However, in this last email (titleless) he finally credits most of his ideas with the [fill-in your own anti-creationist adjective here], Hugh Ross.  Ross is (shamefully) a Canadian-born Old Earth Creationist and astronomer who started “Reasons to Believe.”

Marshall talks about how he listened to a talk from Ross from 1994 and was inspired.  After that he advertises listening to Ross (or himself, I’m not clear) speak further on the topic (since the complete idea wasn’t given away in five emails).  He then claims that it’s amazing that Ross’ “theory” (I’m not sure of what, that God exists and evolution is a damning lie?) is still “New Scientific Evidence” even though it’s “11 years old” (I guess Marshall hasn’t updated his email in a while).  Well I got news for you Perry, quantum mechanics and general relativity are still relatively “new” sciences.  If you want “old” science you have to look at Newton’s laws of motion, or Boyle’s Law.

I’ll leave Marhsall and his “proofs” with this quote from the end of his last email:

One of the hallmarks of a successful scientific model is that it holds up for years and even decades, even while scholars debate it.  I’ve been following Dr. Ross and his work, and virtually every fact he discusses here has been further strengthened and validated by all the physics and astronomy discoveries in the years since.

This time Marshall goes for the information argument.  He starts off by talking about how the email he sent is information and contains a message, and then gets to the crux of his argument:

Messages, languages, and coded information ONLY come from a mind.  A mind that agrees on an alphabet and a meaning of words and sentences.  A mind that expresses both desire and intent.

He then blathers on and shows his cards as an Old-Earth Creationist.  Big Bang theory is okay for him, but this evolution thing is just too hard to grasp.  I’m not going to do him the credit by quoting him any more on this post (I’ll make all the emails available).

His entire insistence through this email is that “information” cannot come about naturally.

Guess what Perry?  It can.

After that Marshall plugs his website a bunch (I won’t, go back to Part 1 if you want to find a link), and some audio lectures he’s done on this tripe.

I am not giving this topic any more of my time since I already have discussed methods for the creation of information. If requested I will articulate them out in a future post however.

Now we get interesting.  In this installment, Marshall pushes the fine-tuning ideas, saying:

If the universe had expanded a little faster, the matter would have sprayed out into space like fine mist from a water bottle – so fast that a gazillion particles of dust would speed into infinity and never even form a single star.

If the universe had expanded just a little slower, the material would have dribbled out like big drops of water, then collapsed back where it came from by the force of gravity.

A little too fast, and you get a meaningless spray of fine dust.  A little too slow, and the whole
universe collapses back into one big black hole.

The surprising thing is just how narrow the difference is.  To strike the perfect balance between too fast and too slow, the force, something that physicists call “the Dark Energy Term” had to be accurate to one part in ten with 120 zeros.

If you wrote this as a decimal, the number would look like this:

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

In their paper “Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant” two atheist scientists from Stanford University stated that the existence of this dark energy term would have required a miracle… “An unknown agent” intervened in cosmic history “for reasons of its own.”

Just for comparison, the best human engineering example is the Gravity Wave Telescope, which was built with a precision of 23 zeros.  The Designer, the ‘external agent’ that caused our universe must possess an intellect, knowledge, creativity and power trillions and trillions of times greater than we humans have.

Absolutely amazing.

That was just the first half of the email.

First: he doesn’t name these “atheist scientists.”  Up until now every quote has been credited, do me a favour Perry, tell me who they are (not so we may sick the machine on them). For all we know the “scientists” could be undergraduate psychology majors who were asked at a bar while inebriated (no offense to Stanford’s drunken undergraduate psychology majors intended).

Second: he doesn’t tell us who says the dark energy term is that fine tuned, and in fact there are some who state that when you look at a large number of the supposedly “fine-tuned” physical constants, there is no evidence to call them as such.  Many times the constants are called fine-tuned since the theorist only adjusts one while holding others constant, this produces a small range where one constant can fluctuate, however, by fluctuating multiple constants there exists potentially many possible universes that could exist.

Marshall then attacks multiverse theories:

Now a person who doesn’t believe in God has to find some way to explain this.  One of the more common explanations seems to be “There was an infinite number of universes, so it was inevitable that things would have turned out right in at least one of them.”

The “infinite universes” theory is truly an amazing theory. Just think about it, if there is an infinite number of universes, then absolutely everything is not only possible… It’s actually happened!

It means that somewhere, in some dimension, there is a universe where the Chicago Cubs won the World Series last year.  There’s a universe where Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t get cement shoes; instead he marries Joan Rivers and becomes President of the United States.  There’s even a
universe where Elvis kicks his drug habit and still resides at Graceland and sings at concerts.  Imagine the possibilities!

I might sound like I’m joking, but actually I’m dead serious.  To believe an infinite number of universes made life possible by random chance is to believe everything else I just said, too.

However, he confuses the word “infinite” with what physicists usually mean, as it “a really big number.”  And besides, Don Page (theoretical cosmologist at the UofA) can wrap his evangelical head around tieing multiverse theory to his faith.

Finally, Marshall finishes with this;

Some people believe in God with a capital G.

And some folks believe in Chance with a Capital C.

Two more installments left.

In this email, Marshall defends Big Bang Cosmology (which is nice, compared to some YECs).  He starts with the story of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, one of the greatest discoveries of the past century.

