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Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

I was deeply touched while reading this piece - I felt that Powell was speaking almost directly to me. I was one of those children who suffered from a learning challenge. I had a very strong case of ADHD, and I'll tell you what I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was ostracized by both teachers and peers. In my isolation I found a sense of control in software development.

During my adolescence I found the anarchist cookbook. I used to read through it, fascinated with its ideology, and sometimes building various explosives and weapons. In high school I experimented with drugs and got very close to flunking out. I got in trouble with the law more times than I'd like to admit. I was very angry and paranoid, and the idiotic policies put in place during the Bush years had a lot to do with that.

Nowadays I'm a completely different person. I'm deeply religious, I try and go out of my way to say kind words and help others, and I'm a much happier person. I'm about to graduate with a degree in biochemistry from a great college. I believe the world would be a much better place if people would try harder to understand and love each other and show mercy. Reading this piece by one of my childhood mentors very much evoked a feeling of vindication.

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> I had a very strong case of ADHD, and I'll tell you what I stuck out like a sore thumb.

Yup

> During my adolescence I found the anarchist cookbook. I used to read through it, fascinated with its ideology, and sometimes building various explosives and weapons.

Yup

> I got in trouble with the law more times than I'd like to admit.

Yup

> I was very angry and paranoid

Still fighting the anger I have from no where. I am not paranoid though the Snowden stuff is making me somewhat.

> I try and go out of my way to say kind words and help others, and I'm a much happier person.

These are things I try to do otherwise I find myself acting ill towards people.

I am not sure which hit me more the article or your comment. Glad to see there are others who acted the way I did in my younger days and are striving to become a better person everyday. This past May I finally graduated from a decent regional college with a degree in Information Systems and now have an awesome job doing what I love.

I am so happy to have read your comment. The Snowden stuff hit me pretty hard as well, and I actually organized my town's rally for the Restore the Fourth demonstrations. If you ever want to talk and get to know each other, my email is in my profile, please feel free to reach out :)

I still am unable to understand the connection to religion.

I was intentionally vague on that point to avoid controversy distracting from my point, but if you're curious, I found faith in Jesus Christ (I became Catholic) and I fully believe that it was by the grace of God that I was brought out of my downward spiral and restored to peace and happiness.

Off on a tangent here, but I'm curious if you're willing to divulge, does your religious bend ever conflict with you being a biochemistry major, and if so how do you resolve the conflictions?

That's actually at the very core in why I went into biochemistry (aside from a naive belief in the triviality of curing cancer and the abundance of nobel prizes). In studying biochemistry I'm able to see how the math and the physics and the chemistry become biology. That is, I can actually know how life works and comes into being. I'll tell you what, God is the ultimate programmer. My studies have only worked to strengthen my faith.

Like the adulterer who professes to love his wife, you have some things to work out.

I have found that once you grasp that they are not all biblical literalists you can get along fine with Christians. The literalists are noisier but I think a minority. I married into a Christian family and they value science and logic as much as anyone.

And yet they believe in an invisible "creator" who takes a personal interest in their daily lives. How should we weigh their valuation of science and logic relative to someone who doesn't believe such things?

Science works best when it studies the here and now, the observable. That's the basis for confidence in empiricism, and that's where solid empiricism ends. Belief in a designer motivated many great men of science to understand this marvelous design, Newton himself being one of many. There's an unlimited world to be studied in the present, all with a high degree of confidence because it can be subject to strictly empirical testing. Quantum theory, understanding DNA, figuring out sleep, curing diseases, the list is really infinite.

When science tries to take what it knows in the here-and-now and extrapolate those present-knowns billions of years into the past, that's where confidence should drop. At that point it's trying to take a hard-won confidence in present observations and borrow it for explaining the past. But it's not justified there.

It's like trying to say you could observe a stock for 40 years and extrapolate that tiny slice of price history billions of years into the future -- and then proceed to claim to confidently know not only what the price was at the end of those billions of years, but also the price action along the entire way.

