User talk:Ace McWicked/Philip J. Rayment - Liar and Hypocrite

You're going to send yourself to an early grave. Probably better off trying to persuade the Pope that Mary was really not a very big deal. Concernedresident omg!!! ponies!!! 22:48, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
 * In my most recent post I have shown that Philip has quite artfully lying through his teeth. AceX-102 22:53, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The biology stuff anyway is, at best, a case of pathological denial, and at worse a series of lies. I'm no fan of religious belief, but I find it odd that people can cheapen and undermine their religion by clinging obsessively to a belief when it's clearly contradicted by evidence. This problem was recognised hundreds of years ago (Augustine or Aquinas I think), yet he's making arguments that paint his belief in a pretty poor light. Humans have three legs so I'll just shut my eyes, cover my ears, and demand that shoe shops sell shoes in threes. Concernedresident  omg!!! ponies!!! 22:58, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Philips going to need a significant discrepant event to change things, and I doubt wiki-ing will do it. Likely, too, if something is debunked, some other ad hoc shit will just take its place.  Unfortunately it's probably the case that Philip will have to do his own thinking to change his mind, which seems unlikely.  Sterile 23:33, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Fuck me Ace, I've managed to read about one fifth of that, and I can't get any further. Kudos for managing to deal with such breathtaking ignorance (and pride in said ignorance).  10:12, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm amazed that you put up with him for this long. I would have given up after the first section. Bravo! 01:47, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

An interjection
I don't have the stomach to read through several months of argument, especially when so much of it is about quote mining pop-sci magazines, discussing who lied and when, and what the word "nothing" means. While I'm sure that people care about their reputations and the proper definitions of words, it seems to me that this sort of conversation is a distraction.

However, I have at least attempted to find sections that discussed what you guys thought the actual science meant, because I do care about that. I would like to throw out a few things that may be relevant.

Firstly, a theory that involves advanced mathematics cannot truly be understood without that mathematics. A theory that describes a wide range of phenomena cannot be understood by looking at particular predictions one by one, without taking a wide view of how the theory is used to lead to those particular predictions (and not others). I know there are some science educators who are really pumped up about getting the word out and getting people enthusiastic about science, but I can honestly say that you can spend years reading Discover, Scientific American, and New Scientist and every Michio Kaku and Brian Greene book, and you will still know less about quantum mechanics than many undergraduate physics students.

This why crackpots like Deeprak Chopra and Masaru Emoto justify wacky statements by waving their hands and chanting "quantum effects". This is why postmodernists and Conservapedians alike confuse the two theories of relativity with moral relativism. It's easy to misrepresent a theory if you overestimate your ability to judge it based on particular words that are used, or on the philosophical musings of one or two scientists (however famous or intelligent). I've encountered tons of people who do this to one of my own fields of research, quantum correlation (or "entanglement"). Tons of people think that entanglement allows some kind of faster-than-light communication (or worse, mystical psychic power), and disabusing them of this kind of notion, without generating even more confusion, is not easy.

Mr. Rayment, if you have doubts about a complex scientific theory, maybe you should go learn the math and the theoretical framework so that you actually understand what's going on in the first place, then decide whether or not it's right. Or find someone who is an expert to talk to, at the very least. And if you're setting out to debunk a theory that you don't understand: kindly shut up and go away. The only people who should try to "debunk" something are those with enough experience and understanding of that something to have a very good reason to expect that it is wrong. If you set out to investigate something in order to prove that it's bunk, you will always succeed, because the entire "education" process will devolve into nothing more than rehearsing to yourself all the reasons why you are right. Or rehearsing with others who share your beliefs. Either way, the process is intellectually meaningless.

