>Incompatible? It certainly places it outside science, but when pushed even science has to accept things without proof. I
No, it doesn't - the closest you'll ever see is "we are still looking for proof of something that makes sense". Dark matter is an example - the moment we came up with it, our very next response was to start FINDING ways to detect it - very quickly we learned that it does bend light. We may not be able to observe it directly but this was NEVER an excuse to accept something that's mathematically perfect without proof, it was only an excuse to look for proof elsewhere.
>it has no (scientific) answer to the solipsist who insists that the material world is an illusion.
Actually, yes it does - several. You my friend are about 2000 years out of date on your science. The "material world is an illusion" argument has been held as a proven fallacy since the time of St. Augustine.
> All attempts to eliminate metaphysics from science so far have failed dismally [Citation needed] - and you won't find one that isn't biased. On the contrary - any mention of metaphysics will automatically get your theory rejected. If it can't be proven, tested and repeated it is NOT science. Nothing that relies on something like that is every considered science and scientists give NO real credence to any such hypotheses - unless they believe they have found a way to test them and make them BECOME science.
>And as I was arguing last week in a different thread, there are unresolved arguments in science over what counts as an observation, which leads to arguments over what is proven.
Yes, this only strengthens my argument about the weakness of human observation - the reason we develop technology that is better at it than us. As our technology improves further our ability to observe improves as well, and these arguments become smaller. Just because they aren't (perhaps can't be) settled doesn't demean science. it only means scientists are self-critical which is a crucial part of the scientific process. Religion on the other hand opposes criticism, it doesn't say "question even our base assumptions" - no priest has ever (publicily) questioned the existence of god - if you do you're not being religious, a scientist however questions HIS base assumptions all the time. A (good) scientist spends most of his time trying to prove his own theories FALSE and the only thing that gives a theory TRUE credence is a consistent fallure by all of science to do so. The only religion that actively encourages it's followers to question the religion ITSELF is budhism - it's interesting that it's the most popular religion among scientists of a more spiritual frame of mind, because it's a belief system that is compatible with science. There is NOTHING in it that you aren't allowed to question or reject.
>As I've said, it doesn't seem to be rejection of proof so much as rejection of coercion to belief. Not the same thing. In the Christian account God provided evidence (not the same as proof) -- John 20:27, for example. Yes, Jesus said that it was better for those who did not require such proof, but that seems to be a matter of trust. If you employ a PI to find out that your wife is not cheating it indicates a lack of trust and could sour the relationship when she finds out -- even if she's a scientist and is in favour of evidence-based decision making.
If she really is, she would actually be asking you "what made you think you had to check ?". That's not only the proper scientific response - it's the mature one that lets relationships survive. That said you're giving a false dichotomy. Human behavior is not subject to fully empirical research. We cannot with absolution predict it. The reaction to pull your hand out of a fire lies in the spinal column, it happens fast - before our conscious minds even know about it, yet we can consciously override and choose to burn. Nothing in human behavior is absolute because all brains are programmed in subtly different ways. This doesn't mean psychiatry an
But there are many other parts of the cycle that could conceivably be replaced by other chemicles. Oxygen can be replaced by Amonia and create cells that are otherwise identical and function just like ours for example. Wikipedia has a page on alternate lifeform theories that lists all the variations, things that make them more or less likely etc. Interestingly - we may have already spotted proof of ammonia breathing lifeforms... finding the articles is left as an excercise for the reader (hint: it's on NASA's site)*
*Yes I'm aware there is another theory about what may have caused the observation - that's why I said "may have"
>It doesn't fall flat. You say that religion rejects evidence. It doesn't. It doesn't reject empirical evidence either. It fully accepts empirical evidence and modifies its beliefs based on empirical evidence.
I didn't say it doesn't accept evidence, I said it ALSO accepts truths WITHOUT empirical evidence. That's incompatible with science which demands evidence for ALL things. If you believe ONE thing without proof, or EVERYTHING without proof is completely unimportant - the results are exactly the same.
>No. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of omnipotence that was dealt with in the early days of Christianity. As I have already explained, putting "God can" in front of a meaningless statement doesn't make it meaningful, and "Proof of God in a system that excludes proof of God" is meaningless.
But that's not what I did. I said God excluded proof of his existence - by choice, and declares it to be a choice, ergo he COULD have made a different choice and those of us who look at religion from the outside can judge the psychology of those who came up with it by the attributes they gave their god's persona. One of which is that they created a god who - right from the start when things like lightning was still held as proof of his actions already declared that he refuses to give proof. That's quite prescient, or perhaps it means our ancestors were a little more sceptical than we give them credit for.
>But it's completely accurate. No it's not. A bee sees something completely different when it looks at that flower - because it sees a wider part of the spectrum, a dog sees less than we do... who sees the truth ? None of us. We all see what we want to see, or rather more correctly - what we NEED to see.
>What, our innate ideas of logic are worthless if they're not infallible? The existence of fallacies doesn't show that we don't get it right most of the time. The failures are interesting, but we have to get logic right to form a view of the world that is sufficiently coherent to get by.
We have no innate logic. We have a pattern matching brain which laymen call logic (these days) because they don't KNOW what logic is. Unless you can recite aristotle's laws of logic - and more importantly construct an argument that obeys them you are not being logical AT ALL.
>If "anything not based on lots of evidence and testing is almost always false" we wouldn't have made it through human history.
Why not ? We didn't NEED acuracy of information to survive. We needed useful bullshit. We needed enough information for flight or fight decisions. In our world today - most of our problems can be attributed to that out of place response. We see somebody that looks different we react as our ancestors did to a strange shape in the grass - we try to work out if we should run, or fight back. Instant racism. Scale it up and it's what culture is and why cultures take so long to get along and learn respect for one another. We associate "like me" with "safe" and "not like me" with "danger". A great conclusion for an ape in a tree - a horrible way to think in today's world. Ironically - the moment we formed civilizations the rules changed. The biggest threat to us is not strangers - 90% of crimes are committed by somebody the victim knows and trusts. Our entire response system is backwards - because it was built on the presumption that threats can be recognized by how they look. It works if "threats" mean lions and tigers. It doesn't work when threats are other people - because people who look different are LESS likely to harm you than people that look just like you. Our instincts were built for a world we DO NOT LIVE in - and we can only do anything good or useful when we override them with conclusions based on evidence. All of politics even today is filled with the false assumptions that come from ancient evolved behaviors masquerading as logic. Indeed, anything not based on evidence is usually false because the only other things we have to base things on are imagination a
>[Citation needed] Hebrews Chapter 11 verse 1 âoeNOW FAITH IS the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things NOT SEENâ.
Citation given.
>No, religion by default accepts belief based on evidence (Psalm 34:8). It just has accepts as evidence more than science does, and the additional things that they accept as evidence in very rare cases leads them to different conclusions.
Now you're arguing semantics (stupidly). If I replace "evidence" with "empirical evidence" then you're entire argument falls flat.
>Presumably true, if such a God existed. Since no god at all exists, this is purely hypothetical anyway. I merely pointed out that the contention in the parent post was false based on what is believed about this god persona.
>Probably not. This is an absolute. The people who believe in god, believe he is almighty, ergo if he so chooses he could so do. If he doesn't, he chose not to - or he doesn't exist.
>Actually, it's mostly right for things that matter to everyday life. Common sense tells me that if I'm hungry eating will make me feel better, that jumping off a cliff will hurt (at least) and so on. It's only on the more esoteric stuff that it's not so good.
Which is fine if all you care about is surviving, if understanding, knowledge and perhaps even a bit of truth is your goal - then you must recognize it's massive deficiencies. Each of our eyes has a blind spot so big that we cannot see the moon if it's right in front of us - smack in the middle. We never see that blind spot because our brain just fills in what it thinks should be there from other clues (mostly memories from when our eyes last moved and the area in the blindspot was visible). What our senses are is data-collecting sensors - what we perceive as reality is that data mashed up with a massive amount of processing which is heavily tilted by past experiences and prejudice. It's remarkably INaccurate in fact. Frankly that's a good thing for survival. "There is a radiation with a wavelength of 400nm coming from there, adjacently up to there, and upwards up to there and and and and and is useful for cognition... "there's a blue flower over there" is useful, so we SEE a blue flower, but that is NOT what our eyes detected.
>Again, it's usually true but there are a few situations it doesn't do well with.
This time you're completely wrong. Logic is NOT some innate process and most people have almost NO skill at all at it. Logic is the foundation of maths and has strict rules. If our innate ideas of logic were worth anything at all then fallacies would not exist as they would never be convincing at all. Logic is a practiced and disciplined skill we developed over millennia exactly to PROTECT ourselves from the mental traps we are otherwise so very prone to.
>But again are not usually fooled in everyday life -- not in ways that matter, anyway.
See my previous bit on this - we're fooled all the time. We literally live in a dreamworld, this is a survival feature. By lying to ourselves we take too much data to process and limit our conscious minds to making decisions on what it actually needs to know. We barely begun to understand the levels of unconscious thought that actually prepares that need-to-know briefing we think of as reality, we have no idea what dark or wonderful secrets it holds - what we do know for sure is, we don't see reality. In fact, if we did- magic shows would be no fun at all (and wouldn't work), optical illusions wouldn't exist...
>[citation needed] Human history - all of it. Oh and just about EVERY idea about the universe that was ever advanced prior to science coming into maturity in the last 2 centuries. How much more of a citation than you need ?
>Why do you assume I am religious? I find religion to be as full of bullshit as strong atheism, and I call it against both sides.
I didn't, that's why the sentence started with "if". I just stated that it's no skin of my back if you are, just don't push i
Except we have at least 8 viable theories on abiogenesis - none of which are proven - all of which are possible. Who says there is only ONE right way for life to start ?
This decision dates to the late 80s I believe. I could ne wrong though. Even so neither python nor Lulama was mature languages then. They we're unproven concepts really Many old school programmers found the idea of meaning full whitespace in python a major put off. It felt like a monumentally bad and exceedingly restrictive decision. I know. I was one of them. In retrospect it was visionary and I love python. Buy coming from a modular programming background it didn't look good at first sight!
I was about that age when I wrote my first program. Sure it was a simple basic program that printed my name in an infinite loop - but it was the start of a new route of discovery.
In short: 1) You're wrong. 2) My answer to the GP - don't TELL them... SHOW them !
", He/She would be unable to prove His/Her existence to such atheists"
Allmight....unable... You don't see the problem with your own claim ?
