What I am saying to you is that you are a hypocrite. You call young earth creationists dumb for believing the world is only 6000 years old, and suggest that they are making all Christians look bad by being so dumb.
You claim that science only has jurisdiction in nature and not with the supernatural. But Jesus is claimed to be an actual person living on earth who performed miracles on earth, affecting natural outcomes via supernatural powers. This is not just a matter of the natural and supernatural being separate. It is a complete refutation of natural laws. This is a view that the supernatural has jurisdiction over everything and that physical laws are not laws but merely suggestions for how things should work when miracles are not currently happening.
Under such a worldview I don't see how you could call anyone dumb for believing in anything.
I am not claiming science is definitely the authority because we have seen no evidence to the contrary. I am saying that if you don't believe science is an authority, you have no business calling anyone dumb for not believing in science.
Your premise comes from a misconception of the authority of science.
Yes my view comes from a view of science as an authority, although I obviously don;t view this as a misconception.
How can a system of logical reasoning that is entirely rooted in naturalistic observations and measurements say anything at all about something that is, by definition, "supernatural"?
A central claim that science makes is that *everything* is governed by natural physical laws (i.e. that nothing real is supernatural).
When I asked "why *shouldn't* you believe the earth is 6000 years old?" I was implying that there is no reason not to believe this according to your worldview. Sure there is scientific evidence to the contrary, but you don't believe in the authority of science. Yeah the universe seems to follow natural physical laws sometimes, but according to the Bible miracles that defy these laws can happen at any time. Surely all the scientific evidence for a 4billion+ year old earth is no match for an evidence defying miracle that makes the earth seem a different age than it is. All it would take is for God to change the half life of radioactive isotopes, and that would lead to science dating everything incorrectly because we assume that these have been the same since the big bang.
If you don't believe in the authority of science, you are really free to believe whatever you want with no threat of cognitive dissonance. You *can* believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old, but only if you feel like deferring to the non-authority of science.
I don't see why you have any right to criticize young earth creationists. They are not making you look less intelligent or unscientific. You are doing that yourself.
I can work about 30 minutes on really boring stuff before I want to start sabotaging the work so no one is ever tempted to try to get me to do that kind of work ever again, and I can work like 16 hours a day on something if I find it really interesting.
For my current job I am obligated to work 9 hours a day, and that seems pretty doable most of the time. I do however get a disproportionate amount of interesting work compared with other developers though.
The Jesus from the Bible doesn't exist. The Jesus that historians will all agree probably existed is not the Jesus from the Bible. Why? Because the Jesus form the Bible was supernatural. The Jesus in the Bible was born of a virgin, walked on water, turned water into wine, healed people by touching them, and was resurrected from death. He probably did some more mundane things as well. Let's say the real Jesus did 50% of the stuff he is attributed with in the Bible. Is he still the real Jesus? What if it was 10% or 1%? What if the deeds of 10 different people were merged into 1 person, like how 2 real life characters can be merged into a single character in a movie adaptation of a true story.
It is not enough to say that a person existed. The truth of Christianity is not vindicated by the existence of a person named Jesus who did some % of the stuff the Bible says, especially when the things he is *most* known for almost certainly did not happen from a scientific point of view.
Let me ask you this. Why *shouldn't* you believe the earth is 6000 years old? And if the reason you come up with is based in evidence and science, why would this play such a crucial role in refuting the 6000 year old earth but not other religious claims? At least the 6000 year old earth is falsifiable. The idea that Jesus was the son of God is not even falsifiable.
99.99% of the work of automatically killing enemy targets is properly detecting enemy targets and assessing their value. Whether the robot makes the decision to kill with or without human intervention is of great importance philosophically and practicality, but is trivial in terms of engineering.
The reason why the military would want automated target detection and assessment is obvious. This just happens to also be the same prerequisite for completely automated military strikes. Given the relatively minimal effort required for a human to approve targets, I suspect the government has no immediate plans to take humans completely out of the loop, but merely plans to gather more potential targets via automation.
People still get to vote. When people figure out that they can print their own BMWs if they vote for the right people, they might actually get off their ass and do it. The whole mechanism of procuring lobbying money as a politician is contingent upon keeping your position of power by getting more votes than any other candidate in elections.
