I like his answer, and you'll feel more comfortable with it if you consider his idea of government.

Ron Paul's views on religion or evolution aren't relevant because as President he would follow the Constitution and not any set of scientific paradigms. It doesn't matter whether he accepts the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, or evolution, or general relativity.

The whole libertarian platform defends that the federal government should let people govern their own lives because it recognizes that politicians and bureaucrats aren't experts in most subjects, and are thus unqualified to make expert decisions. The federal government can't adequately regulate education, healthcare or scientific research on a nationwide level, and should delegate this responsability to local governments.

Limited government is designed to prevent prejudices or special interests from interfering with our lives. This applies to beliefs regarding evolution, or religious beliefs. If you watch the Candidates@Google interview you'll see that Ron Paul defends legalizing prostitution and drugs. He doesn't approve of them, but he thinks it's not the federal government's responsibility to interfere, and that these decisions should be made locally (if that).

Upvote for bananas. I'm glad though that the errors re the Big Bang and general relativity are clarified in comments above.

Re Einstein's religiosity:

"Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and spiritual; and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity." -- Albert Einstein

So what is so hard about Christianity, any "ity" or "ism" to understand? As far as I can tell, both Christian's and Atheists, have not been able to figure out either system of beliefs or disbeliefs yet....at least the ones that chime in on streams like these.....

I'll agree whole-heartedly about Christians. Atheists, however? You seem to be confused as to what atheism is. It is not a system of belief or disbelief. We intentionally eschew systems. Atheism merely states that there is no god. End of story.

Atheists that keep kicking the dead horse of "There can't be a God" are as clueless as fundamentalist Christians, who take every verse in the Bible literally...

You know, all atheism says is that there is no god. If there is only one defining characteristic of a concept, then to repeat it is not "kicking a dead horse". I don't think this phrase means what you think it means.

That's like saying physicists who insist on repeating Einstein's Theory of General Relativity are kicking a dead horse. That is to say, laughable and ludicrous.

even though, interpreted correctly, the verses speak quite lucidly, of universal laws and social phenom..


Hahahahahahahahahaha. Interpreted correctly. You must be fucking kidding me.

You don't mean interpreted. You mean cherry picked. The Bible advocates racism, slavery, homophobia, genocide, mass murder, mysogyny, and all sorts of lovely things. No amount of "historical recentering" or interpretation is going to change that.

All the Atheists need is a manifesto (bible), and a meeting place, and you've got apples and oranges.....Arvana is the closest to a mark here, and anyone who asks me to explain my personal position on the matter......needs to ask more than once, with a humble and sincere heart, and even then you may be told to go fuck yerself.

Again, you seem to have atheism confused as an alternative belief system to religion. It isn't. That's why we don't have a Bible, or meetings. That would be like herding cats.

And to be frank, we also don't really give a shit what you're position is. My heart is sincere, although not very humble, when I say, get a clue about what you are talking about, or go fuck yourself as well.

its so gross and pointy. could you imagine being a cat and discovering this though? it would be like discovering general relativity.

Here's to you, Chaucer.

Wikipedia's summarization of "Theory"

The word theory has a number of distinct meanings in different fields of knowledge, depending on their methodologies and the context of discussion.

In common usage, people often use the word theory to signify a conjecture, an opinion, or a speculation. In this usage, a theory is not necessarily based on facts; in other words, it is not required to be consistent with true descriptions of reality. True descriptions of reality are more reflectively understood as statements that would be true independently of what people think about them.

In science, a theory is a mathematical description, a logical explanation, a verified hypothesis, or a proven model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet, and the theory which explains why the apple behaves so is the current theory of gravitation.

Dictionary.com's definition of "Theory"

Main Entry: the·o·ry
Pronunciation: 'thE-&-rE, 'thi(-&)r-E
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -ries
1 : the general or abstract principles of a body of fact, a science, or an art <the theory and practice of medicine>
2 : a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain natural phenomena —see ATOMIC THEORY, CELL THEORY, GERM THEORY
3 : a working hypothesis that is considered probable based on experimental evidence or factual or conceptual analysis and is accepted as a basis for experimentation —the·o·ret·i·cal

What a scientific theory is NOT:
Guessing
Conjecture
Speculation

Wikipedia's summarization is more than enough to get the point across, but there are those who do not accept the validity of Wikipedia as a source material. For that reason and that I don't like to just grab stuff off the internet and submit it as my own idea, I wrote this.

Intelligent Designers argue that Evolution is just a 'Theory', not a fact. This is true. The fact that beings evolve is not under debate; the process by which they evolve is the question. It has been scientifically proven that evolution occurs. As xxovercastxx rightly pointed out, new strains of influenza appear all the time. The thing is, There is no ladder from observing to fact. This is not a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. What you have is a failure to understand the terms that are used to describe evolution, as well as other theories. A fact is a data, some quantitative or qualitative expression of something that is true. A theory is a description of an idea that interprets and explains those facts.

