Dispatches from a happy Hullian

It's a fantastic excuse to drink Tuborg beer and eat those crackly-with-sugar butter cookies.

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/21097.html

In a previous life I sat on Media Council at Dawson and didn't stand up for the Plant's right to be obnoxious in the Gay Leprechauns Incident. We actually hauled the editor over and took the whole thing way too seriously. I kind of regret that, I hope they're managing to be good and offensive from time to time.

Boycotts are all well and good, and sanctions have their place, but the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments bullying Denmark over some cartoons... time to raise a can of cheap beer in solidarity.

Something from Ideas (on Radio One) earlier this week (Thursday?) was rattling around in my head... they got Philip Yancey, who's one of the better apologist writers out there (in my experience), talking on the subject of rumours of god, and one of the things he unpacks is an anecdote of some atheist friend of his acknowledging that the conditions for human-ish life are pretty unlikely given the range of possible values for all kinds of physical constants and initial conditions in the universe. Yancey goes on to express appreciation that although his atheist friend stayed an atheist, that he acknowledged the improbability of all those factors lining up to allow life, and elaborate that this forms part of his case for a creator — that it's just too unlikely otherwise.

The first thing that gets my goat is the lack of acknowledgement of conditional probability... the standard and well-established way to level the probability argument is to point out that whatever the probability of conditions being sufficient for human life, the only way to be human and observing them is for them to happen. Sitting here in time, being human, the probability of that happening is more or less 1. There seem to be vast stretches of space that don't contain humans, and the universe took a very long time (if you choose to trust physics over Genesis) to spit us out. So maybe we are unlikely, and we would be rightly surprised if we saw people sprouting up on every wandering bit of space debris. Probability doesn't spring out of nothingness, it only has meaning once you set conditions.

But, maybe more fundamental here, is the assumption that somehow the alternate explanation is that there are huge roulette wheels turning setting all the constants and everything after that, and that an absence of god somehow runs right to everything is stubbornly random. No god doesn't mean no logic, far from it. Cellular automata need some ground rules and they're off doing their thing. Math needs some axioms and given some time, some branches of thought are wandering around category theory. We can watch pretty undistinguished functions over time churning out discrete-time systems and they'll settle into patterns. We can set calendars and clocks with trust that gravity will do its thing more or less the same way as it has over the recorded past. They don't get bumped around when somewhere allows gay marriage or a new mixed-fibre clothing sweatshop opens. So we're the settling down of, or at least a temporary plateau in, the particular progression from whatever starting conditions we got. We're pretty stable as cluster points go. Just because things have settled into something, doesn't mean there was some master plan from the get-go. That works for my life and probably for many of you readers... without taking the analogy as proof, doesn't it seem possible that works on a bigger level, too?

This started off as a somewhat ranty response to someone trying to tell me that their god was the source of all good things... but I think it's central enough that it shouldn't just be cast off into the ether for one person to reject. It's probably glaringly obvious and been thought of many time before, but here it is.

I find grace among real people in the present, who are gracious not due to their role in the cosmology, prophesy or some covenant made with people long dead or cobbled together into a historical gestalt, but due to effort, inclination and rising above the call of duty. Same goes for love — maybe the love I feel from people and feel for people is not perfect and world-shaping, but it's beyond what people's natures and obligations require, and beyond what I can stick into a little rational-self-interest box, and beyond describing sometimes, so it's special. There are people out there like that, theists, atheists and undecideds, more than any theology of a fallen world would care to admit. Perfect? No. Permanent? Probably not — some of them quite transient, some of them enduring within the bounds of what people can manage. Patient with my boneheadedness, neglect and foibles? Well, not infinitely, but again, often more than I deserve. It may not be infinite bounty out here in atheist-land, but unless you compare it to the infinity attributed to a god of the gaps and asymptotes, it's good and real and sits firmly in my sense of the real rather than the theoretical or faith-based.

Sometimes I can think I feel God — some part of my Nazarene experience was spent interpreting the world that way — but there's a better, more beautiful and simpler/more-complex/more-subtle explanation out there. One time when I was still going to the Church of the Nazarene and in its thrall, I told my mom about all the stuff I felt God was doing for me. She responded by reminding me that I had a part in that (which is all well and good to be humble about, I guess) and that other people — mere, soft, squishy mortals — did too (chalking them up to just being little pawns of some puppet-master god is just plain ungrateful if you believe in free will). What does that leave? The contributions of animals and inanimate objects? Well, I don't know about you, but it's been certain people and the occasional sentient critter that have been supportive and loving over my 24.5 years... these are the influences I can be thankful for because they had a choice, and they had limited strength and time and perspective, and they were still more gracious and loving than some basic sense of civility or mere pleasure in being friends of family might require. I brushed my mom's words off at the time somehow, but they've stayed with me since.

Some pictures from the St. Jean Baptiste garden party chez moonlightjoy and emjayne... much pulchritude!

( get your scandalous pixels here! )

Gonna get on an aeroplane soon and hope I have someplace to stay when I get there.

Gonna finish the book I thought was going to keep me occupied if I couldn’t sleep on the plane. Everyone, go read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s well-written, although it does have the sci-fi bludgeon feeling that comes from having to be explicit about stuff we have no experience of and it tries a little openly to deal with some heady issues... but there’s enough humanity in there too.

Realizing I’ve come back to some stuff from my early literature search with new eyes -- that I’ve come down a couple of notches on Gips’ list of shape grammar-related programs but that if I keep my nose to the grindstone I may be able to coax a working interpreter of some generality into existence and tackle some part of the subshape problem... if I can do that, it’ll be a good summer. If I can coax something which whittles down a complex pattern by a few discovered rules... it’ll be a good year compressed into a summer :)

The new team environment here is nice, I’m actually the only one in the office who was here last summer -- although in some cases, it’s because a co-worker got his own office. I’ve got more supervision, less felt pressure and feel generally saner than last year... and conference presentations to look forward to...

Home life is pretty good. The roomies are looking for people to fill my and Jinny’s rooms, they’re touring the place from time to time... I’m not sure if we have a roommate for my soon-to-be new place but I think we’ll open it up again soon if we don’t hear from the prospect we’ve been holding it for.

Had supper at the Brotherwoods’ place last night along with funny_socks and a half-dozen other people from Emerge who I now know a bit better. It was a nice, long supper (about four hours of eating, drinking and chatting) with fantastic food (courtesy of Sue and Amélie) and wonderful company and ambience... even if I was about ready to drop from exhaustion (work + showing another Edmontonian around on Monday + miscellaneous activity), I had a good time. And a good sleep after.