Lets say that if the majority of climate scientists are right, we will be in DEEP crap by then, and it will be too late to do anything about it
According to the latest peer reviewed analysis. It's something like 13% of climate scientists. 13% only constitutes a majority in the minds of Al Gore and his followers.
Note what the judge did not dispute: he agreed 'that climate change is mainly attributable to man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide ('greenhouse gases').' He further agreed that 'global temperatures are rising and are likely to continue to rise, that climate change will cause serious damage if left unchecked, and that it is entirely possible for governments and individuals to reduce its impacts'.
The difference being that those assertions are merely unfounded instead of provably false.
THE WORDS HE SPEAKS ON CLIMATE CHANGE ARE THE TRUTH. AND THAT IS THE REAL ISSUE
Err... Al Gore's one message is that CO2 drives climate change. ALL scientific evidence points to this being false -- in fact, not even plausible.
As far as I can tell, Al Gore is nothing short of the leader of a global cult, which preys especially on people without a spiritual source of morality, and so are drawn to his message of a "new morality" and now even a "spirituality" that can are based upon science and saving the world from greedy corporations. That cult now apparently includes the UN and the Nobel Foundation.
But, perjury means lying under oath. And it is very clear that President Bill Clinton did not do that in this case. The whole thing with congress and the impeachment hearings was pure politics, and dirty politics at that.
You are either delusional, or all the information you have is what comes out of CNN. Clinton committed numerous acts of perjury, for example stating under oath that he didn't recall ever being alone with Monica Lewinsky. This doesn't even include more serious crimes, such as using executive privilege to protect himself from a criminal investigation.
Anything that causes us NOT to soil our nest is to be applauded. Mr. Gore is part of the force of good and I applaud him.
Except Gore doesn't campaign against pollution; he campaigns against CO2. Mr. Gore has by his escalating rhetoric first redefined "good," then "morality," and now, finally "spirituality," to all be based on environmentalism. This makes him a force of evil, not good.
Damn shame that he lost to the current asshat Bush by a vote of 4 to 5.
Not that I seriously expect facts to affect your rhetoric, but regardless of what combination of Florida districts had be recounted, Bush would have won. So neither the Florida Supreme Court ruling nor the US Superem Court ruling overturning it ultimately had any impact on who won.
And yet you only believe that the actions of Al Gore and the IPCC will prevent war if you listen to the most extreme delusions of Al Gore and the IPCC. By that logic they should also give the award to the guy who assassinates Al Gore.
I am now forced to preemptive refuse my Nobel Prise.
If the government DID have mechanical dragonflies, how would we know? The drug of choice of the anti-war movement causes both hallucination and paranoia.
Huh? So what that Newton believed in god (and alchemy too)? What does that have to do with anything?
He explained a lot of things that so far only belief had been able to explain. Whether he himself believed or not is irrelevant.
You were suggesting, to the best the I could determine, that religion came about because people like Newton weren't around to challenge notions that were inconsistent with observed reality. That assertion is inconsistent with Newton's religious beliefs.
Your assertion here that Newton "explained a lot of things that so far only belief had been able to explain" is also an example of the ridiculous atheist mythology that religion exists to explain natural phenomena. Newton was able to create the first mathematical model for gravitational attraction, and he determined that this model could explain both observed terrestrial phenomenon as well as the observed trajectories of celestial objects. This did not replace any religious belief. It only replaced inferior scientific speculation. Neither did his work with optics or calculus, as the subject matter of science being irrelevant to the subject matter of religion.
1. Just because it's not enumerated doesn't mean it's not a right (9th Amendment) 2. The right of juries to nullify existed in the English common law. 3. Where do you think the rights protected in the 9th Amendment come from? Probably the English common law in part, yes? 4. "It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision... you [juries] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy" -- John Jay, First Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, State Of Georgia v. Brailsford, 3 U.S. 1,4 (1794).
My argument was against the assertion that jury nullification is a CONSTITUTIONAL right, which it is not. That it may be a right from common law is a different argument. However the constitutional guarantee to equal protection under the law, and also the constitutional mandate that the Constitution and the laws made under the Constitution by Congress are the supreme laws of the land, make it unconstitutional for juries, judges, or anyone, else to modify or disregard laws for particular cases. I don't believe that John Jay was arguing otherwise, but if he was, he was wrong.
