Category: Rants

Put ’em up

The pastoral Andrea links to some discussion of Mark Driscoll’s vile comments on the Ted Haggard affair, which I will not dignify by quoting or linking to.

Pastor Madrid-Swetman seems to take Driscoll to task as much for the tone of his writing as the content. Now I am not the most moderate of writers on subjects I feel strongly about; I sometimes feel justified in using harsh and indeed vulgar language to make clear my emotional as well as intellectual stance on an issue. So while I appreciate Pastor Madrid-Swetman’s feelings on the issue, especially in light of the conflict in the Seattle churches, and indeed I’m wholly in her camp on the issue of gender equality, I submit that “verbal violence”, and indeed physical violence, are not automatically beyond the pale in Christian life and discourse.

After all, as I point out time and time again, our Lord was no mealy-mouth:

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and then you make that convert twice as much a child of hell as you are.”
…
“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”

– Matthew 23

And He did on occasion even blow up and start beating on people:

So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. – John 2

So while I despise Mark Driscoll’s views, I don’t think it’s right to focus on his tone. He obviously believes that he is right, so for us to condemn his tone because we think he’s wrong is counter-productive — what if we needed to use harsh language in a cause we believed was right? So don’t criticize Driscoll’s use of language, criticize his stone-age gender insecurity.

And if Mark Driscoll, the self-described “street fighter” (I believe I shall refer to him from now on as “that pathetic wanker who wants to keep the icky girls out of the clubhouse”) wants to call me “limp-wristed” or “chickified” for upholding gender equality, he may feel free prove it to me on my body with his choice of weapons at a time and place of his convenience. I’ve got 300 pounds and ten years of martial arts experience that may serve to teach him a thing or two about respect for fellow children of God.

Disappointment

Dear ACES Team,

So I’ve finally got FSX running a somewhat decent framerate, thanks to all the helpful hints on the net. The biggest improvement was due to turning antialiasing off and filtering down to bilinear and letting the video card do the rest.

So now I’ve got consistent frame rates of ~25 fps, even with normal autogen and 25% airline traffic. So I embark on a flight in the 738 from CYVR to CYYZ.

Couldn’t someone at ACES take the time out of their elephant-producing schedule to adjust the one variable to make ATC hand you off at a rate somewhat less than once every 30 seconds? And the other variable that make them clear you for a higher altitude 300ft before you reach your assigned?

But ignoring these annoyances that have survived two major version updates (in favour of Elephants!), the flight goes more or less as usual. There’s the awkward fact that every 5 seconds the entire terrain and clouds blink in and out of existence, but I guess I can live with that, because Bill Gates called me personally to assure me it’s all in my head.

Until I’m trying to intercept the ILS for CYYZ 33R. The GPS and the map both agree that the freq is 110.30, so that’s what I’ve tuned. But no ILS ever shows up. So I take over, do a bit of a sideslip over to the glide path (by the way, what freaking genius thought that the maximum bank angle for the 738 on autopilot should be 10 degrees, with no way to change it?).

At decision height, frame rates suddenly drop from 24 to 0.5. I kid you not. No gradual slowdown. All of a sudden I’m watching a literal slide show. I did manage to get on the ground:

So far my FSX experience has been one unmitigated disappointment. Not just this flight, every single one so far has been a exercise in complete frustration. I’ve been using the product since version 1.0 in 1985, and this one has given me the most grief of all of them.

To those who say “don’t expect to get all the good new stuff with old hardware”, I say bull pucky. At the same level of settings as FS2004 (the actual numbers in the cfg file, not just the sliders), performance is far worse. In any supposed “new version” of a product, I expect at least the same level of performace as the old one, given the same requirements.

The autopilot is even worse (I know that’s not saying much) — altitude and course excursions all over the place, and the aforementioned 10 degree bank angle. There are absolutely zero improvements to ATC — couldn’t they take even a day out of their elephant-producing schedule to tweak the two variables controlling handoff times and altitude clearances?

So thanks for nothing, ACES. You may have made some kick-ass elephants, but as far as my perception of your dedication and abilities to make an actual product that works like it should, all I can see is a big pile of elephant doo-doo.

As You Sow…

The absurd irony of Muslims around the world shouting “The Pope accused Islam of being violent — kill him!” has bemused me for some days now. Now the Archbishop of Canturbury has added his own voice to the call for Muslims to face up to the violence inherent in the system:

THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech.
Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.” …

Lord Carey, who as Archbishop of Canterbury became a pioneer in Christian-Muslim dialogue, himself quoted a contemporary political scientist, Samuel Huntington, who has said the world is witnessing a “clash of civilisations”.

Arguing that Huntington’s thesis has some “validity”, Lord Carey quoted him as saying: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

That last sentence reinforces the idea that many have put forward as the key idea of the present clash of cultures. Western culture is a culture of guilt, where one must be aware of one’s faults and strive to overcome them. Islamic culture is a culture of shame, where any slight against one’s perceived honor must be retaliated against with violence.

The fact that Western culture has been wildly successful at bringing freedom and prosperity to much of the world — often as a direct result of guilt over past crimes — and Islamic culture remains mired in poverty and despotism provides the cognitive dissonance that makes today’s Muslims so darn touchy about their culture.

(See also Ralph Peters’s Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States.)

Tilting at Straw Men

Matt Jones discusses a more than usually clueless Creationist’s attempt at rational discourse.

Previous thoughts on the subject can be found in this post.

Let’s examine the post that Matt responds to:

Evolutionists believe in 6 different kinds of evolution:
1. Cosmic Evolution – the origin of time, space, and matter. This is the big bang.
2. Chemical Evolution – the origin of higher elements from hydrogen. (If the Big Bang produced hydrogen and some helium, how did we get the others?
3. Stellar and planetary Evolution – the origin of stars and planets. (No one has ever seen a star form. What you see is a spot getting brighter and you assume a star is forming. It could be the dust is clearing and there’s a star behind it. No one has ever proven the formation of a single star. Yet it’s estimated that there are enough stars for every person on earth to own 2 trillion stars.)
4. Organic Evolution – the origin of life. Somehow life has to get started from non-living material. (But spontaneous generation was proven wrong 200 years ago.)
5. Macro Evolution – Changing from one kind of animal into another. (Nobody has ever seen a dog produce a non-dog. Big or small it’s still a dog. Dog, wolf, and coyote may have had a common ancestor, but they’re still the same kind of animal.)
6. Micro Evolution – Variations within kinds (big dogs and little dogs). Only this one has been observed.

It is not clear whether or not these reflect the original thought of the poster or the study series they she mentions. In any case, they are so full of misrepresentations, misunderstandings and confusion they are, in Pauli’s famous phrase, not even wrong.

The fundamental trick that Creationists use in their debate is to insist on combining the ideas of evolution, which simply means “change”, and random or self causation. That is, they insist that if you say that the number and kinds of species of living things on Earth have changed over time, that that change must have been purely random and causeless.

This trick is dishonest because the first idea is simply an observation about nature, and the second is a philosophical assumption that is not necessarily implied by the first.

It is true that the non-religious often cite the observation that things have changed over time as evidence that it’s all random, but that’s just as dishonest. The idea of evolution can say nothing about origins or reasons for change.

That said, let’s examine each of the statements above:

1. Cosmic Evolution – the origin of time, space, and matter. This is the big bang.

It is ironic that when the Big Bang was first proposed, many non-religious scientists opposed it on the grounds that it was far too creationist, in that it implies a definite beginning in time for the universe. As Matt Jones says, this is not just an airy-fairy theory out there; there are dozens of multiple lines of evidence that come together to suggest that our universe began in a singularity some 14 billion years ago.

Note that this does not imply anything about the origin of this singularity. I happen to assume that God caused the singularity. The non-religious will assume that it caused itself (note that recent inflationary theories that attempt to explain origins simply push the question further back). These speculations regarding cause have nothing to do with the observation that the universe itself, however it got there, began 14 billion years ago and has developed into what we see today. See Hugh Ross’s work for more on this.

