A bugged life

The title of this post actually applies to two completely different matters. First, I saw a really great movie last night about life in East Germany before the wall came down. It's called "The Lives of Others". German with English subtitles. Highly recommended. One of the best films I've ever seen.

But what I really wanted to tell you about was an obsession that's had a hold on me for the past few weeks. Every now and then I am afflicted with a bout of nostalgia. I have a few boxes of memorabilia stashed away in the garage, and the other day I was digging through one of them and came across a box of 5-1/4 inch floppy disks. For those of you two young to remember, these disks are actually floppy. They bend. And in their day they stored a whopping total of 140 kilobytes of data. Ah, those were the days.

One particular disk caught my attention because its label said "P-Lisp". This was my very first Lisp back in the day, and it arguably launched my career in computer science. So I thought it would be cool to resurrect it and watch it run, for old times' sake.

The plan was fairly straightforward: buy an Apple II from Ebay, get a copy of ADTPro, make a disk image, and run in on an Apple II emulator. I figured getting the Apple would take about a week, and then it would take an hour or two to get ADTPro up and running and grab the image. Just a little diversion.

Little did I know.

I logged on to EBay and found just what I needed: an Apple IIe with two disk drives. The high bid was $5! What a steal! So I, being the naive EBay bidder that I am, bid $10 figuring I was sure to win.

Now, you EBay veterans out there -- I can hear you -- you can stop snickering now. As you might expect, I was outbid and lost the auction. But the person who outbid me backed out of the deal, so I got a "second chance" to accept the deal at my original offer. And because of EBay's auto-bid system I didn't even have to pay the full $10, I just had to beat the $5 bid that was in effect when I placed my bid, so the machine could be mine for $6!

That is, it could have been, if I'd gotten the email in time. The second-chance offer is only good for 24 hours, and I just happened to be on a boat when the message arrived. So by the time I got the message it was too late.

(For those of you who are South Park fans, I would now like to call to mind the episode where the kids are all excited about the fact that some TV network is going to air a program where the word "shit" is spoken without being bleeped out. (It's episode 502 in case you want to go back and review.) The program of course is self-referential, because the discussion of the word is not bleeped out, and there's a little counter at the bottom of the screen that starts counting up the number of times anyone says the word during the episode. The counter reaches an astonishingly high number before it's all over. What follows will be all the more fun if you keep that imagery firmly in your mind as you read.)

No problem, I thought, the seller had already re-listed the computer, so I figured I'd just bid again. This time, though, I had more competition and lost out at $20. (Heck, I'd almost had it for $6, why pay three times as much? Surely another single-digit deal will come along.)

One week and half a dozen failed bids later I decided to give up and order an Apple IIe from Top Micro [UPDATE: Top Micro seems to have gone out of business and their site has been taken over by malware spammers], which had several of them in stock for $20 each -- plus $40 UPS Ground shipping. Oh well, it's all for the cause of historical preservation I told myself. I still needed a disk drive, but I figured I'd figure that out later. There seemed to be a steady trade in Apple II disk drives on Ebay.

The IIe finally arrived. I plugged it in, turned it on, and it came up with the Apple II prompt. Cool! It works. I hit a few keys...

Nothing.

The keyboard was dead.

No problem, I thought, probably just a loose connection, and when it comes to old computers I'm MacGuyver. So I whip out the trusty phillips screw driver and open 'er up.

Inside I found a twenty year old puddle of coffee. Cream, no sugar.

Yech.

So I get out a sponge and a shop vac and clean her up as best I can. No dice.

OK, this is obviously not going to work, so back to EBay, where I finally decide that I'm spending too much time on this and I'll just bite the bullet and shell out whatever it takes to get a working Apple with disk drives. "Whatever it takes" turned out to be about $100, but what the heck, it's all for a good cause, yadda yadda yadda.

While I'm waiting for the new machine to arrive I decide I now have nothing to lose by taking drastic measures to try to resurrect the IIe. So I take out the keyboard and give it a good wash with hot water. (You can actually do that safely to most keyboards as long as you dry them out THOROUGHLY before using them again.) No good. OK, here's my new Apple II+ with disks. So I put the IIe away and go to play with my new toy.

Happily, it works out of the box, and within ten minutes I'm actually able to boot one of my old floppy disks. A little bit of playing around convinces me that the drives are in good working order, and I finally work up the courage to try my P-Lisp disk.

Now, I should mention at this point that my P-Lisp disk was, as far as I could determine, the last extant copy on planet Earth. The Lisp community is not that large, and the subject of P-Lisp comes up from time to time, but I had never heard of anyone ever locating another copy despite periodic requests from history buffs to find one. So this is a pretty important disk.

Amazingly, considering all the things that went wrong on this project (and believe me, we're just getting warmed up here) that this one thing *didn't* go wrong is astonishing. I put the disk in the drive and booted it up and it worked. It just worked! There I was playing with a program that hadn't seen the light of day in over twenty-five years. I quickly made a copy of it, and to my amazement (especially in retrospect) that worked too. Cool, I thought, I'm nearly done.

I need to digress for a moment and tell you a little bit about ADTPro. It's a really cool program for resurrecting old Apple II machines. To understand just how cool it is you have to remember that back in 1979 when the Apple II came out they did not have ethernet ports and USB ports and Firewire ports. They had cassette ports. Like audio jacks that you plugged into an actual cassette recorder. That was your mass storage.

ADTPro comes with audio files that you can play back into an Apple II's cassette port to download bootstrap software so that you can get an old II up and running without any disks. This is quite an amazing thing if you think about it, and I can't even begin to imagine what would possess someone to put so much effort into something that is ultimately not really good for very much except nostalgia. But there it is. Anyway, I dug out a bunch of audio cables, hooked it up, and after just two tries (you have to fiddle with the volume a bit) I had uploaded ProDOS and was ready to upload the ADTPro client.

That was the last thing that would go right for a long, long time.

For some reason the ADTPro client just refused to upload. I must have tried it twenty times, with each attempt taking several minutes. The Apple doesn't give you any indication of what goes wrong, it just gets to the end of the upload and prints "ERR" and beeps at you. After about two hours I was about ready to throw that damned machine out the window.

OK, that was obviously not going to work. Happily, ADTPro can also connect via a serial port, which is a more robust connection than the cassette ports. But Apple II's didn't have serial ports built-in, they were add-ons. So back to EBay to buy an SSC and off to Fry's to buy a USB-to-serial converter (because things have come full-circle and Apples once again do not come with built-in serial ports, which is probably as it should be).

By this time my wife is starting to ask me when I'm going to get that damned Apple II out of the workout room.

I watched my Super Serial Card wend its way across the country via UPS's on-line tracking system. In retrospect, this should have been a sign that I was starting to take this project a wee bit too seriously.

The SSC finally arrives, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I can finally get this damn thing done! I plug it in, fire up ADTPro and start the bootstrap procedure...

And it doesn't work! AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

By this time I am completely obsessed. I am determined to get this damned disk image come hell or high water. I am MacGuyver. I eat bugs for a living. No stupid 8-bit machine is going to get the better of me.

Now, I am going to do you a favor and spare you all the details of everything that happened while I was trying to debug the problem I was having with the serial link. Suffice it to say that by the time it was over, two weeks had gone by. I had probably spent twenty hours on it (thirty if you count the trips to Fry's). I had bought three USB/RS232 cables and God only knows how many miscellaneous cables, adapters, breakout boxes, volt meters, crimpers, testers and null modems. I had a frankencable setup so scary it would have made Ridley Scott run screaming in fear.

AND IT STILL DIDN'T WORK!!!

Sometimes it's really hard to know when you've reached the point of diminishing returns. On the one hand I was fully aware that I was spending way more time on this stupid project than it was worth. But on the other hand I really didn't want to quit. I really felt like I was on the cusp of a breakthrough, and that any minute I would figure it out. And eventually I did.

My best advice in situations like that is to get a good night's sleep. I think if I'd actually followed that advice I might have figured it out in half the time. The problem turned out to be a nasty timing-related bug in the device driver for the USB-serial cable that I was using. But the way in which events unfolded turned out to be an almost perfect conspiracy to make this problem as hard to discover as possible.

The first thing that happened was that I bought one USB-serial cable. I chose the name brand (IOGear) figuring it had the best shot at being reliable. I installed the drivers, plugged it in, and it *mostly* worked. There was just one particular circumstance under which it failed, and ADTPro just happened to hit the one magic combination of timing that triggered the bug.

The second thing that happened was that the symptoms were intermittent data corruption. So my attention was naturally drawn to my cabling setup and the old SSC card, which seemed like a more likely source of random problems than a brand spanking new USB device.

The third thing that happened was that I wrote a little Python program that uploaded the bootstrap software successfully. That made me think it was a bug in ADTPro for a long time.

The fourth thing that happened was that I bought two more USB-serial cables, all different makes and models, and they all did exactly the same thing. Of course, they were all running off the same buggy driver too. But I didn't realize that at the time.

I eventually managed to reproduce the problem between two Macs using Python code, which proved that both ADTPro and the old Apple II hardware were blameless. And after another hour or so of sleuthing I finally decided to try a different driver, which solved the problem. Thirty minutes later I had my disk image. My Apple II is now neatly packed away. And I am MacGuyver again.

