The sad thing is that no matter how many times or how it's explained, believers are unable (or outright refuse) to understand the logical fallacy inherent in that type of argument.
The argument that "life is too complex and perfect to have formed on its own, clearly it has been created" is completely useless, and making any deductions from it is just an argument from ignorance. If you ask "ok, let's assume for a moment that you are absolutely correct in that assertion, what does it prove?" you will get different answers from different people. Some will say that the God of the Bible created life, others will say that the God of the Koran did it, others will say that Vishnu did it, and so on. Then it becomes an argument on which religion is right, if any.
In the end, the original argument is completely inconsequential. The argument of which religion is right is not dependent on it in any way, nor does the original argument support any particular religion over the others. Even if the original argument were correct and accurate, it would still tell us nothing.
So why make the argument at all? It doesn't prove (or even is any kind of compelling evidence) that your particular religion is true. Yet people keep making the argument over and over like a scratched record. The only people who keep buying it are the ones who already believe in that particular religion they are selling. Hence they are just preaching to the choir.
I don't think even the post-MTV generation would consider a song from 2010 to be "a classic old song". But then, you were probably being sarcastic... :P
Btw, I don't really understand why so many scientists promote string theory so seriously. Stephen Hawking himself, who's no slouch when it comes to understanding astrophysics, promotes it heavily.
String theory (well, theories) is a misnomer. It's not a scientific theory. String hypothesis would be a more accurate name. For a hypothesis to become a theory it has to be backed up by ample amount of evidence, observations and testing, corroborated and verified by the scientific community at large. String "theory" isn't. Also, a theory should have predictive power and practical applications. String "theory" doesn't.
In an FPS game, traditionally, the whole level is loaded into memory.
That may have been so in the past (and might still be so for the simplest 3D games), but 3D game levels tend to nowadays be so large and with so much detail that scenery is usually loaded dynamically from disk as needed, rather than have every single part of the enormous level, with every single tiny detail, loaded at once. This is especially true for open world sandbox games, but it's also true for most of the linear FPS railshooters as well. (For example, if you play the HL2 expansion Lost Coast, there's a point where you can stack up objects in order to go over a fence you are not supposed to be able to, and that way you can return to a previous part of the level, and you'll see how most of the details are gone, and only very large, rough polygons are showing. The game is keeping only a very low-detail version of the previous parts of the level, which might be visible from the distance, but which should not be reachable normally.)
Naturally when drawing the visible part of the level, the game engine tries to minimize the amount of data sent to the graphics card. (The most optimal way of rendering the scene is, of course, if only those polygons are sent to the graphics card that affect the screen pixels, and nothing more. This is actually quite complicated to achieve perfectly, so there will always be extraneous polygons sent which will not end up visible in any way, usually obscured by other polygons.) The more polygons are sent to the graphics card to be drawn, the heavier it is to draw it and thus the lower the framerate; thus the reason why this is optimized as much as possible.
Usually only polygons in front of the camera are sent to the graphics card. (Of course that's only the first step in pruning away hidden polygons. The next steps are much more complicated.)
Playing with your nonsense is futile, but I'm feeling bored, so I'll comment a bit.
nfq wrote:
But dreams are often indistinguishable from "reality", until we wake up. So this reality could seem unreal too when we wake up in an even more real world of spirituality when we die. The consistency in the world is a mere illusion.
You are basically saying that because during a dream it's not possible to distinguish it from reality (which isn't true, btw), that means the consistency of reality is an illusion. Beautiful backwards logic you have there.
That's like saying that since a fake rolex and a real rolex may be indistinguishable from each other (at least to the layman), the real rolex does not work. What a non-sequitur.
Everything constantly changes in the universe and nothing is consistent, because every being, every particle, are on their eternal journey back to the equilibrium of nothingness where they come from.
Even if I tried to make sense of this, even if I tried to play along and try to understand what is it that you are trying to say, I can't. You could just as well take a dictionary and randomly pick up words from it and put them into a sentence. The result is complete gibberish.