Thanks to the speed of light and Cosmic Microwave Background, billions of years ago is here and now. Observing light from the past is quite different from predicting a stock in the future. For one thing, the laws of physics are inherently stable, while stock price fluctuations are inherently chaotic. Any attempt at an alternate explanation of the history of the universe must do a better job of explaining all the current observations (CMB, red shift, dark matter gravitational lensing, stellar formation and lifecycles, novae, fossil records, multi-isotope dating, plate tectonics, etc.).

I think you might want to read up on both the philosophy of science as well as science itself. Your notions of empiricism/testability as well as the scientific process strike me as a bit naive.

For example, you seem to have some concept of "testing" that involves the observer having to cause the observed phenomenon in order for it to be empirical. On that basis you might have to classify the existence of the sun as a mere hypothesis without empirical backing, though.

Also, you should be aware that a lot of cosmological knowledge very much comes from the here-and-now, in that the light we capture with our telescopes is actually here right now - otherwise, we could not capture it with our telescopes. If you think we should discard those observations because the light we captured has been traveling for a while, you probably also would have to consider it a mere hypothesis that your computer screen showed this text one nanosecond ago.

Cosmology does not somehow mysteriously extrapolate the temperature of the microwave background - it's something you can measure, and which has been measured, a lot.

Of course, there are some assumptions - in the case of cosmology, the probably most important one would be the cosmological principle ("the laws of physics are the same everywhere"). But note that any cosmologist will tell you that that is an assumption, not something that is necessarily true.

Also, you may want to consider that looking back billions of years is what allows us to derive laws of nature which would be a lot harder to figure out by only observing recent events, which then can be used to understand things that are of more immediate concern to us here and now.

For example, the principle of evolution by natural selection was derived from observations of the past and its effects (that is, the biological landscape on the planet), and now is useful in order to explain an predict the development of antibiotics resistance.

For example, you seem to have some concept of "testing" that involves the observer having to cause the observed phenomenon in order for it to be empirical.

No, don't project words into my mouth, because that's not what I'm saying. I have a spectrum of confidence when it comes to science, and the more its conclusions are reached under solid empiricism, the higher that level of confidence.

If the cause was not observable, then it is completely and totally rational to take one's level of confidence down a few notches. After all, we're not able to observe HALF of the cause--(produces)-->outcomes process.

The existence of the sun is not hypothetical, because its existence is on the right side of that process - it's an "already happened" outcome that is routinely confirmed by the senses daily.

The discussion about what caused the sun's existence is irrelevant to the vast amounts of present knowledge that can be gained from empirically observing it in the here-and-now. Not only that, but any claims (Christian, science, or otherwise) about what really caused its existence can ultimately only be glued together by faith (a confidence in things unseen).

It's not very accurate to use the word "faith" to describe any element of the scientific process. Consider the explanations to that effect from this article, which are good reading, but too lengthy to include here: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

A useful excerpt from that article: "In such cases the word faith doesn’t mean “belief without good evidence,” but “confidence derived from scientific tests and repeated, documented experience.”"

So when you can't subject something to empirical observation... such as the original creation of the sun, where exactly does one gain a sure confidence in the explanation for it's original cause?

Let's look at a few simple cause--(produces)-->outcome examples:

- When a chair moves in a room (outcome) and you didn't observe the chair moving, can you with 100% confidence identify why/what moved the chair (cause)?

- When your wallet goes missing from your desk (outcome) and you didn't observe its disappearance, can you 100% identify who/what moved it (cause)?

- When you walk up to your house with a broken window (outcome) having never seen the window being broken, can you 100% with confidence identify the what broke the window (cause)?

I'm not saying that science is using faith to establish confidence in observable OUTCOMES. Science is using faith when it cannot observe CAUSES and proceeds to make claims about those CAUSES. Faith has to do with attributing confidence to that which cannot be observed or subject to empiricism. For example, the original cause of the sun's existence.

To be clear, when I use the word "observe", I mean in the sense of using empiricism and the senses to gather data about reality.

