DNA is NOT information.

A common theme in the childish arguments between theists and anti-theists is the question of DNA being information.  The theists claim that evolution can only remove information from the genome and the anti-theist evolution fans claim that mutation adds information to the genome.

The interesting thing is neither group seems to have much understanding of the term “information”.  It’s as if they agree we live in the information age and they can operate a computer so therefore they actually understand what the term means.

One of the earliest things I remember from my collage days was the computer science classes where the professor made a strong point about the difference between information and data.  His lecture started with a warning that the vast majority of people don’t really understand the difference.  And after getting out on the internet and seeing how people use the term, he was absolutely correct.

The standard definition of information is “a message received and understood”.  The place where the misunderstanding appears to come from is what happens after the message has been received and understood.

Most people seem to think that as you collect up information the result is a pile of information.  But to think of it this way is to fundamentally misunderstand the term.  The result of collecting information is a pile of data not a pile of information.

Information is data that is in transit from one location to another.  In the context of the internet, data starts out on some server.  It gets replicated into a set of messages and is transmitted to another location.  There it is received and if it is in an understandable format it is converted back into data.

Another example: As information is read into a computer, it is organized and most commonly stored on a hard disk.  However, there is no information on a hard disk.  There is only data.  It’s not until that data is taken off of the hard disk and sent somewhere else that it is considered information again.  And just as before, when it finally arrives at its destination the result is data at that location.

There is a very good reason we call large collections of data on a computer data bases and not information bases.  An information management system is used to control the dissemination of information to various locations.  While a database management system is used control data stored at one location.

Claiming DNA is information is a kin to claiming information is stored in a database.  It is an uneducated attempt to make that data seem more important than it really is.  While it might be a good marketing spin, the reality is that it actually shows the lack of understanding a person has about basic computer science concepts.

Another aspect of the misunderstanding is the fight that information is being lost or gained via the process of evolution.  Adding information would be adding elements to the data that where not expressible previously.  For example, adding a person’s address to an information stream that was not previously expressible would be adding information.  Removing that address and the ability to express it would be removing information.

Simply including more of the same information is not adding information it is simply expanding the size of the message.  In the case of DNA more or less base pairs is not adding or removing information.  To add information you would need to be able to add something that was not expressible in earlier versions of the data format.  To remove information you need to make it impossible to send what was being sent in the older versions.

With DNA this is NEVER the case.  The format of the data is always the same set of four nucleotides.  Sure the order and size changes from data set to data set but no additional information is included nor is any information removed.

Another key aspect of information is the need for transmission.  To address this issue one must first define the location where the information is transmitted from and where the information is being received.

Many times, the colloquial description is that DNA is passed from parent to offspring.  But that is wildly inaccurate.  For that to happen, the offspring would need to first exist for the DNA to be passed to them.  However this is not what happens in the real world.

A more accurate portrayal would be that the DNA is replicated and once it is separated from the parent cell, the offspring grows based on the copy of the DNA.  In other words until the separation of the offspring DNA from the parent cell, there is no destination for any information to be sent to.  So in reality, there is no transmission of information from parent to offspring.

Now of course, when you get up to the diploid life forms like most animals, there is an information transfer in the form of sperm to the egg.  But the egg is not the offspring.  Once the DNA from the male arrives and we can legitimately claim the offspring has been created, no additional DNA transfers happen.  So DNA is not being transferred from parent to offspring.

Another attempt to claim DNA is information is when talking about protein synthesis using RNA.  In this case the separate locations are the nucleolus and the site where the protein is actually synthesized.   DNA is used to form RNA that is transferred to the synthesis location and the RNA is information at that time.  However the DNA is not being used as information.  It is the data used to form the message that is represented by the RNA.

Once the RNA arrives, it no longer information.  It is simply a special kind of data most commonly known as code.  It is a set of instructions that guide the production of the protein.  Once again, the RNA is no longer functioning as information it is functioning as the program that guides the protein production.

At best, DNA and RNA only sometimes function as information.  However most of the time they are nothing more than simple data.  To claim that DNA and RNA are information to fundamentally misunderstand the term.

When looked at from this standpoint both the theist lost of information theory and the anti-theist gain of information theory are childishly naive views.  Whether this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the term or an intentional attempt to make their theory sound more convincing, both are wrong at a fundamental level.