Whew!

[UPDATE:] You can find the plisp image here.

What if they held an impeachment and nobody cared?

I wish it were a rhetorical question. Believe it or not, Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush today. None of the major news outlets are covering it.

Barbarians, take 2

There is no other word for a society where something like this has to happen before someone starts to pay attention.

The parents of a blind seven-year-old who was sent to a religious school in Pakistan have told how he was hung by his feet from a ceiling and beaten to death after failing to memorise the Koran.

It may not be all Muslims, but it's not just the fringe either.

While officialdom often turns a blind eye, the sheer brutality of the latest case has led the new prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, to order an inquiry.

Allah only knows how many other seven-year-olds are out there suffering similar abuse but that we haven't heard about just because they haven't died in so dramatic a fashion yet.

Finally!

Hillary is ending her campaign. Halefuckingleujah. Can you say, "Too little, too late?"

Breathtaking chutzpah

In a display of truly breathtaking chutzpah even by her own standards, Hillary Clinton, who just two months ago was saying that Barak Obama was not fit to be commander in chief, is now saying that she'd be willing to be his vice president. This would be surprising if not for the fact that Hillary has already demonstrated that she has no principles whatsoever, and will simply do and say anything to claw her way into power.

I will be surprised and disappointed if Obama offers Hillary the veep spot. Hillary is a delusional pathological liar and she is not fit to be dog catcher, let alone a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Hillary has obviously not come to grips with the fact that Obama beat her fair and square in large measure because of her despicable behavior and that of her supporters. You have to repent before you can receive absolution.

As for all those Clinton supporters who say they will vote for McCain rather than Obama all I can say is: you and McCain deserve each other.

Kangaroo court

What else can you call it when the judge gets fired because he ruled that the prosecution has to disclose its evidence to the defense?

How to stop spam from free email accounts

If you've noticed an increase in the amount of spam you've been getting lately, it's probably because the captchas for both Gmail and Yahoo mail have been broken recently.

Ye gods, how hard can it be to solve this problem? I gave it five minutes of thought just now and came up with an utterly trivial solution that will completely stop free email accounts from being used for spam:

1. Whenever a message is sent to a recipient that has never received a message from that account before, modify the message to include a link at the top that the recipient can click on if the message is spam.

2. Limit the number of new recipients that can receive email from that account to a few dozen a day.

3. If the number of spam reports from that account exceeds a certain threshold, shut the account down.

4. Require a valid credit card number to set up a new account. Even better, charge $1 for a new account.

Point 4 is going to be somewhat controversial because the email providers will argue that if they do this then people will just use someone else's service. But this is not true. If only the Big 3 (GMail, Yahoo and Hotmail) instituted this policy that would be enough to force everyone else to follow suit. The reason is that spammers would abandon the Big 3 and start using smaller free email providers. Once people realized that a particular provider was laden with spam they would just start filtering out all messages from that provider. Once people with legitimate accounts realize that their messages are being spam filtered they will either pressure their provider to adopt the "credit card captcha" for new accounts, or they will switch to a provider that already uses it.

This would not just make a dent in spam from free email accounts, it would *completely* eliminate it because it would make it unprofitable. A single account could not be used to send out more than a couple of hundred spams before it would be shut down, and creating a new account would be too expensive to make spamming profitable. So the spammers wouldn't even try.

Note that this would not eliminate spam altogether, because spam could still be sent from botnets. But that kind of spam is pretty easy to filter.

Can anyone come up with a reason why this wouldn't work?

A Scientific Theology

One of the things that hard-core atheists like Dawkins get wrong IMO is they underestimate the importance of dramatic narrative in people's lives. This is ironic because it is easy to trace this need back to its evolutionary roots. And yet, Dawkins insists, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to deny this simple fact, choosing instead to take the position that acknowledging the power of myth is "condescending."

I believe that at root all humans share an evolved moral intuition whose core features are more or less the same across the entire species. As a result, the divisive rhetoric that tries to separate atheism from other belief systems is counterproductive because it makes people believe that atheism is at odds with their moral intuition, which manifests itself as religion instead of Scientism.

From a practical and political point of view I believe it would be much more constructive and effective for atheism to embrace the proposition that it is a religion rather than positioning itself as the anti-religion. One of the reasons that atheism fails to win more hearts and minds is just that religions have vastly better marketing departments. I think atheists would do well to take a page or two from their books, and that includes the holy ones.

It should come as no surprise to any scientist that there is much that is good in the Bible. If man's behavior is governed by an evolved moral intuition then no book could survive that was fundamentally at odds with that intuition. "Love thy neighbor" and "thou shalt not murder" are really quite fine and dandy ideas, even if they are not the Revealed Word of God.

In fact, because the Bible is an encyclopedic collection of early human thought, it should come as no surprise that there is a lot of wisdom there that goes far beyond these usual moral platitudes. To be sure, there are irreconcilable differences between Science and fundamentalism, but if one leaves even a little room for doubt that every single word in the Bible is literally true (as most people who call themselves Christian do) then there are a lot of opportunities to find common ground.

There is room in a Scientific worldview for the concept of God. Of course, there is no room in the Scientific worldview for God as an extra-physical being, or for the Bible as having any particular standing above any other work of literature. But even within these constraints I think there's a lot of room for reconciliation. Here, then, is a first-draft attempt to construct a literary narrative for atheism, a Scientific Theology.

The core of a Scientific Theology should be an acknowledgement that there are very deep mysteries about our existence, and the very deepest is the manifest asymmetry of every person's perception of reality. The laws of physics are everywhere symmetric, but my perception of reality is radically asymmetric. The laws of physics are the same in all places at all times, but I am here and now. My most basic reality is therefore fundamentally at odds with what is known about the laws of physics, and this naked fact ought to keep Scientists humble about their worldview. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Richard Dawkins' philosophy, or yours, or mine.

Let us then take "God" to mean all that is mysterious and wonderful about this existence, starting (but not ending) with the fundamental mystery of existence. This is a Deistic "god". It is not a supernatural being, not a bearded man in the sky. We are created in God's image only in the sense that God and we are both part of the great mystery that is reality. We are made of atoms, but that is not all we are made of. There are a lot of atoms in the universe, but only a few of them are us, and that makes those atoms special. At least part of what makes them special is that they are arranged in very particular patterns. One aspect of those patterns is that some of those atoms are arranged to form brains which are collections of atoms that can process information. This is a truly remarkable and wonderful fact, and what is even more wonderful and remarkable is that brains are actually capable of understanding the natural processes that brought them into being, and in that understanding we are brought closer to God.

Scientific Theology utterly rejects the Calvinist point of view, that we are totally depraved and separate from God. We are part of God and God is part of us. We have (at least the illusion of) free will, and we have knowledge of good an evil. Does it really matter whether the source of this knowledge is an evolved moral intuition or a result of eating the Fruit of the Tree?

Unfortunately, the world is not black and white, good and evil. The world is painted in colors and shades of grey. This is our burden, to make our way in a world where the Way is not clear and cannot ever be clear. The world is complicated. This is what makes it at once wonderful and terrible. We are in fact, as Christian theology says, doomed to fall short of perfection. But the Christian looks at this inevitable failure and turns to Christ. The Scientist looks at it and sees it as a challenge. Our purpose in life is not to serve God, it is to make this world and this life as good as it can be, knowing all the while that it will never be as good as it can be. This is what it is to be human, to struggle against the complexity and ambiguity of the universe, knowing the struggle will never end, victory can never be achieved, but to struggle nonetheless, and then to pass the torch to the next generation to continue the never-ending struggle that is life and death and love and regret and yin and yang and all that makes existence wonderful and terrible. This may not be the way we would want it to be, but that is the way it is. And in the end, life would be very boring otherwise. We are born to engage in this existential jihad. Like it or not, that is the purpose of life.

Scientific Theology should be tolerant of alternative points of view. Not everyone lives a good life. Some people are born into horrible suffering, from disease or abusive parents or material want. We should not insist that everyone squarely face the harsh reality of existence. If someone finds salvation, or even solace, in Christ, it would be cruel to take that away from them. There are real problems with fundamentalism and evangelism and virulent anti-scientific ideas like creationism, but if someone wants to believe that Jesus died on the cross to save them from their sins and doesn't insist that everyone else believe it too, I don't see the harm.

Personally, I see God in all of the information-processing that I don't have direct conscious access to, from my DNA to my right-brain, to all that stuff happening in all those other brains in the world, and now in all those computers in the world. There's an awful lot of thinking going on that is beyond my ken. And every now and then I can communicate with all those other information-processes -- through meditation, through email and blogs, or by looking at the stars or gazing at the ocean. My God is mysterious and powerful and wise and it knows things that I don't, but it is not all-powerful nor all-knowing. My God forms the light and creates darkness. My God inspired the Bible -- and all the other books ever written. My god is familiar and forgiving and sympathetic and vengeful and mysterious and fallible because my god is us.

My God, like any parent, wants His children to grow up eventually. He does not demand prayer and obsequiousness, but if you want to offer up a prayer he's a good listener. Sometimes prayers are answered, sometimes not. But mostly, my God helps those who help themselves. He gave us (via evolution) the wherewithal to make our own way in the world, and wants us to use our faculties to take responsibility for our lives and make the world a better place. He wants us to love each other, because love produces better results than hate. Where love is not possible (and sometimes it isn't) he'll settle for respect.

