Remember, logical reason doesn't drive political discourse. We are so jaded to politics that you need to elicit strong emotion to have any hope of affecting the average voter. Thus, we devolve into mindless rhetoric in a vain attempt to manipulate people into caring, instead of thinking.
(Caring makes political accomplishment worthwhile; thinking makes it possible. We're currently way overbalanced in the "caring" direction... and graft, but that's a different topic.)
Think about how jamming works. You shine a great big light in the same frequency that the receiver is trying to listen in on. If the design team is thinking about this contingency, suddenly you've got a great way to measure the location of a particular class of AA missile. (for evasive maneuvers or for counter fire)
I got to point 1.2 before giving up on the sermon you linked to. If I can poke it full of holes (as someone who believes in God), then surely an atheist will never take it seriously. It's not true philosophy, but a propaganda piece in the form of philosophy.
He uses several techniques that are common in politics and the press to try to persuade the masses. (1) He defines the terms, and only uses them how he sees fit. (2) He carefully mis-phrases his opponents arguments built upon the terms that he has defined.
Maybe there's something interesting further down, but I just can't slog through all the mushy non-logic to get there.
There are many arguments for and against the existence of God. Many of them still, as of right now, are being debated and discussed in Philosophy journals. But one of those arguments, the argument of a god's existence from intelligent design (or any argument that gets God involved in things like evolution, or star formation, etc..), has roundly been crushed by philosophy scholars many many years ago.
I'm not trying to prove the existence of God based upon the existence of animals. I'm taking the existence of God as a premise, and arguing that we have insufficient theological information to conclude in contradiction. Those are very different forms of argument.
(While I believe philosophy is useful, I don't believe that most philosophers have a clue. The form is good, and sometimes the field provides brilliant insights. In general, though, you can't accept philosophy until you're willing to find and accept the assumptions that a given conclusion is based upon, including the unstated ones. People, in general, can't, won't, don't want to analyse, but will regurgitate the conclusion without thought... including many so-called philosophers, and even most "scholars".)
I forget the physics term, but they actually get a double shockwave this way. (The blast as it's coming down, and as it's coming back up. It's like the way a fold in a piece of paper is thicker.)
Moderators have got to get a life. Just because you don't agree with something is no excuse to mod it into oblivion. Save the "Troll" mod for actual trolls.
The problem with saying that the creation story is just an analogy...
Not my position, but there are those who think that.
The creation story is currently not written like it was intended to be taken literally.
I can't figure out if you've got a typo in here, or what. Something about it is not clear to me. Did you really mean "not", or did you mean "literarily" instead of "literally"? Maybe I just don't understand the position you're taking.
The creation story in Genesis 1 doesn't give a good indication of how literal, or how figurative (or simplified) it is. Most other portions of the Bible are much easier to determine, I'm afraid. I choose to believe that it is somewhat literal, mostly hand-wavy*, with a large dose of symbolism.
*(Whoever wrote it was a human author, and not one with a modern college education. Even if he understood the divine teaching, his primary audience were ancient farmers and herders. Even if we expect correctness, we can't expect precision.)
I think we've established that I am not Rene Descarte. As a rational being, I claim the right to adapt, extend, and correct philosophies that I encounter. (I also claim the right to learn, grow, and adapt my own understanding to better fit reality.) It seems you know more about what he taught than I, but that doesn't mean that he was right ("appeal to authority"). It also doesn't mean that he or his adherents have exclusive rights to the parts of his ideas that are valid (via "shooting the messenger" + "ad hominem").
I reassert that "I think, therefore I am" is a philosophical axiom. If Descarte did not believe so, then I disagree with him.
In Matrix there is that pill-choice given, and the Cartesian way would be to choose going down the rabbit hole and figure out how the system works.
Sigh. There are many aspects of that movie, and you've focused on the wrong one. If we cannot believe our senses, then we cannot trust that we know anything at all (all of our senses, not just the five commonly enumerated). We need a basis upon which to found our reasoning. Otherwise, the world-view we have rationalized will be all wrong, and so will be our belief in it. In the movie, Neo made rational choices, but until his incorrect beliefs were challenged and supplemented with fresh experiences, he could not rationally construct better ones, more closely fitting reality. He could have chosen to reject these new experiences, and chosen to believe he was having a psychotic break, for instance, but the movie wouldn't have been as interesting. There was no proving that he wasn't still in a matrix, of a higher order (a matrix within a matrix, etc). He could only believe that he was truly out. (I honestly thought that was what the ending of "Reloaded" was hinting at, and would have lead to a much more interesting and self-consistent "Revolutions".)
Cartesian position is here much more radical: mathematics works regardless whether I believe [in] it or not, thus it is the way toward certainty.
Truth exists independent of the observer (or believer). Mathematics, specifically, is believed to be a system of such truths. And yet, mathematics explicitly rest upon foundational axioms. Mathematics is redefined from time to time to rest on different axioms giving the same behavior, but there have always been fundamental assumptions at the heart of the system. Each mathematical proofs rest upon a given premise. The fundamental premises which cannot be proven (for they have no premise of their own) are axioms. This is much like the proof for infinite prime numbers. If there existed an axiom for which there is a premise, then it is no longer truly an axiom but a conclusion, and its premise an axiom (or another conclusion resting upon an axiom, etc.). If two or more conclusions rested upon each other ("begging the question"), then the whole becomes a tautology, which can be accepted as a single axiom, or rejected. There is no way to "prove" down into bedrock. Even in mathematics, all we can ever do is prove what must be true based upon accepted axioms.
Again, I'm clearly not Descarte. Though, I would not mind learning more of his thoughts as it may provide useful tools to broaden my own understanding.
Nope. Superficially speaking, God likes car analogies. He rarely talks about just one thing at a time, and he only focuses on that which he thinks it would benefit us to know. I don't think he lied to Moses, but I do believe we've only got the kindergarten version of events.
(Please note the context of the conversation in quotes. I think this is what has you so confused. This isn't a proposed conversation between Moses and God, but between Moses and a hypothetical angelic messenger.)
Besides, God didn't write Genesis. Moses (probably) did. If you were ten and had to do a school report on what your father does for a living, do you think you'd describe it very well? You'd go and ask your dad, surely. What he told you would have been simplified for your understanding, and more than half of what he said wouldn't wind up in your report. For an ancient former-aristocrat turned shepherd, I think we can cut Moses a bit of slack.
Assuming the tradition that Moses indeed wrote the Pentateuch/Torah/Law (something I accept), then there are a number of different possibilities for the book of Genesis, and they're not mutually exclusive.
Direct, divine instruction is one answer. It's the only answer I've come to that really satisfies Genesis Chapter 1. Again, this leads me to believe that this chapter is only somewhat literal, and is intended to be read symbolically.
Many Biblical linguists believe that Genesis had multiple authors during different linguistic periods. If that's true, it actually answers one of the questions that I have had over the book. Genesis may be a compilation of abridged passages. Moses didn't live through this time period, and divine teaching would have been unnecessary if there were already scriptural histories to draw from. We don't have those works, but that doesn't mean that they didn't exist at the time. These could have been in the possession of Jethro (Moses' father-in-law), or they may have been heirlooms of Jacob (Israel), or may have been acquired by an Egyptian prior to the exodus. Moses may have been the abridger.
Addendum: If Moses wrote Deuteronomy, then who wrote Deut 34? Moses didn't describe his own death and burial.
There is some truth to this. It is only strictly true when you limit the definition of science to actual systemic investigation of truth. There are many willing to make unfounded anti-religion claims on behalf of the "science" they worship.
Ironically, one of the reasons your statement is so is because of a lack of humility on the part of religious leaders over the years. To be asked a question, and not have an answer is a sign of weakness. Religious leaders don't want to be socially weak (and historically would have believed that they not afford to be). Thus, it was really easy to reach for answers that God has not provided, or to try to read "in between the lines". Once a pronouncement has been made, it makes that church look weak to back down from a position, so others tend to accept it as doctrine. Then, they stack bad upon bad.
It does not at all surprise me that science has, and continues to contradict these fools. While we may disagree about whether Christianity is true or not, we can both agree that there's a lot of made-up junk masquerading as religion.
You seem to have some funny interpretations of the words "think" and "believe". This is hindering our ability to communicate with one another. For instance, I interpreted your first question as a petty insult. Thus, my answer might not make any sense, as I'm not entirely certain of the definitions you are using.
Ok. Now, my question to you is simply: do you believe in this or do you think that?
I would say that both thought and belief are fundamental in their own ways. If you have no thought, then you cannot reason how the world might behave, and therefore have nothing to believe in. If you have no belief... none whatsoever... then you cannot believe what your own senses tell you, and you have no foundation upon which to reason. This principle expands further to not being able to believe anything which might confirm or deny the results of your reasoning. Thus, a being without belief is unable to reason, and a being without reason lacks belief. That is what I think.
... one can believe in anything at all
There are a great many things out there that people believe in. Some exist in an absolute sense, while others do not. This is the quest of science, to ascertain the difference. There is no clear indication if this is a finite task.
(This is also why fiction such as The Matrix, or certain Star Trek episodes featuring the holodeck have such appeal. They ask us to re-examine our most basic beliefs, if only for a moment. If one can suspend disbelief in those contexts, anything is possible. In the context of fiction, that is quite desirable.)
I hold, though, that all logic must be based upon fundamental axioms. If the axioms we choose are true, and our logic is sound, then we may deduce further truth. If our axioms are false, then we have no assurance that we will gain truth through reason. Any attempt to build a framework of reason that is not built upon axioms will either be tautological (hidden axioms), or self-contradictory. Thus correct belief with thought leads to further correct belief. No amount of thought will lead to truth if our core beliefs are wrong. That is what I believe.
You know that old saying: never talk about politics and religion? That's for people who can't stand to have their world-view challenged. (and as a self-defensive mechanism for the thin-skinned who might run into one of these people.)
Curious about which apparent contradictions you see there. The ones I normally see pointed out aren't contradictions at all, but I'm always interested in a good theological puzzle.
(Gen 1 talks about the creation of the world, and mentions the creation of man as a blip. Gen 2 goes back and fills in details. That's an old tired, and frankly juvenile "proof" of contradiction. I hope you've got something more interesting.)
... the established church.
This bit confuses me. Are you lumping all Christians together into the same meta-church, are you specifically talking about Catholicism, or did you mean to say "their" instead of "the"? There are so many Christian churches out there with wildly differing beliefs that there are dozens of "official" interpretations of any given Bible passage.
You're ignoring the fundamental problem with Genesis 1 (and thus, creation: including animals). If Man did not exist yet, who was observing the creation? How did man come to know about it?
The obvious theological answer was that God and/or angels told someone about it between Adam and Moses (inclusive). The problem with many of Gods (OT) explanations is that they tend to be in dreams and visions, which aren't usually literal. If it was angels, then surely we got the simplified version. "Ooh, ooh! Tell me again about the divergence of Lorises and Pottos!" "Sigh. Listen, kid, he just made them, OK?"
All this arguing over evolution is silly. Faith does not need it, but that doesn't mean that it outright contradicts faith.
To be really pedantic Descartes "cogito ergo sum" really should be: "I _believe_ I think, therefore I _believe_ I am."... There is no proof for tautology.
This is what I was conveying. And again, the universe would need to be extraordinarily strange for this to be false.
Yet, it is still useful. Mathematically, nothing can be proven unless it rests upon axioms: fundamental assumptions that are nothing more than assertions. Belief in self-existence is one of the most fundamental axioms we've got.
Tautologies can be useful, not because they're tautologies, but because they can be true. All of mathematics form a tautological system. They're still incredibly useful.
> Every scientific "fact" is a belief
Facts don't depend on someone believing it. They just are. Regardless of who, or how many believe it.
Truth just is. "Facts" (with the scare-quotes*), especially scientific "facts" may or may not reflect absolute truth. That is the goal of science, but they've had varying degrees of success. (far better than the vast majority of belief systems over the millennia)
*(Scare-quotes imply that something may not be what it purports to be, or may be misnamed. In this case, scientific "facts" may not be facts at all.)
If you didn't have Faith in your Beliefs, you wouldn't have the Belief in the _first_ place.
Hmm. I can see how this argument can be made. I assert that it is possible to believe something is true but have no faith in that belief. Belief is an idea of what the world is really like. Faith is the willingness to act on that belief. If you like, one could say that it is a matter of degree. The strength of your belief is reflected in the strength of your faith in that belief.
Over all, we're basically saying the same things. And you're welcome.
So it will provide a certain linear speedup of those calculations (for example 1000 times faster).
It will not however help with NP hard problems (like protein folding), because these would need real quantum computations (on a quantum computer) to reduce the exponential order of the problem into a lower order one.
For any given (specific) NP hard problem, a 1000x speed increase in computation will result in a solution in 1/1000th of the time. It will still need to complete the same algorithmic steps, but it will do them 1000x faster. What it does not aid with is making the problem of N+1 any closer to N in complexity, or making a general solution any more computationally feasible.
Start with fundamental belief. "I think, therefore I am." This is a rational belief, but it is only a belief. The universe would need to be extraordinarily weird for this one to not be true. But it is still a belief.
Every scientific "fact" is a belief. These are educated beliefs, based upon scientific principles, observations, and methods. Yet they are still beliefs. Various scientific beliefs are challenged and changed on a daily basis. Knowledge of what science says still requires belief in those ideas. Action based on these beliefs is still a form of faith, even if it is entirely non-religious.
This article itself is on the cutting edge of doubting particular scientific ideas. It is a weakened belief in the status quo, and an exploration of an alternate theory. That's how science works.
Science cannot be separated from belief. To do so becomes fanaticism or fiction, and ceases to be science.
One possibility would start out with some means testing, but only that which most face anyway. Set a baseline of double the poverty income. If you make less than the baseline (for any reason), you will receive half of the difference. That way everyone at least reaches the poverty line and there is always a benefit to earning more money. Essentially it would be an expansion of the earned income credit.
And this is exactly the sort of thing our government just can't seem to figure out. I wouldn't use these proportions, but the basic idea is correct. (it would bring back to the forefront the controversy over how to define poverty, but that's another issue.)
My point was that GDP is getting double, triple, quadruple counted. It certainly doesn't represent a measure of domestic production, which is how it is usually misused (and misnamed).
... but it seems likely that some element of wanton disregard is necessary for it to go on for so long on such a scale.
Yep. Both political parties, in different ways, but for the same types of avarice.
Sometimes we don't try hard enough. We are after people willing to risk their lives to kill others, so we can't be altogether too picky. (and yes, we need them.)
No matter how attached someone might be to his robot, he's going to be more attached to his men.
Bingo.
If soldiers don't use robots in dangerous situations for fear of damaging them, it won't be because of emotional attachment issues. It will be due to fear of being raked over the coals for losing the expensive toy, or fear of not being issued a replacement.
My guess would be most of it... and police departments worried about a re-occurrence of the OJ Simpson riots. (Trayvon Martin, losing a pro-sports game, etc)
(IOW those with large minority populations which feel the laws are written by the oppressive majority and are constantly looking for excuses to show their anger through a bizarre display of destroying one another's property.)
Consider for a moment... why the constant slow inflation? It isn't to protect us from deflationary spirals. Combine it with low interest rates in the market, and bonds start to look pretty good.
What does the US government get out of a thriving bond market? It effectively lowers the interest rate on the national debt. You've been hoodwinked. (and you're not alone)
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Remember, logical reason doesn't drive political discourse. We are so jaded to politics that you need to elicit strong emotion to have any hope of affecting the average voter. Thus, we devolve into mindless rhetoric in a vain attempt to manipulate people into caring, instead of thinking.
(Caring makes political accomplishment worthwhile; thinking makes it possible. We're currently way overbalanced in the "caring" direction... and graft, but that's a different topic.)
Think about how jamming works. You shine a great big light in the same frequency that the receiver is trying to listen in on. If the design team is thinking about this contingency, suddenly you've got a great way to measure the location of a particular class of AA missile. (for evasive maneuvers or for counter fire)
I got to point 1.2 before giving up on the sermon you linked to. If I can poke it full of holes (as someone who believes in God), then surely an atheist will never take it seriously. It's not true philosophy, but a propaganda piece in the form of philosophy.
He uses several techniques that are common in politics and the press to try to persuade the masses. (1) He defines the terms, and only uses them how he sees fit. (2) He carefully mis-phrases his opponents arguments built upon the terms that he has defined.
Maybe there's something interesting further down, but I just can't slog through all the mushy non-logic to get there.
I'm not trying to prove the existence of God based upon the existence of animals. I'm taking the existence of God as a premise, and arguing that we have insufficient theological information to conclude in contradiction. Those are very different forms of argument.
(While I believe philosophy is useful, I don't believe that most philosophers have a clue. The form is good, and sometimes the field provides brilliant insights. In general, though, you can't accept philosophy until you're willing to find and accept the assumptions that a given conclusion is based upon, including the unstated ones. People, in general, can't, won't, don't want to analyse, but will regurgitate the conclusion without thought... including many so-called philosophers, and even most "scholars".)
Gah. And now I've got mod points. (Oh, the irony.) You can just pretend that I moded you +1 informative. Thanks.
I forget the physics term, but they actually get a double shockwave this way. (The blast as it's coming down, and as it's coming back up. It's like the way a fold in a piece of paper is thicker.)
Moderators have got to get a life. Just because you don't agree with something is no excuse to mod it into oblivion. Save the "Troll" mod for actual trolls.
Sure, why not.
Not my position, but there are those who think that.
I can't figure out if you've got a typo in here, or what. Something about it is not clear to me. Did you really mean "not", or did you mean "literarily" instead of "literally"? Maybe I just don't understand the position you're taking.
The creation story in Genesis 1 doesn't give a good indication of how literal, or how figurative (or simplified) it is. Most other portions of the Bible are much easier to determine, I'm afraid. I choose to believe that it is somewhat literal, mostly hand-wavy*, with a large dose of symbolism.
*(Whoever wrote it was a human author, and not one with a modern college education. Even if he understood the divine teaching, his primary audience were ancient farmers and herders. Even if we expect correctness, we can't expect precision.)
I think we've established that I am not Rene Descarte. As a rational being, I claim the right to adapt, extend, and correct philosophies that I encounter. (I also claim the right to learn, grow, and adapt my own understanding to better fit reality.) It seems you know more about what he taught than I, but that doesn't mean that he was right ("appeal to authority"). It also doesn't mean that he or his adherents have exclusive rights to the parts of his ideas that are valid (via "shooting the messenger" + "ad hominem").
I reassert that "I think, therefore I am" is a philosophical axiom. If Descarte did not believe so, then I disagree with him.
Sigh. There are many aspects of that movie, and you've focused on the wrong one. If we cannot believe our senses, then we cannot trust that we know anything at all (all of our senses, not just the five commonly enumerated). We need a basis upon which to found our reasoning. Otherwise, the world-view we have rationalized will be all wrong, and so will be our belief in it. In the movie, Neo made rational choices, but until his incorrect beliefs were challenged and supplemented with fresh experiences, he could not rationally construct better ones, more closely fitting reality. He could have chosen to reject these new experiences, and chosen to believe he was having a psychotic break, for instance, but the movie wouldn't have been as interesting. There was no proving that he wasn't still in a matrix, of a higher order (a matrix within a matrix, etc). He could only believe that he was truly out. (I honestly thought that was what the ending of "Reloaded" was hinting at, and would have lead to a much more interesting and self-consistent "Revolutions".)
Truth exists independent of the observer (or believer). Mathematics, specifically, is believed to be a system of such truths. And yet, mathematics explicitly rest upon foundational axioms. Mathematics is redefined from time to time to rest on different axioms giving the same behavior, but there have always been fundamental assumptions at the heart of the system. Each mathematical proofs rest upon a given premise. The fundamental premises which cannot be proven (for they have no premise of their own) are axioms. This is much like the proof for infinite prime numbers. If there existed an axiom for which there is a premise, then it is no longer truly an axiom but a conclusion, and its premise an axiom (or another conclusion resting upon an axiom, etc.). If two or more conclusions rested upon each other ("begging the question"), then the whole becomes a tautology, which can be accepted as a single axiom, or rejected. There is no way to "prove" down into bedrock. Even in mathematics, all we can ever do is prove what must be true based upon accepted axioms.
Again, I'm clearly not Descarte. Though, I would not mind learning more of his thoughts as it may provide useful tools to broaden my own understanding.
Nope. Superficially speaking, God likes car analogies. He rarely talks about just one thing at a time, and he only focuses on that which he thinks it would benefit us to know. I don't think he lied to Moses, but I do believe we've only got the kindergarten version of events.
(Please note the context of the conversation in quotes. I think this is what has you so confused. This isn't a proposed conversation between Moses and God, but between Moses and a hypothetical angelic messenger.)
Besides, God didn't write Genesis. Moses (probably) did. If you were ten and had to do a school report on what your father does for a living, do you think you'd describe it very well? You'd go and ask your dad, surely. What he told you would have been simplified for your understanding, and more than half of what he said wouldn't wind up in your report. For an ancient former-aristocrat turned shepherd, I think we can cut Moses a bit of slack.
Assuming the tradition that Moses indeed wrote the Pentateuch/Torah/Law (something I accept), then there are a number of different possibilities for the book of Genesis, and they're not mutually exclusive.
Direct, divine instruction is one answer. It's the only answer I've come to that really satisfies Genesis Chapter 1. Again, this leads me to believe that this chapter is only somewhat literal, and is intended to be read symbolically.
Many Biblical linguists believe that Genesis had multiple authors during different linguistic periods. If that's true, it actually answers one of the questions that I have had over the book. Genesis may be a compilation of abridged passages. Moses didn't live through this time period, and divine teaching would have been unnecessary if there were already scriptural histories to draw from. We don't have those works, but that doesn't mean that they didn't exist at the time. These could have been in the possession of Jethro (Moses' father-in-law), or they may have been heirlooms of Jacob (Israel), or may have been acquired by an Egyptian prior to the exodus. Moses may have been the abridger.
Addendum: If Moses wrote Deuteronomy, then who wrote Deut 34? Moses didn't describe his own death and burial.
There is some truth to this. It is only strictly true when you limit the definition of science to actual systemic investigation of truth. There are many willing to make unfounded anti-religion claims on behalf of the "science" they worship.
Ironically, one of the reasons your statement is so is because of a lack of humility on the part of religious leaders over the years. To be asked a question, and not have an answer is a sign of weakness. Religious leaders don't want to be socially weak (and historically would have believed that they not afford to be). Thus, it was really easy to reach for answers that God has not provided, or to try to read "in between the lines". Once a pronouncement has been made, it makes that church look weak to back down from a position, so others tend to accept it as doctrine. Then, they stack bad upon bad.
It does not at all surprise me that science has, and continues to contradict these fools. While we may disagree about whether Christianity is true or not, we can both agree that there's a lot of made-up junk masquerading as religion.
You seem to have some funny interpretations of the words "think" and "believe". This is hindering our ability to communicate with one another. For instance, I interpreted your first question as a petty insult. Thus, my answer might not make any sense, as I'm not entirely certain of the definitions you are using.
I would say that both thought and belief are fundamental in their own ways. If you have no thought, then you cannot reason how the world might behave, and therefore have nothing to believe in. If you have no belief... none whatsoever... then you cannot believe what your own senses tell you, and you have no foundation upon which to reason. This principle expands further to not being able to believe anything which might confirm or deny the results of your reasoning. Thus, a being without belief is unable to reason, and a being without reason lacks belief. That is what I think.
There are a great many things out there that people believe in. Some exist in an absolute sense, while others do not. This is the quest of science, to ascertain the difference. There is no clear indication if this is a finite task.
(This is also why fiction such as The Matrix, or certain Star Trek episodes featuring the holodeck have such appeal. They ask us to re-examine our most basic beliefs, if only for a moment. If one can suspend disbelief in those contexts, anything is possible. In the context of fiction, that is quite desirable.)
I hold, though, that all logic must be based upon fundamental axioms. If the axioms we choose are true, and our logic is sound, then we may deduce further truth. If our axioms are false, then we have no assurance that we will gain truth through reason. Any attempt to build a framework of reason that is not built upon axioms will either be tautological (hidden axioms), or self-contradictory. Thus correct belief with thought leads to further correct belief. No amount of thought will lead to truth if our core beliefs are wrong. That is what I believe.
Extraordinarily common, I'm afraid.
You know that old saying: never talk about politics and religion? That's for people who can't stand to have their world-view challenged. (and as a self-defensive mechanism for the thin-skinned who might run into one of these people.)
Curious about which apparent contradictions you see there. The ones I normally see pointed out aren't contradictions at all, but I'm always interested in a good theological puzzle.
(Gen 1 talks about the creation of the world, and mentions the creation of man as a blip. Gen 2 goes back and fills in details. That's an old tired, and frankly juvenile "proof" of contradiction. I hope you've got something more interesting.)
This bit confuses me. Are you lumping all Christians together into the same meta-church, are you specifically talking about Catholicism, or did you mean to say "their" instead of "the"? There are so many Christian churches out there with wildly differing beliefs that there are dozens of "official" interpretations of any given Bible passage.
