Whatever... define it, comment it, but whatever you do, leave some note telling what the fuck 0x13 means! An enum is fine. I prefer to put all the magic numbers in one place so I can tweak the behaviour of the app in one place without having to hunt parameters down, a major time waster, and a great way to conceal an obvious bug till four builds (and two weeks of screaming clients and lawyers) later. But if you just leave a magic number and a bug shows up related to it, someone will be asking you, and they won't be asking politely if it's crashing the build.
And I said something like PRINTER_LINEFEED. It might be GO_TO_GOAL, or COPY, or ANIM_RUN. But whatever it is, say what it is.
You're probably right, but I've seen whole projects done in the wrong language or using the wrong tools because someone there didn't know the right one, and wasn't willing to learn it. So the best answer would probably be, No, but I can learn it.
Just define it right there, if that's the only place you use it. And no, THINGAMABOB_CMD is not easier to understand, because it's a poor choice of a name. Something like PRINTER_LINEFEED is what you want here.
If you are new to coding, don't be a bedroom programmer. You are no longer writing a 10,000 line app alone in your bedroom. You may be working on a million line app with a team. Change your habits accordingly. Learn to work with other people.
Programming is one of those things that humans are not quite smart enough to do. This means you. Check your ego at the door. In the early 90's, IBM estimated that 80% of large projects in the industry (one million lines or more) were "abandoned in disgust". This should give you some idea of what you are up against.
Come to work knowing what you are doing. This may mean cramming in your off hours. Don't say that you don't know how to do something. Say that you do and then learn it!
Put in comments where they are needed, and maintain them. You will forget what you were doing within three months. The harder it was to code, the more you need the comments.
Use descriptive variable names. Try to organize your data into conceptually simple variables where possible.
If you have to complicate a mathematical formula by breaking it into sections appropriate for inner and outer loops, put the formula in the comments. It may even be worth putting in an ASCII diagram if you are working with geometry.
If you can't see the bug, it's because you have become blind to the code. Get someone else to take a look. The mistake may be embarrassingly obvious to a new set of eyes.
If speed is a factor, preprocess the data. Offload runtime cycles to preprocessing.
Maintain an up to date user manual for all tools and apps. Add to it as you add features, update it as you update the features.
Avoid magic numbers where possible, and put any magic numbers you do use into defines, again with descriptive names.
If you can, avoid virtual methods and pointers in streamed objects. This way you can bulk load them and bulk write them. Indices often fast enough, or can be converted to pointers if need be after loading.
If you have lots of booleans, consider a bit array.
Try to write reusable code. Code for the general case when possible, but...
Normalize your data and objects. Don't waste memory and time maintaining variables you don't need. Don't repeat yourself.
Your key indexes should be integers, never strings. Yes, I have seen databases keyed on memo fields--they were tragically slow.
If updating an existing project, get the client to sign off on what is not to be changed or fixed, and make certain that the QA department gets this list. Otherwise bugs will creep onto the list that you are not actually required to fix, expanding the scope of the project.
Build test harnesses whenever you can which can be turned on with a simple switch. This will make regression testing a lot easier.
Agreed. This is a version of what I call the Proof from Theological Proliferation, which, baldly stated, goes something like: "There are lots of books of theology, and you haven't read them all. Therefore, God." Or, "The proof is left as an exercise for the reader."
If there is a killer argument in the book, he should tell us what it is, rather than just brush off questions with a hand wave.
The difference, I think, is that you allow everything to stack--Magic Weapon and Magic Vestment add to a weapon's bonuses, rather than just top them up to a maximum, players can have and use endless Pearls of Power, etc. It's actually fairly easy to make the problem go away--don't allow essentially duplicate powers to stack. If two powers do the same thing by the same method, you just take the better one. So if you have +2 armor, and the 12th level cleric casts Magic Vestment on it, it now becomes +3 armor, not +5.
I've been playing variations on 3.5 since it first came out with a lot of different DM's, and I've never encountered the Super Cleric in any group I've played with. It's not that the players were dumb, we just didn't let things stack like that. I suspect that this is how the game was meant to be played, because it gives you a nice mix of specialties, and the tank is always the best fighter. Played that way, the cleric's own buffs just bring him up a little short of what the tank already has, and the same buffs, cast on the tank, give a lot more benefit to the party.
Okay, you were obviously playing a completely different game. You should have probably dropped your house rules.
Metamagic feats only double the duration of spells, not make them last all day long. Divine Power and Righteous Might last one round per level. Unextended, this might last two fights. Extended, four fights... in both cases, if you're very lucky and the doors between them aren't locked, and you just keep running without searching, looting, or trap checking (just one trap can stymie the overzealous cleric). These will make you a mediocre fighter. Now, you can do this, and cast all the other buffs on yourself, or you can just cast the other buffs on the fighter as he fights--which is a good idea, because they will make him a better fighter than you'll ever be. And start with Protection vs. Evil, which makes him immune to mind affecting spells, and renders his poor Will save irrelevant. If you spend five or six rounds buffing yourself (or ten, as you suggest--what, you're buffing all your stats? Why?), most fights will be almost over by that point--and no, when I DM, I don't give players advance notice of the tough fights, as a rule, and they can happen hours apart. And even divine metamagic won't let you extend and quicken a spell at the same time. The best part of buffing the tank? Buffs don't get resisted. Meanwhile, all those buff spells you are putting on yourself mean you have fewer healing and curing spells to cast on your party. The object of the fight is for the party to do the most damage, not just you.
Pearls of Power don't let you cast spells as many times as you need to. They let you cast one spell of that level twice, and we allowed casters only one per level (I believe this was in the errata.)
As for Blindness, every Wizard I've ever played with has tried the spell and abandoned it in disgust. Turns out that tanks have monster fortitude saves (like saving on a 2 against a 2nd level spell). I've yet to see one land on a tank in play. They do, however, work very well against spellcasters (common in parties, rare amongst opponents--have you noticed how nearly all monsters have good fortitude saves?), and if I'm in a particularly mean mood, I can pretty much eliminate all the casters in the first couple of rounds. Maybe what you need is a new DM.
And 500 points of damage in melee is pure fiction. I've just crunched the numbers, and the best a normal cleric (who hasn't sacrificed core stats for strength) fully buffed can hope for, regardless of levels and assuming he rolls three 20's (three is the clerical maximum) and confirms with maximum damage, is about 150. I had a 15th level fighter/barbarian who averaged 75, on normal rolls and without buffs and wielding an average weapon, and could do up to 175 with a bit of assistance and luck. And he could start fighting on the very first round, rather than spend most of the fight buffing.