\rant on

And while that little bit of rambling was a general purpose warning (and I intended to return immediately to inflation after giving it), once I googled you (out of curiosity regarding your educational background) I found this statement on your Wikipedia user page:


 * "My parents raised me to believe that the Bible could be logically and rationally defended from sceptical criticism. This was mainly in the area of archaeology, but later I learnt of the overwhelming evidence consistent with the Bible's records of creation and the flood, and related events. Without this evidence, I likely would have still believed in creation and the flood, but I would never have dared debate the matter with sceptics. Armed with the evidence, however, I have considerable confidence that the Biblical record is rationally defensible."

This is exactly the kind of silliness that makes it difficult to take creationists seriously. It is a rational thing to ask "What evidence is there for and against Biblical creation?" and go searching. It's even defensible to say "I believe in (a particular form of) creationism and other people believe in (something called) evolution, and I want to see why they don't believe the same way I do, and whether I can teach them something." In fact, I did exactly this when I was a creationist. It is not rationally defensible to go out with an attitude of "I believe that the Bible is defensible because Mom and Dad said so, so I'm going to look out for the evidence that can protect my belief from skeptics." I anticipate that you will say something like "that's not what I was saying", but if that's how you feel, I'm going to save you the trouble: yes, it actually does mean the same thing as the above paragraph; I just phrased it in a way that makes it sound worse. Your original position was that the Bible was true and defensible, you came by that belief due to your upbringing, and golly gee, isn't it lucky that you happened to come by the "overwhelming" evidence you expected and wanted to find, for the position you happened to be born into, and which you intended to believe your whole life anyway even without evidence.

While it's not impossible that such an inquiry could lead to the truth, what will probably happen instead is drastic confirmation bias. The first place you go for evidence is the people who are on your side, who you will trust more. Every argument for the opposition you will interpret through the lens of "How can I resolve the conflict with my worldview?", rather than by honestly appraising the consequences of the argument. Of course, everyone experiences confirmation bias, but it is intellectual suicide to simply give in to it right away like that. The moment you say "I'm looking for evidence that I'm right", you have instantly abandoned any pretense of honest truth searching and admitted that what you are engaging in is politics and spin.

\rant off

By the way, if you're interested in my background (and I'm not assuming that you are or aren't), I have a BS in engineering physics from the Colorado School of Mines, am working on a Master's, and am a bisexual, and an atheist (also, according to Google, twenty-one years old, a geek, part of the furry community, and someone with an account on some dating sites I don't remember signing up for).

Funnily enough, my atheism is not due to my interest in science, my upbringing, or my sexuality. I was raised in a Baptist church (though not quite "typically" Baptist, and they became non-denominational shortly after I left). Long after I realized that creationism was not rationally defensible (I kept believing in it even though I knew evolution was the better explanation), and somewhat before coming to terms with my sexuality, I just applied the "outsider test", realized that I had no arguments for Christianity which would convince me if I was a Muslim or Deist, realized that that was because all my arguments were crap (and that most of the apologetics I'd heard was even worse), and slowly phased Christianity out of my life. I've yet to hear any better arguments for any religion (a few new ones about the existence of God, but those aren't terribly good and they usually don't discuss "God" so much as "something cool and mysterious"), so I remain an atheist.

I'd like to move back to inflation by making a concession here. I can't really defend inflation that well, only moderately better than you can attack it. Oh, I can parrot explanations that other people give, and I can make a few points related to fields I have personally studied (I've used basic quantum field theory extensively), but I haven't spent enough time researching cosmology to know all the details of the theory and the relevant evidence. What I can do, is tell you what I find unconvincing about your arguments, and tell you to go bother some real scientists before (or instead of) getting into more internet arguments.

I can speak about the word "nothing". In this context it refers to the vacuum, and more specifically to a vacuum filled with fields in which there are no excitations. Classically, we have the ubiquitous electromagnetic field and space-time curvature, so there are already interesting properties that "empty" space possesses. In quantum field theory, all particles are excitations of various fields that fill all space. The details of the mechanism behind inflation are not settled, because scientists do sometimes talk about things that they are sure have happened, even if they don't know everything about how they happened. But cosmologists anticipate that the mechanism behind inflation probably has to do with a "vacuum decay", which is essentially a change in those fields, fields that already, in a mathematical sense, give rise to all matter, and allow the number of particles in the universe to change (in predictable and probabilistic ways).