That's why I said "directly". Thermodynamics applies to everything. But it applies to examples framed in terms of heat energy and work, more directly than for example pulmonology. Yes human lungs are definitely subject to the laws of thermodynamics just like every other thing in our universe, but the relationship is more indirect.
almost all historians believe a man named Jesus from Nazareth existed.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were 10 men named Jesus that came from a town called Nazareth. But if all those men were just regular people with no divine ties whatsoever, either the "real Jesus" didn't exist, or the things that the "real Jesus" is most notable for are not true.
Furthermore, I never said he didn't exist. I said he may not exist given your threshold for saying "Jesus existed".
I could say that Darth Vader is a real person, because no doubt there is someone on this planet called Darth Vader, but if he is not the "real" Darth Vader if all the facts about Darth Vader do not apply to him/her.
My point is that even if you could go back in time and find the man, or men named Jesus, the vast majority of the "facts" that are attributed to Jesus will not be true, first and foremost of which is the "fact" that he is the son of God.
Many of the stories about Jesus (like the virgin birth, and reincarnation, etc) were common in messianic figures and myths at that time.
Given your threshold for determining that 2 beliefs are mutually exclusive. I wonder if you can come up with any 2 beliefs that are mutually exclusive by your standards.
That dynamic will change the relative costs of a manned mission versus unmanned missions. And given that the former do orders of magnitude more than the latter currently, we need to consider that the price can decline to the point where purely robotic missions no longer makes economic sense.
It is, but it's changing in the opposite direction. Computers are getting cheaper and more powerful. Better algorithms are being developed. This is why we are seeing an explosion in the use of drones. We are doing unmanned missions on earth because in many circumstances manned missions no longer make economic sense.
Yes manned missions are becoming less expensive. Unmanned missions are becoming less expensive at a higher rate.
There could be, but the theory would be called into serious question when the mechanism we assumed was underlying it was removed. It would be brought back to the state of confidence when Darwin first proposed it, before anything was known about genetics (although I think technically some people did recently about genetics, but Darwin hadn't learned about it yet).
The law of thermodynamics is not directly applicable to biology. Terms like chaos, order, and complexity have completely different meanings in the fields of thermodynamics and biology. You know what has orders of magnitude more "order" than all the life on earth from a physics perspective? The sun. A big giant ball of gas that has not yet expended all its fuel.
There is absolutely more entropy now than before the earth even existed. Why? because before the earth existed, the sun had more unspent fuel (of which the earth would only receive a very tiny fraction). This huge loss of order and increase in entropy of the sun is what allows life on earth to exist. The earth is not a closed system.
Ask any physicist and they will tell you the same thing.
Is it really even worth bringing up other types of "intelligent design" other than the creationist version perpetuated by the discovery institute? I think this just adds confusion to the debate with no real benefit.
I could say that I am a creationist because I create things all the time. But this would add a new definition of what a "creationist" is, that must no be disambiguated every time "creationism" is referenced.
Some things are naturally ambiguous. I don't think "Intelligent Design" is one of those things in 2013.
Why is the theory of evolution hard to falsify? In a certain sense, it could have easily turned out to be false. Darwin didn't even know about genetics when he came up with natural selection. He just assumed there must be some kind of mechanism that worked in the way that genes turned out to work. It was a very good guess given his knowledge at the time. Many others have made similarly bold guesses in science that turned out to be wrong. When genetics was discovered, it was a key piece of evidence strengthening Darwin's theory.
One easy way to falsify The theory of evolution by natural selection is to simply falsify the entire field of genetics.
It's really not any more crazy to believe the earth is 6000 years old than it is to believe in the Bible and that Jesus was the son of God. In fact I would say it's orders of magnitude more likely that the Earth is 6000 years old than the idea that Jesus was anything more than a regular human being if he even existed at all.
The claim that the Earth is 6000 years old is at least a falsifiable claim, even if it is wrong. Wolfgang Pauli was known to offer the following criticism of some unfalsifiable claims "It is not only not right, it is not even wrong".
