Euhm yes it is. University graduates as a percentage of the total population "in the western world" is slightly under 2%. Outside of the western world, "parts per million" might be a better measure.
The really sad part is that less than 1 in 5 of those 2% have any kind of science degree (in other words, the humanities and "business" dominate)
And this is not masters, or phds. It's everyone with any kind of university degree, (including, to my amazement, those who followed a management seminar at a local university). It gets quite a bit better if you include dropouts, but still remains 10%.
A more than basic education is <2% of the population. Usually, religions and ideologies do without them, they don't care. Why would they ? Some religions, like islam, have a direct policy of killing anyone who questions them, which would be a pretty basic property of anyone who was educated in America 10-20 years ago ("empiricism"). Clearly, that hasn't killed them yet (actually it has, but there's historical subtleties here, short story is the "educated" west saw fit to resurrect this disaster. "noble savage" might by a good google search). This kill-em-all strategy has worked for islam (not for muslims though, who by and large live in extreme misery) : empiricism is dead in all muslim nations (with the potential exception of, ironically, Iran. And perhaps a small part of Turkey).
The idea of belief, in the sense of "trust in God" is cute. Why ? Because it's only really a part of Christianity. A muslim doesn't trust in allah, they are dominated by him. A baptism, communion and every sacrament in Christianity is a choice, and this is emphasized in the bible, and in the rituals (e.g. a baptism is clearly stated to be a "temporary" thing, until the kiddo can chose for him/herself). Parents may not agree, society may not agree, but the religion does, tempering the others. In islam it's a threat backed by the death penalty. Not in a weird law system, in the religion itself, pushing lunatics to commit atrocities. A buddhist, likewise, doesn't trust in god, after all there is no "permanent" god (buddhism is full of god-figures though). And a buddhism certainly doesn't trust in god to do the right thing, seriously. They think god is just as likely to change them into a snake and make them eat their own children (a story out of buddhism).
That educated "atheists" respond as if the whole world are perfect Christians has always baffled me. And they expect perfect Christian behavior : doing good by everyone instead of just yourself, everybody cooperating to "save the poor/less fortunate", not using violence if at all avoidable,... Not exactly part and parcel of most atheist ideologies. Yet they will literally be offended if you suggest that means they must differ on these issues, otherwise it's merely a naming thing. And all of these things, certainly as principles, are completely indefensible from within the ideology (and if you press one, they'll come up with the "golden rule". Pray tell, from who are we quoting if we're reciting the golden rule ?). Yet the revered rational though prescribes making everything a cost-benefit analysis, which they of course don't actually do. Certainly the example of atheists, the Greek democracy of Athens during the interbellum, didn't fear using massive amounts of cruelty and violence because they felt like it. It even got most of them killed. Surely an educated person would look stuff up, and examine his own assumptions beforehand. Clearly that's not the case.
Besides, if you enumerate what educated people believed historically, they start seeming a whole lot less smart. I'm sure "we're different", right ? Take how Socrates' ideas about government turned out, to remain with the prime example of atheists in America, look it up and you won't be impressed, trust me. If you look up his opinion on straight lines, you'll literally won't believe how stupid it is (certain geometrical shapes, basically circle and golden-ratio rectangles are "sacred" according to Socrates, amongst others, and therefore other shapes should never be considered for anything, despite the obvious fact, even to Socrates that arches were much, much more solid than his beloved rectangles).
What stupidities do we consider sacred ? Are you truly prepared to say "none" ?
And there's the basic problem : society can do without elites (after a revolution, it may collapse, it may improve, frankly usually it improves), but no elites can do without society supporting them. Historically, when you take the long-term view, the odds of society or even a small elite surviving without religion are slim to none.
The problem here is the reality of the world. Exponentially diminishing resources is... well it's reality. Utilize this well, by constantly finding the "next big thing" by having 1000 people try and 999 fail, and you become the leader of the world. Try to force reality to bend to your plan, your version of "justice", and it... well we've all had history classes.
Add to that that those demands people have "more, less money, now !" isn't a shortcoming of managers. It's a shortcoming of the human race. Frankly, most animals behave that way too, and the others are probably doing it too, except we don't understand how it works yet.
This is like all management strategies. Your post comes down to "sort by ROI for the project, set a little time aside for support". This strategy requires that you can threaten other parts of the business into behaving, which is mostly not feasible.
This is outlawed since Clinton was in office in any public company. The penalty for doing this is that it can expose senior management to personal liability.
Islam is about dedicating your life to the worship of god, and following the law of god in everything you do.
*ahem* That statement is about as meaningful as "rationality is about doing the smart thing". The problem of course is what does "dedicating your life to the worship of god" mean ? There's an answer for that, of course : hisbah
Translation (of the relevant arabic sentence):
Commanding right and forbidding wrong
Note 3 important facts : 1) nowhere does it states that a muslim has to do right and not wrong himself 2) the choice of verbs is not just a coincidence : it is not about asking, pointing out, or helping, it is about forcing 3) "right" and "wrong" are relative terms, obviously pointing to islam's view on the matter. So beating wives = right (under conditions x,y,z), helping orphans = wrong (under conditions x,y,z).
This is the central duty of any muslim : forcing (through talking "if possible", otherwise anything goes) others to abide by islam. This is what's meant by "dedicating your life to the worship of allah".
Christianity barely exists at all.
When was the last time you left your home ? As for dying out, Christianity has been declared dead several dozen times in the last 5 centuries alone. If you have any knowledge of history (merely comparing the sixties to the eighties might be a good first thing to do), you'll realize Jesus' commandment here is probably the wise course of action, and you'll reserve judgement.
