Goodness – me!

Do you ever stop to think what you would like on your gravestone when you are dead?  It’s a good way of finding out what we really want to be like.  I don’t think any of us would like to see phrases like:

“Always selfish and greedy”

“Never had time for anyone else”

“Vindictive and hateful”

When we see a new baby, at a christening who would want to think that the baby would grow up to be a thief, or to have a string of husbands who she cheated on and deserted, or to be a child molester.

We know deep down that we want to be good.

In the 11^th century, Anselm of Canterbury described how being good is possible through ‘goodness’, and how supreme goodness is God.  So that desire to be good is actually us wanting to be like God (supreme goodness), to act like God, to be in his image.

St John’s describes in his gospel that God is love.  So when we love one another, our love is possible through love, which is through God.  We are choosing to act like God, to be part of God.

Each of us has the essence of goodness in us, and the essence of love in us.  God is goodness and God is love, so we all have God within us.  Sometimes we choose to ignore goodness and love, and instead choose to be selfish, vindictive or hateful.  But that is not what we want to be – as we found at the start of this post.

The true Christian religion is about helping us to be what we want to be – good and loving.  It is about connecting with that goodness and love within us; God within us.  It is about learning from Christ what goodness and love looks like, and trying to imitate him.

And if you want to be good and loving, then that means that you want to be like God.  Jesus said that ‘if you have seen me then you have seen God’; Jesus represented supreme goodness and love in human form.  So if you want to be good and loving, since Jesus was supremely good and loving, then you want to be like Jesus, and if you want to be like Jesus you can call yourself a Christian.

Christians pray to help make that connection with goodness and love.  Here’s an example of a Celtic prayer from Lindisfarne:

Help me dear Lord to care too much

To love too freely

To pray unceasingly

To forgive endlessly

To laugh fearlessly

To question

To live

To be who I am

To be where I am

To be what I am

To hope

To believe

To reach out my hand

That’s a good prayer, isn’t it?  It’s about connecting with God within us.  It’s asking God to help us be who we want to be.

Do you want to be the sort of person that the prayer describes?  You can take a step closer by praying that prayer.

Related posts

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/an-argument-for-and-definition-of-god/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-god-of-science/

 

Richard Miles – Archaeology: A Secret History

The description of this program on iPlayer is “Archaeologist Richard Miles presents a series charting the history of the breakthroughs and watersheds in our long quest to understand our ancient past. He begins by going back 2,000 years to explore how archaeology began by trying to prove a biblical truth – a quest that soon got archaeologists into dangerous water.”

Unfortunately the tone and style of presentation of the program was similar to the description.  The program frequently asserts that there is conflict between Archaeology and Biblical truth, and implies that Archaeology has proved the Bible to be wrong.  The church is presented as a dogma bound institution that can only consider that everything in the Bible is to be taken literally.  The church’s only contact with scientific methods was to use them to show that the world was created a few thousand years ago.  Isn’t he aware that different parts of the Bible are written in different genre’s?  Would he think that if archaeology could prove that there wasn’t a good Samaritan then that must show that Jesus was lying when he told the parable?  Does he think that Christians really believe that the Genesis account is to be taken literally?  As far back as the fourth century St Augustine was forthright in his criticism of literal interpretation of Genesis.

The presenter, Dr Miles, frequently implies that archaeologists were ‘in dangerous water’ by thinking – thinking is something that is presumably not allowed by the church.  Doesn’t he know that many of the greatest minds have been and continue to be Christians?  Even the greatest secular scientists realize that questions of God are not trivial.

Dr Miles  appears dismissive of the approach of looking for evidence to support a theory (Empress Helena seeking for evidence of Jesus’ crucifixion) – isn’t he aware that this is precisely the scientific method – build a large Hadron collider to look for a Higgs bosun for instance?  

Dr Miles seems far happier to find something and then simply guess what it might mean.  He appeared disappointed that the speculations of John Frayre (sp?) who ‘instinctively knew’ that the triangular objects had been made by human hand were not immediately adopted.

