In theory, I guess it is better, but considering the fact most people don't know what they are doing, I reckon that the gains one would get using Schulze over approval are not particularly meaningful. In all likeliness, parties will simply publish a canonical "preference list" for their supporters to use, and they will know no better. Approval voting solves the vote fragmentation problem, which most people will understand with minimal explanations, whereas I would be hard pressed to explain the advantages of the Schulze method to laymen.
Even presented like that, I wouldn't necessarily say it's a step backwards. I'd rather have a party that everybody is fine with, even if it is not their first choice, than a party that 40% of the population despises. Over time, the net effect would be a depolarization of politics, which I would say is a good thing.
The concept that all mass in the universe simply poofed into existance doesn't exactly pass Occam's Razor either.
Yes, it does. "Something" has to have simply poofed into existence at some point, whether it be the universe and its laws, a deity, or anything else you could imagine. Occam's razor tells us that it might as well have been the universe. In any case, if this does not satisfy you, you could just posit the existence of an additional physical law which makes up matter with such insanely low probability that we have no chance of ever observing it (or maybe it does it exactly once and then stops). As far as postulates go, that's a lot simpler than God.
You say that "religion only answers the question that it begs" because you disqualify as invalid the presumption that a vantage point exists from which the universe is said to have a purpose. You beggared the question by not sharing the viewpoint from which it is asked; but this is no more than a re-statement of your own position.
No, what I am saying is that there is no need for such a presumption and that the question should not have an implicitly assumed premise.
Those who have that viewpoint do not find this question beggared, but rather the start of science beggared - perhaps you are familiar with the question "but who made it go bang?"
"There exists no metaphysical requirement for anything to have a cause" is not a premise, it is a lack of a premise. It is not begging the question, because it does not suppose anything: all it says is, what we have is good enough, what more do you want? By supposing a divine origin to the universe, there are still as many unanswered questions as before, because you answered one (what made it go bang) and created another (what created this creator). The only reason to do something like that is if you are not satisfied with what science gives you, i.e. your worldview is more restricted.
By saying that the big bang needs to be caused by a "who", but God does not, you have two hidden premises that I do not have at all. First, I do not see why it has to be a "who" rather than a "what". Second, I do not think that God would have to be created, but neither do I think that the universe had to be created. These are restrictions on your worldview that I do not share, so any answers God might provide to you, are extraneous to me, because I am satisfied with less.
If you believe that I, too, have hidden premises, you would be wrong. What happens here is that because I have less preconceived ideas about the universe, I am comfortable with more possibilities: I am comfortable with a universe "just existing", with God creating it, with it being a simulation run on top of Conway's game of life, with a multiverse and whatnot. So on one hand, supposing that God exists does not improve my understanding of the universe a iota - it answers nothing more than its absence would. And on the other hand, I am comfortable with an infinity of options that have the universe created by something that's not God, and they all seem equally arbitrary to me. Thus, logically, I would believe in none of them until evidence can tell them apart. And this flows not from a preconception I have, but from a LACK of preconceptions.
The argument in providing the final answer between religion and science comes down to this: Science must leave un-answered the final question: why Religion must leave un-answered the final question: how
No. Both science AND religion must leave un-answered both why AND how, because there exists no state of affairs such that neither question can be asked about it.
The claim of blinkered scientists to be right against religionists is nothing more that a obscured statement of their personal preference, likewise for blinkered religionists.
Scientists are not "right against" religionists on topics that do not pertain to science. Science is simply non-committal. I am not saying science answers everything. I am saying religion answers nothing. There is an important difference between the two statements.
Most evils attributed to religions are the result of people waking up one day and telling themselves that "heathens need to be suppressed for the good of human kind. And to be perfectly clear, if you do not believe in the exact same God I believe in, you are, in my opinion, a heathen".
And there I was, feeling good about myself because I was under the impression that us atheists knew better than reproduce their schema:(
Evolution is true to the same extent that gravity is true. We know that organisms evolve as surely as we know things fall, it's just that there is a lot more to know about the evolution of things than there is about the falling of them.
The problem is that religion only answers the questions that it begs. For instance, asking "why" the universe exists implicitly assumes the existence of a vantage point from which the universe might be said to have a purpose. Even though religion might "answer" that question, it really doesn't: it begs it. "What created the universe?" is no more pertinent a question than what created that creator, but the former stumps people more than the latter. Religion only provides answers about morality to people who cannot trust any other source. And so on.
The essential difference between science and religion is that the latter has the luxury of not having to be correlated to reality. So whereas science will provide objective answers that are useful in practice, religion will provide subjective answers that are sociologically or emotionally useful. So depending on your point of view, religion either answers a lot of questions or it answers nothing at all (I must say I am in the latter group - I do not see how any religion can answer anything).
Because discrediting AGW isn't politically motivated? You know, I always find it funny when people believe that there is more political motivation to push AGW than to discredit it, as if the large number of filthy rich corporations who would lose from green measures had neither the motivation nor the means to buy scientists and politicians to slow down and muddle the debate. Yet, somehow, Al Gore and his following of tree-loving hippies can do it?
Yeah, but when about half the record years in the last 30 years are in the 15 most recent years, to conclude to the presence of an underlying trend is hardly an extraordinary claim. That does not tell us what caused the trend, and for all we know, it might be a normal, natural fluctuation that will reverse itself soon. Also, the record years do seem to be evenly distributed in the past 15 years, so I'm a tad puzzled. But come on, 30 data points are enough to see *some* trends, and here we can see a clear jump.
The fact that 1 = 0.999... is itself an artifact of notation. 1 and 0.999... are two equivalent notations for the same real number. There is nothing particularly strange about that.
Here's an attempt at formalizing this idea better: the fine-tuning argument asserts that P(Life|Designer) = 1 and P(Life|No Designer) is very small, and thereby concludes that a designer must exist. it's relatively simple to show that the argument actually works if it is also assumed that P(Designer) > P(Life|No Designer) (approx.), where P(Designer) is a prior probability assigned to the designer's existence. A good parallel to make is that most people will eventually conclude that a coin is rigged once the distribution of throws deviates sufficiently far from uniform, and sufficiently close to the expected distribution of a rigged coin. The higher P(Rigged) is assumed, the less it will take for them to switch their interpretation.
So the fine-tuning argument is essentially a Bayesian one. To claim that our universe is "special" is essentially to inflate the prior probability of any model that produces our universe, including a "designer". That is, designers are perceived to be more likely than they actually are, just because they would likely create us. So P(Designer) is inflated, which incidentally puts it over the threshold required for the argument to be valid. By the same logic, even the "all universes exist" paradigm gets an inflated prior probability. The way I see it:
P(All evidence we have | Current cosmological constants, that just happened to be like this) = 1 P(All evidence we have | Current cosmological constants, fine-tuned by a designer) = 1 P(All evidence we have | All universes exist, yay!) = 1
From there, we can just use Occam's razor. What's simplest, a small set of numbers, the set of all such sets (and maybe more), or some anthropomorphic designer? I vote for the former, more than once if I can.
One does have to take into account all the probabilities at stake here. For instance, if you believe (prior to playing) that there is a 50% chance that the lottery is rigged so that you will win, then the rational conclusion, upon winning, is to say that the lottery was rigged. It's a simple application of Bayes' theorem. Similarly, if you think that there is a one in a million chance that the coin you are throwing is rigged to always yield heads, you can compute how many heads in a row it will take for you to conclude that it is probably rigged (probably around twenty).
(unless the 'real' god prefers agnosticism and punishes _any_ decision either way)
That is actually a very valid possibility, mind you. I do not see how a god who rewards Christians for their faith is any more probable than a god who rewards agnostics for their lack of commitment (perhaps because god sees them as being the most rational of all, and thinks that's worth rewarding).
Similarly, god could reward positive atheism, perhaps because he loves irony.
