Debunking Creationism
goodmath | December 14, 2009 An alert reader pointed me at
href="http://www.uncommondescent.com/philosophy/what-is-intelligence/"
rel="nofollow">a recent post over at Uncommon Descent by a guy who calls
himself "niwrad", which argues (among other things) that life is
non-computable. In fact, it basically tries to use computability
as the basis of Yet Another Sloppy ID Argument (TM).
As you might expect, it's garbage. But it's garbage that's right
up my alley!
It's not an easy post to summarize, because frankly, it's
pretty incoherent. As you'll see when we starting looking
at the sections, niwrad contradicts…
goodmath | November 16, 2009 For those who have slightly better memory of recent events than an average
gerbil, you'll surely remember that not too long ago, the Intelligent Design
folks, with the help of Ben Stein, put together a whole movie about how
evilutionists are all a bunch of evil fascists, out to silence the poor,
hard-working IDers.
You'll also remember that Bill Dembski has been talking up the fact that
he's got two peer reviewed papers allegedly about intelligent design. So,
you'd think that after complaining about being locked out of the debate,
now that he has some actual papers to talk about, he'd be…
goodmath | October 19, 2009 I was planning on ignoring this one, but tons of readers have been writing
to me about the latest inanity spouting from the keyboard of Discovery
Institute's flunky, Denise O'Leary.
Here's what she had to say:
Even though I am not a creationist by any reasonable definition,
I sometimes get pegged as the local gap tooth creationist moron. (But then I
don't have gaps in my teeth either. Check unretouched photos.)
As the best gap tooth they could come up with, a local TV station interviewed
me about "superstition" the other day.
The issue turned out to be superstition related to numbers.…
goodmath | October 15, 2009 First, a quick status note: the blog has been really slow lately because I
fell behind schedule on my book, and I've been putting all of my free time
into catching up. I'm finally pretty much caught up, so I should have time to
get back to the Chaos theory posts. I need a few days of study time to get
myself back up to speed, and then some actual good contentful posts should
start showing up.
In the meantime, for your entertainment, I've been looking at a really
silly website that was sent to me by a reader with entirely too much free time
on his hands. It's another one of those supposed…
goodmath | August 20, 2009 As lots of you have heard, William Dembski and Robert Marks just had
href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isYear=2009&isnumber=5208652&Submit32=View+Contents">a
paper published in an IEEE journal. In the last couple of days, I've received about 30
copies of the paper in my email with requests to analyze it.
My biggest criticism of the paper is how utterly dull it is. It's obvious
how they got it published - they removed anything that's really interesting from it. It's
a rehash of the stuff they've written before, stripped of any content that directly hints
at the…
goodmath | August 12, 2009 It sometimes seems like every day, some "intelligent design" bozo comes out with
another book rehashing the same-old crap. I usually ignore it. But this time, I felt
like the promotional materials for one of the new books really stepped right into my
part of the world, rhetorically speaking, and so I figured I should give it a
quick smackdown.
The book in question is Stephen C. Meyer's "Signature in the Cell". Meyer's argument
basically comes down to one that is seems like we've heard and dealt with a thousand times already. There's stuff in the cell which looks kinda-sorta like a machine…
goodmath | May 11, 2009 Over at Uncommon Descent, Dembski has responded to my critique of
his paper with Marks. In classic Dembski style, he ignores the
substance of my critique, and resorts to quote-mining.
In my previous post, I included a summary of my past critiques of
why search is a lousy model for evolution. It was a brief summary of
past comments, which did nothing but set the stage for my
critique. But, typically, Dembski pretended that that was the entire
substance of my post, and ignored the rest of it. Very typical of
Dembski - just misrepresent your opponents, create a strawman, and
then pretend that…
goodmath | May 7, 2009 So. William Dembski, the supposed "Isaac Newton of Information Theory" has a new paper out with co-author Robert Marks. Since I've written about Dembski's bad IT numerous times in
the past, I've been getting email from readers wanting me to comment on this latest piece of intellectual excreta.
I can sum up my initial reaction to the paper in three words: "same old rubbish". There's
really nothing new here - this is just another rehash of the same bankrupt arguments that Dembski has been peddling for years. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that Dembski
has actually…
goodmath | February 12, 2009 As I've mentioned before, I get lots of email from all sorts of people. Lots of it is interesting, and lots of it is stupid. This morning, when I was checking my mail, I found an email from a creationist in my mailbox, which puts forth an "proof" against atheism that I hadn't seen before. It's about as idiotic as most creationist arguments are,
but it's one that I've never seen before, and it's interesting to shred it from the viewpoint of mathematical logic.
Here's his argument:
Now to the main point, and somewhat more interesting stuff. I recently ran across a proof (perhaps not in the…
goodmath | January 8, 2009 One of the many great things about my readers is how you folks keep me up to date with any new crap that springs up, so that I don't need to spend so much time
hunting down the real good stuff. There's a beautiful piece of crap on youtube that was pointed out to me by one of you guys. It's really a wonderful bit of circularity.
