Given that there's a limit on the number of new houses people will want, there's a limit on the number of framing jobs. Moreover, there's ways to build houses that don't require framing, and if people think they have to spend too much on carpenters, they'll come up with nifty new ways to build houses.
Suppose you had to use your CNC mill to support yourself. You can perhaps find a niche, making specialized stuff that some people like, but that doesn't scale to tens of millions of workers. Anything you produce on a routine basis, somebody bigger can produce cheaper than you can. In order to compete, you're going to need more tools than you can afford.
I have investments, which do a heck of a lot better than a savings account. I can sell what I want and have the money in my account in less than a week. I only need one week of liquidity, and I have other sources for that.
Invest in mutual funds. That removes much of the risk, and over time you'll find you get a lot more money than a savings account. The longer you keep it in mutual funds, the less the risk.
Yeah, and if you go around and talk to people who have succeeded in life, you'll find exactly zero people who failed in life due to their initial poverty. It worked for you, and that's great, but it hasn't worked for a whole lot of people, some of which work very hard and try to take advantage of whatever opportunities they find.
We can create value indefinitely, with artistic endeavors. A good novel has value (people pay for the things, after all, and if I pay $10 for a novel it's a good bet that I value it more than $10), and can be distributed with no consumables and a relatively small amount of resources temporarily tied up.
Moreover, to claim that it's a "zero-sum game", you need to specify what's being summed. It isn't true for individual value. Saturday, my wife and I went to a grocery store, and spent a certain amount of money to get a certain quantity of various foods. We wouldn't make the deal if we didn't value the food more than the money, and we couldn't buy it if the store didn't value the money more than food. Hence, each of us has something we value more than what we supplied to the exchange, and so everyone wins.
I didn't inherit a fortune from my father. I inherited some investments from my mother. I cashed in some of them to spend on my son's college tuition, and now they're more highly valued than they ever were. If I withdraw money slowly enough, I can do it indefinitely.
I'm looking at human time here. I'm a human. Moreover, I'm a technophile. If a ELE asteroid had been headed for Earth when I was born, we wouldn't know about it until it was almost upon us and we couldn't do anything about it. Today, we'd be tracking it for a long time before it hit, and we've got ideas on how to deflect one. Give us another century, and we're likely to have the capability. Therefore, whether we'll get smacked in the next ten million years appears irrelevant, while whether we'll get smacked over the next century is relevant, and the probability of that happening is very, very low.
We don't adapt by evolution like other species. If we find an ecological niche we like, we make tools for it. If things change, we make different tools. We live in a very wide range of environments without sacrificing our general fitness.
As far as infrastructure goes, my roads, water, and sewer service are provided by governments. My electrical and natural gas and telephone connections are to regulated monopolies (and my internet connection goes to the phone company). My garbage removal is private countries under contract to the city. Public transportation is mostly government-supported around here, because it loses money in operation while providing benefit to the general public. The US health care system is a tremendously expensive pile of stuff ranging from crap to diamonds. Other countries have different solutions, including some level of government control, and all other countries pay a lot less than we do and many have significantly better results.
I don't live in a communist country, but government control of a lot of infrastructure does just peachy, thank you.
The Universe doesn't throw giant rocks at Earth all that often. There hasn't been an event wiping out all life on Earth in something like a billion years now, and humans are remarkably difficult to eradicate. I don't think one of the fifty-million-year ones would do it.
If we're wiped out on Earth, then to continue the species we'd need completely self-sustaining colonies, able to replace anything they've got with available resources and able to expand. We won't be able to build that for centuries.
So, while I'm not averse to planting colonies off Earth, it will be a long time before we can survive (as a species) a giant mutant star goat.
There are thousands and thousands of scientific theories that are clear, understandable, explain some things, and have been proven wrong.
Not to mention that photons do have gravitational effects, I see no reason why everything in the Universe including electrons would decay into them, and anyone who believes Searle's Chinese Room idea can't be all that smart.
The closest thing I can do to creating a Universe is to write a simulation. I wouldn't exist in the simulation. However, I could get into the debugger and set Mary.is_pregnant to true, and I could have a readout of prayers and hack the code or fiddle with the data to respond.
