When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
If a scientist gives equal weight to the lack of proof of god's existence, and the lack of proof that there is no god, then he is rather sloppily disregarding probabilities. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and if no evidence can be found despite our best efforts, one may safely proceed on the premise that the claim is false even if you cannot conclusively disprove it.
A person's opinions as to what the weighting of the two probabilities are and what constitutes extraordinary are subjective, highly dependent upon culture, etc. The simple truth is that both theism and atheism require faith in the face of a lack of evidence. Faith in the face of a lack of evidence is not very scientific. Agnosticism is a position of logic based upon a lack of evidence. Logic is more characteristic of science. I think the case can be made that agnosticism is the more scientific.
So the conclusion is: applying logic to the rules laid out in the bible can never be valid, since those rules are metaphors (and thus not logical in nature)? Of course the terms "rules" and "logic" here in the mathematical sense.
No. The metaphor may say seven days. While the detail of a 24 hour day may not be valid the sequencing of things may be entirely consistent with science and logic: universe, sun, earth, man. Where the line is drawn between the larger truth of the metaphor and the phrasing of things so that a primitive sheep herder can follow the conversation I can't necessarily say.
One might add that the catholics are pretty squarely in the camp that the bible is not to be taken literally. It was one of their priests that introduced the scientific world to the theory that the universe started with a bang billions of years ago.
Your post boils down to this: many Christians don't take their religion seriously enough to care if its theological basis has been trashed. Heck, they'll help with the trashing.
Not at all. Their religion is about god and his relationship with mankind, science does not address such questions. They believe science addresses how god's creation came into being and how it operates. Their religion is not about the mechanics of god's creation.
The problem is that they claim their book is the word of their god. If they can discard parts as allegory, but others as truth, then how do they decide?
I don't think they are dismissing, I think they are interpreting. For example the 7 days of genesis may not have been 24 hour periods.
If 'god' didn't want people to think the world was 6,000 years old, why say it was in the book?
He doesn't. That was some guys interpretation.
Seems like 'a long long time ago' would have conveyed the same idea,...
But it wouldn't convey the idea of steps, the sequence of events: universe, sun, earth, man.
Making one's faith fit science...
I don't believe that is what they are doing. I believe that many religious people use science to explain how god's creation works, but don't expect science to answer anything about god.
whilst you might like to think most people believe what you have said here, you'd be wrong and pretty much everybody that I've spoken to do not believe what you've said, therefore using todays metaphors, you're the 1%
most likely everybody has the about two dozen people who they know are literal biblicans.....
I think catholics, lutherans, anglicans, methodists, etc represent more than 1% of christianity. Well into the double digits actually.;-)
If you think the bible is metaphorical, then you aren't really a Christian.
The roman catholic priest who developed the currently accepted theory for the origin of the universe, the big bang theory, would have been quite surprised to find out that he is not a christian because he didn't think the 7 days in genesis were the 24 hour periods we know and love.:-)
... more plausible that it is the multiverse that just "is", as opposed to it being created by an omnipotent, omniscient being nobody has ever seen who just "is"...
It is plausible that an individual universe is created in response to some precursor event in the multiverse. Being outside the universe the nature of that event is unobservable. Of course some might say that this smells of creationism, as they did with the big bang theory when it was proposed.:-)
... you load up something to keep the kids amused not realizing that because you just finished downloading it your itunes account is still unlocked and the kids can buy whatever they want without a password for the next few minutes...
I believe Apple updated iOS so that the authorization for the free download could not be used to authorize an in app purchase. The in app purchase requires its own authorization.
Most of the game developers do make an attempt to warn users that the game "changes real money for additional in-app content" but it's a lame attempt. It's easily missed...
Apple puts up a dialog over the app's screen indicating the item to be purchased and the price to be charged. These are standard purchase dialogs displayed and implemented by the operating system, beyond the app's control. Apple also updated iOS so that the authorization for the free download could not be used to authorize an in app purchase. The in app purchase requires its own authorization. And then there is the parental control option regarding in app purchases...