If a God really wanted to prove his existence to such atheists he would have no problem, about half of Genesis is full of him manipulating the thoughts and feelings of Pharao to make him act stupidly just to prove a point ! Clearly changing somebody's mind and notably their reaction to observations is something he already claims to have done.
So he would have no problem getting them to accept the evidence if he chose to gave it since he could just control their minds.
The reality is, that the bible says God doesn't want anybody to have evidence. It says outright that faith must be based on nothing to be faith at all. This is what makes religious explanations by default unscientific. Religion by default rejects belief based on evidence while science by default rejects belief NOT based on evidence.
God would have no problem making people belief if he so wished or giving absolute and irrefutable proof if he so chose. He chose instead to give a universe where we can trust very little - our common sense is mostly wrong, our instinctive logic usually false and our senses prone to faillure and easy to fool. So we rely on multiple observations, technology and a process called the "scientific method" to study the universe and get reliable explanations about it since anything not based on lots of evidence and testing is almost always false. After choosing to put us in a universe where we can't trust anything we didn't test he then says "except me"...
Well.. frankly that sounds just a bit childish to me, but if believing that makes you happy who am I to argue. I can't prove it didn't happen, but since you can't prove it did and God's refusal (according to your own claims - or rather those of your holy book) to prove his existence by default implies that he's existence or lack thereoff can never influence anything we study in science... well who cares ?
Having said that... a god who is that petty wouldn't be worth believing in, in the first place. Going to hell on those grounds would be an act of noble rebellion against a universally bad (pun intended) case of the child-king syndrome.
None of those assumptions remotely approximate the least degree of scientific consensus - the debate is still strongly happening on them.
The evidence we do have can support two conclusions: 1) Life is very fragile and that it happened on earth at all is rare, unique and may never have managed to happen anywhere else. 2) Life is very resilient and has survived despite everything the universe has thrown at is (mostly giant, icy rocks) and continues to survive everywhere it can and everywhere it can't.
The extinction record can logically support BOTH those conclusions even though they are contradictory and until we have more premises (that is to say -data outside of the extinction record) we can't rule one out. This is difficult - the strongest evidence for conclusion 1 is that we've yet to find any conclusive proof that extraterestial life exists (let alone intelligent life). But that's not proof until we've looked everywhere (which is not going to happen soon). The strongest evidence in favor of option 2 is the existence of things like extremeophile bacteria and viable, proper scientific theories that predict life likely existing on some of our solar neighbours and likely having existed in the past on others. There's still some evidence of possible bacterial life on Mars though possibly no longer alive, strong evidence in favor of theories that life may exist beneath the frozen surface of Io exist as well. Again these theories have other possible explanations - but since their simplicity is no different we can't even us Occam's razor. We won't know till we go look, and even doing that must be done carefully lest we destroy the very thing we're trying to find.
I agree with you -since there's no data that can give us an answer, the data we do have supports either conclusion and we as yet lack the technology to change that Occam's razor simply doesn't apply here.
>It's considerably more likely that our theory(/ies) of star formation are lacking.
It's even MORE likely that our theories are generally correct but some specific unknown circumstance caused this particular star to follow a different and unexpected path. This star is not matching the previously observed observations on which our theories are based. The most likely explanation is that something highly unusual (perhaps entirely unique) happened here - we don't yet know what, something that cause it not to do what usually happens.
This is not so much a shortcoming of theory then - theories are generalized models of how the universe behaves which are true most of the time, when all the variables are the same. What we see here is a very clear case that one of those variables must have been very different. We don't yet know why. Finding out why is a challenge and worthy one. It could disprove the theory (one failed experiment does - but only if the variables are the SAME) - more likely we'll end up amending the theories to also include the particular type of star formation that caused this. That doesn't make the theory false for all the other stars - it could, it could be that we were wrong all along, - but that is doubtful we've got lots of observations of stars of various ages that follow the predicted paths of the theory, this exception should therefore raise an expectation of something unique happening differently.
An object falling should accelerate at 9.2 m/s2 - that's a valid scientific theory. If there's air resistence it won't reach that though, and depending on how much the impact will vary - a more refined theory talks of terminal velocities in earth atmosphere (and those aren't perfect since air density is not a constant). Throw in a parachute and your prediction of how fast something will fall is now way off. That's not because the theory of gravity is wrong, it's because the parachute is an unlikely additional factor that doesn't usually enter ito the equation - but we can write a theory of how parachutes will change the prediction (once observed) and deal with that situation seperately.
So the smart money is that we'll see a new theory to explain how some small stars can exist without heavier elements, which doesn't replace the usual heavy elements are needed in small stars theory, it just adds an "unless" clause.
So do I, and most programmers today - but back in the late 70's and 80's this was seen as bad style by most academics (remember the 80's was when Pascal was THE language you learned first at university to teach you how to write good code with) Languages derived from that era's thinking still maintain this. Meantime the hacker's circled around languages like C for their raw power and ability to create elegant yet rapidly built well... hacks without the academic constraints of languages like Pascal. Notably without the "every line designed before the first line is written" design.
Old-school hackers used to call them "bondage and discipline languages"
>Why would you reimplement it? That's quite a lot of work (much more so if you wish to produce a performant implementation). Your library should have just provided a mechanism to bridge both ways between the standard language implementation and the freepascal world; less work, easier to make correct.
