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!
James Abbott says:
January 6, 2013 at 12:35 pm
Lord Monckton said
“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.”
James Abbot said
The notion that it is “illogical” that trace constituents of physical systems can be important simply because they are at trace levels is so pathetic its difficult to know where to start, but here’s a few examples of why trace constituents are essential:
CFCs and HCFCs are even more trace constituents of our atmosphere, but their impact has been very significant in depleting ozone, particularly at high latitudes – leading to international agreements to reduce their use. Ozone is vital in protecting the Earth’s surface from solar UV and is itself a tiny trace gas in the atmosphere.”
I say that is rubbish. The science behind the Ozone Holes and CFC’s is pretty much been debunked.
James Abbott said
“Trace metals in the human body are also essential – without them we die.”\
I say – you cannot compare the human body with the earth’s atmosphere and it is nonsense to even try. The human body is an active biochemical system made up of thousands of chemical compounds. Very small amounts counts. The earth’s atmosphere is an inert chemical system made up of half a dozen chemical compounds. The amount of CO2 is neither here nor there.
James Abbott said
CO2 is a natural greenhouse gas at trace levels, but without any CO2 in the atmosphere not only would the biosphere be in trouble but in terms of climate the Earth would be in a permanent ice-age, all other things being equal. ” I don’t think so. H2O will keep the earth warm.
I really don’t think you know what you are talking about James Abbott.
rgbatduke says:
January 6, 2013 at 10:40 pm
Tenet, sorry, beyond my bedtime. Sometimes that’s what you get when you grow up on phonics. Your apparent vitriol was unnecessary.
The bottom line –
CO2 kept going up, temperatures kept falling. No model came close to explaining it, (or cloud formations, or El Nino and La Nina formation, or ocean movement/temperatures.)
But none of that matters as big financiers have got their returns for futile projects like wind farms, Volt and Fisker vehicles, solar farms, etc. Big government wants to keep it rolling ’cause they get more power AND more money. UN and their client NGOs loves it ’cause they get more power and money.
So who loses? The rest of us – last one standing turn the lights off, sorry doesn’t matter any more.
reason’s murder scene is a forensic nightmare.
all i can be sure of is that it was strangled while it slept.
davidmhoffer says:
January 6, 2013 at 10:49 pm
That’s just silly. The written word has stood the test of time.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh pish.
you finish with a claim that isn’t supported by the facts.
The context was the written word has stood the test of time for communication. Seems pretty effective to me, but I have no proof, just my experience.
For example, you’ve communicated your pishyness very well in just that manner.
Have you bothered to compare old copies of the biblical texts to new ones?
Regarding discrepancies across Bible versions, translations, and copies, it is hardly the Author’s fault. It is His responsibility, though, to feed those who hunger and thirst for truth. He’ll get it to those who genuinely want it, so you don’t have to be concerned.
Goliath was less than 6 feet tall.
You knew him, then? Did you attend his funeral?
There’s at least 3 different versions … that’s just the ones I know of anecdotaly, I’ve never researched it.
Obviously, you are a scholar, and know what you are talking about.
OMG, could this thread go any further OT?
I’ll give it shot:
Wouldn’t it be funny if someone discovered the ancient word for God is what we call Gravity.
Only Gravity can bring order to chaos. Not to mention, the evolution of the universe and life on earth entirely depends upon Gravity.
LOL!
Look for we know there are an infinite number of big bangs a second in a universe (or multi-verse if you prefer) so vast that it would be highly improbable for us not to have come into existence from pure chance.
On the other hand, for all we know a God that we’ll never know in an analytical way created this universe and us for who knows what purpose.
Flip a coin, phone a friend, poll the audience; I don’t care, but, rabid Evangelism for either atheism or theism is rather OT and unproductive. (And yes, I’ve slipped on this myself.)
On topic:
I think the biggest fallacies of the CAGW crowd are the “jumping to conclusion” fallacies. I don’t recall the Latin names but it all boils down to concluding CAGW from flimsy evidence and then sifting, fishing, phishing, and inventing data if necessary to prop up said conclusion.
