Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 129

Can science address singularities?

Things like the beginning of time? This open access paper doesn’t fill us with confidence but the basic idea is fun:

One of the major issues in general relativity that separates it from other descriptions of the universe, like quantum physics, is the existence of singularities . Singularities are points that when mathematically described give an infinite value and suggest areas of the universe where the laws of physics would cease to exist — i.e. points at the beginning of the universe and at the center of black holes…

The authors used the tools of QFT to construct a mathematical object that can signal the presence of singularities in experimentally measurable quantities. This object, which they have named the “functional winding number” is non-zero in the presence of singularities and vanishes in their absence.

This approach has revealed that certain singularities predicted theoretically do not affect quantities that can in principle be measured experimentally, and therefore remain harmless mathematical constructs.

“If our formalism survived scientific scrutiny and turned out to be the correct approach, it would suggest the existence of a very deep physical principle, so the choices of physical variables are rather unimportant,” Casadio concludes. “This could be consequential for our understanding of physics, even beyond the subject of singularities.”

SciencePOD, “A quantum approach to a singularity problem” at Phys.org (December 10, 2021)

So, from their perspective, science can address singularities by invoking “a very deep physical principle.” Like God?

Certainly not randomness.

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Is this the Princeton you used to respect?

Today:

Journalist Abigail Shrier spoke to Princeton University students at a private event on Wednesday, discussing everything from free speech and academic freedom to gender ideology and parental rights.

The talk was held at an off-campus venue, the location of which was revealed solely to RSVP’d guests just a few hours before the event due to “threats and harassment” organizers said were leveled against Shrier and student groups co-hosting the lecture.

Matthew Wilson, “Conservative journalist’s Princeton talk given in secret location as students protest, denounce event” at The College Fix (December 10, 2021)

Abigail Shrier is the author of Irreversible Damage (2021). Trans-activists don’t like it. So no one else at Princeton can hear what she has to say except in secret.

Threats? Harassment? And the local bullies were not rounded up and expelled?

Forget John Nash (surely an unperson now):

The new Woke U is more like Bret Weinstein’s old stamping grounds (utterly forgettable now except for the spectacular bullying):

Will Princeton be this soon? And the graduates will be poured out on the rest of us?

Those who vote for or fund it have consented by their actions.

You may also wish to read: How naturalism rots science from the head down

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Neil Thomas on the ID debate; Everything old is new again

Longtime skeptic Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), offers reviews of three books worth looking at, especially if you are shopping for gifts for people who read books.

We can offer updates on the classics, if Thomas is our guide:

Editor’s note: We are delighted to host a series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham: “The Return to the God Paradigm,” of which this article is the second entry. Thomas is reviewing three books: Is Atheism Dead?, by Eric Metaxas; Return of the God Hypothesis, by Stephen Meyer; and God of the Details, by Cristian Bandea. Find the full series here. Professor Thomas’s recent book is Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design.

Given the often-cyclical movement of intellectual history, some views of the three authors under consideration in this series — Eric Metaxas, Stephen Meyer, and Cristian Bandea — may strike a fascinating note of historical déjà vu. By which I mean that in some cases their analyses represent a reflection (even down to verbal details) of the debate as it developed in late 18th century England when many persons, even though they frequently subscribed to that rather diluted, deistic conception of the Creator then in the ascendant (meaning a creator who no longer actively intervenes in his creation), nevertheless saw claims of atheism as being baseless and actuated by little more than “pride or affectation.”1 Similarly, Metaxas concludes that those today who ignore the cardinal principle of cause-and-effect and the increasingly theistic implications of many branches of modern science are indulging in “wilful unreason or mere affectation” (p. 3).

Many of the late 18th century intelligentsia were inclined to deny that atheism could even exist as a defensible intellectual position and were implacably opposed to the kind of sentiment that would in short order animate the pamphlet “The Necessity of Atheism” (1811), penned by the poet Shelley as an Oxford undergraduate. The majority denied the logical possibility of atheism on grounds of the complexity and fine orderliness of the world — an order which could scarcely have come about by mere unplanned chance. Hence for 18th-century intellectuals the watchword was, pace Shelley, more The Impossibility of Atheism than its claimed “necessity.” 

Neil Thomas, “Nothing New Under the Sun” at Evolution News and Science Today (December 9, 2021)

One wonders what sharp 18-century thinkers – the type of people who wrote the U.S. Constitution, for example – would have made of the multiverse, string theory, or the notion that human consciousness arose as an aid to hunting in groups.

