Note well that the translation in question is from the hebrew old testament, not the Greek new. Isaiah did not prophecy that Jesus would be born of a virgin in the first place. The verse in question does not refer to Jesus. Jesus was never called "Emmanuel".
And last (and my favorite part of the whole thing) Isaiah's entire prophecy was to Ahaz, king of Judah, who was very worried about the kings of Syria (Rezin) and Israel (Pekah) who were getting a whole lot stronger than he was an acting increasingly warlike. Isaiah was supposedly instructed by God to travel to Judah just to reassure Ahaz that God was going to smite Rezin and Pekah and allow Ahaz to die of old age, his kingdom intact and the whole birth of Emmanuel to a young woman was supposed to be the sign that this would be so!
Sadly, Chronicles 2 tells us what actually happened (for whatever meaning of "actually" you want to ascribe to a story from a book of mythology mixed with legend and even a tiny bit of history): "God delivered him [Ahaz] into the hand of the king of Syria; and they smote him, and carried away a great multitude of them captives, and brought them to Damascus. And he was also delivered into the hand of the king of Israel, who smote him with a great slaughter."
Oops. Guess that prophecy didn't work out too well. Smote him with a great slaughter does not sound like Isaiah: "Thus saith the Lord GOD, It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin; and within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broken, that it be not a people."
I guess Isaiah wasn't such a great prophet as all that, huh. Kinda got that one wrong. But hey, he left all sorts of lines in his failed prophecy that could be put to good use, and whoever wrote Matthew obviously found one to repurpose according to his needs.
Not that unlikely. Really, pretty easy. Lots of condom "failures" are little more than the deposit of part of an ejaculation on the labia.
Also, some women have stretchable hymens with comparatively large openings that don't actually tear initially when they have intercourse.
Finally, as various surviving stories make clear, a bride who was less than virginal on their wedding day had a few subterfuges they could use, with the help of their mother (for example) to survive their wedding night -- necessary given that the penalty for not being a virgin was being stoned to death, which hurts a lot and leaves you dead. A bladder of chicken blood hidden between the sheets or even in the vagina, released at the right time, would stain the sheets with enough blood to pass muster when they were hung over the balcony to prove to the crowd that the bride was a virgin. A wise husband might not even investigate the situation very closely or might collude with the bride himself if (for example) he loved her or she represented an advantageous alliance. Female blood was viewed as being "unclean", so it is not unlikely that the detailed circumstances "down there" were not heavily investigated by the groom in any way but one.
Given that his birth is contradictorily reported as occurring during the reigns of two different Herods (Herod the Great in Matthew, Herod Antipas in Luke) with two distinct lineages, with two distinct sets of supposed miracles attending his birth in the two birth stories, since Mark (the oldest and probable primary source of all three Synoptic gospels) not only had no birth but had no resurrection in the oldest extant copies (missing the last 16 verses altogether), one would have to agree. What survived was a syncretic hodge-podge that puts bits from Matthew and bits from Luke together into a Christmas myth that has wise men and taxation in Bethlehem at one and the same time. Nazereth didn't even exist as something more than a goatherding field and burial ground across the possible decades of his birth, and the term is a probable pun, not an actual designation of a birthplace. Nazereth was likely created to service the growing "Christian tourist" movement by the middle of the second century.
There is little reason to accept the baptism story either. Matthew inserted the quote from Isaiah -- which is taken completely out of context, which is a prophecy for a local king that failed spectacularly according to Chronicles, demonstrating that Isaiah was a pretty terrible prophet -- in order to connect Jesus to Jewish prophetic sayings, because Matthew was a Jew and viewed Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, irrelevant to the Gentiles. It was mistranslated and the mistranslation itself became the basis for a whole new myth loosely adopted from Mithraism and the Osiris cult (which which early Christianity, itself a cult, competed). The supposed slaughter of the innocents by Herod the Great was cut from the same cloth -- an attempt to create a connection to misquoted out-of-context prophecy, as was in all probability the connection to John the Baptist, who was by far the winningest Jewish apocalyptic cult that we have any record of. By making John "prophecy" Jesus and pass on his symbolic mantle to Jesus, early Jewish Christians were able to win over many disaffected followers of John after Herod (quite possibly in reality and not just myth) "cut off" his ministry rather suddenly, leaving his followers in a state of extreme cognitive dissonance and looking for any excuse to continue believing the Yahweh would come down and cleanse Israel of Herod's line and the Romans in a proper apocalypse.
Luke, on the other hand, was no lover of the Jews and if anything was part of the movement out of Israel to Rome, hence the prominence of Saul/Paul in his Acts and the blaming of the Crucifixion on the Jews, not the Romans. Which is silly, since the Jews without any doubt had all sorts of laws that put a man to death and the Romans could have cared less -- witness John's supposed head, cut off for mere sport (supposedly) by Herod the Great. The Romans, however, would never have involved themselves in the affairs of a two-bit itinerant preacher unless he was actively fomenting violent revolution, which the Gospels do not report him as doing (quite the contrary, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, render unto Caesar). But then, Luke is far more dressed up with material almost certainly added or originally written after the fall of the temple than even the rewritten Mark, and all of the miracles are suitably exaggerated both in Luke per se and in Acts.
Which is a long way to go from a virgin birth in a fish.
Humans, BTW, can easily have virgin births. Any woman with a perforate hymen, which is pretty much all women, who screws around sexually without actual penetration can have a virgin birth, because sperm deposited on the labia are perfectly capable of swimming up through the hole and fertilizing an egg. It is no doubt less likely than fertilization from a deep ejaculation, but as many women who have become pregnant from similarly external failures of a condom can attest, less likely does not mean impossible or even particularly unlikely. So Mary could just have been engaging in what amount
Absolutely. Working so very, very well that they can, I'm sure, easily winnow it out from the fact that you recently got HIV from your neighbor's husband and are trying hard to keep it from your two wives and the insurance company you are trying to get a huge life insurance policy from so that if your reckless skydiving hobby or the gang you work for as a drug mule kill you, your thirteen children, ten of them illegitimate-r, won't all starve, information that they would never ever use against you unless, of course, it suited them to do so because, for example, you were openly exposing their secrets or calling for the limitation of their powers on the Internet.
