The alleged size of these groups doesn't matter. What matters is that they have managed to sway some 10 or 15% of the US voters, thus giving them 100% control of our rather lame democratic political system.
I don't think they've swayed anyone. Duped a few people, perhaps, but that's short-term, and not as many as you might think. Instead their zeal for voting itself (one of the few positive things I can say about them, and I don't view it as that positive in their case let's just say) is the source of that 10-15%.
I think we need to stop and notice that, in fact, it's not "religion" that has something against science, or even "Christianity," but "certain small, yet extremely vocal, Christian groups that happen to have a lot of money, bluster, and persecution complexes behind them, and who have beefs with approx. 70% of everything important that happens in the world."
The Cathloic Church alone is a hell of a lot bigger than these people could ever hope to be.
Yes, regardless of whether you think he's divine or not, Jesus *did* come up with some pretty enlightened, radical ideas for his time.
Of course, what we know about him is rather limited -- not a huge number of his teachings survive for us to see them, because Jesus, like Socrates, never wrote and everything we know about him comes second-hand (or rather, third or fourth hand). Further, the people who wrote what we have had a vested interest in having him seen as "the" son of God, as opposed to "a" son, since from a certain Christian perspective, we're all God's sons (or daughters, as the case my be).
Those red words in the KJV Bible, and certain writings in the Apocrypha (the Gospel of Thomas particularly, mostly a collection of Jesus' sayings) are just about everything we've got. Rather a shaky foundation for a religion.
If there are laws of physics (and therefore a level of hard determinism), people's wills are also influenced by outside events. There is also a possibility that all outside events effect one's will in such a way that it forces said person to not do a specific action. It is also possible that these events are caused by some outside, hard deterministic course of action that forever repeats itself.
It is a novel tactic to pose the occurance of "permanent" things within infinity. If acceptable, it turns the argument into a race condition: a question of which thing happens first. I tend to view those things as necessarily impermanent, but of course Adam and Eve themselves are permanent in this state (except in how the apple could provide them with an expiration date).
This assumes that there are "irrevocable" occurances that may happen during the infinite time-frame (which is the same thing as an action that makes the occurance impossible). But God's commandment carries no meaning if it becomes impossible to do the action, doesn't it? Does that not imply that things which prevent the consumption, in the long run, of the apple cannot occur? I think it would simplify your argument, without losing anything essential, if you simply had something destroy the apple and the means of making more, and yet that would also make God's specific command irrelevant, voiding the capacity for decision in the situation.
In any case, all the things that can occur that make it impossible to consume the apple could also be undone by other, similar types of things, unless you resort to saying things like "but this thing is impossible to be undone," which I do not think is possible by the laws of physics other than entropy, which seems to be on holiday in Eden (which causes its own special problems).
So then my own conclusion is that if the universe is determined, then it's possible that eve never eats the apple. If it's all random, then eventually she will.
But doesn't free will destroy that determination? In that case, then there's only one way things could have turned out, that is eating the apple, which they did.
I'd say, looking out at the world, that things are random, but the randomness influences each other and thus causes "clumbs" on our scale, so it's not *perfectly* random. But any randomness at all would make it inevitable that the apple be eaten.
P.S. What a fun conversation! I don't know how lucid my arguments are at the moment however.
The same thing could be argued against evolution, that it is a transparent attempt to make an athiestic world view logicaly sound.
"Could be argued" is a weasel term. Anyone can argue anything. I could argue that you don't exist, even if it's obvious that you do. The thing about evolution is that it's been around for a while, has built up a serious amount of scientific backing, and provides a rational explanation for a wide range of problems far outside of, let me be blunt here, your rather limited perspective upon it.
Remember: Darwin wasn't an athiest, and although his conclusions troubled him mightily, he was intellectually honest enough to not discount them simply because they didn't fit in with what he thought true.
I personaly believe strongly in ID, not because I find the evidence for a biblical creation to be strong, but because I find the evidence for evolution to be very weak.
If this is true, then it would not be a reason to believe in Intelligent Design. It would merely be a reason to not believe in evolution. Don't be afraid to have no opinion! If more people weren't, it'd be a sunnier world.... I'll continue to believe that, and continue to read new discoveries and theories with intrest and a large grain of salt.
Skepticism is good. Science is built upon skepticism; that's what makes it powerful, when it is performed correctly, because peer review double-checks conclusions arrived at by experiment, theories are open to attacks, and in the end scientists slowly form descriptions of reality that are correct to, to use a metaphor, more and more decimal points.
That's why Intelligent Design is dangerous; it's not performed correctly in the cases of which I am aware, but the media is not aware of this. Any time they see a conflict they go "hey, fight!" and zoom in with their cameras. Some frankly ludicrous ideas have gained coinage this way lately, like faked moon landings, monkey heads on Mars, etc.
And yes I do understand evolution very well, far better than most posters here, so please don't respond with the typical "you don't understand evolution" argument, because it's not a valid argument.
I hope you'll pardon me if I do not merely take your word for it. Arguments are valid or not valid for reasons other than mere assertion.
Having said that, the reason I will defend the teaching of ID in schools as a theory other than evolution mainly has to do with the the way evolution is taught in schools.
That is terrible, stupid, and wrong!
You don't teach Issue A because you don't like the way Issue B is taught. Instead, you argue that Not-B should be taught, which is NOT, in this case, the same thing as A.
