ALAN MOORE, ANTHROPIC IDEAS AND A REASONABLE CASE

[alschroeder3]

Webcomics are a labor of love and a good thing for obsessive-compulsives. Most creators make absolutely no money from it, but they do it anyway. For a decade I did a superhero(ine) story called MINDMISTRESS. Lately I've been doing another webcomic, Quixotic with a capital "Q" on subjects never touched by any other comic I know of...except Alan Moore's PROMETHEA.

From PROMETHEA #12.

From PROMETHEA #31.

A lot of you know what Moore was talking about, but a lot of you don't. Many of you will object to his implications, some of you won't.

I started a webcomic called A REASONABLE CASE about half a year ago. Done in semi-cartoony style, we've covered matters of philosophy, theology, cosmology, Douglas Adams, escaping firing squads, and ultimate causes.

This is how it started. (I don't want to lure anyone to read it under false pretenses.)

Yeah, I know. Buzzkill.

But this is from the second page, about the ground rules I'll be following.

And this is from the third page, about evolution:

But so far mostly it's looked at the list of coincidences that are gathered under the "anthropic principle" and am currently looking at six possible explanations.

Here's a few examples:

Here's the original page: COINCIDENCE ONE, Page 2 .

Here's the original page: COINCIDENCE ONE, Page 3 (The Briefness of Beryllium).

The original page: COINCIDENCE ONE, Page 4 (Remarkable Resonances)

The original page: COINCIDENCE TWO (The Setup)

The original page: COINCIDENCE TWO, Page 2 (The Ghostly particles)

COINCIDENCE TWO, Page 3 (Cooking a Supernova)

Here's the original page: COINCIDENCE ELEVEN: EXPANDING CONSTANTLY, PART ONE.

Here's the original page: COINCIDENCE ELEVEN: EXPANDING CONSTANTLY, PART TWO.

Not for those bored by science or offended by any talk of religion. If the latter is a trigger for you--although so far it's mostly cosmology and physics--it's not for you.

After all, every webcomic can't JUST be about fart and penis jokes.

Just the (moderately) successful ones.

But hey, as long as I'm not being paid for it ANYWAY...

Might as well do what interests me. There's also the entertainment value to see if I'll fall flat on my face when I finish it in roughly six months. The odds of succeeding probably match the ones in that last panel.

Comments

[q99]

When talking about how unlikely stuff is, you can't overlook the number of opportunities for such chances to exist.


A one in a trillion chance sounds low until you have a couple hundred trillion tries at it. And quite often, a hundred trillion tries for a specific interact is a [i]low ball[/i].

At that point it's less 'coincidence' and more 'if you try things enough times, you *will* get results.'

[drtechnobabel]

Where the webcomic is currently, the author seems to actually be in the process of going over that very subject. He does acknowledge it, though I'm not sure whether he believes it's a reasonable answer or not.

[q99]

Though, fundamentally, the real problem comes down to "How does this imply a creator exactly? Isn't that requiring an even more unlikely set of coincidences to explain the current ones?"

[alschroeder3]

Well...let's just say "unlikely" will be examined in several different ways, and Occam's razor will have a big part in it.

[starwolf_oakley]

That creationist movie "Expelled" covered some of this. It wasn't a very good movie.

[alschroeder3]

Not familiar with that movie. I have heard of that "God is (not) Dead" which sounds pretty dreadful (haven't seen it either) about a silly challenge that no REAL philosophy professor would give. Sort of like the Jack Chick of evangelical movies.

BTW, what I'm striving here for is to be the ANTI-Jack Chick, at least as far as comics are concerned.

[skemono]

Not familiar with that movie.

Lucky you.

It was a movie starring Ben Stein about "intelligent design", how evil evolution is, and how academia is totally oppressing them. It got on a lot of atheists' radars when the crew interviewed people like PZ Myers & Richard Dawkins under false pretenses (i.e., they lied about what movie they were making when they asked for the interview).

[icon_uk]

Normally I'd say if it pissed off Richard Dawkins, then good, but doing it under false pretences takes all the fun out of it.

[alschroeder3]

Oh, THAT one. Yeah, didn't sound like my cuppa tea. I heard about that, but never wanted to see it, my interest in trying to "disprove" evolution being nil. So I forgot the title. People who think academia are distorting the facts for their own agenda deserve only contempt.

[starwolf_oakley]

Only part of that movie that's interesting is (supposedly) scientists tried to redo the "lightning hits the primordial soup creating the first form of life on Earth" theory, and couldn't do it.

Oh, and the end of movie has Ben Stein saying "Anyone? Anyone?"

[jkcarrier]

I'm enjoying the strip so far, especially the clever and funny ways you come up with to illustrate abstract concepts. Some great cartooning there. And I think you're doing a good job pointing out the limits of our current knowledge. Where you lose me is the premise that "Since we don't yet have a good explanation for how these things happened, it must have been a supernatural Creator at work". That's not exactly a testable hypothesis.

[shadur]

Basically, this.

You're doing a better job dressing it up in the sense of wonder Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse-Tyson try/tried to instill in people, but it's still just the "Intelligent Design" argument trying to pretend it's actual science.