All I did in the quoted text was phrase the question in somewhat more neutral/scientific language, and provided a possible answer from some of the reading I've done on the subject of evolutionary psychology. It is pertinent and fairly well-researched explanation, and in my opinion, the best one I've heard yet. I'm not saying it is an extremely concrete, thoroughly tested and broadly accepted scientific theory... it's a somewhat immature field of study, after all, and I'm not an expert on it.
Random mutation and natural selection both exist, and both influence evolution, but we have no evidence, experiments, or even well-constructed theories concerning what else may drive it. It is currently untestable, and therefore unscientific to assume that those two mechanisms drive everything of evolution. Science has become oblivious to this, which should be an obvious fact, because the religious opposition to evolutionary theory makes its supporters, scientists and non-scientists, dig in their heals and turn "random mutation and natural selection" into dogma. The field of evolutionary psychology is completely dependent on this dogma, and completely devoid of actual evidence. Without actual evidence of what drove the evolution of the human mind and brain, its study cannot be considered a field of science.
I apologize for the "potshot," but your reasoning of how oversensitivity to the presence of animals, plus the ability to empathize, plus the ability to imagine, made it a survival advantage for humans to be able to feel that they were in the presence of God, just seemed to me like the epitome of what happens when people try to force dogma into science. It doesn't fit. I find such explanations, as well as explanations for how random mutation and natural selection performed such feats as inventing new biological systems and organs, utterly implausible. But until someone invents a way to quantify the model, there will be no way to mount evidence for or against. In the meantime, forming conclusions about the nature of the human mind based upon these beliefs is extremely dangerous, and IMO, as it is not based in any kind of evidence, it has virtually no possibility of being correct.
I do certainly think it's better than saying simplistically saying "god did it" or "this is something we will never understand, so why bother trying to" or "people believe in God because they're afraid of death and this is a product of their delusions" and dismissing these experiences and phenomena out of hand.
But advancing inherently untestable theories is no better than those things. As both Socrates and Confucius said, the most important part of knowledge is acknowledging the scope of your ignorance. I strongly disagree with ever saying "we can never understand X," but sometimes, to be rational, we must say "it is impossible with our current state of knowledge to understand X, or for that matter, to intelligently speculate." When we come to terms with where the actual threshold between knowledge and ignorance is, THAT is the only time that we are truly capable of advancing our understanding.
Subtle error: evolution favors beneficial traits and selects against harmful traits. Random mutations that don't fall into either category can be left alone to spread through a population for many generations, until changing conditions force said mutation into one of the other categories.
But until they become beneficial, random mutations can only be random. They cannot form ordered things like new brain structures, for instance. An ordered structure without positive or negative pressure is subject to entropy and disappears, like vestigial organs. The idea of an organ waiting around for 1000 generations to continue its evolution is inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Only in creation mythologies do things spring fully-formed into existence. Evolution is slow, incremental.
Only in mythologies and in the fossil record. Practically the only things that are slow and gradual in the fossil record are changes of size. But don't let the facts get in the way of your theory. But even looking at extant species, we should be able to see evolution at work in all species. But out of the millions of species, we have plenty of examples of two-chamber hearts, three-chamber hearts and four-chamber hearts. If you really believe that evolution must be slow and gradual, where are all the living species with hearts mid-way between these heart architectures?
Oh please, the Anthropic Principle, at it's core, simply states that anything which is observed by humans will be tainted by human bias - it's just a truism!
If the strong force was 2% stronger, there would be no atoms. If it was 5% weaker, there would be no stars This is reality. It's not "human bias" to wonder why this force, as well as the other three, were "set" within the narrow ranges necessary for a complex universe. It's noticing the obvious and wondering why. It might require philosophical answers, but philosophy has always been part of science and always will. The facts demand an explanation to any curious mind however.
But if you insist on equating phillosophy with science then you'll have to find yourself another principle to abuse because this one doesn't rule out the possiblity that random chance got it right the "first" time (whatever that means outside our time-containing universe) either, if you insist on applying the laws of probablility that exist inside this universe to the "space" containing "all other" universes. Heck, maybe the perfect human-evolving universe is the only kind that can exist - not that it matters because the "laws" that govern the creation of universes would necessarily exist outside this universe, meaning we can't test them, meaning they aren't science.
