You're forgetting time. You think time occurs for God, just like us. WRONG! We experience time, and can only go one way, forward. But God can see everything that has, is, and will happen. You made the choice, God just knew which one you chose.
But this is clearly incorrect. If God is a four-dimensional being, then He sees humans differently to the way we see each other. To Him, people appear as static worms in space, spanning about 2m in height, 0.5m in width, 0.25m in depth, and about 2.4 billion seconds in the dimension of time.
If we accept this classical picture of the Universe, then we are four-dimensional sculptures suspended in space. Claiming that we have free will is like claiming a painting has free will.
That all said, this becomes somewhat pointless if one believes in the quantum view of the Universe. If a particle has a choice of going to A or going to B, then it will go to A and B at exactly the same time.
So if I went up to God and asked him "heads or tails", he would truthfully answer, "both".
You're setting up a straw man argument. It is important to realise that the phrase, "God is not 100% good", is not logically equivelent to "God is evil".
Good and evil exist in the world. Since God has the power to eliminate both, it may follow that God does not exclusively proscribe to either extreme.
If your child is very sick and needs to get a painful treatment, does that mean that you are cruel?
God defined as an entity that is both omnipotent and omniscient. Your example is flawed, because it presumes that God cannot cure this sickness without pain; clearly, if God is omnipotent, he can.
Seems I was the one misunderstanding matters. I wasn't aware copyright licensing was treated differently to material goods. Certainly seems like quite the loophole.
Goodness knows why this is modded insightful, because it is quite incorrect. EUCD is not part of British law and does currently not hold any legal weight in Britain.
It may do in future, but it certainly does not now.
You may have slightly misunderstood the issue. The EU is a single market; by law, there should be no restriction upon buying goods from different countries that are in the EU. iTunes is welcome to sell cheaper music in France; this is perfectly legal. However, it is illegal to prevent someone from England from importing music bought in France, and this is why the EU is leaning on Apple.
Secondly, your assumption that this will result in higher music costs would only affect prices in the short term. In the long term, prices will settle to an average, because the EU shares a common market. Anyone offering a service that sells music online cannot make distinctions between countries in the EU.
This lawsuit isn't misdirected; the music industry is forcing Apple to illegally create trade restrictions in the EU. If the EU allows this, then more companies will jump on the bandwagon and the EU's single market will start to fragment.
It would be nice if Google Adwords worked as well as its search engine. It would also be nice if broad keywords actually worked full stop. Searching for "Foo Bar" will trigger ads with the keywords "Foo Bar", but won't trigger with "Bar Foo" or "Foo in Bar" or "Foo Bar UK".
It would also be nice if the keywords weren't mysteriously put 'on hold' and disabled for no apparent reason. Considering Google makes its money from adwords, why is it so badly programmed?
Doesn't Microsoft realize they could easily make the end-all browser that'll end up running on almost every palmtop, cell phone, set-top-box, automobile, and personal computer?
To what end? They make no money off IE. A cross-platform IE would just give people more reason to switch away from Windows. And Windows does make Microsoft money.
Firstly, mankind was not always evil. Secondly, God does not only create beings that He knows will worship Him. True worship can only come from beings that have the choice of whether or not to worship. I believe there is ample evidence for a worldwide flood.
So you're saying that evil is a choice that human beings make. Now I'm not familiar with the bible myself, but I assume that some years before the flood, all the evil people in the world were made sterile. Otherwise God would have deliberately murdered innocent children, too young to have had the chance to choose an evil path in life.
Secondly, you seem to have missed my point. When God started the Universe with Adam and Eve, he knew that he'd wind up having to kill most of the world's population. If God started the Universe with Noah's family instead, and lied to Noah about the past, then there would be no need to kill many many people. I ask again; what would be more moral, creating people knowing you'd have to slaughter most of their descendants years down the line, or lying about the past.
One wonders why God decided to create such evil people in the first place. And that leads to some interesting questions; one might except the possibility that all men were evil, but what about newborns? Unless all these evil people were sterile, God decided to drown babies and unborn children as well.
And if God knew that the way he set up the Universe would later require him to wipe out the majority of humanity later on, why did create the Universe that way?
