Rob's Blog

A character in a TV programme I stumbled across yesterday said, and I’m quoting from memory:

I gave up having imaginary friends when I was five. I believe in what I can see, hear and touch. It’s no good asking God for answers, because there is none.

The source of this wisdom? Jesse from Home and Away. Who would have thought it from an otherwise mostly vacuous daytime soap? Perhaps it’s something to do with Auatralians: I seem to remember a character from Neighbours ranting in a similar way after his wife died and someone tried to tell him it was okay because she was in heaven. I have to go back as far as last February to find a similarly brave British programme.

The Horizon documentary on BBC2 tonight stopped short of saying that the Bible code is complete hokum, so I’ll make the leap for you. The Bible code is complete hokum.

In case you missed it, the idea is that by turning the original hebrew version of the Bible into a giant word search and finding words made from equidistant letters that intersect each other, you can predict future events. So, for instance, since the word “Kennedy” intersects the phrase, “assasin who will assinate”, we can predict that Kennedy will be assasinated. Presumably God or the aliens who wrote the Bible inserted the messages for some reason or another.

The code was discovered by three Israelis, including Eliyahu Rips, who published a paper on it. They found that the names of famous rabbis intersected with their dates of birth, and came up with a method of measuring the probablility that this could happen by chance. This probability was very low: 1 in 65,000. What they didn’t mention was that there were numerous ways to spell the rabbis’ names, presumably helped out by the fact that the Bible as written in Hebrew contains no vowels (something the Horizon programme didn’t mention). When the experiment was repeated with alternative spellings it failed. The probability came out at somewhere between 1 in 2 and 2 in 3, indicating that the names were selected by Rips and co. to get the wanted results.

Cue Michael Drosnin who, thoroughly taken in by Rips, published a book or two on the subject. He was spurred on by his prediction that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin would be assasinated, and now thinks there will be a nuclear war in 2006 unless he can get to George W first and stop it. This is slightly scary because W is a religious loony and will soon be making major policy decisions from Bible codes if Drosnin gets his way.

Drosnin once challenged the skeptics to find predictions in Moby Dick. Statistician Brendan McKay, whose website contains much detailed information, did. He points out that the problem with Drosnin’s method of making predictions is that he looks for a name, and then looks for anything interesting that appears near that name. Given the lack of vowels in the Hebrew, and enough controversy over just how you spell “Tony Blair” in Hebrew anyway, and, well, you can see…

I thought this post might turn into a rant about how biased the Horizon programme was in favour of Drosnin. He did get much more air-time than the skeptics. But the weakness of his argument, essentially just repeating how unlikely were these combinations of words he’d chosen to be found near each other, was so obvious that he did most of the skeptics’ work for them. Couple that with Rips’ hopeless attempt to make out that a few accidental errors could cause the results of a follow-up experiment to be out by four orders of magnitude, and it’s quite clear who won the documentary.

There’s a nice little debate going on about the compatibility or otherwise of an omniscient god with free will. It started out between The Raving Atheist and Michelle of And Then?, and has continued over a few days with other people joining in.

The debate is of unusually high quality, given that it’s between theists and atheists, who normally end up arguing over the exact definitions of words or accusing the other of evangelism, or quoting scripture. Some highlights occur in the comments section of the World Wide Rant post.

Brent concisely states the atheist viewpoint:

Can you do something that God does not know you will do before you do it? If the answer is no, then free will is but an illusion. If the answer is yes, then your god is not omniscient.

Steve Polson hits back with,

It would only be a problem for free will if the Creator knew your choice BECAUSE he was making it for you. But if you are the one freely making the choice God’s knowledge is the consequence of your free choice, not the cause of an unfree choice.

Before I deal with this, some background: I’m not entirely convinced that there is such a thing as free will. There is very little evidence for it; I can’t go back and change a decision I made and see what would have happened. At any given moment we only get to choose one option, and our choice could just as well have been the result of deterministic laws of nature as of free will. The only evidence for free will I can see is my own personal experience of it, and not only can I envisage mental mechanisms that would cause the illusion of free will, even the experience of it is far from perfect.

Consider waking up in the morning. You wake up, you decide to get out of bed, and some time later (in my case quite some considerable time later) you find yourself getting out of bed. In that time between deciding to get up and actually getting up, there doesn’t seem to be much free will involved at all. A more mundane example is the way our emotions can make us behave in ways we rationally would rather not. Occasional failure of self control does not suggest free will.

So much for that. The reason theists, in particular Christians, need free will is that they use it to explain evil in the world. Bad people can exist even though God is good because God wants us to choose whether to be good. This is known as the free will theodicy, and there are all kinds of problems with it. For one thing, it is quite possible to concieve of a world that has free will and still has no pain and suffering. For another, you can’t have a god who knows everything and still have free will.