The problem is perspective. E.g. it is beyond obvious that islam has experienced a ridiculous decline in Iran since the rise of the mullahs, but the question is : what's the effect of this ? Some studies say that islam's adherents in Iran are now 10% of the population at best (certainly true in modern parts of Teheran, doubtful elsewhere). Official statistics are equally ridiculous : 100% adherents. Similar problems exist for just about any ideology you might care to study.
Christianity is doubly difficult as it's still committed to a massive proselytizing effort that's bound to be working at least in some places.
And frankly, again given history, sadly I agree with Jared Diamond on this, and I think geopolitical realities will determine the future of religion, not some view that is considered "natural" by a privileged intellectual elite (now those are some views that have died out regularly in history). Islam is a "raiding" religion : it cannot prosper in expanding societies because raiding doesn't work where there's nothing to raid. Christianity is an expansionary religion : it will prosper most where people are building society up from nothing.
What matters for Christianity's spread is "the next America". I've travelled enough to realize that there are a few contenders, like China (doubtful, although it is certainly conquering it's neighbors, militarily destroying islam, confucianism and buddhism as it goes) and South America (ie. Brazil) (also doubtful).
You realize you just offended muslims, right ? According to islam, laws can't be made. (Actually it's more complicated than that, Christianity is the only branch of "abrahamic" religions that is (partially) OK with man-made laws. Partially, incidentally, is why we have the constitution-regular law divide)
You could even make the case that even atheists are against man-made laws. Certainly their philosophy doesn't agree with self-determination : you should just be rational, which means you only ever do the optimal thing, and going against that, that's just horrible. (of course it's mathematically proven that there never are any rational course of action (actually finding the optimal solution is impossible), so atheists are just shooting blind based on previous experience, just like everyone else, but as far as my philosophy coursebook goes, this doesn't seem to have been considered yet)
You're trying to convince "our ideology failed in the real world 100 times but in principle it's great" lefties by pointing out that the real world requires compromises ?
I love how your post demonstrates one of the claims of those Americans beyond any single doubt : for muslims, there is no difference between military and civilians. It is obvious this is an unspoken assumption of your statement : your post only makes sense if every military target is considered on exactly the same as a civilian one. Which mainly highlights one thing : for Christians attacking a missile silo is different from attacking a kindergarten. For muslims (or for sharia) it isn't different at all : it's an attack on the religion, "on all muslims".
That's the part many Americans still don't grasp. The distinction between military and civilian targets is a concept from canon law exclusively, codified in things like the Geneva convention that muslims may have signed, but don't really intend to abide by. You can't expect muslims to play by these rules, which to them have a big stamp "Jesus Christ" all over it, and muslims will blame you exactly the same whether you destroy a tank that's firing on you or a hospital with disabled kids inside.
Please also keep this in mind when reading muslim comments, or judging the reaction to "Jewish atrocities". Islam itself sees itself as one singular army, and they will judge any action on that basis alone, unless it affects them personally. This view has always been a purely theoretical view, with little practical impact on the battlefield, because of the "but who gets to command ?" issue. But it's a hugely popular view for muslims, even moderate ones in America.
You're deviating from the point. The point we're discussing is not the exact semantics of specific theories, just the different standards of truth used for various theories.
I repeat, "truth" means : maths - anything consistent with itself (e.g. a ring in which 1+1 = 0 exists (ie. "1-bit binary, or Z2"), and this is most definitely a true statement in said ring) physics - experiments + theories found to be consistent with these experiments (or best alternative, if no 100% consistent available) medicine - anything that seems to work in large numbers of people, often ignoring essential statistical laws (mostly "assuming" things to be independent when this is obviously wrong) humanities (whether language, philosophy, literature, history,...) - anything that can be thought of (it still varies quite a lot here)
These standards of truth used in different sciences are different, and they don't agree with one another (sometimes within a single science this can happen too, like the standard model - relativity example, although they mostly differ in which observations/experiments they consider authorative and which ones they ignore). The statement "God is a physical reality" matches quite a few of these standards. (certainly in humanities you can't possibly deny it anymore, and even in physics standards it's pretty easy to go there. In maths the answer is not actually known, despite a *lot* of searching)
That's something that's really, really scary in the IT industry right now. The industry is consolidating into huge companies, slowly but certainly. What's the next step ?
Well this is what car companies were doing around, say 1935 something around there. While that consolidation kept going, and car companies were growing, things were really, really good for their employees. Once the growth faltered, well we all know what happened.
That's a good example, one that is nice and easy to shove into a nice, very tidy, small box. But it still breaks down pretty fast if you try to apply it to other theories. Newton's theory can be thought of as a simplification (ie. leaving out terms) of special relativity, but neither theory can be understood as simplifications of general relativity, which starts from a vastly different starting point. There is no way to leave out terms out of general relativity and end up with newtonian gravitation. You can create "sub-worlds" in special relativity where Newton's laws nearly apply. But that is more a property of a very uniform environment, like the surface of a planet. It's basically stating that "these laws + this massive structure surrounding all possible experiments might make you think that Newton applies". It is not possible to create a non-trivial universe containing special relativity (ie. non-empty, more than a trivial amount of matter) where Newton's laws apply everywhere. It is not possible to create a world where general relativity applies where newton's laws also (even nearly) apply.
So how does that work in your view ?
Furthermore we have measurements where relativity can clearly be shown not to apply. The most well-known example would be entanglement, with FTL effects. In general relativity that effect is equal to time travel, which is explicitly excluded as a possibility. By contrast, the standard model says gravity shouldn't exist (it says the graviton should have no effect during interactions, to be precise).
So these theories are directly contradictory, in some cases relativity clearly takes precedence over standard model/quantum theory, in other cases it's plain to see relativity is wrong and quantum theory is right. How does that work in your view ? I'm sure you agree both theories are in wide use.
