Faith statements about the bible

That the Bible is a factually correct account of the events recorded is intrinsically a statement of faith, not a statement of any objective knowledge anyone can have.  It is not a thing anyone can know.  Lets take the best possible case from an objective point of view - if all the accounts of events of the Bible were backed up by piles of independent, contemporary accounts* all you can say is that the Bible gives a consistent account along with contemporary sources.  That's it.

What can we say about the Bible?  If I had it my way, nothing - I'm not really into ancient mythos, even if it is culturally significant.  I'd rather take my high culture via Holst.  But if I'm backed into a corner - we can't say "it's reliable", this is in the same way a statement of faith, something we cannot know. 

It can be said that "it is our interpretation that it is internally consistent".  This is a difficult one, because internal consistency like this relies on some sort of system of interpreting what it is written. The most straight forward one is read what is written and take the words at face value.  People who say that the Bible is internally consistent do not do this, they look at these apparent inconsistencies and apply different interpretations, they sometimes refer to these things as "theology".  Is as good a label as any, if you like calling things "-ologies".  That said, from a straight forwards reading there are a number of apparent inconsistencies and contradictions, people make lists of these things.  But I don't really want to reduce to spamming links, we're all capable of googling ourselves.

We can say "we think it's reliable factual account", if we do think that, "it is a reliable factual account" is a statement of faith, as above.  There is a lot of people who will argue that the Bible is verified by other historical account and archaeologists, even though the broad body of expert opinion, from where the evidence comes, is that the Bible is only somewhat reliable as a factual account.  This does seem to be cherry-picking, a sort of confirmation bias - take what they produce when it agrees with them and discard it if it doesn't. 

But this isn't the major issue at least for me.  In this case saying "we think it's a reliable factual account" is also a statement of faith, because the Bible reports miracles, and to say "I think it's a reliable account" is saying that you think miracles happened.  This is a statement of faith - miracles do not happen nowadays, if you try to look for them in any objective way; they require faith to even see them. 

It goes the other way - saying "the Bible is wrong" is a statement of faith, saying "the evidence suggests the Bible is not a factual account and it has, from a straight forwards reading, many internal inconsistencies" isn't.

I think what I'm getting at here is that if we have to have a conversation about what the Bible is, and how we think about historical evidence, then it is obvious and vital to understand that some things are a statement of faith.  The Bible being a highest authority is one, the Bible being a factual account of history is one, the Bible being internally consistent is one, the Bible being a fraud is one.  We cannot say that the Bible is absolutely anything, from the available evidence.  Even beyond the "I think therefore I am" type thing to the more sensible way of looking at it, the evidence base just isn't there for any of these absolute statements.

I'm not saying we shouldn't make statements of faith, day to day life is full of them.  But it is important to know what are statements of faith and what is available as objective evidence, it can irritate and make people look needlessly silly and closed minded, especially if you're going to cajole unwilling a-religious folk into talking about it even though the subject is deathly dull.  (And it really is, no-one has said anything significantly new and accessible to me about it since Darwinism rocked up).

*They're not - for example, King David, who is the subject of a good chunk of the Bible - the Books of Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles has 1 possibly independent account - someone dug up some stones, which had King David mentioned on them. The stones are probably considered reliable because other stones at the same place contradict accounts of the bible, which isn't something Christian forgers are considered likely to have done.  There is another book which mentions him, but it's not generally considered certain.  Wiki here.

Nature, nurture, genetics, upbringing. Matt Ridley confuses the issue. By bring more information to the party

So I'm reading a massively interesting book about the brain, in the context of Evolutionary Psychology, "the Agile Gene".  It also has some biochemistry in it, but it's worth the struggle.  I quite like evolutionary psychology - not sure why, perhaps it's how the ideas are strung together, I enjoy Psychology and the evolutionary aspect of it is interesting.  It really complicates ideas, though - as with most people, I had a fairly "nature" "nurture" style separation in my head, not thinking it was really one or another but a combination of both.  But it is actually a lot more complicated than that - an example is people who grew in the womb in the third trimester in a famine.  Shortly after they were born the famine ended and they have a significantly higher chance of diabetes when they get older.  A working hypothesis seems to be that the child is constructed in the womb in reaction to the external famine, but then afterwards when it finds ample food due to the difference between the design and what was there.

Both nature and nurture, a seriously complicated interplay between environment and genes, an environmental effect during gestation that played out in the end of life.

But this famine seems to have a second generation effect - the children who were in gestation during the first 6 months were small children, but grew up normally.  They also have small children themselves.  It's not unprecedented in animals, locusts take a few generations to switch from quite, reticent animals to eat-everything-around.  But second generation influences?  Environmental components of who we are are taken somehow directly from our grandparents' environment?  So not only is nature and nurture a false dichotomy, they actually play with each other - nature and nurture influencing genetic responses, but grandparents environment effecting the way we grow.

