You think it's only religion that "gets a pass"? Get real. We've had entire countries be invaded to eliminate free speech against atheists representing an formally-atheistic agenda--remember the USSR?
Secondly, please explain the basic underpinning of your ethical complaint from -your- worldview. Without reference to -theistic- ethics, how is it a problem for Islam or Christianity, as numerically-dominant subcultures, to simply outright kill every last one of you and thereby pursue a very-viable survival strategy to maximize the success of our DNA? Even the slightest valid basis for a complaint, derivable from Darwinian Naturalism, that doesn't parasite off of ethical norms entirely provided by the people you're attacking, please.
"You can't justify violence." Er, why exactly, according to -you-?
The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus might be real too, but you don't believe in them.
Correct. In part, because there's no peer-reviewed studies (written by multiple PhD's and published in a journal of worldwide reknown, incidentally) which quantifies eyewitness reports of them, in the context where we would expect to find them, like this one:
I understand that some of these can be argued, such as upon a basis of supposed vagueness or the possibility of intentional fulfillment on the part of historical believers (for such cases where that would be possible). Therefore, feel free to reduce the estimated probability given by a billion times before we start our comparison with Santa's and the Tooth Fairy's published, verifiable future predictions.
Go ahead, list them. I didn't substantiate it with a treatise, but it doesn't violate logical fallacies.
Yes, it clearly does. At minimum, it's an Appeal to Authority and an Ad Hominem. You are projecting a group of "rational people", lacking any definition, and asserting that a position is correct or incorrect based on whether they correspond to the supposed views your constructed group, which, handily, you further imply, all agree with you, with no logical connection demonstrated between the group and the conclusion.
It's the summary of the ridiculous belief in primitive mythology that people hold.
That one can be called a Bare Assertion Fallacy. There is, in fact, nothing about the belief that is in the least ridiculous, and you tying it's truth-status to its age is called the Genetic Fallacy. Try learning a few of them, or at least develop to the level where you can understand the difference between an actual argument and a mere insulting characterization. You rely, apparently, entirely on the latter. It might work briefly for the easily-intimidated, but it won't work on anyone who knows the rules to reason that you do not, as our exemplar of "rationality".
That there is a minority of scientists who manage to compartmentalize there religious beliefs from their scientific and rational scrutiny means little.
No, -you- mean little, compared to Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Newton, Bayes, Linnaeus, Euler, Babbage, Maxwell, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, Planck, and Heisenberg, to name a few from the list. Both in general, and to science specifically.
I'd like to see one such paper from a scientist in that list that justified their belief in a Biblical god
Many on that list are published theologians as well. So... if you want to see one, try reading one.
You can start at the very beginning, where the Earth is created before the heavenly bodies, to an Earth that doesn't move, and on to ridiculous Noah's Ark stories.
Allegory, it says it is figuratively unmoving (you do realize in physics we now know there is no privileged frame of reference frame, correct?), local flood. In order, summarizing.
The Christian faith is nothing but an offshoot of ancient Hebrew mythology.
Once again, Genetic Fallacy with a dash of Ad Hominem. I suggest less Dawkins parrot-training books, and more Philosophy 101 class. It will help you.
That is why you have people who can build atom bombs and understand the physics of it still believe in the Biblical god.
I'm confused. Are you saying there's anything that the biblical god is said to have done that physics does not agree can happen as a matter of quantum probability?
Because, well, if you're saying that, you aren't among those who "understand the physics of it".
Rationalize away. Back at real reality, you can't get a better test case than an entire state that is atheist -by formal definition-.
Of course there were "political motivations". There always are. That still doesn't alter the fact that this can be more directly explained as a direct consequence of worldview that in any other case you can name--including the Inquisition.
You don't get ahead by sharing everything you make and helping out the competition.
Yes, you do.
Open Source has proven this to be the case, even winning over the historical corporate bastion of conservatism that is IBM. I had two machines on my desk. One Windows, one Linux. Both made the company money by different means.
It's the old question of "getting more of the pie" versus "growing the pie"--the difference being, in software, you can grow the pie exponentially and at a trivial incremental cost. When the domain of technological possibility is grown like that, there's more room for profitable activities for everyone involved.