So you're proposing a philosophy in which the laws of physics are assigned by "random chance"? How does that even make sense? Does the idea some sort of Random Universe Generator really seem more reasonable to you than a Creator?
The observation of the condition of the universe demands some attempt at an answer. I agree that any answer is outside the realm of science. However, scientists DO propose answers, and so these answers become part of the discussion. But being outside the realm of science, the answer of a Creator who intentionally created a spawning ground for life, is equally valid, no more or less scientific, (and IMO far more reasonable) than the answer of an infinite number of non-functional universes.
Really? So there is an inherent truth to it when we use imaginary numbers?
Yes. Not only is it an inherent truth, but the truth inherent in imaginary numbers happens to be extremely relevant to any possible kind of physical phenomena that involves waves, which includes nearly every physical phenomenon.
Math is not the only way to prove things. Repeatability is. Lots of science was put in place long before the mathematics that explain it.
Repeatability doesn't prove anything. It only increases your chances of being right. Everything in science is an approximation, and no scientific proof can every be perfect. A mathematical proof that is not perfect fails to be a proof.
To the extent that math is repeatable, it is so because it has been taught as an international language. While it is nice to have everyone communicating in the same language, what we choose to describe with that language can hardly be considered truth simply because it is meaningful.
Math is repeatable because there is only one way to do it. It doesn't matter how it's taught. You could teach someone that 13 is non-prime, but that person is not then able to separate a pile of 13 objects into multiple piles of equal size, because 13 INHERENTLY IS prime, regardless of language or what anyone is taught.
While 1+1=2 is valid in mathematics, it doesn't provide a meaningful proof of anything. After all, I can take two lumps of Play Dough, slam them together and then how many lumps do I have? It ain't two lumps.
If you want to use math to prove something about the physical world you also need physics. Given that you start with 1 pound of play dough, and slam another 1 pound of play dough into it, given the principle of conservation of mass, and given the mathematical truth that 1+1=2, you now have 2 pounds of play dough. This proof is as strong as the proof upon which the law of conservation of mass rests. Any law of physics is always subject to some finite amount of uncertainty, but laws of math are not.
Then, there is the fact that our choice of assigning numbers to describe physics has actually retarded our understanding of the universe. Thus, we waste huge amounts of time trying to make up crap like Dark Energy to excuse the fact that our math simply doesn't describe the universe we live in.
Are you against the study of physics then? How else do you suggest we learn about the universe, besides coming up with models to explain observed phenomena, and then testing and improving those models?
When the law is wrong, the jury's constitutional, patriotic duty is to overturn the bad law.
There is nothing in the Constitution that even REMOTELY implies that juries should have the power to determine which laws are good and which are bad. And the mandate in the Constitution for equal protection under the law completely opposes that argument. The purpose of having a jury of your peers is to have an objective judgment concerning the facts of the case. It is not their role to judge the law.
I'll go one better, and say that the biosphere was an exercise in ideology and science fiction rather than science or practical engineering. Maintaining tide pools and rain forests for your oxygen supply, as opposed to using technological means, such as CO2 scrubbers, etc, is insane.
Nonsense. Unlike in weightless environments, exercise on the moon should be easy. Just strap a 500 pound moon rock to your back and do some squat-thrusts.
Math is not a language. Mathematical nomenclature is a language. Math is the inherent way that numbers interact with each other. Math does prove things. In fact, it is the only thing that can truly be said to prove things. Given that the mathematical givens are true, the mathematical results are provably true.
The strict, young earth creationism model assumes the Bible is totally correct if taken totally literally.
In which case when Jesus said, "beware the yeast of the Pharisees" he was actually warning against a fungal epidemic that the Pharisees were planning on spreading through infected bread.
Noah, at 600 years old, boarded the boat
Whether you take Genesis literally or not, it will be a fundamental point of failure if it is not translated properly. There are Hebrew words for "boat," but none are used for the Noah's "ark". The word used is "tebah", which probably means "box", "chest", or, if it came from Egyptian, which is most likely IMO, "coffin". The word is only used two places in the Bible, Noah's Ark, and Moses's Ark, which was a basket made of reeds. Both were waterproofed with pitch. As with Egyptian symbology, both would be the appropriate boat-like conveyances for traversing between the land of life and the land of death. Both were used to spare a life from an impending onslaught, which life would be used to found God's new church among mankind. (BTW, the "Ark" of the Covenant is a different word.)
