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Creationists Manipulating Search Results
reallocate writes: It looks like some Creationists are manipulating search results to ensure websites pushing religion are appearing in response to queries about science. Ask Google "What happened to the dinosaurs?" and you'll see links to Creationist sites right at the top. (And, right now, several hits to sites taking note of it.) Google has a feedback link waiting for you to use it.
The answer is that they're still here, SEO-ing the search results.
Dinosaurs, the ones related to lizards, can be traced through the fossil record to a number of extinction events.
Dinosaurs, the ones related to creationism, can be traced through the search results to the pages they've tweaked for rankings.
"Everyone trying to manipulate search results"
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The actual article seems to only say that one web site, titled "What really happened to the dinosaurs", appears in response to one particular search query, "What happened to the dinosaurs".
That's annoying and stupid... but it's not the same as the hyped headline "creationists manipulating results."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm sure every ideologue out there wanting to brand their dogmatic bullshit as truth is doing the same thing.
That what it seems to be from TFS:
Ask Google "What happened to the dinosaurs?" and you'll see links to Creationist sites right at the top."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Their zeal to push their bullshit in a vain attempt to still appear relevant. Kinda like dinosaurs in a tar pit... how fitting.
Maybe someone should tell them that nobody outside the US even remotely takes that "controversy" serious? I do not know a single politician outside the US who would think that even remotely considering pushing an agenda as harebrained as creationism is anything but political suicide. Hell, even our ultra-conservatives would not even touch that shit with a 10 foot pole, knowing that they'd be looked at like they just claimed the tooth fairy existed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It would be a major national news story. There would be editorials in news outlets large and small. Fox News and the right wing press would call it a terrorist act. There would be hearings in Congress, and calls for laws protecting religion. It would be a three ring media circus.
All truths are not created equal. Some points of view are more equal then others.
Why is Snark Required?
"anti-Christian witch hunters"
ROTFLMAO
C'mon guys. you just can't make that kind of shit up. There isn't enough weed on the planet for that. It must be divinely inspired.
"I find the defendant not guilty. As for Science versus Religion, I'm issuing a restraining order. Religion must stay 500 yards from Science at all times"
Maybe the anti-creationist, anti-Christian witch hunters set this bogus thing up, just to have an excuse to go after the Christians. Something looks bogus, but I'm nowhere near convinced that some church is responsible for it.
Who else would care? Fundamentalists have long lost the science war, so they go for the court of public opinion .
Also noted your completely whacked conspiracy theory that a group of anti-cheristian witch hunters set this up so they have another thing to go after.
Seen any suspicious rainbows lately? This might fill you in on what the governmen is doing I hear it targets Christians:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Paleontology (the study of fossils) is much like politics: passions run high, and it’s easy to draw very different conclusions from the same set of facts." M. Lemonick, Parenthood, dino-style, Time, p. 48, January 8, 1996.
And I felt just like waking up from a priest/pastor's best wet dream (sans pre-pubescent kids). Lord Baby Jesus. Fucking politics. I think I laughed for like 2 minutes straight like a nutcase. Imagine voting for your favorite paleontologist for the best excavation. Creationists have THE best comparisons ever. Period.
The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty.
Not any god that a christian would accept. Their god is outside the universe, and created it.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
identified Christians as potential extremists
Identified specific Christians as potential extremists. And they do exist - why is this in any way a surprise? Every faith-based ideology (Marxism obviously falls into this category) eventually attracts violent nutjobs. Even Buddhism has violent extremists, some of whom are currently hard at work ethnically cleansing a Muslim minority in Myanmar. There are also left-wing environmentalist extremists, along with Maoists and anarchists, all of whom the DHS and FBI also track.
Among other things, I find it curious that DHS was searching so hard for "non-Islamist" extremists - almost like Islamist extremists had DHS tacit approval.