But I disagree with you in either case. There is no important science built upon Intelligent Design, while there is a lot of important science built upon evolution. The fact that it hasn't tumbled apart by now speaks volumes about evolution's validity.
It is not taught as a scientfic theory that best describes how life could have formed by it self, but is instead used as an "in your face christians, we don't need your God" attack on christianity and religion.
I deny your assertion. It is your responsibility to prove it now, or at least demonstrate it convincingly.
And like anyone whos "team" is being attacked, I like it when the attack is countered.
That's part of your problem, if I may be so bold to point out such problems. You're thinking of it as "us vs. them." You've defined the world into two groups, when it's not nearly as simple as that. But, in trying to form a rhetorical "us," you risk the development of a "them" specifically to counter you. Then you'll point to it and say "See! It was there all along!"
But then on to the mistaken view that ID has no scientific backing, that is just false. Yes it requires a "non-scientific entity" to work, but regardless of popul
But besides that... In saying that eve had free will, it does not follow that eve will eventually take the apple, because her own free will isn't random (if it were, then it wouldn't be free will, but simply a collection of random or determined events, depending on who you talk to).
Except that free will is dependent on chance.
Over long periods of time, people's wills are influenced by factors that are not entirely outside their control. Perspectives change in response to outside events. If that can happen even slightly, and only rarely, then over infinity it fails, and it's not even necessary to know how it could happen.
Further, free will itself has a chance component at least from a statistical perspective (and I suspect, from an actual one, too). This is something that is not obvious to most people, but it's something I've noticed multiple times. People cannot behave rationally all the time (or even much of the time depending on how cynical you are). In fact, completely rational behavior is not free; it can be predicted.
The thing it's important to keep in mind is that when I say "all possible things happen during an infinite time-frame," the word "possible" means anything that is not explictly impossible, and I mean "hard" impossible. That means things like laws of physics (taking into account even extreme conditions), logic or math being overturned, not "choosing not to do something," which is not "hard impossible" at all but afflicted with the tremendously fickle human whim. (And that's speaking, personally, as a great fan of whimsy.) Thus, if they had free will, then eventually they had to have eaten the apple.
Ah ha... but unless the probability that act is 1, then there is also the possibility that it will *not* happen.
Except that it only takes one "failed check" to lose, while to succeed requires repeated, frequent checks, forever. Over infinite time-frames, it's bound to fail eventually.
In other words: * The chance the event will occur "now" is a number very close to zero. * Thus, the negation of the event is some number very close to one. * Start checking. Just like if you roll dice forever eventually you'll get a six, here you'll eventually fail too.
People have complained that free will isn't like a random number generator, but if it isn't random on some level then there's no way it can be free. And the human consciousness isn't perfect anyway, eventually someone could slip up and *accidently* eat the apple.
But even if it's not random like a roulette wheel is random, it'll happen eventually, simply because it's possible. Even if you change the question to "Will Adam and Eve ever knowingly, purposefully eat the apple," the probability it'll happen over an infinite time-frame is one. If people were forever unchanging then there might be a possibility it could not happen, but if people were unchanging then they wouldn't have free will.
I'd unsimplify it, but then I'd just end up pasting my previous message into the message box.
The "joke" part of the message in question was the bit about President Bush. It was intended to merely be a conversation leavener, to try to clear up what I percieved to be a steadily more intense conversation. I don't *like* intense conversations, and I try to break them up whenever I notice that I'm in one. But anyway.
Take off your "I'm oh so smart" hat and give a sensible example of how your theoretical ramblings apply to the actual world in which we live.
They don't, or at least, not directly to the world in which we ourselves live right now. That's part of the problem. Infinite time scales are not part of every day experience, and it's a mistake to think you can apply your experience to them unless you've had at least a bit of math under your belt. (That's exactly how math I have under my personal belt: "a bit.")
But Adam was supposed to have lived in a situation in which none of us have direct experience; it was supernatural. But it was still similar enough to our world that ordinary rules of logic applied (else the creation story is meaningless*), and that's the environment in which my little infinity thingy matters.
(* Oh, now I'm probably going to have to explain *this* bit.)
The one example you gave--which you are now retroactively claiming to be a joke--was clearly wrong.
(sigh) I didn't retroactively claim anything. I said something, there, that I thought was obviously a joke. Explaining that you've made a joke wrecks the humor, so it's best to avoid doing it if at all possible.
Most things that are possible will in fact never happen...
UNLESS you have an infinite time frame.
Let me try to spell it out. Say, for argument's sake, the chances that a human beings' brain will spontaneously explode in a given second are one in 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Then, the chance of you experiencing a spontaneous brain explosion are uncertain in your lifetime. The chance of there having even been one spontaneous brain explosion so far would be highly unlikely throughout the length of human existance.
But, there's still that one exceedingly slim chance. And if you live forever, then that chance becomes an inevitability, no matter how many zeros you pile on, because there will never be a lack of chances, because fate will forever be rolling dice.
Now. Free will seems like a big and absolute thing, but it is really exceptionally variable and fickle. You have no idea what the inside of your mind will look like even fifty years from now, assuming you live that long.
But even if it were NOT variable and fickle, if there were even the slightest chance that you would do something, then in infinity it would happen. This is not the same thing as "counting only even numbers and happening upon an odd one," because that's impossible by way of the rules of logic. But even then, someone has to be doing the counting, and if they're a machine it could break, or if it's a human they could decide to stop doing it.
