Absolutely. Working so very, very well that they can, I'm sure, easily winnow it out from the fact that you recently got HIV from your neighbor's husband and are trying hard to keep it from your two wives and the insurance company you are trying to get a huge life insurance policy from so that if your reckless skydiving hobby or the gang you work for as a drug mule kill you, your thirteen children, ten of them illegitimate-r, won't all starve, information that they would never ever use against you unless, of course, it suited them to do so because, for example, you were openly exposing their secrets or calling for the limitation of their powers on the Internet.

Which is a good thing, because if, say, all of this extra surveillance power was useful only against the criminally stupid non-terrorist private citizen because a) there isn't enough bandwidth in the Universe to monitor all the bandwidth of the Universe (God has the same problem, BTW) and b) contrary to popular belief, it is really simple to send encrypted messages that the NSA cannot detect or, if they detect, crack and terrorists -- even ones that are stuck in the 15th century as far as their religious ideals are concerned -- are not that stupid and have access to all the tools needed to secure lines of communication, the spook-lords might take it into their heads to notice that the only real difference between a spook and a terrorist is that the spook has nicer things and a 403k and dental.

So they could always, I dunno, stage a terrorist attack in such a way that it got blamed on some hapless Muslim who is inconveniently outspoken and who communicates with his elderly mother in Syria on his cell phone (oops, I mean communicates with his "mother" in Syria, wink wink nod nod know what I mean) or arrange for you to have an accident (I mean an "accident") driving home to work to kiss your wives and deliver a load of cocaine to the Peachy Blister street gang in your neighborhood.

Sure, I know, paranoid government conspiracy ravings, and there is nothing to have stopped them from doing most of this before 9/11 and the Patriot act but a certain amount (we hope) of genuine attachment to the ideals of America beyond the letter of the law and the letter of the law and possibility of consequences if caught at it. I feel every bit as comfortable about it as I used to feel with humans with imperfect brains, sociopathies, gambling debts, and blackmailable secrets sitting on top of nuclear weapons with the means at hand to immediately deliver them and detonate them.

Oh, wait, did you say that those days haven't really ended, and that somewhere out there is a young man with undiagnosed bipolar disorder whose wife just left him for another woman managing a locker full of nukes just begging to be used to columbine the two of them and a few dozen square miles in all directions of their -- I mean his -- house?

Time to honey-badger it. What we don't know, can't hurt us. Which is what most of us do, lest we go mad.

And hey, they could be genuine patriots, right? Observe everything but reveal nothing that ought not to be seen no matter how illegal, immoral, extortable it is, as long as it isn't "terrorism"? All without any sort of real accountability or audit?

rgb

Well, if you have anything really juicy in there -- a bit of porn, some records of your cocaine transactions, maybe some private account numbers and your social security number, you can always send them to me. I'll make sure there are no terrorists hiding under your bed.

And of course, I'm completely trustworthy.

My address:

John Doe
Secret Agent for U.N.C.L.E.
Hiding Under Your Bed (but I'm a nice guy, not a terrorist, and there isn't any more room under here)

In fact, don't bother sending them. I've already got them. And BTW, you snore...

... in a few weeks the powers that be will let (if necessary, "encourage") an act of extreme terrorism on US soil succeed. Then they will go back to the well, and congress will enthusiastically vote us all into chains at the same time they increase the budget and personal power of all of the shadow spooks keeping us safe.

Well, probably not a few weeks -- that would be too suspicious. But look for it within the year, especially if they can find a poster-child terrorist they can point at and say -- look, if only we were tapping everybody's phone (including yours) we could have found him in time to prevent this tragedy...

rgb

We wouldn't know. We do know that perceptual errors, emotional disturbances, and the rest are possible.

You are simply saying that we cannot disprove God, that absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence. Sure. But so what? We can go down an enormously -- actually uncountably infinite -- list of propositions for which we have no evidence. If we are sane, we do not grab arbitrary entries from this list and promote them to plausible beliefs, no matter how pretty a story they make.

Your argument is, of course, ancient and has a name. You are arguing for a God of the Gaps. As human knowledge has expanded, thing after thing that was attributed to God in ancient scripture has been shown to have natural causes. Furthermore, "natural causes" have been shown to have a rigorous, inviolable consistency so much so that when we look hard for cases where our existing laws fail, or where there are still pernicious inconsistencies that suggest that they are not quite right and will require future revision.