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
When true scientists are asked about invisible unicorns the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence of them so most likely they don't exist. And if someone were to claim they exist they better have some proof to back those claims up.
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
Because they know...
Article of faith #1.
... the guy asking the question will react irrationally to any reasonable answer. The scientific answer is - obviously not,...
Article of faith #2.
... there is no evidence whatsoever for anything like that.
Both theism and *atheism* require faith in the face of a lack of evidence. Faith in the face of a lack of evidence is not very scientific.
Once you refuse to dismiss outlandish, untestable ideas because there is no evidence against them...
Agnosticism is a position of logic based upon a lack of evidence. Logic is more characteristic of science.
... you may as well start giving the benefit of the doubt to Nigerian email scams.
And that's just a straw man, and not a very good one at that. There is no benefit of the doubt when the opinion is I don't know. Both theism and atheism are systems where one gives the benefit of the doubt, they merely differ in the boolean state assumed to be correct.
You are pretty uninformed regarding Christianity. Christianity has a wide range of opinions and only a very small minority are of the earth is 6,000 years old persuasion. Many are quite comfortable with the idea that the universe and earth are billions of years old. As a matter of fact a priest from one of these larger groups introduced the big bang theory to the world of science. They also quite comfortable that the bible often speaks in metaphors that are not to be taken literally, that an all knowing God can only communicate to man using concepts that man is capable of understanding.
Wow, you sound like the open minded leading scientists who rejected the big bang theory back in the day because it was developed by a priest and "smelled of creationism".
As demonstrated by the priest referred to above, the religious may also use facts, proof and logic. They just don't do so on religious matters, there they have articles of faith. Of course some atheists seem to have articles of faith themselves, their faith is merely of the opposite polarity. When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
I get your point but I'd prefer to compare it to the overestimation of the Mig-25's capabilities. This seems more appropriate since it offers a comparable state vs state situation. So the Mig-25 is overestimated, the F-15 is designed to handle this "threat", and the F-15 go on to have a kill/loss ratio of 104:0. It seems there is something to be said for overestimating a potential foe.
That's the most politely-worded and voluminous "Fuck you, you're on your own" I've ever read.
That seems an overstatement. Its more of a "No We Can't". Sigh.
Re:Was the world better off due to C?
on
Dennis Ritchie Day
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps I am getting my threads mixed up. I had two running on this topic and perhaps it was the other thread that made the explicit order of magnitude claim. Apologies if so.
Ada actually gets a lot of DOD attention. Note that Ada is part of the GNU compiler collection and generates object code directly. So I don't think comparison to a hobbyist project like Free Pascal is in order.
You will never get hired, wearing a ComiCon T-shirt, and opening your sentences by saying: "Actually,..."
Actually:-), I got a job because when the interviewing manager asked how the programming test I had just taken went I told him how poor a test it was. He was very interested in my opinions regarding the matter. One of the first things I was assigned to do once hired was to create a new test. The manager was a business guy and knew nothing about programming but he understood rational arguments when he heard them.
Of course maybe I was hired because I wore a suit and tie for the interview.
My bank refuses to talk to me about my wife's account. Even with her sitting next to me telling them it is OK. Now when they ask for Jennifer, I say I'm her, in by best husky voice, provide the last 4 of the SSN, and magically I have full access to her account.
I mean come on... I'm a 40 year old guy with an unmistakably male voice. How can they possible accept that I'm Jennifer?
They don't give a shit about fraud. They just want to be able to tick their little boxes.
No, they are simply being courteous and respecting your choice and privacy regarding gender reassignment.:-)
Write them down.
Leave the sheet of paper in your desk drawer, locked if you're paranoid.
Done.
Write it on paper but put it in a safe deposit box at a bank. If you are concerned about the delay in getting a death certificate to transfer ownership of the box then make your heir/successor a co-owner of the box.
I remember trying to install this back in the 3.0 days, being thwarted by the fact that one of the authors of the software owned the copyright on the OS in ISO disc format, effectively making it impossible to get a version to install without paying him. After a few failed days of missing this or that file, and corrupt BitTorrent copies, I gave up, went back to FreeBSD (at the time).
