Yes, and that's where faith comes in. Whether you believe it or like it, that's the belief. I just wanted to clear up the misconception that them being dead somehow invalidated or punished them.
According to you, God has the capability to bring them back to life. Why would He not do so? According to you, God has the capability to prevent their deaths in the first place. Why would He not do so?
Their deaths do not invalidate or punish them; they just refute the theory that God cares about them.
Also, not acting to stop an action is not the same as wanting it to happen, so it depends on the use of the word 'condone' as to if it fits. Perhaps 'willed' is a better word in this case than 'condone', which I think is a loaded word in this case (implying approval, rather than simply acceptance).
Even for we limited mortals, not acting to stop something is the same as wanting it to happen. If I see a man kicking a puppy and I do not stop him despite being capable of such, I am implicitly I condoning his action; I am saying that the cost required to stop the puppy-kicker is less than the benefit generated by that action.
We normally view inaction as being different from action because we are grounded in metabolism; taking any action, no matter how small, costs us something. Thus, taking no action, no matter how small the action we are avoiding is, carries a small benefit. Inaction is slightly safer for us, because it always results in at least a little good; thus, we categorize inaction differently from actions.
This logic does not work for an omnipotent being: because it is omnipotent, every action or inaction costs it nothing. Therefore, by allowing an action to occur, the being is saying that the action will have a net benefit. By disallowing an action, the being is saying that the action will have a net detriment. Hence, everything we can do, God approves of - He believes it will have a net benefit. Everything we cannot do, God disapproves of - He believes it will have a net detriment. There is no way around this, unless you say that God is not omnipotent.
So yes, sometimes parents let children hurt themselves. However, no parent we would call good will kill their children with starvation, plague, earthquakes or hurricanes.
I'll give you rigorous proofs as soon as you give me rigorous definitions of "justice", "good", "evil", "purpose", "life", "truth" and "suffering".
I forgot to mention that part of the reason why you have such trouble with those questions is because they are ill-defined. Find some definitions that work for you, and answers will be much easier.
But the reward from God according to Jesus isn't 'not being dead'.
And the reward my dog got for running out into the street in front of a car was to go live on the farm, except I don't know where that farm is and I've never seen it and as far as I know it doesn't even exist. And the only dog who ever came back from the farm came back for about five minutes two thousand years ago, and nobody's seen or heard from him since - but lots of people will tell you all about it, even though they didn't see it. In fact, the one guy who talked the most about seeing this dog come back to life never met the dog while he was really alive, he just fell off his horse, bumped his head, and had a vision (though he tells the story in a different order).
Is it that kind of reward?
Since when did a bunch of people doing something (even in God's name) mean that God condoned, agreed-with, or willed it? See also: the Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, Westboro Baptist Church, Pat Robertson, et al.
Since God is omnipotent, duh. If an omnipotent being exists, that being necessarily condones any action you perform; if the being does not condone the action, you would not be able to perform it*. See the speed of light, the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, logical impossibilities, the fact that I can't ignore gravity at will, et al.
*More detailed explanation: posit an omnipotent being that can do anything. I choose to take an action in the presence of the omnipotent being. The being must choose to prevent or allow my action. Either option is a choice, made willingly by the being. Therefore, if I choose to kick a puppy and the omnipotent being chooses to refrain from stopping me, the omnipotent being has made a choice that condones puppy-kicking. If I choose to ignore gravity and the omnipotent being chooses to prevent my doing so, the omnipotent being has made a choice that condemns anti-gravity. The only way around this is to posit a being that is potent but not omnipotent, and as such does not have this refuse or allow choice.
Does life have purpose? Is there such a thing as The Truth? Is there life after death? Will I see my lost loved ones again someday? Is there justice in this world? Will good ultimately prevail over evil? Why must there be so much suffering?
That's easy enough:
Only the purpose you make of it. Yes, but only in mathematics; everything else is statistics. No. Yes, if you have pictures of them. Only that which we make. Yes, for all good where good is equal to entropy (or no, for all evil where evil is equal to entropy). Because humans are bastards and nature doesn't give a shit.