> Interesting, so when you can't subject something to the empirical observation... such as the original creation of the sun, where exactly does one gain a sure confidence in the explanation for it's original cause?

Causality, as such, is not directly observable. Correlation is, and causation is inferred from patterns of correlation.

When done scientifically, the specific method to go from observed correlation to conclusions about causation is to form a hypothesis, predict future observations based on that hypothesis that could be falsified to disprove it, and then go and test those predictions.

Eventually, doing this enough, and you'll end up with falsifiable models that have been rigorously tested from which you can make inferences about what must have caused events where you cannot observe the correlated event that you would infer to be the cause that are as strong as the inferences of causation you can make with events where you observe both the putative cause and the effect for which you infer it is the cause.

> If you haven't observed the cause, you have no rational reason to establish 100% confidence about what it was.

If you have observed the supposed cause -- and its supposed effect -- you have no rational reason to assert a causal link with actual 100% certainty. OTOH, with sufficient related observations, prediction, and testing those predictions, you can construct a model of causality that lets you get arbitrarily close to 100% certainty in stating what the cause of an observed effect is, whether or not you can observe the event that is the inferred cause.

> This is really simple rational thinking

It is simply incorrect, and seems grounded in both a mistake about what science does and the mistaken belief that causality is directly observable.

> I don't get how science arrives at any level of confidence about causes that it can't (nor has ever) observed.

The same way it arrives at any level of confidence about causes that it can observe (observe the event, that is, not the fact that it is a "cause", which is never observable, only inferable.)

> I have no problem with confidence in what it can observe, I take issue when it can't observe and attempts to take what it can observe and confidently extrapolate that into the past.

The whole thing science does is produce and refine methods of inferring things that are not observed from things that are.

Causality, as such, is not directly observable.

The whole thing science does is produce and refine methods of inferring things that are not observed from things that are.

This is awful, awful science. Science works best when the entire process (from cause to outcome) can be subject to empiricism.

I think we've reached an impasse here, because clearly we differ on whether or not unobservable events can be reasoned about with any level of confidence. You seem to state that inference and models that produce predictions will lead to a "arbitrarily close to 100%" level of confidence, and that's where I completely, utterly disagree... especially when we're trying to talk "billions of years ago".

Even in the recent case of a broken window, only your neighbor who saw the event could have a decent level of confidence in what caused it. Millions of tests, models, and inferences would only produce an educated guess as to what happened, all of which would be obliterated by a neighbor simply explaining what they saw.

As I said before, I am strictly empirical when it comes to science and am willing to call my personal claims about unseen events as "faith" when I am trying to establish truth about them.

> Science works best when the entire process (from cause to outcome) can be subject to empiricism.

Events can be observed. Causation is not an event, its a relationship between events which cannot be observed, only inferred. Science is entirely about developing, testing, and refining rules for inferring things that are not observed from things that are observed.

> Even in the recent case of a broken window, only your neighbor who saw the event could have a decent level of confidence in what caused it.

I disagree. Its quite possible, in many cases, to observe how it broke, what other objects are in proximity to the broken glass, and other things that were going on in the area and have a "decent confidence" in how it was broken without observing the actual event of breaking.

> Millions of tests, models, and inferences would only produce an educated guess as to what happened

To the extent that this is true, causality is always an educated guess even when you observe the event directly, and the educated guess, with or without observation of the event, can have any arbitrary degree of certainty.

You seem to just be repeating the belief in the myth that causation is directly observable and that science is about reporting observed causation, and not developing predictive rules. That's just plain wrong.

Empirical observation -- which never includes causation -- is the input of science, but it is no the whole of the process. If it was, science would never get beyond describing events that occur (without their causes) and observed correlations. That's not what science is.

Events can be observed. Causation is not an event, its a relationship between events which cannot be observed, only inferred

Hmm, I may be improperly using the word "cause" here because of the connotation of the word causality. I see what you are saying, I probably am using "cause" & "produces" interchangeably.