And... no, Apple lost because the Lisa and Macintosh were absurdly high-priced for their capabilities. IBM and Microsoft won that fight by... let's see... -helping their competitors- through allowing the "clone" market to flourish, from which the efficiencies of scale took care of the rest, driving down the prices and making Apple's pricing look even worse by comparison. Xerox PARC's concepts (you may erroneously know them as "Apple's concepts") were nice, but not nice enough to be cost-justifying compared to the PC-compatible market's pricing. Windows just eliminated Apple's sole claim to advantage, and had the clearly better OS until... well, Apple stuck to tradition and stole the BSD OS. That they don't -like- sharing doesn't alter that they'd have no OS for their desktop/laptop systems without people who did like sharing, before they slapped an "Apple" label on others' work.
As the final argument on how this history proceeded, we can look at what happened when IBM tried to "pull an Apple" with the PS/2 and proprietary interfaces--an unmitigated disaster in the market. It's working for the time being for Apple as history repeats itself, but I expect it won't be long until Android reverses the perceptions again--it's just important to understand that there are alternatives to rapacious business, and spending your money exclusively on that just harms progress and technology for everyone, regardless of immediate perceptions. Though, granted, Apple is all about immediate perceptions...
Well, actually, it does say this, it just doesn't say it -there-.
But as to its supposed purpose, I'll note that I, personally, was never presented with this story as a kid in church (we tended to focus on more the sweetness-and-light stories than darker themes like Lot.... or darker still, say the facts of evolution).
And I submit you never did either, and rather made this connection up right here and now, for your own unstated reasons.
Seems Kepler ("Oh God, I am thinking thy thoughts after thee") for one, found it a useful analytical heuristic.
And, it is remarkably difficult to have even an explication of biology without "slipping" and injecting terms an concepts derived from concepts of design or teleology (e.g. "survival of the fittest"), even when one is assiduously trying to avoid referencing these for explanatory purposes.
Find me any writeup on evolution longer than 10 paragraphs, by any scientist you like, I'll find you where it anthropomorphizes or implies overall intention.
For engineering in general, your notion rests on the assertion that entities used for reference aren't created, because you say so. I"d be quite willing to bet that at least one engineer working on Jaguars would disagree, though, for starters.
Your points regarding "metaphorical interpretation" are appropriate, but I would have to ask in what field it's a problem to say that to interpret the information correctly, you have to use the correct interpretation...
A couple of wider points, though.
1. Adam and Eve were not the first people, and the bible does not say that they were. Undoubtedly you were indeed taught this is what the bible says--it does not. Teaching it precisely, though, that they were the first people given an immortal soul, tends both to be complex and engender a significant amount of cultural contention, leading, I suspect, to a significant amount of "glossing over". I would, however, suggest talking to a qualified Rabbi versed in the text on the issue, if one is available to you.
2. There is absolutely nothing "physically impossible" to, say, a technologically-advanced being capable of manipulating the apparently-random probabilities of quantum effects to generate macro-scale events. This covers all the cases of miracles, such as creation "ex nihilo" and physical reconstruction, in the bible. We may not be able to do them, but it does not follow they are physically impossible. Even from your own worldview, this type of event is indeed physically possible, because it would be the primary candidate (quantum field theory) for how our universe, in terms of physics, came to be--apart from any theological reference.
Bear in mind you are assuming (or more accurately, restricting the scope of possibilities based on what you're stipulating them to be) what the actual "outcome" for Lot's wife was.
For all you know, she went directly to heaven, and being turned bodily into salt was an immediate existential positive for her. You can't "close" the outcome to know how to evaluate it, as good or bad. You consider it "vindictive", etc., based on stipulating the metaphysical system untrue up-front, on a number of levels, which drives your inferred evaluation of God's action.
And, responding to this rather belatedly, mainly because I'm bored...
"This is what you get when you base your life on what you imagine your invisble friend in the sky wants you to do."
Arguing consequences of a belief is precisely the statement I was responding to, as opposed to whatever the context you have in your mind is.
I am pointing out that even his implied claims of relative benefits is weak. You have converted my actual statements into a claim that religion is -true- because of the relative consequences, which would be an Argumentum Ad Consequentiam, if such a claim actually existed in anything I typed.