Because back then freepascal had no means to link to C-libraries. It gained that ability not very long after but this was back when FPC tself was still a very, very new project. I also didn't say it was the entire TCL being reinterpreted, it was a wrapper library that allowed you to embed TCL/TK code inside freepascal programs or execute them dynamically at runtime and communicate with them (so it was ALSO an extension mechanism). Years ago I wrote some interesting stuff with it. These days even if I had the same task I would likely have approached it differently. I didn't have the experience I have now when I was 19 years old.
I mostly agree with you but just to pick a nit on your last point: neither python or lua existed when this choice was first made. At the time the strongest competition was TCL (yeurch) or perl (let's make a language less readable than lisp so you can code in ASCII art).
Perl was (and is) bloody huge as well, sort of ruled it out, more-over the perl manual's license (at the time at least) was RMS's example of why documentation should be free - he wasn't about to make major use of it. TCL was rejected for numerous reasons other posters have commented on.
Now this doesn't mean they couldn't have chosen lua or python instead at a later time when they did exist and the universal guile-extension still hadn't come to life, but it's rather unfair to judge them for initially not consideriing languages that didn't exist.
By that logic I should be punished because the code I write today isn't designed to run on quantum computers.
You're talking about the Mona Lisa, aren't you ? Da Vinci kept working on that right from when he started (as a rather young man) until the day he died.
You are so very right. This is why Stallman is on record as saying "The back-office success of GNU/Linux is not important to us, it's the desktop where freedom really matters. Companies can afford too be in a negotiating position that makes software freedom much less important to them."*
More crucially what you say about engineering is doubly true. Stallman has stated that the decision too base GNU on Unix was never because he was a fan of Unix. On the contrary basing it on Unix meant he lost the ability to try really new and fun concepts in operating system design. Unix is hardly the greatest OS design there ever was, but it is a very, very good one (and the very best ones share the things that make it so good - like being built out of lots of small pieces that can be fit together in a multitude of different ways). Unix was chosen for one reason only: because in 1983 when the GNU project began, Unix was the ONLY portable OS ever developed. Being written in C rather than machine code made it the first ever OS that could be moved between different hardware, it would take another decade and a half before another portable OS even existed. Stallman CARED about portability - he'd seen firsthand what happened to ITS when MIT replaced their PDP10's, he knew it could take years to build a functional free OS, he wanted to make sure when he was done it would run on whatever hardware was current and keep running after that when the hardware changed. He says outright that using GNU made the engineering parts dull and uninteresting and made him (and his cohorts) have a much less fun job - but the importance of portability to achieve lasting software freedom trumped that.
*Note: he didn't say UNimportant, just LESS important. Companies -at least big ones -have legal and financial means to do much of what they want even with closed source products because the suppliers have actual reasons to listen to them, desktop users don't. If you don't have the source you have no power at all.
Wow... you almost managed to make that sound like a GOOD thing...
Please, TCL is a disaster. Then again I once had the misfortune of writing a TCL interpreter library to be used as an extension language by programs writen in freepascal (and since it supported TK as a GUI language). Suffice to say... I would never want to again.
To those poor slobs still stuck in delphi/Object Pascal coding... praise Wirth and the Gods of procedural programming for at least handing you pascalscript since those days !
THIS ! It's worth noting that one of the most prolific and active extension communities out there are the WoW addon developers - wow uses LUA for addons and indeed, as the core in-game scripting language that handles virtually all interaction between the client and the server. Everything you can click, every action you can take is implemented by your client effectively sending the server instructions in LUA, this is why LUA is the language for addons. Nobody can deny thhat WoW is one of the most successful examples of high-availibility extremely redundant massive-user supporting systems out there and using a powerful language like LUA as the core of the client is a big part of how it manages that. It let's WoW outsource a massive degree of it's gigantic processing needs to the paying customers making it (in a slightly twisted version of it) one of the most successful examples of distributed computing in the world.
Lua is a thing of beauty, provided you don't have to be the one to debug it:P On the other hand, if I go to programmers hell, I hope I have been good enough to only go to the third circle where you spend eternity debugging badly commented lua scripts. The fourth circle is mixtures of objective C, C and C++ into single large applications running with java based eventing subsystems, the fifth is debugging perl, the sixth circle is debugging COBOL. The seventh and final circle is manning a helpdesk phone for microsoft.
PS. IBM Assembler would only be the second circle, it's actually not that hard...
"What I meant is that in JS you can declare a new variable at any point in a function by writing "var foo =...". In Scheme, the only way to do that without a let block is to write a bunch of defines at the beginning of a function, and initialize them to some bogus value, so that you can redefine them later. It's a small detail, but it already gets in the way of imperative programming a little. "
This is not limited to list derived languages though. A certain school of thought in the 80's held that only a horribly bad programmer doesn't know all the variables he will need before he writes the first line of code. Well designed programs could be recognized by the programmer knowing upfront exactly what variables he'll need, and enforcing this was seen as a way to enforce better code. This is why pascal had those horrible long Type, Var and Const sections at the top of the code. Pascal didn't even allow locally scoped variables for procedures until about the second or third iteration of the language.
Slashdot Mirror
>Incompatible? It certainly places it outside science, but when pushed even science has to accept things without proof. I
No, it doesn't - the closest you'll ever see is "we are still looking for proof of something that makes sense". Dark matter is an example - the moment we came up with it, our very next response was to start FINDING ways to detect it - very quickly we learned that it does bend light. We may not be able to observe it directly but this was NEVER an excuse to accept something that's mathematically perfect without proof, it was only an excuse to look for proof elsewhere.