The fact that most worldwide religious extremists are currently Muslim does not mean we should give a free pass to domestic extremists just because they happen to follow your preferred religion. (And what makes you so certain that the DHS wasn't investigating domestic Islamists too?) Since Christians are an overwhelming majority in the US, it is certainly logical to look for extremists in that population, especially since they may have an easier time blending in, and there are existing organized extremist groups, some of which have a long history of violence. (I should note that Timothy McVeigh was an "honorably discharged military veteran".)
Creation, evolution... it is all based on belief since you can't prove either.
Can you pick which one has vastly more evidence for it?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If creationists want to be taken seriously they need to stop arguing science on points that aren't disputed.
If creationists wants to be taken seriously they need to create a reason for God to exist, that doesn't fall back on weak, shallow, sad logic paradoxes which don't make sense.
If creationists wants to be taken seriously, they need to prove aspects of there given religion.
The problem is, no creationist has ever been able to do this, they always have to result to shallow, weak, sad and pathetic arguments, against topics they don't understand and using logic that doesn't work. Just saying a theory doesn't make sense, doesn't make it false and doesn't make valid controversy. You can't just radically claim that Dinosaurs don't exist and never once provide evidence of that, that isn't a separate view, it's just a wrong view until you have evidence. Creationism has become the new face of the uneducated adult, and the worst part about this is that it's being pushed onto kids. Creationism can't be taken seriously until it starts making serious, adult arguments. Just because a creationist is to scared to grow up and drop the security blanket, doesn't mean they have a point, they don't.
Your theory requires that the universe be infinite. No proof of that yet, and maybe never.
What is so hard to believe that we created the "god" myth? It's been done many times over the ages, so we have more proof of that than the other way around.
Otherwise, who created god?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yes, but all those other people who created gods were just making them up, whereas the god we made up is the Real Thing!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Google is not public property...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Actually, there was a big stunning double rainbow over Dublin last week as the people of Ireland rejected the teachings of the Church and approved same sex marriage.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u...
Texas, on the other hand, outlawed gay marriage and got deadly floods and tornadoes.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/26/...
Coincidence?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty. Of course, there is no shortage of conflicting, self defeating pseudo-science airheads that will believe anything else rather than making an attempt at living a Christian life with a little less ego.
I do not think that this "probability" means what you think it means.
I will try to tell you. No, it is too much, I will sum up.
Suppose you have an infinite barrel of marbles, 10% of which are green. Then the probability of drawing a green marble is (wait for it) 10%. This isn't a particularly small probability. If there is a single green marble, somewhere in the barrel, the probability of drawing it is asymptotically zero, statistically neglible, less than the chance of winning the lottery, and winning the lottery in one try is far from certain. If the probability that God exists is 1 x 10^{-403} in an infinite, probabilistic Universe, then the probability that God exists is (gasp) 1 x 10^{-403}. This is most definitely not certainty. Certainty isn't the "smallest chance", it is probability 1. It is the largest (possible) chance.
Even 1 x 10^{-403} isn't in the same ballpark as "the smallest chance", by the way. It is enormous compared to the probability that all of the air molecules in the room I'm in will suddenly (by pure chance) happen to bounce in just the right way to form a big blob of liquid air in the middle of the room and leave me gasping in a vacuum as air molecules outside of the house by strange chance miss all of the myriad pathways into the room. Which in turn is unbelievably, awesomely hugely enormous compared to the probability that the infinite, probabilistic Universe is in fact determined and known at the subatomic level by a perfectly organized, uncreated, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent superbeing that created it all by pure magic from nothing.
Oh, wait -- that's a contradiction, isn't it! If the Universe is infinite and probabilistic, then it can't be infinite and deterministic and hence known by an omniscient, omnipotent being, because there is nothing less probabilistic than something that is completely determined by an all powerful, all-knowing being. So your premises directly contradict your conclusion, in addition to demonstrating nothing more than the simple fact that you have absolutely no clue about probability distributions on continuous spaces.
