The ancients did not have a base-10 system of math
This makes no difference, and if anything makes my argument stronger due to less formalized precision. It is not unclear, significant digits or not, that "5 million votes" does not specifically exclude "5,000,001" or "5,000,120". Further, being from a divine source who would be aware of future time periods, we can expect prophecies to be translatable into current conventions and still hold true.
(a) - the passage is gender neutral and is referring to mankind, not the masculine.
That is your grammatical interpretation, not the sole demonstrated one, which is again required for your own claim. If the verse read, "My spirit will not contend with man forever, due to all the bloodshed he participates in..." would you still be as confident it is definitely not the case that males were specifically being referenced, regardless of using the same pronouns? The original Hebrew here uses "adam", the same as used for the specific male human, and Hebrew is actually the form of reference for evaluating potential subtleties of meaning.
You are still trying to apply logic to a discussion of the supernatural
Really, take that Philo 101 course. You simply apparently don't know what "logical" means. "Only material objects exist, therefore Obama will get re-elected" is illogical. "God exists, therefore he can act in the world" is logical. It makes absolutely no difference whether someone believes in anything supernatural at all for the first to be, factually illogical, and the second, factually logical. Logic addresses -only the inferences between premises-, and has -nothing to say about which premises are correct-. To argue for the correctness of premises, you need to go to some -other- methodology or source, such as empiricism.
Point (d) is addressed in the Wikipedia article - her age is not in question.
Neat. Watch this. I'm questioning it. It is, therefore, by definition "in question". You've yet to provide any rationale why you do not feel it possible that whatever (unspecified, handwaving at links is not an argument) reasons you have to make your conclusion, could not reasonably have a 1-in-a-billion error rate. Birth certificates certainly would have far more than that.
So the only remaining point is (c), for which you have not provided anything to back up you assertion.
It's "backed up" by the direct words of the verse. God is making this limitation for the direct purpose of limiting the damage caused by man's lifetime. In the case of someone who is -not- causing such damage, or clearly is causing more good than bad, or for myriad other reasons (including the amount of pro-theism posting her life has indirectly caused at this very moment), there is no reason he could not make an exception.
What biblical scholar are you getting this from so I can read up on the reasoning?
You have me here, and I am sufficient. Address what's in front of you. We're still at zero refuted, all 4 needed, for your "disproven".
The significance of trailing zeros in a number not containing a decimal point can be ambiguous.
Let's save time by getting right down to the core of your problem. You do, or do not, understand that even if demonstrated, "can be ambiguous" gets you -absolutely nowhere- toward the bar you are setting for your argument, that of "disproven"?
what are the 3 I haven't addressed satisfactorily?
I initially named 4. You've addressed none of them satisfactorily, for the purposes of your own argument, in the same manner as above. You've specified what "satisfactory" would be, right here, all by yourself. Nothing you have said approaches the -refutation- that would be required, not for one counterargument of which you've refuted none, but -all- of them, to reach the bar of your own claim. This isn't merely me saying this, this is the well-established-by-all-of-Western-Philosophy logical criteria for what you yourself have framed as the suggested conclusion, once we start using "logical" in a meaningful fashion.
Logic doesn't apply when discussing the supernatural.
Sorry, I don't have time to give you a basic Philo 101 understanding of what "logical" means. In one sentence, "logical" means non-fallacious inference from premises, and says absolutely nothing about what those premises may be.
I'll try anyway - what exactly are you claiming the passage means? What scholar holds that to be the correct interpretation?
I am contending that God is stating the position than man's destructive/sinful nature is such that he's going to put a time limit on the manifestation of the effects of that nature. One can conclude this is a judgment applying to "pre-flood" people, or to man's nature in general... for which the latter case would apply up until the present day.
I'm not claiming to have invented people.
Nice cop-out. If you think such a prediction is unremarkable, go ahead and make yours. I won't even hold you to the standard of the original author, that if anyone ever shows up older than your prediction, you agree to be put to death for a false claim to knowledge, in the original case, of God's supposed knowledge.
I thought it polite not to make you read your own link describing significant digits as "ambiguous" when integers are used with a trailing zero and (obviously) no decimal.
