james mckay dot net

Power-only micro USB leads are a thing

So I took delivery of a new Arduino Micro at the weekend. Since this is my first foray into Arduino development, naturally I had to download and install the Arduino IDE and then plug the thing in. So I got out a micro USB lead and plugged it into the computer.

The LEDs on the board came on as they're supposed to. All well and good so far. But when you connect an Arduino to your computer and load up the Arduino IDE, it's supposed to show up in the "Select Board" dropdown menu at the top:

Mine didn't:

I tried adding it manually through the "Select other board and port..." option:

No ports detected. The "Ports" option in the "Tools" menu was greyed out.

I tried unplugging and replugging it. The computer didn't beep as it normally does when you plug something in. I tried looking in the Windows device manager ... not a trace of it. I tried updating and installing drivers ... again, nothing. I tried a second micro-USB lead ... yet again, nothing. I tried resetting it. I tried updating all my Windows device drivers. Again, nothing. As far as I could tell, I had just spent twenty pounds on a brick.

It was later in the evening that I tried it with a third lead ... to find that this time it worked.

It turns out that power-only micro USB leads are a thing. Most USB cables have four conductors inside them -- two for power and two for data -- but both of the ones that I had originally tried were power-only ones. In fact out of the seven spare micro USB cables that I have accumulated over the years, both of the first two that I had tried had only two. Cutting one of them in two and stripping back the insulation showed that this indeed was the case:

To add insult to injury, this one has the USB trident logo on it. If it doesn't support data transfer, it's not supposed to. Thanks to cheap-and-nasty knock-offs such as this, there's no reliable way to tell at a glance which micro USB cables support data transfer and which ones do not. Cutting the second failed cable in two confirmed that it, too, had only two conductors.

Fortunately all my other micro USB leads were fine, so I'm now ready to get my teeth into some proper Arduino hacking in my spare time. But as for the two power-only ones, to avoid any further confusion, I've thrown them away.

"Seven plus nine is not six"

I can't remember what the exact question was, but I do remember that it involved adding two three-digit numbers together. Let's just say it was 247 + 389. Which, as any reasonably intelligent seven year old should be able to work out, comes to 636.

Seven year old yours truly had worked this out, only to have it marked wrong.

Say what?!!?

I went over my working carefully. Seven plus nine is sixteen. Six in the ones column, carry one, add one to four plus eight gives thirteen. Three in the tens column, carry one again, add one to two plus three gives six. Six hundred and thirty six.

I wrote out the sum again, handed my work in again, and yet again it came back marked wrong.

I got hold of a pocket calculator when I got home. Much as it may be hard for some of my younger readers to believe, those were actually a thing when I was seven years old, though of course we weren't allowed to use them in class.

247 + 389 = 636.

I did the sum a third time, handed my work in again, and a third time it came back marked wrong. With the dreaded words "See me" in red pen next to it.

I duly went up to the teacher's desk.

"Seven plus nine is not six," she said.

I didn't know how to respond to that. I knew that seven plus nine is not six. But seven plus nine is sixteen. It still has a six at the end, you still write six in the ones column, you just have to carry one over into the tens column, and I had even written a little "1" there, as I had been taught to do, to show that that was what I'd done. But Mrs Lester was a rather stern kind of teacher and I was too shy to answer back to her, so I quietly returned to my seat feeling confused, not sure what to do next, and if truth be told, rather offended.

It's only recently, however, that I wondered if maybe she was actually trying to teach me something important. Something that every good teacher should be teaching their students.

Your teacher isn't always right, and when they aren't, you should challenge them.

One of the most important things that every teacher should be instilling into their students is critical thinking. Asking questions, fact-checking, and not swallowing everything you're being told hook, line and sinker are important skills.

Now from time to time I hear people claiming that they're "encouraging critical thinking" when in reality they are doing nothing of the sort. Pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists are especially bad at this: they will proudly tell you that they are doing so because they are "questioning mainstream narratives." But in reality, all they are doing is swapping out "mainstream narratives" for their own particular brand of pseudoscience or conspiracy theories. If you start applying critical thinking to their own claims, their enthusiasm for the aforementioned critical thinking quickly evaporates.

If your aim in teaching "critical thinking" is simply to get your students to think like you, or to repeat exactly what you are teaching them, then you aren't teaching critical thinking at all; you're spoon feeding them. On the other hand, one way that you can tell that you are getting it right is that your students start challenging you.