All of those Big Unanswerable Questions weigh heavily on you - much more so than for religious people who've found all of those questions conveniently answered by their religion of choice.
The only reason why these questions weigh on you is because you don't want the answers. You just have to accept that some things are fantasy, some things are wishful thinking, and some things are real.
That God's such a great guy! It only took him what, fifty-ish years to demolish the Soviet Union? And it looked more like their economic system failed than any sort of divine intervention. And Stalin, the person who was basically responsible for ordering those deaths, died of a stroke at the ripe old age of 74 - after having what was certainly a delicious all-night dinner. And those holy people are still dead.
Oh yeah and did you know that Stalin was declared to be the divinely anointed leader of the Russian armed forces by the Russian Orthodox church? That God - what a sense of humor!
The iPad is like a toaster - a simple appliance anyone can use. It's nearly impossible to screw things up when you're using one, and if you somehow manage to do that you can fix it just by turning it on and off (and maybe shaking out some of the crumbs).
Computers are more like ovens - large, complicated things that take a small amount of skill and training to use (but much less than most people think), and if you're not careful you can burn down your house with one.
I'm not the grandparent, but I share his views. That statement is a a representation of what I've found to be the case in our reality. I have never been shown any factual support for the mythologies any religion, and believe me I've sought such out (after all, wouldn't the world be that much better with a little bit of magic in it?). I've heard every common argument for the existence of some sort of God, and honestly they haven't changed much since Aquinas.
You would think that if some religion somewhere had actual factual support, its followers would be trumpeting those facts to the heavens, wouldn't they? And yet all you get is incoherent babble.
FYI, every large scale, properly blinded study of acupuncture done so far has found it to be as effective as sham acupuncture - and depending on how you define some of those other modalities you mentioned (light and air therapy are basically bullshit, but going outside isn't), they may also be just as effective as placebo.
I'm glad homeopathy is getting a beatdown in the UK, but it's really just the most obvious bullshit in health care.
So do solar panels. And people have been refining solar panel technology for a couple of decades. I bet you the next generation of these Bloom boxes will have a far better ROI.
I know plenty of people who have their own businesses... who have excellent road coverage.
Perhaps it is because they understand that this cost is a necessary component of running a business, and don't spend their time whining about how it comes out of their "disposable" income.
It's not "disposable" any more than your business liability insurance is... or even more disposable than your grocery bill.
Why is it that you feel fine paying for food, but seem to expect roads for "free". If you aren't happy with paying for roads, don't. Nobody says you can't pay out of pocket.
Fixed that for you. Except for your last sentence, which just makes absolutely no sense. We're "subsidizing our socialist brothers abroad" by licensing drugs and procedures to them? Procedures can't be licensed in the first place, and if drug companies are licensing drugs at all instead of selling them directly, they're doing it at a profit - which definitely doesn't count as "subsidizing".
Look - I don't know for sure that God does not exist, just like I don't know for sure that dogcats exist or that flargles exist. Without a clear and explicit definition, it is impossible to determine if a certain thing exists.
I do know however, and with absolute certainty, that the clearly defined God of Christianity does not exist. An all-powerful and all-loving God would not force life and intelligence to come about through the ridiculously wasteful and painful process we call evolution.
This comes from the fact that in order for any theory of spirituality to be true, it must be consistent with our current knowledge of reality. Because reality as we know it right now holds no room for an active God, God either has an undetectable effect on reality or does not exist.
I'll be as cock-eyed and smug in my logical denial as I want to be, because so far nobody has a definition of God that is both testably different from a God that doesn't exist and is consistent with reality.
It's not up to me to provide negative evidence; it is up to someone else (anyone else!) to provide some non-zero amount of positive evidence.
Meh, screw you guys. I had to learn the rudiments of not only Ruby, but the huge and ridiculously magical framework that is Rails in about two weeks for a class. I had to learn Haskell well enough in three weeks to write a compiler from a silly little toy programming language to a stack-based Forth-like virtual machine. Hell, I had to learn Forth well enough to write a compiler for it, while figuring out Haskell! I had to learn fucking emacs because vim wasn't installed on the lab computers and I couldn't install it myself.