Which is a good thing, because if, say, all of this extra surveillance power was useful only against the criminally stupid non-terrorist private citizen because a) there isn't enough bandwidth in the Universe to monitor all the bandwidth of the Universe (God has the same problem, BTW) and b) contrary to popular belief, it is really simple to send encrypted messages that the NSA cannot detect or, if they detect, crack and terrorists -- even ones that are stuck in the 15th century as far as their religious ideals are concerned -- are not that stupid and have access to all the tools needed to secure lines of communication, the spook-lords might take it into their heads to notice that the only real difference between a spook and a terrorist is that the spook has nicer things and a 403k and dental.
So they could always, I dunno, stage a terrorist attack in such a way that it got blamed on some hapless Muslim who is inconveniently outspoken and who communicates with his elderly mother in Syria on his cell phone (oops, I mean communicates with his "mother" in Syria, wink wink nod nod know what I mean) or arrange for you to have an accident (I mean an "accident") driving home to work to kiss your wives and deliver a load of cocaine to the Peachy Blister street gang in your neighborhood.
Sure, I know, paranoid government conspiracy ravings, and there is nothing to have stopped them from doing most of this before 9/11 and the Patriot act but a certain amount (we hope) of genuine attachment to the ideals of America beyond the letter of the law and the letter of the law and possibility of consequences if caught at it. I feel every bit as comfortable about it as I used to feel with humans with imperfect brains, sociopathies, gambling debts, and blackmailable secrets sitting on top of nuclear weapons with the means at hand to immediately deliver them and detonate them.
Oh, wait, did you say that those days haven't really ended, and that somewhere out there is a young man with undiagnosed bipolar disorder whose wife just left him for another woman managing a locker full of nukes just begging to be used to columbine the two of them and a few dozen square miles in all directions of their -- I mean his -- house?
Time to honey-badger it. What we don't know, can't hurt us. Which is what most of us do, lest we go mad.
And hey, they could be genuine patriots, right? Observe everything but reveal nothing that ought not to be seen no matter how illegal, immoral, extortable it is, as long as it isn't "terrorism"? All without any sort of real accountability or audit?
Well, if you have anything really juicy in there -- a bit of porn, some records of your cocaine transactions, maybe some private account numbers and your social security number, you can always send them to me. I'll make sure there are no terrorists hiding under your bed.
And of course, I'm completely trustworthy.
My address:
John Doe Secret Agent for U.N.C.L.E. Hiding Under Your Bed (but I'm a nice guy, not a terrorist, and there isn't any more room under here)
In fact, don't bother sending them. I've already got them. And BTW, you snore...
... in a few weeks the powers that be will let (if necessary, "encourage") an act of extreme terrorism on US soil succeed. Then they will go back to the well, and congress will enthusiastically vote us all into chains at the same time they increase the budget and personal power of all of the shadow spooks keeping us safe.
Well, probably not a few weeks -- that would be too suspicious. But look for it within the year, especially if they can find a poster-child terrorist they can point at and say -- look, if only we were tapping everybody's phone (including yours) we could have found him in time to prevent this tragedy...
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.
For example, China and the US could have a bet -- loser's premier/president has to sing the national anthem of the other on international television. Or they could bet a really nice dinner in Paris. Or maybe they could bet, I dunno, world domination and possession of all lunar resources in perpetuity. I know which one The Brain would pick...
Hmmm, so either we're dealing with a black hole photography nut, or else a black hole that really, really cares about religious doctrine. Enough to drive them to drinking or to shoot somebody, not clear which.
Canon shots. Yet another activity atheists can't participate in.
His noodleness won't need to forgive me of anything. I'm perfectly aware of the correlation between piracy and global warming, and what more evidence does one need? And who can deny the reality of fettucini, especially when made with loving hands?
Unless, of course, one is inclined to think of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as being the incarnation of deity. Or Xenu. Or Krishna. Or Odin. Or Vishnu. Or Allah. Or Jesus. Or Zeus. Or Quetzacoatl. Or Yahweh. Or...
His divine noodleosity makes as much sense as any of the named possibilities, and serves well to emphasize that with the exception of mavericks like Benjamin Franklin who supposedly believed a little bit in "everything" and are N-n for some value of n, everybody is an N-1 atheist except for real atheists who are N.
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
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...
So you mean, God's omniscience is, well, sort of like not being omniscient at all. I mean I can look at the Universe and get all of the information I "need". Well, at least I can get all of the information I need if I'm omniscient enough to know what information I need before I look at it, or if I have moderate needs.
Next you'll be telling me It didn't really create the Universe, it just sort of nudged already existing stuff around, sort of like using a debugger to rewrite existing code. And that It doesn't really control the Universe, it just hacks it a bit so it does some of the stuff that it wants.
Then I'll be telling you:
a) sort of like, not being God at all, isn't it?
b) and besides, there is no evidence that any of these assertions are true, or consistent.
In the end, if God has nonzero information entropy, then It is not God. If it has zero entropy, it has no Choice (and is not God, not in any way that matters). The Universe has zero entropy already.
Assertions of God are almost invariably made without any appreciation for the mathematical challenges of complexity and information content on infinite domains. A shame, really.
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.
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.
To be fussy (and as a physicist I am nothing if not fussy), one can either describe everything in fluid motion as waves simply because the medium is (somewhat) elastic and one can construct a wave equation to describe the propagation of pressure differences, or one can use the Navier-Stokes equations straight up and solve for bulk transport properties. We don't usually refer to the bulk transport as waves. When I stir my wort making beer and get it going in a nice cylindrical eddy in the cylindrical pot, decomposing this bulk transport in a wave description makes little sense, even though the motion is undoubtedly periodic, and it is difficult to see it as the outcome of a suitable transformation of the N-S equations into a real-valued second order PDE in space and effectively second order in time, which is what one usually "expects" for "waves". Second order in time leads to solutions that are either exponential (not waves) or harmonic (waves), with life getting more complicated to the extent that things are generally nonlinear in the N-S equations.
Similarly, I personally wouldn't describe the thermohaline circulation of the ocean as "a wave", or stable currents as "waves", or the flow of water downhill in a stream as "waves", or laminar flow in general as "waves" and am not sure that I'd even describe eddies and the onset of turbulence as waves, although there finally, in the vicinity of the conditions where laminar instabilities can grow and initiate turbulence, a wave description might start to be sensible as periodic propagating wave-like structures appear (even though they probably don't satisfy any sort of sensible wave equation)
Note that your example of shock waves is a good one, as they result when the overpressure in air waves exceeds one atmosphere, at which point (if not long before) the wave equation that was very nearly linear becomes very definitely nonlinear, as the wave underpressure is clipped at 0 atm (a vacuum) but the overpressure is unconstrained. The resulting nonlinear equations can support e.g. solitonic solutions, propagating hyperbolic secants plus a reverberations as the air subsides into normal waves again from nonlinearities in the dispersion. I'd still categorize these as "waves" as they represent a specific limiting behavior of the wave equation with nonlinearities.
So the real question is, are the waves discovered by the MIT volken describable by suitably approximated/linearized second order time equations with complex time solutions (granting that one will still have second order space equations describing the fluctuations away from equilibrium in the bulk medium) ? Or are they first order in time, describing bulk transport but without any elastic "wave" to the wave? Are they just currents in the ocean, or are they currents in the ocean with periods, with wavelengths, or even with solitonic properties e.g. shock fronts?
After all, we know already that the ocean supports waves with wavelengths constrained only by its physical and thermoisobaric geometry and boundaries. There is no "low frequency cutoff" per se in the wave equation that describes sound waves in the water that I know of. In much of the deep ocean, the speed of sound is around 1.5 km/sec, so a 10 Hz wave has a wavelength of 150 meters. A wave with wavelength 500 m has a frequency of 3 Hz. Of course waves with this sort of wavelength propagate in the free ocean in all 3 dimensions, so variations 500 meters "high" can and almost certainly do exist.
It is this last terminology that is very odd. In a transverse wave propagating on e.g. a one dimensional string, the wave amplitude can be described as being thus and such "high", where high is understood to be perpendicular to the direction of propagation. In surface waves in the water (a mix of longitudinal and transverse waves) the wave one can discuss the longitudinal and transverse wavelengths together or separately, but again given horizontal propagation on the gravity
I'm just waiting for drones that will simultaneously cut my lawn and deter burglars.
According to Gary Larson, that would be robodog Ginger featured in "You call that mowing the lawn? Bad dog! No biscuit!" Well, you might have to put a beanie prop-hat on the dog, but it would be pretty close...
To paraphrase, you can't be too rich, too thin, or have too many bits of precision in a calculation. With single precision you have to be enormously careful not to drop digits even in comparatively modest loops; with double precision you can many digits before you run out. You can see it in almost any computations involving trig and pi -- single precision pi degrades in series much faster than double precision pi. It isn't just a matter of not using forward recursion to evaluate bessel functions, which is unstable in any precision (or for that matter, using book definitions of e.g. spherical bessel functions in terms of trig functions) or reordering series to avoid subtracting big numbers and running small to big instead of big to small -- there is simply a big difference between cumulating a random walk with a random digit at the 16th place and one at the 8th place.
A second problem is the exponent. 10^38 just isn't "big" in a modern large scale computation. It is easy to overflow or underflow a single precision computation. 10^308 is a whole lot closer to big, even expressed in decibels. One can concentrate a lot more on writing simple code, and a lot less on handling exponent problems as they emerge.
A final problem is random numbers. This is actually a rather big problem, as lots of code (all Monte Carlo, for example) relies on a stream of algorithmically random numbers that (for example) do not have a period less than the duration of the computation and that do not have significant bunching on low dimensional hyperplanes or other occult correlations. It is much more difficult to build a good random number generator on fewer bits, because the periods of the discretized iterated maps scale (badly) with reduced numbers of bits and it is more difficult to find acceptable moduli for various classes of generators from the significantly smaller discretized space. You can watch this problem emerge quite trivially by building a Mandelbrot set generator in float and rubberbanding in -- oops, you hit bottom rather quickly! Rebuild it in double and you at least have to work to rubberband in to where it all goes flat. You have to build it in a dynamically rescaleable precision to rubberband in "indefinitely" as the details you wish to resolve eventually become smaller than any given finite precision. This actually illustrates the overall problem with single precision quite nicely -- the emergent flat patches in an graphical representation of an iterated map are isomorphic to the establishment of unintended correlations in long runs of iterated maps in a random number generator and the clipping of the graphical representation of small numbers illustrates the problems with mere underflow in real computations of interest.
Personally, I dream of default quad precision and 128 bit processors. 34 decimal digits of precision means that a random walk with n unit steps (which accumulates like \sqrt{n}) require (10^30)^2 = 10^60 steps to get to where I don't still have 4 significant digits. Even a rather large cluster running a rather long time would have a hard time generating 10^60 add operations. In contrast, with only (say) 8 decimal digits a mere 10^16 operations leaves you with no digits at all, assuming you haven't overflowed already. I've run computations with a lot more than this number of operations. I also like the idea of having overflow around 10^5000. It takes quite a while adding numbers at the overflow of double precision to hit overflow, and one basically could add overflow scale single precision floats forever and never reach it. That gives me comfort. It would also make writing a Mandelbrot set explorer tool where one would be likely to give up before rubber banding all the way to the "bottom" -- there are a whole lot of halvings of scale in there to play with that still leave you with much more resolution than needed on the screen.
I like to make sure that the wires are very slightly tipped when I talk so that the electrons go downhill into my phone. Otherwise the wire gets clogged.
Isn't that why the phone lines run overhead? Otherwise the people on the second floor couldn't use the phone!
Shades of a bad science fiction novel. Or even several bad science fiction novels.
Next up on the news at 9 -- replete from eating Fukashima, Godzilla shows up from the trenches off of Japan to eat the Independence before marching on San Francisco, plates a-glowing...
...and this isn't even the first journal to do this. It's probably happening now because an entire book has just come out walking people how universally abused p-values are as statistical measures.
The book is nice in that it does give one replacements that are more robust and less likely to be meaningless, although nothing can substitute for having a clue about data dredging etc.
Donations are already taxed for most non-profits. Tax-exemption for donations isn't the same thing as not paying a corporate tax. Bear in mind that it is trivial to set up non-profit organizations and easy-peasy to use them to pass absolutely obscene not-profits straight through to the corporate officers as salaries, who just happen to be the folks that founded the not-for-profit and who own its not-for-profit shares that, in the event that those same officer/owners convert it over to for-profit, will become disgustingly valuable in an instant (see the history of Blue-Cross-Blue-Shield, for example). My wife worked for just such a non-profit until about a year ago. The company president of this not-for-profit company was knocking down seven digit salaries plus seven digit bonuses at the same time they were cutting her income to pay for an IT transition that they mandated. Her "donation" to the company was indeed not taxed -- it wasn't even voluntary. Non-profits need substantial tax revision almost as badly as religions.
You seem confused about the constitution, the bill of rights, and taxation in general, and nobody has suggested taxing people for exercising a civil liberty (certainly not me). What is being suggested is not giving people a tax deduction for money donated to a club. I'd oppose giving a tax deduction for dues paid to the Shriners, the Benevolent and Paternal Order of the Elks, the Masons, the Knights of Columbus, etc on the same basis, even though in some cases some of those organizations do some charitable works some of the time. I'm even borderline comfortable with tax breaks for donations to things like the Salvation Army whose primary focus is charity, although I am most unhappy with the way they pay their corporate officers and don't like the idea that those that they help get the help only at the cost of proselytizing. I could see clear to similar rules for genuine charities stripped of the missionary component set up by religious groups as well.
But the pass-the-hat donations to churches, used primarily to pay to maintain the infrastructure and personnel of the church, no. Taxing that isn't taxing your right to exercise a civil liberty -- nothing in the world is preventing you from belief or worship. It is taxing the money you are giving to a club designed to promote your belief in yourself and others and to support a huge formal infrastructure that yes, absolutely, exercises a substantial amount of power. We have similar laws regulating donations to things like political action committees and candidates for office -- if those laws were fairly applied to many churches they would not meet the criteria for 527 status because they often advocate for specific candidates or positions and are knee-deep in issue advocacy.
Some churches do good stuff some of the time. My niece is a Methodist minister; so was my grandfather. My grandfather, from all accounts, was a sharpster who ran his household until he ran out of money and then went and held a tent revival somewhere to refill his coffers. My niece works in Palestine trying to bring justice for the Palestinians and peace in a land that has almost never known it. But if you donate money to the Methodist church in church, almost all of that money goes to support the church itself and the minister that preaches to you on Sunday. That's the money I don't think should be deductible, because the government has no business subsidizing the support of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, or the people that run them, "cult" or not, and tax breaks are a de-facto subsidy.
If at some time you want to talk about the religious beliefs or lack thereof of our founding fathers, I'm happy to direct you to their own writings in which it was made perfectly clear that most of them were anything from atheists to deists. Jefferson's personal ambition was to establish a state free from religion, not a religious state, a state where one did not have to profess belief in a God at all in order to exercise political right
Not at all. I'm perfectly happy for people to believe anything they like. However, I absolutely object to giving them tax breaks on the basis of their belief system or to support an organized supernatural belief system. For one thing, as has been pointed out it clearly violates the separation of church and state (as do many other silly things, such as the references to God on currency, and yeah, I oppose those too because they do not speak for me or for a Hindu who believes in Gods, not (the Judeo-Christian) God, or for a Buddhist, or for many others. The state has no business even obliquely endorsing belief in the supernatural, especially given the lack of evidence for anything supernatural to sensibly believe in.
You clearly seem to have Obama on the brain, BTW. Curious, since this discussion isn't really about Obama -- it is a conservative principle to not force religious belief down people's throats and there was never any constitutional reason to give religions of any sort tax breaks (as I said, the Bill of Rights directly and specifically prohibits mixing church and state).
As for judging organizations about being a cult or not being a cult -- that's what is done NOW, when the Federal Government has to decide whether or not any given group of people who adhere to some absurd belief constitute a religion or a cult. The only rule that is consistently applied is that "old" absurd belief systems are grandfathered in and try to stomp on "new" absurd belief systems with hobnail boots, so anything new is a cult, anything old is a religion. So Jehovah's Witnesses, who were never anything but a cult and remain so today, are part of a religion in spite of the fact that some of their religious practices with their children actively endanger those childrens' lives. Ditto Mormanism. Ditto some of the other offshoots of Christianity with their tinhorn messiahs (there are a bunch of them out west and across the south). But Islam or Methodism or Catholicism aren't cults, because a lot of people believe in them instead of only a few. There's no more evidence for any world religion than any other -- zero equals zero -- but numbers apparently matter.
I disagree. I don't want to distinguish a religion from a cult at all. I want none of them to have any sort of legal protection or legal persecution, provided that they obey the common secular law, which includes taking care of your children and giving them blood-based products (like plasma or a blood transfusion) if they need them medically and so on. Including tax protection.
Look, if you wanted to join a chess club, you wouldn't try to deduct your dues. Why should you get to deduct your dues if you join a God club?
I'm an acolyte of the Don't Make Up Stupid Theories About Everything Coming From Nothing Because a Big Guy In The Sky Made It So Without Evidence. Especially don't try to sell them as revealed truth (without evidence) in contradiction to all of the other equally absurd and related theories that are sold as revealed truth (without evidence) that were invented by unbelievably primitive cultures to establish political-religious hegemony. As for "all human wisdom that existed in the past is foolishness" -- quite a lot of it was. Not all of it. You know how we can tell which is which?
I didn't think so, but a big hint is this -- NOT because it is written in scripture, NOT because it is believed by a large or small fraction of the human population, NOT because they are the words of somebody famous, NOT even because the "wisdom" isn't overtly inconsistent and hence isn't a priori impossible.
In the meantime, I'm not a big fan of the everything came from nothing theory simply because it isn't terribly consistent with physics. I much prefer everything came from everything, or if you prefer, the gobsmackingly obvious observation that "nothing" is not a state that has ever been observed or that can reasonably be inferred from observations of that which we can measure. But whether or not you yourself think that everything came from nothing (ex nihilo) because there wasn't really nothing, there was God, and God, while not really something, was enough to make something out of nothing or whatever tangled web of irrational logic you want to make up or accept as "ancient wisdom" concerning "creation" in a Universe with an apparent empirical law of conservation of mass energy, otherwise known as the "we have never, ever, seen an act of creation" law) I am highly allergic to giving the name "God" to my own ignorance, allowing it to fill the gaps in my understanding as the easy way out.
What happened before the alleged Big Bang? Was there "nothing"? Was there "something"? Is the visible Universe part of a much larger structure of existence, most of which we simply cannot see? Sure, all of these are perfectly lovely questions and I have no answers to them. How could I? We simply cannot see, and until we can there is no good reason to prefer one "answer" (otherwise know as "hypothesis" since they are only provisional answers) over another and only silly people would spend a lot of time arguing over the enormous range of possible answers, let alone fighting wars and blowing themselves and others up when people refuse to accept one particularly silly hypothesis without evidence or any reasonable hope of obtaining evidence.
But do as you like.
And BTW, I don't have an iPhone. Honestly, I'm not even sure what your implication is when you assert that I do. Are iPhones satanic atheist instruments? Does the fact that Ask Siri is more likely to reveal an evidence-supported truth than Ask the Old Testament grate on you?
