I’ve learned from experience that the way to get a lot of comments is to claim that God doesn’t exist. Some of the comments, unfortunately, seemed to imply that the statements in my post were naive, simplistic, patronizing, etc. My response was basically that the post was indeed simplistic, but not naive (patronizing I will leave as a judgment call); I was just blurting out some things I believe are true, in a rhetorically oversimplified fashion, and not trying to give any sophisticated arguments just then. But it wouldn’t hurt to be more careful and explain what I actually do believe, even if restrictions of space, time, and interest mean that I’ll still be pretty superficial about the reasoning.

One problem with “God” is that nobody agrees on the definition. Of course it’s useless to argue about the “correct” definition, but we should agree on what we’re talking about. So, when I say “God”, I am thinking of something we would recognize as a conscious being, unique in the universe and playing some important role in its creation and/or maintenance, with apparently supernatural abilities (maybe omnipotence or some similar degree of ability, but certainly way above anything we’re familiar with in everyday life). For many academic theologians (although certainly not all), the sticking point there is likely to be the “conscious being” part. In particular, I don’t want to use “God” to refer to nature itself, or to a feeling we get in certain sacred situations, or to the abstract laws of physics, or to our capacity for joy and love, or anything so insentient. Those things might be interesting to talk about in their own rights, but I don’t see why we should call them “God” — they are quite different from the God of classical Abrahamic monotheism, as well as from an Aristotelian unmoved mover responsible for creating the universe. Nor are they what 90% of the 90% of Americans who profess belief in God really mean when they profess that belief, I’d be willing to wager. Whatever most people have in mind when they speak of God, it must be some being that is able to care about we humans. (If you’d like to define God as all of nature or as our love for our fellow persons, then fine, I agree that God exists. But as a good pragmatist who sees no practical consequences flowing from such an identification, I wonder why we should bother. Why not just use a different word?)

So, do we have reason to believe that God exists? There are two possibilities: either the existence of God is a logical inevitability and can be demonstrated through pure reason, or God is possible but not necessary and we must turn to experience, revelation, or something otherwise more contingent.

I honestly don’t know what it would mean for some aspect of reality to be logically necessary; logical necessity is a characteristic of formal statements, not of the real world. Our descriptions of the world might involve certain logical requirements, but the world is whatever it is. In particular, there is absolutely no obstacle to imagining a world without God. It is perfectly straightforward to imagine a strictly mechanistic universe, consisting of certain dynamical objects obeying a set of immutable rules. (In Aquinas and elsewhere you can find the idea that the universe requires a First Cause to keep it all moving. Everyone these days should recognize that this is a perfect example of how you can trick yourself by sloppy use of language; ever since Newton, we’ve understood that motion is a perfectly natural state of being, and doesn’t require any agent to keep it going.) I furthermore see no obstacle to imagining that some of those objects get together to form complex collections possessing what we would call “consciousness.” (The details of how it might happen remain to be worked out, but that’s not an obstacle in principle.) Such a universe could easily last forever as a self-contained entity, without the aid of any external creator or first cause. Indeed, I think our universe is really like that. And since I can perfectly well imagine it, there’s no way to use pure reason to argue that it’s not possible; we have to turn to the actual universe we find ourselves in to determine if God is playing a role.

So we need to examine our particular universe and decide whether it looks like God is a part of it or not. Of course, we ourselves are part of the universe, so we might in principle be able to look purely inside ourselves, appealing to contemplation or even revelation. Personally, I find those methods completely unreliable; we could come to all sorts of absurd conclusions by trusting them. Instead, we should be good empiricists, and try to judge as objectively as we can whether our universe makes more sense with God or without. In other words, we should consider the idea of God as any other hypothesis about how nature works, and test it using conventional scientific methods.

