I Wonder If They're Still Peddling That Bit Of Biological Folk Lore In Textbooks This Many Decades After It Was Found To Be The Product Of Wishful Thinking

THE FLAGSHIP EXAMPLE of natural selection in the popular and classroom biology of my youth was the supposed adaptation of British peppered moth reportedly going from a light colored variant to a dark one, supposedly as a result of the appalling air pollution caused by Britain's reliance on the burning of coal, light colored moths on soot blackened tree bark falling prey to predators, killing them off before they got a chance to breed, so passing on their genes for dark pigmentation and it becoming dominant in succeeding generations.  It appeared in some of the textbooks of high school science and in my tenth grade biology textbook and was taught to children of my generation as science "proving the reality of natural selection."   Well, if that bit of lore hasn't gone into the boneyard of discontinued science on a popular level, as you, dear Darwin defender proves in citing it,  I doubt any scientists who know what they're talking about would bring it up in the way you did.

This description of the scandalous violation of scientific method is not comprehensive, it doesn't give what I think are some of the most obvious problems with the study of the problem, such as leaving out the far longer pupal stage of the lives of the moth in which the coloration of the two variants could not account for the reported observations in the shorter adult lives of the creatures. But it's enough to demonstrate what I disagreed with in Eddington's idealistic description of physical science as done about far smaller, far simpler, perhaps more uniformly existing particles but which goes under the same name. 

 

The idea that natural selection might explain the rise of the dark moths was suggested in the late 19th century. But it wasn't tested until 1953, when E. B. Ford, an Oxford biologist, recruited an amateur lepidopterist, H. B. D. Kettlewell, to get out into the field and find out what was happening. Kettlewell, a doctor, and a moth collector since he was a boy, jumped at the opportunity to abandon his medical practice and pursue his hobby full time.

He lugged mercury-vapor lamps and moth traps into the English countryside, where he released thousands of moths and monitored their survival. The experiments were difficult, but within two years Kettlewell had the evidence Ford was looking for. In industrial areas, birds gobbled up the typical peppered moths, leaving the dark moths behind to reproduce. That explained why the population of dark moths was increasing. And the opposite happened in undisturbed forests -- the dark moths were eaten, and the typicals survived.

''It is the slam-dunk of natural selection,'' Judith Hooper writes in ''Of Moths and Men.'' The experiments made their way into all the evolution textbooks, many of which reproduced a now famous pair of seemingly indisputable black-andwhite photographs. In one, a dark moth is strikingly obvious on a lichen-covered tree trunk, while an arrow points to a nearly invisible speckled moth nearby. In the other, the speckled moth stands like a beacon on a dark, stripped trunk, and the dark moth is neatly concealed.

There it was: natural selection in action. Darwin was right. End of story. Sadly, as Hooper shows, that wasn't the end of the story. In recent years it has become clear that the evidence on which the story hangs is as flimsy as a butterfly's wing. Kettlewell's experiments proved nothing. The most famous example of evolution in action must now become the most infamous.

Kettlewell went into the woods knowing the results he wanted, and he didn't quit until he got them. The experiment was done under highly artificial conditions. Laboratory-bred moths were put on trees in unnatural positions, at the wrong time of day. Kettlewell himself decided which moths were safely concealed from birds and which were not. He was so adept in the field that even his critics might say he could think like a moth. But nobody believed he could see like a bird. ''We don't allow experiments like this any more,'' says Ted Sargent, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Kettlewell's severest critic.

Sargent doesn't suggest that Kettlewell lied or cheated. In Kettlewell's desperation to succeed, and to please Ford, he might simply have seen what he wanted to see. ''There are subtle ways to seduce yourself,'' Sargent says. Hooper's aptly titled book is about the men as much as about the moths. The characters in this tragic tale were among Britain's most brilliant scientists. But that brilliance was undermined by cold ambition that led them to turn on one another and perhaps even tamper with results of experiments. Hooper shows us their failings, but with gentleness and respect, creating a moving and compassionate portrait of Ford, Kettlewell and the others in this decades-long drama.

The most sympathetic figure here is Kettlewell. Ford brought him to Oxford because he was the best field lepidopterist Ford knew. Ford was on a mission, to demonstrate the importance of natural selection in Darwin's theory. But Kettlewell was never accepted at Oxford. He did not have the requisite academic degrees, nor could he compete in the often cruel intellectual jousting common in college dining halls. ''He was the best naturalist I have ever met, and almost the worst professional scientist I have ever known,'' said one colleague.

Kettlewell's personal life crumbled as he struggled to meet the increasing demands placed upon him by Ford, whose reputation owed much to his analysis of Kettlewell's experiments. Ford used him up. Kettlewell, a hypochondriac, increasingly began to suffer from real diseases: recurring bouts of bronchitis, pneumonia, pleurisy and flu, along with heart problems. In 1978, he fell out of a birch tree on a collecting expedition, breaking his back. He never recovered. More than anything, Kettlewell wanted to be accepted as a fellow of the Royal Society. Ford nominated him three times, but did so in a way that made sure Kettlewell would not be accepted.

