John C. Wright's Journal

I have three comments on the last topic, which I here draw out.

The Designer Universe Argument.

I have heard my fellow Christians argue that since life could have arisen from and only from this universe with its unique combination of physical constants, ergo the universe must have been intelligently designed. If every other possible combination of physical constants is equally probably, so goes the argument, that the chance of this universe having this particular set of constants is one in zillion. Ergo is must have been designed.

My fellow theists in this make a weak argument: it is, in fact, an argument from ignorance. We have no warrant for the assumption that other possible configurations of physical constants are possible at all, much less that they are all equally possible. I agree that rolling a zillion-sided die and getting the exact number and the only number needed to produce life in the universe is an astonishing coincidence, perhaps too astonishing to be called coincidence. But I see no warrant for the assumption that "other universes" (a phrase that has no meaning) each have an equal claim to some other number. If the "die" is only a cube, our changes are one in six. If the "die" is a coin, our chances are one in two. If the universe is what it is and cannot possibly be anything other than what it is, then there is no die at all, no other cases to consider, and hence no calculation probability where we count the possible outcomes and compare them to desired results.

So, you can imagine a universe where the speed of light is equal to 2C rather than 1C? I can imagine a universe where Ozma of Oz defeated the Nome King by tricking him into drinking from the Well of Oblivion. What warrant can you give me to show that the 2C universe is one of the universes actually possible to have had been created at the Big Bang, but the Oz universe is not?

Read the remainder of this entry »

. jordan179 opines:

The problem with this posture it that is asks us to accept something that is hard to support, namely, the idea that there are multiple continua which somehow all obey the same laws of nature, in order to escape a conclusion that is easy to support, namely, that the Big Bang, or creation ex nihilo, was a miracle in the supernatural sense of the word.

To support this statement, let me make a careful distinction.

Read the remainder of this entry »

During an ongoing conversation concerning C.S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke, jordan179 asked

My answer was this:

I cannot speak for Lewis. My own brief brush with transhumanists was an eye-opening affair. It was my first encounter with people who try to deck out scientists and engineers with the hairy coats of prophets or the canonical vestments of archbishops, and end up merely embarrassing the engineers as much as the archbishops. I do not see why an engineer would be any better at the an archbishop’s job than visa versa. Listening to the metaphysical musings of physicists (who have never read of word of Aristotle or Kant) is embarrassing enough: you should listen to computer programming speculating about the moral evolution of the human soul. It is knee-slappingly funny, if it were not so sad.

Read the remainder of this entry »

A friend of mine sends me this letter. I submit it to your candid judgment, dear reader, to see if you can deduce a more reasonable explanation of the current and ongoing destruction of the once-great republic of the United States. He writes:

I’m not an economic expert by any means.

I’m just a guy who watches movies. But I noticed something from a couple of Mafia films that seems to explain our current predicament. It’s called ‘busting out.’

In GOODFELLAS, mobster Henry Hill and his pals get control of a restaurant. The owner owes them gambling debts he can’t pay. So instead, they become his silent partners. They then begin taking home cases of imported liquor, pans of steaks, mountains of fresh lobster, and so on. When t hey have all they can possibly want, they take more liquor and food and sell it, sometimes to competing restaurants, at absurd rock-bottom prices. They pay for it all with credit ‘6 the restaurant’s credit. And when, finally, no one will lend the restaurant one more dime, they torch the place for the insurance. They have squeezed the restaurant (really the owner’s good name, not so much the actual building) for every cent they could possibly get. They have ‘busted it out.’

On the SOPRANOS, Tony Soprano gets control of a sporting-goods store owner who owes him money. He and his buds order mass quantities of beer coolers and swimwear, which they give to kids to hawk at the beach for ten cents on the dollar. But it’s pure profit, as it’s all paid for on credit which they never intend to pay off. They come up with all the usual swindles to keep borrowing; using one credit line to pay another, ‘lost in the mail’, ‘gimme one more chance, I’ll have the money Tuesday,’ and so on. But finally, no one will lend the owner another cent, and bam! They torch the place.

Barack Obama and his complicit Congress have borrowed an utterly unsupportable amount of money already, to say nothing of the additional trillions they want to spend nationalizing our medical system. This can only end in hyperinflation, a default on our debts, or possibly both at the same time. The country afterward will be crippled by the near-dearth of credit in any form, because the government will have tapped out bonds, stocks, gold, credit cards, banks, every source of liquid wealth you can think of, they can think of, and will seize.

Why don’t they care? Well, Obama doesn’t care because like the Mafia, America is not his business. It’s something to leech off of. And as he obviously thinks that when he dies, the universe ends, he has a limited time to bleed America. Why not go for all he can, while he can? Why not bust u s out?

Not sure how the Congress feels. Do they really think if America is permanently crippled, they can walk away? Maybe some of the millionaires do. Of course, there won’t be anyplace safe in the entire world if America’s too weak to defend its citizens, but they don’t really think the world’s a dangerous place, most of ‘em. And some, though it’s hard for me to believe, may be so stupid they actually think we CAN borrow 2 trillion bucks a year and somehow skate when the bill comes due.

As a follow-up to the ongoing story published in the last post, has this to say:

Read the remainder of this entry »

Interesting little science tidbit:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17228-why-is-the-earth-moving-away-from-the-sun.html

This means, of course, that was have to start the process of global warming now, not to mention conserving solar power for later generations, so please go out this month and use all the fossil fuels you can!

From http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=31279

The quote below is from a review of Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford a book about the history of technology and society. It’s about six engineering projects that have taken place in Britain since WWII. The projects range from rockets through Concorde to computer games, cell phones, and the Human Genome Project.