Ego aside, you might want to contemplate learning something about probability and reason itself before you argue in favor of something empirically, logically, and statistically indefensible. God (as a concept) is all three.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Texas, on the other hand, outlawed gay marriage and got deadly floods and tornadoes.
Don't forget another state blessed by God, Oklahoma. They are getting hammered too.I think that falls under the "working in mysterious ways" escape clause.
Seriously I do feel awful badly for those folks. I hate when bad things happen to anyone, even if they hate me with a passion.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We need to work together to manipulate all search results to lead to whichever xkcd is most relevant to the topic.
An interesting science fiction plot that has been used so many times it is hackneyed.
It is also a horrendous abuse of the concepts of quantum theory. The problem with the hypothesis of God is that there has been no reproducible, objective, measurement or observation of God. Quite the contrary. The Universe unfolds precisely as if there were no such thing as God, with truly awesome, mind-boggling consistency, follow rules known only approximately (so far) as the "Laws of Nature" which leave no room whatsoever for God, unless it is God's will that the Universe evolve in time as if there were no God.
This is a far cry from asserting that the Aharanov-Bohm effect implies God, even allowing for the imprecision of stating that particles can be "controlled" by observing them, and worshipping something has never, as far as I know, caused that something to come to be.
Finally, there is an information-theoretic argument that proves it quite impossible to create a God by any means such as you suggest. It is quite literally as impossible as reconstructing an encoded string a gazillion bytes long from a single tiny fragment of that encoded string. The information content of God has to be greater than or equal to the information content of the Universe (this is literally the God-property of omniscience). I am a (very) finite part of the Universe. I have enormous (information) entropy relative to the Universe quite aside of the possibility that I have in some sense a quantum indeterminacy in my state. God (if God exists) has zero entropy, quantum Universe or not. There is simply no way the former can generate the latter. Violating the second law of thermodynamics is an understatement.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
DuckDuckGo gave its top result to a fruitcake link saying "Genesis can explain everything...."
Phil Collins or Sega?
The information content of God has to be greater than or equal to the information content of the Universe (this is literally the God-property of omniscience).
That's not how God's omniscience was explained to me. It's more "all seeing" than "all knowing". It's not that God knows every detail of everything in the universe as much as that he can know anything he needs. It's like having a debugger.
And - in response to the inevitable follow-up comment "give me an example" - you are more than capable of finding them on your own - there's no shortage.
No, give me an example. We can make this about my refusal to do your work for you, or we could make it about this alleged evidence you speak of.
On Bing, my response to
What happened to the dinosaurs?
(no quotes) is pretty benign - pbs, wikipedia, and national geographic in that order, and then Answers in Genesis.org, followed by slate. Only 2 of the 8 links on the first response page are fundamentalist, the AIG site and a kiddie site. Finally, while I don't agree with Answers in Genesis, they are certainly not a stealth site, and I don't think it is objectionable just by itself that they in the mix.
Of course, "Your results are personalized" so other people may get different responses.
No, I got the bit about fiction. I just finished reading recent science fiction that utilizes very similar plot lines in several distinct stories, that's all. Even in the movie "Merlin", Mab's existence was contingent on belief. I think American Gods by Neil Gaiman is pretty much precisely that as well. To quote from its Wikipedia page:
The central premise of the novel is that gods and mythological creatures exist because people believe in them (a form of thoughtform).
So as I said, yes, you are quite right, it is (or can be, a premise for a good science fiction/fantasy novel. And has been, several times. And quite a number of bad ones as well. It's a very interesting philosophical/ontological problem -- does belief precede or follow existence?
Personally, as a physicist, I have to say that correct/best belief (as opposed to fantasy) follows existence, and ultimately is empirically founded on it. Religion is the other kind, the one where there is plenty of belief but no solid evidence for the existence of the objects of the belief.
To paraphrase Austin Power, I may believe in a gold plated potty but that doesn't mean that one exists, not even in an infinite Universe where it is possible that one exists.
