Author: VD

This attempt at a critique of my refutation of Richard Dawkins’s “Ultimate 747” argument in TIA by Touchstone of Debunking Christianity should amuse some of you. Microphone Jones correctly pointed out the primary flaw; I added some additional points on the 21st comment. I have to say, there are few individuals I find funnier than those who attempt to defend an argument by saying that if the argument had been different than it actually is, it would be correct.

This is the best part:

Dawkins does not spell out a formal definition of organizational or algorithmic complexity in his book. But you don’t have to be a super-genius to get familiar with the concepts as they are used in science and information theoretic application. I haven’t read Day’s section of “theistic bodycounts” from wars versus “atheistic bodycounts”, but Day’s supporters on my list regale me superlatives of Day’s phenomenal research capabalities. If he’s got such capabilities, he shot all his efforts in previous chapters; Day simply punts here and decides to equate complexity with information.

Oops. That’s a really major blunder. Just in casual terms, complexity is a description of the “number of discrete and differentiated parts”, and information is “reduction in uncertainty”. Complexity and information are related on some level, and those terms do often occur together in computing and information theoretic contexts. But complexity is not information, any more than mass is acceleration.

It is a really major blunder. But the problem here is that the idea of equating complexity with information did not originate with me. You see, I’m not the one who wrote that Richard Dawkins’s Argument from Improbability is rooted in “the source of all the information in living matter”, or brought up the problem of “continually monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe”, or referred incredulously to “bandwidth” contra simplicity. That would be, well, Richard Dawkins.

One can only criticize the existing argument. If Dawkins has something besides sheer quantity of information in mind there, I should very much like to know precisely what it is. But until he offers a convincing definition of complexity that fits his argument, the Ultimate 747 simply will not fly.

UPDATE – This has turned out to be even funnier than I’d thought! When posting my comment at Debunking Christianity, I skipped right over this rather telling bit written by Touchstone in the comments there: “Dawkins is pointing out a structural deficiency in the argument from complexity, that’s all. It’s not an argument for the non-existence of God, just pointing out the poverty of one of the arguments *for* God’s existence.”

“The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.”
– Richard Dawkins, TGD p. 113

“[T]he argument from improbability – the “Ultimate 747″ gambit – is a very serious argument against the existence of God.”
– Richard Dawkins, TGD p. 157

Touchstone not only reads what isn’t there, he obviously can’t read what actually IS there. There is no theistic “argument from complexity” and* Dawkins not only asserts that the Ultimate 747 is an argument for the nonexistence of God, he vows that he has “yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer” to it. (Technically, that may still be true; I’m not a theologian.) Just as Petrarch reversed the metaphor of the “dark ages”, Dawkins is explicitly attempting to reverse the argument from improbability to argue for the non-existence of God.

Touchstone admits he hasn’t read TIA and I suspect he hasn’t really read The God Delusion either. Regardless, it is readily apparent that he is not competent to serve as a reliable interpreter of Dawkins’s poorly articulated intentions.

*I am told that Touchstone meant to write either the Argument from Design or Irreducible Complexity here, both of which certainly exist. However, both are only tangentially related and neither indicate that Dawkins’s argument is not what Dawkins claims it to be, an argument for the nonexistence of God.

67 Mounds View Meerkats (8-3-0)
45 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-6-1)

54 Burns Redbeards (7-4-0)
39 Black Mouth Curs (3-8-0)

77 Judean Peoples Front (5-6-0)
47 Valders Valkyries (5-6-0)

66 Winston Reverends (4-7-0)
41 Masonville Marauders (3-7-1)

52 Alamo City Spartans (8-2-1)
52 Silver Spooners (5-3-3)

I summon and invoke the dread spirit of JOHN SCALZI! (He waits for the appearance of a sulferous orange smoke, which unaccountably fails to appear.) Ahem… zoe ghost brigade old man war android dream whatever… (gestures madly) JOHNATHAN MICHELANGELO SCALZI IL SECONDO SUBITO VIENIQUA!!!

Be not alarmed. I’m merely putting the dark sorcery of the Law of Internet Invocation to the test. I note that the explanation for it, though quite correct, isn’t entirely comprehensive. Unlike my more famous SFWA colleague, I don’t often search for myself via the various search engines; clicking on the Technorati link is about as far as I usually go. However, people email me links when others have written something about me or my books on a near-daily basis. That’s how I got word of the New Oxford Review’s review of TIA, for example.

Anyhow, once we’ve got John in the salt circle, what shall we order him to do? I think I should like to know three hypothetical Obama administration deal-breakers that would cause him to consider not supporting Obama in 2012?

This is where I find things to start getting very interesting, because I think there are some areas where Rothbard’s assertions are, at a minimum, debatable. But keep in mind that the answers are based on the source material, not absolute truth as you understand it to be.

Chapter 4 next week. Economic contractions don’t take holidays.

Daniel Hannan points out the obvious:

We tried to warn you. We said that the bail-out would fail. We pointed out that nationalisation never worked. We predicted that the seizure of the banks would be accompanied by heavy-handed state intervention in their procedures.

Sure enough, stock exchanges have continued to plummet, several banks (notably, as Ambrose reports, in Ireland) are looking for additional bail-outs, and the banks that have already been expropriated are being told by ministers how much to lend and to whom – which is, of course, precisely what caused the crisis in the first place. The next thing, no doubt, is that they will be told to meet the government’s ethnic quotas, to redistribute a proportion of accounts of more than £50,000 to customers with credit problems, and create a number of sinecures for prominent Labour supporters. That’s what happens in socialist economies.

No idea is so bad and fails so completely that you can’t find academics and politicians attempting to repeat it on the grounds of it having been insufficiently implemented.