For me, a background C++ development on Windows along with doing sysadmin-type work outside the main project, was sufficient to get C++ on Linux development work at IBM.
If you can get yourself consulting work or work with a smaller company where you are their main "technical guy", you can often just specify what you're going to do--as my first "resume-able" work with Linux was. Getting approval for doing a client's entire internet presence (mail server, web server, firewall, NAT router) for "free" (outside of a cheap x86 box and my time, of course) was approved without difficulty.
As a major investor in the company you work for, let me congratulate you on how much you're enjoying our "success in life means maximizing shareholder value, always, for everyone" Kool-Aid.;)
As opposed to what you get when your official policy is to reject the "invisible friend in the sky".
20 million of one's own citizens dead by the leaders' own hands and intention, per probably the best test case we'll get, the Soviet Union. Recent, explicitly atheist by policy, large-scale data, what better test-case could you hope for?
By the way, did you have a reason not to use the standard terminology, "God"? Well, because you wouldn't get the response you're looking for, so you want us to believe they are the same thing when you yourself don't think they are the same thing enough to use the usual term. This would be how we identify a clear-cut case of intellectual dishonesty.
If you want to compensate for that, you could produce what I expect would be some easy statistics to demonstrate your point, such as, that the average level of self-reported satisfaction with life is better with your worldview, as an overall -performance result-, rather than anecdotes. Don't have that either?
Being among Slashdot's Lawn Defenders, I can back this. The C64 was clearly dominant in 1984, with "the unfortunates" among the High School techie ("nerd" and "geek" were still quite insulting at the time) caste having a VIC-20, Atari 400/800, or TI-99/4A. IBM's disastrous initial foray with the "PCjr" held them up several years in sheer acquired negative goodwill.
Bear in mind, that almost any (even possible) repercussion generally makes it, on a cost/benefit basis, just not worth posting at all. At least not about anything but the most trivial, uncontroversial stuff (see people's Facebook/Twitter posts when they know their family/friends may be collectively passing judgment, let alone future employers). People will censor themselves and/or soften their presentation on the controversial topics, such as politics and religion.
IMHO, what historically made the internet great as a discussion medium is precisely the freedom to speak your mind, and your full mind, on whatever the topic may be. I think we would have lost a lot of quality frank discussion with the "chilling effect" of "everybody's you know is watching you, and realistically, most of those are just hoping for seeing something to indulge themselves in taking offense to".
"Scientific reality" would be reality as we subset it when restricting ourselves to acknowledging only scientific method as valid. It's really not difficult to do, one can right entire books assiduously avoiding anything but making statements about the domain of science by reference to scientific methodologies, and leave the reader with the general impression you've said something definitive about "reality" per se. You can even pull a massive non-sequitur into a scope of reality your book doesn't speak to at all, preferably with a self-contradictory title that tries to obscure the logical fallacy by rhetorically amplifying it. Dawkins does it all the time.;)
As for "falsifying", I mean scientific falsification. To falsify my premise about the actual dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the scientific meaning of the term, you'd need to come up with a test of the hypothesis, which you then perform, and note that after your test the nuclear missiles did, or did not, fly at each other from both sides--50 years after the fact. You can't test it, so you can't scientifically falsify it, so the assertion isn't in the domain of "science". Still, it's definitely in the scope of "reality".
Slashdot Mirror
You think it's only religion that "gets a pass"? Get real. We've had entire countries be invaded to eliminate free speech against atheists representing an formally-atheistic agenda--remember the USSR?
Secondly, please explain the basic underpinning of your ethical complaint from -your- worldview. Without reference to -theistic- ethics, how is it a problem for Islam or Christianity, as numerically-dominant subcultures, to simply outright kill every last one of you and thereby pursue a very-viable survival strategy to maximize the success of our DNA? Even the slightest valid basis for a complaint, derivable from Darwinian Naturalism, that doesn't parasite off of ethical norms entirely provided by the people you're attacking, please.
"You can't justify violence." Er, why exactly, according to -you-?
The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus might be real too, but you don't believe in them.