So for me, the undercurrent of generating a false conflict between God and Archaeology/Science, and the implied rejection of ‘belief’ spoilt what could otherwise have been an interesting and enjoyable program.  I am disappointed that the BBC feel the need to generate some sort of conflict or controversy in so much of their programming.

Related posts:

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/things-that-a-minimalist-christian-does-not-have-to-believe-the-genesis-account-of-creation/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/an-argument-for-and-definition-of-god/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/how-far-should-we-trust-scientific-prediction/

Related articles

• Reading: Can we trust the Bible? – Charlie Campbell (part 2) (farahgarcia.wordpress.com)
• Archaeology: A Secret History (lovelyoldtree.wordpress.com)
• Archaeology: A Secret History; Alex Polizzi: The Fizer Returns – TV review (guardian.co.uk)

Why I will never fly with SAS again

It began with a business trip to Poland.  I booked an outward flight with Wizzair for about £27 (including reserving a seat in the front two rows) from Luton, but the return Wizzair flight would have got me home after 8pm on the Friday,  so I decided to go for the earlier SAS route through Copenhagen.  It cost around ten times as much but the extra hours are worth it at the weekend.  First mistake!

I wait at the gate in Gdansk for the first leg flight to Copenhagen.  The flight time arrives.  No plane. No SAS representative to ask what is happening.  The Lot representative on the desk next door tells me that they see the flight is delayed, and while we are speaking the SAS rep turns up, and I see the plane arrive.  I ask the SAS lady and she says I have a slim chance of  getting my connection, and if I miss it then the next SAS to Birmingham will go via Frankfurt and get me to Birmingham at 22.50 … but boarding will be in about 10 minutes.

I decide it would be best to cut my losses and go Wizzair, but SAS don’t cooperate with Wizzair and so I have to ring Carlson (my travel agent) who helpfully check but inform me that the Wizzair flight is full.  They tell me that if SAS got me on the flight to Amsterdam then they can get me to Birmingham with Flybe.  The Amsterday flight is forty minutes later than the Birmingham flight, so that sounds feasible.  If I miss the Birmingham flight then I will have to get the SAS groundstaff at Copenhagen to route me to Amsterdam and Carlson will book the Flybe flight – SAS don’t work with Flybe.  I decide to try it as I’m now the only one who hasn’t yet boarded.  Second mistake!

Things look up as the stewardess says ‘don’t worry, we will be quick – it’s only forty minute flight’.   And then she helpfully announces the departure gates for tight connections.  The forty minutes becomes more of course because of waiting to take off, taxiing, queuing to get off, but I’m in the terminal 15 minutes before the Birmingham flight is due to leave.  There is still hope.  But then I see the queue through passport control.  Fifty people at least, maybe a hundred. And only one passport gate open!  Do I be very un-English and queue jump saying my flight is about to leave?  I see the sign on the board tells me to go to the transfer center and I naively think that perhaps they will be able to get me directly on the flight – like sometime Lufthansa will meet you at the gate when your connection is tight.  Third mistake!

I follow the signs to the transfer center  and then they stop.  Have I arrived?  There is a row of desks but only one person sat at them speaking with a customer.  Nothing tells me it is the transfer center  but I see no more signs telling me where to go.  I realise the chance of getting the Birmingham flight is nil.  But I hold out hope of the Amsterdam option.  The person at the desk finishes with his customer so I approach and ask if it’s the transfer center  he says yes.  I begin to explain my situation but he tells me I have to take a ticket.  Huh?  You take a ticket and when your number comes up I will speak to you.  Oh!  Like the meat counter at Sainsbury’s I guess.  I find a machine which I guess is where you get a ticket, but the first is dead.  The second dispenses a ticket.  It gives me number A182, but he is now dealing with A171.  I quickly estimate, five minutes per person and 11 people in front of me…  I won’t even be able to speak to anyone from SAS until the Amsterdam option is gone.  I ring Carlson again, and speak to the woman I spoke to before.  She helpfully tries to look for other options.  As I watch I see the number that the SAS rep is dealing with is now C007.  Huh?  There are not just A series numbers!  Who knows how many people are in front of me?  Things are looking worse!

But I have my meat queue ticket number, so I explore.  I see that there is a SAS to Heathrow leaving in about forty minutes.  Anywhere in UK will do by now! I find someone at the information stand in the airport and she helpfully rings the gate and finds that there are spaces, but the SAS gate rep tells her that I would have to be ‘in the system’ to get on it.  How do I do that?  Yup! You have to go to the transfer center   But she suggests I could try the SAS lady on gate C4.  I ask, but she curtly tells me that no, she’s just waiting for the last passenger at that gate and … you’ve guessed it … I have to go to the transfer centre.

Back at the transfer center  the A series has moved perhaps two numbers.  I ring Carlson again (we are getting quite familiar now) to see if they can get me on the flight somehow, but the system would mean that whilst they could get me a fresh ticket I’d have to check in  somewhere other than the gate (the transfer center ) so there’s not much hope – but it’s worth a try going to the gate.  I go through passport control, only five in the queue now, and arrive at the gate before boarding is complete.  The SAS staff consult each other but decide, no, they can’t let  me on.  They comment that it would not be a good business model for SAS would it.  I suggest that it is not a good business model that I won’t fly SAS again (I’m getting a little irked by now).

So I need the transfer center  I see that there is one this side of passport control – worth a try, but no, it’s temporarily closed ‘we are sorry for the inconvenience, please use the transfer center the other side of passport control’.  Sigh.  But how do I get back?  All the passport control gates facing out are closed!  With another SAS passenger we find someone to ask.  He resorts to banging on the window of the passport officer’s rest room and he comes and lets us out.

It is still some way off my number at the transfer desk, although there are now four people dealing with the backlog.  I discuss again with Carlson and they tell me there is a BA flight to Heathrow or an SAS flight fifteen minutes after that.  They are just looking up the costs when there is a rush on numbers and A182 flashes up on the screen.  ’Oh, my number’s just come up, hang on a moment’ and I start to walk to the assistant.  Too late!  He’s now moved on to A183, and the passenger was closer than me.  What?  Do they seriously expect me to take another ticket?  No way!

The nice Carlson lady books me on the BA flight, and my wife kindly comes from Rugby to Heathrow to pick me up.  We arrive home at 11.20pm, having left the office in Poland at midday UK time.  So much for saving a few valuable hours at the weekend.  Thank you SAS for taking such care of me, and treating me like a human being, and doing your best to make my journey smooth and comfortable!   Don’t you realise that treating people like a meat queue will not win friends?

I realised that what we need in situations like this is someone to talk to.  Not a machine that issues you a number.  Not a notice on the noticeboard.  I’d have been quite happy if I’d been quickly able to speak to a SAS representative who then arranged an alternative route.  I know things go wrong, flights are delayed.  But to be simply given a ticket in a queue of unknown length before you can even speak to someone, when your flight options are dwindling – that is the worst, that is the frustration, the hopelessness.  I just want a human being to talk to who can help me sort my problem.  Like the Carlson ladies, who were great!

So SAS have lost my custom, and I recommend that you don’t trust them with your travel plans either.

Oh, and I’m writing this at 4.30am because I need to get it out of my head.  Roll on weekend…..

SAS – shocking air services?  scandinavian air scandal?  can you think of any? feel free to add some of your own.

Proof of God?

A friend asked “Let us suppose it was absolutely certain there was no god but many people honestly believed there was – how different would the world look today?”

I could answer that if there was no God there would be no universe and no people to observe it.

Clearly, as we are both intelligent people we must be talking about something different when we say the word ‘god’.

