There is a strange parallel between the favoured model of particle physics and Catholic theology. It's a parallel that shows how beliefs that we really want to be true are defended against reason.

Yes, I know. I'm not calling string theory theology. You might think it is, but I can't possibly comment. It's an apparent similarity between thought processes that fascinates me.

So what is this parallel? Well, consider the Catholic doctrines about the nature of God. God is a Trinity but One. Even though three doesn't go one, he just is. But even more than that, God is a mind, with all that a mind can do, but he is also ultimate simplicity. Yeah, right. That really doesn't work at all. Minds of necessity have parts, because they have thoughts and memories, and you can't get such processing, storage and recall of ideas and experiences unless these things are all kept in some way separate, and that means that God cannot be simple. It's not possible by definition, because he is required to have, or to be, a mind.

Now, let's look at what String Theory considers reality to consist of. Fundamental one-dimensional units called strings. These are fundamental, but have to vibrate in certain ways, and have to be under tension. The ways that they vibrate have to involve movement in multi-dimensional space that is curled up in very special ways. Also, strings can attach to multi-dimensional objects called 'branes', leading to new particles and forces. Strings can also move, split, and merge.

This is a highly complex situation. The hope many, many years ago was that there would be a unique mathematical framework associated with the string model and that would decribe our universe. There isn't, and all kinds of extra possible aspects of the model have been discovered.

Now, String Theory is supposed to reduce the complexity of a dozen or so fundamental particles and four fources to characteristics of a single fundamental thing – the String.

But a String Theory string is not a single fundamental thing, even if we forget about branes. Strings can have ends. In order for that to be possible, there must be some internal property of a string that marks parts of it as ends, and parts of it as not ends. Strings can split, and so there must be some aspect of a part of a string that makes it succeptible to splitting in a given situation. Same with joining. If a string is under tension, then there must be parts between which there can be tension. If a string vibrates, then there must be parts that can move relative to each other.

This is similar to theology. A string cannot be fundamental and simple in the same way as God can't be, because it has characteristics that describe an entity with parts.

String Theory is now full of so many different parts, such as dimensional arrangements, branes, strings with ends, closed strings and so on, that it is getting to the same level of complexity as the system of particles and forces that it is supposed to explain.

Theology doesn't get us anywhere in terms of explanations of origins, because a God with a mind is at least as complex as the beings he is supposed to have created.

This is a hard book to review, for good reasons: it's dense with information, and a detailed review would be a significant proportion of length of the book itself. So what I'm going to do is to try give some idea of the flavour of the book, along with a brief general discussion.

It is a good read. Russell Blackford has an easy style that takes the reader smoothly through details of legal cases, political and religious history, and philosophical arguments. Each chapter is carefully laid out, with introduction, conclusion and notes, making the book ideal as both the plan and discussion material for a course on secularism. It's quite a bit more than a text book though, as Russell does make clear his personal political views; the book is an argument for a particular approach to secularism, one that involves considerable liberalism and tolerance, a secular state with a definite Lockian flavour.

The sheer volume of information presented and discussed with clarity and brevity means that the book is an essential read and reference for anyone at all interested in the interaction between religion and Western states. Having said that, there are many who will not be comfortable with its conclusions and the style of secularism suggested by Russell. There is no place in his secularism for the banning of religious clothing as recently instituted by the French government, for example. Also, religious groups are given freedom to make their own policies about matters such as the equality of women in their hierarchies.

Russell's version of liberal secularism has a problem, which is that few if any states have such a system in place, and there are few signs that matters are changing in his direction. Because of this, I would have liked far clearer descriptions in his book of what we actually need to do if we agree with Russell: how do we get to the version of secularism he supports, and how do we defend it? The UK had a visit from the Pope last year, and the Pontiff warned against secular values. A detailed discussion of the political implications of this kind of attack on secularism and how we challenge such attacks would have been useful. Another aspect of the defence of secularism is how states should actively promote it. Russell's approval of considerable state tolerance towards religious views, including freedom to preach, proselytise, and pass on religious views to children seems to me to allow for a slow but persistent erosion of support for liberal secularism.