Correct. In part, because there's no peer-reviewed studies (written by multiple PhD's and published in a journal of worldwide reknown, incidentally) which quantifies eyewitness reports of them, in the context where we would expect to find them, like this one:
http://profezie3m.altervista.org/archivio/TheLancet_NDE.htm
We also have a much lower demonstrable success rate at predicting future events from Santa and the Tooth Fairy, as presented here:
http://www.reasons.org/articles/articles/fulfilled-prophecy-evidence-for-the-reliability-of-the-bible
I understand that some of these can be argued, such as upon a basis of supposed vagueness or the possibility of intentional fulfillment on the part of historical believers (for such cases where that would be possible). Therefore, feel free to reduce the estimated probability given by a billion times before we start our comparison with Santa's and the Tooth Fairy's published, verifiable future predictions.
Go ahead, list them. I didn't substantiate it with a treatise, but it doesn't violate logical fallacies.
Yes, it clearly does. At minimum, it's an Appeal to Authority and an Ad Hominem. You are projecting a group of "rational people", lacking any definition, and asserting that a position is correct or incorrect based on whether they correspond to the supposed views your constructed group, which, handily, you further imply, all agree with you, with no logical connection demonstrated between the group and the conclusion.
It's the summary of the ridiculous belief in primitive mythology that people hold.
That one can be called a Bare Assertion Fallacy. There is, in fact, nothing about the belief that is in the least ridiculous, and you tying it's truth-status to its age is called the Genetic Fallacy. Try learning a few of them, or at least develop to the level where you can understand the difference between an actual argument and a mere insulting characterization. You rely, apparently, entirely on the latter. It might work briefly for the easily-intimidated, but it won't work on anyone who knows the rules to reason that you do not, as our exemplar of "rationality".
That there is a minority of scientists who manage to compartmentalize there religious beliefs from their scientific and rational scrutiny means little.
No, -you- mean little, compared to Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Newton, Bayes, Linnaeus, Euler, Babbage, Maxwell, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, Planck, and Heisenberg, to name a few from the list. Both in general, and to science specifically.
I'd like to see one such paper from a scientist in that list that justified their belief in a Biblical god
Many on that list are published theologians as well. So... if you want to see one, try reading one.
You can start at the very beginning, where the Earth is created before the heavenly bodies, to an Earth that doesn't move, and on to ridiculous Noah's Ark stories.
Allegory, it says it is figuratively unmoving (you do realize in physics we now know there is no privileged frame of reference frame, correct?), local flood. In order, summarizing.
The Christian faith is nothing but an offshoot of ancient Hebrew mythology.
Once again, Genetic Fallacy with a dash of Ad Hominem. I suggest less Dawkins parrot-training books, and more Philosophy 101 class. It will help you.
yet the odds of that happening are essentially zero for practical purposes
In other, more accurate words, "not zero". More on the order of what one might call a miracle.
as anybody with a rational brain and understanding of science would come to the conclusion
I'm not even going to list the number of formal logical fallacies this sentence violates. So, I'll just give a set of directly-refuting examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science
That is why you have people who can build atom bombs and understand the physics of it still believe in the Biblical god.
I'm confused. Are you saying there's anything that the biblical god is said to have done that physics does not agree can happen as a matter of quantum probability?
Because, well, if you're saying that, you aren't among those who "understand the physics of it".
Rationalize away. Back at real reality, you can't get a better test case than an entire state that is atheist -by formal definition-.
Of course there were "political motivations". There always are. That still doesn't alter the fact that this can be more directly explained as a direct consequence of worldview that in any other case you can name--including the Inquisition.
Or atheists...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
You don't get ahead by sharing everything you make and helping out the competition.
Yes, you do.
Open Source has proven this to be the case, even winning over the historical corporate bastion of conservatism that is IBM. I had two machines on my desk. One Windows, one Linux. Both made the company money by different means.
It's the old question of "getting more of the pie" versus "growing the pie"--the difference being, in software, you can grow the pie exponentially and at a trivial incremental cost. When the domain of technological possibility is grown like that, there's more room for profitable activities for everyone involved.
