I thought Dawkins had embarrassed himself enough ...

Quantum Fluctuations

I had thought the implosion of Dawkins "biological" theories would have been enough for this pseudo-scientific charlatan, however as the above link demonstrates, he's not above bringing in misrepresentations of physics in order to attempt to convince a public even less familiar with the notions of quantum mechanics than they are with modern evolutionary theory.

The following is my response to this latest video stream of bullshit:

I'm a bit baffled by how Dawkins and his cohort manage to conflate relativity theory with quantum mechanics, while physicists around the world have been trying for nearly a hundred years to solve the contradictions between the two. One of the main difficulties remaining for relativity theory is that as a theory that systematizes the universe as a whole, it becomes subject to Godel's incompleteness theorem, i.e. any self-consistent system implies the existence of a meta system. QM does not have this issue as it does not propose that the universe as a whole is systematic. However, let me set straight a few of the specifics proffered by this particular pseudo-scientific charlatan.

The total amount of energy in the universe we presently occupy is approximately 10^120 x 10^140 (including degrees of gravitational freedom) quanta, multiplied by the amount of energy per quantum. Sorry to dump water on your drum roll, but each quantum contains an infinite amount of energy, not zero energy. Any infinite amount of anything placed into a finite container will, of course, constantly spill over, creating a measurable, testable release of energy. This energy has indeed been measured and tested, and is known as the Casimir Effect. The University of Leicester, in particular, has proposed sending a probe into space in order to test whether the energy from the Casimir effect could be utilized.

The quantum void, as well, is not nothing, although it is certainly not a 'thing' either. The base particles of matter have no mass and are only differentiated from void by form (angle and spin). Odd isn't it that the ultimate materialism winds up, at the quantum level, being dependent on form - or to put it as Heisenberg did "Plato was right after all.". Mass comes about if/when these particles move in a certain fashion. Rather than being "space" the void could better be pictured as a seething layer of massless particles constantly being created and destroyed.

In fact the void bears a striking resemblance to some facets of Eckhart's mysticism as well as confirming Aristotle in the notion that space is illusory. Put simply, as Aristotle said "unformed matter and the void are not differentiable and therefore the same.". Eckhart's description of the godhead, originally a gnostic term, was that the godhead had no attributes that could be posited of it - i.e. no positive attributes. Eckhart's godhead, then, would also not be differentiable from the void.

Please note that I'm not proposing an intelligent universe, or a personally involved one. The crap Dawkins is displaying, though, proposes through a pile of pseudo scientific crap what is obvious to anybody sensibly familiar with dialectic - i.e. for the void to have self-identity it has to be compared to its opposite, i.e. its difference. The universe may well be the difference that provides the void with its selfsameness as void. Given that Identity and Difference underly all logic as well as all dialectic it would be hardly surprising to learn that this "law of thought" is actually a law of the universe.

Perhaps with the results of the human genome project having pulled the rug out from under Dawkins' genetic bullshit he now has to try to dazzle with his lack of knowledge of elementary physics instead. (in case you're unfamiliar with the results, genes do not translate to phenotypes in any direct manner, in fact genes function much like language, providing the nouns and verbs with which an organism can self-organize its system - linguistics has become the most relevant methodology for genetic exploration).

One thing is certain, though. It's far easier to demonstrate that Dawkins is a bigoted white upper middle class ideologue with no relation to either science or religion, than to prove or disprove the existence of something ('god') that we haven't even defined.