Free will is just an idea. It isn't some essential observed bit of the universe.
No, it's a directly observable quality of consciousness.
From all scientific evidence we are complicated finite state machines. We are entirely physical, deterministic machines.
That is absurd. "All scientific evidence"? Try "no shred of evidence anywhere."
Furthermore, it's a theory which offers no credible explanation for the observed phenomenon of consciousness. Further still, it is a theory which is incompatible with the consciousness's observed property of free will.
If you look at the gravity simulations of such a planetary collision, it seems that the orbit of the resulting moon is a product of the angle of impact more than anything else. So I my impression is that a retrograde orbit could be completely consistent with a moon that is the product of a collision.
Random mutation which allowed the rise of relegion, a clearly beneficial stabalizing force in ancient societies. Standard, non-tortured, evolutionary theory (you know the one, right? the one where beneficial traits, shockingly, benefit their host and thus spread?)
The standard non-tortured evolutionary theory I'm familiar with requires a constant survival and reproductive advantage, generation to generation, in order to effect change. A structure that exists for one person in a million to experience religious ecstasy wouldn't work. Nor could it possibly evolve by this reasoning if religion didn't already exist. Nor did "societies" exist when the modern brain evolved, or religion as we know it.
Except that those mile-deep floods have never, scientifically, been shown to have occurred at the same time, let alone a mere six thousand years ago.
Except that I never claimed these things proved the literal historical accuracy of the flood description of Genesis, and I certainly never claimed that any particular flood or floods happened 6,000 years ago. I merely claimed that atheist scientists acted in the disinterest of actual science to avoid believing something that sounded biblical, and that reality ends up looking a whole lot like SOME kind of interpretation of Genesis.
Atheistic scientists today are forced to take refuge in a belief in an infinite number of unknowable universes, a theory which is neither scientific nor rational.
Huh? Forced? Really? By whom? And what, precicely, are they taking refuge from?
Forced by and taking refuge from the Anthropic Principle. The fact that all the mathematical and physical constants in the universe are "set" in the very narrow ranges which allows the formation of matter, of atoms, of atoms heavier than iron, allows for the existence of liquids, of nuclear fusion and of life. The only palatable alternative to the conclusion that the universe was created for the purpose of sustaining life, is the conclusion that there are an infinite number of unobservable universes that DON'T "work" and that we happen to be in one of the only ones that does.
Look, I agree, faith has a lot of utility, and our society is a lot less stable than it would be if we'd held firmly to the beliefs of the past. The destabalization we're seeing today scares me too, and I can certainly understand how horrific it must seem to someone that's used to the stability that religeous values provide (been there, done that).
You've got me all wrong. I'm not interested in stability, and I'm not interested in believing in things for their utility. I'm only interested in truth. Today's instability is not horrific to me, it's invigorating. The ability of the people of the world to think, both the religious and the non-religious, is badly broken. All should be forced to question and defend their beliefs.
The *point* of the demonstration is to show that there is an area of the brain that is trivial to stimulate and which causes "connection to the sacred". What it shows is that religious experience is hardwired into us. It is not learned and it is not a mystical thing. It is a physical part of the brain.
Hardly. The fact that everyone experienced a this "connection" in a manner that was specific to the kind of connection they had already established "in real life" illustrates that this is not a "hard-wired experience," but is individualized, and highly dependent on religious history. The fact that the brain modulates the awareness of the connection is not new. We've been using drugs and/or meditation to get the brain to do this for eons.
It is an interesting question, but it should be asked with the proper emphasis, in the proper context. Being capable of sensing the presence of empirically unverifiable entities is an ability in the same way that being fooled by an optical illusion is an ability. So instead of asking "why" we have evolved this "ability," I would ask how we have evolved this attribute.
It could be that this attribute itself conferred some useful survival and reproductive benefit, or it could be a neutral or slightly counterproductive "side effect" of attributes that are too advantageous to have been eliminated by natural selection. Humans, like many animals, have an agency detection system of sorts... we need to be able to detect potential predators, prey, comrades, mates, etc. This agency detection system is a bit overactive... false positives are not unheard of, because the evolutionary cost/risk of being a little too sensitive may be lower than being a little under-sensitive. Also, humans are social animals capable of running elaborate internalized social simulations, vividly imagining the moods, motivations and behaviors of real or imagined entities, both human and non-human... this is something else that we've evolved to do rather liberally. We've even been known to shed tears for beings that we know exist only in our imaginations or in a story book.