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It's pointless (I'm certain) to point this out to you, but you are confusing your translations. You need to be reading Isaiah 7:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbi...
Note well that the translation in question is from the hebrew old testament, not the Greek new. Isaiah did not prophecy that Jesus would be born of a virgin in the first place. The verse in question does not refer to Jesus. Jesus was never called "Emmanuel".
And last (and my favorite part of the whole thing) Isaiah's entire prophecy was to Ahaz, king of Judah, who was very worried about the kings of Syria (Rezin) and Israel (Pekah) who were getting a whole lot stronger than he was an acting increasingly warlike. Isaiah was supposedly instructed by God to travel to Judah just to reassure Ahaz that God was going to smite Rezin and Pekah and allow Ahaz to die of old age, his kingdom intact and the whole birth of Emmanuel to a young woman was supposed to be the sign that this would be so!
Sadly, Chronicles 2 tells us what actually happened (for whatever meaning of "actually" you want to ascribe to a story from a book of mythology mixed with legend and even a tiny bit of history): "God delivered him [Ahaz] into the hand of the king of Syria; and they smote him, and carried away a great multitude of them captives, and brought them to Damascus. And he was also delivered into the hand of the king of Israel, who smote him with a great slaughter."
Oops. Guess that prophecy didn't work out too well. Smote him with a great slaughter does not sound like Isaiah: "Thus saith the Lord GOD, It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin; and within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broken, that it be not a people."
I guess Isaiah wasn't such a great prophet as all that, huh. Kinda got that one wrong. But hey, he left all sorts of lines in his failed prophecy that could be put to good use, and whoever wrote Matthew obviously found one to repurpose according to his needs.
rgb
Not that unlikely. Really, pretty easy. Lots of condom "failures" are little more than the deposit of part of an ejaculation on the labia.
Also, some women have stretchable hymens with comparatively large openings that don't actually tear initially when they have intercourse.
Finally, as various surviving stories make clear, a bride who was less than virginal on their wedding day had a few subterfuges they could use, with the help of their mother (for example) to survive their wedding night -- necessary given that the penalty for not being a virgin was being stoned to death, which hurts a lot and leaves you dead. A bladder of chicken blood hidden between the sheets or even in the vagina, released at the right time, would stain the sheets with enough blood to pass muster when they were hung over the balcony to prove to the crowd that the bride was a virgin. A wise husband might not even investigate the situation very closely or might collude with the bride himself if (for example) he loved her or she represented an advantageous alliance. Female blood was viewed as being "unclean", so it is not unlikely that the detailed circumstances "down there" were not heavily investigated by the groom in any way but one.
rgb
Given that his birth is contradictorily reported as occurring during the reigns of two different Herods (Herod the Great in Matthew, Herod Antipas in Luke) with two distinct lineages, with two distinct sets of supposed miracles attending his birth in the two birth stories, since Mark (the oldest and probable primary source of all three Synoptic gospels) not only had no birth but had no resurrection in the oldest extant copies (missing the last 16 verses altogether), one would have to agree. What survived was a syncretic hodge-podge that puts bits from Matthew and bits from Luke together into a Christmas myth that has wise men and taxation in Bethlehem at one and the same time. Nazereth didn't even exist as something more than a goatherding field and burial ground across the possible decades of his birth, and the term is a probable pun, not an actual designation of a birthplace. Nazereth was likely created to service the growing "Christian tourist" movement by the middle of the second century.
There is little reason to accept the baptism story either. Matthew inserted the quote from Isaiah -- which is taken completely out of context, which is a prophecy for a local king that failed spectacularly according to Chronicles, demonstrating that Isaiah was a pretty terrible prophet -- in order to connect Jesus to Jewish prophetic sayings, because Matthew was a Jew and viewed Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, irrelevant to the Gentiles. It was mistranslated and the mistranslation itself became the basis for a whole new myth loosely adopted from Mithraism and the Osiris cult (which which early Christianity, itself a cult, competed). The supposed slaughter of the innocents by Herod the Great was cut from the same cloth -- an attempt to create a connection to misquoted out-of-context prophecy, as was in all probability the connection to John the Baptist, who was by far the winningest Jewish apocalyptic cult that we have any record of. By making John "prophecy" Jesus and pass on his symbolic mantle to Jesus, early Jewish Christians were able to win over many disaffected followers of John after Herod (quite possibly in reality and not just myth) "cut off" his ministry rather suddenly, leaving his followers in a state of extreme cognitive dissonance and looking for any excuse to continue believing the Yahweh would come down and cleanse Israel of Herod's line and the Romans in a proper apocalypse.
Luke, on the other hand, was no lover of the Jews and if anything was part of the movement out of Israel to Rome, hence the prominence of Saul/Paul in his Acts and the blaming of the Crucifixion on the Jews, not the Romans. Which is silly, since the Jews without any doubt had all sorts of laws that put a man to death and the Romans could have cared less -- witness John's supposed head, cut off for mere sport (supposedly) by Herod the Great. The Romans, however, would never have involved themselves in the affairs of a two-bit itinerant preacher unless he was actively fomenting violent revolution, which the Gospels do not report him as doing (quite the contrary, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, render unto Caesar). But then, Luke is far more dressed up with material almost certainly added or originally written after the fall of the temple than even the rewritten Mark, and all of the miracles are suitably exaggerated both in Luke per se and in Acts.
Which is a long way to go from a virgin birth in a fish.
Humans, BTW, can easily have virgin births. Any woman with a perforate hymen, which is pretty much all women, who screws around sexually without actual penetration can have a virgin birth, because sperm deposited on the labia are perfectly capable of swimming up through the hole and fertilizing an egg. It is no doubt less likely than fertilization from a deep ejaculation, but as many women who have become pregnant from similarly external failures of a condom can attest, less likely does not mean impossible or even particularly unlikely. So Mary could just have been engaging in what amount
Absolutely. Working so very, very well that they can, I'm sure, easily winnow it out from the fact that you recently got HIV from your neighbor's husband and are trying hard to keep it from your two wives and the insurance company you are trying to get a huge life insurance policy from so that if your reckless skydiving hobby or the gang you work for as a drug mule kill you, your thirteen children, ten of them illegitimate-r, won't all starve, information that they would never ever use against you unless, of course, it suited them to do so because, for example, you were openly exposing their secrets or calling for the limitation of their powers on the Internet.
Which is a good thing, because if, say, all of this extra surveillance power was useful only against the criminally stupid non-terrorist private citizen because a) there isn't enough bandwidth in the Universe to monitor all the bandwidth of the Universe (God has the same problem, BTW) and b) contrary to popular belief, it is really simple to send encrypted messages that the NSA cannot detect or, if they detect, crack and terrorists -- even ones that are stuck in the 15th century as far as their religious ideals are concerned -- are not that stupid and have access to all the tools needed to secure lines of communication, the spook-lords might take it into their heads to notice that the only real difference between a spook and a terrorist is that the spook has nicer things and a 403k and dental.
So they could always, I dunno, stage a terrorist attack in such a way that it got blamed on some hapless Muslim who is inconveniently outspoken and who communicates with his elderly mother in Syria on his cell phone (oops, I mean communicates with his "mother" in Syria, wink wink nod nod know what I mean) or arrange for you to have an accident (I mean an "accident") driving home to work to kiss your wives and deliver a load of cocaine to the Peachy Blister street gang in your neighborhood.
Sure, I know, paranoid government conspiracy ravings, and there is nothing to have stopped them from doing most of this before 9/11 and the Patriot act but a certain amount (we hope) of genuine attachment to the ideals of America beyond the letter of the law and the letter of the law and possibility of consequences if caught at it. I feel every bit as comfortable about it as I used to feel with humans with imperfect brains, sociopathies, gambling debts, and blackmailable secrets sitting on top of nuclear weapons with the means at hand to immediately deliver them and detonate them.
Oh, wait, did you say that those days haven't really ended, and that somewhere out there is a young man with undiagnosed bipolar disorder whose wife just left him for another woman managing a locker full of nukes just begging to be used to columbine the two of them and a few dozen square miles in all directions of their -- I mean his -- house?
Time to honey-badger it. What we don't know, can't hurt us. Which is what most of us do, lest we go mad.
And hey, they could be genuine patriots, right? Observe everything but reveal nothing that ought not to be seen no matter how illegal, immoral, extortable it is, as long as it isn't "terrorism"? All without any sort of real accountability or audit?
rgb
Well, if you have anything really juicy in there -- a bit of porn, some records of your cocaine transactions, maybe some private account numbers and your social security number, you can always send them to me. I'll make sure there are no terrorists hiding under your bed.
And of course, I'm completely trustworthy.
My address:
John Doe
Secret Agent for U.N.C.L.E.
Hiding Under Your Bed (but I'm a nice guy, not a terrorist, and there isn't any more room under here)
In fact, don't bother sending them. I've already got them. And BTW, you snore...
... in a few weeks the powers that be will let (if necessary, "encourage") an act of extreme terrorism on US soil succeed. Then they will go back to the well, and congress will enthusiastically vote us all into chains at the same time they increase the budget and personal power of all of the shadow spooks keeping us safe.
Well, probably not a few weeks -- that would be too suspicious. But look for it within the year, especially if they can find a poster-child terrorist they can point at and say -- look, if only we were tapping everybody's phone (including yours) we could have found him in time to prevent this tragedy...
rgb
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
For example, China and the US could have a bet -- loser's premier/president has to sing the national anthem of the other on international television. Or they could bet a really nice dinner in Paris. Or maybe they could bet, I dunno, world domination and possession of all lunar resources in perpetuity. I know which one The Brain would pick...
Hmmm, so either we're dealing with a black hole photography nut, or else a black hole that really, really cares about religious doctrine. Enough to drive them to drinking or to shoot somebody, not clear which.
Canon shots. Yet another activity atheists can't participate in.
His noodleness won't need to forgive me of anything. I'm perfectly aware of the correlation between piracy and global warming, and what more evidence does one need? And who can deny the reality of fettucini, especially when made with loving hands?
Unless, of course, one is inclined to think of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as being the incarnation of deity. Or Xenu. Or Krishna. Or Odin. Or Vishnu. Or Allah. Or Jesus. Or Zeus. Or Quetzacoatl. Or Yahweh. Or...
His divine noodleosity makes as much sense as any of the named possibilities, and serves well to emphasize that with the exception of mavericks like Benjamin Franklin who supposedly believed a little bit in "everything" and are N-n for some value of n, everybody is an N-1 atheist except for real atheists who are N.
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
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
So you mean, God's omniscience is, well, sort of like not being omniscient at all. I mean I can look at the Universe and get all of the information I "need". Well, at least I can get all of the information I need if I'm omniscient enough to know what information I need before I look at it, or if I have moderate needs.
Next you'll be telling me It didn't really create the Universe, it just sort of nudged already existing stuff around, sort of like using a debugger to rewrite existing code. And that It doesn't really control the Universe, it just hacks it a bit so it does some of the stuff that it wants.
Then I'll be telling you:
a) sort of like, not being God at all, isn't it?
b) and besides, there is no evidence that any of these assertions are true, or consistent.
In the end, if God has nonzero information entropy, then It is not God. If it has zero entropy, it has no Choice (and is not God, not in any way that matters). The Universe has zero entropy already.
Assertions of God are almost invariably made without any appreciation for the mathematical challenges of complexity and information content on infinite domains. A shame, really.
rgb
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
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.
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To be fussy (and as a physicist I am nothing if not fussy), one can either describe everything in fluid motion as waves simply because the medium is (somewhat) elastic and one can construct a wave equation to describe the propagation of pressure differences, or one can use the Navier-Stokes equations straight up and solve for bulk transport properties. We don't usually refer to the bulk transport as waves. When I stir my wort making beer and get it going in a nice cylindrical eddy in the cylindrical pot, decomposing this bulk transport in a wave description makes little sense, even though the motion is undoubtedly periodic, and it is difficult to see it as the outcome of a suitable transformation of the N-S equations into a real-valued second order PDE in space and effectively second order in time, which is what one usually "expects" for "waves". Second order in time leads to solutions that are either exponential (not waves) or harmonic (waves), with life getting more complicated to the extent that things are generally nonlinear in the N-S equations.
Similarly, I personally wouldn't describe the thermohaline circulation of the ocean as "a wave", or stable currents as "waves", or the flow of water downhill in a stream as "waves", or laminar flow in general as "waves" and am not sure that I'd even describe eddies and the onset of turbulence as waves, although there finally, in the vicinity of the conditions where laminar instabilities can grow and initiate turbulence, a wave description might start to be sensible as periodic propagating wave-like structures appear (even though they probably don't satisfy any sort of sensible wave equation)
Note that your example of shock waves is a good one, as they result when the overpressure in air waves exceeds one atmosphere, at which point (if not long before) the wave equation that was very nearly linear becomes very definitely nonlinear, as the wave underpressure is clipped at 0 atm (a vacuum) but the overpressure is unconstrained. The resulting nonlinear equations can support e.g. solitonic solutions, propagating hyperbolic secants plus a reverberations as the air subsides into normal waves again from nonlinearities in the dispersion. I'd still categorize these as "waves" as they represent a specific limiting behavior of the wave equation with nonlinearities.