Learning a new programming language is easy. Learning a new language paradigm is harder, but you only have to do it four or five times.
Learning how to program, now that was hard. Once you've done that, the rest is easy. People who only know one language are like carpenters who only know how to use a hammer - they miss the point of their art. A carpenter is not a guy who uses a hammer, he's a guy who makes stuff with wood. A programmer is not a person who uses a programming language, she's a person who makes stuff with language.
Hey guess who picked the 1995 date? The reporter. If you run the calculation from 1994, then there is a 95% significance level that there's been global warming. Funny that 1995 is exactly the cutoff year where an honest scientist would have said "no significance", and that's exactly the year the reporter chose.
Further, the more data you add, the higher the confidence rate is.
I would like to point you to the n-body problem. In an n-body system governed entirely by gravity, you cannot be sure where exactly the n bodies will be at an arbitrary time unless you actually step through the simulation - that is, simulate each of those n bodies for every quantum of time. There's no simple equation that can accurately predict the state of the system at a given time.
Now consider the climate. It's an n-body gravity problem. It's also an n-body chemical problem. It's also an n-body convection problem. It's also an n-body radiation problem. It's also an n-body nuclear problem ((IIRC) cosmic rays break down O3 in the upper atmosphere, for example). Also, all of those n-body problems are inputs to all of the other problems. Also, n is obscenely large. And I probably left out a few classes of problem that climate represents.
If you dropped a ball into the middle of three chaotically orbiting black holes, you couldn't be sure if the ball would fall up, down, sideways or widdershins when you let go of it.
Seriously, your argument boils down to "because simple things are simple, complex things should be simple too". Reality just doesn't work like that.
You clearly, clearly do not understand climate science. I don't understand climate science. My fiancee, who is working on a PhD in Earth Systems Science, kinda understands it. I've seen the diagrams she had to memorize as part of her coursework, and they are flowcharts from hell.
For instance, look at this Wikipedia diagram of the nitrogen cycle. It looks relatively simple, right? And at this level, it is. Except every single one of those boxes and most of those arrows are, in and of themselves, another flowchart, with its associated chemical reactions and rates and capacities. And this is just the nitrogen cycle on land, there's another completely different one for the ocean, for the deep ocean and for the atmosphere and the upper atmosphere, for NO2-, for CO, for CO2, SO2, O3, NH4, and beyond - and then they all interact with each other. And we still haven't found all the cycles yet.
I remember looking over her shoulder when she was trying to memorize just the NO2 cycle in just the upper atmosphere - the diagram was a directed graph with something like twenty nodes, each representing a different form of nitrogen (all leading back to NO2), with something like thirty or forty edges interconnecting them, each representing a different chemical reaction, with a different flow rate and a different catalyst and different side-effects.
The complexity is ridiculous. It's simply impossible for a human to hold all of it in their mind at any level of detail. It's like the world's most convoluted spaghetti code, except it runs our AC so we damn well better understand it.
And you want to tell me that someone without four years of chemistry, physics and calculus with an emphasis on geology and earth systems can even begin to understand this stuff on any real level?
Cap and trade will never work for carbon emissions, just like it never worked for sulfur emissions. That's why we're all melting horribly every time it rains.
Wait wait wait, let me get this straight - this guy blatantly makes shit up about bikers doing horrible things. Then, when he claims with absolutely no evidence that a gamer did some horrible yet politically beneficial thing, you believe him?
It works by targetting the buzzing noise they make when they chant their slogans; it also selectively targets females, which will make males think "wtf, why are there no chicks here? I'm leaving".
Further, you don't even need some sort of awesome-sauce optics to track and recognize the mosquitos - you just need to listen for them. They're loud little assholes. And listening to their sounds gives you angle, elevation, species and gender, which is all the data you need to decide to shoot one down.
Of course, all this will lead to in the long run is silent ninja mosquitos. We'll burn that bridge when we come to it too.