I think what is getting me, and that I'm not expressing it well, is that nurture implies some sort of choice, training, but actually nurture, environmental interplays, can be as dictatorial as genetic expressions.  Homosexuality has a component of environmental factors about it - for each older brother a boy has, the boy is around a third more likely to be gay.  So is it the parents' fault a child is gay?  Well, sort of.* 

Also, how much stuff they know about the brain is immense.  They did some experiments on mice, blindfolded them from birth, and found if they were blindfolded for 2 weeks, they could see, if they were blindfolded for 3 weeks they were blind.  Fairly astounding itself, but they actually went in and found the chemicals that did that.  It also has a human component, and a rather tragic one.  Occasionally children are born with cataracts over both eyes and initially the standard practice was not to remove them until the child was 10.  Those children never really learnt to see.

This is all in context of imprinting, which is a fascinating subject itself - how humans imprint, how some parts of our "personality"** are mailable but once set become set in stone.

Sometimes I think the reason I started all this reading about psychology was to see how much we can dictate who we are - can we decide to be different to what we are?  How much can I decide to be different?  And the question still stands, sort of - I want to know what is stuck and what can shift, what we can choose to change.  There are ideas that we are stuck as we are, ever destined to repeat the same cycles, and then there's the more optimistic "we can be whoever we want to be", or as the NLP people put it - if any human can be something, then so can I.***  And it's after reading things like this that I realise I'm probably not asking the right question.  The problem is, I'm not really sure what the right question ought to be.

*Also, my little brother is 1/3 more gay than me, proven by science.

**Personality is a little awkward a word - I wouldn't usually use it in the context of sexual preference, for example.  I would usually put something in like "self" but given I've been talking about development of bodies I didn't want the mistake of people thinking I was talking about anything other than brain-related activity.

***Neither of those are true, by the way.  We are limited, but only somewhat.  And being different is a trick.

You don't have to...

...but it's better if you do

Hoarder

I just realised I am totally a hoarder.  Not in terms of items that ought to be thrown out, but ideas and phrases, ways of explaining and understanding.  Fill my head with them, get irritated when I can't remember them, chase after them when they're fleeting.

Eat them up and make them my own.  But never really.

Ah, we're all composites anyways.

Words that taste good

"...which do nothing but witlessly fool those eager to believe."  - Derren Brown, Confessions of a Conjouror

The hypothesis of God

It is not just that in the ever-expanding realm of scientific knowledge the hypothesis of god has not been required to explain anything, ever.  It is also that in every case where design seems apparent - and to our human eyes, design appears everywhere - natural processes, alone and unaided, have been shown to be sufficient.

It is not just a god is and gods are not needed, it's that, as an explanation, they are replaced.

Expecting this to continue, after so long and so much knowledge gained, is a reasonable, sensible and conservative position to hold.

This is done as a slight extension of something I wrote last month, as a response to people taking issue with the then widely reported comments by Stephen Hawkings about god.  It was done after having some conversations about faith and listening to Carl Sagan talk about how the Universe is not made for us.

The Christian God, from the top

Christians say their God says he will do something.  I come along and see if it happens.  It does not, they say their God does not lie, so I discount their idea of God. 

(I looked for myself, reached my own conclusions, then went and read studies, they mostly didn't contradict what I saw.  There were some subtleties I'd missed.)

They then ask me about it, I explain and they attack me for doing this.  It's wrong to expect a god who apparently says he doesn't lie to not lie.

I do not care if the Bible contradicts itself or historical record, anymore than any other ancient book.  In places it does, in places it doesn't. I don't care about the philosophical arguments for the existence of a god - even if a god existed, you'd still have to show it was yours.

I will examine this god hypothesis in more detail when the predictions made happen.  They do not, so I don't have to look at anything else because it has been shown to be wrong.  False.  Incorrect.

Just to be very clear, this is what happens:

Christians say God will do something.  These things do not happen.  So I think the Christians are wrong about God.

So, what is Fusion

Turns out starting a series of blog entries when I'm moving a few hundred miles away and starting at a new Institution is not massively conducive to actually carrying on.  I forgot moving was stressful.*

I've sold some snake oil in the entry before this.  I've called this thing "Fusion Power" and said that, if we invest lots of money in it, there's a reasonable chance it'll solve all the worlds energy problems.  So what is Fusion?  How is it used to make power?

It is the fusion of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, to make a helium atom with the release of power.†  That probably doesn't mean much to sensible people, so here's it long-form.

In order to get power out a system, you need something with stored energy at the start - the fuel, a reaction to release this energy that then can be converted to a form that can be used.  Coal is set alight, it's used to heat water which spins a turbine to make electricity.  Also petrol in a car engine, set fire to it, drives a piston, does magic, spins a wheel.

This is the fuel for a fusion power plant; many Deuterium atoms (D) and  Tritium atoms (T).  The red circles are protons, the white circles neutrons and the blue circles electrons. (Deut, two nucleons; a proton and a neutron.  Trit, 3 nucleons.  See?)**

These combine to form a Helium  atom (He), the reaction releasing a lot of energy through the spare neutron.  This neutron is captured, the energy used to boil water, spins a turbine, out comes electricity.

