Does the discovery of the Higgs boson mean anything?

An excellent reflection, from Dennis Prager.

Excerpt:

The ‘God Particle’ and God
Without God, major scientific discoveries have no meaning.

By Dennis Prager

...  Both the time and money invested [in this research] were necessary because satiating our curiosity about the natural world is one of the noblest ambitions of the human race.

But scientific discovery and meaning are not necessarily related. As one of the leading physicists of our time, Steven Weinberg, has written, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also it also seems pointless.”

And pointlessness is the point. The discovery of the Higgs boson brings us no closer to understanding why there is a universe, not to mention whether life has meaning. In fact, no scientific discovery ever made will ever explain why there is existence. Nor will it render good and evil anything more than subjective opinion, or explain why human beings have consciousness or anything else that truly matters.

The only thing that can explain existence and answer these other questions is God or some other similar metaphysical belief. This angers those scientists and others who are emotionally as well as intellectually committed to atheism. But many honest atheists recognize that a godless world means a meaningless one, and they admit that science can explain only what, not why.

In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, Woody Allen, an honest atheist, made this point in his inimitable way. Allen told the interviewer that, being a big sports fan, and especially a New York Knicks fan, he is often asked whether it’s important if the Knicks beat the Celtics. His answer is, “Well, it’s just as important as human existence.” If there is no God, Mr. Allen is right.

One must have a great deal of respect for the atheist who recognizes the consequences of atheism: no meaning, no purpose, no good and evil beyond subjective opinion, and no recognition of the limits of what science can explain.

But the atheist — scientist, philosophy professor, or your brother-in-law who sells insurance — who denies the consequences of atheism is as worthy of the same intellectual respect atheists have for those who believe in a 6,000-year-old universe.

Not only is science incapable of discovering why there is existence; scientists also confront the equally frustrating fact that the more they discover about the universe, the more they realize they do not know.

I happen to think that this was God’s built-in way of limiting man’s hubris and compelling humans to acknowledge His existence. Admittedly, this doesn’t always have these effects on scientists and especially on those who believe that science will explain everything.

So, sincere congratulations to the physicists and other scientists who discovered the Higgs boson. We now think we have uncovered the force or the matter that gives us the 4 percent of the universe that we can observe (96 percent of the universe consists of “dark matter,” about which scientists know almost nothing).

However, ironic as it may seem to many of these physicists, only if there is a God does their discovery matter. Otherwise, it is no more important than whether the Knicks beat the Celtics.

Prager nails it. Atheism is untimately nihilistic. It is inherently nihilistic-- atheism is the belief that there is no ultimate meaning to existence. If there is no God, there is no meaning to anything. The Higgs is found and the Celtics won and my nose itches and kids get cancer. So what?

And the boilerplate atheist retort-- 'we give life its meaning'--is bullshit. If we are not endowed with meaning, we cannot create meaning. We are a part of the universe. If it has no meaning, we have no meaning. We meat robots may be able to fake it, to coax a few of our neurons to deceive other neurons into believing (or whatever soulless neurons do) that meaning is real. But in the end meaning is a lie.

If there is no Source of meaning that transcends us, then our sense of meaning is a cruel illusion. But it's not even cruel. It means nothing. It just is. 

Such is honest atheism. If you celebrate the Higgs discovery, you are really celebrating an accomplishment that means something. Whether you admit it or not, you are acknowledging God. Kind of an implicit Tebow.

Meaning isn't a lie. Things do matter. Even the hairs on your head are numbered. The discovery of the Higgs boson is magnificent science. Kudos to the scientists for their amazing work.

Soli deo gloria.

'Darwin predicted nested hierarchies'!

Aristotle's taxonomy of marine life, circa 350 B.C.

Commentor oleg, in reply to my observation that natural selection reduces to 'survivors survive':

Darwin's theory isn't a tautology. It posits that different species had a common ancestor in the past. More specifically, it predicts that clades form a nested hierarchy. That of course can be, and has been, tested by several independent means, so it is at the very least falsifiable in principle.

Try to argue with that.

Ok. I'll try to argue with that.