I shall further explain via example.

In layman's terms, gravity is a physical interaction through which all masses attract each other. Gravity can be observed and tested. In fact, go ahead and test it right now. Stand up and jump. You should find that you return to the ground at a rate of acceleration roughly equal to 9.8 m/s/s. You have just proven a fact: You are attracted to the Earth upon which you rest by an attractive force we call gravity. How does that work, you might ask? Well, Issac Newton's description of gravity went something like this: “I deduced that the forces which keep the planets in their orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve; and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth; and found them answer pretty nearly.”

That means every single point mass attracts every other point mass by a force pointing along the line combining the two. The force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the point masses.

Thus,
F=G(m1m2/r2)
Where
F= the magnitude of the gravitational force between the two point masses
G= the gravitational constant
m1= the mass of the first point mass
m2= the mass of the second point mass
r2= the distance between the two point masses
One could plug in the numbers and actually find the magnitude of gravitational force of your jump.

What I have just described is a Theory explaining the fact that when you jumped, you returned to the Earth (It might be wise to add at this point that newton's theory was later found to be inadequate to describe more than simple interactions between masses, such as the experiment you just performed, as well as interactions at great distances, such as more than 1 or so astronomical unit. More complex interactions require The Theory of General Relativity).

It is with this relatively brief comment that I hope to clear up any confusion for further viewers. Hah, and you though YOU were long-winded, xxovercastxx! If anyone wishes to argue with me, go ahead and shoot me an e-mail at RSRegisterPass@Gmail.com, and I'll be happy to shoot you back a compilation of reasons why you're wrong. Have a nice day!

The Black hole information paradox results from the combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It suggests that physical information could "disappear" in a black hole. It was a contentious subject for science since it violated a commonly assumed tenet of science—that information cannot be destroyed.

In 1975, Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein showed that black holes should slowly radiate away energy, which poses a problem. From the no hair theorem one would expect the Hawking radiation to be completely independent of the material entering the black hole. However, if the material entering the black hole were a pure quantum state, the transformation of that state into the mixed state of Hawking radiation would destroy information about the original quantum state. This violates Liouville's theorem and presents a physical paradox.

More precisely, if we have an entangled pure state and we throw in one part of the entangled system into the black hole while keeping the other part outside, we get a mixed state after we take the partial trace over the interior of the black hole. But since everything within the interior of the black hole will hit the singularity within a fixed finite time, the part which is traced over partially might "disappear", never to appear again. Of course, we don't really know what goes on at singularities once quantum effects are taken into account, which is why this is conjectural and controversial.

Hawking was convinced, however, because of the simple elegance of the resulting equation which 'unified' Thermodynamics, Relativity, Gravity and Hawking's own work on the Big Bang. This annoyed many physicists, notably John Preskill, who in 1997 bet Hawking and Kip Thorne that information was not lost in black holes. In 2004 Hawking had to pay out to Preskill when Hawking conceded that Preskill was in fact correct.

There are various ideas about how the paradox is solved. Since the 1998 proposal of the AdS/CFT correspondence, the predominant belief among physicists is that information is preserved and that Hawking radiation is not precisely thermal but receives quantum corrections. Other possibilities include the information being contained in a Planckian remnant left over at the end of Hawking radiation or a modification of the laws of quantum mechanics to allow for non-unitary time evolution.

In July 2004 Stephen Hawking announced a theory that quantum perturbations of the event horizon could allow information to escape from a black hole, which would resolve the information paradox. Basically, his argument assumes the AdS/CFT correspondence which states that an AdS black hole is dual to a thermal conformal field theory, which is unitary. However, as of 2004 the full details of the theory have yet to be published, so most peers are reserving judgment before accepting the result. When announcing his result, Hawking also conceded the 1997 bet, paying Preskill with a baseball encyclopedia (ISBN 1-894963-27-X) 'from which information can be retrieved at will'. Thorne, however, remains unconvinced of Hawking's proof and declined to contribute to the award.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_paradox

A fascinating one-off documentary from Channel 4 (UK) - detailing Einstein's struggle with his cosmological constant:

" When Albert Einstein formulated General Relativity in 1915, he was not aware the Universe was expanding. Large scale structure in the form of galaxies was not known and all fuzzy luminous nebulae were considered basically similar and within stellar distance scales. Only with Hubble work in 1930 came the realization some of those nebulae were in fact island universes, and that they were not only very far, but also receding from us at enormous speeds. This was not known for Einstein, and since gravitation exerts its influence up to infinity, it was natural for him to postulate some force working in the preservation of an apparent equilibrium among matter, preventing universal collapse. This is why he postulated the Cosmological Constant, symbolized by the Greek letter Lambda, and included a term accounting for it in the field equations. Once universal expansion was discovered, the need for an unknown repulsive agent could be dropped and Einstein dismissed the Cosmological Constant as his 'biggest blunder'"