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What Do You Believe Even If You Can't Prove It?
An anonymous reader writes "That's what online magazine The Edge - the World Question Center asked over 120 scientists, futurists, and other interesting minds. Their answers are sometimes short and to the point (Bruce Sterling: 'We're in for climatic mayhem'), often long and involved; they cover everything from the existence of God to the nature of black holes. What do you believe, even though you can't prove it?"
It is unfortunate that the rest of the world believes that killing a quarter of a million people with gas is acceptable.
The US seemed okay with gassing the Kurds as well. We provided the satellite intelligence to Saddam's military so that they could evaluate the efficacy of their operation.
We didn't make too much noise as long as Saddam continued to pound the crap out of Iran.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Wrong.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
yeah, show me exclusive homosexuality in other animals i mean like humans do, not like confused dogs humping a tree.
Many animals show homosexual activity which includes full mating rituals and sex, not just 'tree humping'. This is know to occur in dolphins and wales, apes, rodents, deer, goats, sheep, and birds. In all, it been observed in hundreds of species. As for cases of exclusive homosexuality, this has also been seen in many species. For example, in japanese Macaque monkeys around 9% of all adults exclusively mate and pair-bond with the same sex.
You're citing Michael Crichton for your evidence against global warming? That's like citing Pauly Shore as an authority on Non-Euclidean Geometry. Newsflash: Crichton is not a scientist. He makes up the science to suit the story. He writes some good books, but he's hardly someone to be taken seriously on something outside his area of expertise (which is telling a good story).
Note that a vast majority of *real* scientists concur that global warming is happening, though there are myriad theories of WHY it is happening.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Why is this modded insightful? It's a complete misinterpretation of the Establisment Clause. There is no "prohibitions against teachign{sic} religion in public schools". The only thing the Establisment Clause prohibits is a state sponsored religion.
Depends on your definition of scientist. He's actually Michael Crichton, MD, graduate of Harvard Medical School (and a BA in Anthropology). At minimum, he used to know a decent amount of biochemistry.
What's simpler:
"The electron lies in a potential well"
Or:
"God did it."
Looks like God is winning this one.
paintball
No, your post cited material which *claims* he made that claim. Which is no more convincing than material which claims he is divine. It is evidence, but to my mind not convincing, because the source is irretrievably biased. Any text where Christ was quoted as saying "no, I'm an ordinary guy" would have been weeded out by the process of determining the Christian canon.
Most importantly, the people who wrote the Gospels wrote *to encourage others to believe in Christ.* They are not impartial historical accounts.
You also apparently can't tell the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, because you mix up which I was speaking about in my post.
There is *much* more evidence, both physical and textual, for the existence of Benjamin Franklin, than there is for the existence of Jesus Christ as a human being as opposed to a religious figure. Mostly because Franklin lived much more recently, and because printing presses and so forth existed in Franklin's time, but not in Christ's.
For instance, we can go to the National Archives and see papers with Franklin's signature on them. I'm confident we can go into the dusty archives of Philadelphia and see records of his property transactions. We can see the building in which the Declaration of Independence was written. However, there is not a single physical artifact that is known to be associated with Jesus himself.
You will probably retort that "these are just written documents like the Gospels", but they are not. Franklin's records and documents have a tremendous amount of extraneous stuff that connects them to a coherent reality: there are dozens of other signatures on the Declaration, and we can go do the same exercise on each one of the participants to develop evidence that *they* existed. Along with the records of Franklin's property transactions, we would find a huge number of other property transactions, almost all of which are credible and make sense.
For the Gospels, the independent evidence for most of their statements is scarce, and only tenuously connected to the crucial points of Jesus's life and works.