The only person who talked to the reporter in question about Plume's status as a covert officer was someone who, under the law, is PERMITTED to disclose it, and that was Armitage.
I don't understand how, if Libby leaked the name on July 8th, and Armitage didn't disclose until "mid-July", Armitage can be said to be the original leaker. What's the specific date that Armitage is known to have revealed Plame's name and status?
Note the part that says she has to serve outside the US within the last 5 years? ...or have a classified identity? Which the CIA confirmed.
Plame was covert under the terms of the IIPA, which is no surprise, considering the terms are actually broader than the CIA's own terms for covert status.
I gave you a graphic of approximate temperature and CO2 variation over 600m years, which shows absolutely no relationship whatsoever between their levels. Indeed quite often the curves move in opposite directions.
You gave me an unsourced curve that looked like your 5-year-old scrawled it in MS Paint. Here's a curve that's a lot more precise:
I trust the correlation doesn't have to be pointed out. Back to your curve - did you even look at it? Did you think it was just coincidences that those cool periods fall right on geological boundaries?
Since those boundaries tend to be associated with events - like, you know, nuclear-winter effects following asteroid impacts - did it occur to you that trying to develop a correlation between temp and CO2 at that gross scale was probably bullshit?
No, I guess not. Which is how I know you haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about.
And yet, you persist with the total fantasy of "increased CO2 levels are associated with warming", even when faced with disparities of such a huge scale.
It's physically impossible for elevated CO2 not to be associated with warming in the absence of any other influence. If CO2 weren't a greenhouse gas life would be impossible on Planet Earth. Plus we know that CO2 absorbs in the infrared spectrum, that can be tested in the lab.
We know that it's not possible for human industry to dump millions of tons of CO2 - to the tune of 2-3 Pinatubo eruptions every year - into the atmosphere without it raising atmospheric CO2 concentration. To suggest otherwise is akin to suggesting that magic fairies show up to scrub the atmosphere.
Warming on the Earth is like filling a pot with holes in the bottom. Whether or not the pot fills to the brim is a question of how much water goes in versus how much spills out. If now the level of water is stable (because input equals output) but we do something to plug a few of the holes, it's obvious that the pot will begin to fill in the future.
That's basic logic. Unless you're arguing that magic is at work in the Earth's atmosphere, the fact that we don't know everything there is to know about the Earth's atmosphere is irrelevant - we know enough to understand the basic consequences of increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. (It's the exact same thing that happened in the past - the climate warms.)
you would have found out the above by yourself, if you had any interest in understanding rather than in following blindly what others say.
If you had any interest in finding out for yourself, you would have realized by now how specious your global warming denial really is. Although I suspect you do know, since you've chosen to post these remarks as an anonymous coward.
So no, sorry, the GCMs are far too primitive at this stage to be considered models of climate akin to theoretical models in the scientific method.
Look, I just don't think you know what you're talking about. The computational models accurately predict every feature of the paleoclimate record, including the Medieval Warm Period.
Fortunately, it matters little to science, because the data continues to say otherwise.
That's just nonsense. Your graph doesn't have nearly enough data to make that association.
We know from the ice core data - for 160,000 years - that increased CO2 levels are associated with warming, not cooling.
As soon as the GCMs actually start predicting (accurately) the very pronounced 100ky cycles of climate change over the last million years or so
Done.
and also explain accurately how the coldest epocs in the history of the planet happened to coincide with CO2 levels many dozens of times greater than the current ones
Since that didn't happen, no explanation is required. CO2 levels are positively associated with warming climate throughout the paleoclimate record.
Right, but what is your evidence that the "fake" past isn't also a key to the future?
you ignore my point that there is no evidence that points to predictability that is not circular, relying on the axiom of predictability itself.
I haven't ignored this point. In fact I conceeded it at the beginning of the discussion.
But the fact that empiricism can only be justified, logically, by circular reasoning isn't a flaw in empircism; it's a flaw in logic. That's the point I keep making that you continue to ignore.
I'm making the argument that you have basic assumptions about how the universe works, without any a priori justification for them.
And I'm telling you that a lack of a priori justification isn't the same as no justification at all.
For instance, I can use prediction testing. I make a prediction that, in 20 seconds, the laws of physics will not substantially change. I make this prediction from a general hypothesis that the laws of physics do not change over human-observable timescales, if at all....
Prediction confirmed. If I do this, say, 100 times, that's a considerable number of fulfilled predictions. Models with predictive power tend to be "right", at least in scientific terms. That's a posteriori evidence that justifies my position.
If faith is simply belief in the absence of evidence, then you have faith - unless you can show me solid evidence that the universe is predictable
I've already done so. If I have faith in anything it's beginning to be faith in your ability to ignore inconvenient rebuttals that you don't know how to address.
If there is an aspect of your definition of faith that I'm missing, then sure - you don't have faith.
I don't know how you could have missed anything, since I've defined the term several times now. What I wonder is how you define it, because when you use it, it seems to mean whatever you'd like it to mean.
I'd prefer to argue with people who believe words have meaning. What you're engaged in is linguistic sophistry.
Finally, don't assume that faith is a bad thing.
Anytime that a position is taken without sufficient evidence to justify it, that's a bad thing. Especially when that position then is used to justify actions that affect other people. How many planes have to be flown into buildings before we see what it means to have absolute belief in things you can't prove?
But that's what I'm saying. We don't need evidence to believe in the basic workings of the universe, because we don't *have* any evidence for it (I know we disagree - please just assume this for the sake of argument). Then there is no justification for treating the universe as we understand it versus any other method of living. We live our lives in faith that the universe meets our basic understanding.
If you're making an argument that people without faith have faith in faithlessness, then you're just engaged in sophistry.
It's the most basic contention in logic that A/= ~A. Faithlessness can't be faith. Bald is not a hair color. The lack of something can't be that something.
Otherwise you're just extending the word "faith" so broadly that it has no meaning at all.
But I think it may just be a matter of degrees.
Sounds like you've never met any people of faith. By all means, walk on down to your local church and try to present evidence that contradicts your belief.
If we all came into being a blink-of-an-eye ago, then we have no past physics to base our expectations on.
But we do have the appearance of past physics, clearly put there for a purpose, and presumably, that purpose is to indicate to us the rules of physics that are going to be true in the future.
I think it can be a form of faith, given my prior belief that there is no evidence that the universe will continue to work as expected (certainly debatable, but go with me here).
And I don't think what you describe would be recognizable as "faith" to anyone of faith, particularly if you framed it in the dogma of their religion as opposed to as an epistomological issue about the universe. Being adamant that you'll change your mind in the face of contradictory evidence, again, is not something that is recognized as "faith." What people call that is "faithlessness." I mean, just open the Bible. Jesus craps all over the guy who needed evidence to believe - to the point where we still use the name "Doubting Thomas" to belittle someone who exhibits too much skepticism. In the very same verse, Jesus praises those who came to conclusions based on no evidence at all - indeed, in the face of contradictory evidence (seeing Jesus put to death on the cross.)
I'm not a Christian and I'm not trying to prosletyze. I'm simply saying that "faith" as it is understood by the faithful - as the word is used by speakers of the English language - describes people who believe something in the face of a lack of evidence, or even contradictory evidence. People who accept conclusions as only tentative, and are prepared to instantly abandon those conclusions in the face of disconfirming evidence, do not have "faith" in those conclusions. "Faith" would be asserting that one would never abandon those conclusions no matter what evidence was presented.
I have this strange thing happen to me where I remember the instances that support the things I already believe are true, and I forget all instances that'd don't.
The simple math you ask is (0.05)^11, which is about a 1 out of 205 trillion probablility (or rather a huge improbability).
Bad assumption, though. Every unit he's getting is a refurbished unit, which means that the unit has already had some kind of failure.
At that rate, I don't see it as so unreasonable for him to get 11 bad units in a row - since every unit he's getting is from the big pile of units that, at one point, went bad.
The evidence you cite works for both of these situations.
And in both situations, it supports the contention that the laws of physics won't change in the future.
What evidence is there to show that 1 is more likely than 2?
1) That there's no known process that could result in 2. 2) It doesn't matter - neither case represents a lesser likelihood of the laws of physics remaining the same in the future.
What happened in the past is a guide to what will happen in the future - though, not proof of it. That's a flaw in how proof works, not a flaw in empiricism. There's no faith required to accept (tentatively) that the historical laws of physics are likely to be the future ones as well. And, again, stating from the outset that you're only acceepting a contention on a provisional basis until you see contradictory evidence is not something that anybody would recognize as "faith". Rather, faithlessness. Seriously. Try it down at your local church and see how faithful the congregation things you are. Tell them you're only believing in God until you see Allah perform a better miracle.
What I'm saying is that there is uncertainty, but we pick a side ("There is no god", "The laws of physics won't radically change") - despite the complete lack of evidence.
