Tag: information

Life Is A Game Walkthrough Part 8

What is information? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Data. It’s all around us. When we open up the internet, we are bombarded with information. Nowadays, there is constant talk about fake news and no matter what political side one is one, everyone agrees that some news is fake news, whether you think it’s Fox or CNN. We all laughed at the old State Farm commercial that said you couldn’t put anything on the internet if it wasn’t true. We also all laugh at the idea that April 1st is the one day everyone checks everything before they share it on the internet.

Something interesting about information is that though it travels through material means most often, it itself is not material. If you read this blog, you do not take the information out of it in a way that no one else has access to that information. The information is expressed in the material form of a screen, but it is not that form.

This also gets us then into imagination. We can take the information we have and combine it in ways that do not really exist. In the gaming world, Pokemon is one of the best examples I can think of this. One takes multiple creatures and types together and combines them to form new creatures with new abilities.

When a new generation comes out, it is always asked what new creatures will be used this time that have not been used before. For instance, this last generation had a peacock, a flamingo, and a dolphin. With imagination, while we are making things that are new, we are still only taking existing ideas and combining those with other ideas to make new things.

Consider the idea of taking adjectives and combining them with nouns that they normally wouldn’t be used with and lo and behold, you get something that is new. For instance, what if we took the noun “cat” and combined it with the verb “purple”? We are not used to seeing purple cats. I certainly can’t think of any purple cats that exist.

Somehow, we make things that are in some sense real. They are not real in the world outside of our minds, but they still have some kind of reality to them. We can have a discussion about the nature of Superman all the while knowing that Superman doesn’t really exist. He is a figment of the imagination in one sense, but at the same time he is an icon and a “real” figure that we talk about.

As a Smallville fan, when I was at work and wanted a Halloween costume, I would wear a Smallville T-shirt and change my name badge to say “Clark Kent.” No one saw that and thought “What an interesting name.” Everyone who actually noticed it would recognize immediately that Clark Kent is Superman.

What has this to do with our game? All of our game like any other game is still information. When I boot up a console game at my home, there is information being displayed on my screen, often in a visual form, and I am using the information that existed in the imaginations of other people and seeing it given a quasi-reality on my screen. When I play a game like D&D, I have to rely on imagination to see how the story works and my companions do the same. It will be an odd game if I imagine a dragon while my companion imagines a goblin.

All of this will be relevant as we go on, but for now, let’s realize the role information plays in our lives.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Book Plunge: Evidence Considered Chapter 17

Does atheism have a case with evolutionary computation? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We’re continuing our look today at the work of Glenton Jelbert. We’re still on the science section which many of you know is not my forte. On this chapter, I cannot comment much because I do not claim to understand the science. What I will comment on is a couple of claims that Jelbert makes that I think can be worth discussing.

Jelbert does rightly say that a goal is central to biological evolution. The goal in biological evolution is the passing along of genes with the end result being reproduction, survival, and food. Jelbert in the chapter says he puts the word goal in quotation marks because goal implies an intent.

The fascinating thing about this is that this is something that fits exactly in line with classical theism. When classical theists talk about teleology, they do not mean intelligent design. Instead, what they mean is that things do indeed act towards an end. This does not mean rational things or divine things. It means anything that is created acts toward an end.

Edward Feser gives a summation of what this means here. Too many atheists will be too quick to jump on their own assumptions. Feser tells us we have to drop everything we’ve heard from the modern ID movement and just look at the argument of Aquinas for what it means to him, not understood in light of modern ideas of teleology. I leave it to the reader to go through Feser’s article as he explains it much better than I can and those intrigued can get his books.

What this means then is that if we have a goal in evolution, then we have a basis for the existence of God. This does not mean that evolution is some entity that has this intent in mind. It just means that if creatures tend to, all things being equal, act toward a certain end, then there is a reasonable case for theism.

At the end of the chapter then, we get to another claim of Jelbert’s that bears relation to this. Jelbert is right that the removal of biological evolution would not require the acceptance of a creator. I agree. One could be an atheist even before Darwin. On the other hand, the acceptance of biological evolution does not require the negation of a creator. (If this is so, and I am sure it is, it makes me wonder why we’re arguing this so much.)

Yet Jelbert says something problematic when he says that Robert J. Marks II, his opponent in this chapter, has not connected a creator to any specific claims theists make, then he has not established theism. At this, he is definitely wrong. Suppose we could take the classical arguments like Aristotle did and establish there is some sort of deity, which is what Aristotle did. Even if we don’t know the nature of this deity in connection to an established world religion, we still have a deity. It seems to be a bizarre universe in which we can say a deity exists and atheism is true. Establishing theism does not mean establishing an Abrahamic religion. It means establishing theism. Establishing theism is necessary to showing an Abrahamic religion is true, but it’s not sufficient. Still, it is sufficient in itself to refute atheism.

We’ll deal with chapter 19 when we return.

In Christ,
Nick Peters