Book Blog 4: 50 Years from Today

I've been slowly reading the book called 50 Years from Today. It is an interesting collection of short writings by 60 influential people in the world in 2008.

I like the book because it shows a glimpse into the minds of intellectual people when they think about what life in the near future might be like.

Many of the writers predict that technology will play a huge part in transforming many different areas of life including healthcare, transportation, international relations, and commerce.

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In chapter 54, Peter Marra predicts that in 50 years we will have lost 10% of the current bird population to global warming.

In chapter 55, Nsedu Obot-Witherspoon predicts that childhood diseases will become more prevalent due to warmer global climates.

William H. Meadows predicts in chapter 56 that humanity will rediscover the importance of preserving, instead of destroying and exploiting, the wilderness areas of the world.  

In chapter 57, Lawrence Krauss (who recently debated popular Christian apologist William Lane Craig) points out that in order for all of humanity to have available to it the amount of energy that is available to those in the West a Gigawatt power plant would need to come online every day for over forty years!  This will not happen.  Therefore, he says that our energy sources and/or consumption will need to be greatly altered in order to achieve the goal of having the energy that is available to the West available to all of humanity.  

In addition, Krauss predicts that scientists will create life in the laboratory, and that scientists will largely understand the origins of life within 50 years.  He also predicts that human intelligence could be surpassed by machine intelligence.  He's not as optimistic as Ray Kurzweil, who says that machine intelligence may surpass human intelligence in 30 years.  Krauss predicts that virtual reality will become a more significant part of life.  He points out that it already is a significant part of the lives of some people due to online communities such as Second Life, a virtual world where people meet, buy virtual land, have virtual employment, and basically live virtual lives.

Krauss ends by stating his hope that religious fundamentalism will not play as active a force against scientific progress as it played over the last thousand years. 

Pascal's Biased Wager

Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal is credited for popularizing an argument for believing in God known as Pascal's Wager.  It's a logical argument, but I don't think it's a persuasive argument.

One form of the argument reads like this:

1. If God exists, then I have everything to gain by believing in him.
2. If God does not exist, then I have nothing to lose by believing in him.
3. Either God does exist or God does not exist.
4. Therefore, I have everything to gain or nothing to lose by believing in God.



When it's broken down into logic book-style, it looks like this:

1. If P, then Q. 
2. If R, then S.
3. Either P or R.
4. Therefore, Q or S.


The first three lines are premises. The last line is the conclusion.

Objection

One way to disagree with a logical argument such as Pascal's Wager is to object to at least one of the premises. For example, one could object to the first line, premise one. Or, one could object to the second line, premise two. One could not object to the third line of Pascal's Wager, premise three, because it is necessarily true.

Pascal's Wager is not persuasive because premise one is weak, and premise two is false.

Premise one is weak because "God" is ambiguous. Which God is it referring to? Zeus? Allah? Jesus?  All of them? Pascal's Wager is biased because the "God" he believes in is the God of Catholicism.  But, if one picks a specific God, then the premise needs evidence to support it.  For example, if one picks the God of Catholicism, then one needs to provide a lot of evidence in order to show that the premise is true about the God of Catholicism.  One would need a lot of evidence, rather than a little, because the claim of the premise is extraordinary. What evidence is there that I would gain everything by believing in the God of Catholicism?

Premise two is just false. If God does not exist, then one does have something to lose by believing in Him. What does one have to lose? Believing in truth! If one believes in a God that does not exist, then one has lost believing in the truth. This is a real and significant loss. Therefore, premise two is false.

That is why I think Pascal's Wager is a bad argument.

Limits of Intelligent Design

I listened to a podcast interview of Dr. Bill Dembski in which he stated what he considers to be the proper scope of intelligent design theory.

At roughly the 20:55 and 26:50 minute marks, he says that one cannot necessarily infer from intelligent design theory that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, all-good, or all-loving Creator God.  That would be going too far, he says.  Instead, intelligent design theory points only to some yet unknown intelligence behind the evidence of design in biological life.