Both cases are tested using huge labs. If relativity is correct, computer chips cannot work, because the voltages they use shouldn't be able to flip the transistors. If quantum theory is correct there cannot be any planet in orbit around... well anything at all, really. Matter wouldn't even come together to form planets at all.
And how do you deal with the theory of architecture ? Which plainly states that the world isn't even newtonian. That theory is in wide use all over the world, and is taught to thousands of students as the correct way to look at buildings.
You might be interested to know that thermodynamics is derived from quantum mechanics, and is understood as its limit for large enough numbers of particles.
Start of thermodynamics : 1650 Start of quantum theory... let's be extremely flexible here and use the date for the "ultraviolet catastrophe" : 1911 (in reality the first date where people were really convinced of quantum theory is probably when the first atomic test turned out to work : so July 16, 1945 would probably be a more correct date. That was the point when people like Einstein and Feynman really became convinced of the correctness of quantum theory. Up until then it was mostly "interesting equations you have there" stage. Or at least, that's what his book says)
You really seem to like the idea of time travel.
Within their realms, however, every single observation ever made matches the theory.
Really, so how do the myriad of FTL effects fit into relativity ? Relativity, as an idea, collapses as soon as you have any kind of FTL effects. And, pray tell, how do you explain any form of space phenomena (like earth-sun in orbits) with the standard model ? How do you explain that there is any non-trivial amount of matter sticking together in the first place ?
Both are pretty common measurements these days, both are measurements that can be calculated by the respective theories (in trivial ways, I might add, but don't worry, there's also plenty of difficult problems). And in both cases the prediction of the theory doesn't ma
And the roots for every political party in Europe (and America if you go back enough) are the same as the roots of Stalin's purges. Your point being ?
When you go back far enough, we all came from the same single cell (not just from the same single celled organism, from one single cell). You, me, Jesus, Obama, everyone.
Surprisingly, the other wizards don't condone genocide. Don't order prophets to commit paedophilia (yes muslims claim their prophet was ordered by allah to rape a 6 (or 9) year old girl. At least that's what he claims, and you know, if he has lied then islam doesn't exist anymore).
That's the weakness of ANY rule system : in the end it's humans interpreting the laws. Iran's laws, for example, have a constitution that guarantees human rights as they signed the relevant documents.
The laws are quite resonable. In the end, the question comes down to : do you trust American judges to be reasonable ? If you don't, for the love of God, leave the country ASAP.
Why do you insist on defining a singular standard of truth ? Let me tell you : it doesn't work. As you say most sciences don't work with theories. So here's your argument:
a) no validated theory of God-as-a-physical-reality exists b) no theories exist at all for medicine (and climate science, and results of applied statistics in general, and...)
And you believe that God does not exist. I'm sure you agree that medicine and it's cures do exist, and are valid science.
This very discussion is a physical reality caused by God's existence (even independent of what you call the "physical reality of God").
There's other problems:
But they work within a theory which describes all different manners of decay. So they can coalesce those "answers" into really only one.
Cute, but this is a standard that would not be sufficient for a mathematician. So there's a lot of different standards of "truth" that don't even have all that much in common.
A mathematical truth is essentially any non-contradicting statement. A physicist's truth is any repeatable result of an experiment, and theories constructed from that. The caveat being that those theories are considered "lesser truth" (e.g. the observations of Jupiter's moons and the speed-of-light tests in Chicago are much more "true" than the special theory of relativity that they spawned). The theorys are merely stop-gap measures valid until a contravening datapoint is found, at which point we switch to new theories (and we have impossible datapoints for pretty much any physical theory. We know QCD is wrong, we know general relativity is wrong, and we know the standard model is wrong : they contradict eachother and relativity has this extremely annoying way of always getting the right answer, while simultaneously being the theory which describes the least). But they're the best theories at the moment for most datapoints). But the real truth are the experimental results. A climate scientist's truth is like a doctor's truth : it is essentially nothing more than something that seems to have happened and direct deductions from those (non-repeatable) "facts". Facts is between apostrophes since even the facts are relatively bad measurement results (5% is a pretty normal error range for a weather station outside of "the west", at sea there's bigger error margins still, as we don't even have stationary stations there). E.g. "the earth is heating up" or "this person got sick due to such-and-such bacterium". Sure there are indications that this has happened, but you can't repeat the experiment, and there is a large (compared to physics) chance that it is in fact something completely different (see the denialist websites for a million -somewhat less likely- theories) (an example from medicine would be that 2 viral infections peaking at different times are nearly indistinguishable from a bacterial infection, yet they're fundamentally different things)
When you go up the ladder from math to things like the humanities, ever bigger problems are tolerated:
In math you have the "spawn of Godel", and the result of the "choice" disaster, which limit math enormously. Essentially there are fundamental unsolved (and unsolvable) problems with natural numbers, and everything based on them. We just don't know what to do about those problems, and we don't want to do away with natural numbers entirely, even if there's small problems with them.
In physics. First you have all the problems we ignore in maths. On top of that we essentially don't know the rules of the universe. So we're not working from first principles into useful laws, rather the reverse. We also have many assumptions that are entirely unproven (e.g. the all-important japanese electron assumption which essentially states that all distinct phenomena react in the same way no matter where, when or how they occur. Needless to say, this is a huge assumption. Also there's the basic assumption that a simple unde
Nonsense, there were Muslim astronomers experimenting with heliocentric models back in the 13th century
Not according to wikipedia:
Nicolaus Copernicus (German: Nikolaus Kopernikus; Italian: Nicolò Copernico; Polish: Mikoaj Kopernik; in his youth, Niclas Koppernigk;[1] 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.[2]
Unless "comprehensive" is the way to make this statement a technical lie, you're plain wrong.
