Truth, faith, science and religion

I came across an interesting blog article recently, entitled Internet Arguments and the Search For Truth. It discusses the meaning of ‘faith’, and its relation to religion and science. The author has some interesting things to say about ideologues and debate, and I recommend reading it.

Whether science and religion can co-exist seems to be a common topic of disagreement and confusion, especially the divide manufactured between ‘Creationism’ and ‘Evolution’. Certainly it was a common theme to the questions people had to ask last year when the VUW Christian Union ran our Ask God in the Quad event here at Vic, and it has come up again this year.

Unfortunately some Christians have quite strong and loud beliefs along the lines of ‘God created the Earth in 6 (24 hour) days a few thousand years ago, this is the only possible way of interpreting the bible, and Evolution is an evil plot by Science to destroy people’s faith in God’. For their own part, their opponents often have equally fundamentalist views that Evolution conclusively disproves all religion, without even understanding very well what Evolution means.

I see no contradiction between science and Christianity. I am no biologist, and I cannot claim to have a terribly clear knowledge of exactly which of the claims grouped under the popular heading of ‘Evolution’ are generally accepted by the scientific community from what evidence. The closest I have come to studying evolution is the use of evolutionary computation techniques in AI (genetic algorithms, genetic programming, etc.), where they are a useful technique for optimisation and machine learning. My understanding is that there is a clear case from fossil records that there has been change with species throughout history, and a fairly clear case for speciation and common descent (at least to some extent), but there is no scientific consensus on how life came to exist in the first place. There seem to be a range of models for and hypotheses on abiogenesis, but no substantial evidence.

There are in fact quite a range of views within Christianity on the origins of life, based on different interpretations of the creation account given in Genesis. OriginScience.com gives one useful comparison of some of the views, from the perspective of a proponent of Old-Earth Creationism. TalkOrigins has a much shorter summary of some interpretations.

Christians have been thinking about these issues for quite a long time: Augustine of Hippo (a Christian theologian and philosopher who lived from 354 AD to 430 AD) had some interesting attitudes towards the interpretation of the Genesis account (as well as open-mindedness in general). He makes the excellent point:

In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

Davis A. Young has written a good article about Augustine’s views that I recommend reading, both for non-Christians and Christians.

Essay writing as graph traversal

As one of the assignments for COMP425 (Computational Logic) we have to write an essay about ‘logic and computation’. We were discussing this in class yesterday, and it was suggested that essay writing is essentially graph traversal (or perhaps flattening). I wonder how true this is.

History Meme

Following Patrick’s example:

At VUW:

andrew@rise:~$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
105 java
56 cd
51 mixerctl
39 git-branch
26 git-status
25 ls
19 ssh
15 git-checkout
13 xmms2
11 gitk


I am rather surprised that I have run git-branch more than git-status. I guess I tend to run it quite a few times in a row to see branches, create a new one and then check them again.

At home:

andrew@rata:~$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
114 sudo
49 ssh
31 less
30 clothes
28 kontact
27 cd
21 ls
19 ./ical2sqlite
13 ifconfig
13 aptitude


On my laptop:

andrew@rimu:~$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
83 ssh
74 sudo
39 ifconfig
31 xrandr
30 ls
25 sync_rata
25 cd
23 ping
15 iwconfig
15 grep


Blogs

I now post on a couple of other blogs that readers of this one may also want to read:

• The blog for my flat, Kelp. All of us in the flat will be posting on this from time to time.
• I have started a blog for my Honours project, where I will be keeping a regular journal of my research. This is probably of less interest to the general public, unless you find optimising compilers exciting.

New cellphone number

My cellphone number has changed. To derive the new number from the old, take the old number without the + as an 11 digit number (starting 64273) and add 577828525717. The result should be a 12 digit number, starting with 6421 for +64 21. I will keep the old phone for now, but will not check it often so I advise against calling or sending SMSes to it. Email, Jabber and IRC are still better ways to contact me when possible.

Book recommendation: Infinity Beach

I recently read Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction.

It is set about a thousand years in the future, when humans have settled on planets in a number of other solar systems but no other life has been found on any of the many planets explored. Humanity has reached the point where everybody can live a comfortable life, but there is no longer any real progress. The main character, Dr. Kim Brandywine, works for an organisation aiming to find extra-terrestrial intelligence but does not really believe that there is any life in the universe beyond that brought from Earth. This slowly starts to change when an old acquaintance suggests to her that the failed SETI expedition in which her sister died may not have been what it seemed. She begins to investigate, and becomes increasingly obsessed with discovering what happened as she uncovers evidence that the four crew of the expedition were apparently anxious to hide something.

Change of address

I moved out of my old flat yesterday, and into a new flat on Kelburn Parade. The new flat is quite a bit bigger (7 bedrooms rather than 3), though the bedrooms are smaller. It is of course much closer to the university. The flat is being run by TSCF, with people from VUWCU and ICF living there.

We do not have a phone currently, and I will not be online as much as usual as we do not have a proper Internet connection yet. For now I have a USB wifi adapter in middle of a parabolic wire mesh dish sitting propped in the window at a certain angle connected to my laptop to connect to the VUW network, then a cable between my desktop and laptop with my laptop routing so I can connect from my desktop. I then connect to SWANS with OpenVPN over that. This all results in a very flaky and unreliable connection.

We are planning to have a flat-warming on 2008-03-01, so keep that day free if you are my friend and live in Wellington.

Interesting post about geek communication

I recently came across this blog post summarising a talk by Michael Schwern at BarCampBlock about communication among geeks and between geeks and others. I recommend it to all, geek or otherwise, as it makes some interesting points about how geeks tend to communicate. One point I found interesting was about ‘tact filters’:

Most non-geeks have outbound tact filters: they filter what they want to say and add polite noise as it passes through. Geeks have inbound tact filters: they take bare communication with no politeness and just wrap it in assumed politeness as they interpret it.

When non-geeks talk, geeks think the polite sounds they make are redundant.

When geeks talk, non-geeks just think they’re being incredibly rude.

Do you think that this is true, and had you already realised it? What do you think of the rest of the article?

A tree

This morning, at around 9:50 am, I was walking from the fruit and vegetable market to church (as I do almost every Sunday), when a woman came up to me with a small tree in a green plastic pot with gold-coloured foil around it.
“Would you like a free tree?” she asked.
I replied that I did not really have anywhere to put it, but she gave it to me anyway, putting it into the bag in which I was carrying 3 carrots and 6 eggs which I had just bought. She said something about going away somewhere, it being a bonzai of some sort, and that she was sure that I would take good care of it, then returned to her car and drove off, leaving me with the tree. I continued my walk to church, with one bag rather more full than it had been. A few minutes later, I removed the foil.

An interesting occurence

Some weeks ago, I was walking up Northland Road on a nice sunny day, minding my own business, when all of a sudden there was a loud BANG comparable to a gunshot. I looked at the road in the direction of the sound, and saw a cyclist riding carefully to a halt, with his front tyre completely separate from the front wheel. It was rather surprising.