Thinking scientifically about science?

 For a Change, Science Writers Think Critically About Science

Denyse O Leary

Science writers have the sort of relationship to science that automotive writers do to cars. Readers often hear a “Thumbs up!” or “Thumbs down!” about one trend, theory, or school of thought. But in the rush and press of news, we less often hear a philosophical reflection that goes beyond cliches like “Science is self-correcting.” But, every now and again, we do. Here are three recent examples.

The “Scientific Method” is Rather Messier than We Think

Philip Ball, author of Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science (University of Chicago, 2023), discusses the messy truth about how theories win out. He writes at Nautilus:

Scientists often assert that their practice is governed by the “scientific method,” in which one formulates a hypothesis that makes predictions and then devises an experiment to put them to the test. But this is a modern view, codified in particular by the “pragmatist” philosophers of the early 20th century like John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. Later philosophers of science such as Paul Feyerabend question whether science has ever been so formulaic and argue that its ideas depend as much on rhetorical skill and persuasion as on logic and demonstration.

That unsettles some scientists, who insist on “experience” — observation and experiment — as the ultimate arbiter of truth. But although in the long run a theory that repeatedly conflicts with experimental observation can’t survive, in the short term theorists may be right to stick to their guns in the face of apparent contradiction. More often, supporters of rival theories might argue about the interpretation of an experiment. One party may triumph not because their interpretation is right but because they’re better at presenting their case. Or a scientist may reach the wrong conclusions from a correct and even elegant experiment just because they posed the wrong question.

PHILIP BALL, “WHAT IS A BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENT?” NAUTILUS, AUGUST 11, 2023

Politicizing Science Spurs Loss of Trust

We have been hearing for decades about the problems with shoddy research going undetected but the recent resignation of neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne as president of Stanford due to a research scandal pushed it up the news cycle a ways. At his blog, Matt Ridley, author with Alina Chan of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (Harper, 2021), offers a look at how science has been losing the public’s trust. It’s from his paywalled interview with Tunku Varadarajan at the Wall Street Journal, where he talks about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic:

But there’s a “tension between scientists wanting to present a unified and authoritative voice,” on the one hand, and science-as-philosophy, which is obligated to “remain open-minded and be prepared to change its mind.” Mr. Ridley fears “that the pandemic has, for the first time, seriously politicized epidemiology.” It’s partly “the fault of outside commentators” who hustle scientists in political directions. “I think it’s also the fault of epidemiologists themselves, deliberately publishing things that fit with their political prejudices or ignoring things that don’t.” …

One motivation: Pessimism sells. “You don’t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It’s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.” Mr. Ridley invokes Michael Crichton, the late science-fiction novelist, who hated the tendency to describe the outcomes of models in words that imply they are the “results” of an experiment. That frames speculation as if it were proof.

MATT RIDLEY, “HOW SCIENCE LOST THE PUBLIC’S TRUST” MATT RIDLEY, JULY 23, 2021

Politics marketed as science is probably a bigger source of loss of public trust right now than ignorance or prejudice are. People want to believe science has answers when they know that politics doesn’t. 

Can Science Really Have All the Answers?

For years I believed this claim, partly out of deference to the scientists propagating it, but also because the prospect of a final revelation thrilled me. Eventually, I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Now I see the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.

JOHN HORGAN, “THE DELUSION OF SCIENTIFIC OMNISCIENCE,” CROSS-CHECK, AUGUST 13, 2024

At one time, as he says, it was a comparatively popular view, but stifled of late. What dampened it?

But the concept of scientific omniscience was flawed from the start. Read Brief History [of Time] and other books carefully and you realize that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific. And more than century after discovering quantum mechanics, physicists still can’t agree on what the theory actually says about the world. 

HORGAN, AUGUST 13, 2024

He adds that we have made no progress on how life began or how consciousness exists.

On reflection, it’s not possible that science can explain everything. For one thing, what there is to know expands with what we learn and will expand again when we learn more. The 19th-century British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) put it like this:

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

“ULYSSES”

And, of course, sometimes we are searching for things that are not there. If life required an intelligent origin, then the search for the (unintelligent) origin will never succeed. If consciousness is an immaterial reality, the search for a material “explanation” won’t succeed either. That’s not the end of science; it just means that the world we live in is not quite what we thought.

At any rate, science writers can be quite interesting when they allow themselves to play around with ideas a bit.

Against Roman II

Roman: A servant, I read your response, I'm not persuaded.

 You weren't persuaded to change a life long position after a very shallow reading of an alternative view ? You don't say.

Romans:if space is not a "limiting factor" then in what sense does it bound him? If he has immediate access then it IS immanent.

AservantofJEHOVAH: If you would go back and read my actual remarks you would see that I never said that JEHOVAH is bound I said that his essence is bordered but his actualised potential is not bound because he is Telekinetic

If a border does not mean X is bordered by Y such that beyond Y X cannot access Y without a medium then I don't know what a border means, if you just insist on using the term border but rob it of all its actual meaning then our language means nothing. You might as well say God has literal toe nails, but what I mean by toe nails bears no relation to what we mean by toe nails in the physical world.

Telekinesis in this instance means being able to actualise potential and thus cause change or motion at a distance without an intermediary. Do some reading on a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement for an idea on what that might seem like as a phenomenon.

Roman: tell me what you mean by "border," if it cannot be "breached" then I don't know what you mean when you say God has immediate access to it.

AservantofJEHOVAH:here is a point beyond which his essence does not extend from its center.

Romans:I also don't know what you mean by virtually immanent as opposed to literally immanent, immanent just means immediately accessable without mediation, if the holy spirit is not something seperate from God then his knowlege and powers and literally immanent.

AservantofJEHOVAH: There is literal space between him and his creation this literal space has no impact on his capacity to access his creation in whole or in part.

Romans:Space and time are not abstractions, the past really does not exist, and the future really is not yet, and things are really distanced from one another, perhaps measurements of time and space are abstractoins sure, but what they measure are not. But even if they were abstractions, prior to creation what sense does it make to talk about space, what would that be an 'abstraction' of?

AservantofJEHOVAH:In what way does any of this prove that space and time are not abstractions. Abstractions are really descriptive of concrete realities saying that a thing is an abstraction is not the same as saying that it is not real. But we ought not to conflate abstraction with the concrete realities they are used to describe. We know that though the events of the past are completed or have progressed they determine the present to a large extent and even the future and ought not to be confused with the concept of the past tense itself.

I agree his holy spirit is his actualized potential, but if that potential is literally everywhere and immediate (none mediated), then what does it mean to say he's bounded?

I don't know where you got this Idea that I claimed that he was bound. His essence is bordered his power is unbound being telekinetic he can actualise potential over distance without mediation.

Romans:You keep telling me I'm "projecting" human type insecurities .... no I'm just noting what terms mean and noting that claiming God is unlimited yet bounded is a logical and metaphysical contradiction. I'm also asking what words you use mean, if "form" is not analogous to anything we usually mean by "form" it's literally meaningless.