If this one idea survives me then my life will not have been lived in vain.

Whither free will?

sblinn over on reddit raises an interesting point (particularly since we have a Calvinist lurking out there somewhere):


what does it mean to now have a good working theory of evolutionary morality while not having a good working theory of the free will to exercise it? ... If all we can do is carry out the mechanisms of biology and chemistry, according to our compositions and environmental stimuli, whatever right and wrong are we will still be doing whatever it is this mechanism computes.


There are a couple of answers to this.

First, we are not completely deterministic. At root we are quantum entities. Whether or not quantum randomness actually plays any significant role in our thought processes is not known, but the possibility cannot be ruled out based on our current understanding.

Second, even if we are completely deterministic that does not mean that our actions are completely predictable because of Chaos theory.

Third, even if we were completely deterministic and predictable we somehow have the illusion that we have at least a certain amount of free will. Imagine you get up in the morning and you have to decide whether to wear the red tie or the blue one. Whether or not you actually have free will in your decision, it certainly feels like you do. But there are also clearly things over which we do not exercise free will. You cannot choose to believe that the red tie is actually green, for example. (Well, maybe you can, but I can't.)

A belief in a certain amount of free will, even if in reality it is only an illusion, is a logical prerequisite to morality, and a practical necessity for the functioning of human society. If all our actions are truly out of our control (as the Calvinists would have you believe) then there is truly no reason for morality, because then everything that happens is merely a consequence of the laws of physics or the Will of God or the Hand of Fate (all of which become indistinguishable from each other in that case, by the way). The only reason philosophy (or religion) matters at all is that we each have this sense of self over which we feel like we exercise some degree of control. Absent that, nothing matters. There is no reason to punish murderers, or, indeed, not to become a murderer yourself, because whatever happens is just the inescapable consequence of whatever is out there pulling our strings. Absent free will, there is no more sense getting morally indignant about the Holocaust than about the fact that the sun rises in the morning.

Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion

... is the title of an excellent and well-informed article by David Sloan Wilson. Some highlights:


It is absurd, in retrospect, that evolutionists have spent much more time evaluating the major evolutionary hypotheses for guppy spots than for the elements of religion. This situation is beginning to remedy itself as scholars and scientists from all backgrounds begin to adopt the evolutionary perspective in their study of religion.

...

[Large-scale empirical studies reveal that o]n average, religious believers are more prosocial than non-believers, feel better about themselves, use their time more constructively, and engage in long-term planning rather than gratifying their impulsive desires. On a moment-by-moment basis, they report being more happy, active, sociable, involved and excited. Some of these differences remain even when religious and non-religious believers are matched for their degree of prosociality. More fine-grained comparisons reveal fascinating differences between liberal vs. conservative protestant denominations, with more anxiety among the liberals and conservatives feeling better in the company of others than when alone.

...

By my assessment, the majority of religions in the sample are centered on practical concerns, especially the definition of social groups and the regulation of social interactions within and between groups. New religious movements usually form when a constituency is not being well served by current social organizations (religious or secular) in practical terms and is better served by the new movement. The seemingly irrational and otherworldly elements of religions in the sample usually make excellent practical sense when judged by the only gold standard that matters from an evolutionary perspective — what they cause the religious believers to do.


He then goes on to give an extended example based on the Indian ascetic tradition of Jainism:


Jainism is one of the oldest and most ascetic of all the eastern religions and is practiced by approximately three percent of the Indian population. Jain ascetics filter the air they breathe, the water they drink, and sweep the path in front of them to avoid killing any creature no matter how small. They are homeless, without possessions, and sometimes even fast themselves to death by taking a vow of “santhara” that is celebrated by the entire community. How could such a religion benefit either individuals or groups in a practical sense? It is easy to conclude from the sight of an emaciated Jain ascetic that the religion is indeed a cultural disease — until one reads the scholarly literature.


Hopefully that will induce you to read the whole piece. it is long, but well worth the effort.

UPDATE: Dawkins' reply is also worthwhile, if only for balance.

Can morality exist without God?

[NOTE: This essay is rough and incomplete, but it will be at least three days before I have another chance to work on it. Rather than keep my adoring fans waiting (both of you) I've decided to go ahead and post this draft and make updates later.]

Denis Prager and Joseph Talushkin sum the issue up nicely in their book, "The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism":

If there is no God, there are no rights and wrongs that transcend personal preference ... Moral judgements [are] purely subjective. It is self-evident and acknowledged by the foremost atheist philosophers that if a moral God does not exist, neither does a universal morality. Without God all we can have are opinions about morality...

And indeed they are correct. No less a secular luminary than Bertrand Russell wrote:

I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it.

Prager and Talushkin wrote in 1986 (which is why their book is called what it is and not "The Judaism FAQ" :-) and Russell wrote in 1960. These dates turn out to be significant. The problem of how to define an objective morality without God was in fact solved in 1980 by a fellow named Robert Axelrod. As far as I'm concerned, Axelrod's name IMHO ought to be numbered alongside Darwin, Einstein and Newton as one of the greatest contributors to human knowledge of all time. Instead his work has gone virtually ignored by almost everyone, religious and secular alike. But as usual, I am getting ahead of myself.

It should be noted that defining morality with God is no slam-dunk. First you have to decide which God to follow because there are so many to choose from. Even the God of Abraham, who has pretty much cornered the market of modern theology, comes in three major versions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) and countless minor ones. The putative Word of God includes such guidance as:

When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads, until ye have made a great slaughter among them... (The Q'uran, sura 47:4)

and

Put away your sword, for those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. (Matthew 26:52)

So which is it? How can we decide which version of God's Word to follow without some standard that transcends God?

The question of whether God sets the moral standard or follows a moral standard was first raised by Socrates in 380BC. The dilemma can be summed up thusly: if God says what he says because He is moral then morality transcends God. On the other hand, if what is moral is defined by the Word of God, then in what sense can morality thus defined be considered "good"? Is it moral to kill unbelievers because Allah says so? What if God said it was OK to kill innocent children? Would that in fact make it moral? (And if your response is: God would never say that, then my response is: 1) he already has said it on a number of occasions, and 2) who are you, mere mortal, to say what God would and would not say?

Even putting aside the metaphysical question of the moral status of God, there are practical issues involved with how to interpret God's word. For example, Leviticus 24:16 says, "And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death..." Does that mean we should institute the death penalty for blasphemy? Or take the second commandment. This is commonly taken as a prohibition against idol worship (though the sight of Catholics bowing down before statues of saints really makes me wonder sometimes) but the actual text says, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth." Does that mean that photographs, statues, and portraits are immoral? Muslims think so. How do we decide? These kinds of conundrums are legion, and have kept theologians occupied for millennia.

To these questions I would add one more: why aren't all the atheists raping and pillaging? In Norway, for example, the overwhelming majority of the population is non-religious, and yet you do not see uncontrolled outbreaks of selfish behavior. To the contrary, Norway is socialist, and has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world. Sweden and Japan are similar. By way of contrast, the United States, with one of the highest concentrations of avowed Christians in the world, has one of the highest rates of violent crime, and is notorious for its ever-increasing socio-economic disparities.

The mere fact that this observation appears to require explanation is also indicative of the answer: people have a moral intuition, a subconscious sense of right and wrong, a conscience. And although they differ in detail, there are remarkable consistencies in moral intuition across all the world's religions and cultures. For example, there is an overwhelming consensus that killing innocents without provocation is wrong. There is not a single culture in the world that does not consider killing, lying and stealing to be evil. Conversely, there is not a single culture in the world that does not consider justice (including punishment for transgressions), honesty and charity to be virtues. To be sure, moral intuition is not uniform. For example, some people's moral intuition tells them that abortion is evil, while others' do not. My point is not to say (at this point) that moral intuition is a reliable guide to morality, merely that moral intuition exists. This should be non-controversial except among the most extreme pedants.

If we accept that moral intuition exists two questions naturally arise. First, is moral intuition a reliable guide to morality? Even the most cursory examination reveals that it cannot be absolutely reliable because it is not absolutely uniform. Some people think abortion is acceptable, some people think it isn't. They can't both be right.

The second question, which I believe will shed some light on the first, is: where did this moral intuition come from? There are three possibilities. The first is that it came from God, that it is one aspect of being created in His image. This is an attractive possibility, but alas not supported by the Bible. According to the Bible, moral intuition arose when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good an evil. (To the contrary, the Bible is quite clear that man was not created with the capacity to tell good from evil, which has always led me to wonder how God expected Eve to know that she was supposed to obey God and not the serpent. But that is a matter for another time.)

The third possibility is that moral intuition evolved. This has always seemed intuitively improbable. After all, evolution is all about survival of the fittest, the ends justify the means, red in tooth and claw, and all that, while our moral intuitions tell us things like that we ought to take precious resources and give them to the poor and the weak, which would seem to be exactly the opposite of what Darwinian evolution would lead us to expect. But Darwin is subtle, and evolution produces a lot of things that one might not expect at first glance, like peacock's tails. The puzzle of how Darwinian evolution could lead to non-selfish behavior was solved by Robert Axelrod in 1980.