Mind you, if you're handing out artifacts like candy on Halloween, anything is possible. And the XP drain was enough to discourage our players from manufacturing high level items. Did you drop that too?
Or are you just a paid 4th ed fanboy? I've met lots of those at the WotC site--or maybe it was just a couple with different aliases. Anyway, not one hardcore D&D player that I know (and I know quite a few) has any use for 4th ed. Too bad they bulked all those 3.5 books--those are worth a lot now.
I have to disagree with just about everything you've said here... with the exception of 4th ed being not much fun.
1) It's a drag for DM's because you can't do anything with the system but frustrate the players. Monster powers are arbitrary and often completely out of line with their challenge ratings, and there was often no logical or systematic reason for what monsters could do. At the same time, you couldn't actually tell an epic fantasy story in it because the high level free form magic was all gone, so even if you gave those abilities to your NPC's there was no way for the players to respond.
2) Wizards have not ruled the game since 2nd ed, and clerics have never been other than a support class. Druids still kick ass, but everyone gets their moment to shine. Are you sure you played 3.5? A cleric who spends five full rounds buffing himself can be a mediocre fighter, but still can't beat a fighter two levels lower than he is (we put this to the test.) But a similar range of buffs on the tank can turn him into a Dragon slaying god. Spellcasters are good at taking out hordes of grunts, but for bosses, there's no saving throw against a good axe.
Okay, AC, I know you're deeply allergic to history, but look up Imperial Oil. John D. Rockefeller not only forced customers to deal with him as a monopoly, he forced suppliers to deal with him as well. It was the first big anti-trust case in American history.
I despair when I meet people who don't know things like this. I don't have the decades it would take to educate them, and apparently, they won't take the time either.
And no monopoly of force? It's called anarchy--raiding warlords who show up, burn your farm, kill you and your sons, rape your daughters (and your wife, if she's still good looking), and take all your stuff. Feudalism was considered a major improvement. Doesn't say much for anarchism, does it?
As noted, most people don't have a choice of what internet provider is offered. But beyond that, do a tracert on traffic to another part of the country. See that? That's Ma Bell for most of the links. So your local provider is largely irrelevant.
Business is good for goods and services that you can opt out of. Those you can't (like the internet these days) are called infrastructure, and giving business control over infrastructure is a golden invitation to rent-seeking behaviour, because something you can't opt out of is called a monopoly--particularly when the trunk lines are owned by the people who got there first.
Legislative capture (special interest control of government) is a problem in its own right, and will become a more pressing problem now that the Supreme Court has given corporations the right to buy politicians as they see fit. If the Tea Party would address that issue, I'd sign up. But they won't, because they are a wholly owned subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp., the goal of which is, you guessed it, legislative capture. In fact, he's built a whole enterprise on it. Want to drum up support for legislative protection of your obsolete business model? Rupert is your man, if you can afford him! So much for small government.
I'd be interested in reading this book, because I suspect that it doesn't say what a lot of people think it says. Most claims that you cannot disprove the existence of God rely on a fallacy of ambiguity; the assumption that when people use the word God, they are talking about the same thing. But there are probably as many conceptions of God as there are people, and many of these conceptions are indeed falsifiable. And its not even clear from the article that most of these scientists actually believe in any kind of God--just some vague sort of mysticism.
The type of God that is most often offered by academics when they claim that people like Dawkins don't understand religion is an extremely nebulous deistic god, and I think it's relevant that most of these academics begin with the words, "I'm an atheist, but..." The type of God they talk about does not inspire worship--at best, it inspires philosophical contemplation and wonder. This is God as a Platonic Ideal--an equation, when you get right down to it. And these academics have managed to convince themselves that all the rest of the faithful share their views. According to them, religious people are just telling stories, but don't claim that they are true, they are seeking moments of significance, searching for the God beyond God, and so on and on...
But the vast majority of believers in the world adhere to the crudest theology imaginable. To them, God is a Being who is eternal but acts in time and therefore exists in time, heaven is a real place where they will go with their friends and other people who agree with them and spend eternity pretty much in the physical state they have now. In short, what the vast majority of believers want is magic. They don't just tell stories, they claim that they are true. They are making broad truth claims about reality which are subject to empirical debunking, and have in fact been debunked. And to the vast majority of believers out their, the theology of academics sounds like the utterances of the Vorlon ambassador with his translator turned off. Most believers understand exactly what Dawkins is saying, but as Karen Armstrong was told recently by a Baptist minister, they have no clue what these academics are talking about, and regard them as atheists as well. As it turns out, Dawkins has a better grasp on religion as it actually exists than the so-called experts.
So let's say that you're an enlightened, apophatic, deistic, live and let live kind of believer. Bully for you. But if you take a moment to look up from your studies, you might notice that there are vast hordes of people who believe really crazy things. The fastest growing Christian sects preach the Gospel of Prosperity, which is sort of like being a Secretard except that Jesus takes the place of the Universe as the magical swag dispenser. Conservapedia wants to combine Jesus with Ayn Rand, which should be about as likely as the successful merging of two colliding freight trains, but I don't doubt they will find a market for it. Christianity has gone post-Christian, and the atheists had nothing to do with this. If Christianity is your bag, well, last chance to see before it goes extinct. You might want to do something about that. Meanwhile, a lot of other people are so attached to the idea of the devil that they are planning a war against him, in whatever guise they assume him to be taking (usually something like everybody else but us), and the weapons of choice seem to be nuclear. Then there are the Christian Dominionists, who believe that Christianity must take over the world (that is, all governments) before Jesus can return, which is not exactly endearing Islamicist extremists, who have similar ideas concerning Islam. Again, see weapons of choice. And if you still entertain the idea that this is a lunatic fringe, remember that Rick Warren, a Dominionist Christian, was able to command the two candidates for the last presidential election to stand and deliver. Can you do that?
So this is what the complaints are about. Nobody is parti
As Mark Twain put it, a lie could be half-way around the world before the truth could put its boots on--and that was before the internet. Now we have internet echo chambers where the ignorant can stay ignorant with the help of other fools, some of whom make a living at being fools, and where, if you just stay within the limits of the circle-jerk, you need never encounter an idea or piece of evidence that challenges your views.
I keep mine clipped to the side belt ring of by pants using one of those mountain climbing clips (the one I'm using now I bought at the Smithsonian Aeronautical Museum--if you're going to buy a souvenir, make it useful.) I've got six keys and a 16 GB USB key on the thing. If you have more than this on your keychain, you probably need to split it up, and keep only the keys you need to get in, and the rest for additional cabinets, sheds, etc, stored at home or at work.