Although natural theology has a long history, it’s not an especially distinguished one, with the argument from design taking an especially heavy beating (from Hume even before Darwin). Consequently, a lot of people don’t like the idea that we should treat God as an hypothesis to be empirically tested. Stephen Jay Gould tried to argue that religion and science are compatible because they are strictly non-overlapping in their spheres of interest. But if you look hard at his argument, it only makes sense because his definition of “religion” is what most people would call “moral philosophy.” It’s certainly true that religion has important aspects other than a theory of the nature of reality — moral and social aspects, most obviously. But it also makes claims about how reality works, and those claims can be tested by the same criteria that other claims about reality can be tested. (Furthermore, if the claims about reality fail to be supportable, there doesn’t seem to be much reason left to put any stock in the moral or social aspects — but that’s an entirely separate kettle of fish.)

By the standards of conventional scientific reasoning, the idea that there exists a God that plays an important role in the universe does very badly as an hypothesis, as I’ve discussed in some detail elsewhere. Everything we’ve ever seen in the universe is completely compatible with a purely naturalistic description; we’ve never seen any reliable evidence of supernatural influence or design, and adding an entirely new metaphysical category to a perfectly self-sufficient universe is an unnecessarily drastic step in our attempts to fill in those gaps that remain in our understanding. (Again, plenty of people disagree; the argument from design is alive and well, and now typically refers to the exquisite perfection of the laws of nature rather than to the human eye. I just think adherents of this view are wrong.) It didn’t have to be this way; I could equally well imagine a universe in which evidence for the existence God were quite manifest, with good alternate-universe scientists who were among the most devout members of society. It’s just not the universe in which we live.

Of course mine is a minority view, if we were to take a poll among all the people in the world. That’s exactly the reason why it’s worth pressing the issue. It wouldn’t be fair to call belief in God the Big Lie, as the people who argue in its favor are generally quite sincere. But it is the Big Mistake; of all the incorrect beliefs in the modern world, this is certainly the one that combines the widest prevalence with the most significant impact. So it’s worth arguing against, gently but persistently.

Not that I expect to change anybody’s mind (although one theologian did tell me that I had convinced him to give up on the argument from design, if not on belief in God). But at least now I can point to this post if the issue arises again, so the blog can concentrate on important issues like ice cream and performance art.

Good news and bad news here at Preposterous HQ. The good news is, we’ve added a Google search to the site — find it near the bottom of the right-side column. (I noticed this gizmo at Christina’s LIS Rant.) Now you can find out how many times I have mentioned Einstein (9), God (8), or Bush (16). Something should be done to redress the balance there.

The bad news is this paragraph I came across at Blogshares:

Preposterous Universe suffered a huge setback with several analysts urging their clients to ditch the stock as it suffered a public relations disaster. The exact nature of customer dissatisfaction was not known but Alan Dean was rumoured to have had a hand in it. Industry insiders suspect a Schroedinger’s Cat (artefact) was involved. Preposterous Universe share price dropped from B$745.92 to B$305.83.

I think I might be worried/sad/philosophical, if only I had any idea what any of it meant.

This is an image of the comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt”), taken by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft as it did a fly-by in January.

Can you believe it? It looks too dramatic to be true, although I’m sure it’s for real. The heavily cratered surface seems different from other comets we’ve seen up close. Probably the image was tinkered with a bit to bring out the highlights, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

So is the mission: Stardust is not just taking pictures, it has captured material from the comet’s tail and is sweeping its way back to Earth. In January 2006, if all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will land gently in Utah, and scientists will begin analyzing the comet material in the lab. A great example of what wonderful science can be done without diverting all of our money into sending astronauts to Mars (sorry, couldn’t help myself).

There are interesting and uninteresting questions one can ask about torture. An interesting one is “Is it ever morally permissible for a regime to torture prisoners?”

I would love to answer “No”, but it’s a complicated question. The standard arguments in favor of torture are well known. Imagine we are in a situation of imminent peril to a very large number of people (a “ticking time bomb,” literally or figuratively), and we know for sure that a certain prisoner has information that could be used to prevent the disaster, and strongly suspect that the prisoner would give up the information under torture but would not under conventional interrogation. That’s a lot of conditions that must be satisfied (1. imminent danger to 2. a very large number of people, 3. knowledge that prisoner has crucial information that 4. they will not give up without torture but 5. they might give up under torture), but I would add at least one more: 6. the prisoner must, by previous actions, have forfeited even minimal personal rights, e.g. by committing some egregious crime. I don’t think it’s right to torture an innocent bystander who happened to overhear a terrorist plot but for some reason doesn’t want to divulge the information. If all of these circumstances clearly applied, I would be willing to concede that torture would be justified. Under ordinary non-desperate conditions, I strongly believe that every person has a minimal set of rights that society has no right to violate; but under well-defined emergency conditions, the interests of the larger group can reasonably take precedence.

