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LHC Forces Bookmaker To Lower Odds On the Existence of God
A UK bookmaker has lowered the odds on proving that god exists to just 4-1 to coincide with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider. The chance that physicists might discover the elusive sub-atomic object called the "God particle" has forced the odds lower. Initially the odds that proof would be found of God's existence were 20-1, and they lengthened to 33-1 when the multi-billion pound atom smasher was shut down temporarily because of a magnetic failure. A spokesman for Paddy Power said, "The atheists' planned advertising campaign seems to have renewed the debate in pubs and around office water-coolers as to whether there is a God and we've seen some of that being transferred into bets. However we advise anyone still not sure of God's existence to maybe hedge their bets for now, just in case." He added that confirmation of God's existence would have to be verified by scientists and given by an independent authority before any payouts were made. Everyone getting a payout is encouraged to tithe at least ten percent.
Scientists being required as part of the proof to earn the payout that God exists? Damn, bookies sure do know how to make it a safe bet.
So, if there were a god and we were part of the creation an independent verification would have to come from outside this existence.
Bizarro perhaps?
So this is what deus ex machina means.
Surely God would be something a bit bigger than a particle.
...bookies are rich. Remember odds go in as more people bet on it (i.e. more money bet on it), so there are some real deluded people out there betting on this.
This article is jibberish. The 'God Particle', aka the Higgs Boson has nothing to do with whether God or Gods exist. Is this 'bet' that people are placing a bet on the Higgs Boson, or are they actually betting on whether a God exists?? I am very confused, but probably less confused than the person who wrote the article!!
-Bill
... seems rather hard within the realm of an empirical science.
At least, that was the case in pre-modern times.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
the LHC has captured the public's imagination, calling the elusive particle in question the "god particle" is obviously just a flowery turn of phrase
unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon your point of view, it has apparently devolved/ evolved into a powerful public relations gimmick
personally, i feel that you want the general public engaged in science, any way you can, even if that involves purposeful misconceptions or blowing things out of proportion. sometimes you need cheap gimmicks to captures people's attentions, and really, what's wrong with that? who cares how you get them in the door, as long as they get in the door
get the general public interested and engaged in scientific questions which aren't even remotely tangentially related to their lives, because for every 10 people who get the wrong idea, and start making bets on silly things like proving the existence of god, as if that could ever be actually settled with a science experiment, there is an eleventh person, perhaps a 13 year old kid, who's imagination is sparked by wonder at the larger concepts in play
sometimes its hard to tell the difference between a misconceived turn of the phrase and a genuine attempt at drawing a larger and deeper inference and connection in a subject matter. who am i, or any of us, to throw cold water on the idea of a god particle? isn't discovering the deeper mechanisms of how our natural world works poetically or literally akin to touching the mind of god, whatever the poetic idea of the "the mind of god" might mean to you, atheist, or religious?
so let the god particle be particle physics' new public relations ambassador. and for those of you who are so literal as to be mediocre: don't poo poo the god particle. milk it for all it is worth. beacuse that 13 year old kid might be the next niels bohr
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
- "Barrack Obama. He believes and that's good enough for me."
Anyone can say "I believe". What comes out of their mouth, however, and what they actually believe, are two different matters entirely. Note: this is not a comment directed at Barrack Obama specifically, but the blind sheep like our Anonymous Coward friend here who is willing to place trust in an unknown entity rather than their own self. Oh, wait ... I see.
Peace,
Andy.
God do I hate that thing being trudged out for every idiotic theism "debate". It's basically a combination of a tautology (requires a non-zero probability of God's existence) and a few preposterous assumptions (voluntarism, the notion that "wagering for God" does not affect your life, the "other gods" complaint, which can result in infinite "misery" for a "for" wager, etc).
It's cute enough as a philosophical experiment, but the typical layman interpretation of it is just plain idiotic.
sic transit gloria mundi
Why are you on /. honestly? Blind faith is the antithesis of being a nerd. Aside from trolling is there any purpose at all for you to be here?
You'd think the "Paddy" in the name would be a giveaway - it might be a stereorotype, but it's something. Either that or the head office in Dublin... it's like 1916 never happened, and I'm not even Irish myself. Oh well, what else to expect from a bunch of Americans who think Scotland is in England. 8)
(this is not a
Those are might high odds for such an elusive creature as gods.... I wonder how much they put E.T. existing for example.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Nonsense. Most of the members here have never seen any evidence of real, live females, yet they believe in them through faith alone. You know what they say - everyone needs something to believe in :)
The over/under on the Higgs boson's mass is +147 GeV.
...instead of a straight up bookie.
Scientific proof must emerge by 31st Dec 2009, to confirm his omnipresence in order for bets to be deemed winners.
I would sell my house and bet it all against this, that would be the easiest 25% sucker money ever.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
The Slashdot administration hereby promises to "get rid of Idle" as soon as the existence of God is empirically proven or disproven by Science.
-- TBD, self-appointed ambassador for the administrators of /.
To be fair we can using genetics/biology, a vast array of history, logic and obviously quantum physics to prove with a high degree of accuracy that women do in fact exist. And rest easy, no theoretical math was used at all (that stuff keeps me up at night ... i shouldnt be on at 4am but i had a nightmare about number theory).
Reminds me of this old joke. A woman walks up to a redneck and asks him: "Why do you believe in God, you have never seen him!" The redneck thinks about it for a second and then replies: "I have never seen your pussy neither, but I believe you have it anyways!".
Uhm, wrong. If a god exists and does something -- ie, not necessarily omnipotent but with any potency at all -- his existence can be found out. You cannot prove only god's inexistence, or, the presence of a god who set up the universe in motion but doesn't touch it anymore. That type of a god can matter as he can just silently wait outside for souls who leave the universe, but there's absolutely no way to find out he does exist.
Our inability to prove the existence of a meddling god doesn't mean he does not exist, but it's enough for me to not bet my whole life on such an unlikely thing. A hiding god -- hey, come on -- that's so much against scriptures of mainstream religions that there's no reason to even bother.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Is betting on the existence of God just a fail/fail?
Assuming God doesn't exist and therefore it isn't proven, you fail.
