--- It is impossible to prove, using science, whether or not the supernatural exists. The supernatural, if it exists, might or might not be limited to the laws of cause and effect that govern natural processes. Cause and effect is necessary for science; without it, predictions are meaningless.
Sorry dude. Quantum mechanics works perfectly fine and the laws of cause and effect don't apply. There are plenty of uncaused events. We don't need causes for science we need consistent results. We don't have a cause for why radioactive particle decay (and not naive even to say it's supernatural) but we can predict with remarkable accuracy the rate of the substance's decay and how it will decay.
--- I don't. You can certainly question the supernatural, debate its existence, discuss it, etc. You can't examine it using science, though: you have to use theology and philosophy (which, fortunately, includes logic).
There are no skills found in theology or philosophy which make the undetectable, detectable. In either case you are forced to argue about something which doesn't exist and has no affect on the universe. I dare say a talk with a gardener or cooper would be massively more productive. And thankfully philosophers have other areas of interest which actually matter. Only the non-existent is immune to science.
--- These three assertions cannot be scientifically proven, though lots of people believe them through faith.
Faith is a fallacy. You can use it to conclude the contradictory things. The point of science it to discovery what our universe does and why. If something doesn't do something in our universe, only then does it avoid science.
Beyond your rather silly lines drawn in the sand, you are still missing a pretty critical point. There aren't any supernatural questions anymore. Everything people give credit to the supernatural for, has been firmly busted. This isn't anything amazing. It simply is what it is. Everything credited to the supernatural, to date, has been anything but. Start of life, existence of life, start of the universe, function of the brain, order of the planets, structure of the atom. These things are scientific. So long as you want a God that does anything, or exists... you have a problem. You could argue that your God is just extremely sneaky and has no connection to this universe, but few theists do that. Theology is nothing. The root is theo (god) and there is no god.
The idea that there are different subject areas is amusing but false. Staking claim on everything non-science doesn't help you very much when everything that interacts or exists in this universe is subjected to it. You are staking claim on nothing, and not even the empty space of nothingness (that's scientific), you are actually getting zippo... not even spacetime or artificial time.
Doubtful, when we die. We die. Hardly a figure it out then kind of thing. Usually when you do an experiment you want to get the results *before* you are dead. In any event, there's still no reason to even suppose an afterlife of a God, so what's the point of ignore the argument and never getting an answer?
-- Any such being, if it exists, is outside the realm of science. Science by definition limits itself to natural explanations
Science limits itself to things which exist. If such a being exists it is scientifically relevant. Moreso if you toss in all the stuff this thing is suppose to have done. Create life, grant prayers, make the universe. Though, though are natural things so there's a problem. Either God is completely irrelevant or you are just blowing smoke.
-- No, I make no such claim.
Well, that is the claim you need to make to put this character outside of the natural realm. You can't just declare something supernatural and make it immune to being questioned. Oh, don't ask about black holes, they are supernatural. Sure they have natural effects, they grant prayers, etc... but, they are not subject to scientific inquiry.
-- Science is the process of hypothesis and experimentation through which we seek natural explanations for our observations. The supernatural, if it exists, is the concern of philosophers and theologians, not scientists.
If the supernatural exists, it would easily be subject to the same processes of experimentation. The reason we seek natural explanations rather than supernatural ones, is that supernatural ones have thus far never existed. Each thing we check has a reasonable natural explanation, and each thing which has a natural effect and a consistent natural effect is easily subjected to science.
Why can't gardeners or coopers be concerned about the supernatural? I mean, if there is no way to detect it, or find any changes or effects in the natural world due to the supernatural (what would be needed to dodge science). Then why philosophers and theologians? What special powers or abilities do these people have to discern the non-existent in all its ineffectualness?
-- That's why Intelligent Design is not science: it allows supernatural explanations alongside natural ones.
Actually it could call for super intelligent aliens to have created all life on Earth. Which would certainly be a natural explanation. The reason Intelligent Design is not science is because it doesn't actually have any theory or facts behind it. It is simply the next evolution of creationism (set to dodge the unconstitutional God angle), with the same song and dance of arguing that evolution isn't enough to explain the world or that it's just too damned complex to have evolved. Sure, you can have a few changes over short periods of time, but large numbers of changes over a large period of time is impossible!
Intelligent Design is not science because it doesn't predict anything, it doesn't have a theory, it doesn't have facts... it just sits around making tired flawed arguments about real science.
--It is hard for us time bound creatures to even imagine someone or something that has always existed, someone that just IS.
Why can't the universe "just IS"? Seems a bit of a stretch to demand something just exist because the universe can't just exist.
--If there is a possibility, even a small one, that there is a God, then what, if any is my responsibility to Him?
Clearly, any superpowerful being who created this entire universe with a trillion trillion stars wants to be worshiped unconditionally by some intelligent ape on some small planet around an average star within a fairly average galaxy.
--Is there maybe a judgement after death?
The existence of a creator doesn't actually have any bearing as to whether there is something after death. And even then it seems like a dumb question.
-- If there is, what are my chances?
Well, an infinite number of possible mutually exclusive gods. I would gather they would be 1/infinity or 0.
-- Was Jesus who He claimed to be, the Immanuel, 'God with us" the "I AM" come to earth?
Was David Koresh? The Koran was better written and that Immanuel is simply a silly contradiction between Isaiah and the Gospels. I daresay the odds of that crazy absurd nonsense is zero.
-- When he claimed to be THE truth, was He lying or deceived?
I don't think there is any real basis to the story. Beyond a lack of historical evidence, it's patently absurd.
-- What if there is a heaven and a hell and physical death of only the body, with its brain, is not the end of my existence?
My brain, contains, everything I am. I daresay it could easily rot away and I would be non-existent just like I would be non-existent before I was born.
-- After all, in the physical world there is no extinction either. There are conservation laws. When you burn a piece of wood in your fireplace it doesn't go out of existence.
It changes form and no longer exists as a piece of wood. Just as if the order in my brain didn't exist I wouldn't exist. "I" am the order and arrangement of my brain. Just because the atoms which make up my brain will still exist after death, does nothing to imply that I (as the order and arrangement of my brain) will continue to exist.
-- It only changes form. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed and neither can the eternal spirit person that is the real conscious you.
I only have seen evidence for once conscious me, located firmly between my ears.
-- Right now you still have opportunity to determine the CORRECT answer to these and other important questions concerning your eternal destiny. I suggest you don't fool yourself, but earnestly seek true answers to these questions.
They aren't hard questions. And again, no evidence for eternal anything or destiny. You should really stop reading books written by bronzed age con-men. Your claims are absurd. The truth is rather simple: what you see is what you get. By the way, if you don't believe that my left sock created the universe as a video game, you will go to hell and burn forever and ever. But, beyond belief, you must eat at least one sock before you die. You see salvation is gained by faith and deeds. Believe my sock is that awesome, and eat at least one thing made in her image.
I don't think I'll reply in detail to everything. I'll just point out that fossils. regardless how you interpret them are very widespread. There are in fact few places of this planet that do NOT have fossils.
Not generally fossils but, areas where specific fossils are not found. If you are in a layer of rock formed in the Precambrian you aren't going to find any bones. Due to certain issues with the oceans we don't find many fossils in the water.
Even if they made some petrified wood, is that the way it really formed? Time is the biggest enemy of fossil making. The is NO known mechanism for making fossils over long periods of time - period. Using fossils, any fossils, as evidence for evolution is a wishful fairy tale.
No petrified wood forms in a very specific way, we simply made the fossilized wood by forcing the process to happen in a few days rather than a large number of years. Having extra time at your disposal wouldn't cause an inability to make fossils. That's just stupid. Secondly, there are many well understood chemical and physical properties which lead to fossil formation.
(....from multiple radiological clocks...) To use any clock, you have to assume (believe = have faith) that your clock has always ticked at the same or a known rate over the total time measured.
No. That's why one uses multiple clocks. Firstly, sometimes there are slight (1% or so) fluctuation in the initial content of the radiological clock material. One need only believe that all of these radiological decay rates from the half a dozen methods you use remain constant, as would be expected if the laws of physics hold roughly true. Though, to be fair, they have only held true each and every time we checked, perhaps they magically stop working when we aren't looking.
There is evidence that clocks based on atomic properties have drifted as much as by a factor of 300 million times since the "big bang". This drift is related to very fundamental properties of space itself changing as the universe expanded.
Respectfully, no there is not. It took a long while before heavier radioactive particles even formed and from that time, the half lives have remained constant. It is extremely silly to suggest other wise with "there is evidence", as if that is some forgiving phrase with which to preface lies.
The equations for atomic behavior include Planks constant. Evidence that evolutionists like to keep silent shows that the some of the so called "constants" are anything but constant over long time periods. There are few things in nature that are really constant other than change itself. So your clocks are based on faith.
There may have been some slight change in such things as Planks and the speed of light, these are really really small and only true for the first split second of time. Radiological decay and half-lives are extremely consistent. The idea that some error exists and thus the universe is 6,000 years old is downri
Evolution is a belief, not science. Science is about facts, observations and measurements. The interpretation of these facts is not always part of real science, but is guided by the basic world view of a scientist.
Evolution is a theory and a group of facts which that theory explains. The theory explains everything we see about animals not only the skeletal evidence we find in fossils but the modern evidence we see in the organs and habits of modern organisms as well as the coding of the DNA and the changes in proteins between species. People certainly believe evolution, in some kind of mutual exclusive relationship with science, rather because it is science and one of the most powerful and predictive elements of science we have. It is the cornerstone of all of biology.
One of the cornerstones of Darwinian Evolution always brought up is the subject of fossils. It is a science fact that we find fossils all over the earth.
No. It is also a prediction of evolution and common ancestry that we should find specific fossils in specific areas. If we found a mammal in the Precambrian, evolution is screwed. We find fossils of organisms which would have lived in that biome in that time. We find fossils geographically everywhere, however we find specific fossils geologically on in rocks they specifically belong to. We don't find, for example, fossils of dinosaurs less than 64 million years ago. So, finding a T-Rex embedded in 30 million year old rock, would send shockwaves through the scientific community.
However, nobody has ever made a fossil nor watched one form in nature. Today when a living thing dies, it decays.
Actually a group of Israeli scientists have managed to make petrified wood. It is true that things usually decay, and there is a pretty rare set of conditions needed for fossilization. However, it is nothing more than an argument from ignorance to note that since many things decay that they all decay.
It never makes a fossil. I order to make one, the creature to be fossilized has to die quickly, along with all decay causing organisms and then be buried away from air. A massive catastrophe of water, such as the flood of Noah could make fossils, but no slow process we know anything about could.
Hate to break it to you but Noah Ark is a myth. Geologically there is no evidence for it. And the counterevidence is overwhelming to say the least. The original story is copied from the much earlier Assyrian work the Epic of Gilgamesh, and does not depict real events. Futhermore, you can't make a natural fossil within a couple thousand years. It takes much longer than that to replace the bone with minerals.
Evolution is faith, in lots and lots of time. It basically substitutes billions and millions of years for the creative power of God.
Actually there are dozens of way to determine the age of the Earth, using those methods we have come up with a rather hard value of 4 billion years. That isn't faith, it is what the evidence tells us. Multiple independent methods finding the same value. Whereas your evidence consists of, I assume, nothing (on account of the evidence all pointing to 4 billion).
The evolutionist's God is time, lots of time. Without all that supposed time, evolution is a dead farce, pure belief, masquerading as science.
