How respond to unusually "rational" creationist?

[Gil Hamilton]

The funny thing is that he's not wrong. To paraphrase Fermi, he's not even wrong. Wrong means you predicted something and got a result different from what you predicted, which is just as good (strictly speaking) as getting the result you did predict. Creationists very explicitly don't have "wrong" in their world view. That is why they can never say they are approaching things scientifically, because they lack the notion of "wrong".

[Simon_Jester]

If you're going to draw on a field of science of mathematics in order to try and under-write your theological argument, a proper grasp of the material is your responsibility and if you go off spouting popular misconceptions it *does* suggest that you couldn't bother cracking a book on the topic so as to grant your interlocutors the consideration of at least doing your own homework.

In this case, doing his own homework would require about three semesters of graduate physics curriculum plus the requisite undergraduate education to enter a graduate physics program, an investment of five to six years of one's life and tens of thousands of dollars' worth of tuition fees (the textbooks alone will have an aggregate cost on the close order of a thousand dollars). It is neither easy nor cheap, and I for one feel I have absolutely no right to expect anyone to do it unless they feel it to be their calling in life.

It is of course possible to cheat on this kind of homework by asking someone else who's already done it (which is what you did). But in all likelihood that's exactly what he believes he did; unless you specifically quiz a physicist on this question and they know general relativity and quantum mechanics quite well (not all physicists do), you won't get the answer "well, they don't really contradict each other, they're just incompatible approaches." You have to ask the right question of the right person to get that from them.

Now, if we were talking about someone who had made a truly pig-ignorant statement ("quantum mechanics is bullshit"), I would be asking them to show math and deriding their ignorance. If we were talking about someone who claimed to have significant insights into physics in their own right, I would be asking them to show math and deriding their ignorance if they did not comply.

But when they simply say something they learned in good faith, something they could very easily have picked up even from the highest-quality popularizations that exist on the subject... I don't have a problem with that.

Most of my disgust with people who do that sort of thing is rooted in the fact that I am acutely conscious of my own under-education on the topic and am therefore unwilling to cut breaks for people equally uneducated who spout off as though they knew their subject.

Conversely, having actually gone and done at least the groundwork to become educated in such a topic... I find it very difficult to fault anyone for not doing so. The barrier to entry for quantum mechanics is high, and unless you are willing to devote years of your life primarily to studying the subject you will not understand it beyond the popularization level.

If normal people are to speak of quantum physics at all, they will inevitably speak of it at the popularized level, just as people talking about disease will be thinking in terms of the basic-level "germ theory" concepts and not the cutting edge of cell biology.

Someone who is educated to the maximum level that I could reasonably expect from a layman in biology (they understand evolution, they know basic cell biology and a few bits of biochem, and so forth) would still make mistakes about the cutting edge of the discipline. Someone who is educated to the maximum level I could reasonably expect from a non-specialist* in quantum mechanics and general relativity could still very reasonably believe that QM and GR do "contradict" each other as opposed to merely being mutually incompatible in that you can't use both on the same problem at the same time.

That's a very narrow shade of meaning, after all.

*Anyone who does not literally do quantum mechanics or relativity for a living, including physicists whose focus is in other disciplines, even highly competent ones.

[Kanastrous]

Dude, I've read a few books. Inexpensive, readily-available pablum-grade texts to which just about anyone living in a first-world country has access. And even a for-the-general-public layman's pablum-grade text makes this concept clear if you will only bother to read it. And if he couldn't bother to do that much - then I don't agree that he is acting in good faith. He's likely consulted a source already sympathetic to his viewpoint which just reinforced his presumptions.

My point is that between the years-of-dedication-high-IQ-gifted-mathematician types and the know-nothing-make-it-up-as-you-go-along types lies a band of education-for-lay-people-in-terms-they-can-grasp-that-are-still-somewhat-valid. The barrier for entry to *that* field is above-room-temp IQ and a few dollars to purchase a book (or above-room-temp IQ and a library card, really).

I'm not faulting someone for a failure to grasp esoteric and really tough-to-grasp concepts. I'm faulting them for coming off all definitive while mis-representing those concepts because they couldn't bother to acquire even a cheap and cheerful layman's-grade understanding of their subject - and that didn't stop them from blathering on about it.