But if somehow it is proven then it would be a cataclysmic event in this universes history and this event would have huge consequences, or maybe just one. Assuming God exists we must consider how his existence fits in with us at present. It's based around choice and thus belief. Because God cannot be proven (at present) to exist or not exist we we have belief rather than knowledge of his existence. To satisfy that belief we must choose to have faith. Take away that factor and the universe asplodes! Or rather the events that are promised in the Bible will come to pass - the second coming and judgement day. How will the winner of a bet on God respond to this? "Hey God, I'm rich! I just gambled on you!" This poses 2 rather large problems: 1. Gambling is a Sin. 2. "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" - The Bible. Therefore:
Assuming God does exist and it is proven, you fail.
Unlucky!
CAPS LOCK: Are you ready to unleash the fury?
Paddy Power is an Irish company you insensitive clod! The one I had chance to work for as web developer - I would surely know if they were from UK.
No, it's not faith, we have pictures! :-) Lots of pictures. Mmmm boobies.
The Authority is not the Creator.
Squirrel!
I wouldn't read too much into this. The bookmaker in question, Paddy Power, have a history of outrageous bets and paying out early to get themselves newspaper inches.
Their last stunt was to pay out on all bets on Obama winning 3 weeks ago.
One with omnipresence would be easy to prove. What would be accepted as proof of God ? There are more than enough structures in space that are omnipresent ... The gravity field of, well, anything, is by definition omnipresent (even though it's not so at every last moment in time, it's just everywhere any human will ever go, or even any photon that will ever touch a human). The laws of nature are omnipresent and eternal. Force carrying particle fields are omnipresent and eternal, ... If you only need a "mechanical" God, the bet is won already.
These fields are "capable of doing anything that's possible" since they actually DO anything that happens (if you push someone down the stairs, these fields are the "thing" that actually create the force on your victims body causing him to start to fall). And they are omnipresent, omnipotent and eternal.
So that bet would be won by just looking up in a physics book, and pointing out that such structures exist.
You can't prove that there is or is not an omnipresent omnipotent entity that can choose whether to act or not : the basic demand of an experiment would be that it would have to be repeateable. Since presumably this entity would tire of those experiments and would stop responding, any experiment that "proves" the existence of God would stop doing so after a while. When God parted the sea in the exodus, that could be said to prove his existence, however, the next day there is no proof left, and anybody could correctly claim that there is no proof God exists.
This is an unsolveable problem : let's assume some idiots' dream comes true today : Jesus comes down from heaven, beats the crap out of every existing army by waiving his hand, throws all muslims and all other unsavory individuals into hell, and builds a final country where he is king and everything is happy.
Would that prove the existence of God ? Well no. There are problems :
Since that would not be accepted as proof, what exactly do you suggest WOULD prove (and be repeateable) that God exists ?
The problem is that the basis of religious dogma, namely that there are eternal, unchangeable and unchallengeable laws that must be obeyed, or dire consequences will follow, is a basic assumption of science. Without that as a given, not a single experiment would be doable, nor would it prove anything.
But you can disprove specific religions :
The problem of doing this with the bible is that it hardly makes any direct claim at all. Sure it claims that allowing murder will have dire
God's not a name, it's a profession or a kind of creature. for christians it's the only one, and since they can't mention his name, his profession is capitalised. what if it turns out that Zeus, Hera and Poseidon exist? in that case, god should not be capitalised.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Of course you can prove that god doesn't exist.
Dead bodies don't rise from the dead.
People can't walk on top of water without cheating.
No one can ascend to the heavens without cheating by using technology.
Omniscience isn't possible given the speed of "c".
The same goes for omnipresence and omnipotence.
Omnipotence also violates the second law of thermodynamics.
The list goes on and on and on. So many scientific theories and laws of mother nature provide direct testable evidence that no gods are possible in objective reality.
It doesn't even take accurate scientific theories to prove god doesn't exist. Newton's Laws work just fine... Einstein just puts the nail in gods coffin.
Remember valid scientific theories tell you as much about what is possible as they tell you about what is NOT possible.
Newton proves that it's not possible for a human being to jump from the Earth to the Moon without the aid of technology.
Face it, god is a belief stricken faith based delusional myth that has gripped and stolen the lives of a huge portion of humanity.
It's easy to see what happens after death: we rot and are eaten by bugs and scavengers or we are consumed by fire on Earth. No magical ride to the pearly gates. No utopia awaits. Not even blackness for once your bio-electro-chemical brain functions and cell functions cease you're dead and can no longer perceive nada. No magical "soul" that leaves your body... just a cessation of the biological processes that provide you with the illusion that you are you. In fact you are many billions of cooperating cells that simply stop.
Delusional fantasies of an afterlife for each of us after our deaths only provide comfort against the harsh realities of nature.
Live your life to the fullest. Live your life minimizing the harm you do to others - preferably no harm to others. Don't support others who would harm others.
What is your purpose in life? Other than survival life has whatever purpose and meaning that you choose for it, even if it's a delusional fantasy. It's just better - in my humble opinion - to live one's life closer to objective reality than living it with delusional belief stricken delusions that stifle one's thinking requiring one to suspend critical thinking just because on hopes that the universe will spare each of us our own personal universal cold death.
Peace.
Oh, and if you want to have your "faith" - aka stupidity - in magic then fine be stupid and believe all you want in magical invisible non-existent mythological super beings all you want, just don't make anyone else join your death cult.
Remember to kill god if you see him for he has a large list of crimes against humanity stacked up.
Buy a bigger needle. Money solves a LOT of problems.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't wield much authority around here.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Why are you on /. honestly? Blind faith is the antithesis of being a nerd. Aside from trolling is there any purpose at all for you to be here?
You don't participate in many of the programming threads, do you?
If I were a bookmaker, and the existence of god was one of my "events" I'd be providing million to one odds.
And I'm not saying that is as a non-believer, I'm saying this because if existence of god was proven, the world would change instantly. Due to the fact it would be the rapture - money would be irrevelant
The resulting negligence of destroying a company would be forgiven, anyway. Muahaha
I record my sleeptalking
Do you think non-Christians also need to capitalize pronouns in reference to God (the Christian one)? I always see them refer to 'Him' rather than simply 'him'. It's not just us atheists who may be breaking syntax rules to make a point, k?
well by defintion you can't tithe say nine percent or eleven percent as that would not be tithing.