>it has no (scientific) answer to the solipsist who insists that the material world is an illusion.
Actually, yes it does - several. You my friend are about 2000 years out of date on your science. The "material world is an illusion" argument has been held as a proven fallacy since the time of St. Augustine.
> All attempts to eliminate metaphysics from science so far have failed dismally
[Citation needed] - and you won't find one that isn't biased. On the contrary - any mention of metaphysics will automatically get your theory rejected. If it can't be proven, tested and repeated it is NOT science. Nothing that relies on something like that is every considered science and scientists give NO real credence to any such hypotheses - unless they believe they have found a way to test them and make them BECOME science.
>And as I was arguing last week in a different thread, there are unresolved arguments in science over what counts as an observation, which leads to arguments over what is proven.
Yes, this only strengthens my argument about the weakness of human observation - the reason we develop technology that is better at it than us. As our technology improves further our ability to observe improves as well, and these arguments become smaller. Just because they aren't (perhaps can't be) settled doesn't demean science. it only means scientists are self-critical which is a crucial part of the scientific process. Religion on the other hand opposes criticism, it doesn't say "question even our base assumptions" - no priest has ever (publicily) questioned the existence of god - if you do you're not being religious, a scientist however questions HIS base assumptions all the time. A (good) scientist spends most of his time trying to prove his own theories FALSE and the only thing that gives a theory TRUE credence is a consistent fallure by all of science to do so. The only religion that actively encourages it's followers to question the religion ITSELF is budhism - it's interesting that it's the most popular religion among scientists of a more spiritual frame of mind, because it's a belief system that is compatible with science. There is NOTHING in it that you aren't allowed to question or reject.
>As I've said, it doesn't seem to be rejection of proof so much as rejection of coercion to belief. Not the same thing. In the Christian account God provided evidence (not the same as proof) -- John 20:27, for example. Yes, Jesus said that it was better for those who did not require such proof, but that seems to be a matter of trust. If you employ a PI to find out that your wife is not cheating it indicates a lack of trust and could sour the relationship when she finds out -- even if she's a scientist and is in favour of evidence-based decision making.
If she really is, she would actually be asking you "what made you think you had to check ?". That's not only the proper scientific response - it's the mature one that lets relationships survive. That said you're giving a false dichotomy. Human behavior is not subject to fully empirical research. We cannot with absolution predict it. The reaction to pull your hand out of a fire lies in the spinal column, it happens fast - before our conscious minds even know about it, yet we can consciously override and choose to burn. Nothing in human behavior is absolute because all brains are programmed in subtly different ways. This doesn't mean psychiatry an
Fair enough, I was just curious. I got your point - just thought the code would be interesting to look at and play with.
You're right, it's MY memory that failed me :P that or I made a typo ...
But there are many other parts of the cycle that could conceivably be replaced by other chemicles. Oxygen can be replaced by Amonia and create cells that are otherwise identical and function just like ours for example. Wikipedia has a page on alternate lifeform theories that lists all the variations, things that make them more or less likely etc.
Interestingly - we may have already spotted proof of ammonia breathing lifeforms... finding the articles is left as an excercise for the reader (hint: it's on NASA's site)*
*Yes I'm aware there is another theory about what may have caused the observation - that's why I said "may have"
>It doesn't fall flat. You say that religion rejects evidence. It doesn't. It doesn't reject empirical evidence either. It fully accepts empirical evidence and modifies its beliefs based on empirical evidence.
I didn't say it doesn't accept evidence, I said it ALSO accepts truths WITHOUT empirical evidence. That's incompatible with science which demands evidence for ALL things. If you believe ONE thing without proof, or EVERYTHING without proof is completely unimportant - the results are exactly the same.
>No. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of omnipotence that was dealt with in the early days of Christianity. As I have already explained, putting "God can" in front of a meaningless statement doesn't make it meaningful, and "Proof of God in a system that excludes proof of God" is meaningless.
But that's not what I did. I said God excluded proof of his existence - by choice, and declares it to be a choice, ergo he COULD have made a different choice and those of us who look at religion from the outside can judge the psychology of those who came up with it by the attributes they gave their god's persona. One of which is that they created a god who - right from the start when things like lightning was still held as proof of his actions already declared that he refuses to give proof. That's quite prescient, or perhaps it means our ancestors were a little more sceptical than we give them credit for.
>But it's completely accurate.
No it's not. A bee sees something completely different when it looks at that flower - because it sees a wider part of the spectrum, a dog sees less than we do... who sees the truth ? None of us. We all see what we want to see, or rather more correctly - what we NEED to see.
>What, our innate ideas of logic are worthless if they're not infallible? The existence of fallacies doesn't show that we don't get it right most of the time. The failures are interesting, but we have to get logic right to form a view of the world that is sufficiently coherent to get by.
We have no innate logic. We have a pattern matching brain which laymen call logic (these days) because they don't KNOW what logic is. Unless you can recite aristotle's laws of logic - and more importantly construct an argument that obeys them you are not being logical AT ALL.
>If "anything not based on lots of evidence and testing is almost always false" we wouldn't have made it through human history.
Why not ? We didn't NEED acuracy of information to survive. We needed useful bullshit. We needed enough information for flight or fight decisions.