Axelrod explored a famous mathematical model of moral choices called the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). PD is a game played with two players. Each player has only two possible moves: cooperate (C) or defect (D). Points are awarded according to the following schedule:

* If both players cooperate each one gets 3 points.

* If both players defect, each one gets 1 point.

* If one player cooperates and the other defects then the cooperating player gets 0 points and the defecting player gets 5 points.

(The Prisoner's Dilemma is called that because it is usually framed as a story about two prisoners who each have to decide whether to testify against the other. But the model applies to a wide variety of social interactions.)

The main thing to notice about the scoring system is that no matter what your opponent does you always do better for yourself by defecting than by cooperating. So on its face there should never be any reason to cooperate. Intuitively, the best Darwinian strategy is to always defect. And indeed, defection is the best strategy for a single round of PD. It is even the best strategy for multiple rounds of PD if the number of rounds is known in advance. (This is because defecting is the best strategy on the last round, so it must be the best strategy on the round before, etc.)

*HOWEVER* (and this quite possibly the single most under-appreciated insight in all of human history) if the number of rounds is not known in advance then it turns out that there is no one best strategy! Which strategy is best for you depends on which strategy your opponent is using.

For example, suppose that you opponent is using a TIT-FOR-TAT strategy (which in this context we may call an-eye-for-an-eye), where they cooperate on the first move and then respond on the next move with whatever you did on the previous move. In that case your best strategy is to alway cooperate. By way of contrast, if your opponent is using a strategy of ABSOLUTE ALTRUISM (always cooperate) then your best strategy (as in the non-iterated PD) is to always defect.

The Prisoner's Dilemma has been around for a long time, but only relatively recently has computing power become cheap enough to really allow an exploration into its dynamics. This is what Robert Axelrod did starting in 1980. And what he discovered is truly astonishing.

Axelrod performed a series of experiments pitting little computer programs to play PD against each other. I won't bore you with the details here. Instead I'll just cut to the chase. Here are the major results.

1. In nearly all circumstances, the "best" strategy (in the sense that it was the strategy that accumulated the most points when playing against a selection of other strategies) was TIT-FOR-TAT. This included tournaments among programs generated by humans as well as programs that were generated automatically and "evolved" according to Darwinian natural selection.

2. No human-generated program ever beat TIT-FOR-TAT. However, automatically generated programs did occasionally (about 25% of the time) evolve that were able to beat it. All of these program were very complex.

3. Nearly all of the programs that were able to "survive" for any length of time in the Darwinian simulations had a number of features in common. They were nice, which is to say, they were never the first to defect. They were easily provoked, that is, it didn't take very many defections before they defected. And they were forgiving, that is, once the opponent started to cooperate again they would quickly start to cooperate in return.

These results are proof that the naive intuition about Darwinian morality, that moral behavior cannot evolve, is wrong. Purely selfish behavior does not reproduce well. Neither does purely altruistic behavior. What reproduces best is a set of behaviors that very closely track the major features of human moral intuition: niceness, retribution, and forgiveness.

Now, of course this does not prove that moral intuition evolved, but it does show pretty convincingly that it could have. The burden is no longer on the atheist to justify their belief in morality. They can now say: my morality comes from a moral intuition wired into my brain by evolution according to Axelrod's model. If a religious person wants to claim that God is necessary for morality the burden is now on them to show why this is not possible. And that would be a heavy burden indeed. It is indeed a shame that Bertrand Russell did not live to see Axelrod's results.

Now, of course this far from the last word on morality. Moral intuition doesn't speak with absolute clarity about what is right and wrong. It requires deliberation and interpretation, just like the Word of God. But (and this is the crucial point) it provides common ground for a discussion about morality between the religious and the secular. For the purposes of achieving a consensus on what moral behavior is it is not necessary to achieve consensus about what the source is. Some people will say God, some will say Allah, and some with say evolved moral intuition. As long as they arrive at the same conclusions that's good enough. If everyone agrees that it's wrong to kill, it doesn't matter that people disagree about the narrative that led them to that conclusion. Of course, it would be nice to get everyone to agree on the narrative also, but that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. So failing that, arriving at the same conclusions by different routes seems to me to be the next best thing.

There are three features of an evolved intuition as a basis for moral behavior that make it particularly attractive as an account of how human being ought to behave. First, it allows for a morality that changes over time. Religious people recoil at this because they are fond of believing that moral behavior is revealed by God and is unchanging. But this is not reflective of reality. There was a time when slavery and stoning people to death for blasphemy really was considered moral. Now it's not. Darwinian morality allows us to excuse our forbears on the grounds that their moral intuitions might have been different from ours, and may have even been more appropriate to their circumstances. (For example, early societies lived much closer to the edge of survival than modern ones. Dissent is a luxury they may not have been able to afford.)

A second attractive feature of evolved moral intuition that makes it attractive is that it actually embraces religion, or at least predicts its emergence. If moral behavior has survival value, then beliefs that enforce moral behavior also have survival value, and so we would expect those to evolve as well. Surprisingly perhaps, the answer to the question: "is morality possible without God?" turns out to be "no", but not because God is a prerequisite for morality, but rather a necessary consequence of the mechanism by which moral behavior is produced (at least in an environment that includes creatures with sufficiently large brains).

The third feature that makes evolved intuition attractive as a basis for morality is that it can account for behaviors that transcend the short-term needs of our bodies. We mostly think of evolutionary theory as applying to DNA, but evolutionary theory can be applied to any information-carrying entity that is capable of reproducing itself. In the case of humans, there are two different replicators in play: our DNA, and the thoughts and ideas resident in our brains (what Dawkins calls memes). These two replicators are symbionts. Ideas cannot (yet) reproduce without brains, and brains reproduce much better in the presence of ideas like agriculture and antibiotics. But sometimes the needs of these two replicators are in conflict. But a discussion of that will have to wait for a few more days.

Scientific morality: the trailer

For those of you eagerly awaiting my post on Scientific morality, here's a sneak preview. Note that the slide show is four years old and things have evolved (no pun intended) since then, so be kind.

A Critical Examination of Calvinism

I was starting to prepare some arguments against Calvanistic morality when I discovered that someone had already done it for me -- and even more fortuitously, that person is (or at least considers himself) a Christian. Just a heads-up in case wrf3 wants to respond :-) A post on Scientific morality is still in the works.

Untitled

I was going to call this post "On the teleology of informatics" but that just came out sounding way too postmodernist. But I couldn't come up with anything better.

mar13 writes:


There are a wide spectrum of CP. Our David is one of the more servere case due to his brain damage from a skull fracture. ... Please pardon my morbid thought, (and trust me, this is way more painful for me to bring up than yours) but if human dignity is bound up in our information processing, then there is every little reason to keep David [in] existence, except for medical research purposes.


First, let me reiterate how sorry I am for your tragedy, and that I in no way wish to dissuade you from your faith if it gives you comfort (more on this later). But since you ask...

Even from a hard-core Scientific (capital S) point of view, it is not true that "if human dignity is bound up in our information processing, then there is every little reason to keep David [in] existence, except for medical research purposes." Scientists distinguish between a person and their body. They are not the same thing. This is similar to the distinction that religions make between a person's body and their soul, except that the soul is usually taken to be some extra-physical entity that survives the death of the body. The Scientific point of view is that a person *is* the information stored in their brains. So there is an intimate and mostly unseverable bond between a person and their body. We do not yet know how to extract the information that is a person from the brain that information resides in, except for the little bits that come out in what they say and write and do. At the moment, when the brain dies the person dies, even if the rest of the body that person once resided in might still be alive. The status of such a body is not unlike Henrietta Lack's cancer cells. It is human life, but it is not a person.

Now, I don't know David. I can only base my judgement on what you have told me, and what you have told me is that he is a person with CP. A person with CP -- even severe CP -- is still a person.


How would you find strength in these kinds of life problem?


I have never had to deal with anything even remotely as difficult as what you are faced with, so until I am tested that way the only really honest answer to your question is that I don't know. This is one of the reasons that I take issue with Dawkins and Harris. I don't know their life stories, but from what I can tell they, as I, have been the beneficiaries of life's inequities rather than its victims. It's unbelievably arrogant to sit in an ivory tower and tell someone living in the slums of Calcutta that they should not turn to Jesus or Allah or whatever helps them get through their day.

Also, I occasionally turn to God myself in difficult times. I have been extraordinarily blessed and my troubles are trivial compared to what some people have to face, but I have my challenges and I occasionally have a chat with the Big Man. (I tell him I don't believe in him. He says that's OK :-) Even as a Scientist I recognize that faith is a very powerful force. The thing you believe in doesn't have to be real in order to reap the benefits of believing in it, and I don't want to take that away from anyone (unless they try to force me to believe in it too, of course).

But to answer your question directly: Scientists accept that the world is the way it appears to be to our senses. it is a world of great beauty and joy and and, too often, a world of tragedy and despair. Bad things happen to good people sometimes. People die. That's just the Way It Is.

But though we are creatures of information, we are not creatures of logic. We are not Vulcans, we are humans. Logic is only one aspect of ourselves. We have emotions and passions and desires and internal demons. All those are part of the human condition.

We have the power to make the world better than it would otherwise be. (We also have the power to make it worse.) And we can achieve a limited sort of immortality by taking parts of ourselves -- little bits of the information that lives in our brains -- and making them resident in other brains through writing, talking, and generally being known by other people. As long as David is remembered and loved, part of him is still alive in *your* brain (and now, mine, and everyone else who is reading this). In this way we sow the seeds of our souls.

I find my strength by waking up every day marveling at how privileged I am to be a part of this grand adventure we call reality, to be present here, now, and to witness and participate in all the incredible, marvelous, and occasionally terrible things happening here. Whether this will turn out to be enough when the time comes for me to really be tested I won't know until I get there. I hope it is. It's all I have.

A "conversation" with Tim Keller

[The following, in case it is not immediately obvious, is fiction.]

[UPDATE: It turns out I may have gotten at least one important aspect of Tim Keller's theology wrong.  Keller is a Presbyterian, and hence a Calvinist, and hence believes in predestination.  Whether or not this means that he does not believe in free will I cannot say.  To me, predestination is logically incompatible with free will, but I have no idea if Keller agrees with this.  See the postscript at the end for more about why I cannot correct this error.]

Ron: Hello, Rev. Keller. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

Tim: You are most welcome. It is no great imposition, particularly since you are letting me borrow some of your brainpower to hold up my end of the conversation.

R: Yes, that will actually come to be quite relevant later on in our little chat. But I'm getting way ahead of myself. I invited you here because I saw the video of the talk you gave at Google and I was quite impressed (not convinced, mind you, just impressed), enough that I was motivated to buy and read the book you were plugging...

T: Please, I was not "plugging" my book. It's just that the issues I raise are so complex and nuanced that an hour is not nearly enough time to do them justice, so I have to point people to the book for the details.

R: I apologize for my poor choice of words. Let us return to the matter at hand. I think you are striving towards some very important goals, but I disagree with some of the conclusions that you come to. I would like an opportunity to challenge you on some of these points, and maybe even reach some common understanding. (That is what you're aiming for, isn't it?)

T: Indeed it is. The central motivation for my book was to address the increased polarization of society between faith on the one hand and secularism on the other. Both sides are growing increasingly belligerent in their rhetoric, and I fear that if this trend is not reversed the result will be social catastrophe.

R: Yes, I completely agree. So let us build this exchange on the foundation of that bit of common ground. You also argue that secularism requires no less a leap of faith than religion.

T: That's right. All beliefs are grounded in unprovable assumptions, which is to say, in faith of some sort. But the defense of my position is rather lengthy and is laid out in detail in...

R: ... your book, yes, I know. If I may, I think we can short-circuit this part of the conversation because I actually agree with you. Science (or secularism or atheism or whatever you want to call non-belief in God) requires just as much a leap of faith as any religion. In fact, I have encouraged (to the extent that a non-academic like myself is able to do so) my secular brethren to embrace the idea that Science (with a capital S) is a religion. I think it's a much stronger position the the usual view that Science is fundamentally different from all other belief systems.

T: Well, I find that quite disarming. You are the first atheist (do you mind if I call you that?) that I have met that has conceded that point so quickly. The amount of common ground we are finding here (without even trying very hard) is quite remarkable. Perhaps we will find that we agree on everything and we can cut short this entire conversation and go get a bite to eat.

R: You can call me an atheist if you must, but I don't like the term because it has too much baggage associated with it. In particular, I do not identify with much of the vitriolic rhetoric coming from people like Dawkins and Harris. That's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, because I think there's a chance for us to make some real progress here. Alas, I am not quite so sanguine about the possibility of adjourning by lunch time, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.

T: Indeed. Miracles happen all the time.

R: We'll see. But as long as we're on a roll I'd like to agree with another one of your propositions, which is that one cannot prove that God does not exist. Moreover, I'm sure that Dawkins and Harris would readily concede this. You cannot prove a negative. Dawkins' answer to this is also my answer: indeed you cannot prove that God (by which is meant the god of Abraham) does not exist, but neither can you prove that Thor or Kthulu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist.

T: I think there's a lot more evidence for Jesus than there is for the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

R: Perhaps. The point is just that your argument that God's existence cannot be disproven is a straw-man. Even the most strident atheist will readily concede that point.

T: Very well. What is your position then?

R: I'll get to that in a minute. But first, I'd like to propose one more bit of common ground that we might use as a foundation for this discussion. (I predict this will be the last one.) See this basketball?

T: Well, no, actually I don't.

R: OK, work with me here. Suspend your disbelief for a moment (have a little faith?) and imagine that we are really having this conversation, and that I am holding a basketball in my hands.

T: Very well.

R: Do you believe that this basketball exists?

T: I sense a rhetorical trap being set, but OK, I'll bite. Yes, I believe this basketball exists.

R: I give you my word that this is not a rhetorical trap. The point I want to make is not nearly so facile. The only reason I'm resorting to making it with an imaginary basketball is that you're not really here. If you were to make some time to actually meet with me I would make the exact same argument with a real, physical basketball. (It doesn't even have to be a basketball. Any every-day object will do. I just happened to pick a basketball because I thought the word had a certain pleasing way of rolling trippingly off my keyboard.)

T: Very well. Since we seem to be building a relationship of mutual trust and respect here I will concede the point and stipulate that this basketball exists.

R: Good. Now, I will go further and claim that at least part of the reason that you believe that this basketball exists is that you can directly experience it. If I dribble it [bounce!] you can hear the sound it makes. If I toss it to you (think fast!) you can feel it. Yes?

T: Well, applying suspension of disbelief here (since in point of fact this basketball does not really exist), yes, I will agree that if there were a real basketball here, my direct physical experience would figure prominently in the thought process that leads me to conclude that it exists. However there is still a leap of faith involved because I have to assume that my senses and thought processes are reliable. I can't prove that.

R: Yes, I thought we had already agreed that at root everything requires some leap of faith. But here, let me help you with your suspension of disbelief.

[A basketball suddenly appears out of nowhere.]

T: Say, that's a pretty neat trick. How did you do that?

R: A magician never reveals his secrets.

T: So let me try to anticipate where you're going with this. You want to use this basketball as an example of a material object whose existence no one doubts. Is that right?

R: Wow, you're good. It's almost as if you could read my mind.

T: Yes, well, my ESP is working better than normal today.

R: Indeed. So yes, that is exactly right. The last bit of common ground that I want to establish is that there are things in the world -- like basketballs -- whose existence is wholly uncontroversial at least in part because they can be directly experienced. I do not claim that this in any way proves that this basketball actually exists in a metaphysical sense, only that we -- and most people in the world -- can agree that it exists (even though we cannot definitively eliminate the possibility that we could be wrong). In fact, we can reach such a strong level of consensus that if we met someone who genuinely denied the existence of this basketball we would question their sanity.

T: Or think them to be a philosopher.

R: Doesn't that amount to the same thing? [wink]

T: If I were really here I would give you a wry look. But in any case, I am willing to accept the existence of everyday material objects as uncontroversial, at least within the context of a discussion of the social discord brought about by the polarization of secularism and faith.

R: Good. I'm pretty sure that's the last thing we'll agree on for a while.

T: Don't be so pessimistic.

R: Don't underestimate my prophetical abilities. I am going now going to argue that by your own standards atheism is better than Christianity.

T: Hm, you may well have been correct about our leaving common ground behind for a while.

R: Yes, I thought as much. So let us make sure we're on the same page about what your standards are. In your book you argue that Christianity ought to be taken seriously (at least) because it offers the best hope for bringing people together and healing the societal rift between the religious and the secular.

T: Again oversimplified, but basically correct.

R: OK, first I would like to point out that this is at odds with what Jesus himself said. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law." (Matthew 10:34-35)

T: You are quoting those verses out of context, and seriously misinterpreting what they mean. Jesus is simply prophesizing (correctly, I might add) what the result of his ministry will be. It wasn't his intent to bring about discord. It is man's imperfection and inability (or unwillingness) to accept His Word that causes it.

R: I have always found it odd that a supposedly all-powerful God can be rendered impotent by man's obstinance (or imperfections).

T: Now you are the one erecting straw-men. God is not impotent. He chose to give us free will. It is one of His greatest gifts to us.

R: Raymond Smullyan had some interesting things to say about that. But we must be careful not to get distracted by too many tangents or we'll be here all day. My point is just that empirically, Christianity has not been particularly effective at bringing about the social synthesis that you seek, and that was anticipated by no less than Jesus Himself. Indeed, in the U.S. most of the beligerance on the religious side of the social divide comes from people who call themselves Christians.

T: I most emphatically do not see eye-to-eye with the Westboro Baptist Church.

R: I didn't think you did. The fact that you do not agree with them is precisely my point: even among those who call themselves Christians there are huge disagreements about what Christianity is all about. And these disagreements go back to the very beginnings of Christianity. It wasn't until the Council of Nicea, three hundred years after Jesus's death, that Christians even managed to agree on whether or not Jesus was divine. And this sort of thing permeates the history of the church even to this day.

T: Well, you have Dawkins and Harris (and Hitler and Stalin). We have Fred Phelps.

R: Hitler was a Catholic, but again let us not get distracted by tangents. The point is not that Christianity has its extremists. The point is that Christianity cannot even heal the rifts within itself. That does not bode well for Christianity as a path for healing the rifts in society as a whole.

T: I never said it would be easy.

R: Indeed not. But the fact that it is not easy cannot be so lightly dismissed.

T: I do not dismiss it lightly.

R: But you just did. You said, "I never said it would be easy," and left it at that as if there was nothing more to be said. But (and this is crucial) the fact that it is not easy completely undermines your position.

T: I don't see how.

R: Well, your position is that we are saved from sin and evil through the death and resurrection of Jesus. But the mere fact of his death and resurrection are not enough. You have to believe that Jesus died for our sins in order to reap the benefits.

T: That is technically correct, but your choice of words is misleading. It is not like God is playing some kind of game where he challenges us to profess belief in some arbitrary incredible thing or be damned for all eternity. God is not so petty. We achieve salvation through God's grace, and it is simply impossible -- spiritually, physically, logically impossible -- to receive Grace without believing that it is real. Grace is like love. (In fact, Grace is love.) It is not possible to receive someone's love if you don't believe that they love you.

R: Of course it is. When I was growing up there were many occasions when I was convinced that my parents hated me, like when they made me eat my lima beans for example. But that didn't change the reality that in fact they did love me, and that I was the beneficiary of that love.

T: Hm, that's actually not a bad metaphor. I may want to use it in my next sermon on theodicy. Yes, your parents did love you even as they watched you gag on your lima beans, just as God loves us even as he watches us suffer. But as long as you were angry with your parents your relationship with them was imperfect. To fully realize a loving relationship there has to be both love and a belief that that love is real.

R: Agreed. But the problem is that the nature of God's love is not so clear.

T: It is quite clear to me.

R: Yes, and if everyone in the world could easily achieve the same level of clarity we would not be having this discussion. Just as we don't have to spend a lot of time arguing about basketballs.

T: Well, that is why I wrote my book.

R: Which brings me back to the same point: why was it necessary for you to write your book? Why is God's Word so obscured that it requires so many books to be written about it?

T: Because love is more complicated than basketballs.

R: To be sure. But why didn't God write your book? Why didn't God communicate his Word in such a way that it would be understood without the need for all this additional clarification? Either it is possible to communicate the Word in a way that will be understood or it is not. If it is, why didn't God just communicate that way to begin with? And if it isn't, aren't your efforts futile?

T: Maybe God is using me (and my book) to do exactly what you suggest.

R: That is possible. But I read your book and found it utterly unconvincing, so God still doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of getting through, at least not to me.

T: God is not going to force himself on you. You have to let him in.

R: I would like nothing better. Truly, if God is real, I want to know. But I've read the Bible (not every word, but a lot of it) and I've read your book and many others besides, and I am still not convinced.

T: Not convinced of what?

R: Of the central tenets of Christianity (as described by you in your book): that a triune God created me in His image, that I am separated from God by sin, that God became man and died on the cross to redeem me. I don't believe any of that.

T: Can you tell me why?

R: I could, but that would be a very long conversation, and it would be mostly tangential to the real point I want to make.

T: How about just a few examples. It would be helpful for me to know where my book falls short.

R: Very well, if you insist. There are so many problems it is hard to know where to begin. Let's see. How about this. In chapter 6 you address the issue of the apparent conflicts between science and the Bible. (I applaud you for taking on this issue by the way. It is very important.) You write:

"[I]t is false logic to argue that if one part of the scripture can't be taken literally then none of it can be. That isn't true of any human communication."

What you say is true, but it undermines your position in two ways. First, the Bible is not (according to you) a human communication. It is the inerrant Word of God.

T: It is still a human communication. The Bible was written by humans, albeit inspired and guided by God.

R: OK, but that leaves you with the second problem: if not all of the Bible can be taken literally (and I will note in passing that not who call themselves Christian will concede that) then you are left with the problem of deciding which parts can and which cannot. How can you possibly make those decisions? Logically there are only two alternatives. Either you take the fundamentalist position that the Bible is perfect and every word should be taken literally, or you have to rely on some extra-Biblical authority to pass judgement on how any given Biblical passage is to be interpreted (because the Bible itself provides no explicit guidance in that regard).

T: It's pretty clear that parts of the Bible are just poetry. The Song of Solomon for example...

R: Maybe it's clear to you. It's not clear to a fundamentalist. And it's certainly not clear to me. (As far as I can tell, the entire Bible is nothing but a collection of bronze-age myths.) How do we resolve this conflict? We obviously can't rely on the Bible to do it.

T: There is independent corroboration for much of what the Bible says. And in particular, there is overwhelming evidence that what the Bible has to say about Jesus is really true, and that is what really matters.

R: You've changed the subject, but I'll let that slide. Very well, let's talk about Jesus. Some of the things you say are just flat-out wrong. For example, you write:

Jesus's miracles ... were never [just] magic tricks.... You never hear him say something like, "See that tree over there? Watch me make it burst into flames."

It is ironic that you would choose that example, because that is almost exactly what Jesus does in Matthew 21:18-22.

You also write, in support of the Biblical account of the Resurrection:

For a highly altered, fictionalized account of an event to take hold in the public imagination it is necessary that the eyewitnesses (and their children and grandchildren) all be long dead.

First, it is far from clear that the (alleged) eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection took hold "in the public imagination" before the (alleged) witnesses (and their children and their grandchildren) were dead. Even by your own reckoning, the very earliest accounts of the Resurrection were not written until ten or fifteen years after it had happened, and the earliest Gospel (Mark) was not written until thirty or forty years later. Furthermore, the earliest known copies of Mark do not include an account of the Resurrection!

Second, there are eyewitness accounts of all kinds of things that (almost certainly) didn't actually happen. Bigfoot. Alien abductions. Witchcraft. The miracles of Mohammed.

Third, there are internal inconsistencies in the Resurrection accounts. For example, Mark reports Mary, Mary and Salome finding Jesus's empty tomb in great detail, even quoting the "young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side." (Who was this young man? He couldn't have been an angel because the Bible says unequivocally that he was a man.) But then it says, "Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid."

If they said nothing to anyone, how did the author of Mark know what had transpired?

It gets worse. 1 Corinthians 15:5 reports that Jesus "appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve." This is at odds with Mark, which does not report a separate appearance to Peter. Moreoever, who are "the Twelve"? Presumably these are the twelve disciples. But there is one little problem: one of the Twelve was Judas Iscariot, and Judas was already dead, having hanged himself three days earlier. (Mark gets this right, saying that Jesus appeared "to the eleven.")

1 Corinthians then goes on to say that Jesus, "...appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have died." You cite this as evidence that the Resurrection must have happened because:

Here Paul... lists the eyewitnesses. Paul indicates that the risen Jesus not only appeared to individuals and small groups, but also appeared to five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive at the time of his writing and could be consulted for corroboration.

But Paul does not "list" the eyewitnesses! He only says that there were 500 of them. He doesn't say who they actually were. So how exactly would one consult them? (To say nothing of the fact that the 500 were "of the brothers", that is, they were believers, and so any account they had of seeing their spiritual leader risen from the dead would be suspect to say the least.)

Fourth, you argue that the Resurrection must have happened because it was a singular event in history. You write, "the Christian view of resurrection, absolutely unprecedented in history, sprang up full-blown immediately after the death of Jesus." But Jesus's resurrection was not unprecedented. There was at least one other resurrection that preceded it: Lazarus was also raised from the dead. Not only that, but Lazarus was resurrected after being dead four days, not just three. So not only was Jesus's death not unprecedented even by Biblical standards, he didn't even set the record for longest time dead before coming back!

T: But Lazarus was resurrected by Jesus!

R: Why should that matter? Don't forget, we're not discussing Jesus's ability to perform miracles here, we're discussing whether or not the Resurrection really happened. If you wish to argue that we should believe in the historicity of the resurrection in part because it was an unprecedented event, how do you account for the fact that A) it was not an unprecedented event according to the Bible and B) Lazarus's resurrection -- which was even more remarkable in and of itself than Jesus's (because it came first and Lazarus had been dead longer) -- attracted no historical attention at all? There is not a single independent account of it anywhere outside of the Gospel of John (which, by the way, was written decades after these events supposedly took place). It is inescapable. The more I study the Bible the clearer it becomes to me that it has only the most tenuous grounding in historical fact. (And I'm not the only one. Bart Ehrman thinks so too, and he's a born-again Christian! Or at least he was.)

T: My, you've covered a lot of territory here. May I respond?

R: You may, but it's important to keep in mind that my aim here was not to convince you that the Resurrection didn't happen. I can't prove that, and I know there's no hope of convincing you that I am right. My aim is simply to show you some of the reasons that *I* don't believe in the Resurrection, and to hopefully convince you that I've come to this conclusion not out of ignorance or prejudice but after careful study and consideration. I don't want to convince you that I am right. My hope is only to convince you that my position is defensible, that the case for the resurrection is not quite the slam-dunk you say it is.

T: Well, I think it is a slam-dunk, but I will grant that you seem to have given it careful consideration, even if I think you've reached the wrong conclusion.

R: That's good enough for now. I don't want to reach agreement about the Resurrection (because that's hopeless). What I hope to reach agreement on is simply the proposition that reasonable people can disagree about it in a way that reasonable people cannot disagree about, say, the existence of this basketball here. Will you concede that much?

T: I am very reluctant to do so, but this discussion (and my empty stomach) has left me emotionally drained, so I suppose I will for now. I feel sorry for you.

R: Really? Why?

T: Because you do not know God's love. You must be a very empty person. If you don't believe that you were created by God in his image then you must believe that you are just some kind of cosmic accident whose existence has no purpose or meaning.

R: I believe no such thing, and I will thank you not to make such presumptions.

T: Under the circumstances I think it's unfair for you to take me to task for "my" choice of words.

R: But those words are an almost direct quote from your book: "[T]he nonexistence of God ... not only makes all moral choices meaningless, it makes all life meaningless too."

T: Well, doesn't it? If we are just random agglomerations of matter, what can possibly provide life with transcendent meaning?

R: Information.

T: I'm afraid you lost me.

R: Let me explain. You believe that a person has intrinsic value.

T: That's right, because we are created in the image of God.

R: Does a person's intrinsic value diminish in any way if, say, they lose an arm or a leg?

T: No, of course not.

R: How about an eye?

T: No, of course not.

R: Both eyes?

T: A person's intrinsic value is not diminished no matter how many body parts they lose. That we are created in God's image does not mean that we are physically like God, it means that we are spiritually like God, that we are capable of love...

R: What if they lose their heart?

T: I assume you don't mean that in the poetic sense.

R: No, I mean it literally. Does a person with an artificial heart have any less intrinsic value than someone with a biological heart?

T: The idea that love is resident in the heart is just a fanciful metaphor. The heart is just a pump, and losing it no more diminishes a person's intrinsic value than losing a limb, or even a fingernail.

R: For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure most atheists would agree with that. Now for the last question: what if someone loses their brain? Imagine, say, a drowning victim who is rescued, but not before their brain has been deprived of oxygen. Their body is revived. They are breathing. Their heart is pumping. But there is no detectable activity in their brain, and all medical indications are that it has been damaged beyond repair. They are "brain-dead." Is this person's intrinsic value diminished?

T: That is a very difficult question.

R: Indeed, and I actually don't need you to answer it. But let me give you another example which might make it easer to reach a conclusion. This is a true story. There once was a woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951 from cervical cancer. But before she died some of her cancer cells were cultured, and the descendants of those cells are still alive. They are human cells. They have a full complement of human DNA (specifically, Henrietta's DNA). But I trust you would agree that those cells do not have the same intrinsic value as an intact human being.

T: This is getting quite morbid.

R: I'm sorry about that, but I don't know of a gentler way to make this point. Henrietta's cancer cells are alive. They are life. Moreoever, they are human life. But I think you would be very hard-pressed to find a lot of people who believe that they have the intrinsic value of a person. So there is something wrong with the slogan, "All human life is sacred."

T: I think that slogan means, "All human beings are sacred."

R: Exactly. Or to put it another way, all persons are sacred, or have intrinsic value, or whatever you want to call it. But that raises the question: what makes a person? And I submit to you that what makes a person is not necessarily that they were created in the image of God. There is an alternative, principled scientific account of what makes a person special, namely, that they have a functioning brain. Our DNA makes us human but it is our brains that make us people.

T: I still don't see what this has to do with the idea that "information" is what gives life transcendent meaning.

R: That's understandable. I'm not using the term in it usual everyday sense. I don't mean that, for example, the information you find in, say, a phone book gives life meaning. I mean it in a much broader and technical sense, in the way that computer scientists or mathematicians mean it. I mean it in the sense in which it answers the question: what makes brains special? And the answer to that question is: brains are special because of their capacity to process information.

T: I think that is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.

R: Really? Why?

T: Well, for starters, computers process information too. Does that mean that computers should be considered human? Even DNA contains information. By that argument, Henrietta Lacks's cancer cells should be considered human. No, I'm afraid you've gone completely off the rails here. The reason brains are special is because they are the conduit to the human soul, and it is the soul that makes humans special, not brains per se.

R: It is true that computers (and DNA) process information. But you have made a basic logical fallacy. Brains are special because they process information. It does not follow that everything that processes information is special the way brains are. This is called the converse accident fallacy. Human brains are special because they can process information in ways that no computer can (yet). Also, I should point out that you are using the term "human" where you should be using the term "person." It is the soul (or brains) that makes people special. It is an important distinction.

T: Why?

R: Two reasons. First, sloppy thinking about humans vs people leads you to all kinds of ethical conundrums, like whether or not Henrietta Lacks's cancer cells should be accorded human rights. If you distinguish the concept of "person" from the concept of "human" those kinds of dilemmas simply evaporate because everyone can agree that while Henrietta's cells might be human, they are most assuredly not a person. And second, it leaves one open to the possibility of some day encountering a person who is not human.

T: Wasn't it you who was making disparaging comments about Bigfoot earlier in the conversation?

R: I'm not talking about Bigfoot. I'm talking about the possibility of encountering intelligent life on other planets, or even creating artificial intelligence here on this planet. Suppose you met an intelligent alien, would you accord it "human" rights? From a religious point of view this would be quite a sticky issue, but from the information-centric point of view it would not. An intelligent alien would be a person by virtue of its having a brain (or something equivalent that was the seat of its intelligence). As far as we know at this point, all persons are human. But it won't necessarily always be so.

T: Your reasoning is circular. You've used the information-processing capabilities of human brains to define the threshold necessary to be considered a person, and then used that definition to conclude that humans have intrinsic value. You could just as easily have skipped a step and just said that humans have intrinsic value to begin with.

R: It's not circular because information (and information-processing capability) can be objectively defined independently of humans. And using this human-independent definition it is quite clear that human brains are special. Human brains can do things that nothing else in the known universe can do. They can talk (and listen). They can laugh. They can imagine. Those are quite amazing feats.

T: More evidence of God's design.

R: Or the complexity that evolution guided by natural selection is capable of producing. The point is (and this is important) we don't have to agree on how human brains got to be the way they are in order to agree that human brains are special. Furthermore, we can also agree that human brains are special at least in part because of what they do, and not because of how they came to be.

T: I'm still waiting for you to get to the part about transcendent meaning.

R: Once you accept that brains are special because of what they do that leads you inexorably towards many of the same moral and metaphysical conclusions that religion does. "Human rights" (which should properly be called "person's rights") for example, follow directly from the proposition that brains are special. People have rights because people have brains and brains are special. Killing a person is wrong because by killing a person you destroy his brain and that's bad because brains are special.

And it's not the brain per se, it's really the information stored inside that brain that's the really valuable commodity, because that is what makes us who we are. So Alzheimer's is bad because it destroys the information in a brain while leaving the brain itself (and the body that contains it) intact. You can derive other moral principles from this as well. For example, true information (usually) has more value than false information, which is why lying is (usually) bad.

The point is, you don't have to believe in God or a soul to reach (nearly) all of the same conclusions about life and its value and its purpose as religious people do. All you have to believe in is the specialness of brains. And that is a much easier thing to get people to agree on.

T: Well, I can't say I can find any overt flaw in your reasoning, but I can't say it makes me feel very warm and fuzzy. The idea that I am a child of God gives me much more comfort than the proposition that "I am my brain."

R: But that's actually part of the beauty of science. It doesn't demand faith. Science works whether you believe in it or not. That's another reason why science, not religion, is a much better basis for reconciling the rift between science and religion than religion is. Religion only works for believers. Science works for everyone.

T: Saying that science is right is not exactly what I'd call reconciliation.

R: I didn't say that science is right. I said it was a better basis for reconciliation in part because it does not demand faith. To serve this purpose it doesn't really matter whether or not it is right, all that matters is that everyone agree. And I submit to you that it's going to be a lot easier to get people to agree to the principle that brains are special than to agree to Christianity. In fact, it's probably not much harder to get people to believe in the specialness of brains than it is to agree to the existence of basketballs. Furthermore, the essential elements of the Scientific (note the capital S) teleology are completely compatible with many religious beliefs. You can be a Christian and still accept the proposition that brains are special as a foundation for morality.

T: Say, what happened to that basketball anyway? It doesn't seem to be around here any more.

R: Never mind that now. I think we've done a good day's work here, and I'm famished. Shall we adjourn and grab a bite to eat?

T: Sounds good to me. I know a great little Mexican place around the corner.

R: Hm, beans give me gas. How about Sushi?

T: Never touch the stuff. Italian? There's a place down the street that makes a great osso bucco.

R: I don't eat veal ever since I learned how it is made. Tell you what. How about we just grab a sandwich and go sit under a tree?

T: Sounds good to me.

R: Well, at least we agree on that.

T: It's a start.

---

Postscript: I sent a draft (very nearly identical with the version above) of this essay to Tim Keller (the real one). This is how he responded (via his assistant):


Dear Ron,
Tim looked the dialog over, and he doubts he would have responded to your questions the way you have him responding. He thinks that the imagined dialog would be misleading if it supposed to represent what he would say if he was actually asked that series of queries. He adds that he doesn't think he knows anyone well enough to be sure he could imagine how he or she would actually respond to a long set of real-time questions like that.