Since all of the "easy" gaps have been plugged, you are stuck following this chain:

Laws of Nature (microscopic nuclear + E&M and QFT) -> nuclei and nucleons
Laws of Nature (E&M/QED) -> atoms and molecules (Chemistry!)
Chemistry -> Inorganic and Organic chemistry
Organic chemistry + classical E&M and mechanics -> biochemistry and biophysics
Biochemistry and biophysics -> evolutionary biochemistry, neurophysiology etc (Biology)
Biology -> neuropsychology, anthropology, medicine, (Psychology!)
Psychology & information theory & mathematics -> Intelligence and cognition, Artificial intelligence, etc.

At this point, you take the fact that the science is incomplete to extend the quite correct observation that we don't understand all aspects of human consciousness (yet!) in full detail as a "gap" in which you can insert God. Consciousness is only possible with God, God can communicate with humans by directly manipulating microscopic physics, chemistry, biology, psychology laws in ways that directly violate the second law of thermodynamics, and so on. Forget whether or not there is any good reason to think that this is true. Forget the fact that we have an entire, consistent, empirically validated chain of physical law and reasoning stretching from the microscopic to the macroscopic. If you hear voices in your head, it could be God instead of (for example) your right brain talking to your left brain or some other perfectly natural thing. Hence in your mind, there is a reason to believe, and furthermore to invent a whole new "logic" to explain the fact that your conclusions can be held independent of the mere common sense that leads to the development of consistent science.

Obviously -- seriously -- you are mistaken. What you are doing is called the "Mind Projection Fallacy". To quote wikipedia:

Once one has grasped the idea, one sees the Mind Projection Fallacy everywhere; what we have been taught as deep wisdom, is stripped of its pretensions and seen to be instead a foolish non sequitur. The error occurs in two complementary forms, which we might indicate thus: (A) (My own imagination) (Real property of Nature), [or] (B) (My own ignorance) (Nature is indeterminate)

Welcome to B, with an admixture of A. Our ignorance is not an excuse for assuming that Nature is indeterminate and there is room for e.g. violations of the first or second laws of thermodynamics at the whim of a Deity, and your imagination of God filling the gaps in our knowledge is neither evidence nor (worse!) certainty that that which you imagine is a real thing.

rgb

For example, China and the US could have a bet -- loser's premier/president has to sing the national anthem of the other on international television. Or they could bet a really nice dinner in Paris. Or maybe they could bet, I dunno, world domination and possession of all lunar resources in perpetuity. I know which one The Brain would pick...

Hmmm, so either we're dealing with a black hole photography nut, or else a black hole that really, really cares about religious doctrine. Enough to drive them to drinking or to shoot somebody, not clear which.

Canon shots. Yet another activity atheists can't participate in.

His noodleness won't need to forgive me of anything. I'm perfectly aware of the correlation between piracy and global warming, and what more evidence does one need? And who can deny the reality of fettucini, especially when made with loving hands?

Unless, of course, one is inclined to think of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as being the incarnation of deity. Or Xenu. Or Krishna. Or Odin. Or Vishnu. Or Allah. Or Jesus. Or Zeus. Or Quetzacoatl. Or Yahweh. Or...

His divine noodleosity makes as much sense as any of the named possibilities, and serves well to emphasize that with the exception of mavericks like Benjamin Franklin who supposedly believed a little bit in "everything" and are N-n for some value of n, everybody is an N-1 atheist except for real atheists who are N.

Most atheists/agnostics at this point will insist upon their own definitions. It becomes a semantic argument, and if you insist upon your own definitions, you have effectively erected a straw man. Perhaps this is not the best approach.

I think you have it exactly backwards. The meaning of omniscient and omnipotent are perfectly clear and are contained in any dictionary. As you say above, every religion, including the many sects and branches of "Christianity", faced with the obvious fact that their god(s) is/are not possessing of either quality in its true formal meaning, adopt some weaker definition, so that God isn't all-knowing (the literal meaning of omniscient) or all-powerful (the literal meaning of omnipotent) or all-good (omnibenevolent) or ubiquitous (omnipresent) or "perfect" or any other infinite quality that would get them in the kind of obvious trouble any sort of infinite attribute is likely to lead to. At the same time, they have to assert that this really really big, mostly knowing, somewhat powerful, occasionally incredibly cruel being was knowing enough and powerful enough to be the proximate cause of the entire visible Universe as well as any still unseen invisible parts, which he (masculine gender usually assigned) created out of nothing, because otherwise most of us wouldn't consider even a really big, really smart, mostly good space alien to be a god, we'd consider them to be somebody like us, living in time's stream with every moment mostly a surprise because our finite information capacity is "infinitely" smaller than the information content of the Universe.