Well, I must admit that without the 2 billion years life has been evolving it would have have been hard to evolve the life we have today. It is a good thing that we have pretty clear verification of time periods we are talking about, from multiple radiological clocks. Again, though amusing belief and science are not mutually exclusive... in fact when science is done right it should heavily inform beliefs. You can, in fact, believe in things science has proven.
Indeed there is. An "a" in front of a word, originally from Greek or Latin means "without" or "not". Amoral means without moral, amuse means not to muse, that is to think. An atheis
You are telling me that a magical guy who created everything in the universe is outside the realm of the science? Are you telling me that there is a realm which cannot and does not have any effect on the material/natural realm and has no effect on our lives? Basically anything more than talking about a nothing with no effect on us at all, is within the scientific realm. Science has slowly whittled the supernatural realm from just about everything down to nothing. Such that now you need talk about things which, by definition don't effect us and can't matter, to still talk about the supernatural.
The different domains idea is really an amusing exercise in special pleading. Religion has over the years and still today made a number of very testable claims. They claimed the sun traveled around the earth, diseases were caused by sin, and that God man all the living things on Earth. So long as religion goes around making claims about the world, science will go around testing those claims.
You are making the same basic assumption that the original article makes: Namely that evolution is true and that special creation by God is false.
Actually, that's not really an assumption. That's what science shows to be true based on massive amounts of evidence. We find that both evolution is true and that special creation is false. However, the article suggest that due to the frequency of religious belief that there should perhaps be a biological component, and moreover a genetic cause. This latter claim is extremely suspect due to it existing in the realm of memetic rather than genetic evolution as well as for a number of more general flaws.
The evolutionary world view requires a convoluted, contradictory theory why man is so incurably religious.
No it doesn't. There is plenty of atheism to go around, and beyond outright atheism there is a massive amount of irreligious people, in fact polls show that 50% of people would currently describe themselves as religious in the United States and that number is dropping. However, we are talking about a belief, rather than some part of our phenotype. One need only show that that belief can spread and pass from one person to another to explain it's success. Religion is well evolved for the task of spreading from one person to another with promises of eternal happiness for conforming and eternal suffering for failing to... an infinite carrot with an infinite stick.
The Biblical world view cuts through all that and simply states that we are made in the image of God.... It is really that simple and the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
I think you do Lord Occam a disservice by pretending that an explanation that explains nothing and raises a huge number of secondary questions is on par with a simple materialistic explanation which actually fits the facts. The point is that at the core the explanation regardless of complexity needs to actually explain the facts it is set forth to explain. Certainly you could say "Goddidit" to any problem, and it does only contain 8 letters, but it fails in that it doesn't actually resolve anything.
Just as hardware and software are distinct, so too is the brain and the mind. Software can exist independent of any particular hardware. In the same way, the mind can be independent of the brain.
Actually neurology has rather firmly come down against this. The brain is the seat of our very being. We are fully contained in that three pound lump of gray stuff between our ears. The best computer analog would be some form of highly flexible firmware running on hardware, without any software in sight.
In fact, we find that in infants the original programming is hardwired (instinct) within the primitive brain to look at things that move and to recognize faces, whereas later this is turned off when our brains grow large enough to counteract this. However the software isn't written, rather it develops with our brains. Infants are born with a vast number of neurons, more than they can use. When they try to grab things, the strongest signals get through and the unused neurons atrophy. This allows for skill development and learning. It's not a program, it's a self rewiring asynchronous system wholly material in existence and function.
Creationists and religious folks have been so busy bickering about evolution they didn't notice when, in the last few decades, neurology came in and obliterated the idea of a soul. Modern science tells us that "we" are about three pounds of gray stuff. Our perception of ourselves is natively rather flawed. When we are told that our brain "thinks for us", we tend to think of it like a computer our mind uses to do things rather than the more accurate understanding that our brain is 'us'. It is a wonderful organ, but not the greatest at perceiving itself. Rather I should say, I am a wonderful organ. I control my body with ease.
We understand what causes these experiences to happen, typically a smell of roses is triggered by actually smelling roses, tastes and other things are triggered by material things as well. However, the really telling part isn't that we can trigger perceptions of material things but that the perception for triggering the non-existent things occurs in the same part of the brain. When we fiddle with the smell section we end up recalling actual things, whereas when we fiddle with this section we get things which don't, and very exacting stories which fit in perfectly with religious and alien experiences.
His question was trying to shift the burden of proof to the other side. Which you correctly noted, but that isn't agnosticism. Agnosticism is the idea that you can't know whether or not god exists. Either weakly in that you just don't know or strongly in that proof isn't possible. However, this question is different from the questions of whether or not you believe in god(s) or whether or not there is a god.
People think and see crazy things while some guy fiddles with his brain. Really! That is odd.
As far as science can tell, religion is absolutely false. I do think it is a proposition worth looking into, but we have. The world doesn't fit what we would expect to find if religion were true. In fact, the world we have is exactly like the world we should have if there were no gods.
There certainly exists some reasons for seeing aliens or angels and those reasons are fairly interesting. We have managed to trigger certain parts of the brain which give people either a religious experience or of aliens. Hard evidence for their existence is a waste of time, but finding why you see them is a fairly important point.
Basically you are confusing what is evolving in each situation. For example if you possess a religion that doesn't mean that that religion evolved to help you out. Just as if you possess a tapeworm in your gut or mites in your eyebrows that they aren't there to help you out. They are rather there to help themselves. Religions increase in frequency from being preached and expanded (this is why there are so many proselytizing religions), they have become entire systems setup with reasons to believe (just faith) and certain rules and edicts (have lots of kids and teach them this too; Shakers actually had the opposite belief and are now defunct because nobody had kids.). Many of these actually do convey rather significant advantages to the religion. However the advantage or disadvantage to you doesn't matter that much to the meme being evolved.
