You clearly have no idea what my positions are. You need to learn reading comprehension and how to make proper logical inferences from what you have read.
Why should I give you leeway because only one thing showed you don't have a clue instead of several? That little bit in your post was a bit of a warning that you are considering the issue from a very narrow and unrealistic viewpoint.
This indicates to me that you are not only an ideologue, but one who is not willing to read any ideas that don't sync with your own within one sentence. If anything is dangerous people who are willfully ignorant.
Are you an example of a generation with a distorted view of the world and a lack of empathy for the less well off due to growing up with servants?
Had you actually read my complete post, you wouldn't need to ask this question.
If not, exactly what is your damage, and why are you passing it off as acceptable and the values that built the USA as "communism"?
Had you actually understood what I wrote, you wouldn't be asking this question.
No not everyone wants to or should become an employer. Luckily you have the option of just buying stocks in companies and you can become part owner.employer without actually having to know how to do those things. The only thing you need to do is research.
Not that research is easy. I fail to do adequate research all the time. I sign things without reading them. I pick mutual funds in my 401K without really knowing anything about mutual funds. But I *could* do research if my life really depended on it. And it's a lot easier than running a business.
BUT....not everyone wants to become an employer. And I think there ought to be room in this economy for both skilled and unskilled workers to earn a living wage with a 40 hr work wk.
I agree in the sense that I think you should be able to earn the living according to what your skills are worth. If your skills are not worth a living wage, then it is time to get better skills. Times are changing and automation is taking over more and more unskilled jobs. Pretty soon even jobs currently outsourced to 3rd word countries will be more cheaply done by machines. There really isn't going to be much opportunity for people who don't have useful skills.
The good news is that all this automation creates more wealth in the form of better goods for cheaper prices, and we (i.e. tax payers) will be able to afford educational programs to help unskilled workers develop new skills.
This is essentially the problem. Your only primary path to success is a downward spiral where you become the scumbag taking advantage of the misfortunes of your fellow man.
And if enough people do this, it will create larger demand for and a smaller supply of workers raising their market value.
By not becoming a "scumbag", you are actually helping to perpetuate the problem.
By becoming a "scumbag" you are actually giving workers more options, making them more valuable, and a better bargaining position.
If the labor market really is so lop-sided, you could become an employer, pay higher wages than everyone else, and still make a profit (i.e. not be a scumbag), but then you couldn't hire as many people as you otherwise would have (i.e. you can help some people more or help more people less)
What does it matter what he "should" do? He's drowning. If no one saves him, he dies.
Whether he is going to die or not, he should still try to survive. He shouldn't stop trying under the assumption that the only thing that can save him is benevolence of extremely wealthy people.
Real life isn't heroic fantasy where willpower trumps physical reality, you know.
I never said willpower trumps reality. I am saying that the reality is that it is probable that no one will save you, so you'd better try to save yourself.
The original poster implied the labour market is very lop-sided because he thinks so. If you suggest him something *if* the labour market is very lop-sided, for him you suggested him that something.
What rsilvergun thinks and what is reality are not the same thing. I am not suggesting workers try to become employers in reality because I don;t think that the labor market is so lop-sided in reality. I am suggesting that *if* the labor market ever were to become like rsilvergun thinks it already is, that workers should do this.
Ah yes - the "take one sentence from someone's argument and ignore the rest" answer.
It would be easy for me to take one sentence fragment from your post, and then label it as a Stalin-style communism apology, and ridicule it as such, but this is a pretty childish debate tactic.
Furthermore I was not suggesting that workers actually become employers. I was suggesting that this is what workers should do *if* the labor market was really as lop-sided as the original poster implied (which I don't think it is).
And again, I'll ask why we're racing to the bottom? There's a difference between fighting for something you want just trying to survive one more day. A man swimming the English Channel is fighting for something, a man drowning is just a man drowning. It's OK to pull him up for air you know?
Yeah it's actually good to save the man that is drowning. What should the man do if no one is going to save him? What if there are more drowning people than people willing to save drowning people? It doesn't matter that it's not fair that he is drowning.
And Toqueville was a rich entitled prick. Not the sort I want to base public policy on. But nice quote.
