atheists who claim with certainty that there is no god are first class fools
Who are these people? I've seriously never heard any of the famous atheist, or even one I've met in person, say that they know, as an absolute certainty, that there isn't a God of some kind.
They go around talking about the null hypothesis and scientific process... they just don't know.
Exactly. They don't know, so the default assumption wins out. Not believing in God is just as rational as not believing in fairies, ancestral spirits, or super-advanced fungal space aliens - you can't prove that they don't exist. And more importantly, why doesn't the governor ever tell people to ask them for help?
Sorry, by 'original poster' I meant to refer to SETIGuy, the person I first replied to, not RightwingNutjob.
I think it's obvious that the sum total of human knowledge is built up from various foundations over time
Exactly. My problem is that SETIGuy seems to treat publicly-funded science as more important or fundamental, while treating privately-funded research as a sort of parasite that can only build on the former. I was trying to show that things are more complex than that by pointing out that the exact opposite argument could be made fairly easily.
Yeah, there was that MASSIVE private space program before NASA finally got involved.
[Of course, there was a lot built on top of German developments in WWII, but that was still "public" ie. military resources...]
Which was itself built off of private writings and experiments on rocketry, which was itself based on privately-developed understanding of physics and chemistry.
In fact, space travel is the exact opposite of the process the original poster mentioned: something that started out privately in the abstract theory stage and was entirely government-run by the time it got to practical applications.
Built off of private research on electricity in the 18th and 19th century.
Modern Medicine?
'Modern' is pretty vague, but plenty of early work on anatomy and vaccination was done privately.
Space-travel?
And you need physics and chemistry for that, which started with private experimentation.
In fact, space travel is the exact opposite of the process the original poster mentioned: something that started out privately in the abstract theory stage and was entirely government-run by the time it got to practical applications.
100% of known terrorists breath oxygen. Therefore, if you find someone breathing oxygen, it's an extremely strong indicator that they're a terrorist, no? Well, no, it isn't...
Yes, yes it is. And we encourage everyone to do their utmost to end this threat by destroying all oxygen-breathing organisms.
Sincerely,
The Society of Anaerobes
Re:Sugar is not only toxic but it's addictive.
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I'm not quite convinced, but I have to give you props for basing your belief on something akin to experimentation and peer review. Well done.
Re:What about radioactive water?
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HFCS is radioactive?
Only in Japan.
Re:Sugar is not only toxic but it's addictive.
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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If I drink a regular soda, even half a can, I will get a migraine. If I mix a drink such as lemonade with regular old white sugar, I get a sugar high, but no migraine...
HFCS truly is a horrible substance compared to natural or even partially processed sugars. Maybe in the land of ivory towers they are virtually identical, but down here in reality, my body treats them differently.
How did you rule out the difference in taste, the added dyes and flavor, the acidity, and most importantly the caffeine as your migraine trigger?
First, there's nothing in your post that would suggest that lack of water is the cause for their choice of spectrum use. I don't think that you've addressed my main point (to clarify a bit), that photosynthetic organisms that have always lived in water weren't very likely to be water-limited when developing or altering their methods of photosynthesis.
Second, if you're referring to red/pink photosynthetic organisms, they developed red-colored green-absorbing pigments long after the green-colored blue-absorbing chlorophyll. As a legacy of their evolutionary history, they still need the older green stuff (chlorophyll a) to do the water-splitting electron transfer.
[Science] seems to assume that the answer is "no reason, freak accidents", and elevates this to "fact".
I don't think you get this "science" thing.
A lot of people are affected by an irrational set of ethics that goes slightly beyond securing the most comfortable existence for themselves. A lot of people irrationally believe that there is a point in trying to preserve humanity beyond our own individual lifespans.
Yes, but you don't need religion for that.
Thankfully though, despite your rejection of divinity, the purpose of religion seems to affect most of humanity.
Mostly because it gets away with using dishonest arguments, like the "ethics requires religion" one that you used in the previous paragraph.