Michael Palmer says:
January 6, 2013 at 6:31 pm
@FrankK, your objections to the climate models may be valid and based on much experience, but they are unrelated to pure logic.
—————————————————————————————————————
You seem to enjoy having the last word, but I disagree.
It involves more than just objection to climate models. If climate models are flawed and fudged and don’t fit the data, as is plainly evident, then it logically follows that the theory of AGW is false since the theory is based on those results. Are you claiming there is no logic in that conclusion??! if so then your so called “pure” logic does not seem very practical.
Cogent, concise, complete. And characteristically courteous yet courageous. Thanks!
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.
This is a variant of ontological argument, and like all such arguments, is thereby immediately suspect because they all are based on verbal trickery instead of sound reasoning. Let’s see if this one is too.
When one uses the phrase “supreme being” at all one has defined something — the concatenation of the term “being”, something (in context a sentient being) and “supreme”, or highest. Even if you do believe in a supreme being, by referring to it you have defined it, and in order to define it (by your argument) you must be bigger than the supreme being. If it is not defined, neither you nor I could carry on a conversation about it. We would be writing “If one says a Xychlocus doesn’t exist, he’s defined the Xychlocus” and so on, neither one of us having any idea what a Xychlocus actually is.
Note well the advantage of algebra here — putting an actual undefined symbol in place of the words you claim I might be using to “define” something takes all of the meaning away and reveals rather expectedly that they were actually already defined and we both understood them perfectly well.
A second error is your unusual idea that somehow defining something requires one to be “bigger” or “superior” or “supreme” to the thing being defined. How exactly does this work? If I define, say, The President of the United States (which I think I could do pretty well) does that make me bigger than the president? Superior to the president? Supreme to the president? I can define my wife even better, but if I argued that by doing so I’m in any way better or superior to her she’d put me in my place straight off.
I’m afraid that I don’t really see any evidence in nature that anything that is accurately and completely defined must be smaller than the thing defining it, unless you are confusing the idea of “definition” with that of “possessing complete and perfect information about”. In that case, of course, we can leave out the supreme bit and just shoot for everything, the Universe itself, which is everything that actually exists. I’m not certain that it is correct to say that the Universe “defines” itself or that subsets of the Universe are “inferior” to it (which smacks of control and value judgement, not ordinal ranking of measurable size or information content).
Either way, I’d actually agree with this part of your argument and have made it myself as part of a conditional proof that if God exists, God must be the Universe, the sum total of everything that exists. That doesn’t prove that God does exist, of course, because we usually append additional properties onto God, such as being sentient. One can argue pretty strongly that a non-empty Universe exists, but in order for the Universe to be God it would have to be sentient, compassionate, capable of reasoned action.
So just as I can use the term Universe, or for that matter Supreme Being or God, and have you understand what I’m referring to, in the one case the fairly concrete everything that really exists (minimally yourself) and in the other two a hypothetical version of all that plus transcendent sentience, without actually thinking myself bigger than the Universe, or the supreme being or without any danger of being grievously misunderstood, we can surely work out some sort of reasonable criterion for assigning to the ideas a degree of belief without being accused of making ourselves “superior” to that which we discuss, or without the smoke screen of insisting that I have to know the state of every single subatomic particle in the dog lying at my feet in order to be able to state with some degree of confidence “there is (or is not) a dog lying at my feet”. I don’t have to completely define a blue fairy in order to be reasonably sure that there isn’t one flying around my head while I type. I don’t have to completely define Jupiter to be able to see it and decide that it probably is or isn’t there, even though it is much larger than I am and I’m not even in principle capable of holding all of the state information required to completely defined Jupiter or to measure it even if I were.
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.
Sir, you beg the question by calling it a “creation” — a statement for which you haven’t a shred of evidence and which doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. All the Universe is a “witness” of is that “the Universe exists”. Its existence need not be logically predicated on the prior existence of something else, nor is it necessarily the case that the something else was intelligent, compassionate, loving, etc.