I really hope you go back and read my post with a little more care his essence is bordered his power is not his spirit is a quality an attempt to describe his ability to project his actualised potential over distance all the while retaining complete control of it without a mediator.

Romans:1 John 3,2 doesn't mean literally since angels and the annointed don't have literal eyes, it means that they will have immediate knowledge of God.

They do literally see and by far superior means than physical eyes but the point is that they will closely resemble him as to both inward and outward quality

On noise cancellation tech in biology.

 Noise Cancellation: A Remarkable Design Solution in Biology

David Klinghoffer

Snakes should be immune to their own poison. Electric eels should not shock themselves. And protection from self-generated noise requires a preplanned noise cancellation system.

In a Dispatch in Current Biology, Leonard Maier discussed a biological requirement many don’t think much about: how to ignore your own noise. Eliminating self-generated noise, he says, is accomplished by “Active Sensing.” 

Animals use active sensing to investigate their environment. The active sense inputs must be discriminated from those arising independently from environmental signals. An experimental and modelling study has revealed how precise control of dendritic spike backpropagation contributes to such discrimination

The study referenced by Maier was published in Current Biology by Muller, Abbott, and Sawtelle. It involves some heavy reading in neuroscience, but the basic idea is easy to understand. If you’re trying to listen to something while making loud noises yourself, you need a way to subtract your own noise.

Biological noise cancellation works at the neuron level. The basic idea of “spike backpropagation” is that the receiving neuron sends precisely controlled signals to the sending neuron with an “image” (so to speak) of its own noise profile. This negative image cancels the noise part of the complete signal, eliminating self-generated noise from the received signal, so that the brain receives only the environmental signal. 

By analogy, consider how the James Webb Space Telescope images extremely faint objects in the infrared part of the spectrum. The telescope and its instruments generate heat that would swamp any photons from the target object. One method is to cool the instruments down as far as possible to reduce self-generated heat. This is done with liquid helium. Another method is to subtract spectral lines generated by the telescope. 

Noise cancellation is also used by exoplanet searches, as done by the Kepler mission (2009-2018). The spectral signature of a transiting planet would normally be overwhelmed by the brightness of its host star. Astronomers subtract the star’s light before and after the transit to detect the planet. The orbiting solar observatory SOHO used a similar method with its coronagraph, creating an artificial eclipse that blocked the bright light of the sun so that the faint corona could be observed. Noise cancellation is performed visually in adaptive optics and photographic noise reduction, and audibly with Dolby noise reduction and noise-cancelling headphones. The latter case is noteworthy for listening to sounds outside and inside the earphone, then inverting them to neutralize the outside sounds. One tech site says it is “A bit like taking +2 outside and adding -2 inside to make zero.”

Each of these techniques requires foresight and engineering precision to pull off. Additionally, the methods require continuous tracking (active sensing) to keep the instruments aligned properly and responsive to changing conditions.

Noise-Cancelling Fish

To  find that biology uses noise cancellation is both surprising and logical. An organism’s sensors must be able to differentiate between self and non-self. Muller et al. made their discovery about signal backpropagation by experimenting on mormyrid fish. These are weakly electric fish that can generate currents as well as passively receive them. The “elephantfish” is an example of a mormyrid. 

Neuroscientists have found mormyrids useful for studying biological signal processing, because the fish sends out electric pulses that need to be attenuated by the brain, and receives signals from conspecifics and from prey. Maier explains why a noise cancellation system had to exist. Sadly, he gives credit to evolution for a system that acts with “surgical precision” — 

The electrosense is comprised of passive and active electroreception. The passive electrosense (ampullary receptors) is highly sensitive to the weak electric fields generated by movements of invertebrate prey. Activeelectroreception requires the generation of a brief (∼1 ms) electric organ discharge by an electric organ, and tuberous receptors tuned to the electric field produced by the electric organ discharge. Mormyrid fish have retained the passive sense and evolved the active electrosense essential for spatial learning and navigation that makes locating prey mor efficient. The evolution of the active sense comes at a price for mormyrid fish (specifically Gnathoneumus petersii). The brief mormyrid electric organ discharge evokes a large ringing spiking response in ampullary receptors that lasts ∼200 ms. The electric organ discharge rate ranges from 5 Hz (rest) to 60 Hz (foraging) and the ringing response overlaps the prey related sensory input. Ampullary receptors should be swamped by this noise and identification of prey obliterated. Ampullary receptors project to output cells within the medullary electrosensory lobe. Remarkably, electrosensory lobe output neurons respond faithfully to passive electrosensory input with no hint of their cacophonous input. There must be a mechanism that eliminates the ringing noise with surgical precision.

The fish’s method is just like noise cancellation in the technologies mentioned: subtract the unwanted noise to get the signal.

Cancellation of ringing noise is via learning a ‘negative image’ equal and opposite to the ringing response, followed by summation of the ringing noise and its negative image. The key to the negative image lies in a predictive corollary discharge signal that precisely times the occurrence of each electric organ discharge. The corollary discharge reaches cerebellar granule cells which, in turn, project to apical dendrites of the medium ganglion cells. The medium ganglion cells learn to precisely follow the ringing noise and their inhibitory input to the output cells summates with and cancels their ringing noise input.

It’s a clever trick, but even more remarkable in the details. The neurons along the signal path have to adjust for the propagation rate and know when to potentiate (increase) the spikes or depress (decrease) them to create the “negative image.” Width, amplitude, and timing of the spikes are crucial to success. This image (actually a backward-propagating pulse train) must be faithfully reproduced across synapses, where electrical signals are converted to chemical signals and vice versa. In addition, the precision extends to the types of ion channels (e.g., sodium or calcium) in the axons and dendrites. It’s mind boggling to read the details in Maier’s synopsis and Muller et al.’s research. But there’s more: hormones are involved, too.

Signal Prioritization

Another paper about noise cancellation in mormyrid fish appeared in Current Biology a month after the Muller paper. Fukutoni and Carlson determined that the system also relies on hormones — in particular, testosterone — to coordinate the motor output and internal prediction of sensory consequences. In breeding males, they found, “inhibition activated by a corollary discharge blocks sensory responses to self-generated electric pulses, allowing the downstream circuit to selectively analyze communication signals from nearby fish” to determine if they are juveniles, females, or non-reproductive males. “In this case, testosterone directly affects the biophysical properties of the electrocytes in the electric organ that determine the EOD [electric organ discharge] waveform.” If evolution had not thought of that set of random mutations needing selection, then the poor fish would have gone extinct. (The authors didn’t say that; just trying to be logical.)

Regarding this twist on subject, Washington University in St. Louis took note that a “hormone alters electric fish’s signal-canceling trick.” It boils down to timing control.

The electric fish known as mormyrids send out electric pulses as signals; they also have developed a way to ignore or block their own messages. A system called corollary discharge inhibits the fish’s sensory perception for a brief, well-defined period of time after it releases an electric pulse — allowing it to prioritize messages from others, such as potential mates.