So, electricity, no real waste, job done.  Except it's not that easy.  Atoms in general dislike combining, they will really avoid it.  Of all the atoms, D and T are the most inclined to combine but the most is... Well, it's like this.   To make 2 atoms combine, they have to be moving fast enough to overcome the forces keeping them apart.  Going back to secondary school chemistry (it's a stretch, I know) heat is just atoms moving around, something is hotter, the atoms are moving more quickly.  In order to get D and T moving fast enough to combine, they need to be heated up to around 800 million Kelvin.  To give this some context, the core of the Sun is 13 million Kelvin.

So very hot.

And entirely doable.  It takes a lot of power to heat up the fuel to that temperature, but once it gets up to that temperature it self heats; it pulls itself up by its bootstraps.  If you can keep everything close together and behaving nicely, the neutrons escape to heat the water with 4/5s of the energy, but 1/5 of the energy goes into the helium, which doesn't escape, it goes back into the fuel, heating it up to temperature and causing more fusion.

Easy as pie.  So what can we use to heat things up to a lot hotter than the temperature of the Sun?  Well, there are 2 main methods currently pursued for getting the fuel this hot.  One is putting the fuel in a magnetic bottle and driving an electric current through it, called Magnetic Confinement Fusion (or MCF).  This is the one that involves sacrificing baby goats, Latin and dark robes.‡

The one I'm working on, in my own little way, involves over a hundred of the Worlds Most Powerful Lazers all shining at a point the size of a small ball bearing, ramming it up to over a thousand times its original density and then heating it up to the really hot temperatures, have it explode, catch the energy and then repeat with another ball.  About 20 times a second.

Which is the next thing I'll write about - why we're making it so dense, why we have to do that before its hot, how this is difficult, why we have to do it so often and what this means, in terms of a power plant.  Unavoidably this is going to require some maths, but only a little bit.

(My PhD is at the end of this long road, I promise)

*One of the odd things about life is that I deal with various situations, look back at them and think, "I would have done this differently".  I didn't do anything wrong, I just didn't react as well as I could have.

Could do better, then.  All in all though, this year has started brilliantly, mostly better than I expected, just I don't usually take things that have gone well and pick them apart.  Well, I do, just not as much - cognitive bias :) Imperial is, as the kids say, a complete sausage fest though.

†Actually not, but for the purposes of my case it'll do

**A representation of a deuterium atoms, nucleons and atoms don't have colour as colour is a macroscopic quality, electrons are way further away, they'd all have blury boundaries not solid ones, etc etc...  On the other hand, protons are red, neutrons are hard to see and electrons are blue, unless they're being very mathematical and then they're brown, because Feynmann said they are.  I get slightly put off if anyone says any different - some people think protons are pale yellow, which is just silly.  They're red.

‡They don't deny it.

Crazy Crystal Lady

So, I went out last night.  Invited to 3 different things, I chose a physics party and then drinks with a couple of friends of mine and some of their friends, finance types.  We all got on well, they seemed like decent guys, dealt with me teasing them well, so was alright.

There was a crystal lady.  Or a lady who used  mystic crystals as a conversation point.  I can deal with this entirely vacuous bullshit, but not if someone starts pulling out "evidence" - she was saying things like "I'm from MIT" and "I used MIT science".  Firstly, nullius in verba, bitch.  And it's "the scientific method", preceeds MIT by a few hundred years.  Enlightenment values, use the brain you were born with.  I lasted about 20 seconds before I had a go at the person who had started this and retreated.  I had no way of redeeming the situation - I couldn't lie and pretend like she wasn't bullshitting, and I couldn't criticise and rip her to shreds because I was new to the group.  I suppose I should have deflected, which is what I would have done had my friend, who is more confrontational than I am, not started demanding empirical evidence.

The problem with using language like that with people who don't understand what empirical evidence is is that they'll start giving you something else.  The questions to ask are things like "how often are you wrong?", "can you see auras through obstacles?",  "With what success rate?"  If, on the other hand, they start giving cargo-cult science, then I'm past what I know how to politely deal with.  It's like going up to a Christian and saying "I'm believe in Jesus, he wasn't God though.  He was gay and he slept with Mary Magdalen and had a whole bunch of kids, escaped from the cross and lived the rest of his live in a cave as a cult leader".  People genuinely believe things like that, but how on earth do you deal?

Although I do need to figure it out, invariably I'm going to come across situations like this and I need to be able to do them.  The nice thing about most religious people, mainstream at least, is they know that people will often view their faith as kooky and for the sake of social lubricant don't bring it up.  And that is the kind of religious faith that is fine.

So today's job - figure out ways that might work to defuse situations like the above.  I sometimes wish I was one of those people who had these sorts of social skills automatically.  I suspect though, that doesn't often happen.  Hard earned is usually the way.