Kettlewell died on May 11, 1979. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography says he ''apparently'' overdosed on a painkiller. But Kettlewell's colleagues knew his death was no accident, Hooper says. Many obituaries expressed enormous affection; ''everyone loved him,'' one said. Everyone except Ford, that is. Told that Kettlewell had committed suicide, Ford called him a coward.

The story of the peppered moth, as Hooper shows, is not what it seemed. Nor is it settled. The dark moths have now nearly disappeared, but the debate continues. ''At its core lay flawed science, dubious methodology and wishful thinking,'' Hooper writes. ''Clustered around the peppered moth is a swam of human ambitions, and self-delusions shared among some of the most renowned evolutionary biologists of our era.''

 

While there are some real a-holes in the hard physical sciences, I've got to say those in the life sciences, especially surrounding the atheist strongholds of evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology are some of the biggest and most revolting a-holes there are. I know, I've known biologists and they complain about their colleagues in those terms surprisingly often. I think there's something in the treatment of human beings and animals as objects that leads either such people to take up those fields or attracts such people to them.  Though, me not being prone to claiming scientific knowledge where I know it isn't, wouldn't claim there was any way of testing such a nasty suspicion about the culture of the life sciences and the pseudo-sciences of alleged behavior.  It's just a suspicion on my part.

 

Natural selection is an ideological imposition on the real scientific study of evolution,  it's adoption and maintenance,  universally enforced as a required ideology to work and be held respectable in the profession of science is an even bigger scandal than this little example of how its inadequate basis in the actual establishment of it in the disinterested observation of nature is lacking and the larger truth that only the tiniest fraction of the actual thing, evolution, almost all of which is forever lost in the billions of years of its history, will ever be vulnerable to honest scientific methods, so much so that there will never be any adequate explanation of any of it, the claim that "its cause" will ever be known one of the most dishonest ever made as science or in intellectual history.

If I had the time I would expand on the same kind of criticism of reliance on artificial conditions to make claims about evolutionary history.  One of the most habitually honest of evolutionary biologists, the geneticist Richard Lewontin once made the observation about his main teacher, the eminent geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky,  that his work with fruit flies was all done in the lab and not in natural conditions - it is enormously difficult to study such things in nature and I doubt much of any precise and accurate information could ever be honestly published asserting more general claims from it.  Lewontin also has written about what the biological scandal of the peppered moth study tells us about the confidence level that should be placed in scientific claims surrounding the study of evolution, he is, in fact, one of the better internal critics of his own field.  Yet he was the object of criticism by the late Lynn Margulis who noted that after a talk he gave about his own work in population genetics that it was, as well, not unambiguously demonstrated in the actual field and was the product of highly artificial, I would gather highly theoretical and mathematical speculation.  To get back to the many uses of mathematics to, perhaps, create what may or may not be there.   But I don't have time to chase down all of the citations to show that.  You're going to have to take my word for it unless you want to fact check me, or not, as you choose to believe or not. 

Update:  Rereading this for corrections not previously caught, I wondered if the fable of the peppered moth demonstrating Darwinian natural selection in action is still being peddled and, yep, as in Science News for Students. 

Since I didn't mention one of the biggest problems for this as an example of natural selection THAT IS THAT THERE WAS NO EVOLUTION OF SPECIES IN THE JUST-SO STORY, THE VERY THING WHICH NATURAL SELECTION IS ALLEGED TO EXPLAIN, there, I just pointed it out.   That is obvious from even this updated version of it in which, as Brits gave up burning coal the color change is supposed to have reverted back to a pre-industrial revolution distribution, though I wonder how they would study that in any precise way without having a representative sample of those long ago dead moths. 

 

Naw, evolution is too complex, its raw material too much lost forever in the past for scientific method to be applied to it.  Its study will always generate self-interested lore to fill in the gaps and even more so it will be materialist ideology that is shoved into those gaping chasms.  

Update 2:  I should have noted that the survival of lichen on soot covered trees figured into the folk tale of evolutionary science, maybe even more so than the version that I was told about soot which, as I recall, didn't mention lichen.  Just to try to be accurate.

Update 3:  NO, no, no, no, no, no.  Victorian era butterfly collections are not a representative sample of the distribution of anything in nature, they are a humanly chosen collection.  How many insects damaged in collection and discarded in the field, how many disposed of because they were insufficiently unlike a previously collected, murdered and mounted specimen already had, how many not put into the case for other reasons BY THE PERSON MAKING THAT CHOICE would account for what we've got now.  And you'll never know what those animals not caught and included were like.  I wonder if anyone has ever speculated that stupider or just slower or more enfeebled individuals are over-represented in such collections or maybe it's an unrepresentative sample due to mere chance that didn't happen to give you a representative sample of what tiny part of that species lives you want to write about.  

No, the study of life available for inspection is enormously complex, I don't think it makes much sense to include it with the gooviest theoretical physics being done today under the same name, "science".  The poverty of our language covers up a hell of a lot of discrepancy like that, especially in academic language that wants to generalize about everything.