Other Cases in Biology

What is revealed in these papers is a remarkably effective noise cancellation technology in fish. They can sense faint electrical signals from prey and from conspecifics despite initiating electrical pulses into the water 60 times a second! Those pulses would swamp the faint signal from the target, were it not for a combination of neurons, ion channels, mathematically precise algorithms and hormones working together to subtract the self-signal and hone the target signal. The resultant signal, furthermore, must activate instinctive behaviors or it would accomplish nothing.

The principle behind this biological methodology can be extended to every case in biology where an organism, whether a cell or a fruit fly or a grizzly bear, needs to discriminate signals from self to respond to environmental signals. Grizzly bears, I have heard, give off a very strong odor. Yet their sense of smell is remarkably sensitive. They must be able to perform “smell cancellation” to subtract their own odor from the signal they wish to focus on. Echolocation wouldn’t work if the dolphin or bat was unable to discriminate between its own clicks and the echoes from the target. You can think up more examples, and perhaps curiosity about how they are achieved will generate some fruitful research projects for advocates of intelligent design.

Against Roman

Roman: So when you say "his essence is bordered" what does that actually mean? If it does not mean that beyond his border things are more and less immanent to him and thus  does not have immediate access, then what? if he has immediate access in what sense is he "bordered."

AservantofJEHOVAH:As I've explained space is not a limiting factor to JEHOVAH he is telekinetic so despite not being immanent he does have immediate access to the entirety of his creation despite being bordered.

Romans:Telekenesis doesn't change anything I said, evenodong y people who supposedly have telekenisis know things more and less immanently, and access things more and less immanently

AservantofJEHOVAH: And how many telekinetic individuals are you aquatinted with so that you can authoritatively pronounce on the nature of JEHOVAH'S telekinesis. Because of the nature of his telekinesis JEHOVAH has immediate access to the entirety of his creation despite not being immanent you are the one imposing human type limitations on JEHOVAH not me.

Romans:Also if Jehovah has immediate knowledge of anything at all times, it makes no sense to say he has a center of perception.

Why not? If there is a border between JEHOVAH'S essence and everything else the the fact that this border is not a limiting factor to his access to the creation does not make it go away.

Romans:The Holy spirit is just God in his action, it's not a separate thing.

1 Kings 8:27 doesn't imply that at all, it implies that no space can contain God because God is transcendent.

Heavens and earth refer to the creation. There is a border between the creation and its creator that cannot be breached in either direction. The spirit is a projection of JEHOVAH'S Actualised potential so I agree with you in a sense. But the spirit's effect is immediate so one can say that JEHOVAH is virtually immanent despite not being literally immanent.

Romans:1 Kings 8:39 There is no reason to take "heavens" in this regard to be a literally place (anymore than he literally hears, or literally has arms), it refers to God in his transcendence, i.e. beyond our immanent phenomenological world.

  AservantofJEHOVAH: Taken as whole the statements imply that there is a border between JEHOVAH and his creation but possessing telekinetic capabilities that give him immediate access to his creation he can immediately assess and affect his entire creation. Like I said most of these objections involve a projecting of human type insecurities upon JEHOVAH.

Romans:To say that there exists some uncreated "space" is to deny what the bible says clearly, that all things are created by God, also if God existed alone prior to creation there being "space" is nonsense, space between him and what?

AservantofJEHOVAH:Infinity Roman space and time are abstractions like numbers, colours abstractions can neither be created nor destroyed only instantiated.

Romans:If Jehovah exists "in" some "space" and is bounded, and can only act through some substance that is distinct from him called (holy spirit), then he is not self-sufficient but nor is he self-existent, but he is continent and dependent like other creatures.

AservantofJEHOVAH: No because the holy spirit is his Actualised potential and hence not a supplement to his power so he remains self sufficient in that all the information and energy manifest in his work came out of him and is not supplemented because he is telekinetic he can instantly actualise this potential at any place and time beyond the border of his essence.

Romans:Also what do you mean when you say he has a "form?" like a shape? Does he have a front and back? I mean are you seeing the problem here?

AservantofJEHOVAH:Do you believe that the holy angels have a front or a back or an up or a down. I seem to remember specifying that his form is unlike anything in the creation and that we ought not to imagine that it would be humanoid. So no his form is not humanoid. Does not consists of specialised parts and so has no front/back/left/right/up/down. Just like the bodies the angels have and the anointed expect to receive.

1Johh ch.3:2"Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is."

Libertarian Calvinism?

 

The Logic of God?

 

On the Filoque controversy.

 

Tom Sowell deconstructs master race delusions?

 

James Tour sets matters straight re: OOL science.

 

Against Nincsnevem XXIII

 Nincsnevem:Also, since this is relevant to the topic, I'll mention that Jehovah's Witnesses often point out that why death would be a punishment if their souls would live on in heaven. But the question is inherently flawed, since we don't say that. Even then, it wouldn't be a punishment, a shame that this hypothetical scenario has nothing to do with what we teach. Just at first glance

AservantofJEHOVAH: I Suspect that most JWS would be savvy enough to know that the souls of Adam and Eve would go in the other direction if there was such an intermediate state. What I do remember asking is why the righteous dead Having been freed from their sinful bodies and having received the post mortem evangel that they supposedly receive are not praising JEHOVAH.

Isaiah ch.38:18,19NIV"18For the grave cannot praise you,

death cannot sing your praise;

those who go down to the pit

cannot hope for your faithfulness.

19The living, the living—they praise you,

as I am doing today;

parents tell their children

about your faithfulness"

You claim that Jesus parable at Luke 16:19-31 is a literal understanding of condition of the righteous dead in their intermediate state, the word picture there is one of feasting and Joyful fellowship for the righteous so why aren't they praising JEHOVAH who has made this provision for them?

Also how could it be a kindness for Jesus to take Lazarus away from this bliss and return him to the Sinful body and world he had just escaped?

Against nincsnevem XXII

 Mr.Nevem:The Satanic claim "you will not surely die" (Genesis 3:4) has nothing to do with the immortality of the soul. God proposed here that if they break His command, then "in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die." From this, it is apparent that here "you will die" did not refer to the literal, physical death, but the consequence of it, that man will die, or (his body) will return to the dust. Here, the word "death" does not refer to physical death but spiritual death, separation from God, and loss of grace.

 AsservantofJEHOVAH:Typical argument by assertion The bible explains what death means

Genesis ch.3:19NIV"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou RETURN unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou RETURN."

Of course the churches of Christendom ignore the obvious meaning of RETURN the soul reverts to its pre-sin state at death and divine justice can make no further demands upon it

Romans ch.6:7NIV"For he that is dead is freed from sin."

The dead CANNOT sin only the living can sin and the punishment is death for those who do sin but sin and the penalty for sin ends at death. So to punish the dead any further would be unrighteous on JEHOVAH'S part 

Nincsnevem"In the day that you sin, you will die" - When you sin, I will take away my grace, eternal life, and you will die.

When Satan says, "you will not surely die," he means, "Just go ahead and sin; God will not fulfill His threat (he's just bluffing)."

