Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Quantum Theory, Perspective, and Reality

“Without the quantum theory, our molecules and atoms would dissolve instantly.” This is a quote from the book, Physics of the Impossible, written by Michio Kaku. The book explores the possibility of performing or creating seemingly impossible events or things, such as force fields, time travel, phasers, teleportation, and so forth. The quote above comes from the chapter that deals with the possibility of teleportation, and it occurs while the author is discussing some of the basics of quantum mechanics, more specifically, about how much of quantum mechanics relies on probabilities, as opposed to known certainties.

Without getting into the nitty-gritty details of quantum mechanics (I am only familiar with some of the basic principles of quantum mechanics), I think there is much that can be said about the opening quote. Michio Kaku seeming to be saying in that quote that the world would fall apart if quantum theory didn’t work. This idea strikes me as ludicrous. Quantum mechanics is not reality; quantum mechanics is a description of reality. Reality exists apart from our understanding of it, our models (such as quantum mechanics) are imperfects descriptions of that reality.

I don’t know that Michio Kaku was actually trying to say that the theory of quantum mechanics holds our world together. He was probably just trying to emphasis that, despite its weirdness, quantum mechanics is the best description of the subatomic world that we have. But claiming that a human-created model is reality, I think, is more than just a poor choice of words or hyperbole: people really do think that the way they understand something IS reality.

Take this for example: a person lives to be over one hundred years old. As this is a rare thing, the local newspaper sends someone out to do an interview. During the interview, the reporter asks the person who is one hundred years old, “To what do you credit your longevity?” How could a person who is one hundred years old possibly know what factor in their life contributed to their longevity? They could pick anything that they did that their friends, who did not live as long, did not do, or vice versa, but how would the hundred year old know that that difference was what made the difference? Another example: someone was a witness to a tragic and completely unexpected accident. In gathering information about the accident, a reporter asks the witness, “What could the victims have done to prevent the accident?” Again, how could the witness know which factor he observed contributed to the accident?

Now I am not saying that the hundred year old or the witness have no useful information. What I am trying to point out is that often, we jump from, “That person has useful information,” to “That person has the answer.” This is just like quantum mechanics: it has useful information, but it surely does not have all the answers, especially as scientists learn more about subatomic behavior. Neither am I saying that there is no reality, there are just perspectives. What I am saying is that no one has a perfect understanding of reality. This would mean, first of all, that multiple witnesses and perspectives are preferable to a single witness; second, ultimate authority will not come from any person, so ultimate authority must come from somewhere outside of man; third, humility is required since we are all wrong in our thinking somewhere.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

How Transitional Forms are Identified, Pt. 1

Transitional forms are typically identified by their appearance. Take Archaeopteryx for instance. Because it has features that are similar to birds (feathers, wings) and features that are similar to reptiles (long bony tail, claws on forelimbs, teeth in beak), it is considered to be a transitional form between those two groups of creatures.

While transitional forms are typically identified by their appearance, it should be pointed out that a transitional form can only be positively identified by doing cross-breed experiments. Let’s review what a transitional form is supposed to be. A transitional form is a creature that is descended from a different creature and is ancestral to a third type. Using Archaeopteryx as an example again, Archaeopteryx is thought to be descended from reptiles (more specifically, dinosaurs) and ancestral to birds (Archaeopteryx is considered to be a bird itself, but it is considered to be ancestral to, or near the ancestry of, all other birds). Therefore, it would be theoretically possible to cross-breed Archaeopteryx with a bird and cross-breed Archaeopteryx with a dinosaur.

Maybe cross-breeding Archaeopteryx with a dinosaur or a bird would not work. While Archaeopteryx is considered to be a transitional form between these two groups, there may be additional transitional forms between Archaeopteryx and dinosaurs, and between Archaeopteryx and birds. In this case, Archaeopteryx would be able to cross-breed with the transitional forms nearest it, and then those transitional forms could cross-breed with birds and dinosaurs. The point is, if something truly is a transitional form, it should be able to cross-breed with and individual belonging to a different species, which could then cross-breed with still another species, which could cross-breed with still another species, and so on, until you finally reach a species that belongs to an entirely different group.

The problem with the cross-breeding test for transitional forms is that transitional forms are found in the fossil record: they are dead. You can not cross-breed animals that are dead. This is why appearance is often used for identifying transitional forms. Appearance is related to genetics, so the idea is that two animals that share many similar characteristics will have much of the same genes, and therefore they may very well be able to cross-breed. However, is it true that two animals that bear many similarities are closely related genetically?