If you want to test to see if the theist or anti-theist is being dishonest or just dumb.  Restate their argument replacing the word information with the word data.  Chances are the argument will have the same or better level of validity however it won’t sound so sexy.

Also be aware that most of these arguments are coming from people that are not very skilled in computer science or computer technology.  They are normally biologists and theology majors without the necessary training to really understand the words they are using.

Looking For The Wrong Answer

Many times while attempting to come to a conclusion concerning a religious question people seem to want to NOT actually consider what the possible answers are.  For both the theist and anti-theist groups the question seems to be does a god exist or not.  They appear to want to cast the question as a strictly black or white issue.  However like most things in life viewing it as a simply Boolean question is over simplistic at best.  At worst it is a major act of intellectual dishonesty.

If we lived in the 19^th century or before, it would be perfectly reasonable to think that a question of a god’s existence had to be a simple yes or no answer.  There was nothing in logic that indicated that any other kind of answer was possible.  The prevailing thought was that a god had to exist or had to not exist.  There was no middle ground and there could be no middle ground.

This dramatically changed in the 20^th century.  The work of many of the greatest mathematicians showed beyond a reasonable doubt that considering a question to only have a true or false answer was over simplistic.  Before their work it was considered rational to view all questions as ultimately having an answer.  If we didn’t yet have the answer, with enough work and intelligence, we would eventually figure out what the correct answer was.

Unfortunately for people attempting to push that world view, the 20^th century demonstrated just how incorrect they where.  The failure of the 19^th century view can be summed up with the word “undecidability”.  For the first time, people began to create questions that could not be answered and where taking it a step further and proving that the questions were impossible to answer.

This was not just the old view that the problem was so complex that it would take more time to solve.  This was actually showing that there was no solution nor could there ever be a solution.  It was not a matter of what evidence was available or the intelligence level of the researcher.  The questions where formulated in an environment where every single detail that could be used as evidence was available.  In addition, because of the environment of these questions, it was not difficult to try every possible way of solving the problem and show that every approach would fail.

If you don’t think this affects you, consider the question of is it possible for you to predict when your computer will lock up.  The actual answer is no.  In the general case it is not possible to predict that and any claim that it can be is simply wrong.  While in some special cases, it is possible to predict the lock up, attempting to answer the question in general is simply not possible.

Strangely enough, if you could answer that question, it would immediately put into doubt all the previous questions that you had thought you had answered.  But exploring that aspect is another posting all in itself.

For the purposes of this post, the important thing is to get people to realize sometimes the question does not have a simple yes or no answer.  It’s very possible that the question can have a third answer which is that we cannot decide if the answer is yes or no.

Placed in general terms, there are cases where there simply is not enough information in a system for a decision to be reached.  It’s not like we will come across new evidence in the future, there simply is not enough no matter how hard you look for it.  You cannot find it because it simply does not exist.

There has even been work where one of these problems is augmented with some additional information that should make it possible to answer the question.  Unfortunately, when you do this you change the system at a fundamental level and all of a sudden you are back in the same boat and you still cannot answer the question.

My favorite version of these kinds of problems is the recursive language test.  The question is can you design a method to test a language to see if it is recursive.  It’s not important what a recursive language is.  If you want to learn there are numerous sources.

The important thing to understand is that if the language is actually recursive, your test will eventually complete and return a definite positive response.  However, if the language is not recursive, your test will run forever and will never return a definite negative result.

In fact, it’s not hard to show this is actually quite common.  Consider the decimal expansion of PI.  Is there a sequence of seven seven’s in a row in that expansion.  Obviously the ultimate answer is either yes or no.  But how would you go about answering the question?  Given that it is transcendental and has an infinite number of digits, all you could is start generating digits one after another and check to see if you found the seven seven’s as you where doing it.

Once again, obviously if you ever came across the pattern you where looking for, you could stop and return a definite positive response to the question.  But what if that pattern never appears?  You would search forever and never come across a definite negative response.

Until the definite positive response is found, any claim that the pattern exists or doesn’t exist is simply incorrect on a trivial level.  It is nothing more than a guess backed up with no evidence.  While assuming one or the other answer may be useful to some reasoning processes, assuming the validity of that reasoning process can only be one of two cardinal sins of reasoning.  It is either woefully ignorant of the facts, or it’s blatantly dishonest.

The same thing can be said of a question of a god’s existence.  Until there is absolute proof of the existence, any claim that a god exists or doesn’t exist is simply wrong on a fundamental basis.  Choosing to accept either position is belief plain and simple.  This is why there are so many agnostics in the atheist community.