Satan In The Flash - This Is Not Religion

 

 

I don't usually listen to anything from CNN but I watched this and by the time I got a load of Kenneth Copeland and after, I have to admit I had never believed in the reality of Satan so strongly as I do now and firmly believe these hallelujah peddlers are his worldly servants.  If those boobs who wrote the First Amendment so as to not exclude this kind of stuff from protection ever got a load of these guys, they might have changed their minds.

Hate Mail - I Will Probably Tire Of Answering This Soon But In The Meantime I'm Taking My Good Times Where I Find Them

I USED TO REFLEXIVELY use the term "college-educated" to describe the class of people who have a college degree but after going online and reading the unedited, unfiltered thinking of thousands of people who fit that description I realized that the label was dishonest and so have settled on "college-credentialed". If you've got a problem with that, complain to the colleges and universities, especially those who cater to the rich and powerful who fill the media and the scribbling industry with their stupider sons and, to an extent, daughters who they don't trust with what they really value, extracting money out of the wealth created by those who create wealth and fill the legal and political system with those in between to rig things for them.

The rest of you are just white-collar class TV and Hollywood addled boobs who didn't spend enough time away from entertainment and so find yourselves reaching senectitude already voluntarily feeble minded. 

 

I'd trust any number of people who came up through an apprenticeship, formal, informal, self-structured, . . . that depended on them doing instead of a larger number with degrees from an accredited university or college. I was thinking that just the other day while leaving a comment on the latest dribble that came out of Dr. Ben Carson. You boobs figure you're on the right side of stuff but all you do is discredit those who might get something done through your snobbery and conceit.

When The Idealistic View Of Science Runs Up Against The Reality Of It In Real Life - How Would A Janitor Handle This Mess?

I AM LEAVING OUT some of the mathematical example in section III of Eddington's lecture, The Concept of Structure because it is, in a way, a recapitulation of what he has already said using mathematical examples.  Hey, if science can leave things out, so can I.   I hope this has encouraged you to read his book which contains a lot of information and ideas worth thinking about, hard. Especially when encouraged to buy, wholesale, the ideological claims of well positioned, well thought of sci guys, especially as they almost always make those claims about things well outside of what made them famous. Though, as I've continually pointed out, BY COMMON AGREEMENT AMONG SCIENTISTS huge areas of human experience are excluded from their study and, also, something I've never seen admitted anywhere in science, the experience of other presumably sapient creatures not human, such scientists continually want to use the science that cannot touch those things or even has a means of including them in their specialized and limited calculations and measurements and connecting numbers on graphs even as they claim they can do so and, guess what, what they find generally supports what they wanted to find. At least that's what gets reported. Though, to some extent, that is also a product of the selective choices of journal editors and referees, department heads and the not exactly ideologically disinterested general culture of science and academia. The farther away from the idealistic definition of science you get, the more obvious that becomes. Though there are honest people who work in all of the physical sciences, that, too, diminishes rather fast the more attenuated the claims of using scientific method becomes.

. . . In order to formulate this point explicitly we shall distinguish between a structural concept and more general kinds of concepts. A structural concept is obtained from the corresponding general concept by eliminating from our conception everything which is not essential to the part it plays in a group-structure. It is an element in a specified pattern without any properties except in connection with the pattern. Its properties are those of a mathematical symbol, which consist solely of its associations (or, more strictly the associations of its associations) with other symbols. The corresponding general concept, if any, is our conception of what the symbol represents in our ordinary non-mathematical form of thought. A general concept lacks the precision of a mathematical concept, and is often difficult to pin down to anything definite. Except as applied to sensations, emotions, etc. of which we can be directly aware, it is doubtful if the general concept is more than a self-deception which persuades us that we have an apprehension of something which we cannot apprehend. Nevertheless, such concepts must be reckoned with is part of our ingrained form of thought.

I object to this claim by Eddington as the ability to do math about something is no guarantee that what is claimed is not a self-deception, an "apprehension of something which we cannot apprehend." The history of even physics and mathematics contains such things, the aether which he admitted about half of physicists of his time still believed was there and had explanatory power, I can't recall which eminent British physicist of the late 19th or early 20th century claimed he knew it was there because he could measure it (one wonders if he meant the same way that today's cosmologists "know" that dark matter and, or dark energy is there because it makes their equations balance). One looks at the unspoken of boneyard of discontinued science and looks at the papers that supported the existence of such science and find it is chock full of numbers, equations, tables of data, etc. And I've mentioned here, recently "ego-depletion" in what gets called science by scientists but which, when looked at using basic formulations of scientific method - checking to see if they could replicate the original studies - it disappeared. I would not call the many years that the concept inserted itself not only into the formal science of psychology but also into public policy and educational babbling and practice a success of the scientific method or of the mathematization of what is supposedly a study of the mind. 

 

The ideal that Eddington is presenting here is as capable of being used to create elaborate, sciency stuff out of the faith in its potency, ignoring the requirement of observation but also even when things are observed and interpreted by scientists and, especially, because they want to see what they only believe they see.  

I don't always disagree so strongly with what Eddington says, perhaps by "eliminating from our conception everything which is not essential to the part it plays in a group-structure" all of that inconveniently discontinued science, but his description as a general definition of scientific method is obviously not covered by what people mean when they say "science". It is kind of surprising to me that someone as sharp in his insight into science as a human and social activity could ignore the actual history of the subject.

. . . The concept referred to in Chapter VIII were general conceptions occurring in our ordinary form of thought. It is now possible to add that in employing them to furnish the frame of thought in which our scientific knowledge is contained, we have gradually eliminated their general aspects, until now we recognize only the corresponding structural concepts. Correspondingly the resulting frame of thought has become a mathematical frame, and the knowledge contained in it is mathematical knowledge - a knowledge of group structure. By introducing the mathematical theory of structure modern physics is able to carry out in a precise manner the general principles described in the last chapter. For example, we there insisted that the significance of a part cannot be dissociated from the system of analysis to which it belongs. As a structural concept the part is a symbol having no properties except as a constituent of the group structure of a set of parts.

To show how these ideas are applied, let us consider the concept of space. Taking first the general concept, we usually regard infinite Euclidean space as the simplest kind of space to conceive. One would have thought that the infinitude would be rather a serious obstacle to conception; but most people manage to persuade themselves that they have overcome the difficulty, and even profess themselves utterly unable to conceive a space without infinitude [or more likely, they don't think about it that hard or just pretend to].  But, whatever the truth about the general concept, the structural concept of Euclidean space is exceptionally difficult. Since I want to give here a comparatively easy illustration, I shall consider uniform spherical space which has a much simpler structural concept.

Any point in spherical space can be changed into any other point by a rotation of the sphere. [by which I assume he means it can be made to serve the same function in the structure, taken as a mathematical object] Thus to the points or elements of spherical space, A, B, C, . . ., there correspond operations P, Q, R, . .. which are the rotations of the sphere; and the group of the operations is simply the group of rotations in the proper number of dimensions (in this case four dimensions). Regarding "space" as a structural concept, all that we know about spherical space is that it has the group-structure of this group of rotations. When we introduce spherical space in physics we refer to something - we know not what - which has this structure. Equally, if we refer to Euclidean space we refer to something - we know not what - with a specifiable group-structure, though it requires rather more advanced mathematical conceptions to formulate the specification. Similarly the space of irregular curvature which appears in Einstein's theory is something with a group-structure requiring rather more elaborate specification.

The general concept, which attempts to describe space as it appears in familiar apprehension - what it looks like, what it feels like, it's negativeness as compared with matter, its "thereness" - is an embellishment of the bare structural description. So far as physical knowledge is concerned, this embellishment is an unauthorized addition. Philosophically it is all to the good that we find a difficulty in conceiving in non-mathematical form of thought the kinds of space which modern physics has introduced; for we are thereby discouraged from making such embellishments.

 

I think whatever good there is in that is all fine and good as long as physicists don't mistake what they've abstracted out of the reality which we find ourselves in as "everything." Though to be fair to Eddington, I don't think he or Einstein or others of his generation were as totalizing in their attempts to find a "Fundamental Theory" or a "Grand Unified Theory" as the even more overtly ideological of the next generations up to and including so many of those who are chasing that same end and far more arrogant in their claims for what they are doing, and far more openly ideological in their motivations.

Again, I think Eddington was being overly naive in the general conception of things that even pure physicists hold. I don't think there is any way for most people to conceive of even imagined objects without "embellishment" though they might be hard pressed to put those into numbers. And, as I pointed out, not only have they in the past but they still do create imaginary objects, claim those have external existence independent of their (or scientists sharing their) imagined mathematically or theoretically created objects. As I pointed out Stephen Hawking demanded that such mathematically created universes be admitted into science apparently for, among other things, him being able to claim he's eliminated the possibility of there being a God - it not being in the imagination of Hawking that the God who created one universe could create as many or an an infinitude of universes, in which case no probabilistic argument against such a fecundly creating God would have any logical validity. I know of at least two precedents in the Scriptures of two world religions for that idea.

And scientists of his time were already doing that. If history is told by the winners, the lore of science is told in terms of its currently held retained ideas, seldom in the ideas that fall by the wayside and in the null results which have such a hard time getting published, even when the tester of an idea comes up with disconfirming evidence and writes it up honestly.

We value science for the things that scientists were right about, we aren't' supposed to admit that even some of the brightest have not always gotten it right, we aren't supposed to notice the ideas that were current for a time, sometimes a very long time but which are then discarded as I hope natural selection will be before it generates even more depravity. We are not supposed to be even as modest in the claims made for what is discovered by even the most honest of scientists such as Eddington in making claims for the completeness of its knowledge on the day we are making or taking such a claim for granted. That is, unless, you don't like something that science gets right for entirely ideological reasons, such as the Darwinian economists and the unqualified doctor that fed their ideology as science into the ear of Trump and through FOX and News Max or as sold by the extraction industries through an icy blonde during the Sunday Morning Lie Hours on American network TV.