Whenever I look at the Universe, it rather behaves like a perfectly mechanical system without any guiding intelligence. In fact, the Universe behaves pretty much the way I’d expect it to behave if there was no God. This doesn’t prove that there isn’t a God, but neither is it compelling evidence in favor of the proposition.
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.
Then we are in agreement, because believe me, I’m really, really skeptical. I do agree with your statement, though: If God exists — where we really would need to spend a fair bit of time defining as exactly as possible what “God” and “exists” are going to mean in this proposition, lest we get into pointless misunderstandings — and God is Love (which needs more than a bit of definition right away, because God is not Love, Love is an emotion, a mental state, and the God I thought we were discussing is a concrete being with objective, not subjective, existence), then God is going to make Himself known because God is apparently invisible!
Where I’ve added a bit of emphasis.
Let’s start with the last bit. God, being apparently invisible by virtue of the fact that neither you nor I nor pretty much anybody can see Him (or really, It as there is no reason to think of It as being male) has to in some sense become un-invisible in order to be observed. I, like most sensible people, tend to be very skeptical of the existence of things that cannot be observed, or that are only conditionally observed by other people, long ago and not regularly and reproducibly observable.
This does leave us with a few puzzles. God is usually considered to be all-powerful (here’s where it would have been great to have worked out our definitions ahead of time) so if God is invisible it is entirely God’s choice to be invisible. As long as God remains invisible, it is pretty reasonable, frankly, not to believe in It. There is an infinity of things that could invisibly, undetectably “exist”, and trying to believe in all of them without evidence would make my believing muscles sore. God doesn’t get an epistemological “bye” by virtue of being the Supreme Being — rather I would say that with a big claim like that the evidence has to be equally big.
Second, you assert that God is Love and elsewhere suggest that God Loves me. I have doubted this since my first puppy died some fifty two years ago. Remember, for this to be true, God has to exist (in spite of invisibility) AND love me, and of course is the sole cause of my puppy’s death. Dying puppies is not convincing evidence of love. Invisibility — nay, indetectability — isn’t convincing evidence of existence. And dead dogs (and loved ones) are only a tiny part of the pain I’ve experienced, and for that matter I’ve been enormously lucky, pain-wise, so far — many people and small children worldwide have it far worse.
In other words the problem of theodicy is as thorny now as it ever was. None of the explanations for evil and pain and suffering I’ve ever read in religious apologia have been at all convincing (rather, self-serving for the religion in question in its blind need to gain converts). What is a convincing explanation for pain and evil in the world is the simplest one — there is no God, only a strictly, objectively real Universe with impersonal rules. If we want to reduce the evil and suffering in the world, nobody else is going to do it for us, and there will be no miracles helping it along the way or higher power telling us how to do it.
Now if I am wrong and God does exist and supernatural miracles do happen and God is Love, it is enormously simple for that loving God to stop being invisible and mute. Or, perhaps, God is being maximally loving by being invisible and mute, by leaving the Universe alone to just happen on its own, uncontrolled, as much a surprise to God as it is to me. Either way, as a good skeptic I will not believe in something without evidence, in the case of God pretty strong evidence.
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.
Right. God wrote it in a secret code where it doesn’t say what it says, it says what somebody wants it to mean. This is the most pathetic of excuses. You’ve just stated that God loves everybody and entrusted certain men with writing down His Words. How do we know? Those men told us. Do we believe people who say “I’m speaking for God” in general? No, we consider them crazy or guileful. But even those trusty men wrote it down in code. It says one thing but means another. If that isn’t enough, they wrote it down at different times, and different manuscript copies were made over thousands of years, causing whatever was originally written to disappear among a welter of redacting, insertion, deletion, addition, forgery. Some things were arbitrarily rejected (on our behalf) centuries after they were written, other things made it through. Finally, the surviving manuscripts were mistranslated into relatively modern languages and the book was variously typeset.
Why, exactly, is any of this evidence of anything at all except the usual literary evolution of a system of religious myths and legends? Why (if it was so perfectly written) do I need a secret decoder ring to understand it now? And even if it were explained to me by the most devout and wisest of humans why would I believe that what they tell me is true? Why, in fact, should I believe you?