Steve Polsen argues that God can know what you’re going to do in advance without that affecting your choice. His knowledge is the consequence of your free choice. This gets the argument backwards. God cannot predict random events in the same way that he can’t create square circles; it doesn’t make any logical sense. Therefore if God knows the future then it logically must be because the future is determined.

This in no way proves there is no god. It does limit the kinds of god that are possible, and opens theists to the kind of argument presented by Niclas Berggren:

even if god was unaware of what would ensue after his having created the universe, he is still admitted by the theist to know what happens spatially, i.e., at any point in time, as happenings are, indeed, realized. If so, god would have known, a posteriori, what his creation had given rise to, and hence could have rectified anything with which he was discontent (due to his omnipotence). This he has not done and thus is blameworthy for evil.

Update: Some more excellent arguments on this subject in a posting at dustbury.com, in particular in the comments section.

Sky News recently featured an interview with an Anglican minister on the subject of the appointing of a gay bishop. His message, although not put quite so bluntly, was that while it’s okay to be gay, it’s not okay for two men to have sex.

On the BBC’s Talking Point page on the subject, Paul, UK agrees with him. “It’s not gay people that the Bible teaches against, it’s the homosexual act. Celibacy is the best option – both for gays and for unmarried heterosexuals – who want to take holy orders. In this case, as Dr John has stated that he is, and will remain, celibate, surely the issue is more one of non-repentance for what the Bible teaches is a sin.”

But this is intellectually dishonest. How can anything as harmless as two consenting men having sex be wrong? Making people choose between acting against their nature or feeling perpetually guilty, when there is a harmless alternative, is not moral, it is cruel. It simply doesn’t make sense to suggest otherwise and it’s hard to see how one can do so without abandoning reason and taking the bible literally.

Despite assertions to the contrary, the bible does have plenty to say about homosexuality. Richard Murray, UK, a conservative Christian, demonstrates where a literal interpretation leads when he writes, “To all you “Christians” who say being gay is okay, I suggest you read your bibles. This is a case in which the Word of God is shouted down by the liberal mob.”

So what do the liberal mob have to say? John M, Lyne Meads, UK writes, “The church is a reflection of society. The Bible reflects the society of the times in which it was written. There are as many interpretations of the scriptures as there are people, each person accepting or rejecting passages according to need or circumstance. Churches which don’t adapt decay. A church which reflects the current needs of its people may thrive.”

In other words, the bible is irrelevant. If we are free to pick and choose the bits we like and ignore or re-interpret the bits we don’t like, then there doesn’t seem to be much point in reading it at all. This doesn’t sound very Christian to me. And yet it’s exactly the right way to go about things. You have to think for yourself. How right or wrong something is can be measured directly by the amount of harm it would do to others. It cannot be measured in terms of thousand-year-old literature.

That so many are taking seriously a discussion about whether or not God wants there to be gay bishops suggests that they are not thinking for themselves.

I’m all for freedom, especially in previously repressed countries like Iraq. And I’m all for people being allowed to practice their ridiculous traditions, as long as they don’t interfere with others. But I’m completely confounded as to why someone would voluntarily whip themselves with chains and spray blood from their gashed scalps. Even The Raving Atheist is at a loss for words (he has a good picture, though).

Update: I missed a trick – some of these people were chanting, “Down, down, with the Americans! Yes, Yes to an Islamic state!” Say what you like about the Americans, but who would want to live in an Islamic state? So much for freedom…

I’ve just finished watching the BBC1 documentary I am a Mohel, about the Jewish tradition of circumcising babies at eight days old. In it, a mohel who is also an emergency room doctor, performs a couple of circumcisions and explains what the tradition means to him.

A bris is performed for a number of reasons, he explains. It’s a way of marking your body in an irreversible way. A reminder that you are a jew. Before cutting off his own newborn son’s foreskin he says, “what a bris is teaching you – what it teaches me anyway – is that there’s got to be a removal of a cover. A bris is teaching you to get involved in your life. Don’t just sit back. Don’t just do things and then get on with your life later. The things that you do are your life. So hopefully baby can teach us one little lesson to make things what we do a part of us; a part of who we really are.”

Did you follow that? In order to teach us some vague lesson, baby has to have part of his dick cut off in a barbaric mess of screaming and blood. I wonder who this meaningless waffle is intended to convince.

The mohel also explains that because we are born with a foreskin, it is proof that we are not born perfect. That our bodies can be changed, improved. What kind of god creates imperfect babies and then requires that part of them be cut off to enter a covenant with him? It doesn’t make any sense.

Circumcision is painful, risky and even according to many Jews, un-necessary.

One mother explains that the fact that her baby is circumcised does not mean he is forced into becoming a Jew, rather it means he has the option of practising judaism. I wonder what he would say if he was given the option not to have his penis mutilated?