(no subject)

[maradydd]

By way of Pharyngula, apparently the creationists are starting to abuse information theory, not just physics, in their tortured attempts to justify their doctrine.

Of course, you understand, this means war.

ETA: /me reads the comments. Oh. Apparently creationists reject Claude Shannon's work on information theory. Infidels. They shall be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

One thing that I will never understand is why creationists believe that an omniscient God is bad at math.

Comments

[tdj.livejournal.com]

For (much) more on this subject: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/bad_math/debunking_creationism/

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I'm going to go to bed angry tonight, aren't I.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Hoboy. From MarkCC's first two posts, all I can say is that I hope Dembski never learns about Chaitin's omega, or I'm going to have to go bury an axe in his skull. I am personally offended.

I guess I understand how real biologists feel now.

[graydon.livejournal.com]

Oh Chaitin, swoon. Did you read Exploring Randomness? If not, do! It's a short, sweet, delightfully lucid and fun book. All the theorems are demonstrated with executable code in a little micro-lisp.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Ooh, not yet. I've read a bunch of his papers and his lecture notes from the Estonian Winter School that he taught at a few years ago, and have been slogging my way slowly through Algorithmic Information Theory, which has a lot of executable code in a micro-lisp that he doesn't spend a whole lot of time explaining. Exploring Randomness sounds like a good first course before tackling AIT again; I'll look for it, thanks!

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I have a copy, of course. :)

[tdj.livejournal.com]

I know of someone who worked in a lab where there was a grad student secretly getting a cell bio PhD so he could have credentials to write an anti-evolution book. The Moonies supported his family while he was in school.

I'm not that up on information theory - I only touched upon it as it applied to chemical engineering's version of entropy in grad school. Dembski strikes me as an excellent warning to mathematical modelers: "At every step, make sure your model for reality has something to do with reality."

[geekosaur]

I think the proof text for that is a circular pool in Solomon's temple which is described in such a way that one can derive π = 3.0. (To which the Jewish answer is, roughly, "calm down, nobody said it's a math textbook.")

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Well then it's a crap description. Go Jews.

Maybe this explains the occasional stories one hears about some whackjob legislator somewhere in the midwest proposing a bill to set pi equal to 3.

[geekosaur]

It is indeed, per Snopes (which also gives the origin as I Kings 7:23).

[geekosaur]

BTW, the correct answer is "find a multi-digit number which isn't a multiple of either 10 or 7 in the Tanakh. Of course it's rounded."

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

"See! The Bible's not inerrant! We're only going to one significant digit, the one after the decimal point could be wrong."

*beats head into wall repeatedly*

[lightning-rose.livejournal.com]

Hell, if I were an omniscient, all powerful, god there would be no irrational numbers.

And just to f*ck with creationists I'd a scatter a few crocoduck (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Crocoduck) skeletons in the fossil record.

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

One can derive that, if one makes a variety of assumptions that aren't necessarily specified in the text. For example, they could have been measuring the inner circumference of the vat, but the outer diameter. (Obviously, with Bronze Age technology, the thickness of the vat wall is not insignificant.)

I've seen another source that claims that the average vat in that culture had a flared lip, so measuring the diameter across the lip, but the circumference around the main body of the vat, would have gotten them measurements that don't match up.

And then there's your other point, that they're probably just rounding the numbers. I mean, it's not like they intended to publish their findings in some kind of peer-reviewed forum, and standards for journalistic accuracy back then were pretty slack.

One of the only things I find at all respectable about Answers In Genesis is that they maintain a list of "arguments we wish Creationists would stop using" (with the subtext being "because they suck so hard and make us all look bad"). If pro-science folks had such a list — a list of "arguments we shouldn't use against Creationists, because they're crappy arguments and we can do so much better" — I'd nominate the "the Bible says pi equals 3.0!" argument for a high place on the list.

[Edit: Realized I was talking to the person I was referencing, edited first sentence of para 3 accordingly. Oopsy.]

[geekosaur]

You had me wondering for a moment. :) Anyway, my comment above was the formal restatement of the "it's not a math textbook" quick quote. Rounding is one of the "givens" of Tanakh interpretation (another is that any mention of "seventy" means "a lot"; it's a direct consequence of the "seven and ten" observation). The exception is when the counting follows the tradition of near-eastern formal documents, as with the censuses [noting that the Hebrew "elef" used to mean "troop", not "thousand" as usually translated]) and the records of donations to the building and dedication of the Tabernacle.

