It's taking a while to process this week
Apr. 23rd, 2005 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
metawidgetSomething 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?
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?