Introducing the occasional mistake into your teaching material can be a good way to do this, but it needs to be done carefully. The mistakes need to be ones that you should reasonably expect your students to spot, otherwise you will be teaching them misinformation. You should also make sure that you are giving your students the confidence that they need to challenge you. Stern, strict, no-nonsense or authoritarian teachers probably won't be able to pull this off, especially with children who don't have a great deal of confidence to begin with. But the lesson is one that every good teacher should be teaching their students. Make sure that you're teaching them to think critically about what you yourself are teaching them---and that you're giving them the space and the confidence to challenge you when you get it wrong.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Accurate and honest metric weights and measurements

My height is 1 metre and 78 centimetres. I refuse point-blank to quote that in feet and inches.

My weight, as of 12:30 on Saturday 19 August, is 79.8 kilograms. One again, I don't care what that is in stones and pounds, so working it out is left as an exercise for the reader.

Over the past three months I have made it my goal to take a five kilometre walk every day that I can. Once again, converting that into miles is left as an exercise for the reader.

Those who have engaged in discussions with me in (sometimes lively) debates about science and faith will be aware that one particular passage from the Bible that I am always quoting, over and over again, is Deuteronomy 25:13-16, which says this:

¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that I am an ardent proponent of metrication, frustrated at the lack of progress that the UK has made in this area since the initial push in the 1960s and 1970s, and totally opposed to any attempt to head in the opposite direction.

This one should be a no-brainer. With the exception of the UK, the USA, Myanmar and Liberia, almost every other nation on Earth uses metric units exclusively. It's not hard to see why either. Metric units of measurement make sense. Different measurements of the same units are related to each other by multiples of ten, with a consistent set of prefixes denoting their relationships. So getting from metres to kilometres, grams to kilograms, bytes to kilobytes and so on, you just notice the word "kilo" at the start and multiply by one thousand.

On top of that, metric units, or SI units, are the foundation for measurement in science, engineering, commerce, finance, law, education and just about every other context where measurement is used. They are based on well defined, easily measurable, high-precision quantities. They are consistent, unambiguous, precise, easy to understand, easy to work with, internationally recognised, and exactly the same everywhere you go. They are the lingua franca of accurate and honest weights and measurements worldwide.

Imperial measurements, by contrast, are a mess. There are sixteen ounces in a pound and fourteen pounds in a stone---or is it the other way around? Up until the nineteenth century, the number of pounds in a stone varied depending on where you were and on what was being measured. There are eight furlongs in a mile, ten chains in a furlong, 22 yards in a chain, three feet in a yard, twelve inches in a foot ... how on earth are you supposed to remember all the details? British and American gallons are different. British and American tons are different. I have no idea how much a fluid ounce is supposed to be. Repeat after me: an acre is the area of a rectangle whose length is one furlong and whose width is one tenth. None of it offers you a shred of sense or coherence whatsoever.

Someone asked me the other day on Facebook, in response to my quoting of Deuteronomy 25 yet again, whether I thought that having a mixture of imperial and metric measurements was unbiblical. I replied that it quite possibly could be. Having two different systems of measurement makes it a whole lot harder for consumers to compare like for like when trying to figure out how much something costs. Supermarkets being supermarkets, they will take every opportunity they legally can to pull off shenanigans like that. This was a concern back in the 1970s when the push for metrication was in full swing, and it would be a concern if we were to try to turn the clock back to imperial ones again.

Unfortunately, there are certain politicians here in the UK who, in the wake of Brexit, want to do precisely that. One of the most prominent of these is, of course, the Right Honourable Member for the eighteenth century, Sir Jacob Rees Mogg, who instructs his staff, in no uncertain terms, that imperial measurements they must use. The only reason why anyone would want to do things such as this is some sort of misguided rose-tinted nostalgia for the good old days of the 1940s and 1950s or earlier. Why don't we just bring back post-war rationing, outside loos, black and white TV, and horses and carriages while we're at it?

There is no such thing as "historical science"

Now if you're a Christian homeschooling parent, looking for a science curriculum that takes a Christian worldview while teaching accurate and reliable information about the history and nature of God's creation, I would recommend that you look no further than BioLogos's Integrate. In recent years, BioLogos have risen in prominence as champions of factual accuracy and honest discussion about science within evangelical Christian circles, and their entry into the homeschooling curriculum market is much needed in an arena that at times seems saturated with pseudoscientific and pseudobiblical woo---much to the dismay of an increasing number of Christian homeschooling parents.