My point is, if it's not *impossible*, I mean rigorously, logically impossible and not just someone saying they won't do something, then during an infinite time-frame it must happen. Lots of things that seem impossible, especially where human beings are concerned, are certainly not.
That is true, but the problem is that infinity does not mean ALL things (continual infinity v discrete). If you take a number system, and count all EVEN numbers, you can count on for infinity, but NEVER count an ODD number.
Well there you're begging the question, you're counting even numbers, so by definition you're not counting odd ones, which are mutually exclusive. Since there are no even numbers that are odd, it's impossible, that is there's a probability of zero, that you can read even numbers (and nothing else) for infinity and encounter an odd one.
But that's besides the point. If your thought experiment involved a counting machine it makes sense, but not if you're talking about a human being, with the free will human beings have (which may or may not be the point of the scene, though many theologians say it is), who can do anything and doesn't have to count even numbers if he is seized by the urge not to.
As for the apple, you will eat it eventually, given an infinite time frame, unless there's something that specifically gives the act a zero probability over infinity. Merely urging yourself not to do it won't work -- before infinity passes you'll forget what an apple is, and what eating is.
I'm afraid you haven't convinced me, sorry. But if you're so sure then don't just give up, I'm not just saying these things just because, I really think I'm right on this but I'll admit that I'm wrong if you prove it to me.
What is the source of your immense conviction in this?
My source of immense conviction is that it's mathematically, and hence logically, true!
It is a pleasing and satisfying theory...
Really? I wish I was at all pleased or satisfied by it. Thinking about infinity frankly scares the hell out of me, as it would most people who did it honestly.
Can you elaborate on what "all possible things" actually means?
Do not say such things to a gag writer! Let's just say that, over an infinite time, all possible things happen... including President Bush admitting that he was wrong to invade Iraq!
If that doesn't shock you speechless you're either obtuse or profound.
Please see the dozen other messages I've posted already responding to arguments like this. What's necessary isn't just infinity, what's necessary is infinity + non-zero probability. That sounds like a zero probability to me.
I think it's obvious that I don't think evolution is solely about the survival of *your* kids, but that cooperation between members of the same species (and, as in the case of symbotic relationships) is at work. It may be that the culling function may depend solely on your kids' survival, but cooperation can assist in that while also assisting in the survival of others.
But whether that's better, or whether it's better to take advantage of their good graces while providing nothing in return, that's a dilemma that only a prisoner could solve.
Sorry....do you actually read the Bible? If you had you surely would have come accross this verse.
(John 8:)36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (NIV)
The idea being here being of free will to NOT be in sin and to turn back to God, to be the prodigal son.
I honestly can't believe that you're making that argument! In that passage Jesus is talking about freedom from sin.
The Bible has been thought over, mulled over, meditated upon, wrassled, wrangled, and rhetorically twisted more than any other work in human history. People have used the Bible to justify all kinds of things that seem unlikely to have been intended by the original authors. (Jesus, who is one of the greater voices in western literature regardless of whether you think he was 50% God, has been especially mutiliated in this manner.)
I'm athiest. There, I said it. But I used to be Christian. "Used to be," mainly, because of things like this.
Obviously, the answer is no, because it could have entered an infinite loop.
Then, spunky, it's not possible! (Though it is too possible, if anything could change the program, or if the hardware could be changed, or something happens to affect the current in the circuits, or the power is cut, or something else happens.)
Adam is not a computer program. If he has free will, then chances are not zero. If he doesn't have free will, even then, the chances are not zero unless there's something supernatural about him, something probably related to his also-supernatural immortality, to make the chance zero.
Also, if Adam doesn't have free will, then what's the point of God's little experiment?
Ah, but sometime during their infinite life they must (since they MUST do ALL things) seal their mouths shut so it becomes impossible to eat anything.
Only if the seal is permanent. If they're immortal, I can only assume that their flesh is exempt from physics, so one could argue that their bodies are privilaged beyond concepts like mouth-sealing. Also it depends on how we define "eating," they could have opened a hole in their throat and put the food in directly, or mashed up the apple and snorted it.
On providing you with the mental image of naked people snorting mashed apple: you're welcome.
Of course you're also assuming that the tree was immortal and that the command to not eat from it would never be lifted.
"Okay, I, your infallible creator, admit that I was wrong, though I really can't be, and that you don't have free will after all. I'll be taking back my tree now, I have some more angels I want to tempt. Here's some gift certificates for Denny's, have lunch on me!"
We are given no reason to believe that the situation in the early bits of Genesis is temporary. In fact, since Adam is specifically told he won't die, you could say it was implied that it was eternal, until something happened to stop it. There's only one thing in the story that could, isn't there?
Let's put it this way: assuming my probability of succumbing to a particular temptation is 0, what is the probability that after an infinite amount of time, I will have succumbed to that temptation?
That's a big assumption. You simply don't know what your mind will be like even a short period of time into the future. Even if there's the slightest chance you'll change your mind, before infinity is done (which will never happen), then it will happen.
If the chance of succumbing is zero, then the chances than it will happen are undefined, if memory serves. That is, we don't know. But in this case the chance is obviously greater than zero, even if it is very, very small.
Particularly, in the real world, doing some things changes the world so that other things can't be done. If Adam and Eve had said "Ok, we're not supposed to eat from this tree... let's chop it down to make sure we can't" then no matter how infinite the amount of time they lived, they couldn't have eaten from it.