Seriously.
So far, very little of what you’ve said makes a lot of sense. A Bible that I can’t just read, or read critically, I have to read it sympathetically in the company of somebody that will “explain away” everything that doesn’t make sense. A God that only visits the planet to update “his word” every few thousand years (and that delivered only to a select few who are “in the club”) — but who loves us. An apparently uncreated Universe that is supposedly evidence of a creation.
Why, exactly, is it unreasonable to think that the Universe is what it is, uncreated and unsentient? That there is no God, and that there was no “dictation” of any special wisdom or imparted knowledge to a remote tribe of ignorant savages living in barbaric times. That the reason the Bible makes no sense is that it makes no sense, not that you have to twist and interpret its words until they make sense. And that if we want to move to higher moral ground and improve the world, we’ll have to do it ourselves, as best as we can, without supernatural help.
All of this is entirely consistent with the reliable evidence at hand and it is a lot simpler explanation. That doesn’t make it right, but it does make it better to believe.
rgb
Tenet, sorry, beyond my bedtime. Sometimes that’s what you get when you grow up on phonics. Your apparent vitriol was unnecessary.
I apologize. Beyond my bedtime too, and really, that pair of paragraphs was pretty confusing…;-)
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.
Why?
rgb
“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.”
————
Confusing consensus of people with consensus of evidence.
[Reply: Pondering how a non-sentient data item reaches it’s consensus… -ModE ]
Heck, even the IPCC says it illogical – as Dr. Spock would say.
Maybe the models have a problem.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/28/1210514109
http://landshape.org/enm/santer-climate-models-are-exaggerating-warming-we-dont-know-why/
Shouldn’t it be argumentum ad corporum tauri?
I however have made a very vague definition of God as a “eternal and infinite beyond time and space causeless cause.
Which is all well and good, that you’ve made this very vague definition. Suppose that I renamed that causeless cause “the Universe”, of which space and time are (perhaps) only a part, and left the eternal and infinite bit out as essentially unknowable assertions and hence irrelevant to us. Everything you’ve described, without the intelligence. It doesn’t need it; in its (near) eternal infinity things might well happen nearly randomly so that eventually the monkeys type Shakespeare. And (nearly) infinitely later, even type it again. This is even more believable, because otherwise you have to explain how the uncaused cause that supposedly creates space and time manages to think without them “before” time begins. Whatever that means.
Don’t hesitate not to be vague, because once you’ve come up with a fairly specific hypothesis for not only something existing without cause (that part I get, it is reasonably called “the Universe”), but that something being a priori intelligent, then we can assess its plausibility. I tend to see intelligence as a high order phenomenon, one involving information theory, entropy, and lots of moving parts (things that change in time in patterned information encoding ways).
However unlikely you think the paint spatters representing the Universe suitable for life might be, take that degree of probability and make it geometrically smaller and you have an idea of the probability of the paint spatters required to self-organize into a designer of the Universe.
Not fair to cheat and just make intelligence an a priori infinitely improbable characteristic of your infinite eternity and explain the visible Universe however improbable you want to judge it in ignorance, with the an even less probable uncaused cause judged in even greater ignorance as it is out there where it cannot even in principle be observed, slipping the pea neatly under the shell. But if you’re gonna invoke probability and the anthropic principle or use the term “cause” in some sense other than its formal definition in physics (where it doesn’t mean cause at all as the laws of physics are conservation laws, saying that certain things are never observed to be created, only moved around into different forms), prepare to be challenged.
Amen brother. Talking of religion the movement itself has been described by the BBC as using the language of religion to advance their cause. Even the law recognizes it to a certain degree as a religion. Now, scientists who refuse to re-consider the theory, no matter what the evidence to the contrary, might be going down the same track.
Then the law.
Thank you Lord Monckton. Clear & precise.
Have a great year.
M’Lord, well done sir. Very well done.
