Quantum Everything

When anyone other than a particle physicist talks about “quantum”, it is almost always a magic word used to project a pseudoscientific aura onto sheer raving lunacy. “Quantum” as a prefix is almost universally used to signify that the noun it modifies is about to be made crazy stupid. So you know when you see something called the Quantum Bible, it’s not going to be refined, elegant, coherent, or intelligent.

Here are the first bits of this rewritten version of the Bible. I’m being kind and sparing you the associated annotations, which are even longer than the text.

1 And behold the Great Singularity is everywhere and nowhere. 2 Without form nor mass and without space and time – It is, has been and will be, eternal. 3 An Eternity in space, an Eternity in time incorporating all that is known and then some. 4 But eternally restless and driven to manifest in form, time and space.
5 And so it is that manifestations cyclically occur and our worlds gain their existence. 6 But we are manifestations of the Cycle of the Great Singularity for we emanate from Its bosom and return thence in accordance with Its Universal Order.

7 And so it comes to pass that the Great Singularity becomes pregnant with the energy for manifestation and in accordance with the Great Universal Order that lies at the heart of its existence there follows a mighty cataclysmic manifestation. 8 In that instant all the parts of matter materialize, each to become the building blocks of all form yet to be. 9 For at that instant the quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons, neutrino’s and all their anti-matter shall give rise to a world of form, a world of time and a world of distance; but yet all are imbibed with the stuff which is the Great Singularity – timeless, formless and Eternal.

10 And lo the great Illusion is initiated ; and for they who are blinded by form and distance and time there is no merging eternally of the form and the formless. 11 And wretchedly shall they live their days in the half truth and never connect with the Great Singularity which is their birthright and from whose bosom they emanate and exist and to whence they return unconsciously.
12 And so it is that the particles of form receive their kernel which shall determine all their interactions and all form that shall yet follow. 13 Indeed the kernel shall support the breadth of all form and being, all of the sea and the great land masses, all of life and of death. 14 For each kernel is complete as it imbibes all of the Great Singularity and indeed so is it also with the collective of all kernels of all particles of form. 15 Such is the completeness of the manifestation in form that no adjustment nor interference nor correction is required nor will be forthcoming by the Great Singularity.

16 In the restlessness of the Great Singularity has a need arisen – to create consciousness of Itself. 17 And so form is manifest so that consciousness shall ultimately arise and lo the consciousness shall feed upon the great environments which are none other than the manifestation of the Great Singularity! 18 In this way shall the Great Singularity create consciousness of Self through the manifestation and they that shall be conscious of the manifestation shall be the consciousness of the Great Singularity in form. 19 And so shall they passage with consciousness as they de-form and reconnect at physical death with the Great Singularity. 20 For this passage of return has the Great Singularity manifest the black holes of de-materialization; both in form and in consciousness shall these be as a portal for passage from form to formless, and so shall consciousness disconnect from form to merge with the eternal formlessness which is the Great Singularity. 21 And so shall it come to pass that those who access true consciousness of all things will prepare their passage through the black hole, as they shed form and mass, time and distance, and disconnect their consciousness from that domain – so shall they pass through the portal and inherit eternity within the bosom of the Great Singularity.

In case you missed it in that great wallow of babble, the guy (who is a neurosurgeon! What is it with neurosurgeons and goofiness?) also doesn’t like evolution, and has a weird deterministic theory in which all the potential in every species was set within it at the instant of its creation by the Great Singularity. I am unable to bear the thought of reading any more of any of Ian Weinberg’s essays, though: my kernel is incapable of coping with any more Quantum.

Witless wanker peddles pablum for CFI

It looks like Michael De Dora is calling me out. The wishy-washy, sloppy-thinking director of the NY CFI, whose main claim to fame lately is a series of blog articles notable only for their fuzziness and willingness to accommodate any nonsense from religious BS artists, is now taking me to task for my post arguing that the Tennessee case of a creationist objecting to a textbook calling creationism “the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days” was a) an example of a true twit peddling ignorance, and b) that the textbook phrasing was accurate and justifiable.

De Dora disagrees. He thinks it is inappropriate for a biology text to directly address a damaging social trend that is hurting the teaching of science — and that we shouldn’t refer to religious stories as myth. He even has the gall to call what he wants to promote a “science only approach,” and in a remarkably weasely bit of wording, tries to imply that I think that just teaching science would “negatively impact the quality of public school education”. Interesting move. Sometimes, lying about your opponent’s position does work.

But he forgets what we’re fighting against.