Naturally, the peddlers of pseudoscientific and pseudobiblical woo aren't taking this quietly. Answers in Genesis's response to BioLogos Integrate is fairly predictable. In an article in September 2021 titled "Human Wisdom: Something to Suspect?", Bryan Osborne says this about it:

BioLogos’ Integrate curriculum critiques young earth creation with logical fallacies and fails to distinguish between historical and operational sciences

It's a common refrain that comes up in young earthist literature time and time again. They claim that "operational science" and "historical science" are two different things, and while the former is observable, testable and repeatable, the latter relies entirely on unproven assumptions and interpretations about the past that cannot be tested because no-one was there to check. Those of us who, as Christians, accept scientific facts about the age of the earth and evolution, overlook this distinction, they say.

Osborne goes so far as to say that because of assumptions, interpretations and worldviews, "historical science" is nothing more than guessing:

What about “operational” versus “historical” science? Operational science is using the scientific method in the present to gain and apply knowledge. Operational science is observable, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable. Historical science is using present-day observations, such as rock layers, fossils, radioisotopes, and interpreting them with a set of assumptions about the unseen past, a worldview, to make a guess about their origin and age. Since the past is gone, historical science is not observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Thus, historical science is drastically different from operational science. In historical science, your assumptions about the humanly unobserved past drive your conclusions in the present. And if you start with the wrong assumptions (wrong worldview) built on the wrong foundation (man’s ideas), you will likely get the wrong conclusions.

This is completely untrue. It is untrue because it itself overlooks something very important: namely, the one critical thing that both "operational" and "historical" sciences have in common.

"Operational" and "historical" science share a common set of rules.

Interpretation of scientific evidence is not a free-for-all. If it were, then we could claim that current mortgage rates were evidence for a young earth, because treknobabble. Similarly, one can not simply dismiss assumptions out of hand as being "just an assumption," otherwise you would be able to claim in court that gunshot wounds were not necessarily caused by bullets. Good luck with that.

Clearly, some interpretations are valid, but others are not, and likewise some assumptions can be legitimately challenged but others can not. We have to draw the line somewhere, and what allows us to draw the line is a common set of rules and principles that sit at the foundation of every branch of science, "historical" as well as "operational." It is by applying these rules that scientists can make a distinction between valid and invalid interpretations, and in so doing they can place constraints on what could or could not have happened in the past. A 4.5 billion year old Earth in a 13.8 billion year old universe fits within those constraints. A six thousand year old Earth in a six thousand year old universe does not.

What are the rules in question? The rules and principles of mathematics, measurement, logic and basic honesty.

"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to have accurate and honest weights and measures.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to report evidence accurately.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to interpret evidence in ways that are mathematically consistent and coherent.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to make sure that their conclusions are consistent with their measurements, and that they are not exaggerating things nor playing things down.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to correctly account for sources of error such as contamination.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to take steps to account for and eliminate cognitive biases.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to avoid logical fallacies.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to quote people in ways that accurately reflect the context from which the quotes are taken.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to apply the same standards of quality control to evidence in support of a theory as to evidence against it.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to account for all the evidence and not just a cherry-picked subset of it.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to have their findings reproduced by other researchers.
"Operational science" and "historical science" alike are both required to keep accurate lab notes.

These are rules that apply to every area of science without exception. They are not arbitrary. They are not designed to "stack the deck" against anyone. They do not change to suit anyone's whims or political agendas. Nor were they made up in some sort of ivory tower. They were forged in the fires of hands-on, practical experience over many centuries, in a wide variety of different contexts. Nor do they depend on your worldview in the slightest: addition, subtraction, geometry, trigonometry, differential and integral calculus, linear regression, error bars, standard deviations, Bayes's theorem and so on and so forth all work in exactly the same way whether you are a Christian or an atheist, and whether you believe that miracles are a legitimate explanation for scientific evidence or not. Neither "naturalism" nor "materialism" nor "secularism" nor "Darwinism" nor any other weasel word ending in "ism" have anything whatsoever to do with them. These rules are exactly the same for both "operational science" and "historical science." They are rules that everyone must follow in every context without exception, for the simple reason that not sticking to them is lying.