I'm not a secularist. It not my view that the state should treat religions with tolerance. I believe that in order to survive a liberal state has to actively work to promote liberal views, and if that means that the state has to come into conflict with religious groups, then so be it. The state, in my view, does have to promote certain values such as fairness, and the use of reason, and when it comes to the education of children, the teaching of these values has to be compulsory to protect young minds from religious indoctrination and to help them resist cultural oppression. I would be more open to secularism if I believed it to be sustainable. So I would welcome another book from Russell which would concentrate more on how to build and defend his preferred form of secularism.

But anyway, even with this, this book is a must-have. It needs to be kept to hand in any discussion of Western secularism.

In this RD.net discussion article, a letter to the BBC Focus magazine is discussed.  It's a letter thoroughly hostile to Robin Ince's show Nine Lessons And Carols For Godless People

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/644684-bbc-focus-magazine-s-letter-of-the-month

"The title of Helen Pilcher's piece, 'Tis the season to be jolly rational, in the December issue (p. 91), is disappointing and could even be interpreted as insulting to those non-atheistic scientists among us. There is, in any case, nothing rational about the smart alec posture of atheism, which is after all just another dogma - in this case, the dogma of scientism. I am personally against all forms of dogma, whether religious or scientific, and should like to point out that there are many distinguished, rational scientists (list available on request), who do not claim that science has all the answers and who have ably defended the view that there is a non-material, spiritual dimension to the Universe. Robin Ince's show Nine Lessons And Carols For Godless People is just another example of the childish and arrogant materialism put about these days by Richard Dawkins and his ilk. These people do a disservice to both science and humanity."

I find this an interesting letter.  I'm now hooked on Holmes, so let's apply his methods and see what we can discover:

It starts with something about the title, indicating that the response was probably written in haste, before the rest of Pilcher's piece had been written.  It doesn't say "I interpreted", but "could even be interpreted", which is defensive, apologetic.  It then talks about the lack of rationality of posture - again defensive, because a posture has nothing to do with content.  "Smart alec" - English idiom, based on a form of inverse snobbery, talking about someone acting too intellectual.  Note the lower case 'a' in 'alec', again indicating either haste or carelessness.  'Smart Alec' is an old-fashioned idiom too, indicating someone at least middle-aged (the same for the word 'ilk').  Use of the word 'disservice' suggests reasonable education, but, again, probably middle age. Declaring atheism a dogma shows ignorance of religious atheism in non-Abrahamic belief systems, indicating limited knowledge of religions or world cultures.  Linking 'non-material' and 'spiritual'reveals very limited philosophical education.  Using the word 'childish' to refer to Ince's show reveals a reactionary, conservative attitude to humour.  Tory voter.  'Personally' in 'personally against all forms of dogma' is attention seeking, loading up the phrase with emotion.  It's someone with doubts about their religious beliefs, because otherwise they would not have been defensive, and certainly not written to a magazine.  The doubts are quite strong, as the indication that a list is available on request is using the magazine as a proxy for their own doubts - if they can convince the magazine, they can feel relieved.  If they were confident, they would mentioned a specific scientist or two.  The use of 'humanity' at the end is fascinating, it's despairing in tone, indicating that the whole house of cards of faith is threated by Dawkins, Ince and the atheist 'gang'.  Overall the reaction, especially the mention of titles, suggest that the writer hasn't watched the show they are complaining about.

To summarise, we have a defensive, hastily written piece written by a fairly-well-educated middle-aged scientist with limited experience of anything much outside science, probably English, and who hasn't even watched the show.