The 6K year estimate has been around for quite some time, as someone started with the birth of Jesus and traced the years back with the ages of ancestors. Back when the Bible was considered to be literally true, having not contradicted much science yet, people believed it. Then, for a while, almost nobody believed in it. Nowadays, it seems that some people have a reaction against science and find some nonsense derived from the Bible to believe instead.
You seem to be confused on the role of science and religion.
Christianity teaches that God made the Universe, and presumably its physical laws. God isn't bound by them. Miracles are miracles because they can't scientifically happen. According to the Bible, Joseph was going to quietly annul his marriage when he found Mary was pregnant. He didn't believe in virgin births, and it took an angel to convince him this was one. Jesus coming back to life after three days was a miracle.
We know that matter and energy are conserved everywhere we can see or infer. We don't know that it is everywhere under all circumstances. If there was a small variation every millennium or so, we wouldn't notice.
We really don't know much about the actual Big Bang. We have theories that tell us, in general, what happened beginning a teensy fraction of a second after the Big Bang, but they have a lot of holes. (Why is the Universe matter rather than anti-matter?) At what point did conservation laws apply? By Noether's Theorem, the conservation of energy and momentum are equivalent to the laws of physics not varying over spacetime, but what does that mean when there is no spacetime?
You're also confusing "evidence" with "scientific evidence". My personal experiences constitute evidence, even if they aren't objectively verifiable. For practical purposes, we can't confine our beliefs to things that can be shown scientifically. We do need some sense of morality, for example.
The Christian belief system is founded on a limited number of beliefs, mostly expressed in the New Testament, and none of which are falsifiable. Christianity is not built on holy texts, which came along after the religion was founded.
FWIW, the Episcopalians I know (the idea of an Anglican church became unpopular here in the late 18th Century, for some reason, so they changed the name) do believe in God.
The problem with the Church of England is that it's official, so being an Anglican isn't quite as voluntary as being an Episcopalian here. Around here, if you don't believe in God, you generally don't associate with a religion, although the Unitarian churches around here are very atheist-friendly..
I don't think anyone reads Genesis literally except for atheists.
Regrettably, you're wrong. There are far too many Young-Earth Creationists around.
Most militant atheists and leftists do not grasp poetry, exalt decadent modern art, and often can scarcely even tolerate listening to classical music.
In other words, you make up things about people you don't like, and accuse them of having different tastes in art, as if that's reprehensible. I don't know how many of my friends and family like poetry, but they all like classical music to some extent. I'm kind of on the right wing of my family, politically, so I do know something about militant leftists. The religious beliefs are more varied.
Most militant atheists, including even Richard Dawkins, are entirely ignorant of modern evolutionary psychology and sex selection.
Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. Assuming that there's anything vaguely scientific about "modern evolutionary psychology and sex selection", I'd wager he knows about it. He may not agree with you, and on matters biological I'm trusting him more than you.
The truth is there is no question that belief in God is genetic...If you believe in evolution, then you should believe we have no way of changing people's belief in God.
There are genetic factors that tend to religious belief. I suspect that if you go up Dawkin's family tree in any direction, you'll hit Christians soon enough. Moreover, evolution is about changing genetic things, so your last sentence is flatly contradictory.
It's possible to believe in Christianity and also to believe that the Bible is the work of fallible but generally inspired and wise people. If you believe in God and the Trinity and that Jesus was God and died for our sins so that we may enter the Kingdom of Heaven after we die, that doesn't imply that everything ever written about religion must be true, or even a set of writings selected in a very political process some time after Jesus. The early Christians didn't have anything like the current Bible, and they were Christians.
Many people have spiritual feelings. Whether these are accidents of the evolution of the brain or a true sense of something real is something we're not going to resolve here*. Given the spiritual feelings, people have a feeling of God and many more or less push it into an intellectual framework, usually with some of their own interpretations, so that we get reasonably consistent religions that change over time. (We also get distortions of religion used to validate personal beliefs and/or desires, but that's a different effect.)