As for the reasons that religious and supernatural beliefs exists that's basically a side effect of our large brains. Typically the learning curve we need is so steep that as kids it is generally best that we accept everything we hear as true and a large part of what we hear as adults. This however leads to superstition, scams, ghosts, con-artists, astrology, religion, aliens, and myths. But it also leads us to quickly learning the things we need to know to be vastly successful in the real world.
We only evolved our really impressive brain in the last few million years, it'll take a while to work the kinks out. That's also the reason our hips and knees have some many problems, they evolved (changed greatly from previous forms) much more recently than our elbows and ribs.
As for the comment about being a great apes uncle, really the very idea of the grouping of apes including chimps, orangutans and gorillas but magically excluding humans is rather silly. It would rather be more accurate to say that humans are great apes.
The term bearing false witness doesn't equate to lying as many people would suggest rather it equates to perjury, and actually perjury under a guilty until proven innocent law system. You find a number of these requirements for very harsh punishments for falsely accusing a person of a crime, mostly because unless they could prove the allegations false they would be punished (usually death). In Hammurabi's code the punishment for accusing somebody of a crime who proved his innocence was typically death. Our modern society is much more fair in these regards and thus we don't have such strong condemnations of things which in the end are rather moot to us. Though we do have perjury and filing a false police report these are fairly minor rather than capital offenses.
Come on now, he said he had a degree in theology. If there is any degree which claiming you have and not having is a rather moot point it is theology. Just accept his degree on faith. It'll be fine.
Well, what if every year the speed of any of those modes of transport doubled in speed. How much would it matter when the time taken for any of the modes is about 1 second? Don't you think it would be an actual break through if rather than get there in linear time, you got there in say constant time? That would be an actual marked improvement. It would take a wormhole in this analogy, but never the less. That would be the a shift in time complexity. If you could travel at the speed of light or roughly jogging speed it wouldn't much matter if compared to instantaneous travel.
Even though ion propulsion is really kinda slow, if you're going far enough it will easily beat any rocket ship. Just sits there accelerating slowly for a long long time. Which is a marked improvement on a linear time mode of transit. Even in the real world, time complexity matters. Don't get me wrong, I did redesign an algorithm the other day to make it twice as fast because it was in constant use. Twice as fast is still twice as fast. In the computer world it is worth spending a couple hours to double the speed of somethings rather than waiting 18 months.
The real kicker is this is just a radix sort, which is a time complexity break through compared with merge sort. A merge sort is O(log(N)N), whereas Radix sort is O(N). He could simply sort more units. He might as well say his algorithm is 1,000,000X faster. This would be trivial to 'prove'. Just sort a trillion integers.
Not only this but doesn't it simple reek of but-wait-ism.
Okay, we are switching the power grid over to AC electricity because it goes X miles with only a 10% degradation.
But wait! DC current suddenly starts innovating and it can now go X/4 with only a 10% degradation... rethink this decision!
They honestly want a second thought on this based on their estimates of being able to get this crappy stuff to work perhaps on par with the better technology with terms of efficiency. Well, what about duration. I've had this CFC in my hallway for 15 years, assuming a reduction in heat (due to increased efficiency) the bulbs should last longer but will they last 15 years?
That said, sure, just ban bulbs which are less than 90% efficient.
My question is where the hell does this guy think that 10X faster is, first, impressive, and secondly worth a damn? Has he never heard of time complexity? Merge sort is order O(N(logN)) ten times faster than that and you get O(N(logN)) that's a speed boost if I ever saw one. Finally, this is really a radix sort, which is O(N) because it it is bitwise rather than comparison. That's not ten times faster that is log(N) times faster.
This isn't amazing, I wrote a radix sort back in college. It's an impressive algorithm. This is just that but crappier. Why not write an even faster integer sorting program.
Clearly. This kind of crap will exist for exactly as long as it take somebody to file a lawsuit claiming they bought some software which they had good reason to believe is valid and it deleted his files which took X number of manhours and were worth Y number of dollars.
Ain't that the truth. I swear Wikipedia is worthless for searching. Like completely worthless. You'd think they could wiki the searches better. You type in what you are searching for and get a disabig page for everything somebody actual thinks you might want. While at Wikipedia and I want to find something, I have to load up Google to find the damned thing.
How dare you sir, Bono saved the ailing copyright system. I mean, seriously under the old system the copyrights would expire after like 50 years after your death. This simply would not do! We needed an additional 20 years after our deaths to make publishing any work during our lives worthwhile.
Why just the other day I was talking to a friend who wanted to write, what would certainly be a very profitable, book for years to come. But, was leaning against it because he could only collect money for 50 stinking years after his death. I informed him of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act which upped that to 70 years after his death. He perked right up and started writing that same day!
Best I can tell, you're probably right. Though, I don't think Muhammad writing a book and claiming it was dictated by God should not be a claim accepted at face value as you did in your post. However, that's a side issue.
As for the core point of the last statement it is a rather parsing note. Sure 2:256 says no compulsion of religion, however 2:257 says if you don't believe you will burn forever. It's a little like Christians who say they don't hate homosexuality, God does... and they support God.
No pressure, but if you don't do this... you burn forever and ever in hell. Though, again, being false does really take the wind out of that sail. If you don't believe in the Easter Bunny you will get sent to Never-Never-Land and cut on by pirates!
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--- It is impossible to prove, using science, whether or not the supernatural exists. The supernatural, if it exists, might or might not be limited to the laws of cause and effect that govern natural processes. Cause and effect is necessary for science; without it, predictions are meaningless.
Sorry dude. Quantum mechanics works perfectly fine and the laws of cause and effect don't apply. There are plenty of uncaused events. We don't need causes for science we need consistent results. We don't have a cause for why radioactive particle decay (and not naive even to say it's supernatural) but we can predict with remarkable accuracy the rate of the substance's decay and how it will decay.
--- I don't. You can certainly question the supernatural, debate its existence, discuss it, etc. You can't examine it using science, though: you have to use theology and philosophy (which, fortunately, includes logic).