And... no, Apple lost because the Lisa and Macintosh were absurdly high-priced for their capabilities. IBM and Microsoft won that fight by... let's see... -helping their competitors- through allowing the "clone" market to flourish, from which the efficiencies of scale took care of the rest, driving down the prices and making Apple's pricing look even worse by comparison. Xerox PARC's concepts (you may erroneously know them as "Apple's concepts") were nice, but not nice enough to be cost-justifying compared to the PC-compatible market's pricing. Windows just eliminated Apple's sole claim to advantage, and had the clearly better OS until... well, Apple stuck to tradition and stole the BSD OS. That they don't -like- sharing doesn't alter that they'd have no OS for their desktop/laptop systems without people who did like sharing, before they slapped an "Apple" label on others' work.
As the final argument on how this history proceeded, we can look at what happened when IBM tried to "pull an Apple" with the PS/2 and proprietary interfaces--an unmitigated disaster in the market. It's working for the time being for Apple as history repeats itself, but I expect it won't be long until Android reverses the perceptions again--it's just important to understand that there are alternatives to rapacious business, and spending your money exclusively on that just harms progress and technology for everyone, regardless of immediate perceptions. Though, granted, Apple is all about immediate perceptions...
"This watermark includes our user IDs, the time the screenshot was captured and the IP address of the server we were on at the time."
And, without a password to go with that user ID, none of these are what one should reasonably consider "personal" or "sensitive" in the first place.
IMHO, in terms of privacy concerns, this is a non-story. Simply presenting it to Slashdot as a neat graphical hack would make more tinfoil-free sense.
"Toss attachment for body aside, realizing I am everywhere. One who is everywhere is joyous."
--Osho
(This message brought to you by Smirnoff Triple Black, et al)
Well, actually, it does say this, it just doesn't say it -there-.
But as to its supposed purpose, I'll note that I, personally, was never presented with this story as a kid in church (we tended to focus on more the sweetness-and-light stories than darker themes like Lot.... or darker still, say the facts of evolution).
And I submit you never did either, and rather made this connection up right here and now, for your own unstated reasons.
Seems Kepler ("Oh God, I am thinking thy thoughts after thee") for one, found it a useful analytical heuristic.
And, it is remarkably difficult to have even an explication of biology without "slipping" and injecting terms an concepts derived from concepts of design or teleology (e.g. "survival of the fittest"), even when one is assiduously trying to avoid referencing these for explanatory purposes.
Find me any writeup on evolution longer than 10 paragraphs, by any scientist you like, I'll find you where it anthropomorphizes or implies overall intention.
For engineering in general, your notion rests on the assertion that entities used for reference aren't created, because you say so. I"d be quite willing to bet that at least one engineer working on Jaguars would disagree, though, for starters.
Your points regarding "metaphorical interpretation" are appropriate, but I would have to ask in what field it's a problem to say that to interpret the information correctly, you have to use the correct interpretation...
A couple of wider points, though.
1. Adam and Eve were not the first people, and the bible does not say that they were. Undoubtedly you were indeed taught this is what the bible says--it does not. Teaching it precisely, though, that they were the first people given an immortal soul, tends both to be complex and engender a significant amount of cultural contention, leading, I suspect, to a significant amount of "glossing over". I would, however, suggest talking to a qualified Rabbi versed in the text on the issue, if one is available to you.
2. There is absolutely nothing "physically impossible" to, say, a technologically-advanced being capable of manipulating the apparently-random probabilities of quantum effects to generate macro-scale events. This covers all the cases of miracles, such as creation "ex nihilo" and physical reconstruction, in the bible. We may not be able to do them, but it does not follow they are physically impossible. Even from your own worldview, this type of event is indeed physically possible, because it would be the primary candidate (quantum field theory) for how our universe, in terms of physics, came to be--apart from any theological reference.
Bear in mind you are assuming (or more accurately, restricting the scope of possibilities based on what you're stipulating them to be) what the actual "outcome" for Lot's wife was.
For all you know, she went directly to heaven, and being turned bodily into salt was an immediate existential positive for her. You can't "close" the outcome to know how to evaluate it, as good or bad. You consider it "vindictive", etc., based on stipulating the metaphysical system untrue up-front, on a number of levels, which drives your inferred evaluation of God's action.
Probably a question best asked of Descartes or Pascal, or one of the other engineers (and creators of engineering itself) listed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science
Like not ignoring that the success rate for survival for those holding an atheism stance, according to themselves, is 0%?
How "ignorant" of a "drain" on society is it to invest resources in something that never ultimately succeeds, by definition?