AservantofJEHOVAH: JEHOVAH calls what is not as though it is so once he has predetermined an outcome he Can speak as if it has already occurred that is why on the very day that the prospect of eternal human perfection had ended for the original human pair they could be regarded as already dead living from JEHOVAH standpoint would mean entitled to eternal human perfection any less than that would be regarded as dead.

Genesis ch.3;22,23NIV"And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 23Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken"

From here on humanity was dead. We note that there was no tree of death in the garden. So eternal human perfection was JEHOVAH'S purpose for our race and not superhuman perfection.

Nincsnevem:Then the "dispute" with Satan was not about the immortality of the soul but whether humanity will lose God's special privilege that the human body is free from the compulsion of death. God warned Adam not to eat from 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil', or he would die on that day (Gen 2:17). Adam and Eve ate from it anyway, but did not die a biological death >on that day<, as they lived much longer (Gen 5:5). Adam, however, lost fellowship with God (he was driven out of Eden) and eternal life (he could no longer eat from the tree of life, Gen 3:23-24). Adam's (man's) death on "that day" was spiritual-religious death (cf. Eph 2:1), which led to biological death. So the "death" with which God threatens man is twofold: the death of supernatural life (i.e., loss of sanctifying grace) and [as a result] the mortal transformation of the body: before the Fall, man could have not died; since then, man cannot not die.

AservantofJEHOVAH: Just as JEHOVAH can count those he has determined to grant eternal life as already living though dead. he can count those he is determined to punish with eternal death as already dead though alive.

Luke ch.9:60NIV"Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”"

That is why Christ death can furnish a substitutionary atonement. If the wages of sin were eternal conscious torment. Then Christ would need to undergo eternal conscious torment to be a substitute for us

Nincsnevem:This of course is avoided by the Jehovah's Witnesses' interpretation, and they want to explain away the "day" here as exactly a thousand years. But why would it be a thousand years "on that day"? I know there's a biblical statement, "With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3:8), but that doesn't make it applicable here (this is a leap in logic), so this is entirely a leap of logic. Also, we know that this is metaphorical language, illustrating that God is outside time, and before Him, a day is not literally exactly a thousand years but eternity.

The fact of the matter is the man lost his human imperfection on that day and thus as from the divine perspective was dead on that day. Psalm ninety was written by the prophet Moses it points out that a yom from JEHOVAH'S Perspective would necessarily be very different from man's perspective does the Catholic church teach that the seven yom in which JEHOVAH Made the world are seven 24 hour yom. As I pointed out the man lost his human perfection on that 24 hour day but even from the standpoint of experiencing the consequences of losing human perfection from the divine perspective less than a day could have said to have passed .

JEHOVAH'S perspective is the only one that matters

Psalms ch.90:3,4NIV"You turn people back to dust,

saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”

4A thousand years in your sight

are like a day that has just gone by,

or like a watch in the night."

Nincsnevem:The Peter's part (which I say again, they arbitrarily tie together with the Moses' part using biblical leap logic) is obviously only symbolic: especially since the context does not explain how Adam "died" >that day<, but why the Last Judgment day is delaying in human terms, the answer: because in God's view our "time" is just a moment. "A thousand years" is an ancient analogy: a very long time.

 AservantofJEHOVAH:When the man was driven away from the tree of life his doom was confirmed and he lost his human perfection that is how he died that day

Genesis ch.3:22-23NIV"22And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken."

nincsnevem: and then, as I mentioned, the subject of the debate was not whether man has an immortal soul but whether he will die physically (i.e., whether God will carry out the threat, or be afraid that man has become like God, autonomous, or self-legislating).

So if we insist on taking the bodily death on that day literally, as Jehovah's Witnesses do, but rule out the false excuse, then Satan would be right: man did not die that day but lived much longer.

AservantofJEHOVAH: By stripping the man of his human perfection on that day and driving him from the tree of life JEHOVAH Fulfilled his Just punishment on the man the sentence was staggered to allow the birth of some who will show a different and thus vindicate JEHOVAH as creator. You see the real debate is whether or not man's fall was really the fault of his maker or not? If man was well made why could he not fulfill the purpose for which he was made? Those who argue that man's sin was predestined are the ones who are taking Satan's side of the debate.

Separating eggs from zeros?

 Fossil Friday: Imagining Eggs in the Famous Archaeopteryx Fossils

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday I could not resist discussing a paper (Guimarães 2023) that I recently stumbled upon. It is still in preprint stage at bioRxiv and has not undergone peer review. I definitely hope that it will not survive peer review as it easily qualifies as the most ridiculous piece of garbage science I ever came across. The author is Portuguese computer scientist Jorge Guimarães, who apparently lacks any expertise in paleontology or geology. His paper has been heavily promoted on social media by his medical software company, ALERT Life Sciences, claiming that the “Mona Lisa of fossils was rediscovered” and promising a “paradigm shift in evolution,” “following what is arguably the biggest fossil rediscovery of all time.” The same institution also published nothing short of a three volume book by Guimarães (2018) on the “ground breaking findings.” This sounds like something really interesting and unusual.

So What Did He Find?

The author maintains that:

Since 1877, researchers have missed the fact that Archaeopteryx, the icon of evolution and the Mona Lisa of fossils, was nesting over more than one hundred jellybean-like soft eggs and hatchlings.

Following what is arguably the biggest fossil rediscovery of all time, can you imagine the day when museums around the world will make the decision to change the display position of this fossil to reflect its nesting posture?

A paradigm shift in evolution starts with the change in the display position of Archaeopteryx and extends into the evolution of reproduction in animals, the evolution of wings and flight, attention to fossil sediment instead of just bones, and new perspectives on mass extinctions, among others.

When you look carefully at the images in the preprint paper it is quite clear why scientists have “overlooked” these hundreds of eggs and hatchlings in five different fossil specimens of Archaeopteryx, including the name-giving isolated feather: there is simply nothing there at all, but just a random pattern of stone matrix. At work apparently is some kind of pareidolia effect, where people erroneously believe they see things like a human face in random places where there isn’t anything. The author also seems to be ignorant of the multiple lines of taphonomic evidence (see Arratia et al. 2015: 78–100) that strongly contradict his hypothesis that the fossil preservation of bird nests with adults still sitting in breeding position on eggs and hatchlings can be explained by the occasional flooding of colonial ground nesting sites on the shore of the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen lagoon.

Did the author find any hard evidence of egg shells apart from his Rorschach-test-like identification of alleged shapes of eggs? Something like microstructure or chemical composition of the eggshells? Nothing at all. His excuse is that the specimens were not available for such studies, because access to the original specimens was denied to him or the potentially invasive studies were not authorized by the museum curators.

This is still more problematic because there is considerable evidence that, even though the first dinosaurs had soft eggs, hard-shelled eggs belong to the ground plan of theropod dinosaurs and birds (Norell et al. 2020). The author’s claim of non-rigid eggs in Archaeopteryx would therefore strongly conflict with the consensus phylogeny. And we have not even mentioned yet that the supposed eggs are much too small and too numerous for an ancient bird of the size of Archaeopteryx, or that a preservation in nesting position is inconceivable unless you assume that the animals miraculously did not bother to make a move while being flooded.