There are no skills found in theology or philosophy which make the undetectable, detectable. In either case you are forced to argue about something which doesn't exist and has no affect on the universe. I dare say a talk with a gardener or cooper would be massively more productive. And thankfully philosophers have other areas of interest which actually matter. Only the non-existent is immune to science.
--- These three assertions cannot be scientifically proven, though lots of people believe them through faith.
Faith is a fallacy. You can use it to conclude the contradictory things. The point of science it to discovery what our universe does and why. If something doesn't do something in our universe, only then does it avoid science.
Beyond your rather silly lines drawn in the sand, you are still missing a pretty critical point. There aren't any supernatural questions anymore. Everything people give credit to the supernatural for, has been firmly busted. This isn't anything amazing. It simply is what it is. Everything credited to the supernatural, to date, has been anything but. Start of life, existence of life, start of the universe, function of the brain, order of the planets, structure of the atom. These things are scientific. So long as you want a God that does anything, or exists... you have a problem. You could argue that your God is just extremely sneaky and has no connection to this universe, but few theists do that. Theology is nothing. The root is theo (god) and there is no god.
The idea that there are different subject areas is amusing but false. Staking claim on everything non-science doesn't help you very much when everything that interacts or exists in this universe is subjected to it. You are staking claim on nothing, and not even the empty space of nothingness (that's scientific), you are actually getting zippo... not even spacetime or artificial time.
Doubtful, when we die. We die. Hardly a figure it out then kind of thing. Usually when you do an experiment you want to get the results *before* you are dead. In any event, there's still no reason to even suppose an afterlife of a God, so what's the point of ignore the argument and never getting an answer?
-- Any such being, if it exists, is outside the realm of science. Science by definition limits itself to natural explanations
Science limits itself to things which exist. If such a being exists it is scientifically relevant. Moreso if you toss in all the stuff this thing is suppose to have done. Create life, grant prayers, make the universe. Though, though are natural things so there's a problem. Either God is completely irrelevant or you are just blowing smoke.
-- No, I make no such claim.
Well, that is the claim you need to make to put this character outside of the natural realm. You can't just declare something supernatural and make it immune to being questioned. Oh, don't ask about black holes, they are supernatural. Sure they have natural effects, they grant prayers, etc... but, they are not subject to scientific inquiry.
-- Science is the process of hypothesis and experimentation through which we seek natural explanations for our observations. The supernatural, if it exists, is the concern of philosophers and theologians, not scientists.
If the supernatural exists, it would easily be subject to the same processes of experimentation. The reason we seek natural explanations rather than supernatural ones, is that supernatural ones have thus far never existed. Each thing we check has a reasonable natural explanation, and each thing which has a natural effect and a consistent natural effect is easily subjected to science.
Why can't gardeners or coopers be concerned about the supernatural? I mean, if there is no way to detect it, or find any changes or effects in the natural world due to the supernatural (what would be needed to dodge science). Then why philosophers and theologians? What special powers or abilities do these people have to discern the non-existent in all its ineffectualness?
-- That's why Intelligent Design is not science: it allows supernatural explanations alongside natural ones.
Actually it could call for super intelligent aliens to have created all life on Earth. Which would certainly be a natural explanation. The reason Intelligent Design is not science is because it doesn't actually have any theory or facts behind it. It is simply the next evolution of creationism (set to dodge the unconstitutional God angle), with the same song and dance of arguing that evolution isn't enough to explain the world or that it's just too damned complex to have evolved. Sure, you can have a few changes over short periods of time, but large numbers of changes over a large period of time is impossible!
Intelligent Design is not science because it doesn't predict anything, it doesn't have a theory, it doesn't have facts... it just sits around making tired flawed arguments about real science.
--It is hard for us time bound creatures to even imagine someone or something that has always existed, someone that just IS.
Why can't the universe "just IS"? Seems a bit of a stretch to demand something just exist because the universe can't just exist.
--If there is a possibility, even a small one, that there is a God, then what, if any is my responsibility to Him?
Clearly, any superpowerful being who created this entire universe with a trillion trillion stars wants to be worshiped unconditionally by some intelligent ape on some small planet around an average star within a fairly average galaxy.
--Is there maybe a judgement after death?
The existence of a creator doesn't actually have any bearing as to whether there is something after death. And even then it seems like a dumb question.
-- If there is, what are my chances?
Well, an infinite number of possible mutually exclusive gods. I would gather they would be 1/infinity or 0.
-- Was Jesus who He claimed to be, the Immanuel, 'God with us" the "I AM" come to earth?
Was David Koresh? The Koran was better written and that Immanuel is simply a silly contradiction between Isaiah and the Gospels. I daresay the odds of that crazy absurd nonsense is zero.
-- When he claimed to be THE truth, was He lying or deceived?
I don't think there is any real basis to the story. Beyond a lack of historical evidence, it's patently absurd.
-- What if there is a heaven and a hell and physical death of only the body, with its brain, is not the end of my existence?
My brain, contains, everything I am. I daresay it could easily rot away and I would be non-existent just like I would be non-existent before I was born.
-- After all, in the physical world there is no extinction either. There are conservation laws. When you burn a piece of wood in your fireplace it doesn't go out of existence.
It changes form and no longer exists as a piece of wood. Just as if the order in my brain didn't exist I wouldn't exist. "I" am the order and arrangement of my brain. Just because the atoms which make up my brain will still exist after death, does nothing to imply that I (as the order and arrangement of my brain) will continue to exist.
-- It only changes form. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed and neither can the eternal spirit person that is the real conscious you.
I only have seen evidence for once conscious me, located firmly between my ears.
-- Right now you still have opportunity to determine the CORRECT answer to these and other important questions concerning your eternal destiny. I suggest you don't fool yourself, but earnestly seek true answers to these questions.