Well this can be handled three ways:
1. God's commandment is final and eternal, meaning it always will hold meaning. Thus, there will always be a danger from the fruit, Because He Said So, no matter what Adam and Eve do. I prefer this one, since it means God is talking about the universal and not the temporary.
2. The tree is immortal too, as is everything else in the garden. It'll grow back and grow new fruit eventually.
3. If the tree is the only member of its species, and killing it makes it extinct, then the issue becomes a competition between how likely it is that Adam will eat the fruit and how likely he'll devise the means to chop the tree down, then do so. Simple, and it possibly gets Adam out of his fix... unless God makes a new tree. Keeping number one in mind above, plus adding in that God had to have put the tree in the garden for a reason, one that cutting it down probably wouldn't fix, and it makes it harder to extract Adam from his mess.
That said, this is the bible. There's about as much point apply proper transfinite mathematics to it as there is teaching a fish to whistle.
Not true. All mathematics is related, so the seeds of all of it are, in essence, contained in the simple order of the integers, and I'd say that counting matters in the Bible. And since the Bible refers to the infinite, it certainly isn't asking too much to bring maths that deal with the infinite into the picture.
Clearly someone's been getting his logic from Douglas Adams. Adams was joking.
Adams was always joking. And yet, very often he was serious too.
You're talking about the "population of the universe is zero" bit, which I *have* been thinking about lately. I've been thinking that, in fact, that bit has dodgy math (and I'm not even a mathematician folks), but I won't get into that. It's still funny.
Take the number 0. Add 2 to it. Add 2 to it again. Do this an infinite number of times.
You'll only ever have even numbers. Just because a set is infinite does not mean it includes all possibilities.
If its probability is zero then I don't see what the problem is; we're talking about non-zero probabilities here. Things with non-zero probability are certain; things with zero probability are merely undefined.
If you think someone can set their mind so that a thing will forever be unthinkable to them, then I'd say you are either a dogmatic idiot (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt), or you have a touching faith in the inability of the universe, given infinity to work with, to devise contexts that can change people's minds.
Now that's about the silliest thing I've ever heard.
I didn't say it had a non-zero silly value. It's still true, though.
If I have a computer program, and I tell it to loop infinitely doing exactly the same thing, that's exactly what it will do. It has no free will. It does what I tell it to, and nothing more. It will not "inevitably over vast millenia" decide to do something else.
If it's impossible for it to do something else, then the chance of that occuring is zero. In that case, the chance of it happening is zero over infinity, which is undefined, I seem to remember.
But if it's even slightly possible, like if freak cosmic rays struck an instruction bit in the computer's memory to cause it to flip, then eventually that would happen enough times to change the program's output.
The only way that any un-ordered event would ever happen is if I allowed my program to make up its own mind to do random things. That, by definition, is free will.
I think we've just proven that the universe has free well. Good job, us!
Wait a moment -- are you saying Adam *had* free will in the garden, and thus he *must* have eventually eaten the apple? Are you arguing on my side?
From an evolutionary standpoint, once you have passed on your genes and ensured the survival of your progeny, you are effectively irrelevant.
I dispute this, you can always assist those who haven't passed their genes on yet, which explains motherhood.
There's also a negative effect on those that have yet to breed: you're consuming resources that they need, which may be part of the reason cancer exists, to help shorten lifespans and leave more resources for breeders.
We have an upper bound on that time, though, and it's 130 years (see Genesis 5:1). That's how long Adam had been around when Seth was born, and that was after they got kicked out of Eden. I'm pretty sure x less than 130 years is not quite long enough that all probabilities approach certainty.
Well, if the *possible* frame of time was truly infinite, then it would have happened eventually. Then, the amount of time that passed could be considered a measure of how probable it was. So, the measure of time before Adam succumbed to the pleasures of Granny Delicious could just be quite short. (I'd imagine there's not all that much to *do* in a perfect garden, anyway, especially if you don't know about S-E-X.)
If I'm in an infinite time frame, then all the possible-things-that-can-happen-and-do have a different, finite amount of time that passes before they occur. The number of zeroes might overflow the universe before it occurs, but it'll still happen after a finite time.
Oh, and re: quantified pin-dancing angels -- twelve.
Infinity just means 'forever', not that anything is possible just because you have a long time to complete any task possible.
But infinity is more than just a long time.
It's more than just a long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long time.
No matter how many longs I add to the above sentence, it's longer than that. Of course, the laws of thermodynamics say all energy will have converted into unusable forms before infinite time has passed, but I doubt the writers of the Bible had that in mind.
Do you still think that because anything is possible that you'd sleep with that guy?
Given an infinite time frame, yes. An infinite number of times. In fact, in an infinite time frame, I'd rape him an infinite number of times, he'd rape me an infinite number of times, and we'd each look at each other and say "Elvis -- live and on stage!" an infinite number of times while spinning counter-clockwise on our heads while painted in green and purple stripes.
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The alleged size of these groups doesn't matter. What matters is that they have managed to sway some 10 or 15% of the US voters, thus giving them 100% control of our rather lame democratic political system.
I don't think they've swayed anyone. Duped a few people, perhaps, but that's short-term, and not as many as you might think. Instead their zeal for voting itself (one of the few positive things I can say about them, and I don't view it as that positive in their case let's just say) is the source of that 10-15%.