*The only good way I've come up with to tell the difference is to find alien intelligent life and finding if they have something like human religion.
Science is really nothing more than a rigorous method of thinking
Science is a rigorous method of thinking that works only on certain topics; specifically, on things that can be objectively observed and fit into a logical framework. Religious and moral topics can't be objectively observed. It's possible to scientifically study human morality and religion, but there's no way to test the actual beliefs. A strict positivist would say that "Is there a God?" and "Is it immoral to violate private property rights?" to be non-questions because of this.
As long as religion confines itself to things that can't be objectively verified (like "Jesus died for your sins" or "God knows what is best for you"), it has no conflict with science. When it starts making falsifiable statements (like "The world is six thousand years old" or "God only gives burdens people can bear"), they can get into conflict. The basics of religion are typically not falsifiable, so if they are to be known they have to be known without the scientific method.
We can't live on a purely scientific basis either. We need some sort of morality, and that can't be on a scientific basis.
Curious how they interpret genesis then. If the big bang theory is accurate, then a god simply cannot have created the universe. It all comes down to relativity: If the universe started as a single dimensionless point, then the gravity would have been so strong that time didn't exist. If time didn't exist, then there was no time for a god to create the universe.
Who's the "they" that interprets Genesis? Last time I talked to a Catholic about it, they apparently viewed Genesis as a symbolic account that satisfied a psychological need. Biblical literal truth is more of a Protestant fetish, although not all Protestants go with it. The base of Christianity (at least in the West) is in the Nicene Creed. It's about God and Jesus and some wonky concepts from Aristotelian logic. It has nothing to do with details of how the Universe was formed.
You're assuming that God is constrained by the time of the Universe we live in. That's a bad assumption. God doesn't have to play by the God-given rules. We don't even know if there's something outside our Universe (a question that's likely to remain unanswered) that might have something corresponding to our time but with a different starting place.
Heck, St. Augustine thought God created time along with the Universe, so the question of "What was God doing before?" is probably meaningless.
The main reason that there is so much pedophilia in Catholicism
Last I looked, the reason there was so much child molestation in Catholicism was that there's so much all over. The numbers are frightening. The really unpleasant thing about the Catholic Church was that it hid child rapists and shuffled them around to other positions where they had access to children, not that that's unique.
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Given that there's a limit on the number of new houses people will want, there's a limit on the number of framing jobs. Moreover, there's ways to build houses that don't require framing, and if people think they have to spend too much on carpenters, they'll come up with nifty new ways to build houses.
Suppose you had to use your CNC mill to support yourself. You can perhaps find a niche, making specialized stuff that some people like, but that doesn't scale to tens of millions of workers. Anything you produce on a routine basis, somebody bigger can produce cheaper than you can. In order to compete, you're going to need more tools than you can afford.
I have investments, which do a heck of a lot better than a savings account. I can sell what I want and have the money in my account in less than a week. I only need one week of liquidity, and I have other sources for that.
Invest in mutual funds. That removes much of the risk, and over time you'll find you get a lot more money than a savings account. The longer you keep it in mutual funds, the less the risk.
Yeah, and if you go around and talk to people who have succeeded in life, you'll find exactly zero people who failed in life due to their initial poverty. It worked for you, and that's great, but it hasn't worked for a whole lot of people, some of which work very hard and try to take advantage of whatever opportunities they find.
We can create value indefinitely, with artistic endeavors. A good novel has value (people pay for the things, after all, and if I pay $10 for a novel it's a good bet that I value it more than $10), and can be distributed with no consumables and a relatively small amount of resources temporarily tied up.
Moreover, to claim that it's a "zero-sum game", you need to specify what's being summed. It isn't true for individual value. Saturday, my wife and I went to a grocery store, and spent a certain amount of money to get a certain quantity of various foods. We wouldn't make the deal if we didn't value the food more than the money, and we couldn't buy it if the store didn't value the money more than food. Hence, each of us has something we value more than what we supplied to the exchange, and so everyone wins.
I didn't inherit a fortune from my father. I inherited some investments from my mother. I cashed in some of them to spend on my son's college tuition, and now they're more highly valued than they ever were. If I withdraw money slowly enough, I can do it indefinitely.