We're not special. We'll [probably] be wiped out eventually, and the universe will not notice. If I won't be alive to see my grandchildrens children, I really shouldn't give a fuck about them. Right?
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premises. Scientific explanations might not tell you what you should care about, but they also don't tell you what you should not care about.
>>Why do the planets revolve around the sun? God likes circles.
>He must be pretty annoyed then. Seriously, can anybody explain why orbits tend to be elliptical?
In the original creation, all orbits were circular. Only after the Fall of Man did things start to orbit in imperfect ellipses. Seriously, where did you go to Sunday school?
Different author. My comment to you was on a much narrower topic (about reading).
Which is irrelevant - bringing the focus back to the topic that started the thread, and was in the post that you were responding to, and is clearly the impetus for your involvement is a normal part of any conversation.
Remember "that was not the point of your post and you know it" where you tried to pretend my post was not about what I wrote but about what you'd have preferred me to write?
I remember, and the point of your post was to equivocate critical reading of the Bible with attempting to "make nonsense of" it. If you were only posing about literary criticism in general you would have been wildly off topic, and your other posts have made it abundantly clear that your reason for posting was the fact that I was defending criticism of something you hold dear.
you're hardly going to try to argue that the second para of your first reply to me was intended as a mark of your profoundest respect!
This makes our disagreement rather clear - you expect my "profoundest respect" for your tome, while I'm only offering the exact same level of respect I give any other book. I'm sorry, but you don't get extra respect for you and yours just because you want it.
It's always intriguing that the harshest, most sarcastic and caustic critics [of the bible] have never actually read it.
I pointed out that this was false, and why. Everything I've said is germane to that topic (criticism of the Bible) and I challenge you to find anything I've said that was more insulting than necessary to make my point.
The problem is that you expect anything religious to be treated with an extraordinary level of respect merely because it is religious, while I think that your ideas about religion should be treated with exactly the same level of respect as your ideas about any other serious topic. It's almost as if you really think that saying anything harsher than "I'm not a Christian" would be to (in your words) "shout insults or slanders" about your religion.
And when angry atheists choose to shout to all and sundry about how little they think of the Bible (in case we hadn't guessed that from your atheism)
Again, why are you making assumptions about me, and where are all these belittling remarks I seem to be making? It would be nice if you would either point them out or stop inserting them into my mouth, "out of respect for [your] fellow man".
I do like the way angry atheists can't talk about anything without having to follow it up be reiterating that they are atheists.
What about atheists? You do realize that more than half the people on Earth follow non-Christian religions, right? And you're the only one getting angry.
A post on a common misconception about critical reading?
That was not the point of your post, and you know it.
Better follow it up by telling me how you think the Bible is rubbish, just in case I hadn't spotted your opinion in your previous post...
The original topic was the Christian Bible, and it isn't rubbish, it's a collection of works by people in ancient times. Some is probably historically accurate, some pure mythology, and a large part of it a mixture of the two. You need to accept that non-believers treating it in the same way you might treat the The Odyssey is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
If your mindset before you pick up a book (any book) is "I want to find ways that this does not make sense", you might as well not bother picking up the book.
Ditto if your mindset is "This is the Truth, and must be believed."
Oddly enough, you comparison of the Christian Bible to A Tale of Two Cities is quite apt. Both are works of fiction set in real historical periods and locations, and using exaggerated or made-up idealized characters to express emotion and promote a particular view of the world. The weird thing is that the book with magic in it is the one you want me to treat as non-fiction.
How does evolution explain a four chambered heart?... Why would we form all the necessary components to be able to form words without the brain power necessary to process speech?... What possible evolutionary advantage has writing given man? We are the only creature ever on the planet to be able to read and write, so it obviously has never had an evolutionary advantage... why are we able to do it. What is the evolutionary point.
At best, even if there were no current explanations for those things, you've merely listed some interesting avenues for future research.