I think we need to stop and notice that, in fact, it's not "religion" that has something against science, or even "Christianity," but "certain small, yet extremely vocal, Christian groups that happen to have a lot of money, bluster, and persecution complexes behind them, and who have beefs with approx. 70% of everything important that happens in the world."
The Cathloic Church alone is a hell of a lot bigger than these people could ever hope to be.
Yes, regardless of whether you think he's divine or not, Jesus *did* come up with some pretty enlightened, radical ideas for his time.
Of course, what we know about him is rather limited -- not a huge number of his teachings survive for us to see them, because Jesus, like Socrates, never wrote and everything we know about him comes second-hand (or rather, third or fourth hand). Further, the people who wrote what we have had a vested interest in having him seen as "the" son of God, as opposed to "a" son, since from a certain Christian perspective, we're all God's sons (or daughters, as the case my be).
Those red words in the KJV Bible, and certain writings in the Apocrypha (the Gospel of Thomas particularly, mostly a collection of Jesus' sayings) are just about everything we've got. Rather a shaky foundation for a religion.
On the other hand, the South Andean Punbeast was denied space on the ark, and died out with the unicorns and dinosaurs.
Thank god.
If there are laws of physics (and therefore a level of hard determinism), people's wills are also influenced by outside events. There is also a possibility that all outside events effect one's will in such a way that it forces said person to not do a specific action. It is also possible that these events are caused by some outside, hard deterministic course of action that forever repeats itself.
It is a novel tactic to pose the occurance of "permanent" things within infinity. If acceptable, it turns the argument into a race condition: a question of which thing happens first. I tend to view those things as necessarily impermanent, but of course Adam and Eve themselves are permanent in this state (except in how the apple could provide them with an expiration date).
This assumes that there are "irrevocable" occurances that may happen during the infinite time-frame (which is the same thing as an action that makes the occurance impossible). But God's commandment carries no meaning if it becomes impossible to do the action, doesn't it? Does that not imply that things which prevent the consumption, in the long run, of the apple cannot occur? I think it would simplify your argument, without losing anything essential, if you simply had something destroy the apple and the means of making more, and yet that would also make God's specific command irrelevant, voiding the capacity for decision in the situation.
In any case, all the things that can occur that make it impossible to consume the apple could also be undone by other, similar types of things, unless you resort to saying things like "but this thing is impossible to be undone," which I do not think is possible by the laws of physics other than entropy, which seems to be on holiday in Eden (which causes its own special problems).
So then my own conclusion is that if the universe is determined, then it's possible that eve never eats the apple. If it's all random, then eventually she will.
But doesn't free will destroy that determination? In that case, then there's only one way things could have turned out, that is eating the apple, which they did.
I'd say, looking out at the world, that things are random, but the randomness influences each other and thus causes "clumbs" on our scale, so it's not *perfectly* random. But any randomness at all would make it inevitable that the apple be eaten.
P.S. What a fun conversation! I don't know how lucid my arguments are at the moment however.
The same thing could be argued against evolution, that it is a transparent attempt to make an athiestic world view logicaly sound.
... I'll continue to believe that, and continue to read new discoveries and theories with intrest and a large grain of salt.
"Could be argued" is a weasel term. Anyone can argue anything. I could argue that you don't exist, even if it's obvious that you do. The thing about evolution is that it's been around for a while, has built up a serious amount of scientific backing, and provides a rational explanation for a wide range of problems far outside of, let me be blunt here, your rather limited perspective upon it.
Remember: Darwin wasn't an athiest, and although his conclusions troubled him mightily, he was intellectually honest enough to not discount them simply because they didn't fit in with what he thought true.
I personaly believe strongly in ID, not because I find the evidence for a biblical creation to be strong, but because I find the evidence for evolution to be very weak.
If this is true, then it would not be a reason to believe in Intelligent Design. It would merely be a reason to not believe in evolution. Don't be afraid to have no opinion! If more people weren't, it'd be a sunnier world.
Skepticism is good. Science is built upon skepticism; that's what makes it powerful, when it is performed correctly, because peer review double-checks conclusions arrived at by experiment, theories are open to attacks, and in the end scientists slowly form descriptions of reality that are correct to, to use a metaphor, more and more decimal points.
That's why Intelligent Design is dangerous; it's not performed correctly in the cases of which I am aware, but the media is not aware of this. Any time they see a conflict they go "hey, fight!" and zoom in with their cameras. Some frankly ludicrous ideas have gained coinage this way lately, like faked moon landings, monkey heads on Mars, etc.
And yes I do understand evolution very well, far better than most posters here, so please don't respond with the typical "you don't understand evolution" argument, because it's not a valid argument.
I hope you'll pardon me if I do not merely take your word for it. Arguments are valid or not valid for reasons other than mere assertion.
Having said that, the reason I will defend the teaching of ID in schools as a theory other than evolution mainly has to do with the the way evolution is taught in schools.
That is terrible, stupid, and wrong!
You don't teach Issue A because you don't like the way Issue B is taught. Instead, you argue that Not-B should be taught, which is NOT, in this case, the same thing as A.
But I disagree with you in either case. There is no important science built upon Intelligent Design, while there is a lot of important science built upon evolution. The fact that it hasn't tumbled apart by now speaks volumes about evolution's validity.