Not in all cases. Evolutionists have a term for when two different animals that are not supposed to be related happen to look very much like each other. Such an unrelated similarity is said to be the result of convergent evolution. A classic example of convergent evolution is the similarities between the Tasmanian wolf and a true wolf. Both of these animals have the classic dog-type body. Both are about the same size. However, one is a marsupial, and the other is a placental.

Now based solely on outward appearances, it might be thought that the Tasmanian wolf represents a transitional form between marsupials and dogs. Of course, we are told that it is not. The similarities that exist between Tasmanian wolves and true wolves exist simply because they were subjected to similar selective pressures, and they adapted to those pressures by evolving similar traits. A legitimate question to ask is: why are the similarities between these two animals not representative of a genetic relationship while the similarities between Archaeopteryx and dinosaurs show that they are related?

The evolutionist’s answer to the previous question is: the differences between marsupials and placentals are primitive characteristics, that is, the features that distinguish those two groups arose very early in mammalian history, while the common features in both wolves and Tasmanian wolves arose much later. Therefore, the common features between Tasmanian wolves and true wolves must be convergent because they came long after the placental and marsupial groups arose. And how do they know that wolves and Tasmanian wolves evolved long after marsupials and placentals did? By the fossil record. The earliest placentals and marsupials are found in rocks that date back to the late Cretaceous while fossils of wolf-like animals and Tasmanian wolves come from rocks that date much later in the Tertiary.

Okay, so the first marsupials and placentals are supposedly found in older rocks that Tasmanian wolves and wolves. Could it be the case that wolves are an exception? Maybe wolves are directly descended from Tasmanian wolves and wolves are actually convergent with other placentals. The reason this latter idea is not accepted is because it is thought that ancestral conditions do not change much. There is a rule of thumb that a feature generally only arises once in evolutionary history. In cases where the same feature has arisen twice (such as in cases of convergent evolution) it is easier to accept that the ancestral conditions have remained unchanged while the later features are the ones that are convergent. Much of this thinking is codified in a study called cladistics.

Cladistics is the study of descent among living creatures. The end product of cladistics is a cladogram, a branching tree pattern with known species occupying the tips of the branches and the stems representing lines of descent. Nodes (points of branching on the tree) represent hypothetical common ancestors. A cladogram is constructed by creating a list of all of the features of the organisms being studied and scoring the features, usually with a zero or a one. Zero usually denotes the absence of a given feature, a one represents the presence of the feature. In addition to tabulating all the features, an outgroup also has to be selected. An outgroup is an organism that is known to more ancestral to, or derived from a more ancestral stock, than the creatures being studied. The outgroup is there so that the researcher may know what the primitive features are. After all of this data has been collected, the information is run through a program. The program looks through the data and creates branching tree (cladogram) out of it. The cladogram produced is the most parsimonious tree out of all the possible trees that could be constructed. This means that the organisms are ordered on the tree so that the development of the common ancestor to all of the descendants has the fewest number of changes and reversals (loss of a previously existing feature).

Evolutionary scientists like cladistics because it is rigorous and testable. If the exact same features are scored and the same programming is used each time, then the same results will be obtained. Being able to get the same results means that the method is repeatable, which means that the results of one scientist can be independently verified by another.

Now step back and examine what has been explained so far about organisms that look similar to one another, convergent evolution, and cladistics. Convergent evolution shows that not all similar features are the result of common ancestry, but there are ways (such as comparing ancestral features to more recently evolved features) that can distinguish convergent evolution from common ancestry. Cladistics is a rigorous, testable method used for tracing the ancestry of several organisms. So does this sufficiently answer the question, is it true that two organisms that bear similarities are genetically related? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it builds a model to explain how common features are the result of common ancestry except in some cases that can be identified and explained. No, in the sense that these explanations do nothing towards answering a larger question: do transitional forms exist at all?