It is the tragedy of science in our time that it is not done on a consistent basis as honestly or as carefully as it is supposed to be, as divorced from ideology, as uninfluenced by the desire of people with PhDs after their name and, even, faculty appointments at prestigious universities or associated with some ideological outfit attached to one. It is the tragedy of science how much of it is a malignant source of poisons and environmental destruction which is far better funded and far more influential than the enormously important science of environmental preservation and protection. It is a tragedy that so many eminent theoreticians in real science, such as physics and the pseudo-sciences, such as psychology and the mix of the two in evolutionary science are the opposite of modest in pursuing their ideological agendas through their claimed and granted expertise.

I use the word "tragedy" merely as a convention, ignoring the involuntary implications of that word, I do it because to say "immorality" or, more ideologically consistent with their own materialist-atheist-scientism, "amorality" would be to introduce something not considered polite or done in the intellectual milieu of modernism. 

 

When you take a critical though not entirely hostile look at science, that thing which is at any given time what scientists say it is or allow to go under that label, it looks as varied, as good and as bad, as idealistic and as grubby as religion does. I am not interested in the naively idealistic and optimistic view of anything, religion, science, certainly not of music or the arts or history or anything.  I'm all in favor of looking at it realistically or, rather practically, looking at what's wrong with it to make it better. Like a good janitor does.

Clueless About What The Life Of A Music Major Was Like The Idiot Imagines Me As He May Have Been

WE NEVER DID all-nighters. I never stayed up till 3 AM voluntarily. After my first semester I moved out of the dorms because I couldn't sleep in them and I never spent a lot of time talking to people about things BECAUSE I WAS A MUSIC MAJOR WITH THE NEXT TO THE HEAVIEST CREDIT REQUIREMENT IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSITY. Music Ed had a few more mandatory credits to graduate than my BA program and, as I pointed out to someone in the administration, some of the things with the highest work load attached to them, applied lessons, had the fewest credits awarded for doing the work. I spent six to eight hours a day practicing - major instrument, minor instrument, learning vocal music - alone in a practice room on top of all the academic work that all other Humanities majors had to take, the ones for my degree and the two mandatory performance groups and people asking me to accompany them - I was in demand because I was an efficient rehearsal piano player and a good sight reader.   AND I TAUGHT A FEW LESSONS FOR MONEY WHILE I WAS IN SCHOOL.

I wasn't a theater major always on self-display or some bull shit putting words on paper major who had time for that stuff. I didn't spend a lot of my time talking to people and trying to impress them, there wasn't time for that. 

 

One thing, if someone tells me they're thinking of majoring in music, unless they're really willing to go through what you have to and not have any guarantee you'll ever be able to support yourself with it, better to major in something else.   I wouldn't recommend theater "arts".  It leaves too many who take that route as stupid as "communications" or psych majors.

Gerald Clayton, Sachel Vasandani - Dusk Baby

 

 

Gerald Clayton, piano, composition

Sachel Vasandani, voice, lyrics

Dayna Stephens, sax

Joe Sanders, bass

Justin Brown, drums

Before I Continue With This Chapter - Which I Intend To Finish

CONSIDERING HOW MUCH and the extent to which so many college-credentialed Americans and those who want to be taken as smarty-pants are obsessed with demanding a proof of the existence of God that they are rather remarkably free in giving their credulity away in so many things other than that. If Sean Carroll or one of the other imaginary, would-be Lords of Creation came up with a theory of everything, I would bet you that a small fraction of one percent of those who would embrace it on the basis of the meat-headed claim that it would finally dispose of God - probably why Carroll et al want them to believe they've almost got one nailed down - would begin to understand it. I'm sure I wouldn't. The many true believers in it would be as reliant on the Lords of Creation as they like to imagine medieval Catholics were reliant on the faith which they so despise - one which is largely a fiction created out of Brit anti-Catholic propaganda and a few details added by later atheists but which didn't much exist.

I wonder if any of the people who demand "prove it" would be any more open to having that proof presented to them or if they'd reject it in pretty much the same way that Trump cultists are still Covid skeptics or QAnon lunatics reject reality on an even more comprehensive basis.

I doubt one in a hundred of you guys could say what you mean by "exists," to start with. I'd have a hard time saying what that means and, unlike you, I've thought about it. So did Eddington, in fact, the next chapter in The Philosophy of Physical Science talks about it, The Concept of Existence

I find a difficulty in understanding books on philosophy because they talk a great deal about "existence", and I do not know what they mean. Existence seems to be a rather important property, because I gather that one of the main sources of division between different schools of philosophy is the question whether certain things exist or not. But I cannot even begin to understand these issues because I can find no explanation of the term "exist".

