I was planning on ignoring this one, but tons of readers have been writing
\nto me about the latest inanity spouting from the keyboard of Discovery
\nInstitute’s flunky, Denise O’Leary. <\/p>\n
Here’s what she had to say:<\/p>\n
\nEven though I am not a creationist by any reasonable definition,
\nI sometimes get pegged as the local gap tooth creationist moron. (But then I
\ndon’t have gaps in my teeth either. Check unretouched photos.)<\/p>\nAs the best gap tooth they could come up with, a local TV station interviewed
\nme about “superstition” the other day.<\/p>\nThe issue turned out to be superstition related to numbers. Were they hoping
\nI’d fall in?<\/p>\nThe skinny: Some local people want their house numbers changed because they
\nfeel the current number assignment is “unlucky.”<\/p>\nLook, guys, numbers here are assigned on a strict directional rota. If the
\nnumber bugs you so much, move.<\/p>\nDon’t mess up the street directory for everyone else. Paramedics, fire chiefs,
\npolice chiefs, et cetera, might need a directory they can make sense of. You
\nmight be glad for that yourself one day.<\/p>\nAnyway, I didn’t get a chance to say this on the program so I will now: No
\nnumbers are evil or unlucky. All numbers are – in my view – created by God to
\nmarch in a strict series or else a discoverable* series, and that is what
\nmakes mathematics possible. And mathematics is evidence for design, not
\nsuperstition.<\/p>\nThe interview may never have aired. I tend to flub the gap-tooth creationist
\nmoron role, so interviews with me are often not aired.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n* I am thinking here of numbers like pi, that just go on and on and never
\nshut up, but you can work with them anyway.(You just decide where you want
\nto cut the mike.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n
It’s such concentrated stupidity, it’s hard to know quite where to start. So
\nhow about we start at the beginning?<\/p>\nDenise O’Leary claims not<\/em> to be a creationist by “any reasonable
\ndefinition”? Yeesh. No point even trying to argue with that. She’s just playing
\nthe usual ID’ers games with the definition of “creationist”.<\/p>\nThen, very rapidly, we get the usual victimization rant. Poor, poor
\nDenise. Such an unfortunate soul, so looked down on. I mean, she spews
\nnon-stop nonsense, and all she gets for it is a nice salary, lots of attention,
\na publishing contract, and some television interviews. Those IDers sure are
\nput upon, aren’t they?<\/p>\nThen – shock!<\/b> – she gets something right<\/em>. The subject of
\nthe interview was goofy people who want their house numbers changed, because
\nthey think that they got unlucky numbers. Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.
\nAbsolutely. <\/p>\nIt brings to mind an interesting story. Back when I was in college, my
\nfamily had to move. My parents had taken out a ten-year renegotiable mortgage,
\nand they couldn’t afford the increased payments while also making the tuition
\nbills for me and my brother. They ended up selling the house very quickly. But
\nit was really strange. The people who bought it were Chinese, and they hated
\njust about everything<\/em> about the house. They hated the landscaping.
\nThey hated the kitchen. They hated the tiling. They hated the slate foyer.
\nThey hated the windows. They hated the parquet wood floors. They thought it
\nwas too big. Honestly, if there was anything that they actually liked<\/em>
\nabout the house, I don’t know what it was. But they bought it. Because it
\nfaced in the right direction<\/em>, and it was the only house facing exactly
\nthat direction on the market. Their feng shui master had told them that they
\nmust<\/em> have a house that faced in that direction – that anything else
\nwould bring them terrible luck. So they bought it.<\/p>\nPeople believe all sorts of strange things. There are all sorts of peculiar
\nsuperstitions, about numbers, names, shapes, colors, directions. It’s all silly.