For instance, what if God created the entire Universe after the Great Flood. What if Noah and his families recollections of what happened were false memories, implanted by God. What would be more moral? Creating the world and humanity knowing that you would have to commit genocide later on, or simply lying to Noah about what occured. The outcome would be the same; the question is whether you believe it would be more moral for God to falsify the evidence, or to create millions of people in such a way that you knew you'd be forced to kill them later on.
It is no coincidence that cultures across the planet have their own flood story.
An alternative explanation is simply that floods are common natural disasters. It doesn't take much imagination to scale it up.
A local flood would not require a large ship when one could just have the animals walk to another region. A large ship would not have been built either because the inhabitants of said region would have been unprepared. No, I'm talking about a worldwide flood.
Sorry, I'm not really one of the believers. A global flood and Noah's Ark takes too much divine intervention to explain away. Doubtless an omnipotent God could manipulate reality enough to make it possible, but it seems an overly complicated explanation.
Furthermore, as I understand it, God is meant to be all-good, as well as all-powerful and all-knowing. Worldwide genocide doesn't particularly strike me as something a moral God would do.
Just to double-check, this is the Ark as in the actual story of Noah's Ark? i.e. the one that carried animals whilst the world was entirely submerged, and not just evidence of a large ship/localised flooding that would be the basis for a Noah's Ark mythology to grow around.
In other words, are we talking about a standard historical basis for flood mythology, or a supernatural event that happened in the past?
The Bible is the most historically authenticated ancient set of documents we have. That's pretty miraculuous considering the majority of the world hates it and would like to see it completely go away.
Not believing in something is not the same as hating it.
It is pretty miraculous, in the way that 66 separate accounts tainted by human influence and church bureaocracy represent the truth of all things. Funny how those in the early church kept all the right writings and threw away all the writings that were incorrect or irrelevant. Of course, no-one had an agenda. Hypothetically, uf there was an account of Jesus saying "Organised religion is inherently evil and misleading", would the early Christian church include it in the bible, or would it be conviniently left to one side?
The bible is not used often by historians. It sometimes contradicts with archelogical evidence, and the records of other civilisations. It is awash with contradictions.
Personally, I've always been confused by Gods seeming lack of morality. Thou shalt not kill, but it's perfectly alright for God to commit genocide, then commit his victims to an eternity of suffering. This does not fit my definition of a loving God.
A virus "evolving" into a new type of virus is still a virus. I doubt the "new" species of virus has anything the previous one did not have.
What about immunity to a particular drug? Viruses and bacteria in particular mutate and share DNA like we share ideas.
Here is the real question: Has anybody ever observed a virus evolving into a bacteria or vice versa? That's what Darwinian Macroevolutiuon claims and that's wht needs to happen in order for it to have been observed.
If you mean "observed" by "watch it happening right this instant with one's own eyes", then no. Instead, as with sciences such as astronomy and geology, evidence is gathered through finding patterns in past events.
The distinction between 'macroevolution' and 'microevolution' I've never understood. It seems to be that it's a belief that small changes in the short term cannot add up to large changes in the long term. And that's the thing that seems rather odd to me. It's like saying, well, perhaps gravity keeps this solar system together, but how can it possibly keep whole galaxies together?
The idea that you can combine something observable with something unobservable seems odd to me.
Not to me. For instance, Hawking Radiation is a theory derived from direct observations about relativity and quantum mechanics. It says that black holes will emit radiation, inversely proportionate to their size. This has never been observed, because the radiation involved would be too small, and our only hope of observing it is to find miniture black holes created at the beginning of the Universe. Yet despite this lack of observable events, it does provide a rational explanation as to why small black-holes would evaporate into thin air, explaining a lack of small black holes. Scientists accept it as probably true, because it combines observable events to predict unobservable pheonomenon.
Any real evidence that is found is part of God's creation, so of course He does not falsify it. The only thing that falsifies anything is if it was never true to begin with.
Then I'm curious about your take on distance of stars. We can see that a particular star or galaxy is so many millions of light-years away, using basic triangulation. We have observed that light travels at a constant rate. Therefore, the light would take millions of years to reach us, implying the the Universe has to be at least this old.