It's true that Darwin's theory isn't a tautology. Darwin posited universal common ancestry, which is a testable hypothesis (although difficult to test). And heritable variation isn't a tautology. Living things vary and pass on some of the variations to their offspring. That's banal, but not a tautology.


Natural selection is a tautology. Individuals that are relatively more reproductively successful than other individuals will pass on more of their traits to the next generation. But individuals who pass on more of their traits to the next generation are..... relatively more reproductively successful. That's merely a restatement of "individuals who pass on more of their traits to the next generation".

Individuals that are relatively more reproductively successful are... relatively more reproductively successful.

Survivors survive, colloquially.

Tautology.

Actually, Darwinists, always loathe to use precision, understand the tautology problem.

So they fudge. They use "natural selection" with one of three meanings, according to the polemics of the moment:

1) Survival of survivors ('Natural selection is survival of the fittest.' Who are the fittest? The survivors!)
2) Acausal statistical observation ("In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next.")
3) Causal mechanism (a "Blind Watchmaker"; "evolution is like a two-cycle engine")

Each of the three definitions of natural selection is an atheist fail. Tautology is banal. Acausal statistical observation is feckless and merely descriptive-- it lacks agency, and by definition causes nothing. Causal mechanism necessarily involves a propensity towards an end (i.e. that which is caused), which is teleological, and which presupposes Him Whom We Shall Not Name.

You understand why atheists are loathe to use precision.


oleg, again:

[Darwin's theory] posits that different species had a common ancestor in the past.

Yep. It does. And it may be true. But the evidence for universal common ancestry is inconclusive. The similarities/differences in organisms over time may be due to common ancestry, or common design, or both. One can group automobiles in phyletic trees (descending from Model T, with 'species' like Chevy and Mustang, etc) in a manner quite similar to the way one can construct a tree of life. But automobiles are designed. Their 'common ancestry' is common design, not descent with modification by variation and natural selection.

oleg again:

More specifically, [Darwin's theory] predicts that clades form a nested hierarchy. That of course can be, and has been, tested by several independent means, so it is at the very least falsifiable in principle.

A clade is a group consisting of a type, represented by a single branch on a phyletic tree, and all of it's related types that are distal to and connected to that branch. In biology, it refers to a species and all of its descendants, as depicted in a tree.

A nested set is an inclusion hierarchy, consisting of the common single "branch" and each distal branch extending from it.

A nested hierarchy is a tree of nested sets. Russian matryoshka dolls are a nested heirarchy. So is the classification of shapes: an isosceles triangle is a subset of triangle is a subset of polygon is a subset of shape.

Thus a clade is a type of nested hierarchy, as a matter of definition.

Darwin didn't 'predict' that clades form a nested hierarchy. The dictionary predicted it.

Nor did Darwin 'predict' a nested hierarchy in biology. The first scientist to propose a classification system of living things that incorporated nested hierarchies was Aristotle. He proposed the first scheme of biological classification-- the Tree of Being. Most of biology from 300 B.C. to the modern era-- for 2000 years-- was based on Aristotle's exploration of the hierarchy of nature.

The system of nested hierarchy used widely today is the Linnaean system of taxonomy, which uses Aristotle's categories of genus and species and consists of numerous nested hierarchies. Linnaeus published his system of taxonomy incorporating nested hierarchies in 1735. 

Darwin was born in 1809.

So Darwin didn't predict that "clades form a nested hierarchy", for two reasons:

1) A clade is a nested hierarchy, as a matter of definition. 

2) The categorization of living things into nested hierarchies is 2000 years old, and the modern system of taxonomy incorporating nested hierarchies was developed a century before Darwin's birth. 

But Darwin did "predict" this: the system of nested hierarchies observed in taxonomy is the result of universal common ancestry by the mechanism of natural selection. Darwin denied common design. In other words, Darwin made an inference from a taxonomy that was already in existence long before his birth.

Darwin did not "predict" the system of taxonomy based on nested hierarchies. He offered an explanation for it. An atheist explanation for it.

