EEVblog #833 - Mailbag

[Fungus]

I just don't buy that some quantum fluctuation in a multiverse resulted in a singularity that expanded into everything we see.  That is an explanation, but the scientific proof of that theory is just as speculative as a creation of the universe by God.

Maybe so. Maybe the whole universe visible universe is just a simulation in a computer, like the movie "Matrix".

If you tell the the universe was created by A God, I can't disprove it, and neither can anybody else.

(Proving negatives is impossible, that's why the burden of proof is on the people making the claim, not on the people who don't believe in that claim).

The part I have a problem with is that it was created by the god described in the Christian Bible.

Basing your life on The Bible makes absolutely no sense to me. Basing your life on Harry Potter seems sensible by comparison.

Further, am I to believe that atoms ordered themselves into the first cell?

Not in a single giant step, no.

Am I to believe that the first cell just appeared?

See above.

Am I to believe that evolution shaped the course of biological history?  That by the power of natural selection (i.e. death) the complexity of life was advanced far beyond the complexity of a single cell?  On what basis?

The theory of evolution is beautifully elegant and easy to understand. That's what makes it so compelling.

The fossil record exists - we can see parts of evolution happening.

We know about DNA, we can see mutations and adaptations happening. The genome project has pretty much confirmed evolution as fact now.

(Remember: Darwin formed the theory long before we knew about DNA. He had no idea how it happened. Then, bang! DNA was discovered and we had the mechanism. It matched the theory perfectly. That's science in action...)

Science has so far fallen short of an adequate explanation for me on these questions.

 

I'd think that engineers could recognize that highly improbable things do happen.  But they usually happen on purpose.

Nope. Hardly anything in science happens on purpose. It's just vast numbers of atoms hitting each other randomly.

Things happening on purpose is engineering, not science.

The other particular question is, "why Jesus?"  To this I'd say the major influence on me was reading the new testament.  Yes, our earliest fragments of the new testament are dated some 30 years after Jesus died.  And the majority of the new testament wasn't written by people who knew Jesus, but by people who knew people who knew Jesus.  But the claims written down are incredible.  The resurrection of Jesus is frankly an outlandish claim.

The resurrection wasn't in those first fragments. It was added much later and not included in the "official" Bible until the fifth century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark#The_ending_of_the_gospel_of_Mark

Also very interesting is what the Quran has to say about the crucifixion. The Quran says the whole thing was faked:

(Surah 4)

157. That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah.;- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not:-

158. Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise;-

http://www.wright-house.com/religions/islam/Quran/4-women.php#155

After all, all the Jews or Romans had to do was to produce Jesus' body and the whole thing would have been settled.

Either that, or ... the entire thing is a work of fiction. It didn't happen. There's not a single piece of solid evidence that it isn't a subversive 1st century novel that people chose to believe as real events.

Remember: There was no TV or Internet back than. Any minstrel could walk into any tavern and sing a song about a man named Jesus.

Do it enough times and that person takes life, eg.: King Arthur, Robin Hood, etc.

I humbly ask you to read the new testament if you have never done so.

I've read it.

The great Roman census? Never happened. Herod's killing of all the males under 2 years old? Never happened. Tell me: If all the actual verifiable claims in the New Testament turn out to be false, why would the non-verifiable claims be truth?

What about all the gospels that never made it into the final edit? There's a lot of them. What makes the other gospels any less valid than the four official ones?

Why did Peter's Gospel not make it in? Wasn't he the most important disciple?

What about the Gospel of Thomas where young Jesus uses his magic powers to kill other children, then when the parents come to Joseph's house to complain he turns them all blind (a variation of this story is also in the Quran so it has independent verification...)

I don't accept the claim that it is just like the Quran.  I've read some of it also, and it's a different book about a different set of beliefs.

Folk tales are like that. Look at how many different Christian religions there are. Imagine if the Catholics and Baptists both ignored their copies of The Bible and only passed it along by word of mouth for 200 years. After that time they both write a Bible. My Guess? You'd have two completely different books at the end of it, even though they were both based on the same original text.

nb. Yes, both of those books would be an example of evolution. selection works for ideas as well as biology, each person in the chain selects the interpretation of the story they like best and repeats that altered version to the next generation. Eventually the story is distorted.

(If you've never played [url-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers]Chinese Whispers[/url], you should. You'll be shocked at how distorted a message can get with just a single phrase and four or five people passing it along).

[Fungus]

... a majority of athiests/agnostics (or whatever label you prefer).  And IME, they have all made up their minds and are impervious to any discussion that doesn't agree with their beliefs.