The only explanation to this, if you believe in Creationism and a young Universe, is that God created the light in place, The star may not even be real; God could have created the light without bothering to construct a star -
Creation is not a scientific theory, it is a historical event. That places it outside of the realm of science. Creation is also a supernatural event. This also places it outside of the realm of science. Science has do with seeing what is there and finding out how it works.
So you agree that creationism has no place in the science classroom. I suppose that's a step in the right direction.
As for being taught in history classrooms, I suspect creationists will have to find some more archelogical evidence to suppose their hypothesis that the Universe was created 4000 years ago. Doubtless those historians studying societies older thand 4000 years will find themselves quite put out to be shown wrong.
I have no problem with creationism being taught as a religious idea. Or being taught apart from government-funded education. However, it seems odd to teach it along with evolution as a science, when it is not. And it seems odd to mention it in history classes, when the vast majority of historians will tell you that the bible really isn't all that accurate.
That said, I always find philosophical debates on God fascinating, and I would encourage any school to have such discussions upon God. So long as both sides of the divide are represented.
This is not correct if you are refering to Darwinian Macroevolution. It is not something that can be observed and therefore does not pass the first step of the Scientific Method.
Off the top of my head, I can think of several simple tests that could disprove the theory that life evolved on earth from simple beginnings. Here's just one of them:
Test the distance of the stars and galaxies in the sky using parallax. If none of these stellar objects are further than, say, 10'000 lightyears from us, then we can conclude that the Universe is not old enough for species to have evolved through evolution.
Of course, people have tried this experiment, and found it in evolution's favour. And, indeed, any experiment I suggest that could disprove evolution as a means of creation on our planet, has probably already been done and come out in evolution's favour.
The other thing we should differentiate between is the evolution, which is an observed fact, and the theory that life on this planet was created solely through evolution, which is theory (much like the theory gravity holds us in orbit around the sun). Viruses and bacteria evolve into new species all the time, which is really quite the problem! Doubtless we'd have a much easier time if they didn't.
The idea that you can separate 'macroevolution' from 'microevolution' always struck me as somewhat odd. That's believing in ponds but not believing in seas. However, since an omnipotent being could easily falsify any evidence that we find, so I do suppose it's academic arguing creationism from a rational point of view.
One could argue the opposite. If Creationism is a valid scientific theory, why is it that only a minute percentage of scientists believe that it is true?
For instance; for every creationist scientist you can name, I can name two scientists who believe that creationism is utter rubbish. In fact, I'll do one better: for every creationish scientist you can name, I can name two scientists named steve, who believe that creationism is utter rubbish.
Dr. Stephen T. Abedon, Ph.D., Microbiology, University of Arizona Dr. Stephen B. Aley, Ph.D., Biology, Rockefeller University Dr. Steven I. Altchuler, Ph.D., Nutritional Biochemistry and Metabolism Dr. Stephen W. Arch, Ph.D., Biology, University of Chicago Dr. Stevan J. Arnold, Ph.D., Zoology, University of Michigan Dr. Stephen M. Arthur, Ph.D., Wildlife Biology, University of Maine Dr. Steven W. Barger, Ph.D., Cell Biology, Vanderbilt University Dr. Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Biology, Vanderbilt University Dr. Stephen Beckerman, Ph.D., Anthropology, University of New Mexico Dr. Stephen M. Beverley, Ph.D., Biochemistry, University of California
However, this is all really academic. Biology is a science. Evolution is a scientific theory, as there are simple tests one could devise to disprove it. Creationism is not a scientific theory because it is not disprovable; any evidence to the contrary can be explained away by God's omnipotence.
I doubt anyone objects particularly to Creationism being taught as a religious viewpoint. What most people object to is Creationism being taught as a science, when it is trivial to prove that it is nothing of the sort.
At University some of our Unix coursework was once graded by computer. As you can imagine; it didn't go very well. If you forgot to put a full-stop in an error message, 5% off. If you didn't leave two newlines after the output, another 5% off. It became an exercise in making sure your output was word-perfect to the spec. And even then I only managed 85%:|
Fortunately, the coursework was worth hardly anything, and after the fuss kicked up about it, I believe the professor went back to hand-grading.