There is a compulsion among Darwinists, demonstrated nicely by oleg's assertion, to attribute wildly fantastic accomplishments to Darwin. 'We wouldn't know the relationships between living things without Darwin' and 'Darwin predicted nested hierarchies', and 'Darwin's theory is indispensable to medical science' and 'Darwin's theory predicted DNA and the genetic code', and 'Darwin was the first to propose universal common ancestry (many others, including Immanuel Kant, had proposed it long before Darwin), and "nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution", yada, yada.

Atheists have a bizarre propensity to attribute herculean accomplishments to their idols. 

Darwin's explanation for nested hierarchies-- universal common ancestry by natural selection-- remains unproven. There is evidence for and against universal common ancestry. And even if universal common ancestry is true, it can be explained as readily by common design as it can be explained by natural selection. 

Actually, design-- teleology from the perspective of a Thomist-- is a much better explanation for life than natural selection.

Teleology has explanatory power, and it isn't a tautology. 

Hostis humani generis

A nice essay by John Yoo about Obama's use of selected killing of terrorists.

Excerpt:

The administration has made little secret of its near-total reliance on drone operations to fight the war on terror. The ironies abound. Candidate Obama campaigned on narrowing presidential wartime power, closing Guantanamo Bay, trying terrorists in civilian courts, ending enhanced interrogation, and moving away from a wartime approach to terrorism toward a criminal-justice approach. Mr. Obama has avoided these vexing detention issues simply by depriving terrorists of all of their rights—by killing them. 

Some information about these strikes comes from the disclosure of national secrets that appear designed to help the president's re-election. Recent leaks have blown the cover of the Pakistani doctor who sought to confirm bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad; revealed a British asset who penetrated al Qaeda and stopped another bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner; and assigned credit to the administration for the Stuxnet computer virus that damaged Iran's nuclear program (even identifying the government lab that designed it). 

American intelligence will have a steep hill to climb when it asks for the future cooperation of agent-assets and foreign governments. Notably silent are the Democrats and media figures who demanded the scalp of a Bush White House aide, Scooter Libby, for leaks by another government official of the cover of a CIA operative who had left the field years earlier.

It's not news that Obama and his hacks are dissembling frauds for whom politics, not governance, is paramount.

Later in his essay, Yoo raises the issue of prudence and ethics of selected killing of Islamic terrorists.  There are genuine questions of prudence. It may be more effective to capture and interrogate than to kill.

Regarding ethics, I believe that is is entirely ethical to kill terrorists anywhere and anytime we find them. That includes American citizens, if they are actively engaged in terrorist activities. We are at war with Islamic terrorists, a just war, and Islamic terrorists are unlawful enemy combatants who flout all conventions of warfare and of civilization. As Yoo observes, such rogue murderers were classically termed hostis humani generis, the enemy of all mankind. They deserve no protection by just war theory or by Geneva Conventions. And they certainly have no Constitutional protections, which have no jurisdiction over unlawful enemy combatants in wartime. Islamic terrorists are actively engaged in a murderous war on mankind-- a jihad on the Dar-al-harb-- and should be targeted without hesitation, using whatever method is most effective.

If they can be captured and interrogated, fine. If not, they should be killed. The only constraints on killing them should be tactical and strategic, not ethical.

To the extent that Obama, regardless of his hypocrisy, is targeting them without remorse, bravo.

"... a verification of a prediction made by evolution"

Steven Novella has an amusing post in which he discusses the recent discovery of a dinosaur with proto-feathers and reviews the evidence that modern birds are related to dinosaurs. Interesting stuff, for sure, and very important for our understanding of dinosaurs and of the origin of birds.

But, predictably, when it comes to evolution Novella can't contain himself:

The story of feathered dinosaurs is one of the strongest success stories for evolutionary theory, and continues to be a thorn in the side of evolution deniers. They cannot help but expose their ignorance and deception when they clumsily try to deny the implications of feathered dinosaurs. So I tend to revel, just a bit, in each new significant discovery of a feathered dinosaur. The latest discover, recently published in PNAS, provides evidence that feathers were even more common among dinosaurs than previous evidence demonstrated. There is some debate among experts about how prevalent protofeathers and feathers were, and so a new piece of solid fossil evidence helps clarify the debate further. 