Can I set up an an example for you to translate into how we arrive at knowledge?

Let's say we both stumble upon a giant multi-level sandcastle on the beach. For the sake of this thought experiment, assume we never saw the creation of this sandcastle, nor can we observe any other sandcastles like it being caused into existence (i.e. it was there long before we existed, and we'll never observe one being created again)

Me, in my irrational Christian ways would use faith to say "well, I've never come across one of these before, but I would posit an intelligent designer caused the existence of that sandcastle". You, with your rational and logical models of scientific inference, would take all sorts of measurements and gather the available present evidence and extrapolate that data deep into the past. Given the benefit of time, you would argue the complex movements of the ocean against the rocks and beach likely formed the sandcastle in a slow process over millions of years.

After all, the only present observable evidence we have is the ocean, the waves, the rocks, the sand (and all those intertwined processes), so it's clearly the only way we can arrive at a cause, right?

Given the wishy-washy benefit of time, the complex movements of the ocean against the rocks and beach likely formed the sandcastle in a slow process over millions of years.

Why a sandcastle? By using a known designed object as a stand-in for objects whose design is under dispute, you're inadvertently begging the question[0].

Scientists didn't just decide to hate creation one day, making up evolution in response. They looked at everything they saw[1], then over centuries of discovery, found that simple creation didn't agree with the evidence. On a shorter time scale, the same process leads born creationists (like myself) to accept evolution on its merits.

Also, when evolutionary biologists refer to processes that occur over vast lengths of time, they aren't using time for its "wishy-washy benefit[s]", they're using time because time is what they observe in the form of sedimentary layers, isotopic decay, and genetic drift. Science is not like Doctor Who, in that "timey wimey" hand waving is discouraged.

Can you provide a specific instance where an interventionist/creationist model provides better agreement with the evidence?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

[1] By which I mean conducted experiments, made observations, and gathered evidence.

First of all: One very viable option in science is to say that we don't know. If we don't know, we simply don't know, there is no point in making stuff up. That does not mean that people might not form hypotheses as a first step to eliminating that lack of knowledge, but as long as we don't have some serious evidence, it's just a hypothesis, not a claim of knowledge, and we continue to simply not know, even if we might be speculating wildly as to what the explanation might be, and in some cases it might be that we never will know, and that is perfectly fine.

In this context you should also note that simply positing an intelligent designer does not actually gain you anything. Explanations can be recognized by their ability to predict future observations. Positing an intelligent designer does not allow you to make any predictions whatsoever. There is nothing necessarily fundamentally wrong with positing an intelligent designer - it's just not an explanation - so, if you want to have an explanation, you are still on square one. You essentially just have given the thing you lack knowledge about a name, namely "intelligent designer", but you haven't gained any knowledge about it.

As for your sand castle example: Well, I don't really have a clue how a geologist or an archeologist would go about that, but presumably one could try and determine the structure of the castle, such as the form of the grains, and how they stick together, and find other instances of similar structure to try and figure out what kinds of processes might be able to form such a structure? But as always: When in doubt, we simply don't know.

Also, I smell the Boeing from the junkyard argument for creationism. In case I am right there, you urgently should educate yourself about what natural selection is and in particular how natural selection is not random, and how evolution without natural selection would not work.

dragonwriter has already answered this pretty well, I think, I just want to provide one more challenge for your categorization:

So when you can't subject something to empirical observation... such as the original creation of the you yourself, where exactly does one gain a sure confidence in the explanation for your original cause?

Well, leaving aside the "sure confidence" (science never gets you 100 % certainty on anything ever): You correlate that for all of the other similarly shaped moistened collections of organic molecules for which you know anything of where they originated from, it was their parents. That's why you probably are pretty sure that you were born by your mother. If you want to know the same thing about our sun, you look at any number of the 100 billion or so stars in our galaxy which are in all kinds of different stages of their lives to correlate how stars commonly tend to come about - and your best guess is, again, that the sun probably happened similarly to other stars with similar observable properties.