It is actually not proven to be said by de Toqueville, but even if it was, what you said is an ad hominem (attacking an idea based on who proposed it). Furthermore it is not referring simply to public policy. It is much broader than that. A democracy is the pretty much the best circumstance a common man can find himself in, especially given his circumstances throughout the vast majority of human history. He doesn't even have to fight (i.e. risk his life) to achieve the change that his ancestors did. All he has to do is care enough to vote in an informed way. If he can't put forth this relatively small effort compared to the price others paid for freedom, then he doesn't deserve freedom.
Maybe this is a bit harsh, but if you are waiting for the people in positions of privilege to voluntarily give up what they have, you're going to be waiting a very long time. In reality, fairness is not free. You have to fight for it. It's not fair that you have to fight for fairness. Life is not fair.
Calling it "Workaholism" implies we have a choice.
Calling it "Workaholism" actually implies we are addicted to "wrokahol", and the notable feature about addiction is the lack of choice. Maybe some would argue that alcoholics can decide not to be addicted as hard as this may be. I would also argue that workers can decide not to accept jobs that overwork them.
If you don't like it there's not much you can do. The job market sucks, and it's never going to get any better. Off-shoring and abundant work Visas guarantee that. You're given X amount of work to do and Y amount of time and if you don't do X you're fired, so you put in extra hours. Again and again and again. Heck, it's even worse for the Visa holders. They're practically indentured serfs. If they don't put the hours in it's back to where they came from with a black mark to boot. And those are the guys we're competing with for jobs....
Well if the job market is so terrible (for employees) and never getting better, then the obvious thing to do is to exploit that and become an employer. You can hire people for essentially nothing, and rake in huge profits for doing very little work.
Heck, is it just me or can nobody in the American Media do anything except blame the workers? Maybe it's because the capitalists own the media... Heck, I don't know.
I don't really see anyone blaming the workers. I do see people suggesting that workers take appropriate steps to protect their interests. Maybe workers should learn skills that indentured serfs don't have. Maybe workers should take advantage of a world with cheap unskilled labor rather than being a part of the unskilled labor force and therefore causing a higher supply to demand ratio of unskilled labor (as I implied earlier). Maybe workers should actually vote. Workers clearly have an electoral advantage. They, however, continue to vote for republicans and democrats that are selling them out to corporations (or simply don't vote at all).
Is it "blaming the workers" to point out the actions that workers could do to achieve their goals? Is it "blaming the workers" to tell them that no one is going to fight for them if they won't fight for themselves?
If you want something, you need to fight for it. No one is going to just give it to you. If you're strategy is "complaining" about it, then it had better be at a level that causes politicians to be voted out of office, because what is happening right now isn't doing anything.
"In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." --possibly Alexis de Toqueville or Joseph de Maistre
That is not true because there is no upper bound on the energy at which you can claim your model of new physics exists. No matter what the energy of your machine is I can always crank up the energy of my model so that you cannot see it there. The point at which people stop being interested in a theory is when they rule it out as an explanation of a particular phenomenon it was invented to solve not when they have excluded any possibility that the theory exists in nature.
If my hypothesis requires 100x the energy of what the LHC can provide to verify, it is still falsifiable. It is only when my hypothesis requires more energy than than any machine could conceivably provide (i.e. infinite, or it changes to always be out of range, etc) that it becomes unfalsifiable in principle.
That is exactly the definition I am using. The problem is that you are not stating you hypothesis correctly. The hypothesis which is interesting to us particle physicists is not "does the Higgs boson exist?" but "is the Higgs boson the primary mechanism for breaking the electroweak symmetry by giving fundamental particles mass?".
"Does the Higgs boson exist?" is not in itself a complete hypothesis unless it also contains a definition of what the Higgs Boson is. A hypothesis that the Higgs boson is actually a black widow spider and in fact does exist but doesn't do what physicists thought is a semantic problem (and probably an intentional one). When you say "Does the Higgs Boson exist?" there is an implicit assumption that it is the one proposed by Higgs. If there is any ambiguity, then that needs to be disambiguated.
Extending this to religion the question about whether a creator exists is exactly the same as asking whether the Higgs boson exists: you can only ever get a definitive answer in the positive case where what you are looking for exists and you find it. If you want a falsifiable hypothesis then you need to ask a more specific question e.g. is phenomenon X explainable by mechanism Y.
Russel's teapot as he presented is not so much about falsifiability as it is about burden of proof. Russel simply said that his hypothetical teapot was too small to be seen by our most powerful telescopes. This makes his hypothesis unfalsifiable in practice, but not unfalsifiable in principle. We could look for it with a spaceship, or try to build more powerful telescopes. His point was not that we will never be able to find to teapot, but rather that the burden of proof is on the person claiming that the teapot exists, not upon skeptics to disprove it.
What would make Russel's teapot unfalsifiable in principle is if the teapot had properties that made it logically impossible to find. For example if it had the property that it was undetectable by scientific instruments because it was supernatural, etc.
Or alternatively, whatever he did *was* illegal in Japan, but law enforcement was not able to prove what he did. I don;t know anything about Japanese law, but I do know that the fact that someone has not been imprisoned does not mean that they haven't committed any crimes, it just means they haven't been caught if they did.
It's not factually a lie. In fact it is trivially true. If it were not true this would imply that we would understand any technology no matter how advanced it was, regardless of our mental/biological limitations.
If you could get your wife and son back, but the price was to reject your faith, would you do it?
Would you rather have more time (albeit finite) on earth with the people you love, or would you rather have faith that you will have an eternity together in heaven (if it exists)?
I realize you don't actually have this choice. Feel free to ignore my question if you don't want to think about it.
when you've searched the whole forest, several times over,
Everywhere we have looked and thought we'd find godly influence
We have come nowhere close to searching the whole amazon forest. We are discovereing lots of new species all the time (especially insects, etc). We *really* haven't explored the whole universe, so it's probably not a good idea to make any arguments contingent upon having looked *everywhere*.
Everywhere we have looked and thought we'd find godly influence, it turned out to be not so. This has been going on for hundreds of years, so it's safe to assume it's not a fluke. If we can assume that it will continue, then god will retreat further and further the more closely we can look.
You are doing a lot of assuming. You are assuming that you know exactly what evidence for God looks like. You are assuming that if something happened in the past that it will continue to happen. Someone in the early 20th century might assume that no one will ever go to the moon due to a trend of not being able to go to the moon for a long time.
But then, Nietzsche really killed him, because the argument becomes really simple: A thing can be defined completely by the effects it has upon other things. If it has no effect on anything, then it does not exist. From this follows a) there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself and b) there is no such thing as a no-touching-the-universe-god.
Nietzche was not making a scientific claim. Things aren;t automatically true because Nietzche said them. Many people are of the opinion that God caused the big bang. Are you saying the big bang had no effect on us?
The second is that we know entropy to increase over time. God, however, is a highly ordered state and explaining how the universe went from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, and from high complexity to low complexity turns out to not make the claims more likely or simpler, but the opposite.
This is a horrible argument. This assumes that the laws of thermodynamics as we know them apply to God in order to disprove God. Why on earth would you assume that? Everything we know breaks down at the big bang. You can't even say something was a certain way *before* the big bang, because time itself was created in the big bang. There was no "before the big bang".
There are a lot of truly terrible arguments for the existence of God, and some equally horrible arguments for why God can't exist. one thing many have in common is they assume a lot of things that are really not reasonable to assume at all.
Actually that is not quite correct. The notion of a Higgs boson is not falsifiable in principle.
The higgs boson hypothesis as it was presented was falsifiable in both principle and in practice, because they supplied a predicted a range where they expected it would exist.
ll you need to do is say that it has a higher mass than you can reach with your accelerator.
This would make the hypothesis unfalsifiable in practice, but falsifiable in principle as a bigger machine could (and probably will be built).
At some point this mass will be so large that your higgs can no longer explain the things that it was invented to solve but that is NOT the same as saying that there is no fundamental scalar Higgs field out there
This doesn't make the hypothesis unfalsifiable. It makes the hypothesis incoherent. This is like saying "I think that a particular spider exists in the amazon, and I predict that it will actually be indistinguishable from a unicorn." Whether unicorns exist in the amazon is another question, but if it did, it would not lend any credibility to the original spider hypothesis.
all it says is that if such a field exists it would no longer be able to explain why fundamental particles have mass.
This is usually when theories get dropped - not because they have been proven wrong but because they have been shown not to solve the problem they were invented for.
Which is a different characteristic than falsifiability.
Falsifiability simply means that there is an experiment that can be done to determine whether the hypothesis is true. In the case of falsifiability in principle, this experiment doesn't need to be possible at the current time, it just needs to be logically possible (i.e. not logically impossible).
There is an important difference between something that is only unfalsifiable because of circumstance and something that is just unfalsifiable due to logic. Circumstances can change, logic can't.
can you think of a repeatable experiment that would prove or disprove that there is a creator?
I suppose this would be similar to thinking of an experiment that would prove or disprove that some same particular species of spider lives in the rainforest.
The experiment is "look for the spider", and if you find it, then it exists, and if you don't, then you don't really know, but it makes sense to tentatively assume the null hypothesis (that it doesn't exist).
In this sense, the God hypothesis is not unfalsifiable in principle, just in practice. It's important to note this difference between falsifiability in principle and practice. The Higgs boson hypothesis was falsifiable by an experiment involving the LHC. The LHC didn't exist in the 18th century so if the Higgs boson were proposed in the 18th century would not have been practically falsifiable, but it was still falsifiable in principle (i.e. a machine like the LHC could one day, maybe hundreds of years in the future, be constructed).
There is a good argument to be made that the existence of God is also not falsifiable in principle. You could have a super powerful alien capable of destroying entire worlds and causing us to hallucinate in anyway it desires. You could never really trust that an entity claiming to be the creator of the whole universe was telling the truth. Any beings significantly more technologically advanced than us would be practically indistinguishable from a God.
Also, even if there were really a God that created our universe, this God could not know for sure that he was really God in the sense that he couldn't know that there was nothing greater than himself (for the same way that we atheists can't know that there is nothing greater than us).
But if it turns out that God's existence is unfalsifiable in principle, then this means that even God presenting himself to us, is still not sufficient proof for his existence, because we don't even have a way to verify that a being is really God (i.e. that there is nothing greater) and not just some extremely powerful being.
If a powerful being showed us a video of himself creating the universe, we can probably assume he is powerful enough to fabricate a video. Obviously the proof is probably not going to be a conventional video, but whatever form the proof takes, it doesn't matter. We can assume that a sufficiently powerful being could convince us of anything, regardless of whether it's true or false.
You can claim that God made biology possible by creating a universe in which biology could make them exist, but you can't claim that God "created" animals at all.
This seems like a pretty dumb rule. If I claim human beings created computers, am I wrong because it turns out that computers are actually directly created by industrial machines?
By saying you think God created the universe you are still saying that God created all life (and probably that he knew he was creating life), but that evolution is the mechanism by which life was created (i.e. evolution can still be true even if God created the animals).
So really it seems that the heart of the issue is more to do with whether you are allowed to claim evolution is false, and less to do with claiming that God created life (which I would assume every religious person believes).
In addition to the new clauses, the UK government clarified the meaning of creationism, reminding everyone that it's a minority view even within the Church of England and the Catholic Church.
I suppose by creationism, they mean the idea that all animals were created at once, rather than simply the idea that God created animals?
I am pretty sure that if/whenever net neutrality gets passed, it will be something that does exactly the opposite of what it's initial proponents wanted (i.e. worse than if no law at all were passed), and the politicians will be able to claim to be heroes for passing net neutrality. Look at who we are dealing with. Republicans and democrats. I think the goal of net neutrality is perfectly good, I just don't trust politicians to know anything about how to regulate the internet. It's pretty safe to say that they have already demonstrated that they don't.
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You clearly have no idea what my positions are. You need to learn reading comprehension and how to make proper logical inferences from what you have read.
Why should I give you leeway because only one thing showed you don't have a clue instead of several? That little bit in your post was a bit of a warning that you are considering the issue from a very narrow and unrealistic viewpoint.
