(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

[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.)