So the real question is, are the waves discovered by the MIT volken describable by suitably approximated/linearized second order time equations with complex time solutions (granting that one will still have second order space equations describing the fluctuations away from equilibrium in the bulk medium) ? Or are they first order in time, describing bulk transport but without any elastic "wave" to the wave? Are they just currents in the ocean, or are they currents in the ocean with periods, with wavelengths, or even with solitonic properties e.g. shock fronts?
After all, we know already that the ocean supports waves with wavelengths constrained only by its physical and thermoisobaric geometry and boundaries. There is no "low frequency cutoff" per se in the wave equation that describes sound waves in the water that I know of. In much of the deep ocean, the speed of sound is around 1.5 km/sec, so a 10 Hz wave has a wavelength of 150 meters. A wave with wavelength 500 m has a frequency of 3 Hz. Of course waves with this sort of wavelength propagate in the free ocean in all 3 dimensions, so variations 500 meters "high" can and almost certainly do exist.
It is this last terminology that is very odd. In a transverse wave propagating on e.g. a one dimensional string, the wave amplitude can be described as being thus and such "high", where high is understood to be perpendicular to the direction of propagation. In surface waves in the water (a mix of longitudinal and transverse waves) the wave one can discuss the longitudinal and transverse wavelengths together or separately, but again given horizontal propagation on the gravity
Hmmm, I can think of a few places where strengthening with novel carbon structures would be quite welcome...
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To paraphrase, you can't be too rich, too thin, or have too many bits of precision in a calculation. With single precision you have to be enormously careful not to drop digits even in comparatively modest loops; with double precision you can many digits before you run out. You can see it in almost any computations involving trig and pi -- single precision pi degrades in series much faster than double precision pi. It isn't just a matter of not using forward recursion to evaluate bessel functions, which is unstable in any precision (or for that matter, using book definitions of e.g. spherical bessel functions in terms of trig functions) or reordering series to avoid subtracting big numbers and running small to big instead of big to small -- there is simply a big difference between cumulating a random walk with a random digit at the 16th place and one at the 8th place.
A second problem is the exponent. 10^38 just isn't "big" in a modern large scale computation. It is easy to overflow or underflow a single precision computation. 10^308 is a whole lot closer to big, even expressed in decibels. One can concentrate a lot more on writing simple code, and a lot less on handling exponent problems as they emerge.
A final problem is random numbers. This is actually a rather big problem, as lots of code (all Monte Carlo, for example) relies on a stream of algorithmically random numbers that (for example) do not have a period less than the duration of the computation and that do not have significant bunching on low dimensional hyperplanes or other occult correlations. It is much more difficult to build a good random number generator on fewer bits, because the periods of the discretized iterated maps scale (badly) with reduced numbers of bits and it is more difficult to find acceptable moduli for various classes of generators from the significantly smaller discretized space. You can watch this problem emerge quite trivially by building a Mandelbrot set generator in float and rubberbanding in -- oops, you hit bottom rather quickly! Rebuild it in double and you at least have to work to rubberband in to where it all goes flat. You have to build it in a dynamically rescaleable precision to rubberband in "indefinitely" as the details you wish to resolve eventually become smaller than any given finite precision. This actually illustrates the overall problem with single precision quite nicely -- the emergent flat patches in an graphical representation of an iterated map are isomorphic to the establishment of unintended correlations in long runs of iterated maps in a random number generator and the clipping of the graphical representation of small numbers illustrates the problems with mere underflow in real computations of interest.
Personally, I dream of default quad precision and 128 bit processors. 34 decimal digits of precision means that a random walk with n unit steps (which accumulates like \sqrt{n}) require (10^30)^2 = 10^60 steps to get to where I don't still have 4 significant digits. Even a rather large cluster running a rather long time would have a hard time generating 10^60 add operations. In contrast, with only (say) 8 decimal digits a mere 10^16 operations leaves you with no digits at all, assuming you haven't overflowed already. I've run computations with a lot more than this number of operations. I also like the idea of having overflow around 10^5000. It takes quite a while adding numbers at the overflow of double precision to hit overflow, and one basically could add overflow scale single precision floats forever and never reach it. That gives me comfort. It would also make writing a Mandelbrot set explorer tool where one would be likely to give up before rubber banding all the way to the "bottom" -- there are a whole lot of halvings of scale in there to play with that still leave you with much more resolution than needed on the screen.
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I like to make sure that the wires are very slightly tipped when I talk so that the electrons go downhill into my phone. Otherwise the wire gets clogged.
Isn't that why the phone lines run overhead? Otherwise the people on the second floor couldn't use the phone!
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...with laser beams! Radical!
Shades of a bad science fiction novel. Or even several bad science fiction novels.
Next up on the news at 9 -- replete from eating Fukashima, Godzilla shows up from the trenches off of Japan to eat the Independence before marching on San Francisco, plates a-glowing...
...and this isn't even the first journal to do this. It's probably happening now because an entire book has just come out walking people how universally abused p-values are as statistical measures.
http://www.statisticsdonewrong...
The book is nice in that it does give one replacements that are more robust and less likely to be meaningless, although nothing can substitute for having a clue about data dredging etc.
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Donations are already taxed for most non-profits. Tax-exemption for donations isn't the same thing as not paying a corporate tax. Bear in mind that it is trivial to set up non-profit organizations and easy-peasy to use them to pass absolutely obscene not-profits straight through to the corporate officers as salaries, who just happen to be the folks that founded the not-for-profit and who own its not-for-profit shares that, in the event that those same officer/owners convert it over to for-profit, will become disgustingly valuable in an instant (see the history of Blue-Cross-Blue-Shield, for example). My wife worked for just such a non-profit until about a year ago. The company president of this not-for-profit company was knocking down seven digit salaries plus seven digit bonuses at the same time they were cutting her income to pay for an IT transition that they mandated. Her "donation" to the company was indeed not taxed -- it wasn't even voluntary. Non-profits need substantial tax revision almost as badly as religions.