BTW: my point is not that Christians were the sole caretakers of science, it's that they're the only caretakers that managed not to burn all their scientific knowledge and they also didn't get destroyed (btw : although not a certainty, it is extremely likely that all of the societies that did get destroyed burned their scientific knowledge first. A prime example of this would be the mayans : they possessed relatively advanced astronomic knowledge in their early period that was no longer present in their last period).
Another sidepoint is that muslims, and by that I mean all variants of muslim civilization, except the last one (let's called it "post-colonization islam" to illustrate that it's the one that uses the western (canonical) institutions that were created during colonization) destroyed all their scientific knowledge (and they're still at it). They did not just destroy it, they did so for this reason.
And while this is less true today due to the massive resources oil use has made available to the human race, making scientific research basically have insignificant budgets, these Catholic orders that did guard science during the dark ages invested huge amounts of their budgets into scientific research, copying books, and all sorts of necessary things... I wouldn't be surprised if they invested 80% or more of their resources, that could have gone to luxury living, into science.
Today even the tiny science budgets we do allocate (sadly far less than 1% of govt. budgets) pay for a huge amount of research, thanks to oil allowing us to work and live at the scale that we do. But it's pretty obvious what would happen if we lost our abundant energy reserves, and no serious attention is put into it. Except of course, by the aforementioned orders who maintain huge paper libraries, and actually have a plan if funding dries up. Perhaps an illustration for how far this can go, how well it can work, see here.
"You might want to think a bit more deeply about what is evidence in science."
Well I've only followed philosophy of science for 2 years. I'm sure there's things I'm missing.
If you don't agree with the empiricist view of evidence in science (a repeatable experiment) why don't you just say flat out what you consider "scientific evidence". The mere fact that you assume there is some unified view on "evidence" does not bode well for a good answer, of course.
The empiricist view is widely followed, but it has the problem that almost nothing that is taken as proof in things like climate science or medicine is considered acceptable as proof (both work with statistical proof, and when you dig down it boils down to "this usually happens, so it must be true". Sometimes they tried a million times and they only got 50 different answers. For climate science or medicine that would be absurdly strong proof, far stronger than they usually get. For physics that would be laughably weak, unless this is a consistent result, but will probably be considered interesting (mostly the 50 weird answers will be considered interesting though, you would need an explanation for every value). For mathematics it would not justify looking at the result at all)
It gets worse. The mere fact that someone thought it up is considered proof of it's existence in the humanities. For them, Batman exists, and they will study him.
Wait what? I don't believe in gods, which makes me an atheist. And that has nothing to do with my being an atheist? You make no sense.
And why is this:
The idea is that to me, something exists if it is observed to have an effect on the universe.
God obviously does have many observable effects on the world. The bible would be one, our society, science, Christmas,... These are real effects whether "God" is a real god or a figment of some Roman's imagination 2000 years ago. So this claim of yours doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It is logically inconsistent.
If this is true, your standard for proof of existence is not even satisfied by empiricism ("we believe what we can observe", which is a very stringent standard that isn't sufficient for so-called statistical sciences like medicine or climate science, because we can't (repeatably) see the climate change in response to stimuli and we cannot repeatably cure patients ("every patient is different") or even reliably make them sick).
Since you claim a pure motivation motivated by rationality and, it must be that you feel compelled by relatively obscure mathematical arguments to believe or not believe something, and you refuse to accept the limits of empiricism (that you can't prove a negative, which is necessary to make the step from agnost to atheist). Since you claim it is your concerns about this that lead you to disbelieve, surely you can agree that you must apply this to everything. Otherwise you're nothing but a hypocrite.
The list of non-empiricist sciences (the only ones, therefore, that you can accept the conclusions and existence of) : First order logic, constructivist second-order logic... that all, folks ! (btw: an additional subtlety is that neither of these sciences claims anything exists, the empty set is a solution to both theories)
List of empiricist sciences (that you cannot accept by your own rules) : math (excluding the two tiny above-mentioned domains), physics, chemistry, medicine,...
If you truly believed as you do, because of the proof issues, that means you cannot believe in any kind of science.
But this makes me think your motivation, the real one, is simply:
But I prefer to call myself an atheist. Because I lead my life as though no gods existed,
Have you been in a coma the last 1400 years ? The only science that was ever pushed forward in the muslim world was in the early days when those countries' populations were 99% or more Christian or Jewish. After that, their results were burned and only the (very few) things that could be transmitted over boats and the like to, mostly fundamentalist, Christians survived.
It is rumoured some things survived in a few libraries in Baghdad and/or Constantinople. Rumoured.
That's a statement (and it's even not the statement Christians are making. Christians claim any good moral person goes to heaven, and you really have to commit serious atrocities before you'll get sent to heaven. You criticism ironically does apply to islam, which does claim that saying the shahada will get a massacring rapist into heaven).
We're not talking about statements here. We're talking about real, live killing. Are you seriously going to claim there's no difference ?
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Euhm yes it is. University graduates as a percentage of the total population "in the western world" is slightly under 2%. Outside of the western world, "parts per million" might be a better measure.
The really sad part is that less than 1 in 5 of those 2% have any kind of science degree (in other words, the humanities and "business" dominate)
And this is not masters, or phds. It's everyone with any kind of university degree, (including, to my amazement, those who followed a management seminar at a local university). It gets quite a bit better if you include dropouts, but still remains 10%.