It is not taught as a scientfic theory that best describes how life could have formed by it self, but is instead used as an "in your face christians, we don't need your God" attack on christianity and religion.
I deny your assertion. It is your responsibility to prove it now, or at least demonstrate it convincingly.
And like anyone whos "team" is being attacked, I like it when the attack is countered.
That's part of your problem, if I may be so bold to point out such problems. You're thinking of it as "us vs. them." You've defined the world into two groups, when it's not nearly as simple as that. But, in trying to form a rhetorical "us," you risk the development of a "them" specifically to counter you. Then you'll point to it and say "See! It was there all along!"
But then on to the mistaken view that ID has no scientific backing, that is just false. Yes it requires a "non-scientific entity" to work, but regardless of popul
But besides that... In saying that eve had free will, it does not follow that eve will eventually take the apple, because her own free will isn't random (if it were, then it wouldn't be free will, but simply a collection of random or determined events, depending on who you talk to).
Except that free will is dependent on chance.
Over long periods of time, people's wills are influenced by factors that are not entirely outside their control. Perspectives change in response to outside events. If that can happen even slightly, and only rarely, then over infinity it fails, and it's not even necessary to know how it could happen.
Further, free will itself has a chance component at least from a statistical perspective (and I suspect, from an actual one, too). This is something that is not obvious to most people, but it's something I've noticed multiple times. People cannot behave rationally all the time (or even much of the time depending on how cynical you are). In fact, completely rational behavior is not free; it can be predicted.
The thing it's important to keep in mind is that when I say "all possible things happen during an infinite time-frame," the word "possible" means anything that is not explictly impossible, and I mean "hard" impossible. That means things like laws of physics (taking into account even extreme conditions), logic or math being overturned, not "choosing not to do something," which is not "hard impossible" at all but afflicted with the tremendously fickle human whim. (And that's speaking, personally, as a great fan of whimsy.) Thus, if they had free will, then eventually they had to have eaten the apple.
Ah ha... but unless the probability that act is 1, then there is also the possibility that it will *not* happen.
Except that it only takes one "failed check" to lose, while to succeed requires repeated, frequent checks, forever. Over infinite time-frames, it's bound to fail eventually.
In other words:
* The chance the event will occur "now" is a number very close to zero.
* Thus, the negation of the event is some number very close to one.
* Start checking. Just like if you roll dice forever eventually you'll get a six, here you'll eventually fail too.
People have complained that free will isn't like a random number generator, but if it isn't random on some level then there's no way it can be free. And the human consciousness isn't perfect anyway, eventually someone could slip up and *accidently* eat the apple.
But even if it's not random like a roulette wheel is random, it'll happen eventually, simply because it's possible. Even if you change the question to "Will Adam and Eve ever knowingly, purposefully eat the apple," the probability it'll happen over an infinite time-frame is one. If people were forever unchanging then there might be a possibility it could not happen, but if people were unchanging then they wouldn't have free will.
I'd unsimplify it, but then I'd just end up pasting my previous message into the message box.
The "joke" part of the message in question was the bit about President Bush. It was intended to merely be a conversation leavener, to try to clear up what I percieved to be a steadily more intense conversation. I don't *like* intense conversations, and I try to break them up whenever I notice that I'm in one. But anyway.
Take off your "I'm oh so smart" hat and give a sensible example of how your theoretical ramblings apply to the actual world in which we live.
They don't, or at least, not directly to the world in which we ourselves live right now. That's part of the problem. Infinite time scales are not part of every day experience, and it's a mistake to think you can apply your experience to them unless you've had at least a bit of math under your belt. (That's exactly how math I have under my personal belt: "a bit.")
But Adam was supposed to have lived in a situation in which none of us have direct experience; it was supernatural. But it was still similar enough to our world that ordinary rules of logic applied (else the creation story is meaningless*), and that's the environment in which my little infinity thingy matters.
(* Oh, now I'm probably going to have to explain *this* bit.)
The one example you gave--which you are now retroactively claiming to be a joke--was clearly wrong.
(sigh) I didn't retroactively claim anything. I said something, there, that I thought was obviously a joke. Explaining that you've made a joke wrecks the humor, so it's best to avoid doing it if at all possible.
Most things that are possible will in fact never happen...
UNLESS you have an infinite time frame.
Let me try to spell it out. Say, for argument's sake, the chances that a human beings' brain will spontaneously explode in a given second are one in 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Then, the chance of you experiencing a spontaneous brain explosion are uncertain in your lifetime. The chance of there having even been one spontaneous brain explosion so far would be highly unlikely throughout the length of human existance.
But, there's still that one exceedingly slim chance. And if you live forever, then that chance becomes an inevitability, no matter how many zeros you pile on, because there will never be a lack of chances, because fate will forever be rolling dice.
Now. Free will seems like a big and absolute thing, but it is really exceptionally variable and fickle. You have no idea what the inside of your mind will look like even fifty years from now, assuming you live that long.
But even if it were NOT variable and fickle, if there were even the slightest chance that you would do something, then in infinity it would happen. This is not the same thing as "counting only even numbers and happening upon an odd one," because that's impossible by way of the rules of logic. But even then, someone has to be doing the counting, and if they're a machine it could break, or if it's a human they could decide to stop doing it.
My point is, if it's not *impossible*, I mean rigorously, logically impossible and not just someone saying they won't do something, then during an infinite time-frame it must happen. Lots of things that seem impossible, especially where human beings are concerned, are certainly not.