Combining these two attributes (overactive agency detection + social simulation, projection and empathy) it's not hard to imagine why people might sometimes have experiences such as those described in the article and that they would take the shape of religious icons that have been conditioned from youth to treat as real, true and important. Given the self-propagating and self-reinforcing (what you might call "memetic") quality of these beliefs and their consequential social importance, it may indeed be in one's best interest (from a survival and reproductive point of view) to at least give the appearance of earnestly believing in them, which the occasionally "feeling" of an invisible "presence" would help produce. So it could be a component of a sort of evolutionary feedback loop.
LMRAO (Laughing My Religious Ass Off). Reality Check: You sound just like a Young-Earth Creationist, attempting to spin and explain in great detail why radiocarbon dating is invalid.
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According to the latest peer reviewed analysis. It's something like 13% of climate scientists. 13% only constitutes a majority in the minds of Al Gore and his followers.
The difference being that those assertions are merely unfounded instead of provably false.
Err... Al Gore's one message is that CO2 drives climate change. ALL scientific evidence points to this being false -- in fact, not even plausible.
As far as I can tell, Al Gore is nothing short of the leader of a global cult, which preys especially on people without a spiritual source of morality, and so are drawn to his message of a "new morality" and now even a "spirituality" that can are based upon science and saving the world from greedy corporations. That cult now apparently includes the UN and the Nobel Foundation.
You are either delusional, or all the information you have is what comes out of CNN. Clinton committed numerous acts of perjury, for example stating under oath that he didn't recall ever being alone with Monica Lewinsky. This doesn't even include more serious crimes, such as using executive privilege to protect himself from a criminal investigation.
Except Gore doesn't campaign against pollution; he campaigns against CO2. Mr. Gore has by his escalating rhetoric first redefined "good," then "morality," and now, finally "spirituality," to all be based on environmentalism. This makes him a force of evil, not good.
Not that I seriously expect facts to affect your rhetoric, but regardless of what combination of Florida districts had be recounted, Bush would have won. So neither the Florida Supreme Court ruling nor the US Superem Court ruling overturning it ultimately had any impact on who won.
Yes but Gore belongs to that notable minority who actually become stupider by thinking.
And yet you only believe that the actions of Al Gore and the IPCC will prevent war if you listen to the most extreme delusions of Al Gore and the IPCC. By that logic they should also give the award to the guy who assassinates Al Gore.
I am now forced to preemptive refuse my Nobel Prise.
If the government DID have mechanical dragonflies, how would we know? The drug of choice of the anti-war movement causes both hallucination and paranoia.
You were suggesting, to the best the I could determine, that religion came about because people like Newton weren't around to challenge notions that were inconsistent with observed reality. That assertion is inconsistent with Newton's religious beliefs.
Your assertion here that Newton "explained a lot of things that so far only belief had been able to explain" is also an example of the ridiculous atheist mythology that religion exists to explain natural phenomena. Newton was able to create the first mathematical model for gravitational attraction, and he determined that this model could explain both observed terrestrial phenomenon as well as the observed trajectories of celestial objects. This did not replace any religious belief. It only replaced inferior scientific speculation. Neither did his work with optics or calculus, as the subject matter of science being irrelevant to the subject matter of religion.
My argument was against the assertion that jury nullification is a CONSTITUTIONAL right, which it is not. That it may be a right from common law is a different argument. However the constitutional guarantee to equal protection under the law, and also the constitutional mandate that the Constitution and the laws made under the Constitution by Congress are the supreme laws of the land, make it unconstitutional for juries, judges, or anyone, else to modify or disregard laws for particular cases. I don't believe that John Jay was arguing otherwise, but if he was, he was wrong.