The word "existence" is , of course, familiar in everyday speech; but it does not express a uniform idea - a universally agreed principle according to which things can be divided into existing and non-existing. Differences of opinion as to whether a thing exists or not sometimes arises because the thing itself is imperfectly defined, or because the exact implications of the definition have not been grasped thus the "real existence" of electrons, aether, space, colour, may be affirmed or denied because different persons use these terms with somewhat different implication. But ambiguity of definition is not always responsible for the difference of view. Let us take something familiar, say an overdraft at a bank. No one can fail to understand precisely what that means. Is an overdraft something which exists? If the question were put to the vote, I think some would say that its existence must be accepted as a grim reality, and others would consider it illogical to concede existence to what is intrinsically a negation. But what divides the two parties is no more than a question of words. It would be absurd to divide mankind into two sects, one believing in the existence of overdrafts and the other denying their existence. The division is a question of classification, not of belief. If you tell me your own answer, I shall not learn anything new about the nature or properties of an overdraft; but I shall learn something about your usage of the term "exists" - what category of thing you intend it to cover. 

 

So, the discussion of the existence of God will probably end up convincing no one who doesn't really want a "proof of God's existence" because they don't really want one to start with, they want a reason for not choosing to believe in God, or the existence of Jesus or, from what I see from that linked comment thread, apparently really want him to not have said all the good things he did say.  

 

My choice to believe is related exactly to those things that were said by him which I think are the most radical extension of the basis of the Mosaic Law as "do to others what you would have done to you" what you do to the least among you you do to The Lord, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, if you have stuff to give it away to those who aren't going to pay you back (I suspect that among the hard sayings concerning economic justice and charity are the real motives for rejecting him).  It has nothing to do with any proof, you prove things about numbers and imaginary lines, shapes and three dimensional things you have in your mind, those kind of things are the only ones you get that tight a level of argument for that it can be even optimistically called "proof".  Proof is another word that's used loosely, "proof" generally has nothing to do with what we choose to believe.  The wider issue of life is covered by the concept of truth as opposed to lies, accepting the truth or choosing to believe what isn't true or being duped by slick talkers into choosing to believe them.  The media that you guys worship enough to believe should be allowed to lie with impunity because Madison and a bunch of slave owning rich, white men told you to make no laws restricting, does that all the time.  Yet you don't have sufficient concern about that to prevent that peddling of lies by law.  

America's college-credentialed class would seem to have a now and then, off and on, very slippery and corrupt relationship with the concept of proof and the truth except on that one issue covered by the challenge to "prove it." 

If you read the things I posted the last week or so, you will come to a passage from Jeremiah which gave a solid means of knowing God, not surprisingly one covered even more radically in The Gospel by the Jesus you deny existed, to do justice, to do economic justice, to do right by the least among us is to know God.  I don't need more than that to have full confidence, especially as atheism seems to so regularly come up with reasons to do evil, especially among its "ethicists" who always seem to be coming up with lists of people it's OK to kill and others who want to convince us that science says it's best to do nothing for those we really don't want to help.  Things like that led to me rejecting atheism. 

You know, in all of the history of Western Thought and that elsewhere, in science, for example among all the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, in string and membrane theory, in all of the varying interpretations of natural selection, psychology, sociology, etc. etc. etc. etc. atheists and agnostics and "skeptics" and those "free thinkers" (who so regularly, as materialistic determinists deny the possibility of free thought) believe all kinds of things that are and were not true and delusional and not infrequently self-contradicting.  Apparently the quality of your belief is no guarantee of it producing reliable, durable knowledge.  Maybe you should fix atheism, scientism and materialism, I think your demands for "proof" are a distraction from the problems with your own faith.

Yes, Tiffany Cross - Frmr. Speaker Boehner Slammed in ‘Dear John’ Letter

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Bernard Farrell - The Wedding Anniversary

The Wedding Anniversary

Drama On One presents the world premiere of a brand spanking new comedy by Bernard Farrell.

Jack and Deirdre are happily married ... well sort of. After a little tension creeps in (on whether Leixlip is a centre of medical excellence or not) ... they decide to ... surprise each another!

Stephen Brennan was Jack

Deirdre was played by Janet Moran

Peter Gaynor played Malcolm, the Counsellor

Venetia Bowe was Tracy

Johnny Thunder was played by Bryan Murray

Sound engineer Mark Mc Grath

Produced by Kevin Reynolds

If I ever had the misfortune to fall in love again at my age one of the first things I'd have to make sure is that he didn't care about anniversaries, birthdays, and I'd make him promise never to plan any kind of a surprise and especially a surprise party for me. There's a reason they figure so heavily in comedies of misfortune.

I'd try the Podcast button at the link, it's the most reliable way to listen and it gives you access to other plays if this one isn't for you.

 

The Modest (and correct) Claims Of Eddington Are Contradicted In The Totalizing Ideology Of Materialistic Scientism Which Is The Faith Of Modernism

IN THIS LITTLE STUDY of one of Eddington's lectures about just what the most accomplished field of modern science has achieved my motive is to point out just how limited that very impressive accomplishment is and what it consists of. And their limits.

 

Other sciences, chemistry, biology, are often said to rely entirely on what physics has shown and that's true to some extent but I would bet that in their study of complex molecules and what they do, what might be effectively the more infinitely complex study of living organisms, their bodies, their lives, their species, genera,etc. their environment, etc. what is of most pressing interest to theoretical and even particle physics is probably of next to no importance.