However many atheists actually fail to understand the ramifications of the position they are in and fall into the same childish trap that the worst of the theists fall into.  Simply put, they begin to believe their own bullshit.  Though they cannot prove that their position is correct, they begin to act like the opposing position is wrong.  When in reality, by definition, if they cannot prove they are correct, they surely cannot prove the opposing position is wrong.

What both variations on crazy do is begin to believe a dogma that their position is correct.  They gain a delusion that they are right.  From there they quite commonly begin to think the other side is out to get them.  Whether it’s the evil non-believers corrupting the faithful, or the evil bible thumper’s taking away our human rights, both are vilifying the other group in an attempt to make their flavor of crazy look better.

The worst of the theists will find examples of non-theists doing distasteful things and then claim all the non-believers are evil and the anti-theists will find examples of theists doing distasteful things and then claim all theists are evil.  All you have to do if find examples of people claiming all Muslims are terrorists, or all Christians want to take away abortion rights to find these paranoid delusions of grandeur.

Notice that both groups are doing the same thing.  They are declaring their position is right or good and the opposing position is wrong or evil.  They are both acting moralistically and assigning good and evil labels for various groups of people.

The only possible reason to do this is to try and suppress the position to which you are opposed.  It’s no more or less than an attempt to kill the messenger because you don’t like the message.  It’s why you see so many ad hominem fallacies used by both groups against the other.  If you cannot attack the message, attack the messenger.

So as a round about way of getting at what is different between an atheist and an anti-theist, consider the differences.  Without a definite positive answer to the question of a god’s existence, choosing to believe a god exists or doesn’t exist is simply childishly stupid. It is jumping to a conclusion without the evidence to support the position. Without a belief in either position, claiming one or the other position is wrong is nothing but a demonstration that you hold a belief.

If the theists are wrong for holding unsubstantiated beliefs, the anti-theists are wrong for holding their unsubstantiated beliefs.  Simply put you cannot show the other side is wrong by doing the same thing you claim is wrong.

Get it through your thick heads, the reason there is nothing wrong with atheism is because there is nothing wrong with theism.  There is nothing wrong with theism because there is nothing wrong with atheism.  If you want to find something wrong, all you got to do is find the person that thinks either position is wrong and you will have found the wrong you where looking for.

Why I don't respect most anti-theists.

You may have noticed from my previous postings that I have very little respect for most anti-theists.  Occasionally I come across anti-theists that I can respect, but they are generally few and far between.  Conversely, most of the theists I come across are very respectable people and only occasionally do I find theists that worthy of real contempt.

Strangely enough, I attribute this to religion.  Most theists learn at a very early age that if they want to follow some religion, they are going to come across people with different religions.  If they want to be respected enough to be allowed to believe what they want, they need to be respectful of others and allow them to believe what they want.

The anti-theists on the other hand don’t think they follow any religion.  By definition, anti-theism is a position that is opposed to theism and they all seem to be sure that theism is a religion so there is no way that they could be following something they are opposed to.

What the anti-theists fail to see is that a religion is nothing more than a way of running one’s life based on a faith.  A faith is nothing more than holding one or more beliefs.  And a belief is holding some unproven idea as true without the evidence to support that position.

Placed in a mathematical context, a belief is some assumption, being held as true for the sake of reasoning.  There is nothing wrong with it, but for the anti-theists, when this is done in a religious context it is faith and it is bad.  But if the same thing is done in science it is sound logical reasoning and is good.

It all sounds like the actual correct answer to the question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin”. Which of course is: “Whatever number makes my argument sound stronger”.

Theists might try to evangelize me, but they stop pretty quickly to avoid me doing the same thing back to them. I have no problem being as irritating to them as they are to me.  This tit for tat type of response seems to quickly settle down to a position of mutually disagreeing with each other’s position, but with respect for each others right to think what they want.

Anti-theists on the other hand are quite different.  They seem to want to play an “I’m superior to you” type of position.  If you don’t agree with their positions, they begin to sling insults and logical fallacies your way.  If you respond in kind, it quickly turns into a childish “Whose daddy’s dick is bigger” type of argument.

The main difference is that only a small number of theists will actually resort to such childish tactics.  Most of them, once they realize they can’t convert you to their position, will at least have the decency to allow you to believe the way you want to.

On the other hand, most of the anti-theists will actually resort to such tactics as their primary means to push their agenda.  It’s much less common for the anti-theists to realize they have picked a loosing battle, give up and simply get on with life.

I suspect this is due to how most anti-theists come into existence.  For the vast majority of them, they started out as theists.  At some point in time, something happened that that destroyed their faith.  It doesn’t seem to matter if it was something they felt was right was condemned by their religion, they where treated unfairly, or they logically deduced how wrong their faith was.

One way or another they got the idea that theism was wrong and now they are against it.  Hence the reason I call them anti-theists.  They are specifically about being opposed to theism.  For many of them, this amounts to throwing their lot in with what they see as the strongest position opposing religion which of course is science.

The reality is that science is totally separate from religion and there is not a single place where the two schools of thought overlap.  Sure there are idiot theists that try to use science to promote their positions, but even most theists consider those idiots to be whack jobs.

However, in the anti-theist camps, the norm seem to be people that think science is a reasonable way to show the theists are wrong.  Problem is, without evidence, science says nothing about the correctness or wrongness of any position.  It is simply unscientific to talk about something without evidence, yet that doesn’t stop the anti-theists from claiming rational thought is a good tool to refute theism.

You will notice a distinct push, especially by the most extreme anti-theists, to take on a position known as scientism.  It is a position that only science can be used to answer questions, and includes a distinct tendency to ridicule non-scientific arguments. 

It appears to be a kind of delusions of grandeur.  The vast majority of the things people talk about are non-scientific so therefore they are unimportant.  On the other hand, only a small elite group of intelligent people are qualified to talk about the really important things.  The delusion is that if this “real important” stuff was actually so important, more people would be talking about it.

It’s almost like an upper classman, ridiculing as lower classman for not knowing something.  It can only be described as a kind of undue arrogance.  What makes the arrogance worse, it that it leads the anti-theists to have an over inflated confidence in the soundness of their position.

The reality is when it comes to a question of the existence of a god; there is no evidence one way or another.  To claim that science can shed any light on the issue is either ignorant of what science is, or a down right dishonest attempt to baffle their opponent with scientific sounding bullshit.

So the school of hard knocks has taught me that to start with theists should be given the benefit of the doubt and be respected until they show they don’t deserve it.  On the other hand anti-theists need to earn their respect.

As an atheist, I don’t believe a god exists and I don’t believe a god doesn’t exist.  From my standpoint, the only thing wrong is the declaration that either position is wrong.  What decides the question of the level of respect I will give is the level of respect I receive.

Evolution and Origins of Life

So how many times have you heard an anti-theist talk about how stupid the theists are when they talk about both evolution and the origins of life?  The argument is generally stated as “evolution doesn’t speak to the question of the origins of life”.

While this may be true, the theists where never talking about it in that way.  Contrary to the popular anti-theistic belief it is quite possible to talk about a scientific subject and just not restrict oneself to scientific views.  It may not be the stuff of a scientific paper, but then again neither is most of the conversations in this world.

Many anti-theists try to claim that the only thing that is real is what science defines as real.  However, ever since the empiricist movement from several hundred years ago, it has been quite clear that what is real is not defined by science.  Some choose to believe what science defines as real actually is the same as reality, but that is only a belief.

What science does do is define what is acceptable in a scientific conversation.  It sets guidelines of what can be considered evidence and limits thinking to the verifiable conditions that it was founded on.

But thinking that evolution can only be thought of in a scientific context, is a childish bigoted view that presupposes that only science is worthy of conversation.  This is the general starting point for what is known as scientism.  The religion of believing science is the only valid way to describe the universe.

While many of the theists can’t describe why they want to talk about evolution and origins at the same time doesn’t mean they are wrong to do so.  In fact I see it as actually a very good sign of the theists having a strong intuitive understanding of some of the flaws in evolution.

When someone says that they don’t accept evolution, there are at least two possible meanings of what they are saying.  On one hand they could be saying they reject everything stated in the theory.  But on the other hand they could simply be saying that they don’t accept ALL of evolution.  The insane anti-theists only ever hear the first one and don’t bother to ask before they start into their normal insult and logical fallacy side show acts.

So lets say we have a theist or an atheist (which of course if not an anti-theist), and they don’t accept evolution.  They would agree that the parts that can be demonstrated in solid scientific experiments are acceptable and they don’t have a problem with those parts.