The Pope's constant complaints about moral relativism are particularly ironic, for several reasons.
First, one of the most commonly mounted defenses of religious faith these days is derived from postmodernism, which uses epistemological relativism to argue that science is just another religion--even Catholics are now resorting to this line of argument (and they should know better.) The problem with epistemological relativism is that it necessarily implies moral relativism--if nothing is true, you cannot claim that anything is right or wrong.
Second, using God as a basis for moral absolutes runs into the Euthyphro problem, named after Plato's dialogue. Basically, you can't argue that something is good because the gods demand it: if they demand it because it is good in and of itself, than the gods are irrelevant, but if it is good because they demand it, then morality is simply the will of the powerful, and nothing is really good. The Pope's insistence that what is good is good because God says so actually leads to moral relativism.
Finally, there is the problem of transcendentalization. A recent study discovered that when people prayed to God for an answer, the answer was always in agreement with their current beliefs. God never disagrees with his followers, because God is simply the projection of their own beliefs, desires, and opinions onto the cosmos. Reliance on God for such answers, and insisting that they convey absolute standards of right and wrong, not only encourages moral relativism, but an iron-clad moral solipsism reinforced by blind faith.
It's still a ridiculous hypothesis. Every new form of entertainment is accompanied by doomsayers who claim it's the end of the world as we know it, from the the invention of writing onward, including novels, movies, radio, TV, the internet, and now video games. And every one of them has been wrong.
Miller thinks that our indulgence in entertainment is what is limiting our reproduction, and he's been flogging this nonsense for years, ignoring the stunningly obvious and well documented fact that lower birth rates are caused by global urbanization, combined with reliable birth control methods and low infant mortality rates (if all your children live, you don't need to have as many). Children on the farm are assets--they count as capital; children in the city are liabilities. This is a good thing, because it means that there is a built in social/market force that limits human population to a sustainable level. Unfortunately, the moral panic factor in Miller's hare-brained theory provides it a far higher media profile than it deserves.
Um, not so much. The excess was in secular leaders hijacking religion, making their own government-established versions and then using those to justify all of their secular abuses. The Church of England is a good example here, and the one our founders had most-clearly in mind
This, of course, rests on the assumption that there is a 'pure' religion as opposed to the opportunistic use of religion for personal or political ends. But all religions have a history of exploitation for personal gain mixed with refinements which arise from genuine human moral concerns. The abolition of slavery is a good example, where both sides used their own interpretations to argue their case, and it should be remembered that slavery was a well entrenched practice which was never challenged in principle in the bible--they only occasionally disputed who should be a slave or who shouldn't be, but never the practice itself. Abolition was a 'secular' concern incorporated into Christianity. Since both motivations originate outside of the religion, you could argue that there is in fact no such thing as religion at all, only the transcendentalization of secular concerns. And you would be right. Religion is a political tool, an attempt by human beings to claim that their opinions are written in the stars, and must never be challenged. Fortunately, we do have the right to challenge them, which is why, over time, we are actually able to make some real progress. Bad ideas don't stand up to scrutiny, good ideas do.
Secular dogmas work the same way, and have their own counterpart to God; the Marxists had historical inevitability, the fascists had their national destinies, and extreme libertarians have elevated the market to a quasi-mystical force. Marx was one of a group of philosophers called the Young Hegelians--it is interested to note that Hegel's philosophy was, more properly, a work of theology. The best thing one can say for secular dogmas is that they are falsifiable in a way that religions are not. They have to deliver their goods in this world, and when they fail, as they always do, they fall out of favour. Unfortunately, the secular dogmas had modern weaponry and industrialization at their command. Imagine the crusades with automatic rifles, artillery, and bomber squadrons, or just look at Africa and the Middle East. I never had much use for Marx, but disparaging Marxism now is just too damn easy. Even the old hippies are embarrassed by it--you can only get so far on future promises. Religion always has the afterlife, the Kingdom to Come, it always falls prey to Antony Flew's question, "What would you take as evidence that religion is false?". The worst thing that can be said about a scientific hypothesis is that it is 'not even wrong' but this can be said of the whole of theology.
As for absolutist Darwinists, perhaps you don't believe in evolution, which I would take as a failure on your part and a point in my favour. If you are talking about Social Darwinism, this should better be known as Social Spencerism, because it is a half baked social theory that existed before the Origin of Species was published. You also seem to take charity as a circumvention of evolution; in fact, human evolution seems to be accelerating, rather than slowing down. The main difference is that we have replaced raw natural selection with social selection. For social animals like humans, social competence is an indispensable part of the fitness criteria, and this includes altruism and mutual support. As for absolutist atheists, calling atheism a dogma is like calling bald a hair colour or not collecting stamps a hobby. If you're referring to the communists, their dogma was communism. We don't talk about absolutist afairyists, so you seem to have fallen prey to a category error.
And if you think that radical Islam is the only source of trouble amongst religion, google Helen Ukpabio and the Liberty Gospel Church of Nigeria, or find out about the proposed anti-gay laws in Uganda. The Ugandan ministers have the support of Christian
Both good and bad. If they succeed, we end up with a type of theocracy, which is disastrous for the time being, but it would cause a backlash, which could correct the problem in the long term. So, again, the question is, how much pain can you stand? The outgroup antagonism that exists now is fueling the culture wars. The backlash might eventually correct that, but the theocratic tendency would do a lot of damage in the short term.
Ben was a regular at the salons of Paris and London; the organizer of one of these said that of the members, most were atheists, and the rest were still deciding. Franklin never came out and declared, but he probably didn't do so because he thought religion was useful rather than true. It is also interesting that at the time of foundation, about 18% of the American populace attended church regularly (Washington was one of those who gave up in disgust). This number has been growing since then, with a large spike during the Weslyan revival.
The ignorance of history is a major factor here. The founders lived in a world where the excesses of religion wielding political power was a very present thing. Thanks to the separation of church and state, we have been afforded the luxury of forgetting this. But any ideology that deals in absolutes, whether it be secular or religious, will evoke the absolute to disdain lesser goods--and when you think you hold the absolute Truth or Good, all other goods become worthless. The perfect is not just the enemy of the good, it is the mortal enemy of all goods. Life, liberty, happiness, charity, tolerance, knowledge, reason, and anything that is not held up as absolute will be cast aside, along with all who would defend them. Billions have died, and will die, for the idols of dogma. If religion has an evolutionary advantage, it is probably in strengthening ingroup solidarity at the expense of outgroup antagonism; effective in prehistory, catastrophic in a world of globalisation. I suspect that religions will, in this century, claim at least a billion victims, and make Stalin, Hitler, and Mao look like amateurs. In the aftermath, Richard Dawkins will sound positively mild and conciliatory.
