...there is no way to prove that e.g. our senses and perceptions reflect reality.
It's true that there's no way to disprove solipsism. No evidence of any kind could possibly be mustered to contradict the idea... since any such evidence could just be more illusion. You can't prove that the outside world exists, that the sense-data coming in has some relation to an actual external reality. You have to take it 'on faith'.
Except... hold up. Let's assume the converse for a moment. Okay, fine, have it your way. We'll grant that nothing but your own mind is real and everything else is just a dream you're having.
Then what?
You've just rendered everything pointless. Solipsism and related brain-in-a-vat models are internally consistent, but practically useless. If our senses don't correlate at all with an external world... then what? Assuming that sort of thing inevitably leads to futility. The alternative idea - that the senses do relay data that in some way informs us about an outside world - doesn't have that inevitable implication, and has the bonus of being at least potentially falsifiable.
The 'supernatural' in practice means 'incomprehensible' - unknowable by humans - something forever beyond human ken, something we will never be capable of understanding. Different terms are used - the 'ineffable', the 'mystery', and so forth - but the basic idea is the same.
Think about the difference between the notion of the 'powerful alien' (a staple of science fiction) and the notion of a 'god' in a religion. What's the essential difference between them? In the stories, they both do amazing, astonishing things. But a powerful alien is (ultimately, eventually) comprehensible - often in the story humans are able to figure out some way of duplicating its powers, or interfering with them, etc. Gods, though, are beyond what humans can do, and there's no point in trying to figure out why or how they do what they do.
And if you decide that something is fundamentally incomprehensible, you will stop trying to understand it. E.g. here or here.
"There is no distinction in nature between microevolution and macroevolution. Macroevolution is just larger quantities of microevolution over much longer times. It's like saying that there's 'microwalking' which is what I do from the car park to the office every morning, and down to the shops on weekends, and that can result in changes of my location over time on a small scale; but the idea that people, over tens of thousands of years, walked out of central Africa into Europe, then over to Asia, across to North America and into South America - that's 'macrowalking' and it's impossible. God must have put them there." - Anthony Steele
The problem is that all (multicellular*) life on Earth fits into a nested hierarchy. Two of them, actually.
Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution. (Little-known fact: Linnaeus, who invented the "kingdom, phyla, genus, species, etc." classification scheme for living things, tried to do the same thing for minerals. But minerals don't form from copy-with-modification, and a 'nested hierarchy' just didn't work and never caught on.)
Today, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected - that of DNA. This really is a 'text' being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it's the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.
It didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life - like that of cytochrome C - have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don't affect its function. (Genetic sequences for cytochrome C differ by up to 60% across species.) Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology - "this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue..." - conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
The details of these trees are very specific and very, very numerous. There are billions of quadrillions of possible trees... and yet the two that we see (DNA and morphology) happen to very precisely match. This is either a staggering coincidence, or a Creator deliberately arranged it in a misleading manner, or... universal common ancestry is actually true.
(*Single-celled organisms are much more 'promiscuous' in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a 'web' of life than a 'tree'. But even if the tree of life has tangled roots, it's still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life.)
That paper does indeed prove that some versions of inflationary spacetimes can't be eternal. It notes that it doesn't address all possible models, however.
In any case, there's a separate issue. You state, "at some point the fundamental mathematical principles of the universe had to 'always exist'. To me, the difference between that and a Supreme Deity isn't all that far of a stretch."
I disagree. It's not clear to me that mathematical principles like "2+2=4" actually "exist" in a sense analogous to how, say, the computer I'm typing this on "exists". It's a complicated question. Post-relativity, it seems that hyperbolic geometry best describes spacetime as we see it. So, in what sense does Euclidean geometry "exist"?
Besides which, mathematical truths, whatever their ontological status, don't have causal power. We model what actually exists in math, but the math doesn't make things behave that way. We modeled geometry in Euclidean terms for centuries before Einstein came along and figured out it didn't match reality. The model we used changed, not reality.
Positing even eternal changeless mathematical forms that 'exist' in some sense is tempting - the Mandelbrot Set sure seems 'discovered' more than 'invented' - but it's a far cry from a sentient being that does things.
There's no contradiction between their beliefs and behavior, because there's always a loophole in their beliefs - "God made it that way" - that lets them shrug and go back to reaping the practical benefits of scientific discovery.