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At Mind Matters News: Detailed brain mapping outlines what we can — and can’t — know

Your brain, fully mapped, would take up a good part of the internet. And then it would just change again:

Recently, a cubic millimetre (one millionth) of the human brain was imaged in sections via an electron microscope and found to contain 1.4 petabytes of data with respect to nerve cells, blood cells, etc. A petabyte would be like taking over 4,000 digital photos per day, over your entire life. There are only 1,440 minutes in a day. But that wasn’t the big surprise: Cells were seen that were never seen in other animals, for example,

News, “Detailed brain mapping outlines what we can — and can’t — know” at Mind Matters News (December 10, 2021)

“It is like discovering a new continent,” said Jeff Lichtman of Harvard, the senior author of the paper that presented these results. He described a menagerie of puzzling features that his team had already spotted in the human tissue, including new types of cells never seen in other animals, such as neurons with axons that curl up and spiral atop each other and neurons with two axons instead of one. These findings just scratched the surface: To search the sample completely, he said, would be a task akin to driving every road in North America.

Moniquer Brouillette, “New Brain Maps Can Predict Behaviors” at Quanta Magazine (December 6, 2021)

Takehome: Living things, even comparatively simple ones, cannot be entirely comprehended by simple measurements.

Alternatively, move on, folks. It all just sort of happened… Like there is an infinity of universes out there of which we can have no knowledge where it didn’t happen.

You may also wish to read: If computers thought like fruit flies, they could do more.

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James Tour vs. Denis Lamoureux on whether evolution is compatible with Christianity

James Tour is a chemist. Denis Lamoureux is an associate professor of science and religion at St. Joseph’s College in the University of Alberta:

You be the judge.

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Woke world destroys Darwinian evolutionary biologist

Darwinists learn the hard way:

A young evolutionary biologist (PhD, UC Santa Barbara) who did postgraduate research at Penn State, Colin Wright specializes in behavioral ecology of social insects. Like most biologists, he is trained to identify and recognize biological sex in animals as a real thing. He knows that there are some unusual cases of sex in biology, such as hermaphrodites that can self-fertilize, male seahorses that perform the role of carrying the young, and members of one sex that act in ways characteristic of the opposite sex. There are also cases in humans of ambiguous genitalia and people suffering from gender dysphoria who deserve respect and understanding. These, however, do not imply that sex is a continuum of choices where anyone can self-identify as any spot on that spectrum. Sex is a biological reality, he argues.

Boy, was he in for a surprise. When he posted on Instagram a peer-reviewed paper that highlighted the advantages that men have in sports, his post was called “hate speech” and was promptly removed.

David F. Coppedge, “Evolutionary Biologists Aghast at Cultural Wokeism” at Creation–Evolution Headlines (December 9, 2021)

Darwin might have said as much in The Descent of Man, to the acclaim of evolutionary biologists. But Colin Wright may never get tenure. He may never work in biology again unless he agrees that sex is a meaningless concept.

Those other evolutionary biologists had better get with the program and denounce him, right? Or just shut up and stay shut up.

From an old source: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

We’d be happy to help but we can only help people who think that intellectual freedom is not negotiable. It must be okay to criticize Darwin too.

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At Theology Unleashed: Philosophical objections to intelligent design

Steve Meyer, author of The Return of the God Hypothesis, and philosophy of science PhD.candidate Seth Hart face off:

Answering Claims That ID is Pseudoscience | Stephen Meyer & Seth Hart Discuss the Demarcation Problem. The demarcation remains unsolved in philosophy of science. Opinions can be found on the internet of what makes something pseudoscience rather than science with ready answers of what fits where and why. However, none of the definitions employed stand up to academic scrutiny.

Stephen Meyer is the well known author of “Darwin’s Doubt” among other books, and the head of the discovery institute. He will be discussing the demarcation problem with Seth Hart, who is currently working on a PhD which covers this topic in detail.

In this stream we will present various arguments which have been made which argue that Intelligent Design is Pseudoscience and show how they fail. What remains is to argue that ID is bad science, but that’s a scientific debate.

Here’s an intro from Evolution News and Science Today:

Also up for discussion: problems with Popperian falsification as a scientific standard, the question of whether you need to know the mechanism of design in order affirm ID, how Isaac Newton’s thinking supplies refutations of materialist accusations against ID, and much more. Arjuna, by the way, has emerged as a most valuable host for high level discussions of ultimate questions. Many thanks to him. Think of it: a Hindu moderating a conversation between two Christian philosophers about science and faith — fascinating.

Note: Re Theology Unleashed as a Hindu site. Lots of people are now finding a voice to question materialism, naturalism, physicalism, and Darwinism.

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Classic in devolution: Burrowing snakes have poor eyesight, challenging theory

The theory was that snakes evolved from extreme burrowers. But that’s not what this team found:

The ancestor of all living snakes probably had substantially better vision than present-day burrowing snakes, according to new research.

An international team of scientists — led by the Natural History Museum and the University of Plymouth — carried out the first detailed analysis of gene sequence data for any species of the so-called “blindsnakes” (Scolecophidia), a group of small-eyed burrowers.