Absolute bollocks.

The ONE thing you can definitely say about somebody who labels themselves as "Atheist", the ONLY piece of information that label tells you about them, is that they are wide open to persuasion.

[AlxDroidDev]

Am I too late for the religion-bashing party?

Yes, you are too late.

That's too bad. I have good story of when I made a christian question her own beliefs.

You sat down to read The Bible together?

Or possibly made her watch Cosmos with Neil Tyson.

hahahaha! Not quite!

I asked her why there were so many versions of the bible. And she used exactly the word I was hoping she would: "interpretation". So I suggested that "God's word" isn't absolute, but dependent on a man's - the translator - interpretation of it, so that specific definition of god was the result of a single man's interpretation.

The I moved on to ask her why there were so many christian religions, again, using the same argument: any christian definition of god isn't absolute, but biased by the religion. Therefore there isn't god... there is only religion. I even mentioned Joseph Smith, and how he single handed founded a christian religion (mormonism) based on his own book, on his own interpretation of things.

When she said that the god is the same among all christian religions, I used a dirty trick: some Socrates syllogism.  They presume that all christian religions follow only one and the same god, but in each religion their god expect different things from them (like not ingesting caffeine, or that women cannot wear trousers [yes, this is a thing in some churches in Brazil], not drinking alcohol, and the most bizarre things). Therefore, it cannot be the same god in all these churches -> there are many gods or no god at all.

To knock her out, I went full logic on her: isn't god omnipresent, omnipowerful, benevolent, and all that shit? That, by definition, is completely incompatible with the world we have, where there are evil people, pain, suffering, famine, misery, war, and so on.

She tried to argue that not everyone has "accepted" Christ in their heart (I hate when they say this). To counteract that, I asked her if starving children in Somalia will have a chance to go to heaven, even if they've never been introduced to her christian god - therefore not accepct christ or anyone, and all they've known all their life is war, disease and misery. What kind of god would be so fucked up to allow a kid to starve just because some preacher hasn't been to their country?

I am quite sure she didn't sleep that night and might have missed a mass (or maybe 5). I thought of suggesting her to read some Kiekergaard, so she would have her faith restored, but I didn't bother. The world doesn't need anyone else thinking more about god than about man.

[retrolefty]

To reply or not to reply?  I've not posted here often, but this topic got my attention, albeit a little late.  After reading 12 pages of mixed opinions, I guess I'll throw mine in.

While I agree almost completely with @jonw0224, i have never entered into any (public) discussions of religion in this forum.  It is quite obviously owned, operated, and populated with a majority of athiests/agnostics (or whatever label you prefer).  And IME, they have all made up their minds and are impervious to any discussion that doesn't agree with their beliefs. So be it.  The Aths/Ags love Religion Bashing as an online sport. I just find it boring and off-topic.   

 That is really not saying much as the the same behavior can be seen by many here on many subject posts, technical or otherwise.

[Richard Crowley]

That is really not saying much as the the same behavior can be seen by many here on many subject posts, technical or otherwise.

No question.  But you don't see as much sport-bashing in other subjects (save, perhaps Politics).  Which is the reason for the long-time caution about discussion of politics and/or religion.

[miguelvp]

For being a self organized conglomerate or potential fields that interact at many field levels with random experimental changes that help us interact and manipulate with other conglomerates around us to our conglomerate advantage that are driven by a highly parallel state machines that also self organized we sure make a lot of noise about what is real and what is not.

At the quantum level there is no real matter, just potentials and interactions that resemble music more than any other metaphor that we can use.

Newton, Descartes and the whole mechanical movement could explain a lot, but life is more than that, we are not just mere machines but we are systems that form part of other systems. All interconnected at the quantum level with fields that have tendencies.

But it's hard to accept what reality is because our senses and perceptions experiences solids as solids and objects when it's really just fields that are just pure math with no reality outside our perception of what is around us.

There are probably a lot of other systems that we can't interact with, no more than being able to play with your own shadow.

Trying to figure out why a tree gives so much fruit when only a few if any will grow as a tree doesn't make sense at the machine level because it's a waste of energy, but it does make sense when you take the whole forest and animals that depend and collaborate on that system.
Edit: as the expression, can't see the forest for the trees

Newtonian thinking holds us at bay because it can explain a lot and very well, but it tramples our understanding of seeing past the machines we use as metaphors of our surroundings.

Life is not condensable and life does feel itself, as a human being at the end of the day, I do feel insulted by being reduced to a machine, a clock or a system, it's the same story just using different terms.

All of the above just a big paraphrasing of the movie mindwalk, which changed my life more than any other movie out there.

