Wednesday, July 25, 2012


3,000-year-old wheat traces said to support biblical account of Israelite conquest
Archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tur claims find at Tel Hazor is a remnant of Joshua’s military campaign in 13th century BCE
By ASHER ZEIGER July 23, 2012, 10:58 pm 4
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Ancient city at Tel Hazor (photo credit: CC BY ritculio, Flickr)
3,000 YEAR old wheat SUPPORT Jewish conquest of Land of Israel
·                                 TEL HAZOR
·                                 ARCHAEOLOGY
·                                 AMNON BEN-TUR
Traces of burnt wheat found in Israel’s Upper Galilee are evidence of the 13th-century-BCE Israelite conquest of the Promised Land, an archeologist said.
Tel Hazor, a national park, has long been recognized as one of the country’s most important archaeological sites. From the 18th to the 9th centuries BCE, it was the largest fortified city in the country and had commercial ties with both Babylon and Syria. The Book of Joshua describes Hazor as the “head” of several kingdoms that united to fight the Israelites. In 2005, Tel Hazor was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
In recent years, the archaeological digs at Tel Hazor revealed a monumental structure, which scholars believe was the royal castle of Hazor, dating back to the Canaanite Period (third to second millennium BCE).


This season, the excavation, which is being conducted under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, uncovered a storage room in the castle. In the room were 14 large clay jugs containing seeds of burnt wheat.
Professor Amnon Ben-Tur of the Hebrew University has been in charge of the Hazor excavations since 1990. In an interview with Ynet, Ben-Tur said that the jugs were destroyed around the 13th century BCE, a period, he said, which coincided with the biblical account of Joshua’s capture of Hazor. According to Chapter 11 in the Book of Joshua, Hazor was the only city in the Land of Israel that was destroyed by fire during the conquest.
Ben-Tur’s assessment regarding the destruction of Hazor is far from being a foregone conclusion in the archaeological world. Scholars are at odds as to when Hazor was destroyed and by whom. While the most widely accepted school of thought accepts the theory that Hazor was destroyed by the Israelites in or around the 13th century BCE, there are many scholars who hold that Hazor was destroyed by either the Egyptians, the Sea Peoples, or nomadic tribes that wandered the region at the time.
Ben-Tur disagreed, noting that Hazor was not included in any of the lists of Israelite cities destroyed by the Pharaohs. Furthermore, Ben-Tur holds that the Sea Peoples traditionally stayed close to the coastline, and would not have conquered a city as far inland as Hazor.
Ben-Tur said that the recent discovery at Hazor “sheds even more light on Israelite history.”

Thursday, July 19, 2012


Video: To Dawkins's Dismay, a "Darwinian Physician" Goes Off-Message

David Klinghoffer July 12, 2012 4:32 PM | Permalink

Here's a very amusing video -- unintentionally so. Richard Dawkins interviews "Darwinian medicine" advocate Dr. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan. Dawkins starts off primed to have his strident Darwinism reflected back to him by Dr. Nesse, a genial fellow who wrote a book called Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine.
But almost immediately Nesse goes off message, and you can hear the tinge of concern in Dawkins's voice. In his face, you can see his doubts about Nesse grow as they talk. Even as he repeatedly reaffirms that natural selection alone lies behind the body's seeming "design," Nesse says all kinds of things that are delicious for viewers who are open to seeing actual, intelligent design in nature.
Nesse, for one thing, keeps using the word "designed" to describe physiological features. This gets Dawkins nervous: "You used the word design," he interrupts, "and we need to obviously interpret that in a special Darwinian sense."
Nesse allows that Dawkins is right, but in a way that raises awkward doubts:
You know I always end up using the word design and someone in the audience always says "You shouldn't do that, Dr. Nesse, because you don't really mean design." And they're obviously right of course.
He goes on,
But when you look at how the mechanisms of the body work, it's almost automatic to talk about them being designed, but what really gives the proof [otherwise] is when you look at how badly designed they are. No sensible person would ever have left the body the way it is.
You can imagine Dawkins's relief at hearing that.
As a first example of "bad design" that comes to mind, Nesse speaks about our forearm with its two slender bones, the radius and the ulna. If those bones were thicker we wouldn't be so vulnerable to a kind of fracture, a Colles fracture, that besets skateboarders -- who when they fall forward off their board, catch their weight on their extended forearms. That does sound painful, yet the same feature allows us to rotate our arms in countless delicate ways, with a fine dexterity that makes it possible to play the piano or the violin, or paint portraits.
It's a trade-off between sturdiness and mobility, explains Nesse -- a "historical legacy," an example of "path dependence": "Everything in the body...is trade-offs all the way down." He seems not to notice that this is true of all design, in the human context, that you can possibly think of. It's in the nature of the physical world that every good must be somehow bought at the expense of something else. Only in pure creativity, which happens in the mind, is no compromise necessarily exacted. Translate your creative idea into matter, and it's a different story.
Nesse goes on to speak of "six possible reasons...why the body isn't better designed." He catches himself yet again: "I'm using the word design over and over again. I can see why other people do, you know. It's very hard to find another word to refer to these mechanisms that work so well."
That work so well? I thought they were all so badly designed?
Dawkins interrupts again, and this time he sounds almost cross: "Once and for all, it looks like design. Natural selection produces a powerful illusion of design."
Nesse accepts the correction, with the same winning smile he wears throughout the interview: "I'm talking about natural selection as if it has a mind. It's so easy to talk that way, isn't it?"
Finally he makes a design argument -- not that he intends it as such -- that I for one hadn't heard before:
I am amazed, Richard, that what we call metazoans, multi-celled organisms, have actually been able to evolve, and the reason [for amazement] is that bacteria and viruses replicate so quickly -- a few hours sometimes, they can reproduce themselves -- that they can evolve very, very quickly. And we're stuck with twenty years at least between generations. How is it that we resist infection when they can evolve so quickly to find ways around our defenses?
"Amazing" is the right word. He's talking about the origins of multi-celled organisms like us: How did we ever survive, under a Darwinian view, long enough to escape being consumed by creatures that reproduce so much more quickly?
What exactly that transition was between one-celled organisms or few-celled organisms and multi-celled organisms -- the ability of an immune system to protect us from things that evolve so much faster than we do, that want to have us for lunch -- must be very crucial in the origins of life.
"Crucial"! Yes that's the word all right. This leaves Richard Dawkins with a frown on his face, as well it might. Watch the whole thing for yourself. It repays the investment of time.
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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The only siyum hashas that I am scheduled to attend is at Met-Life Stadium in New Jersey on August 1.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012


Mind and Cosmos

Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

Monday, July 2, 2012


On the Origin of Everything

‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss

Illustration by Andy Martin
Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING

Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
By Lawrence M. Krauss
Illustrated. 202 pp. Free Press. $24.99.

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Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explainsomething, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?
Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro­magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and allthe fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.
The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.
What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? Well, there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain ­arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-­quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements ofelementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absenceof the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.
And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.
David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.”