(Speaking as a Bible believing Christian)
You're ignoring the fundamental problem with Genesis 1 (and thus, creation: including animals). If Man did not exist yet, who was observing the creation? How did man come to know about it?
The obvious theological answer was that God and/or angels told someone about it between Adam and Moses (inclusive). The problem with many of Gods (OT) explanations is that they tend to be in dreams and visions, which aren't usually literal. If it was angels, then surely we got the simplified version. "Ooh, ooh! Tell me again about the divergence of Lorises and Pottos!" "Sigh. Listen, kid, he just made them, OK?"
All this arguing over evolution is silly. Faith does not need it, but that doesn't mean that it outright contradicts faith.
What a witty retort. Care to elaborate, or was my statement merely uncomfortable?
This is what I was conveying. And again, the universe would need to be extraordinarily strange for this to be false.
Yet, it is still useful. Mathematically, nothing can be proven unless it rests upon axioms: fundamental assumptions that are nothing more than assertions. Belief in self-existence is one of the most fundamental axioms we've got.
Tautologies can be useful, not because they're tautologies, but because they can be true. All of mathematics form a tautological system. They're still incredibly useful.
Truth just is. "Facts" (with the scare-quotes*), especially scientific "facts" may or may not reflect absolute truth. That is the goal of science, but they've had varying degrees of success. (far better than the vast majority of belief systems over the millennia)
*(Scare-quotes imply that something may not be what it purports to be, or may be misnamed. In this case, scientific "facts" may not be facts at all.)
Hmm. I can see how this argument can be made. I assert that it is possible to believe something is true but have no faith in that belief. Belief is an idea of what the world is really like. Faith is the willingness to act on that belief. If you like, one could say that it is a matter of degree. The strength of your belief is reflected in the strength of your faith in that belief.
Over all, we're basically saying the same things. And you're welcome.
For any given (specific) NP hard problem, a 1000x speed increase in computation will result in a solution in 1/1000th of the time. It will still need to complete the same algorithmic steps, but it will do them 1000x faster. What it does not aid with is making the problem of N+1 any closer to N in complexity, or making a general solution any more computationally feasible.
Not so.
Start with fundamental belief. "I think, therefore I am." This is a rational belief, but it is only a belief. The universe would need to be extraordinarily weird for this one to not be true. But it is still a belief.
Every scientific "fact" is a belief. These are educated beliefs, based upon scientific principles, observations, and methods. Yet they are still beliefs. Various scientific beliefs are challenged and changed on a daily basis. Knowledge of what science says still requires belief in those ideas. Action based on these beliefs is still a form of faith, even if it is entirely non-religious.
This article itself is on the cutting edge of doubting particular scientific ideas. It is a weakened belief in the status quo, and an exploration of an alternate theory. That's how science works.
Science cannot be separated from belief. To do so becomes fanaticism or fiction, and ceases to be science.
Again, our economy can't yet sustain it.
And this is exactly the sort of thing our government just can't seem to figure out. I wouldn't use these proportions, but the basic idea is correct. (it would bring back to the forefront the controversy over how to define poverty, but that's another issue.)
My point was that GDP is getting double, triple, quadruple counted. It certainly doesn't represent a measure of domestic production, which is how it is usually misused (and misnamed).
Yep. Both political parties, in different ways, but for the same types of avarice.
Please reread "at least the first 18 years". (You're right, but you're also wrong.)
Sometimes we don't try hard enough. We are after people willing to risk their lives to kill others, so we can't be altogether too picky. (and yes, we need them.)
Bingo.
If soldiers don't use robots in dangerous situations for fear of damaging them, it won't be because of emotional attachment issues. It will be due to fear of being raked over the coals for losing the expensive toy, or fear of not being issued a replacement.
My guess would be most of it... and police departments worried about a re-occurrence of the OJ Simpson riots. (Trayvon Martin, losing a pro-sports game, etc)
(IOW those with large minority populations which feel the laws are written by the oppressive majority and are constantly looking for excuses to show their anger through a bizarre display of destroying one another's property.)
Consider for a moment... why the constant slow inflation? It isn't to protect us from deflationary spirals. Combine it with low interest rates in the market, and bonds start to look pretty good.
What does the US government get out of a thriving bond market? It effectively lowers the interest rate on the national debt. You've been hoodwinked. (and you're not alone)