A more than basic education is <2% of the population. Usually, religions and ideologies do without them, they don't care. Why would they ? Some religions, like islam, have a direct policy of killing anyone who questions them, which would be a pretty basic property of anyone who was educated in America 10-20 years ago ("empiricism"). Clearly, that hasn't killed them yet (actually it has, but there's historical subtleties here, short story is the "educated" west saw fit to resurrect this disaster. "noble savage" might by a good google search). This kill-em-all strategy has worked for islam (not for muslims though, who by and large live in extreme misery) : empiricism is dead in all muslim nations (with the potential exception of, ironically, Iran. And perhaps a small part of Turkey).
The idea of belief, in the sense of "trust in God" is cute. Why ? Because it's only really a part of Christianity. A muslim doesn't trust in allah, they are dominated by him. A baptism, communion and every sacrament in Christianity is a choice, and this is emphasized in the bible, and in the rituals (e.g. a baptism is clearly stated to be a "temporary" thing, until the kiddo can chose for him/herself). Parents may not agree, society may not agree, but the religion does, tempering the others. In islam it's a threat backed by the death penalty. Not in a weird law system, in the religion itself, pushing lunatics to commit atrocities. A buddhist, likewise, doesn't trust in god, after all there is no "permanent" god (buddhism is full of god-figures though). And a buddhism certainly doesn't trust in god to do the right thing, seriously. They think god is just as likely to change them into a snake and make them eat their own children (a story out of buddhism).
That educated "atheists" respond as if the whole world are perfect Christians has always baffled me. And they expect perfect Christian behavior : doing good by everyone instead of just yourself, everybody cooperating to "save the poor/less fortunate", not using violence if at all avoidable, ... Not exactly part and parcel of most atheist ideologies. Yet they will literally be offended if you suggest that means they must differ on these issues, otherwise it's merely a naming thing. And all of these things, certainly as principles, are completely indefensible from within the ideology (and if you press one, they'll come up with the "golden rule". Pray tell, from who are we quoting if we're reciting the golden rule ?). Yet the revered rational though prescribes making everything a cost-benefit analysis, which they of course don't actually do. Certainly the example of atheists, the Greek democracy of Athens during the interbellum, didn't fear using massive amounts of cruelty and violence because they felt like it. It even got most of them killed. Surely an educated person would look stuff up, and examine his own assumptions beforehand. Clearly that's not the case.
Besides, if you enumerate what educated people believed historically, they start seeming a whole lot less smart. I'm sure "we're different", right ? Take how Socrates' ideas about government turned out, to remain with the prime example of atheists in America, look it up and you won't be impressed, trust me. If you look up his opinion on straight lines, you'll literally won't believe how stupid it is (certain geometrical shapes, basically circle and golden-ratio rectangles are "sacred" according to Socrates, amongst others, and therefore other shapes should never be considered for anything, despite the obvious fact, even to Socrates that arches were much, much more solid than his beloved rectangles).
What stupidities do we consider sacred ? Are you truly prepared to say "none" ?
And there's the basic problem : society can do without elites (after a revolution, it may collapse, it may improve, frankly usually it improves), but no elites can do without society supporting them. Historically, when you take the long-term view, the odds of society or even a small elite surviving without religion are slim to none.
Giving the firefighters/babysitters on a programming team direct unchecked (beforehand) access to operational systems.
The problem here is the reality of the world. Exponentially diminishing resources is ... well it's reality. Utilize this well, by constantly finding the "next big thing" by having 1000 people try and 999 fail, and you become the leader of the world. Try to force reality to bend to your plan, your version of "justice", and it ... well we've all had history classes.
Add to that that those demands people have "more, less money, now !" isn't a shortcoming of managers. It's a shortcoming of the human race. Frankly, most animals behave that way too, and the others are probably doing it too, except we don't understand how it works yet.
This is like all management strategies. Your post comes down to "sort by ROI for the project, set a little time aside for support". This strategy requires that you can threaten other parts of the business into behaving, which is mostly not feasible.
This is outlawed since Clinton was in office in any public company. The penalty for doing this is that it can expose senior management to personal liability.
So : good luck with that.
Just threaten those developers with a mandatory editor, vim, emacs, eclipse or nano, switching every week.
The productivity (measured in broken bones per week) will skyrocket without expensive goons.
Islam is about dedicating your life to the worship of god, and following the law of god in everything you do.
*ahem* That statement is about as meaningful as "rationality is about doing the smart thing". The problem of course is what does "dedicating your life to the worship of god" mean ? There's an answer for that, of course : hisbah
Translation (of the relevant arabic sentence):
Commanding right and forbidding wrong
Note 3 important facts :
1) nowhere does it states that a muslim has to do right and not wrong himself
2) the choice of verbs is not just a coincidence : it is not about asking, pointing out, or helping, it is about forcing
3) "right" and "wrong" are relative terms, obviously pointing to islam's view on the matter. So beating wives = right (under conditions x,y,z), helping orphans = wrong (under conditions x,y,z).
This is the central duty of any muslim : forcing (through talking "if possible", otherwise anything goes) others to abide by islam. This is what's meant by "dedicating your life to the worship of allah".
Christianity barely exists at all.
When was the last time you left your home ? As for dying out, Christianity has been declared dead several dozen times in the last 5 centuries alone. If you have any knowledge of history (merely comparing the sixties to the eighties might be a good first thing to do), you'll realize Jesus' commandment here is probably the wise course of action, and you'll reserve judgement.
The problem is perspective. E.g. it is beyond obvious that islam has experienced a ridiculous decline in Iran since the rise of the mullahs, but the question is : what's the effect of this ? Some studies say that islam's adherents in Iran are now 10% of the population at best (certainly true in modern parts of Teheran, doubtful elsewhere). Official statistics are equally ridiculous : 100% adherents. Similar problems exist for just about any ideology you might care to study.