They aren't hard questions. And again, no evidence for eternal anything or destiny. You should really stop reading books written by bronzed age con-men. Your claims are absurd. The truth is rather simple: what you see is what you get. By the way, if you don't believe that my left sock created the universe as a video game, you will go to hell and burn forever and ever. But, beyond belief, you must eat at least one sock before you die. You see salvation is gained by faith and deeds. Believe my sock is that awesome, and eat at least one thing made in her image.
I don't think I'll reply in detail to everything. I'll just point out that fossils. regardless how you interpret them are very widespread. There are in fact few places of this planet that do NOT have fossils.
Not generally fossils but, areas where specific fossils are not found. If you are in a layer of rock formed in the Precambrian you aren't going to find any bones. Due to certain issues with the oceans we don't find many fossils in the water.
Even if they made some petrified wood, is that the way it really formed? Time is the biggest enemy of fossil making. The is NO known mechanism for making fossils over long periods of time - period. Using fossils, any fossils, as evidence for evolution is a wishful fairy tale.
No petrified wood forms in a very specific way, we simply made the fossilized wood by forcing the process to happen in a few days rather than a large number of years. Having extra time at your disposal wouldn't cause an inability to make fossils. That's just stupid. Secondly, there are many well understood chemical and physical properties which lead to fossil formation.
http://www.safossils.com/fossil.html
http://www.scsc.k12.ar.us/TuttS/fossil_formation.h tm
http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/prehistoric/what/howf ormed.html
http://www.fossils-facts-and-finds.com/how_are_fos sils_formed.html
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/earth/fossils/f ossil-folklore/how_are_fossils.htm
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/education/energylesso ns/coal/gen_howformed.html
Really, it isn't hard to figure out.
(....from multiple radiological clocks...)
To use any clock, you have to assume (believe = have faith) that your clock has always ticked at the same or a known rate over the total time measured.
No. That's why one uses multiple clocks. Firstly, sometimes there are slight (1% or so) fluctuation in the initial content of the radiological clock material. One need only believe that all of these radiological decay rates from the half a dozen methods you use remain constant, as would be expected if the laws of physics hold roughly true. Though, to be fair, they have only held true each and every time we checked, perhaps they magically stop working when we aren't looking.
There is evidence that clocks based on atomic properties have drifted as much as by a factor of 300 million times since the "big bang". This drift is related to very fundamental properties of space itself changing as the universe expanded.
Respectfully, no there is not. It took a long while before heavier radioactive particles even formed and from that time, the half lives have remained constant. It is extremely silly to suggest other wise with "there is evidence", as if that is some forgiving phrase with which to preface lies.
The equations for atomic behavior include Planks constant. Evidence that evolutionists like to keep silent shows that the some of the so called "constants" are anything but constant over long time periods. There are few things in nature that are really constant other than change itself. So your clocks are based on faith.
There may have been some slight change in such things as Planks and the speed of light, these are really really small and only true for the first split second of time. Radiological decay and half-lives are extremely consistent. The idea that some error exists and thus the universe is 6,000 years old is downri
Evolution is a belief, not science. Science is about facts, observations and measurements. The interpretation of these facts is not always part of real science, but is guided by the basic world view of a scientist.
Evolution is a theory and a group of facts which that theory explains. The theory explains everything we see about animals not only the skeletal evidence we find in fossils but the modern evidence we see in the organs and habits of modern organisms as well as the coding of the DNA and the changes in proteins between species. People certainly believe evolution, in some kind of mutual exclusive relationship with science, rather because it is science and one of the most powerful and predictive elements of science we have. It is the cornerstone of all of biology.
One of the cornerstones of Darwinian Evolution always brought up is the subject of fossils. It is a science fact that we find fossils all over the earth.
No. It is also a prediction of evolution and common ancestry that we should find specific fossils in specific areas. If we found a mammal in the Precambrian, evolution is screwed. We find fossils of organisms which would have lived in that biome in that time. We find fossils geographically everywhere, however we find specific fossils geologically on in rocks they specifically belong to. We don't find, for example, fossils of dinosaurs less than 64 million years ago. So, finding a T-Rex embedded in 30 million year old rock, would send shockwaves through the scientific community.
However, nobody has ever made a fossil nor watched one form in nature. Today when a living thing dies, it decays.
Actually a group of Israeli scientists have managed to make petrified wood. It is true that things usually decay, and there is a pretty rare set of conditions needed for fossilization. However, it is nothing more than an argument from ignorance to note that since many things decay that they all decay.
It never makes a fossil. I order to make one, the creature to be fossilized has to die quickly, along with all decay causing organisms and then be buried away from air. A massive catastrophe of water, such as the flood of Noah could make fossils, but no slow process we know anything about could.
Hate to break it to you but Noah Ark is a myth. Geologically there is no evidence for it. And the counterevidence is overwhelming to say the least. The original story is copied from the much earlier Assyrian work the Epic of Gilgamesh, and does not depict real events. Futhermore, you can't make a natural fossil within a couple thousand years. It takes much longer than that to replace the bone with minerals.
Evolution is faith, in lots and lots of time. It basically substitutes billions and millions of years for the creative power of God.
Actually there are dozens of way to determine the age of the Earth, using those methods we have come up with a rather hard value of 4 billion years. That isn't faith, it is what the evidence tells us. Multiple independent methods finding the same value. Whereas your evidence consists of, I assume, nothing (on account of the evidence all pointing to 4 billion).
The evolutionist's God is time, lots of time. Without all that supposed time, evolution is a dead farce, pure belief, masquerading as science.
Well, I must admit that without the 2 billion years life has been evolving it would have have been hard to evolve the life we have today. It is a good thing that we have pretty clear verification of time periods we are talking about, from multiple radiological clocks. Again, though amusing belief and science are not mutually exclusive... in fact when science is done right it should heavily inform beliefs. You can, in fact, believe in things science has proven.