Unfortunately, Marshall continues speaking.  He grabs a couple interviews with Robert Wilson (co-discoverer of the CMB):

Robert Wilson was asked by journalist Fred Heeren if the Big Bang indicated a creator.

Wilson said, “Certainly there was something that set it all off.  Certainly, if you are religious, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis.”

Which is likely the good PR thing to say when cornered by an interviewer.  Scientists are known for being a bit sheepish with discussing religion, mainly since people who grant funding might look less favourably on someone who actively attacked the religious (especially forty years ago).

I do have to disagree strongly with Wilson though, a theory of origins that matches with Genesis was well accepted through most of the Roman empire, the following dark ages, and right up until the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and that was simply that the six-day, 6000 years ago story of Genesis was literally true, not a scientific theory based on the evidence pointing to a 13.73 billion year old universe.  It’s also worth pointing out the mutually contradictory creation myths of Genesis chapters 1 and 2.

Finally, I’ll touch on the other interview Marshall mined for:

In an interview, Penzias was asked why there was so much resistance to the Big Bang theory.

He said, “Most physicists would rather attempt to describe the universe in ways which require no explanation. And since science can’t *explain* anything – it can only *describe* things – that’s perfectly sensible.  If you have a universe which has always been there, you don’t explain it, right?

“Somebody asks you, ‘How come all the secretaries in your company are women?’ You can say, ‘Well, it’s always been that way.’  That’s a way of not having to explain it.  So in the same way, theories which don’t require explanation tend to be the ones accepted by science, which is perfectly acceptable and the best way to make science work.”

Except science does explain things.  The majority view of philosophy of science is that science does explain things, the theory of evolution is an explanation, just as much as the big bang theory.  Do new theories pose new questions? Absolutely, but that’s part of the fun of science.  Marshall seems to be attempting to hint at an anti-supernatural bias in science, however, in my opinion the evidence just hasn’t lead there (despite times it could).  Science isn’t inherently naturalistic in its assumptions, merely natural explanations are much more plausible than supernatural ones (due to the apparent overabundance of nature, versus the apparent absense of supernatural stuff).

More posts to come on the fun musings of Perry Marshall.

The first email was entitled “Einstein’s Big Blunder.“  Not exactly a sellar of a title to me – there’s enough relativity denialists out there already.  But this isn’t what the email was about.  This one is more about using big bang cosmology to set up for the First Cause argument.

He begins by screwing up basic history:

100 years ago, Albert Einstein published three papers that rocked the world. These papers proved the existence of the atom, introduced the theory of relativity, and described quantum mechanics.

One for three. First, the papers demonstrated the photoelectric effect (and that therefore light was a particle or photon), special relativity (general relativity was described later) and Brownian motion (that matter was made up of subatomic particles, the atom was first postulated by the Greeks and discovered by Rutherford and a combination of people described quantum mechanics, namely Bohr, Heisenberg and Shrodinger).

A rocky start, but Marshall continues:

His equations for relativity indicated that the universe was expanding.  This bothered him, because if it was expanding, it must have had a beginning and a beginner. Since neither of these appealed to him, Einstein introduced a ‘fudge factor’ that ensured a ‘steady state’ universe, one that had no beginning or end. [emphasis added]

The word “beginner” refers to someone who is new at something, like I’m a beginner at skateboarding, not a creator or a cause.  But setting grammar aside, we still have a misrepresentation here: he presents no evidence that this is why Einstein implemented a cosmological constant, more likely he added it because the consensus was that we live in a steady state universe, and its difficult in science to predict something completely out of line with fundamental assumptions (and rightly so, because as Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”).  So by putting forth General Relativity with a fudge factor that made it compatible with established science, it was easier to accept (even for Einstein, who probably assumed it first).  The issue of needing a god to get things going likely didn’t play into this issue.

Marshall continues:

Not only does the universe have a beginning, but time itself, our own dimension of cause and effect, began with the Big Bang. That’s right — time itself does not exist before then.  The very line of time begins with that creation event.  Matter, energy, time and space were created in an instant by an intelligence outside of space and time.

Hold on there Mr. Marshall. You made a big jump out of no where. Time did not exist before the big bang, yes. However, “matter, energy, time and space” do not necessarily require an external creation event. There is ample evidence that the total energy of this universe is zero (within some quantum uncertainty), this includes all the matter (which can be converted to energy, thanks again to Einstein for that prediction). And we do predict that matter/energy can “pop” into existence in our own universe via Hawking Radiation. So its not necessary that external creation had to occur. The beautiful result of quantum mechanics is that not every event has a cause (good example: the spontaneous emission of photons from an atom)!

Marshall finishes his first email with the appeal to authority quote mine that attempts to show a deistic/theistic side of Einstein:

About this intelligence, Albert Einstein wrote in his book “The World As I See It” that the harmony of natural law “Reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”
He went on to write, “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

Was Einstein spiritual? Definitely, but he was likely more of a pantheist than a deist or theist. Basically following the ideas of Spinoza that the universe itself is beautiful and worthy of worship, and may even be the manifestations of god. To put it simply “the universe (and its laws) is god.”

Since Marshall staggered his emails over five days, I’ll try to spread my responses out too. Look for part 2 tomorrow.