Calling All Physicists

Over the years I have been mulling a problem in metaphysics: the ontological mysteries of Quantum Mechanics. I have been developing a theory in this regard (see, for example, The Ontology of Time and my unresolved alternatives in Sense and Goodness without God, pp. 98-99, III.4.1), and now, informed by some recent discoveries and publications in the sciences (and finally a stronger understanding of EPR experiments), I am able to write up a proposal intelligibly enough for an actual physicist to evaluate it.

Are Women Just Stupid?

A friend of mine posted the following on a policy blog, and as I was meeting his request for a response by email I realized I was basically just writing my next entry for my own blog. So why not just post it all here?

Monday, August 25, 2008

Men or Women: Who’s More Intelligent?

The other day, having my evening tea with friends in the university’s fast food restaurant, one of my well-read friends claimed women to be intellectually inferior to men. Though calling himself a feminist, he went on to assert that women were simply unable to create good literature or make some groundbreaking scientific or intellectual achievement. ‘Why’, said he, ‘are there so few women’s names on the historical records of human intellect? They were, in the 20th century, given complete freedom to pursue education and have other rights.’ I readily came to the defense of the opposite sex by mentioning names of great women writers and scientists, reminding him that a mere half-century of freedom (if really given) should be considered as a factor in contrast to thousands of years of slavery and confinement of women in all human societies.

However, my friend weaseled himself out of the discussion by claiming that the brain characteristics of men have evolved for more intelligent and creative thinking. After the session, I searched the internet and failed to find any study that would definitely prove my friend’s claims. However, I thought of this issue as interesting and important enough to be brought to contemporary writers/readers’ attention. I would love to get everyone’s opinion on it. Please send your brief opinion (up to 300 words) via e-mail (to me at dempsey87@yahoo.com) on the question: Are Men more Intelligent than Women? I’ll include the responses in our next issue of The Audience Review. Please include the following information with your opinion: Name, Age, Sex, Profession, Location (City and Country)
Looking forward,
Ernest

At his request, here is my own reply:

Birth Control & Abortion

Here's an enormous change of subject for you!

I've been sitting on two topics on women's issues that I've long had in the queue for my blog. I've now found the time for them. I'll do one today, the other sometime later. Both relate in one way or another to my old debate with Jennifer Roth: Is There A Secular Case Against Abortion? The Carrier-Roth Debate (2000), which I blogged about a few months ago (in The Abortion Controversy).

The first of these issues is a claim I made in that debate, which I reproduce in full here (emphasis added):

However, abortion statistics, such as appear in any World Almanac, only measure medical procedures, including the use of prescription abortifacients like the "Abortion Pill." What is rarely understood in this issue is the fact that the most popular means of birth control actually partly relies upon inducing early abortion, and is very likely responsible for many times as many abortions as occur in counted procedures. Hormonal medications of this sort include "The Pill," and Norplant, as well as the numerous herbal solutions which share the same or similar chemical properties and are thus employed in third world countries as a less expensive alternative to the manufactured pharmaceuticals that they mimic. All these chemicals operate simultaneously on many levels, primarily by preventing ovulation and hindering sperm, but also by preventing implantation (and thus causing expulsion) of an egg that, despite all else, is fertilized anyway. In other words, all chemical forms of birth control, including the pill, cause abortions--and no one can know whether or when they have worked by their primary means or in this last-resort manner. This means that any discussion about the morality or legality of abortion necessarily entangles us in the morality and legality of the use of the pill and related implants and injections. This is all the more true given that women can deliberately cause this early-abortion effect up to three days after intercourse by taking a double or triple dose of their ordinary birth control pills.

In response to this, many years ago someone wrote to me that they had found a scientific article claiming there was no evidence of this. Though they knew there had to be something fishy about that (since they, like me, had read literature claiming the contrary) they wanted to know what was up with this article. The paper in question, by doctors Roberto Rivera, Irene Yacobson, and David Grimes, is "The mechanism of action of hormonal contraceptives and intrauterine contraceptive devices," in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 181.5 (November 1999): pp. 1263-69.