Whole organs systems can not be formed by random mutation, and they don't work without the entire system....but some changes have to come in sets or they never work. Evolution will never explain that.
Now you're just asserting things. I know your intuition is strongly telling you "That can't happen!", but if you're going to deal with modern science you have to learn to deal with things being counter-intuitive.
I have never heard an adequate explanation as to how complex systems can evolve.... Just because it's not a controversy to you doesn't mean it's not controversial to some very bright and stupid people, alike.
Among people who don't really know a lot about evolution, sure, it's controversial. Among people who actually know what they're talking about there is no controversy.
What part of evolution is testable, verifiable and makes predictions?
Predictions:
Not all kinds of living things were alive at the same time (no dinosaurs with rabbits in their stomachs).
Transitional creatures existed between whales and a land-dwelling ancestor, and between reptiles and mammals & birds.
Older fossils will generally be of things with simpler body plans, while younger ones will be a mixture (single cell only -> both single and multi-cell).
Genetic and protein sequences will form nested trees of similarity that are very similar to the one created using gross anatomy (which was made by creationists!).
Signs of chromosomal fusion in human DNA (humans have one less chromosome than our closest extant cousins).
Every time we discover a new organism (living or fossilized), sequence a new strand of DNA, or sequence a new version of a protein, we are testing the related predictions that an evolutionary history of life suggests. And all of those are independently verifiable.
There is a reason these two topics are still called Theories rather than proven fact.
Yes, because theories and facts are different kinds of things - one doesn't morph into the other.
Slashdot Mirror
you guys want to use the most absurd, extreme example for "religious people"
A person who just believes in and prays to God is an "absurd, extreme example" of religious people?
simple facts which expose the kind of statements I initially responded to
If someone said "I know for sure that there can't be a god at all", I'll be happy to mock them for you, just show me where they said that.
Clear thinkers spot the incongruity
The problem is that you think that "God might exist" and "people believe in God for irrational reasons" are incongruent. They aren't.
atheists who claim with certainty that there is no god are first class fools
Who are these people? I've seriously never heard any of the famous atheist, or even one I've met in person, say that they know, as an absolute certainty, that there isn't a God of some kind.
They go around talking about the null hypothesis and scientific process ... they just don't know.
Exactly. They don't know, so the default assumption wins out. Not believing in God is just as rational as not believing in fairies, ancestral spirits, or super-advanced fungal space aliens - you can't prove that they don't exist. And more importantly, why doesn't the governor ever tell people to ask them for help?
Not really... the point of the original poster
Sorry, by 'original poster' I meant to refer to SETIGuy, the person I first replied to, not RightwingNutjob.
I think it's obvious that the sum total of human knowledge is built up from various foundations over time
Exactly. My problem is that SETIGuy seems to treat publicly-funded science as more important or fundamental, while treating privately-funded research as a sort of parasite that can only build on the former. I was trying to show that things are more complex than that by pointing out that the exact opposite argument could be made fairly easily.
Yeah, there was that MASSIVE private space program before NASA finally got involved.
[Of course, there was a lot built on top of German developments in WWII, but that was still "public" ie. military resources...]
Which was itself built off of private writings and experiments on rocketry, which was itself based on privately-developed understanding of physics and chemistry.
In fact, space travel is the exact opposite of the process the original poster mentioned: something that started out privately in the abstract theory stage and was entirely government-run by the time it got to practical applications.
The internet? GPS? Tele-communications? TV?
Built off of private research on electricity in the 18th and 19th century.
Modern Medicine?
'Modern' is pretty vague, but plenty of early work on anatomy and vaccination was done privately.
Space-travel?
And you need physics and chemistry for that, which started with private experimentation.
In fact, space travel is the exact opposite of the process the original poster mentioned: something that started out privately in the abstract theory stage and was entirely government-run by the time it got to practical applications.
You have a degree in bologna.
Just to be fair, can you show me a case where the public option even existed without building upon the private one?
