SCIENCE and RELIGION

There, I said it. And now someone's going to get offended.

Isn't it wonderful how people (including myself) want to save the world and can't figure out that the world has no interest in being saved? People see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and find excuses to live the way they want to live. I'm no different.

However, being a scientist, I like to dissect things. Religion is not immune from such dissection and makes a wonderful psychology experiment because it is just one of a number of different ways of thinking. But because many of members of the General Public (but assuredly not you, Gentle Reader) decide to get upset when someone doesn't conform to their philosophy, let me state, for the record, that

I am not out to convert anyone. People are free to believe whatever makes them comfortable.

This is just my rant page and below, I'm going to babble about the thing that irks me most about religion: the mis-use of science in an attempt to proselytize.

This includes that strange group of people known to dabble in "crackpot" science.

If you are of the easily-excitable type, I recommend you Click this link now.

If you decide to proceed, you have the right to experience any emotion you please, but you don't have the right to blame me for it.

Dave's Philosophy of Science: Science is nothing more than model-building. We see "reality" and we are interested in "understanding" it; either because we are truly interested in it, because we wish to predict it, or because we wish to manipulate it. Regardless of the reason, we try to state things that agree with "reality." We call a statement that agrees with "reality" true. We then use logic to derive other true statements. If we run across a case where no statement or derived statement seems to describe some aspect of "reality," we add a statement (called an axiom) and then continue building our logical set of statements. The model is the body of statements. This is science.

One goal of science is to try and re-create the model from as few axioms as possible. This is because scientists are too busy filing grant proposals to try and remember the whole model.

The difference between science and other philosophies is that science performs this test of statements against "reality." If the statment doesn't match "reality," we alter the statement until it does.

There are two ways to abuse this process:

Failing to perform the test.
Example: Cold Fusion.
Incorrect use of logic to derive a statement from an axiom.
Example: Bible Codes.

Having created a false statement, two false arguments ensue:

Derivation of Reality
"Well, because this (false) statement is true, the universe must be thus-and-so."
You can't derive "reality." "Reality" just *is*.
Accusation of inconsistancy
"Well, your science says this (false) statement is true, and it certainly is not, therefore the whole of science is wrong and we should go back to the fifties when there were no gays in the military and everyone was Christian."
Inconsistency is bad, true, but one inconsistent statment does not invalidate a working body of statements.

So, having said all that, on to the fun:

Crackpot Science

Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between religon and crackpot science. But I'm working on it. ;) James Randi does much better, however. and I would direct you to his site until I can come up with something coherent. But expect the following sub-heading to be filled at some point:

Astrology

Religion

I'll be blunt: there is no convincing proof for or against the existence of some concious entity that hand-crafted the universe from fine Corinthian leather. Or whatever. So if there's no proof for "A" or "not-A" you are free to add either "A" or "not-A" (or both, if you're Zen) to your model as an axiom.

The trouble begins when someone says otherwise.

Bible Codes and Numerology

Not too long ago, a friend of mine posed the following question: "Look at all these instances of the number 19 in the Quran. Does that mean it's divinely inspired?"

This is a case of an incorrect derivation. The basic argument runs like this: "If I count up the occurrances of x in this body of text, the number is divisible by p. But if I count up the occurrances of y in the text, that number is also divisible by p. And, wait... if I count up the occurrances of z, t, and w, all of those numbers are divisible by p, too. The chances of that must be astronomical!"

Well, that depends on probability, and probability works like this:

The odds of something happening are given by the ratio of the number of ways it can happen to the number of all possibilities. The standard example is what are the odds of getting two "heads" if we toss three coins?

The number of ways we can get two heads is:

head, head, tail
head, tail, head
tail, head, head

or three ways. Now, the total count of all possibile ways that the coin can land in three tries is 2^3 or eight. So the probability that, in tossing three coins, you'll get two heads is 3/8 or 37.5% If order matters, then we get into the difference between combinations and permuations, but the basic idea remains.

Given that the probability of a coin landing on a particular side is 50%, we can state that the probability of one particular pattern showing up in three tosses of the coin is 50% x 50% x 50% or 12.5%.

Now let's do something obviouosly incorrect. If we say that the chances of getting a "head" is 50%, can we say that the chances of getting two heads in three tosses is 50% x 50% (which equals 25%)? Obviously not, because it gives us the wrong answer---but this is exactly the error of the numerological argument above!

Look at it this way: If I give you any random number, the odds that it will be divisible by 19 are one-in-nineteen. So the argument runs that if x,y,z,t, and w are all divisible by nineteen, the odds of that happening must be one-in-ninteen^5 = one in 2,476,099! That's gotta MEAN somthing!

What it means is that the probability was incorrectly calculated. Just as you can't state the probability of two heads landing in three coins is 25%, you can't do this. We have to take the total number of cases where some count of characters which is divisible by 19 (let's call that number Q) is divided by the total number of cases that are divisible by any number, the number of these cases we'll call P. The problem is that Q contains ways of counting that seem nonsensical (such as, how many times an "is" follows an "h"), and P contains the same ways, plus many many more. When you finally calculate Q/P, you get 1/19... which is the answer you expected.

The Rapture

Read this