Random mutation and natural selection both exist, and both influence evolution, but we have no evidence, experiments, or even well-constructed theories concerning what else may drive it. It is currently untestable, and therefore unscientific to assume that those two mechanisms drive everything of evolution. Science has become oblivious to this, which should be an obvious fact, because the religious opposition to evolutionary theory makes its supporters, scientists and non-scientists, dig in their heals and turn "random mutation and natural selection" into dogma. The field of evolutionary psychology is completely dependent on this dogma, and completely devoid of actual evidence. Without actual evidence of what drove the evolution of the human mind and brain, its study cannot be considered a field of science.
I apologize for the "potshot," but your reasoning of how oversensitivity to the presence of animals, plus the ability to empathize, plus the ability to imagine, made it a survival advantage for humans to be able to feel that they were in the presence of God, just seemed to me like the epitome of what happens when people try to force dogma into science. It doesn't fit. I find such explanations, as well as explanations for how random mutation and natural selection performed such feats as inventing new biological systems and organs, utterly implausible. But until someone invents a way to quantify the model, there will be no way to mount evidence for or against. In the meantime, forming conclusions about the nature of the human mind based upon these beliefs is extremely dangerous, and IMO, as it is not based in any kind of evidence, it has virtually no possibility of being correct.
But advancing inherently untestable theories is no better than those things. As both Socrates and Confucius said, the most important part of knowledge is acknowledging the scope of your ignorance. I strongly disagree with ever saying "we can never understand X," but sometimes, to be rational, we must say "it is impossible with our current state of knowledge to understand X, or for that matter, to intelligently speculate." When we come to terms with where the actual threshold between knowledge and ignorance is, THAT is the only time that we are truly capable of advancing our understanding.
But until they become beneficial, random mutations can only be random. They cannot form ordered things like new brain structures, for instance. An ordered structure without positive or negative pressure is subject to entropy and disappears, like vestigial organs. The idea of an organ waiting around for 1000 generations to continue its evolution is inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Only in mythologies and in the fossil record. Practically the only things that are slow and gradual in the fossil record are changes of size. But don't let the facts get in the way of your theory. But even looking at extant species, we should be able to see evolution at work in all species. But out of the millions of species, we have plenty of examples of two-chamber hearts, three-chamber hearts and four-chamber hearts. If you really believe that evolution must be slow and gradual, where are all the living species with hearts mid-way between these heart architectures?
If the strong force was 2% stronger, there would be no atoms. If it was 5% weaker, there would be no stars This is reality. It's not "human bias" to wonder why this force, as well as the other three, were "set" within the narrow ranges necessary for a complex universe. It's noticing the obvious and wondering why. It might require philosophical answers, but philosophy has always been part of science and always will. The facts demand an explanation to any curious mind however.
So you're proposing a philosophy in which the laws of physics are assigned by "random chance"? How does that even make sense? Does the idea some sort of Random Universe Generator really seem more reasonable to you than a Creator?
The observation of the condition of the universe demands some attempt at an answer. I agree that any answer is outside the realm of science. However, scientists DO propose answers, and so these answers become part of the discussion. But being outside the realm of science, the answer of a Creator who intentionally created a spawning ground for life, is equally valid, no more or less scientific, (and IMO far more reasonable) than the answer of an infinite number of non-functional universes.
Yes. Not only is it an inherent truth, but the truth inherent in imaginary numbers happens to be extremely relevant to any possible kind of physical phenomena that involves waves, which includes nearly every physical phenomenon.
Repeatability doesn't prove anything. It only increases your chances of being right. Everything in science is an approximation, and no scientific proof can every be perfect. A mathematical proof that is not perfect fails to be a proof.
Math is repeatable because there is only one way to do it. It doesn't matter how it's taught. You could teach someone that 13 is non-prime, but that person is not then able to separate a pile of 13 objects into multiple piles of equal size, because 13 INHERENTLY IS prime, regardless of language or what anyone is taught.
If you want to use math to prove something about the physical world you also need physics. Given that you start with 1 pound of play dough, and slam another 1 pound of play dough into it, given the principle of conservation of mass, and given the mathematical truth that 1+1=2, you now have 2 pounds of play dough. This proof is as strong as the proof upon which the law of conservation of mass rests. Any law of physics is always subject to some finite amount of uncertainty, but laws of math are not.
Are you against the study of physics then? How else do you suggest we learn about the universe, besides coming up with models to explain observed phenomena, and then testing and improving those models?
