UBERKUH: Adam, thank you for agreeing to interview with me. I have read your article in the latest Skeptic magazine, and I am impressed by its profundity as well as its simplicity as a means to achieve the former. In keeping with that simplicity, I have divided this interview into two parts. The first part contains questions around your article, and the second part contains questions about your article. You might say this is a roundabout way to discover more about you and your article. This may seem like a short interview, but I expect detailed answers.

AROUND

UBERKUH: Let me begin with the simplest but, perhaps, most important, question. What motivated you to write this article?

ADAM: I first discovered Dr. Dino's $250,000 Offer for proof of evolution while researching alternative scientific theories. When I read the contest guidelines, I almost immediately realized that I could probably meet Dr. Hovind's challenge by formalizing his hypotheses and invoking the Weak Anthropic Principle. I constructed a straightforward proof one afternoon while sitting at Jiffy LubeTM and dropped it in the mail about a week later. After several weeks of obsessing, I received an e-mail from Dr. Hovind in which he dismissed my proof as "mere speculation," although he never actually forwarded it to an impartial committee of scientists for an official decision. At first, I assumed that he simply didn't understand the proof, but when I remembered that his IQ is a whopping 160, I figured it was much more likely that he was being intellectually dishonest. When I mentioned Dr. Hovind's unscrupulous behavior to Dr. Shermer of the Skeptics Society, he offered to publish "Doubting Dr. Dino" in Skeptic magazine.

UBERKUH: Readers of your article may imagine that you are an atheist. Is this true?

ADAM: I'm not surprised that some readers assume that I'm an atheist, especially considering Jean-Paul Buquet's illustration that accompanies my article, but as you know, I'm really playing Devil's Advocate. I guess I should also mention that I don't wear bow ties!

UBERKUH: How would you describe your worldview with respect to belief in a deity?

ADAM: My answer to that question depends on your definition of God. I consider positive definitions of God to be the memetic counterparts of material idols, because all such definitions preclude the possibility of Infinite Being. Paradoxically, I would define God as Undefined Being. My answer also depends on your set of possible answers. On the one hand, God both exists and doesn't exist with respect to univalent logic; in this case, I would say that God both exists and doesn't exist – what choice would I have? On the other hand, God either exists or doesn't exist with respect to standard bivalent logic; in this case, I would say that God exists. On yet another hand, God either exists or doesn't exist or superexists with respect to trivalent logic; in this case, I would say that God superexists...

UBERKUH: Why do you feel it is necessary to consider non-standard logical systems? What exactly do you mean by "superexists"? And why do you say that God "superexists"?

ADAM: I acknowledge that homo sapiens as a species naturally prefers standard bivalent logic, but I‘d rather not let my bilateral physiology exert undue influence on my sapience! In reality, non-standard logics are no more objectionable than the non-standard, Gaussian geometry that underlies Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

I use the term superexistence to distinguish necessary being from contingent being, and I'd argue that the difference between self-existence and mere existence more than justifies my introduction of separate ontological categories. I say that God superexists, because a quale of certainty always attends my contemplation of Infinite Being.

UBERKUH: Would you please elaborate on this "quale of certainty"?

ADAM: To paraphrase the "half-spoken" teaching of Bodhidharma:

Understanding comes
in the middle of a sen-
tence, not at the end.

If you reach the end of my haiku before you understand it, then you don't really understand it. Because qualia are preverbal, they must be intuited as well.

ABOUT

UBERKUH: You begin your article by referring to evolution as a hypothesis. Although you easily satisfy the requirements of Dr. Hovind's $250,000 Offer, regarding your position on evolution's claim to truth as an accurate description of natural processes over time, you seem, if you will forgive my presumption, noncommittal. Could you expand on this position?

ADAM: My proof is based on Dr. Hovind's assumptions rather than my own, so I don't necessarily agree with my own conclusion. For example, he insists that all possible explanations for the existence of the Universe are reducible to his "three known options," whereas I would contend that there are countless irreducible explanations. But because I am seeking to persuade Dr. Hovind rather than myself, I restrict the scope of my proof to his "three known options." In fairness to Dr. Hovind, I should give him some credit for the simplicity of my proof! My own assumptions concerning the origin of the Universe are derived from the Bible but only minimally from Genesis. They're best characterized by a loose translation of Job 38: 4: "Where were you in the beginning? What could you possibly know about it?"

UBERKUH: In your disproof of Dr. Hovind's first hypothesis, you state that "the intersection of God and the Universe is the Universe itself." This may be more of an academic question, but, for the sake of clarification, why does it necessarily follow from the fact that the Universe is the subset of God that the intersection between God and the Universe is the Universe itself? As an addendum, why do you then conclude that the appropriate intersection is Nothing? In other words, what in the definition of intersection forces a conclusion that follows from previous arguments?

ADAM: You have to bear in mind that the third hypothesis turns out to be false, so all of the expressions in my analysis of it are also false, although this isn't obvious until the last step where the Universe is identified with Nothing. Line 4 of my analysis of the first hypothesis follows from line 3, because the intersection of a set and its subset is always that subset. Euler-diagrammatically, if circle G completely contains circle U, then the area of their overlap is exactly equal to the area of circle U. Line 5 follows from line 4, because the intersection of disjoined sets is always Nothing. Euler-diagrammatically, if circle G and circle U do not overlap, then the area of their overlap is exactly equal to Nothing.

Some readers object that my definitions of G and U introduce an artificial disjunction between God and the Universe that's inconsistent with Dr. Hovind's assumptions. They say that G and U must be able to intersect, because Dr. Hovind believes in the omnipresence of God. What they don't understand is that there's a difference between spatial disjunction and ontological disjunction. For example, there's a class of subatomic particles called bosons that don't obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle, e.g. it's possible for two or more bosons to occupy the same spatial location simultaneously. Under certain conditions, it's possible for some bosons to occupy the same spatial location simultaneously without causally affecting each other. Otherwise, how could gravitons escape from black holes?

UBERKUH: In your proof of Dr. Hovind's third hypothesis, you state that because the Universe cannot be a subset of itself, it must be equal to itself. Why is this necessarily true?

ADAM: Technically speaking, the Universe can't be a proper subset of itself, but it must be an improper subset of itself. An improper subset of a set is a subset of that set only in the sense that it isn't a superset of that set. Euler-diagrammatically, it's impossible for circle U to have less area than itself, but it must have exactly the same area as itself.

UBERKUH: Your proof of Dr. Hovind's third hypothesis and your disproof of his first and second hypotheses demonstrate, as you explain, that the Universe is the only unique necessary cause of itself. Formally, you have deduced this. Yet, some may contend that there is an overriding informal or "common sense" interpretation that contradicts that deduction, which makes it appear rather tautological. Do you find that you have proven anything with your line of reasoning here?

ADAM: Given specific assumptions, my proof establishes that the Universe is superexistent. If that seems counterintuitive, perhaps that's because the human mind is more accustomed to thinking about the Universe as an ensemble of merely-existent component parts rather than a self-existent whole. Or maybe Dr. Hovind's assumptions have no basis in reality...

UBERKUH: Thank you for your time.

ADAM: Don't ubermention it!