My point is targeted at actual, committed young-Earth creationists who claim the scientific data really supports their position - not the Omphalos types. (Those I address elsewhere in this very thread, e.g. here.)
"One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth.
Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully.
The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.
It's your serve.
Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!". If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves?
Either way the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."
Basically, you're trying to use science to disprove an unscientific opinion. That's not an appropriate tool in this particular argument.
Well, first off, it's not intended to convert the diehard. It's not intended to convert anyone by itself, even. It's intended to provoke thought and investigation. A little searching might turn up something like this.
Second, it's not even a scientific argument. Rather, I'm pointing out a discrepancy between stated beliefs and behavior in practice.
The Phelps cult sure as heck aren't baptists, despite the name on the sign... Yet still I get asked about them in regards to my faith.
Yeah, like how atheists get asked about Hitler all the time, despite the fact that Hitler was sort of neo-pagan quasi-Christian who thought Jesus was Aryan.
I do agree that those rates are in the high 99% range, but the important point is we are not by any means immune to speciation pressures that apply to all animals.
Um... saying that we are not separate species now is not a claim that 'under no circumstances could humanity ever split into separate species'. Where the heck did you get that from?
We make a normative decision to have faith in science the same way we do to have faith in religion.
I, er, disagree. Strongly. There are big differences between 'believing in something based on evidence', 'believing in something without evidence', and 'believing in something despite evidence'.
Basically no evangelicals are really young-Earth types. How do I know? Because they don't put their money where their mouths are.
Finding oil is a very important and high-stakes issue for oil companies. Literally trillions of dollars are riding on it. Exxon's exploration budget alone is around $20 billion per year. When the chips are down and they need to find the most likely spots to drill - what kind of geology do they use? Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plankton (with a few plants and dinosaurs), but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could in those conditions? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
The alternative to that seems to be that there were multiple sets of humans who evolved into humans during a similar period of time on an evolutionary scale.
For a much clearer picture of how species really do come about, look up 'ring species'. For example, the Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can't breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don't seem to be fertile, like mules.
So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species then?
Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you've got an idea how species actually do form, instead of the 'saltationist' strawman that many try to imply.
It's true, we're all descended from one female, the "Mitochondrial Eve" - in the sense that she's the most recent common matrilineal ancestor. That is to say, by chance, she had daughters, and they had daughters, and so forth. There were other women alive at the time, but at some point or another their great^n granddaughters had all sons.
One major confusion is that species don't form from individuals. There's no 'single mutation that produces a new species'. There's always a population that diverges.
For a much clearer picture of how species really do come about, look up 'ring species'. For example, the Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can't breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don't seem to be fertile, like mules.
So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species then?
Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you've got an idea how species actually do form, instead of the 'saltationist' strawman that many try to imply. (Not saying you are, just that it's a very common misunderstanding that's often deliberately promoted.)
Note also that human 'races' are all entirely cross-fertile, and thus are decidedly not 'separate species'.
"Many eyes" doesn't solve everything, and nobody claimed it did. One thing it does do is shorten the 'half-life' for bugs to be found. Bugs tend to be found faster when many eyes are looking at the source. Some can remain for a long time - obviously - but according to every metric I've seen, open-source code tends to have noticeably fewer bugs than proprietary code.
"Surely you have observed how the first taste of argument provokes lads to misuse it as a kind of sport, that is, they use it competitively. Having been proven wrong in argument, they must go on to prove others wrong. They are like puppies, welcoming all comers to pull and tear at words with them".
Lair is 1080p native. Wipeout HD, too. I'm sure there are a few others, but most of them are earlier games. Everyone seems to have settled on 720p as the 'standard', for now, in order to ensure enough eye candy.
Actually, I'm a software developer, too. I was just pointing out that the AC couldn't have it both ways. If developers were doing the right thing, then an API that allowed them to check for disallowed permissions on startup wouldn't be a particular hardship. On the other hand, if a developer's incompetent, then the last thing we should do is allow them any and all permissions they ask for.
GP was stating that programmers would never handle all the possible permutations of missing permissions, and he's right IMO. Look no further than Windows where 99.9% of applications completely ignore all error codes for WinAPI calls.
So... developers are bad coders, and therefore we should give them free reign over our privacy?
If the permission hasn't even been granted, you get fatal exceptions thrown back at you because, as it says in the Android API, it's expected that A) the developer request permissions in the manifest (which are presented to the user at install time) before using calls that demand them, B) the user accepted these permissions when installing the app, and C) the system won't arbitrarily pull permissions out from under the developer at runtime.