This sort of ignorant-ass echo-chamber BS is a real problem. I have a fingernail grasp on some basics, and I know how ignorant that leaves me. This guy doesn't even have a fingernail grasp and he thinks himself competent to base arguments on his misunderstandings.

[Gil Hamilton]

If you want a book that is a good read and will teach you some science, Kanastrous, I recommend picking up Feynman's QED. You'll learn about electrons and photons and why some of the weird stuff that falls out of the physics end of quantum happens. You won't learn the true physics and mathematics of what he's talking about (as he notes, that requires three years of being a physics graduate student specializing in QED), but you'll get a picture.

[Kanastrous]

I'll pick it up. Sounds like a good companion to The New Physics, Other Worlds and The God Particle.

Yeah, God Particle is an awful title (I think) but it's a good read...

[Simon_Jester]

Dude, I've read a few books. Inexpensive, readily-available pablum-grade texts to which just about anyone living in a first-world country has access. And even a for-the-general-public layman's pablum-grade text makes this concept clear if you will only bother to read it. And if he couldn't bother to do that much - then I don't agree that he is acting in good faith. He's likely consulted a source already sympathetic to his viewpoint which just reinforced his presumptions.

What, the part about QM and GR "contradicting" each other?

I really don't think it's possible to say with confidence that they don't contradict each other without fully grasping the nature of the incompatibility. Because they are incompatible- you can't use them in the same place to cover the same thing, except on the most rudimentary level, and even on that level it is braincrushingly difficult (as in "this looks like a job for Steven Hawking" difficult). They are routinely presented as incompatible to the point of being nearly mutually exclusive. I can easily see someone who honestly DID try to learn about this subject by reading reasonably good books on the subject coming away with the belief that they really are mutually exclusive and that scientists use both theories anyway despite the cognitive dissonance because we don't have a better idea.

Because to be brutally honest, that take on the situation really isn't all that far from the truth.

I'm not faulting someone for a failure to grasp esoteric and really tough-to-grasp concepts. I'm faulting them for coming off all definitive while mis-representing those concepts because they couldn't bother to acquire even a cheap and cheerful layman's-grade understanding of their subject - and that didn't stop them from blathering on about it.

A cheap and cheerful layman's grade understanding of the QM/GR conflict is entirely consistent with believing that the two theories contradict each other. Only by either being a physicist who understands the basics of both theories, or by asking a physicist who does so, are you likely to get the definitive answer that "no, they do not contradict each other."

It's especially easy to miss this if you try to acquire a layman's understanding without knowing which books to steer for- a common problem if you don't have an expert guiding your studies.

[Kanastrous]

Well, one of the nice things about a layman's grade pop-guide to the topic is that the authors frequently *do* spoon-feed you things like 'no, they don't really contradict one another; they can be regarded as different conceptual tools or frameworks for describing the same phenomena, or different aspects of the same phenomena, and each is acknowledged as partial progress toward a more inclusive and elegant theory that may resolve their apparent incompatibilities.'

Without being in any way unusually smart or well-educated, I somehow managed to absorb what said authors wrote on that score. Why should I not expect another layman who wants to base arguments on the idea to do the same?

re: choice of books - well, I guess I have to concede that. Although as a consumer you have a responsibility to see what people in the field have to say about a given text before deciding that it's representative of what actual experts in the field think. That's what book reviews are for, and they're pretty readily available.

[Simon_Jester]

Without being in any way unusually smart or well-educated, I somehow managed to absorb what said authors wrote on that score. Why should I not expect another layman who wants to base arguments on the idea to do the same?

I submit that the answer is "because you were lucky." Empirically, many people who are reasonably intelligent and sincerely attempt to do what you did do not learn what you learned as a result.

[Kanastrous]

Since I can't quantify how much of choosing to pick up a book which you made an effort to select properly and absorbing its contents is luck, I can neither agree nor disagree with this.

[General Zod]

Without being in any way unusually smart or well-educated, I somehow managed to absorb what said authors wrote on that score. Why should I not expect another layman who wants to base arguments on the idea to do the same?

I submit that the answer is "because you were lucky." Empirically, many people who are reasonably intelligent and sincerely attempt to do what you did do not learn what you learned as a result.

I suspect a bigger problem is that it's difficult to know which books you can trust. QM is such a mind bogglingly complicated topic that it's really hard to know if the authors of the books you're reading really are qualified to write the book or if they're just full of shit.

Edit: I see the point was already covered. Nevermind.

[Kanastrous]

The academic qualifications on the dustcover ought to be a decent clue. If the author won or shared in a Nobel Prize for physics (or two), teaches at a prestigious university and has the endorsements of his professional peers, then you can reasonably expect that his text is one of the better ones.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the contents of the book are entirely right and true - Rutherford was a great physicist in his time and we all know how some of *his* predictions turned out - but at least it reassures you that what you're reading is in line with the best presently-accepted work on the subject.

[Rye]

The mistake both creationists on the hand and liberals on the other make is that they attempt to doctor either one theory or the other - depending on religious and political bias - to fit the other, disregarding reality in the process, rather than waiting for the improved knowledge that can allow us to understand both together. They butcher one incomplete model to fit another, when neither is necessarily or even probably the final word. This is both unscientific and disrespectful in the extreme of the God that created our wonderfully complex universe and gave us of His [sic, you can hear the capitals when fundies talk about Jehovah] spirit, so we can even begin to understand its wonders.

Presupposing the truth of the scripture and asserting all evidence to the contrary is a problem in "understanding" rather than the text and concepts themselves is pseudoscientific. The type of thinking where a given party line (Christianity, Scientology, IngSoc, etc) must be true and that anything to the contrary is down to errors on the parts of the interpreters rather than the writers is self-serving epistemology-dodging.

[Simon_Jester]

Since I can't quantify how much of choosing to pick up a book which you made an effort to select properly and absorbing its contents is luck, I can neither agree nor disagree with this.

Quite a bit. Textbook selection can be a crapshoot, even with someone who's supposed to know the material to guide you. And even then, comprehension is luck because so much depends on how the reader perceives the emphasis placed on different passages, how much attention they were paying at different points during their reading, and so on.

[Liberty]

On the original OP:

This makes me think of something my creationist brother recently told me over fb. He said the following:

The theologian Wayne Grudem does an excellent job of summing up my thoughts on this subject. In answer to the question, "Will any new scientific or historical fact ever be discovered that will contradict the Bible," he responds, "Here we can say with confidence that this will never happen--it is in fact impossible. If any supposed 'fact' is ever discovered that is said to contradict Scripture, then (if we have understood Scripture rightly) that 'fact' must be false, because God, the author of Scripture, knows all facts (past, present, and future)."

In other words, any scientific "facts" that appear to contradict the Bible must be wrong. It's not that he's simply throwing out evidence, he says, it's just that we don't have full understanding now, and science, etc, changes its mind frequently. Archaeology says Jericho wasn't inhabited at the time of the supposed exodus? So what. That'll change with the next big find.

This sounds like what your debating partner is doing. He is saying that while science may currently appear to contradict Genesis, that's only because we don't know everything in science yet, and with more scientific discoveries, we will see that actually, science and Genesis are in perfect harmony.

Here is the problem: he is ASSUMING that he is right, and then saying that science will prove him right "eventually" with utterly no proof. All we have to go on in reality is what evidence we have now. We can't start predicting what future science will find based on fairy tales. That's bullcrap.

[Kanastrous]

Since I can't quantify how much of choosing to pick up a book which you made an effort to select properly and absorbing its contents is luck, I can neither agree nor disagree with this.

Quite a bit. Textbook selection can be a crapshoot, even with someone who's supposed to know the material to guide you. And even then, comprehension is luck because so much depends on how the reader perceives the emphasis placed on different passages, how much attention they were paying at different points during their reading, and so on.

I think you are assigning far too little responsibility to the reader when it comes to comprehending the text. Yeah, how much attention the reader is paying makes a difference. Do you mean to suggest that the reader's failure to pay attention is somehow not their own damn fault? If some guy is making a false presentation because he couldn't bother to pay fucking attention to the text with which he was trying to educate himself, that's on him.

And again I'm not talking about rarefied and obscure scholarly tomes found mostly in college book stores, I'm talking about trade paperback texts with brightly-colored cover art available next to the coffee bar, the kind of books that proudly advertise the Nobels collected (or co-collected) by their authors and list endorsements by luminaries in the field right on the back. If you can't bother to research your layman's text even to the degree of checking out the dustcover that's on you, too.

[Simon_Jester]

I think you are assigning far too little responsibility to the reader when it comes to comprehending the text. Yeah, how much attention the reader is paying makes a difference. Do you mean to suggest that the reader's failure to pay attention is somehow not their own damn fault?