The God that I conclude exists is a creator, and a God who sustains the universe.  Clearly the universe exists and continues to exist.  Ask a physicist why and he will probably say ‘because of the laws of physics’.  A rose is a rose by any other name, so at minimum my God is the laws of physics – we just choose to give it different names.

Perhaps my friend’s question is going beyond that definition of God.  Perhaps he is asking about a God who has ‘character’, a ‘me’-ness that I have.  (I know that I exist, there is an essence that is ‘me’).  What would things be like if there was not a God who had an essence of ‘me’?

It’s actually not easy to define what ‘I’ am.  Science of course shows that my brain has massively complex computational ability, but that doesn’t really help.  Literature and philosophy, and our daily experience tells me that there are things like love, joy, peace, thoughts, free will.  Let’s consider these as parts of ‘me’, and think – what if there were not a god who also had these characteristics.

But once again, the same sort of argument applies.  God is love, joy, peace.  Therefore without God there would be no love, joy or peace.  There would be no literature, there would be no mathematics, no equations, there would be not science.

Free will though is slightly different.  We know we have free will, and yet it is inexplicable by science.  It is inconsistent with the laws of physics.  Free will seems a bit of a paradox.  If God is the laws of physics, and free will is inconsistent with the laws of physics then how can that work?  A rational explanation is that free will is something that is a gift of God, that is not constrained by the laws of physics.  Therefore we begin to see what would be different in my friends question.  Without God we would have no free will, we would not be able to choose right from wrong, we would simply be robots who respond to stimuli.

But to explore the question further.  My last paragraph introduced right and wrong.  We know that there is right and wrong – even if we don’t always know what is right and what is wrong.  Right and wrong are different from free will, so let’s suppose that we were able to have free will but had no knowledge of right and wrong.  Clearly right and wrong exist.  Goodness and evil exist.  And yes, my definition of God includes ultimate goodness.  So without God we would have no constraint on what we do, we would simply live to serve ourselves.  The world would be governed simply by whoever was strongest.  We would be like most of the rest of the animal kingdom.  States like North Korea would be everywhere and left unchecked.  Anarchy would reign.  The world would be a very different place to live.

So have I proved God exists?  I think so (but I would) – simply because my definition of God includes things that we know exist.  I define that nothing can exist without God, and so anything which exists must be God.

My friend asked what if God didn’t exist but people believed that he did.  I hope that I have shown that such a question is not directly answerable, it is like the “can god make a thing so heavy that he cannot lift it” question, or “can God make something that doesn’t exist”.  But perhaps I’ve also been able to answer the questions behind the question.  Will it satisfy my friend?  I doubt it.  If any of us really doesn’t want to change our views then no amount of logical reasoning will make a difference.  But perhaps others will find the discussion interesting….

If you found this post interesting you might also like:

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/goodness-me/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-god-of-science/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/can-god-answer-prayer-in-a-universe-that-operates-according-to-the-laws-of-physics/

Irrelevant church

The church in recent decades has not been successful in the UK. The results shown below, although a little old now, are from one of many surveys that tell the same story – church attendance has  been in decline for a long time.

In the latest UK census, 60% of the population identified themselves as Christian, yet typically only 5% attend church.

In my town, the leaders of the churches meet regularly to discuss matters of importance.  This is seen as a success, and there are some noble initiatives that involve people from many churches working together: running a charity for the homeless, running food banks, helping people get out of debt, offering a friendship and flip-flops to late night-clubbers.  This is excellent work, and if similar things are not happening in your town then you have some catching up to do! But we must wait and see if this good work makes a difference to the statistics above.

If a business saw sales steadily declining like church attendance, the management would be desperate to explore anything that might change this trend.  A struggling business would go and talk with customers, and would work with key customers to improve the service that they provide.  Innovative products would be developed and tried on the market.  Similarly,  one would expect the church to encourage any initiative that aims to connect with ordinary people.