This most likely means they don’t have a problem with modern generics.  If you can do a test in a lab over and over again, varying the conditions, and observing the outcomes, that’s pretty solid evidence and accepting what is found is not all that hard.

But consider archeology.  All you can do is dig up stuff and attempt to classify it into your favorite categories.  The older and older the things you dig up are, the less likely there is that you could get any genetic material for comparison.  And as the geologists are so fond of saying, only some environments are conducive to the creation of fossils.

So archeology gives us by definition a VERY incomplete view of what was alive at some point in time. The further back in time we go the less information we can actually glean from what we find. Not only are a small number of the members of a species fossilized, a potentially large number of species could have existed in an environment that didn’t produce fossils.

Also notice that there is no real experimentation.  Nobody has buried something and dug it up millions of years later to see how it was changed.  Simply looking at the results without knowing the exact initial conditions, is not an experiment.  It’s just digging up pretty artifacts and organizing them in your display box.

So how does this relate to evolution and the origins of life?

One of the core concepts of evolution is the tree of life otherwise know as the common ancestor theory.  This theory in its most extreme form postulates that all life on earth is related genetically and the process of natural selection accounts for all the diversity of life.

Here is where the origin question enters the picture.  Was there a single unique instance where life began (however it happened) or where there many instances where matter somehow managed to get organized in such a way to make the jump from not life to life?

Of course the theists say that a god did it once a long time ago. The anti-theists, just the same, say it also happened one time a long time ago.  But consider the possibility that life actually got started many times.  If this was the case, not all life is related in a parent/child relationship.  Different life forms could have formed totally independently of each other and survived until today meaning there are life forms that don’t have a common ancestor between them.

Simply talking the scientific side, going back in time one would expect to life to get simpler and simpler.  The earliest forms of life would most likely be very simple single cell organisms. As you get closer and closer to this postulated first life form, we would also expect that the genetic sequences used for reproduction would also be simpler and simpler.

No matter how you slice it, simpler and simpler genetic sequences mean fewer and less complicated proteins could have formed.  This would mean the basic chemistry of life would have to get simpler the further you went back in time.  It is easy to infer that as the chemistry gets simpler, the likelihood of it happening goes up.

So we are on a trajectory of life becoming simpler and the chances of those chemical reactions randomly happening increasing as we go.  At some point, we would have to reach a point where the chemical reactions are so commonplace that they happen in many places at many times.

For the single occurrence model to be correct, life would need to have started late in this sequence of events.  The multiple occurrence models favor an earlier start to life.  And this brings us to the real question.  What is your definition of life?

There is no generally accepted definition of the term.  It’s kind of like the definition for pornography.  “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it”.

With so many possible definitions, all the factions are free to choose whatever definition they want.  Simply put, this means everyone is right or everyone is wrong.  Since some of the positions are diametrically opposed, it’s not actually possible for everybody to be right so the only sane answer is that everybody is wrong including the scientismistic (is that a word) fans of evolution.

This really goes to the question of how you would tell the difference between to the two positions.  The ignostic position is that like the question of the existence of a god, the question of the validity of the common ancestor theory is meaningless until you define precisely what you mean with the term “life”.

So here are a few questions that need to be answered first:

1.      What is the minimal genetic sequence(s) that qualifies as a life form?

2.      Starting with that, what are the sequences of mutations that lead to all modern life forms?

3.      What additional supporting chemistry needs to be in place within this entity to qualify as an original life form?

4.      What are the minimal environmental conditions needed around the life form for it to survive?

5.      What does this original life form consume and secrete?

Until there are accepted definitions for at least some of these questions, arguing over the question of single or multiple occurrences of life starting is just another example of arguing the number of angels that can dance of the head of a pin.

It also means that theistic questions about how evolution and the origins of life are related are well founded.  In addition it means that anti-theists that say evolution doesn’t speak to the origins of life, while being scientifically correct, are simply being intellectually dishonest.

Unless you can precisely define what life is, any claim that there are common ancestors between all species is just a religious dogma. To think it isn’t, is precisely to be an anti-theist (a person with a religion that hates different religions).

Math is not a subset of science, math is a tool used by science

It really surprises me that there is a need for this posting, but again and again I see scientism fans claiming that math is a subset of science or some other such nonsense.  It seems like what they are just trying to make science seem stronger than it actually is.

To begin with, math was invented literally thousands of years before the idea of science was even conceived.  There is solid evidence of the use of mathematic way back into ancient times.  In contrast science, at best, is only a few hundred years old.

In general, the longer some subject is around the broader and more evolved we would expect that subject to be.  Considering that math has been around for much longer than science we would expect math to be much more intricate than science and this is exactly what we find.

The diversity of subjects that fall into a math category is simply enormous. If you can think of a subject that involves using numbers or equations to solve a problem, there most likely has been something written about it.

Science on the other hand is comparatively quite limited.  To argue otherwise would be to claim that in a few hundred years, science has been able to amass more information than thousands of years of math did.  This is a simple cardinality argument.  If you want to play asshole, given that mathematics has named all the integer values and that set is infinite, there are simply names for more things in mathematics that science can ever have.

But playing whose daddy has the bigger dick games is not really telling of much more than the opinions of the various pundits.  But a differentiation between math and science can be made on a much more fundamental level.  And this appears to be where many scientism fans fail because they don’t have a basic understanding of some of the fundamentals of mathematics.

At their cores mathematics and science are fundamentally different.  Science is based on the idea that for something to be valid it must be a falsifiable idea.  The idea must be subject to being challenged and there must be a way for that challenge to be tested. Mathematics on the other hand is based on ideas that are not falsifiable (also known as proven).  For math the real significance of an idea is when it is shown that it is correct and can never again be challenged.

In fact if you really push a real degreed scientist to show some scientific idea is proven, he will correct you with a statement saying that nothing in science is proven correct.  The best science can do is prove something is wrong.

Any idea in science is subject to being changed when new evidence is presented.  However, in math, once a theory has been proven, it is not possible for new evidence to be presented.  In fact this gets at exactly what a mathematical proof actually is and why the idea of a scientific proof is an oxymoron.

In both science and math, we have what is known as a hypothesis.  This can be best described as a half baked idea.  It’s generally vague, all the consequences of the idea have not been worked out, and nobody would ever claim that it is in any way proven.

In both fields, once all the consequences of the hypothesis are worked out and we can show that everything is consistent, we reach the level of a theory (a fully baked idea).  Notice that at this level, if we assume the theory is correct, we can be assured that everything works and any possible result the theory produces makes sense.

In science the best we can do is begin to look for evidence that a theory is not correct.  While evidence that doesn’t contradict some theory is important, by far, evidence that refutes a theory is much more important because it definitively shows that the theory is wrong.  But science never achieves a level of certainty where it is legitimate to claim the theory if correct.  The best science can do is show that some theory has not been proven wrong.

However, in math, reaching the level of a theory starts the process of trying to prove the theory.  While this process may have similarities to the experimental process in science the outcomes are considerably different.

In mathematics, the process of proving a theory is a process where all possible opposing ideas are ruled out leaving the theory as the only possible solution.  Because all the alternative ideas have been ruled out, the level of certainty of the theory being correct is enormously larger than what science achieves with its experimentation. In fact when math does succeed in proving a theory, we no longer call it a theory and start calling it a law or a fact to differentiate it from a theory which is by definition unproven.

Because of the rigors of being forced to find all alternative ideas and then rule each and every one out, mathematics guarantees that a proven theory can never be disproven.  Put in scientific terms, that means the idea is no longer falsifiable and therefore it is now unscientific. 

If math was a part of science, every time it accomplished its goals, another piece of science would suddenly become an invalid idea.  While math is a useful tool to science, it is extremely misguided to think that math is a subset of science.  It’s not misguided to think that math is a subset of the tools that are at science’s disposal.

But to think math is a subset of science is a kin to thinking a hammer is a subset of a carpenter.  At best to make that argument you would have to be rather naive.  At worst, it would be a blatant attempt to raise the level of importance of the hammer to the carpenter.

Of course, a carpenter knows what a hammer is good for, doesn’t need a pep-rally on the virtues of the hammer, and surely doesn’t argue that he’s better than everyone because he uses a hammer.  Any fool can use a hammer.

If only seems to be the anti-theistic wacko’s, trying to muster some additional credibility that make the argument that math is a part of science.  They are obviously only trying to lend the certainty levels found in math to science so they appear to have a better alternative to the theists they seem to hate.

The Anti-Theist Creation Myth; The Big Bang.