I'm trying to read a book about extra dimensions - "Warped Passages", by Lisa Randall.  It's bad.  She has an amazing ability to come up with analogies that make things even more confusing, a tendency to say the same thing three times in as many paragraphs, and also something I'm going to call "Physics Tourettes" - an inability to hold back spouting highly technical jargon for more than a few chapters.

The book starts off OK, with gentle introductions to modern physics, and we get some basic descriptions of particle physics and symmetries, but then, trying to keep things lucid seems to be just too hard.  We start to launch into the Higgs Mechanism which we poor readers just have to accept, because it's all so difficult to explain, and then before long we are on to supersymmetric string theory and how it's all jolly because these extra dimensional objects called 'branes' turn up, and super-string ends have to attach to brane, presumably because of super-glue, and then off we go, with no holding back.

It doesn't have to be like this.  Brian Greene has shown how a physicist can write the most detailed book in a lucid manner.  And more recently, Brian Cox has done the same thing magnificently with books on quantum theory and relativity.  His co-authored books are marvells of explaining the highly technical with patient clarity.

If you haven't got the patience to do what Cox and Greene do, which is to lead the reader slowly through clear explanations, then it's really not worth bothering.  At least it isn't worth it for me. There is only so many descriptions of the Higgs Mechanism through bad analogies I'm prepared to deal with.

Wikipedia: Scientism refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

Scientism is used generally in a negative way, to indicate a tendency towards excessive reductionism, or the rejection of other views of the world.

I see scientism in another way.  It a view of the world based on the acceptance of reality.  A positive scientism can be based on the extremely well-established truth of physicalism.  We humans are beings of matter, made of physics.  That has some significant but rarely-mentioned implications for all human belief systems, which is that all human thoughts and beliefs must have physical representation.  It doesn't mean that all thoughts and beliefs must be about physical objects and states, but that a physical system - the mind, operating via the brain - generates and holds all human thoughts and memories.  It is an inevitable consequence of this that all human thoughts are, in principle, open to scientific investigation, in the same way that all software and processing in a computer is open this way.  It is likely to take a considerable amount of time and research effort before we can find out what happens in the brain to a sufficient degree of detail that we can describe the physical language of thought, but there is nothing in principle that will prevent this being possible.

So, scientism is not an exaggeration.  All of human thought is founded on material things doing physical things.  This does not mean that other ways of looking at the world aren't useful.  In dealing with computers we don't want to have to consider what the hardware is doing with binary data billions of times each second.  We can deal with computers using higher-level symbols and gadgets such as icons and windows. 

But, the truth of physicalism means that any attempt to deny the potential applicability of science to any area of human thought is simply false, it's a rejection of reality.

I'm afraid this link isn't going to be visible to those outside the UK, but it's well worth it for those who can see it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01b4wmr/Survivors_Natures_Indestructible_Creatures_The_Great_Dying/

Richard Fortey starts a series about life that has survived over long periods of time, even through huge extinction events.

What is truly astonishing is the continued existence of organisms that are virtually unchanged after hundreds of millions of years.  Examples of this are the lancelet, a small worm-shaped animal that is so simple it's barely noticeable that it is a vertebrate, exactly like the fossils of hundreds of millions of years ago, and Lingula, a creature that looks like a clam with a long foot, but it not related to molluscs.  Lingula is a brachiopod, and is virtually indistinguishable from fossils from 550 million years ago.  That's over half a billion years.

I think this persistence of form is astonishing because I would have expected life to have continually explored the "fitness landscape" through mutation and natural selection.  It seems very strange to think that such "living fossils" as Lingula are the best that can be achieved by evolution in that niche, and that all minor variations away from the genotype of Lingula would be less fit.  