However, in mature businesses and large institutions there will always be those in charge who will want to decide what goes ahead and what doesn’t.  There will be procedures and processes that try to reduce risk.  That’s fine if sales are good, but in difficult times it brings sluggish response and inertia allows the competition to steal the custom.  In contrast, entrepreneurs see an opportunity in a market and act swiftly to see if they can make it a success.  Sometimes they fail but other times a life-changing product emerges.

I have been involved in a number of initiatives that the church has not been ready to engage with, and I have met others who have been unable to pursue their passion because it did not match with their leader’s view.  There is only so much discouragement that enthusiastic men and women can take before they give up trying.  I reached a point where I realised that it was impossible for me to work within the constraints imposed by the institutional church.  If I were to continue to try I would simply upset others and frustrate myself.  Entrepreneurs don’t fit well in big business.  However, I couldn’t give up trying to make God relevant to people today.

I wonder how many others simply give up and lose heart. If you have had similar experiences of feeling chained down and prevented from pursuing your passion, then be encouraged.  Try again.  Have a go. By yourself if needs be.  If God – that essence of goodness, creator and sustainer of everything,  supreme love – if God has given you a passion – don’t let human institutions stop you from pursuing it.

Resistance to change would be less of a problem if it weren’t for the statistics mentioned earlier.  But given the state of church attendance, what is going wrong?  In my experience, those in church circles simply don’t realize what the barriers that discourage interest in church.

To the 95% of the population who haven’t become immune to church, the activities offer little attraction.  I suggest below three possible reasons why the church is unable to connect with the average man and woman in England.

1) the church today doesn’t offer a solid explanation of who and what God is.

Many Christians in the public arena portray God as a God of the supernatural.  He will answer your prayers, but he isn’t involved in everyday life.  As science continues to discover more about the universe, there is less and less that can requires supernatural intervention and more and more that appears to have a satisfactory secular explanation.

Church leaders are rarely specialists in science and are not well equipped to deal with, for example, the apparent conflict between evolution and Genesis.  As science advances, outspoken atheists will claim that God is on the run, and use graphs like that above to support their case.

In the 11^th century Anselm was trying to understand and explain what God must be like, and did not constrain God to the supernatural. In my view we need more of this today.  People need to understand how God fits with the discoveries of science.  We need to understand how to respond to TV programs like for instance Brian Cox’s Wonders of Life series.  We need to show that a credible God is not just a God of the supernatural but a God of everything.  We need to show that the universe is more than a material universe.  I offer some thoughts on this elsewhere on this blog.

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-god-of-science/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/proof-of-god/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/goodness-me/

2) The church has diluted and distracted from the central message that Christ brought

In a rapidly changing world it is good to have something solid to hold on to.  The Bible is often grasped as that solid thing.  However, it seems to me that Christians have fallen in love with the Bible and turn backwards somersaults to try to justify that everything in it is completely accurate and that God must have had a reason for it.  The Bible contains the Old Testament, and if you have a viewpoint that everything in the Bible is true then there are difficult implications.  It says God hates homosexuality, but not why he does.  He is a God of wrath and anger,  commanding genocide, yet he is also love, and we are made in his image .   Paul wrote letters that said a lot about who should do what in meetings 2000 years ago, and since his letters are in the Bible things like women priests and bishops are the issues of major importance.  They are what we see church goers arguing about, and unfortunately they are not always gracious in the way they do it.  All of this is a distraction.

The central message of Christianity can be found in the Gospels.  You could throw away the rest of the Bible – indeed in times of explosive growth the gospel message was all there was.  People need to hear what Jesus taught, not stories about who got swallowed by what whale.

3) The church insists on subjecting attendees to uncomfortable and embarrassing experiences.

