Another Sin Of My Old Age - Hate Mail

DOING PROJECTS has proven to be a good way to keep a'goin' here and right now I'm committed to the Louis Boudin project, trying to figure out how to deal with his huge study of judicial attacks on representative democracy.

That's a long way of saying I'm not going to deal with your complaint because it's something I've dealt with over and over again.  Here, for example, from about seven years ago:

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The Bizarre Idea That Mathematical Confirmation of A Religious Teaching Debunks Religion
See an important and exciting Update Below. 

Oh, dear.  Now the atheist boys at Salon are claiming that the recent calculations of game theory, surrounding the "prisoner's dilemma" knock the stuffings out of Jesus.  They claim that the calculations of that branch of mathematics confirms that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you.   Which, since they are so interested in chronological priority,  would seem to be a rather bizarre move in this particular game.   Having read a few things online, I'm not entirely convinced that the simplistic set up of the game and the calculations is really useful to address the teachings of the Jewish tradition, which is not about any artificial set up of such a simplistic scenario but one in which real people are living in the real world with a far fuller range of motivations and interests and in a far richer context of personal and impersonal relationships.  But, for the purpose of the brawl, I'll pretend to entertain the idea.

They make the typical atheist mistake of believing that God couldn't have anything to do with mathematics, that mathematics is, somehow, safe atheist territory where God can't get in.  But, luckily, whoever it was who composed the first line in Genesis blows them out of the water.  If God created the heavens and the Earth, if God is the Creator of of all things visible and invisible, as they say in one version of The Creed, then, of course, you'd expect to find confirmation of something that important if you can work it out mathematically.  While I'd never make that claim, unless forced to, that reluctance would be based in the kind of "tidiness of mind" that Eddington talked about, not any logical or moral objections.

I daresay that most of you are by no means reluctant to accept the scientific epic of the Creation, holding it perhaps as more to the glory of God than the traditional story. Perhaps you would prefer to tone down certain harshnesses of expression, to emphasise the forethought of the Creator in the events which I have called accidents. I would not venture to say that those who are eager to sanctify, as it were, the revelations of science by accepting them as new insight into the divine power are wrong. But this attitude is liable to grate a little on the scientific mind, forcing its free spirit of inquiry into one predetermined mode of expression; and I do not think that the harmonising of the scientific and the religious outlook on experience is assisted that way. Perhaps our feeling on this point can be explained by a comparison . A business man may believe that the hand of Providence is behind his commercial undertakings as it is behind all vicissitudes of his life; but he would be aghast at the suggestion that Providence should be entered as an asset in his balance sheet. I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.
A. S. Eddington: Science and the Unseen World

I am not above pointing out that in this case it would appear to be mathematicians who are mixing math with religion, claiming to have confirmed the logical validity of a moral commandment that human history has shown to be anything but a matter of the most persuasive obviousness.   People, even those who claim to believe that it is a command of God in the Torah (Leviticus 19:18) or of Jesus in the Second Testament, even those people have had the hardest of times living up to this, one of the simplest and yet hardest of teachings.   That it took mathematics up until the very late 20th century to confirm a teaching that extends back into the Jewish tradition in written form many centuries before the Common Era certainly doesn't discredit the insight of the prophets who knew that intuitively.   No more than that it took cosmology until the early 20th century to get to that beginning of Genesis mentioned above, and it was a priest-physicist who came up with that one, too.

And, most ironically of all, it is the atheists who claim that mathematics confirming that most unobvious and difficult of religious teachings, somehow, confirms their debunking of the religious figures who taught that.   I think the untidiness of mind that represents is more than some philosophical maid service could clean up.   Perhaps they would like to address the many atheists of the past two centuries who have denied the truth that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you,  as so many of them have, Nietzche, Haeckel, Rand, ...   Because they are the ones debunked by mathematics if they really have proven the validity of the religious teaching in question.

Update:  It just occurred to me that, now that the atheists are claiming that the truth of that particular commandment has been proven to the level of mathematical certainty, that we can now expect atheists, en masse to begin successfully applying the fruits of reason and science in their own lives.  We can look forward to them proving the superiority of atheist-materialist ideology to that religion which has taught the commandment for thousands of years to such mixed success, though, I would claim, far more success than the denial of its validity would be in reforming the lives of those who heard the words of the Torah, Rabbi Hillel and Jesus.   Now we can see the real test of the atheist devotion to logic, mathematics and reason.

Aren't you just waiting with baited breath to see the atheists acting as if they believed that they should do unto others as they would have done unto them?  I mean, we can look forward to them ditching the double standards favoring atheists that they have always insisted on.   Only, I wouldn't hold your breath TOO long. 

Update: 2022  See the interesting comments made at the time here. 

I will add that re-reading this, it makes me think of such declarations as Richard Dawkins' and other Darwinist fundamentalists who claim, as he infamously put it,  

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

The basic ideology of scientistic, atheistic materialism is that all of reality, all of everything is of one nature, the nature that the material universe has and that every aspect of that must be coherently a part of that one, narrow reality.  If, as the paper claimed that there is a mathematical proof of "The Golden Rule" then, by that ideology the universe has that as one of its attributes and all of reality must be understood to accommodate that reality.   

As I noted in the very thing you object to me saying about the pseudo-sciences of sociology, psychology, science-pretending anthropology and, Lord help us, economics, that you can make the hugest of assumptions that the hugely complex phenomena those pretend to study with science can be studied in that way because all of reality must be susceptible to the methods used to study simple physical phenomena due to the doctrine of that materialist monism.  If that is true any mathematical confirmation of The Golden Rule would mean that that was a scientifically confirmed attribute of physical reality, under your own ideology. If that is true then Darwinian speculation of "the survival of the fittest." what Darwin, himself said was an exact equivalent of "natural selection" is incompatible with that mathematical proof in a matter directly relevant to Darwin's theory. 

As I said at the time, I'm skeptical of all of that but if you're going to bring me something like this I'm able to argue out the logical conclusions based on where you want to fight about it and to point out it doesn't work out the way you want it to.