Good enough an explanation yet?
(sigh) Okay, let me simplify it a little.
* If math isn't a reason to be certain of something then I don't know what is.
* I have a personal fear of infinity, and I can't see how anyone can avoid it if they thought on it enough.
* And "a joke."
That is true, but the problem is that infinity does not mean ALL things (continual infinity v discrete). If you take a number system, and count all EVEN numbers, you can count on for infinity, but NEVER count an ODD number.
Well there you're begging the question, you're counting even numbers, so by definition you're not counting odd ones, which are mutually exclusive. Since there are no even numbers that are odd, it's impossible, that is there's a probability of zero, that you can read even numbers (and nothing else) for infinity and encounter an odd one.
But that's besides the point. If your thought experiment involved a counting machine it makes sense, but not if you're talking about a human being, with the free will human beings have (which may or may not be the point of the scene, though many theologians say it is), who can do anything and doesn't have to count even numbers if he is seized by the urge not to.
As for the apple, you will eat it eventually, given an infinite time frame, unless there's something that specifically gives the act a zero probability over infinity. Merely urging yourself not to do it won't work -- before infinity passes you'll forget what an apple is, and what eating is.
I'm afraid you haven't convinced me, sorry. But if you're so sure then don't just give up, I'm not just saying these things just because, I really think I'm right on this but I'll admit that I'm wrong if you prove it to me.
Aaah. But they were innocent, which meant they couldn't enjoy it.
Wow, it really must have been work.
What is the source of your immense conviction in this?
My source of immense conviction is that it's mathematically, and hence logically, true!
It is a pleasing and satisfying theory...
Really? I wish I was at all pleased or satisfied by it. Thinking about infinity frankly scares the hell out of me, as it would most people who did it honestly.
Can you elaborate on what "all possible things" actually means?
Do not say such things to a gag writer! Let's just say that, over an infinite time, all possible things happen... including President Bush admitting that he was wrong to invade Iraq!
If that doesn't shock you speechless you're either obtuse or profound.
(thinking carefully here)
I think you're right. Still, we're talking about non-zero probabilities, so it doesn't matter.
Please see the dozen other messages I've posted already responding to arguments like this. What's necessary isn't just infinity, what's necessary is infinity + non-zero probability. That sounds like a zero probability to me.
I think it's obvious that I don't think evolution is solely about the survival of *your* kids, but that cooperation between members of the same species (and, as in the case of symbotic relationships) is at work. It may be that the culling function may depend solely on your kids' survival, but cooperation can assist in that while also assisting in the survival of others.
But whether that's better, or whether it's better to take advantage of their good graces while providing nothing in return, that's a dilemma that only a prisoner could solve.
Har har.
Sorry....do you actually read the Bible? If you had you surely would have come accross this verse.
(John 8:)36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (NIV)
The idea being here being of free will to NOT be in sin and to turn back to God, to be the prodigal son.
I honestly can't believe that you're making that argument! In that passage Jesus is talking about freedom from sin.
The Bible has been thought over, mulled over, meditated upon, wrassled, wrangled, and rhetorically twisted more than any other work in human history. People have used the Bible to justify all kinds of things that seem unlikely to have been intended by the original authors. (Jesus, who is one of the greater voices in western literature regardless of whether you think he was 50% God, has been especially mutiliated in this manner.)
I'm athiest. There, I said it. But I used to be Christian. "Used to be," mainly, because of things like this.
Obviously, the answer is no, because it could have entered an infinite loop.
Then, spunky, it's not possible! (Though it is too possible, if anything could change the program, or if the hardware could be changed, or something happens to affect the current in the circuits, or the power is cut, or something else happens.)
Adam is not a computer program. If he has free will, then chances are not zero. If he doesn't have free will, even then, the chances are not zero unless there's something supernatural about him, something probably related to his also-supernatural immortality, to make the chance zero.
Also, if Adam doesn't have free will, then what's the point of God's little experiment?
(It's not an experiment? Looks like one to me.)
Ah, but sometime during their infinite life they must (since they MUST do ALL things) seal their mouths shut so it becomes impossible to eat anything.
Only if the seal is permanent. If they're immortal, I can only assume that their flesh is exempt from physics, so one could argue that their bodies are privilaged beyond concepts like mouth-sealing. Also it depends on how we define "eating," they could have opened a hole in their throat and put the food in directly, or mashed up the apple and snorted it.
On providing you with the mental image of naked people snorting mashed apple: you're welcome.
Of course you're also assuming that the tree was immortal and that the command to not eat from it would never be lifted.
"Okay, I, your infallible creator, admit that I was wrong, though I really can't be, and that you don't have free will after all. I'll be taking back my tree now, I have some more angels I want to tempt. Here's some gift certificates for Denny's, have lunch on me!"
We are given no reason to believe that the situation in the early bits of Genesis is temporary. In fact, since Adam is specifically told he won't die, you could say it was implied that it was eternal, until something happened to stop it. There's only one thing in the story that could, isn't there?
Let's put it this way: assuming my probability of succumbing to a particular temptation is 0, what is the probability that after an infinite amount of time, I will have succumbed to that temptation?
That's a big assumption. You simply don't know what your mind will be like even a short period of time into the future. Even if there's the slightest chance you'll change your mind, before infinity is done (which will never happen), then it will happen.