1. Just about every religion makes more supernatural claims than just some innocently vague claim about souls.
2. Just about every definition of a soul that is separate from nature is incoherent. Such a belief is in conflict with science because it is in conflict with logic (one of the axioms of science). Willfully denying apparent reality of nature and/or assuming the existence of some supernatural realm for no good reason is unscientific.
And according to wikipedia the cost of the apollo program was:
$20.4 billion, or $109 billion in 2010 dollars, averaged over the six landings as $18 billion each.
The cost of the MER mission was $924 million.
If we look at distance covered per $, the apollo missions averaged $109billion/90.2km = $1.2million/meter
If we look at distance covered per $, the MER mission averaged $924million/43.46km = $21260/meter
And if time is really such a factor, we could have sent over 100 Mars rovers for the cost of the Apollo program, and that's being generous and assuming there would be no cost savings from leveraging existing R&D.
As to the scientific value of each, it's worth noting that the lunar missions were sample return with a considerable quantity of material returned. Any scientific comparison is going to strongly favor a sample return mission over missions that don't have sample return just because of the much higher value of returning samples for study on Earth.
There is no reason an unmanned mission can't bring back samples.
Or rather I should say that I wasn't complaining about the Federal Reserve, and the inherent risk involved with investing in the dollar. I was complaining about the false sense of security that the government perpetuates through regulators that don't actually regulate anything, and ratings agencies that are paid directly and indirectly by the companies they are raitng. I was also complaining about the bailouts that some banks that were too big to fail got, which creates a moral hazard to become as big as possible and be as risky as regulations/and their minimal enforcement will allow.
The part about the Federal reserve driving investment through inflation, I think is pretty smart. I don't think it is necessarily implemented in practice in the best way possible, but I think the basic idea makes sense if your goal is maximum growth.
We won't be sending humans on a one-way trip. That's a pipe dream at this stage.
Every trip into space there is a fairly high chance of everyone dying. In addition to the 14 astronought that died in the space shuttle accidents, we have had numerous people die on the ground and in test flights. Granted these are not suicide missions, there was every intention for these people not to die, but the US government also routinely sends people on actual suicide missions. These are usually covert rather than public spectacles.
Short of a dictatorship forcing people to go, the government is not going to send people on a one-way trip to a moon with no prospect of survival.
As I said our government is fine with getting people killed when they think the payoff is high enough. They just don't want the negative public reaction. In this respect, we are really no different than a dictatorship.
Those who volunteer for such an endeavour are generally not going to be useful to your mission in a scientific capacity.
That hasn't stopped us before. We sent a school teacher on the Challenger mission that blew up.
I don't think we should send humans because I think it's a pointless waste of resources, that only detracts from an science that might take place. If people are willing to volunteer on some private mission to Europa, I'm fine with it. I do not share you're belief that the US government would never sanction a manned trip into space with a low likelihood of safe return to earth for the reasons I mentioned earlier.
Bacteria don't need to have evolved with humans to be able to infect them (e.g. like viruses). All that is needed is for bacteria to be able to survive inside a human and for whatever they produce to be toxic to humans. This doesn't seem like such a stretch considering some bacteria can live in harsh environments like volcanoes and that most things are toxic to humans.
I think a bigger danger is humans contaminating Europa. You can kind of sterilize a robot. You can't sterilize a human. Humans contain entire ecosystems in their bodies.
Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
They also are orders of magnitude more difficult to get to mars or Europa healthy and stay that way for any length of time. If you could spend the same amount of money that a manned mission would cost on an unmanned mission, you could afford an order of magnitude more and better robots as well.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
As I said, it's fine if you want to go to Europa and see it for yourself before dying. This doesn't help science at all. Having one person there doesn't magically make everyone else able to experience Europa. All the human can do is send back pictures and data just like a robot would. A robot isn't just a better telescope. A robot can use any instrument that a human could use.
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You're getting further and further off-topic.
I was unaware that you were in charge of deciding what the topic of this conversation was.
What I am saying to you is that you are a hypocrite. You call young earth creationists dumb for believing the world is only 6000 years old, and suggest that they are making all Christians look bad by being so dumb.