I'll now tell you more or less what I told this inquirer.

Our Mathematical Universe

It was recently brought to my attention that Russell Howell, Professor of Mathematics at the Christian academy of Westmont College in Santa Barbara (California) has taken notice of my article "Fundamental Flaws in Mark Steiner's Challenge to Naturalism in The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem" (2003). He only quotes (in fact somewhat misquotes) a single isolated comment from my article and ignores almost everything else it says, even though the ignored material contradicts his argument in ways he curiously neglects to mention. His paper, "Does Mathematical Beauty Pose Problems for Naturalism?" was published in the 2006 issue of the online Journal of the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences (yes, Christians have an association for everything).

I won't bother discussing the rest of his essay, since my article against Steiner already rebuts the same thesis Howell defends, and more than adequately in my opinion. I am only interested here in Howell's lame mischaracterization of my arguments, insofar as he quotes me at all. Since I'm not the actual target of Howell's article, I'm only mentioned on page 9. He brings me up only when discussing Maxwell's use of a particular heuristic to discover electromagnetic radiation: by combining the assumption of a "conservation of charge" with mathematical descriptions of electrical systems that were already empirically established, he calculated (in effect) that energy should be leaking away from electrical systems (he was right: it was being converted into radio waves).

Experimental History

A few weeks ago I teamed up with my friend David Fitzgerald once again to talk about historical method for a gaggle of godless kids at Camp Quest West. David and I dressed up in silly costumes and did a skit or two. One girl loved my hand-made ivy crown so much I was happy to let her have it after the show, but sadly we were so busy we forgot to get any pictures. Oh well. Anyway, the gist of our presentation was that the scientific method also applies to the field of history, and in fact history is really just another science, with its own peculiarities like every other field.

The Ontology of Time

Ontology is the study of being. Ontologists ask questions like "What does it mean to say something exists?" The ontology of time is therefore the study of what it means to say that time exists or that something exists in time. In other words, what is time? I discuss the ontology of time in some detail in Sense and Goodness without God (pp. 88-96).

In response to what I wrote there, Dave Matson asked:

Why should time be defined in terms of relativity physics where, presumably, it means a fixed future? I would think that time, as defined in quantum mechanics, would be equally preferable. As defined in this latter sense, time is presumably compatible with an undetermined future.

If we accept time as defined in relativity, then it seems that physicists would have to accept that there are "wheels within wheels" within quantum mechanics, which most physicists deny. That denial suggests that time as seen in quantum mechanics is defined differently than in relativity physics. One view seems compatible with a fixed future whereas the other does not obviously fit into that mold, if at all.

So arguing for a fixed future on the basis of relativity theory is tantamount to assuming that its definition of time should be preferred. Therein, I see a problem.

In answering this question I will use RT for Relativity Theory and QM for Quantum Mechanics. And I will not repeat what I said in my book. So if you haven't read it, though you don't have to in order to understand what follows, you probably should read it before commenting on any of this.

Yockey on Biogenesis

Was the origin of life so amazingly improbable only God could have done it? No.

Wasn't that a deliciously brief answer? Well, okay, first a quick recap, for those who don't like deliciously brief answers: I've argued this at dizzying length at the Secular Web in "Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept?" which led to a much briefer and considerably more rigorous paper, still my best known contribution to philosophy: "The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities against a Natural Origin of Life," published under peer review in Biology & Philosophy (19.5, November 2004, pp. 739-64). In that article I catalogued and analyzed seven frequently-repeated errors or fallacies deployed by creationists who try to argue that the origin of life ("biogenesis") could not have happened naturally. I even took the trouble of explaining exactly what they could do to avoid all seven errors and make their argument work. Unfortunately for them, actually doing this requires knowledge we don't yet have, which is their most fundamental mistake: they are arguing from ignorance, and arguments from ignorance are, well, ignorant. We simply don't know enough to say whether natural biogenesis is improbable.

Oh, you want to know what those seven typical errors are? Okay. Just a quick list: