I can show you Newtonian gravity. Apples fall off trees. But that's been disproven too. You're missing the point. Science doesn't deal with absolute proof. It only gives us ways to disprove things, until we're left with things we can't easily disprove. Gravitational lensing is a name for a phenomenon which may be multiple other phenomena interacting, or it may be some singular phenomenon explained by one theory. It's a convenient label to refer to something by, not proof. Again, science doesn't deal with absolute proof.
Gravitation lensing may be the current proposed mechanism, but that could change in the future. It has been proposed as a theory, something that holds up under repeated experiments. It does *not* mean that it has been proven, which would imply that it was immutable. Science does not prove things. It is a method to construct a model, based on the core idea of explicitly stating your assumptions, constructing hypotheses, and then testing them repeatedly. Those with a high level of reproducibility become called theories. Eventually, after extreme attempts to disprove them, theories become established as laws. Laws can be disproven. Science operates with falsifiable statements, things you can potentially disprove. There exist no means of absolute proof.
I've tried English, but that's pretty malleable. Too much goalpost moving. I try math, less malleable, but incomprehensible to most. I'd try C or Python next, but that's almost as doomed. Human language sucks.
I think you're trying to shift the commonly accepted connotations of the words agnostic and atheist. From Wiki:
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[3][4][5] Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist.[4][5][6][7] Atheism is contrasted with theism,[8][9] which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.[9][10]
Agnosticism is the belief that the truth values of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, as well as other religious and metaphysical claims—are unknown.
The GP is correct in this one. The commonly accepted connotation of atheism is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities, or, by forming the converse of that statement, the commonly accepted connotation of atheism is the belief in the rejection of the existence of deities. Furthermore, you falsely take agnosticism (a non-denominational, non-religious, concept) to be the inverse of Gnosticism.
A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis (esoteric or intuitive knowledge) is the way to salvation of the soul from the material world. They saw the material world as created through an intermediary being (the demiurge) rather than directly by God. In most of the systems, this demiurge was seen as imperfect, in others even as evil. Different gnostic schools sometimes identified the demiurge as Ahriman, El, Saklas, Samael, Satan, Yaldabaoth, or Yahweh.
Sorry, that is not the "Same as Dawkins", because Dawkins has repeatedly stated that deities could exist, but it's not worth making arguments about them. Dawkins is properly agnostic, not an Atheist. If he were to assert the negative existence of all deities, he would be an Atheist, but again, he has repeatedly refuted this claim.
I'm going to quote naasking, from the comments above, since he made the point succinctly:
That's incorrect. Dawkins has acknowledged many times that deities could exist, but we have no reason to believe in them (empirical or a priori). Any such insults are directed at the arguments of people who profess to have such a legitimate reason to believe in a particular deity. And he's right to. Such arguments are invariably foolish at best.
No. Modern science is predicated on the explicit stating of assumptions, and the formulation of a model from falsifiable hypotheses. It does not speculate that the Universe is only exactly as we know it. Instead, it explicitly says that we could be wrong, often are wrong, and presents a mechanism to process these new inputs. As for "supernatural"--the word is useless. If it exists, if it has any sort of existence, effect, instantiation, etc. (pick a word.. modern dictionaries reduce everything to "essence", effectively, just try looking up the core word in any given definition repeatedly, over and over. You'll always wind up at the same small subset of words.), then it is part of the Universe, even if we're not aware of it, and is natural.
+5 Insightful. I, myself, am dictionary (simple) agnostic. There are things we do not understand, things that the best models available to us do not cover. This does not mean we should attempt to fill in the gaps for the sake of having something, anything in there. They should be left as gaps. Anything else is making an assumption. All models are based on assumptions/axioms, but making them gratuitously, and without making them explicit, is more harmful than helpful in the long run.
I doubt they'd be a sociopath if they actually feared consequences. More likely, religion is a tool of sociopaths to manipulate non-sociopaths. Personally, I regard superstitious belief as the evolutionary result of having an incomplete model about the world, and failure to make correlations might result in you being eaten by a puma. As time goes on, and our models improve, we should work to eliminate superstitious beliefs that no longer match the model, and in many cases, are in themselves detrimental.
I do not believe that when I flip a switch that I am performing some ritual that causes the almighty to create light.
I still believe that if no one dance the sun would not come back after winter.
I'm failing to see how the two scenarios aren't similar. For both, you were given, and did not personally discover, the model which describes them. Yet, despite claiming to believe the generally accepted model, you immediately give an example of how you disbelieve the generally accepted model, because it's "pretty".
You are a case study in why it's difficult to have rational discussions with irrational people. They'll only accept something once the odds are so overwhelmingly stacked against them that they'd look like idiots to their fellows irrationals. Arguments from emotion do not a rational discussion make.
I think you missed the part where I stated that science makes its assumptions explicit rather than implicit. I didn't say anything about the validity of derived arguments from various sources of assumptions. I simply said that scientists make their assumptions explicit and religions deign not to, in general.
If someone presents me with a well-formed logical argument that proves B (within an axiomatic framework obviously), but I believe A, I change my belief. This is what a rational being does. I don't get emotional about it, I simply adjust my model of reality. If there is no well-fomed logical argument within an axiomatic framework, I either ignore or refute it with a well-formed logical argument based in an axiomatic framework. (Phew, someone should invent a shorter way to say that...)
The sad part of this is that you're absolutely right. The vast majority of the people in the world lack the ability to think critically when it directly confronts a long-held viewpoint.
An honest dialog with a theologian? Most of the time, I have difficulty explaining the concept of an axiom (an assumption) to them, let alone getting them to realize that all statements fundamentally rely on them. Math grappled with this and formalized it over a century ago, and we're left with two main assumptions upon which the entirety of mathematics (and all of science by extension) are built. The difference here is that scientists can explicitly list the assumptions in their models, don't claim them to be the One Truth, and accept only falsifiable propositions beyond those axioms, whereas religious people seem incapable of accepting that their claims fundamentally rely on making one or more assumptions.
Indeed. For most end-users doing recreational stuff, the iPad fits the bill fine. Gave the SO one last year for xmas, it's nearly attached to her at the hip. But, when it comes to doing actual work, she still picks up the laptop. Me, I use a Linux laptop and virtually never touch the iPad. On the other hand, the TV functions as a rather large monitor...
That's not what he's saying. You're attacking something he didn't say. One point of having tenure is that you are shielded from the need to meet benchmarks constructed explicitly to eliminate the possibility of a scientist gaining tenure. If the universities can't eliminate the existing tenured professors, then they can prevent there ever being any more by raising the bar ever-higher. Once tenure can safely be eliminated ("No one meets the standard! We should just get rid of it."), those benchmarks would likely go away. Their purpose is not to promote science--their purpose is to promote the bottom line of a University, an activity inherently tied to corporate politics. Tenure is supposed to shield you from that.
Schools in my state have a similar problem. Even if every single student in the schools were to ace a given standardized test, the bar will be higher the next year (an implementation detail) and, being unable to meet that higher bar, they would lose funding. This sort of ever-increasing bar with no sanity-check simply does not work.
The whole "spontaneous" thing is ancient thinking. Today, we understand that the Universe consists of a complex set of reactions (which may yet be more complex, or our model overcomplicated). From Wiki:
The now-famous "Miller–Urey experiment" used a highly reduced mixture of gases—methane, ammonia and hydrogen—to form basic organic monomers, such as amino acids.[26] This provided direct experimental support for the second point of the "soup" theory, and it is around the remaining two points of the theory that much of the debate now centers. In the Miller–Urey experiment, a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia was cycled through an apparatus that delivered electrical sparks to the mixture. After one week, it was found that about 10% to 15% of the carbon in the system was now in the form of a racemic mixture of organic compounds, including amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.
Sounds a lot like mixing a "bowl of water" (calling it a bowl of water is oversimplifying too much for my taste) to me. Let's not start in on your blatant abuse of probability: orders of magnitude less does not equal zero. Try out Zeno's Paradox sometimes.
I don't think you quite get what evolution is. Typically, scientists use the word evolution to describe the combined results of many probabilistic factors."Random chance" mutation is one of those. Ever heard of abiogenesis? If we speak in terms of time "steps" (years, seconds, whatever), then each new time step is the evolution of the previous time step. f(x+1) = f(f(x)). Evolution within already living structures is merely a specific case of the general.
Unfortunately, the current best model of the Universe (physics) suggests that rights are not inherent, and are, in fact, defined by who evolved to consume resources more effectively and therefore outsurvive the other animals. Rights are not inherent to the physical existence of a being (an arbitrary subset of the particles/forces in the Universe). Rights are a human construction to optimize for the happiness of a particular population, in our case humans--and often, not even all humans, depending on who you ask about rights.
It is well and good to claim such a noble thing, but for the fact that reality doesn't bear it out upon experimentation.
There are some limits to human performance. For instance, you can't fly a modern fighter jet manually. Due to the lack of a tail, you'd pitch the thing over without the delta wing and stability control. F1 is the ground version of this. You can't beat the computer/hydraulics for shifting speed, and you really just want it to be in the right gear right now.
That said, human limits are pretty high. Just watch any of the riders doing the Isle of Man. Landing on the edge of a single wheel and recovering, at speed, is not uncommon.
This is the dirty secret about life. It consumes resources. The other dirty secret is that all resources (potential energy) run out, at least so far as most widely accepted theories about the Universe go. Perpetual motion machines allowing us to "sustainably" use the same energy source "forever" don't exist. Most humans would rather not admit either one--some sort of current top-of-the-food-chain guilt combined with willful ignorance of physics and the inability to look at the potential future of conscious entities in the Universe rather than just their own kids. Who else is going to get the only known conscious entities in the Universe off of this planet for the long haul? The dolphins?
We need to figure out how to mine for resources somewhere else, or we run out eventually. That's the hard, cold bottom-line.
Slashdot Mirror
I can show you Newtonian gravity. Apples fall off trees. But that's been disproven too. You're missing the point. Science doesn't deal with absolute proof. It only gives us ways to disprove things, until we're left with things we can't easily disprove. Gravitational lensing is a name for a phenomenon which may be multiple other phenomena interacting, or it may be some singular phenomenon explained by one theory. It's a convenient label to refer to something by, not proof. Again, science doesn't deal with absolute proof.
Gravitation lensing may be the current proposed mechanism, but that could change in the future. It has been proposed as a theory, something that holds up under repeated experiments. It does *not* mean that it has been proven, which would imply that it was immutable. Science does not prove things. It is a method to construct a model, based on the core idea of explicitly stating your assumptions, constructing hypotheses, and then testing them repeatedly. Those with a high level of reproducibility become called theories. Eventually, after extreme attempts to disprove them, theories become established as laws. Laws can be disproven. Science operates with falsifiable statements, things you can potentially disprove. There exist no means of absolute proof.
I've tried English, but that's pretty malleable. Too much goalpost moving. I try math, less malleable, but incomprehensible to most. I'd try C or Python next, but that's almost as doomed. Human language sucks.
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[3][4][5] Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist.[4][5][6][7] Atheism is contrasted with theism,[8][9] which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.[9][10]
And more Wiki:
Agnosticism is the belief that the truth values of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, as well as other religious and metaphysical claims—are unknown.
The GP is correct in this one. The commonly accepted connotation of atheism is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities, or, by forming the converse of that statement, the commonly accepted connotation of atheism is the belief in the rejection of the existence of deities. Furthermore, you falsely take agnosticism (a non-denominational, non-religious, concept) to be the inverse of Gnosticism.
A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis (esoteric or intuitive knowledge) is the way to salvation of the soul from the material world. They saw the material world as created through an intermediary being (the demiurge) rather than directly by God. In most of the systems, this demiurge was seen as imperfect, in others even as evil. Different gnostic schools sometimes identified the demiurge as Ahriman, El, Saklas, Samael, Satan, Yaldabaoth, or Yahweh.
I think he's actually an uncommon Richard. ;)
Sorry, that is not the "Same as Dawkins", because Dawkins has repeatedly stated that deities could exist, but it's not worth making arguments about them. Dawkins is properly agnostic, not an Atheist. If he were to assert the negative existence of all deities, he would be an Atheist, but again, he has repeatedly refuted this claim.
That's incorrect. Dawkins has acknowledged many times that deities could exist, but we have no reason to believe in them (empirical or a priori). Any such insults are directed at the arguments of people who profess to have such a legitimate reason to believe in a particular deity. And he's right to. Such arguments are invariably foolish at best.
No. Modern science is predicated on the explicit stating of assumptions, and the formulation of a model from falsifiable hypotheses. It does not speculate that the Universe is only exactly as we know it. Instead, it explicitly says that we could be wrong, often are wrong, and presents a mechanism to process these new inputs. As for "supernatural"--the word is useless. If it exists, if it has any sort of existence, effect, instantiation, etc. (pick a word.. modern dictionaries reduce everything to "essence", effectively, just try looking up the core word in any given definition repeatedly, over and over. You'll always wind up at the same small subset of words.), then it is part of the Universe, even if we're not aware of it, and is natural.
+5 Insightful. I, myself, am dictionary (simple) agnostic. There are things we do not understand, things that the best models available to us do not cover. This does not mean we should attempt to fill in the gaps for the sake of having something, anything in there. They should be left as gaps. Anything else is making an assumption. All models are based on assumptions/axioms, but making them gratuitously, and without making them explicit, is more harmful than helpful in the long run.
I doubt they'd be a sociopath if they actually feared consequences. More likely, religion is a tool of sociopaths to manipulate non-sociopaths. Personally, I regard superstitious belief as the evolutionary result of having an incomplete model about the world, and failure to make correlations might result in you being eaten by a puma. As time goes on, and our models improve, we should work to eliminate superstitious beliefs that no longer match the model, and in many cases, are in themselves detrimental.
I do not believe that when I flip a switch that I am performing some ritual that causes the almighty to create light.
I still believe that if no one dance the sun would not come back after winter.
I'm failing to see how the two scenarios aren't similar. For both, you were given, and did not personally discover, the model which describes them. Yet, despite claiming to believe the generally accepted model, you immediately give an example of how you disbelieve the generally accepted model, because it's "pretty".
You are a case study in why it's difficult to have rational discussions with irrational people. They'll only accept something once the odds are so overwhelmingly stacked against them that they'd look like idiots to their fellows irrationals. Arguments from emotion do not a rational discussion make.
I think you missed the part where I stated that science makes its assumptions explicit rather than implicit. I didn't say anything about the validity of derived arguments from various sources of assumptions. I simply said that scientists make their assumptions explicit and religions deign not to, in general.
If someone presents me with a well-formed logical argument that proves B (within an axiomatic framework obviously), but I believe A, I change my belief. This is what a rational being does. I don't get emotional about it, I simply adjust my model of reality. If there is no well-fomed logical argument within an axiomatic framework, I either ignore or refute it with a well-formed logical argument based in an axiomatic framework. (Phew, someone should invent a shorter way to say that...)
The sad part of this is that you're absolutely right. The vast majority of the people in the world lack the ability to think critically when it directly confronts a long-held viewpoint.
An honest dialog with a theologian? Most of the time, I have difficulty explaining the concept of an axiom (an assumption) to them, let alone getting them to realize that all statements fundamentally rely on them. Math grappled with this and formalized it over a century ago, and we're left with two main assumptions upon which the entirety of mathematics (and all of science by extension) are built. The difference here is that scientists can explicitly list the assumptions in their models, don't claim them to be the One Truth, and accept only falsifiable propositions beyond those axioms, whereas religious people seem incapable of accepting that their claims fundamentally rely on making one or more assumptions.
No, the World was created 1386723418 seconds ago, according to date +%s.
Indeed. For most end-users doing recreational stuff, the iPad fits the bill fine. Gave the SO one last year for xmas, it's nearly attached to her at the hip. But, when it comes to doing actual work, she still picks up the laptop. Me, I use a Linux laptop and virtually never touch the iPad. On the other hand, the TV functions as a rather large monitor...
It must be an attempt to one-up the King James Programming Markov chain.
Exactly how much is the "Nobel Peace Price"? I'd like to mod you Funny, but I'm out of points...
That's not what he's saying. You're attacking something he didn't say. One point of having tenure is that you are shielded from the need to meet benchmarks constructed explicitly to eliminate the possibility of a scientist gaining tenure. If the universities can't eliminate the existing tenured professors, then they can prevent there ever being any more by raising the bar ever-higher. Once tenure can safely be eliminated ("No one meets the standard! We should just get rid of it."), those benchmarks would likely go away. Their purpose is not to promote science--their purpose is to promote the bottom line of a University, an activity inherently tied to corporate politics. Tenure is supposed to shield you from that.
Schools in my state have a similar problem. Even if every single student in the schools were to ace a given standardized test, the bar will be higher the next year (an implementation detail) and, being unable to meet that higher bar, they would lose funding. This sort of ever-increasing bar with no sanity-check simply does not work.
The now-famous "Miller–Urey experiment" used a highly reduced mixture of gases—methane, ammonia and hydrogen—to form basic organic monomers, such as amino acids.[26] This provided direct experimental support for the second point of the "soup" theory, and it is around the remaining two points of the theory that much of the debate now centers. In the Miller–Urey experiment, a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia was cycled through an apparatus that delivered electrical sparks to the mixture. After one week, it was found that about 10% to 15% of the carbon in the system was now in the form of a racemic mixture of organic compounds, including amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.
Sounds a lot like mixing a "bowl of water" (calling it a bowl of water is oversimplifying too much for my taste) to me. Let's not start in on your blatant abuse of probability: orders of magnitude less does not equal zero. Try out Zeno's Paradox sometimes.
I don't think you quite get what evolution is. Typically, scientists use the word evolution to describe the combined results of many probabilistic factors."Random chance" mutation is one of those. Ever heard of abiogenesis? If we speak in terms of time "steps" (years, seconds, whatever), then each new time step is the evolution of the previous time step. f(x+1) = f(f(x)). Evolution within already living structures is merely a specific case of the general.
Actually, this makes him sound rather more like one of the VHEMT people.
Unfortunately, the current best model of the Universe (physics) suggests that rights are not inherent, and are, in fact, defined by who evolved to consume resources more effectively and therefore outsurvive the other animals. Rights are not inherent to the physical existence of a being (an arbitrary subset of the particles/forces in the Universe). Rights are a human construction to optimize for the happiness of a particular population, in our case humans--and often, not even all humans, depending on who you ask about rights.
It is well and good to claim such a noble thing, but for the fact that reality doesn't bear it out upon experimentation.
There are some limits to human performance. For instance, you can't fly a modern fighter jet manually. Due to the lack of a tail, you'd pitch the thing over without the delta wing and stability control. F1 is the ground version of this. You can't beat the computer/hydraulics for shifting speed, and you really just want it to be in the right gear right now.
That said, human limits are pretty high. Just watch any of the riders doing the Isle of Man. Landing on the edge of a single wheel and recovering, at speed, is not uncommon.
This is the dirty secret about life. It consumes resources. The other dirty secret is that all resources (potential energy) run out, at least so far as most widely accepted theories about the Universe go. Perpetual motion machines allowing us to "sustainably" use the same energy source "forever" don't exist. Most humans would rather not admit either one--some sort of current top-of-the-food-chain guilt combined with willful ignorance of physics and the inability to look at the potential future of conscious entities in the Universe rather than just their own kids. Who else is going to get the only known conscious entities in the Universe off of this planet for the long haul? The dolphins?
We need to figure out how to mine for resources somewhere else, or we run out eventually. That's the hard, cold bottom-line.