I don't expect everyone to be firing on all cylinders 100% of the time while reading a book. Distractions happen. In actual academic programs, this is why we have teachers and homework and tests: to force the student to go to much greater lengths to be absolutely sure they fully understand all the key concepts. Doing that costs labor and resources on both the teacher and student's parts; it's difficult to do on your own time unless you are determined as all hell.

There's a reason why you very rarely encounter self-taught individuals who can match the beneficiaries of professional education, especially in advanced subjects. All you have to do to misunderstand in a sincere attempt to learn physics from the ground up by reading popularizations is not be a genius with an eidetic memory or not read the book three times to make sure you caught everything.

That's a higher standard than I expect the layman to meet.

And again I'm not talking about rarefied and obscure scholarly tomes found mostly in college book stores, I'm talking about trade paperback texts with brightly-colored cover art available next to the coffee bar, the kind of books that proudly advertise the Nobels collected (or co-collected) by their authors and list endorsements by luminaries in the field right on the back. If you can't bother to research your layman's text even to the degree of checking out the dustcover that's on you, too.

And yet it is entirely possible to read, say, A Brief History of Time and walk away with misconceptions. The only failing required is failure to be a genius. The fact that it's a trade paperback with lots of words and few equations makes it worse, not better, because it's much easier to misinterpret a text passage than an equation. Someone may outright fail to read an equation, but they won't read it wrong and think something completely different from what the author meant.

With text, this is far from guaranteed unless the reader is very careful or the authors are very good as writers, not just as physicists or mathematicians. And you can laugh at the person who misreads and call them stupid if you like. I prefer not to, because I think it's often a matter of luck, not of some inherent vice or flaw in the person who misunderstood the text.

[Darth Hoth]

Update:

He has thus far proved oblivious to the epistemological argument; effectively, he is unwilling to accept the idea that Genesis is not necessarily a scientifically accurate description of the original creation. This was to be expected; as I noted, he is an inerrantist (although not a "literalist", or at least, not one in the usual sense). In that, he is little different from your bog-standard garden variety creationist, I suppose.

However, challenging the part of his argument that hinged on quantum theory and general relativity being incompatible and showing that they are not (or at least, not in the way he thinks), did cause him to withdraw. Now he has apparently ordered new books so he can read up on the matter himself. In that way, I suppose something worthwhile came out of our exchange; he will no doubt learn something useful from more studies of real science, even if his worldview as such does not change.

[Kanastrous]

And you can laugh at the person who misreads and call them stupid if you like. I prefer not to, because I think it's often a matter of luck, not of some inherent vice or flaw in the person who misunderstood the text.

When that person presumes to use his misunderstandings as basis for an argument intended to show the rest of us how wrong we are and how well-supported his theism is - you bet I'm going to laugh at them. A person who can't be bothered to vet his own arguments where they are easily vet-able before offering them isn't deserving of much respect on intellectual (and possibly even ethical) grounds.

Notice how I prefaced my first post on the topic with 'my understanding,' etc? That's because while I believe that I have correctly absorbed what the pablum-grade texts had to offer I still know that someone with more thorough education may well identify flaws in my understanding (beyond the flaws built in simply by reading introductory pop texts rather than sitting down and studying the material in a real academic setting). That is not too much to expect from Mister I've-Got-It-Figured-Out-Well-Enough-to-Lecture-You-Heathens, when it comes to the same material.

[Simon_Jester]

Update:

He has thus far proved oblivious to the epistemological argument; effectively, he is unwilling to accept the idea that Genesis is not necessarily a scientifically accurate description of the original creation. This was to be expected; as I noted, he is an inerrantist (although not a "literalist", or at least, not one in the usual sense). In that, he is little different from your bog-standard garden variety creationist, I suppose.

How is an inerrantist different from a literalist?

However, challenging the part of his argument that hinged on quantum theory and general relativity being incompatible and showing that they are not (or at least, not in the way he thinks), did cause him to withdraw. Now he has apparently ordered new books so he can read up on the matter himself. In that way, I suppose something worthwhile came out of our exchange; he will no doubt learn something useful from more studies of real science, even if his worldview as such does not change.

This is consistent with what I expected had happened to him: he read the wrong book or imperfectly understood the right book, and came away with a vague notion that two theories he (like everyone who doesn't do the math) didn't really understand were mutually exclusive instead of mutually incompatible. Or failed to fully comprehend the difference.