I’m not surprised that someone should shoot himself after reading The God Delusion. The thought of suicide has to cross any intelligent individual’s mind upon reading it and realizing that there are literally hundreds of thousands of dim-witted individuals eligible to vote who genuinely believe TGD to be a masterpiece of science, philosophy, and reason rather than the insubstantial bit of intellectually fatuous, snipe-and-dodge evangelical atheism it actually is. Such a waste. It’s tragic to think that after reaching the correct logical conclusion to Dawkinsian moral logic, the unfortunate young man didn’t see fit to shoot the pretentious Archbishop of High Church Atheism first.

A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

“He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong,” the relative wrote. “I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn’t wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences – that was all there was – just social consequences.

“He mentioned the book he had been reading ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins and how it along with the science classes he had take[n] had eroded his faith.

Now, obviously the young man wasn’t particularly intelligent or he wouldn’t have found Dawkins’s shoddy logic and nonexistent scholarship to be the least bit convincing. But the possibility of this sort of thing happening is one of the reasons I wrote The Irrational Atheist – readers may recall my assertion that sociopathy and suicide are among the logical consequences of rational atheism – and arranged for free electronic copies of it to be made available to anyone who might like to peruse it. In fact, Dawkins and company really should embrace TIA; its exposure of their fallacious arguments just might save their lives from one of their pathetic young converts one day.

Why yes, I am enjoying the president-elect’s appointments. I can only imagine how much fun his actual administration is going to be!

Barack Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as his attorney general is a very discouraging sign for anyone who hoped the new administration would de-escalate the war on drugs. As Dave Weigel noted earlier today, Holder pushed for stiffer marijuana penalties when he was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia

Holder is seriously hard core on drugs. He believes it’s important to eradicate “marijuana violence”. And he’s right. Because when someone’s pizza delivery is sleazed by a baked dude with the munchies, government has to act!

Attn: Gov. Palin. The 2012 youth vote is now in play.

UPDATE – The anti-war Left were the next to feel the sharp kiss of Obama’s treacherous blade:
Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama’s national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.

It’s just not looking very good for the Keynesians these days, is it:

Dow 7,997.28 -427.47 -5.07%

S&P futures vs fair value: -8.60. Nasdaq futures vs fair value: -15.00.

Nothing goes straight up or straight down. There WILL be a rally coming soon. It’s more likely to kick off in the next two weeks than this week, but there will be a rally. However, don’t be misled by the cheerleaders into thinking that this is anything but a short-term bottom.

Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests it will never be successful in reducing male demand for female prostitution:

A brothel reputed to be the largest in Europe has been overwhelmed with interest after offering free entry for life to customers who have its name tattooed on their arm. The manager of Pascha, which houses more than 120 prostitutes across its 12 stories, did not expect any takers when he put up posters advertising the tongue-in-cheek promotion. But more than 40 men have already come forward to have the name inked onto their arm in large blue letters, and the brothel’s tattoo artist is having to work extra shifts to keep up with demand.

As Spacebunny likes to say, men are always proud of the wrong things… at least, the wrong things from a female perspective. So, you can expect that an anti-prostitution policy designed around reducing men’s demand for sex isn’t very likely to be viable. Considering the way in which criminal laws and fatal infectious diseases haven’t eliminated homosexuality over the last millenium, it’s rather optimistic, shall we say, to argue that the occasional $1,500 fine is going to have any impact at all on men’s demand for sex with women. The fine is still cheaper than a weekend trip to Hawaii.

Although I am not a consumer of paid sexual services myself, I am an adamant advocate of legal prostitution. It is not only the free market’s way of undermining the feminist political fascism that is destroying the West, it also happens to nicely highlight the fundamental absurdity of most atheist concepts of morality. That undermining is why the feminist Left is utterly obsessed with attempting to stamp out “sex slavery”. As usual, the feminist position is logically incoherent; they attempt to argue that while paid sex between adults can and should be subject to government control, unpaid sex between children cannot and should not be.

Never forget that legality is not morality. The only thing that has ever prevented prostitution from becoming a part of mainstream Western culture is its Christian moral tradition, not the laws that sprang from that tradition. Secular culture, which has no broadly applicable moral tradition and rejects the application of Christian morality to sexual matters, has no rational basis for objecting to prostitution; one thing atheists who so admire European secularism seldom see fit to mention is the way in which brothels, call girls, and roadside hookers are a normal part of the Old World landscape.

Men will always pay for sex in one way or another. Many young women will always find it easier and more to their liking to earn a living through their sexual capital than by working in any of the more conventional labor markets. And the Iron Law of Supply and Demand will always trump the best legal efforts of politicians and societal reconstructionists.

Yet another data point in support of his mantra:

Flight controllers were revamping plans Wednesday for the remaining spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour’s visit to the international space station, after a crucial tool bag floated out to space during a repair trip. The briefcase-sized tool bag drifted away from astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper on Tuesday as she cleaned and lubed a gummed-up joint on a wing of solar panels on the space station. She and fellow astronaut Stephen Bowen were midway through the first of four spacewalks planned for the mission. The tool bag was one of the largest items ever lost by a spacewalker….

“What it boils down to is all it takes is one small mistake for a tether not to be hooked up quite correctly or to slip off, and that’s what happened here,” said lead spacewalk officer John Ray. Stefanyshyn-Piper and Bowen finished the spacewalk in almost seven hours by sharing tools from Bowen’s bag. Ray noted that Stefanyshyn-Piper showed “real character and great discipline” by continuing on. She was the first woman to be assigned as lead spacewalker for a shuttle flight.

I can’t help but note that Miz Steffy-Pie is rather ahead of the game when compared with the usual female first. She didn’t actually manage to kill herself.