Why "historical science" needs to stick to the rules too

Now to be fair, you could claim that "historical science" differs from "operational science" in that you are less likely to do any direct damage if you get it wrong. But that doesn't give you a free pass to flout the rules. In fact, flouting the rules when discussing the "historical sciences" can do a lot of indirect damage for two reasons in particular.

First of all, it sows confusion in people's minds about what the rules actually are. If your arguments about "historical science" are riddled with blatant mathematical errors, sloppy thinking, logical fallacies, and misrepresentation of evidence, people in your audience will end up believing that such mathematical errors, sloppy thinking, logical fallacies and even misrepresentation of evidence are legitimate forms of reasoning. They will end up applying them to other areas of science and engineering, to finance and commerce, to politics, and to just about everything else as well. They will believe that they are acting with honesty and integrity when in reality they are not. This will have all sorts of bad consequences, from undermining their ability to do their jobs properly, to opening them up to prosecution for fraud, to even in some cases killing people. In fact we saw this happening a lot during the covid-19 pandemic. Many of the falsehoods in arguments against vaccination or masks have exactly the same logical fallacies and non sequiturs that I see time and time again in YEC arguments.

Secondly, it is a breach of trust. As I've said, the rules are simply the rules of honesty and getting your facts straight. If someone thinks that the rules do not apply to the historical sciences, what else do they think they do not apply to? What other forms of dishonesty do they think are acceptable and in what contexts? Furthermore, even if they acknowledge the need to follow the rules in other contexts, are they practicing what they preach? If someone isn't prepared to even acknowledge the need for accuracy and honesty about everything, how can they expect anyone to consider them accurate and honest about anything? It is this breach of trust that causes many young Christians to struggle when they learn that their church leaders hadn't been straight with them.

So I'm sorry, but when discussing "historical science," you must still stick to the rules. You must still report and interpret both the evidence and the methods used to analyse it accurately and honestly. For this reason, not only is the distinction between "operational science" and "historical science" invalid, but it can actually do a lot of damage.

Becoming like little children does not mean what you think it means

Another Bible verse that is repeatedly misunderstood and incorrectly portrayed as an anti-intelletual manifesto is Matthew 18:3:

And he (Jesus) said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

I've heard many interpretations of that verse over the years. Many of them make good and noble statements in themselves, but unfortunately they almost always miss the point that Jesus was actually making.

Take, for example, the idea of "child-like innocence." Innocence is indeed important, but how many children do you actually know (other than your own, of course -- everyone knows that their own children are perfect) who this actually describes? Anyone who's ever been bullied at school, or who has ever had to look after a screaming toddler throwing a tantrum in Tesco, will know full well that the concept of "child-like innocence" is a fantasy.

Nor is this verse an anti-intellectual manifesto. Jesus is not telling us here that our faith should be child-like, or, as an old song by Chris Bowater once put it, "children believe the truth unhindered by reason." On the contrary, the Bible tells us that we should move on to a mature faith, informed and tempered by wisdom. 1 John 4:1 tells us not to believe every spirit, but to test the spirits to see which are from God. If your faith is unhindered by reason, you won't just believe the truth, you'll end up believing a whole lot of patent nonsense along with it. Somehow I don't think Jesus was intending here that we should fall hook line and sinker for astrology, homeopathy, water divining, reading tea leaves, feng shui, ancient aliens, anti-vaccination, or accelerated nuclear decay.

So what was Jesus talking about then? The answer becomes clear when you look at the one thing that everyone ignores: the context from which this verse was taken. Here are the first five verses of Matthew 18 in full:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me."

Puts an entirely different perspective on it, doesn't it? Jesus's words were in response to yet another argument among His disciples about who was the greatest, who would be in charge. Children, by contrast, are anything but in charge. They are accountable to everyone and responsible for no-one. They have rules and restrictions that adults don't. They lack rights that adults enjoy. They have to go to bed early. They are not allowed to drive or to vote. They have to go to school. All in all, they are Just Another Brick In The Wall.

By telling us that we have to become as little children, Jesus was not telling us how to behave, nor that we had to dumb things down. On the contrary, He was calling for humility. He was telling us that the entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven is not at the top of the org chart, but at the bottom.

Featured image credit: Lead Beyond (via Flickr)

1 Corinthians 1 is not an anti-intellectual manifesto

1 Corinthians 1:18-31 is probably one of the most misunderstood passages in the Bible.

¹⁸For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
²⁰Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. ²²Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
²⁶Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. ²⁸God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, ²⁹so that no one may boast before him. ³⁰It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. ³¹Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

There are a few things that everyone needs to understand about these verses.