But that's clearly not true. That the laws of physics have been observed to remain the same for the past 2 billion years (yes, we really do have observations covering that period of time) is evidence that they won't change any time in the future.
It's not proof in the logical sense (and indeed proofs in the logical sense very rarely prove anything at all), but it's definitely evidence. And I'm not familiar with any definition of "faith" where the maximally conservative assumption that things will be as they've always been and that little to nothing exists for which there is no evidence could be described as "faith."
Certainly a Christian who heard you say "I'm only going to believe in those things for which there is abundant evidence, and I'm going to change my mind when the evidence changes" would accuse you of being "faithless." Changing your mind when contrary evidence emerges is the exact opposite of "having faith."
What I'm saying is that there is uncertainty, but we pick a side ("There is no god", "The laws of physics won't radically change") - despite the complete lack of evidence.
There's not a lack of evidence. The fact that it's always been observed to be true for 2 billion years is evidence that it's a good assumption - which is why people make that assumption. I said there was no proof, logically, but that's irrelevant - that's a failure of logic, not an indication that it's a bad conclusion to work under. And we accept it tentatively, so that when the laws of physics are observed to change for the first time ever, we can change our minds about that.
Stating in advance that you're going to change your mind - cut and run - when the "going gets tough" is exactly what people would describe as lacking faith, not having it.
At some point, you just have to take on faith that there is predictability to the universe.
Nonsense. No faith is required when there's all this evidence that the universe is predictable.
There's no evidence that there is no god, and there's no evidence that there is - there's only faith.
There's actually abundant evidence that everything that is believed to be true about God is actually human invention, and there's considerable evidence that none of the gods worshiped by humans actually exist. I can't disprove every kind of God, mostly because the term "God" is so hopelessly broad that, really, it could describe anything.
As Dawkins says, there's almost certainly no God. The tentative conclusion of atheism is perfectly adequate for me.
But what evidence is there that the universe will continue to work as you've already observed?
Why would it change?
The simple fact that that's what you've observed in the past? That's circular reasoning.
Of course it is. The simple fact is, empiricism can't be verified by logic.
But honestly that's a flaw in logic, not a flaw in empiricism.
There's no way to prove that the universe will not be radically different tomorrow than it is today
I don't see why I have to prove it. As a tentative conclusion it's obviously more reasonable than the alternative - that the laws of physics will begin to radically flux tomorrow, something that has never been observed to occur. The conclusion that it will be the same is much more reasonable than the conclusion that it won't be.
If that was really true, do you think so many people would believe?
Yes, I do. Human beings have an astounding capacity to be completely wrong. In fact being wrong about stuff is one of the easiest things in the world to do.
It turns out the gospels are written closer to the time of events, our earliest copies come from closer to the time, they're more complete and there are more of them.
Well, that's clearly not true. The earliest we can date any of the Gospels is 70 AD, and that's a bit of a stretch. The accepted consensus is about 90-120 AD.
On the other hand, we do have other records from around 0 AD, but none of them mention either Jesus, and of his apostles, his minsitry, his execution, or the rise of early Christianity.
A lot of people who died claiming that he rose from the dead.
They were mistaken and didn't know it. Simple explanation. Plenty of people have died for wrong ideas.
Every religion has martyrs. Martyrdom is not evidence for the veracity of a claim.
Which clearly isn't the case, so why don't you take the fingers out of years, open your eyes, drop the glib, arrogant attitude and actually examine the evidence that is there.
I did, when I was a Christian. (Meaning I was quite sympathetic to the evidence; if anything, biased in favor of Christianity.)
The result of my examination is that I became an atheist.
Just because that's your definition of faith, doesn't mean it's the biblical definition.
Actually, it's Jesus's (the fictional Bible character) - "blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." The Bible defines faith as belief in that for which there is no evidence. Unless you're saying Jesus was a liar?
And yet so many people assert exactly that about the theory of evolution as applied to humanity.
No, they don't. The theory of evolution is supported by abundant evidence from multiple, independent lines of investigation; as a result it's accepted by consensus science. It's probably the best-tested theory in science and its met every evidentiary challenge put forth.
We still only accept it tentatively, of course. And it's been a remarkably effective (and interesting) model for the biological sciences. Essentially evolution is the reason biology is a science and not just stamp-collecting. People are, as a result, enthusiastic about evolution.
That enthusiasm isn't an assertion that the theory is Absolutely True.
For a Christian, faith is based on facts and evidence.