Aristotle called from 300 BC, asking how exactly "more recent" means "more true".
He'd also like to know if his ideas are now too old to be true, given he basically created scientific methodology and all.
And, responding to this rather belatedly, mainly because I'm bored...
"This is what you get when you base your life on what you imagine your invisble friend in the sky wants you to do."
Arguing consequences of a belief is precisely the statement I was responding to, as opposed to whatever the context you have in your mind is.
I am pointing out that even his implied claims of relative benefits is weak. You have converted my actual statements into a claim that religion is -true- because of the relative consequences, which would be an Argumentum Ad Consequentiam, if such a claim actually existed in anything I typed.
For me, a background C++ development on Windows along with doing sysadmin-type work outside the main project, was sufficient to get C++ on Linux development work at IBM.
If you can get yourself consulting work or work with a smaller company where you are their main "technical guy", you can often just specify what you're going to do--as my first "resume-able" work with Linux was. Getting approval for doing a client's entire internet presence (mail server, web server, firewall, NAT router) for "free" (outside of a cheap x86 box and my time, of course) was approved without difficulty.
As a major investor in the company you work for, let me congratulate you on how much you're enjoying our "success in life means maximizing shareholder value, always, for everyone" Kool-Aid. ;)
As opposed to what you get when your official policy is to reject the "invisible friend in the sky".
20 million of one's own citizens dead by the leaders' own hands and intention, per probably the best test case we'll get, the Soviet Union. Recent, explicitly atheist by policy, large-scale data, what better test-case could you hope for?
By the way, did you have a reason not to use the standard terminology, "God"? Well, because you wouldn't get the response you're looking for, so you want us to believe they are the same thing when you yourself don't think they are the same thing enough to use the usual term. This would be how we identify a clear-cut case of intellectual dishonesty.
If you want to compensate for that, you could produce what I expect would be some easy statistics to demonstrate your point, such as, that the average level of self-reported satisfaction with life is better with your worldview, as an overall -performance result-, rather than anecdotes. Don't have that either?
Nah, anything that has specifically 23 pairs of chromosomes is expected to be able to infer it.
Being among Slashdot's Lawn Defenders, I can back this. The C64 was clearly dominant in 1984, with "the unfortunates" among the High School techie ("nerd" and "geek" were still quite insulting at the time) caste having a VIC-20, Atari 400/800, or TI-99/4A. IBM's disastrous initial foray with the "PCjr" held them up several years in sheer acquired negative goodwill.
Government-encroaching Luddite religion suppressing science and freedom!
How'd I do?
Or, maybe it's just a good idea to have some sort of vetting process before people start mass-injecting biological material into themselves.
Bear in mind, that almost any (even possible) repercussion generally makes it, on a cost/benefit basis, just not worth posting at all. At least not about anything but the most trivial, uncontroversial stuff (see people's Facebook/Twitter posts when they know their family/friends may be collectively passing judgment, let alone future employers). People will censor themselves and/or soften their presentation on the controversial topics, such as politics and religion.
IMHO, what historically made the internet great as a discussion medium is precisely the freedom to speak your mind, and your full mind, on whatever the topic may be. I think we would have lost a lot of quality frank discussion with the "chilling effect" of "everybody's you know is watching you, and realistically, most of those are just hoping for seeing something to indulge themselves in taking offense to".
"Scientific reality" would be reality as we subset it when restricting ourselves to acknowledging only scientific method as valid. It's really not difficult to do, one can right entire books assiduously avoiding anything but making statements about the domain of science by reference to scientific methodologies, and leave the reader with the general impression you've said something definitive about "reality" per se. You can even pull a massive non-sequitur into a scope of reality your book doesn't speak to at all, preferably with a self-contradictory title that tries to obscure the logical fallacy by rhetorically amplifying it. Dawkins does it all the time. ;)
As for "falsifying", I mean scientific falsification. To falsify my premise about the actual dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the scientific meaning of the term, you'd need to come up with a test of the hypothesis, which you then perform, and note that after your test the nuclear missiles did, or did not, fly at each other from both sides--50 years after the fact. You can't test it, so you can't scientifically falsify it, so the assertion isn't in the domain of "science". Still, it's definitely in the scope of "reality".