The third paragraph in makes clear what "52,000" and "52,000,000" mean in terms of the degree of specificity specified by the value.
She has been thoroughly vetted. I have much more confidence in her birth year than I do that any particular English language verse in the bible correctly communicated the intent of the original author from 5000+ years ago, writing in some ancient language that probably (definitely?) did not have vowels.
Fair enough. Only 3 counterpoints to go, then, to "disprove" the notion from your own viewpoint (leaving aside such areas where you are blatantly illogical), let alone mine.
I can only say that this particular passage in the bible, taken literally and out of context, has been proven wrong.
Ah well, absolutely not, though we've reached a fairly common point in argument, which tends to lead to very long threads, that being, someone implying that having -some- objection to -some- of a list of counterarguments demonstrates a refutation of the original point.
In reality here, with how logic works, you'd need to refute -all- of them (including the notion that since God is specifying it for his purposes, he is free to allow exceptions that do not detract from that stated purpose, which you touched none at all) to have a claim such as "disproven" be other than a non-sequitur.
This tends to be a rather tedious and pointless process of someone insisting that "since you haven't disproven me, I've disproven you", though, which I spare us both from in this case.
The accuracy of the number, by someone who, to you, can only be a desert nomad who knew a few hundred people tops, with no internet to refer to for even present-day-for-him statistical data, is very notable in its correlation with billions of future people over thousands of years. If you feel it isn't notable, feel free to state your prediction for the next three thousand years, -with- the internet to advantage you with virtually all knowledge of all humanity as your starting point.
Who said she was a man? The "his" in my comment was referring to God. I suppose I should have capitalized it to stick to Catholic convention.
The verse stipulating the bound says "man" and "his". Strictly speaking, Jeanne's age would not be relevant to the specified set, per a direct reading. I assume it's a contradiction you're going for here.
I don't buy your argument that 120 has two significant digits. The zero is significant. At the very least it is ambiguous, and so we get into issues of interpretation. At least He didn't say "No man shall live longer than two times the life of my favorite donkey plus the time it takes an egg to decay" or something.
Okay, feel free not to buy how significant digits in specifying measurements according to math itself works. I'll continue to stick with math--and according to that, the zero is not significant. For it to be so, something indicating this would need to be present--such as "120.", or if you're objecting on notation grounds, something like "120 years and six months".
You verified it personally, and this is your unbiased conclusion? Many things look solid based on an error rate of billions-to-one against.
Of course, once you start making things up, you might as well go whole hog.
Being the only one "making things up" here, I'll take your word for it.
And... the rest of your commentary was just silly, so I trust you don't need a rebuttal. You aren't faced with a circular bible-backing-the-bible argument here, you are faced with reality backing the bible.
If you like, though, as noted elsewhere, this verse can also be interpreted as a countdown to "the flood". I'm guessing you'd not prefer that view, though.
You're overthinking this. I simply mean "entropy" to mean, per physics within a Naturalism metaphysics, I can just wait and my troll is automatically and inevitably taken care of. It makes no difference to that outcome if there are short-term reconstructive processes within that Naturalistic context--or did you want me to disagree with your position?
I actually picked up a book back then giving a disassembly of the 1541 code with some line-level commentary--though, apparently, even the author of this book which was -only about- the 1541 internals couldn't figure out what the code was doing for page after page after page in some cases.
It was really horrific spaghetti code. I don't know what they were thinking either--unless it was some kind of "security through obscurity" notion that their IP would be protected by making the firmware 95% gratuitous nonsense functionality-wise, or, possibly, they actually wrote the firmware in a poorly-chosen high-level language and compiled it.
Ah yes... what was it... six times faster than the baroque firmware of the 1541 drive?
I still remember as one of my first exposures to programming, going through the Assembly for the particularly lovely serial data transfer routine... since the 1541 and C64 happened to have the same CPU running at the same clock speed, the code bypassed using the clock line for timing at all, and blasted the data across using both the data line -and- the clock line simultaneously. Over the several hundred lines of Assembly for the transfer, the clock cycles per instruction were calculated -precisely- to ensure that the data was on the lines within, IIRC, a 4 clock-cycle window, so given the maximum number of cycles the C64 CPU and the 1541 CPU could be "out of sync" during the transfer, the data was assured to be there from the 1541 side when the C64 pulled the bits off.
