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Done: Categorized all 300-plus of my Facebook "friends", of whom I probably only know maybe a hundred personally, as a consequence of the numerical necessities of Facebook gaming. Also discovered that there is no copy of the canonical Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen et al. to be had for love or money, after a trip to the Clementi Textbookshop. Mindful that I wouldn't have that much free time, I borrowed only two books from the library this visit, among them Pratchett's (with Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen) Darwin's Watch: The Science of Discworld III. The choice was not unlikely given that I'm an avid reader of Pratchett (and am constantly vexed at the slim selection at my regional library), but what piqued me was that it happened to be a great counterpart to a book I had just returned, Davydov's God Exists: New Light on Science and Creation (preview).  Book covers in warm red shades (Source: Amazon.com) We first note the similarities: both books are concerned about God and Science. Let us proceed with Davydov's God Exists, which I picked up in order to hear both sides of the debate - one must be able to argue the other side to claim understanding, and I may pen the best argument I can make for particular God(s) one day. For now, hear Davydov out. A little background: Joseph Davydov received his Ph.D. at the Moscow Institute of Energy in 1967, and was a former subject of the USSR, which as we know enforced state atheism. Davydov begins by stating that atheism is the opposite of religion (strictly speaking not the case, since Buddhism is commonly recognized as a religion and states that there is no God). He then asserts that atheism is scientifically bankrupt, and that religion in contrast agrees with science. Undoubtedly an interesting position to occupy, and he proceeds to justify it. Davydov defines idealism as the primacy of objective ideas and the subordinacy of matter, while materialism is the reverse. Of the latter school, he holds up Lenin as stating that "there is nothing in the world except for matter in motion", a phrase that will be repeated many times over the course of the book; this sentiment came, by the way, from Karl Marx's practical dialectical materialism, and of course Marx was a key founder of modern communism; it is no wonder that the two got intertwined. It is apparent that Davydov holds no great love for the Soviet regime (and who can blame him?), and his objective is to discredit the philosophy of dialectical materialism, and thereby atheism. In particular, he states that the Bible is powerful because it is true, and communism collapsed (well, almost totally) because totalitarian atheism is false. (Of course, one then wonders what conclusions can be drawn from the gradual demise of religious states in favour of secular ones...) What are the major thrusts of his arguments? On idealism and materialism, he attempts to discredit materialism through the analogy that the primacy of matter is akin to an engineer building an aeroplane, then thinking of the design, which is absurd - surely an engineer would think first (thus primacy of ideas) before building? This is not a new argument at its heart (and to be fair, truly novel arguments almost never get discovered), and is mostly the teleological argument, more commonly known as the argument from design, or watchmaker argument (it is obvious that such incredibly complex things as humans must have had a designer, i.e. God, just as a watch presupposes a watchmaker). As you may expect, Pratchett's Darwin's Watch has something to say on this, which we shall leave for later. Holding a Ph.D. in science, Davydov is not wanting for evidence - the ratio of the radius of the nucleus to the diameter of the atom is approximately that of the radius of the Sun to the solar system, he says. Does this similarity not then demonstrate that they are different details of some creative, intelligent design, he continues. However, is this good reasoning? Firstly, the diameter of the solar system is not universally agreed upon - if Pluto is taken as the boundary, it is just 0.1% of a light year. If you take the cloud of comets revolving around the sun as part of the solar system, it is about a thousand times greater, on the order of one light year. Then let us say instead that the nucleus-atom ratio is several orders of magnitude smaller than it actually is. Is there then a similar cosmological ratio that can be presented as evidence for design? Yes, that of the Earth to the Moon. If several orders of magnitude greater, we may use the galaxy, and so on. Thus, presented with enough such ratios, it would be more surprising that no "designed" coincidences could be found! Davydov claims that (Soviet, at least) scientific atheism uses completely unproven basic assumptions, namely that "the world contains nothing except for weighty and visible matter", which is demolished by phenomena such as photons (weightless) and radio waves. It does in fact seem to defeat Lenin's "everything is matter in motion" materialism, but wait - some current definitions of matter do include energy and fields as forms of matter. Davydov has no truck with this so-called revisionism, and says that scientific atheism has adapted their dogma to agree with scientific advances circa 1900. A related criticism is made of the "scientific atheist" statement that "matter is uncreatable and there exists a law of conservation of matter", which is not true of some forms of matter (e.g. if electrons and positrons, which are generally considered matter, come together to form photons, sometimes not considered matter). A third one is of the expansion of the Universe, which contradicts the fixed Universe supposedly hailed by atheists and materialists - indeed, Davydov reveals that they once declared the expanding Universe theory as "blatantly religious". Thus it appears that Davydov takes umbrage at the fact that Marx, Lenin and their dialectical materialist buddies moved their philosophical foundations to suit new evidence, that the sort of matter that they recognized when crafting their theory is not the sort of matter that was later scientifically