They are not a command to drop out of school or university.
They are not an instruction to pretend that you don't understand things that you do.
They are not a free pass to make things up, or to preach falsehood or misinformation.
They are not an invitation to let your education or training go to waste.
They are not a licence to view subject matter experts with contempt.
They are not an excuse for sloppy thinking, intellectual laziness, or dumbing things down.
They are not intended to make anyone feel ashamed of their Oxbridge or Ivy League education.

The "foolish things of this world" that Paul talks about here are people who lack education and understanding for reasons beyond their control. In New Testament times, only one or two percent of the population could even read or write. Basic literacy and numeracy skills were a privilege on a par with getting into Oxford or Cambridge today. In modern times, they refer to people such as children with Down Syndrome; to those born into poverty; to those living in war zones whose schools have been bombed and whose teachers have been killed; and to victims of discrimination who have been denied an education simply because of who they are. They do not refer to people who lower their intellectual standards by choice.

Unfortunately, far too often I have heard these verses preached in ways that seem to encourage or even command these things, telling us not to be afraid to appear "odd" or "unintellectual." To be sure there may be times when we may need to stand for positions that are unpopular, or take decisions that appear crazy at first -- any venture capitalist will tell you that very often the best ideas fall into this category, only to be vindicated later on -- but when the message being preached is one that demonises "reason" and critical thinking as if they were the enemies of faith, or when the "foolishness" being proclaimed is outright misinformation, then what we are looking at is the glorification of wilful ignorance. Such behaviour is not just foolishness; it is laziness and dishonesty.

It also misses the point of these verses completely. Paul's statement here is primarily a political one. Knowledge is power, and very often people with a good education or superior technical knowledge use that knowledge to control and manipulate others. We see that in politicians, we see it in lobbyists and marketers, we see it in the military-industrial complex, and we see it in advertisers and Big Tech, who invest vast sums of money on data mining and coming up with algorithms to manipulate and control people. One of the recurring themes throughout the Bible is redressing the balance of power away from people such as these towards those who are less fortunate. That is what the Beatitudes are all about, for example.

So what about those of us who do have a good education? For us, the relevant passage of Scripture is the Parable of the Talents. It's a familiar story -- three servants were entrusted with their employer's assets; two put them to work and doubled their investments, while a third just went and buried his in the ground. The response of their boss is pretty much what you would expect: the two who doubled their investments got promoted, while the one who did nothing ended up getting fired.

There is no shame in being intelligent or well-educated. Our skills, abilities and education are a gift from God and we need to acknowledge them as such and give thanks for them. But more importantly, we need to put them to use in ways that are fruitful. And we need to use them to protect those who do not have the same blessings as we do. There are ways in which their lack of education and understanding leaves them vulnerable to deception and manipulation, and we need to support them, protect them, and help them to avoid it.

Featured image credit: Tom Hilton (via Flickr)

The mother of all conspiracies

Some people insist that the theory of evolution, and deep geological time with its millions and billions of years, are all a lie, and a complete fabrication by the scientific community. But could this really be the case?

First of all, consider what kind of a lie we are talking about here. One that spans millions of research papers published by millions of scientists over a period of more than two hundred years. One that is detailed, meticulous, comprehensive, mathematically precise, and very self consistent. While not every study fits precisely, those that do not are the exception rather than the rule, and only ever concern the fine details and not the overall bigger picture.

It is not possible for such a level of deception to be sustained merely through casual fraud by individual researchers. To get the level of detail that we see in the scientific record, millions of scientists worldwide across multiple different disciplines -- geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, paleontology, anthropology and more -- would have to have been consciously and deliberately acting in collusion for more than two centuries to squander trillions of dollars on systematically misinterpreting, misrepresenting and even fabricating evidence in a tightly coordinated and disciplined way in order to weave such a narrative.

Such a deception would have to encompass scientists from all walks of life -- from undergraduates and postgraduates through to retirees, as well as people who have made career moves from paleontology, evolutionary biology or geology to other lines of work such as software engineering, who would no longer have any incentive to remain silent about it.

It would have to include scientists working in areas such as oil exploration and cancer and vaccine research, whose financial and professional incentives are to produce results that are correct rather than ideologically convenient.

It would have to include not just atheists but Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews. It would have to include scientists from multiple different nations, including places such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, where you would expect the prevailing Islamic religious climate to incentivise exposing such a deception rather than being complicit in it.