The whole fine tuning argument is idiotic, no matter how you slice it. First of all, it is a false dichotomy, as if the only possibilities were a universe fine tuned by a creator, or a universe like the one we have, but with various cosmological constants. Well, I'm sorry, but no. The universe could have been any cellular automaton like the game of Life. Any simulation of a made up universe you run on a computer could have been the real thing. Of course, evidence rules them out, but evidence also rules out all values for cosmological constants other than those we have, so what's the point? If "fine tuning" is a problem, then "tuning" the universe so that it works like the one we have ought to be an even bigger problem, no? Like, you could imagine some elegant, compact model for a universe, with no apparent parameters to fine tune, that produces life with probability one. Why didn't we get that? Better yet, you could imagine a universe where "souls" really do exist: think Minecraft with AI blocks (now, it wouldn't be "artificial" anymore if the universe really did work like this!). Such a block would be a black box, mysterious, impossible to investigate from within the universe (other than reverse engineering, but that would be hard as all hell) - a fantastic, foolproof design!
Second, the fine tuning argument can be easily turned against a creator. A creator can be variously intelligent, thereby limiting their ability to fine tune the universe properly. It can be variously powerful, limiting their ability to implement their design. They can be variously motivated, they can have limited attention span, their morality can be variable, they can be lazy, they can hate life, and so on. So even in order to create us, a designer ought to have been fine tuned.
The bottom line is this: the fine tuning argument essentially asserts that P(Life|Designer) = 1.0 and P(Life|No Designer) is very small, and then proceeds to conclude that P(Designer|Life) > 0.5. What's interesting is that under these (flawed) assumptions, such an argument CAN be valid, but only depending on your priors. If you believe that, in the absence of any evidence, the probability that a God exists is high enough, then it does follow from the fine tuning argument's suppositions that God likely does exist. It suffices that you believe that P(Designer) > P(Life|~Designer) (approximately). Now, if you believe that giving an a priori probability to God is nonsensical, then the fine tuning argument falls apart, because you need this probability if you want to get anywhere. Else, the most consistent way to give a priori probabilities to possible models for the universe is to scale it so that simple explanations are inherently more probable than complex explanations (and exponentially so, because each additional bit doubles the number of models). This is a sort of Bayesian Occam's razor. And then the argument still fails, and majorly so.
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In theory, I guess it is better, but considering the fact most people don't know what they are doing, I reckon that the gains one would get using Schulze over approval are not particularly meaningful. In all likeliness, parties will simply publish a canonical "preference list" for their supporters to use, and they will know no better. Approval voting solves the vote fragmentation problem, which most people will understand with minimal explanations, whereas I would be hard pressed to explain the advantages of the Schulze method to laymen.
Even presented like that, I wouldn't necessarily say it's a step backwards. I'd rather have a party that everybody is fine with, even if it is not their first choice, than a party that 40% of the population despises. Over time, the net effect would be a depolarization of politics, which I would say is a good thing.
The concept that all mass in the universe simply poofed into existance doesn't exactly pass Occam's Razor either.
Yes, it does. "Something" has to have simply poofed into existence at some point, whether it be the universe and its laws, a deity, or anything else you could imagine. Occam's razor tells us that it might as well have been the universe. In any case, if this does not satisfy you, you could just posit the existence of an additional physical law which makes up matter with such insanely low probability that we have no chance of ever observing it (or maybe it does it exactly once and then stops). As far as postulates go, that's a lot simpler than God.
You say that "religion only answers the question that it begs" because you disqualify as invalid the presumption that a vantage point exists from which the universe is said to have a purpose. You beggared the question by not sharing the viewpoint from which it is asked; but this is no more than a re-statement of your own position.
No, what I am saying is that there is no need for such a presumption and that the question should not have an implicitly assumed premise.
Those who have that viewpoint do not find this question beggared, but rather the start of science beggared - perhaps you are familiar with the question "but who made it go bang?"
"There exists no metaphysical requirement for anything to have a cause" is not a premise, it is a lack of a premise. It is not begging the question, because it does not suppose anything: all it says is, what we have is good enough, what more do you want? By supposing a divine origin to the universe, there are still as many unanswered questions as before, because you answered one (what made it go bang) and created another (what created this creator). The only reason to do something like that is if you are not satisfied with what science gives you, i.e. your worldview is more restricted.