[drtechnobabel]

In his defense (and at the risk of being wrong/sounding stupid) I don't think he's trying to say 'science proves God exists' so much as he is saying 'someone can believe in a god for logical reasons'. Of course intelligent design can't be proven scientifically (at least not with our current level of scientific understanding), but it can't be disproven scientifically either (again, not right now anyway). You guys are correct in the idea that intelligent design isn't actual science, but again, I don't think that's what he's going for. He might be using scientific facts to back up his argument, but I doubt he is trying to provide concrete proof so much as he is saying that believing in a creator doesn't mean you are being irrational, at long as your beliefs don't contradict what we do know. In other words, his argument is philosophical/metaphysical in nature, not scientific. Now, if this series ends with him saying that everything he talked about is irrefutable proof that there is to be a creator, and that you are wrong if you believe otherwise, then I would agree with you that his reasoning is flawed, because there he absolutely no way that he could definitively prove that.

In full disclosure, I will admit that I am probably projecting on him more than I should. I am a Christian (can't say I'm the best example of one, but who is, really? Unrelenting self-improvement is, or at least should be, the point), but I know that I could never prove my beliefs to you or anyone else scientifically, and that you have every right to disagree with me, as the burden of proof is on me and I can't provide any definitive scientific proof. However I could, for instance, tell you why I feel it is possible for me to believe in God while simultaneously agreeing that evolution is fact (as an aside, which as you may notice I'm doing a lot of here, it's a pet peeve of mine when people say they 'believe' or 'don't believe' in evolution. Belief implies that it's personal opinion rather than fact). My belief in God can only be metaphysical in nature, and me saying that there is a higher power in that regard is just as sound as someone else saying there isn't, because neither of us can prove the other wrong. Now if my beliefs relied on believing in something that DID directly contradict fact (like if I was a Young Earth Creationist, for example), then you would have every right to tear into my beliefs and prove me wrong, because you would in fact have evidence that directly contradicts me. After all, you may not be able to prove God doesn't exist, but you can prove the earth is way older than 6000 years, and that life does adapt over generations in order to survive.

Would I prefer you agree with me? Of course I would, everyone would prefer that other people agree with what they say. Would I fault you and claim you were wrong if you didn't? No, because again, the burden of proof is on me (after all, I AM the one saying that an undetectable entity with unlimited power is responsible for everything in existence, which even I'll admit sounds kind of ridiculous), and I have no way to prove to you that my beliefs are any more or less valid than yours.

I admit, I kind of got carried away there, and ended up making this more about me than I probably should have, but I hope you get the point that (hopefully) the author and I are trying to make here. You can't prove your metaphysical beliefs with science, but you can justify them, if that makes any sense.

[alschroeder3]

Don't oversell it. Grin

I'm just making, in my own words, a "reasonable case". I am NOT claiming anyone will be immediately convinced and/or converted to my point of view. But it is a point of view that I don't think has been presented widely---and many people are frankly, unaware of the various coincidences that allow us to evolve into thinking beings.

[alschroeder3]

There's certainly some truth in that. And there are certainly some who go overboard on this for MY tastes. I have a distaste for Hugh Ross on the pro-theist side, because he takes it TOO far---goes in about the specialness of the Earth, when you have a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, and at least a hundred billion galaxies. Any "specialness" of Earth is mere statistics. When you talk about the entire universe, though, there are some odd coincidences that seem to imply SOMETHING is going on. OTOH, saying that Design cannot be considered---eliminating it a priori ---doesn't strike me as a healthy reaction either. (NOT saying that's what you're saying, but some people would certainly say that.) That's why it was listed as one of six possible explanations in the strip just before the current one.

[alschroeder3]

Absolutely. But then, many of the alternatives proposed are EQUALLY untestable. But we'll get to that. Some things can't be explained quickly or in a few words.

[drexer]

"A lot of you know what Moore was talking about, but a lot of you don't. Many of you will object to his implications, some of you won't."

That is such an horrible manipulation of his words and viewpoint of the world.

Also, most of those numbers really do need context and/or sources. As they stand they are just spam.

Perhaps I'm being unfairly negative here, but I'm always bothered by people pushing the anthropic principle to the limit of its strectching point without even considering the weak variant.

[alschroeder3]

Oh, I'm not implying--remotely---that Moore is a churchgoer or anything like it. Anyone who reads any of his works, including PROMETHEA, would know that. Just that he's the first to acknowledge the anthropic principle in any way, shape or form in the comic pages---and some of the implications of THOSE PAGES I reproduced might lead some to resent its implications. As you probably know from reading PROMETHEA, a thoroughly mystic work which, in the first page I reproduced, had a running story by Aleister Crowley, that is not the case.

Actually, I think I have given numerous sources for the numbers I cite, with extensive links to other places to back them up.

But I can understand you being negative. And I am not asking you to take anything on my word. Follow the links provided.

[wizardru]

No offense, but this strikes me as the same level of 'I've done a lot of research to draw a conclusion that sounds reasonable to people who don't know the actual science' material that a lot of ID people use...and Neal Adams when putting forth his hollow earth theory.

Most everything shown here seems to be making the case of 'this is really unlikely, so it couldn't have been by chance, right?' That's certainly a position to take, but honestly the math just made me start skimming. If Cosmos has imbued one thing upon me, it's how much we have to reevaluate what we know, as what we know keeps changing. We know a lot, but we don't know a far greater amount. Ultimately, it all leads back to a question that can never be adequately answered, which is "what existed before existence?" If you do have a creator, then where did it come from? Eventually you will always get to a 'it's always been that way' answer somewhere down the line and that won't actually answer the linear desire of questioner, IMHO.

[alschroeder3]

No offense taken. It's a perfectly understandable reaction. Just bear in mind what I'm explaining is a starting point--a necessary one, but not the final point.

[mishalak]

Dealing with this on a purely art level and disregarding the arguments, I am bored by this. There are lots of words without much information and the drawings do not hold my attention.