It is the closest thing I've seen to -perfectly optimal- code in my 30-ish years of development since. Actually, as far as I can tell, this was in fact perfectly optimal given the hardware characteristics of the C64 and 1541.
As I'm thinking about it now... I think this was actually code from FCopy/4-Minute-Backup, but Fastload was comparable, and as I recall didn't require blanking the screen to turn off all interrupts during the data transfer at a slight speed penalty...
Okay, so simpler:
Your characterization of the supposed consistently-negative effects across theists: Directly, provably, and proven, wrong.
Your lame attempts at recasting an issue of fact as a psychological issue and thus evading the matter at hand: Wholly invalid, though a reasonably competent parroting of Dawkins, and suitably peppered with incorrectly-used terms such as "irrational".
You entire mechanism of relative evaluation of worldviews: Disingenuous in its relative comparison of an actual demographic to a non-demographic of no particular stance on anything beyond "not God".
You handwaving and vague dismissal of what you can't, or won't, respond to while exiting: Transparent.
The mechanism by which I would automatically win this argument by inevitable default on your part anyway: Entropy.
Thanks for playing.
Well, to be precise, a "contradiction" requires that two contrary statements be made, and they are made applying -as of the same time- and -in the same sense-.
Typically, I see such claims with respect to what are, at best, "soft contradictions" fulfilling only the first attribute above, rather than a true contradiction.
Perhaps you'd like to select some that you feel clearly meet the "same time" and "same sense" requirement, to support your view, rather than just linking an overtly-biased list.
Couldn't muster enough concern about your views to check if the "lateknight" reference was indicating another as the OP poster, or yourself. Read "he" as "you", where appropriate.
I'm touched that you hold me in such esteem, but I must disagree.
I hold your position in no esteem. That's why you correctly understood my sense as sarcastic, just couldn't stick with an honest rendering of the content, as is your habit further on...
but it would be quite unfair to say that it applies to the list as a whole. Nor was that the point being made by "lightknight" or myself.
And who said that? I asked for a statement as to -which- he considered "cognitively impaired" due to theistic belief, to make even the initial preconditions to serious consideration of his stance possible. Feel free to continue to argue with yourself, though.
Your own words - and the words of other religious moderates - are the most damning condemnation of religion which exist; even you admit that the fewer irrational, superstitious, faith-based views we have, the better off we are.
When quoting my words, please make them words that are actually there that I made. Firstly, I do not consider the particular views of a subset of Taoism referenced to be harmonious with the core of Taoism's worldview of an abstract, impersonal "uniting spiritual nature" to existence. I do, in fact, accept nonphysical conscious entities, but would reject a worldview that simultaneously claims them in particular while not having an overall metaphysics supporting the notion. I am not debating "correct" in my response, rather "objectionable on any level", which is called-for by his extensively-refuted, if commonplace, tactic of "refutation by psychologization".
Secondly, it seems self-evident that there are no worldviews whatsoever that can be claimed to have -no- potential negative effects ("downsides" as I put it, relative to Taoism and your make-believe void-utopia of no particular content, no particular stances, and thus no particular questionable behavior resulting from that non-content)--but this is wholly irrelevant. For any -actually existing- philosophy anywhere, there are conjectural downsides, and these must be a) demonstrated realistic, and b) weighed against the benefits to form any kind of valid overall evaluation.
Slashdot Mirror
The ancients did not have a base-10 system of math
This makes no difference, and if anything makes my argument stronger due to less formalized precision. It is not unclear, significant digits or not, that "5 million votes" does not specifically exclude "5,000,001" or "5,000,120". Further, being from a divine source who would be aware of future time periods, we can expect prophecies to be translatable into current conventions and still hold true.
(a) - the passage is gender neutral and is referring to mankind, not the masculine.
That is your grammatical interpretation, not the sole demonstrated one, which is again required for your own claim. If the verse read, "My spirit will not contend with man forever, due to all the bloodshed he participates in..." would you still be as confident it is definitely not the case that males were specifically being referenced, regardless of using the same pronouns? The original Hebrew here uses "adam", the same as used for the specific male human, and Hebrew is actually the form of reference for evaluating potential subtleties of meaning.