Or, to toss in a reference to Russell, it is possible that there is a silver teapot floating around in an orbit around Saturn. I might, if I were un-sane enough, believe in such a teapot, and write out an entire mythology based on the teapot and how it got there and what its existence means for the Universe in general. But even if I convinced every human alive on Earth that I must be right, that as an authority on all matters concerning the Sacred Silver Teapot my word on this cannot be doubted, not even the deep and profound belief of every person in the world has the slightest chance of either creating the teapot from nothing but the belief itself or increasing the probability that the teapot exists from a number so close to zero that their kids go to the same school, noise from parties in zero's yard keep the probability up at night, they argue about who is going to trim the hedge and who is providing the beer...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
If you have an infinite barrel of marbles, you can't make a statement such as "10% of them are green".
You absolutely can. Let me give a simple example: the positive integers. That is, unquestionably, an infinite set. And it also is quite clear that precisely 10% of them are divisible by 10.
Mathematically, here's how we would describe it. Consider the set of integers from 1 to N. Let x(N) be the fraction of members in that set that are divisible by 10. It's quite easy to show that as N->infinity, x(N)->1/10.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
For me he's also a myth, but sadly for certain gullible people he's a definite HIT.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Most atheists/agnostics at this point will insist upon their own definitions. It becomes a semantic argument, and if you insist upon your own definitions, you have effectively erected a straw man. Perhaps this is not the best approach.
I think you have it exactly backwards. The meaning of omniscient and omnipotent are perfectly clear and are contained in any dictionary. As you say above, every religion, including the many sects and branches of "Christianity", faced with the obvious fact that their god(s) is/are not possessing of either quality in its true formal meaning, adopt some weaker definition, so that God isn't all-knowing (the literal meaning of omniscient) or all-powerful (the literal meaning of omnipotent) or all-good (omnibenevolent) or ubiquitous (omnipresent) or "perfect" or any other infinite quality that would get them in the kind of obvious trouble any sort of infinite attribute is likely to lead to. At the same time, they have to assert that this really really big, mostly knowing, somewhat powerful, occasionally incredibly cruel being was knowing enough and powerful enough to be the proximate cause of the entire visible Universe as well as any still unseen invisible parts, which he (masculine gender usually assigned) created out of nothing, because otherwise most of us wouldn't consider even a really big, really smart, mostly good space alien to be a god, we'd consider them to be somebody like us, living in time's stream with every moment mostly a surprise because our finite information capacity is "infinitely" smaller than the information content of the Universe.
So yes, I've learned the hard way that there is little point in discussing Christianity in a reasoned way with a Christian. The fact that they are still a Christian is de facto proof that they have already arrived at a state of cognitive dissonance wherein all the myriad contradictions in (e.g.) the Bible itself or between bald assertions in the Bible (old and/or new testaments and/or apocrypha) and mere reality are smoothly elided and rationalized by doing what you're doing, bending the clear definitions of the simple terms used to describe God with a capital G.
One has to do this, because otherwise the problem of theodicy is a crushing burden for any religion claiming any significant fraction of the "omni"-properties conjoined with the assertion that god is good. One has to literally turn off one's common sense to believe that a being exists that on the one hand created the entire Universe out of nothing in some sort of state of knowledge of its future course (in most of the Bible, it is pretty clear that this state is supposed to be perfect knowledge beginning to end, alpha and omega and predestination and all that) but who created the Universe filled with evil as experienced by humans (undeniable) but was at the same time all-good and who runs things so that one can never detect Its existence because the visible Universe appears to follow rigorous rules that are never violated and that are utterly indifferent to human suffering.
That's actually the more interesting aspect of Chrisitianity in particular. Since Jesus is advanced as being God and Human and all-compassionate and perfectly good, and since the New Testament is full of direct quotes of Jesus asserting that he can do literally anything (and so can all of us) just by "having faith" and wishing it into being, Christians have to engage in the most incredible mental distortions to explain the mind of God/Jesus in such a way that there is room for the existence of human suffering on Earth and Hell for unbelievers and all of the other madness while the principle parties remain hidden.