There are almost as many Gods as there are believers, and the first thing you will discover when the state imposes religion is that the state's God is not your God. Europe is secular precisely because most European countries have entrenched state religions. The separation of church and state allowed religions to evolve and compete, and is one of the main reasons that America is so religious. If these clowns get their way, religion will be disgraced in America as well. They will do the secularists job for them. Joy is the reason, love is the method, but pain is the teacher.
The question is, how much pain can you stand?
One would think that the spectacle of Islamic Jihadism would be enough to remind us of what religion is when given free reign, but two hundred years of domesticated and tamed Christianity have encouraged the illusion that the creature has changed its nature. It hasn't. It's just biding its time...
Yeah, except they're not telling you they're the government, are they. That would be the whole 'infiltration' thing, wouldn't it? They're just arguing their point. Shame on them. They should tell you they're the government. But no, that would mean that the government is telling you what to think. So they can't tell you they're the government. But then, they're sneaky. And anyone who agrees with the government and posts their opinion is being sneaky too.
Hmmmm... maybe you just don't like it when people disagree with you? Sounds like religion to me. Oh, sorry... am I being religious?
Oh, no, the government wants to argue against bullshit! Man the barricades! BULLSHIT IS SACRED!!!
No, it's not. Get a grip. Telling the truth is never a bad thing. And by the way, a lot of us infiltrate these groups and do the same thing for free, for that very reason. Bullshit is bullshit. And presenting evidence for the truth is always a good thing.
By the way, this is a Democratic administration dispelling lies about a Republican administration. Now, put your tin foil hats away, take your meds, and calm down.
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. Either the ambient temperature has to be pretty cool, or the thing has to be fitted with liquid coolant--which makes it essentially a battery. Leaving this out of the explanation makes all the claims pretty underwhelming.
I've seen it. It's bad. Really bad. I think this is what drove Carrie Fisher to do drugs. She was in it, and she had to say the lines, and the lines were bad even by Lucas standards, and I cringed with every word. It was torture by proxy; what Jabba did to Leia was nothing compared to what Lucas did to Fisher in that special...
Murdoch has been talking about a paying model for internet news for a year or so now. The problem is, he's got the wrong product. People will pay for information, though. The Economist has been growing steadily for thirty years, making good profits, and can even charge for their web site. But Murdoch isn't selling information, he's selling infotainment--crap, basically. The internet already has tons of free crap, so why would anyone pay Murdoch for his crap?
Wow, this is so badly misinformed that I don't know where to begin...
Writers, musicians, and movie makers usually don't get paid for the time they work--they work on spec, or on borrowed money, and hope that they can pay it back. This makes these high risk ventures, and no one is going to bother with high risk ventures unless the occasional success covers the cost of failed attempts.
Of course, there are low risk ventures: Harlequin romances, formula adventure stories, soap operas, bubble gum pop, and muzak. Mediocre product moves in reliable quantities. The world you would create would make anything beyond this impossible.
As it is, publishers do their best to trap writers in a contract which states that they are "writers for hire"--that is, they get paid only a fixed some for their time (as you suggest they should) while the publisher gets to keep any extra profits, because they now own the rights entirely. So, you see, the corporations agree with you entirely. That's how they steal the work of the individual.
Copyright law is a mess, but this is stunningly naive.
Okay, that came out garbled--picked the wrong formatting option...
First point: The default logical position for any proposition is to assume it false until some evidence is given. This is a principle that we employ hundreds, and perhaps thousands of times each day. For example, it is not impossible that a king cobra has crept under your bed while you slept, but if you take this possibility seriously, you will not put your foot down on the floor to get up. Serious consideration of all unlikely possibilities will leave you paralysed, and in all likelihood, clinically insane. Why, then, do we discard this principle in one single case--the existence of God?
Second: Certain cognitive heuristics, though common, have extraordinarily bad histories of reliability. Of all of these, our tendency to see conscious intentionality at work where there is none, particularly in areas where we have no explanation, has the worst record. We are hard wired towards paranoia, because a false positive in this regard was far less dangerous for our ancestors than a false negative. This error is at work in belief in conspiracy theories (the Illuminati did it), psychic phenomena (the spirits did it), all kinds of false pattern recognitions (the pattern was put there intentionally by something) and even in our reactions to bad weather (our resentment towards the weather as if it meant to spoil our picnic.) And yet, what do we fill in the gap in our understanding in cosmology with? An intentional being. Now, how reliable a guess do you really think this is?
Third: As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, we have evolved to understand the world we live in, the middle world, not that of the very big or very small. We have no talent for cosmology. And again, what we encounter in the common understanding of cosmology are principles suited to the middle world; most commonly, the expectation of intentionality. Again, how likely is this to be accurate?
Fourth: While there may be no direct evidence of God, one would expect that a universe created or informed by a divine presence would differ in some particulars from a universe not created or informed by that presence. The problem of evil raises its head, but even more so, the problem of sterility--why is the universe not teeming with life? I can imagine a universe which consists entirely of verdant pockets of life, much of it intelligent, all of it eventually accessible by normal bodily locomotion, in which all transactions between living organisms are positive sum. Thus, the lion does not eat you, but something that you provide (a nectar sack, perhaps), in return for which it provides some other service. No nature red in tooth and claw, no war, no violence. Our universe does not conform to the expectations one would have of a universe created or informed by what we conceive as God.
The objection offered to this is that perhaps God had to do it this way. But if God is constrained, what created the constraints? One of the conclusions of theology is that God is not only omniscient, omni benevolent, and omnipotent, but perfectly free. Because if God is not perfectly free, something else limits God, and that something else is actually God.
Fifth: As our conceptions of God continue to race ahead of disconfirming evidence, why do we continue to use the word God? The God of Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton, or Teilhard de Chardin has nothing in common with Jehovah, yet we use the same word for all. The statement: "There is some X which exists, where X can mean anything, and exists does not necessarily have its common meaning, and this X we call God" is true because it is trivial. It carries no information because its terms have no fixed meaning. Contemporary theology has argued itself into a void.