They found that seven of the 12 genes associated with bright-light vision in most snakes and lizards species are not present in scolecophidians.

This, they say, demonstrates extensive vision gene loss over tens of millions of years of evolutionary history, similar to that which has also been observed in burrowing mammals with reduced vision.

It also challenges the hypothesis that all snakes living across the world today evolved from extreme burrowers, because the vision genes lost in scolecophidians are present in most other living snakes. The researchers say it would be extremely unlikely for such genetic deficiencies to have been reversed through evolution.

University of Plymouth, “Burrowing snakes have far worse eyesight than their ancestors” at ScienceDaily (December 9, 2021)

In short, the Darwinian assumption that something as complex as eyesight could just somehow evolve turns out to be “extremely unlikely”? They’re going to need to eventually read Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves.

The paper is open access.

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At Mind Matters News: Why neuroscientist Mark Solms is no materialist

Mainly due to information theory:

He points out that, to begin with, Einstein’s famous equation — E equals MC squared — makes the point that matter is derivative. It’s a state of energy

—

Mark Solms: Information, in neuroscience, is a crucial concept, and it’s very hard to think about quantum physics and the big questions that are unsolved that flow from it without the concept of information — which, I hasten to draw your attention to the fact, is not matter. I’m not a materialist for exactly that reason. [01:27:30]

I don’t believe that the mind can be reduced to matter. Matter is an appearance. If you’re wanting to make connections between mind and body and see them both as appearances, then you can’t be a materialist. We must always remember, as I keep saying, that these are concepts. These are abstractions. These are inferences. These are words that we use to try to articulate these profound things. I think that, among those tools, the concept of information, in the sense that Shannon introduced it into physics in 1948, has not yet begun to… The implications, the importance, the value of this concept has not begun to fully reveal itself. [01:28:30]

—

News, “Why neuroscientist Solms is no materialist: Information theory” at Mind Matters News (December 9, 2021)

Problems like that are why Darwinism/naturalism is failing.

Takehome: In Solms’s view, the true implications of quantum mechanics and information theory in refuting materialism are only beginning to be understood.

The main thing to see is that neuroscience has not been good news for materialism, naturalism, or Darwinism. Lots of (non-religious) people are beginning to discover that.

The discussion to date

Here’s the first portion of the debate/discussion, where neuropsychologist Mark Solms shares his perspective: Consciousness: Is it in the cerebral cortex — or the brain stem? In a recent discussion/debate with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, neuropsychologist Mark Solms offers an unconventional but evidence-based view, favouring the brain stem. The evidence shows, says Mark Solms, author of The Hidden Spring, that the brain stem, not the cerebral cortex is the source of consciousness.

And Michael Egnor responds:

1.2. Neurosurgeon and neuropsychologist agree: Brain is not mind Michael Egnor tells Mark Solms: Neuroscience didn’t help him understand people; quite the reverse, he had to understand people, and minds, to make sense of neuroscience. Egnor saw patients who didn’t have most of their frontal lobes who were completely conscious, “in fact, rather pleasant, bright people.”

1.3. Then Solms admits what all know but few say: Neuroscientist: Mind is not just brain? That’s career limiting! Neuropsychologist Mark Solms and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agreed that clinical experience supports a non-materialist view but that the establishment doesn’t. Mark Solms: “science is an incredibly rigid… sort of… it’s like a mafia. You have to go along with the rules of the Don, otherwise you’ve had it.”

In the second portion, they offer definitions of consciousness:

2.1 Materialist neuroscientists don’t usually see real patients. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and neuropsychologist Mark Solms find common ground: The mind can be “merely what the brain does” in an academic paper. But not in life. Egnor takes a stab at defining consciousness: Following Franz Brentano, he says, “A conscious state is an intentional state.” Next, it will be Solms’s turn.

2.2 A neuropsychologist takes a crack at defining consciousness. Frustrated by reprimands for discussing Big Questions in neuroscience, Mark Solms decided to train as a psychoanalyst as well. As a neuropsychologist, he sees consciousness, in part, as the capacity to feel things, what philosophers call “qualia” — the redness of red.

3.1 Einstein believed in Spinoza’s God. Who is that God? Neuropsychologist Mark Solms admits that life is “miraculous” and sees Spinoza’s God, embedded in nature, as the ultimate explanation. In a discussion with Solms, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor argues that it makes more sense to see God as a Person than as a personification of nature.

3.2 Egnor and Solms: What does it mean to say God is a Person? Mark Solms and Michael Egnor discuss and largely agree on what we can rationally know about God, using the tools of reason. Egnor argues that, if the most remarkable thing about us is our personhood (I am), it Makes sense to think of God as a Person (I AM).

You may also wish to read: Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

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