I suspect that the ideology of materialist reductionism that has a faith that everything real is reducible to the smallest unit is wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out there is no single smallest unit, as a start. Previously and as recently as the turn of the 20th century that neo-atomist ideology was a philosophical-ideological position that even some of the finest people working as scientists and philosophers of science didn't hold (you could go look at Ludwig Boltzmann and his opponents for that). From how the science developed it's only reasonable to believe that what they study is real, though I doubt their view of those tiny bits of matter-energy is as nearly complete and comprehensive as they like to believe it is, but I think the higher levels dealing with larger objects and plants and creatures not really well thought of as objects are as real, and the physical aspects of those studies are as real as the presumably more enduring realities of electrons, protons, and even their smaller constituent particles which are, as well, not relevant to the most important aspects of human life. I think our material culture would have been quite different, no doubt our use of electronics and some of the aspects of the use of things like X-rays in medicine, etc. would have been different if physics had not developed in the way it did. If atomic theory had not been developed we would certainly not have developed nuclear weapons and nuclear power which may yet kill us all, for example. But if our material culture had not developed the way it did human lives and cultures would still have most of its pressing problems to fix else we all perish. I kind of think that our species surviving and living a decent life is what we are more properly concerned with than the speculations of recent and, pretty much, totally theoretical physics and cosmology. I think that the culture of college-credentialed lefties and even many of the vestiges of traditional American style liberalism - NOT the same thing as 18th century European style liberalism - has been rotted out by being distracted from what it should be doing.

It was one of the most shocking things going online and being exposed to the thinking of college credentialed people, unedited, in such large numbers just how daffy some of the most conceited of those people are. That the "new atheism" came in with the attacks of 911 opened up the problem that ideological atheism, which as it developed is intrinsically tied to the atomic theory first invented with the motive of promoting atheism in ancient Greece and India and, no doubt elsewhere and the reductionist materialism that arose with the human invention of scientific methods in the late medieval period and gained steam in the miscalled "enlightenment". I will admit I was also kind of shocked at how superficial a level of thinking so much of the contemporary culture consists of. I think that is related to the nihilism of materialism but I won't go into that again right now.

And it is so practically counterproductive. I had to conclude from what the new atheists said that their obsessive hatred of religion and God and, especially Christianity was more important to so many of these college credentialed people that they really had no interest in winning elections and establishing the egalitarian democracy that they pretended to care about, otherwise, why would they so gratuitously alienate so many voters over totally unimportant and largely make believe offenses. I did come to the conclusion that that was a major aspect of a larger, overriding aspect of class and, to some extent, regional snobbery which did nothing to expand the Democratic voter base, either. But it was one my reading and interest helped me to see through not long into my reading of the unedited thoughts of such college-credentialed snobs. My long study of the relationship of Darwinism with eugenics in opposition to the post-WWII lie that those had nothing to do with each other, and as soon as I started reading the primary literature, the relationship of Darwinism to Nazism was a branch of the same study in self-defeating lefty idiocy which was one of the results of observing American lefties unedited, unfiltered thinking.

Life is complicated, I think too complicated to be dealt with comprehensively by science and certainly not reducible in the way that atheist-materialist-scientism insists it is. Even if their hunch is true, human science has certainly not come anywhere close to a beginning of demonstrating that, though even now it is the absolutist faith of most atheists that it is known to be true and that they have come close to knowing the non-mind of their no-god, and, as it turns out, that mind is not expressed in the absolutes that would be necessary to produce the absolute material base of everything but in the mathematics of vague probability.

I needed to get that off my chest, the ever calm and not frustrated Eddington continued with a vegan - and sheep - unfriendly example of very real human experiences that science can't begin to touch.

We shall refer to this abstraction as the mathematical concept of structure, or briefly as the concept of structure. Since the structure abstracted from whatever posses the structure can be exactly specified by mathematical formulae, our knowledge of structure is communicable, whereas much of our knowledge is incommunicable. I cannot convey to you the vivid knowledge which I have of my own sensation and emotions. There is no way of comparing my sensation of the taste of mutton with your sensation of the taste of mutton. I can only know what it tastes like to me, and you can only know what it tastes like to you. But if we are both looking at a landscape, although there is no way of comparing our visual sensations as such, we can compare the structures of our respective visual impressions of the landscape. It is possible for a group of sensations in my mind to have the same structure of a group of sensations in your mind. It is possible also that a group of entities which are not sensations in anyone's mind, associated together by relations of which we can form no conception, may have this same structure. We can therefore have structural knowledge of that which is outside of everyone's mind. This knowledge will consist of the same kind of assertions as those which are made about the physical universe in the modern theories of mathematical physics. For strict expression of physical knowledge, a mathematical form is essential, because that is the only way in which we can confine its assertions to structural knowledge. Every path to knowledge of what lies beneath the structure is then blocked by an impenetrable mathematical symbol.