Finally: The belief in God is motivated by Einstein's parsimonious question: Is the universe friendly? But perhaps the question is not whether the universe is friendly to us, but whether we are friendly to it. Consider what happens when you fall in love: the person you love be
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Whatever... define it, comment it, but whatever you do, leave some note telling what the fuck 0x13 means! An enum is fine. I prefer to put all the magic numbers in one place so I can tweak the behaviour of the app in one place without having to hunt parameters down, a major time waster, and a great way to conceal an obvious bug till four builds (and two weeks of screaming clients and lawyers) later. But if you just leave a magic number and a bug shows up related to it, someone will be asking you, and they won't be asking politely if it's crashing the build.
And I said something like PRINTER_LINEFEED. It might be GO_TO_GOAL, or COPY, or ANIM_RUN. But whatever it is, say what it is.
You're probably right, but I've seen whole projects done in the wrong language or using the wrong tools because someone there didn't know the right one, and wasn't willing to learn it. So the best answer would probably be, No, but I can learn it.
Just define it right there, if that's the only place you use it. And no, THINGAMABOB_CMD is not easier to understand, because it's a poor choice of a name. Something like PRINTER_LINEFEED is what you want here.
If you are new to coding, don't be a bedroom programmer. You are no longer writing a 10,000 line app alone in your bedroom. You may be working on a million line app with a team. Change your habits accordingly. Learn to work with other people.
Programming is one of those things that humans are not quite smart enough to do. This means you. Check your ego at the door. In the early 90's, IBM estimated that 80% of large projects in the industry (one million lines or more) were "abandoned in disgust". This should give you some idea of what you are up against.
Come to work knowing what you are doing. This may mean cramming in your off hours. Don't say that you don't know how to do something. Say that you do and then learn it!
Put in comments where they are needed, and maintain them. You will forget what you were doing within three months. The harder it was to code, the more you need the comments.
Use descriptive variable names. Try to organize your data into conceptually simple variables where possible.
If you have to complicate a mathematical formula by breaking it into sections appropriate for inner and outer loops, put the formula in the comments. It may even be worth putting in an ASCII diagram if you are working with geometry.
If you can't see the bug, it's because you have become blind to the code. Get someone else to take a look. The mistake may be embarrassingly obvious to a new set of eyes.
If speed is a factor, preprocess the data. Offload runtime cycles to preprocessing.
Maintain an up to date user manual for all tools and apps. Add to it as you add features, update it as you update the features.
Avoid magic numbers where possible, and put any magic numbers you do use into defines, again with descriptive names.
If you can, avoid virtual methods and pointers in streamed objects. This way you can bulk load them and bulk write them. Indices often fast enough, or can be converted to pointers if need be after loading.
If you have lots of booleans, consider a bit array.
Try to write reusable code. Code for the general case when possible, but...
Normalize your data and objects. Don't waste memory and time maintaining variables you don't need. Don't repeat yourself.
Your key indexes should be integers, never strings. Yes, I have seen databases keyed on memo fields--they were tragically slow.
If updating an existing project, get the client to sign off on what is not to be changed or fixed, and make certain that the QA department gets this list. Otherwise bugs will creep onto the list that you are not actually required to fix, expanding the scope of the project.
Build test harnesses whenever you can which can be turned on with a simple switch. This will make regression testing a lot easier.
Agreed. This is a version of what I call the Proof from Theological Proliferation, which, baldly stated, goes something like: "There are lots of books of theology, and you haven't read them all. Therefore, God." Or, "The proof is left as an exercise for the reader."
If there is a killer argument in the book, he should tell us what it is, rather than just brush off questions with a hand wave.
Okay, now I see where you're coming from.
The difference, I think, is that you allow everything to stack--Magic Weapon and Magic Vestment add to a weapon's bonuses, rather than just top them up to a maximum, players can have and use endless Pearls of Power, etc. It's actually fairly easy to make the problem go away--don't allow essentially duplicate powers to stack. If two powers do the same thing by the same method, you just take the better one. So if you have +2 armor, and the 12th level cleric casts Magic Vestment on it, it now becomes +3 armor, not +5.
I've been playing variations on 3.5 since it first came out with a lot of different DM's, and I've never encountered the Super Cleric in any group I've played with. It's not that the players were dumb, we just didn't let things stack like that. I suspect that this is how the game was meant to be played, because it gives you a nice mix of specialties, and the tank is always the best fighter. Played that way, the cleric's own buffs just bring him up a little short of what the tank already has, and the same buffs, cast on the tank, give a lot more benefit to the party.
Okay, you were obviously playing a completely different game. You should have probably dropped your house rules.
Metamagic feats only double the duration of spells, not make them last all day long. Divine Power and Righteous Might last one round per level. Unextended, this might last two fights. Extended, four fights... in both cases, if you're very lucky and the doors between them aren't locked, and you just keep running without searching, looting, or trap checking (just one trap can stymie the overzealous cleric). These will make you a mediocre fighter. Now, you can do this, and cast all the other buffs on yourself, or you can just cast the other buffs on the fighter as he fights--which is a good idea, because they will make him a better fighter than you'll ever be. And start with Protection vs. Evil, which makes him immune to mind affecting spells, and renders his poor Will save irrelevant. If you spend five or six rounds buffing yourself (or ten, as you suggest--what, you're buffing all your stats? Why?), most fights will be almost over by that point--and no, when I DM, I don't give players advance notice of the tough fights, as a rule, and they can happen hours apart. And even divine metamagic won't let you extend and quicken a spell at the same time. The best part of buffing the tank? Buffs don't get resisted. Meanwhile, all those buff spells you are putting on yourself mean you have fewer healing and curing spells to cast on your party. The object of the fight is for the party to do the most damage, not just you.
Pearls of Power don't let you cast spells as many times as you need to. They let you cast one spell of that level twice, and we allowed casters only one per level (I believe this was in the errata.)
As for Blindness, every Wizard I've ever played with has tried the spell and abandoned it in disgust. Turns out that tanks have monster fortitude saves (like saving on a 2 against a 2nd level spell). I've yet to see one land on a tank in play. They do, however, work very well against spellcasters (common in parties, rare amongst opponents--have you noticed how nearly all monsters have good fortitude saves?), and if I'm in a particularly mean mood, I can pretty much eliminate all the casters in the first couple of rounds. Maybe what you need is a new DM.
And 500 points of damage in melee is pure fiction. I've just crunched the numbers, and the best a normal cleric (who hasn't sacrificed core stats for strength) fully buffed can hope for, regardless of levels and assuming he rolls three 20's (three is the clerical maximum) and confirms with maximum damage, is about 150. I had a 15th level fighter/barbarian who averaged 75, on normal rolls and without buffs and wielding an average weapon, and could do up to 175 with a bit of assistance and luck. And he could start fighting on the very first round, rather than spend most of the fight buffing.