The problem, of course, is that such stringent conditions rarely apply. I used to be in favor of the death penalty, as I believed that there were some people who had, by their behavior, given up any right to live. I still believe that, but now I am strongly anti-death-penalty, only because I have no confidence whatsoever that our justice system can accurately determine who those people might be. Even the chance of one mistake, putting someone to death who was innocent (or even not as unforgiveably guilty as had been supposed), makes the use of the death penalty completely unpalatable. Similarly with torture — the danger that it could be used against people who do not meet all of the above criteria is real and terrible. Of course, with the death penalty there is a straightforward alternative (life imprisonment), whereas in the shadow of a ticking time bomb the choice may not be so clear.

There are further problems, which have been widely discussed of late: specifically, the longer-term deleterious effects of being known as a country that permits torture. Breaking the prohibitions against such behavior invites similar treatment of your own citizens, not to mention general resentment among people who tend to sympathize with the tortured subjects. On the other hand, if all of the above highly restrictive conditions were actually met before torture was ever used, it would be confined to moments of such extreme danger that the attendant bad publicity would likely be an irrelevant side issue.

There are interesting blogospherical thoughts on the issue from Jack Balkin, Eugene Volokh, Kieran Healy, and Matthew Yglesias, among many others. It’s very difficult, as Volokh mentions in another post, to even think rationally about these questions, as the real-life consequences are so sickening. But, as recent events have shown, we have little choice.

An example of an uninteresting question about torture would be: “Did high-level officials in the Bush administration understand how it was being used in Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons?” This question is uninteresting, not because it is unimportant, but because the answer is perfectly obvious: Of course they did. Not only does it seem implausible on the face of it that widespread patterns of similar behavior spontaneously arose in the acts of a few bad apples, and not only do the infamous torture memos and other documents make clear how the administration was planning its legal justification all along, but the administration has been very open in its view that there should be essentially no restrictions on how the “war on terror” should be conducted, in any theater and by any U.S. agent. The President and his officers consider themselves to be unimpeachable agents of good in the war against evil, and will never hesitate to break a few eggs in the process of making their omelet against terror. What’s been happening in Iraq is a perfectly consistent extension of well-documented policy, and there’s no reason to think that it’s disconnected from the orders from on high.

The only reason the administration is acting even somewhat contrite is because there were photos taken, and the images are too vivid and horrifying for anyone to admit they were part of an approved policy. Had the evidence been limited to testimony of prisoners and Amnesty International reports, the response would not have extended beyond stonewalling. Who knows what else is still going on.

Update: Never mind. Belle Waring has answered all the questions. Or unasked them, at any rate.

I confess that I’ve never read Ulysses (although Dubliners was brilliant), but I don’t see why that should stop me from celebrating Bloomsday. Today is the centenary celebration of the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through Dublin, as recounted in James Joyce’s masterpiece.

My best Bloomsday experience, believe it or not, was at an Irish pub in Paris a few years ago. (Don’t be too surprised; Paris has at least thirty-eight Irish pubs, which although probably not as many as Chicago is still pretty good.) Everyone in the pub spoke English, mostly with delightful Irish accents. A group of actors visiting from Ireland took turns reading from Joyce’s works, including a yeomanlike effort at Finnegan’s Wake. My favorite was the reading from The Dead. An overly long excerpt:

She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stockstill for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:

“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.

“Why, Gretta?” he asked.

“I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.”

“And who was the person long ago?” asked Gabriel, smiling.

“It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother,” she said.

The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins.

“Someone you were in love with?” he asked ironically.

“It was a young boy I used to know,” she answered, “named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate.”

Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.

“I can see him so plainly,” she said, after a moment. “Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them — an expression!”

“O, then, you are in love with him?” said Gabriel.

“I used to go out walking with him,” she said, “when I was in Galway.”