Christianity is doubly difficult as it's still committed to a massive proselytizing effort that's bound to be working at least in some places.
And frankly, again given history, sadly I agree with Jared Diamond on this, and I think geopolitical realities will determine the future of religion, not some view that is considered "natural" by a privileged intellectual elite (now those are some views that have died out regularly in history). Islam is a "raiding" religion : it cannot prosper in expanding societies because raiding doesn't work where there's nothing to raid. Christianity is an expansionary religion : it will prosper most where people are building society up from nothing.
What matters for Christianity's spread is "the next America". I've travelled enough to realize that there are a few contenders, like China (doubtful, although it is certainly conquering it's neighbors, militarily destroying islam, confucianism and buddhism as it goes) and South America (ie. Brazil) (also doubtful).
Laws ? Made ?
You realize you just offended muslims, right ? According to islam, laws can't be made. (Actually it's more complicated than that, Christianity is the only branch of "abrahamic" religions that is (partially) OK with man-made laws. Partially, incidentally, is why we have the constitution-regular law divide)
You could even make the case that even atheists are against man-made laws. Certainly their philosophy doesn't agree with self-determination : you should just be rational, which means you only ever do the optimal thing, and going against that, that's just horrible. (of course it's mathematically proven that there never are any rational course of action (actually finding the optimal solution is impossible), so atheists are just shooting blind based on previous experience, just like everyone else, but as far as my philosophy coursebook goes, this doesn't seem to have been considered yet)
You're trying to convince "our ideology failed in the real world 100 times but in principle it's great" lefties by pointing out that the real world requires compromises ?
I love your optimism, man. Just love it.
I love how your post demonstrates one of the claims of those Americans beyond any single doubt : for muslims, there is no difference between military and civilians. It is obvious this is an unspoken assumption of your statement : your post only makes sense if every military target is considered on exactly the same as a civilian one. Which mainly highlights one thing : for Christians attacking a missile silo is different from attacking a kindergarten. For muslims (or for sharia) it isn't different at all : it's an attack on the religion, "on all muslims".
That's the part many Americans still don't grasp. The distinction between military and civilian targets is a concept from canon law exclusively, codified in things like the Geneva convention that muslims may have signed, but don't really intend to abide by. You can't expect muslims to play by these rules, which to them have a big stamp "Jesus Christ" all over it, and muslims will blame you exactly the same whether you destroy a tank that's firing on you or a hospital with disabled kids inside.
Please also keep this in mind when reading muslim comments, or judging the reaction to "Jewish atrocities". Islam itself sees itself as one singular army, and they will judge any action on that basis alone, unless it affects them personally. This view has always been a purely theoretical view, with little practical impact on the battlefield, because of the "but who gets to command ?" issue. But it's a hugely popular view for muslims, even moderate ones in America.
If you're paying $8000, and only care about the "one significant digit", can I have the $499 you don't care about ?
Just because a digit is 0 doesn't mean it's insignificant.
You're deviating from the point. The point we're discussing is not the exact semantics of specific theories, just the different standards of truth used for various theories.
I repeat, "truth" means : ...) - anything that can be thought of (it still varies quite a lot here)
maths - anything consistent with itself (e.g. a ring in which 1+1 = 0 exists (ie. "1-bit binary, or Z2"), and this is most definitely a true statement in said ring)
physics - experiments + theories found to be consistent with these experiments (or best alternative, if no 100% consistent available)
medicine - anything that seems to work in large numbers of people, often ignoring essential statistical laws (mostly "assuming" things to be independent when this is obviously wrong)
humanities (whether language, philosophy, literature, history,
These standards of truth used in different sciences are different, and they don't agree with one another (sometimes within a single science this can happen too, like the standard model - relativity example, although they mostly differ in which observations/experiments they consider authorative and which ones they ignore). The statement "God is a physical reality" matches quite a few of these standards. (certainly in humanities you can't possibly deny it anymore, and even in physics standards it's pretty easy to go there. In maths the answer is not actually known, despite a *lot* of searching)
What that means exactly ... good question.
That's something that's really, really scary in the IT industry right now. The industry is consolidating into huge companies, slowly but certainly. What's the next step ?
Well this is what car companies were doing around, say 1935 something around there. While that consolidation kept going, and car companies were growing, things were really, really good for their employees. Once the growth faltered, well we all know what happened.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/google-4q-2011_n_1217153.html What does this mean ? Although Wall Streets has some balls to call 2.7 billion "below expectations".
That's a good example, one that is nice and easy to shove into a nice, very tidy, small box. But it still breaks down pretty fast if you try to apply it to other theories. Newton's theory can be thought of as a simplification (ie. leaving out terms) of special relativity, but neither theory can be understood as simplifications of general relativity, which starts from a vastly different starting point. There is no way to leave out terms out of general relativity and end up with newtonian gravitation. You can create "sub-worlds" in special relativity where Newton's laws nearly apply. But that is more a property of a very uniform environment, like the surface of a planet. It's basically stating that "these laws + this massive structure surrounding all possible experiments might make you think that Newton applies". It is not possible to create a non-trivial universe containing special relativity (ie. non-empty, more than a trivial amount of matter) where Newton's laws apply everywhere. It is not possible to create a world where general relativity applies where newton's laws also (even nearly) apply.
So how does that work in your view ?
Furthermore we have measurements where relativity can clearly be shown not to apply. The most well-known example would be entanglement, with FTL effects. In general relativity that effect is equal to time travel, which is explicitly excluded as a possibility. By contrast, the standard model says gravity shouldn't exist (it says the graviton should have no effect during interactions, to be precise).