discovered. Therefore, since the original interpretation of dialectical materialism is false, dialectical materialism must be false! At this point, it may be instructive to rewind a little to the front of the book, where Davydov mentions that the Bible is 3300 years old, and must be correctly translated into modern scientific language for its truth to be apparent. He further includes a charming Middle English poem from the 14th century to make his point, that it is unintelligible without commentary, presumably from a graduate student in Medieval Literature. Skipping the observation that Davydov allows, nay, insists upon, a liberal interpretation of his chosen holy text while denying the same to poor ol' Marx, let us partake of his explanation. For a start, the Biblical earth is stated not only to refer to land, but to also the "concepts of planet, material, matter, the galaxy, the Universe and the Material World". However, a problem is that early believers would almost certainly have directly and literally interpreted earth as the land, and insisted that this was correct (the alternative, of admitting doubt, is not particularly common in religion) - indeed some such as the Young Earth Creationists of today would concur. Then, by Davydov's standards, would their belief be false since their premises were shown to be inaccurate? Continuing on, Davydov maps the Six Days of Creation to six scientific eras - Energy Evolution, Hydrogen Evolution, Planetary Evolution, Stellar Evolution, Biological Evolution and Intelligent Evolution, in that order. One immediate objection might be the placing of Stellar Evolution after Planetary Evolution, since the currently accepted scientific hypothesis is that the Sun was formed first some 4.6 billion years ago, and that the planets (including Earth) then coalesced in another hundred million years or so. Unfortunately, Davydov doesn't have much choice, since the book of Genesis clearly states that by the end of the third day, there existed dry land and seas, and even vegetation, and the making of two great lights to rule the day and night only came after that, during the fourth day. In other words, your apple trees (remember, God created all species...) flourished before the Sun sparked into life. I guess one might interpret dry land, seas and vegetation in other ways (a tree of gases?) just as Davydov interpreted the "waters" of the second day as hydrogen plasma, and the "firmament" as vacuum space. Or maybe the "two great lights" can be interpreted not to refer to the Sun and Moon, but to some other entities. Who knows? Further, while Davydov names the stages "Evolution", he does not follow the scientific consensus regarding evolution, insisting that it is guided and limited; he says that "fossils discovered by archaeologists convinced us that the evolution of each living species occurred without the slightest trace of transformation of lower life forms into higher forms." This, I believe, is not quite true (see list of transitional fossils). Davydov then pulls out several counterarguments to evolution, including the argument by design (again), that interspecies breeding isn't possible because different species are unrelated (false, think horse-zebra and lion-tiger crosses among others), and that scientific atheism has embraced the theory according to which human beings descended from apes (false, since the scientific claim is that humans and apes have a common ancestor that is properly neither human nor ape). Here, it appears that the author has not bothered to grasp the most rudimentary basics on evolution, writing that "if we were to dry out the Atlantic Ocean, none of the billions of fish there would turn into a sheep or a camel...", disregarding the sheer scope of time that the process of evolution requires, i.e. Darwin's finches took millions of years to split into a dozen species. A more accessible example may be (low-tech) animal husbandry, where men chose animals with desired characteristics and crossbred them, and it often happens that in a relatively short period of time (on the order of thousands of years), new species are created, if the definition of different species being unable to interbreed is taken.  Picture them marching up an ark together (Sources: Lovemymastiff.com & Puppy-and-dog-tips.com) For yet another example, Take dogs - while nominally a 180-pound English Mastiff and a 2-pound Chihuahua are of the same species, in practice they aren't going to have babies. Compare this to the case of lions and tigers, which Davydov would likely accept as different species, despite being much more physically and reproductively compatible. It would be quite understandable for a layman to pronounce the mastiff and chihuahua to be of different species; surely they appear more distinct than horses from zebras, or lions from tigers!  Wolves don't particularly like the implications of evolution either (Sources: Arizona.edu & Anno.nl) As for the argument from design that remains, Darwin's Watch deals with it. The general agency of designless evolution is that it is guided by competition - for food, for space, for mates, i.e. "natural selection", that the the gene pool of each generation is altered just a teeny weeny bit as the "more successful" have more kids, and that this glacial change, as populations of what was originally a common species become isolated (not as hard as one may suppose, since fruit flies fed different kinds of food will not mate with each other after as few as eight generations, in an easy-to-reproduce experimental setup), splits an original species into new, distinct ones. Thus, I ended up slightly disappointed with Davydov's tome, which offered few new insights regarding the proof of an Absolute God, although I hasten to add that I do not see how a definite proof of the nonexistence of such a being can be formed, and thus my formally agnostic leaning. In addition, consider Davydov's pains in matching up scientific reality with the Biblical canon of creation in Genesis, and showing that Genesis does not contradict science. Leaving aside the order of Sun/Earth creation, how meaningful is such a matching? Let's do the same with the Egyptian myth of creation. "In the beginning there was