By saying that the big bang needs to be caused by a "who", but God does not, you have two hidden premises that I do not have at all. First, I do not see why it has to be a "who" rather than a "what". Second, I do not think that God would have to be created, but neither do I think that the universe had to be created. These are restrictions on your worldview that I do not share, so any answers God might provide to you, are extraneous to me, because I am satisfied with less.
If you believe that I, too, have hidden premises, you would be wrong. What happens here is that because I have less preconceived ideas about the universe, I am comfortable with more possibilities: I am comfortable with a universe "just existing", with God creating it, with it being a simulation run on top of Conway's game of life, with a multiverse and whatnot. So on one hand, supposing that God exists does not improve my understanding of the universe a iota - it answers nothing more than its absence would. And on the other hand, I am comfortable with an infinity of options that have the universe created by something that's not God, and they all seem equally arbitrary to me. Thus, logically, I would believe in none of them until evidence can tell them apart. And this flows not from a preconception I have, but from a LACK of preconceptions.
The argument in providing the final answer between religion and science comes down to this:
Science must leave un-answered the final question: why
Religion must leave un-answered the final question: how
No. Both science AND religion must leave un-answered both why AND how, because there exists no state of affairs such that neither question can be asked about it.
The claim of blinkered scientists to be right against religionists is nothing more that a obscured statement of their personal preference, likewise for blinkered religionists.
Scientists are not "right against" religionists on topics that do not pertain to science. Science is simply non-committal. I am not saying science answers everything. I am saying religion answers nothing. There is an important difference between the two statements.
Most evils attributed to religions are the result of people waking up one day and telling themselves that "heathens need to be suppressed for the good of human kind. And to be perfectly clear, if you do not believe in the exact same God I believe in, you are, in my opinion, a heathen".
And there I was, feeling good about myself because I was under the impression that us atheists knew better than reproduce their schema :(
Evolution is true to the same extent that gravity is true. We know that organisms evolve as surely as we know things fall, it's just that there is a lot more to know about the evolution of things than there is about the falling of them.
The problem is that religion only answers the questions that it begs. For instance, asking "why" the universe exists implicitly assumes the existence of a vantage point from which the universe might be said to have a purpose. Even though religion might "answer" that question, it really doesn't: it begs it. "What created the universe?" is no more pertinent a question than what created that creator, but the former stumps people more than the latter. Religion only provides answers about morality to people who cannot trust any other source. And so on.
The essential difference between science and religion is that the latter has the luxury of not having to be correlated to reality. So whereas science will provide objective answers that are useful in practice, religion will provide subjective answers that are sociologically or emotionally useful. So depending on your point of view, religion either answers a lot of questions or it answers nothing at all (I must say I am in the latter group - I do not see how any religion can answer anything).
Because discrediting AGW isn't politically motivated? You know, I always find it funny when people believe that there is more political motivation to push AGW than to discredit it, as if the large number of filthy rich corporations who would lose from green measures had neither the motivation nor the means to buy scientists and politicians to slow down and muddle the debate. Yet, somehow, Al Gore and his following of tree-loving hippies can do it?
Yeah, but when about half the record years in the last 30 years are in the 15 most recent years, to conclude to the presence of an underlying trend is hardly an extraordinary claim. That does not tell us what caused the trend, and for all we know, it might be a normal, natural fluctuation that will reverse itself soon. Also, the record years do seem to be evenly distributed in the past 15 years, so I'm a tad puzzled. But come on, 30 data points are enough to see *some* trends, and here we can see a clear jump.
The fact that 1 = 0.999... is itself an artifact of notation. 1 and 0.999... are two equivalent notations for the same real number. There is nothing particularly strange about that.
Here's an attempt at formalizing this idea better: the fine-tuning argument asserts that P(Life|Designer) = 1 and P(Life|No Designer) is very small, and thereby concludes that a designer must exist. it's relatively simple to show that the argument actually works if it is also assumed that P(Designer) > P(Life|No Designer) (approx.), where P(Designer) is a prior probability assigned to the designer's existence. A good parallel to make is that most people will eventually conclude that a coin is rigged once the distribution of throws deviates sufficiently far from uniform, and sufficiently close to the expected distribution of a rigged coin. The higher P(Rigged) is assumed, the less it will take for them to switch their interpretation.