I'm guessing the snark on the skeptics-guide page set you off. I thought the source appropriate for maradydd's journal, but their snarky sidebar obnoxious, fwiw.

---

edited for clarity as to whose snark, and where the referenced comment is relative to this.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

You know... I was pondering sphere worlds the other day and wondering... If you had a massive star inside a massive shell such that both had sufficient mass to have appreciable gravity of their own, couldn't you have a situation where from some vantage point, PI would at least appear to equal 3. :)

[hukuma.livejournal.com]

You know, information theory is just a theory. Teach the controversy!

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I'm dangerously close to putting this quote in my thesis.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Of course their omniscient god can be bad at math. It's all part of his divine plan, which we mortals are too insignificant to comprehend, despite the fact that we are the Most Important Species Anywhere.

[geekosaur]

Actually there's no proof of that (that we're the "Most Important Species"), and some speculation based on the Zohar (playing numbers games with the Hebrew phrasing about G-d creating the universe) that the stars (or galaxies, depending on who you ask) in the sky are other places where G-d is experimenting.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I'd actually be interested in reading that. Link/reference?

[geekosaur]

Oddly enough, I'm having trouble finding online references; Google search just gets me a bunch of creationists trying to use conservation of mass/energy to "prove" Someone created the universe. I did find this, which is moderately surprising from that bunch of fundies.

I do need to correct my initial statement, though: in general it's taken that the other worlds were created and destroyed; outlooks like the abovementioned are rare, and the notion that there are other worlds whose inhabitants have been given Law are even rarer. OTOH the speculation goes back considerably father than I realized, given the Gemara quotes.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

The main reason why I'm curious is that there's a similar trope in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, which I enjoy a great deal. I'm curious how deep his research goes, because it would not surprise me at all if this were what he was drawing on.

[geekosaur]

Anything based on the Zohar is somewhat dubious to start with; nobody knows when it was actually composed, and there's considerable evidence that it was in fact a sort of practical joke played on the Jewish community.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Hmm. If you chalk up the Zohar as a practical joke played on the Jewish community, you pretty much have to discount all of the Kabbalistic works, which I'm not ready to do.

As for "when it was actually composed", our degree of accuracy is roughly in line with most religious works of unknown origin -- i.e., "within about 1000 years". It was written no later than the 13th century, and very unlikely to be written before the 1st century CE. It stands out in that most books that we can't date any more precisely than that are far older than (possibly) 13th century works, but still -- I don't think it's any more dubious than half of the Tanakh or most of the Christian mystic writings, or the Christian Gospels.

(Something I've noticed -- generally the Jewish writings have less certainty about the time of their composition, but greater certainty that the contents haven't been significantly altered since they were written, compared to the Christian writings, which are far more accurately dated, but also far more likely to have been "adjusted" along the course of their lifetime.)

[graydon.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately it goes much further than rejecting AIT or any of the formal information-theory work that's been done. They've also been flatly juxtaposing normal information-theory mathematics with verbal "explanations" saying that some equation states the exact opposite of what it actually states. For years. They picked this up around the same time they picked up the terms "intelligent design" and "irreducibly complex", and "numerical" arguments about the "improbability" of evolution being able to function (of course, measuring a mathematical object that does not describe any actual mode of selection). Such tactics have more syllables -- and numbers! -- and so sound much more sciencey than "bible". Their whole approach these days is to hide in "science clothes", claim no relation to religion at all, and rely on the inability of the general public to tell the difference. Make it look like two competing theories in the same, "wide-open" scientific fields.

It is indeed a sad and angry-making day when you discover how deep this shit goes. My condolences. Maybe a few minutes on cuteoverload? That always helps for me.

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

One thing that I will never understand is why creationists believe that an omniscient God is bad at math.

Because they believe that he created them in his image....

[naggy.livejournal.com]

Creationist logic:
1.) I am created in God's image.
2.) I am an idiot.
3.) Thus, God is a greater idiot.

Resources?

[(Anonymous)]

"...creationists believe than an omniscient God is bad at math." LOL, well they certainly don't represent Him that well in that regard.

It's been a long time since I read anything by Shannon (brief communications stint back in my undergrad EE days).

Anyway, I'm bad at math, but I do like reading about stuff like this. Can anyone point me to (a) some accessible resources on information theory and (b) maybe a few scholarly papers that would be way above my head anyway? Who's doing research on naturalistic origins of information?