Indeed there is. An "a" in front of a word, originally from Greek or Latin means "without" or "not". Amoral means without moral, amuse means not to muse, that is to think. An atheis
You are telling me that a magical guy who created everything in the universe is outside the realm of the science? Are you telling me that there is a realm which cannot and does not have any effect on the material/natural realm and has no effect on our lives? Basically anything more than talking about a nothing with no effect on us at all, is within the scientific realm. Science has slowly whittled the supernatural realm from just about everything down to nothing. Such that now you need talk about things which, by definition don't effect us and can't matter, to still talk about the supernatural.
The different domains idea is really an amusing exercise in special pleading. Religion has over the years and still today made a number of very testable claims. They claimed the sun traveled around the earth, diseases were caused by sin, and that God man all the living things on Earth. So long as religion goes around making claims about the world, science will go around testing those claims.
You are making the same basic assumption that the original article makes: Namely that evolution is true and that special creation by God is false.
... It is really that simple and the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Actually, that's not really an assumption. That's what science shows to be true based on massive amounts of evidence. We find that both evolution is true and that special creation is false. However, the article suggest that due to the frequency of religious belief that there should perhaps be a biological component, and moreover a genetic cause. This latter claim is extremely suspect due to it existing in the realm of memetic rather than genetic evolution as well as for a number of more general flaws.
The evolutionary world view requires a convoluted, contradictory theory why man is so incurably religious.
No it doesn't. There is plenty of atheism to go around, and beyond outright atheism there is a massive amount of irreligious people, in fact polls show that 50% of people would currently describe themselves as religious in the United States and that number is dropping. However, we are talking about a belief, rather than some part of our phenotype. One need only show that that belief can spread and pass from one person to another to explain it's success. Religion is well evolved for the task of spreading from one person to another with promises of eternal happiness for conforming and eternal suffering for failing to... an infinite carrot with an infinite stick.
The Biblical world view cuts through all that and simply states that we are made in the image of God.
I think you do Lord Occam a disservice by pretending that an explanation that explains nothing and raises a huge number of secondary questions is on par with a simple materialistic explanation which actually fits the facts. The point is that at the core the explanation regardless of complexity needs to actually explain the facts it is set forth to explain. Certainly you could say "Goddidit" to any problem, and it does only contain 8 letters, but it fails in that it doesn't actually resolve anything.
Just as hardware and software are distinct, so too is the brain and the mind. Software can exist independent of any particular hardware. In the same way, the mind can be independent of the brain.
Actually neurology has rather firmly come down against this. The brain is the seat of our very being. We are fully contained in that three pound lump of gray stuff between our ears. The best computer analog would be some form of highly flexible firmware running on hardware, without any software in sight.
In fact, we find that in infants the original programming is hardwired (instinct) within the primitive brain to look at things that move and to recognize faces, whereas later this is turned off when our brains grow large enough to counteract this. However the software isn't written, rather it develops with our brains. Infants are born with a vast number of neurons, more than they can use. When they try to grab things, the strongest signals get through and the unused neurons atrophy. This allows for skill development and learning. It's not a program, it's a self rewiring asynchronous system wholly material in existence and function.
Creationists and religious folks have been so busy bickering about evolution they didn't notice when, in the last few decades, neurology came in and obliterated the idea of a soul. Modern science tells us that "we" are about three pounds of gray stuff. Our perception of ourselves is natively rather flawed. When we are told that our brain "thinks for us", we tend to think of it like a computer our mind uses to do things rather than the more accurate understanding that our brain is 'us'. It is a wonderful organ, but not the greatest at perceiving itself. Rather I should say, I am a wonderful organ. I control my body with ease.
We understand what causes these experiences to happen, typically a smell of roses is triggered by actually smelling roses, tastes and other things are triggered by material things as well. However, the really telling part isn't that we can trigger perceptions of material things but that the perception for triggering the non-existent things occurs in the same part of the brain. When we fiddle with the smell section we end up recalling actual things, whereas when we fiddle with this section we get things which don't, and very exacting stories which fit in perfectly with religious and alien experiences.
His question was trying to shift the burden of proof to the other side. Which you correctly noted, but that isn't agnosticism. Agnosticism is the idea that you can't know whether or not god exists. Either weakly in that you just don't know or strongly in that proof isn't possible. However, this question is different from the questions of whether or not you believe in god(s) or whether or not there is a god.
I am never agnostic about the absurd.
Why not just a doctorate in linguistics and languages? Same background, less crap.
People think and see crazy things while some guy fiddles with his brain. Really! That is odd.
As far as science can tell, religion is absolutely false. I do think it is a proposition worth looking into, but we have. The world doesn't fit what we would expect to find if religion were true. In fact, the world we have is exactly like the world we should have if there were no gods.
There certainly exists some reasons for seeing aliens or angels and those reasons are fairly interesting. We have managed to trigger certain parts of the brain which give people either a religious experience or of aliens. Hard evidence for their existence is a waste of time, but finding why you see them is a fairly important point.
Basically you are confusing what is evolving in each situation. For example if you possess a religion that doesn't mean that that religion evolved to help you out. Just as if you possess a tapeworm in your gut or mites in your eyebrows that they aren't there to help you out. They are rather there to help themselves. Religions increase in frequency from being preached and expanded (this is why there are so many proselytizing religions), they have become entire systems setup with reasons to believe (just faith) and certain rules and edicts (have lots of kids and teach them this too; Shakers actually had the opposite belief and are now defunct because nobody had kids.). Many of these actually do convey rather significant advantages to the religion. However the advantage or disadvantage to you doesn't matter that much to the meme being evolved.
As for the reasons that religious and supernatural beliefs exists that's basically a side effect of our large brains. Typically the learning curve we need is so steep that as kids it is generally best that we accept everything we hear as true and a large part of what we hear as adults. This however leads to superstition, scams, ghosts, con-artists, astrology, religion, aliens, and myths. But it also leads us to quickly learning the things we need to know to be vastly successful in the real world.