100% of known terrorists breath oxygen. Therefore, if you find someone breathing oxygen, it's an extremely strong indicator that they're a terrorist, no? Well, no, it isn't...
Yes, yes it is. And we encourage everyone to do their utmost to end this threat by destroying all oxygen-breathing organisms.
Sincerely,
The Society of Anaerobes
I'm not quite convinced, but I have to give you props for basing your belief on something akin to experimentation and peer review. Well done.
HFCS is radioactive?
Only in Japan.
If I drink a regular soda, even half a can, I will get a migraine. If I mix a drink such as lemonade with regular old white sugar, I get a sugar high, but no migraine ...
HFCS truly is a horrible substance compared to natural or even partially processed sugars. Maybe in the land of ivory towers they are virtually identical, but down here in reality, my body treats them differently.
How did you rule out the difference in taste, the added dyes and flavor, the acidity, and most importantly the caffeine as your migraine trigger?
... and good luck finding an in-network hooker.
Look for "sex surrogate" in the psychiatric section.
Hey man, penicillin isn't free.
You misspelled "hookers and blow".
Second, if you're referring to red/pink photosynthetic organisms, they developed red-colored green-absorbing pigments long after the green-colored blue-absorbing chlorophyll. As a legacy of their evolutionary history, they still need the older green stuff (chlorophyll a) to do the water-splitting electron transfer.
they are tuned to gather 'enough' energy without wasting water (which is rarer for them than sunlight)
True. Except for the plants that grow in rain forests, or the ocean, or lakes, or swamps, or rivers, or ...
Unfortunately corporations count as citizens in this country.
Corporations are "legal persons" - they can own things, have due process rights, and can be sued. They aren't citizens - they can't vote, etc.
[Science] seems to assume that the answer is "no reason, freak accidents", and elevates this to "fact".
I don't think you get this "science" thing.
A lot of people are affected by an irrational set of ethics that goes slightly beyond securing the most comfortable existence for themselves. A lot of people irrationally believe that there is a point in trying to preserve humanity beyond our own individual lifespans.
Yes, but you don't need religion for that.
Thankfully though, despite your rejection of divinity, the purpose of religion seems to affect most of humanity.
Mostly because it gets away with using dishonest arguments, like the "ethics requires religion" one that you used in the previous paragraph.
We're not special. We'll [probably] be wiped out eventually, and the universe will not notice. If I won't be alive to see my grandchildrens children, I really shouldn't give a fuck about them. Right?
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premises. Scientific explanations might not tell you what you should care about, but they also don't tell you what you should not care about.
>>Why do the planets revolve around the sun? God likes circles.
>He must be pretty annoyed then. Seriously, can anybody explain why orbits tend to be elliptical?
In the original creation, all orbits were circular. Only after the Fall of Man did things start to orbit in imperfect ellipses. Seriously, where did you go to Sunday school?
Different author. My comment to you was on a much narrower topic (about reading).
Which is irrelevant - bringing the focus back to the topic that started the thread, and was in the post that you were responding to, and is clearly the impetus for your involvement is a normal part of any conversation.
Remember "that was not the point of your post and you know it" where you tried to pretend my post was not about what I wrote but about what you'd have preferred me to write?
I remember, and the point of your post was to equivocate critical reading of the Bible with attempting to "make nonsense of" it. If you were only posing about literary criticism in general you would have been wildly off topic, and your other posts have made it abundantly clear that your reason for posting was the fact that I was defending criticism of something you hold dear.
you're hardly going to try to argue that the second para of your first reply to me was intended as a mark of your profoundest respect!
This makes our disagreement rather clear - you expect my "profoundest respect" for your tome, while I'm only offering the exact same level of respect I give any other book. I'm sorry, but you don't get extra respect for you and yours just because you want it.
It's always intriguing that the harshest, most sarcastic and caustic critics [of the bible] have never actually read it.
I pointed out that this was false, and why. Everything I've said is germane to that topic (criticism of the Bible) and I challenge you to find anything I've said that was more insulting than necessary to make my point.