As for Religion is more than just Gods and stories passed verbally from generations and highly distorted and manipulated, it's a system and a set of neural net of teachings of what worked for some and didn't for others, but explained to the uneducated with embellishments and magic or whatever works for them.

Religions have more to do with the interactions than the actual dogma, but with our perception is hard to see how everything is connected.

I do find Hinduism fascinating even if I didn't study it fully. And the math behind music is so close to the quantum reality that is scary, I guess the self similarity of us being just waves and fields interacting in harmony like the chords of a note having a distinct feeling of the separate notes.

creation/destruction is the core of reality, but we do lack of good metaphors to explain how things really are because we are limited by our own confines and it doesn't help that we box things in units instead of looking at the whole because it's way beyond of what we are capable.
Edit: by creation and destruction I mean systems, not energy, just transformations that are perceived as creation and destruction.

Anyways atheist, believer whatever religion, we are all part of it all and the interactions are what makes life interesting.

Edit: BTW that movie MindWalk is boring but fascinating at the same time, no right answer at the end, just makes you think and see things in a different way. Its probably the only movie that I watched more than 10 times, the rest only once, but I get more and more out of this one. But I bet 99.9% of the population will fall asleep before 1/4th of the movie.

Edit2: and sorry for spoiling the movie, but it's been out for 25 years and I bet the book is better but I didn't read it (yet, I'm not into books past technical reference manuals although I did like to read H.P. Lovecraft a lot when I was younger but who has the time anymore?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turning_Point_(book)
BTW, the movie is based on the book, so probably totally different, but I do love the movie, didn't read the book.
Written by:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra
I probably should read all of his books.

Edit3: yup, not done yet, just wanted to say that to me what it counts at the end is all about connections, relationships and interactions, that holds true for believers and non-believers because it's what nature is all about. nature as in the metaphysical meaning that encompasses all of it, and you can't deny (well of course you can and I'm sure some will) that there is purpose behind it all.

[daqq]

...Based on my knowledge of science, the universe had a beginning.  If it had a beginning, there was some cause to the beginning....
Science has so far fallen short of an adequate explanation for me on these questions.

Well, using god(s) to explain beginnings is not an explanation - you are just outsourcing the question.

I as a human being have a limited scope of knowledge, limited powers over my immediate environment, limited scope of perception. I can construct devices to extend this, to a point. Even though I'm pretty complicated my powers are fairly limited, my life fairly finite, mortal, I can die tomorrow and the Universe won't notice. But based on your assessment I had to have been planned and created with an intent in mind.

Now, let's compare man with god(s) - an all powerful, immortal entity, all knowing, with a complexity FAR greater than that of a man, capable of creating a Universe at a whim. Yet somehow he doesn't have a problem with more humble beginnings - just existing, or just starting to exist from nothing or randomly. He could have been created by someone/something else, but, who created that fellow?

Using god as an explanation for complexity or origins of the Universe, life is not an answer - you are just outsourcing the issues to someone else.

[mikron]

Is there even a point in trying to have an intelligent discussion about irrational ideas such as gods and miracles?

[Fungus]

Is there even a point in trying to have an intelligent discussion about irrational ideas such as gods and miracles?

If you live in a country where the majority of people believe those irrational ideas, including their presidents and the people who set the policies, then I'd say yes. Keep the debate visible, no matter how silly it seems, no matter how much of a jerk it makes you look in public ("Why can't you respect the other guy's personal beliefs, dude?")

We wouldn't accept strong personal belief in astrology, Ouija boards or Poseidon in our political leaders and schoolteachers, why should we accept Christianity?

It's also possible to look things like The Bible, pick out the things that can be verified and check them out. That's a factual debate, nothing irrational there.

[AlxDroidDev]

If you live in a country where the majority of people believe those irrational ideas, including their presidents and the people who set the policies, then I'd say yes. Keep the debate visible, no matter how silly it seems, no matter how much of a jerk it makes you look in public ("Why can't you respect the other guy's personal beliefs, dude?")

^^^^ That!

[mikerj]

If you live in a country where the majority of people believe those irrational ideas, including their presidents and the people who set the policies, then I'd say yes. Keep the debate visible, no matter how silly it seems, no matter how much of a jerk it makes you look in public ("Why can't you respect the other guy's personal beliefs, dude?")

The thing about personal beliefs is that they should generally be kept personal.

As the joke goes: Religion is like a penis.  It's perfectly fine thing to have, but if you wave it in my face we have a problem.

[Fungus]

As the joke goes: Religion is like a penis.  It's perfectly fine thing to have, but if you wave it in my face we have a problem.