If the chance of succumbing is zero, then the chances than it will happen are undefined, if memory serves. That is, we don't know. But in this case the chance is obviously greater than zero, even if it is very, very small.
Argh, missed these bits:
Particularly, in the real world, doing some things changes the world so that other things can't be done. If Adam and Eve had said "Ok, we're not supposed to eat from this tree... let's chop it down to make sure we can't" then no matter how infinite the amount of time they lived, they couldn't have eaten from it.
Well this can be handled three ways:
1. God's commandment is final and eternal, meaning it always will hold meaning. Thus, there will always be a danger from the fruit, Because He Said So, no matter what Adam and Eve do. I prefer this one, since it means God is talking about the universal and not the temporary.
2. The tree is immortal too, as is everything else in the garden. It'll grow back and grow new fruit eventually.
3. If the tree is the only member of its species, and killing it makes it extinct, then the issue becomes a competition between how likely it is that Adam will eat the fruit and how likely he'll devise the means to chop the tree down, then do so. Simple, and it possibly gets Adam out of his fix... unless God makes a new tree. Keeping number one in mind above, plus adding in that God had to have put the tree in the garden for a reason, one that cutting it down probably wouldn't fix, and it makes it harder to extract Adam from his mess.
That said, this is the bible. There's about as much point apply proper transfinite mathematics to it as there is teaching a fish to whistle.
Not true. All mathematics is related, so the seeds of all of it are, in essence, contained in the simple order of the integers, and I'd say that counting matters in the Bible. And since the Bible refers to the infinite, it certainly isn't asking too much to bring maths that deal with the infinite into the picture.
Clearly someone's been getting his logic from Douglas Adams. Adams was joking.
Adams was always joking. And yet, very often he was serious too.
You're talking about the "population of the universe is zero" bit, which I *have* been thinking about lately. I've been thinking that, in fact, that bit has dodgy math (and I'm not even a mathematician folks), but I won't get into that. It's still funny.
Take the number 0. Add 2 to it. Add 2 to it again. Do this an infinite number of times.
You'll only ever have even numbers. Just because a set is infinite does not mean it includes all possibilities.
If its probability is zero then I don't see what the problem is; we're talking about non-zero probabilities here. Things with non-zero probability are certain; things with zero probability are merely undefined.
If you think someone can set their mind so that a thing will forever be unthinkable to them, then I'd say you are either a dogmatic idiot (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt), or you have a touching faith in the inability of the universe, given infinity to work with, to devise contexts that can change people's minds.
Now that's about the silliest thing I've ever heard.
I didn't say it had a non-zero silly value. It's still true, though.
If I have a computer program, and I tell it to loop infinitely doing exactly the same thing, that's exactly what it will do. It has no free will. It does what I tell it to, and nothing more. It will not "inevitably over vast millenia" decide to do something else.
If it's impossible for it to do something else, then the chance of that occuring is zero. In that case, the chance of it happening is zero over infinity, which is undefined, I seem to remember.
But if it's even slightly possible, like if freak cosmic rays struck an instruction bit in the computer's memory to cause it to flip, then eventually that would happen enough times to change the program's output.
The only way that any un-ordered event would ever happen is if I allowed my program to make up its own mind to do random things. That, by definition, is free will.
I think we've just proven that the universe has free well. Good job, us!
Wait a moment -- are you saying Adam *had* free will in the garden, and thus he *must* have eventually eaten the apple? Are you arguing on my side?
From an evolutionary standpoint, once you have passed on your genes and ensured the survival of your progeny, you are effectively irrelevant.
I dispute this, you can always assist those who haven't passed their genes on yet, which explains motherhood.
There's also a negative effect on those that have yet to breed: you're consuming resources that they need, which may be part of the reason cancer exists, to help shorten lifespans and leave more resources for breeders.
We have an upper bound on that time, though, and it's 130 years (see Genesis 5:1). That's how long Adam had been around when Seth was born, and that was after they got kicked out of Eden. I'm pretty sure x less than 130 years is not quite long enough that all probabilities approach certainty.
Well, if the *possible* frame of time was truly infinite, then it would have happened eventually. Then, the amount of time that passed could be considered a measure of how probable it was. So, the measure of time before Adam succumbed to the pleasures of Granny Delicious could just be quite short. (I'd imagine there's not all that much to *do* in a perfect garden, anyway, especially if you don't know about S-E-X.)
If I'm in an infinite time frame, then all the possible-things-that-can-happen-and-do have a different, finite amount of time that passes before they occur. The number of zeroes might overflow the universe before it occurs, but it'll still happen after a finite time.
Oh, and re: quantified pin-dancing angels -- twelve.
Infinity just means 'forever', not that anything is possible just because you have a long time to complete any task possible.
But infinity is more than just a long time.
It's more than just a long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long time.
No matter how many longs I add to the above sentence, it's longer than that. Of course, the laws of thermodynamics say all energy will have converted into unusable forms before infinite time has passed, but I doubt the writers of the Bible had that in mind.
Do you still think that because anything is possible that you'd sleep with that guy?
Given an infinite time frame, yes. An infinite number of times. In fact, in an infinite time frame, I'd rape him an infinite number of times, he'd rape me an infinite number of times, and we'd each look at each other and say "Elvis -- live and on stage!" an infinite number of times while spinning counter-clockwise on our heads while painted in green and purple stripes.
On a terraformed Mars.