Calvinist Information Theory, redux

This is a follow up to my previous post looking at some of the the "information theory expertise" over at Triablogue. Peter Pike is willing to do what other T-Bloggers like Hays are not, and wandered into an area where real demonstrable knowledge can be applied to his claims and idea. And as this post may show, there's a good reason Hays and others remain safely out of the reach of knowledge accountability -- Peter went off on a subject he has shown he's not got even a basic grasp on, and has now gone on to demonstrate clearly that he's not just confused, but obstinate and incorrigible in clinging to and amplifying his confusion. Think of this post as "What if someone took the time to really examine Triablogue 'knowledge' when they ventured into a subject where they were liable to real knowledge?".

Readers looking for discussion about the typical (a)theological subjects can go ahead and skip this post. I think this post is worthwhile as a matter of diligence, as a "for the record", a review that will document in some detail the kind of hostility to real knowledge Triabloggers, or at least Peter Pike are given to display. It's also useful to note Peter's aversion to correction and getting things right. He's got more than he needs to understand he's dug himself into a hole here, from several people, not just me. Often enough, Pike and the Triabloggers just get conspicuously quiet when good criticisms are leveled, else they obfuscate and prevaricate. Typically, this kind of feedback would go right into the combox for the post over at Triablogue, but the Triabloggers do not suffer criticism like this on their blog, so I'll burn a slot in the post queue here at DC in order to provide some documentation of the errors and problems with Information Theory According to Peter Pike™.

Peter Pike, 8/14/2008 8:41 PM

I will add one thing for people who are interested. T-Stone's example of a 1,000 x 1,000 random pixel grid is only "maximally complex" if there are no repetitions at all. That is, there must be 1,000,000 pixels each with their own unique color. If there are any repetitions, compression can occur.

This is incorrect, as just a little experience with compression will demonstrate. When converted to bits (binary), any string beyond just a handful of bits will have repetitions. Repetitions are not automatic candidates for compression, as many repetitions are more expensive to record and store as instances of a pattern than just leaving the repetition in the datastream untouched. This means that Pike's statement: "If there any repetitions, compression can occur." is a false statement.

Here's a quick example. If we examine the string:

[A] = "11001100"

We can see that it contains a number of repetitions. For example [11] [00] [11] [00] is one grouping of repetitions. 1 [100] 1 [100] would be another, and [1100]*2 would be another.
Pike supposes these repetitions are all opportunities for compression, but none of them actually produce a smaller program when compressed than the uncompressed program. The reason is that the "bookkeeping" for small repetitive patterns is more costly than the uncompressed pattern itself. It's only when the length of the repeating patterns becomes significant in length and the number of those repetitions is large that we can effect some amount of compression. A short string of English text takes more space to "compress" the few words that repeat than it saves. A long string of English text is likely to have a number of words that are long (>4 characters) and occur many times (the work 'molecule' might appear 300 times in a long article about biology, for example).

For example, suppose that the random pixels are simply 1 or 0, that is the pixel is either on or off (i.e. "white" or "black"). Now suppose that one section of the string shows:

0100010011101011

We can easily compress this by saying "00" = A and "01" = B and "10" = C and "11" = D. Thus, the above string of numbers can be compressed to:

BABADCCD

This is a simplistic examination. In fact, given that we have 26 letters to choose from, there is no reason that we have to stick with only two-digit numbers. We can use four-digit numbers sections easily enough represented with just 16 letters.

"Simplistic" is a charitable description of this examination. Here, Peter shows he is unfamiliar with how binary representation of data works. He begins with a binary string "0100010011101011", which he supposes might be compressed to "BABADCCD". But "0100010011101011" is just 16 bits long, and "BABADCCD", at least on byte-strings is 64 bits, as every character maps to a byte, which consumes 8 bits (8 char * 8 bits/char == 64 bits). So, on a conventional platform, Pike's "compressed" string has gotten FOUR TIMES LARGER, just in terms of representation. He hasn't even addressed the logic needed to provided the mapping between patterns ("00") and symbols ("A"). Even in a conceptual machine where a "pikebyte" is only 2 bits long (enough to allow for the symbols "A", "B", "C", and "D"), he still has produced a "compressed" version of the source string that is 16 bits, exactly the size of his "uncompressed" string (8 char * 2 bits/char == 16 bits).

All of this inflation he has introduced without providing the logic used to effect the compression/decompression, which is not free, and makes his "compressed" program just that much bigger than the uncompressed program that just echoes the string out as it is.

Of course, this level of compression immediately begs the question: is it really less complex to have various symbols represent sequences of other symbols? That is, while the string "BABADCCD" is shorter than the string "0100010011101011", the program needed to convert "BABADCCD" is more complex than simply reading "0100010011101011".

As above, the string "BABADCCD" is NOT shorter than "0100010011101011" (binary, pixels that are 1 or 0). Pike doesn't understand bits and bytes. The binary string "01000001" and the ASCII character 'A' both take up the same amount of storage -- 8 bits in both cases. To Pike's credit here, he is at least grabbing the idea that the compression logic matters in terms of complexity from whatever web page he's trying to catch up on this topic from, now that his goofs have been pointed out.

This also brings to mind the question: if complexity in information is reduced due to compression where certain symbols stand for a certain combination of other symbols, then we can theoretically define a symbol as a long combination of other symbols. In other words, we can say:

"*" = "0100010011101011"

Now we can transmit all of the above with a simple character: "*"

Here Peter Pike is invoking magic for us, or something supernatural at least. There is no free lunch with information. One can assign a symbol to point to a referent string (like "0100010011101011"), but there's a cost incurred in associating the symbol and its referent, and the symbol is never more than a symbol. If we construct a couple lines of code like this:

char* a = "0100010011101011";
std::cout << a;

We haven't shrunk the string "0100010011101011" at all. All we have done is assign an alias for it, a symbol that makes it easier for humans to conceptualize what is going on. But in terms of compression, nothing is achieved at all. Transmitting "*", in quotes as Pike has it, just produces an asterisk character on the output. In the fragment above, sending the variable a to std::cout just dumps our original string as output. Perfectly nothing is achieved by Peter's stratagem. His magic is a bit of self-hoaxing.

As we continue in this vein, obviously constructing a symbol code for all the iterations of a 1,000 x 1,000 grid will be immense; but the output will be greatly condensed. No matter which iteration comes about, it is represented by one symbol.

Creating symbols for a given output does not achieve compression itself. It is only when the repetitions in the data are so large and frequent that the symbol table plus the mapping logic is smaller than that data that compression is achieved. Additionally, Pike gives us the clue that he believes he can cheat with external symbol tables, pre-calculating all the possible permutations for the matrix, and simply resorting to transmitting a "permutation ID" as an elegant way to realize dramatic (like 10,000x) compression! The creation and storage of the symbol table counts against the size (and those algorithmic complexity) of the program. Pike here fails to understand the constraints the compression must operate within, and the costs it must incur in implementing compression heuristics.

But this brings to bear more issues beyond simply the complexity of the information itself. The program of compression (which, in order to be useful, must be able to decompress data as well) can be infinitely more complex than the output; and vice versa. But if we're merely looking at the information present and not considering the compression algorithms at all, then "*" is obviously less complex than "BABADCCD" which is itself less complex than "0100010011101011".

Confused gobbledygook. Perhaps Peter can tell us how he can start with "*" and produce "0100010011101011" without incurring the overhead of "0100010011101011"?

Some people want to stop thinking at that level and not consider any further. Others don't. You can decide whether it's important or not.

Ahh, the irony!

Peter Pike 8/14/2008 9:12 PM

Idahoev said:
---
There will always be repetitions in any string of sufficient length
---

Exactly my point.

That was not the same point. Idahoev was correctly pointing that repetitions occur in strings that cannot be compressed any further. Pike supposes that repetitions -- like the same bit value occurring twice in a row (or any two-bit combination, as it happens) implies compressibility. Idahoev points out the the inevitable repetitions in any string beyond a few bits is all the indicator Peter needs to see that he's mistaken. Peter considers this counterfactual a vindication of what he's been saying all along.

You further said:
---
...nonetheless you cannot create a compressor that will successfully compress random numbers. This is because you compress by replacing repeated sequences with shorter sequences, and then adding those shorter sequences to a symbol table.
(The symbol table's size must be considered part of the compressed string's size, otherwise, all you've done is destroy the original string because you can't uncompress.)
---

And that's where you're wrong.

Consider the example once again. If you only have two digits (a 1 and a 0) for a 1,000,000 long string, you'll find a lot of repetitions. Even if the 1's and 0's are generated randomly. And those repetitions are sufficient enough that you can include a symbol table with your data.

In a "pure" random sample, you'd have approximately the same number of "00", "01", "10", and "11" sequences. Thus, you could replace them all with the four symbols "A", "B", "C", and "D". Your string (which was 1,000,000 bits long) is now 500,000 bits long. Are you seriously claiming that the symbol table will be 500,000 bits in size?

Peter has obviously never tried this before or worked with data compression algorithms in any meaningful way, as casual interaction with the problem would arrest thoughts like this immediately. Pike is incredulous that Idahoev might suppose the the symbol table might take up a full half megabyte. Why would that be? Because Pike supposes that this random string can trivially be compressed in half... for free! How does Peter get to an estimate of 50% compression? Well, apparently he thinks he can trade "00" for "A" and realize a 2:1 compression. Two characters for one, right?

Wrong.

"00" is binary, {0 | 1} remember, so "00" takes up just two bits of space. For conventional computing platforms, "A" consumes EIGHT BITS, and even if he restricts his alphabet to just {A | B | C | D}, all he's done is reached parity for the original string (1 char "A" * 2 bits/char == 2 bits), and he's still got to add on the symbol table mapping logic in his program, which will unavoidably make his "compressed" version of the program bigger than the uncompressed version. The best he can hope to do with his plan here is to produce a program just a little bigger than the uncompressed program.

You said:
---
But you can't do that. The amount of information
(=complexity) in a string is defined as the smallest algorithm which
can produce that string.
---

Which is exactly my point. Dawkins (and by extention, T-Stone) only have the universe, which would be the "output" of the whole algorithm. They have no idea how complex or how simple something need be to produce that output. They don't even
think about that. Information theory can say nothing about God because we don't have all the sufficient knowledge available to us. What it can say is whether natural processes can account for the information we see present.

Thanks for venting your views. Now perhaps you could actually read what I wrote before responding.

That was exactly Pike's point, that complexity is defined as the smallest algorithm which can produce that string? Hah. As for the universe, information theory cannot tell us whether natural processes can account for the information we see around us. Information theory is a mathematical model, and doesn't reflect anything about the physical world necessarily. We can use it profitably to measure complexity all around us, and there is an unimaginable amount of complexity to comprehend in the universe. But none of that tells us whether natural processes can give rise to the information and complexity we observe and measure around us. This whole discussion started because Vox Day thought he had real knowledge about complexity by doing a drive-by read on fractals at Wikipedia. Pike knows even less about the subject than Vox Day, as he is ably demonstrating here, but none of this is attached to real process, but rather is anchored in the curious idea that Sierpinski triangles are "infinitely complex".