In our world today - most of our problems can be attributed to that out of place response. We see somebody that looks different we react as our ancestors did to a strange shape in the grass - we try to work out if we should run, or fight back. Instant racism. Scale it up and it's what culture is and why cultures take so long to get along and learn respect for one another. We associate "like me" with "safe" and "not like me" with "danger". A great conclusion for an ape in a tree - a horrible way to think in today's world.
Ironically - the moment we formed civilizations the rules changed. The biggest threat to us is not strangers - 90% of crimes are committed by somebody the victim knows and trusts. Our entire response system is backwards - because it was built on the presumption that threats can be recognized by how they look. It works if "threats" mean lions and tigers. It doesn't work when threats are other people - because people who look different are LESS likely to harm you than people that look just like you.
Our instincts were built for a world we DO NOT LIVE in - and we can only do anything good or useful when we override them with conclusions based on evidence. All of politics even today is filled with the false assumptions that come from ancient evolved behaviors masquerading as logic.
Indeed, anything not based on evidence is usually false because the only other things we have to base things on are imagination a
>[Citation needed]
Hebrews Chapter 11 verse 1 âoeNOW FAITH IS the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things NOT SEENâ.
Citation given.
>No, religion by default accepts belief based on evidence (Psalm 34:8). It just has accepts as evidence more than science does, and the additional things that they accept as evidence in very rare cases leads them to different conclusions.
Now you're arguing semantics (stupidly). If I replace "evidence" with "empirical evidence" then you're entire argument falls flat.
>Presumably true, if such a God existed.
Since no god at all exists, this is purely hypothetical anyway. I merely pointed out that the contention in the parent post was false based on what is believed about this god persona.
>Probably not.
This is an absolute. The people who believe in god, believe he is almighty, ergo if he so chooses he could so do. If he doesn't, he chose not to - or he doesn't exist.
>Actually, it's mostly right for things that matter to everyday life. Common sense tells me that if I'm hungry eating will make me feel better, that jumping off a cliff will hurt (at least) and so on. It's only on the more esoteric stuff that it's not so good.
Which is fine if all you care about is surviving, if understanding, knowledge and perhaps even a bit of truth is your goal - then you must recognize it's massive deficiencies. Each of our eyes has a blind spot so big that we cannot see the moon if it's right in front of us - smack in the middle. We never see that blind spot because our brain just fills in what it thinks should be there from other clues (mostly memories from when our eyes last moved and the area in the blindspot was visible). What our senses are is data-collecting sensors - what we perceive as reality is that data mashed up with a massive amount of processing which is heavily tilted by past experiences and prejudice. It's remarkably INaccurate in fact. Frankly that's a good thing for survival. "There is a radiation with a wavelength of 400nm coming from there, adjacently up to there, and upwards up to there and and and and and is useful for cognition... "there's a blue flower over there" is useful, so we SEE a blue flower, but that is NOT what our eyes detected.
>Again, it's usually true but there are a few situations it doesn't do well with.
This time you're completely wrong. Logic is NOT some innate process and most people have almost NO skill at all at it. Logic is the foundation of maths and has strict rules. If our innate ideas of logic were worth anything at all then fallacies would not exist as they would never be convincing at all. Logic is a practiced and disciplined skill we developed over millennia exactly to PROTECT ourselves from the mental traps we are otherwise so very prone to.
>But again are not usually fooled in everyday life -- not in ways that matter, anyway.
See my previous bit on this - we're fooled all the time. We literally live in a dreamworld, this is a survival feature. By lying to ourselves we take too much data to process and limit our conscious minds to making decisions on what it actually needs to know. We barely begun to understand the levels of unconscious thought that actually prepares that need-to-know briefing we think of as reality, we have no idea what dark or wonderful secrets it holds - what we do know for sure is, we don't see reality. In fact, if we did- magic shows would be no fun at all (and wouldn't work), optical illusions wouldn't exist...
>[citation needed]
Human history - all of it. Oh and just about EVERY idea about the universe that was ever advanced prior to science coming into maturity in the last 2 centuries.
How much more of a citation than you need ?
>Why do you assume I am religious? I find religion to be as full of bullshit as strong atheism, and I call it against both sides.
I didn't, that's why the sentence started with "if". I just stated that it's no skin of my back if you are, just don't push i
Except we have at least 8 viable theories on abiogenesis - none of which are proven - all of which are possible.
Who says there is only ONE right way for life to start ?
This decision dates to the late 80s I believe. I could ne wrong though. Even so neither python nor Lulama was mature languages then. They we're unproven concepts really
Many old school programmers found the idea of meaning full whitespace in python a major put off. It felt like a monumentally bad and exceedingly restrictive decision. I know. I was one of them. In retrospect it was visionary and I love python. Buy coming from a modular programming background it didn't look good at first sight!
Sorry, minor brainfart needs correcting: I was reffering to Exodus of course, not Genesis.
I was about that age when I wrote my first program. Sure it was a simple basic program that printed my name in an infinite loop - but it was the start of a new route of discovery.
In short:
1) You're wrong.
2) My answer to the GP - don't TELL them... SHOW them !
", He/She would be unable to prove His/Her existence to such atheists"
Allmight....unable...
You don't see the problem with your own claim ?
If a God really wanted to prove his existence to such atheists he would have no problem, about half of Genesis is full of him manipulating the thoughts and feelings of Pharao to make him act stupidly just to prove a point !
