Irreducible Complexity

A few weeks ago, Mark Goodacre posted over at the NT Blog on the problem of the Criteria of Embarrassment.

It is interesting, and one thing that came out of the comments was that the criteria is perhaps a little bit of a misnomer. Taken at face vale it is an oxymoron: if an author really is embarrassed about some detail, they’d just omit it.

The point of the criteria of embarrassment is that “embarrassed” sections are those that seem to be written to say why the obvious interpretation of a set of events are wrong. The events, we infer, are common knowledge.

For example, if as a school teacher, a student was late. You said “why were you late?” and she said “I didn’t meant to be late, and I only went into McDonalds to ask the time, but then I had to queue, so it took me a long time.”

What can you infer about the truth? Well I think almost everyone would infer that the student was in McDonalds when they should have been in school. If you are cynical you might decide they went it for a burger, if you believe them, you might believe them. But either way, mentioning McDonalds is conspicuous. Would the student rather you didn’t know she was in McDonalds? Possibly. I think we can probably also infer that she figured it was possible you knew independently, or could find out independently that she was there. So adding that embarrassing concession helps make her story more robust to challenge.

I think of something like that when I think of the criteria of embarrassment. When the justification for something is trying to pull you away from the obvious interpretation.

Clearly injustice, but in which direction? Is blue collar crime too harshly punished, or white collar crime too lenient?

h/t Failblog

Its the story of a cat with a big nose and a skull cap, who says “Oi vey” a lot and speaks in a Yiddish patois. He’s a money lender by day, but he’s always on hand to help out his friends.

Its going to be huge.

Well I really hope Yiddy Cat would never get made. I hope anyone with an ounce of cultural sensitivity would dump it in the trash before finishing the first script.

So I’m a disappointed with the BBC for screening “Rasta Mouse”. Its a children’s program about a Mouse with brown fur, who wears a Tam, and says “Rasta” a lot. He’s a reggae musician by day, but he’s always on hand to help out his friends.

Rasta is a complex and sophisticated religion, with a complicated relationship with Christianity and Judaism. It has a subtle theological vocabulary, or Iyaric, centred around a tension between the subjective self and the divine. Its adherents are discriminated against in the law of many western countries, including the US and UK, because of their use of Cannabis in devotional contexts.

But most folks know of Rasta only from their crude portrayal in the most primitive racial and behavioural stereotypes, in a way that would be obvious and highly politically incorrect if it were aimed at Muslims, Jews or Buddhists.

I’m most pissed at some of the reactions. Its fine, you know, because Rasta is fair game. Its only a children’s show. Rastafari is small, its adherents are vaguely ridiculous. And, let’s face it, they’re black, and they don’t get invited to Bilderberg meetings. And the best friend of one of the writers is a Rasta. Or at least, he wears red gold and green and smokes pot…

To me this is nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the religion. I think we could all do with learning more about others’ beliefs. Though I’ve been interested in Rasta for a couple of years, I still know almost nothing. And we can fundamentally disagree with the Rasta concept of God without reducing them to stupid stereotypes. Reducing any group of people to crude stereotypes is insulting. Whether Rastas, Jews, Blacks, or Gays. Peddling that crudity at children is even worse.

Very touching speech. And I agree with his conclusions. God is the actions and attitudes of connected humanity.

I was taught in my theology degree that you don’t say “Muzlim”, but “Musslim”, and its “Islahm” (long ah-sound) rather than “Izlam”. From my meagre Arabic dalliances, I also figure it is “Osama Bin Laden”, but “Ibn Laden” when used on its own.

Any other bits of Islamic naming we massacre?

Reading various responses to the May 21, 2011 believers is quite amusing.

The most common objection from other Christians goes something like:

“It won’t be May 21, 2011, because Jesus said that nobody knows the day or the hour except the Father. If you think you know, you’re wrong.”

Leaving aside that the believers have worked out an elaborate theology to work around this verse, I do find this kind of proof-texting amusing. Because Jesus “says” this, right after saying that the end will come before “this generation will … pass away”. So clearly he was wrong.