BTW, I think this is a good demonstration of your misunderstanding of how science determines probable causation: Have you ever been to a magic show? Your model of causality would mean that you would not be fooled by any of the tricks (if you could observe actual causation, you would notice the lack of causation between the misdirection and the effect). The fact that you (probably) are fooled is evidence that you do actually use the principles described by dragonwriter, you just aren't quite aware of it.

Or in short: If you are interested in this, you really should read a bit about the philosophy of science. People have spent a great deal of effort on figuring out this stuff and all the fallacies that you haven't quite thought through yet.

you really should read a bit about the philosophy of science

Sounds like you're quite well-educated on this topic. Can you list a few recent philosophy of science books that you've read? I'm also interested in hearing your personal thoughts on each book you recommend, because I will not accept a simple copy/pasted list of coursework from Wikipedia. I want to hear about material you've personally read and your thoughts on each one, seeing as how you're thrusting these expectations on me.

It's not like what I am saying is totally new here. I'm plenty well read on the topic, and most of what I've said is similar in vein to Hume [1] (and others') work on the problem of induction [2]. For such a well-educated "philosophy of science" man as yourself, I'm surprised you've missed that obvious connection.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Induction [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Good morning,

no, I can not, and no, I am not thrusting any expectations on you, I am just telling you that there is literature out there that you might be interested in - though it seems like you are already aware of that.

Given that you seem to be familiar with the philosophical problem of induction, I guess I will revise my interpretation of what you are saying, and suggest books on actual science instead. It was not at all obvious to me that you were trying to point out the problem of induction, and if you were, then I would suggest that you haven't actually understood it, or rather, its consequences.

I think there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the argument for the problem of induction - but you have to realize that philosophically, there is no distinction there between the inductive conclusion that there is a big bang or evolution or bacteria or electromagnetism ... and the inductive conclusion that there is a sun. "The sun" and its associated properties and predictions are also pure induction and thus equally vulnerable to the problem of induction. And even more mundane things like the assumption that there are people out there and that there is a supermarket out there and that the bread that they sell you is not poisonous and ... - they are all inductive results. The problem of induction thus postulates that they are all equally problematic. See also solipsism.

The problem with your arguments is that you make an arbitrary distinction between things you supposedly "observe directly" and things that are "only derived inductively", which you do not justify (and which is not justified by the problem of induction), and which I would suggest is actually not justifiable, and what I am criticizing are the inconsistencies resulting from that. My best guess is that you need some more scientific background to see clearer why that distinction is arbitrary.

Well, nothing wrong with trusting theories with more/clearer/better evidence more, of course. Now, apparently, I interpreted your previous post incorrectly as to how you go about distinguishing better evidence from worse evidence, but my main point that I was trying to make still stands: Your distinction is somewhat arbitrary and I have the strong impression that you aren't really aware of it.

For example, you are constantly referring to the here-and-now as some kind of special category of evidence. You do realize that there isn't really any "here and now"? There is no "sun here now" - there is only a brain here and now that processes signals that we hypothesize come from photo receptors in the eyes, which we further hypothesize were stimulated by waves of electromagnetic radiation, which in turn we hypothesize has previously been traveling for around eight minutes from what we hypothesize to be a star, about which we further hypothesize how it works internally, which is part of why we hypothesize that it is still creating those electromagnetic waves, even though we wouldn't know for another eight minutes if it had disappeared (or so we hypothesize). That's a whole lot of hypotheses and indirect evidence and quite a bit of looking into the past involved to call that "present knowledge from the here and now", don't you think?

And no, we can not observe the cause - you only can observe the effects, ever. In the case of the sun, that is the electromagnetic radiation that we hypothesize to be created by a star in our neighbourhood.

And essentially the same thing is true for the big bang: We see its effects, among those the microwave background, which is electromagnetic radiation which we hypothesize to be coming from the horizon of when the universe became transparent, which we hypothesize to be 13.7 billion light-years away, ... - and if you have a radio telescope, it can easily be confirmed by the senses daily.