A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind.

“Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?” he said coldly.

She looked at him and asked in surprise:

“What for?”

Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:

“How do I know? To see him, perhaps.”

She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.

“He is dead,” she said at length. “He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”

“What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically.

“He was in the gasworks,” she said.

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

If I were quicker, I’d be ahead of the curve. I had been planning to mention this poll about religious belief from pollingreport.com, which had been forwarded to me by a friend, but hadn’t gotten around to it; now somehow everyone is all over it. (See comments from Ed Brayton, Kieran Healy, and Eugene Volokh.)

The interesting thing is, the numbers that are making people jump are those concerned with literal interpretations of the Bible: Sixty percent of American adults believe in the literal truth of the Flood, sixty-four percent in the parting of the red sea, and sixty-one percent that the world was created in six days. These are indeed alarming, as is the fact that seventy percent of adult Americans believe in Hell and the Devil. The number that is most scary to me is the biggest one: Ninety percent believe in God. To me, the belief in God is no more intellectually respectable than belief in Hell or in the Flood, or in the six-day creation. After all, the Bible is supposed to be the inspired word of God, and why would He lie? (Although even the authors of the Left Behind series agree that the part in Revelation about the sword coming out of Jesus’ mouth is supposed to be symbolic.)

The amount of observational evidence for God is precisely equal to that for the Devil, the Flood, astrology, or the Easter Bunny: zero. There are plenty of a priori arguments floating around, but anyone who isn’t already convinced can see that they’re pretty silly. It shouldn’t be any more respectable to believe in God than it is to accept the more extravagant consequences that follow from such a belief. I hate to admit it, but religious liberals who cling to a wishy-washy notion of divinity that is shaped to conform to their pre-existing beliefs seem to be less intellectually honest than the Biblical literalists. For the same reason, I find myself sympathizing with the bishops who refuse communion to openly gay couples — of course they are wrong, but at least they are being consistent, as officers of a church that condemns homosexuality. Religious belief is a strong and meaningful stance to take on how the universe really works; one that is wildly at odds with all of our experience, but not one that lends itself to arbitrarily picking and choosing among its tenets.

The only interesting thing I have ever learned from Mickey Kaus’ blog: the internet is spelling the death of fashion. Not that anyone should be surprised, really.

Apparently, in the good old pre-electronic-dissemination-of-information days, a new trend could sweep onto the scene and enjoy months of popularity within the safe confines of fashionista circles. Whereas today, the “derisive cackling of so many bloggers” is able to squelch revolutionary new ideas (like the fauxhawk, here fetchingly modeled by David Beckham) before they can live out their natural spans.

But I have faith in the ability of cultural institutions to adapt and thrive under challenging new conditions. The fashion vanguard will have to develop new strategies to resist the taunts of the uncultured, or even to exploit them in the service of greater hipness. What could be more cool than to not only look cutting-edge, but to be persecuted by the electronic masses at the same time? We owe a debt of gratitude to our scenester elites, who are willing to suffer the slings and arrows of faceless bloggers in order that innovative hairstyles may continue to be explored.

Hey, this is my 100th post. Congratulations, in a sense, to me.

The Poor Man points to a post by Brad DeLong, which in turn relates an email account of a talk by Seymour Hersh here at the University of Chicago. The talk was about the torture at Abu Ghraib, giving the very vivid impression that things were much worse than we’ve been told thus far. DeLong says “If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined–even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines.” An inspired formulation, very reminiscent of Hofstadter’s Law. I therefore propose DeLong’s Law:

The Bush Administration is always worse than one imagines, even when taking into account DeLong’s Law.

It’s useful to keep in mind, even if it’s no real help.

Update: Actually, DeLong has a few other laws (here, here, here), so I’m not being original.