Mind you, if you're handing out artifacts like candy on Halloween, anything is possible. And the XP drain was enough to discourage our players from manufacturing high level items. Did you drop that too?
Or are you just a paid 4th ed fanboy? I've met lots of those at the WotC site--or maybe it was just a couple with different aliases. Anyway, not one hardcore D&D player that I know (and I know quite a few) has any use for 4th ed. Too bad they bulked all those 3.5 books--those are worth a lot now.
So, what game were you playing?
I have to disagree with just about everything you've said here... with the exception of 4th ed being not much fun.
1) It's a drag for DM's because you can't do anything with the system but frustrate the players. Monster powers are arbitrary and often completely out of line with their challenge ratings, and there was often no logical or systematic reason for what monsters could do. At the same time, you couldn't actually tell an epic fantasy story in it because the high level free form magic was all gone, so even if you gave those abilities to your NPC's there was no way for the players to respond.
2) Wizards have not ruled the game since 2nd ed, and clerics have never been other than a support class. Druids still kick ass, but everyone gets their moment to shine. Are you sure you played 3.5? A cleric who spends five full rounds buffing himself can be a mediocre fighter, but still can't beat a fighter two levels lower than he is (we put this to the test.) But a similar range of buffs on the tank can turn him into a Dragon slaying god. Spellcasters are good at taking out hordes of grunts, but for bosses, there's no saving throw against a good axe.
Okay, AC, I know you're deeply allergic to history, but look up Imperial Oil. John D. Rockefeller not only forced customers to deal with him as a monopoly, he forced suppliers to deal with him as well. It was the first big anti-trust case in American history.
I despair when I meet people who don't know things like this. I don't have the decades it would take to educate them, and apparently, they won't take the time either.
And no monopoly of force? It's called anarchy--raiding warlords who show up, burn your farm, kill you and your sons, rape your daughters (and your wife, if she's still good looking), and take all your stuff. Feudalism was considered a major improvement. Doesn't say much for anarchism, does it?
As noted, most people don't have a choice of what internet provider is offered. But beyond that, do a tracert on traffic to another part of the country. See that? That's Ma Bell for most of the links. So your local provider is largely irrelevant.
Business is good for goods and services that you can opt out of. Those you can't (like the internet these days) are called infrastructure, and giving business control over infrastructure is a golden invitation to rent-seeking behaviour, because something you can't opt out of is called a monopoly--particularly when the trunk lines are owned by the people who got there first.
Legislative capture (special interest control of government) is a problem in its own right, and will become a more pressing problem now that the Supreme Court has given corporations the right to buy politicians as they see fit. If the Tea Party would address that issue, I'd sign up. But they won't, because they are a wholly owned subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp., the goal of which is, you guessed it, legislative capture. In fact, he's built a whole enterprise on it. Want to drum up support for legislative protection of your obsolete business model? Rupert is your man, if you can afford him! So much for small government.
I'd be interested in reading this book, because I suspect that it doesn't say what a lot of people think it says. Most claims that you cannot disprove the existence of God rely on a fallacy of ambiguity; the assumption that when people use the word God, they are talking about the same thing. But there are probably as many conceptions of God as there are people, and many of these conceptions are indeed falsifiable. And its not even clear from the article that most of these scientists actually believe in any kind of God--just some vague sort of mysticism.
The type of God that is most often offered by academics when they claim that people like Dawkins don't understand religion is an extremely nebulous deistic god, and I think it's relevant that most of these academics begin with the words, "I'm an atheist, but..." The type of God they talk about does not inspire worship--at best, it inspires philosophical contemplation and wonder. This is God as a Platonic Ideal--an equation, when you get right down to it. And these academics have managed to convince themselves that all the rest of the faithful share their views. According to them, religious people are just telling stories, but don't claim that they are true, they are seeking moments of significance, searching for the God beyond God, and so on and on...
But the vast majority of believers in the world adhere to the crudest theology imaginable. To them, God is a Being who is eternal but acts in time and therefore exists in time, heaven is a real place where they will go with their friends and other people who agree with them and spend eternity pretty much in the physical state they have now. In short, what the vast majority of believers want is magic. They don't just tell stories, they claim that they are true. They are making broad truth claims about reality which are subject to empirical debunking, and have in fact been debunked. And to the vast majority of believers out their, the theology of academics sounds like the utterances of the Vorlon ambassador with his translator turned off. Most believers understand exactly what Dawkins is saying, but as Karen Armstrong was told recently by a Baptist minister, they have no clue what these academics are talking about, and regard them as atheists as well. As it turns out, Dawkins has a better grasp on religion as it actually exists than the so-called experts.
So let's say that you're an enlightened, apophatic, deistic, live and let live kind of believer. Bully for you. But if you take a moment to look up from your studies, you might notice that there are vast hordes of people who believe really crazy things. The fastest growing Christian sects preach the Gospel of Prosperity, which is sort of like being a Secretard except that Jesus takes the place of the Universe as the magical swag dispenser. Conservapedia wants to combine Jesus with Ayn Rand, which should be about as likely as the successful merging of two colliding freight trains, but I don't doubt they will find a market for it. Christianity has gone post-Christian, and the atheists had nothing to do with this. If Christianity is your bag, well, last chance to see before it goes extinct. You might want to do something about that. Meanwhile, a lot of other people are so attached to the idea of the devil that they are planning a war against him, in whatever guise they assume him to be taking (usually something like everybody else but us), and the weapons of choice seem to be nuclear. Then there are the Christian Dominionists, who believe that Christianity must take over the world (that is, all governments) before Jesus can return, which is not exactly endearing Islamicist extremists, who have similar ideas concerning Islam. Again, see weapons of choice. And if you still entertain the idea that this is a lunatic fringe, remember that Rick Warren, a Dominionist Christian, was able to command the two candidates for the last presidential election to stand and deliver. Can you do that?
So this is what the complaints are about. Nobody is parti
Yes, exactly.
As Mark Twain put it, a lie could be half-way around the world before the truth could put its boots on--and that was before the internet. Now we have internet echo chambers where the ignorant can stay ignorant with the help of other fools, some of whom make a living at being fools, and where, if you just stay within the limits of the circle-jerk, you need never encounter an idea or piece of evidence that challenges your views.
I keep mine clipped to the side belt ring of by pants using one of those mountain climbing clips (the one I'm using now I bought at the Smithsonian Aeronautical Museum--if you're going to buy a souvenir, make it useful.) I've got six keys and a 16 GB USB key on the thing. If you have more than this on your keychain, you probably need to split it up, and keep only the keys you need to get in, and the rest for additional cabinets, sheds, etc, stored at home or at work.