You are still trying to apply logic to a discussion of the supernatural
Really, take that Philo 101 course. You simply apparently don't know what "logical" means. "Only material objects exist, therefore Obama will get re-elected" is illogical. "God exists, therefore he can act in the world" is logical. It makes absolutely no difference whether someone believes in anything supernatural at all for the first to be, factually illogical, and the second, factually logical. Logic addresses -only the inferences between premises-, and has -nothing to say about which premises are correct-. To argue for the correctness of premises, you need to go to some -other- methodology or source, such as empiricism.
Point (d) is addressed in the Wikipedia article - her age is not in question.
Neat. Watch this. I'm questioning it. It is, therefore, by definition "in question". You've yet to provide any rationale why you do not feel it possible that whatever (unspecified, handwaving at links is not an argument) reasons you have to make your conclusion, could not reasonably have a 1-in-a-billion error rate. Birth certificates certainly would have far more than that.
So the only remaining point is (c), for which you have not provided anything to back up you assertion.
It's "backed up" by the direct words of the verse. God is making this limitation for the direct purpose of limiting the damage caused by man's lifetime. In the case of someone who is -not- causing such damage, or clearly is causing more good than bad, or for myriad other reasons (including the amount of pro-theism posting her life has indirectly caused at this very moment), there is no reason he could not make an exception.
What biblical scholar are you getting this from so I can read up on the reasoning?
You have me here, and I am sufficient. Address what's in front of you. We're still at zero refuted, all 4 needed, for your "disproven".
The significance of trailing zeros in a number not containing a decimal point can be ambiguous.
Let's save time by getting right down to the core of your problem. You do, or do not, understand that even if demonstrated, "can be ambiguous" gets you -absolutely nowhere- toward the bar you are setting for your argument, that of "disproven"?
what are the 3 I haven't addressed satisfactorily?
I initially named 4. You've addressed none of them satisfactorily, for the purposes of your own argument, in the same manner as above. You've specified what "satisfactory" would be, right here, all by yourself. Nothing you have said approaches the -refutation- that would be required, not for one counterargument of which you've refuted none, but -all- of them, to reach the bar of your own claim. This isn't merely me saying this, this is the well-established-by-all-of-Western-Philosophy logical criteria for what you yourself have framed as the suggested conclusion, once we start using "logical" in a meaningful fashion.
Well, though it's a very long story... in this particular case, being from Michigan, I've actually seen this happen. ;)
Logic doesn't apply when discussing the supernatural.
Sorry, I don't have time to give you a basic Philo 101 understanding of what "logical" means. In one sentence, "logical" means non-fallacious inference from premises, and says absolutely nothing about what those premises may be.
I'll try anyway - what exactly are you claiming the passage means? What scholar holds that to be the correct interpretation?
I am contending that God is stating the position than man's destructive/sinful nature is such that he's going to put a time limit on the manifestation of the effects of that nature. One can conclude this is a judgment applying to "pre-flood" people, or to man's nature in general... for which the latter case would apply up until the present day.
I'm not claiming to have invented people.
Nice cop-out. If you think such a prediction is unremarkable, go ahead and make yours. I won't even hold you to the standard of the original author, that if anyone ever shows up older than your prediction, you agree to be put to death for a false claim to knowledge, in the original case, of God's supposed knowledge.
I thought it polite not to make you read your own link describing significant digits as "ambiguous" when integers are used with a trailing zero and (obviously) no decimal.
The third paragraph in makes clear what "52,000" and "52,000,000" mean in terms of the degree of specificity specified by the value.
She has been thoroughly vetted. I have much more confidence in her birth year than I do that any particular English language verse in the bible correctly communicated the intent of the original author from 5000+ years ago, writing in some ancient language that probably (definitely?) did not have vowels.
Fair enough. Only 3 counterpoints to go, then, to "disprove" the notion from your own viewpoint (leaving aside such areas where you are blatantly illogical), let alone mine.
...or Thomas Saying 43.
I can only say that this particular passage in the bible, taken literally and out of context, has been proven wrong.