I'm looking at human time here. I'm a human. Moreover, I'm a technophile. If a ELE asteroid had been headed for Earth when I was born, we wouldn't know about it until it was almost upon us and we couldn't do anything about it. Today, we'd be tracking it for a long time before it hit, and we've got ideas on how to deflect one. Give us another century, and we're likely to have the capability. Therefore, whether we'll get smacked in the next ten million years appears irrelevant, while whether we'll get smacked over the next century is relevant, and the probability of that happening is very, very low.
We don't adapt by evolution like other species. If we find an ecological niche we like, we make tools for it. If things change, we make different tools. We live in a very wide range of environments without sacrificing our general fitness.
As far as infrastructure goes, my roads, water, and sewer service are provided by governments. My electrical and natural gas and telephone connections are to regulated monopolies (and my internet connection goes to the phone company). My garbage removal is private countries under contract to the city. Public transportation is mostly government-supported around here, because it loses money in operation while providing benefit to the general public. The US health care system is a tremendously expensive pile of stuff ranging from crap to diamonds. Other countries have different solutions, including some level of government control, and all other countries pay a lot less than we do and many have significantly better results.
I don't live in a communist country, but government control of a lot of infrastructure does just peachy, thank you.
The Universe doesn't throw giant rocks at Earth all that often. There hasn't been an event wiping out all life on Earth in something like a billion years now, and humans are remarkably difficult to eradicate. I don't think one of the fifty-million-year ones would do it.
If we're wiped out on Earth, then to continue the species we'd need completely self-sustaining colonies, able to replace anything they've got with available resources and able to expand. We won't be able to build that for centuries.
So, while I'm not averse to planting colonies off Earth, it will be a long time before we can survive (as a species) a giant mutant star goat.
Would it be any worse than what we've got now?
Ever pushed a person in a wheelchair up a slope? Down a slope? There's a difference between "physically possible" and "fine".
And require pedestrians to change levels, which can be hard on some of them. Ever pushed a person in a wheelchair up a slope?
There are thousands and thousands of scientific theories that are clear, understandable, explain some things, and have been proven wrong.
Not to mention that photons do have gravitational effects, I see no reason why everything in the Universe including electrons would decay into them, and anyone who believes Searle's Chinese Room idea can't be all that smart.
The closest thing I can do to creating a Universe is to write a simulation. I wouldn't exist in the simulation. However, I could get into the debugger and set Mary.is_pregnant to true, and I could have a readout of prayers and hack the code or fiddle with the data to respond.
Photons have energy, which creates gravitational curvature. E=mc^2 applies here.
The 6K year estimate has been around for quite some time, as someone started with the birth of Jesus and traced the years back with the ages of ancestors. Back when the Bible was considered to be literally true, having not contradicted much science yet, people believed it. Then, for a while, almost nobody believed in it. Nowadays, it seems that some people have a reaction against science and find some nonsense derived from the Bible to believe instead.
You seem to be confused on the role of science and religion.
Christianity teaches that God made the Universe, and presumably its physical laws. God isn't bound by them. Miracles are miracles because they can't scientifically happen. According to the Bible, Joseph was going to quietly annul his marriage when he found Mary was pregnant. He didn't believe in virgin births, and it took an angel to convince him this was one. Jesus coming back to life after three days was a miracle.
We know that matter and energy are conserved everywhere we can see or infer. We don't know that it is everywhere under all circumstances. If there was a small variation every millennium or so, we wouldn't notice.
We really don't know much about the actual Big Bang. We have theories that tell us, in general, what happened beginning a teensy fraction of a second after the Big Bang, but they have a lot of holes. (Why is the Universe matter rather than anti-matter?) At what point did conservation laws apply? By Noether's Theorem, the conservation of energy and momentum are equivalent to the laws of physics not varying over spacetime, but what does that mean when there is no spacetime?
You're also confusing "evidence" with "scientific evidence". My personal experiences constitute evidence, even if they aren't objectively verifiable. For practical purposes, we can't confine our beliefs to things that can be shown scientifically. We do need some sense of morality, for example.