So next time somebody dies slowly of cancer, next time a baby is born in innocence with the terrible affliction of Down's syndrome, the next time a small child dies of starvation or from malaria or from being bitten by a snake, the next time you are directly confronted with the cogniti
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Why? For asking for some evidence? That out of all the gods that man has had, that even ONE of them has some actual basis in fact? Because I'm not willing to believe in any of them just because someone says that their bible says so (the fallacy of argument from authority).
Many of the same people who refuse to accept tons of evidence for global warming) accept the bible without a shred of evidence. "You gotta believe ." No, I don't. It's not intolerant to point out that the emperor hasn't had clothes for thousands of years, any more than it was "intolerant" to denounce slavery or child-beating in opposition to that same bible.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
We wouldn't know. We do know that perceptual errors, emotional disturbances, and the rest are possible.
You are simply saying that we cannot disprove God, that absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence. Sure. But so what? We can go down an enormously -- actually uncountably infinite -- list of propositions for which we have no evidence. If we are sane, we do not grab arbitrary entries from this list and promote them to plausible beliefs, no matter how pretty a story they make.
Your argument is, of course, ancient and has a name. You are arguing for a God of the Gaps. As human knowledge has expanded, thing after thing that was attributed to God in ancient scripture has been shown to have natural causes. Furthermore, "natural causes" have been shown to have a rigorous, inviolable consistency so much so that when we look hard for cases where our existing laws fail, or where there are still pernicious inconsistencies that suggest that they are not quite right and will require future revision.
Since all of the "easy" gaps have been plugged, you are stuck following this chain:
Laws of Nature (microscopic nuclear + E&M and QFT) -> nuclei and nucleons
Laws of Nature (E&M/QED) -> atoms and molecules (Chemistry!)
Chemistry -> Inorganic and Organic chemistry
Organic chemistry + classical E&M and mechanics -> biochemistry and biophysics
Biochemistry and biophysics -> evolutionary biochemistry, neurophysiology etc (Biology)
Biology -> neuropsychology, anthropology, medicine, (Psychology!)
Psychology & information theory & mathematics -> Intelligence and cognition, Artificial intelligence, etc.
At this point, you take the fact that the science is incomplete to extend the quite correct observation that we don't understand all aspects of human consciousness (yet!) in full detail as a "gap" in which you can insert God. Consciousness is only possible with God, God can communicate with humans by directly manipulating microscopic physics, chemistry, biology, psychology laws in ways that directly violate the second law of thermodynamics, and so on. Forget whether or not there is any good reason to think that this is true. Forget the fact that we have an entire, consistent, empirically validated chain of physical law and reasoning stretching from the microscopic to the macroscopic. If you hear voices in your head, it could be God instead of (for example) your right brain talking to your left brain or some other perfectly natural thing. Hence in your mind, there is a reason to believe, and furthermore to invent a whole new "logic" to explain the fact that your conclusions can be held independent of the mere common sense that leads to the development of consistent science.
Obviously -- seriously -- you are mistaken. What you are doing is called the "Mind Projection Fallacy". To quote wikipedia:
Once one has grasped the idea, one sees the Mind Projection Fallacy everywhere; what we have been taught as deep wisdom, is stripped of its pretensions and seen to be instead a foolish non sequitur. The error occurs in two complementary forms, which we might indicate thus: (A) (My own imagination) (Real property of Nature), [or] (B) (My own ignorance) (Nature is indeterminate)
Welcome to B, with an admixture of A. Our ignorance is not an excuse for assuming that Nature is indeterminate and there is room for e.g. violations of the first or second laws of thermodynamics at the whim of a Deity, and your imagination of God filling the gaps in our knowledge is neither evidence nor (worse!) certainty that that which you imagine is a real thing.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.