Every other scientist working in academia and industry would have to be turning a blind eye to it, even though they were having to compete with it for funding for their own research projects.

Accountants and administrators in academia and industry would have to be complicit in it, even though they in particular would want to scrutinise what the money they were managing was being spent on, and what return it was giving on people's investments.

Politicians worldwide would have to be complicit in it -- including the Islamic authorities in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries, and young earth creationist politicians in the USA. None of them are demanding investigations into what all the government grants on evolutionary science are being spent on, nor are they demanding that scientists develop additional rules and protocols to tighten up and prevent such deception.

Furthermore, the millions of people worldwide involved in the deception would all have to be so adept at keeping it under wraps that there is not a shred of evidence for it on Wikileaks or the dark web. Investigative journalists too would have to be complicit in it, because investigative journalists build their entire careers on sniffing out and exposing scandals such as this, and such a story would be the scoop of the century.

If this really were happening, then it would be the mother of all conspiracies. NASA faking the moon landings, 9/11 being an inside job, MI5 being behind the death of Princess Diana, chemtrails, alien spacecraft in Area 51, and the US Navy covering up the existence of mermaids are all child's play by comparison. If this really could be happening, then it is difficult if not impossible to think of a conspiracy that could not.

I shall leave the final word on that one to Charles Colson, who had this to say about conspiracies in his book Born Again:

I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world — and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.

Featured image credit: Beatrice Murch

Accurate and honest weights and measures everywhere

Whenever I address young earth claims, I always start off by quoting Deuteronomy 25:13-16.

¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lᴏʀᴅ your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lᴏʀᴅ your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

There are three reasons why I take this line. First, it establishes a clear Biblical basis for my response. YECs insist that the Bible needs to be our starting point, and accordingly I am doing precisely that. Secondly, my university degree is in physics, and physics is basically the study of what accurate and honest weights and measures look like in a wide variety of contexts.

Thirdly, and most importantly, however, I thought that it was something that we should all be able to agree on, at least in principle, no matter how old we believe the earth to be, or who or what we believe did or didn't evolve from what. I expected the young earth response to be either some sort of attempt (however ill-informed or unconvincing) to try to persuade me that their approach to weights and measures was indeed accurate, or even perhaps to attempt to deflect the question with an accusation that "evolutionists tell lies too."

I turned out to be wrong.

To date, almost every single YEC who has responded to these verses has done so by denying that they are even relevant to the discussion. One person said he thought I was "overthinking" things, and another said that I needed to "balance" them against other verses of Scripture. But by far the most common response has been an accusation that I've been taking them out of context, and that they are all about buying and selling, and not about "historical" science. So far, about a dozen different people have taken this line with me. At least two of them were staff members of one of the Big Three young earth ministries.

Demanding the right to tell lies

Not having accurate and honest weights and measures is, by definition, lying. This is the case in every context that involves measurement, whether it involves buying and selling or not. No exceptions, no excuses. I shouldn't even have to quote the Bible to make this point, let alone quibble about the context. It is simply a statement of the obvious.

This is why you can't play the "out of context" card here. Even if these verses did have some specific contexts in mind, to exclude them from other contexts where measurement is used is flat-out demanding the right to tell lies about those contexts. It is also effectively an admission that you know full well that you aren't telling the truth, but that you are demanding that your falsehoods be accepted as truth anyway.

But playing the "out of context" card has other implications as well. If someone thinks that the Bible’s demands for accurate and honest weights and measures do not apply to the historical sciences, what else do they think they do not apply to? And what other forms of dishonesty do they think are acceptable and in what contexts? If someone isn't prepared to even acknowledge the need for accuracy and honesty about everything, how can they expect anyone to consider them accurate and honest about anything?

For example, if they are undertaking any form of Biblical exegesis, how can their teaching be considered reliable about what the original Hebrew text of the Bible means, or about the cultural, social and political contexts in which it was written? Furthermore, even if they acknowledge the need for accurate and honest weights and measures in trade and finance, are they practicing what they preach?

What is the context of Deuteronomy 25 anyway?

Deuteronomy 25:13-16 comes towards the end of a passage of Scripture consisting of a variety of miscellaneous laws and regulations. In the NIV, Deuteronomy 23:15-25:19 is headed "Miscellaneous laws." Some of them involve trade, commerce and finance, but others do not -- other topics include such matters as marriage and divorce, the treatment of animals, caring for the poor and needy, handling disputes, and so on. The only overarching theme is broad, general principles of fairness and justice in society.