So the fine-tuning argument is essentially a Bayesian one. To claim that our universe is "special" is essentially to inflate the prior probability of any model that produces our universe, including a "designer". That is, designers are perceived to be more likely than they actually are, just because they would likely create us. So P(Designer) is inflated, which incidentally puts it over the threshold required for the argument to be valid. By the same logic, even the "all universes exist" paradigm gets an inflated prior probability. The way I see it:
P(All evidence we have | Current cosmological constants, that just happened to be like this) = 1
P(All evidence we have | Current cosmological constants, fine-tuned by a designer) = 1
P(All evidence we have | All universes exist, yay!) = 1
From there, we can just use Occam's razor. What's simplest, a small set of numbers, the set of all such sets (and maybe more), or some anthropomorphic designer? I vote for the former, more than once if I can.
One does have to take into account all the probabilities at stake here. For instance, if you believe (prior to playing) that there is a 50% chance that the lottery is rigged so that you will win, then the rational conclusion, upon winning, is to say that the lottery was rigged. It's a simple application of Bayes' theorem. Similarly, if you think that there is a one in a million chance that the coin you are throwing is rigged to always yield heads, you can compute how many heads in a row it will take for you to conclude that it is probably rigged (probably around twenty).
(unless the 'real' god prefers agnosticism and punishes _any_ decision either way)
That is actually a very valid possibility, mind you. I do not see how a god who rewards Christians for their faith is any more probable than a god who rewards agnostics for their lack of commitment (perhaps because god sees them as being the most rational of all, and thinks that's worth rewarding).
Similarly, god could reward positive atheism, perhaps because he loves irony.
The whole fine tuning argument is idiotic, no matter how you slice it. First of all, it is a false dichotomy, as if the only possibilities were a universe fine tuned by a creator, or a universe like the one we have, but with various cosmological constants. Well, I'm sorry, but no. The universe could have been any cellular automaton like the game of Life. Any simulation of a made up universe you run on a computer could have been the real thing. Of course, evidence rules them out, but evidence also rules out all values for cosmological constants other than those we have, so what's the point? If "fine tuning" is a problem, then "tuning" the universe so that it works like the one we have ought to be an even bigger problem, no? Like, you could imagine some elegant, compact model for a universe, with no apparent parameters to fine tune, that produces life with probability one. Why didn't we get that? Better yet, you could imagine a universe where "souls" really do exist: think Minecraft with AI blocks (now, it wouldn't be "artificial" anymore if the universe really did work like this!). Such a block would be a black box, mysterious, impossible to investigate from within the universe (other than reverse engineering, but that would be hard as all hell) - a fantastic, foolproof design!
Second, the fine tuning argument can be easily turned against a creator. A creator can be variously intelligent, thereby limiting their ability to fine tune the universe properly. It can be variously powerful, limiting their ability to implement their design. They can be variously motivated, they can have limited attention span, their morality can be variable, they can be lazy, they can hate life, and so on. So even in order to create us, a designer ought to have been fine tuned.
The bottom line is this: the fine tuning argument essentially asserts that P(Life|Designer) = 1.0 and P(Life|No Designer) is very small, and then proceeds to conclude that P(Designer|Life) > 0.5. What's interesting is that under these (flawed) assumptions, such an argument CAN be valid, but only depending on your priors. If you believe that, in the absence of any evidence, the probability that a God exists is high enough, then it does follow from the fine tuning argument's suppositions that God likely does exist. It suffices that you believe that P(Designer) > P(Life|~Designer) (approximately). Now, if you believe that giving an a priori probability to God is nonsensical, then the fine tuning argument falls apart, because you need this probability if you want to get anywhere. Else, the most consistent way to give a priori probabilities to possible models for the universe is to scale it so that simple explanations are inherently more probable than complex explanations (and exponentially so, because each additional bit doubles the number of models). This is a sort of Bayesian Occam's razor. And then the argument still fails, and majorly so.