The problem with these nut cases in Texas is they have no faith. No amount of science will sway me from what i feel to be true. No amount of world religions will change my mind what I know to be right. This does not mean I am inflexible, but that flexibility comes with experience, not cult brain washing. And because these people have not faith, how can they build faith in their children. They can't. So they limit their exposure to the world knowing the false faith could never withstand the truths in the world.
Here's a quick question: do your parents share your religion? Statistically, almost all religious people follow their parents religion. Very, very few people actually convert from their parents religion to another.
It might not have been violent or painful, but the evidence suggests that yes, in fact, the reason why you believe in your religion is due to the gentle and loving brainwashing of your parents, along with their inherent genetic predisposition.
Asimov wrote a perfect tract on this here. A relevant quote:
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
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According to you, God has the capability to bring them back to life. Why would He not do so? According to you, God has the capability to prevent their deaths in the first place. Why would He not do so?
Their deaths do not invalidate or punish them; they just refute the theory that God cares about them.
Even for we limited mortals, not acting to stop something is the same as wanting it to happen. If I see a man kicking a puppy and I do not stop him despite being capable of such, I am implicitly I condoning his action; I am saying that the cost required to stop the puppy-kicker is less than the benefit generated by that action.
We normally view inaction as being different from action because we are grounded in metabolism; taking any action, no matter how small, costs us something. Thus, taking no action, no matter how small the action we are avoiding is, carries a small benefit. Inaction is slightly safer for us, because it always results in at least a little good; thus, we categorize inaction differently from actions.
This logic does not work for an omnipotent being: because it is omnipotent, every action or inaction costs it nothing. Therefore, by allowing an action to occur, the being is saying that the action will have a net benefit. By disallowing an action, the being is saying that the action will have a net detriment. Hence, everything we can do, God approves of - He believes it will have a net benefit. Everything we cannot do, God disapproves of - He believes it will have a net detriment. There is no way around this, unless you say that God is not omnipotent.
So yes, sometimes parents let children hurt themselves. However, no parent we would call good will kill their children with starvation, plague, earthquakes or hurricanes.
I'll give you rigorous proofs as soon as you give me rigorous definitions of "justice", "good", "evil", "purpose", "life", "truth" and "suffering".
I forgot to mention that part of the reason why you have such trouble with those questions is because they are ill-defined. Find some definitions that work for you, and answers will be much easier.
And the reward my dog got for running out into the street in front of a car was to go live on the farm, except I don't know where that farm is and I've never seen it and as far as I know it doesn't even exist. And the only dog who ever came back from the farm came back for about five minutes two thousand years ago, and nobody's seen or heard from him since - but lots of people will tell you all about it, even though they didn't see it. In fact, the one guy who talked the most about seeing this dog come back to life never met the dog while he was really alive, he just fell off his horse, bumped his head, and had a vision (though he tells the story in a different order).
Is it that kind of reward?
Since God is omnipotent, duh. If an omnipotent being exists, that being necessarily condones any action you perform; if the being does not condone the action, you would not be able to perform it*. See the speed of light, the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, logical impossibilities, the fact that I can't ignore gravity at will, et al.
*More detailed explanation: posit an omnipotent being that can do anything. I choose to take an action in the presence of the omnipotent being. The being must choose to prevent or allow my action. Either option is a choice, made willingly by the being. Therefore, if I choose to kick a puppy and the omnipotent being chooses to refrain from stopping me, the omnipotent being has made a choice that condones puppy-kicking. If I choose to ignore gravity and the omnipotent being chooses to prevent my doing so, the omnipotent being has made a choice that condemns anti-gravity. The only way around this is to posit a being that is potent but not omnipotent, and as such does not have this refuse or allow choice.
That's easy enough:
Only the purpose you make of it. Yes, but only in mathematics; everything else is statistics. No. Yes, if you have pictures of them. Only that which we make. Yes, for all good where good is equal to entropy (or no, for all evil where evil is equal to entropy). Because humans are bastards and nature doesn't give a shit.
The only reason why these questions weigh on you is because you don't want the answers. You just have to accept that some things are fantasy, some things are wishful thinking, and some things are real.