Of course, appearances might be deceptive.  Modern Lingula might be genetically quite different from its ancestors of so very long ago.  Unfortunately the likelyhood of ever being able to testing this is precisely zero! 

http://ibnlive.in.com/generalnewsfeed/news/muslim-groups-demand-action-against-authors/953672.html

Muzzaffar Bharti of Muslim Ekta Manch also echoed the demand and said that such acts will not be tolerated. "It seems it was done knowingly. When the matter of Rushdie's visit was settled, why did the authors read from the banned book? We cannot expect the scholars to do such things. It is police who have to ensure that our feelings are not hurt," Bharti said. 

I believe in the right of everyone to hold whatever metaphysical beliefs they like as long as they don't harm others.  I have nothing against the construction of Churches, or Mosques or Temples.

What is intolerable is attempting to bully others because of your metaphysics.   That's bad enough.

But I find statements like the one I quoted above utterly beyond comprehension.  I keep re-reading the sentence about the police acting to prevent hurt feelings and I feel nothing but bewilderment.  I don't mean this in a mocking way; I'm not being sarcastic - I just find it incomprehensible that an adult would feel it appropriate to use such methods to prevent 'hurt feelings'.  I find it equally puzzling that an adult could make such a statement and not feel so embarassed and ashamed by it that they wanted to run away and hide.  

Does this mean that other cultures really are so different from our own that we have no hope of understanding what some of those in that culture are thinking?  If so, what hope for our future?

Nature doesn't make watches, even though it has a trillion eyes, so is hardly blind. The maker of watch makers is other watch makers. Watch makers take the raw material of unskilled humans and refine them into craftsmen and craftswomen, and these are artificially selected until only the best watchmakers' businesses survive. There was a first watch maker, who managed to put the parts into the right sequence to make the first, simple watch. This may have been unlikely, but it is a vast universe, and on perhaps trillions of planets beings had millions of years struggling to make timepieces, so it had to happen somewhere, and it did. It happened here, at least once. Once it happened, then the watchmaker could advertise shop opening hours and things could really get going.

Nature did make the being who make the first watch, and Nature had no idea what she was doing, so she was, in a sense, the blind maker of watch makers (considering how the first watch maker got made, it was polite to allow for some privacy anyway).

I tell a small lie, though. Nature could blindly make a watch. Here's the recipe:

Take a universe, empty, full of random elementary particles. Leave it for a very long time. Such a long time that even if you wrote on every atom in the universe, that would not give you the number of digits needed to express the time in years. Or in billions of years. On in trillions of years.

But, eventually, by chance alone, a watch will appear. That's because, given enough time, anything will appear. Even a Big Bang. Even a watch maker will appear, with workshop. To keep with scientific tradition, I should call this a Boltzmann Workshop[1].

But here's the thing, even though this is so very, very unlikely, it's unlikeliness, it's straining of credibility, is as a gnat compared to the elephant in the universe of the Abrahamic God.

If you found a watch, still ticking, lying on the grass, as Paley suggested, it would make far more sense to assume that it appeared out of nothing than it was made by a deity.

I mean, what's the chance of finding a deity, still ticking, lying on the grass? A deity complete with workshop and watch-making tools?

[1] A Boltzmann Brain is a mind that has appeared out of randomness, by pure chance.  It's an idea from the fellow who was the pioneer of thermodynamics.

On RichardDawkins.net a poster wrote that they didn't like the absence of ultimate meaning or absolute morality.  That got me thinking....

Why should anyone want either ultimate meaning or absolute morality? What dreadful ideas they are.

Fortunately, they are also ideas which are quite ridiculous. For example, what could an 'ultimate meaning' actually be? Where would it be written? How could we know about it? The same goes for 'absolute morality': how could we measure an example of morality so as to determine it's relationship to this absolute standard?

Also, what relevance to our lives could these absolutes and ultimates have? Suppose we discover somehow that the ultimate meaning of life was to reproduce itself. Would that make anyone want to have more children simply because of the discovery? Suppose we discover that according to the absolute standard of morality, eating chocolate is extremely wicked. Would that stop anyone? Suppose we found, somehow, that according to the absolute moral standard, child murder was a good thing. Would you do it?