You claim that science only has jurisdiction in nature and not with the supernatural. But Jesus is claimed to be an actual person living on earth who performed miracles on earth, affecting natural outcomes via supernatural powers. This is not just a matter of the natural and supernatural being separate. It is a complete refutation of natural laws. This is a view that the supernatural has jurisdiction over everything and that physical laws are not laws but merely suggestions for how things should work when miracles are not currently happening.
Under such a worldview I don't see how you could call anyone dumb for believing in anything.
I am not claiming science is definitely the authority because we have seen no evidence to the contrary. I am saying that if you don't believe science is an authority, you have no business calling anyone dumb for not believing in science.
What about sending old or terminally ill people?
What about sending people to permanent colonies? Human beings don't live forever. None of us survive indefinitely, even on earth.
Your premise comes from a misconception of the authority of science.
Yes my view comes from a view of science as an authority, although I obviously don;t view this as a misconception.
How can a system of logical reasoning that is entirely rooted in naturalistic observations and measurements say anything at all about something that is, by definition, "supernatural"?
A central claim that science makes is that *everything* is governed by natural physical laws (i.e. that nothing real is supernatural).
When I asked "why *shouldn't* you believe the earth is 6000 years old?" I was implying that there is no reason not to believe this according to your worldview. Sure there is scientific evidence to the contrary, but you don't believe in the authority of science. Yeah the universe seems to follow natural physical laws sometimes, but according to the Bible miracles that defy these laws can happen at any time. Surely all the scientific evidence for a 4billion+ year old earth is no match for an evidence defying miracle that makes the earth seem a different age than it is. All it would take is for God to change the half life of radioactive isotopes, and that would lead to science dating everything incorrectly because we assume that these have been the same since the big bang.
If you don't believe in the authority of science, you are really free to believe whatever you want with no threat of cognitive dissonance. You *can* believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old, but only if you feel like deferring to the non-authority of science.
I don't see why you have any right to criticize young earth creationists. They are not making you look less intelligent or unscientific. You are doing that yourself.
I can work about 30 minutes on really boring stuff before I want to start sabotaging the work so no one is ever tempted to try to get me to do that kind of work ever again, and I can work like 16 hours a day on something if I find it really interesting.
For my current job I am obligated to work 9 hours a day, and that seems pretty doable most of the time. I do however get a disproportionate amount of interesting work compared with other developers though.
The Jesus from the Bible doesn't exist. The Jesus that historians will all agree probably existed is not the Jesus from the Bible. Why? Because the Jesus form the Bible was supernatural. The Jesus in the Bible was born of a virgin, walked on water, turned water into wine, healed people by touching them, and was resurrected from death. He probably did some more mundane things as well. Let's say the real Jesus did 50% of the stuff he is attributed with in the Bible. Is he still the real Jesus? What if it was 10% or 1%? What if the deeds of 10 different people were merged into 1 person, like how 2 real life characters can be merged into a single character in a movie adaptation of a true story.
It is not enough to say that a person existed. The truth of Christianity is not vindicated by the existence of a person named Jesus who did some % of the stuff the Bible says, especially when the things he is *most* known for almost certainly did not happen from a scientific point of view.
Let me ask you this. Why *shouldn't* you believe the earth is 6000 years old? And if the reason you come up with is based in evidence and science, why would this play such a crucial role in refuting the 6000 year old earth but not other religious claims? At least the 6000 year old earth is falsifiable. The idea that Jesus was the son of God is not even falsifiable.
99.99% of the work of automatically killing enemy targets is properly detecting enemy targets and assessing their value. Whether the robot makes the decision to kill with or without human intervention is of great importance philosophically and practicality, but is trivial in terms of engineering.
The reason why the military would want automated target detection and assessment is obvious. This just happens to also be the same prerequisite for completely automated military strikes. Given the relatively minimal effort required for a human to approve targets, I suspect the government has no immediate plans to take humans completely out of the loop, but merely plans to gather more potential targets via automation.
We can just print out a new internet.
People still get to vote. When people figure out that they can print their own BMWs if they vote for the right people, they might actually get off their ass and do it. The whole mechanism of procuring lobbying money as a politician is contingent upon keeping your position of power by getting more votes than any other candidate in elections.
That's why I said "directly". Thermodynamics applies to everything. But it applies to examples framed in terms of heat energy and work, more directly than for example pulmonology. Yes human lungs are definitely subject to the laws of thermodynamics just like every other thing in our universe, but the relationship is more indirect.
almost all historians believe a man named Jesus from Nazareth existed.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were 10 men named Jesus that came from a town called Nazareth. But if all those men were just regular people with no divine ties whatsoever, either the "real Jesus" didn't exist, or the things that the "real Jesus" is most notable for are not true.
Furthermore, I never said he didn't exist. I said he may not exist given your threshold for saying "Jesus existed".
I could say that Darth Vader is a real person, because no doubt there is someone on this planet called Darth Vader, but if he is not the "real" Darth Vader if all the facts about Darth Vader do not apply to him/her.
My point is that even if you could go back in time and find the man, or men named Jesus, the vast majority of the "facts" that are attributed to Jesus will not be true, first and foremost of which is the "fact" that he is the son of God.
Many of the stories about Jesus (like the virgin birth, and reincarnation, etc) were common in messianic figures and myths at that time.
Given your threshold for determining that 2 beliefs are mutually exclusive. I wonder if you can come up with any 2 beliefs that are mutually exclusive by your standards.
That dynamic will change the relative costs of a manned mission versus unmanned missions. And given that the former do orders of magnitude more than the latter currently, we need to consider that the price can decline to the point where purely robotic missions no longer makes economic sense.
It is, but it's changing in the opposite direction. Computers are getting cheaper and more powerful. Better algorithms are being developed. This is why we are seeing an explosion in the use of drones. We are doing unmanned missions on earth because in many circumstances manned missions no longer make economic sense.
Yes manned missions are becoming less expensive. Unmanned missions are becoming less expensive at a higher rate.
There could be, but the theory would be called into serious question when the mechanism we assumed was underlying it was removed. It would be brought back to the state of confidence when Darwin first proposed it, before anything was known about genetics (although I think technically some people did recently about genetics, but Darwin hadn't learned about it yet).
The law of thermodynamics is not directly applicable to biology. Terms like chaos, order, and complexity have completely different meanings in the fields of thermodynamics and biology. You know what has orders of magnitude more "order" than all the life on earth from a physics perspective? The sun. A big giant ball of gas that has not yet expended all its fuel.
There is absolutely more entropy now than before the earth even existed. Why? because before the earth existed, the sun had more unspent fuel (of which the earth would only receive a very tiny fraction). This huge loss of order and increase in entropy of the sun is what allows life on earth to exist. The earth is not a closed system.
Ask any physicist and they will tell you the same thing.
Is it really even worth bringing up other types of "intelligent design" other than the creationist version perpetuated by the discovery institute? I think this just adds confusion to the debate with no real benefit.
I could say that I am a creationist because I create things all the time. But this would add a new definition of what a "creationist" is, that must no be disambiguated every time "creationism" is referenced.
Some things are naturally ambiguous. I don't think "Intelligent Design" is one of those things in 2013.
Why is the theory of evolution hard to falsify? In a certain sense, it could have easily turned out to be false. Darwin didn't even know about genetics when he came up with natural selection. He just assumed there must be some kind of mechanism that worked in the way that genes turned out to work. It was a very good guess given his knowledge at the time. Many others have made similarly bold guesses in science that turned out to be wrong. When genetics was discovered, it was a key piece of evidence strengthening Darwin's theory.
One easy way to falsify The theory of evolution by natural selection is to simply falsify the entire field of genetics.
It's really not any more crazy to believe the earth is 6000 years old than it is to believe in the Bible and that Jesus was the son of God. In fact I would say it's orders of magnitude more likely that the Earth is 6000 years old than the idea that Jesus was anything more than a regular human being if he even existed at all.
The claim that the Earth is 6000 years old is at least a falsifiable claim, even if it is wrong. Wolfgang Pauli was known to offer the following criticism of some unfalsifiable claims "It is not only not right, it is not even wrong".
These two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
1. Just about every religion makes more supernatural claims than just some innocently vague claim about souls.
2. Just about every definition of a soul that is separate from nature is incoherent. Such a belief is in conflict with science because it is in conflict with logic (one of the axioms of science). Willfully denying apparent reality of nature and/or assuming the existence of some supernatural realm for no good reason is unscientific.
And according to wikipedia the cost of the apollo program was:
$20.4 billion, or $109 billion in 2010 dollars, averaged over the six landings as $18 billion each.
The cost of the MER mission was $924 million.
If we look at distance covered per $, the apollo missions averaged $109billion/90.2km = $1.2million/meter
If we look at distance covered per $, the MER mission averaged $924million/43.46km = $21260/meter
And if time is really such a factor, we could have sent over 100 Mars rovers for the cost of the Apollo program, and that's being generous and assuming there would be no cost savings from leveraging existing R&D.
As to the scientific value of each, it's worth noting that the lunar missions were sample return with a considerable quantity of material returned. Any scientific comparison is going to strongly favor a sample return mission over missions that don't have sample return just because of the much higher value of returning samples for study on Earth.
There is no reason an unmanned mission can't bring back samples.
Or rather I should say that I wasn't complaining about the Federal Reserve, and the inherent risk involved with investing in the dollar. I was complaining about the false sense of security that the government perpetuates through regulators that don't actually regulate anything, and ratings agencies that are paid directly and indirectly by the companies they are raitng. I was also complaining about the bailouts that some banks that were too big to fail got, which creates a moral hazard to become as big as possible and be as risky as regulations/and their minimal enforcement will allow.
The part about the Federal reserve driving investment through inflation, I think is pretty smart. I don't think it is necessarily implemented in practice in the best way possible, but I think the basic idea makes sense if your goal is maximum growth.
Whoooooa there dude, and you're complaining about the dollar not being a safe investment?
I wasn't complaining at all. In fact, if you recall, I said:
It's really quite an ingenious system, but it sucks for people who want to play it safe.
We won't be sending humans on a one-way trip. That's a pipe dream at this stage.
Every trip into space there is a fairly high chance of everyone dying. In addition to the 14 astronought that died in the space shuttle accidents, we have had numerous people die on the ground and in test flights. Granted these are not suicide missions, there was every intention for these people not to die, but the US government also routinely sends people on actual suicide missions. These are usually covert rather than public spectacles.
Short of a dictatorship forcing people to go, the government is not going to send people on a one-way trip to a moon with no prospect of survival.
As I said our government is fine with getting people killed when they think the payoff is high enough. They just don't want the negative public reaction. In this respect, we are really no different than a dictatorship.
Those who volunteer for such an endeavour are generally not going to be useful to your mission in a scientific capacity.
That hasn't stopped us before. We sent a school teacher on the Challenger mission that blew up.
I don't think we should send humans because I think it's a pointless waste of resources, that only detracts from an science that might take place. If people are willing to volunteer on some private mission to Europa, I'm fine with it. I do not share you're belief that the US government would never sanction a manned trip into space with a low likelihood of safe return to earth for the reasons I mentioned earlier.
Bacteria don't need to have evolved with humans to be able to infect them (e.g. like viruses). All that is needed is for bacteria to be able to survive inside a human and for whatever they produce to be toxic to humans. This doesn't seem like such a stretch considering some bacteria can live in harsh environments like volcanoes and that most things are toxic to humans.
I think a bigger danger is humans contaminating Europa. You can kind of sterilize a robot. You can't sterilize a human. Humans contain entire ecosystems in their bodies.
Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
They also are orders of magnitude more difficult to get to mars or Europa healthy and stay that way for any length of time. If you could spend the same amount of money that a manned mission would cost on an unmanned mission, you could afford an order of magnitude more and better robots as well.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
As I said, it's fine if you want to go to Europa and see it for yourself before dying. This doesn't help science at all. Having one person there doesn't magically make everyone else able to experience Europa. All the human can do is send back pictures and data just like a robot would. A robot isn't just a better telescope. A robot can use any instrument that a human could use.