In any case, if you are selling books or educational material that promote a sloppy or dishonest approach to weights and measures, or if you are making a living as a public speaker promoting such an approach, what you are doing comes under the umbrella of trade, commerce and finance anyway.

The rules of measurement are universal.

Accurate and honest weights and measures are determined on the basis of universal rules. These are rules that apply to every area of science, whether you want to call it “operational” or “historical”; to every area of engineering; to finance and commerce; and even to some areas of politics such as how elections are conducted.

If someone’s arguments about “historical science” flout the rules, they will be sowing confusion in people’s minds about what accurate and honest weights and measures even look like in the first place. They will end up applying fallacies that they see in YEC arguments to other areas of science and engineering, to finance and commerce, and to all sorts of other areas. They will believe that they do indeed have accurate and honest weights and measures when in reality they do not. This will have all sorts of bad consequences, from undermining their ability to do their jobs properly, to opening them up to prosecution for fraud, to even in some cases killing people.

In fact we’ve seen that happening a lot over the past two years or so with many of the conspiracy theories around COVID-19. Many of the falsehoods in arguments against vaccination or masks have made exactly the same logical fallacies that I see time and time again in YEC arguments. For example, both adopt a very black-and-white approach to "unreliability" that takes the view that because something doesn't work perfectly, that somehow means that it doesn't work at all. By contrast, the rules of accurate and honest weights and measures tell us that unreliability must be quantified and that you can't claim that a measurement technique is any more unreliable than what is indicated by its error bars.

Accuracy and honesty are non-negotiable.

My position on all discussions about science and faith -- whether we are talking about creation and evolution, climate change, vaccination, election results, or anything else, stands. I don't have a problem with the age of the earth itself, but when discussing what can or cannot be supported by the evidence, honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information is non-negotiable. Any creation model, any interpretation of Genesis 1, any attempt to challenge the scientific consensus on the age of the earth or evolution, must obey Deuteronomy 25:13-16, and any that does not is not scientific, not Biblical, and not honest. As for people who deny that accuracy and honesty are even necessary, I find it very difficult to see how such people could possibly even be approaching these discussions in good faith.

Failing the FizzBuzz of geology

How much scientific knowledge do you need to fact-check young Earth claims?

Literal Six Day Young Earth Creationists love to point to the credentials of their leaders. Andrew Snelling and Steve Austin have PhDs in geology; Jason Lisle, Russell Humphreys and John Hartnett have PhDs in astrophysics; and John Sanford has a PhD in genetics. The irony of this is, of course, that they are quite happy to dismiss the overwhelming majority of PhDs who aren't young Earth creationists out of hand. But the implication of this is, of course, that if you don't have a PhD yourself, then you should just shut up because you don't have the authority to contradict them.

Or do you?

In my own field of software development, we have a problem. Very often, when interviewing job candidates, we will get someone with an impressive looking CV and impressive looking qualifications, yet who struggles to handle even the most basic programming tasks. When faced with such candidates, we need to filter them out at the earliest possible stage of the recruitment process in order to avoid wasting time and money.

To this end, candidates are often asked to complete a ridiculously simple coding exercise right at the very start of the interview process, typically in the initial phone screen. The most famous example is called the FizzBuzz test. It is based on a children's game, and it asks you something like this:

Print out the numbers from 1 to 100. But for every number divisible by three, print "Fizz". For every number divisible by five, print "Buzz". If a number is divisible by both three and five, print "FizzBuzz".

Even entry-level developers should be able to answer this question with their eyes closed. But many candidates -- some of whom even have PhDs in computer science -- struggle with it.

Only if they manage to complete FizzBuzz does the interview then proceed to more advanced topics such as object oriented design patterns, regular expressions, database concurrency, test driven development, or machine learning. If they don't, they are thanked for their time, the phone screen is cut short, and they are not invited for a second on-site interview.