The Pope's constant complaints about moral relativism are particularly ironic, for several reasons.
First, one of the most commonly mounted defenses of religious faith these days is derived from postmodernism, which uses epistemological relativism to argue that science is just another religion--even Catholics are now resorting to this line of argument (and they should know better.) The problem with epistemological relativism is that it necessarily implies moral relativism--if nothing is true, you cannot claim that anything is right or wrong.
Second, using God as a basis for moral absolutes runs into the Euthyphro problem, named after Plato's dialogue. Basically, you can't argue that something is good because the gods demand it: if they demand it because it is good in and of itself, than the gods are irrelevant, but if it is good because they demand it, then morality is simply the will of the powerful, and nothing is really good. The Pope's insistence that what is good is good because God says so actually leads to moral relativism.
Finally, there is the problem of transcendentalization. A recent study discovered that when people prayed to God for an answer, the answer was always in agreement with their current beliefs. God never disagrees with his followers, because God is simply the projection of their own beliefs, desires, and opinions onto the cosmos. Reliance on God for such answers, and insisting that they convey absolute standards of right and wrong, not only encourages moral relativism, but an iron-clad moral solipsism reinforced by blind faith.
It's still a ridiculous hypothesis. Every new form of entertainment is accompanied by doomsayers who claim it's the end of the world as we know it, from the the invention of writing onward, including novels, movies, radio, TV, the internet, and now video games. And every one of them has been wrong.
Miller thinks that our indulgence in entertainment is what is limiting our reproduction, and he's been flogging this nonsense for years, ignoring the stunningly obvious and well documented fact that lower birth rates are caused by global urbanization, combined with reliable birth control methods and low infant mortality rates (if all your children live, you don't need to have as many). Children on the farm are assets--they count as capital; children in the city are liabilities. This is a good thing, because it means that there is a built in social/market force that limits human population to a sustainable level. Unfortunately, the moral panic factor in Miller's hare-brained theory provides it a far higher media profile than it deserves.
Um, not so much. The excess was in secular leaders hijacking religion, making their own government-established versions and then using those to justify all of their secular abuses. The Church of England is a good example here, and the one our founders had most-clearly in mind
This, of course, rests on the assumption that there is a 'pure' religion as opposed to the opportunistic use of religion for personal or political ends. But all religions have a history of exploitation for personal gain mixed with refinements which arise from genuine human moral concerns. The abolition of slavery is a good example, where both sides used their own interpretations to argue their case, and it should be remembered that slavery was a well entrenched practice which was never challenged in principle in the bible--they only occasionally disputed who should be a slave or who shouldn't be, but never the practice itself. Abolition was a 'secular' concern incorporated into Christianity. Since both motivations originate outside of the religion, you could argue that there is in fact no such thing as religion at all, only the transcendentalization of secular concerns. And you would be right. Religion is a political tool, an attempt by human beings to claim that their opinions are written in the stars, and must never be challenged. Fortunately, we do have the right to challenge them, which is why, over time, we are actually able to make some real progress. Bad ideas don't stand up to scrutiny, good ideas do.
Secular dogmas work the same way, and have their own counterpart to God; the Marxists had historical inevitability, the fascists had their national destinies, and extreme libertarians have elevated the market to a quasi-mystical force. Marx was one of a group of philosophers called the Young Hegelians--it is interested to note that Hegel's philosophy was, more properly, a work of theology. The best thing one can say for secular dogmas is that they are falsifiable in a way that religions are not. They have to deliver their goods in this world, and when they fail, as they always do, they fall out of favour. Unfortunately, the secular dogmas had modern weaponry and industrialization at their command. Imagine the crusades with automatic rifles, artillery, and bomber squadrons, or just look at Africa and the Middle East. I never had much use for Marx, but disparaging Marxism now is just too damn easy. Even the old hippies are embarrassed by it--you can only get so far on future promises. Religion always has the afterlife, the Kingdom to Come, it always falls prey to Antony Flew's question, "What would you take as evidence that religion is false?". The worst thing that can be said about a scientific hypothesis is that it is 'not even wrong' but this can be said of the whole of theology.
As for absolutist Darwinists, perhaps you don't believe in evolution, which I would take as a failure on your part and a point in my favour. If you are talking about Social Darwinism, this should better be known as Social Spencerism, because it is a half baked social theory that existed before the Origin of Species was published. You also seem to take charity as a circumvention of evolution; in fact, human evolution seems to be accelerating, rather than slowing down. The main difference is that we have replaced raw natural selection with social selection. For social animals like humans, social competence is an indispensable part of the fitness criteria, and this includes altruism and mutual support. As for absolutist atheists, calling atheism a dogma is like calling bald a hair colour or not collecting stamps a hobby. If you're referring to the communists, their dogma was communism. We don't talk about absolutist afairyists, so you seem to have fallen prey to a category error.
And if you think that radical Islam is the only source of trouble amongst religion, google Helen Ukpabio and the Liberty Gospel Church of Nigeria, or find out about the proposed anti-gay laws in Uganda. The Ugandan ministers have the support of Christian
Both good and bad. If they succeed, we end up with a type of theocracy, which is disastrous for the time being, but it would cause a backlash, which could correct the problem in the long term. So, again, the question is, how much pain can you stand? The outgroup antagonism that exists now is fueling the culture wars. The backlash might eventually correct that, but the theocratic tendency would do a lot of damage in the short term.
Ben was a regular at the salons of Paris and London; the organizer of one of these said that of the members, most were atheists, and the rest were still deciding. Franklin never came out and declared, but he probably didn't do so because he thought religion was useful rather than true. It is also interesting that at the time of foundation, about 18% of the American populace attended church regularly (Washington was one of those who gave up in disgust). This number has been growing since then, with a large spike during the Weslyan revival.
The ignorance of history is a major factor here. The founders lived in a world where the excesses of religion wielding political power was a very present thing. Thanks to the separation of church and state, we have been afforded the luxury of forgetting this. But any ideology that deals in absolutes, whether it be secular or religious, will evoke the absolute to disdain lesser goods--and when you think you hold the absolute Truth or Good, all other goods become worthless. The perfect is not just the enemy of the good, it is the mortal enemy of all goods. Life, liberty, happiness, charity, tolerance, knowledge, reason, and anything that is not held up as absolute will be cast aside, along with all who would defend them. Billions have died, and will die, for the idols of dogma. If religion has an evolutionary advantage, it is probably in strengthening ingroup solidarity at the expense of outgroup antagonism; effective in prehistory, catastrophic in a world of globalisation. I suspect that religions will, in this century, claim at least a billion victims, and make Stalin, Hitler, and Mao look like amateurs. In the aftermath, Richard Dawkins will sound positively mild and conciliatory.