Notice that to identify convergent evolution, more recently evolved features have to be compared to ancestral characteristics. Put another way, convergent evolution can be identified if it is first accepted as fact that the creatures in question have evolved from something. Similarly, cladistics is rigorous an testable if it is first accepted that the creatures in the study evolved from something and that most shared features are the result of common ancestry. In other words, convergent evolution and cladistics only make sense in the light of the theory of evolution, so they have no explanatory power in determining whether transitional forms (a necessary part of the theory of evolution) exist or not. So for the purposes of determining whether transitional forms exist, shared features can not be used to identify transitional forms.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

The Difference Between Conservative and Libertarian

I saw an article recently that intrigued me. It was titled, “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.” It was written by Theodore Olsen, and he was making a case that his support for gay marriage was consistent with his conservatism, despite the fact that many conservatives oppose gay marriage. The main gist of Olsen’s argument was that legalizing gay marriage is consistent with such principles of liberty and freedom. If the constitution guarantees people the right to right to live their lives as they see fit, should sexual preference be one of those protected rights?

First, the idea that there can be such a thing as gay marriage is absurd. The definition of marriage is a union between a man and a woman. Explicitly in the definition of marriage is the necessity of the two parties being opposite genders. So legalizing gay marriages would not simply be a matter of having the state recognize gay marriages, it would necessitate a redefinition of the word marriage. And changing the definition of marriage is a graver error than one might think (more on that later).

But enough about how advocates of gay marriage are unknowingly advocates of breaking down the meaning of words. The thing that struck me most about the article was what the title said: “The CONSRVATIVE Case for Gay Marriage.” The article did not define what conservative is, but it was apparent from what the article said that conservative means something like, “freedom to do and live as you want.” I would suggest that this is a deeper error than misunderstanding the definition of marriage.

Having “freedom to do and live as you want” is not conservative, it is libertarian. Libertarians have the idea that people should be free to do whatever they want as long as they do not infringe on other people’s ability to do whatever they want. A friend of mine described libertarianism this way, “Your freedom extends to the tip of my nose.” I like to think of libertarianism as controlled anarchy. But that is not what conservatism is. A very good explanation of conservatism is given in Mark Levine’s book, Liberty and Tyranny. On page 27 of Liberty and Tyranny, Levine says, “It is Natural Law, divined by God and discovered by reason, that prescribes the inalienability of the most fundamental and eternal human rights—rights that are not conferred on man by man and, therefore, cannot legitimately be denied to man by man.” The point I want to make here is that conservatism acknowledges the existence of God and that man’s liberty is given to him by God. Other prominent conservative pundits, such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, also acknowledge the existence of God and derive their understanding of morality and freedom from their belief in God. This stands in direct opposition to libertarianism, for to the libertarian, man ultimately determines what liberty is. Notice, MAN can do whatever HE wants as long as it does not interfere with another MAN’s ability to do as HE wants. The limits of liberty are defined entirely in terms of man. The conservative, on the other hand, will acknowledge restrictions on their liberty based on the knowledge that man was created by God. So the conservative would say, gay marriage can not be legal because, traditionally, marriage has always been between a man and a woman. Why is tradition important? Because, ultimately, that tradition of marriage came from God. God created Adam and Eve to be the first couple, and all their descendants (or, simply, all people) are also to be joined together as man and wife in a marriage. This is why it is a grave error to change the definition of marriage as a union between a man and woman to something else. The word marriage is not a word created by man for the purpose of man: it is a word that describes an institution created by God.

I believe that this article is not simply reflective of thinking in the gay marriage debate. It seems to me that there is a widespread confusion of the terms “conservative” and “libertarian.” Some people treat them as being related, or treat libertarianism as a type of conservatism. While it is true that there is some overlap in the thinking of libertarians and conservatives, particularly in economic matters, both ideas have different core values which should not be confused.

Some Thoughts About the Movie Avatar

It is difficult to summarize the movie Avatar. One way would be to say that it is a spectacular, amazing piece of propaganda. Or it can be called a special effects mastery of anti-American proportions. The difficulty in summarizing Avatar is that, as a visual medium, it is one the best movies ever, yet the story is so thoroughly permeated with nativism and pantheistic elements, that if every detail stained with these pagan ideas were eliminated, there would be about 2 minutes of movie left.

The story of Avatar can be summed up simply: an American mining corporation on the distant planet Pandora is running into trouble with the Pandoran natives, the Na’vi. Being greedy, ruthless, and strong, the humans decide that they will simply take the ore they came for, eliminating the natives if necessary. However, a human with a Na’vi avatar (an avatar is an artificially created body that can be controlled remotely) befriends the Na’vi and rises up to defended them against the rampaging forces of the humans. Much of this general story is familiar. The humans are greedy and only care about profit. The natives are peaceful and live harmoniously with the land. When push comes to shove, the natives defend themselves and the humans then label them as “terrorists,” “aborigines,” one of many things on the forsaken planet Pandora that is out to kill humans. They then feel justified in exterminating the natives. As I watched the movie, I wondered how much of the story was influenced by the liberal explanation of what happened when Europeans colonized America and ran into conflicts with the Native Americans.