By the way, you don't have to appeal to branes or parallel universes for there to be parts of the universe we can't see. Even with only one ordinary universe, there are parts of it we can't see because light from them can't have reached us yet. That's why we can't tell whether the parts we can't see extend infinitely, or not.
You're suggesting that the Universe could be infinite in space, but not time, then?
Energy has a discrete spectrum for a bound system, but it's continuous for a free system, such as a non-interacting particle.
Are you sure? It seems odd that it would apply to one and not the other.
We also don't know that our universe is finite in size or mass. Of course, the part of it we can see is finite, but we don't know about the universe in general.
True. By 'Universe' I meant 'all that we can see'; branes and parallel universes not withstanding:)
I hope Europeans can stop complaining about our corrupt government, and Americans can stop whining about European governments in general, and we can all collectively recognize the lameness of basically all big world powers.
If Microsoft were based in the EU, I suspect the US would have pushed a lot harder to punish its abuse of its monopoly position.
The only reason the EU seems to be leaning a lot more heavily on Microsoft is, I suspect, due to the fact that Microsoft takes more money out of the local EU economy than it takes in.
Slashdot Mirror
If we accept this classical picture of the Universe, then we are four-dimensional sculptures suspended in space. Claiming that we have free will is like claiming a painting has free will.
That all said, this becomes somewhat pointless if one believes in the quantum view of the Universe. If a particle has a choice of going to A or going to B, then it will go to A and B at exactly the same time.
So if I went up to God and asked him "heads or tails", he would truthfully answer, "both".
You're setting up a straw man argument. It is important to realise that the phrase, "God is not 100% good", is not logically equivelent to "God is evil".
Good and evil exist in the world. Since God has the power to eliminate both, it may follow that God does not exclusively proscribe to either extreme.
Tales like this have been floating around IRC for years.
Seems I was the one misunderstanding matters. I wasn't aware copyright licensing was treated differently to material goods. Certainly seems like quite the loophole.
Goodness knows why this is modded insightful, because it is quite incorrect. EUCD is not part of British law and does currently not hold any legal weight in Britain.
It may do in future, but it certainly does not now.
You may have slightly misunderstood the issue. The EU is a single market; by law, there should be no restriction upon buying goods from different countries that are in the EU. iTunes is welcome to sell cheaper music in France; this is perfectly legal. However, it is illegal to prevent someone from England from importing music bought in France, and this is why the EU is leaning on Apple.
Secondly, your assumption that this will result in higher music costs would only affect prices in the short term. In the long term, prices will settle to an average, because the EU shares a common market. Anyone offering a service that sells music online cannot make distinctions between countries in the EU.
This lawsuit isn't misdirected; the music industry is forcing Apple to illegally create trade restrictions in the EU. If the EU allows this, then more companies will jump on the bandwagon and the EU's single market will start to fragment.
Not arguing with you there, unfortunately :(
That said, with France's recent decision, maybe people will wake up to what the EUCD will mean before it's too late.
The EUCD isn't law. At least not yet.
You mean that they can stop selling to the whole of the EU. Common market, remember?
It would be nice if Google Adwords worked as well as its search engine. It would also be nice if broad keywords actually worked full stop. Searching for "Foo Bar" will trigger ads with the keywords "Foo Bar", but won't trigger with "Bar Foo" or "Foo in Bar" or "Foo Bar UK".
It would also be nice if the keywords weren't mysteriously put 'on hold' and disabled for no apparent reason. Considering Google makes its money from adwords, why is it so badly programmed?
Secondly, you seem to have missed my point. When God started the Universe with Adam and Eve, he knew that he'd wind up having to kill most of the world's population. If God started the Universe with Noah's family instead, and lied to Noah about the past, then there would be no need to kill many many people. I ask again; what would be more moral, creating people knowing you'd have to slaughter most of their descendants years down the line, or lying about the past.
One wonders why God decided to create such evil people in the first place. And that leads to some interesting questions; one might except the possibility that all men were evil, but what about newborns? Unless all these evil people were sterile, God decided to drown babies and unborn children as well.
And if God knew that the way he set up the Universe would later require him to wipe out the majority of humanity later on, why did create the Universe that way?
For instance, what if God created the entire Universe after the Great Flood. What if Noah and his families recollections of what happened were false memories, implanted by God. What would be more moral? Creating the world and humanity knowing that you would have to commit genocide later on, or simply lying to Noah about what occured. The outcome would be the same; the question is whether you believe it would be more moral for God to falsify the evidence, or to create millions of people in such a way that you knew you'd be forced to kill them later on.
Sorry, I'm not really one of the believers. A global flood and Noah's Ark takes too much divine intervention to explain away. Doubtless an omnipotent God could manipulate reality enough to make it possible, but it seems an overly complicated explanation.
Furthermore, as I understand it, God is meant to be all-good, as well as all-powerful and all-knowing. Worldwide genocide doesn't particularly strike me as something a moral God would do.
Just to double-check, this is the Ark as in the actual story of Noah's Ark? i.e. the one that carried animals whilst the world was entirely submerged, and not just evidence of a large ship/localised flooding that would be the basis for a Noah's Ark mythology to grow around.
In other words, are we talking about a standard historical basis for flood mythology, or a supernatural event that happened in the past?
Um. A quick question; do you seriously believe the whole Noah's Ark story?
Not believing in something is not the same as hating it.
It is pretty miraculous, in the way that 66 separate accounts tainted by human influence and church bureaocracy represent the truth of all things. Funny how those in the early church kept all the right writings and threw away all the writings that were incorrect or irrelevant. Of course, no-one had an agenda. Hypothetically, uf there was an account of Jesus saying "Organised religion is inherently evil and misleading", would the early Christian church include it in the bible, or would it be conviniently left to one side?
The bible is not used often by historians. It sometimes contradicts with archelogical evidence, and the records of other civilisations. It is awash with contradictions.
Personally, I've always been confused by Gods seeming lack of morality. Thou shalt not kill, but it's perfectly alright for God to commit genocide, then commit his victims to an eternity of suffering. This does not fit my definition of a loving God.
What about immunity to a particular drug? Viruses and bacteria in particular mutate and share DNA like we share ideas.
If you mean "observed" by "watch it happening right this instant with one's own eyes", then no. Instead, as with sciences such as astronomy and geology, evidence is gathered through finding patterns in past events.
The distinction between 'macroevolution' and 'microevolution' I've never understood. It seems to be that it's a belief that small changes in the short term cannot add up to large changes in the long term. And that's the thing that seems rather odd to me. It's like saying, well, perhaps gravity keeps this solar system together, but how can it possibly keep whole galaxies together?
Not to me. For instance, Hawking Radiation is a theory derived from direct observations about relativity and quantum mechanics. It says that black holes will emit radiation, inversely proportionate to their size. This has never been observed, because the radiation involved would be too small, and our only hope of observing it is to find miniture black holes created at the beginning of the Universe. Yet despite this lack of observable events, it does provide a rational explanation as to why small black-holes would evaporate into thin air, explaining a lack of small black holes. Scientists accept it as probably true, because it combines observable events to predict unobservable pheonomenon.
Then I'm curious about your take on distance of stars. We can see that a particular star or galaxy is so many millions of light-years away, using basic triangulation. We have observed that light travels at a constant rate. Therefore, the light would take millions of years to reach us, implying the the Universe has to be at least this old.
The only explanation to this, if you believe in Creationism and a young Universe, is that God created the light in place, The star may not even be real; God could have created the light without bothering to construct a star -
As for being taught in history classrooms, I suspect creationists will have to find some more archelogical evidence to suppose their hypothesis that the Universe was created 4000 years ago. Doubtless those historians studying societies older thand 4000 years will find themselves quite put out to be shown wrong.
I have no problem with creationism being taught as a religious idea. Or being taught apart from government-funded education. However, it seems odd to teach it along with evolution as a science, when it is not. And it seems odd to mention it in history classes, when the vast majority of historians will tell you that the bible really isn't all that accurate.