Two famous figures in the science fiction world are mentioned in this anecdote:

Since they are British, I assume "pissed" in the sentence above means intoxicated with spirits, not intoxicated with anger.

My comment: Myself, I see no evidence that any new tool has transformed anyone’s "awareness" — a phrase I notice has mystical rather than scientific implications.

Like the debate between G.K. Chesterton and H.G. Wells about the wisdom of a scientifically-organized eugenic socialist utopia, history has once again come down on theside of the writer the intelligentsia dismiss as an irrational religious obscurantist, and history has debunked, even humiliated, the faddish optimism of the writers whose zealous idolatry of science is regarded by the intelligentsia as rational and progressive. I am frankly puzzled why worshipers at the altar of progress regard their worship as scientific, when real scientific thought consists, not of enthusiasm, but measured skepticism, detailed observation, and experimentation under conditions that control the variables. 

I know of no one who regards G.K. Chesterton as the great prophet of the modern age, even though he saw and described the ills of the modern world decades, or a century, in advance; but I often here the foresight of H.G. Wells lauded. We see in operation the reverse Cassandra effect, where the more completely exploded a man’s predictions are, the less skeptically his devotees regard his oracles.

By way of Kokorognosis:

Gladly: below the cut is the cover art for my book TITANS OF CHAOS, which I use for my wallpaper.
The art is by Scott Fisher, who outperformed even his considerable skills.
The main character, Amelia Windrose, was one I also drew many sketches of — I have a whole notebook at home full of them — was drawn here by Mr. Fisher, who never saw or heard rumor of this notebook, and who nonetheless drew the same features I did for the character.
Odd, no?
It is both (1) an advertisement to anyone peering over my shoulder at my computer, and (2) a pretty picture of a pretty girl for whom I feel both (a) the fatherly pride of creation, since I invented her, and, antithetically, (b) the innocent philogynous admiration of a fanboy, for whom most science fiction covers featuring attractive space princesses in postures of ecstasy are drawn. Read the remainder of this entry »

Lorna Dueck from Listen Up TV  (a Canadian Christian news program) interviewed me for her television show. This is an episode where Robert J. Sawyer, a real science fiction writer, is also being interviewed. They asked me some softball questions, and I bunted them. Smooth a pie. I did it over my lunch hour at a little church just down the street, so my talking head should have a nice altar and stained glass window behind me.

I do not know when or where the program will be aired.I wore my hat, so my hat will get some air time, and my Saint Justin-Martyr medal, which I used to flash secret messages in Morse Code to my Jesuit ‘handler’ working for MI-13, which the Anglocatholic secret service branch devoted to hunting Nazi vampires created by Nordic necromancy after World War II.

Fortunately, the young atomic rocketeers of the Space Rocket Galileo, led by Dr. Cargraves, uncovered the Nazi base on the dark side of the moon, where the Nazis had learned the secrets of reviving the undead from the Macrobe-led technocrat-sorcerers of Sulva.

Dr. Cargraves, after a desperate flight from the insect-guards of the Grand Lunar, entered the mysterious blue area of the moon, where the ruined city of the Inhumanoids is located, fell in love with Nah-ee-lah the Moon Maid, and, with her help, recovered his rocketship from space vampire Nazi hands, and flew back to Earth.

In secret consultation with the Pope, and with Antonio Barberini the Younger the Commander in Chief of the Papal armies hidden in the hollow core of the Earth since the days of Julius II (FOOTNOTE: fortunately, the Borgia Popes were able to find and exploit the secret volcanic vents under Aetna leading to Pelludicar, the interior world, long before the Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane discovered them, so that the Interior Lands were drawn into the orbit of the Holy League, and are firmly anti-Cromwell) it has been decided to return to the moon and perform an mass-excorcism of that entire heavenly sphere. This should have the beneficial side effect of robbing thewerewolves of Iceland of their extra powers they get when the moon is full.

Unfortunately the rocket-planes were supposed to have parts made by General Motors, and now that GM is going to be run by the same addlepated bureaucrats who run Amtrack, we doubt the parts will be available. We are negotiating with the Disney Corporation — you all know that the rides in Tomorrowland are just props to cover up the real workind spaceport Disney erected in Florida in the 1950’s, right? — to see if they can supply us, and the Science Patrol of Japan (who are coming along) with a fleet of longrange moonrockets. 

When I get more information I will tell you. Not about the Nazi vampire hunting. That is strictly hush-hush. About the Listen Up TV show.

NOTE ADDED LATER: Dark Horse Comics, who evidently (all of them) grew up reading the same high octane pulp I did have produced a comic book that sounds like it came from what I described above: Werewolves on the Moon fighting Vampires . American werewolves, no less.  I kid you not. http://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/16-275/Werewolves-on-the-Moon-Versus-Vampires-1

The Childlike Empress (or someone who looks like her) takes me to task for my condemnation of James Joyce’s ULYSSES. Here are the comments in full:

This is a book review by Theodore Dalrymple, a man of letter of no mean accomplishment. I reprint it here in full, without comment, except to say that his sentiments are remarkably similar to my own, despite our difference of faith. If you have not read Theodore Dalrymple before, you are in for a treat: in him, the old virtues of essayist and epigrammist and student of human nature live again, an avatism from a more cultured and learned age now lost.

What the New Atheists Don’t See
To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
Autumn 2007

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Samuel Beckett came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the bastard!”

Beckett’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Beckett’s line implies that God’s existence would solve some kind of problem—actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.

Of course, men—that is to say, some men—have denied this truth ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.

The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.

The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design).

Read the remainder of this entry »