So, if you were to apply your standards consistently, you probably would have to consider belief in the existence of the sun right now or belief in the existence of bacteria and viruses (you can not observe those with your senses, in case you mean that a little bit too literally) as a matter of faith.

I would think that that's silly, and it's much saner to say that the empirical evidence for the sun and the big bang and bacteria is all pretty strong, possibly varying a bit in strength, but without any of the qualitative differences that you seem to be implying.

The scientific problem with Christianity isn't that science proposes an answer to things. It's that it looks at the stories proposed by Christianity and calls "bullshit" because of Occam's razor.

Virgin birth. Resurrection. Parting the seas. Water into wine. And so on. Things that straight up, didn't fucking happen, ever, by any reasonable probabilistic estimation based on what we know about the world today, and those are far more recent than billions of years ago - words in a book are so far outweighed by what we know about the world that we're talking sub .01% chances here. And if you want to start calling them metaphors or helpful fictions, that's fine, but you're departing from any regular version of Christianity.

If the rules of our universe were so flexible that stuff like that could happen with such regularity less than a few thousand years ago, it's overwhelmingly likely that we'd have seen some evidence of gross violations of physical laws today.

When it comes to creation and all that, sure, science is blind, most scientists would agree with you there. But that doesn't mean Christianity has the answers. I'll take ignorance over blind belief in a random story any day, and that's what science has going for it.

> invisible "creator" who takes a personal interest in their daily lives

Yet again, very literal interpretation.

Religionists show no consistency in what they consider literal or not. I was raised catholic, am quite seriously offended by religion, and have had more arguments with religionists than I care to remember. What is literal to one person is not literal to the next. Further, when cornered a person will change their mind as it suits them. Discussion of religion is a quagmire, and the pursuit of fools.

You must be fun at parties.

"You must be fun at parties." (No reply link)

Religious discussion is party fun? "You must be fun at parties."

It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion. And therefore as they would understand the frame of the world must endeavor to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity, so must it be in seeking to understand these visions.

-- Isaac Newton

Later, the invented Chaos Theory.

> takes a personal interest in their daily lives.

Says who? Not all Christians think of god that way. You write as if you haven't thought about this much or spoken with many believers. Atheists aren't automatically entitled to the moral and intellectual high ground you know. I'd judge their "valuation of science and logic" the same way I'd judge yours (critically and carefully), and you don't get a pass because you believe in science. /An atheist.

"I'll tell you what, God is the ultimate programmer."

Do you have a peer reviewed source for this?

I'll tell you what, God is the ultimate programmer.

Let me guess, was the universe written in javascript?

Well, that's what we tell everybody, but it's really just a bunch of Perl scripts running on an old Sun box hidden in the janitor's closet.

This is a reference to this XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/224/

If I believed in a god, I'd have trouble deciding which news would be more unbearable: finding out there is no god, or finding out that this god wrote the universe in Perl.

Obviously not: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.ogg

Greg Chaitin wrote a LISP interpreter in FORTRAN.

There are absurd anti-science sects of Christianity, but mainstream Catholicism isn't one of them. I was taught evolution in both Catholic grade school and Jesuit high school --- in the late 80s and early 90s. It wasn't taught as a controversy or one of many possibilities, but rather as scientific fact.

For what it's worth, if you're not familiar with Christianity, most Christian religions aren't biblical literalists. I was taught in grade school, by nuns, that the Old Testament wasn't to be taken literally.

Yes. Pope Pius XII acknowledged evolution as compatible with Christianity in 1950, though he did not embrace it. In 1996 Pope John Paul II went further:

> Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

The Jesuits are outstandingly good, for a religious denomination, in their respect for scientific truth. Other parts of the Catholic church (I'm thinking of Franciscan institutes like the Christian Information Centre) lean creationist.

The Jesuits are pretty great. But my Catholic elementary school wasn't Jesuit, and it taught evolution and a non-literal interpretation of the Old Testament.

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