Douglas Ell: how an MIT atheist found God through math

[anon50609448]

@jsroberts

They seemed to argue quite well for standard scientific theories like evolution, but then they tried to tie this to their idea of how science was actually perfectly in line with the Bible. That was always the weakest part of the argument, and somehow the Bible clearly showed them an interpretation that was generally not a mainstream Christian view, or even one shared by the other apologists.

It is excruciating obvious in cases like this that a person came to a conclusion they were dead set on adopting and then put their rational brain to the task of finding a justification, like a White House lawyer set to make legal arguments in favour of extrajudicial executions.

@art_carnage

It seems obvious that he was a fauxatheist, who never really lost the desire for a god, that was drilled into him as a child. So eventually, he decided to invent his own. All it takes is a determined resolve to ignore reality.

Exactly. But rather than even having the guts to invent his own, he went with the Abrahamic God, which is laughable. It drives me nuts because I also have a god-shaped hole in my psyche, and I am also smart enough to make up a very clever argument to convince myself that there is something to fill it, but I know that it’s just bullshit and I’m only motivated to do that by the wiring of my stupid meat-brain-that-is-all-I’ve-got. Fuck this guy for feeling contented.

@knappa

For what it’s worth, as it is completely useless, a master’s degree in theoretical (no one calls it that) mathematics is basically a consolation prize given to dropouts in math PhD programs. Without knowing anything more about a person than that, I would better trust someone who stopped at the undergraduate level.

Oh seriously, he has a masters in mathematics? The way the article was hyping him (and he hypes himself on his website) I thought he had more than one PhD or something. A masters in math and a law degree. My money just went from brilliant person who convinced themselves of something stupid to just a plain old idiot.*

* Plain old idiot not meant to preclude IQ in the top 1 or 2%.

@shaddack

Ignosticism

I think this position doesn’t work because definitions follow meaning, not the other way around. Go back two thousand years and you could argue the same thing about heat (and in fact philosophers did, leading them to the absurd conclusion that there was no such thing as heat). We’ve been grasping at somethiing we couldn’t put our finger on called “heat” for a long, long time, and quite recently in human history we put a pretty good definition around it (though one that will undoubtedly be obliterated by some future paradigm shift).

People have been grasping at God for a long time. Maybe they are grasping at something that is actually out there, or maybe it’s just nonsense. But just like actual heat was nothing that could have even been comprehended by the ancient philosophers saying there was no heat, an actual “God” would almost certainly be something we don’t currently have the concepts or language to understand. Thus, asking for a definition is fine if you simply don’t wish to participate in the discussion, but you can’t pretend there needs to be a definition to have a discussion - if there did we’d never learn anything.

@Israel_B

Defining something inherently limits it to a narrow understanding which is why the idea of a God-ometer is ludicrous to begin with.

I’m probably the only person here who finds the idea of a God-ometer plausible.

@robulus

However the bit people seem to jump past is that life and consciousness are possible. We exist in a universe governed by seemingly arbitrary laws of physics, and with only the tiniest of variations to those laws life would be impossible.

I can answer this in a few ways.

1. We’re alive and conscious, so life and consciousness are possible.

2. We have no reason to believe the laws of physics even could be different. Maybe those universal constants aren’t constants, but as far as I know, we no one has shown that yet.

3. We have no basis to believe that variations in the laws of physics would result in life being impossible. Our brains can be simulated with sufficient computing power by any Turing complete machine. Turing complete is an absurdly low bar. Something that thinks the same way you do could live in Conway’s Life game. We fundamentally have no idea what the universe would be like if the laws of physics were different, but if there are even two dimensions of space and the ability for things to, on average, exist or not exist at a location ,then life can exist in it.

4. People don’t think of a proper time scale for this because there is not time scale for the universe coming into being. Time is part of the universe. The creation of our universe wasn’t the result of billions of years or trillions of years of random combination, there were no years. The probability of our universe coming into being could be zero and that would still not making it impossible for it to come into being. We don’t understand what the no-universe condition is like, and we cannot apply any mathematical reasoning to it. (If anything is “God” my money would be the condition of there nothing being anything)

5. Reply number 1 sounded pretty facetious, didn’t it? What’s the thread that links 2, 3, and 4? It’s that the argument hinges on being at imagining the scope of possible unknown unknowns. The fact that life exists is all the proof we need that life can exist. The kind of speculation Ell is doing is saying, “Wow, I really can’t see a way we could have come to be in this universe, therefore there must be something magical going on.” It’s either unreal arrogance or a frantic god-shaped hole in his head hitting the panic button to compartmentalize his thinking.

@GulliverFoyle

One is a failure to understand probability theory which you already addressed, another complexity theory (the irreducible complexity fallacy)

The improper Bayesian analysis is one thing, but I’m a lot more latched onto the failure to understand that even an event with probabilty zero is possible, and given a state of timelessness we have no reason not to think that everything possible will happen. The seemingly most likely alternative is that nothing at all will happen, and even though Cogito Ergo Sum is a flawed argument for me existing, it seems a pretty compelling argument that something has happened or is happening.

@Skeptic

The universe doesn’t necessarily have infinite mass, and the kind of life the universe is supposedly “fine tuned” for requires mass.

Since we are we are necessarily in a universe in which life occurred, the probability of us finding ourselves in a life-universe is irrelevant. Instead, the relevant probability is the probability of there ever being any universe with life. And that ever doesn’t mean “at any time” since time is part of the universe. My best guess it that means that we are discussing the probability of it even being possible for life to be given all possible configurations of matter, energy, time, space and possibly infinite other things/forces that we aren’t aware of. Anyone who guesses that probability is low is making some incredible assumptions with no evidence.

@Mindysan33

These religion threads are always fun!

Well, the one thing we can all agree on is that Douglas Ell’s argument sounds really, really stupid.