One point worth noting is that as well as being a very simple test to answer, this is also a very simple test to administer. A suitably briefed member of your HR team should be able to weed out the non-FizzBuzzers armed with nothing more than the most rudimentary understanding of programming, and a crib sheet highlighting the important things to look out for. For what it's worth, here is what it looks like in Python:

for i in range(1, 101):
    if i % 3 == 0 and i % 5 == 0:
        print('FizzBuzz')
    elif i % 3 == 0:
        print('Fizz')
    elif i % 5 == 0:
        print('Buzz')
    else:
        print(i)

Young Earth Non-FizzBuzzers

There are some young Earth claims that I wouldn't expect everyone to be able to fact-check. It took me several evenings to understand the RATE project's study on helium diffusion in zircons, for example. I had to read the RATE report itself, its critiques, the RATE team's responses to the critiques, and a whole lot of background information. I had to revise areas of physics that I hadn't looked at since I left university. I wouldn't expect anyone without a university degree in physics or geology to even know where to begin with that one.

But this is where FizzBuzz comes in. Discussing helium in zircons is the geological equivalent of asking a job candidate to create a neural network to implement biometric face recognition software from scratch, in assembly language, on the Nintendo Switch. Instead, start with the claims that are easiest to understand and easiest to fact-check, and work up from there.

For example, you don't need a degree in anything to see that when a PhD geologist claims that a rock formation is not fractured, yet photos on his organisation's own website clearly show fractures in the very places where he claims there aren't any, he has failed the geological equivalent of FizzBuzz. Sure, he may try to explain away the fractures and "reinterpret" them when confronted by their existence, but when he started off by claiming that they weren't even there in the first place, how can you consider his "reinterpretation" to be credible?

Similarly, what scientific knowledge do you need to understand just how devastating a deal-breaker the RATE project's 22,000°C heat problem is for a young Earth? You just need to know that 22,000°C is four times as hot as the surface of the sun, six times as hot as the highest known boiling point to science, and hot enough to vaporise the surface of the Earth many times over. These are things you learn at school, or that you can find out with a simple Google search.

So here I pose the question. If a PhD geologist is making such easily falsified claims about aspects of geology that you, as a non-geologist, are able to fact check, why should you take them seriously when they talk about the aspects that you are not?

The time I forgot about the speed of light

The Fallacies of Distributed Computing are a set of eight assumptions, originally noted by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems, that are commonly made by programmers and architects who are new to distributed computing and network architecture. They are:

The network is reliable;
Latency is zero;
Bandwidth is infinite;
The network is secure;
Topology doesn't change;
There is one administrator;
Transport cost is zero;
The network is homogeneous.

All eight of these assumptions are wrong. In fact, these eight fallacies are the reason why Martin Fowler came up with his First Law of Distributed Object Design: don't distribute your objects.

The first time I fell foul of these fallacies was particularly embarrassing, because it was in a situation where I should have known better.

I was working for a small web agency at the time. A lot of our work was graphic design, webmastering and SEO for local businesses, but we had a few larger clients on our books for whom we had to do some actual coding and server administration. One of them was an airport taxi reservations company who wanted a new front end for their online portal.

Their database was running on SQL Server Express Edition (the free but hopelessly under-powered version), on the same server as the web front end, hosted in a data centre in Germany. Because this was running at pretty much full capacity, they asked us to move it to a larger, beefier server. Since this meant moving up to one of the paid editions, my boss did a bit of shopping around and came to the conclusion that we could save several thousand euros by moving the database to a hosting provider in the USA. Due to the complexity of the code and the fact that it was running on a snowflake server, however, the web front end had to stay put in Germany.

He asked me what I thought about the idea. I may have raised an eyebrow at it, but I didn't say anything. It sounded like a bit of an odd idea, but I didn't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

But I should have. There was one massive, glaring reason -- one that I, in possession of a physics degree, should have spotted straight away.

The speed of light.

The ultimate speed limit of the universe.

It is 299,792,458 metres per second now and it was 299,792,458 metres per second then. It has been 299,792,458 metres per second everywhere in the visible universe for the past 13.8 billion years, and expecting it to change to something bigger in time for our launch date would have been, let's just say, a tad optimistic.

Now that distance may sound like a lot, but it's only 48 times the distance from Frankfurt to New York. It simply isn't physically possible for a web page in Germany to make more than twenty or so consecutive requests a second to a database in America -- and many web pages in data-driven applications, ours included, need a whole lot more requests than that.

Needless to say, when we flipped the switch, the site crashed.

To say this was an embarrassment to me is an understatement. I should have spotted it immediately. I have a university degree in physics, and the physics that I needed to spot this was stuff that I learned in school. What was I thinking?

Featured image by WikiImages from Pixabay