The problem is that you expect anything religious to be treated with an extraordinary level of respect merely because it is religious, while I think that your ideas about religion should be treated with exactly the same level of respect as your ideas about any other serious topic. It's almost as if you really think that saying anything harsher than "I'm not a Christian" would be to (in your words) "shout insults or slanders" about your religion.
And when angry atheists choose to shout to all and sundry about how little they think of the Bible (in case we hadn't guessed that from your atheism)
Again, why are you making assumptions about me, and where are all these belittling remarks I seem to be making? It would be nice if you would either point them out or stop inserting them into my mouth, "out of respect for [your] fellow man".
I do like the way angry atheists can't talk about anything without having to follow it up be reiterating that they are atheists.
What about atheists? You do realize that more than half the people on Earth follow non-Christian religions, right? And you're the only one getting angry.
A post on a common misconception about critical reading?
That was not the point of your post, and you know it.
Better follow it up by telling me how you think the Bible is rubbish, just in case I hadn't spotted your opinion in your previous post...
The original topic was the Christian Bible, and it isn't rubbish, it's a collection of works by people in ancient times. Some is probably historically accurate, some pure mythology, and a large part of it a mixture of the two. You need to accept that non-believers treating it in the same way you might treat the The Odyssey is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
...if you're going to deal with modern science you have to learn to deal with things being counter-intuitive.
Thanks for finally admitting it, evolution doesn't make sense. I knew one of you would someday admit it.
LOL. Nice one, but even creationists know the difference between "counter-intuitive" and "not making sense".
If your mindset before you pick up a book (any book) is "I want to find ways that this does not make sense", you might as well not bother picking up the book.
Ditto if your mindset is "This is the Truth, and must be believed."
Oddly enough, you comparison of the Christian Bible to A Tale of Two Cities is quite apt. Both are works of fiction set in real historical periods and locations, and using exaggerated or made-up idealized characters to express emotion and promote a particular view of the world. The weird thing is that the book with magic in it is the one you want me to treat as non-fiction.
How does evolution explain a four chambered heart? ... Why would we form all the necessary components to be able to form words without the brain power necessary to process speech? ... What possible evolutionary advantage has writing given man? We are the only creature ever on the planet to be able to read and write, so it obviously has never had an evolutionary advantage... why are we able to do it. What is the evolutionary point.
At best, even if there were no current explanations for those things, you've merely listed some interesting avenues for future research.
Whole organs systems can not be formed by random mutation, and they don't work without the entire system. ...but some changes have to come in sets or they never work. Evolution will never explain that.
Now you're just asserting things. I know your intuition is strongly telling you "That can't happen!", but if you're going to deal with modern science you have to learn to deal with things being counter-intuitive.
I have never heard an adequate explanation as to how complex systems can evolve. ... Just because it's not a controversy to you doesn't mean it's not controversial to some very bright and stupid people, alike.
Among people who don't really know a lot about evolution, sure, it's controversial. Among people who actually know what they're talking about there is no controversy.
What part of evolution is testable, verifiable and makes predictions?
Predictions:
Not all kinds of living things were alive at the same time (no dinosaurs with rabbits in their stomachs).
Transitional creatures existed between whales and a land-dwelling ancestor, and between reptiles and mammals & birds.
Older fossils will generally be of things with simpler body plans, while younger ones will be a mixture (single cell only -> both single and multi-cell).
Genetic and protein sequences will form nested trees of similarity that are very similar to the one created using gross anatomy (which was made by creationists!).
Signs of chromosomal fusion in human DNA (humans have one less chromosome than our closest extant cousins).
Every time we discover a new organism (living or fossilized), sequence a new strand of DNA, or sequence a new version of a protein, we are testing the related predictions that an evolutionary history of life suggests. And all of those are independently verifiable.
There is a reason these two topics are still called Theories rather than proven fact.
Yes, because theories and facts are different kinds of things - one doesn't morph into the other.