Ah well, absolutely not, though we've reached a fairly common point in argument, which tends to lead to very long threads, that being, someone implying that having -some- objection to -some- of a list of counterarguments demonstrates a refutation of the original point.
In reality here, with how logic works, you'd need to refute -all- of them (including the notion that since God is specifying it for his purposes, he is free to allow exceptions that do not detract from that stated purpose, which you touched none at all) to have a claim such as "disproven" be other than a non-sequitur.
This tends to be a rather tedious and pointless process of someone insisting that "since you haven't disproven me, I've disproven you", though, which I spare us both from in this case.
The accuracy of the number, by someone who, to you, can only be a desert nomad who knew a few hundred people tops, with no internet to refer to for even present-day-for-him statistical data, is very notable in its correlation with billions of future people over thousands of years. If you feel it isn't notable, feel free to state your prediction for the next three thousand years, -with- the internet to advantage you with virtually all knowledge of all humanity as your starting point.
Who said she was a man? The "his" in my comment was referring to God. I suppose I should have capitalized it to stick to Catholic convention.
The verse stipulating the bound says "man" and "his". Strictly speaking, Jeanne's age would not be relevant to the specified set, per a direct reading. I assume it's a contradiction you're going for here.
I don't buy your argument that 120 has two significant digits. The zero is significant. At the very least it is ambiguous, and so we get into issues of interpretation. At least He didn't say "No man shall live longer than two times the life of my favorite donkey plus the time it takes an egg to decay" or something.
Okay, feel free not to buy how significant digits in specifying measurements according to math itself works. I'll continue to stick with math--and according to that, the zero is not significant. For it to be so, something indicating this would need to be present--such as "120.", or if you're objecting on notation grounds, something like "120 years and six months".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
Her birth record is solid.
You verified it personally, and this is your unbiased conclusion? Many things look solid based on an error rate of billions-to-one against.
Of course, once you start making things up, you might as well go whole hog.
Being the only one "making things up" here, I'll take your word for it.
And... the rest of your commentary was just silly, so I trust you don't need a rebuttal. You aren't faced with a circular bible-backing-the-bible argument here, you are faced with reality backing the bible.
If you like, though, as noted elsewhere, this verse can also be interpreted as a countdown to "the flood". I'm guessing you'd not prefer that view, though.
Just to generally note here on an advocacy level...
That both interpretation A and interpretation B could be viable stances for a theist, would not make "neither A nor B" a viable stance for an atheist.
Considering...
...I'd say a "clarifying addendum", at most, might be called-for.
a) Jeanne is not a "man"
b) Per math, 120 has two significant digits, specifying a range through 125 years - 1 second
c) Since it's stated as intended for God's own purposes, he could choose exceptions
d) An erroneous record of age for this single proposed exception among billions is not statistically unlikely
That would indeed explain the lack of a viable "retirement plan".
Are you similarly baffled as to whether forewarning was made if a friend says, "Don't go there. Trust me"?
You're overthinking this. I simply mean "entropy" to mean, per physics within a Naturalism metaphysics, I can just wait and my troll is automatically and inevitably taken care of. It makes no difference to that outcome if there are short-term reconstructive processes within that Naturalistic context--or did you want me to disagree with your position?
Clearly, you fail metaphor.
If you search to the ends of the Earth, I suspect you'll find someone who can elaborate on it. Until then, I suggest Job 26:7.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth
Gave that some thought. And, ah, no. Talk to the entropy.
*Ahem*
That's -Saint- Jeanne Calment to you, friend.
Genesis 6:3.
Add in the notion that if the car can't drive 5 miles without the camshaft, we'll never get to the point of adding the radiator, and you're... closer.
I actually picked up a book back then giving a disassembly of the 1541 code with some line-level commentary--though, apparently, even the author of this book which was -only about- the 1541 internals couldn't figure out what the code was doing for page after page after page in some cases.
It was really horrific spaghetti code. I don't know what they were thinking either--unless it was some kind of "security through obscurity" notion that their IP would be protected by making the firmware 95% gratuitous nonsense functionality-wise, or, possibly, they actually wrote the firmware in a poorly-chosen high-level language and compiled it.