So yes, I've learned the hard way that there is little point in discussing Christianity in a reasoned way with a Christian. The fact that they are still a Christian is de facto proof that they have already arrived at a state of cognitive dissonance wherein all the myriad contradictions in (e.g.) the Bible itself or between bald assertions in the Bible (old and/or new testaments and/or apocrypha) and mere reality are smoothly elided and rationalized by doing what you're doing, bending the clear definitions of the simple terms used to describe God with a capital G.

One has to do this, because otherwise the problem of theodicy is a crushing burden for any religion claiming any significant fraction of the "omni"-properties conjoined with the assertion that god is good. One has to literally turn off one's common sense to believe that a being exists that on the one hand created the entire Universe out of nothing in some sort of state of knowledge of its future course (in most of the Bible, it is pretty clear that this state is supposed to be perfect knowledge beginning to end, alpha and omega and predestination and all that) but who created the Universe filled with evil as experienced by humans (undeniable) but was at the same time all-good and who runs things so that one can never detect Its existence because the visible Universe appears to follow rigorous rules that are never violated and that are utterly indifferent to human suffering.

That's actually the more interesting aspect of Chrisitianity in particular. Since Jesus is advanced as being God and Human and all-compassionate and perfectly good, and since the New Testament is full of direct quotes of Jesus asserting that he can do literally anything (and so can all of us) just by "having faith" and wishing it into being, Christians have to engage in the most incredible mental distortions to explain the mind of God/Jesus in such a way that there is room for the existence of human suffering on Earth and Hell for unbelievers and all of the other madness while the principle parties remain hidden.

So next time somebody dies slowly of cancer, next time a baby is born in innocence with the terrible affliction of Down's syndrome, the next time a small child dies of starvation or from malaria or from being bitten by a snake, the next time you are directly confronted with the cognitive dissonance between your belief and reality, instead of doing what you usually do, instead of participating in the ritual designed to help you elide the contradictions and consider the horror part of the "mystery" of God, why not confront them?

Down's syndrome is perfectly understandable as a trisomy of a chromosome that happens for no "reason" other than the accidents of imperfect processes that are completely indifferent to the outcome and proceed according to equally indifferent natural law. It is impossible to understand in the context of any being powerful enough to prevent the accident, compassionate enough to wish for such cruel accidents to never occur to a sentient being, benevolent enough to repair any such accident after it happens if you somehow want to assert that they "couldn't" do it before (but were still God). The fact that Down's syndrome and the full host of afflictions that can easily be explained by the principles of physics in an indifferent universe where statistical mechanics describes the progression of entropy isn't a mystery, it is an utter lack of evidence for anything mysterious. It is humans who make up all of the mystery because of their egocentric desire to be the center of something's attention rather than a rather unlikely and transient pile of thinking stardust with a strictly limited shelf life.

rgb

No, I got the bit about fiction. I just finished reading recent science fiction that utilizes very similar plot lines in several distinct stories, that's all. Even in the movie "Merlin", Mab's existence was contingent on belief. I think American Gods by Neil Gaiman is pretty much precisely that as well. To quote from its Wikipedia page:

The central premise of the novel is that gods and mythological creatures exist because people believe in them (a form of thoughtform).

So as I said, yes, you are quite right, it is (or can be, a premise for a good science fiction/fantasy novel. And has been, several times. And quite a number of bad ones as well. It's a very interesting philosophical/ontological problem -- does belief precede or follow existence?

Personally, as a physicist, I have to say that correct/best belief (as opposed to fantasy) follows existence, and ultimately is empirically founded on it. Religion is the other kind, the one where there is plenty of belief but no solid evidence for the existence of the objects of the belief.

To paraphrase Austin Power, I may believe in a gold plated potty but that doesn't mean that one exists, not even in an infinite Universe where it is possible that one exists.

Or, to toss in a reference to Russell, it is possible that there is a silver teapot floating around in an orbit around Saturn. I might, if I were un-sane enough, believe in such a teapot, and write out an entire mythology based on the teapot and how it got there and what its existence means for the Universe in general. But even if I convinced every human alive on Earth that I must be right, that as an authority on all matters concerning the Sacred Silver Teapot my word on this cannot be doubted, not even the deep and profound belief of every person in the world has the slightest chance of either creating the teapot from nothing but the belief itself or increasing the probability that the teapot exists from a number so close to zero that their kids go to the same school, noise from parties in zero's yard keep the probability up at night, they argue about who is going to trim the hedge and who is providing the beer...

rgb

So you mean, God's omniscience is, well, sort of like not being omniscient at all. I mean I can look at the Universe and get all of the information I "need". Well, at least I can get all of the information I need if I'm omniscient enough to know what information I need before I look at it, or if I have moderate needs.

Next you'll be telling me It didn't really create the Universe, it just sort of nudged already existing stuff around, sort of like using a debugger to rewrite existing code. And that It doesn't really control the Universe, it just hacks it a bit so it does some of the stuff that it wants.

Then I'll be telling you:

a) sort of like, not being God at all, isn't it?

b) and besides, there is no evidence that any of these assertions are true, or consistent.

In the end, if God has nonzero information entropy, then It is not God. If it has zero entropy, it has no Choice (and is not God, not in any way that matters). The Universe has zero entropy already.

Assertions of God are almost invariably made without any appreciation for the mathematical challenges of complexity and information content on infinite domains. A shame, really.

rgb

An interesting science fiction plot that has been used so many times it is hackneyed.

It is also a horrendous abuse of the concepts of quantum theory. The problem with the hypothesis of God is that there has been no reproducible, objective, measurement or observation of God. Quite the contrary. The Universe unfolds precisely as if there were no such thing as God, with truly awesome, mind-boggling consistency, follow rules known only approximately (so far) as the "Laws of Nature" which leave no room whatsoever for God, unless it is God's will that the Universe evolve in time as if there were no God.

This is a far cry from asserting that the Aharanov-Bohm effect implies God, even allowing for the imprecision of stating that particles can be "controlled" by observing them, and worshipping something has never, as far as I know, caused that something to come to be.

Finally, there is an information-theoretic argument that proves it quite impossible to create a God by any means such as you suggest. It is quite literally as impossible as reconstructing an encoded string a gazillion bytes long from a single tiny fragment of that encoded string. The information content of God has to be greater than or equal to the information content of the Universe (this is literally the God-property of omniscience). I am a (very) finite part of the Universe. I have enormous (information) entropy relative to the Universe quite aside of the possibility that I have in some sense a quantum indeterminacy in my state. God (if God exists) has zero entropy, quantum Universe or not. There is simply no way the former can generate the latter. Violating the second law of thermodynamics is an understatement.

rgb

The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty. Of course, there is no shortage of conflicting, self defeating pseudo-science airheads that will believe anything else rather than making an attempt at living a Christian life with a little less ego.

I do not think that this "probability" means what you think it means.

I will try to tell you. No, it is too much, I will sum up.

Suppose you have an infinite barrel of marbles, 10% of which are green. Then the probability of drawing a green marble is (wait for it) 10%. This isn't a particularly small probability. If there is a single green marble, somewhere in the barrel, the probability of drawing it is asymptotically zero, statistically neglible, less than the chance of winning the lottery, and winning the lottery in one try is far from certain. If the probability that God exists is 1 x 10^{-403} in an infinite, probabilistic Universe, then the probability that God exists is (gasp) 1 x 10^{-403}. This is most definitely not certainty. Certainty isn't the "smallest chance", it is probability 1. It is the largest (possible) chance.

Even 1 x 10^{-403} isn't in the same ballpark as "the smallest chance", by the way. It is enormous compared to the probability that all of the air molecules in the room I'm in will suddenly (by pure chance) happen to bounce in just the right way to form a big blob of liquid air in the middle of the room and leave me gasping in a vacuum as air molecules outside of the house by strange chance miss all of the myriad pathways into the room. Which in turn is unbelievably, awesomely hugely enormous compared to the probability that the infinite, probabilistic Universe is in fact determined and known at the subatomic level by a perfectly organized, uncreated, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent superbeing that created it all by pure magic from nothing.

Oh, wait -- that's a contradiction, isn't it! If the Universe is infinite and probabilistic, then it can't be infinite and deterministic and hence known by an omniscient, omnipotent being, because there is nothing less probabilistic than something that is completely determined by an all powerful, all-knowing being. So your premises directly contradict your conclusion, in addition to demonstrating nothing more than the simple fact that you have absolutely no clue about probability distributions on continuous spaces.

Ego aside, you might want to contemplate learning something about probability and reason itself before you argue in favor of something empirically, logically, and statistically indefensible. God (as a concept) is all three.

rgb

To be fussy (and as a physicist I am nothing if not fussy), one can either describe everything in fluid motion as waves simply because the medium is (somewhat) elastic and one can construct a wave equation to describe the propagation of pressure differences, or one can use the Navier-Stokes equations straight up and solve for bulk transport properties. We don't usually refer to the bulk transport as waves. When I stir my wort making beer and get it going in a nice cylindrical eddy in the cylindrical pot, decomposing this bulk transport in a wave description makes little sense, even though the motion is undoubtedly periodic, and it is difficult to see it as the outcome of a suitable transformation of the N-S equations into a real-valued second order PDE in space and effectively second order in time, which is what one usually "expects" for "waves". Second order in time leads to solutions that are either exponential (not waves) or harmonic (waves), with life getting more complicated to the extent that things are generally nonlinear in the N-S equations.