only water, a chaos of churning, bubbling water..." - does this not describe exactly the scientific reality of the fluid gases that eventually became the solar system? And out of this came "hills of dry land", and over these came the first sunrise. Note that there could not by definition be a sunrise without anything for it to rise over, so this leaves open the possibility that Ra-Horus the Sun came before the Earth, in perfect concordance with known scientific fact! Next, let us ask the Australian Aboriginals, those experts with boomerangs. "There was a time when everything was still. All the spirits of the earth were asleep - or almost all. The great Father of All Spirits was the only one awake. Gently he awoke the Sun Mother. As she opened her eyes a warm ray of light spread out towards the sleeping earth... and everywhere she walked plants grew." How incredibly accurate - the Sun's energy allowed the first plants to photosynthesize! Certainly it is, like the Egyptian story, scientifically no less spot-on than Genesis. What about us Chinese? Well, we had Mr. Pangu to do the task. "In the beginning there was nothing in the universe except a formless chaos. However this chaos coalesced into a cosmic egg for about 18,000 years. Within it, the perfectly opposed principles of Yin and Yang became balanced and Pangu emerged (or woke up) from the egg." Dare I see the Big Bang theory? Come to think of it, what are we paying those physicists and cosmologists for? Fund them millions and build them observatories, and the best they can do is to confirm what Chinese peasants knew thousands of years ago. Not to leave out the Hindus, in the interest of harmony - of all the cosmologies described thus far, they probably come closest to current scientific consensus, that the Earth is over 4 billion human years old - no mucking about with interpreting days as eras for the Hindus! Shiva, Lord of the Dance, dances the creation and destruction of the Universe, exactly the cyclic model, and this universe is just part of an infinity dreamed by untold numbers of other deities, the many-world hypothesis. Might Davydov not then logically embrace the superior revealed truth of the Vedas? As a final demonstration, consider the opening of Moby Dick. "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." may in fact be a veiled description of Creation. There is a hint of untold ages ("never mind how long precisely"), of nothing in the beginning ("having little or no money... nothing particular to interest..."), and of impending flux in the hydrogen plasma which led to the Earth ("sail about a little... the watery part of the world.") The point is, even given the acceptance of an abstract Absolute God, its conflation with the specific God of the Bible, or of any particular religious tradition that claims itself as the only truth, cannot be done with any reasonable degree of confidence. It is the equivalent of stating that there is some perfect, wonderful, indescribable being outside space and time, and from there jumping to a knowledge of said being getting very unhappy if one particular species out of the innumerable ones created by Him does anything productive in one particular day-and-night cycle out of every seven, and that He will torment any member of that species forever and ever if it doesn't believe in Him, even if it never heard of Him and didn't have the imagination to dream all His accepted attributes up. Summing up, Davydov's contempt for the forced atheism of the USSR is well-founded, but unfortunately his scientific approach to reconciling science and his particular chosen faith is unimpressive. Indeed the religious counterpart to the USSR, a theocracy where belief in a particular God is forced upon its subjects on pain of punishment, is no better. Would Davydov accept an alternate reality USSR, where Christianity were the only state religion, with atheists-by-choice and members of other religions persecuted? But it's obviously the only truth... I will leave off with another argument by another Ph.D. (in Gas Kinetics). Dr. Monty White has taken up the challenge of defending the literal Biblical position of the Earth being about 6000 human years old, a task I do not envy. His "simple, conservative arithmetic" proof goes as follows: beginning from Adam and Eve, assuming the population only doubles every 150 years, there would still be over eight billion people in less than 5000 years, close to the current world figures. Thus, it all adds up! In contrast, Dr. White says, if humans have really been around for hundreds of thousands of years as evolutionists say, then using a figure of 50000 years and the same doubling rate, there would be 10100 humans, which is clearly false! Without pausing to let the incredulity sink in, Dr. White confidently says that "...such a calculation makes nonsense of the claim that humans have been on earth for tens of thousands of years." and challenges the dumb evolutionists: "If humans were around millions of years ago, why is the population so small?" No, unfortunately, I don't think this is a joke, which makes it unimaginably pathetic. One might present Dr. White with a pair of fruit flies (named Flydam and Fleve, perhaps), with the supremely conservative doubling rate of a week. Then, in a year, by Dr. White's logic, the original pair would have undergone 52 doublings, leaving a grand total of 4 500 000 000 000 000 flies (you do the math), and in a mere ten years the mass of the flies would be far greater than that of the Earth. Ergo, fruit flies have existed for only days, if they exist at all. Where are the hordes of hamsters flooding the earth? It is a distressing sight to see undoubtedly intelligent people mortgage all good sense in defence of the dumb parts of religion. On the bright side, I feel much more confident about completing my Ph.D. all of a sudden. Not the greatest of starts to the new season of the $100 Challenge, no thanks to Owen's one-on-one miss. $90/$100 after Week One. $50 on Man City (-1.5) vs Wolverhampton Wanderers (at 1.90) $40 on Arsenal (-2.5) vs Portsmouth (2.10) $10 on Man United 1, Wigan 0 [Exact Score] (6.00) Next: Algo Brüno Championleagueo
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