I didn't think that it was April 1st but now I am uncertain.
Publicly heal an amputee and I will believe.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Paddy Power's annual turnover is in the region of two billion euros; they have a huge internet presence and a healthy telephone business; they run 248 betting shops including 187 in Ireland, where gambling is virtually a religion and religion is actually taken seriously.
After two months trading, they have taken only five thousand pounds on this book. They take more than that in five minutes for a low-grade dog race on a wet Wednesday afternoon.
This is just a publicity stunt by a bookmaker known for this sort of thing.
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
You seem to be unfamiliar with the scientific method. Perhaps I haven't seen any evidence yet, but my private anatomical research (not published yet) strongly suggests their existence. Right now I am building a Large Hard-on Collider to prove this theory.
Ezekiel 23:20
I know it's tough to remember but Ireland isn't part of the UK, at least 85% of the island is not. Paddy Power is an Irish bookmakers with UK operations.
two things either are or they are not: Consciousness and Existence. And neither can exist without the other.
Where did God come from?
he came from the splitting of the absence of anything at all, when teh emptiness became aware of itself and split giving us the whit boards of consciousness and existence.
Whats the purpose?
Simple survival, the religion of survival.
Everyone knows it too.
As god, how dod you know you exist and are not vanishing away into where you came from, if you are all that exist?
expansion, growth change....
And you would do thing to help insure growth and expansion, such as create life that will evolve and help growth and expansion, ie becoming knowledgeable as to how to crate a universe and doing so.
So now you know what you purpose is.
Will the LHC find the god particle?
no, as doing so will contradict the the conscious minds ability to create new things on its forever search for the knowing the existence of god.
And then there is kaballa, becoming one with the creator.
shrug...
I'd like to know the odds on the chances our world would turn out the way it did verses other opportunities, given the complexity of the universe and our planet. Be the odds would be extremely high so I put my money on God.
Put a bet on God existing - smighted for gambling. Or. Don't gamble on Gods existence - smighted for being an non-believer. Gah
When the headline reads, "Scientists Prove the Existence of God," only scientists will read the article. For everybody else, the headline will be enough to create joy, bolster faith, and get science funding cut (because science has answered the only truly important question). Eventually scientists will realize that calling a particle "the God particle" was a really stupid idea.
Scientist 1: Turn on the LHC!
* Click... Whirrrrr *
Scientist 2: It's on
* Foooooooom! *
Scientist 1: What the? God?!
God: Yes, it is I
Scientist 1: But, what are you doing here?
God: I'm here to collect my winnings. I put down a $1m with Paddy Power that I don't exist.
Scientist 2: So you made $4m?
God: No, I've made $33m because I placed my wager when they lengthened the odds.
Both Scientists: Wow!
God: Yes, that's why I'm God.
Summation 2
>Unfortunately 90% or more of the discussions on places such as Slashdot will be between people who haven't ever read anything by the people who have done better, and who think their latest point has never been proposed by anyone else before.
This sounds like circular reasoning to me.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Are you implying most here have seen evidence of real, dead females? Yikes.
I think you are confusing scientists with atheists. Scientists are not interesting in proving the existence of god or not.
A god being a being of infinite intelligence and power. Would be near impossible to prove or disprove. I don't see how finding the God Particle will prove or Disproove God. Because there is always a question beyond hat of how and why. So we find it. It seems to be the controling force in the universe but how did it get here, is it made up of more basic parts...
There are a Lot of Athiests out there claiming that they are so much smarter then everyone else, however they know just as little about the universe then everyone else. And jumps to the same irrational ideas that makes them feel better.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Actually, that was Jews. They were determined to keep the "not taking the Lord's name in vain" bit, so whenever God's name was rendered in text, they replaced it with a series of symbols known as the divine tetragrammaton. In modern English Bible's, it's rendered as LORD in small caps, so you can distinguish it from the ordinary english use of the word lord. Yahweh, Jehovah, God, these are all different ways of assigning some name to that abstract placeholder that nobody really knows what to do with anymore - none are, as far as we know, the "actual" name of God. You get much the same thing in literature sometimes. Say a story about a nasty aunt, who only ever refers to the protagonist as "boy". You'll often find that the word Boy becomes capitalized, showing that it represents a proper noun, and emphasizing the depersonalizing nature of that mode of address, etc. It's not unheard of.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Vaporising people is not evidence of a deity.
How would God go about proving to a scientist that He had created the universe... and why would He bother.
I'm guessing most people on here have no idea how a bookmaker figures out the odds on a bet. Its not how most people think.
If a bookmaker gives 2:1 odds that, say, the Red Sox will beat the Yankees, he is NOT saying he believes (in any form) that the Yankees are more likely to win. The reason you get two dollars back for every one is not because its twice as likely the Yankees will win, but rather the bookmaker has twice the money coming in betting for the Yankees. That may translate indirectly to odds being based on the likelihood of something happening, but its indirect because its purely about money in versus money out for each side of a bet.
So lowering the odds in bets that God exists doesn't mean the bookmaker thinks there is a God or thinks its any more likely, it just means that he's found more people willing to take that bet, pretty much on faith.
(It still amazes me, back on this direct subject, how misrepresented the term "God Particle" is in the media -- they completely gloss over the fact that it was a term meant to mock theists, not support them)
http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/
Squirrel!
When the headline reads, "Scientists Prove the Existence of God," only scientists will read the article.
Unless the headline's on a Slashdot article, in which case, only scientists will read the summary, and only scientists will jump straight to the comments.
Squirrel!
Which god? Your god, his god, her god? Zeus? if its Zeus, I think we've already disproved his existence so what does that make the proabability now? If your talking about that one religion where a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree, then that is a very specific God that can be put through the scientific method and with time will turn into yet another mythologoy. Wikipedia seems to think so Christian Mythology. The funny thing is I can't find a Islam Mythology...