That said, I always find philosophical debates on God fascinating, and I would encourage any school to have such discussions upon God. So long as both sides of the divide are represented.
Off the top of my head, I can think of several simple tests that could disprove the theory that life evolved on earth from simple beginnings. Here's just one of them:
Test the distance of the stars and galaxies in the sky using parallax. If none of these stellar objects are further than, say, 10'000 lightyears from us, then we can conclude that the Universe is not old enough for species to have evolved through evolution.
Of course, people have tried this experiment, and found it in evolution's favour. And, indeed, any experiment I suggest that could disprove evolution as a means of creation on our planet, has probably already been done and come out in evolution's favour.
The other thing we should differentiate between is the evolution, which is an observed fact, and the theory that life on this planet was created solely through evolution, which is theory (much like the theory gravity holds us in orbit around the sun). Viruses and bacteria evolve into new species all the time, which is really quite the problem! Doubtless we'd have a much easier time if they didn't.
The idea that you can separate 'macroevolution' from 'microevolution' always struck me as somewhat odd. That's believing in ponds but not believing in seas. However, since an omnipotent being could easily falsify any evidence that we find, so I do suppose it's academic arguing creationism from a rational point of view.
One could argue the opposite. If Creationism is a valid scientific theory, why is it that only a minute percentage of scientists believe that it is true?
For instance; for every creationist scientist you can name, I can name two scientists who believe that creationism is utter rubbish. In fact, I'll do one better: for every creationish scientist you can name, I can name two scientists named steve, who believe that creationism is utter rubbish.
Dr. Stephen T. Abedon, Ph.D., Microbiology, University of Arizona
Dr. Stephen B. Aley, Ph.D., Biology, Rockefeller University
Dr. Steven I. Altchuler, Ph.D., Nutritional Biochemistry and Metabolism
Dr. Stephen W. Arch, Ph.D., Biology, University of Chicago
Dr. Stevan J. Arnold, Ph.D., Zoology, University of Michigan
Dr. Stephen M. Arthur, Ph.D., Wildlife Biology, University of Maine
Dr. Steven W. Barger, Ph.D., Cell Biology, Vanderbilt University
Dr. Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Biology, Vanderbilt University
Dr. Stephen Beckerman, Ph.D., Anthropology, University of New Mexico
Dr. Stephen M. Beverley, Ph.D., Biochemistry, University of California
However, this is all really academic. Biology is a science. Evolution is a scientific theory, as there are simple tests one could devise to disprove it. Creationism is not a scientific theory because it is not disprovable; any evidence to the contrary can be explained away by God's omnipotence.
I doubt anyone objects particularly to Creationism being taught as a religious viewpoint. What most people object to is Creationism being taught as a science, when it is trivial to prove that it is nothing of the sort.
If I had mod points I'd be sure to mod you back up, but alas, I do not :(
At University some of our Unix coursework was once graded by computer. As you can imagine; it didn't go very well. If you forgot to put a full-stop in an error message, 5% off. If you didn't leave two newlines after the output, another 5% off. It became an exercise in making sure your output was word-perfect to the spec. And even then I only managed 85% :|
Fortunately, the coursework was worth hardly anything, and after the fuss kicked up about it, I believe the professor went back to hand-grading.
By the way, you don't have to appeal to branes or parallel universes for there to be parts of the universe we can't see. Even with only one ordinary universe, there are parts of it we can't see because light from them can't have reached us yet. That's why we can't tell whether the parts we can't see extend infinitely, or not.
You're suggesting that the Universe could be infinite in space, but not time, then?
Energy has a discrete spectrum for a bound system, but it's continuous for a free system, such as a non-interacting particle.
:)
Are you sure? It seems odd that it would apply to one and not the other.
We also don't know that our universe is finite in size or mass. Of course, the part of it we can see is finite, but we don't know about the universe in general.
True. By 'Universe' I meant 'all that we can see'; branes and parallel universes not withstanding
If Microsoft were based in the EU, I suspect the US would have pushed a lot harder to punish its abuse of its monopoly position.
The only reason the EU seems to be leaning a lot more heavily on Microsoft is, I suspect, due to the fact that Microsoft takes more money out of the local EU economy than it takes in.