Circularity is something that I find beautiful in math. What I mean by
circularity is that because numbers are closed, you can run around in circles playing
games with that closure. Another post that I've got in progress is talking about RSA
encryption, which is a…
goodmath | August 18, 2008 Someone sent me some questions about information theory; or actually,
about some questions raised by a bozo creationist arguing about information
theory. But the issues raised are interesting. So while I'm
nominally snarking at a clueless creationist, I'm really using it
as an excuse to talk about one of my favorite mathematical subjects.
The creationist is confused by the information theory idea of information and complexity. That is somewhat confusing.
Intuitively, we think of information in terms of semantics and communication. We think that information is related to semantic content.…
goodmath | August 6, 2008 Someone sent me another stupid Jewish article. It's still not the
wonderful relativity denial that I lost, but it's pretty delicious as
stupidity goes. This time it comes from Chabad. For those who aren't
familiar with it, Chabad is a Chasidic organization, which originally
formed around people following a very famous Rabbi from the town of
Lubav after he emigrated to the US. Chabad grew into a very large
fundamentalist organization that is very devoted to what they call
outreach. (I call it proselytization.)
Anyway - on to the article: "Are Science and Religion a Contradiction?". Large…
goodmath | July 31, 2008 Once again, you, my readers, have come through with some really high-grade crackpottery. This one was actually sent to me by its author, but I didn't really look at it until several readers sent me the same link because they thought it was my kind of material. With your recommendations, I took a look, and was rewarded. In a moment of hubris, the author titled it
A Possible Proof of God's Existence from Multiverse Assumptions.
This article is basically a version of the classic big-numbers probabilistic
argument for God. What makes this different is that it doesn't line up a
bunch of fake…
goodmath | January 5, 2008 I've been sent Yet Another Proof of God. This one goes to rather a lot of trouble
to appear to be mathematical. I thought that it would be fun to rip it apart. For a change, this one is from an Islamic moron, rather than the usual Christian moron.
Alas, it's pretty much as stupid and shallowly wrong as the usual christian one.
Our genius prover starts off with a bunch of definitions. They're a classical example of what I call "obfuscatory mathematics"; that is, mathematical notations and definitions that are created for the purposes of obstruction, not clarification. Obfuscatory math is…
goodmath | October 16, 2007 A few weeks ago, I received an email about a new book, "The Faith Equation", by Marvin Bittinger. Bittinger is an author of math textbooks - including, I think, my first calculus text. The book is supposed to be Bittenger's explanation of how mathematics validates christianity. Needless to say,
I asked for a review copy - this is something right up my alley.
I've taken longer to get around to reviewing it than I intended, but life's been busy
lately. I'm going to review it in several parts: it's too dense, full of bad arguments of so many different kinds that I can't possibly do it justice…
goodmath | September 13, 2007 Much to my professional shame, PZ recently pointed out David Plaisted, a Computer Science professor at
the University of North Carolina, who has
href="http://www.cs.unc.edu/%7Eplaisted/ce/challenge8.html">an anti-evolution screed on his university
website. Worse, it's typical creationist drivel, which anyone with half a brain should know is utter
rubbish. But worst of all, this computer scientist's article is chock full of bad math. And it's
deliberately bad math: this guy works in automated theorem proving and rewrite systems - there's no way
that he doesn't know what utter drivel his…
goodmath | April 24, 2007 When I'm bored, I'll periodically take a look at the blogs published by
the bozos at the Discovery Institute. I can generally find something good for a laugh. So I was doing that tonight, and came across yet another example of how they try to distort
reality and use slimily dishonest math to try to criticize the evidence for evolution. This time, it's an article by "Logan Gage" called What exactly does genetic similarity demonstrate?.
Francix X. Clines, an excellent writer for The City Life and Editorial Observer sections of The New York Times, today (April 23, 2007) repeats what may be…
goodmath | April 4, 2007 Apparently, Michael Egnor just can't get enough of making himself look like an idiot. His latest screed is an attack on me, for criticizing his dismissal of evolution as a tautology.
My observation that "Natural Selection" is a tautology, and therefore useless to modern medicine, seems to have set off quite a few Darwinists. Prominent Darwinist blogger Mark Chu-Carroll took me to task here, and comes up with an approach that he believes gets "Natural Selection" off the tautological hook: he asserts that all scientific theories are reducible to tautologies! Mark writes:
And this brings…
goodmath | April 2, 2007 A couple of weeks ago, I revisited George Shollenberger, the creator the alleged "First Scientific Proof of God", and commented on his pathetic antics on amazon.com, trying to explain just why no one had bothered to post a single review of his book. (If you'll
recall, according to George, it's because everyone is too busy considering the impact that his proof is going to have on their activities.)
Normally, I wouldn't revisit a two-bit crank like George after such a short interval, but he showed up in the comments again to specifically point at a post he made on his own blog, which he…
goodmath | March 14, 2007 Today's bit of basics is inspired by that bastion of shitheaded ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor. In part of his latest screed (a podcast with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute), Egnor discusses antibiotic resistance, and along the way, asserts that the theory of evolution has no relevance to antibiotic resistance, because what evolution says about the subject is just
a tautology. (I'm deliberately not linking to the podcast; I will not help increase the hit-count that DI will use to promote it's agenda of willful ignorance.)
So what is a tautology?
A tautology is a logical statement…