The Christian belief system is founded on a limited number of beliefs, mostly expressed in the New Testament, and none of which are falsifiable. Christianity is not built on holy texts, which came along after the religion was founded.
FWIW, the Episcopalians I know (the idea of an Anglican church became unpopular here in the late 18th Century, for some reason, so they changed the name) do believe in God.
The problem with the Church of England is that it's official, so being an Anglican isn't quite as voluntary as being an Episcopalian here. Around here, if you don't believe in God, you generally don't associate with a religion, although the Unitarian churches around here are very atheist-friendly..
Regrettably, you're wrong. There are far too many Young-Earth Creationists around.
In other words, you make up things about people you don't like, and accuse them of having different tastes in art, as if that's reprehensible. I don't know how many of my friends and family like poetry, but they all like classical music to some extent. I'm kind of on the right wing of my family, politically, so I do know something about militant leftists. The religious beliefs are more varied.
Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. Assuming that there's anything vaguely scientific about "modern evolutionary psychology and sex selection", I'd wager he knows about it. He may not agree with you, and on matters biological I'm trusting him more than you.
There are genetic factors that tend to religious belief. I suspect that if you go up Dawkin's family tree in any direction, you'll hit Christians soon enough. Moreover, evolution is about changing genetic things, so your last sentence is flatly contradictory.
It's possible to believe in Christianity and also to believe that the Bible is the work of fallible but generally inspired and wise people. If you believe in God and the Trinity and that Jesus was God and died for our sins so that we may enter the Kingdom of Heaven after we die, that doesn't imply that everything ever written about religion must be true, or even a set of writings selected in a very political process some time after Jesus. The early Christians didn't have anything like the current Bible, and they were Christians.
Many people have spiritual feelings. Whether these are accidents of the evolution of the brain or a true sense of something real is something we're not going to resolve here*. Given the spiritual feelings, people have a feeling of God and many more or less push it into an intellectual framework, usually with some of their own interpretations, so that we get reasonably consistent religions that change over time. (We also get distortions of religion used to validate personal beliefs and/or desires, but that's a different effect.)
*The only good way I've come up with to tell the difference is to find alien intelligent life and finding if they have something like human religion.
Science is a rigorous method of thinking that works only on certain topics; specifically, on things that can be objectively observed and fit into a logical framework. Religious and moral topics can't be objectively observed. It's possible to scientifically study human morality and religion, but there's no way to test the actual beliefs. A strict positivist would say that "Is there a God?" and "Is it immoral to violate private property rights?" to be non-questions because of this.
As long as religion confines itself to things that can't be objectively verified (like "Jesus died for your sins" or "God knows what is best for you"), it has no conflict with science. When it starts making falsifiable statements (like "The world is six thousand years old" or "God only gives burdens people can bear"), they can get into conflict. The basics of religion are typically not falsifiable, so if they are to be known they have to be known without the scientific method.
We can't live on a purely scientific basis either. We need some sort of morality, and that can't be on a scientific basis.
Who's the "they" that interprets Genesis? Last time I talked to a Catholic about it, they apparently viewed Genesis as a symbolic account that satisfied a psychological need. Biblical literal truth is more of a Protestant fetish, although not all Protestants go with it. The base of Christianity (at least in the West) is in the Nicene Creed. It's about God and Jesus and some wonky concepts from Aristotelian logic. It has nothing to do with details of how the Universe was formed.
You're assuming that God is constrained by the time of the Universe we live in. That's a bad assumption. God doesn't have to play by the God-given rules. We don't even know if there's something outside our Universe (a question that's likely to remain unanswered) that might have something corresponding to our time but with a different starting place.
Heck, St. Augustine thought God created time along with the Universe, so the question of "What was God doing before?" is probably meaningless.
Last I looked, the reason there was so much child molestation in Catholicism was that there's so much all over. The numbers are frightening. The really unpleasant thing about the Catholic Church was that it hid child rapists and shuffled them around to other positions where they had access to children, not that that's unique.
An interesting theory. Got any actual evidence for it?