Of course... what I was explicitly suggesting was not making promise C in the first place.
Were I traveling back in time and influencing Android's design, I would have had the manifest request permissions. Then, at startup, the app could check what permissions it actually has. This allows graceful fallback - perhaps the user doesn't have (or want) a Facebook account, so the app doesn't need to be able to get accounts or contact info. Other parts of the app can still function just fine.
On the the other hand, if the user denies a permission the developer deems crucial, the app can detect this and put up a note - "Bad user! No game for you until you let pull ads from the net!"
Set up an API that lets apps query what permissions they actually have. They can set up fallbacks (including "screw you, I'm taking my marbles and going home!") if they choose, right as they're initializing.
There's no reason they couldn't have let the user set what permissions an app could have. Even if they granted all requested permissions by default, they could allow the user to restrict them after installation. If an app didn't like that, they could still choose to refuse to work.
I'm sure the carriers had some input on that lapse.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that there's no way to disprove solipsism. No evidence of any kind could possibly be mustered to contradict the idea... since any such evidence could just be more illusion. You can't prove that the outside world exists, that the sense-data coming in has some relation to an actual external reality. You have to take it 'on faith'.
Except... hold up. Let's assume the converse for a moment. Okay, fine, have it your way. We'll grant that nothing but your own mind is real and everything else is just a dream you're having.
Then what?
You've just rendered everything pointless. Solipsism and related brain-in-a-vat models are internally consistent, but practically useless. If our senses don't correlate at all with an external world... then what? Assuming that sort of thing inevitably leads to futility. The alternative idea - that the senses do relay data that in some way informs us about an outside world - doesn't have that inevitable implication, and has the bonus of being at least potentially falsifiable.
More here.
The 'supernatural' in practice means 'incomprehensible' - unknowable by humans - something forever beyond human ken, something we will never be capable of understanding. Different terms are used - the 'ineffable', the 'mystery', and so forth - but the basic idea is the same.
Think about the difference between the notion of the 'powerful alien' (a staple of science fiction) and the notion of a 'god' in a religion. What's the essential difference between them? In the stories, they both do amazing, astonishing things. But a powerful alien is (ultimately, eventually) comprehensible - often in the story humans are able to figure out some way of duplicating its powers, or interfering with them, etc. Gods, though, are beyond what humans can do, and there's no point in trying to figure out why or how they do what they do.
And if you decide that something is fundamentally incomprehensible, you will stop trying to understand it. E.g. here or here.
Spending money to promote an idea is different from spending money to apply an idea.
Er... not exactly new. And hasn't set the world on fire. Oil companies don't use this model because it hasn't worked.
I didn't suggest starting an oil company.
I suggested starting an oil surveying company.
The problem is that all (multicellular*) life on Earth fits into a nested hierarchy. Two of them, actually.
Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution. (Little-known fact: Linnaeus, who invented the "kingdom, phyla, genus, species, etc." classification scheme for living things, tried to do the same thing for minerals. But minerals don't form from copy-with-modification, and a 'nested hierarchy' just didn't work and never caught on.)
Today, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected - that of DNA. This really is a 'text' being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it's the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.
It didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life - like that of cytochrome C - have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don't affect its function. (Genetic sequences for cytochrome C differ by up to 60% across species.) Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology - "this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue..." - conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
The details of these trees are very specific and very, very numerous. There are billions of quadrillions of possible trees... and yet the two that we see (DNA and morphology) happen to very precisely match. This is either a staggering coincidence, or a Creator deliberately arranged it in a misleading manner, or... universal common ancestry is actually true.
(*Single-celled organisms are much more 'promiscuous' in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a 'web' of life than a 'tree'. But even if the tree of life has tangled roots, it's still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life.)
In any case, there's a separate issue. You state, "at some point the fundamental mathematical principles of the universe had to 'always exist'. To me, the difference between that and a Supreme Deity isn't all that far of a stretch."
I disagree. It's not clear to me that mathematical principles like "2+2=4" actually "exist" in a sense analogous to how, say, the computer I'm typing this on "exists". It's a complicated question. Post-relativity, it seems that hyperbolic geometry best describes spacetime as we see it. So, in what sense does Euclidean geometry "exist"?
