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So?

I figure that if one has the position that accepting things on faith makes sense, that ought to extend to other people doing the same, even if they disagree.

Sure it does, that's how we know history. What I'm saying is that WE KNOW Egypt WOULD NOT have reported such a thing if their behavior is consistent at all. So, we wouldn't EXPECT this to have been reported... so that it isn't is no surprise (and lends no weight to your claim).

No, it's not needed. There's more to look at than writings. People don't leave their environment undisturbed and leave traces. And assuming Egypt somehow avoided recording anything about all this, there still would be archaelogical evidence, and the neighbours would still have noticed, and have plenty time to make good use of the situation.

The effects would be very noticeable. If such a thing happened, Egypt would have been dealt a huge blow. Massive amounts of death leave traces, even if nobody writes them down.

We're talking here about: unusable water, all the fish in the Nile dead, rotting animals and people everywhere, lots of insects, ruined harvest, dead livestock, lots of dead people, and no army. Add to that half a million people that suddenly vanished. The immediate aftermath would involve yet more massive amounts of death from starvation and illness.

By all rights, Egypt should have been in an enormous crisis that would at the very least critically cripple the country for generations. It would give anybody a terrific opportunity to invade and conquer Egypt. Yet again, it didn't happen.

First, from my understanding, this was one city/region in Egypt, not all of Egypt. Second, I'm not sure how it would have left ample evidence. That was a long time ago.

Archaeology, for instance.

- Not true. First, you should know that even among Biblical scholars, the numbers (population size) are disputed, BASED on the text (not just liberal skepticism).

Bible disagrees. In multiple translations.

More info here

Said organized scripture may even have scientific or archeological evidence associated with it. But the definition of faith is that, regardless of whether or not anyone can produce any observable, repeatable evidence, one accepts something as truth.

Here's the funny thing - Christianity doesn't. Genesis was trivially a fairy tale, but did you know that Exodus never happened? The whole "Pharaoh enslaves the Jews, Jews eventually flee" sequence is pure interpolation by later Jewish residents of the area; if anything, the ancestors of the Jews actually ruled parts of northern Egypt for a time.

Furthermore, a whole lot of archaeological evidence from that period that we do have is significantly distorted, because it was gathered by archaeologists who would dig "with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other", as it were. After all, if you think the Bible is a perfect, unerring guide to history, why not let it guide your archaeological research? It's a pity that "guidance" is really more of a taint.

My wife is telling me I shouldn't be engaging in this kind of conversation with people I don't really know on a Sunday morning.

Why?

The short version is that, if you admit that death may not be the end of the soul, a lot of assumptions about the behaviour of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, etc., deity change. He can save the eternal souls of people who leave or are removed from this world. Which doesn't answer a lot of your questions, I'm sure.

I think an afterlife introduces more problems than it solves.

For one, I don't think it does anything to the morality of what I said in the previous post. If you watch your child cross on a red light and get hit by a car without doing anything, it still won't be considered good parenting even if you take him to Disneyland afterwards.

Also, at least in the conceptions of heaven I've heard of, whoever gets there can't possibly be you. This is because it's described as being a place of no suffering and eternal happiness.

But think of what that means. It means that every single thing that used to drive you is gone. So you like golf? In heaven you won't need it, because playing it can't possibly make you happier than you already are. If in life you strived to help people that will be gone as well, because eternal happiness can't be compatible with awareness of people's suffering. If you had family or friends remaining when you died you can't possibly care about them anymore, because worrying about them isn't being happy. If you created works of any kind, there's no point anymore. There's no way you can get a feeling of accomplishment because you're already as happy as you can be at all times.

So the way I see it, even if heaven existed, as described there's nothing to look forward to in it.

The other problem is that there is plenty evidence for personality being linked to the brain, so if you no longer have one you can hardly be yourself. For that matter, which version of you would go to heaven? As you can see from the linked article, brain tumors and damage can change people to the point of making them entirely incapable of religion.

It's okay, both Moses and Abraham are made up people whose connection to reality is tenuous at best.

Who cares if he gets the name of a fictional character wrong?

It's okay, both Moses and Abraham are made up people whose connection to reality is tenuous at best.

Who cares if he gets the name of a fictional character wrong?

Good thing the whole of Exodus never actually happened, huh?

TL;DR version:
There's no sign of any sort of decline in overall Egyptian power during any time that could reasonably be attributed to the Exodus.

Science and religion are often mutually exclusive. Science requires empirical evidence and peer review -- and repeatability. If you don't think a scientific theory is correct, you find evidence to show it. Or you run an experiment, if it's applicable. No scientific theory is an absolute: everything can change in the blink of an eye given the right evidence (although given the body of evidence shown for evolution, this isn't very likely). Science is not religion because it depends on empirical evidence, and because it does not purport to be unchanging or absolute. Those happen as a result of good science, not before good science.