If you want to call the vacuum "nothing", for philosophical reasons, that's up to you. It's a common practice, because "nothing" is vague and poetic, and it makes everything sound so much more profound and interesting when you talk about something coming from nothing. Scientists may sometimes enjoy talking about their theories in this way, and journalists may lap it up, but science, as a practice and an institution, doesn't really care about what the vacuum is called. What science does care about is modeling how the state of an (already existing) universe before inflation gave rise to a universe after inflation.

As for the "Where did the universe come from?" argument, besides being largely unrelated to inflation (a historical event that seems to have occurred near but definitely after the beginning), it's also a "God of the gaps" argument. There are a million possible answers. Natural explanations? It could be that the universe has always existed, and science will eventually reveal that before the "Big Bang" the universe has been large before. It could be that the universe was spawned by a black hole in another universe. It could be that there's a natural multiverse that spawns billions of universes, and we've only seen a small fraction of everything that exists. Artificial explanations? Universe-creating aliens. God. A really powerful intelligence which is not infinite and has nothing to do with any human religion. The whole universe is a simulation, an experiment in someone's lab. Maybe this issue will be unresolved, and no human being will ever find out if the universe has a particular type of cause. That's an unsatisfying possibility, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.

Anyone can come up with a theory. But we can't pick an answer for "Where did the universe come from?" (or "What caused the universe?") until we at least have evidence in favor of one particular class of ideas, to the exclusion of others. Saying "Current scientific theories are wrong, therefore God." is a worthless argument. For what it's worth, the accommodationist argument, saying "The Bible describes creation by God out of nothing, and so does science, therefore God." is also pretty worthless, given how vague the terminology is.

Actually, even if we find that the Big Bang is it, and there's nothing farther back in time to investigate, that's still only debatably "something out of nothing". "Something out of nothing" implies that there's some condition where there's no universe, and then some condition where there is. Science doesn't (actually, can't) address that first one, by its very nature. Science talks about observable things, so if there's a condition where there's no universe, and nothing to observe, science really has nothing to say about it. Rather than "something out of nothing", cosmology really discusses "the universe, with a particular earliest time", in much the same way as geography describes "the earth, with a particular northern-most location", with no particular interest in locations outside the applicability of the particular discipline.

I think what a lot of people are really getting at with the "first cause" argument is actually a different question anyway. If you keep asking "why" about the natural world, and keep going back and back along the chain of causation, most people eventually get to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and the slightly less fundamental question "Why this universe, and not a different one?" While I'd be interested in hearing an answer to this, I suspect that there is no answer to the first question that will ever satisfy most people. God is clearly not the answer, because then the question simply becomes "Why is there something (including God) rather than nothing (and no God)?" And for that matter, "Why would God create this seemingly arbitrary universe and not any slightly (or radically) different one?" Even if one were to argue that God is somehow logically necessary (although I obviously don't think this is possible): "Why these logical rules and not others (or none)?"

In the end, this is not a testament to any profound mystery regarding the universe waiting to be uncovered. Rather, it's a tribute to how much human beings always want perfect answers, always seeking certainty via the answers to these kinds of "why" questions, which are grammatically correct but have no clear meaning. Or to put it differently.

-- Quantheory (talk) 08:54, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I should probably clarify that the page "Ace McWicked/Creationist Madness" is in fact a copy of an ongoing discussion over at Philip's site. Not actually here. Sorry to confuse you...AceX-102 11:00, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

Nice
I liked your last remark. Oversighted now though on the site. How are you going to live for two months? 08:17, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Never mind the oversight, I captured the page....heh. i9 09:03, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * And once again, creationist logic triumphs! -- Nx  / talk 09:05, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Philip wins again! He is a super genuis of the highest order. i9 09:10, 4 October 2010 (UTC)