Goliath was less than 6 feet tall.
The rest of your diatribe is a lesson in logical fallacy, and you finish with a claim that isn’t supported by the facts.