Why is it that our biology classes — or even public schools in generally — must reject religious beliefs to educate children? I think we will find that, even if decided that our children would be better off hearing critique of their parents’ religious beliefs, this question is irrelevant, as according to our laws we cannot do such a thing. In turn, the answer seems to be that we should ensure our high school science teachers are instructing students on how to think like a scientist, and imparting to students the body of knowledge scientists have accrued (and that all of our teachers generally are doing similar in their respective fields).

Oh, let us confine our discussion to the nebulous vagueness of “religious beliefs”, that we may continue to pretend that charlatans are not lying to our children. There should be nothing special, nothing privileged about calling a falsehood a “religious belief”. When religious ideas directly contradict the scientific evidence, we must be able to point out that they are wrong…and please note, the textbook in question did not even slam creationist foolishness that hard, but merely pointed out that it is the product of a religious myth.

This isn’t simply about religious freedom. It’s about a loony-tunes popular bogosity that explicitly claims the earth is 6,000 years old and was created in six days, both assertions false, unsupported by any credible evidence, and contradicted resoundingly by the body of evidence discussed in the textbook. Those are “beliefs” that must be rejected by any scientist, by any textbook purporting to describe how science works and what conclusions it reaches — anything less is cowardly intellectual dishonesty.

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I am not opposing a “science only approach”. I am saying that a science only approach has a story to tell that must contradict the ridiculous myths our Sunday schools are feeding our children. We don’t need pablum-pushers like De Dora helping the pious frauds further gut our science curricula.

I haven’t even reached the worst part of De Dora’s quisling approach. He has a footnote.

It is important to note that creationism and related ideas like intelligent design do belong to the field of religion, not science; they are theology and philosophy (bad theology and philosophy, but that’s another matter). Hence, science cannot reject them in full — for how does the scientist answer the claim that God made it look like there’s been evolution, and that we are merely natural products, to test our faith? Or that God has been the hand behind the process of evolution? A scientist must here put on the philosopher’s cap to continue.

Great. Creationism? Can’t criticize it in our science classes. Somebody says the universe appeared magically a few thousand years ago, I guess that has to be a valid answer on the test question, “How old is the universe?”. To actually state that it is about 14 billion years old, and make such an answer a necessary part of the student’s grade…why, that is philosophy or theology, and not to be discussed in science class.

And here’s ever-helpful Michael De Dora, reassuring the creationists that “science cannot reject [their ridiculous ideas] in full”. Thanks heaps. Did I mention “cowardly intellectual dishonesty”? Yes, I did. And that’s what De Dora is endorsing.

And a special thanks to CFI. What the hell were they thinking when they gave this milquetoast marshmallow a soapbox? Does CFI stand for the Church of Fatuous Incompetence now?

Deepak Chopra discovers…learning

He seems very surprised. I guess it’s something he’s never experienced before.

Chopra has a little story to tell. It seems colobus monkeys have discovered that eating charcoal absorbs some of the irritating toxins in their diet, so the monkeys have been chowing down on the stuff for several generations. This is cool and clever, but not at all surprising — organisms adapt and take advantage of their environment all the time. But Chopra being Chopra has to put a very weird spin on it.

He argues that the behavior isn’t genetic, because it’s too recent — not quite right, novel mutations have to arise sometime, but in this case I agree with him that it isn’t likely to be genetic, because it spread more rapidly through the population than genes do. Then he claims that it can’t have been by chance, because, he claims, monkeys don’t eat random stuff. There, of course, he’s wrong — it’s practically a hallmark of monkeys that they are curious and try all sorts of things. What he then tries to do from this fallacious exclusion, though, is leap to an amazing conclusion.

What we are witnessing is an intelligent discovery on the part of creatures who stand far below Homo sapiens on the evolutionary chain, and that discovery is being passed on from mother to child without genetic adaptation. To me, this means that quite a blow has been struck for intelligence being innate in the universe. It suggests that evolution itself has never been random but is guided by the principle of intelligence — not “intelligent design,” which is a red herring supplied by religious conservatives. The intelligent universe is a cutting-edge idea, not a throwback to scripture. As a theory, it gives us a much more elegant explanation for many things that are clumsily explained by falling back on randomness to explain every new development in Nature.

Monkey discovers new material in its habitat, charcoal left by human fires. Monkey eats some. Monkey discovers it has soothing effect on its guts. Monkey eats more, more monkeys watch and learn, habit spreads through population.

That’s it. That’s the simple story. From this, Chopra invents this bizarre idea that an intelligent universe is pushing clever ideas into monkey brains, and is guiding ‘evolution’. It’s a crazy claim spun out of a fairly straightforward observation of entirely natural behavior by some monkeys.

Chopra doesn’t know what evolution is.