I really like to hear this type of honesty and strict logic when people discuss matters that often get muddled by emotion, faith, and alleged personal revelation.  Thanks Dr. Dembski.

Book Blog 3: 50 Years from Today

I've been slowly reading the book called 50 Years from Today. It is an interesting collection of short writings by 60 influential people in the world in 2008.

I like the book because it shows a glimpse into the minds of intellectual people when they think about what life in the near future might be like.

Many of the writers predict that technology will play a huge part in transforming many different areas of life including healthcare, transportation, international relations, and commerce.

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Chapter 50 is Doug Osherhoff's.  He brings up the need to develop alternative energy sources.  Oil, he says is being used faster than new sources of it are found, and coal is dirty and harmful in the long-term.  He is concerned about global warming, and how the United States has not taken a leadership role in dealing with that issue.  Also, he is concerned with religious objections to promising scientific fields like stem-cell research.

In chapter 51, Lyman Page talks about the recent explosion of interest in cosmology.  In the past 15 years, he says, scientists have pinned down the age of the universe to 13.7 billion years old (with an error margin of 200 million years or so).  In the next 50 years, he predicts that we will have much more powerful telescopes that will enable us to better observe the trillions of other galaxies in the universe.

In chapter 52, Carol M. Browner, former administrator of the EPA, not surprisingly highlights the severity of the problem of climate change, and predicts we will have learned to respect the environment more.

Popular atheist writer and biologist Richard Dawkins says in chapter 53 that we will have killed the soul.  Humans will be known to be only material beings.  The idea that humans have a soul which is separate from the body is an idea, he says, that will have been disproved.  

Book Blog 2: 50 Years from Today

I've been slowly reading the book called 50 Years from Today. It is an interesting collection of short writings by 60 influential people in the world in 2008.

I like the book because it shows a glimpse into the minds of intellectual people when they think about what life in the near future might be like.

Many of the writers predict that technology will play a huge part in transforming many different areas of life including healthcare, transportation, international relations, and commerce.

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In chapter 47, Earl G. Brown talks about the continuing "arms race" between humans and microbes.  As humans continue to fight against microbial disease, microbes continue to evolve.   Due to the genetic variations of microbes that survive our attacks, microbial diseases become more and more resistant to our prevailing methods of attacking them.  Therefore, says Brown, we need to learn how to fight microbial disease without creating a super microbial disease in the process.  

In chapter 48, Carol Bellamy predicts that humans will increasingly view themselves as citizens of the world.  We will look more and more to meet the needs of people who are outside of our "tribe," whether it be the family, religious group, or geographical area we live in.

In chapter 49, James Canton, a self-proclaimed futurist, says that population growth, IT, nanotechnology (the redesign of matter at the atomic level), neurotechnology, healthcare, and genetics will become increasingly important issues.  He predicts that most people will have had their genomes professionally mapped and analyzed in order to get an in-depth understanding of one's personal health concerns and potential health trends.  He also has a minority view in the book I think, which is that free markets are key to global prosperity.

Book Blog 1: 50 Years from Today

I've been slowly reading the book called 50 Years from Today. It is an interesting collection of short writings by 60 influential people in the world in 2008.

I like the book because it shows a glimpse into the minds of intellectual people when they think about what life in the near future might be like.

Many of the writers predict that technology will play a huge part in transforming many different areas of life including healthcare, transportation, international relations, and commerce.

----------------------

In chapter 45, Keith B. Richburg predicts that Chinese will be widely spoken, an AIDS vaccine will have been discovered, three-quarters of the world's population will live in one of a dozen or so of the world's "megacities," GMO varieties of rice will be feed the world and grow in practically every environmental condition, and virtual reality will become common entertainment.

In chapter 46, Greg Poland predicts that cancer, diabetes, dental caries, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, and multiple sclerosis will be thought of as vaccine-preventable.  Currently highly-invasive medical procedures will become non-invasive and require little to no recovery time due to the precision of treatment and lack of undesirable side effects.  He says exercise will become more important due to the rise of global affluence and love of leisure.