Similar to many native cultures, the Na’vi have a pantheistic belief. When they kill an animal, they go through a routine of apologizing to it for having to kill it. The death of anything, even a predator that was attempting to kill you a few moments ago, is a bad thing, for it throws things out of balance. Lost on the makers of Avatar is the conclusion that if ultimate goodness is having all things in nature balanced, then humans, or any other fictitious intelligent being, take a back seat in importance to nature as a whole. Indeed, native human cultures are not happy places where man lives in harmony with each other and nature. Rather, death and destruction are the way of life, due to things like human sacrifice, constant war between opposing tribes, and squalid lifestyles where diseases run rampant. These things were notably absent from the world of Pandora.

There is another thing that sets Pandora apart from our world. On Pandora, everything in nature is literally connected to each other. On our world, pantheistic ideas abound with things like the circle of live, unity of all living things, or some mysterious force that binds all things together. These ideas are rubbish on earth: the only thing that circulates among living ecosystems are chemicals, life is unified only in the sense that all living things share common characteristics, and the only force that binds us together is gravity. However, things are very different on Pandora. On that planet, when a Na’vi wants to ride a mount (they have horse-like and pterodactyl-like creatures that they often ride), they do not use bridles or reigns. Rather, they link up with these creatures. All Na’vi have a long, braided pony tail, and coming out of the end of it is a bundle of long filaments. All of the creatures on Pandora have a pair of tentacles coming from the back of their head. Each tentacle ends in a little bulb that has a bundle of long filaments in it. So when a Na’vi rides one of its mounts, it connects the end of its ponytail with a tentacle on the beast, the filaments join, and the two creatures minds’ are connected. The Na’vi is them able to control the beast simply by thinking.

As impressive as that is, apparently a similar system exists throughout the world of Pandora. Trees also have some sort of communication system that involves the transfer of electrical impulses. This phenomena fascinated one of the human scientists (who, because of her appreciation for the planet itself, and not just the ore that could be sent back to earth, was actually a good guy), and in describing her findings to another person, she stated that all of the plant life was connected to each other with more complexly than the human brain. She didn’t go so far as to say that the whole planet with a single, living organism, but her description came awfully close. To close the gap, the Na’vi could also connect with the trees of Pandora. This was their way of communicating with their ancestors (the human scientist explained this as linking up with memories of past Na’vi that have been stored in the trees).

Finally, the Na’vi have a god. Her name is Eywa. While they never really get into exactly what Eywa is, it isn’t too hard to figure out that Eywa is the planet itself. With the stored memories of all of the dead Na’vi in the trees, and with the plants having more neural connections that the human brain, Eywa couldn’t be anything but a characterization of the collective intelligence and action of the planet as a whole. The movie make it abundantly clear that Eywa is real, for the climactic scene of the movie comes when the Na’vi, defeated and fleeing from their human attackers, are rescued by herds and flocks of wild animals that storm onto the battlefield and decimate the human army. This was in response to the avatar praying to Eywa.

The conclusion of the whole matter is that Pandora is fictitious. Not only does the planet Pandora not exist anywhere in our universe, it can not. I should confess that I lied earlier. In response to the connectedness of Pandoran life, I said that earth is not the same, for nothing binds earth but the cycling of chemicals and gravity. This is not true, for like Pandora, we have a God. But the God of earth, the God of the universe, is so awesome, He puts Eywa to shame. The true God is not the collective of all life on earth, He exists apart from earth, in a spiritual realm outside of nature, physics, and time itself, for He created them all. Despite this grandeur, God cares about the earth and sustains it. The universe does not exist because the laws of physics work and keep things in order, it exists because God caused it to exist and he continues to sustain it. Finally, the crown of God’s creation is not the planet earth, it is Man. Earth is but our home, a home God gave to us as caretakers, but still just a home. This, then, is the error of Avatar. In rejecting man as the chief of God’s creation, the makers of Avatar created a world, literally from the roots up, where a pantheistic god of nature was real. The danger of Avatar is that the spectacular colors, images, and detail of the movie are a siren song for a pagan religion that is at total odds with the reality of the universe in which we live.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Foundations

So, I am new to blogging and I want to start out by describing my worldview. Maybe it is not terribly important to do this, but I do what to have a post up that describes, in a little detail, what I believe. I hope that may give a context in which enything else I say may be understood.
My worldview, the set of ideas and concepts that I hold to be true which then determine how I interpret the world around me, is very important to me and I try to always remain conscience of what my worldview is. When discussing a topic with someone else, or reading material written by someone else, I also try to figure out what their worldview is, to see what kind of assumptions they are making and how that affects their conclusions. Because worldviews are so important to me, I want to begin by spelling mine out now, so that anyone who reads this may know where I am coming from.