At the moment, evolutionary theory refuses to abandon the notion of random selection, and geneticists cling stubbornly to the doctrine of random mutations to explain why new things appear in the unfolding story of life. We all have a stake in this argument, however. Seeing the red colobus evolve before our eyes cannot be denied. It didn’t happen randomly, and their new discovery represents a quantum leap forward in their survival. There’s much to think about here, since we want to know how early humans made their first discoveries and passed them on to us. Rather than saying that a larger brain made intelligence possible, why not say the opposite, that intelligence dictated a larger brain so that it could expand? Life moves forward inexorably, no one doubts that. Now it’s up to us to explain the hidden forces behind evolution, in hopes that we can tap those forces and guide our own future.

The colobus story is not an example of evolution at all — it involves no changes in, or transmission of, heritable traits in a population. It is explainable entirely in terms of simple behavioral plasticity, and requires no intervention by an external intelligence, challenges absolutely nothing in evolutionary theory, and doesn’t demonstrate any hidden forces. If he were to try and present such a fable at a scientific meeting, he’d be laughed out of the room.

The only mystery here is why newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle continue to publish his drivel. Is someone under the misapprehension that he is a respected or even credible thinker? He’s a loon.

Evangelical scholar expelled!

Michael Behe is a professor at Lehigh University. He’s also a crank, marginalized and mocked and belittled in academia, and regarded as an ignorant ideologue. But he’s still holding his position and he’s still allowed to express himself. That’s the principled position we hold in academia — he’s allowed to speak even stupidly, and we’re allowed to fire back.

That’s not the way creationists work, though. Bruce Waltke is apparently a respected Old Testament scholar who used to work at the Reformed Theological Seminary. Not any more, though. He made the mistake of speaking in a BioLogos-sponsored seminar, saying that you could be a Christian, you could even believe the Bible was inerrant, and you could also believe in evolution. He was promptly shown the door, but not because what he said was irrational and incoherent, but because evolution is a proscribed subject.

But while Milton insisted that this provides for “a diversity” of views, he acknowledged that others are not permitted. Darwinian views, and any suggestion that humans didn’t arrive on earth directly from being created by God (as opposed to having evolved from other forms of life) are not allowed, he said, and faculty members know this.

This is a tough one for me. The article is full of opinion from loons affiliated with BioLogos and the Templeton Foundation, organizations that I think are dangerous because they willfully poison science with superstition, so it hurts to agree with them at all, especially since they only endorse the compatibility of religion and science as a tool to smuggle lies into the search for truth…but they are right to condemn the closed-mindedness of these theologians.

Of course, I also have a tiny amount of sympathy for the theologians. Their beliefs are so ridiculous (and I include the beliefs of Waltke and the followers of BioLogos and Templeton) that any introduction of reason and evidence-based thinking risks inducing the meltdown of the elaborately rickety structure of their belief. The RTS should be reassured, though: BioLogos and Templeton both show that at least some people’s stupidity can perennially persist even in the face of facts that show they are wrong.

Crazies…on twitter? Say it ain’t so!

I’ve been getting a few odd, cryptic messages on twitter from someone calling himself @spiritualgenome. I looked him up to figure out what the heck he was babbling about, and found his web page. Turns out he’s a crop circle nut, and you might find a few minutes amusement in his delusions.

Fascinating new discoveries by Russian molecular biologists have revealed that DNA has a mysterious resonance that has been termed the Phantom-DNA Effect. In addition these Russian researchers have found that DNA reacts to voice activated laser light when it is set at the specific frequency of the DNA itself. Using these methods it is possible not only to change the information patterns in the DNA, but it is also possible to communicate with the DNA.

This “phantom DNA” effect is all over the web, surprisingly: people claim that if you shine a laser through a solution of DNA, it scatters or resonates in some particular pattern that persists even after you remove the DNA. Guess what? While it’s a very popular subject on fringe websites hosted on cheap servers with crappy web design, it seems to be completely absent from the scientific literature.

Huh. Who would have guessed?

You might be wondering what it has to to do with crop circles. All will be explained in the following paragraph.

It seems that there is a divine intelligence in the DNA that is capable of resonating with the natural frequency of the earth in order to create crop circles. This divine intelligence is what the Hindus refer to as the Inner Self, and there are indications that the increase in crop circle activity in recent decades is set to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar, at which point this divine intelligence in the DNA will become generally known to the world, thus ushering in a new era in 2012.

Ooooo-OOoOO-ooooh. Magic DNA, lasers, quantum physics, psychic powers, vibrations, crop circles, mystical Mayan calendars, and 2012 — it’s got everything. Total lunatic meltdown.

I just thought somebody who would throw together something this insane deserved a brief flurry of attention to his wacky webpage before I blocked him.