Christians would be the first people getting in people's faces if we tried to make Ouija boards part of the school curriculum.

[Brumby]

... and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be alone.

[jonw0224]

Fungus,

Thanks for taking time to reply.  As this is off topic for an Electronics Forum, I won't go on and on, but I'll address some points you made.

"Not in a single giant step, no".  I suppose if I told you a purple African Elephant flew out of my rear end, you'd be more convinced if I followed that up with, "well, he didn't come out in one giant step".

I know well the difference in science and engineering.  Everything in a scientific experiment is on purpose.  The explanation of what happened has a purpose.  Why am I to conclude the results don't have some purpose, even if I don't know what that purpose is?

I'm going to attempt for my next project to just throw components together and hope something useful eventually comes out.  I don't know biology, but I do know math.  And it would take a tremendous amount of time for me to come up with anything useful that way.  You can claim evolution is verified by the discovery of DNA, but I'm not aware of any evolutionary theory that describe how DNA came together in the first place.  Much less the replicating mechanism, the protein construction, etc, etc.  Updated evolutionary theory merely explains how small changes in DNA can result in small changes in an organism.  The assumption is the changes add to make something entirely new (or result in death).  The theory does nothing to explain origins, because that would be chemicals coming together randomly until life happened.  It would be the same as if I threw components together randomly and hoped eventually I'd get something.  And the probability of that happening is just so near zero, it would take a universe of universes for us to expect a single simple cell to spontaneously happen just one time.  But you have to have a DNA replicating living cell before evolution can even enter the discussion.  Therefore, science is still short of an explanation of life.  I choose to believe an explanation based on a creator, because the world doesn't look random to me, it looks engineered.  (read Darwin's Doubt by Stephen Myers, or at least start with my obscure review of his book to see if you'd be interested http://jonw0224.weebly.com/blog/darwins-doubt)

Next, you became a Bible scholar.  I'm not a Bible scholar, but I can read the short ending of Mark (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2016:1-7), and the resurrection is in the short ending my friend.  On the events that "didn't happen" (e.g. Herod's killings and the census), am I to suppose that anything in history for which I can only find one source recording it's occurrence did not happen?  Anything written and not collaborated by other writings as untrue?  I think we've both been around the Internet long enough to know that the presence or absence of collaboration says little about the truthfulness of a statement, just that someone else out there agrees or not.  I think collaboration would make an argument for truth stronger, but the lack of collaboration does not make something false by default.

I could continue to address the gospel of Peter, Thomas, and the Quran, and what makes them suspect sources on a historical Jesus, but I've flown off topic enough here.  Maybe I should have ignored all of this and kept quiet, but I felt keeping quiet was more wrong than right.  I'm not expecting anyone to hail me as right or convert to Christianity due to reading a few posts on the Internet, but I felt I should speak up rather than watch the bashing silently.

-Jonathan

[mtdoc]

  I don't know biology, but I do know math.  And it would take a tremendous amount of time for me to come up with anything useful that way.  You can claim evolution is verified by the discovery of DNA, but I'm not aware of any evolutionary theory that describe how DNA came together in the first place.

You're right. You don't know biology!

BTW, Accepting the FACT of biological evolution does not rule out belief in a god/creator,etc - despite what the fundamentalist Christians (or overzealous athiests) would have you believe. 

Too many people spend way too much time trying to tell others what to believe and impose their belief system on others. The number of people killed, tortured and enslaved due to religious zealotry (Christian and Islamic in particular) just staggers the mind.

[Fungus]

I'm not aware of any evolutionary theory that describe how DNA came together in the first place.

OK, but the leap of logic from that statement to: "Therefore it must have been the god of the Christan Bible" is way bigger than any of the evolutionary steps you're complaining about.

I'm going to attempt for my next project to just throw components together and hope something useful eventually comes out.  I don't know biology, but I do know math.  And it would take a tremendous amount of time for me to come up with anything useful that way.

Sure, but it wouldn't take you very long at all if what you're doing is throwing sticky colored balls together trying to achieve a particular combination of colors and there are trillions and trillions and trillions of you doing it simultaneously.

(How many atoms are there in the universe?)

[Fungus]

Too many people spend way too much time trying to tell others what to believe and impose their belief system on others. The number of people killed, tortured and enslaved due to religious zealotry (Christian and Islamic in particular) just staggers the mind.

How many people are being made miserable right now by other people telling them they're shameful, deviant and that they can "pray away the gay" at special camps?

If they're really lucky they'll be shown pictures of naked men while receiving electroshocks as therapy. Not adults either, teenagers.

