08.31.08

Tim Keller @ Google

Posted in Faith and Practice, Culture and Ideas at 9:24 pm by Jeff

An absolutely fascinating talk and discussion at Google by Tim Keller regarding his book The Reason for God. Interestingly, this was one of Google’s better attended sessions of their “authors @ Google” lecture series.

2 Comments

  1. Adam said,

    September 15, 2008 at 8:19 am

    Jeff
    cool google video,

    I agree with several things Keller talks about and find them helpful.

    However, help me think about something -
    I’ve never found the watchmaker argument or whatever it is called (specified complexity?) - the poker analogy in Keller’s speech, to be even moderately convincing. Is not all of reality at the same time wholly improbable yet observably 100% likely? For instance, what are the chances that a woman by the name of Jackie, would be born in Denver, CO then adopted by her mom’s step-sister and raised in a baptist church that by chance invited a mennonite college (Tabor) choir to sing and recruited her to come to KS and meet a farm boy named Ken, marry, and have a fourth child by the name of Adam (me)? I’d say one in about 80 billion squared. And yet at my current vantage point, it is 100% likely and indeed, reality. So, that a seemingly infinite universe would birth one of billions of universes over billions of years that just so happened to allow for human sustainability seems while absurdly improbable - completely likely. The fact that we from the later, human point of view can wonder at the unlikelihood of our own existence seems analogous to my musing about the statistical improbability of millions of events aligning to coalesce into my parents having given birth to me.

    It seems that a theistic and a naturalistic point of view “tie” on this issue as to whether one is more compelling than another.

    agree?

    - Adam

  2. Jeff said,

    September 15, 2008 at 8:20 am

    I don’t think the analogy breaks down that easily, but I do see your point. My first thought is that in complicated systems, we expect complicated (though unexpected) outcomes, but in simple systems, we expect simple outcomes. The universe began as a simple system, so we should expect simple outcomes. But instead we experience a highly complicated outcome. Similarly, in the poker game, we have a simple system which typically leads to simple outcomes (no hand, a pair, three of a kind, etc.). Not to say that we never expect to get a royal flush, but it is highly improbable.

    We also have to account for the factor of strategy since the player has to choose which cards to discard in order to build the hand, so even the poker game includes the nature of intelligence in determining certain outcomes. And if someone keeps getting royal flushes in consecutive hands, we naturally deduce that such a simple system cannot be expected to produce such a complicated outcome barring the intervention of some intelligence (a big cheater in this case!).

    –Jeff