Peter Pike 8/14/2008 9:52 PM

Next, Pike move on to respond to comments from "nihilist"...

Nihilist,

First, I assumed what T-Stone meant by "maximal randomness" was the impossibility of the string to be compressed. Given that assumption, then my statements about randomness come into play.

Above, Pike said this:

FWIW, I disagree with T-Stone’s version of information and complexity. And despite what his post would lead you to believe, the idea that “maximal randomness = maximal complexity” is not true for all information theories."

It's not just my post(s) that will lead you to believe that the maximally complex string is the random string, it's the theories and proofs themselves, from Shannon, Kolomogorov, and others. Moreover, algorithmic complexity defines "random" as any string that is shorter than any program that can produce that string, given a reference platform like a Turing machine. That means that "random" is defined as "incompressible" in the theory.

Even if Peter cannot understand the conceptual basis for this, there's a simple exercise that will tease out the absurdity of Pike's claim. If a random string is compressible by 50%, as he suggested above, then the output of a compression pass on random string A will produce a shorter (by half) output string A'. But if any string with repetitions can be compressed, we can just repeat the processes until we have compressed any arbitrarily long string down to nothing at all. Magic! Take A' and compress it down to half it's size, producing A'', and take A'' and compress that down by half to yield A'''. Pretty soon, you've got all the worlds data neatly compressed into Pike's Magic Asterisk ("*"). Clearly, there must be a floor for the compressibility of any given input, and this is what information theory and algorithmic complexity focus on.

Again, consider the example of the 1,000,000 bits. Random data will tend to have an equal number of "00", "01", "10", and "11" number sequences. When you have 1,000,000 bits, that means you'll have roughly 250,000 of each. (As anyone who's rolled dice know, these percentages rarely happen in the real world.)

You can compress those to halve the length of the string. Even including the symbol table will not increase the string length back to its original size.

Here, Pike reiterates his error in clear terms, just to make sure he has no wiggle room in denying it later. "You can compress those to halve the length of the string", he says, referring to a million random bits. His understanding of the concepts here is such that he suppose two bits (which we represent as "00") is compressible by 50% to "A". But A isn't representable in less than two bits in an alphabet that has four symbols. These are rudimentary errors for this subject.

Therefore, it follows that a "maximally random" string can only be a set length, and if it cannot be compressed it must have specific rules in place as to what is in the string. Therefore, the "random" strings are not so random after all in order to be "maximally complex."

Information theory has shown that the opposite of what Pike claims here is true. There is no "set length" for a "maximally random" string, and it is the complete absence of rules governing the contents of the string. Rules are what enables compression! That's why, for example, we can render the "infinitely complex" output of a Sierpinski triangle or a Mandelbrot set with just a handful of lines of code -- the code implements the simple rules that govern the output for each. Randomness is "without rule", which is what makes it information-rich. Rules represent certainty, and information is measured as the reduction of uncertainty.

Now there are random aspects to it. I'm not denying that. Rather, as the string gets longer, in order to maintain its maximal complexity it must lose its randomness.

This is precisely the opposite of what information theory and Kolmogorov complexity demonstrate. Here's a short quote from Nick Szabo's tutorial on Algorithmic Information Theory that captures the idea (Peter, I invite you to have a read of the whole thing):

A truly random string is not significantly compressible; its description length is within a constant offset of its length. Formally we say K(x) = Theta(|x|), which means "K(x) grows as fast as the length of x".

(emphasis mine)

Let's use lower case letters for an example. Suppose our string starts with:

"jq"

The next letter can be completely random.

What does it mean for a letter to be "completely random"? This makes no sense at all. If the next letter is random, it can be any one of the possible letters. Another "j then q" is no more or less random than any other letter pair, prima facie. Randomness obtains from the unpredictability of the arriving input, and has nothing to do with whether it repeats or not. A fair coin flipped 20 times is exactly as likely to produce "00000000000000000000" as it is "10010110010101110010", even though the first string is trivially describable programmatically as a 20-iteration for loop echoing a 0 to the output, and the latter is not. Some random strings coincide with strings that have simple rules, statistically. But a maximally complex string has the fewest rules and the least structure. In any case, the idea that the next letter is "completely random" or not based on the letters that came before it is nonsense.

It can even be another "j." But if it is another "j" then a "q" CANNOT follow, else it can be compressed (say with a "J").

Now short strings can indeed run into problems with the symbol table, but even if we say the individual portions of the symbol table are twice the size of each bit of the string, then because there are only 26 lower case letters in the alphabet, random letters will result in letter "pairs" every (1/26) x (1/26), or 1/676 times. Thus, even having a text with only, say, 2,000 randomly generated characters will provide sufficent number of repeats for you to be able to compress the string. And that's even if you're using an arbitrary table and you're not tailor-making a compression program (like you would for language). You know that the pairing of "jq" will occur roughly ever 676 times, so that substitution will reduce the original length of the (sufficiently long) string even if that's the only substitution you make.

ASCII text is compressible due to its lavish use of bits in representation. If our random string only draws from the lower-case, 26-letter alphabet, you only need five bits per letter, where ASCII characters are 8 bits, meaning you can realize more than 35% compression right off the bat, if you are beginning with ASCII representations. To avoid "illusionary" compression (take a text file with randomly generated letters in it and you will see this file can always be shrunk with gzip, due to the wasted extra bits for each ASCII character), use random bits. ASCII strings are not random, no matter what letters the string contains, due to the wasted bits in the format.

In any case, the mistake operating in this paragraph from Pike is the belief that he can replace "jq", or any other two-letter combination, with symbolic metadata that takes up less space in capturing it. For example, if we have the following string:

[D] = "kujqopjqbnlsjqjqlmze"

We can identify four instances of the pattern "jq" which are candidates for Pikian compression (bolded). But the compression requires encodimg and this is what thwarts the compression of two-letter patterns. For example, we might use digits as our indirections into our symbol referent patterns. Here, we might use "1" to indicate the subsitution for "jq", meaning anytime we encounter a "1" we should replace it with "jq":

[E] = "ku1op1bnls11lmze"

[E] is 4 bytes shorter than [D], but you cannot represent a symbol table or the substitution coding in the space of those 4 bytes. If we suppose that we can overcome this with larger strings, we realize bigger savings, but only by preserving the non-random statistical distribution of the letters. If, instead of a 20 character string, we multiplied [D] by a factor of 10, we would have a 200 character string with 40 instances of 'jq' that we might replace. That's a lot better savings, 40 bytes you might do a little something with. But this only happens because the source string is NOT STATISTICALLY RANDOM, having 40% of the letter pairs matching "jq", several deviations over what we would expect statistically. This is precisely the insight Kolmogorov, Solomonoff and Chaitin all arrived at concerning the information in a string; the more statistically random a string is, the less compressible it becomes.

You can increase the complexity of the symbol table to be any finite value greater than the length of the string, and it will still be possible to compress that string if the string is longer. Only if you claim that the complexity of the symbol table is infinitely large will you be unable to compress the string in this manner.

This is one of the few paragraphs Peter offers in the whole thread that is not demonstrably incorrect. But in this case, that is only because it's incomprehensible. Peter, what is the "complexity of the symbol table", since you are clearly not using the accepted Kolmogorov-Chaitin definition of the term? This paragraph isn't coherent enough to qualify as possibly "wrong".

Therefore, a "maximally random" that is "maximally complex" can only have a finite number of repetitions (depending on the number of symbols the string itself has and the symbol table that would accompany it). Even adding in the symbol table's information, there is still a finite length that a "maximally random" string can be before it must obey rules (i.e., no longer be random) and still maintain it's "maximal complexity."

Peter doesn't identify a "maximally random" what here, but assuming he means "maximally random string", it is safe to say that a finite string does, indeed, contain a finite number of repetitions for any given pattern. So we can give Peter a second nod for the thread here. But while correct, it's irrelevant, and tells us nothing about the complexity, or lack thereof, for any given string. Peter offers a novel theorem here, names that a string with high statistical randomness must at some point begin to "obey rules". Peter doesn't tell us what these rules are, or when they kick in, or where we might anticipate this "kick in" of the "rules". Curiously, strings beyond this length are both "no longer random", and "maximally complex". If Peter is onto anything but spewing BS here, he's got ideas that will make him world famous in mathematical circles.

Finally, consider the odds that a string of random characters would reach it's maximal complexity by purely random means. The vast majority of random strings (unless you keep them really short) will have those repetitions enabling compression. It is far more likely that a random process will generate those strings than that one will generate a "maximally complex" string.

Finally! The maths that obtain here show just the opposite. Highly random strings do not contain the kinds of patterns and frequencies that lend themselves to effective compression -- this is the very definition of random! Peter hasn't grasped this yet, but he's demonstrably wrong based on the very terms he's using: if a given string can be compressed to any significant degree, it's definitionally not a highly random string.

It is far easier for an intelligent being to create a maximally complex string than for a maximally complex string to occur randomly.

It's quite difficult for a human to create a statistically random string. Go ahead and try it sometime, Peter. Sources of randomness abound all around us in nature, and tapping into one of these sources provides an easy, reliable, instantaneous supply of random input (for example, circuit shot noise or radioisotope decay). Computers can easily create pseudo-random strings that pass all the statistical tests for random distribution, way faster than any human can make up string they suppose are random, but which very often pass statistical evaluations for randomness.

But again, I predicated this on the belief that T-Stone accepted "maximal complexity" as the inability to compress the string.

And FWIW, I didn't invent this theory, but I don't remember where I read it either. If you must have a name for it, you can try to Google it. I've written it out for you so I don't feel the need to spend any more time on it.

There's no theory to claim invention for. And nothing coherent to even try to blame on someone else, some other source. Peter says he's written it out for us, yet the reader has perfectly nothing that will help determine the complexity or information content of a given string, according to Calvinist Information Theory, for lack of a better, or Peter-supplied name for it.

Peter Pike 8/14/2008 10:07 PM

BTW, just to clear up one other thing that may cause confusion, since Idahoev said:
---
You can only successfully compress when some sequences occur more frequently than others, so that you encode the frequent ones with short strings and the infrequent ones with long strings, and your net size of message + symbol table decreases. It doesn't work on random strings.
---

This is not accurate at all. And because I like T-Stone so much, I'll use the Wiki article to demonstrate it.

Wiki says:
---
...[T]he following string:

25.888888888

...can be compressed as:

25.[9]8

Interpreted as, "twenty five point 9 eights", the original string is perfectly recreated, just written in a smaller form.
---

Idahoev makes a noble attempt to get through, but fails. He explains that compression is available "when some sequences occur more frequently than others", and points out that this "doesn't work on random strings". So, in response to this, Peter pulls out an example string ("25.888888888") that is precisely the kind of string Idahoev told him is compressible, and which is ridiculously far from statistical random distribution of its symbols. It's as if Peter thinks "25.888888888" has a highly random distribution of its symbols chosen from the phase space of digits (and apparently the '.' character). The string in question has the digit "8" occuring in 9 of the 12 positions in the string, making it close to the theoretically least statistically random string available for that length ("888888888888", or any 12 digit string consisting of the same symbol).