\nAnd it’s amazing how many of us still hold on to those odd ideas, or at least
\nthe behaviors that they imply. To get personal, I know perfectly well that
\nnothing I say is going to cause the world to turn on me and make something
\nbad happen. But European Jews have a lot of superstitions about drawing attention
\nto themselves, and I never<\/em> say things like “Well, things couldn’t
\npossibly get any worse”, or “Things are so great, I can’t imagine how they could
\nget better”. Those are both statements that “draw attention”. I know how stupid
\nit is, but that doesn’t change the feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when
\nsomeone says something like that.<\/p>\nSo yeah, superstitions like that are silly, and they do deserve to be
\nmocked. Mine included. But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Denise wouldn’t
\nbuy a house where a satanist had performed his phony rituals without getting
\nit purified by a priest with holy water, and that she wouldn’t see anything
\nremotely silly about it. She sees her<\/em> superstitions as legitimate,
\nbut others as mockable.<\/p>\nANyway, enough of that. Let’s get to the good part.<\/p>\n
She says “No numbers are evil or unlucky. All numbers are – in my view –
\ncreated by God to march in a strict series or else a discoverable* series, and
\nthat is what makes mathematics possible. And mathematics is evidence for
\ndesign, not superstition.”<\/p>\nOy, oy, oy.<\/p>\n
Numbers were not created by a supernatural being. No deity, no matter how
\npowerful, could have created a universe where numbers didn’t exist, or didn’t
\nwork. <\/p>\nThis is a surprisingly difficult and subtle point. But numbers, in some
\nsense, aren’t real<\/em>. They’re purely conceptual. There’s no such thing
\nin the real universe as the number 2. There are plenty of examples of “two
\nobjects”, but the number 2 doesn’t exist. Far worse, there is absolutely no
\nway of claiming that π really exists. There are no perfect circles in the
\nuniverse. And the only sense in which π can possibly exist in the real
\nuniverse is as a measurement. <\/p>\nNumbers are an artifact of reasoning. They don’t exist out there in the
\nvoid, waiting for someone to find them. They’re a consequence of a simple set
\nof rules. And those rules must<\/em> work. There’s no way that God can
\nchange the nature of an abstraction that doesn’t really exist. He could make
\nit impossible for us to conceive<\/em> of those rules. But the rules would
\nstill<\/em> work. Even if there was no universe at all<\/em>, those
\nrules could still be said to exist, and therefore, that the numbers still
\nexist.<\/p>\nIt comes down to a deceptively simple question: “What is a number?”. And
\nthere is no single answer to that question! I can define numbers informally,
\nby counting. I can formalize that a bit, and get two different kinds of
\nnumbers: ordinals and cardinals. I can formalize differently, and get surreal
\nnumbers. Still another way, I can start with different rules, and get Piano
\nnumbers. Or another way, and get computable numbers. I can define real
\nnumbers, complex numbers, vectors, quaternions. Those are all perfectly valid
\nconcepts – and they’re all different<\/em>. Which one really<\/em>
\ndefines numbers? All of them. None of them. Take your pick. Numbers are
\nwhat you want them to be. They don’t exist outside of your mind. They’re a tool
\nthat we use to understand the universe – but they don’t have any real,
\nobjective reality. <\/p>\nBut Denise’s stupidity doesn’t end there. She needs to qualify things – the
\nnumbers “all proceed in a strict series, or else a discoverable series”.<\/p>\nBzzzt. Wrong. <\/p>\n
You can look at that statement in two ways. One way of looking at it – which
\nI think is the one she meant – is just completely, utterly, wrong. The other way,
\nwhich you could reasonably argue is the correct interpretation, is totally
\nfouled up by that qualification.<\/p>\nInterpretation one:<\/b><\/p>\n
“The numbers all proceed in a strict series”<\/em>. My initial reading
\nof this is that “series” implies a listing or enumeration of one number after
\nanother. <\/p>\nThe problem with this is that you can’t put the real numbers into
\nthat kind of series. The real numbers are an uncountable set: you can’t
\nenumerate the elements of an uncountable set. So they can’t possibly be
\nput in a series.<\/p>\nYou could weasel out of that problem, by saying that the
\nqualification solves the problem: you can<\/em> enumerate the rational
\nnumbers: you can put them into a kind of series. Since she explicitly mentions
\nnumbers like π as being exceptions<\/em>, you could argue that she meant
\nthat the rational numbers could be put into a series, and that the “discoverable
\nseries” qualification was meant to cover the irrational numbers. <\/p>\nAlas, that doesn’t work either. First, from her wording and description, I
\nreally don’t think that when she said the numbers are in a strict series, that
\nshe had in mind an ordering where, for example, 2 comes before 1\/3, and
\n1\/3 comes before 1\/100. But you can’t enumerate the rationals in
\nanything like comparison order, which is what I think she was trying
\nto say.<\/p>\n