This indicates to me that you are not only an ideologue, but one who is not willing to read any ideas that don't sync with your own within one sentence. If anything is dangerous people who are willfully ignorant.
Are you an example of a generation with a distorted view of the world and a lack of empathy for the less well off due to growing up with servants?
Had you actually read my complete post, you wouldn't need to ask this question.
If not, exactly what is your damage, and why are you passing it off as acceptable and the values that built the USA as "communism"?
Had you actually understood what I wrote, you wouldn't be asking this question.
No not everyone wants to or should become an employer. Luckily you have the option of just buying stocks in companies and you can become part owner.employer without actually having to know how to do those things. The only thing you need to do is research.
Not that research is easy. I fail to do adequate research all the time. I sign things without reading them. I pick mutual funds in my 401K without really knowing anything about mutual funds. But I *could* do research if my life really depended on it. And it's a lot easier than running a business.
BUT....not everyone wants to become an employer. And I think there ought to be room in this economy for both skilled and unskilled workers to earn a living wage with a 40 hr work wk.
I agree in the sense that I think you should be able to earn the living according to what your skills are worth. If your skills are not worth a living wage, then it is time to get better skills. Times are changing and automation is taking over more and more unskilled jobs. Pretty soon even jobs currently outsourced to 3rd word countries will be more cheaply done by machines. There really isn't going to be much opportunity for people who don't have useful skills.
The good news is that all this automation creates more wealth in the form of better goods for cheaper prices, and we (i.e. tax payers) will be able to afford educational programs to help unskilled workers develop new skills.
This is essentially the problem. Your only primary path to success is a downward spiral where you become the scumbag taking advantage of the misfortunes of your fellow man.
And if enough people do this, it will create larger demand for and a smaller supply of workers raising their market value.
By not becoming a "scumbag", you are actually helping to perpetuate the problem.
By becoming a "scumbag" you are actually giving workers more options, making them more valuable, and a better bargaining position.
If the labor market really is so lop-sided, you could become an employer, pay higher wages than everyone else, and still make a profit (i.e. not be a scumbag), but then you couldn't hire as many people as you otherwise would have (i.e. you can help some people more or help more people less)
What does it matter what he "should" do? He's drowning. If no one saves him, he dies.
Whether he is going to die or not, he should still try to survive. He shouldn't stop trying under the assumption that the only thing that can save him is benevolence of extremely wealthy people.
Real life isn't heroic fantasy where willpower trumps physical reality, you know.
I never said willpower trumps reality. I am saying that the reality is that it is probable that no one will save you, so you'd better try to save yourself.
The original poster implied the labour market is very lop-sided because he thinks so. If you suggest him something *if* the labour market is very lop-sided, for him you suggested him that something.
What rsilvergun thinks and what is reality are not the same thing. I am not suggesting workers try to become employers in reality because I don;t think that the labor market is so lop-sided in reality. I am suggesting that *if* the labor market ever were to become like rsilvergun thinks it already is, that workers should do this.
Ah yes - the "take one sentence from someone's argument and ignore the rest" answer.
It would be easy for me to take one sentence fragment from your post, and then label it as a Stalin-style communism apology, and ridicule it as such, but this is a pretty childish debate tactic.
Furthermore I was not suggesting that workers actually become employers. I was suggesting that this is what workers should do *if* the labor market was really as lop-sided as the original poster implied (which I don't think it is).
And again, I'll ask why we're racing to the bottom? There's a difference between fighting for something you want just trying to survive one more day. A man swimming the English Channel is fighting for something, a man drowning is just a man drowning. It's OK to pull him up for air you know?
Yeah it's actually good to save the man that is drowning. What should the man do if no one is going to save him? What if there are more drowning people than people willing to save drowning people? It doesn't matter that it's not fair that he is drowning.
And Toqueville was a rich entitled prick. Not the sort I want to base public policy on. But nice quote.