That God's such a great guy! It only took him what, fifty-ish years to demolish the Soviet Union? And it looked more like their economic system failed than any sort of divine intervention. And Stalin, the person who was basically responsible for ordering those deaths, died of a stroke at the ripe old age of 74 - after having what was certainly a delicious all-night dinner. And those holy people are still dead.
Oh yeah and did you know that Stalin was declared to be the divinely anointed leader of the Russian armed forces by the Russian Orthodox church? That God - what a sense of humor!
The iPad is like a toaster - a simple appliance anyone can use. It's nearly impossible to screw things up when you're using one, and if you somehow manage to do that you can fix it just by turning it on and off (and maybe shaking out some of the crumbs).
Computers are more like ovens - large, complicated things that take a small amount of skill and training to use (but much less than most people think), and if you're not careful you can burn down your house with one.
I'm not the grandparent, but I share his views. That statement is a a representation of what I've found to be the case in our reality. I have never been shown any factual support for the mythologies any religion, and believe me I've sought such out (after all, wouldn't the world be that much better with a little bit of magic in it?). I've heard every common argument for the existence of some sort of God, and honestly they haven't changed much since Aquinas.
You would think that if some religion somewhere had actual factual support, its followers would be trumpeting those facts to the heavens, wouldn't they? And yet all you get is incoherent babble.
FYI, every large scale, properly blinded study of acupuncture done so far has found it to be as effective as sham acupuncture - and depending on how you define some of those other modalities you mentioned (light and air therapy are basically bullshit, but going outside isn't), they may also be just as effective as placebo.
I'm glad homeopathy is getting a beatdown in the UK, but it's really just the most obvious bullshit in health care.
Ah yes, good old falsum in omnibus. Totally not a logical fallacy at all.
So do solar panels. And people have been refining solar panel technology for a couple of decades. I bet you the next generation of these Bloom boxes will have a far better ROI.
Fixed that for you. Except for your last sentence, which just makes absolutely no sense. We're "subsidizing our socialist brothers abroad" by licensing drugs and procedures to them? Procedures can't be licensed in the first place, and if drug companies are licensing drugs at all instead of selling them directly, they're doing it at a profit - which definitely doesn't count as "subsidizing".
Look - I don't know for sure that God does not exist, just like I don't know for sure that dogcats exist or that flargles exist. Without a clear and explicit definition, it is impossible to determine if a certain thing exists.
I do know however, and with absolute certainty, that the clearly defined God of Christianity does not exist. An all-powerful and all-loving God would not force life and intelligence to come about through the ridiculously wasteful and painful process we call evolution.
This comes from the fact that in order for any theory of spirituality to be true, it must be consistent with our current knowledge of reality. Because reality as we know it right now holds no room for an active God, God either has an undetectable effect on reality or does not exist.
I'll be as cock-eyed and smug in my logical denial as I want to be, because so far nobody has a definition of God that is both testably different from a God that doesn't exist and is consistent with reality.
It's not up to me to provide negative evidence; it is up to someone else (anyone else!) to provide some non-zero amount of positive evidence.
It is a sad, sad day when illegal underground crackers care more about their reputation than the company that makes the games they're cracking.
Umm? SQL injection is relevant to you? What sort of retarded library are you using that doesn't let you parametrize your SQL input?
Meh, screw you guys. I had to learn the rudiments of not only Ruby, but the huge and ridiculously magical framework that is Rails in about two weeks for a class. I had to learn Haskell well enough in three weeks to write a compiler from a silly little toy programming language to a stack-based Forth-like virtual machine. Hell, I had to learn Forth well enough to write a compiler for it, while figuring out Haskell! I had to learn fucking emacs because vim wasn't installed on the lab computers and I couldn't install it myself.
Learning a new programming language is easy. Learning a new language paradigm is harder, but you only have to do it four or five times.
Learning how to program, now that was hard. Once you've done that, the rest is easy. People who only know one language are like carpenters who only know how to use a hammer - they miss the point of their art. A carpenter is not a guy who uses a hammer, he's a guy who makes stuff with wood. A programmer is not a person who uses a programming language, she's a person who makes stuff with language.