After Darwin published his theory of evolution one of the early challenges to the idea of evolution, which includes the claim that all life on earth is related through common ancestors, was that there were significant gaps between major groups of living creatures. Birds, for example, seem to be their own group without a close connection to any other group. They are, of course, related to vertebrates. But if evolution were true then there must be fossil evidence connecting birds to another group, such as reptiles...

Creationists are stuck arguing that it is nothing but a coincidence that the group hypothesized to the related to modern birds is turning out to have feathers and protofeathers as a common feature. Nothing changes the fact, however, that this is a verification of a prediction made by evolution. The ability to successfully make predictions about what will be discovered in the future is powerful vindication for any scientific theory.

Now I believe that the hypothesis that birds evolved from dinosaurs is well-supported, although there certainly remains some controversy. It's interesting and good science.

But what to make of Novella's bizarre assertion that such evidence is a triumph for evolutionary theory?

For a century after Darwin published Origin the established wisdom was that dinosaurs were closely related to reptiles (-sauros means "reptile" or "lizard"), and that birds were descendants of thecodonts, which were "socket-toothed" reptiles that flourished in the Triassic. In the later 20th century, anatomists and paleontologists and cladists and comparative biologists established striking similarity between the bones of some dinosaurs and modern birds. Feathered and proto-feathered fossils of dinosaurs, discovered with increasing frequency in the late 20th century, made the relationship even more clear.

Now consider Novella's bizarre assertion:

... this is a verification of a prediction made by evolution. The ability to successfully make predictions about what will be discovered in the future is powerful vindication for any scientific theory.

But "evolution"-- Novella means Darwinism-- predicted none of this. I challenge Novella to cite references from evolutionary biologists during the past 150 years predicting that birds rather than reptiles would be found to be related to dinosaurs based on Darwinian principle of heritable variation and natural selection and common descent.

While T. H. Huxley was an early proponent of the dinosaur-to-bird theory, he based his view on morphological similarities and paleontological evidence, not on any insight gained from 'random variation and natural selection'. And his view was rejected-- in favor of the dinosaur-reptile theory-- by the Darwinist-monopolized evolutionary community for 100 years.

That's hardly a successful "prediction made by evolution".

The only thing evolutionary theory "predicted" was that living things descended from a common ancestor. That's as far as "random variation and natural selection" gets you. Darwinian principles don't distinguish between dinosaur-bird relatedness and dinosaur-reptile relatedness.

And what Darwin really offered was not really a prediction, but an explanation, for relatedness. The explanation was common ancestry. Discernment of actual relatedness depends on morphological similarities, the fossil record, etc, and not at all on Darwin's theory. The real work in unraveling the fascinating relationship between dinosaurs and birds has been done by the anatomists and the paleontologists and the cladists and the comparative biologists. 'Chance and necessity' doesn't tell you whether your ancestors had feathers or scales. Careful morphological and paleontological work tell you.

That's the real science, and it depends not squat on non-existent Darwinian "predictions".

What about common ancestry as evidence for dinosaur-bird relatedness? Darwinism again contributes nothing. Darwinists insist that relatedness (anatomical similarity, etc) is evidence for common ancestry, but one cannot then logically claim that the inference to common ancestry is evidence for relatedness. That's circular reasoning.

If the anatomists and the paleontologists and the cladists and the comparative biologists had published evidence that dinosaurs were the progenitors of reptiles, instead of birds, Darwinists would have touted the indispensability of evolutionary theory in establishing the dinosaur-reptile relationship.

Another successful prediction by evolution!

As usual, Darwinists and their fanboys try to take credit for the work of real scientists. Darwinists take credit for anything-- as one might expect for the theory that "survivors survive".

Darwinism is never wrong, because banal observations (living things vary heritably) and tautologies (survivors survive) are never wrong. 

Feser on the cosmological argument and the beginning of the universe

The cosmological argument: dominoes in a series of simultaneous causation, not causation extended in time.