Everyone ‘knows’ that good Christians have to go to church (which is not true by the way).  So who outside the church would want to be a good Christian when it means:

Sit still and be quiet.  Stand and sit to order.  Enforced action songs.  Waving flags.  Amateur dramatics.  Organ music. 300 year old songs, that everyone must join in (or at least pretend to).   Weak coffee and embarrassing conversations. Cold.  Hard seats that are too close together.  Don’t ask questions.  Don’t suggest anything might be different.  Smile and pretend to be friendly even if you feel miserable.

Regular churchgoers put up with this and probably don’t notice anymore, but as I wrote in my book The Leap:

When I was much younger and recently married, I thought it would be nice to give my wife some sexy underwear – but how was I to get it?  I braced myself and went into the ladies underwear shop.  OK, I’m inside, but now what?  It would seem perverted to be fondling ladies underwear.  An assistant comes up, and I’m supposed to know what size and type of underwear I’m looking for.  Do I want red or black? Silk? Lacy bits?  Aaaaagh! – get me out of here!

That’s how I felt in church too, before I became a Christian. I look at non-Christians in christening parties and realise that that’s how they must be feeling too.  The church environment can be very alien and uncomfortable.

The church needs to decide what the Sunday meeting is for.  I was at a discussion group where we asked that question, and each of the people in the group  had a different answer, including a strategic call to arms / instruction for the week, a time to meet other Christians, a time to quietly contemplate God, an ‘outreach’ event to invite friends to.   I fear it can’t be a ‘one size fits all’, and so the church need to think carefully about what the Sunday service is.  It’s worth reflecting that for example William Wilberforce was not acting under instruction from his church leader when he fought for the abolition of slavery, but I am sure he obtained spiritual support and encouragement from his church.

Finally, I am convinced that today as throughout history we need the many who stood up in a synagogue and read out: “He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,   that the blind will see,   that the oppressed will be set free”

 

Related articles

• The Church’s biggest crisis? (godandpoliticsuk.org)

 

God, miracles and the laws of physics.

If something is consistent with the laws of physics, can it be a miracle?  If something behaves inconsistently with the laws of physics, does it prove that there is a God? Does a scientific explanation of an event say anything about the existence or non-existence of God? 

Consider the statement, “The earthquake was caused by the contraction of the crust of the earth”.  The statement in itself clearly says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God.  Yet people have often read meaning into disastrous events, considering them to be ‘acts of God’.

Whilst they may be right, just over 2000 years ago a tower fell on eighteen people and killed them.  At the time an investigation might have concluded that the tower fell due to subsidence of the foundations, or poor workmanship – there might have been a completely explainable ‘natural’ cause.  Yet there were probably a number of people who thought that this was God’s judgement on those eighteen people. The event is referred to in the Bible, and we hear that Jesus spoke to the crowd saying, “those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem?”  Clearly Jesus didn’t consider this event to have been an act of God.

Let’s consider another sequence of events that was also described in the Bible.  Jesus tells one of his followers to:

 “go down to the lake and throw in a line. Open the mouth of the first fish you catch, and you will find a large silver coin. Take it and pay the tax for both of us.” (Ref Matthew 17:27)

Clearly this might be explained by the following ‘natural’ sequence of events:  A merchant on a quayside dropped some coins and one fell into the water.  A fish happened to be attracted to the large shiny silver coin, and tried to eat it (we use such ‘lures’ to catch fish today).  The coin got stuck in the fish’s mouth.  The fish was rather hungry and particularly attracted to the bait on the disciple’s fishing line.  The fish was caught on the disciple’s line and he found the coin.  This explanation is fully consistent with the laws of science and our experience of the sorts of things that happen every day. But that’s not enough to satisfy us.  We can’t believe that it just happened by chance.

So why do we find the event so surprising?  Is it because we know that the particular chain of events is very unlikely?  We know that people drop money. We know that fish are attracted to shiny objects and swallow them. We know that people catch fish. So to catch a fish with a coin in its mouth does not seem so very unlikely.  Each event by itself is possible, although the complete chain of events becomes increasingly unlikely – I don’t personally recall hearing of anyone else who has caught a fish with a coin in its mouth. What makes the story special is that Jesus predicted that the first fish to be caught would have a coin in its mouth, and that he instructed the disciple to do such a strange thing in order to get the coin.  We recognise that there must be a ‘fix’ going on somewhere.