I have noticed in this thread that your nonsense has increased exponentially. In the past you have only argued for things like ufos, cryptozoology, psychic powers of the human mind, the supernatural (in the most popular sense) and so on. Although the subject matter itself has always been quite nonsensical, at least you were mostly coherent in your writing. In this thread, however, you have been extraordinarily incoherent and nonsensical, so much so that nobody can understand what you are even trying to say (or at least I can't).
Either you have taken the next step in your poe'ness, or if you are being serious, things have gotten noticeably worse.
It's interesting how similar the creation story of Big Bang is to ancient myths.
Write anything sufficiently vague, and it can be made to resemble anything else, when sufficiently interpreted in the proper direction.
Ancient myths would be much more credible and interesting if they went to more accurate detail about things like the geometry of spacetime and its expansion from a singularity. Even ancient languages were expressive enough to describe these things even without current terminology and knowledge, so it's not an excuse. (A good example of this is ancient Greek. Surviving texts of ancient Greek mathematicians are quite specific enough for us to know where things like the Pythagorean theorem or the Archimedes principle came from. There's no reason why ancient languages could not have been used to describe things like the geometry of spacetime, gravity as a consequence of it, and the expansion of the universe.)
Question: If I'm playing an FPS game and I'm facing a wall, does the rest of the game-world exist behind me? Maybe somewhere in memory at least, right?
No, it's completely destroyed. When you turn around, it magically appears back from nothing.
We should start TASing PSP games. Those are all 16:9... :P
Are the current-generation consoles the first ones to support 16:9 TVs and monitors (and hence such resolutions)? Or did the previous-generation ones also have support? (OTOH, TASing those is still far ahead and not necessarily a good idea because the property owners might take more notice the more recent games we TAS.)
They say (basically) that at certain points in the past, life forms were exposed to high amounts of radiation or something like it
Serendipitously, while browsing wikipedia, I happened to stumble across the source of the above misunderstanding. It's confusing radiation in physics (which is the emission of energetic particles) with evolutionary radiation in biology (which is the rapid diversification of species that fill empty ecological niches). The two terms are in no way related to each other, besides using the word "radiation" (two completely different meanings of it).
I always like it when I can learn something new from these types of discussion.
It's hard to think of a universe could start from scratch somewhere in the past without a mind
That doesn't explain anything because it still leaves open the question where that mind came from. The only thing you have done is add an additional (and needless) step into the process.
materialism also doesn't seem to have any explanation on
That's a completely null argument. No deductions can be done from that argument (if you deduce something from it, you are only arguing from ignorance, which is worth nothing).
Philosophers of science hate to hear it, but there are few things less useful for the practice of science than the philosophy of science; most scientists know (or care) very little about it, and for those that do know (or care about) it, it does not affect how they do science.
I always thought that philosophy of science is just the "meta-level" discourse on what is the so-called scientific method, what is good and bad science (and pseudoscience), how scientific tests should be performed, the notion and importance of peer reviewing (and the reason for it), how evidence should be interpreted and what makes evidence valid or invalid, how test results should be interpreted, what is the most rational approach for determining how the universe works, the role of rational skepticism in science, and so on.
(As opposed to just doing the hard work, perform the physical observations, measurements and tests, writing and publishing papers showing your results, and so on.)
For example, there's an ongoing debate discussing whether evolution is falsifiable
Is this an actual debate among scientists, or is it just creationists inventing problems that aren't there (and claiming that it's a "debate")?
There are many ways to falsify evolution. For example, if all species had completely unrelated DNA, with no shared parts, that would pretty much destroy the idea of common ancestry. Also if DNA of different species consisted of a wild mishmash of parts of other species' DNA (so that it would be impossible to build a hierarchical tree of common elements), that would also be quite impossible to explain by evolution.
The history of life on Earth could also be used to falsify evolution. If it were confirmed with all possible tests and measurements, and without any reasonable doubt, that modern animals lived in the pre-cambrian, for instance, that would be quite a puzzle to solve, and it would pretty much destroy the evolutionary history of life on Earth.
Natural selection is falsifiable. Simply show extensive studies on how the environment does not affect in which direction species change.