All in the name of The Bible.

(But hey, personal beliefs are harmless, right? People should be allowed to believe whatever they want and I'm the one being a jerk here...)

[jonw0224]

mtdoc,

I'm not saying I don't believe in evolutionary biology.  Just that in regards to origins, if doesn't matter, because evolution can't happen on living things when they don't yet exist.  Evolutionary biology answers the wrong question and that's my point.

fungus,

"(how many atoms are there in the universe?)."  If you read my book review, I spend most of my time trying to put a number on it.  Here's the link again: http://jonw0224.weebly.com/blog/darwins-doubt.  Take it for what it is, the musings of an amateur, but I think we're all there since this isn't a topic of our expertise.  And, I agree, it's a huge leap from believing in a creator and believing in the God of Christianity.  Also a huge leap towards denial of a creator.  But life is a series of steps isn't it?

-Jonathan

[miguelvp]

Too many people spend way too much time trying to tell others what to believe and impose their belief system on others. The number of people killed, tortured and enslaved due to religious zealotry (Christian and Islamic in particular) just staggers the mind.

Yup, non religious countries are way better at it.

As for people telling others what to believe or not to believe, the song Revolution by the Beatles comes to mind.

[Fungus]

I'm going to attempt for my next project to just throw components together and hope something useful eventually comes out.  I don't know biology, but I do know math.  And it would take a tremendous amount of time for me to come up with anything useful that way.

Sure, but it wouldn't take you very long at all if what you're doing is throwing sticky colored balls together trying to achieve a particular combination of colors and there are trillions and trillions and trillions of you doing it simultaneously.

And even if we do go with electronics components, I can imagine some useful circuit building blocks would appear if a few trillion of us sat down with components that had magnetic legs and threw them together randomly. RC filter? Easy. Constant current LED driver? Not difficult.

This op-amp (from an LM324) is a bit more complex but certainly plausible:



It's just math, and people tend to vastly underestimate the number of events going on all around us.

[Fungus]

I'm not saying I don't believe in evolutionary biology.  Just that in regards to origins, if doesn't matter, because evolution can't happen on living things when they don't yet exist.

Sure it can.

A certain group of atoms might be more stable than another group under large temperature fluctuations.

If we start with equal amounts of both then something happens to change the daily temperature variation in the environment then one group will be favored over the other.

But none of that matters. Even if we give you detailed diagrams of what went on you can still say "Yes, but god designed it that way", can't you?

And then we're back to the real problem with your belief, that it's unfalsifiable. If the only angle you ever look at your belief from is its unfalsifiability then you're doing it wrong.

ie. You'll get the wrong answers whenever you look at the history of The Bible, Evolution, or whatever. Every single thing can be explained by god (eg. God was guiding men when they chose the gospels or God was guideng them when they translated the books to English) but it's a non-answer. It answers nothing, it's an empty statement.

If God is the creator of everything then who created God? (obviously somebody really clever, right...?) "Turtles all the way down"

[Fungus]

...watch Cosmos with Neil Tyson.

I have to say I'm in two minds over that one.

I love the original but I'm not a fan of Tyson. Should I watch it or not?

[jonw0224]

Fungus,

My belief is totally falsifiable.  And bring me some evidence that falsifies it instead of making mere assertions and conjectures ("certain groups of atoms might be more stable?"), and I'll change my mind.  Thanks,

-Jonathan

[retrolefty]

Fungus,

My belief is totally falsifiable.  And bring me some evidence that falsifies it instead of making mere assertions and conjectures ("certain groups of atoms might be more stable?"), and I'll change my mind.  Thanks,

-Jonathan

 I don't think falsifiability means what you think it means, but maybe I'm wrong about that. Ones, with the belief in God, need to provide examples of what kind of evidence(s) would convince or prove to them that their God might not exist.

 How could one prove to you without you giving examples or other criteria of the proof you would require to drop your faith in God?  I might not believe in God simply because I've seen no evidence that proves to me the he/she exists, but I'm open to new evidence that I myself might come up with or that others bring up or share.

 As an engineering type, I believe in lots of things but can't say I have total faith in anything. I believe the sun will rise again tomorrow but not because of any kind of faith, rather just personal experience and learning some about gravity and orbital relationships between celestial objects has given me the evidence for my belief.

 

[Groucho2005]

...watch Cosmos with Neil Tyson.

I have to say I'm in two minds over that one.

I love the original but I'm not a fan of Tyson. Should I watch it or not?

Tyson's narration may not be to everyone's liking but I think he did a great job with this one. Have a look at the reviews on IMDB, they might help you make up your mind.