Derren Brown has been filmed tossing coins.  The film shows him tossing ten ‘heads’ in a row.  The probability of that happening by chance is (0.5)¹⁰ = 1 in 1024.  When we see something happening that has only a one in a thousand chance we know that there must be some fix, especially when we know the man is a conjurer – and yet we’ve seen it with our own eyes.  The explanation is that he spent days being filmed tossing coins until the unlikely event actually came up.  The difference in the story above is that Jesus only had one shot at getting it right.

Almost every week someone wins the lottery.  The chance of there being a winner of the lottery is extremely high.  Yet if a friend gave you a ticket in advance of the lottery and said “This ticket will win”, and then you did win you would know that the friend had fixed it in some way.  If you knew that your friend was not a crook, but had your best interests in mind it might make you pay somewhat more attention to what he said in future.

The conclusion from all these examples is that it is quite possible for something to be fully consistent with the known behaviour of the matter in the universe and yet still require some explaining.  Is there some sort of ‘fixing’ going on that we don’t know about?

Examples of ‘fixing’ are taken by many to be indication of there being a God; scientific evidence for God. And such examples may not contravene the laws of physics, but just be very unlikely events.  As we look at the discoveries of science there is no point doubting the validity, but (depending on your starting point) some things seem to be incredibly unlikely.  It is worth wondering, is there some sort of ‘fixing’ needed?

 

Related posts:

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/can-god-answer-prayer-in-a-universe-that-operates-according-to-the-laws-of-physics/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/an-argument-for-and-definition-of-god/

http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/evolution/

 

How far should we trust scientific prediction?

Scientific models can accurately predict behaviour of what we have measured. Popular science programmes imply that we can assume that what we haven’t measured is equally predictable.  Are they correct?

We can record data from all sorts of events.  A man walks to work, we can record how far he has got at which time, and we can plot a graph of it.  We can then derive an equation to fit a curve through the data points that we have recorded. Programs like excel do this automatically.  Some equations will fit the data very badly; others will match each point of data exactly.  So we now have some equations that match the data, but those equations do not predict what happened before and after we recorded our data.  They do not predict how the man got up and walked around his house before leaving for work, or how he sat on his chair for three hours before walking to get a coffee.  In this case it is easy to see that the equations are only valid as a model for the data that has been recorded.  We would be completely wrong to use them to predict all the walking that the man does in his life.

We have all seen a graphical representation of a sound.  Whenever any sound or noise is recorded it can be represented by a graph.  Once we have the raw data, it is possible to define equations that describe the shape of the data.  This is known as Fourier Analysis.  So, we have our raw data, and we have our equations, and we can find that the equations almost perfectly match the behaviour of the raw data.  In our Fourier analysis, we can take a short stretch of  completely random signal, and we can analyse it and model it with equations that match it almost perfectly.  But if we try to use those equations to predict the precise signal in the section of the noise before or after what we have analysed we will get completely the wrong answer.  The sort of shape will look similar, but the detail will be completely different.

Both of these are examples of what science does.  It records data and then it determines equations that match the data that has been recorded.  We use these equations to immense practical purpose and most of the time they hold true.  When measurement doesn’t match the equations then we tend to dismiss the measurement as faulty.  Nobody would believe me if I claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine!

However, we must recognise that we may simply be in a short stretch of ‘white noise’ and it would be bad science and bad logic to insist that our equations hold true outside of the domain in which they were developed and tested.  Commentaries about potential other universes,  events before Big Bang, or even events in the distant past of our own universe or planet fall into this category.  It is not an act of science, but an act of faith to assume that the behaviour of the material universe has always been and always will be the same, as that which we see today.