Ah yes... what was it... six times faster than the baroque firmware of the 1541 drive?
I still remember as one of my first exposures to programming, going through the Assembly for the particularly lovely serial data transfer routine... since the 1541 and C64 happened to have the same CPU running at the same clock speed, the code bypassed using the clock line for timing at all, and blasted the data across using both the data line -and- the clock line simultaneously. Over the several hundred lines of Assembly for the transfer, the clock cycles per instruction were calculated -precisely- to ensure that the data was on the lines within, IIRC, a 4 clock-cycle window, so given the maximum number of cycles the C64 CPU and the 1541 CPU could be "out of sync" during the transfer, the data was assured to be there from the 1541 side when the C64 pulled the bits off.
It is the closest thing I've seen to -perfectly optimal- code in my 30-ish years of development since. Actually, as far as I can tell, this was in fact perfectly optimal given the hardware characteristics of the C64 and 1541.
As I'm thinking about it now... I think this was actually code from FCopy/4-Minute-Backup, but Fastload was comparable, and as I recall didn't require blanking the screen to turn off all interrupts during the data transfer at a slight speed penalty...
Ah, memories.
Going by your sig, I think you should get a bonus +1 Informative for your sheer dedication to posting on Slashdot alone...
Okay, so simpler: Your characterization of the supposed consistently-negative effects across theists: Directly, provably, and proven, wrong. Your lame attempts at recasting an issue of fact as a psychological issue and thus evading the matter at hand: Wholly invalid, though a reasonably competent parroting of Dawkins, and suitably peppered with incorrectly-used terms such as "irrational". You entire mechanism of relative evaluation of worldviews: Disingenuous in its relative comparison of an actual demographic to a non-demographic of no particular stance on anything beyond "not God". You handwaving and vague dismissal of what you can't, or won't, respond to while exiting: Transparent. The mechanism by which I would automatically win this argument by inevitable default on your part anyway: Entropy. Thanks for playing.
Well, to be precise, a "contradiction" requires that two contrary statements be made, and they are made applying -as of the same time- and -in the same sense-.
Reference
Typically, I see such claims with respect to what are, at best, "soft contradictions" fulfilling only the first attribute above, rather than a true contradiction.
Perhaps you'd like to select some that you feel clearly meet the "same time" and "same sense" requirement, to support your view, rather than just linking an overtly-biased list.
Couldn't muster enough concern about your views to check if the "lateknight" reference was indicating another as the OP poster, or yourself. Read "he" as "you", where appropriate.
I'm touched that you hold me in such esteem, but I must disagree.
I hold your position in no esteem. That's why you correctly understood my sense as sarcastic, just couldn't stick with an honest rendering of the content, as is your habit further on...
but it would be quite unfair to say that it applies to the list as a whole. Nor was that the point being made by "lightknight" or myself.
And who said that? I asked for a statement as to -which- he considered "cognitively impaired" due to theistic belief, to make even the initial preconditions to serious consideration of his stance possible. Feel free to continue to argue with yourself, though.
Your own words - and the words of other religious moderates - are the most damning condemnation of religion which exist; even you admit that the fewer irrational, superstitious, faith-based views we have, the better off we are.
When quoting my words, please make them words that are actually there that I made. Firstly, I do not consider the particular views of a subset of Taoism referenced to be harmonious with the core of Taoism's worldview of an abstract, impersonal "uniting spiritual nature" to existence. I do, in fact, accept nonphysical conscious entities, but would reject a worldview that simultaneously claims them in particular while not having an overall metaphysics supporting the notion. I am not debating "correct" in my response, rather "objectionable on any level", which is called-for by his extensively-refuted, if commonplace, tactic of "refutation by psychologization".
Secondly, it seems self-evident that there are no worldviews whatsoever that can be claimed to have -no- potential negative effects ("downsides" as I put it, relative to Taoism and your make-believe void-utopia of no particular content, no particular stances, and thus no particular questionable behavior resulting from that non-content)--but this is wholly irrelevant. For any -actually existing- philosophy anywhere, there are conjectural downsides, and these must be a) demonstrated realistic, and b) weighed against the benefits to form any kind of valid overall evaluation.
Boring empty claims.