So these theories are directly contradictory, in some cases relativity clearly takes precedence over standard model/quantum theory, in other cases it's plain to see relativity is wrong and quantum theory is right. How does that work in your view ? I'm sure you agree both theories are in wide use.
Both cases are tested using huge labs. If relativity is correct, computer chips cannot work, because the voltages they use shouldn't be able to flip the transistors. If quantum theory is correct there cannot be any planet in orbit around ... well anything at all, really. Matter wouldn't even come together to form planets at all.
And how do you deal with the theory of architecture ? Which plainly states that the world isn't even newtonian. That theory is in wide use all over the world, and is taught to thousands of students as the correct way to look at buildings.
You might be interested to know that thermodynamics is derived from quantum mechanics, and is understood as its limit for large enough numbers of particles.
Start of thermodynamics : 1650 ... let's be extremely flexible here and use the date for the "ultraviolet catastrophe" : 1911 (in reality the first date where people were really convinced of quantum theory is probably when the first atomic test turned out to work : so July 16, 1945 would probably be a more correct date. That was the point when people like Einstein and Feynman really became convinced of the correctness of quantum theory. Up until then it was mostly "interesting equations you have there" stage. Or at least, that's what his book says)
Start of quantum theory
You really seem to like the idea of time travel.
Within their realms, however, every single observation ever made matches the theory.
Really, so how do the myriad of FTL effects fit into relativity ? Relativity, as an idea, collapses as soon as you have any kind of FTL effects. And, pray tell, how do you explain any form of space phenomena (like earth-sun in orbits) with the standard model ? How do you explain that there is any non-trivial amount of matter sticking together in the first place ?
Both are pretty common measurements these days, both are measurements that can be calculated by the respective theories (in trivial ways, I might add, but don't worry, there's also plenty of difficult problems). And in both cases the prediction of the theory doesn't ma
And the roots for every political party in Europe (and America if you go back enough) are the same as the roots of Stalin's purges. Your point being ?
When you go back far enough, we all came from the same single cell (not just from the same single celled organism, from one single cell). You, me, Jesus, Obama, everyone.
That's what muslims say, certainly.
Every other religion denies it.
Surprisingly, the other wizards don't condone genocide. Don't order prophets to commit paedophilia (yes muslims claim their prophet was ordered by allah to rape a 6 (or 9) year old girl. At least that's what he claims, and you know, if he has lied then islam doesn't exist anymore).
That's the weakness of ANY rule system : in the end it's humans interpreting the laws. Iran's laws, for example, have a constitution that guarantees human rights as they signed the relevant documents.
Judges think allah entitles them to violate any agreement they make (technically sharia requires any muslim to violate any agreements they make if it suits the cause - it is "haram" to respect peace treaties if they can win militarily)
The laws are quite resonable. In the end, the question comes down to : do you trust American judges to be reasonable ? If you don't, for the love of God, leave the country ASAP.
Any sane person would have no problems here.
That's cute. Let's now consider the same picture with the term "jailbait" below it (or as a section header, or ...).
What exactly does said pic refer to then ?
Why do you insist on defining a singular standard of truth ? Let me tell you : it doesn't work. As you say most sciences don't work with theories. So here's your argument :
a) no validated theory of God-as-a-physical-reality exists ...)
b) no theories exist at all for medicine (and climate science, and results of applied statistics in general, and
And you believe that God does not exist. I'm sure you agree that medicine and it's cures do exist, and are valid science.
This very discussion is a physical reality caused by God's existence (even independent of what you call the "physical reality of God").
There's other problems :
But they work within a theory which describes all different manners of decay. So they can coalesce those "answers" into really only one.
Cute, but this is a standard that would not be sufficient for a mathematician. So there's a lot of different standards of "truth" that don't even have all that much in common.
A mathematical truth is essentially any non-contradicting statement.
A physicist's truth is any repeatable result of an experiment, and theories constructed from that. The caveat being that those theories are considered "lesser truth" (e.g. the observations of Jupiter's moons and the speed-of-light tests in Chicago are much more "true" than the special theory of relativity that they spawned). The theorys are merely stop-gap measures valid until a contravening datapoint is found, at which point we switch to new theories (and we have impossible datapoints for pretty much any physical theory. We know QCD is wrong, we know general relativity is wrong, and we know the standard model is wrong : they contradict eachother and relativity has this extremely annoying way of always getting the right answer, while simultaneously being the theory which describes the least). But they're the best theories at the moment for most datapoints). But the real truth are the experimental results.
A climate scientist's truth is like a doctor's truth : it is essentially nothing more than something that seems to have happened and direct deductions from those (non-repeatable) "facts". Facts is between apostrophes since even the facts are relatively bad measurement results (5% is a pretty normal error range for a weather station outside of "the west", at sea there's bigger error margins still, as we don't even have stationary stations there). E.g. "the earth is heating up" or "this person got sick due to such-and-such bacterium". Sure there are indications that this has happened, but you can't repeat the experiment, and there is a large (compared to physics) chance that it is in fact something completely different (see the denialist websites for a million -somewhat less likely- theories) (an example from medicine would be that 2 viral infections peaking at different times are nearly indistinguishable from a bacterial infection, yet they're fundamentally different things)
When you go up the ladder from math to things like the humanities, ever bigger problems are tolerated :
In math you have the "spawn of Godel", and the result of the "choice" disaster, which limit math enormously. Essentially there are fundamental unsolved (and unsolvable) problems with natural numbers, and everything based on them. We just don't know what to do about those problems, and we don't want to do away with natural numbers entirely, even if there's small problems with them.