I’m just left to wonder if the ancient formal Latin logic includes space for things such as:
argumentum ex malus notitia
argumentum ex falsum notitia
argumentum ex defectiva methodo (algorithm)
argumentum ex commodo
argumentum ex regimen præsta pecunia
Just sayin’…
One minor technical point, and I have no idea how this would be covered in latin, is that the word “tropopause” makes it sound like things STOP there. Like it is a nice, quiet, STATIONARY point. Somewhere that convection stops, so the winds end and it’s just this nice flat occlusive window through which only IR can move.
Yet that is a fallacy.
It is a rapidly moving space that changes velocity from upward to sideways and thus must have some turbulence at the “bounds”. Further, we know there is mass transport across those bounds as the stratospheric air descends at the ‘cold pole’. (So must be replaced at the middle somewhere…)
Look at the graph here:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/wind-speed-alt-1090.gif
From here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/tropopause-rules/
wind speed is about 86 knots at the tropo’pause’ and 1/2 that just a bit each side.
That is not “paused”, that is “squirting out sideways like a shot watermelon seed”
So what is the class of error that leads from the ‘pause’ to the mistaken belief ‘frame’ that only infra-red radiation matters in a Cat 2 hurricane force wind speed? Hmmmm?
I would love to have a label for it.
“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.”
How very 17th Century British of you. Animals DO reason, as anyone who has observed them knows. But, of course, this clashes with traditional Jewish and Christian theology, which treats them as expendable commodities put here for man to exploit to his miserable heart’s content.
Is this really the forum for religious sanctimony? Do you Mr. Monckton honestly think you’re closer in likeness that any other life-form to your Creator you claim to be the Lord of Life and Light? According to what or whom? If you say the bible, Aristotle, Plato (who decided animals did not have immortal souls, and also advocated lying for a supposedly good cause), or Church doctrine then you yourself are arguing from alleged authority. Since you are not an expert on beasts, as you call them, you’re also arguing from ignorance. Since you have never met this Creator, you are arguing from assumption. And since your soul cannot be proven, your are arguing from belief.
It is very illogical to write about logic when your closing paragraph belies your own.
If anyone is interested, here are some more articles on Global Warming seen by some as a new religion.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/losing-their-religion-as-evidence-cools-off/story-e6frgd0x-1226510184533
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/the_religion_of_global_warming.html
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/religion.htm
There you go again! I told you yesterday that there is no acceleration in the rate of sea level rise AND that sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age AND the Little Ice Age. So why do you harp on about this non problem???
Robert Brown: maybe one day we might get to some sort of answer to the ‘is there. isn’t there’ argument if a flaw in the simulation can be discovered. As you probably know: it is suggested by Silas Beane and others, that over the next 2-3 centuries we may be able to produce a simulation of an entire universe populated with sentient beings like us (or indeed, even better, perhaps more peaceful models). Furthermore if the proposition that we exist in simulation is tested, in the way that Beane has suggested, then the existence of God is established (but he or she is only a computer programmer). But the obvious problem remains – who created the computer programmer? Just as the old lady responded who believed the world was supported on the back of a turtle, the answer is: ‘it’s computer programmers all the way down!’. Anyway – it’s a great pleasure to read your contributions to this blog, even when it goes off thread.
Centers for Disease Control says: January 6, 2013 at 7:08 pm
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.
AHA! I KNEW it all along!
NOW we are getting somewhere!
It is always nice to see a discussion develop in a sensible and logical way.
Please send tribute asap, (prefer gold and beautiful virgins, thanks) oh gathered peasants!
(Well, really, just gold will suffice, the rest follows.)
rgbatduke wrote
quote
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.
unquote
If you’re prepared to do half the experiment then you could always use just olive oil like your illustrious scientific compatriot — spilling an edible substance should keep the jail time down to… oooh, three years max. Send a couple of students, just in case.
Choose a day when the sun’s low and the windspeed is below 7 m/s. (Early morning is a good time, so the student idea might not work.)
JF
Oh, yes, tell the students to have a look on Google Map Image, drop their viewpoint onto Atlantic Beach Bridge and look south east. Reassure them that they’ll be doing no more than the boat leaving a smooth in that image. Do this without witnesses…
If we take it as read now that the “science” behind AGW has fallen on it’s face, we have to turn to the question of why has it lasted so long.