Similarly, I personally wouldn't describe the thermohaline circulation of the ocean as "a wave", or stable currents as "waves", or the flow of water downhill in a stream as "waves", or laminar flow in general as "waves" and am not sure that I'd even describe eddies and the onset of turbulence as waves, although there finally, in the vicinity of the conditions where laminar instabilities can grow and initiate turbulence, a wave description might start to be sensible as periodic propagating wave-like structures appear (even though they probably don't satisfy any sort of sensible wave equation)

Note that your example of shock waves is a good one, as they result when the overpressure in air waves exceeds one atmosphere, at which point (if not long before) the wave equation that was very nearly linear becomes very definitely nonlinear, as the wave underpressure is clipped at 0 atm (a vacuum) but the overpressure is unconstrained. The resulting nonlinear equations can support e.g. solitonic solutions, propagating hyperbolic secants plus a reverberations as the air subsides into normal waves again from nonlinearities in the dispersion. I'd still categorize these as "waves" as they represent a specific limiting behavior of the wave equation with nonlinearities.

So the real question is, are the waves discovered by the MIT volken describable by suitably approximated/linearized second order time equations with complex time solutions (granting that one will still have second order space equations describing the fluctuations away from equilibrium in the bulk medium) ? Or are they first order in time, describing bulk transport but without any elastic "wave" to the wave? Are they just currents in the ocean, or are they currents in the ocean with periods, with wavelengths, or even with solitonic properties e.g. shock fronts?

After all, we know already that the ocean supports waves with wavelengths constrained only by its physical and thermoisobaric geometry and boundaries. There is no "low frequency cutoff" per se in the wave equation that describes sound waves in the water that I know of. In much of the deep ocean, the speed of sound is around 1.5 km/sec, so a 10 Hz wave has a wavelength of 150 meters. A wave with wavelength 500 m has a frequency of 3 Hz. Of course waves with this sort of wavelength propagate in the free ocean in all 3 dimensions, so variations 500 meters "high" can and almost certainly do exist.

It is this last terminology that is very odd. In a transverse wave propagating on e.g. a one dimensional string, the wave amplitude can be described as being thus and such "high", where high is understood to be perpendicular to the direction of propagation. In surface waves in the water (a mix of longitudinal and transverse waves) the wave one can discuss the longitudinal and transverse wavelengths together or separately, but again given horizontal propagation on the gravity constrained surface, transverse is understood as "high", a wave is so and so many meters high.

Underwater waves are a different matter altogether. For one thing, there is no sharp interface like the water's top surface, constraining them. Sound waves are longitudinal, and one would not usually describe the amplitude as a "height" even if they were propagating or were standing waves constrained by the top and bottom boundary conditions in the vertical dimension or were a superposition of a horizontal travelling wave and a vertical stationary wave -- a sound wave propagating from right to left between two hard sheets might have modes that could be so described, but the vertical wavelengths are not really transverse wave amplitudes.

What one would like to do is interpret these words as "there exist transverse waves in the deep ocean with actual bulk transport of water up and down by distances of up to 250 meters (each way) around some undisplaced mean, with the displacement occurring in space and time. This is hard to imagine in a highly compressed dense fluid effectively constrained between two surfaces, because it has to satisfy a continuity equation -- one cannot move water up without more water flowing in to replace it on the bottom from somewhere, and without it flowing out of the way on top to somewhere.

Structures like this are not impossible to the N-S equation -- little is, really. One can imagine, for example, a set of convective rolls that propagate around in some closed path. In order for this to be "a wave", IMO the rolls cannot be stationary in their local medium, but actually have to propagate on top of any bulk transport of the medium in e.g. a current. Convective rolls in the Gulf Stream that are just going around in the moving frame but are moving relative to the stationary ground wouldn't count, as the bulk transport is driven by something (thermohaline density changes, atmospheric flow, coriolis forces, non-Markovian history, and boundary conditions) completely independent of the process that creates and amplifies the convective rolls.

rgb

Hmmm, I can think of a few places where strengthening with novel carbon structures would be quite welcome...

rgb

I'm just waiting for drones that will simultaneously cut my lawn and deter burglars.

According to Gary Larson, that would be robodog Ginger featured in "You call that mowing the lawn? Bad dog! No biscuit!" Well, you might have to put a beanie prop-hat on the dog, but it would be pretty close...