In physics. First you have all the problems we ignore in maths. On top of that we essentially don't know the rules of the universe. So we're not working from first principles into useful laws, rather the reverse. We also have many assumptions that are entirely unproven (e.g. the all-important japanese electron assumption which essentially states that all distinct phenomena react in the same way no matter where, when or how they occur. Needless to say, this is a huge assumption. Also there's the basic assumption that a simple unde
Nonsense, there were Muslim astronomers experimenting with heliocentric models back in the 13th century
Not according to wikipedia :
Nicolaus Copernicus (German: Nikolaus Kopernikus; Italian: Nicolò Copernico; Polish: Mikoaj Kopernik; in his youth, Niclas Koppernigk;[1] 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.[2]
Unless "comprehensive" is the way to make this statement a technical lie, you're plain wrong.
BTW: my point is not that Christians were the sole caretakers of science, it's that they're the only caretakers that managed not to burn all their scientific knowledge and they also didn't get destroyed (btw : although not a certainty, it is extremely likely that all of the societies that did get destroyed burned their scientific knowledge first. A prime example of this would be the mayans : they possessed relatively advanced astronomic knowledge in their early period that was no longer present in their last period).
Another sidepoint is that muslims, and by that I mean all variants of muslim civilization, except the last one (let's called it "post-colonization islam" to illustrate that it's the one that uses the western (canonical) institutions that were created during colonization) destroyed all their scientific knowledge (and they're still at it). They did not just destroy it, they did so for this reason.
And here is a list of famous scientists of the middle ages, to illustrate how knowledge was really kept.
And while this is less true today due to the massive resources oil use has made available to the human race, making scientific research basically have insignificant budgets, these Catholic orders that did guard science during the dark ages invested huge amounts of their budgets into scientific research, copying books, and all sorts of necessary things ... I wouldn't be surprised if they invested 80% or more of their resources, that could have gone to luxury living, into science.
Today even the tiny science budgets we do allocate (sadly far less than 1% of govt. budgets) pay for a huge amount of research, thanks to oil allowing us to work and live at the scale that we do. But it's pretty obvious what would happen if we lost our abundant energy reserves, and no serious attention is put into it. Except of course, by the aforementioned orders who maintain huge paper libraries, and actually have a plan if funding dries up. Perhaps an illustration for how far this can go, how well it can work, see here.
"You might want to think a bit more deeply about what is evidence in science."
Well I've only followed philosophy of science for 2 years. I'm sure there's things I'm missing.
If you don't agree with the empiricist view of evidence in science (a repeatable experiment) why don't you just say flat out what you consider "scientific evidence". The mere fact that you assume there is some unified view on "evidence" does not bode well for a good answer, of course.
The empiricist view is widely followed, but it has the problem that almost nothing that is taken as proof in things like climate science or medicine is considered acceptable as proof (both work with statistical proof, and when you dig down it boils down to "this usually happens, so it must be true". Sometimes they tried a million times and they only got 50 different answers. For climate science or medicine that would be absurdly strong proof, far stronger than they usually get. For physics that would be laughably weak, unless this is a consistent result, but will probably be considered interesting (mostly the 50 weird answers will be considered interesting though, you would need an explanation for every value). For mathematics it would not justify looking at the result at all)
It gets worse. The mere fact that someone thought it up is considered proof of it's existence in the humanities. For them, Batman exists, and they will study him.
This is all very reasonable
Wait what? I don't believe in gods, which makes me an atheist. And that has nothing to do with my being an atheist? You make no sense.
And why is this :
The idea is that to me, something exists if it is observed to have an effect on the universe.
God obviously does have many observable effects on the world. The bible would be one, our society, science, Christmas, ... These are real effects whether "God" is a real god or a figment of some Roman's imagination 2000 years ago. So this claim of yours doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It is logically inconsistent.
If this is true, your standard for proof of existence is not even satisfied by empiricism ("we believe what we can observe", which is a very stringent standard that isn't sufficient for so-called statistical sciences like medicine or climate science, because we can't (repeatably) see the climate change in response to stimuli and we cannot repeatably cure patients ("every patient is different") or even reliably make them sick).
Since you claim a pure motivation motivated by rationality and, it must be that you feel compelled by relatively obscure mathematical arguments to believe or not believe something, and you refuse to accept the limits of empiricism (that you can't prove a negative, which is necessary to make the step from agnost to atheist). Since you claim it is your concerns about this that lead you to disbelieve, surely you can agree that you must apply this to everything. Otherwise you're nothing but a hypocrite.
The list of non-empiricist sciences (the only ones, therefore, that you can accept the conclusions and existence of) : First order logic, constructivist second-order logic ... that all, folks ! (btw: an additional subtlety is that neither of these sciences claims anything exists, the empty set is a solution to both theories)
List of empiricist sciences (that you cannot accept by your own rules) : math (excluding the two tiny above-mentioned domains), physics, chemistry, medicine, ...
If you truly believed as you do, because of the proof issues, that means you cannot believe in any kind of science.
But this makes me think your motivation, the real one, is simply :
But I prefer to call myself an atheist. Because I lead my life as though no gods existed,
You simply want to lead that life.
Have you been in a coma the last 1400 years ? The only science that was ever pushed forward in the muslim world was in the early days when those countries' populations were 99% or more Christian or Jewish. After that, their results were burned and only the (very few) things that could be transmitted over boats and the like to, mostly fundamentalist, Christians survived.
It is rumoured some things survived in a few libraries in Baghdad and/or Constantinople. Rumoured.
That's a statement (and it's even not the statement Christians are making. Christians claim any good moral person goes to heaven, and you really have to commit serious atrocities before you'll get sent to heaven. You criticism ironically does apply to islam, which does claim that saying the shahada will get a massacring rapist into heaven).
We're not talking about statements here. We're talking about real, live killing. Are you seriously going to claim there's no difference ?