Not a Good Combination for Science

However, neither lack of evidence nor conflicting evidence stopped the author from drawing far-reaching conclusions, based on the hypothetically assumed colonial ground nesting behavior, such as an evolution of bird flight from ground-up rather than tree-down, and an origin of wings and feathers for breeding purposes rather than locomotion. Both views may or may not be correct, but they are certainly not supported by the highly controversial evidence presented by the author. But I can hardly blame him for his act of creative imagination, because that is what much of mainstream evolutionary biology is all about anyway.

The author first presented his “sensational” results on September 18, 2019, at the annual conference of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft in Munich, Germany. I don’t know what the reaction of the experts was at this event (I would bet on embarrassed silence and some good laughs), but apparently they could not convince him to reconsider his maverick interpretation. One could easily brush aside this case as an extreme exception produced by an incompetent non-expert in a non-peer-reviewed medium. But unfortunately this case is rather symptomatic of a general trend in modern paleontology towards overinterpreting, overhyping, and overselling poor fossil evidence. The reason seems to be a combination of publish-or-perish pressure, pressure by PR departments to oversell results in pursuit of renewed public grants, and the career incentive to push evolutionary scenarios and just-so stories with fossil data as supposedly hard evidence. Not exactly a good combination for the advance of science.

References

Arratia G, Schultze HP, Tischlinger H & Viohl G (eds) 2015: Solnhofen – Ein Fenster in die Jurazeit. 2 vols. Pfeil Verlag, Munich (DE), 620 pp. https://pfeil-verlag.de/publikationen/solnhofen-ein-fenster-in-die-jurazeit/

Guimarães MJ 2023. Colonial ground nesting by Archaeopteryx suggests wing evolution in primal association with nesting and the ground up evolution of flight. bioRxiv. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.30.542892

Norell MA, Wiemann J, Fabbri M, Yu C, Marsicano CA, Moore-Nall A, Varricchio DJ, Pol D & Zelenitsky DK 2020. The first dinosaur egg was soft. Nature 583, 406–410. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2412-8

Martin Luther: a brief history.

 

On Darwinism's contribution to the rise of master race delusion.

 

Robert Bowman's attempt to slant the playing field .

 Robert Bowman:If you want to disprove the doctrine of the Trinity, you must disprove one of the following propositions:

1. There is one God (i.e., one proper object of religious devotion).

AservantofJEHOVAH: the Nicene creed teaches that this one/ most high God is essentially tri-personal so I merely need to demonstrate from scripture that the one/ most high God is not tri-personal to falsify the Nicene creed,and most other mainstream versions of the trinity. Most Trinitarian arguments also have the unintended consequence of falsifying the creeds for they center on demonstrating that the unipersonal Christ is the supposedly tri-persinal most high God 

2. The one God is a single divine being, the LORD (Jehovah, Yahweh).

3. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is God.

AservanofJEHOVAH:The God and Father of Jesus is, according to scripture, the most high God/the only true God and thus has no co-equals as a matter of fact the unqualified ho Theos i.e is used exclusively of him throughout the scriptures a real problem for Christendom's creeds 

Luke ch.1:32NIV"He will be great and will be called the Son of the MOST HIGH. The LORD God will give him the throne of his father David,"

John ch.17:3NIV"Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the ONLY TRUE GOD, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent."

AservantofJEHOVAH:Thus the God and Father of Jesus is both the distinct person and the distinct utterly falsifying bowman's conception of the trinity.

4. The Son, Jesus Christ, is God.

AservantofJEHOVAH:Very vague thus allowing Trinitarians room to be slippery. I am sorry but you will need to be tighter than this if you want to be taken seriously. Is Jesus the most high God . This would necessarily exclude his having any co-equals and of course if the most high God is necessarily tri-personal it would necessarily rule out any unipersonal Christ or logos being numerically identical to the tri-personal Most High God.

 

5. The Holy Spirit is God.

aservantofJEHOVAH,:No it/he is not.

6. The Father is not the Son.

AservantofJEHOVAH:Since we have established that the God and Father of Jesus is the MOST HIGH God This seems like a moot point.

7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

AservantofJEHOVAH;Well okay does this prove that he/it is coequal with the God and Father of Jesus though?

8. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.

Anyone who affirms all eight of these propositions without equivocation is affirming the doctrine of the Trinity, since this is just what the doctrine of the Trinity says.

AservantofJEHOVAH:The propositions are too vague and need some tightening up the central concern of biblical theology is the identity of the MOST HIGH GOD i.e JEHOVAH Christendom's creeds render a positive identity most high impossible. Only in scripture do we see the most high clearly identified as the God and Father of Jesus.

In order to dispute the doctrine of the Trinity, then, you *must* take issue with one or more of the propositions stated above. Anything else is tangential to the issue.:

AservantofJEHOVAH:In order for us to take the trinity seriously a forthright statement as to who /what Trinitarians identify as the MOST HIGH GOD must be issued one that leaves no room for the usual trinitarian slipperiness.

Then a comparison with the bible as to who the bible identifies as the most high God so as to demonstrate that Christendom's most high God is numerically identical to the Bible's most high God.

The thumb print of JEHOVAH cosmic edition vs. biological edition..

 Comparing Design Evidence in Physics Versus Biology — Is One Stronger than the Other?

David Klinghoffer

I really enjoyed physicist Brian Miller’s two-part ID the Future interview with Rabbi Aaron Zimmer and Rabbi Elie Feder about support for intelligent design from physics (see here and here). Both are gifted explainers, as you know already that Dr. Miller is. I was not familiar with their podcast series, Physics to God, but of course I checked it out, in particular the episode “Physics vs. Biology,” where they weigh differences between the case for design in biology and the case in physics. They don’t come down one way or the other about the former, which is fair enough. (Their backgrounds are respectively in physics and mathematics, not that you have to be a biologist to have a view on ID in biology.) In the episode, though, they argue that the evidence for design in physics is necessarily the stronger of the two. 

Why? Because the fine-tuning of the physical constants underlying the existence of the universe has no evolutionary history. We have no reason for thinking they were other than what they are now, very precisely, at the Big Bang. As Zimmer and Feder say in the podcast, there are no “fossils” indicating previous sets of constants that could have been somehow naturally winnowed or otherwise tuned by unguided, unintelligent forces. With fossils of previously existing life forms, on the other hand, there is at least a suggestion of evolution — whether that was guided (intelligent design) or unguided (Darwinian theory). With the physical constants, there’s no ground for arguing against design other than by appealing to purely speculative ideas of other universes that can never be scientifically detected. (And even then, as Stephen Meyer shows in Return of the God Hypothesis, whatever mechanism might generate universes would itself demand an explanation pointing to ID.)

Nakedly Versus Less Nakedly

The multiverse is nakedly an attempt to save atheism from science. Darwinian theory is less nakedly so. On that I’d agree. In fact, Paul Nelson recalled here the other day watching atheist physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg thinking about the cosmological constant, and visibly troubled by it: “[H]e paced the stage from one end to the other, not looking at the audience, muttering to himself and staring at his feet.”