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Come on, the LHC prove God? How exactly would it do that? Do people somehow think that a probability of producing some particle X has anything to say one way or another whether or not a god exists? What about particle Y? Or when you slam atoms together instead of protons? The fact remains that no god concept has anything to say one way or another on these questions. I find it rather absurd that anybody would consider the LHC to have anything to say here. As for whether or not a god can be proven, of course, that depends entirely upon the god. If you provide a specific definition that is testable, then it can be tested for. The problem is that most people who believe in one god or another refuse to do this. They stick only to words and phrases which are, by their very construction, completely untestable. I'm talking here about things like, "God is love," or, "God created the Universe." You just can't test these things. Sometimes, of course, they make very specific predictions, such as, "God heals as a response to prayer," or, "God will cause the world to end in 1922," which, once tested, invariably come out to be false. One wonders why they continue to believe that the existence of a deity is even reasonably likely.
You realize, of course, that any argument you make for non-literal interpretation of the bible could be made equally for the qur'an.
As for Buddhism- your statement is a massive over simplification and demonstrates a poor understanding of that religion. However, for the sake of argument: your specific counter example is false, as Buddhism doesn't actually say that *every* person knows *everything*.
Can I bet they won't find proof before a certain date?
Surely that's worth putting every penny on - as you're going to hell anyway if you're wrong.
It may not be faith but if you keep doing it you will go blind!
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
I thought it was already argued successfully that Babelfish proved the existence of god.
I'm an agnostic. When God (or whatever name he, she or it wishes to go by) comes down here and does something to prove his/her/its existence, then I'll believe in God. Until that point, or until I die, I'll simply acknowledge that God's existence is neither proven or disproven, but possible.
:D
Chances are, the only time we'll find out for certain is when we die. We'll wake up in heaven, hell, purgatory or whatever realm the dead go to, or... we won't. At that point, what does it matter?
Thing is, if I had a bit of spare cash to make it worthwhile, I'd place a bet on God's existence.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
The story is that the "God particle" is a shortened version of the original description: http://solapanel.org/article/comments/god_in_a_particle/ .
If there was a god, and he did in fact make the universe from nothing, and all that is he hand crafted into being the way he wanted it to be....... can you call a MD5 for the universe proof to win the bet?
This is a silly argument. The response of C.S. Lewis was that omnipotence does not mean "ability to do things that are inherently impossible." A square circle is a non-thing, therefore even an omnipotent God cannot make it. Nonsense doesn't become sense just because you insert the words 'God can'.
If something is logically possible, an omnipotent God could do it. And we may guess incorrectly about what's possible. But what you're doing is knocking down straw men. The God you're disproving is the one of childish belief.
I think it borders on idiotic the way some try to ram God up everybody's backside at the fall of a hat; and calling the Higgs boson the "God particle" isn't a very good idea either. This is science, right? It deals with what can be measured using the scientific method - nothing more and nothing less. God only becomes a subject worthy of scientific discourse if and when he/she/it can be measured or otherwise dealt with using the scientific method. And that, everybody, really is the end of this debate.
As for the Higgs boson - my intuition tells me that it doesn't exist, so that's what my money is on. I just don't think we will find it - but to tell the truth, I don't mind if we do find it. Because what we as scientists really hope for is to find out whether our theories are good or not; I hope we don't find it, because that opens up for much more exciting research.
But back to the God thing; there are two things that strike me in the current debate. First, when Dawkins is so anti-religious, I think what it actually is about, is religious people; because somehow they - that is, the loudest of them - are perniciously boneheaded, and in the end one just gets so sick of having to deal with that kind of non-subject. Just take this thing about ID: one wonders how many times scientists have explained and clarified what science is and why ID has nothing to do with it - but it's like water on a goose. So what's the use of trying? The world would be better without that kind of people.
The other thing is, what is it really those people believe in? Is it God, the almighty and all-knowing, who created the world and us with it? Or is it the Bible? And if so, which version? - quite apart from the fact that it isn't self-consistent, so you can't believe all of the Bible anyway without performing some acrobatic mind-tricks. The God we always hear about is supposed to be good and truthful - so why would he create a world where things are laid out so that it looks exactly as if the world is about 13 billion years old and life has evolved as Darwin described it; and then write a Bible that tells us it was all done in less than a week? It just doesn't add up.
And you know what? It is not because we should close our eyes and out minds and "have faith". As far as I can see, if you have faith in God, then you will trust him not to be a deceitful creature with a twisted mind, who has set traps everywhere; then your common sense is enough to let you see the truth, and if your common sense tell you that the Bible is a load of cobblers, then it is because the Bible is a load of cobblers. Your faith should give you the strength to turn away from the liers that feed on you, even if those liers turn out to be the whole congregation that you feel comfortable with.
But then of course, I am only an atheist, or agnostic if you like; and that is my position on the matter.
Blind faith is the antithesis of being a nerd.
I believe that since you have no blind faith in Captain Kirk, you can just turn in your nerd card on the way out the door.
Ah but maybe those tests were manufactured just to keep you believing.... In fact some group of illuminati could have created all of that just to keep nerds under control, through the belief that females exist, and that if they work hard enough they will eventually see one.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Couldn't they use creationist Bill Dembski's Explanatory Filter to determine if God exists? I mean, if they detected design it would have to be God, and not space aliens or any other designers because "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." as Dembski has said.
Pretty much to prove that god exists, we would need a recurring phenomenon that violates all our existing physical models, and is not explained after long effort with new models. For instance, if there compelling evidence that parts of the universe genuinely violated the laws of thermodynamics, then we might be miracle territory. Proving a particle predicted by the standard model simply indicates that if god exists, the laws originally created are not changing at human time scale, so are no different than no god at all. Maybe.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Buddhism *does* say that the world only exists as seen in the mind. Ergo whatever is not seen in the mind (like anything that causes an accident) does not exist. What exactly is wrong with this deduction ?
Another good point is that anyone freed from the desire to eat dies. Dies horribly. How exactly does that "end suffering" ? Okay maybe Al Gore might agree as long as OTHER people are "freed" from that egoistical co2 producing "surviving" desire.
You just continue to purpetuate the stupidly naive idea that the idea of gods makes sense in the first place. The word god describes something that is not describe'able. You can't prove or disprove a thing that has no properties that can be measured. How do you measure omnipotence without having omnipotence to begin with? And omniscence?