From Ed Feser's great post on the pitiful lack of insight by atheists on the cosmological argument for God's existence. Feser points out that the most common atheist 'retorts' to the cosmological argument are nonsense, and serve merely to point out the philosophical illiteracy or mere intellectual laziness of atheists.


As a primer, my earlier post on Aquinas' First Way, which is one version of the cosmological argument, is here.

Feser:

3. “Why assume that the universe had a beginning?” is not a serious objection to the argument.

The reason this is not a serious objection is that no version of the cosmological argument assumes this at all. Of course, the kalām cosmological argument does claim that the universe had a beginning, but it doesn’t merely assume it. Rather, the whole point of that version of the cosmological argument is to establish through detailed argument that the universe must have had a beginning. You can try to rebut those arguments, but to pretend that one can dismiss the argument merely by raising the possibility of an infinite series of universes (say) is to miss the whole point.

The main reason this is a bad objection, though, is that most versions of the cosmological argument do not even claim that the universe had a beginning. Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Thomistic, and Leibnizian cosmological arguments are all concerned to show that there must be an uncaused cause even if the universe has always existed. Of course, Aquinas did believe that the world had a beginning, but (as all Aquinas scholars know) that is not a claim that plays any role in his versions of the cosmological argument. When he argues there that there must be a First Cause, he doesn’t mean “first” in the order of events extending backwards into the past. What he means is that there must be a most fundamental cause of things which keeps them in existence at every moment, whether or not the series of moments extends backwards into the past without a beginning.

In fact, Aquinas rather famously rejected what is now known as thekalām argument. He did not think that the claim that the universe had a beginning could be established through philosophical arguments. He thought it could be known only via divine revelation, and thus was not suitable for use in trying to establish God’s existence. (Here, by the way, is another basic test of competence to speak on this subject. Any critic of the Five Ways who claims that Aquinas was trying to show that the universe had a beginning and that God caused that beginning – as Richard Dawkins does in his comments on the Third Way in The God Delusion – infallibly demonstrates thereby that he simply doesn’t know what he is talking about.)

Feser observes that the 'cause' invoked in the cosmological argument is not the cause of a temporal beginning of the universe, but the cause for the existence of the universe at every moment, including now. The dominoes of the cosmological argument are a arrayed in a string of simultaneous causation, not causation extended in time. It addresses 'cause' as the reason for existence of each thing at every moment, not 'cause' of the first thing in a temporal sequence. Aquinas and nearly all others who formulated important versions of the cosmological argument assumed a universe eternal in the past.

The cosmological argument has nothing-- nothing-- to do with the Big Bang.

Nearly all atheist 'retorts' to the cosmological argument get this rudimentary part of the argument wrong. They understand nothing of the actual argument, and nothing even of its premises.

"Have you ever peed in the pool..."

Jimmy Kimmel gives a kid a lie detector test. Very Funny.

Darwin and Maxwell

Commentor oleg on Maxwell and Darwin:

Egnor: "You'd think, bach, that after 150 years you guys would finally figure out what your Victorian "theory" really means. Besides survivors survive."

[oleg] That's a pathetic response, Mike. You cannot argue on substance, so you poo-poo the time period. Well, you know what? Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism is also a "Victorian theory." It was formulated about the same time as Darwin's. No shame about the timing.

The contrast between Maxwell's theory and Darwin's is very instructive.

Maxwell's theory is perhaps the most powerful and beautiful in science. It is mathematically elegant, precise, comprehensive, and astonishingly heuristic (eg it demonstrated that light is a form of electromagnetism, and it served an a basis for Einstein's work on special relativity). Maxwell himself was an uncommonly passionate Christian (like most great scientists who created modern science), and understood his work as the exploration of God's creation.

Darwin's theory is a banal tautology and a non-sequitor.

Banal: there is heritable variation in living things

Tautology: living things that are reproductively successful (survivors) are more effective at passing their traits to their young (survive). Survivors survive.

Non-sequitor: this trivial observation explains the origin of species, is indispensable to biology, is the best idea anybody ever had, yada, yada.

Bottom line:

Maxwell's work is an example of the best in science.

Darwin's work is an example of the best in using a banal "theory" to market fashionable ideology (atheism).