There is nothing in the Constitution that even REMOTELY implies that juries should have the power to determine which laws are good and which are bad. And the mandate in the Constitution for equal protection under the law completely opposes that argument. The purpose of having a jury of your peers is to have an objective judgment concerning the facts of the case. It is not their role to judge the law.
I'll go one better, and say that the biosphere was an exercise in ideology and science fiction rather than science or practical engineering. Maintaining tide pools and rain forests for your oxygen supply, as opposed to using technological means, such as CO2 scrubbers, etc, is insane.
Nonsense. Unlike in weightless environments, exercise on the moon should be easy. Just strap a 500 pound moon rock to your back and do some squat-thrusts.
Math is not a language. Mathematical nomenclature is a language. Math is the inherent way that numbers interact with each other. Math does prove things. In fact, it is the only thing that can truly be said to prove things. Given that the mathematical givens are true, the mathematical results are provably true.
In which case when Jesus said, "beware the yeast of the Pharisees" he was actually warning against a fungal epidemic that the Pharisees were planning on spreading through infected bread.
Whether you take Genesis literally or not, it will be a fundamental point of failure if it is not translated properly. There are Hebrew words for "boat," but none are used for the Noah's "ark". The word used is "tebah", which probably means "box", "chest", or, if it came from Egyptian, which is most likely IMO, "coffin". The word is only used two places in the Bible, Noah's Ark, and Moses's Ark, which was a basket made of reeds. Both were waterproofed with pitch. As with Egyptian symbology, both would be the appropriate boat-like conveyances for traversing between the land of life and the land of death. Both were used to spare a life from an impending onslaught, which life would be used to found God's new church among mankind. (BTW, the "Ark" of the Covenant is a different word.)
No, it's a directly observable quality of consciousness.
That is absurd. "All scientific evidence"? Try "no shred of evidence anywhere."
Furthermore, it's a theory which offers no credible explanation for the observed phenomenon of consciousness. Further still, it is a theory which is incompatible with the consciousness's observed property of free will.
fant.asia?
kinesth.asia?
auditoryaph.asia?
theorientnotsoutheast.asia?
If you look at the gravity simulations of such a planetary collision, it seems that the orbit of the resulting moon is a product of the angle of impact more than anything else. So I my impression is that a retrograde orbit could be completely consistent with a moon that is the product of a collision.
The standard non-tortured evolutionary theory I'm familiar with requires a constant survival and reproductive advantage, generation to generation, in order to effect change. A structure that exists for one person in a million to experience religious ecstasy wouldn't work. Nor could it possibly evolve by this reasoning if religion didn't already exist. Nor did "societies" exist when the modern brain evolved, or religion as we know it.
Except that I never claimed these things proved the literal historical accuracy of the flood description of Genesis, and I certainly never claimed that any particular flood or floods happened 6,000 years ago. I merely claimed that atheist scientists acted in the disinterest of actual science to avoid believing something that sounded biblical, and that reality ends up looking a whole lot like SOME kind of interpretation of Genesis.
Forced by and taking refuge from the Anthropic Principle. The fact that all the mathematical and physical constants in the universe are "set" in the very narrow ranges which allows the formation of matter, of atoms, of atoms heavier than iron, allows for the existence of liquids, of nuclear fusion and of life. The only palatable alternative to the conclusion that the universe was created for the purpose of sustaining life, is the conclusion that there are an infinite number of unobservable universes that DON'T "work" and that we happen to be in one of the only ones that does.
You've got me all wrong. I'm not interested in stability, and I'm not interested in believing in things for their utility. I'm only interested in truth. Today's instability is not horrific to me, it's invigorating. The ability of the people of the world to think, both the religious and the non-religious, is badly broken. All should be forced to question and defend their beliefs.
Hardly. The fact that everyone experienced a this "connection" in a manner that was specific to the kind of connection they had already established "in real life" illustrates that this is not a "hard-wired experience," but is individualized, and highly dependent on religious history. The fact that the brain modulates the awareness of the connection is not new. We've been using drugs and/or meditation to get the brain to do this for eons.
LMRAO (Laughing My Religious Ass Off). Reality Check: You sound just like a Young-Earth Creationist, attempting to spin and explain in great detail why radiocarbon dating is invalid.
O RLY? You've experienced both then, I take it? Why is it that all those acid trippers in the 60s didn't go on killing sprees then?