Peter tells Idahoev that his claims are "not accurate at all", then goes on to provide examples that affirm precisely what Idahoev said. How would Peter write this string "in a smaller form": "439806931752"? That would be a better test of what Idahoev was telling him.

In the same way, random data (especially binary data that only has 2 digits to use) will form "runs" that can be compressed in this manner. Suppose you get the sequence: 1000000000.

That can be compressed (as per T-Stone's beloved Wiki!) as: 1[9]0.

So even ignoring everything else with the symbol table, Wiki agrees with me that random data can be compressed so long as there are "runs" in it. And with "pure" random data...there will be runs.

"1000000000" is not a string that registers high for statistical randomness. By definition, if a string can be compressed into a program that is smaller than the echo of the string itself, it's not maximally random. So, algorithmic information theory provides a mathematical basis for identifying and measuring the randomness(complexity) of a string. There will be repetitions for any string of more than a few symbols, but it is the nature of randomness, proven my the maths of the theory, that the repetitions and patterns contained are not compressible, even in principle. No way, no how. Maximally random strings defy compression, tautologically, as that is what we mean when we assign the label "maximally complex" or "maximally random". If the reader consults the Wikipedia article Peter linked to, it will be seen that the strings in question are NOT presented as random strings. These are "best case" non-random strings, the opposite configuration of strings we are focusing on in terms of complexity and incompressibility.

Peter Pike 8/15/2008 8:09 AM

As I was dropping off to sleep last night, I think I discovered where the problem in understanding my position is coming in for folks like Idahoev. Idahoev would be correct if we were forced to use the same symbol "alphabet" to compress data as we used to create it. While this restriction is necessary to get computers to communicate with each other, it's an artificial restriction when it comes to information as a whole.

Information Theory and Algorithmic Complexity assume symmetric representations on both sides. It doesn't matter what alphabet gets used, as all data gets rendered as binary -- a stream of bits -- ultimately anyway. Alphabets and other symbols are just useful mnemonics for human conceptualization. Peter's computer doesn't store the letters "Peter" as letters on his hard disk when he saves his name in a document. What gets stored is "0101000001100101011101000110010101110010", and even that is a human-friendly set of symbols representing alternate magnetic states. Everything gets crushed down to bits, ultimately.

As a quick example, suppose that Adam writes a program and compiles it so it's in binary form. He wants to send it to Bill, but Bill lacks a compiler, an internet connection, and a portable storage device. He does, however, have the ability to type 1s and 0s into a program on his computer and have it save it as a binary file.

Adam wants to send the program to Bill so he can have it too, but when he prints out the binary file (as 1s and 0s) it is much too long to mail inexpensively. Therefore, he compresses it using the compression technique I already showed (i.e. "00" = "A", etc.), and drops that compressed form in the mail. Bill gets it, converts it back to binary, inputs it into his computer and has the program.

Now this technique is impossible for computers (although it may be possible for a quantum computer) since they can only function in binary. However, binary is very inefficient for humans, which is why we don't speak binary. The English alphabet serves as a meta-alphabet for the binary alphabet, and you can compress the binary alphabet in the English meta-alphabet (and then transmit it in the meta-alphabet before converting back to the binary alphabet).

This has been dealt with adequately above. Peter is confused about the binary representation of data, and supposes that "00" (binary) is bigger in terms of storage than "A" (ASCII), or "A"(2 bit symbols {A|B|C|D}). The missing idea for Peter is that when you have more than two symbols ({0|1}) in your symbol set you need more than one bit to represent a symbol. The lower-case 26-letter alphabet requires 5 bits to represent a letter, in other words. With 6 bits you can represent the 26 letters in both cases and the digits 0-9, etc. As your symbol space gets larger, the space you need to allocate for each symbol grows. This is what Peter does not understand and what defeats his compression strategies (if what he is saying is true, he's worth billions for his earthshaking innovations!).

If you keep that in mind (the difference between the alphabet and the meta-alphabet) it should help you understand my original point. Even if random strings cannot be compressed using the alphabet, some of them can still be compressed using a meta-alphabet. However, my argument is that there are still some strings that remain that are incompressible in both the alphabet and the meta-alphabet, and those would be the correct definition of "maximally complex." And because those strings must obey certain rules, the "maximally random" string is not the "maximally complex" string.

This is completely confused. Peter ends things up no more clued-in than he began. What are the "certain rules" that a maximally complex string must obey, Peter. If they are certain, please enumerate them. Here is a way for Peter to refute the whole of what I've been saying, along with the rest of the world that relies on Shannon, Kolmogorov, Solomonoff and Chaitin. If Peter can enumerate and demonstrate the "rules" that make a string maximally complex and yet NOT maximally random, he will have shown me up, and launched a revolution in information theory -- Famous by Friday, as they say. As it is, I predict that these rules will remain unenumerated and undemonstrated, and we will not see a revolution in information theory, because Peter is just making all this up as he goes, and covering as best he is able when his blunders are pointed out. Strings that have the attributes that defy further compression (small patterns, fairly and unpredictably distributed) are the conceptual basis for the term "random" in information theory and algorithmic complexity. What makes a string maximally complex/random is its *lack* of rules, or the single rule that there are no rules that apply, rules which can be used as the basis for further compression.

-Touchstone

Stan's Argument: Not Creating Is The Greater Good.

Stan the Half-Truth Teller is one of our commenters and he makes a recurring comment every now and then that I'd like to feature to facilitate some discussion about it because I think it is a good example of an efficient, sound and succinct argument against the existence of the Christian God.

Stan says the following.

If we accept the Theist's position, then god chose to create. Choosing instead to not-create would have been a greater good, as it would have necessarily avoided any suffering or evil whatsoever.

What Would Jesus Do...in Hell???

In 2000, a Texas police officer was shot and killed in the line of duty. He was a rookie. His name was Aubrey Hawkins (29) of the Irving Police Department. Hawkins was killed by the “Texas Seven,” the infamous group of men who had escaped from John Connally Prison the same year. Prison escapee George Rivas, the Texas Seven ringleader, had orchestrated robbing an Oshman’s Sporting Goods store in Irving. It was here that this convict and his cohorts, looking over their shoulders, running from the law in utter desperation, faced a fateful decision when encountering Officer Hawkins—kill him and escape or be captured and let him live? The decision was quickly and brutally made. Hawkins was shot and then run over. They knew how badly they wanted to escape their pursuers. Even when maintaining freedom meant killing a police officer, Rivas decided to go through with it. It was at this point that an ordinarily infamous gang became the officially deadliest mob in America.

How could these thugs have been called the deadliest men in America? Because under Texas law, anyone who takes the life of a peace officer gets either a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole, or the death sentence—no exceptions. Knowing this, Rivas and his pernicious posse could now kill anyone else they wanted and it would be a freebie. If you're already going down for life in prison or death, how can you be further penalized for any additional murders you commit?

When Rivas was finally caught, he asked for the death sentence and rightly received it. Hey, smart move on his part! Even a cretin of a human being shouldn't be kept around without a purpose. Lifetime incarcerations, much like the religious idea of eternal torture, sound justifiable to some, but they accomplish nothing. Why should a person lay around and be kept in a cage for 50 to 70 years? The purposelessness, the hopelessness, the pointlessness of it is cruel in its own rite. The waste, the consumption of resources in keeping useless human beings alive can’t be justified.

Having thought about this topic as it has to do with earthly matters, I soon began to wonder about it as it pertained to heavenly matters; namely, what would God have the unsaved do as we live out our eternity in Hell? Since Jesus doesn't want to rehabilitate us, what would he have us do in the devil's abode?

My mother used to say, "Go to your room and think about what you've done." Do you think maybe this is what Jesus is really saying to us by confining us to Hell? If this is true, it reflects wholly vapid reasoning because it implies rehabilitation, but the Bible says there isn't going to be any rehabilitation for the damned. (Luke 16:19-31)

Does God want us to suffer? If so, then he is a sadist, a monster who takes pleasure in the suffering of others, but the Bible says he doesn't take pleasure in such suffering. (Ezekiel 18:24) And if it is the case that God hates it when the wicked suffer, then why has he constructed it so that the wicked suffer eternally? It makes not a lick of sense.

So, I want to know: what does God want us to do in Hell, amidst those agonizing moments of regret and reflective thought? Amongst those endless feelings of everlasting contempt, what does God have to say to us then? When we can force back the pain of damnation long enough to think coherently, what does Jesus want us to think about? What should we do when there is no redemption, no hope, and not a drop of mercy to be found? What do we do when we’ve blown our last chance? Could a perfectly just God “run out” of mercy and have a “last chance”? If Jesus was in our lost condition, suffering eternal retribution, what would he do?

If there is some sort of hierarchy in Hell, some sort of satanic "pecking order," should we follow it to serve our master, Lucifer? What about the demons that are right under him? Can they command us too? Will demons sodomize us there as it happens in prisons here on earth? Are we supposed to obey if higher-ranking hell-spawns command us to sodomize Hell's new arrivals as sort of an initiation? Or, should we lead a salvation-less ministry in hell, in the bleak hope that perhaps the Catholics were right, and we are merely in a purgatory, and may get out if we are spiritually redeemable? Should we bathe in the hotter parts of hell to please God, hoping maybe he will see us suffering enough and change his mind? But how can we do these things, knowing full well that there is no relief, that there is no reward for us ever, and that God never changes his mind (Numbers 23:19)? When the misery is too much, does Jesus still sympathize? Does he hear us at all down there? Does he even care? Should we bother to pray, to count beads, to chant, to beg, to call upon the name of Christ?

In life, God doesn't like idleness. He likes for us to work and stay busy. But in death, he doesn't care about us anymore. He doesn't love us anymore, and apparently, doesn't even want to think about us anymore. We know this because the bible has no commandments or advice for the hellbound. By God not caring, he inadvertently encourages more evil in Hell. Because of God's neglect of us at that point, we might as well resolve to be more wicked than ever, just like the Texas Seven. We might as well wish and think bad thoughts, pleasing ourselves by looking lustfully at the "hot" curves of another cute little dancing demon on the equivalent of a table-top at a topless bar in Hell. We ought to steal from Hitler’s magma hole, and as much as is possible, add to the suffering our fellow sufferers are already being subjected to. If it’s possible, maybe I can assist Genghis Kahn in another torso-chopping raid? Maybe I'll get to bunk with Ivan the Terrible and play Chess?

God is a hypocrite. He tells us to always love those who hate us because if we love only those who love us, we are no better than sinners who do the same (Luke 6:38), but God doesn't practice what he preaches; his enduring love abides only to those who love him and will receive his invitation to come to the wedding feast of heaven. But once the rest of us (the unsaved) die, his love for us is extinguished, as is his mercy. He lets us exist only for the purpose of suffering, but with no hope of redemption, with nothing to look forward to ever again. He is a quitter who has given up on his wayward children. He has left them out on the street to be forgotten about. He is worse than a mother who leaves her children to starve, scampering for old food between the cushions of a couch. When they die, they are forgotten about, but when we die, we continue to live...to live and to suffer. No wonder the annihilationists find such Christ-like character and great comfort in their doctrine that a merciful God could never create any other hell except eternal sleep!

Christians spend a tremendous amount of time and energy getting us prepared to meet Jesus in the afterlife. For the saved, it's going to be one great big party/worship service in the New Jerusalem. But what about when the afterlife commences for the unsaved? What then? And why do we hear so little about it nowadays? Why do Christians avoid talking about it? Could it be that they are ashamed to talk about a God who plans to torture his own children?

Christians say so much about a God who has a plan and purpose for everything and everyone. But he clearly doesn’t, not for the godless. No, God keeps junk. Like an old, eccentric packrat with psychiatric issues, lounging in her bathrobe, staring out a window, sipping tea, before going into a wide-eyed tirade about the neighborhood kids, God shows purposelessness and extremely poor planning. God keeps junk. What a disappointing revelation!

(JH)

The Earliest Witnesses

Jesus is reported in the Greek gospels to have lived and died in Galilee and Palestine (possibly with a sojourn to Egypt). Jesus is reported to have died in Jerusalem, the religious and ceremonial center of Palestine. So it would make sense to find out what the first strain of Christianity was in Palestine, see what they believed, and compare it to current orthodoxy. It would be even more important if these beliefs differed in substantial ways from current orthodoxy, and even more important if they differed on points of contention that are central to current orthodoxy. Finally, it would be very important to determine how long this form of belief persisted in Jerusalem, and what eventually caused it to die out.

Now, it seems obvious to me that legends flourish on distance, translation and lack of contradiction from credible sources. So it would be a critical piece of the puzzle if we saw the story we have of Jesus becoming progressively more legendary as it spreads away from Jerusalem and as it is spread to people who are outside of the Aramaic/Hebrew-reading Semitic populations of the Levant.

Luckily, we have such a group. They are variously called the Ebionites or the Nazarenes. We know them largely through the lens of writers of an orthodox viewpoint who argued against their beliefs. However, their beliefs do in fact differ significantly from the proto-orthodox schools. It's instructive to see what the proto-orthodox report about these Christians of Palestine. So let's see what they have to say:

And the (Ebionaeans allege) that they themselves also, when in like manner they fulfil (the law), are able to become Christs; for they assert that our Lord Himself was a man in a like sense with all (the rest of the human family).

—Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies 7.22

The ancients quite properly called these men Ebionites, because they held poor and mean opinions concerning Christ. For they considered him a plain and common man, who was justified only because of his superior virtue, and who was the fruit of the intercourse of a man with Mary.

—Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Chp. 27

As to these translators it should be stated that Symmachus was an Ebionite. But the heresy of the Ebionites, as it is called, asserts that Christ was the son of Joseph and Mary, considering him a mere man

—Nicene Fathers, The Translator Symmachus, Chp. 17

For since they wish Jesus to be in reality a man, as I have said before, Christ came in him having descended in the form of a dove and was joined to him (as already we have found among other heresies also), and became the Christ from God above, but Jesus was born from the seed of man and woman.

They say that the Christ is the True Prophet and that the Christ is son of God by spiritual progress and a union which came to him by a lifting up from above; but they say that the prophets are prophets through their own intelligence and not from truth. Him alone they wish to be both prophet and man, and son of God and Christ, and mere man, as we have mentioned before, but because of excellence of life he came to be called the Son of God.

—Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 30.14.4-5 and 18.5-9

Vain also are the Ebionites, who do not receive by faith into their soul the union of God and man, but who remain in the old leaven of [the natural] birth, and who do not choose to understand that the Holy Ghost came upon Mary, and the power of the Most High did overshadow her: wherefore also what was generated is a holy thing, and the Son of the Most High God the Father of all, who effected the incarnation of this being, and showed forth a new [kind of] generation; that as by the former generation we inherited death, so by this new generation we might inherit life. Therefore do these men reject the commixture of the heavenly wine, and wish it to be water of the world only, not receiving God so as to have union with Him, but they remain in that Adam who had been conquered and was expelled from Paradise: not considering that as, at the beginning of our formation in Adam, that breath of life which proceeded from God, having been united to what had been fashioned, animated the man, and manifested him as a being endowed with reason; so also, in [the times of] the end, the Word of the Father and the Spirit of God, having become united with the ancient substance of Adam's formation, rendered man living and perfect, receptive of the perfect Father, in order that as in the natural [Adam] we all were dead, so in the spiritual we may all be made alive. For never at any time did Adam escape the harms of God, to whom the Father speaking, said, "Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness." And for this reason in the last times (fine), not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man, but by the good pleasure of the Father, His hands formed a living man, in order that Adam might be created [again] after the image and likeness of God.

—Ireneaus, Against Heresies 5.1.3

What shines clearly through this is that the doctrine of the trinity could not possibly have been the understanding of the Christians who supposedly lived the closest in time and space to the actual time of the legendary Jesus.

So the Christians who state that it's impossible to imagine people dying for their faith on the basis of a legend are failing to understand that the legend didn't exist for the Christians in Palestine. Specifically the Ebionites are said to have rejected the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and his resurrection in a physical body, in addition to their acceptance of the Jewish laws as binding. They persisted in this belief for a very long time. Some authors have suggested that it was their ideas that Mohammed used in the Quran.

If early witnesses (eyewitnesses) are the most reliable, isn't the anomaly of the beliefs of the Ebionites one of the starkest problems with theories like Bauckham's?

There are more plausible explanations than that the early Jerusalem church was full of eyewitnesses. One possibility is that there are no eyewitnesses and the Greek gospels are fictions. This makes perfect sense of the situation and suggests that the Ebionites would naturally center in Palestine as they would have views consistent in the main with the other inhabitants of that region.

Another is that there was a man Jesus who was in no way regarded as a supernatural being by the people alive with him and may or may not have done any of the things reported in the Greek gospels but that he was remarkable in some way and legends began to adhere to his life story soon after he was gone. It's nearly impossible to be certain which of the above explanations is correct, but both have similar theological implications.

This map (which I got from Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth), shows the distribution of those heresies. This describes the situation as it existed prior to the conversion of the emperor, Constantine. The map makes great sense if you think that the Greek gospels are fictions since it allows for legendary development within geographical areas. Some stories that are at variance with what eventually became the dominant form of Christianity were clearly the mainstream view in large areas of the Christian world, and they were not uniform. This was the status quo prior to the empire burning all heretical books and plenty of heretics.

Thus we have the following facts:

1. The earliest Palestinian Christians did not believe in the divinity of Christ, his virgin birth, or his bodily resurrection.

2. They persisted in this belief for a very long time (even possibly until they Muslim conquest, when they may have converted to Islam).

3. The orthodox beliefs we consider central to Christianity today could not have been the beliefs that early Christian martyrs had (if there were early Christian martyrs), unless we postulate that God allowed heretics to dominate the Christian church in the most sacred place to it from the very beginning of the religion.

I Used to be an Atheist Too, But Now I’m a Christian

From time to time here at D.C. we get the apologetic defense of Christianity from a so called former atheist. It’s not that these former atheist were actively engaged in the study of why God and Christianity, as expressed in the Bible, is not true. But rather these individuals were simply (by default) basically irreligious / nonreligious.

Without having done any objective scholarship (apart from the popular ecclesiastical books, broadcast media, and socializing with people of faith which formed their view of God and Christianity), the world of these former self proclaimed atheist is highly subjective. They may even have felt legitimate in who they claimed to be by the fact that the term “atheist” evokes a stark and sharp reaction from the general religious population. Thus, the real question needs to be raised: Are ALL NON-RELIGIOUS or (better yet) ANTI-RELIGIOUS people atheist?

As expressed in a comment here the other day, I read where one of these people proved his atheism by self- indulgent actions such as: I was a drunk, did drugs / sold drugs, had sex with whores, lied, stole, hated God and had absolutely no morals or ethics (Sure sounds like some of the Biblical patriarchs). Such actions, in these new Christian's mind equates wild living without morals or ethics as, not just Godless acts, but such actions some how makes them a bona fide “atheist”. However, (in reality) what we have is simply a irreligious, nonreligious or even an anti-religious person on a self centered ego trip of health and social destruction that has never academically attacked the existence of God or the Bible, but simply had no use for either of them in their life and just resented the whole idea of Christianity and, ironically, it is from such people that atheist are absoultlly claimed to have no morals or ethics.

The problem is that without any objective certification, people may subjectively label themselves most anything they choose too. As such, I may consider myself rich, good looking, very intelligent, a VIP, a Christian or an atheist and so on. The terms atheism and Christian can be highly relative terms; however Christianity has even more limitation in that its meaning has value ONLY if one is orthodox within a set denominational dogmatic tradition. As such, many denominations privately and / or openly feel they have all the truth. That is, they are “really closer to what God wants” by dogmatically teaching their faithful that what they do and believe are what Jesus and the Apostles really taught.

As an example, the terms “I believe in Jesus, the Bible, God, and so on are all relative and, again, are only orthodox within a given sect or denomination based on its creedal confession. Moreover, when asked which is worst: An atheist or a heretic, the creedal based mind of faith will almost always responded: A heretic! Why? Because false doctrines will send a person to Hell as fast as any denial of God or, if the sect happens not believe in Hell, then any Christianity besides their own has been distorted by time from the false traditions of sinful man thus, taking the person of a “false faith” (a great oxymoron) nowhere!

As a consequence, such dogmas may even be more damning since they can infect other people of faith, plus these dogmas could even be taught by Satan himself (See the Pastoral Epistle‘s “seducing spirits, and doctrine of devils” (1 Timothy 4:1)). Need proof: Just sit down and have a discussion with a proselyting Mormon or Jehovah Witness. Then discuss what they told you with a Baptist preacher or Catholic priest. Then discuss what the priest told you with the Baptist and again with the Mormon missionary.

On the other hand (speaking for myself) I find that former ministers and academically train lay people who are now atheist have the background and the means to objectively reject Christianity for more than the nonreligious / anti-religious “atheist” can ever do or even understand.

So what we have in like minded atheist as we find in posts here at DC are people who were not in to the self-indulgent party-hardy world that simply resented God and Christianity because it limited their wild life style, but dedicated people who have moved on with their lives way from the superstitious but comforting myths of God and the Bible.

In conclusion, People who have spent years in Christianity and have rejected it are grounded in their atheism, plus I have yet to see one return to his former world of faith (This post is not about the non-religious scientist who now accepts a theistic created universe, but who, in the same way would not and academically could not defend sectarian Christianity). This post is about the self proclaimed "former atheist” who, as a non-religious / anti-religious person, did not really academically deny God and the Bible, but rather had no use for either of them in his or her life and subjectively thinks that they were an atheist when, in fact, they were simply what their new faith - Christianity - calls a Godless sinner!

If God Has A Plan, Free Will Is An Illusion

This is a short mathematical proof that if God has a plan, then free will necessarily is an illusion. 2 + n = 4, if n = 2 then free will is an illusion.
Got your attention didn't it? It's really just a little joke used to make a point.
In response to my assertion that Jesus was a human sacrifice, some of our commenters kept saying that "God has a plan" and that Jesus sacrifice doesn't meet the criteria for a Human sacrifice even though Jesus was a Human whose sacrifice of his life saved us from Gods Wrath by his blood (Rom. 5:9). Regardless of how that equivocation plays itself out, the fact that God has a plan and things seem to be going according to plan, nullifies the concept of Free Will.

Think about 2 + n = 4. We don't know what the 'n' variable is but the relationships inherent in that problem were already worked out ahead of time whether (as some ancients believed) it is mystical or it is just naturally ocurring like the shape of water that fills a hole. Even though we don't know what the 'n' variable is, it can only be one thing.

So when Christians say that God has a Plan, that means that things can only work out one way, and the variables only have the appearance of being unknown. As long as God has a plan, free will only has the appearance of being unknown to us. To an omniscient God, it must be obvious. This is why, free will is an illusion as long as God has a plan.

Peter Pike and Calvinist Information Theory

Peter Pike's wrestling with the concepts of information theory and algorithmic complexity over here. He thinks there's something fishy with the idea of random strings being more complex than repetitive or structured strings. Let's take a look at his analysis...

Unfortunately for T-Stone, if he paid attention to what he has written here he’d see that he’s soundly refuted Dawkins. After all, if maximal randomness is equivalent to maximal complexity, then it is easy for me to write a program that will generate completely random output.

That's quite a claim, Peter. Do you know what's involved in writing a program that generates completely random output? It's a tricky problem, and "complete randomness" ends up having the program access some physical process external to the virtual environment -- radioactive decay events are often chosen as the source of random input. The system calls in your OS's standard libraries are pseudo-random, not "completely random", and without adding in additional code to address the problem, quite predictable and repeatable in many cases. Even then, if you look at the code you are invoking by a single call to rand(), you'll see it doesn't come for free, even pseudo-random data generation.

But it's important keep our points of reference intact, here. It's the design argument that objects to the idea of emergent complexity, and materialist interpretations of our history promote the idea that complexity emerges, and that in some cases, simpler configurations give rise to more complex configurations. If humans can point back to single-celled organisms as their ancestors, relying on impersonal, natural processes, clearly there are mechanisms and dynamics involved that will produce increasing complexity over time. This is why science supposes the design argument is a vacuous one. Dawkins "Ultimate 747" argument explicitly opposes the design argument, appealing to "crane" processes, and descrying "skyhook" processes as absurdities.

In other words, it is easy for me—a person who is not maximally complex—to produce a program with output that is maximally complex. Thus, if we want to play T-Stone’s game and use complexity in this sense, then Dawkin’s argument must be surrendered.

This is wrong in several ways. First, you are not a 1,000x,1,000 pixel grid, Peter. So, while such a grid populated by random values is maximally complex, it doesn't have nearly the scope a system as complex as a human being has, so in absolute terms, it's shy by multiple orders of magnitude. The random grid is as complex as it can be, for its size, but it's infinitesimal in size in comparison to a complete description of a human.

Second, there's a profound difference between a program that produces random output, and a program that (re)produces a given output that in this case happens to be random. For example, this bit of code has almost no algorithmic complexity:

int main()
{
 for(i= 0; i < 1000; i++) 
 {
    for(j= 0; j < 1000; j++)
       cout << rand() ;
 }
}

This program will produce 1,000x1,000 output of random integers (or pixel values), but it will produce a different output every time. Algorithmic complexity is a measure of the instructions needed to render a given, specific output, so this code would be a "disqualified" in terms of measuring complexity, Kolmogorov-style. It is incapable of rendering the output requested of it. In order to produce a given string, one that is provided and is non-compressible (random), the program needs to "echo" every single value, making the program scale linearly with the size of the output. So, in order to reproduce this string "99585249515829886853", something like this is needed programmatically:

int main()
{
 cout << '9';
 cout << '9'; 
 cout << '5';
 cout << '8';
 cout << '5';
 cout << '2';
 cout << '4';
 cout << '5';
 cout << '1';
 cout << '5';
 // ... etc, shortened for brevity

}

So, in order to achieve the alogorithmic complexity needed for any given random output, Peter would need to "handcode" every value in the output. This is why we say a random string has maximal algorithmic complexity -- it defines algorithmic abstraction, and requires "hand-made" output echoes for every discrete value.

Third, Peter has gotten so wrapped around the axle of information theory that he has apparently who is arguing for the plausibility of emergent complexity. Just so we're straight, Peter, it's the materialist explanation that embraces emergent complexity, the progression from more simple configurations to more complex ones, and without any personal oversight or intervention. It is theistic arguments that cannot accept emergent complexity that lead to absurdities -- "skyhooks", as Dawkins calls them.

If I can make a program that is more complex than I am, then God can create a universe that is more complex than He is.

That may be! But it proves to much for the theist, as it makes God superfluous -- that was what the design argument aimed at, remember, demonstrating the necessity of God. If simpler can give rise to complex, then we have Dawkins' "crane", and the design argument is defeated. A simple, singularity can unfold to unfathomable complexity, and that is what materialist cosmologies and evolutionary biologies propose.

FWIW, I disagree with T-Stone’s version of information and complexity.

Well, then this would be a fine opportunity for Peter to show he isn't just BSing once again, and give us his "version of information and complexity". How do you define 'information' and 'complexity', Peter? How do you measure each?

And despite what his post would lead you to believe, the idea that “maximal randomness = maximal complexity” is not true for all information theories.

The competing theories are conspicuous in the absence, here, Peter. What alternative information/complexity theory do you embrace/propose, if not that of Shannon, Kolmogorov and Chaitin. If you've got something better, or even roughly equivalent, you'll be famous by Friday.

And in fact, if I were to use T-Stone’s definition of complexity then I would ask him to explain not why there is so much complexity in the universe, but rather why there is so little complexity.

Peter, how little is there? And how much do you calculate there should be? If you give me the calculations for your expectations, and your calculation for the actuals, I can try to give you an account for the difference, looking at your maths. As is it, I suspect you have no clue what you are talking about in terms of your request.

If complexity = randomness, then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that there’s a lot of the universe that is not random, and therefore there is a lot of this universe that is not complex. Under his information theory, randomness is the default. We do not need to explain random data. We do need to explain structured and ordered data. Therefore, we do not need to explain complexity; we need to explain non-complexity.

I have no idea what "randomness is the default" -- it's a seemingly random thing to assert, here. Be that as it may, noone with any expertise or even casual knowledge of the involved sciences is promoting the idea that the "universe is random". That's a creationist bogeyman, a concept alien to science. Our understanding of the universe identifies sources of randomness, combined with uniform constraints that provide structure. A combination of random "inputs" then, filtered through structuralizing processes, producing (often) complex outputs. The timing of decay events in a radioactive isotope is random at the event level, but the physical laws that randomness operates within produce a very nice logarithmic curve in charting the production of daughter isotopes, over time and statistically significant instances. Randomness driving structured output through physical constraints.

T-Stone is just giving a sleight of hand here. It would be like a mathematician saying "a > b" and having T-Stone say, "The greater than sign is inverted with the less than sign, therefore 'a > b' means 'a is less than b'."

This is complete nonsense. What is the 'sleight of hand' here, Peter? I've not inverted any operator semantics, nor can I identify anything that maps to "operator inversion". I'm deploying the concepts of information theory and algorithmic complexity in completely uncontroversial fashion, using them as they are used day in and day out by people who understand and work with information and algorithmic complexity everyday, for purposes mundane and sublime.

Butas soon as he engages in his sleight of hand, we respond: "If the greater than sign is inverted with the less than sign, then 'a > b' is no longer true, rather 'a < b' is. Inverting the operator without inverting the operands does not refute the original expression.

Complete gibberish, not matched to anything I've said. Pathetic hand-waving.

What kind of science needs a lawyer?

Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O' Leary demonstrates the "lean into it" response to her cognitive dissonance. In this post, she lays out her case for why the Intelligent Design movement is winning. Such is her grasp of matters under discussion in the quote she provides, that she offers retorts like this:

Not only should spontaneous generation be true if they are right, but so should magic, Magic, after all, is simply another name for sudden self-organization.

That’s right folks - just toss the bedclothes into the air and they’ll come down in a perfect mitred-corner bed. Just toss whatever into the stew pot, sans cookbook, and you’ll evolve a gourmet dinner. How generations could have come and gone, and no one ever noticed that before is beyond me.

Ahem. Beyond her.... yes, indeed.

Anyway, commenter "Tom Riddle", lavishing in being as yet undetected by the high-trigger banninator over by the esteemed moderators at UD, points to this story as a counterfactual in the first comment of the thread:

Report: Judge Says University Can Deny Course Credit to Christian Graduates Taught With Creationism Texts

That story probably merits a post of it's own, come to think of it. Here's O'Leary's reponse to having this pointed out:

Actually, Darwinism is the only supposedly scientific theory I have ever heard of that always seems to need a legal defense fund - and thrives simply by expelling opposition. That is a reliable mark of falsehood.

Skipping over the rich opportunities presented by the irony in her remarks (ever wonder why UD only has the "choir" in the comment stream?), it's maybe worth pointing out that Galileo would have done well to have high-powered counsel and fantastically deep pockets, and his offense was heliocentric astronomy (er, maybe we should say "impertinence" and "arrogance" about having the facts and observations right over the Emperor's courtiers, in anticipation of the kinds of quibbles D'Souza is wont to offer as apologetics on this). And Galileo's discovery was only a scrape on the elbow of Christian theology.

The ideas of Charles Darwin are no disproof for Christianity. Christianity survives on its unfalsifiability, and as a long time theistic evolutionist, I say that evolution has a lot to recommend it beyond just avoiding the head-in-the-sand obstinance of creationism. If Christianity has a nominally respectable theodicy, it is one that includes the "open theology" elements implied by an embrace of evolution. Even so, Darwin's ideas are arrows aimed at all the crucial organs of Christianity, and is the threat of this "dangerous idea" that puts evolution in the front lines of the culture wars. Whereas Galileo simply bumped man off his exalted pedestal at the "center" of the cosmos, Darwin didn't disprove God, but instead made him largely superfluous in terms of creation and the development of life on Earth. For an ideology that is perfectly immune to falsification, superfluity is as about as threatening a prospect as Christianity can expect to face.

Darwin thus becomes the enemy of theism, as it provides a framework that holds out the promise of reducing theism to a remote kind of deism. Evolution does not, and cannot provide account for the provenance of the physical law, and the universe itself, but given the laws and emergent properties of the developing universe that spring forth from them, "formed from the dust" just gets the nod of parsimony over the hand of God, as God as sculptor, tinkerer, biological hobbyist isn't needed to explain the diversity and dynamics of all the life we see around us.

That puts science, science that embraces the core of Darwin's dangerous idea, in danger itself. In providing the framework that eliminates a major "gap" where God was historically posited, atheistic and deistic paradigms achieved a level of robust coherence they had not before.

And the Church is not amused.

Gone are the days when the pope could have Darwin placed under house arrest. Indeed, to its credit, Rome has managed to reform its thinking on science and biology since the days of Bellarmine. Problems abound still, but you will not find the foolish dogmatism and dishonest wholesale dismissals of the evidence for evolution coming from the Vatican. Nashville is the new Rome. And while the Christian Right has nothing like the temporal power enjoyed by the great inquisitors, as a bloc they remain enormously powerful in America, waning now, but still wielding tremendous power in political and relgious vectors of American culture.

This calls for talented and intrepid lawyers.

Indeed, the rule of law is the triumph of secular principles over religious ones in the public sphere. If science is to remain science, loyal to its methodology and heuristics, it needs protection. When you follow the evidence for evidence's sake, it will eventually lead you across heavily guarded religious boundaries, and inquiry will be stifled and thwarted if its not supported by the law. Moreover it's the very best and most powerful scientific theories that will need the best legal counsel, the deepest pockets for its legal defense fund. For it is these theories that reach the deepest, and provide the most profound explanations and insights into the most compelling questions man has, and which religion has always jealously guarded as it's "God given turf". Darwin's simple idea, that all living things are connected by heredity into a unified "tree of life" is the most profound answer science has ever provided to mankind. It's not even an anti-religious idea, but one that sends much established dogma, much received wisdom teetering on the edge of irrelevancy.

Darwin understood this. He agonized over the dislocating implications of his simple conclusion. More than 150 years later, with the compelling confirmation of genetics for the hypothesis he drew from fossils and keen, careful observations in his journeys, his "dangerous idea" is much more dangerous to principalities of long standing than it has ever been. The church universal, or at least that part that sides with dogma over against the interlocking array of mutually supporting lines of evidence that is modern biology (and physics), will not concede to the facts without a fight. Happily, a "fight" in our society usually means a war of words, funds, votes and legal maneuvers. Better than bullets and flaming stakes, I say. But it is still a pitched battle, and the front lines are places where lawyers and lawmakers make a big difference.

Darwin's ideas are big, profound, sweeping ideas. They don't disprove God, but they do tend to marginalize him, and for much of the established religous culture, that's just as bad, and possibly worse. The better Darwin's ideas prove to be, the more lawyers and active defending they will need by the friends of science, a circumstance exactly opposite of what O'Leary supposes to be the case.

-Touchstone

State Senator Sues God

Lawmaker asks court to ban Almighty from 'harmful activities,' 'terroristic threats'.

A Nebraska state senator is moving forward with a controversial lawsuit against his maker, requesting "a permanent injunction ordering [God] to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats."

State Sen. Ernie Chambers I-Omaha, appeared before Douglas County District Judge Marlon Polk in a scheduling hearing against God on July 28.
Chambers, an atheist, requested that the court acknowledge the presence of God in the courtroom so he wouldn't be required to "serve notice" of the trial, according to the Omaha World-Herald.
The court had previously told Chambers the lawsuit would be thrown out if he was unable to serve notice to his Creator.
Chambers responded by arguing he attempted to contact God on multiple occasions and he should not be required to verify his existence when the U.S. government acknowledges him by printing "In God We Trust" on its currency.

The complaint drew widespread criticism when Chambers filed the lawsuit against God last year for creating "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects and the like."
Chambers also blames God for causing "calamitous catastrophes resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or distinction."
According to the lawsuit, the Creator "has manifested neither compassion nor remorse, proclaiming that defendant will laugh" when disaster strikes.
Chamber began his grievance as a way to call attention to "frivolous" lawsuits after several senators authored bills barring them. He said the Constitution mandates open courthouse doors to everyone – even those who seek to sue the Almighty.
"This started out as an exercise in the workings of the judiciary," he said. "My point and the crux of the matter is that everyone is entitled to their day in court. That's the whole crux of the matter, and I think people get caught up in the religion end of it – but that's not what this is about."
While Chambers hopes the court will rule against God, he doesn't expect any earth-shaking results from the decision.
"Once the court enters the injunction, that's as much as I can do," he told the World-Herald. "That's as much as I would ask the court. I wouldn't expect them to enforce it."

Vox Day: The "Fractal Intelligence" Delusion

On a private email loop, I've been getting bits and pieces of Vox Day offered by way of theistic argumentation. In particular, theistic friends find Mssr. Beale's "take down" of Dawkin's complaint that "A God capable of calculating the Goldilocks values for the six numbers would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself”[1]. Now, I've only read just a few pages of the opening of The Irrational Atheist, and have now read through Chapter VIII, "Darwin's Judas" just as means of familiarizing myself with the arguments being advanced on the email loop, and I guess I've been out of the loop for a while with respect to the mensa-punk-apologist groove that's happening out there. There's a lot of the book I haven't read yet, but just from what I have, I can say... that is one target-rich environment for fisking.

Anyway, it's easy to poke fun of the smaller, tangential blunders Day makes - in response to Dawkins' complaint, for example, Day says:

"Third, does Dawkins seriously wish to argue that Martin Rees is more complex than the universe? We know Rees calculated the Goldilocks values, so if he can do so despite being less complex than the sum of everyone and everything else in the universe, then God surely can, too. "[2]

Day apparently thinks that "calculating", or maybe just reading a physics textbook describing these parameters' values, is what Dawkins is pointing to in his objection. Hah! Calculating, say, the weak nuclear force is no small feat, and one wonders if Day, even as confused as he is here, supposes that Rees calculates these values on his own, apart from the enterprise of science?

I think it's safe to say that Dawkins would laugh at this kind of response, the idea that calculating a set of parameters' values represents the kind of complexity Dawkins is referencing, and rightly so. It's the machinery (for lack of a better metaphysical term) that unifies and interrelates these parameters that implicates something fantastically sophisticated, complex. Like Day supposes that Rees has matched the complexity of an automobiles design(er) by figuring out the car's design parameters: gas mileage, horsepower, number of gears, number of tires, etc.

As Day works through the "Fractal Intelligence and the Complex Designer" section, though, the errors become more fundamental, and less silly. Day continues on page 153:

"There is no reason why a designer must necessarily be more complex than his design. The verity of the statement depends entirely on the definition of complexity. While Dawkins doesn’t specifically provide one, in explaining his “Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit,” he refers to the Argument from Improbability as being rooted in “the source of all the information in living matter.” Complexity, to Dawkins, is therefore equated with information." [3]

Day can be forgiven here for his frustration; Dawkins does not spell out a formal definition of organizational or algorithmic complexity in his book. But you don't have to be a super-genius to get familiar with the concepts as they are used in science and information theoretic application. I haven't read Day's section of "theistic bodycounts" from wars versus "atheistic bodycounts", but Day's supporters on my list regale me superlatives of Day's phenomenal research capabalities. If he's got such capabilities, he shot all his efforts in previous chapters; Day simply punts here and decides to equate complexity with information.

Oops. That's a really major blunder. Just in casual terms, complexity is a description of the "number of discrete and differentiated parts", and information is "reduction in uncertainty". Complexity and information are related on some level, and those terms do often occur together in computing and information theoretic contexts. But complexity is not information, any more than mass is acceleration.

Day then gets ready for his example, which he intends to use in refuting Dawkins thusly:

"But as any programmer knows, mass quantities of information can easily be produced from much smaller quantities of information. A fractal is perhaps the most obvious example of huge quantities of new information being produced from a very small amount of initial information. For example, thirty-two lines of C++ code suffice to produce a well-known fractal known as the Sierpinski Triangle."[4]

Now, a recursive algorithm can produce arbitrary large amounts of output; so long as it continues to recurse, code for rendering Sierpinski triangles is stuck in an infinite loop, with each iteration produce a new level of rendering. But, complexity is not information, and while code for Sierpinski triangles and Mandelbrot set fractals (the other example Day invokes here) can generate enormous, unlimited amounts of output, both Sierpinski triangles and fractals are classic examples of precisely the opposite of what Day understands: minimal complexity.

Day has the clues right there in front of him on the page. He's proud of the fact that in just 32 lines of C++ code, he can produce staggering amounts of output. But complexity in information terms is measured by the size of the smallest program required to precisely the output. That means that a 32 line program is, by the very definition of complexity, not complex at all, and is in fact a very elegant example of simplicity. The essence of a fractal is self-similarity. Recursion simply applies this features of itself to itself, on a different scale.

A 1,000 x 1,000 pixel grid of random pixels, on the other hand, isn't as pretty to look at as a rendering of the Mandelbrot set, but it is much more complex -- maximally complex, as it turns out (which is part of why it's not as appealing aesthetically as a fractal image!). It's counterintuitive to people who don't work with information theory and algorithmic complexity, but its a fact of the domain: randomness is the theoretical maximum for measured complexity. You can't get any more complex than purely random. In a random grid of pixels, we cannot guess anything about any pixels at all. In a rendering of Sierpinski triangles, or the Mandelbrot or Julia set, as soon as we see one level of rendering, prior to any recursion, we no everything about the rest of image, and can reproduce the fractal to any depth of detail without the original program.

What does all this mean? Well, at a high level, it means Day has no idea what he's talking about in this part of the book. Worse, in a book that's held up as a treatise against slipshod reasoning and sloppy argumentation, this section indicts the author rather than his subjects. Dawkins' argument may not stand on its own, and may prove unsound in some regard. But Day's refutation is an example that works in Dawkins' favor, if anything, and Day doesn't even know it.

Intrigued by the profoundly amateurish analysis in this section, I did a little googling, suspecting that Day's "expertise" comes on the cheap thanks to a DSL line and a web browser (and even that must be done in a lazy, half-ass fashion, as even nominal effort with Google will unearth simple, straightforward treatments of this subject that would have shown Day how confused he was). The reader can judge for themselves what the likelihood is of this connection, but consider: here’s a paragraph from the Wikipedia article on “Fractal”:

“Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms). Natural objects that approximate fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, and snow flakes.”[5]

Note the similar phrasing used in the Wikipedia text, and Day’s quote above from page 155:

“considered to be infinitely complex”, and “not only considered to be complex, but infinitely complex”.[6]

Also notice Day’s use of “approximate fractals”, a term used in the Wikipedia text as well. That by itself may not be compelling, but considered with the list of examples provided --- clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines and snowflakes -- all of which Day names in his list, except for coastlines (which Day may be identifying indirectly with his mention of ‘other natural examples’)... one cannot read the Wikipedia text beside Day’s discussion on page 155 without recognizing them as cognates. See for yourself:

Day, page 155:

“Nor do they require human intelligence or computers to produce them, as approximate fractals can be found in clouds, snowflakes, lightning, mountains, and other natural examples.”[7]

Wikipedia, “Fractal”:

“Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms). Natural objects that approximate fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, and snow flakes.”[8]

Now, there’s nothing wrong per se with getting clued in by a Wikipedia page, or cribbing from its text in discussing fractals or other topics, but please note that there’s an important clue in these juxtaposed quotes. If Day is working from this Wikipedia article as his source here, it’s significant that he left out a key qualification - “(in informal terms)”. It’s parenthetical in the text, as it should be apparent to the informed reader, and is superfluous for readers familiar with formal concepts of complexity. But just in case, the text helpfully notifies the reader, and perhaps Day, if my conjecture is right, that fractals are “infinitely complex” only in a casual sense.

Day emphasize that Sierpinski triangles are not just complex, but "considered to be ... infinitely complex". He conveniently leaves out the key qualification that such characterizations obtain only in informal terms, why? Because it eviscerates his argument! In terms of actual, measured complexity, Sierpinski triangles aren't complex at all, they are 'complexity poor', as Day documents himself in his own arguments by noting that the output requires less than three dozen lines of code to produce.

All of this gets wrapped up with a new brand name that Day is proud to introduce to the reader: the argument from "Fractal Intelligence", as defeater for theoretical problems Dawkins identifies in a Complex Designer (if complex things require designers, then who designed God?). But because Day is thoroughly confused about the basics of complexity as a concept, he ends up writing comedy, rather than refutation. Unfortunately, because information theory and algorithmic complexity are outside the conceptual frameworks of most of his readers, Christians gobble this up, credulous, enthused by the prospects of Dawkings getting refuted. I have no idea how widespread Vox Day's books, articles or ideas are -- I'd not heard of him until he was brought up on my discussion loop a couple months ago -- but his gobbledygook is getting approving nods and applause in some Christian quarters, apparently, since I am seeing Chapter VIII of his book being seriously offered as a refutation of Dawkins objections on the complexity of God requiring his own Designer.

-Touchstone

---

[1] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Mariner Books), p. 143.
[2] Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist, p. 153.
[3] ibid., p. 153.
[4] ibid., p. 153
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
[6] Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist, p. 155.
[7] ibid., p. 155.
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal

My Anti-Climactic Milestone

Last weekend at the pool, in response to some of my critical questions about pagan cannibalism and communion, one of my family asked me if I was an Atheist. Yikes!
We were hanging out in the pool. The local preacher lives close by and he was blaring some Old Ancient Medieval Church music and we were commenting on it. Someone said it reminded them of taking communion. I make it a habit of asking critical questions about religion whenever I find the topic comes up but I don't usually give my opinion other than "I don't get it". So, I asked the critical question about the "body and the blood", cannibalism and pagan ritual. That was when they asked me if I was an Atheist. This was a turning point, an engagement that I wasn't sure I wanted to have especially on the weekend in the pool, but to deny it would obviously be lying so I had to "frame it" properly to do damage control. I said
"I don't believe a God Exists".
and they said
"Well, I'm not sure if I do either".
and another said
"Well, I do."
and that was it. We went back to splashing around and talking about summery, pooly stuff. My milestone was surprisingly anti-climactic. I guess I could say it went swimmingly. I think my strategy of asking critical questions and giving them food for thought paid off for me. What a relief. Now I am officially out of the closet.

Why Jesus Fails to Qualify as Neither a Sacrifice or Messiah

I’ve listed below some of the reasons why Jesus fails to qualify as a sacrificial offering or as the Messiah / Christ. To get Jesus to a point where he can be both a human sacrifice and a retuning Messiah Warrior-King (as in the book of Revelation); the Jewish concepts of both Messiah and sacrifice had to be totally degraded and forcibly hooked together.
It‘s little wonder St. Paul states:

“For the message about the cross is nonsense to those who are being destroyed, but it is God's power to us who are being saved. … For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, God was pleased to save those who believe through the nonsense of our preaching.” (1 Corinthians. 1: 18 & 21)

Reasons to reject Jesus as a sacrifice:

A. The Roman method of crucifixion, which included the beating Jesus received before he was nailed to the cross, was done by non-consecrated pagan gentile men who were not set apart as holy in God’s sight, but Jesus’ beating and crucifixion generally was not any different from the thousands the Romans had made examples out of earlier (Josephus, Jewish Wars 2: Ch.308; Philo Flacc 72: 84 -85).

B. No animal in the Hebrew Bible was tortured and made to suffer as an atonement to God. The animal was ritualistically sacrificed with a knife, thus it bled to death very quickly. Afterwards, its whole body was brunt or only its fat and organs were burnt with the sweet smell in the form of smoke of the burning flesh rising up to God.

By contrast, Jesus was purposely made to suffer under pagan gentile Roman law (not the under God’s law as found in Leviticus 1-18 (see Jacob Milgrom’s excellent article “Old Testament Sacrifices and Offering“, The Interpreter‘s Dictionary of the Bible: Supplementary Volume (Abingdon Press,1976)pp.763-771) and was neither quickly killed by proper bleeding nor was he burnt.

Even the innocent women, children and babies who were slain with the sword at Jericho and Ai died quickly and then were burnt so Yahweh could enjoy it. As such, Jesus’ death failed to qualify as a consecrated sacrifice under any of the Priestly laws of the Hebrew Bible. Again, since Jesus was not burnt as a human sacrifice as required in the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh (God ) not could feast upon the smell of the smoke. Instead, the God of the New Testament is pattern after patriarchal cycle of Abraham who must offer up his son Isaac.

C. No sacrificial animal, be it human or beast, could still be alive (resurrected) after the act of sacrifice and remain a true offering to God. Its life (as carried in the blood) wase sealed in death to God forever in the heavens by the rising smoke from the burning sacrifice.

F. No one single offering atoned once and for all the sins of the Jews much less those of the entire future world (contra Paul’s theology in Romans). That Jesus is said to be sinless is only a relevant truth: To the educated religious Jews; he was blasphemer. To the Christians; he was the sinless lamb of God.


The problem of Jesus bleeding to death as he was crucified between two criminals crucified the exactly same way caused medieval artists to paint these two men as only being tied to their crosses as contrast to Jesus who was nailed to his cross to leave no doubt that it was only Jesus who shed his blood for sin.

To Summarize:
First, the theology and concept of Jesus as a sacrifice to God to atone for all the world's sin is a totally a foreign and perverted concept to the Hebrew Torah.

Secondly, the concept that the Messiah would be a Warrior-King anointed by God to deliver Israel from foreign rule, plus return Israel to its eternal covenant with God was totally abused by Paul and the Gospel writers in order to force a false thesis or theology on to this famous Jewish apocalyptic ideal. This can be even more understood by the fact that it was in the Greek Hellenistic world where this new theology gained most of its following and where the people who accepted this deformed theology were first called Christians in Antioch: Greek Asia Minor.

In conclusion, the whole concept of Jesus as either a sacrifice or the Messiah is a total perversion of both historical Jewish concepts. It’s little wonder the disciples really never could figure out just who Jesus was or what he was up to.

By contrast, it was Paul, a man who most likely never saw or heard Jesus in the flesh, who systematized the theology of the early church in order to save it and make it function. Thus, no “Plain of Salvation” can be taught from the Synoptic Gospels, but certainly from Paul’s letters (especially his final account of Romans) that are load with a systematic theology of salvation.

Xavier and the Evolution of Legendary Miracles

I regularly encounter pseudo-skepticism -- reflexive doubt in response to criticism of credulous belief -- on the question of how the legend of Jesus could have developed in the period between Jesus' death and the writing of the synoptic gospels. Many Christians just don't see how or why such fantastic inventions arose from the crushing disappointment of the crucifixion of the man they supposed the Messiah (assuming here, arguendo, the historicity of Jesus and his crucifixion by the Romans at around the time commonly supposed)? "Why would these people die for a lie?" goes a common retort.

That's a fair question, even if it is offered pseudo-skeptically. But I don't think it's nearly as difficult as Christians commonly suppose. Even granting the dubious claims that all of Jesus disciples except John died a martyr's death (and indeed, this is precisely the kind of narrative we might expect as a later bit of legendary embellishment), we need not suppose a deliberate, coordinated conspiracy of lies is demanded of the situation. Rather, we need only look to the social capacity and disposition toward legend-making.

Inevitably, the pseudo-skeptic demands an example. I've suggested the legend and folklore of King Arthur, and pointed to the invention of "Newton's apple" by Voltaire as casual examples of the tendency to mythologize and embellish real people and events that capture our passions and imaginations. Reading a bit about Andrew Dickson White this week, intrigued by his provocative phrase "an asylum for Science", used in reference to his ambitions for Cornell University, a school he co-founded, I came across White's book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (which title I believe is familiar to me from the words of Bertrand Russell?). In the book, White recounts the case of Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits, patron saint of missionaries, and the man the Catholic church credits with converting more souls to Christianity than any other since Paul.

White's book (which can be read here, or at Google books complete with footnotes here) has a chapter on Xavier, in which he details the progression and development of legends -- miraculous legends -- about Xavier in the aftermath of his death. Here is why White chose to examine the case of Xavier:

"We have within the modern period very many examples which enable us to study the evolution of legendary miracles. Out of these I will select but one, which is chosen because it is the life of one of the most noble and devoted men in the history of humanity, one whose biography is before the world with its most minute details - in his own letters, in the letters of his associates, in contemporary histories, and in a multitude of biographies: this man is St. Francis Xavier. From these sources I draw the facts now to be given, but none of them are of Protestant origin; every source from which I shall draw is Catholic and Roman, and published under the sanction of the Church. " [1]

White provides his basic claim for the chapter here:

"During his career as a missionary he wrote great numbers of letters, which were preserved and have since been published; and these, with the letters of his contemporaries, exhibit clearly all the features of his life. His own writings are very minute, and enable us to follow him fully. No account of a miracle wrought by him appears either in his own letters or in any contemporary document. At the outside, but two or three things occurred in his whole life, as exhibited so fully by himself and his contemporaries, for which the most earnest devotee could claim anything like Divine interposition; and these are such as may be read in the letters of very many fervent missionaries, Protestant as well as Catholic."[2]

White continues with an example:

"For example, in the beginning of his career, during a journey in Europe with an ambassador, one of the servants in fording a stream got into deep water and was in danger of drowning. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed very earnestly, and that the man finally struggled out of the stream. But within sixty years after his death, at his canonization, and by various biographers, this had been magnified into a miracle, and appears in the various histories dressed out in glowing colours. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed for the safety of the young man; but his biographers tell us that it was Xavier who prayed, and finally, by the later writers, Xavier is represented as lifting horse and rider out of the stream by a clearly supernatural act. "[3]

(emphasis mine in both quotes above)

According to White, Xavier is both quite keen on identifying diving providence, but claims or even mention of miracles is conspicuously missing from his writings. Not only are miracles absent from Xavier's own accounts, the man who knew Xavier best, fellow Jesuit and historian of the order Joseph Acosta, positively denies the presence of miracles in the Jesuits' missionary enterprise of the time:

"But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic times, and says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching could no longer produce apostolic results ``lies in the missionaries themselves, because there is now no power of working miracles.'' He then asks, ``Why should our age be so completely destitute of them?'' This question he answers at great length, and one of his main contentions is that in early apostolic times illiterate men had to convert the learned of the world, whereas in modern times the case is reversed, learned men being sent to convert the illiterate; and hence that ``in the early times miracles were necessary, but in our time they are not.''[4]

Over the course of the decades following Xavier's death, admiring biographers and sponsors for Xavier's canonization produced a rapid "evolution" of miracles and supernatural works that got attached to Xavier, increasingly fantastic as time went by. Here, White recalls the situation 70 years after Xavier's death:

"In 1622 came the canonization proceedings at Rome. Among the speeches made in the presence of Pope Gregory XV, supporting the claims of Xavier to saintship, the most important was by Cardinal Monte. In this the orator selects out ten great miracles from those performed by Xavier during his lifetime and describes them minutely. He insists that on a certain occasion Xavier, by the sign of the cross, made sea-water fresh, so that his fellow-passengers and the crew could drink it; that he healed the sick and raised the dead in various places; brought back a lost boat to his ship; was on one occasion lifted from the earth bodily and transfigured before the bystanders; and that, to punish a blaspheming town, he caused an earthquake and buried the offenders in cinders from a volcano: this was afterward still more highly developed, and the saint was represented in engravings as calling down fire from heaven and thus destroying the town.

The most curious miracle of all is the eighth on the cardinal's list. Regarding this he states that, Xavier having during one of his voyages lost overboard a crucifix, it was restored to him after he had reached the shore by a crab.

The cardinal also dwelt on miracles performed by Xavier's relics after his death, the most original being that sundry lamps placed before the image of the saint and filled with holy water burned as if filled with oil.''[5]

This is just a small sample of the inventory provided by White in the chapter. What is striking is not just the breadth and depth of the body of legend associated with Xavier in the years following his death, but the "whole cloth fabrication" of the stories. For most, and possibly all of the miraculous accounts given later, there doesn't even seem to be the "seed" used for later embellishment, but a kind of ex nihilo creation of a miraculum vitae for Xavier (one can feel the account of the crab returning Xavier's crucifix resonating with Paul's miraculous survival of the viper's bite on Malta in Acts).

The import of the example of Xavier, and the spontaneous appearance and evolution of miracles attributed to him should be obvious to the Christian, to the pseudo-skeptic; given a couple decades, and a cult following, the invention and development of miracle accounts -- accounts of fantastic miracles -- isn't implausible, or even novel, and relevant examples are found right inside the history and culture of Christendom itself.

I do note that White's book is now well over a hundred years old, and as science proves, a lot can be discovered over the course of a hundred and more years. I've done some googling on this, but have not found anything that indicates that White's claims in the book have been overturned by the discovery of new evidence from Xavier's writings or reports by his contemporaries that substantiate the miracles later attributed to him. If readers are aware of such a case, I stand to be corrected. But as it is, I commend the case of Xavier and his admirers to the pseudo-skeptic, as a vivid historical example of "legendation" in action, the kind of inventions and embellishments we see accounting for the death of Jesus circa 30CE and the legend of Jesus emerging over the next 50-60 years.

[1] Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (Prometheus Books, 1993), lib ii, cap XIII, p. 5.
[2] ibid., p. 6.
[3] ibid., p. 6.
[4] ibid., pp. 9-10.
[5] ibid., pp. 14-15.

Atheism, Agnosticism and the Default Position

On a forum someone said this: "Atheism is not a belief, rather it is the absence of a belief, and it is beliefs which need to be justified." I responded as follows:

Atheism simply describes a "non-theist." Since the word “atheism” is a negative one, meaning “not a theist,” it doesn’t specify much of anything else except that a person who is an atheist is a non-believer. A non-believer in what? When the question is whether a person believes in any God, an atheist is someone who does not believe in any of them. However, I want to add that when the question is whether a person believes in, say Christianity, an atheist is someone who does not believe in the Christian God. Christians themselves were called atheists in the first century C.E. because they did not believe in the gods and goddesses of the Roman Empire, even though they clearly believed in a God. So when I say Christians are atheists with regard to all other gods but their own, I am being accurate by calling them atheists with regard to those other gods, even if they are not atheists with regard to whether any God exists. It depends on the question and the context what the words atheism/atheist mean.

An agnostic will agree with the atheist against all religious accounts, but she will go on to argue against atheism, claiming it can give no sufficiently justifiable account of the natural world either.

I cannot make too much sense of the idea that atheism, in the context of our debates, means a lack of a belief in God. My position is that agnosticism is the default position, the position that merely says, "I don't know" (which can probably best be described as soft-agnosticism). ANYONE WHO LEAVES THE DEFAULT POSITION HAS THE BURDEN OF PROOF, whether it's a theist or an atheist. When faced with the theist claims an atheist denies them. She doesn't merely say, "I don't believe you," for then she would be an agnostic, the default position. An atheist says "there is no god" (again, depending on the question being asked). And the strong atheist claims she knows this with a great deal of assurance while the weak atheist claims she knows this weakly.

So when an atheist says, "there is no God," or "this God does not exist," those are indeed stated beliefs. If it isn't a stated belief then what is it? And all beliefs must be justified sufficiently to the person making the claim. Non-beliefs must be those things we have never heard about or taken a position on.

So Do You Believe in God?

I get this question so frequently, I’ve decided to make a better effort to reply. To be honest, I don’t like the question because it presumes we know what those words mean. Here are some responses, touching on more or less serious aspects of the topic.

1. Which god? Do you mean Zeus, Baal, Athena, Shiva, Allah, Jehovah, or some other? If you mean one of those, then no. I am not a theist. I don’t believe in an individual being that created and now controls the world.

2. What is belief? Is it a cognitive conclusion that I have reached based on logical consideration of evidence?

That would assume I have access to all the information, and I do not. Is it an emotional feeling for something beyond myself? Well, my emotions vary, and some days are hopeful, other days are dark. Emotions are a rocky basis for “belief.” Do I make a leap of faith, not knowing anything really, but simply wanting to “believe,” and putting stock in a “scripture” to give it support? This is also difficult because knowing about the origins of “scripture,” I know the complexity; they were not simply dictated. Also, the strength of my blind faith can also vary and I’m not sure how completely I am supposed to convince myself in order to say I “believe.”

3. The concept of “God” usually meant by this question is some sort of being that exists “out there.” The god of the Bible is very separate, superior to humans, but anthropomorphic in many ways. Other gods are also considered “out there” and have controlling powers we do not have. A more New Age notion of god includes “the divine” in all of us, and still involves the notion of “spirit” infusing people. There is an assumption in most approaches to spirituality of a kind of “force,” which can be called by different names, but which is a thing in a universe of other things. As such, I do not resonate with this idea of “god” as an entity.

2. What is belief? Is it a cognitive conclusion that I have reached basic on logical consideration of evidence?4. If I must use the concept at all, I would equate it with the “nature of being.” This is close to “ground of being,” a phrase coined by John Robinson many years ago in Honest to God. For me it involves a perception of existence grounded in the profound science of modern physics. Most ordinary people do not know much about this. Yet, we now know from findings in both relativity theory and quantum physics, that the universe is much more strange and incredible than we ever realized. It calls for massive humility because there are things no one understands, yet we now have good reason to question all of our basic assumptions about “reality.” The difference is bigger than finding out the world is not flat. We have evidence for questioning our ideas about matter, linear time, cause and effect, and more. String theorists agree there are eleven dimensions. Yet the general population operates all day every day assuming things that are completely out of date. The knowledge has not reached the masses. This is akin to having everyone act as if the earth is still flat. The issues are intensely profound, with implications for everything we do. The big words for me are “mystery” and “possibility.” Feelings are humility, awe, and excitement. There is no religious description of “god” that matches the grandeur of the universe as it is – elusive, ever-changing, impossibly mind-boggling. And this includes us. We are part of the fabric; there is no separation. If this is believing in god, then by all means, a hundred times YES! But I’m still not drawn to the language.

A couple of quotes that I find consistent with this:

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”`
-Carl Sagan



“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
-Albert Einstein



5. Dispensing with the “god” word, it makes a little more sense for me to address “spirituality,” although this word has often meant a focus on other-worldly things. I prefer to describe spirituality as a way of living which is here-and-now. These are attributes rather than a definition. They involve feelings and perceptions and experiences which depend on openness. This openness can be chosen and developed. Rather than escaping into a different realm, I think of spirituality in terms of how we live our lives – the choices, the consciousness, the texture of daily life. There are several aspects of this:

Accord. This is the experience of feeling attuned with the rest of existence - a feeling of belonging on earth, being a part of the rest of nature, and in harmony with everything around. When you are in accord, you move along with the vast river of evolutionary change, feeling connected in a fundamental way with the harmony and power of the whole. You feel as though you are tapping into a rich resource that is beyond you, much larger than yourself. Your inner spring of god-within connects with the vastness of god-beyond, a "deeper power" rather than "higher power," a subterranean aquifer connecting all of life. This produces a sense of trust and safety, a knowledge that you fit, that you have a place.

Awareness. With awareness you are alive and awake, fully experiencing life. This means being totally grounded in the here and now. Your sensory experiences are vivid, and you notice what is happening when it is happening, both around and inside you. You do not reject uncomfortable experiences or deny pain; you are open and embracing of all that life has to offer. This makes it possible for you to enjoy things more intensely and to learn from difficulties. You are not trying to be on some other plane of existence, but are willing and happy to be here now, like a curious child.

Growth. Growth is a natural process. You are not static or inert; you are a changing, growing being. And your experiences can propel you to develop further. As a plant needs the attention of water and food to grow, you need to attend to your needs and consciously make opportunities to learn and change. This aspect of spirituality is active, complementing the more receptive elements of accord and awareness. As humans we are granted the exciting option of making conscious loyal commitments to move in positive directions. Learning will often occur anyway, as a neglected plant will often survive, but informed with a sense of accord and awareness, you can take action on your own spiritual behalf.

Transcendence. There are moments of awe for us in life, those times of being overwhelmed with wonder at beauty, or love, or natural power. At these moments you get clues about the immensity of the cosmos, like pinpricks in the veil around your limited consciousness. You are humbled and thrilled as you gaze at a sunset or a torrential waterfall. A moment of pure love can be ecstatic. Let your vision extend into the night sky, and you may experience a blissful dissolving of your individual ego. Not needing to understand or control, you can experience a sense of total Mystery. These moments are gifts that reflect your spiritual capacity, gifts that become more available as you open to your sense of the ultimate. This is not ultimate in the sense of above or better, but simply beyond your usual mode of consciousness. These are moments of realization knowing that the sense you have of “god” within is not only in contact with but one and the same as the transcendent “god”-beyond. You are a wave in the ocean, individual in a sense but also part of something much bigger – the immensely huge and powerful ocean of existence. You don’t understand and you don’t need to understand. All of this is multiverses away from “believing in God.”

So even though I would have to say I don’t believe in God and I am an atheist in the true definition of the word, ie, not a theist, I obviously feel compelled to question and reclaim the language being used and make this rather inadequate stab at describing my lived experience. It’s a bit defensive and that’s because the stereotype of the cold, shallow, hedonistic, selfish atheist needs to be challenged. In my opinion, it’s all about how we live, and not what we “believe.”

What do you think?

Kind regards,
Marlene Winell, Ph.D., psychologist and author of "Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion" and facilitator for retreats for religious recovery called "Release and Reclaim" The next one is Aug. 15-17 in Berkeley, CA