There are almost as many Gods as there are believers, and the first thing you will discover when the state imposes religion is that the state's God is not your God. Europe is secular precisely because most European countries have entrenched state religions. The separation of church and state allowed religions to evolve and compete, and is one of the main reasons that America is so religious. If these clowns get their way, religion will be disgraced in America as well. They will do the secularists job for them. Joy is the reason, love is the method, but pain is the teacher.
The question is, how much pain can you stand?
One would think that the spectacle of Islamic Jihadism would be enough to remind us of what religion is when given free reign, but two hundred years of domesticated and tamed Christianity have encouraged the illusion that the creature has changed its nature. It hasn't. It's just biding its time...
Yeah, except they're not telling you they're the government, are they. That would be the whole 'infiltration' thing, wouldn't it? They're just arguing their point. Shame on them. They should tell you they're the government. But no, that would mean that the government is telling you what to think. So they can't tell you they're the government. But then, they're sneaky. And anyone who agrees with the government and posts their opinion is being sneaky too.
Hmmmm... maybe you just don't like it when people disagree with you? Sounds like religion to me. Oh, sorry... am I being religious?
Oh, no, the government wants to argue against bullshit! Man the barricades! BULLSHIT IS SACRED!!!
No, it's not. Get a grip. Telling the truth is never a bad thing. And by the way, a lot of us infiltrate these groups and do the same thing for free, for that very reason. Bullshit is bullshit. And presenting evidence for the truth is always a good thing.
By the way, this is a Democratic administration dispelling lies about a Republican administration. Now, put your tin foil hats away, take your meds, and calm down.
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. Either the ambient temperature has to be pretty cool, or the thing has to be fitted with liquid coolant--which makes it essentially a battery. Leaving this out of the explanation makes all the claims pretty underwhelming.
I've seen it. It's bad. Really bad. I think this is what drove Carrie Fisher to do drugs. She was in it, and she had to say the lines, and the lines were bad even by Lucas standards, and I cringed with every word. It was torture by proxy; what Jabba did to Leia was nothing compared to what Lucas did to Fisher in that special...
Murdoch has been talking about a paying model for internet news for a year or so now. The problem is, he's got the wrong product. People will pay for information, though. The Economist has been growing steadily for thirty years, making good profits, and can even charge for their web site. But Murdoch isn't selling information, he's selling infotainment--crap, basically. The internet already has tons of free crap, so why would anyone pay Murdoch for his crap?
Wow, this is so badly misinformed that I don't know where to begin...
Writers, musicians, and movie makers usually don't get paid for the time they work--they work on spec, or on borrowed money, and hope that they can pay it back. This makes these high risk ventures, and no one is going to bother with high risk ventures unless the occasional success covers the cost of failed attempts.
Of course, there are low risk ventures: Harlequin romances, formula adventure stories, soap operas, bubble gum pop, and muzak. Mediocre product moves in reliable quantities. The world you would create would make anything beyond this impossible.
As it is, publishers do their best to trap writers in a contract which states that they are "writers for hire"--that is, they get paid only a fixed some for their time (as you suggest they should) while the publisher gets to keep any extra profits, because they now own the rights entirely. So, you see, the corporations agree with you entirely. That's how they steal the work of the individual.
Copyright law is a mess, but this is stunningly naive.
Okay, that came out garbled--picked the wrong formatting option...
First point: The default logical position for any proposition is to assume it false until some evidence is given. This is a principle that we employ hundreds, and perhaps thousands of times each day. For example, it is not impossible that a king cobra has crept under your bed while you slept, but if you take this possibility seriously, you will not put your foot down on the floor to get up. Serious consideration of all unlikely possibilities will leave you paralysed, and in all likelihood, clinically insane. Why, then, do we discard this principle in one single case--the existence of God?
Second: Certain cognitive heuristics, though common, have extraordinarily bad histories of reliability. Of all of these, our tendency to see conscious intentionality at work where there is none, particularly in areas where we have no explanation, has the worst record. We are hard wired towards paranoia, because a false positive in this regard was far less dangerous for our ancestors than a false negative. This error is at work in belief in conspiracy theories (the Illuminati did it), psychic phenomena (the spirits did it), all kinds of false pattern recognitions (the pattern was put there intentionally by something) and even in our reactions to bad weather (our resentment towards the weather as if it meant to spoil our picnic.) And yet, what do we fill in the gap in our understanding in cosmology with? An intentional being. Now, how reliable a guess do you really think this is?
Third: As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, we have evolved to understand the world we live in, the middle world, not that of the very big or very small. We have no talent for cosmology. And again, what we encounter in the common understanding of cosmology are principles suited to the middle world; most commonly, the expectation of intentionality. Again, how likely is this to be accurate?
Fourth: While there may be no direct evidence of God, one would expect that a universe created or informed by a divine presence would differ in some particulars from a universe not created or informed by that presence. The problem of evil raises its head, but even more so, the problem of sterility--why is the universe not teeming with life? I can imagine a universe which consists entirely of verdant pockets of life, much of it intelligent, all of it eventually accessible by normal bodily locomotion, in which all transactions between living organisms are positive sum. Thus, the lion does not eat you, but something that you provide (a nectar sack, perhaps), in return for which it provides some other service. No nature red in tooth and claw, no war, no violence. Our universe does not conform to the expectations one would have of a universe created or informed by what we conceive as God.
The objection offered to this is that perhaps God had to do it this way. But if God is constrained, what created the constraints? One of the conclusions of theology is that God is not only omniscient, omni benevolent, and omnipotent, but perfectly free. Because if God is not perfectly free, something else limits God, and that something else is actually God.
Fifth: As our conceptions of God continue to race ahead of disconfirming evidence, why do we continue to use the word God? The God of Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton, or Teilhard de Chardin has nothing in common with Jehovah, yet we use the same word for all. The statement: "There is some X which exists, where X can mean anything, and exists does not necessarily have its common meaning, and this X we call God" is true because it is trivial. It carries no information because its terms have no fixed meaning. Contemporary theology has argued itself into a void.
Finally: The belief in God is motivated by Einstein's parsimonious question: Is the universe friendly? But perhaps the question is not whether the universe is friendly to us, but whether we are friendly to it. Consider what happens when you fall in love: the person you love be