It is actually not proven to be said by de Toqueville, but even if it was, what you said is an ad hominem (attacking an idea based on who proposed it). Furthermore it is not referring simply to public policy. It is much broader than that. A democracy is the pretty much the best circumstance a common man can find himself in, especially given his circumstances throughout the vast majority of human history. He doesn't even have to fight (i.e. risk his life) to achieve the change that his ancestors did. All he has to do is care enough to vote in an informed way. If he can't put forth this relatively small effort compared to the price others paid for freedom, then he doesn't deserve freedom.
Maybe this is a bit harsh, but if you are waiting for the people in positions of privilege to voluntarily give up what they have, you're going to be waiting a very long time. In reality, fairness is not free. You have to fight for it. It's not fair that you have to fight for fairness. Life is not fair.
Calling it "Workaholism" implies we have a choice.
Calling it "Workaholism" actually implies we are addicted to "wrokahol", and the notable feature about addiction is the lack of choice. Maybe some would argue that alcoholics can decide not to be addicted as hard as this may be. I would also argue that workers can decide not to accept jobs that overwork them.
If you don't like it there's not much you can do. The job market sucks, and it's never going to get any better. Off-shoring and abundant work Visas guarantee that. You're given X amount of work to do and Y amount of time and if you don't do X you're fired, so you put in extra hours. Again and again and again. Heck, it's even worse for the Visa holders. They're practically indentured serfs. If they don't put the hours in it's back to where they came from with a black mark to boot. And those are the guys we're competing with for jobs....
Well if the job market is so terrible (for employees) and never getting better, then the obvious thing to do is to exploit that and become an employer. You can hire people for essentially nothing, and rake in huge profits for doing very little work.
Heck, is it just me or can nobody in the American Media do anything except blame the workers? Maybe it's because the capitalists own the media... Heck, I don't know.
I don't really see anyone blaming the workers. I do see people suggesting that workers take appropriate steps to protect their interests. Maybe workers should learn skills that indentured serfs don't have. Maybe workers should take advantage of a world with cheap unskilled labor rather than being a part of the unskilled labor force and therefore causing a higher supply to demand ratio of unskilled labor (as I implied earlier). Maybe workers should actually vote. Workers clearly have an electoral advantage. They, however, continue to vote for republicans and democrats that are selling them out to corporations (or simply don't vote at all).
Is it "blaming the workers" to point out the actions that workers could do to achieve their goals? Is it "blaming the workers" to tell them that no one is going to fight for them if they won't fight for themselves?
If you want something, you need to fight for it. No one is going to just give it to you. If you're strategy is "complaining" about it, then it had better be at a level that causes politicians to be voted out of office, because what is happening right now isn't doing anything.
"In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." --possibly Alexis de Toqueville or Joseph de Maistre
Is it possible that they just misjudged the distance between the earth and the supernova by 4.7 lighthours?
I have always dreaded the day when robots achieved fundamental jump.
That is not true because there is no upper bound on the energy at which you can claim your model of new physics exists. No matter what the energy of your machine is I can always crank up the energy of my model so that you cannot see it there. The point at which people stop being interested in a theory is when they rule it out as an explanation of a particular phenomenon it was invented to solve not when they have excluded any possibility that the theory exists in nature.
If my hypothesis requires 100x the energy of what the LHC can provide to verify, it is still falsifiable. It is only when my hypothesis requires more energy than than any machine could conceivably provide (i.e. infinite, or it changes to always be out of range, etc) that it becomes unfalsifiable in principle.
That is exactly the definition I am using. The problem is that you are not stating you hypothesis correctly. The hypothesis which is interesting to us particle physicists is not "does the Higgs boson exist?" but "is the Higgs boson the primary mechanism for breaking the electroweak symmetry by giving fundamental particles mass?".
"Does the Higgs boson exist?" is not in itself a complete hypothesis unless it also contains a definition of what the Higgs Boson is. A hypothesis that the Higgs boson is actually a black widow spider and in fact does exist but doesn't do what physicists thought is a semantic problem (and probably an intentional one). When you say "Does the Higgs Boson exist?" there is an implicit assumption that it is the one proposed by Higgs. If there is any ambiguity, then that needs to be disambiguated.