When corrected on the point, I am not surprised to learn that he backed up and reconsidered. People make mistakes like that all the time; that's how they learn.

When that person presumes to use his misunderstandings as basis for an argument intended to show the rest of us how wrong we are and how well-supported his theism is - you bet I'm going to laugh at them.

I think in this case, the only short-range objective of his argument was to demonstrate that there is "more beyond" in science. That much is true, or so likely to be true that no rational scientist would bet against it. His misunderstanding merely led him to choose a bad example to support the belief that we haven't reached the end of science.

Now, his conclusion "we haven't reached the end of science, therefore science will one day prove the existence of God" is absurd; that claim has no greater a priori probability than "we haven't reached the end of science, therefore science will one day prove the existence of Azathoth."

A person who can't be bothered to vet his own arguments where they are easily vet-able before offering them isn't deserving of much respect on intellectual (and possibly even ethical) grounds.

That's the thing, though, it's not easily vettable. Most educated laymen have heard of this notion that "quantum gravity" is the next holy grail in physics, because of some incompatibility between QM and GR. That's not even wrong, so far as it goes, and the point where Hoth's friend is wrong is on the subtleties of the incompatibility. Subtleties are not easy to check if you don't have the right kind of expert easy to hand.

Notice how I prefaced my first post on the topic with 'my understanding,' etc? That's because while I believe that I have correctly absorbed what the pablum-grade texts had to offer I still know that someone with more thorough education may well identify flaws in my understanding (beyond the flaws built in simply by reading introductory pop texts rather than sitting down and studying the material in a real academic setting). That is not too much to expect from Mister I've-Got-It-Figured-Out-Well-Enough-to-Lecture-You-Heathens, when it comes to the same material.

Rereading the original post by this guy, he didn't use his (imprecise) understanding of the QM/GR compatibility as evidence for anything. He just used it as an example. And I'll grant that he came out and said it instead of throwing out a big sheet anchor of "It is my understanding that..." But since his argument never depended critically on the thing he got wrong, I don't think he should be condemned for failing to dig deep enough to find out that it was wrong.

He would have had to do significant digging to do that with confidence, while completely suppressing his own confirmation bias. Doing so would probably require him to kick himself up to the 90th or 95th percentile of the educated population in terms of knowledge on the subject.

So I'm not going to blame him for the slip.

[Darth Hoth]

How is an inerrantist different from a literalist?

From what I understand, the terms are somewhat poorly defined, with considerable overlap. But as I have heard it, literalists are those who believe that the words and letters as such, interpreted as literally as possible, show the correct meaning of the text and The Truth (TM). Inerrantists are somewhat more open to interpretation; they instead try to determine the author's original intent, and read the passages in accordance with that. So, if I have understood it right, they are basically somewhat less literal literalists.

Something that I have observed myself, although this may not be part of the definition as such, is that those who call themselves inerrantists tend to be more concerned with the source texts in their original language. Literalists are more prone to assuming that the translation of their choice is also one hundred per cent faithful and accurate.

Of course, both groups still pick and choose bits and phrases that should be considered poetic, or literary devices, and so forth.

This is consistent with what I expected had happened to him: he read the wrong book or imperfectly understood the right book, and came away with a vague notion that two theories he (like everyone who doesn't do the math) didn't really understand were mutually exclusive instead of mutually incompatible. Or failed to fully comprehend the difference.

When corrected on the point, I am not surprised to learn that he backed up and reconsidered. People make mistakes like that all the time; that's how they learn.

Yeah, well . . . as I said, apart from the inerrantism he is fairly reasonable most of the time. Which is why one can still be friends with him, but also makes it all the more enfuriating when something Bible-related comes up and he just appears to shut off his facilities for critical thought.

[Kanastrous]

He would have had to do significant digging to do that with confidence, while completely suppressing his own confirmation bias. Doing so would probably require him to kick himself up to the 90th or 95th percentile of the educated population in terms of knowledge on the subject.

Simon, it would follow from that statement that I'm in the 90th or 95th percentile of the educated population in terms of knowledge on the subject. And I think we can both see what's wrong, with *that*.

I don't see why you are so reluctant to acknowledge that there are layman's grade texts that can reliably communicate dumbed-down layman's explanations of complex stuff and that a layman who just bothers to read them carefully can easily pick up what those texts have to say.