We only evolved our really impressive brain in the last few million years, it'll take a while to work the kinks out. That's also the reason our hips and knees have some many problems, they evolved (changed greatly from previous forms) much more recently than our elbows and ribs.
As for the comment about being a great apes uncle, really the very idea of the grouping of apes including chimps, orangutans and gorillas but magically excluding humans is rather silly. It would rather be more accurate to say that humans are great apes.
The term bearing false witness doesn't equate to lying as many people would suggest rather it equates to perjury, and actually perjury under a guilty until proven innocent law system. You find a number of these requirements for very harsh punishments for falsely accusing a person of a crime, mostly because unless they could prove the allegations false they would be punished (usually death). In Hammurabi's code the punishment for accusing somebody of a crime who proved his innocence was typically death. Our modern society is much more fair in these regards and thus we don't have such strong condemnations of things which in the end are rather moot to us. Though we do have perjury and filing a false police report these are fairly minor rather than capital offenses.
For example, when I microwave my burrito... it gets hot.
Clearly the sun and the burrito have a microwave cause for being heated, rather than human reasons.
"Oil companies... give money now!"
Come on now, he said he had a degree in theology. If there is any degree which claiming you have and not having is a rather moot point it is theology. Just accept his degree on faith. It'll be fine.
Well, what if every year the speed of any of those modes of transport doubled in speed. How much would it matter when the time taken for any of the modes is about 1 second? Don't you think it would be an actual break through if rather than get there in linear time, you got there in say constant time? That would be an actual marked improvement. It would take a wormhole in this analogy, but never the less. That would be the a shift in time complexity. If you could travel at the speed of light or roughly jogging speed it wouldn't much matter if compared to instantaneous travel.
Even though ion propulsion is really kinda slow, if you're going far enough it will easily beat any rocket ship. Just sits there accelerating slowly for a long long time. Which is a marked improvement on a linear time mode of transit. Even in the real world, time complexity matters. Don't get me wrong, I did redesign an algorithm the other day to make it twice as fast because it was in constant use. Twice as fast is still twice as fast. In the computer world it is worth spending a couple hours to double the speed of somethings rather than waiting 18 months.
The real kicker is this is just a radix sort, which is a time complexity break through compared with merge sort. A merge sort is O(log(N)N), whereas Radix sort is O(N). He could simply sort more units. He might as well say his algorithm is 1,000,000X faster. This would be trivial to 'prove'. Just sort a trillion integers.
Not only this but doesn't it simple reek of but-wait-ism.
Okay, we are switching the power grid over to AC electricity because it goes X miles with only a 10% degradation.
But wait! DC current suddenly starts innovating and it can now go X/4 with only a 10% degradation... rethink this decision!
They honestly want a second thought on this based on their estimates of being able to get this crappy stuff to work perhaps on par with the better technology with terms of efficiency. Well, what about duration. I've had this CFC in my hallway for 15 years, assuming a reduction in heat (due to increased efficiency) the bulbs should last longer but will they last 15 years?
That said, sure, just ban bulbs which are less than 90% efficient.
Windows Vista is better than individually packaged pepper-jack flavor imitation cheese slices. Hell, sliced bread doesn't even edge it out.
My question is where the hell does this guy think that 10X faster is, first, impressive, and secondly worth a damn? Has he never heard of time complexity? Merge sort is order O(N(logN)) ten times faster than that and you get O(N(logN)) that's a speed boost if I ever saw one. Finally, this is really a radix sort, which is O(N) because it it is bitwise rather than comparison. That's not ten times faster that is log(N) times faster.
This isn't amazing, I wrote a radix sort back in college. It's an impressive algorithm. This is just that but crappier. Why not write an even faster integer sorting program.
void supermegasort(vector <int> &tosort) {
assert(!farts.stink());
vector <int> everynumber(1<<(sizeof(int)-1),0);
for (int i=0;i < tosort.size();i++) everynumber[tosort[i]]++;
for (int i=0,v=0;i < everynumber.size();i++) for(int q=0;q<everynumber[i];q++)tosort[v++]=i;
}
Yeah, negative numbers would be rather... fun. But, note... I asserted that my farts don't stink. So you can't be critical of that great code there.
Clearly. This kind of crap will exist for exactly as long as it take somebody to file a lawsuit claiming they bought some software which they had good reason to believe is valid and it deleted his files which took X number of manhours and were worth Y number of dollars.
I just criticize, not do.
Ain't that the truth. I swear Wikipedia is worthless for searching. Like completely worthless. You'd think they could wiki the searches better. You type in what you are searching for and get a disabig page for everything somebody actual thinks you might want. While at Wikipedia and I want to find something, I have to load up Google to find the damned thing.
How dare you sir, Bono saved the ailing copyright system. I mean, seriously under the old system the copyrights would expire after like 50 years after your death. This simply would not do! We needed an additional 20 years after our deaths to make publishing any work during our lives worthwhile.
Why just the other day I was talking to a friend who wanted to write, what would certainly be a very profitable, book for years to come. But, was leaning against it because he could only collect money for 50 stinking years after his death. I informed him of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act which upped that to 70 years after his death. He perked right up and started writing that same day!
Best I can tell, you're probably right. Though, I don't think Muhammad writing a book and claiming it was dictated by God should not be a claim accepted at face value as you did in your post. However, that's a side issue.
As for the core point of the last statement it is a rather parsing note. Sure 2:256 says no compulsion of religion, however 2:257 says if you don't believe you will burn forever. It's a little like Christians who say they don't hate homosexuality, God does... and they support God.
No pressure, but if you don't do this... you burn forever and ever in hell. Though, again, being false does really take the wind out of that sail. If you don't believe in the Easter Bunny you will get sent to Never-Never-Land and cut on by pirates!
Thank you for your input.