Extending this to religion the question about whether a creator exists is exactly the same as asking whether the Higgs boson exists: you can only ever get a definitive answer in the positive case where what you are looking for exists and you find it. If you want a falsifiable hypothesis then you need to ask a more specific question e.g. is phenomenon X explainable by mechanism Y.
is the big bang exlainable by a deity?
What would be the proof of a deity? I thought the being at the end was a superpowerful alien? I only saw the movie.
They predicted that the Higgs was greater than 114.4 GeV and the particle they found is at 125 GeV. WTF are you talking about?
Russel's teapot as he presented is not so much about falsifiability as it is about burden of proof. Russel simply said that his hypothetical teapot was too small to be seen by our most powerful telescopes. This makes his hypothesis unfalsifiable in practice, but not unfalsifiable in principle. We could look for it with a spaceship, or try to build more powerful telescopes. His point was not that we will never be able to find to teapot, but rather that the burden of proof is on the person claiming that the teapot exists, not upon skeptics to disprove it.
What would make Russel's teapot unfalsifiable in principle is if the teapot had properties that made it logically impossible to find. For example if it had the property that it was undetectable by scientific instruments because it was supernatural, etc.
Or alternatively, whatever he did *was* illegal in Japan, but law enforcement was not able to prove what he did. I don;t know anything about Japanese law, but I do know that the fact that someone has not been imprisoned does not mean that they haven't committed any crimes, it just means they haven't been caught if they did.
It's not factually a lie. In fact it is trivially true. If it were not true this would imply that we would understand any technology no matter how advanced it was, regardless of our mental/biological limitations.
I did what you said, and I got the result that Hinduism was true and not Christianity.
Let me ask you a question:
If you could get your wife and son back, but the price was to reject your faith, would you do it?
Would you rather have more time (albeit finite) on earth with the people you love, or would you rather have faith that you will have an eternity together in heaven (if it exists)?
I realize you don't actually have this choice. Feel free to ignore my question if you don't want to think about it.
when you've searched the whole forest, several times over,
Everywhere we have looked and thought we'd find godly influence
We have come nowhere close to searching the whole amazon forest. We are discovereing lots of new species all the time (especially insects, etc). We *really* haven't explored the whole universe, so it's probably not a good idea to make any arguments contingent upon having looked *everywhere*.
Everywhere we have looked and thought we'd find godly influence, it turned out to be not so. This has been going on for hundreds of years, so it's safe to assume it's not a fluke. If we can assume that it will continue, then god will retreat further and further the more closely we can look.
You are doing a lot of assuming. You are assuming that you know exactly what evidence for God looks like. You are assuming that if something happened in the past that it will continue to happen. Someone in the early 20th century might assume that no one will ever go to the moon due to a trend of not being able to go to the moon for a long time.
But then, Nietzsche really killed him, because the argument becomes really simple: A thing can be defined completely by the effects it has upon other things. If it has no effect on anything, then it does not exist. From this follows a) there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself and b) there is no such thing as a no-touching-the-universe-god.
Nietzche was not making a scientific claim. Things aren;t automatically true because Nietzche said them. Many people are of the opinion that God caused the big bang. Are you saying the big bang had no effect on us?
The second is that we know entropy to increase over time. God, however, is a highly ordered state and explaining how the universe went from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, and from high complexity to low complexity turns out to not make the claims more likely or simpler, but the opposite.
This is a horrible argument. This assumes that the laws of thermodynamics as we know them apply to God in order to disprove God. Why on earth would you assume that? Everything we know breaks down at the big bang. You can't even say something was a certain way *before* the big bang, because time itself was created in the big bang. There was no "before the big bang".
There are a lot of truly terrible arguments for the existence of God, and some equally horrible arguments for why God can't exist. one thing many have in common is they assume a lot of things that are really not reasonable to assume at all.
Actually that is not quite correct. The notion of a Higgs boson is not falsifiable in principle.
The higgs boson hypothesis as it was presented was falsifiable in both principle and in practice, because they supplied a predicted a range where they expected it would exist.
ll you need to do is say that it has a higher mass than you can reach with your accelerator.
This would make the hypothesis unfalsifiable in practice, but falsifiable in principle as a bigger machine could (and probably will be built).