Read everything at http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution and then come back, because you have shown a profound lack of understanding about what evolution (and science in general) are all about.

Evolution does not require irrefutable proof. It is not an irrefutable proof in itself, either. It is a very, very strong theory (such that no - or nearly no - reputable scientists don't believe in evolution), supported by over a century of research and evidence (no, evidence is not irrefutable proof. It's just the raw material from which theories can be constructed and tested). The core ideas of evolution (natural selection, competition, mutation, etc.) haven't changed since Darwin. The mechanisms by which it happens have been discovered, or are still being discovered.

I'm not sure where you got your definition of 'religion' as 'faith in the unseen'. That may describe faith. But there's a kink in your definition. Chemists -- who regularly produce materials that a century ago would be unimaginable -- depend on the theory of the atom to describe this process. Physicists go further and describe subatomic particles. Until very, very recently, nobody had seen an atom (IBM managed to create a tunnelling electron microscope capable of seeing xenon atoms a couple of years ago). It took no faith to accept the atom. Would you call chemistry a religion, then, because it has belief in the unseen? If you say yes, then I'm afraid you're in an extremely small minority of fanatic theologians. If you say no, then you would have to concede that something else is going on here. The difference is that chemists came to the conclusion that there were atoms after much evidence to show it. It took chemists most of a century to accept that atoms actually were the basic elements of matter. What convinced them was experiments, not faith.

Finally, atheism is by definition a lack of religion. You may believe that it is impossible to be an atheist, on the grounds that nobody can live entirely without religion (but I must disagree with you there, on empirical grounds again, because many atheists exist). But to say that atheism is a religion is a conflict of terms. It is saying "the lack of religion is a religion", which leads irreparably to circular logic.

Warning: rambling post ahead.

My gut feeling is that, from strictly a hardware perspective, we're already capable of building a human-level AI. The problem is that, from a software perspective, we've focused too much on approaches that will never work.

As far as I'm concerned, the #1 problem is the Big Damn Database approach, which is basically a cargo cult in disguise. Though expert systems are useful in their niches, "1. Expert system 2. ??? 3. AI!" is not a workable roadmap to the future. I'm certain that it's far easier to start with an ignorant AI and teach it a pile of facts than it is to start with a pile of facts and teach it to develop a personality.

The #2 problem is the Down To The Synapse approach. This, unlike BDD, could quite possibly create "A"I if given enough hardware. But I think that, while DTTS will lead to a better understanding of medicine, it won't advance the AI field. It won't lead to an improved understanding of how human cognition works — it certainly won't teach us anything we didn't already know from Phineas Gage and company.

Even if we go to all the trouble of developing a supercomputer capable of DTTS emulation of a human brain — so what? If we ask this emulated AI to compute 2+2, millions of simulated synapses will fire, trillions of transistors will flip states, phenomenal amounts of electricity will pour into the supercomputer, just for the AI to give the very same answer that a simple circuit consisting of a few dozen transistors could've answered in a tiny fraction of the time, using the amount of electricity stored on your fingertip when you rub your shoes on the carpet during winter. And that's not even a Strong AI question. That's not to say that working DTTS won't be profound in some sense, but we know we can build it better, yet we won't have the faintest idea of where to go next.

That brings me to my core idea — goals first, emotions close behind. Anyone who's pondered the "is/ought" problem in philosophy already knows the truth of this, even if they don't know they know the truth of it. The people building cockroach robots were on the right track all along; they're just thinking too small. MIT's Kismet, for instance, gives an idea of where AI needs to head.

That said, I think building a full-on robot like Kismet is premature. A robot requires an enormous number of systems to process sensory data, and those processing systems are largely peripheral to the core idea of AI. If we had an AI already, we could put the AI in the robot, try a few things, and ask the AI what works best. So, ideally, I think we need to look at a pure software approach to AI before we go off building robot bodies for them to inhabit.

And how to do that? I think Electric Funstuff's Sim-hilarities captures the essence of that. If we give AIs a virtual world to live in — say, an MMO — then that removes a lot of the need for divining meaning from sensory input, allowing a sharper focus on the "intelligence" aspect of AI. Start with that, grow from there, and I can definitely see human-level AI by 2029.

The biggest problem atheist have, is that atheism by definition has no moral compass, no absolute, even theoretical, to base anything on.

Of course, many would also argue that leaps of faith are required for normal day to day life, active science, and the like.

Just a theory? You're right! However, you're also very, very wrong.

Evolution is just a theory.

I do not think that means what you think that means. For an explaination visit here or here.