The Abnormal Distribution

As I pointed out yesterday when considering a critique of Swinburne, a lot of popular science blogging is concerned with the arguments for intelligent-design creationism: the argument that the nature and complexity of the world yields empirical evidence for the existence of a god, an “intelligent designer” who designed the world.

Such arguments have a long provenance. Thomas Aquinas published his five proofs of God’s existence near the beginning of his Meisterwerk, the Summa Theologiae, written somewhere between 1265 and 1268 when he was in Rome (see Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy, vol. 2 of A New History of Western Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, pp 67-9).

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I recently looked through Nature’s List of Top 50 Science Blogs and ended up reading quite a lot of the Good Math, Bad Math Weblog of Mark Chu-Carroll, a computer scientist at a major industry research center who is enamoured of mathematics.

The Science Top 50 Weblogs seems to be heavy on biology and the U.S. Theme du Jour – maybe Theme du Siecle – which seems to be evolution versus creationism. Chu-Carroll came across an argument for the likelihood of the resurrection of the incarnation of God, proposed by Richard Swinburne, Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of the British Academy. Swinburne proposed his argument in a book, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, published by the Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press in 2003.

Now, I am no connoisseur of arguments about a god – any god – nor do I usually have much interest in such. However, Chu-Carroll’s comment awoke my interest, not only because of its less than deferential nature, but also because I recall Swinburne writing a book on Bayesian confirmation theory in the early 1970′s, which I tried to use – and failed – as a student trying to distinguish good arguments from bad arguments when the premisses were not certain (if the premisses are certain, deductive logic is good enough – I leave aside the question of which deductive logic……). And so it seemed to me that assigning Swinburne’s argument to a category of “bad math”, indeed, according to Chu-Carroll, “mind-numbingly stupid math”, was probably mistaken.

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