Besides which, mathematical truths, whatever their ontological status, don't have causal power. We model what actually exists in math, but the math doesn't make things behave that way. We modeled geometry in Euclidean terms for centuries before Einstein came along and figured out it didn't match reality. The model we used changed, not reality.
Positing even eternal changeless mathematical forms that 'exist' in some sense is tempting - the Mandelbrot Set sure seems 'discovered' more than 'invented' - but it's a far cry from a sentient being that does things.
Gaze upon the abyss, and be dismayed.
My point is targeted at actual, committed young-Earth creationists who claim the scientific data really supports their position - not the Omphalos types. (Those I address elsewhere in this very thread, e.g. here.)
Of course, if you're willing to go the 'God is beyond human understanding' route, then it's the intellectual equivalent of dividing by zero. You can 'prove' anything at that point.
Or, as Daniel Dennett puts it:
"One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth.
Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully.
The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.
It's your serve.
Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!". If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves?
Either way the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."
Well, first off, it's not intended to convert the diehard. It's not intended to convert anyone by itself, even. It's intended to provoke thought and investigation. A little searching might turn up something like this.
Second, it's not even a scientific argument. Rather, I'm pointing out a discrepancy between stated beliefs and behavior in practice.
And the goal is to get back to a place where decisions don't have consequences anymore?
Yeah, like how atheists get asked about Hitler all the time, despite the fact that Hitler was sort of neo-pagan quasi-Christian who thought Jesus was Aryan.
Um... saying that we are not separate species now is not a claim that 'under no circumstances could humanity ever split into separate species'. Where the heck did you get that from?
I, er, disagree. Strongly. There are big differences between 'believing in something based on evidence', 'believing in something without evidence', and 'believing in something despite evidence'.
Finding oil is a very important and high-stakes issue for oil companies. Literally trillions of dollars are riding on it. Exxon's exploration budget alone is around $20 billion per year. When the chips are down and they need to find the most likely spots to drill - what kind of geology do they use? Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plankton (with a few plants and dinosaurs), but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could in those conditions? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
For a much clearer picture of how species really do come about, look up 'ring species'. For example, the Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can't breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don't seem to be fertile, like mules.
So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species then?
Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you've got an idea how species actually do form, instead of the 'saltationist' strawman that many try to imply.
One major confusion is that species don't form from individuals. There's no 'single mutation that produces a new species'. There's always a population that diverges.
For a much clearer picture of how species really do come about, look up 'ring species'. For example, the Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can't breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don't seem to be fertile, like mules.
So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species then?
Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you've got an idea how species actually do form, instead of the 'saltationist' strawman that many try to imply. (Not saying you are, just that it's a very common misunderstanding that's often deliberately promoted.)
Note also that human 'races' are all entirely cross-fertile, and thus are decidedly not 'separate species'.
"Many eyes" doesn't solve everything, and nobody claimed it did. One thing it does do is shorten the 'half-life' for bugs to be found. Bugs tend to be found faster when many eyes are looking at the source. Some can remain for a long time - obviously - but according to every metric I've seen, open-source code tends to have noticeably fewer bugs than proprietary code.
(Plato's Republic, Book VII 539b)
How new is this notion again?
Lair is 1080p native. Wipeout HD, too. I'm sure there are a few others, but most of them are earlier games. Everyone seems to have settled on 720p as the 'standard', for now, in order to ensure enough eye candy.
Actually, I'm a software developer, too. I was just pointing out that the AC couldn't have it both ways. If developers were doing the right thing, then an API that allowed them to check for disallowed permissions on startup wouldn't be a particular hardship. On the other hand, if a developer's incompetent, then the last thing we should do is allow them any and all permissions they ask for.
So... developers are bad coders, and therefore we should give them free reign over our privacy?
Of course... what I was explicitly suggesting was not making promise C in the first place.
Were I traveling back in time and influencing Android's design, I would have had the manifest request permissions. Then, at startup, the app could check what permissions it actually has. This allows graceful fallback - perhaps the user doesn't have (or want) a Facebook account, so the app doesn't need to be able to get accounts or contact info. Other parts of the app can still function just fine.
On the the other hand, if the user denies a permission the developer deems crucial, the app can detect this and put up a note - "Bad user! No game for you until you let pull ads from the net!"
Set up an API that lets apps query what permissions they actually have. They can set up fallbacks (including "screw you, I'm taking my marbles and going home!") if they choose, right as they're initializing.
I'm sure the carriers had some input on that lapse.