Clearly that's impossible, since there's absolutely no evidence for any of the major Christian dogma. There's no evidence that Jesus said any of the stuff he's held to say in the Bible (though I agree with the consensus of historians that there actually was a real Jesus, just like there was a real King Arthur.) There's no evidence of resurrection. There isn't even any evidence of God.
If the beliefs of Christians were based on facts and evidence, they'd be atheists.
You give interesting definitions of faith.
People wrongly conflate "faith" and "trust." Trust is when you believe in something that hasn't let you down. Faith is when you believe in something that has always let you down.
The answers may be good enough or close enough to what actually happend to give us what for our purposes is respectable predictive power, but it's still just guesswork until we've repeated the whole thing for ourselves and verified the results.
So you're saying, unless we know everything, we don't know anything? How do you survive in our society hating science as much as you do?
Look, what would you have us do? The scientific method comes to tentative conclusions from evidence. The conclusions are tentative because they represent the best explanation for what we currently know, but we're learning new things all the time, and sometimes, we learn things that show us we were wrong. Being wrong isn't the worst thing in the world.
Religion, on the other hand, offers the following - just make-up whatever you want and pretend like it's true. (Or we'll make something up for you if you're not feeling creative.) How is that better? Surely no reasonable person could mistake make-believe for a path that's liable to be fruitful in finding out what is true?
Nobody holds the claims of science to be absolute. Absolute certainty is the province of religion, not science. Personally, I'd rather be mostly right and getting righter (as our knowledge expands and is refined) than, like religion, fixedly and eternally wrong.
Truth or certainty. I guess you can pick which is more important.
I think when people make statements like this, they're referring to things like "faith that the world will act in an hour the way it acts now", or "faith that I am not in the Matrix, and can believe that my own eyes are not deceiving me".
"Faith" is when you believe in something in spite of the evidence. To the extent that I believe those propositions, I believe them based on the evidence, so my belief doesn't constitute faith.
Without basic assumptions ("faith", if you want), we couldn't function at all.
Assumptions aren't faith. To the extent that those assumptions lead to replicable successes in understanding the world that is apparently around us, they're substantiated by evidence, and therefore need not be taken on faith.
Faith is when your prayers are not answered but you pray anyway. Faith is when all indications are that you're wrong, but you believe anyway. Empiricism is when you change your mind in response to contradictory information. Isn't that the exact opposite of faith? Don't you get called "faithless" when you do that, in fact?
Because, when it all boils down to it, you have to have faith in something, be it science or religion.
No, actually, you don't have to have faith in something. I don't have faith. I let the evidence determine what conclusions I come to - and since I can always get more evidence, those conclusions are always tentative.
Faith is only required if you demand absolute certainty. Once you get over your terrified reaction of finding out you live in an uncertain world, you can essentially free yourself from the mental bad habit of "Faith."
An attempt to limit scholarly inquiry by excluding it from scientific discussion will only discourage diversity in the scientific community.
Nobody's excluding ID from scientific debate - the ID'ers are doing that themselves. They've earnestly resisted participating in any scientific discussion of their ideas.
Because that's what you do when you know your ideas can only fool the gullible. Any time they want to bring forth their scientific evidence for peer-review, that's absolutely fine with every scientist. They never will, of course, because they know it's all hokum. That's why they go for the schools first. Because ID isn't about science or evidence or arriving at a consensus that explains the data; it's about laying a groundwork to overturn secularism in the public sphere. (Just ask Phillip Johnson if you don't believe me. There's a reason they call it the "Wedge Movement.")
it shouldn't be religion because (at least the reasonable arguments) don't actually argue for a "God,"
No - just a supremely powerful being, present at the creation of the universe, with the power to fine-tune initial conditions and suspend the laws of physics.
That's a somewhat limited skill-set, I think. If you don't think they're talking about God there's just no end to how credulous you can be. Indeed - if they're not talking about God, isn't there a recursion problem? If you're saying it's aliens, who designed the aliens?
If you can lead a group and fight in the group at the same time, and that's the game's idea of "complex strategy", then the strategy isn't very complex at all.
It took me a while but I think I figured out the bad assumption underlying your argument. That thing, where you can't do two things at once? You know, like walk and chew gum?
That's just you, actually. That's not the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
The only person who talked to the reporter in question about Plume's status as a covert officer was someone who, under the law, is PERMITTED to disclose it, and that was Armitage.
I don't understand how, if Libby leaked the name on July 8th, and Armitage didn't disclose until "mid-July", Armitage can be said to be the original leaker. What's the specific date that Armitage is known to have revealed Plame's name and status?
I guess you missed the part where he wasn't convicted of "outing" anybody.
I guess you missed the part where his misleading and false statements obstructed the investigation.
Don't know how you could have, though, since that's what he was convicted of.
Note the part that says she has to serve outside the US within the last 5 years? ...or have a classified identity? Which the CIA confirmed.
Plame was covert under the terms of the IIPA, which is no surprise, considering the terms are actually broader than the CIA's own terms for covert status.
I gave you a graphic of approximate temperature and CO2 variation over 600m years, which shows absolutely no relationship whatsoever between their levels. Indeed quite often the curves move in opposite directions.
- years.gif
You gave me an unsourced curve that looked like your 5-year-old scrawled it in MS Paint. Here's a curve that's a lot more precise:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/gene/peakoil/co2-400k
I trust the correlation doesn't have to be pointed out. Back to your curve - did you even look at it? Did you think it was just coincidences that those cool periods fall right on geological boundaries?
Since those boundaries tend to be associated with events - like, you know, nuclear-winter effects following asteroid impacts - did it occur to you that trying to develop a correlation between temp and CO2 at that gross scale was probably bullshit?
No, I guess not. Which is how I know you haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about.
And yet, you persist with the total fantasy of "increased CO2 levels are associated with warming", even when faced with disparities of such a huge scale.
It's physically impossible for elevated CO2 not to be associated with warming in the absence of any other influence. If CO2 weren't a greenhouse gas life would be impossible on Planet Earth. Plus we know that CO2 absorbs in the infrared spectrum, that can be tested in the lab.
We know that it's not possible for human industry to dump millions of tons of CO2 - to the tune of 2-3 Pinatubo eruptions every year - into the atmosphere without it raising atmospheric CO2 concentration. To suggest otherwise is akin to suggesting that magic fairies show up to scrub the atmosphere.
Warming on the Earth is like filling a pot with holes in the bottom. Whether or not the pot fills to the brim is a question of how much water goes in versus how much spills out. If now the level of water is stable (because input equals output) but we do something to plug a few of the holes, it's obvious that the pot will begin to fill in the future.
That's basic logic. Unless you're arguing that magic is at work in the Earth's atmosphere, the fact that we don't know everything there is to know about the Earth's atmosphere is irrelevant - we know enough to understand the basic consequences of increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. (It's the exact same thing that happened in the past - the climate warms.)
you would have found out the above by yourself, if you had any interest in understanding rather than in following blindly what others say.
If you had any interest in finding out for yourself, you would have realized by now how specious your global warming denial really is. Although I suspect you do know, since you've chosen to post these remarks as an anonymous coward.
So no, sorry, the GCMs are far too primitive at this stage to be considered models of climate akin to theoretical models in the scientific method.
Look, I just don't think you know what you're talking about. The computational models accurately predict every feature of the paleoclimate record, including the Medieval Warm Period.
Fortunately, it matters little to science, because the data continues to say otherwise.
That's just nonsense. Your graph doesn't have nearly enough data to make that association.
We know from the ice core data - for 160,000 years - that increased CO2 levels are associated with warming, not cooling.
As soon as the GCMs actually start predicting (accurately) the very pronounced 100ky cycles of climate change over the last million years or so
Done.
and also explain accurately how the coldest epocs in the history of the planet happened to coincide with CO2 levels many dozens of times greater than the current ones
Since that didn't happen, no explanation is required. CO2 levels are positively associated with warming climate throughout the paleoclimate record.
Meh - it's not a flaw in logic - that's just what logic is.
Well, yeah. What it is is flawed.
We can't even be sure there is a past.
Right, but what is your evidence that the "fake" past isn't also a key to the future?
you ignore my point that there is no evidence that points to predictability that is not circular, relying on the axiom of predictability itself.
I haven't ignored this point. In fact I conceeded it at the beginning of the discussion.
But the fact that empiricism can only be justified, logically, by circular reasoning isn't a flaw in empircism; it's a flaw in logic. That's the point I keep making that you continue to ignore.
I'm making the argument that you have basic assumptions about how the universe works, without any a priori justification for them.
...
And I'm telling you that a lack of a priori justification isn't the same as no justification at all.
For instance, I can use prediction testing. I make a prediction that, in 20 seconds, the laws of physics will not substantially change. I make this prediction from a general hypothesis that the laws of physics do not change over human-observable timescales, if at all.
Prediction confirmed. If I do this, say, 100 times, that's a considerable number of fulfilled predictions. Models with predictive power tend to be "right", at least in scientific terms. That's a posteriori evidence that justifies my position.
If faith is simply belief in the absence of evidence, then you have faith - unless you can show me solid evidence that the universe is predictable
I've already done so. If I have faith in anything it's beginning to be faith in your ability to ignore inconvenient rebuttals that you don't know how to address.
If there is an aspect of your definition of faith that I'm missing, then sure - you don't have faith.
I don't know how you could have missed anything, since I've defined the term several times now. What I wonder is how you define it, because when you use it, it seems to mean whatever you'd like it to mean.
I'd prefer to argue with people who believe words have meaning. What you're engaged in is linguistic sophistry.
Finally, don't assume that faith is a bad thing.
Anytime that a position is taken without sufficient evidence to justify it, that's a bad thing. Especially when that position then is used to justify actions that affect other people. How many planes have to be flown into buildings before we see what it means to have absolute belief in things you can't prove?
But that's what I'm saying. We don't need evidence to believe in the basic workings of the universe, because we don't *have* any evidence for it (I know we disagree - please just assume this for the sake of argument). Then there is no justification for treating the universe as we understand it versus any other method of living. We live our lives in faith that the universe meets our basic understanding.
/= ~A. Faithlessness can't be faith. Bald is not a hair color. The lack of something can't be that something.
If you're making an argument that people without faith have faith in faithlessness, then you're just engaged in sophistry.
It's the most basic contention in logic that A
Otherwise you're just extending the word "faith" so broadly that it has no meaning at all.
But I think it may just be a matter of degrees.
Sounds like you've never met any people of faith. By all means, walk on down to your local church and try to present evidence that contradicts your belief.
If we all came into being a blink-of-an-eye ago, then we have no past physics to base our expectations on.
But we do have the appearance of past physics, clearly put there for a purpose, and presumably, that purpose is to indicate to us the rules of physics that are going to be true in the future.
I think it can be a form of faith, given my prior belief that there is no evidence that the universe will continue to work as expected (certainly debatable, but go with me here).
And I don't think what you describe would be recognizable as "faith" to anyone of faith, particularly if you framed it in the dogma of their religion as opposed to as an epistomological issue about the universe. Being adamant that you'll change your mind in the face of contradictory evidence, again, is not something that is recognized as "faith." What people call that is "faithlessness." I mean, just open the Bible. Jesus craps all over the guy who needed evidence to believe - to the point where we still use the name "Doubting Thomas" to belittle someone who exhibits too much skepticism. In the very same verse, Jesus praises those who came to conclusions based on no evidence at all - indeed, in the face of contradictory evidence (seeing Jesus put to death on the cross.)
I'm not a Christian and I'm not trying to prosletyze. I'm simply saying that "faith" as it is understood by the faithful - as the word is used by speakers of the English language - describes people who believe something in the face of a lack of evidence, or even contradictory evidence. People who accept conclusions as only tentative, and are prepared to instantly abandon those conclusions in the face of disconfirming evidence, do not have "faith" in those conclusions. "Faith" would be asserting that one would never abandon those conclusions no matter what evidence was presented.
I have this strange thing happen to me where I remember the instances that support the things I already believe are true, and I forget all instances that'd don't.
And you do, too.
The simple math you ask is (0.05)^11, which is about a 1 out of 205 trillion probablility (or rather a huge improbability).
Bad assumption, though. Every unit he's getting is a refurbished unit, which means that the unit has already had some kind of failure.
At that rate, I don't see it as so unreasonable for him to get 11 bad units in a row - since every unit he's getting is from the big pile of units that, at one point, went bad.
The evidence you cite works for both of these situations.
And in both situations, it supports the contention that the laws of physics won't change in the future.
What evidence is there to show that 1 is more likely than 2?
1) That there's no known process that could result in 2.
2) It doesn't matter - neither case represents a lesser likelihood of the laws of physics remaining the same in the future.
What happened in the past is a guide to what will happen in the future - though, not proof of it. That's a flaw in how proof works, not a flaw in empiricism. There's no faith required to accept (tentatively) that the historical laws of physics are likely to be the future ones as well. And, again, stating from the outset that you're only acceepting a contention on a provisional basis until you see contradictory evidence is not something that anybody would recognize as "faith". Rather, faithlessness. Seriously. Try it down at your local church and see how faithful the congregation things you are. Tell them you're only believing in God until you see Allah perform a better miracle.
What I'm saying is that there is uncertainty, but we pick a side ("There is no god", "The laws of physics won't radically change") - despite the complete lack of evidence.
But that's clearly not true. That the laws of physics have been observed to remain the same for the past 2 billion years (yes, we really do have observations covering that period of time) is evidence that they won't change any time in the future.
It's not proof in the logical sense (and indeed proofs in the logical sense very rarely prove anything at all), but it's definitely evidence. And I'm not familiar with any definition of "faith" where the maximally conservative assumption that things will be as they've always been and that little to nothing exists for which there is no evidence could be described as "faith."
Certainly a Christian who heard you say "I'm only going to believe in those things for which there is abundant evidence, and I'm going to change my mind when the evidence changes" would accuse you of being "faithless." Changing your mind when contrary evidence emerges is the exact opposite of "having faith."
What I'm saying is that there is uncertainty, but we pick a side ("There is no god", "The laws of physics won't radically change") - despite the complete lack of evidence.
There's not a lack of evidence. The fact that it's always been observed to be true for 2 billion years is evidence that it's a good assumption - which is why people make that assumption. I said there was no proof, logically, but that's irrelevant - that's a failure of logic, not an indication that it's a bad conclusion to work under. And we accept it tentatively, so that when the laws of physics are observed to change for the first time ever, we can change our minds about that.
Stating in advance that you're going to change your mind - cut and run - when the "going gets tough" is exactly what people would describe as lacking faith, not having it.
At some point, you just have to take on faith that there is predictability to the universe.
Nonsense. No faith is required when there's all this evidence that the universe is predictable.
There's no evidence that there is no god, and there's no evidence that there is - there's only faith.
There's actually abundant evidence that everything that is believed to be true about God is actually human invention, and there's considerable evidence that none of the gods worshiped by humans actually exist. I can't disprove every kind of God, mostly because the term "God" is so hopelessly broad that, really, it could describe anything.
As Dawkins says, there's almost certainly no God. The tentative conclusion of atheism is perfectly adequate for me.
But what evidence is there that the universe will continue to work as you've already observed?
Why would it change?
The simple fact that that's what you've observed in the past? That's circular reasoning.
Of course it is. The simple fact is, empiricism can't be verified by logic.
But honestly that's a flaw in logic, not a flaw in empiricism.
There's no way to prove that the universe will not be radically different tomorrow than it is today
I don't see why I have to prove it. As a tentative conclusion it's obviously more reasonable than the alternative - that the laws of physics will begin to radically flux tomorrow, something that has never been observed to occur. The conclusion that it will be the same is much more reasonable than the conclusion that it won't be.
Is it just that you're afraid of uncertainty?
If that was really true, do you think so many people would believe?
Yes, I do. Human beings have an astounding capacity to be completely wrong. In fact being wrong about stuff is one of the easiest things in the world to do.
It turns out the gospels are written closer to the time of events, our earliest copies come from closer to the time, they're more complete and there are more of them.
Well, that's clearly not true. The earliest we can date any of the Gospels is 70 AD, and that's a bit of a stretch. The accepted consensus is about 90-120 AD.
On the other hand, we do have other records from around 0 AD, but none of them mention either Jesus, and of his apostles, his minsitry, his execution, or the rise of early Christianity.
A lot of people who died claiming that he rose from the dead.
They were mistaken and didn't know it. Simple explanation. Plenty of people have died for wrong ideas.
Every religion has martyrs. Martyrdom is not evidence for the veracity of a claim.
Which clearly isn't the case, so why don't you take the fingers out of years, open your eyes, drop the glib, arrogant attitude and actually examine the evidence that is there.
I did, when I was a Christian. (Meaning I was quite sympathetic to the evidence; if anything, biased in favor of Christianity.)
The result of my examination is that I became an atheist.
Just because that's your definition of faith, doesn't mean it's the biblical definition.
Actually, it's Jesus's (the fictional Bible character) - "blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." The Bible defines faith as belief in that for which there is no evidence. Unless you're saying Jesus was a liar?
And yet so many people assert exactly that about the theory of evolution as applied to humanity.
No, they don't. The theory of evolution is supported by abundant evidence from multiple, independent lines of investigation; as a result it's accepted by consensus science. It's probably the best-tested theory in science and its met every evidentiary challenge put forth.
We still only accept it tentatively, of course. And it's been a remarkably effective (and interesting) model for the biological sciences. Essentially evolution is the reason biology is a science and not just stamp-collecting. People are, as a result, enthusiastic about evolution.
That enthusiasm isn't an assertion that the theory is Absolutely True.
For a Christian, faith is based on facts and evidence.
Clearly that's impossible, since there's absolutely no evidence for any of the major Christian dogma. There's no evidence that Jesus said any of the stuff he's held to say in the Bible (though I agree with the consensus of historians that there actually was a real Jesus, just like there was a real King Arthur.) There's no evidence of resurrection. There isn't even any evidence of God.
If the beliefs of Christians were based on facts and evidence, they'd be atheists.
You give interesting definitions of faith.
People wrongly conflate "faith" and "trust." Trust is when you believe in something that hasn't let you down. Faith is when you believe in something that has always let you down.
The answers may be good enough or close enough to what actually happend to give us what for our purposes is respectable predictive power, but it's still just guesswork until we've repeated the whole thing for ourselves and verified the results.
So you're saying, unless we know everything, we don't know anything? How do you survive in our society hating science as much as you do?
Look, what would you have us do? The scientific method comes to tentative conclusions from evidence. The conclusions are tentative because they represent the best explanation for what we currently know, but we're learning new things all the time, and sometimes, we learn things that show us we were wrong. Being wrong isn't the worst thing in the world.
Religion, on the other hand, offers the following - just make-up whatever you want and pretend like it's true. (Or we'll make something up for you if you're not feeling creative.) How is that better? Surely no reasonable person could mistake make-believe for a path that's liable to be fruitful in finding out what is true?
Nobody holds the claims of science to be absolute. Absolute certainty is the province of religion, not science. Personally, I'd rather be mostly right and getting righter (as our knowledge expands and is refined) than, like religion, fixedly and eternally wrong.
Truth or certainty. I guess you can pick which is more important.
I think when people make statements like this, they're referring to things like "faith that the world will act in an hour the way it acts now", or "faith that I am not in the Matrix, and can believe that my own eyes are not deceiving me".
"Faith" is when you believe in something in spite of the evidence. To the extent that I believe those propositions, I believe them based on the evidence, so my belief doesn't constitute faith.
Without basic assumptions ("faith", if you want), we couldn't function at all.
Assumptions aren't faith. To the extent that those assumptions lead to replicable successes in understanding the world that is apparently around us, they're substantiated by evidence, and therefore need not be taken on faith.
Faith is when your prayers are not answered but you pray anyway. Faith is when all indications are that you're wrong, but you believe anyway. Empiricism is when you change your mind in response to contradictory information. Isn't that the exact opposite of faith? Don't you get called "faithless" when you do that, in fact?
The fundamental basis of the scientific is repeatability.
All the evidence that underlies evolution is repeatable - without having to reproduce 3 billion years in a laboratory the size of the entire Earth.
When you understand how this can be true, you'll be a lot less stupid - and you'll understand what "repeatability" means in the scientific method.
Because, when it all boils down to it, you have to have faith in something, be it science or religion.
No, actually, you don't have to have faith in something. I don't have faith. I let the evidence determine what conclusions I come to - and since I can always get more evidence, those conclusions are always tentative.
Faith is only required if you demand absolute certainty. Once you get over your terrified reaction of finding out you live in an uncertain world, you can essentially free yourself from the mental bad habit of "Faith."
An attempt to limit scholarly inquiry by excluding it from scientific discussion will only discourage diversity in the scientific community.
Nobody's excluding ID from scientific debate - the ID'ers are doing that themselves. They've earnestly resisted participating in any scientific discussion of their ideas.
Because that's what you do when you know your ideas can only fool the gullible. Any time they want to bring forth their scientific evidence for peer-review, that's absolutely fine with every scientist. They never will, of course, because they know it's all hokum. That's why they go for the schools first. Because ID isn't about science or evidence or arriving at a consensus that explains the data; it's about laying a groundwork to overturn secularism in the public sphere. (Just ask Phillip Johnson if you don't believe me. There's a reason they call it the "Wedge Movement.")
it shouldn't be religion because (at least the reasonable arguments) don't actually argue for a "God,"
No - just a supremely powerful being, present at the creation of the universe, with the power to fine-tune initial conditions and suspend the laws of physics.
That's a somewhat limited skill-set, I think. If you don't think they're talking about God there's just no end to how credulous you can be. Indeed - if they're not talking about God, isn't there a recursion problem? If you're saying it's aliens, who designed the aliens?
If you can lead a group and fight in the group at the same time, and that's the game's idea of "complex strategy", then the strategy isn't very complex at all.
It took me a while but I think I figured out the bad assumption underlying your argument. That thing, where you can't do two things at once? You know, like walk and chew gum?
That's just you, actually. That's not the rest of us.