Clearly changing somebody's mind and notably their reaction to observations is something he already claims to have done.
So he would have no problem getting them to accept the evidence if he chose to gave it since he could just control their minds.
The reality is, that the bible says God doesn't want anybody to have evidence. It says outright that faith must be based on nothing to be faith at all.
This is what makes religious explanations by default unscientific. Religion by default rejects belief based on evidence while science by default rejects belief NOT based on evidence.
God would have no problem making people belief if he so wished or giving absolute and irrefutable proof if he so chose. He chose instead to give a universe where we can trust very little - our common sense is mostly wrong, our instinctive logic usually false and our senses prone to faillure and easy to fool. So we rely on multiple observations, technology and a process called the "scientific method" to study the universe and get reliable explanations about it since anything not based on lots of evidence and testing is almost always false.
After choosing to put us in a universe where we can't trust anything we didn't test he then says "except me"...
Well.. frankly that sounds just a bit childish to me, but if believing that makes you happy who am I to argue. I can't prove it didn't happen, but since you can't prove it did and God's refusal (according to your own claims - or rather those of your holy book) to prove his existence by default implies that he's existence or lack thereoff can never influence anything we study in science... well who cares ?
Having said that... a god who is that petty wouldn't be worth believing in, in the first place. Going to hell on those grounds would be an act of noble rebellion against a universally bad (pun intended) case of the child-king syndrome.
None of those assumptions remotely approximate the least degree of scientific consensus - the debate is still strongly happening on them.
The evidence we do have can support two conclusions:
1) Life is very fragile and that it happened on earth at all is rare, unique and may never have managed to happen anywhere else.
2) Life is very resilient and has survived despite everything the universe has thrown at is (mostly giant, icy rocks) and continues to survive everywhere it can and everywhere it can't.
The extinction record can logically support BOTH those conclusions even though they are contradictory and until we have more premises (that is to say -data outside of the extinction record) we can't rule one out. This is difficult - the strongest evidence for conclusion 1 is that we've yet to find any conclusive proof that extraterestial life exists (let alone intelligent life). But that's not proof until we've looked everywhere (which is not going to happen soon). The strongest evidence in favor of option 2 is the existence of things like extremeophile bacteria and viable, proper scientific theories that predict life likely existing on some of our solar neighbours and likely having existed in the past on others. There's still some evidence of possible bacterial life on Mars though possibly no longer alive, strong evidence in favor of theories that life may exist beneath the frozen surface of Io exist as well.
Again these theories have other possible explanations - but since their simplicity is no different we can't even us Occam's razor. We won't know till we go look, and even doing that must be done carefully lest we destroy the very thing we're trying to find.
I agree with you -since there's no data that can give us an answer, the data we do have supports either conclusion and we as yet lack the technology to change that Occam's razor simply doesn't apply here.
>It's considerably more likely that our theory(/ies) of star formation are lacking.
It's even MORE likely that our theories are generally correct but some specific unknown circumstance caused this particular star to follow a different and unexpected path. This star is not matching the previously observed observations on which our theories are based. The most likely explanation is that something highly unusual (perhaps entirely unique) happened here - we don't yet know what, something that cause it not to do what usually happens.
This is not so much a shortcoming of theory then - theories are generalized models of how the universe behaves which are true most of the time, when all the variables are the same. What we see here is a very clear case that one of those variables must have been very different. We don't yet know why. Finding out why is a challenge and worthy one. It could disprove the theory (one failed experiment does - but only if the variables are the SAME) - more likely we'll end up amending the theories to also include the particular type of star formation that caused this.
That doesn't make the theory false for all the other stars - it could, it could be that we were wrong all along, - but that is doubtful we've got lots of observations of stars of various ages that follow the predicted paths of the theory, this exception should therefore raise an expectation of something unique happening differently.
An object falling should accelerate at 9.2 m/s2 - that's a valid scientific theory. If there's air resistence it won't reach that though, and depending on how much the impact will vary - a more refined theory talks of terminal velocities in earth atmosphere (and those aren't perfect since air density is not a constant). Throw in a parachute and your prediction of how fast something will fall is now way off.
That's not because the theory of gravity is wrong, it's because the parachute is an unlikely additional factor that doesn't usually enter ito the equation - but we can write a theory of how parachutes will change the prediction (once observed) and deal with that situation seperately.
So the smart money is that we'll see a new theory to explain how some small stars can exist without heavier elements, which doesn't replace the usual heavy elements are needed in small stars theory, it just adds an "unless" clause.
So do I, and most programmers today - but back in the late 70's and 80's this was seen as bad style by most academics (remember the 80's was when Pascal was THE language you learned first at university to teach you how to write good code with)
Languages derived from that era's thinking still maintain this. Meantime the hacker's circled around languages like C for their raw power and ability to create elegant yet rapidly built well... hacks without the academic constraints of languages like Pascal. Notably without the "every line designed before the first line is written" design.
Old-school hackers used to call them "bondage and discipline languages"
>Why would you reimplement it? That's quite a lot of work (much more so if you wish to produce a performant implementation). Your library should have just provided a mechanism to bridge both ways between the standard language implementation and the freepascal world; less work, easier to make correct.