While the Christians have their Genesis creation myth, the anti-theist crowd has their own creation myth in the form of the Big Bang theory.  If you listen to the anti-theists they would have you believe the theory is established scientific fact just the same as the Christians would claim the Genesis story is established fact.

In reality the Big Bang theory has absolutely no evidence to support it just as the Genesis story has no evidence.  Now of course the anti-theists will start claiming that things like relativity, Hubble’s law, and cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) are evidence of the correctness of the Big Bang theory.  But are they?

Most of this claim there is evidence comes from the observation of the Doppler affect and the observation that light coming from distant sources appears shifted in frequency.  The assumption is that this entire shift in frequency is caused by the Doppler affect.  However, what evidence is there that this is actually so.  Simply put none.

First they assume that light travels unchanged, at a constant speed, for the entirety of its journey from its source to here on earth where we see it.  But what evidence is there for that?  The furthest that humans have ever transmitted an EM signal is only about 0.002 light years.  These signals are the transmissions from the Voyager space craft.  So would someone please explain to me how a transmission of such a short length provides any evidence of things working the same way over distances that are billions of times longer?

The Quantum Theory fans would have you believe that the laws of physics are quite different on extremely small scales, so why should we believe they are the same on extremely large scales?  At least the quantum fans have some evidence to support their claim.

It is interesting that part of Planck’s kicking off the quantum theory was the relationship between frequency and energy.  The higher the frequency of the light, we find the higher the energy level of the light. In general, the light coming from distant objects is red shifted to a lower energy level.  The objects further away have a greater red shift.

If light simply lost a little energy during its long travel, we would see what would look like a Doppler shift when we received the light.  All it would take is slight drag or loss of energy for this effect to be real.  In addition, there would be no way for us to find this experimentally because we cannot transmit and receive light over any significant distance.

Given that some nearby galaxies have a blue shift; it’s not hard to imagine that both a Doppler shift and a slight drag could both be real phenomenon.  All observations that we would have made are still valid, only the interpretation of those observations would change.

Most importantly, it would mean that the universe is not expanding.  And therefore since it’s not, there is no reason to believe that all the matter used to be closer together, so there is no evidence that a big bang happened.

Recently, a real kink in the big bang theory has come to light (pun intended).  Measurements of the red shift from various objects have shown that the rate at which the universe is supposes to be expanding is accelerating.  But this is a problem in itself.

According the conservation of energy laws, no new energy is supposes to be created.  However to accelerate, you must add energy to the objects that are accelerating.  So where is new energy coming from?  If the universe is accelerating its expansion must be being caused by additional energy that was not present in the past, or it is being released from someplace where it has been locked up for the entire past of the universe.

Interestingly enough, if the universe was simply cooling down and becoming denser, you might expect that the drag it produces on light would increase.  A simple explanation might be that over time the existing energy is getting more and more evenly distributed across the universe.  As energy gets more evenly distributed the amount of energy that light has to interact with on its long journey increases.  So, this would cause the amount of drag and therefore red shift to increase.  This would look like the rate of expansion is increasing when viewed from here on Earth.

About this time the anti-theists will start so say, “You don’t have any evidence for this”.  The appropriate response, “Well you don’t have any evidence for your position either”.  At which point they generally bring up cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR).  They generally ask well how do you explain CMBR?  Well actually quite easily. 

If light is loosing energy as it travels, CMBR is simply light from much further away that has been red shifted down into the microwave range.  At this point the smarter ones go after "but we have no evidence the universe is that large".  This of course leads to the question of the sensitivity of the instruments being used to see distant objects.

Ever noticed that as equipment has been getting more and more sensitive, the estimated size of the universe has been getting bigger?  The simple reality is that to focus light that has longer and longer wavelength (and therefore smaller and smaller frequency) you need a bigger and bigger detector.

Once you have instruments the size of the diameter of the Earth or even the diameter of the Earth’s orbit you MIGHT be able to claim you are actually seeing to the edge of the universe, but any estimate that you are making now, is just you trying to make up a theory that fits the observations you do have.

Give me 1000 years of increases in the sensitivity of detecting equipment without seeing anything further away and you may have some evidence.  But claiming there is nothing out there because you haven’t seen it, is just intellectual dishonesty.

The main point of this post was to highlight the fact that given any set of observations it quite easy to come up with alternative explanations that fit those observations perfectly.  To choose one particular interpretation and demand that others agree with it is exactly why so many anti-theists are simply pushing their flavor of religion on others.

Anybody can write something in a book and get some group of people to believe it.  After a while you get a clergy of people that have studied the book and are somehow qualified to tell others what it means.  It doesn’t matter if it religion or science, the same thing is being done.

Belief in relativity, IS just another religion.

If you listen to many anti-theists, you will no doubt have come across their tendency to try and use the scientific method as a justification of their ideas.  It generally is presented that verifiable evidence is preferable to unverifiable evidence.  Leaving a side the obvious question of the validity of only considering verifiable evidence, this approach is misguided mostly by the fact that there are an awful lot of cases in science where the established explanation is based on unverified assumptions that have no evidence to support them.

If you are going to require that when an explanation is formulated, only verifiable evidence is allowed to be considered, that leaves you will a big logical problem when the final explanation contains ideas that have never been verified with any experiment.

The best known and most misunderstood example of this is the theory of relativity.  If you ask most people if they think that relativity is a correct, they will say yes.  But if you ask them to explain the theory, very few, even college professors, are able to explain the theory in an adequate way.

The reality is that with some high school level mathematics training, relativity is an extremely simple idea.  It is also quite easy to understand where the theory is useful and where people use it incorrectly.  But a real good question is just how verified is the theory?

Proponents of the theory will claim that it's been verified when actuality, even more than 100 years after it was published, its core concepts have never been tested.  Several tangential aspects of the theory have been verified, but they only show that theory has not been proven wrong.  They are a far cry from showing that the theory is correct.

One thing, most people fail to understand is that there are entire families of theories that predict exactly the same thing relativity does.  Every single observation ever made is equally well explained by those theories as it is by relativity. But if you ask people about WHY relativity is better than those alternative theories, there are even less people that can give that answer than there are people that can explain the basics of relativity itself.

So you may be asking, what is unverified.  Simply put the two postulates that form the basis of the whole theory.  The easiest one to deal with is the invariance of the speed of light. The issue has to do with exactly how you measure that speed.  Basically this can be done one of two ways.

The first way is to setup a light and a clock at one end of some distance, and put a mirror at the other end.  You turn on the light and measure the time it takes for the light to travel to the mirror and return.  This is known as the two way speed of light.

The other way, known as the one way speed of light, is where there are two points at some distance apart that each have clocks that have been synchronized so the time difference for light to travel the distance can be measured.

You would have to be an idiot to not realize that a more complicated test with two clocks that have to be synchronized is less precise than the single clock test.  A major assumption that the two clocks run at the same speed has to be added for the two clock model to hold any validity.  We already know that where you are can absolutely affect the speed a clock runs.

Simply take two identical atomic clocks and place one on the ground floor of a tall building and place the other one on the top floor.  They actually run at different speeds.  This fact is why the GPS system must account for the difference in clock rates in orbit and on the ground.

The relativity proponents will claim that the issue is because of the gravitational field and special relativity does not account for it.  But where exactly have they performed any experiments that are free of any gravitational field?

So we know that clocks DON'T always run at the same speed and we don't have a lab to perform the tests outside of a gravitational field.  So how is the two clock method anything more than being told we should ignore the man behind the curtain?  No experiment is ever actually performed that meets the requirements, and any experiment that is performed must take into account they fact the assumption of the clocks working at the same rate is wrong.

So if we turn our attention to the two way, one clock test, we get around the synchronization and clock rate problems.  But all of a sudden relativity is NOT so assured any more.  Some simple calculations show that whether the speed of light is constant or the speed of light is variable, all possible observations are exactly the same.

The only serious argument that has been made is one that Ritz and deSitter had years ago.  deSitter argued that if light was not constant in speed the observed orbits of binary star systems would be distorted.  But that argument adds another big assumption.  The assumption is that the speed of light is constant over the whole distance regardless of the length of that distance.

Given that today, the farthest any EM signal has been transmitted and received is about 0.002 light years.  That's quite a bit away from being anything near the distance between star systems.  To assert that the speed of light is constant of such a large distance is nothing more than a guess.  Once again no experiment has ever verified the assumption.

So we are left with a situation where the only reliable test is over a very short distance using a method that doesn't rule out the possibility of the assumption being wrong.  So given no experiment has been performed using either of the methods that is not open to serious questions, how can anybody claim relativity is right or wrong?  Simply put there is no verifiable evidence for either position.

So how exactly is belief in relativity any different than a belief in a religion?