It’s an interesting point and I’d never heard it put quite that way. The podcast is definitely worth listening to and considering.

The issue for Trinitarians'.

 Luke ch.1:32NIV"He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,"

The God and Father of Jesus is ,according to scripture, THE MOST HIGH GOD. This what Trinitarians' need to address the God and Father of Jesus has no co-equals in absolute contradistinction to any of the members of Christendom's trinity.

Indeed the identity of the most high God on the whole is a Trinitarian issue because none of the entities name in the trinity is without numerous co-equals and thus none of them match the designation most high which the scriptures gives to the Lord JEHOVAH.

The Cambrian explosion was nuclear.

 From Bad to Worse for Darwinism, as New Cambrian Explosion Finds Arrive

David Coppedge

More bad news for Darwinism arrived after my last article about Cambrian Explosion. I showed there that taphonomic conditions should have produced Precambrian animal fossils had they existed. Now, some of the other props for Darwin’s House of Cards have been removed. Tom Bethell had said in that book, “The near-instant explosion of body plans is the opposite of what Darwin’s theory predicts” (p 134)

Oxygen Theory Deflated

“No, oxygen didn’t catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth’s first multicellular organisms,” begins some news from the University of Copenhagen. “Life on Earth didn’t arise as described in textbooks.” What? Textbooks wrong? Shocking!

“The fact that we now know, with a high degree of certainty, that oxygen didn’t control the development of life on Earth provides us with an entirely new story about how life arose and what factors controlled this success,” says the researcher, adding:

“Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten.”

Textbooks had been saying, “increased oxygen levels triggered the evolutionary arrival of more advanced marine organisms.” Scientists at the university, with international peers, claim that the oxygen theory “is being disproved” by measurements of oxygen levels in rocks dating from “the Avalon explosion, a forerunner era of the more famed Cambrian explosion.” The Avalon Explosion they date at “between 685 and 800 million years ago.” 

Defying expectations, the result shows that Earth’s oxygen concentrations had not increased. Indeed, levels remained 5-10 times lower than today, which is roughly how much oxygen there is at twice the height of Mount Everest.

Evolutionists have a strained relationship with oxygen. They don’t want it at the origin of life, but they were relying on it to power the Avalon and Cambrian Explosions. And in modern times, they struggle with the complexity of molecular machines that protect life from Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). Current atmospheric oxygen levels appear finely tuned for complex life, as biologist Michael Denton argues in Fire-Maker. We have a Goldilocks value that balances the advantages of oxygen for metabolism against the disadvantages of too much or too little.

Time Squeeze

A different paper last month in PNAS, by Lyle Nelson and scientists from Canada and the U.S., has more bad news for those who want to stretch out the duration of the Cambrian Explosion.

The early Cambrian Period marks the important interval when most major groups of animals first appear in Earth’s sedimentary record. The tempo of this biological diversification is still poorly defined because, globally, there are few absolute age constraints that calibrate early Cambrian fossil occurrences or the carbon isotope perturbations used to correlate the biostratigraphy of different continents. In this study, we present high-precision age constraints for strata in the southwestern United States, which suggest the early Cambrian animal radiation was significantly faster than currently recognized. Accurately constraining the timing and rates of early animal evolution is a critical step toward better understanding this milestone in Earth’s history.

The authors measured “precise zircon U–Pb dates for the lower Wood Canyon Formation, Nevada,” which lies in the southeastern Death Valley region. Their measurements constrain the onset of the explosion to “younger than 533 Mya, at least 6 My later than currently recognized.” Out with 540 Mya; in with 533 Mya as the new official “onset of infaunalization” (the sudden appearance of complex animal body plans).

Formally, the base of the Cambrian is now defined by the first appearance of an ichnofossil assemblage that includes Treptichnus pedum, a distinctive branched, bilaterian trace fossil, interpreted as potentially formed by priapulids. The inclined branches of T. pedum are the earliest examples of systematic probing of the substrate, thus marking the onset of infaunalization that is pervasive in the Phanerozoic sedimentary record.

Priapulidae are complex animals, still extant today, that reproduce sexually and have a true coelum (body cavity), muscles, nerves, and a through gut. If the trace fossils are from one of these phylum members, they represent a significant level of “infaunalization” indeed.

Phylum Squeeze

The famous Burgess Shale (pictured above), the showcase of early Cambrian animals, has produced another taxonomic group: the earliest swimming jellyfish (phylum Cnidaria, subphylum Medusozoa). The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) announced this month the discovery of “well preserved” fossils of Burgessomedusa phasmiformis, a newly-named jelly complete with a medusa (free-swimming) stage — the most advanced type. Other cnidarians (the phylum that includes corals and anemones) are known in lower Cambrian strata, but medusozoans are “the most efficient swimmers in the world” (here). Was this a primitive cnidarian?

Jellyfish belong to medusozoans, or animals producing medusae, and include today’s box jellies, hydroids, stalked jellyfish and true jellyfish. Medusozoans are part of one of the oldest groups of animals to have existed, called Cnidaria, a group which also includes corals and sea anemones. Burgessomedusa unambiguously shows that large, swimming jellyfish with a typical saucer or bell-shaped body had already evolved more than 500 million years ago.

Burgessomedusa fossils are exceptionally well preserved at the Burgess Shale considering jellyfish are roughly 95% composed of water. ROM holds close to two hundred specimens from which remarkable details of internal anatomy and tentacles can be observed, with some specimens reaching more than 20 centimetres in length. These details enable classifying Burgessomedusa as a medusozoan. By comparison with modern jellyfish, Burgessomedusa would also have been capable of free-swimming and the presence of tentacles would have enabled capturing sizeable prey.

The date given (505 Mya) is not significantly different from earlier estimates for medusozoans mentioned in my 2013 article about “instant body plans,” but it points to an even earlier first appearance:

“Although jellyfish and their relatives are thought to be one of the earliest animal groups to have evolved, they have been remarkably hard to pin down in the Cambrian fossil record. This discovery leaves no doubt they were swimming about at that time,” said co-author Joe Moysiuk, a Ph.D. candidate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto, who is based at ROM.

If it was already swimming like a modern jellyfish, it had parents who swam, and ancestors who swam. This is among the earliest identifiable medusae, but its date necessitates earlier ancestors. One of those must have (in Darwinism) won the mutational lottery to start swimming freely. But it would have needed muscles, nerves, and sensory equipment to avoid floating off into evolutionary oblivion. Given that jellyfish rarely fossilize, being 95 percent water, it’s within the realm of possibility that earlier specimens may turn up some day even closer to biology’s big bang.

Majoring on Minors?

Graham Budd and friends had a little spat with Nicholas Strausfeld about details of a Cambrian animal. The give and take in Science at the end of June concerned whether a lower Cambrian lobopodian named Cardiodictyon had a tripartite brain and thus represented the origin of euarthropod brains, euarthropods being the most complex group within the panarthropods. (Strausfeld et al. responded here). 