Because back then freepascal had no means to link to C-libraries. It gained that ability not very long after but this was back when FPC tself was still a very, very new project. I also didn't say it was the entire TCL being reinterpreted, it was a wrapper library that allowed you to embed TCL/TK code inside freepascal programs or execute them dynamically at runtime and communicate with them (so it was ALSO an extension mechanism).
Years ago I wrote some interesting stuff with it. These days even if I had the same task I would likely have approached it differently. I didn't have the experience I have now when I was 19 years old.
I mostly agree with you but just to pick a nit on your last point: neither python or lua existed when this choice was first made. At the time the strongest competition was TCL (yeurch) or perl (let's make a language less readable than lisp so you can code in ASCII art).
Perl was (and is) bloody huge as well, sort of ruled it out, more-over the perl manual's license (at the time at least) was RMS's example of why documentation should be free - he wasn't about to make major use of it. TCL was rejected for numerous reasons other posters have commented on.
Now this doesn't mean they couldn't have chosen lua or python instead at a later time when they did exist and the universal guile-extension still hadn't come to life, but it's rather unfair to judge them for initially not consideriing languages that didn't exist.
By that logic I should be punished because the code I write today isn't designed to run on quantum computers.
Any chance you made your pylisp thing open source ? I'd LOVE to see that and play with it.
By that logic... COBOL is alive and well too.
Your post proved the disclaimer in your sig correct. I wholeheartedly approve.
You're talking about the Mona Lisa, aren't you ? Da Vinci kept working on that right from when he started (as a rather young man) until the day he died.
You are so very right. This is why Stallman is on record as saying "The back-office success of GNU/Linux is not important to us, it's the desktop where freedom really matters. Companies can afford too be in a negotiating position that makes software freedom much less important to them."*
More crucially what you say about engineering is doubly true. Stallman has stated that the decision too base GNU on Unix was never because he was a fan of Unix. On the contrary basing it on Unix meant he lost the ability to try really new and fun concepts in operating system design. Unix is hardly the greatest OS design there ever was, but it is a very, very good one (and the very best ones share the things that make it so good - like being built out of lots of small pieces that can be fit together in a multitude of different ways). Unix was chosen for one reason only: because in 1983 when the GNU project began, Unix was the ONLY portable OS ever developed. Being written in C rather than machine code made it the first ever OS that could be moved between different hardware, it would take another decade and a half before another portable OS even existed. Stallman CARED about portability - he'd seen firsthand what happened to ITS when MIT replaced their PDP10's, he knew it could take years to build a functional free OS, he wanted to make sure when he was done it would run on whatever hardware was current and keep running after that when the hardware changed. He says outright that using GNU made the engineering parts dull and uninteresting and made him (and his cohorts) have a much less fun job - but the importance of portability to achieve lasting software freedom trumped that.
*Note: he didn't say UNimportant, just LESS important. Companies -at least big ones -have legal and financial means to do much of what they want even with closed source products because the suppliers have actual reasons to listen to them, desktop users don't. If you don't have the source you have no power at all.
>Who said Guile is ugly?
General Bison ?
Oh wait, I got it ! An anagram writer who can't spell !
What ? We're not playing scattergories ?
>TCL ... which is still being actively developed
Wow... you almost managed to make that sound like a GOOD thing...
Please, TCL is a disaster. Then again I once had the misfortune of writing a TCL interpreter library to be used as an extension language by programs writen in freepascal (and since it supported TK as a GUI language). Suffice to say... I would never want to again.
To those poor slobs still stuck in delphi/Object Pascal coding... praise Wirth and the Gods of procedural programming for at least handing you pascalscript since those days !
THIS !
It's worth noting that one of the most prolific and active extension communities out there are the WoW addon developers - wow uses LUA for addons and indeed, as the core in-game scripting language that handles virtually all interaction between the client and the server.
Everything you can click, every action you can take is implemented by your client effectively sending the server instructions in LUA, this is why LUA is the language for addons.
Nobody can deny thhat WoW is one of the most successful examples of high-availibility extremely redundant massive-user supporting systems out there and using a powerful language like LUA as the core of the client is a big part of how it manages that. It let's WoW outsource a massive degree of it's gigantic processing needs to the paying customers making it (in a slightly twisted version of it) one of the most successful examples of distributed computing in the world.
Lua is a thing of beauty, provided you don't have to be the one to debug it :P
On the other hand, if I go to programmers hell, I hope I have been good enough to only go to the third circle where you spend eternity debugging badly commented lua scripts. The fourth circle is mixtures of objective C, C and C++ into single large applications running with java based eventing subsystems, the fifth is debugging perl, the sixth circle is debugging COBOL.
The seventh and final circle is manning a helpdesk phone for microsoft.
PS. IBM Assembler would only be the second circle, it's actually not that hard...
"What I meant is that in JS you can declare a new variable at any point in a function by writing "var foo = ...". In Scheme, the only way to do that without a let block is to write a bunch of defines at the beginning of a function, and initialize them to some bogus value, so that you can redefine them later. It's a small detail, but it already gets in the way of imperative programming a little. "
This is not limited to list derived languages though. A certain school of thought in the 80's held that only a horribly bad programmer doesn't know all the variables he will need before he writes the first line of code. Well designed programs could be recognized by the programmer knowing upfront exactly what variables he'll need, and enforcing this was seen as a way to enforce better code.
This is why pascal had those horrible long Type, Var and Const sections at the top of the code. Pascal didn't even allow locally scoped variables for procedures until about the second or third iteration of the language.