The NBA Finals are underway, and like many expatriate Philadelphians I am watching with mixed feelings. On the one hand you have the Lakers, one of those dominant teams overflowing with arrogant superstars who are impossible to like, not to mention the frequency with which the franchise has beaten up on my beloved Sixers in NBA finals past (2001, 1982, 1980, 1954, and 1950 — the last two in the Sixers earlier incarnation as the Syracuse Nationals, and the Lakers earlier home in Minneapolis). So under ordinary circumstances it would be easy to root for the Detroit Pistons, plucky underdogs with hard-working overachievers like Rip Hamilton and Ben Wallace. The complicating factor is coach Larry Brown, who for the previous six years had been coaching the Sixers. Brown resurrected the franchise from the doldrums, leading us to the Finals in 2001, only to jump ship after realizing that a series of bad deals he himself had made had left the team stuck in mediocrity. Adding everything up, I still have to root for the Pistons, who are now up two games to one after completely dismantling the Lakers last night. Announcer Al Michaels, assuming like the rest of the media that the Pistons have no real chance to win the series, was trying to be complimentary halfway through the second half when he started to say that the Pistons had at least guaranteed that the series would go six games — before catching himself as he realized 1) how condescending that sounded and 2) that the series is by no means guaranteed to go six games, the Pistons could very well win it in five.

The playoffs have been very entertaining thus far, but ESPN decided to spice things up by having a round-table discussion with Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and rookies Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James. James and Anthony are both only 19 years old, but it was the wise old heads Bird and Magic that said the stupid things that discussions like this always seem to generate. In particular, Bird thinks that the NBA needs more white superstars to get people interested in the league. (And Magic immediately agreed with him.) He’s going to get in trouble for that, obviously. Hopefully the criticism will point out that Bird is being clueless, not racist — although in the context of sports it’s not always a useful distinction to draw. The NBA is about 77% African-American, and has been for a while. As people will quickly point out, race hasn’t been an obstacle to popularity for Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, and countless others. But while Bird emphasizes that blacks are the best athletes in the world etc etc, by claiming the you need white stars to interest a white audience he injects the race issue where it just isn’t as important as he supposes. What the NBA really needs is a minor-league system, so that youngsters who skip college can get trained in how to play the game, including occasionally making a fifteen-footer and executing a pick and roll (or even a simple entry pass). If the quality of the product is there, the fans will follow.

Note added in proof: As this article was being prepared, we became aware of similar work by Uncertain Principles.

It looks like the Higgs boson, the only part of the Standard Model of particle physics that has not yet been directly detected, might be heavier than we thought, and correspondingly even more difficult to detect. This, anyway, is the claim of a new analysis from the D0 experiment, one of the two (along with CDF) large general-purpose detectors at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab. (See also comments from David Harris.) What they’ve actually done is to improve their measurement of the mass of the top quark, the penultimate particle of the Standard Model, discovered at Fermilab in 1995. Through the miracle of quantum mechanics, the properties of all the different particles of the Standard Model come into calculating the rates of various interactions; so given what we know about certain interactions, we can infer the mass of the Higgs if we very accurately know the mass of the top.

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions that go into such an inference. Personally, I tend not to trust them; the history of physicists predicting the mass of particles like the top and the Higgs is not filled with spectacular successes. Usually we don’t come up with a convincing explanation until after we’ve finally measured it.

Fermilab’s Tevatron is currently the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, and two of its major goals are to find the Higgs and to find something completely outside the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry or extra dimensions. Competition is on its way, from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, which is scheduled to turn on in 2007. The LHC will have a significantly higher energy than the Tevatron, and should easily be able to detect something new and interesting, whatever that may be. There is a “nightmare scenario” in which the LHC discovers the Standard-Model Higgs and nothing else, giving us no clues about new physics; I’ll put long odds against it, though.

Particle physics is desperate for an experimental discovery that isn’t already accommodated by the Standard Model; no particle accelerator has given us such a surprise since, oh, the mid-Seventies. This drought has caused a great deal of anxiety and hand-wringing, but it is certainly the exception rather than the rule; more often in physics the experiments are running far ahead of the theories, and we’re scrambling to explain all of the new phenomena being uncovered. I suspect we’ll be rapidly back into such a phase once the LHC comes online, if not sooner. (For any physics undergraduates or beginning graduate students out there who are worried about job prospects and wondering what field to go into, my advice would be particle phenomenology. In the five-year timescale to get a Ph.D., the field will go from being listless and anticipatory to rambunctious and contemporary, and good young people will be in huge demand.)