You seem confused about the constitution, the bill of rights, and taxation in general, and nobody has suggested taxing people for exercising a civil liberty (certainly not me). What is being suggested is not giving people a tax deduction for money donated to a club. I'd oppose giving a tax deduction for dues paid to the Shriners, the Benevolent and Paternal Order of the Elks, the Masons, the Knights of Columbus, etc on the same basis, even though in some cases some of those organizations do some charitable works some of the time. I'm even borderline comfortable with tax breaks for donations to things like the Salvation Army whose primary focus is charity, although I am most unhappy with the way they pay their corporate officers and don't like the idea that those that they help get the help only at the cost of proselytizing. I could see clear to similar rules for genuine charities stripped of the missionary component set up by religious groups as well.
But the pass-the-hat donations to churches, used primarily to pay to maintain the infrastructure and personnel of the church, no. Taxing that isn't taxing your right to exercise a civil liberty -- nothing in the world is preventing you from belief or worship. It is taxing the money you are giving to a club designed to promote your belief in yourself and others and to support a huge formal infrastructure that yes, absolutely, exercises a substantial amount of power. We have similar laws regulating donations to things like political action committees and candidates for office -- if those laws were fairly applied to many churches they would not meet the criteria for 527 status because they often advocate for specific candidates or positions and are knee-deep in issue advocacy.
Some churches do good stuff some of the time. My niece is a Methodist minister; so was my grandfather. My grandfather, from all accounts, was a sharpster who ran his household until he ran out of money and then went and held a tent revival somewhere to refill his coffers. My niece works in Palestine trying to bring justice for the Palestinians and peace in a land that has almost never known it. But if you donate money to the Methodist church in church, almost all of that money goes to support the church itself and the minister that preaches to you on Sunday. That's the money I don't think should be deductible, because the government has no business subsidizing the support of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, or the people that run them, "cult" or not, and tax breaks are a de-facto subsidy.
If at some time you want to talk about the religious beliefs or lack thereof of our founding fathers, I'm happy to direct you to their own writings in which it was made perfectly clear that most of them were anything from atheists to deists. Jefferson's personal ambition was to establish a state free from religion, not a religious state, a state where one did not have to profess belief in a God at all in order to exercise political right
Not at all. I'm perfectly happy for people to believe anything they like. However, I absolutely object to giving them tax breaks on the basis of their belief system or to support an organized supernatural belief system. For one thing, as has been pointed out it clearly violates the separation of church and state (as do many other silly things, such as the references to God on currency, and yeah, I oppose those too because they do not speak for me or for a Hindu who believes in Gods, not (the Judeo-Christian) God, or for a Buddhist, or for many others. The state has no business even obliquely endorsing belief in the supernatural, especially given the lack of evidence for anything supernatural to sensibly believe in.
You clearly seem to have Obama on the brain, BTW. Curious, since this discussion isn't really about Obama -- it is a conservative principle to not force religious belief down people's throats and there was never any constitutional reason to give religions of any sort tax breaks (as I said, the Bill of Rights directly and specifically prohibits mixing church and state).
As for judging organizations about being a cult or not being a cult -- that's what is done NOW, when the Federal Government has to decide whether or not any given group of people who adhere to some absurd belief constitute a religion or a cult. The only rule that is consistently applied is that "old" absurd belief systems are grandfathered in and try to stomp on "new" absurd belief systems with hobnail boots, so anything new is a cult, anything old is a religion. So Jehovah's Witnesses, who were never anything but a cult and remain so today, are part of a religion in spite of the fact that some of their religious practices with their children actively endanger those childrens' lives. Ditto Mormanism. Ditto some of the other offshoots of Christianity with their tinhorn messiahs (there are a bunch of them out west and across the south). But Islam or Methodism or Catholicism aren't cults, because a lot of people believe in them instead of only a few. There's no more evidence for any world religion than any other -- zero equals zero -- but numbers apparently matter.
I disagree. I don't want to distinguish a religion from a cult at all. I want none of them to have any sort of legal protection or legal persecution, provided that they obey the common secular law, which includes taking care of your children and giving them blood-based products (like plasma or a blood transfusion) if they need them medically and so on. Including tax protection.
Look, if you wanted to join a chess club, you wouldn't try to deduct your dues. Why should you get to deduct your dues if you join a God club?
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I'm an acolyte of the Don't Make Up Stupid Theories About Everything Coming From Nothing Because a Big Guy In The Sky Made It So Without Evidence. Especially don't try to sell them as revealed truth (without evidence) in contradiction to all of the other equally absurd and related theories that are sold as revealed truth (without evidence) that were invented by unbelievably primitive cultures to establish political-religious hegemony. As for "all human wisdom that existed in the past is foolishness" -- quite a lot of it was. Not all of it. You know how we can tell which is which?
I didn't think so, but a big hint is this -- NOT because it is written in scripture, NOT because it is believed by a large or small fraction of the human population, NOT because they are the words of somebody famous, NOT even because the "wisdom" isn't overtly inconsistent and hence isn't a priori impossible.
In the meantime, I'm not a big fan of the everything came from nothing theory simply because it isn't terribly consistent with physics. I much prefer everything came from everything, or if you prefer, the gobsmackingly obvious observation that "nothing" is not a state that has ever been observed or that can reasonably be inferred from observations of that which we can measure. But whether or not you yourself think that everything came from nothing (ex nihilo) because there wasn't really nothing, there was God, and God, while not really something, was enough to make something out of nothing or whatever tangled web of irrational logic you want to make up or accept as "ancient wisdom" concerning "creation" in a Universe with an apparent empirical law of conservation of mass energy, otherwise known as the "we have never, ever, seen an act of creation" law) I am highly allergic to giving the name "God" to my own ignorance, allowing it to fill the gaps in my understanding as the easy way out.
What happened before the alleged Big Bang? Was there "nothing"? Was there "something"? Is the visible Universe part of a much larger structure of existence, most of which we simply cannot see? Sure, all of these are perfectly lovely questions and I have no answers to them. How could I? We simply cannot see, and until we can there is no good reason to prefer one "answer" (otherwise know as "hypothesis" since they are only provisional answers) over another and only silly people would spend a lot of time arguing over the enormous range of possible answers, let alone fighting wars and blowing themselves and others up when people refuse to accept one particularly silly hypothesis without evidence or any reasonable hope of obtaining evidence.
But do as you like.
And BTW, I don't have an iPhone. Honestly, I'm not even sure what your implication is when you assert that I do. Are iPhones satanic atheist instruments? Does the fact that Ask Siri is more likely to reveal an evidence-supported truth than Ask the Old Testament grate on you?
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