Ladies, you have a mysterious and special garden

People send me stuff via email, and I browse through it all in the early morning, before I go offline and get to work, and that means I often wake up to some of the most disgusting, revolting, horrible messages: death threats, angry letters, and all kinds of interesting insults. But sometimes the worst comes from people who are on my side, like this message that really ruined my breakfast. It’s from a Catholic anti-choice site, full of prim certainties about gods and babies and your reproductive organs, and it has this…this…letter to a young girl, written by Alice von Hildebrand.

Be prepared to hurtle back and forth from hilarity to revulsion.

Let us take off our “secular” eyeglasses, and then we shall be able to see that women, far from being “discriminated” against, are in many ways privileged. And this is the “secret” I wish to share with you. The body of every little girl born into this world is mysteriously sealed by what is properly called the “veil of virginity”. That is to say, a “secret” is entrusted to her body, and a secret is always “veiled”. According to Christian teaching, this veil closes the entrance to a mysterious garden which belongs to God in a special way, and for this reason cannot be entered into except with His express permission, the permission that God grants spouses in the Sacrament of Matrimony. Any little girl aware of this “mystery” will feel that her body is to be modestly clothed, so that its secret will be hidden from lewd looks.

Little girls, of course, grow up. How beautiful when a bride can say to her husband on their wedding night, “I have kept this garden virginal for you, and now, with God’s permission I am giving you its key, knowing that you will enter into it with reverence”.

Moreover, when a wife conceives a few hours after her husband has embraced her, God creates the child’s soul in her body, (as you certainly know, neither husband nor wife can produce the human soul; God alone can create it.) In other words, there is a personal “contact” between God and the woman which, once again, gives to the female body a note of sacredness. Don’t forget that He whom the whole universe cannot contain, was “hidden” in the womb of the Holy Virgin for nine months. Once you realize this, you will be awe-filled for the double mystery that God has confided to you: to conceive a human being made to God’s image and likeness, and to give birth to it in pain and anguish. Do not forget that it was also in pain and anguish that Christ re-opened for us the gates of paradise – which had been shut by sin. To women has been granted the awesome privilege of nobly suffering so that a new human being, made to God’s image and likeness, might come into the world. Meditate upon this for a moment, and you will feel a deep reverence for your body. It belongs to God, and is not a “play thing” that you can dispose of as you please.

Wow. In a few short paragraphs, she’s managed to promote the cult of virginity, insist on magical ensoulment at the instant of conception, belittle the struggle for equality of women, glorify pain, and imply that anyone who doesn’t follow Catholic dogma is throwing away their body…and she does it with a kind of Victorian smugness that alone is rather off-putting.

I think I’ll go take a shower now.

TFN makes a serious tactical error

I’m a fan of the Texas Freedom Network — they are fighting the good fight in the heart of one of the craziest states in the country — but they just made a big mistake. They are celebrating their 15th anniversary by bringing in a big-name speaker…Arianna Huffington. Jebus. One of the worst purveyors of pseudo-science, quackery, and New Age clown-noise on the internet. It reminds me a bit of Bill Maher winning an award from AAI…except that in this case, Huffington hasn’t made any contribution to the promotion of science.

Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t endorse that loon.

TFN does good work, though: if you were planning to go, wait until the event is over, and then mail them a $25 donation.

I’m still astounded, though. What were they thinking?

Guess who caused the recent earthquake in California?

It wasn’t God, a least. It was Deepak Chopra.

Had a powerful meditation just now – caused an earthquake in Southern California.

Was meditation on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake. Sorry about that

Some people were upset at my remarks re earthquake. Sorry about that. I was actually meditating when it happenned and thougt” Whoaaa!”

What a buffoon.

I think I’ll go eat a burrito and see if I can cause a mudslide in California a little later. Followed by a typhoon. Maybe if I add extra hot sauce I can also trigger some fires.

Weep for Denyse

It’s tough being Denyse O’Leary. She’s one of the loudest voices for Intelligent Design on the net, and she has to perpetually struggle with her own ignorance in order to come up with new excuses to deny evolution, and all she ever accomplishes is to briefly dazzle us with her incompetence. She has come up with two new problems with evolution lately. Brace yourselves, put your coffee down, and swallow before you read them. I’ll will not be held accountable for damaged keyboards!

How about this? Macroevolution is about changes in form and size, which kittens do routinely as they grow up. Therefore, evolution is trivial. And false? I’m not sure where she’s going with that. I wonder if she’s been consulting with that JohnHamilton wanker on this thread.

And here’s another one: if chimpanzees and humans are 98% identical genetically, why are spinsters so picky about marrying humans? Seriously: she’s proposing a “Would Denyse O’Leary marry it?” test for speciation.

It’s so sad. The only cheerful news here is that Ms O’Leary is completely unaware of the scrambled state of her brains, which is a small mercy.