I had a horrifying experience recently. While laughing with my 7 year old niece at a BBC comedy programme aimed at children, she proudly showed me a book based on the series: “The Horrible History of the World”, by Terry Deary, the chap who produces the BBC programme.
I was horrified to realise the theme of the book is the denigration of every foundation stone of our Western Civilisation.
Targets include God & religion, of all denominations, the law & history itself. Among others, Hammurabi’s Code, The Ten Commandments & The Twelve Tablets of Roman Law are belittled.
The family is attacked, & the following is a direct quote:
“this is NOT a book about ‘history’, it’s a book about ‘people’ – the most disgusting, evil, cruel and horrible creatures on Earth”
This is not a comedy book aimed at 7-13 year olds, it’s straight brainwashing. It’s freely available from public libraries, whose kiddies shelves are crammed with a huge array of these books, popularised by the BBC “comedy” series, as well as an abundance of Global Warming propaganda. Published in 2003, it has been polluting our childrens’ minds for nearly 10 years.
Why, in 90+ pages of unrelieved gore, murder, slaughter & torture, are the only words of praise for China, which has never managed a democratic govt in it’s 5000+ year history?
I have emailed Lord Tebbit, a tough-minded right wing ex member of Margaret Thatchers Govt.
I have shown this sinister work to a couple of local priests & vicars, & I urge you all to visit your libraries, verify what I’ve said, & raise as loud an outcry as you can.
Why would the BBC sponsor such a corrosive work?
This is the same BBC which sheltered the vile Jimmy Savile for 40 years, to gain as large an audience as possible for it’s propaganda.
This is the BBC which launched a completely unfounded attack on Lord McAlpine, accusing him of being a paedophile, than which there is no greater smear. This betrays a level of journalistic incompetence & spite which is almost unbelievable.
This is the same BBC which decided in January 2006 that the science of AGW was ‘settled’, & that thus they no longer needed to abide by their charter terms which demand impartial reporting of both sides of a debate. Their panel of 28 “experts & scientists” turned out to be activists, including, interestingly, one female C of E vicar.
The above are all facts, to the best of my knowledge, & my opinions obviously.
Now I’m going to indulge in some speculations.
What if the BBC is signed up to the Club of Rome doomists?
What if Their political thinking hasn’t matured beyond Communism, or some sort of belief in a depopulated & rural world as envisaged by “A Blueprint for Survival”, first published as Vol 2, No 1 of the ecologist magazine 1972? I have the Penguin paperback edition.
We are at present seeing the impoverishment of the first world, through deindustrialisation, over regulation & expensive energy. We are seeing the world’s elite 1% enriching itself through massive Cap & Trade taxes
What if we have Pol Pot in the Whitehouse? Set on bankrupting the US with ridiculously huge debts? The UK & EU are following the same trail.
What if UN Agenda 21 is the real deal? With it’s plans to depopulate the planet by 80% – 90%?
It’s plan to nationalise all property, establish one world govt, for which the EU is the forerunner?
It’s plan to abolish the family, & bring your kids up in barracks?
What if the film: “The Hunger Games” is a blueprint?
Was Alabama right to ban UN Agenda 21 in June 2012?
http://www.thenewamerican.com & go to 10 July 2012 Sustainable Freedom: Surging Opposition to Agenda 21, “Sustainable Development”
There is also an article on the new american site about the bullying EPA losing a case, in the supreme court, against the sackett family, but I cant put my hand on the reference.
Truly we live in Orwellian or Kafkaesque times.
I wonder why UN Agenda 21 Architect Maurice Strong has moved to China?
I wonder why George Soros praised China’s political system?
I wonder when/if China will pull the plug on the US economy by ceasing to buy US govt bonds?
I hope I’m wrong with my speculations, I would like the strong minds on this site to check me out.
I believe I’m right about the BBC, I’m with James Delingpole there:
http://www.bogpaper.com & go to “Thank God for Jimmy Savile”
Here’s to 2013, the year we saved the world 🙂
We live in interesting times.
JD.