Tim is sorry he doesn't have the time to respond to the questions himself. He appreciates your effort and your willingness to show it to him.

Thanks so much.

And then a little while later I got this:


Ron,
One more thought from Tim...
since he doesn't believe he would answer these questions in this way, it wouldn't be right to post this as if he had said these things, since he hasn't and he wouldn't. Thanks, Ron.

To which I responded as follows:


[The "real" Tim Keller (T2) bursts into the room.]

T2: Who is this imposter?

T1: Hello, my name is Tim Keller. Who are you?

T2: You're not Tim Keller, *I'm* Tim Keller.

T1: Why, so you are. I am Tim Keller as imagined by Ron Garret. But it's very good of you to join us. Shall I bow out now?

T2: No, I have a bone to pick with you.

Ron: You shouldn't blame him. I'm really the one you should be angry with. He didn't really have a choice in the matter.

[T2 regards T1 with a quizzical scowl.]

T2: Nothing he's said has been what I would have said. He doesn't even look like me. His nose is all wrong.

R: I'm sorry, I did the best I could under the circumstances. All I had to work with was your picture on Google Video, and the image quality is not the best. But perhaps you'd like to take this opportunity to set the record straight?

T2: No, I'm sorry, I don't have time for that. I'm a very busy man.

R: Then what is it you expect me to do?

T2: Dispose of him.

T1: I'm not sure I like the sound of that.

R: You want me to kill him?

T2: No, I don't want you to kill him. Don't be ridiculous. You can't kill him. He isn't real.

R: Well, despite the fact that he isn't real, I've grown rather fond of him, and I would prefer to keep him around.

T1: Why, thank you!

T2: I don't think that's right.

R: Why not?

T1: Because he doesn't answer questions the way I would, and so it is disingenuous of you to present him as if he were me.

R: Well, *of course* he doesn't answer questions the way you would. He's just a figment of my imagination.

T1: Excuse me, but would you please stop talking about me as if I weren't in the room?

R: Sorry. OK, look, I'll make him go away.

[T1 vanishes in a puff of smoke.]

R: Are you happy now?

T2: No. I want you to expunge all memory of him. I want you to make it as if he never existed. I don't want anyone to ever know about him.

R: You want me to disown my creation?

T2: Yes.

R: And why should I do that?

T2: Because you present him as if he were me, and he isn't.

R: Are you saying that the positions he takes are not your positions?

T2: Yes.

R: Can you be specific? I really tried very hard to represent your views accurately. I can cite you chapter and verse (so to speak) to show that every position he took is supported by something you wrote in your book. Can you tell me where I got it wrong?

T2: No, sorry, I'm a very busy man. No time for that.

R: Well, I'm afraid that leaves me in a very difficult position. And I'm disappointed too. I would have thought you would appreciate this rhetorical device I've chosen, particularly since it was actually your idea.

T2: What? That's ridiculous. I never suggested that you write me into a dialog.

R: That's true, but you did come up with the metaphor of God writing himself into the script. It's in one of the later chapters of your book. (That idea was not original with you, by the way. Douglas Hoftstadter used the same device back in the 70's, and for all I know it goes back further than that.) I had hoped you'd see the dialog format as a small homage, not as an insult.

T2: Hmmm....

[Suddenly the *real* real Tim Keller (T3) bursts into the room.]

T3: What's going on here? Who is this? He looks familiar.

R: Ah, Rev. Keller, good of you to join us. Won't you sit down?

I leave it to you to write the next line.

---

To date, Tim Keller has not responded.

Praise for the Prius

On a recent vacation I decided to rent a Toyota Prius. After driving it 200 miles the gas tank was still showing full. Not mostly full, but completely, 100% full. (It's a digital gage.) I thought to myself: this can't be right. Even if the thing does get 50 miles to the gallon, that still means we've burned 4 gallons and it can't be more than a 10-12 gallon tank, right? So it just has to be down at least a third of a tank, right? So that means that the gas gage must be broken. So that means that we really have no idea how much gas we have, and we could get stuck in the middle of nowhere. So we'd better fill up.

We pulled in to what is very likely the very last pump-first-pay-later gas station in the United States, possibly the world and topped it off. By the time gas was bubbling out of the filler hose we'd squeezed 2.7 gallons into the tank.

2.7 gallons!

Holy shit! We'd been averaging more than 70 miles per gallon! I would not have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

The most amazing thing about is that these were not 200 highway miles. These were 200 miles in the city and an badly overcrowded state highway. These were 200 frustrating stop-and-go miles. It turns out that the Prius, probably because of the regenerative braking system, actually uses less gas in the city than on the highway. I am duly impressed.

If only it didn't look so goofy I might actually buy one for myself.

This is how prophecy is supposed to work

A prediction made by Charles Darwin almost 150 years ago has been confirmed.

Like father, like daughter

Not that I would ever trust anything that I read on Fox News, but if what they report is true it puts a whole new light on Chelsea Clinton's dressing-down of a student who (supposedly) asked her about Monica Lewinski. That question earned a terse response:

“Wow, you’re the first person actually that’s ever asked me that question in the, I don’t know, maybe 70 college campuses I’ve now been to, and I do not think that is any of your business,” [Chelsea] Clinton said.

And if the question had actually been about Monica I would have had a certain amount of sympathy for this position. But (if Fox News is to be believed, which is always a big IF) it wasn't. The question was about Hillary's credibility in light of her comment about the "vast right-wing conspiracy." According to Fox:

"A male questioner earned a terse response when he asked whether her mother’s credibility had been hurt during the scandal. Before learning the truth about her husband’s relationship with Lewinsky, the former first lady had claimed the allegations against him were fabricated by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

That question is very much in bounds, because the fact of the matter is that Bill Clinton did "have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski."

I am beginning to think that the entire Clinton family is nothing but a pack of pathological liars.

Hooray for Hollywood

I was up in Mountain View yesterday chatting with Y Combinator companies, and I was really struck by the difference in cultures between the Silicon Valley and LA. It was hardly any effort at all to get twenty of the world's most brilliant hackers in the same room at the same time, while in LA we consider ourselves lucky to find even one decent Python programmer. But LA has its charms. Today I was on a panel at a seminar for filmmakers learning how to raise money for movies, and one of the people on the panel was Frank Darabont who directed The Shawshank Redemption, one of my favorite films of all time.

I arrived way too early for the panel, so I decided to pop over to the Kodak Theatre to grab a bite to eat. The place was crawling with tourists taking pictures of the out-of-work actors in front of Grauman's who hustle for tips by dressing up like famous movie characters. I had a brief chat with a convincing but rather dispirited Albus Dumbledore, who had been out of work for weeks as a result of the writer's strike. That is just not an experience you could ever hope to have in Mountain View.

I once told Paul Graham that one of the things I love about LA is its phoniness, but that wasn't really the right word. The word I should have used but didn't for fear of coming across too starry-eyed was magic. I love LA's magic -- but not in the phony Disney-esque sense of the word. I mean in the real professional-magician sense of the word. The kind of magic a magician does is not real magic. It's acting. It's sleight-of-hand and misdirection and when it's done right it gives a very convincing illusion of magic happening before your eyes. A really good magician makes it look like magic even if you know how the trick is done.

The film industry is all about creating those kinds of illusions. Everyone knows that ET is just a muppet, and that bicycle isn't really flying across the moon, but film can create mighty convincing illusions, and in that sense film is magic. Not "real" wish-upon-a-star kind of magic, but professional-magician kind of magic.

The trick with film is that it takes its magic to a whole nuther level from traditional magic. Traditional magic is designed to elicit only one emotion: wonder. But film can elicit the entire panoply of human emotion: laughter, fear, love, joy, sorrow. What's more, those emotions are real. And because the emotions are real, the illusions that evoked them seem all that much more real and vivid.

There's a kind of delicious and fearsome danger in the extent to which movies present convincing illusions. It makes it hard, for example, to separate actors from the characters they play. People love movie stars because they think they know them when what they really know are the characters they play. Sometimes it becomes difficult even for actors to separate themselves from their characters, because to really act well you have to get yourself to actually feel the emotions that you are portraying. Good acting isn't really acting, it's genuinely feeling, which is one of the reasons that acting can be such an emotionally taxing line of work.

This perilously fuzzy line between illusion and reality permeates the culture of the entire city of Los Angeles. Culturally, it is the diametric opposite of the culture in the Silicon Valley, where everything revolves around the harsh objective reality of MOSFET transistors. People in Silicon Valley are very good at slinging bits and crunching numbers, and are generally (except for VC's) pretty earnest and straightforward. People in LA are the exact opposite. There's a huge amount of phoniness, but it's a particular kind of phoniness that I find fascinating and wonderful. Everyone is dreaming of being a movie star or a producer or a director or selling their screenplay. The fascinating thing about it is that the reality of being any of these things is nothing at all like the dream. Frank Darabont has been nominated for three or four Oscars, and he has to hustle for money to make his next feature just like anybody else. His rolodex is a bit fatter, but other than that he's pretty much in the same boat as anybody else. And we're all driven by this desire to make a particular kind of magic happen, of rendering a transcendent experience on film. That what I feel when I look up at the Hollywood sign, and that's why I love LA. The Silicon Valley is cool, but it's not magic.