But surely there is a forest in these trees. Brains! Are they products of unguided natural processes? A look at the figures in their respective papers should astonish anyone that creatures with legs, antennae, mouth parts, guts, muscles, and central nervous systems should appear in rocks suddenly without precursors. Darwinians waste time trying to connect details of one tree to details in other trees, when the forest is shouting, “We were designed!” 

As new discoveries continue putting the squeeze on the Darwinian scenario, proponents of intelligent design feel no pressure. Complex life appearing suddenly, operating from day one with exceptionally rich functional information, is just what we would expect from engineering genius.

Why our Al overlords will never possess a "Logos".

 Human Exceptionalism — Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never Tell a Story

Peter Biles

One of the biggest contentions in the current debate over OpenAI’s new Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT is its purported ability to create a story, to speak and communicate narrative like a human storyteller. If you ask ChatGPT to write an Edgar Allan Poe-esque story, it will generate something spooky, gothic, and darkly poetic. Ask it to write a Shakespearean sonnet, and out comes a fourteen-lined poem about nature and romance. Need a horror thriller like The Shining or It by Stephen King? You got it.

For all its scary impressiveness, and the guarantee that the technology will only get better, the chatbot extraordinaire fails and will always fail to tell a story. In fact, it can’t be expected to generate meaningful art and literature whatsoever. Why? In short, ChatGPT isn’t a person.

AI Lacks Understanding

Critics might interject and say that LLMs are starting to match the dexterity and even beauty of human poetry and art. AI can crank out verse in the spirit of Milton and Donne (or maybe not quite, but it can approximate the style) and write your freshman composition paper for you. To be fair, it can do a lot. And some entry-level writing jobs may inevitably fall to AI. The technology journal CNET has already employed an AI system to generate articles, although the results have been a bit disastrous, to say the least.

But while AI can generate poems, stories, and essays, it can never grasp the meaning of what it produces. It’s not a sentient mind (despite former Google employee Blake Lemoine’s claim to the contrary) intent on communicating truth, goodness, and beauty to you. Instead, it’s pulling from a preexistent database and giving you approximations of what you’re asking for. It’s algorithmic. The AI optimists (and those declaring doom for all writers and artists) might just be misunderstanding the purpose and nature of language and art.

Josef Pieper on the Purpose of Language

Josef Pieper, a 20th-century philosopher, outlined the two primary functions of language. In his excellent little book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, he writes:

First, words convey reality. We speak in order to name and identify something that is real, to identify it for someone, of course — and this points to the second aspect in question, the interpersonal character of human speech (p. 15).

For Pieper, language has a “two-fold purpose”: it conveys reality through the word and establishes relationships among persons. It connects us through shared meaning. Can AI do this? Sort of. It can scrape the Internet and produce a coherent sentence. However, Pieper would be skeptical of its ability to fulfill either function, since AI cannot be interested in “reality.” He writes further, “Because you are not interested in reality, you are unable to converse. You can give fine speeches, but you simply cannot join in a conversation; you are incapable of dialogue” (p. 17). Here, Pieper is talking about the “sophists” in Plato’s era. They were witty rhetoricians but had more interest in persuasion and manipulation than in telling the truth.

So, is ChatGPT simply technological sophistry, drawing on a bizarre Internet landscape, designed to give you fancy distortions of the world? Robert J. Marks, Senior Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, writes in his book, Non-Computable You:

When discussing artificial intelligence, it’s crucial to define intelligence. Computers can store oceans of facts and correlations; but intelligence requires more than facts. True intelligence requires a host of analytic skills. It requires understanding; the ability to recognize humor, subtleties of meaning, and symbolism; and the ability to recognize and disentangle ambiguities. It requires creativity (p. 16).

The Question of Consciousness

Christina Bieber Lake, Clyde Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, expresses a similar conviction about the limits of computed “intelligence,” particularly in relation to literature. She writes in her book Beyond the Story:

Computers can be programmed to “write” stories, but since they do not have first-person consciousness, they cannot reasonably be said to have intended them. Whatever meaning such stories can be said to have is limited by the parameters of the programmer — who is necessarily a language animal (p. 14).

Bieber Lake turns the issue into the fundamental question of consciousness. “First-person consciousness,” she contends, is a uniquely human quality, and in Robert Marks’s terms, it can never be “computed.” No algorithmic complexity will ever be able to generate consciousness, regardless of how humanoid our robots become. She writes:

All art, and especially story, depends on a relationship between conscious persons. For any story to exist, much less to have meaning, conscious persons must be intentionally interacting with each other. There is always an I and a you and a thing — usually another you — for the I and the you to focus on.

She further notes that intent is always shared “by one person with another person.” The personal, communicative nature of storytelling rules out AI as a legitimate author. It can’t intend meaning and can’t speak to you as a person to a person.

The Person Behind the Word

Her comments lead to the perennial question of authorial “intent,” or whether the author’s intended meaning in a text should have any bearing on its interpretation. Robin Phillips writes that if language is common, comprised of words with definite meanings (although words can change meaning, and their combinations be subject to differing interpretations), intent matters significantly. He observes:

If we were attending only to the meaning of a poem as an isolated collection of words rather than as a work of communication and art, then it would not make any difference whether it was written with artistic intent, that is to say, by a human being rather than a computer or an ape. Hence, all the predicates we might apply to the meaning of the poem we should be able to use whether or not it had a human creator. But this is not how we engage with art, for many aesthetic predicates that we commonly apply to poems would be meaningless when predicated to the computer-generated poem. Consider such predicates as “witty,” “intelligent,” “insightful,” “controlled,” “suppressed,” “overdone,” etc., which presuppose a creative intelligence behind them. To attend to the poem as an artwork is, therefore, to already be aware of more than merely the meaning of the words themselves: it is to be aware of their meaning as an intended artwork.

If we consider ancient oral cultures, where storytelling and myths were primarily communicated by mouth and received by ear, we might get a better sense of the human uniqueness of language. When we read a story, or a poem, or study a painting, we might come away with different impressions, or even various interpretations, but one aspect is evident: a personal consciousness was responsible for creating it, affirming the wisdom of a quote often attributed to C. S. Lewis, “We read to know we are not alone.”

Rise of the Corsican.

 

Stars powered by the dark?

 

On the role of imaginary numbers in describing/explaining the real world.

 Intelligent Design in Imaginary Numbers

Eric Hedin

The concept of imaginary numbers can seem like an especially esoteric or detached-from-reality notion, perhaps dreamt up in the overactive imaginations of mathematicians. The absurdity of the concept doesn’t improve when one learns that the origin of imaginary numbers comes from trying to take the square root of a negative number.

Positive numbers have a pleasing solidity to them, in that they correspond to countable “things.” Five apples, ten people, and even fractional amounts, such as 2.2 pounds of rice. The number zero becomes less concrete, referring merely to the absence of something — such as, zero cows in the barn. Although most people are more comfortable with negative numbers than imaginary numbers, when we encounter a number like negative five, we have already departed from a simple association of the number with tangible things. 

