(There is nothing particularly supreme about any of the Greek, Nordic or Celtic "Gods", for example. Nor were they ascribed unique ownership of any segment of worldly affairs. As best as I can tell, such views seem to originate more with the Semitic peoples and it is largely Judeo-Christian anthropologists who attach such views to others.)
You must have reached that conclusion without reading Plato. Besides the Greek, God is equally-well represented in the Hindu scriptures. Other ancient scriptures are more open to argument.
Without a clear, meaningful definition of what it is a person is rejecting, it makes no sense to talk about rejecting it, because what you are rejecting, what others think you are rejecting and what you think you are rejecting are not going to be the same except by chance alone. However, this gets interesting in the case of anything which, by definition, transcends that which can be defined. It's like asking a computer to solve a non-computable problem. If a computer could solve it, it would not be non-computable.
There are numerous clear and meaningful definitions of God. For one that would be clear and meaningful to a Western modern scientist, I would recommend Swedenborg's "Divine Love and Wisdom." (Swedenborg was a pre-modern Western scientist.)
The easiest way to handle this case is to simply place it into the category of "unknowable", along with all of the things that science has firmly and definitively shown to be unknowable. If you add two unknowables together, you still end up with an unknowable, so it really doesn't matter which of the unknowables are real and which aren't. At least, from any kind of scientific perspective.
"Unknowable...from a scientific perspective" just means "unscientific." To place anything in the "unknowable" category without proof of unknowability is wrong. At the very least, it is not the action of a lover of truth or knowledge.
Please. Do all unprovable claims get equal value in your mind? Is your non belief in Zeus or the flying spaghetti monster a faith statement?
Of course all unprovable claims do not get equal value. I do believe in Zeus, as the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Zeus was a specific Greek representation of the spiritual authority of God, and I do believe in the spiritual authority of God. I do not believe in the FSM, because the preponderance of the evidence suggest that he was made up as a metaphor for the absurdity of religious belief, and I do not believe in the absurdity of religious belief.
There is a fallacy known as "shifting the burden of proof." That is what you are doing by claiming my non belief in your god is a belief. It isn't my job to defend a non claim. People who believe in god need to step up to the plate and actually present evidence. The fact that I have rejected the evidence presented so far does not make my non claim a claim. Moreover, the word "faith" in a religious context is ultimately an excuse to avoid evidence. In contrast, the word "belief" an a scientific context is a statement of an overabundance of evidence to support a particular claim (until better evidence to the contrary comes along). They mean different things.
It is absurd to claim that "there is no God" is a non-claim. "I don't believe in God" would be the non-claim. In my experience, most people who believe in God do so based on an overabundance of evidence, regardless of whether they are using the word "faith", "believe", or "knowledge".
And you can't make the iron clad statement that there isn't a 40000 foot long Dune sandworm living below your house. But that isn't evidence that it is true. You can't prove there isn't a Tooth Fairy. Does that mean it exists? Does that mean that people denying that there is a Tooth Fairy are the ones that must prove there isn't, and not that those making the positive assertion must provide the evidence?
Yes. If you're going to posit a claim that there is no Tooth Fairy, the burden of proof is on you to 1) define what you mean by a Tooth Fairy, and 2) offer evidence to support your position.
But when a scientist says "There is no god", that is NOT what they mean. Again, keep in mind: "There is no god" is equaly as valid or invalid as "There is no flying spaghetti monster". It does NOT mean "its impossible for it to be a god". It means "there's no reason for me to think there is a god, therefore I don't waste my time with it".
That's not what "there is no god" means. "There is no god" means "there is no god." But since when do scientists say there is no God? Any scientist who says that is not saying it as a scientist. And anyone who says there's no reason to think there is a god is not looking.
The current cosmological models (those close to THE STANDARD MODEL) assume that many fundamental constants are randomly determined in the pre-inflationary period. As a result, they predict that there must be an infinite number of parallel universes. There is no observational evidence for these universes - the only reason they theoretically exist is that the theory says initial values for such things as the fine structure constant (alpha), the cosmological constant, Planck's constant etc. MUST be random, and if this is so, the alternate universes simply MUST exist. Any theory proposed that says these values may be determined non-randomly is considered to deviate greatly from the standard model on that count alone.
How does it even make sense that a fundamental constant of physics be "randomly" determined. Of what could this "random constant generator" possibly consist?
PS: If you'd like to admit it or not, most people with religious convictions were born and raised with that religion fostered and enforced into them by family members. There are pretty small numbers of spontaneous conversions and a quite a bit larger number of marriage conversions, but by in large what your parent believe in is what you believe in.
So what? Most scientific belief is what people have read in text books, not reasoned conclusions from scientific experiments that the designed and executed, or original theories that they subjected to the scientific method.
This has happened before. There used to be people who believed in geocentrism for the exact same reason taht people reject evolution - because they just honestly WANT to believe the bible. But here's the deal, even creationist don't believe in geocentrism, yet creationist still believe the bible. So what happened? They just changed their interpretation of it. I can't figure out why they don't just do that again.
There were very few people who ever used the Bible to defend geocentrism. Heliocentrism was more a threat to astrology than anything else. People who want to believe in the Bible don't just reinterpret it to be consistent with neodarwinism, because there are serious flaws in neodarwinism, and people who believe in the Bible don't have the need to have neodarwinism as an explanation of their existence, and so don't feel a need to overlook those flaws.
To me, the history of computers, the history of science, the history of language, of math, of music, and others, together offer fairly compelling evidence that the "random mutation" idea of evolution is wrong. We see parallels to biological evolution in all sorts of things like the ones above, and in every one of these parallels there is a directional drive, not a random one, that is driving change (combined with a mechanism for survival of the fittest). There are no parallels to be found driven by random mutations.
He re-read the paper because of the quotes by creationists. It was re-reading the paper that revealed the errors in the paper. It was the errors is the paper that caused him to withdraw it.
Do you get it? He withdrew the paper because it was wrong. Creationists drove him to discover that it was wrong, but their quotes are not WHY it was withdrawn.
If you re-read the article, you will note that he admits that he withdrew the paper because he was embarrassed to be associated with creationists. If he had just randomly discovered mistakes in one of his 1955 papers, I don't believe there is any way he would have withdrawn it.
Evolution has made thousands of correct predictions, that for example, life evolves and fans out in slow, gradual steps.... And that humans have one less chromosome than our ape ancestors, which was recently found to happen because two chromosomes merged into one during the development of homo sapiens.
So, you're suggesting that two ape chromosomes merged into one in "slow gradual steps"?
All I can do is cancel the service, and hope others do too.
I hope so too. I only get about a 200kbps upload rate with Comcast, so the more people who are likely to flood the upstream with bitorrent traffic that leave Comcast, the happier I will become. As a software developer I need to upload executables and data to client servers all the time. Verizon FIOS is also available in my area now as well, but its upstream rate is about the same. Given the choice, in the context of a shared bandwidth among a user pool, I'd opt for an ISP that blocked bitorrent uploads. (I use eMule, but only throttled way down.)
BTW, the article title is very misleading. The Congressman in question only wants transparency for what Comcast and other ISPs are doing, so that customers can choose freely, and he rejects the idea of solving this with "net neutrality."...all of which I agree with.
Corporatism was the system under which the Fascists developed guilds, purportedly to represent and empower the various economic sectors, but actually to assert unprecedented government control and intervention on those various economic sectors. We don't really have anything like that in the US, especially not when compared to other developed countries.
Theorists got interested in String Theory when they observed that two events far apart can affect each other, but there is no obvious connection.
Theorists got interested in String Theory when they recognized that the formula for the Strong Force is remarkably similar to the formula for a vibrating string. So is there a good reason for this similarity? I have no doubt. Is it accurately described by any version of String Theory? Incredibly unlikely.
The most preposterous aspect of String Theory is the claim that these strings are the most fundamental components of the universe. The smaller the scale on which we examine the universe, the more complex it appears. It is irrational to come up with a theory in which it suddenly simplifies, simply be cause we want it to be simple, and because we want to finally be able to claim to understand "everything". That's not going to happen. Being ignorant of something's substructure is no basis for claiming it has none, and scientists who do so undermine their credibility of scientists.
The human mind has great limitations as it evolved in our limited solar system, and everything is wired up in this closed intimate relation with the sun. Our ability to think conceptually is limited to our needs in our direct environment.
This seems easily refutable. There is nothing in our direct environment that necessitated the ability to compose massively complex works of music like Beethoven's 9th and innumerable other great works, or to comprehend or derive higher mathematics, or any number of other things that seem to be more innately human than any of our survival-based abilities.
except string theory is based on some very complicated math and heavily encrusted in physics, intelligent design on the other hand is an attempt to justify the writings of biblical authors over 2,000 years ago there is a clear difference.
The truth of a proposal is not necessarily proportionate to the complexity of the math. In fact, if anything, the opposite is more true. String theory is a theoretical framework developed to defend the beauty of the concept of the mathematical interconnectedness of the physical world. The intelligent design theory is a theoretical framework developed to defend the beauty of the concept of the conscious design and intentional interconnection of the physical world.
The majority of useful work that is done in science is indeed dispassionate and methodical. However all of the great theoretical discoveries have been possible only because the human mind is capable of recognizing beauty in things that are true.
That isn't how air quality regulations work. Under the Clean Air Act, setting auto emissions standards is the exclusive responsibility of the Federal Government. As things currently stand, no state can regulate tailpipe CO2 emissions. When California wins their lawsuit, then states will be able to choose weather to follow CA CO2 regulations or to follow the Federal do-nothing approach.
That is just not true. If it were, CA would just pass their own tougher law and let the Federal government sue THEM if they didn't like it. And the Federal government would have no constitutional power to do so. CA's only gripe is that they can't adopt their own tougher standards within the federal framework of the Clean Air Act and its permit system without a waiver. And that makes sense -- it's not their program. They have no case -- the granting of a waiver is at the discretion of the Administrator of the EPA, according to whether or not in his judgement doing so is conducive to the goals of the act (among other things). Whatever those CA's interest is, they are free to pursue them with their own programs, at their own expense. They have no possible basis for a suit.
California (with other states) has already won a suit saying that EPA must grant such a waiver, however EPA has not done so. Thus, they are suing again, this time asking the court to order EPA to do so immediately.
There is no such lawsuit. The only ruling I can think you could possibly be referring to is the ruling by the Supreme Court that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
Ah yes, it's the great conspiracy. So tell me, when Republicans controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress, were these same scientists being denied federal grants? It seems to me that it's the Conservatives complaining about the silencing of critics, but they were being silenced by officials of an all-Republican run government.
Yes. All the climatology grant money has been for "showing the effects of global warming" since before the Republican majority. I suppose next you're going to tell us that NPR was right-wing radio during the Republican majority.
He's a security guy, not a biologist. His list (I must not be well today, I'm actually RTFAs) is correct; e.g., 3000 deaths this century in the US from terrorism and 40,000 every single year on the highways, but OMG ITS TEH TERRAISTS!
That's because 3,000 murders is a more vile thing than 40,000 accidental deaths.
Schneier's point is that the modern world has changed a lot faster than our brains are able to, and as a result, we're maladapted for some of the tasks facing us today, like assessing remote risks.
Well, I think he's clearly wrong. I think the same faults in assessing risks would have been present in East Africa 100,000 years ago... Over-emphasizing the risk of being eaten by a sabre-toothed cat and under-emphasizing the risk of being axed in the head by a romantic rival. The true absurdity of his argument is that this makes the brain an inferior design to a computer. In reality the brain and the computer have radically different functions, and by comparison both the function and the design of the computer is ridiculously trivial.
Free CO2 in the air is gonna cost somebody a lot of money someday. Collecting a fixed amount for it at the time of origination is a way of containing the risk, since climate change is liable to be more expensive and less predictable.
No. No it's not. If America proves to be stupid enough to fall for this crap, then we deserve what we get -- which is the end of our superpower status. Currently there is still more freedom and rationality in America than in China, but the trend looks better for China in the long term. I think I might have to switch host countries down the road.
There's a minor flaw in that argument: CO2 isn't pollution and there is no cost to "cleaning it up." (Actually there is a NEGATIVE cost to cleaning it up, as the world's food crops, forests, and other vegetation consume it faster the greater ts concentration, which results in more food, forests and vegetation for everyone.)
No, you're merely demonstrating a logical contradiction. If I say "the goal of X is Y" and then "X goes for Z, not Y", then one of my statements is false. In this case, X is a random human, Y is reproduction, and Z is masturbation.
No, the post I responded to defined a biological purpose for sexuality. Using something for a purpose other than its intended purpose is the definition of "perversion."
What does it mean for something to be "inherently intimate"? Is that like the sun being "inherently bright"? Do you have some sort of metric here? Do you completely lack counterexamples?
It means that human sexuality has an inherent nature, and that that inherent nature involves intimacy, and that expressions of human sexuality inconsistent with intimacy are inconsistent with the essential nature of sexuality, and therefore harmful to it, and therefore a perversion of it.
No, I cannot quantify it. No, I do not lack counterexamples.
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You must have reached that conclusion without reading Plato. Besides the Greek, God is equally-well represented in the Hindu scriptures. Other ancient scriptures are more open to argument.
There are numerous clear and meaningful definitions of God. For one that would be clear and meaningful to a Western modern scientist, I would recommend Swedenborg's "Divine Love and Wisdom." (Swedenborg was a pre-modern Western scientist.)
"Unknowable...from a scientific perspective" just means "unscientific." To place anything in the "unknowable" category without proof of unknowability is wrong. At the very least, it is not the action of a lover of truth or knowledge.
Of course all unprovable claims do not get equal value. I do believe in Zeus, as the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Zeus was a specific Greek representation of the spiritual authority of God, and I do believe in the spiritual authority of God. I do not believe in the FSM, because the preponderance of the evidence suggest that he was made up as a metaphor for the absurdity of religious belief, and I do not believe in the absurdity of religious belief.
It is absurd to claim that "there is no God" is a non-claim. "I don't believe in God" would be the non-claim. In my experience, most people who believe in God do so based on an overabundance of evidence, regardless of whether they are using the word "faith", "believe", or "knowledge".
Yes. If you're going to posit a claim that there is no Tooth Fairy, the burden of proof is on you to 1) define what you mean by a Tooth Fairy, and 2) offer evidence to support your position.
That's not what "there is no god" means. "There is no god" means "there is no god." But since when do scientists say there is no God? Any scientist who says that is not saying it as a scientist. And anyone who says there's no reason to think there is a god is not looking.
How does it even make sense that a fundamental constant of physics be "randomly" determined. Of what could this "random constant generator" possibly consist?
So what? Most scientific belief is what people have read in text books, not reasoned conclusions from scientific experiments that the designed and executed, or original theories that they subjected to the scientific method.
There were very few people who ever used the Bible to defend geocentrism. Heliocentrism was more a threat to astrology than anything else. People who want to believe in the Bible don't just reinterpret it to be consistent with neodarwinism, because there are serious flaws in neodarwinism, and people who believe in the Bible don't have the need to have neodarwinism as an explanation of their existence, and so don't feel a need to overlook those flaws.
To me, the history of computers, the history of science, the history of language, of math, of music, and others, together offer fairly compelling evidence that the "random mutation" idea of evolution is wrong. We see parallels to biological evolution in all sorts of things like the ones above, and in every one of these parallels there is a directional drive, not a random one, that is driving change (combined with a mechanism for survival of the fittest). There are no parallels to be found driven by random mutations.
If you re-read the article, you will note that he admits that he withdrew the paper because he was embarrassed to be associated with creationists. If he had just randomly discovered mistakes in one of his 1955 papers, I don't believe there is any way he would have withdrawn it.
So, you're suggesting that two ape chromosomes merged into one in "slow gradual steps"?
Tell it to string theorists.
I hope so too. I only get about a 200kbps upload rate with Comcast, so the more people who are likely to flood the upstream with bitorrent traffic that leave Comcast, the happier I will become. As a software developer I need to upload executables and data to client servers all the time. Verizon FIOS is also available in my area now as well, but its upstream rate is about the same. Given the choice, in the context of a shared bandwidth among a user pool, I'd opt for an ISP that blocked bitorrent uploads. (I use eMule, but only throttled way down.)
BTW, the article title is very misleading. The Congressman in question only wants transparency for what Comcast and other ISPs are doing, so that customers can choose freely, and he rejects the idea of solving this with "net neutrality."
Corporatism was the system under which the Fascists developed guilds, purportedly to represent and empower the various economic sectors, but actually to assert unprecedented government control and intervention on those various economic sectors. We don't really have anything like that in the US, especially not when compared to other developed countries.
Theorists got interested in String Theory when they recognized that the formula for the Strong Force is remarkably similar to the formula for a vibrating string. So is there a good reason for this similarity? I have no doubt. Is it accurately described by any version of String Theory? Incredibly unlikely.
The most preposterous aspect of String Theory is the claim that these strings are the most fundamental components of the universe. The smaller the scale on which we examine the universe, the more complex it appears. It is irrational to come up with a theory in which it suddenly simplifies, simply be cause we want it to be simple, and because we want to finally be able to claim to understand "everything". That's not going to happen. Being ignorant of something's substructure is no basis for claiming it has none, and scientists who do so undermine their credibility of scientists.
This seems easily refutable. There is nothing in our direct environment that necessitated the ability to compose massively complex works of music like Beethoven's 9th and innumerable other great works, or to comprehend or derive higher mathematics, or any number of other things that seem to be more innately human than any of our survival-based abilities.
The truth of a proposal is not necessarily proportionate to the complexity of the math. In fact, if anything, the opposite is more true. String theory is a theoretical framework developed to defend the beauty of the concept of the mathematical interconnectedness of the physical world. The intelligent design theory is a theoretical framework developed to defend the beauty of the concept of the conscious design and intentional interconnection of the physical world.
The majority of useful work that is done in science is indeed dispassionate and methodical. However all of the great theoretical discoveries have been possible only because the human mind is capable of recognizing beauty in things that are true.
That is just not true. If it were, CA would just pass their own tougher law and let the Federal government sue THEM if they didn't like it. And the Federal government would have no constitutional power to do so. CA's only gripe is that they can't adopt their own tougher standards within the federal framework of the Clean Air Act and its permit system without a waiver. And that makes sense -- it's not their program. They have no case -- the granting of a waiver is at the discretion of the Administrator of the EPA, according to whether or not in his judgement doing so is conducive to the goals of the act (among other things). Whatever those CA's interest is, they are free to pursue them with their own programs, at their own expense. They have no possible basis for a suit.
There is no such lawsuit. The only ruling I can think you could possibly be referring to is the ruling by the Supreme Court that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
Yes. All the climatology grant money has been for "showing the effects of global warming" since before the Republican majority. I suppose next you're going to tell us that NPR was right-wing radio during the Republican majority.
Except that there's no need to do it.
Which would be a fantastic argument if only those alleged impacts were based in reality, which they are not.
That's because 3,000 murders is a more vile thing than 40,000 accidental deaths.
Well, I think he's clearly wrong. I think the same faults in assessing risks would have been present in East Africa 100,000 years ago... Over-emphasizing the risk of being eaten by a sabre-toothed cat and under-emphasizing the risk of being axed in the head by a romantic rival. The true absurdity of his argument is that this makes the brain an inferior design to a computer. In reality the brain and the computer have radically different functions, and by comparison both the function and the design of the computer is ridiculously trivial.
No. No it's not. If America proves to be stupid enough to fall for this crap, then we deserve what we get -- which is the end of our superpower status. Currently there is still more freedom and rationality in America than in China, but the trend looks better for China in the long term. I think I might have to switch host countries down the road.
There's a minor flaw in that argument: CO2 isn't pollution and there is no cost to "cleaning it up." (Actually there is a NEGATIVE cost to cleaning it up, as the world's food crops, forests, and other vegetation consume it faster the greater ts concentration, which results in more food, forests and vegetation for everyone.)
Here's a better idea. Drive your car wherever you want to go; drill in Alaska; deport Gore.
No, the post I responded to defined a biological purpose for sexuality. Using something for a purpose other than its intended purpose is the definition of "perversion."
It means that human sexuality has an inherent nature, and that that inherent nature involves intimacy, and that expressions of human sexuality inconsistent with intimacy are inconsistent with the essential nature of sexuality, and therefore harmful to it, and therefore a perversion of it.
No, I cannot quantify it. No, I do not lack counterexamples.