At some point this mass will be so large that your higgs can no longer explain the things that it was invented to solve but that is NOT the same as saying that there is no fundamental scalar Higgs field out there
This doesn't make the hypothesis unfalsifiable. It makes the hypothesis incoherent. This is like saying "I think that a particular spider exists in the amazon, and I predict that it will actually be indistinguishable from a unicorn." Whether unicorns exist in the amazon is another question, but if it did, it would not lend any credibility to the original spider hypothesis.
all it says is that if such a field exists it would no longer be able to explain why fundamental particles have mass.
This is usually when theories get dropped - not because they have been proven wrong but because they have been shown not to solve the problem they were invented for.
Which is a different characteristic than falsifiability.
Falsifiability simply means that there is an experiment that can be done to determine whether the hypothesis is true. In the case of falsifiability in principle, this experiment doesn't need to be possible at the current time, it just needs to be logically possible (i.e. not logically impossible).
There is an important difference between something that is only unfalsifiable because of circumstance and something that is just unfalsifiable due to logic. Circumstances can change, logic can't.
can you think of a repeatable experiment that would prove or disprove that there is a creator?
I suppose this would be similar to thinking of an experiment that would prove or disprove that some same particular species of spider lives in the rainforest.
The experiment is "look for the spider", and if you find it, then it exists, and if you don't, then you don't really know, but it makes sense to tentatively assume the null hypothesis (that it doesn't exist).
In this sense, the God hypothesis is not unfalsifiable in principle, just in practice. It's important to note this difference between falsifiability in principle and practice. The Higgs boson hypothesis was falsifiable by an experiment involving the LHC. The LHC didn't exist in the 18th century so if the Higgs boson were proposed in the 18th century would not have been practically falsifiable, but it was still falsifiable in principle (i.e. a machine like the LHC could one day, maybe hundreds of years in the future, be constructed).
There is a good argument to be made that the existence of God is also not falsifiable in principle. You could have a super powerful alien capable of destroying entire worlds and causing us to hallucinate in anyway it desires. You could never really trust that an entity claiming to be the creator of the whole universe was telling the truth. Any beings significantly more technologically advanced than us would be practically indistinguishable from a God.
Also, even if there were really a God that created our universe, this God could not know for sure that he was really God in the sense that he couldn't know that there was nothing greater than himself (for the same way that we atheists can't know that there is nothing greater than us).
But if it turns out that God's existence is unfalsifiable in principle, then this means that even God presenting himself to us, is still not sufficient proof for his existence, because we don't even have a way to verify that a being is really God (i.e. that there is nothing greater) and not just some extremely powerful being.
If a powerful being showed us a video of himself creating the universe, we can probably assume he is powerful enough to fabricate a video. Obviously the proof is probably not going to be a conventional video, but whatever form the proof takes, it doesn't matter. We can assume that a sufficiently powerful being could convince us of anything, regardless of whether it's true or false.
You could just read TFA:
I guess....
You can claim that God made biology possible by creating a universe in which biology could make them exist, but you can't claim that God "created" animals at all.
This seems like a pretty dumb rule. If I claim human beings created computers, am I wrong because it turns out that computers are actually directly created by industrial machines?
By saying you think God created the universe you are still saying that God created all life (and probably that he knew he was creating life), but that evolution is the mechanism by which life was created (i.e. evolution can still be true even if God created the animals).
So really it seems that the heart of the issue is more to do with whether you are allowed to claim evolution is false, and less to do with claiming that God created life (which I would assume every religious person believes).
In addition to the new clauses, the UK government clarified the meaning of creationism, reminding everyone that it's a minority view even within the Church of England and the Catholic Church.
I suppose by creationism, they mean the idea that all animals were created at once, rather than simply the idea that God created animals?
I am pretty sure that if/whenever net neutrality gets passed, it will be something that does exactly the opposite of what it's initial proponents wanted (i.e. worse than if no law at all were passed), and the politicians will be able to claim to be heroes for passing net neutrality. Look at who we are dealing with. Republicans and democrats. I think the goal of net neutrality is perfectly good, I just don't trust politicians to know anything about how to regulate the internet. It's pretty safe to say that they have already demonstrated that they don't.
you are a liar.