Even the most enlightened people still talk about god as if children. Gods defy a valid description so this conversation is all meaningless and utterly futile!
God was one of us?
> whether there is a God and we've seen some of that being transferred into bets.
I thought that God didn't play dice with the universe. Now you're telling me that God is in the dice?
Your brain is not a computer.
The God Particle...?
ummm... forcon? jedon? sithon? Come on, help me out here.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
Paddy Power is a bookie in Ireland.
Specifically the part of Ireland which is not part of the UK.
If he/she/it (heshit HEH-shEHt) is omnipresent, then everything will contain heshit, and heshit cannot be isolated and observed.
If heshit is omniscient and ALL POWERFUL!!! then heshit can conceivably make it impossible to verify heshit's existence.
Therefore heshit might exist and you can't prove it.
However, heshit might make it possible to verify heshit's existence, since heshit is ALL POWERFUL!!!, heshit can do that too.
So, i'd say i'd say heshit has got a pretty good position, I wouldn't bet against heshit.
After all, heshit is ALL POWERFUL!!!
For if god is proven, there will be no need for faith, and in a puff of logic, god will disappear. This bookie obviously read Douglas Adams.
Answer the question using math.
F = ma
an immovable object has infinite mass, m = âz, a = F/âz => a = 0 regardless of F
an irresistible force is F = âz, , a = âz/m => a = âz regardless of m
But F = âz and m = âz, a = âz/âz => a is indeterminate, ie we have no tools to answer this question.
in case things aren't displayed properly, âz is the infinity symbol
Even further though the question only really applies to our world, and thus cannot apply to God, simply because if God does exist, is not part of our world.
Once you seriously start to think about that question you do realize how stupid it is, I mean, immovable to whom? Us? to be immovable to use it would have to have an infinite mass, and unless it had infinite density it would take up infinite space. If it didn't take up infinite space, it would have infinite density, it would be infinitely small, and IIRC would have infinite gravitational pull. Infinite gravitational pull which would cause the entire universe to collapse on this infinitely small item.
Still the question can be expanded to "if X is omnipotent, can X do something they can't do." Problem is we can only come up with situations that we comprehend, that are bound to the world we know. If a being was truly omnipotent, it would be beyond our comprehension. so all in all, the question is a stupid one.
i saw someone else write what you just wrote before you, and they wrote it better ;-P
all joking aside, someone else having figured something out before you did is not an automatic reason not to have a debate. at the very least, its a mind exercise that trains the mind to make the next leap into the unknown
no one has answered every question, and for those questions that remain open in our time, those of us who will answer them authoritatively will have trained their minds by reliving debates which are already settled and closed
no one approaches a subject matter cold and can speak authoritatively on it. those who can speak authoritatively on any subject meanwhile have spent years debating and wrestling with issues that previous great minds have closed the book on. you have to inhabit a subject matter in order to know what you are talking about. and you inhabit a subject matter by reliving, for yourself, all of the closed debates
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Despite the fact that I'll have mine soon, I like to think that you don't actually need a physics degree to be able to discern between pure rubbish and actual fact. The name "god-particle" has been utterly abused and misused here and in many casual discussions of particle physics and the LHC. "God particle" is a real misnomer, and the existence of the particle (it's the higgs boson) has nothing to do with theology. We've conjectured that there's a particle which is responsible for conferring the property of mass on matter, it's called the higgs boson and we're trying to find it. That's it!
So. What are the odds against the existence of the FSM? (Flying Spaghetti Monster)
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And why has no one yet invoked him / her / it in this discussion?
(sigh) Must it ALWAYS be me?
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Surely, proof that those noodly appendages will eternally remain hidden from us!
.
.
- aqk
F U
Matter? Your God needs matter? What for?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Dear Slashdot Gods,
In the comments for this article, please replace all instances of "God" with "my Butt." I would like to read these comments to a group of elderly nuns at the Vatican, but I am afraid that "God" is overused and will offend them.
Many thanks,
Godly Anonymous Coward
You make the mistake of thinking that by "disproving" some bit of dogma or scripture that you disprove "certain religions".
Religion was designed to defy proof or disproof. If you ask why a perfect God would cause a newborn infant to die of sepsis, you are told "He works in mysterious ways" or "His ways are not our ways". It's the ultimate dodge.
"The existence of God" has no objective validity, and is therefore meaningless.
The essence of belief is that it cannot be 'proven'; it must be believed. And 'belief' does not make it fact or true, just belief.
The problem occurs when a 'belief' threatens us physically ("My beliefs requires that I kill you") or challenge one of our core beliefs ("Your concept of morality is responsible for child abuse") or provides a similar conflict. We respond to conflicting beliefs, naturally enough, defensively. Then things usually get worse since few people react to a challenge of their beliefs by modifying their own belief ("You must believe as I do or you are wrong)".
If reasoning with those who hold conflicting beliefs is unsuccessful, the only practical way to deal with beliefs is through tolerance of others' beliefs and a defense against those who want to do us physical harm. Realizing that others' beliefs in and of themselves do us no harm is the first step. It's only when they choose to act in a threatening manner that a problem arises. Learning how to deal with that conflict is the second step.
So you must ask yourself why it is important for you to prove the existence of God. It certainly doesn't matter to God whether you do or not. It's a fools argument.
Well if that's the case...
- You can't prove evolution exists. No-one witnessed it. Mybe a psychotic alien has an evo-ray.
- You can't prove that gravity and electromagnetic waves permeate the universe. No one's even been out of the solar system. Maybe a psychotic alien has a gravo-ray.
-You can't even prove to me that Iraq exists, I've never been there. Maybe a psychotic alien has a middle-east-exists-ray.
- And yet most scientists would agree that all of the above things have been proven to be true.
Imagine that there was a real rapture. Where millions or possibly billions of believers instantly disappeared and headed to paradise. In front of billions of witnesses. While driving cars and planes that ended up crashing. Etc. And then plagues started arriving as described in the bible. Sure, someone out there could argue that some ferengi-like race of aliens just ripped off the bible so they could rob us blind, but I think it'd be hard for even scientists to dispute that the rapture would be reasonable proof of God.
And here I was thinking that "God" would be the creator of logic and therefore not bound it its creation and able to do "impossible" things. Silly me...
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
Even if we figure out and learn to use all of the abilities and resources of God. It does not prove or disprove God's existence. Giving a monkey a paint brush does not make him Da Vinci.
"There is no such thing as laws of nature. Every so called law of nature is mankinds attempt to put the things mankind perceives into understandable terms."
Just because our efforts to codify the laws of nature are not yet perfect does not mean that there are no laws of nature. If we follow your logic then nothing exists because all we observe is just our senses turning what they perceive into understandable terms.
"The universe does not need a god to exist"
Scientifically speaking to know this you would need to know the cause of the Big Bang. If so then please enlighten us all with evidence to back you up, if not then your conclusion is flawed.
Amazing how so many assumptions are implicitly made for something that has not only never been observed, but has never even had any objective reason to suggest the possibility of existence.
This is just plain silly. Just as silly as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
"Actually the problem with proving God exists or does not exist with science is that you need to compare something created by God to something not created by God"
Actually I think Douglas Adams had the right idea. If you could find something naturally produced by the universe that was so incredibly unlikely to have occurred by normal processes (even given the vast number of worlds which may sustain life) then that would be some step towards evidence....so start looking for that Babel fish!
Or more accurately: What is [undefined]?
You can't answer a question that itself doesn't compute.
Considering the difficulty of the question, it's simple to say God is what we don't know. This is because if we create an arbitrary definition of god to pose as our hypothesis we find that it is one of many infinite possible definitions. Therefore the odds that any definition of god is true are infinite to 1. Considering what we know of the universe so far through scientific rigor tells us nothing specific, neither proves nor disproves any of our hypotheses. We have no idea of the odds of weather we're looking at the product of creation, a complete accident, a facet of a much larger multi-verse, or whatever the unimaginable variations of possibility. We're a product of our environment, making observations about this environment, entirely subjectively, and with no absolute frame of reference.
All conjecture regarding God seems to only validly exist in the cloud of probability that exists beyond that which is identified and categorized by observation, since anything within the sphere of human knowledge tells us sweet bloody nothing. So the more we know, the more the probability wave collapses and God ceases to exist.
Crap, did I just kill religion?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
A while ago I read on Slashdot that given enough time, a technological civilization will eventually figure out how to create complex, completely realistic simulations of worlds and universes. We are on the verge of being able to do that ourselves. In a sufficiently complex simulation, the creatures living inside the virtual universe will also attain that ability. The simulated universes would greatly outnumber the real ones, which means that our own universe is far more likely to be a simulation than to be real. I wonder what odds the bookmakers would give on that?
Or you could Get rid of it yourself
he can't even make us all believe that he exists :-)
Seriously, nobody can prove the existence of God (or ones own existence, or anything else), without first very clearly defining what it means 'to exist' and what 'God' is exactly. And then only if other people accept your definitions, that is, if they find them believable, can you prove anything to them. So proving is a matter of believing after all, only after applying rigorous logic. If I don't want to believe in God, you can never prove his existence to me, because I will not accept your definitions. Vice versa, If someone wants to believe in God, they can always find definitions that will make it logically true.
So, if God were to appear in front of me saying, "I am God, I exist" I could simply say, "No you don't, you're a figment of my imagination." or "No you're not, you're just someone pretending to be God". And then he'd smite me to hell, of course.
assignment != equality != identity
'God has a plan' and 'God gave you free will' are not mutually exclusive.
God set the rules for the universe,i.e., every action has a consequence, and gave you freewill to do as you wish. Perhaps his plan is to develop a moral being that has freewill. Maybe all it takes for us to become god-like is to choose to always do what is best for all humans, including oneself. Our ignorance and selfishness as humans is definitely largely responsible for the hell that most people live in today, in the past, hopefully not in the future.
Are we scientists or technician? isn't there a difference?
But giving a monkey a paint brush would, in all likelihood prove the existence of a paint brush factory. And you noted "abilities" as well--how did that monkey learn how to paint like da Vinci?
I live in Australia! When the turn on the internet filter, how am I supposed to find out about women then? All I will have is my faith!
God: "Bender, being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket."
Bender: "Or a guy who burns down a bar for the insurance money!"
God: "Yes, if you make it look like an electrical thing. When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
Fair enough but what I meant by abilities is that if our technology provided us with all of the abilities that God is purported to have, the discovery of that the abilities exist would not in and of itself prove or disprove the existence of God. Nor would the discovery of that technology diminish the accomplishments of a God that should he/she/it be confirmed to exist. In fact, just because we discover a viable mechanism for accomplishing all of the feats that any of the gods that are purported to exist have accomplished, does not mean that we have found the mechanism that those gods actually used. My comment about the monkey simply means that having tools or abilities, knowing how to use them and knowing how to use them well are all unrelated concepts.
I dare you, Just go ahead and Die, you'll know for sure then.
Your example is not proof that God exists. How do we know that this beardy man in a white robe is not merely a psychotic alien with a destructor ray?
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Any intelligent god that wasn't born on earth would be, by definition, an extraterrestrial intelligence. An extraterrestrial intelligence could be considered a god if it had godlike powers.
Actually, speaking the tetragrammaton (YHWH or JHVH) was what they avoided, instead referring to god as Adonai (the lord, honorific form) or Elohim (a word for A god as opposed to THE god).
Well, most of us have direct experience of ONE female at least, our moms. Add in aunts, sisters and teachers.
mst3k did it best though:
http://www.mst3kinfo.com/ward_e/Bit907d.html
"Ok, so one woman exists. That means all women exist?"
http://www.jesuslovesporn.net/
A guy i used to work with changed the compile button to 'please god' :D
I would argue because of what I call the Matrix Theory, science cannot disprove the existence of an outside entity (i.e. a creator/God). If science can explain that everything follows the physical laws of the universe from the start of time through the end of time does that mean Gods doesn't exist? No, it just means if there is a God who created the universe they work in it using the laws they set up (which, would make sense). But if on the other hand science determines there are points were universal laws breakdown that points to some outside initiator. So then science may in theory be able to prove God by disproving the alternatives. So the interesting thing is that science while unable to disprove God (Matrix theory) even if it demostrates our world conforms to explainable and scietific laws (however, God could be working within those laws), there is the possiblity that if those laws do not always hold and sometimes break or have broken, well then that gets really interesting. It tickles your noodle and it seems at most one should be agnostic if one intends to claim they are logical, objective and/or rational.
Respect the Constitution
I'm not saying that philosophy doesn't have it's place. The problem with philosophy is that few people test it against objective reality thus they'll (or you'll) believe just about any mind poo that comes around.
The stupidity is rampant...
#1 - Science
Science is the study of the natural world, and by definition is not in any way capable or concerned with understanding the supernatural (If there is such a thing). Philosophy is a bigger risk to the idea of supernatural things then science is.
#2 - The God Partical
This isn't "God" or his tiny fingers... this is the Higgs-Boson. The stupid nickname came from the fact that finding the thing is a pain in the ass. Scientists looked for it for a long time, and it's an elusive little bastard. Due to this, they started simply refering to it as "That god damn partical". Later when a book was written on the subject, it was refered to as the God Particle... obviously not forseeing the rampant hyper-religious nonsense which would follow
#3 - Evidence of God
If you are religious, you'd better hope like hell they don't prove it anyway... read your bible. With evidence, there is no faith, without faith it is impossible to please god, without a happy god you're going to burn.
If you're not religious, then what do you care about this sillyness? History is blanketed in people claiming to prove god exsists, or that certain things we don't understand are the work of god... and as the flashlight of knowledge keeps pushing into the shadows, we're proven right again and again. From proving thunderstorms aren't gods at war, to proving our own evolution. It's enough to be right, no need to drag them through the mud about it.
#4 - Focus
People are losing focus of what we are actually acheiving with the LHC with this nonsense. Stop and take it in, we've created this massive machine which is capable of pushing a partical up to the light barrier and shoving it harder still. We can force nature's hand converting speed to mass. I mean hell, just making a vacume that is miles around is increadible! Don't seek to belittle the efforts of many of our best minds by dragging this pathetic 'athiest vs thiesm' bullshit into their work.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
Good Morning all,
A friend sent me this link and I have no intention of coming back to further the discussion, so I am posting as Anonymous.
I can say this for certain: we will NOT prove the existence of God by looking to creation. It is impossible. I come from an Evangelical Christian theological position. If I could sum up everything that exists it would God and creation. God is not creation, therefore you cannot prove He exists through it, all that one can "see" about God is this: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). So if you are looking for a "physical" God made of "matter", you will never find him. All that we (creation) can "see" from creation is that "something" made it. Scientists can call it a "big bang", others can say that God made the Big Bang. What is seen is invisible, and since all that can be seen according to the Bible is God's power and nature, his power made all that is created and his nature is not creation, it is Spirit (whatever that is, but to be sure it is not created) according to John 4.
My point, for those who do not believe in God, do not look to "creation" for your answer, all you will get is the same thing that the ancient peoples believed...an idol to explain how things work (Ra to worship the Sun, for example). Instead of an idol carved out of wood, stone or gold, you will get one of the imagination and scientific theory. For those who believe in God, do not look to creation to explain or prove he exists. ALL, and I repeat, ALL that we can know about God is only possible through "self revelation". God must reveal himself otherwise its just our imagination making him into our image.
Anonymous B.A., M.A.
the basic algorithm of life is to multiply with errors, then kill off everything except the best specimens (except the top-10 so to speak).
True, but the time-granularity of the algorithm is fine, not coarse, and it is continuously iterative, not "block" iterative, as your next sentence misapprehends:
Periods of exponential growth end with either massacres of huge die-offs.
These can and sometimes do occur, but natural selection operates on atomic "blocks", making it a "streaming" process at the level of the gene (the "atoms" in the transformation). Either a gene reproduces before it is destroyed by its environment, or it doesn't; there is some debate about the whether larger "block sizes" are special cases of this or not (group selection, etc.), but there is no doubt that selection units extend to individuals (organisms). "Darwinism" is natural selection operating at the level of the organism, and this specificity illustrates how general the process of selection (natural or man-made) really is, and how much the modern understanding of evolution transcends "mere" Darwinian selection.
This is obviously the real problem people have with evolution.
The people who "have a problem with evolution" object to it either because a) it contradicts an ontological claim they've likely been indoctrinated since early childhood to believe (that a deity created everything, for *US*-- humans, and pretty much exactly as it appears now at that), or b) as a corollary to (a), they do not think that speciation is possible (for which they've concocted the spurious term "macro-evolution"), or even if it is possible, that not enough time has elapsed for it to occur ("young-Earth creationists"). Your assertion that people will their beliefs based on the implications of possible beliefs is an assertion that beliefs are pragmatic, which is an even stronger claim to pragmatism (a la James' "will to believe") than you spend most of this post (rightly) disparaging. So not only isn't it "obvious" that this is a major objection people have to evolution, it's not the case in the first place.
If it applies to humans, it means lots of people are going to die at some point.
Worse than that: it means a lot of people already have died and in massive numbers for hundreds of thousands of years before the emergence of Abrahamic religions around Palestine in the bronze age, or Helenic religions around the Mediterranean before that. Not only do the relevant creation myths fail to incorporate the antiquity of the earth and the universe, but they imply that an allegedly benevolent deity "sat on its hands" for eons while tens or hundreds of billions of humans died in misery, without the benefits the myths claim were bestowed only upon the latest tiny sliver of humanity in the latest tiny sliver of humanity's tenure on Earth. If one cannot syncretize one's beliefs or abandon them outright, the only alternative is to (earnestly, mind you) reject any impinging knowledge from sources outside the religion (whether science or other religions).
2) science, even mathematics, will never have the answers to all questions.
This is philosophical realism; a more rigorous way of stating it is to say that "There may, in principle, exist truths which cannot, in principle, be ascertained."
I disagree with your assertion that we are "close to proving[!?] that that realism is true; that's shooting oneself in the foot if anything is. I'm also puzzled that you say that such purported proof is "worse", because you don't specify in whose eyes it is worse or which position(s) it diminishes. Epistemological realism diminishes epistemological pragmatism, but this is due to the weakness of pragmatism at least as much as the correctness of realism.
We do know that there are infinitely [many?] such problems...
No, we don't. We don't know
[The Christian bible] has a very unified central authorship and message concerning the dealings of God with mankind.
No, it doesn't. The books themselves are inconsistent, there are technical problems in the stories related, and any illusion of consistency or unification is only because humans met and decided what to consider canon and what to consider apocryphal. Furthermore, you claim that the Bible defines the message "concerning the dealings of God with mankind". You're shooting the barn and then painting a bull's eye around the place you hit. Your reasoning is circular; it is an unconvincing tautology to say that some sprawling and meandering work (by authors whose only link is their common theism) covers all the "right spots" when you used that very work to define what the "right spots" are in the first place!
Much of it depicts human history written down before it ever took place.
No, it doesn't. The Bible is incredibly vague in any "prediction" it can be construed not to botch, while botching claims about reality whenever it does dare to be specific enough to test. All its predictions are of the kind "some bad stuff will happen to some people, some good stuff will happen to some people". Those aren't predictions, they're truisms. If we squint, and want to believe the way an indoctrinated and entrenched person does (or if we are incurious, unscrupulously trusting, or just dim-witted), then perhaps we could convince ourselves of anything, from the Bhagavad Gita to the Bible to voodoo to tea leaves.
Just think about how specific a divinely-inspried work of prophecy could be. It could contain information about the treachery at Thermopylae, the battles of Tours and Hastings, the discovery of the "new world" by Europe, any mention at all of the contemporaneous oriental civilizations which were vastly more advanced than those in Europe, the rise of modern democracy, the dangers of chemical and nuclear weaponry in the world wars, global stock market crashes, solutions to the problems of poverty and human suffering all over the world, and mathematical insights, all in esquisite detail before they happened.
If such a book were conceived with true foreknowledge, it would be the most precise and useful guide to civilization ever, even after millenia of use. Instead, it is vague enough to fit most circumstances if the reader squints hard enough, makes statements that are clearly at odds with physical reality (and some of which were known by more advanced societies to be wrong even when they were written, such as the value of Pi), and could easily have been written by anyone who lived 2000 years ago. Your denial of these things is either ignorant or irrational.
When the art of printing was finally invented in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg, guess which human writing was first printed?
You're appealing to popularity when it suits you. (It's ironic and hypocritical that you drop this tactic when discussing your doubt of stellar fusion.) Christianity was spread at the point of a sword, by self-righteous Christians performing the Inquisition. When the printing press was invented, the Christian Church was the most powerful social entity in the world, spanning nation-states, languages, and cultures, after centuries of bloody conquest. It is unsurprising in the least that such a powerful tool as the printing press was abused by the most powerful human social construct.
Guess which book its enemies have endeavored to destroy more than any other?
Guess which book has inspired its followers to murder, torture, enslave, and subjugate the greatest number of their fellow humans-- the Christian bible.
there are many religious writings, but none of them come even remotely close to the content and distribution of this remarkable book.
And yet, "this remarkable book" (a pithy phr
Has the thought ever occurred to you that if there is a set of rational laws in the universe, there might be a rational lawgiver?
Reality must operate a certain way regardless of what way that actually is. Simply by existing, reality has some form of structure.
We know that human laws don't just happen, but are made by (mostly) rational human beings.
You're equivocating on the word "law". Human "laws" are social contracts which humans can violate. The rational set of "laws" that describe how reality works cannot be violated by definition, no matter what, because reality doesn't work another way; just the one already mentioned.
Why then should the natural laws which you call rational not also be because of rational processes of thought by a transcendent rational being, God.
Because they are entirely different kinds of "laws". It just so happens that in the English language (which by accident you happen to have been born in a place for you to learn and speak), these two disparate concepts have use the same lexeme.
If there is such a rational transcendent being...
That's a big "if" indeed. You can't use a reason to justify itself though: If such a being exists, then these other conditions imply that such a being exists gets you nowhere because it's not established that such a being exists in the first place!
...who created everything including us, not want to communicate with another rational being he created?
You're appealing to a lack of imagination. It is just as easy to imagine a creator deity not wanting to communicate with his creations.
A big problem with the scientific method is that it is only applicable to the present.
No, it applies to all time. That is why it works at all. What you are claiming is that the past and future don't exist, and are therefore utterly speculative in nature. I wonder how short a time interval you consider to be "the present"; A day? A minute? Four seconds? A year?
To determine the truth of history, we have to rely on witnesses, human or archaeological.
But humans have known some history directly by witnessing it, while other history we must work out for ourselves because nobody has ever witnessed it (such as the laying down of sedimentary rock, the formation of planets, the evolution and eventual extinction of life on Earth for 4 billion years, etc.
The most definitive witnesses of history are written records that have come down to us.
No, the most difinitive witness of history is physical reality itself. Written records can be valuable, but they can also contain errors of fact through their authors being mistaken or malicious or incompetent or any combination thereof.
There is no way to prove by the scientific method that Aristotle Jesus Christ or George Washington were ever alive on planet Earth.
Science doesn't "prove" anything, but we can conclude scientifically that these individuals were or were not alive when and where they are purported to have been, that they did or did not do certain actions, and so forth.
The scientific method cannot be used to determine the truth of a matter recorded by a witness from the past.
Yes, it can be so used. There is a widespread story about a plague of mortal illness that swept through Europe during the Dark Age. By examining physical artifacts, we can ascertain what happened, where, and when. Burial pits, human remains, forensics and pathology all indicate that certain claims about what happened are true while others are not. By corroborating accounts, we can ascertain which among them are historical and which are fabrications.
Similarly, we can use geophysics and paleontology, fossil records and vulcanism an
After you draw your last breath and I draw mine, we will learn who was right and who was wrong.
Unless you are the wrong one, in which case nobody will ever be able to witness the outcome, because dead will actually mean dead.
I personally believe that I have made a safer bet than you.
You spam Slashdot discussions with untenable ontological arguments, and now you back-pedal and say that belief is a matter of will (it isn't), and that it isn't a matter of belief in the first place, but of covering one's butt (which again isn't belief). The atheist can make exactly the same wager as Pascal, so the wager argument fails. Belief is a matter of actually thinking a proposition is true, not of deciding that belief is "safer" or even "preferable".