Oh, right, sorry, I forgot that the bible can’t be wrong. If it appears to be wrong, we just have to interpret it differently until we can make it right. So in your interpretation of the passage, Jesus didn’t literally mean that bit, but did literally mean the bit about not knowing; whereas the interpretation where Jesus didn’t literally mean either is wrong. Gotya. Thanks.

If you haven’t noticed the media, the world is due to end in October, and Judgement Day is just over a week away (May 21, 2011).

Which means, for those folks who believe in the rapture and the validity of the numerology behind that date, May 21, 2011 is checkout day.

I just had a little look around. And it seems that the May 21, 2011 movement (e.g. here) is pretty large, in comparison. Larger than most of these little millenarian groups.

And that makes me nervous. When I read the absolute certainty in the words of doomsday cultists, my mind comes back always to Heaven’s Gate, to The Order of the Solar Temple, and to Jonestown. Its a short step from believing that God will bring the end of the world, to believing God wants you to help him do so.

Whatever it takes to get your indoctrinated loved ones home that day, do it. Even if it means promising a last minute conversion.

Maybe I’m paranoid. But combine an irrational belief in the end of the world with a massive humiliation and undermining of belief, and I think few people would act rationally.

So the country will grind to a halt to watch the TV and see a royal wedding. A spectacle witnessed only a couple of times each generation. Tears will be shed, grumpiness will be expressed, and celebrities and new money will see just how wrong they’ve been getting ostentation.

And I’ll be working. Because the 5 minute summary on the news will be fine for me. And I have insane amounts of work to do at the moment.

I was wondering tonight, thinking about our monarchy here in the UK (and let it be known I am rather ambivalent towards it: I have no real desire to throw it over for a republic, but I wouldn’t particularly object if that was the way it went).

God is sometimes described in Kingly language. Because the idea of a Davidic King was important to the Jews of Jesus’s time, and therefore to Jesus too.

Now there are few totalitarian monarchies left in the world. We have rather got into the habit of thinking about monarchies as constitutional monarchies. I wonder, when people think about the Kingdom of God, do they envisage totalitarianism, or constitutionalism?

After this exchange on Doug’s blog, I’ve spent the last couple of days mulling over models of divinity, in an idle kind of way. In particular Kaufman’s Metadivine Realm. The constitution, if you like, behind a divine monarchy. I hope to collect my thoughts into a post on the subject in due course. If you google metadivine realm, you currently get almost no useful results, so it would be worth correcting that, if nothing else!

There are times I feel most like thanking a creator for the situation of my birth.

Like when the state broadcaster of my country funds an hour long academic discussion of the Pelagian Controversy, and then makes it available to the world to listen online.

Its for this reason I never begrudge paying my “TV license” (i.e. state broadcaster subsidy tax, for those of you elsewhere).

Temporarily waking the blog for a Sunday post.

I was reading the comment stream at the facebook page for the “Magis Centre for Reason and Faith” about how science and religion are compatible because science can’t prove or disprove the existence of God.

There are a whole bunch of things wrong with the comments, including the standard category errors, and moving referent errors, and the lack of understanding that science doesn’t prove anything.

But it got me thinking.

Science is a way to tell which explanation is better. You compare the possible explanations, and you figure out their consequences (because all explanations have consequences). You keep going until the consequences differ: explanation one would have consequence A, but explanation two would not. Then you go and look to see which is right. That explanation is better. You then repeat, again and again, until one explanation dominates its peers.

So the problem with the Magis approach, that God’s existence cannot be accessed via science is this: it is an admission that the God explanation for the way the world works has no unique consequences.

To say theology and science are non-overlapping concerns is to say that God has no consequence in the entire universe: the whole universe is exactly as it would be if there were no God. Because if that weren’t true – if there were some place where the existence of God mattered – well, there would be a consequence, then we could go check.

This is a singly modern idea of God, and it is born out of the fact that for millenia, religious folks have thought that there were observable consequences of God. And they were pretty cocky about them. But it has turned out, time and again, they were wrong. So the fashion in theology is to retreat – to say we don’t want to play that game (after all, Creationism is a dirty word among most Christians I know too), so we’ll partition God from science finally – the two can never meet.

Well, okay, that’s fine as a theology I guess, but if you do that, how have you not just made God totally irrelevant?

And if you can name a point at which God is relevant to the universe, how can that not be testable?