(Of course another question is that evolution is difficult to falsify, because alternative explanations for seeming contradictions are always possible. For example, even if there were a species with a random mishmash of DNA from other species, without it belonging anywhere in the cladistic tree, that doesn't actually mean that evolution is false. It's theoretically possible that it's some kind of genetic experiment created by unknown means, either by humans or by some alien species.)
One thing that in my opinion speaks a lot in favor of the world actually existing is that it behaves consistently.
The behavior of the universe is not dependent on your mental state. It doesn't matter if you are asleep, emotional, delusional, hallucinating, drugged, sick or mentally injured, the universe will still work in a completely consistent manner, as it always has. Imaginary worlds inside one's head do not behave even nearly as consistently, but their rules can change arbitrarily.
It is my understanding that one of the cornerstones of science was the realization that the universe behaves consistently. This idea has not always been as self-evident as it is today.
(For example in ancient Greece there were philosophers who thought that, for example, rocks thrown in the air would behave differently depending on the "will" of the rock itself. According to them, even rocks were "conscious" at some level, and they tended towards a natural state, such as being on the ground, which is why rocks fall to the ground. However, this could change from rock to rock, and from throw to throw.
More prominently, though, there was this widespread view that the natural laws governing the Earth were distinct from the natural laws governing the skies. They were separate and independent. It was actually a kind of revolution in scientific thinking that natural laws might actually be the same everywhere, and behave always in the same manner, consistently.)
a necessary (and perhaps sufficient) condition for a theory to be scientific is that it is falsifiable.
I'm not so closely acquainted with the philosophy of science to say anything conclusive about falsifiability being sufficient for a hypothesis to be scientific, but I'm pretty certain that it's not sufficient for it to be useful.
A hypothesis might be falsifiable in theory but not in practice because of the impossibility of testing, observing and/or measuring (even if indirectly) said hypothesis. If a hypothesis cannot be corroborated by testing and observation, it's not a very useful hypothesis.
For example the hypothesis "there's intelligent life outside of this universe" is, as far as we know, completely untestable. It's theoretically falsifiable (if there were a way to observe the outside of this universe, we could test the hypothesis) but not in practice. Hence the hypothesis is not very useful.
Direct observation is not a necessity for a hypothesis to be scientific, thought. Some hypotheses can be inferred from indirect observation. For example there has been no direct, unambiguous observation of a black hole (*), yet we can infer their existence from how the geometry of space works (which is something that can be measured). There's little doubt that black holes (or at the very least something extremely similar) exist.
However, if a hypothesis cannot be tested even indirectly, it's not very useful even if it's theoretically falsifiable.
(*) There are many suspected black holes out there, but they are too far to be directly observable. It would be like trying to observe a planet in another galaxy.
There are a few different (almost equivalent) definitions of entropy. The grade school definition is the amount of disorder in a system. This has fallen out of favor among physicists for being qualitative, subjective, and in some cases, flat out wrong.
Isn't a more modern, semi-informal definition that entropy describes how much energy there is available for useful work in a system? The amount of such energy in a closed system can never increase (which is why it's impossible to have a perpetual motion machine that produces extra energy from nothing).
(Of course the problem with this definition is how do you define "energy available for useful work"...)
how would the evolution believers explain how blind and brainless natural laws could create a much more efficient storage medium than humans -- intelligent beings -- have been able to create?
The answer is easy: Natural selection. (Of course fully understanding the answer is much more difficult and requires entire courses of basic biology, chemistry and other sciences.)
Life on Earth has had billions of years of natural selection to refine the contents of DNA. That's such an immense amount of time that it's difficult for the human mind to grasp. In comparison, humans have had something like 50 years to develop storage devices.
I told about this to Warp earlier and he was so stunned that he couldn't come up with anything to say, probably because he couldn't do anything but agree with me.
Yeah, that must be it.
(In reality, though, when the level of nonsense exceeds a certain threshold, one stops caring and reading. Even amusement on nonsense has its limits. At some point it becomes boring rather than amusing.)
The age of the earth was found by spiritual scientists thousands of years ago.
Damn, and I was hoping you were going to present the lunar recession rate argument. Because it's an actually interesting topic from which people could actually learn something. Well, I suppose it would have been too rational for you.