2. Chemical Evolution – the origin of higher elements from hydrogen. (If the Big Bang produced hydrogen and some helium, how did we get the others?

This is simply dishonest. As Matt Jones says, this is simple nuclear physics — inside stars, which start out all hydrogen, nuclear fusion produces heavier and heavier elements, until the star explodes and spreads those elements out into the universe, where it eventually collects into planets and puppies and butterflies. In fact, we can easily reproduce this in labs, in nuclear weapons, and even in the comfort of our own workshops.

3. Stellar and planetary Evolution – the origin of stars and planets. (No one has ever seen a star form. What you see is a spot getting brighter and you assume a star is forming. It could be the dust is clearing and there’s a star behind it. No one has ever proven the formation of a single star. Yet it’s estimated that there are enough stars for every person on earth to own 2 trillion stars.)

This is dishonest as well. As Matt Jones says, we see stars in various stages of formation all over the place, AND changing over time. Astronomical records going back hundreds and thousands of years have contributed to our models of stellar formation.

4. Organic Evolution – the origin of life. Somehow life has to get started from non-living material. (But spontaneous generation was proven wrong 200 years ago.)

This is also dishonest. The “spontaneous generation” thing is a shibboleth among creationists, but it’s utterly a non sequitur. Because Ben Franklin put some meat in a bell jar 200 years ago and it didn’t develop maggots, this means that there is no way that life could develop from non-life. Utterly ridiculous. We have not quite yet developed a comprehensive account of the development of life, but we are close, and progress is continually being made on that front.

In computer science we see that self-organizing and replicating systems arise spontaneously from all kinds of simple systems all the time. In other words, it is almost trivially easy to write a computer program that simulates some simple initial conditions which spontaneously evolve into self-replicating systems. It’s almost as if there were something about the universe that encouraged the development of life…

Note that the post’s author neglects to mention Avida, the most famous of these computer programs.

5. Macro Evolution – Changing from one kind of animal into another. (Nobody has ever seen a dog produce a non-dog. Big or small it’s still a dog. Dog, wolf, and coyote may have had a common ancestor, but they’re still the same kind of animal.)
6. Micro Evolution – Variations within kinds (big dogs and little dogs). Only this one has been observed.

I put these two together because they reflect a false dichotomy perpetuated by Creationists. Biologically there is no difference. Creationists tend to define the former as being the production of new species, which generally happens when the new species cannot interbreed with the old (although the definition of species and speciation is fuzzy). However, there are many instances of speciation observed in the wild, thus rendering the Creationists’ argument invalid! In Creationist terms, we have observed “macro evolution” in the wild.

In addition, anyone who looks honestly at the fossil record can see a continuous progression of forms. St. Augustine himself, observing the indications of branching families in nature, proposed that animals had evolved from a few initial forms.

Furthermore, the study of genetics shows clearly that we have evolved from earlier forms. We can track individual genes in the genome over time and observe how the various families in nature have developed with mutated versions of those genes, and how some families’ genes contain retroviral DNA that was inserted as a result of infection. The genome is like a palimpset containing layers and layers of overwritten data that can be easily read, just like we can see the development of planets, stars and galaxies as we look out into space (and back in time) until we get a glimpse of the fire of creation itself — the 3 degrees Kelvin background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

The fundamental issue I have with Creationists is honesty. To insist that the abundant evidence of evolution in the universe must be coupled with a belief in its randomness is simply dishonest, for both Creationists and naturalists alike.

I can, in fact disprove it with a simple statement: I believe that God created the universe. I believe that that creation consists of the evolutionary processes we observe throughout the universe today. Therefore, it is demonstrably false that to believe in evolution must mean I don’t believe in God’s creation.

It is a scandal that some loudmouths in the church continue to cling to their own human-inspired interpretations in the face of all the abundant evidence in the natural world, which, as Scripture says, reflects the invisible qualities of the Creator who created it.