First and foremost, I believe that the Bible is the true, inerrant Word of the living God, who is the great I AM, and the Creator of all things. I believe that God is the Trinity: three persons in one Being. These persons of the Godhead are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. God the Son came to earth as a man. As a man, He was named Jesus, yet despite being fully man, He was also fully God. Jesus’ purpose on earth was to die for His people’s sins so that they may be reconciled to God. To accomplish this, Jesus lead a perfect, sinless life, died on the cross in place of His people, and rose again on the third day. Now He sits at the right hand of God (God the Father).

I guess I could sum up the previous paragraph simply by saying that I am a Christian. I wanted to go through some length to explain all that though because the term Christian can mean different things to different people. There are other tenants of my worldview that I want to explain, but from this point on, everything else flows out of the set of beliefs I explained in the previous paragraph.

I am Biblical creationist. This means that I accept the creation account in Genesis to be true. I believe that God created the world in six literal, 24 hour days, that time, space, and matter first came into being at the moment of creation and that immediately after that first moment, God began His six days of creation. I believe that the world is only about 6,000 years old. I reject the idea that any kind of biological evolution is possible. I believe that God created all organisms as kinds and that it is impossible for one kind of organisms to transform into a different kind. However, the gene pool of a kind is very large and it is possible for this gene pool to be restricted or shuffled about so that a population of organisms can change through processes such as natural selection, but how and to what extent they may change is restricted by the gene pool of the kind they belong to. I also accept as fact the occurrence of a worldwide deluge known as Noah’s Flood, and I believe that Noah’s Flood is responsible for much of the geology in the world today.

I believe that the Bible is the standard for all morality. God sets the standard in all matter of right, wrong, and justice. This means that right and wrong are not determined by whether someone gets hurt or not. Rather, right and wrong are standards set by God and God alone. Thus, theft is wrong not because one person has deprived another of personal property, rather, theft is wrong because it breaks rules set by God (the most familiar being the eight commandment). This does not mean that we can never speak of crimes like theft in terms of depriving another person of property: this is a legitimate way to discuss theft and how it affects civil societies. However, theft is ultimately wrong because God had declared it to be so, not because a society has come together and decided that it is good to make theft a crime.

I believe that rules for all human activities, including societies and civil governments, are determined by God and are put forth in the Bible. I believe that all governments, self government, family government, Church government, and civil government, are subject to God and as such, they all must comply with His will. Passages like Romans 13 show that civil governments are to be subject to God, passages like Ephesians 6 show that family governments are to be subject to God, books like I and II Timothy give instructions to Church governments, and rules for self government are evident throughout the Bible. Even though these four governments are all subject to God, they have different spheres of authority. This means that there is a kind of separation of church and state (the Church can judge men in matters of sin, the state can judge men in matters of crime), but since they are both subject to God, the Bible is the ultimate authority for both.

I believe that a model for all civil governments can be found in the laws given to the nation of Israel as described in the Old Testament. Some laws given to Israel are ceremonial, such as dietary laws and laws for sacrifices. These laws have no effect on Christians today since Christ is our mediator with God so that now we can commune with God directly. The civil laws found in the Old Testament, I believe, still have effect today. They not only tell us what things should be considered as crimes to be dealt with by civil governments (things like murder, theft, adultery, to name a few) and what the punishments should be. I do not believe that all of the civil laws given to Israel should be directly applied to countries today, but they should be a model on which we make our laws.

This is a summary of my worldview. This, then, is the bias I will use whenever I approach a topic. So I would have to admit that I am not an unbiased observer of the world. But then again, I would challenge anyone who claims to be an unbiased observer: are you truly bringing no ideas to a topic? Is your mind truly empty when you approach a new subject? I don’t believe that there is such a thing as an unbiased observer. I believe that the best we can get are observers who are aware of their biases.