Hey guess who picked the 1995 date? The reporter. If you run the calculation from 1994, then there is a 95% significance level that there's been global warming. Funny that 1995 is exactly the cutoff year where an honest scientist would have said "no significance", and that's exactly the year the reporter chose.
Further, the more data you add, the higher the confidence rate is.
I would like to point you to the n-body problem. In an n-body system governed entirely by gravity, you cannot be sure where exactly the n bodies will be at an arbitrary time unless you actually step through the simulation - that is, simulate each of those n bodies for every quantum of time. There's no simple equation that can accurately predict the state of the system at a given time.
Now consider the climate. It's an n-body gravity problem. It's also an n-body chemical problem. It's also an n-body convection problem. It's also an n-body radiation problem. It's also an n-body nuclear problem ((IIRC) cosmic rays break down O3 in the upper atmosphere, for example). Also, all of those n-body problems are inputs to all of the other problems. Also, n is obscenely large. And I probably left out a few classes of problem that climate represents.
If you dropped a ball into the middle of three chaotically orbiting black holes, you couldn't be sure if the ball would fall up, down, sideways or widdershins when you let go of it.
Seriously, your argument boils down to "because simple things are simple, complex things should be simple too". Reality just doesn't work like that.
We achieve greatness not by attaining the possible, but by striving for the impossible.
Yes, even when it comes to unsexy projects like infrastructure.
You clearly, clearly do not understand climate science. I don't understand climate science. My fiancee, who is working on a PhD in Earth Systems Science, kinda understands it. I've seen the diagrams she had to memorize as part of her coursework, and they are flowcharts from hell.
For instance, look at this Wikipedia diagram of the nitrogen cycle. It looks relatively simple, right? And at this level, it is. Except every single one of those boxes and most of those arrows are, in and of themselves, another flowchart, with its associated chemical reactions and rates and capacities. And this is just the nitrogen cycle on land, there's another completely different one for the ocean, for the deep ocean and for the atmosphere and the upper atmosphere, for NO2-, for CO, for CO2, SO2, O3, NH4, and beyond - and then they all interact with each other. And we still haven't found all the cycles yet.
I remember looking over her shoulder when she was trying to memorize just the NO2 cycle in just the upper atmosphere - the diagram was a directed graph with something like twenty nodes, each representing a different form of nitrogen (all leading back to NO2), with something like thirty or forty edges interconnecting them, each representing a different chemical reaction, with a different flow rate and a different catalyst and different side-effects.
The complexity is ridiculous. It's simply impossible for a human to hold all of it in their mind at any level of detail. It's like the world's most convoluted spaghetti code, except it runs our AC so we damn well better understand it.
And you want to tell me that someone without four years of chemistry, physics and calculus with an emphasis on geology and earth systems can even begin to understand this stuff on any real level?
Cap and trade will never work for carbon emissions, just like it never worked for sulfur emissions. That's why we're all melting horribly every time it rains.
Wait wait wait, let me get this straight - this guy blatantly makes shit up about bikers doing horrible things. Then, when he claims with absolutely no evidence that a gamer did some horrible yet politically beneficial thing, you believe him?
What the hell is wrong with you?
It works by targetting the buzzing noise they make when they chant their slogans; it also selectively targets females, which will make males think "wtf, why are there no chicks here? I'm leaving".
Further, you don't even need some sort of awesome-sauce optics to track and recognize the mosquitos - you just need to listen for them. They're loud little assholes. And listening to their sounds gives you angle, elevation, species and gender, which is all the data you need to decide to shoot one down.
Of course, all this will lead to in the long run is silent ninja mosquitos. We'll burn that bridge when we come to it too.
Here's a quick question: do your parents share your religion? Statistically, almost all religious people follow their parents religion. Very, very few people actually convert from their parents religion to another.
It might not have been violent or painful, but the evidence suggests that yes, in fact, the reason why you believe in your religion is due to the gentle and loving brainwashing of your parents, along with their inherent genetic predisposition.
Asimov wrote a perfect tract on this here. A relevant quote: