Chris Langan’s defense to his CTMU theory
Written by Tom Beasley in Opinion at April 9, 2011
Below is Chris Langan’s response to my criticism of his CTMU theory, I have posted his response in the interest of fairness. My criticism can be found here. The following post in no way represents the opinions of our blog. I invite the reader to read the entire transaction of events and judge for himself/herself:
How tiresome … another “criticism of the CTMU” that says absolutely nothing about the CTMU.
I was hoping for at least one of two pleasant surprises: that you (Tom Beasley) would manage to grow up a little before sounding off again, so to speak, or that you would at least try to critique my theory in something resembling an honest and meaningful way. Unfortunately, you’ve proven to be a complete disappointment on both counts.
When I offered you a chance to have me read and respond to your CTMU criticism, I was doing you a favor for which you are technically unqualified and of which you are plainly undeserving. Unfortunately for both you and your readers, you’ve wasted this golden opportunity by using it to demonstrate how many bad assumptions, snide innuendos, non sequiturs, and red herrings you can cram into one misbegotten web page without actually writing anything worth reading.
Let me cite some examples.
You complain that I “somewhat attempted to trick you” by “challenging you and you alone … with great flourish, to debunk my nonsensical CTMU theory …” The fact of the matter is that I would never have bothered to respond to a low-profile, patently confused novice blogger like you had you not claimed, with gratuitous “flourishes” of your own including ad hominem jabs and oblique arguments from authority, that you *could* debunk my theory. Of course, as we now see all too clearly, your claim was utter nonsense. Once you’d made it, any unpleasantness to follow came permanently to rest on you alone.
You crow that I “lament your power” when in fact, I don’t think that you have any power, and I suspect that your reluctance to accept your own impotence may be a large part of your problem. (By the way, my issue with your page layout was analogous to “fairness in advertising” – you were denigrating me and my theory on the front page of your blog while relegating my response to a back page, thus shamelessly promoting yourself and your blog at my expense.)
Then you turn around and accuse me of “responding to a relatively obscure blog … for the primary purpose of publicity” when I was merely answering a vacuous and bad-smelling eructation liberally seasoned with aimless carping (your hit piece). What you should have written was “…for the primary purpose of countering and correcting unsolicited *negative* publicity by Tom Beasley”. There’s a difference there, and as long as you’re pretending to be a writer, you might as well get around to learning it.
Another writing tip: you want to be careful about ironic incongruities. As you may not have noticed, the word “sesquipedalian” is self-descriptive; that is, it is sesquipedalian. Much the same can be said for “obfuscated”, a word that most people probably don’t understand. So it’s a little absurd, isn’t it, to pose as a champion of “common language” while explicitly deploring “sesquipedalian, obfuscated language [that] is an intentional inoculation against healthy discourse”? That’s a bit like deploring sloth and obesity between soap opera commercials while inhaling chocolate bonbons as your exercise videos gather dust atop your television.
As for your statements regarding the CTMU, they remind me of (bad) amateur film criticism. You wave your hands, make sweeping pronouncements about style and motivation, and circumvent any and all specific points of content while injecting your personal biases and assumptions and smugly appealing to those of your readers, which you seem to think are identical to your own (if they are, then your readers are in serious trouble). The few statements which convey your impression of what the theory actually says are almost completely erroneous. They no more admit of a productive response than would a summary demand that one explain how quantum mechanics proves that the earth is flat. That’s not what the theory says, and we can’t pretend otherwise.
In the final analysis, your critique leaves us with nothing more than we already knew: that in your personal highly uninformed opinion, my language is convoluted, my motives are dubious, my ideas are without substance, and that I define or develop concepts like dualism, consciousness, and soul in ways that don’t suit you. (As one of your commentators has already noted, you’ve managed to get the dualism part completely backwards.) In other words, you have told us a very great deal about the opinions, linguistic preferences, and conceptual limitations of Tom Beasley, but again, absolutely nothing at all about the CTMU.
Finally, perhaps realizing that you should have delivered somewhat more in the way of substance, you sum it all up as follows:
“If reality is its own designer, why would one then be required to use a theological explanation for the designer? If the universe designed itself, why must it be a spiritual explanation? Langan’s assertion that the intelligent designer is reality itself seems to lead only to the conclusion that if what he were saying were true, that the designer is inherently a naturalistic phenomenon and by no means a spiritual one. Even if his work were sound, the many conclusions he draws from his work are unfounded.”
One is not axiomatically “required” to produce a “theological explanation for the designer”. The point is that any designer-like entity which can actually be shown to exist by logical reasoning about the structure of reality must be objectively analyzed, and its key properties identified and properly interpreted. Where the properties of this entity can be shown to align with certain key properties intuitively attributed to God, the existence of the entity obviously implies the existence of God. The natural theological ramifications – note the intentional coupling of “natural” and “theological” – can then be developed from the given properties.
But as that may be a little hard for you to fathom, the easy take-home message is just this: such an entity can indeed be shown, with logical certainty, to exist. Hence, God exists. And unfortunately for one Tom Beasley, the logical properties of this entity do not bode well for the ultimate consequences of the current antics and convictions of Tom Beasley.
As this clearly exhausts your present level of comprehension, it will have to do for now. I need scarcely add that I sincerely hope, for the sake of you and anyone who respects your views, that you one day manage to expand your powers of comprehension. (Hint: All you really need do is point your mind in the general direction of truth and then open it up a little … and of course, open up an English dictionary when you fail to understand what others are saying.)
Until then, I’m afraid that I have more urgent and worthwhile things to do than further contribute to this hostile and opinionated blog. Now good day.
Having read both Beasley’s criticism and your rebuttal, here is my takeaway.
Beasley seems light on specific criticism to your work. However, the few specific criticisms present go to question fundamental assumptions that you are making. Therefore even one of these criticisms being correct leads to large problems. You seem to ignore these in your response, instead choosing to say things akin to “Just because you say it doesn’t make it true”, when the same can be said for your work as well, and indeed Beasley does say something like this. But if your argument can be boiled down to “I think I’m right and I think you’re wrong,” and you can’t even quote your own work to SHOW why one is right and one is wrong, it speaks to the strength of the work itself.
Additionally, you spend quite a lot of time assuming you are intellectually superior, which may be true as a generality, but must be proved on a situational basis, which you have not done here. Your theory could be the most brilliant ever discovered. Indeed if god were proven to exist, it would likely be the greatest discovery in history. If you are able to prove god in less than 60 pages, but nobody can understand it, then the proof is useless from a practicality standpoint. Why not flesh it out in 1000 pages, holding the readers hand from point to point. This will serve a two-fold purpose. Firstly, elaboration will ensure points are not misinterpreted. Secondly, increased understanding could lead to enlightenment of all mankind.
Or maybe you will find that you are incorrect. Have you ever legitimately considered that as a possibility, or have years of being told how smart you are made you believe that every thought you have must be correct, otherwise why would someone so smart have had the thought in the first place?