OpenBSD always had a simple free install if you had a network connection. There were free bootable images available for download. You boot from one of these and it downloads components as needed during the install. The only thing you had to pay for was a CD that contained all components and could do an install *without* a network connection. At least for the current release, the full CD images for previous releases were available for download.
Somewhere in the conversation did you answer the question as to whether or not you had OpenBSD experience?:-)
Re:Was the world better off due to C?
on
Dennis Ritchie Day
·
· Score: 1
Neither of these tests are fair.
That is my point. The claims that one language is an order of magnitude faster than the other is usually accomplished with such biased comparisons.
To me once you start turning things off you prove C was right all along.
No. The point is that when you remove the functionality (array bounds checking) unique to Pascal the languages are quite comparable. Having that functionality available is not "wrong", not giving the programmer the option is not "right". Its just an option available to an informed programmer to decide if and when it is appropriate.
Have a look at the shootout though i expect modern complier optimisations may no longer be added to the compiler.
You are correct in that the test is really testing compiler implementations not the languages themselves. When contemporaneous compilers that received comparable investments of time and tech were used (back in the day) the comparisons were much closer. Free Pascal looks like a cool project but I don't think it receives an effort in any way comparable to gcc. Unfortunately I'm not curious enough to go dig though old boxes in the garage to discover if I have contemporaneous version of turbo pascal, turbo c and microsoft c.:-)
I learned Pascal first as well. I never had a problem with pointers. Perhaps you merely had trouble the first time (Pascal) you were introduced to the concept and it made more sense the second time (C) you were introduced to the concept. Look at the following code, do you really see some conceptual difference? Could it really be that you did not understand the nature of a variable, or the nature of memory in general? At the time I understood that a variable is just a location in memory, that memory held numbers, and that numbers could be program code, variable, screen data, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
If a scientist gives equal weight to the lack of proof of god's existence, and the lack of proof that there is no god, then he is rather sloppily disregarding probabilities. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and if no evidence can be found despite our best efforts, one may safely proceed on the premise that the claim is false even if you cannot conclusively disprove it.
A person's opinions as to what the weighting of the two probabilities are and what constitutes extraordinary are subjective, highly dependent upon culture, etc. The simple truth is that both theism and atheism require faith in the face of a lack of evidence. Faith in the face of a lack of evidence is not very scientific. Agnosticism is a position of logic based upon a lack of evidence. Logic is more characteristic of science. I think the case can be made that agnosticism is the more scientific.
So the conclusion is: applying logic to the rules laid out in the bible can never be valid, since those rules are metaphors (and thus not logical in nature)? Of course the terms "rules" and "logic" here in the mathematical sense.
No. The metaphor may say seven days. While the detail of a 24 hour day may not be valid the sequencing of things may be entirely consistent with science and logic: universe, sun, earth, man. Where the line is drawn between the larger truth of the metaphor and the phrasing of things so that a primitive sheep herder can follow the conversation I can't necessarily say.
One might add that the catholics are pretty squarely in the camp that the bible is not to be taken literally. It was one of their priests that introduced the scientific world to the theory that the universe started with a bang billions of years ago.
Your post boils down to this: many Christians don't take their religion seriously enough to care if its theological basis has been trashed. Heck, they'll help with the trashing.
Not at all. Their religion is about god and his relationship with mankind, science does not address such questions. They believe science addresses how god's creation came into being and how it operates. Their religion is not about the mechanics of god's creation.
The problem is that they claim their book is the word of their god. If they can discard parts as allegory, but others as truth, then how do they decide?
I don't think they are dismissing, I think they are interpreting. For example the 7 days of genesis may not have been 24 hour periods.
If 'god' didn't want people to think the world was 6,000 years old, why say it was in the book?
He doesn't. That was some guys interpretation.
Seems like 'a long long time ago' would have conveyed the same idea, ...
But it wouldn't convey the idea of steps, the sequence of events: universe, sun, earth, man.
Making one's faith fit science ...
I don't believe that is what they are doing. I believe that many religious people use science to explain how god's creation works, but don't expect science to answer anything about god.
whilst you might like to think most people believe what you have said here, you'd be wrong and pretty much everybody that I've spoken to do not believe what you've said, therefore using todays metaphors, you're the 1% most likely everybody has the about two dozen people who they know are literal biblicans.....
I think catholics, lutherans, anglicans, methodists, etc represent more than 1% of christianity. Well into the double digits actually. ;-)
If you think the bible is metaphorical, then you aren't really a Christian.
The roman catholic priest who developed the currently accepted theory for the origin of the universe, the big bang theory, would have been quite surprised to find out that he is not a christian because he didn't think the 7 days in genesis were the 24 hour periods we know and love. :-)
... more plausible that it is the multiverse that just "is", as opposed to it being created by an omnipotent, omniscient being nobody has ever seen who just "is" ...
It is plausible that an individual universe is created in response to some precursor event in the multiverse. Being outside the universe the nature of that event is unobservable. Of course some might say that this smells of creationism, as they did with the big bang theory when it was proposed. :-)
... you load up something to keep the kids amused not realizing that because you just finished downloading it your itunes account is still unlocked and the kids can buy whatever they want without a password for the next few minutes ...
I believe Apple updated iOS so that the authorization for the free download could not be used to authorize an in app purchase. The in app purchase requires its own authorization.
Most of the game developers do make an attempt to warn users that the game "changes real money for additional in-app content" but it's a lame attempt. It's easily missed ...
Apple puts up a dialog over the app's screen indicating the item to be purchased and the price to be charged. These are standard purchase dialogs displayed and implemented by the operating system, beyond the app's control. Apple also updated iOS so that the authorization for the free download could not be used to authorize an in app purchase. The in app purchase requires its own authorization. And then there is the parental control option regarding in app purchases ...
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
When true scientists are asked about invisible unicorns the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence of them so most likely they don't exist. And if someone were to claim they exist they better have some proof to back those claims up.
Well here is the evidence of unicorns: http://news.discovery.com/videos/animals-mythical-unicorn-found-in-deer-form.html. ;-)
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
Because they know ...
Article of faith #1.
... the guy asking the question will react irrationally to any reasonable answer. The scientific answer is - obviously not, ...
Article of faith #2.
... there is no evidence whatsoever for anything like that.
Both theism and *atheism* require faith in the face of a lack of evidence. Faith in the face of a lack of evidence is not very scientific.
Once you refuse to dismiss outlandish, untestable ideas because there is no evidence against them ...
Agnosticism is a position of logic based upon a lack of evidence. Logic is more characteristic of science.
... you may as well start giving the benefit of the doubt to Nigerian email scams.
And that's just a straw man, and not a very good one at that. There is no benefit of the doubt when the opinion is I don't know. Both theism and atheism are systems where one gives the benefit of the doubt, they merely differ in the boolean state assumed to be correct.
You are pretty uninformed regarding Christianity. Christianity has a wide range of opinions and only a very small minority are of the earth is 6,000 years old persuasion. Many are quite comfortable with the idea that the universe and earth are billions of years old. As a matter of fact a priest from one of these larger groups introduced the big bang theory to the world of science. They also quite comfortable that the bible often speaks in metaphors that are not to be taken literally, that an all knowing God can only communicate to man using concepts that man is capable of understanding.
Wow, you sound like the open minded leading scientists who rejected the big bang theory back in the day because it was developed by a priest and "smelled of creationism".
As demonstrated by the priest referred to above, the religious may also use facts, proof and logic. They just don't do so on religious matters, there they have articles of faith. Of course some atheists seem to have articles of faith themselves, their faith is merely of the opposite polarity. When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
I get your point but I'd prefer to compare it to the overestimation of the Mig-25's capabilities. This seems more appropriate since it offers a comparable state vs state situation. So the Mig-25 is overestimated, the F-15 is designed to handle this "threat", and the F-15 go on to have a kill/loss ratio of 104:0. It seems there is something to be said for overestimating a potential foe.
Lets hear it for peer review. :-)
That's the most politely-worded and voluminous "Fuck you, you're on your own" I've ever read.
That seems an overstatement. Its more of a "No We Can't". Sigh.
Perhaps I am getting my threads mixed up. I had two running on this topic and perhaps it was the other thread that made the explicit order of magnitude claim. Apologies if so.
Ada actually gets a lot of DOD attention. Note that Ada is part of the GNU compiler collection and generates object code directly. So I don't think comparison to a hobbyist project like Free Pascal is in order.
You will never get hired, wearing a ComiCon T-shirt, and opening your sentences by saying: "Actually,..."
Actually :-), I got a job because when the interviewing manager asked how the programming test I had just taken went I told him how poor a test it was. He was very interested in my opinions regarding the matter. One of the first things I was assigned to do once hired was to create a new test. The manager was a business guy and knew nothing about programming but he understood rational arguments when he heard them.
Of course maybe I was hired because I wore a suit and tie for the interview.
My bank refuses to talk to me about my wife's account. Even with her sitting next to me telling them it is OK. Now when they ask for Jennifer, I say I'm her, in by best husky voice, provide the last 4 of the SSN, and magically I have full access to her account. I mean come on... I'm a 40 year old guy with an unmistakably male voice. How can they possible accept that I'm Jennifer? They don't give a shit about fraud. They just want to be able to tick their little boxes.
No, they are simply being courteous and respecting your choice and privacy regarding gender reassignment. :-)
Write them down. Leave the sheet of paper in your desk drawer, locked if you're paranoid. Done.
Write it on paper but put it in a safe deposit box at a bank. If you are concerned about the delay in getting a death certificate to transfer ownership of the box then make your heir/successor a co-owner of the box.
I remember trying to install this back in the 3.0 days, being thwarted by the fact that one of the authors of the software owned the copyright on the OS in ISO disc format, effectively making it impossible to get a version to install without paying him. After a few failed days of missing this or that file, and corrupt BitTorrent copies, I gave up, went back to FreeBSD (at the time).
OpenBSD always had a simple free install if you had a network connection. There were free bootable images available for download. You boot from one of these and it downloads components as needed during the install. The only thing you had to pay for was a CD that contained all components and could do an install *without* a network connection. At least for the current release, the full CD images for previous releases were available for download.
Needless to say, I didn't get a job.
Somewhere in the conversation did you answer the question as to whether or not you had OpenBSD experience? :-)
Neither of these tests are fair.
That is my point. The claims that one language is an order of magnitude faster than the other is usually accomplished with such biased comparisons.
To me once you start turning things off you prove C was right all along.
No. The point is that when you remove the functionality (array bounds checking) unique to Pascal the languages are quite comparable. Having that functionality available is not "wrong", not giving the programmer the option is not "right". Its just an option available to an informed programmer to decide if and when it is appropriate.
Have a look at the shootout though i expect modern complier optimisations may no longer be added to the compiler.
You are correct in that the test is really testing compiler implementations not the languages themselves. When contemporaneous compilers that received comparable investments of time and tech were used (back in the day) the comparisons were much closer. Free Pascal looks like a cool project but I don't think it receives an effort in any way comparable to gcc. Unfortunately I'm not curious enough to go dig though old boxes in the garage to discover if I have contemporaneous version of turbo pascal, turbo c and microsoft c. :-)
I learned Pascal first as well. I never had a problem with pointers. Perhaps you merely had trouble the first time (Pascal) you were introduced to the concept and it made more sense the second time (C) you were introduced to the concept. Look at the following code, do you really see some conceptual difference? Could it really be that you did not understand the nature of a variable, or the nature of memory in general? At the time I understood that a variable is just a location in memory, that memory held numbers, and that numbers could be program code, variable, screen data, etc.
:= 42;
Pascal
var p: ^integer;
new(p);
p^
C
int *p;
p = (int *) malloc(sizeof(p));
*p = 42;