Physical science consists of purely structural knowledge so that we know only the structure of the universe which it describes. This is not a conjecture as to the nature of physical knowledge; it is preciesly what physical knowledge as formulated in present-day theory states itself to be. . .

I'll break in here to point out that Eddington is not only saying but admitting that there are real and important limits in what science deals with for the motive of coming up with knowledge of some things which can then be communicated with fewer ambiguities to other scientists. In that he is recapitulating the development of scientific methods, the measurement of closely observed phenomena in order to come up with desired, though inevitably limited seemingly objective knowledge of them - leaving aside the fact that the act of observation introduces an inevitably subjective activity within that, not to mention those coming into it through measurement - perhaps the uncertainty that modern physics finds comes into their activities through observation and measurement are them coming up against the hard fact that what they do is not totally objective. I would point out that it also means that though they might agree on everything, their agreement on what they observe and measure can never be total no more than the photons that someone is receiving when they look at the landscape he posits will be the same one coming in at the same angle will be to the person standing next to him. Even the closest science is only held to be uniform, one person to another, in so far as they agree to agree on that. That's not a problem if they are careful not to try to use their agreed to abstractions to make stuff up, especially stuff made up out of ideological or other motives and scientists have been doing that from almost the start. Today, especially in the theoretical branches of science, it's totally out of hand, entire branches of science and especially the pseudo-sciences coming up with stuff that is not observed at all, the numbers being more imaginary than the square root of negative one is considered to be.

In fundamental investigations the conception of group-structure appears quite explicitly as the starting point; and nowhere in the subsequent development do we admit material not derived from group-structure.

The fact that structural knowledge can be detached from knowledge of the entities forming the structure gets over the difficulty of understanding how it is possible to conceive a knowledge of anything which is not part of our own minds. So long as the knowledge is confined to assertions of structure, it is not tied down to any particular realm of content. It will be remembered that we have separated the question of the nature of knowledge from the question of assurance of its truth. We are not here considering how it is possible to be assured of the truth of knowledge relating to something outside of our minds; we are occupied with the prior question how it is possible to make any kind of assertions about things outside our minds, which (whether true or false) has a definable meaning.

I would go on to say that here Eddington is being quite unrealistic about what science in reality is because science is only what scientists say it is at any given point in any given area. Sometimes it is as careful and precise and modest in its assertions as Eddington, rightly, says it SHOULD be, in reality it is far less true now than it was even when Eddington gave this lecture in 1938, during which time science was chock full of racist, class-driven (especially in Britain) notions of the application of natural selection to the human population, eugenics. I don't know what Eddington thought of eugenics but it was (and remains) firmly embedded in science. In 1938 scientists who had arrived at a professional agreement on eugenics due to their total belief in the reality of natural selection were looking hopefully on the Nazi's applications of it, Charles Davenport and other American scientists were fully on board and cooperating with the Nazis. Yet the existence of natural selection was known only in the communications of scientists, it has never been observed except in the most ambiguous of self-interested assertion by scientists and, when their claims are rigorously considered, major flaws in their claims arise in what they left out. It is hardly a rigorous example of the scientific method that Eddington claimed for his branch of science along with his modest claims for it.

I think what Eddington also has done here is to bring modern science back to the ambitions of Descartes and those in his generation to give the study of nature the same level of agreed to finality that can be achieved in pure mathematics, the level of mathematics that consists of tight proofs of claims about numbers and objects. I have pointed out any number of times that there is something extremely interesting in the fact that the only things for which human beings have that level of tight proof, universally agreed on - when those who can understand it understand the claims and have tested them out - are for things which are not known to exist anywhere but in the imagination of human beings. But the limits of what can be done in that way were almost instantly ignored in claiming the total potency of the methods of science to make it a totalizing system of ideology, economics, politics, etc. Mathematics is what Thomas Hobbes, the evangelist of violent depravity, constructed his faith from, As John Wallis noted that was "the mathematics from which he takes his courage" but which he understood certainly far less than the Reverend Wallis did. Karl Marx, in his second evaluation of natural selection - after he started having qualms that it was not merely the boon to the promotion of atheism and materialism that made him first recommend it to Engels - noted that natural selection was a reproduction of the British class system, turning Malthus on its head to assert that his economics is inverted and applied to all of nature. Marx correctly noted that natural selection is a recapitulation of Hobbes' "war of all against all." If you want to see how right he was, read Haeckel's The History of Creation to see just how depraved and totalizing a claim it was, Haeckel declared Darwinism to assure the total victory of his own materialist monism, apparently with no objection from Darwin who endorsed that book as science in the highest possible terms.

At the same time Eddington was giving his lectures, physicists and chemists in a number of other countries were about to embark on the application of recent physics to produce atomic bombs based on the same science that Eddington had collaborated in. He would certainly have suspected they were doing that. I am not that close a student of the Quaker, Eddington, to have any idea what he thought of that as he gave his lectures.

Kurt Rosenwinkle - Zhivago

 

Kurt Rosenwinkel – guitar

Mark Turner – tenor saxophone

Ben Street – bass

Jeff Ballard – drums