The ancients rejected negative numbers as being without meaning because they could see no way physically to interpret a number that is less than nothing….As late as the sixteenth century we find mathematicians referring to the negative roots of an equation as fictitious or absurd or false.1

Nonetheless, we learn fairly early on in school how to do simple arithmetic with negative numbers. In particular, we learn that the square of any (real) number is positive. So, how could a negative number even have a square root? Surely, the label “imaginary” is appropriately applied to the result of any such endeavor.

Why Bring Up Imaginary Numbers? 

I raise the issue simply because imaginary numbers have shown themselves to facilitate, despite their moniker, mathematics without which we would be seriously impeded in our ability to describe and quantify reality. To understand their nature, it will help to introduce complex numbers. If the square root of -1 is designated with the letter i, then a complex number, z, might be written as z = a+bi, where a and b are real numbers. So, a complex number has two parts, a real part, a, and an imaginary part, b. 

We are accustomed to real numbers being laid out on a “number line,” typically with the positive numbers to the right of zero and the negative numbers to the left of zero. In this sense, real numbers are one-dimensional, with a number corresponding to every point on the line. Analogously, it can be useful to consider complex numbers as two-dimensional quantities, with a complex number corresponding to every point on a plane.

This is exactly how complex numbers are visualized — as points on a so-called complex plane. The familiar number line makes up the x-axis, or real axis, so any point on this line has its imaginary part b=0. Points in the plane above or below the real axis have a positive or negative imaginary part, respectively. Since complex numbers correspond to the points in a plane and the entire real number axis is just a single line in that plane, it makes sense that learning to work with complex numbers should lead to expanded functionality in mathematics.

And Such Is the Case!

What kind of practical benefit has come to us through the use of complex numbers? 

When people first considered taking square roots of negative numbers, they felt very uneasy about the problem….They certainly would not have believed that the new numbers could be of any practical use. Yet complex numbers are of great importance in a variety of applied fields; the electrical engineer would, to say the least, be severely handicapped without them.2

Solving mathematical problems involving fluid flow, oscillatory motion, and quantum mechanics are all facilitated through theorems and procedures for handling functions of complex variables. At this point, someone might object to all this by asserting that the physical world corresponds to real things, so how could invoking imaginary numbers avoid a departure from reality? Remember, however, that the form of a complex number, z = a+bi, contains two real numbers, a and b, and it’s these real numbers that end up corresponding to actual properties of real-world phenomena.

An electrical engineer can analyze an alternating current circuit by assuming a complex-number form of the electrical current. The actual current corresponds to just the imaginary part, but the complex resistance, known as the impedance, has physical meaning in both its real (ohmic resistance) and imaginary parts (capacitive and inductive impedance).

The term, imaginary, for the part of a complex number that lies off the real number axis may contribute to our sense that mathematicians are dabbling in something out of a fairy tale. René Descartes, in 1637, is credited with being the first to assign this label to results involving the square root of a negative number.

Before Descartes’ introduction of this term, the square roots of negative numbers were called sophisticated or subtle.3

I think these earlier labels would’ve actually been more appropriate, considering the enormous benefit complex number theory has given us in mathematical descriptions and calculations of many aspects of the physical world. Exploring the possibilities found in the realm of complex numbers (perhaps not too dissimilar, after all, to an adventure in fairy land) we reach a particularly magical point known as Cauchy’s integral formula. This ultimately useful mathematical result comes from doing calculus with complex numbers.

Almost Insurmountable Difficulty

Anyone who has taken a calculus course learns the process of integration for finding the area under the curve described by a mathematical function. One also learns, however, that integrating certain functions poses almost insurmountable difficulty. Cauchy’s integral formula, however, melts the difficulty of doing a wide class of integrals by taking advantage of the two-dimensional number space of complex numbers.

When I’ve taught complex variable theory as part of an advanced mathematics course for physics majors, introducing this topic to students feels something like giving them a secret power to do math. The author of the book already referenced on imaginary numbers describes his first encounter with Cauchy’s formula while studying at Stanford University:

For me, complex function theory was a revelation bordering on a mystical experience….With Cauchy’s theory of complex integration one could almost without effort, calculate the values of a seemingly endless number of incredibly odd, strange, and downright wonderfully mysterious-looking definite real integrals….Such calculations were to me, then, seemingly possible only if one had the powers of a sorcerer.4

One example of a practical application of Cauchy’s formula for complex variables is in solving an integral from the equation of motion for a planet with an elliptical orbit, which leads to the famous result of Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion. A completely different use of complex numbers arises in the research field of computational nanoelectronics. Analyzing electron transmission through nanoscale structures routinely includes considering information revealed by the imaginary part of the complex variable associated with the energy of the electrons. The following statement is from an article on currents circulating around a benzene ring molecular structure.

The positions of the transmission zeros and poles in the complex energy plane, and their possible interference or even complete cancellation of each other, are shown to correlate with the amplitude and resonance structure of the circular transmission resonances.5

What Does All This Have to Do with Intelligent Design? 

I think that the discovery of the almost unbelievably practical applications of complex number theory — derived from the bold intellectual extension of real numbers into the two-dimensional realm — is so “wonderfully mysterious” that it seems more consistent with a buried treasure we were intended to find than a prodigious bit of unexpected luck encountered by accidental beings in a happenstance universe.

For centuries, mathematicians discounted the “imaginary” solutions of equations involving the square roots of negative numbers. But when these nonsensical outcomes of mathematical manipulations were tentatively embraced and explored, they revealed a hidden usefulness without which our quantitative formulations of reality would be severely curtailed. If the extension of our familiar one-dimensional number line to a two-dimensional complex number plane proved fruitful, who’s to say that a further extension of numbers to encompass a complete three-dimensional volume might not disclose further unimaginable treasures?6

Notes

Paul J. Nahin, An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √(-1), (Princeton University Press, 1998), 5-6.

Mary L. Boas, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006), 47.

Boas, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences, (2006), 6.

Nahin, An Imaginary Tale, (1998), 188.

Eric R. Hedin, Arkady M. Satanin, and Yong S. Joe, “Circular transmission resonances and magnetic field effects in a ring of quantum dots connected to external leads in the meta-configuration,” Jnl. of Computational Electronics, June 2019, Volume 18, Issue 2, pp 648–659. DOI 10.1007/s10825-018-01291-2.

A speculation on what a 3-dimensional number might correspond to is suggested by the mathematical impossibility of the square root of a negative number, which led to the two-dimensional plane of complex numbers. Another mathematical “impossibility” is the problematic case of division by zero, giving infinity. Perhaps the three-dimensional space above and below the complex number plane is populated by quantities (call them complete numbers) that correspond to complex numbers divided by zero. This hint is not without basis, as complex numbers that lead to infinities in real quantities (such as the transmission amplitude) have turned out to have practical significance (signifying the energy width of the transmission resonance). Furthermore, Cauchy’s formula, referred to above, actually exploits the existence of points in the complex plane that lead to infinites.