But is it fine to record the audio and make that public? Is this fair use?
If you ask the music industry, it's not. If you ask a court of law, it depends on the country, judge and how good your lawyers are.
Derakon wrote:
Copyright is messed up, but more in the "lasts way too long" sense
IMO copyright law should be completely rehauled and changed to:
- 10 years from the moment of publication for music.
- 20 years from the moment of publication for literature.
- 30 years from the moment of publication for movies and video games.
- 20 years from the moment of publication for anything else that doesn't fit into those categories (but is deemed as deserving copyright).
Any such copyright could be extended by an additional 10 years by paying a modest yearly fee.
(The rationale behind the different times is the average amount of effort needed to produce such works of art.)
I am as ignorant of comic books as you are, so this is only the vague impressions I have got by watching/reading about them (rather than reading them directly). Of course I have read some comic books in the past (such as Hulk and Spiderman), but that was a long time ago, and I wasn't an afficionado even then.
Kyrsimys wrote:
2) Where to start? I know they've been publishing Superman comics, for example, since the 1930s. Do I need to start at the beginning to understand everything that's going on today? If not, what would be a good place to start? I understand the DC universe has just undergone some massive reboot, so should I just start from there or would I really be missing out if I did?
IIRC the DC universe has undergone something like 3 "reboots" (justified in-universe, rather than simply starting from scratch without explanation). I'm not expert enough to answer your question in a competent manner, but if I had to say something, then I'd say that if you want to get into the current DC universe (and have the resources available), start from Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985). AFAIK it's the first major (in-universe) "reboot" and some kind of start of the "modern" DC comics.
3) DC or Marvel? Do you feel one is clearly better than the other? What are the main differences between the two? Which one has more interesting characters?
I have got the impression that Marvel comics tend to be darker, grittier and more violent, while DC comics tend to be more idealistic and light-hearted (although there are probably individual counter-examples on both sides; Batman is probably such a counter-example on the DC side, although it probably depends on the writer).
The only point I disagree with is that I don't think we can claim that it's unlikely that any God at all exists, if we use the term "God" very loosely.
As I commented earlier, it's probably a good idea to avoid using the label "God" when talking about something that's not what people usually understand by that term. For example, using it in the pantheistic sense (iow. using it just as a synonym for "the Universe") can only cause confusion.
What do most people think when they hear the name "God"? I'd say that it would be something like:
- A supernatural sentient being that's not bound to this universe and who existed before it.
- He created this universe by his own will.
- He created it with the explicit purpose for humans to be able to live here.
- He either directly created humans, or at the very least put the gears in motion for humans to eventually appear.
- He still exists today, is everywhere and is actively observing us and, perhaps, interacting with us.
In the vast majority of cases, also:
- There's only one.
- He was not himself created, but has always existed.
If your definition of "God" does not include all those properties, then it may be a good idea to avoid the label, to avoid confusion.
nfq wrote:
The real age of the earth is about 2 billion
From all your nonsense, this is the only one I couldn't pass. Please amuse us with your argument why that's so.
(Let me guess: It has something to do with the recession rate of the Moon? But please, don't let me interrupt your explanation.)
I think scientists might lie about these things because they don't want to accept the idea that they could have wasted huge junks of their lives on believing a lie, instead of following the Biblical Truth. They've made this huge investment in having faith in science for years, now they are in denial, refusing to accept any of the sheer endless amount of contrary evidence to their positions. ;)
Again: That idea doesn't work because of the scope of the conspiracy that would be necessary. Hundreds of thousands of scientists from all over the world, from different countries, cultures and religious backgrounds, for over a hundred years. Not very likely.
(Many of them have only a cursory knowledge of Christianity, so it would be rather strange for them to have an anti-Christian agenda. Why would they?)
I still think a PC tower case is most representative of the system. Of course, most PCs were horizontal a long time ago, but the ATX mid tower or full tower case is almost standard among PCs nowadays, making it an easily-identifiable icon.
All current-generation consoles support placing them vertically. I wonder if it could cause confusion.
(And as I said earlier, a keyboard might be confusing if we one day start TASing C64, Amiga, Amstrad, Spectrum...)
