Quite counterintuitive.

Re: nuclear fuel - you just need to get that spent nuclear fuel off the Earth (i.e. shoot it at 11 km/s) because you do not care how long it will take to crash into the sun and you can use solar energy to slow it down gradually.
That is if you really want to get rid of something that might be an important resource down the road, in a very expensive way.

@bmacs27

I wondered if that might not be the case.

Counterintuitive indeed.

All my instincts shout to do something different. Further proof, not that I needed it, that I need to stay the heck off a motorcycle.

Thanks for sharing.

Depressing to contemplate that the casualification, lack of complexity (let alone city size), lack of ambition and the presence of a bloody-minded and counterintuitive game engine makes this sort of thing absolutely impossible in the latest SimCity piece of shit game.

The government regulation you have, the more susceptibility you create for crony-manipulations of the regulatory monopoly that is the SEC. If you freed the market, you'd give individuals the choice as to where and how to invest their money whereby the security and return would be a "selling point" and not an afterthought.

"Hit pieces" like this one may regurgitate a lot of the same findings but they always draw the exact opposite conclusion (as counterintuitive as it seems to most people who misunderstand human behavior and economics).

Schuko all the way, best plug on the planet (at the moment). Ground always attaches first, the socket forms a protective casing and pins can not be touched long before contact happens, is protected from elements better, latched inlets (both pins need to push on them to allow the plug thru), can be plugged in two orientations.. Seems counterintuitive that it would be the safest to have neutral and live be allowed to switch places but it prevents highly dangerous practice of connecting earth and neutral inside the appliance, 50% of the time that would short and trip the fuses. Appliance manufacturers HAS to follow basic safety quidelines. Also means onnecting a plug is easy, just breen-yellow to ground, rest is up to you which way you want them. In fact, most of use can't remembers which color is neutral and which is live as they are BOTH treated as live.

Also they don't have fuses in the plug. Again, seems counterintuitive but the fuse is meant to protect individual parts of the circuit. The fuse in the appliances them selves protect the appliance, not it's cord. The fuses on the wall sockets have to be built to protect all cabling, both in and out of the wall.

Small details but it forces buildings to be built with higher standards, less shortcuts can be made.

One feature on Schuko is that when pulled from the cable, the plug leaves the socket first. In UK plugs, you can have a situation where someone trips on a wire and the wire will leave the plug, plug stays in the wall (or wall socket is damaged too) Making the weak point the plug-socket connection, the wire will stay firmly screwed inside the plug, socket and plug will be undamaged. There are L shape plugs too with Shcuko so this is not always the case but most often, those are incased and molded: your appliance will take the hit instead and fly off the desk. Also stops dangerous cable pulling with long cables with extensions for ex in construction sites. You have to actually go and move it yourself. Safer, more work but safer (yes, there are few cases where we knot the wires to stop it happening but when done by a professional, we know how to knot them so that the force is not pulling or bending the plugs at all, otherwise they can disconnect by them selves, often modus operandi when rigging lights)

Also, the pins are round, making bent pins something that just wont happen unless you drive a truck over them. Damaged, bent pins will be destroyed in the process, preventing someone to just bend them back in shape: the tube will not be round again.. It's a genius design.

Only thing that it is horrible at is transformers, small PSUs that takes up sometimes three sockets as Shcuko is more compact, the extensions are smaller then too.. So sometimes two wall sockets can take one PSU and we end up with lots of extensions chained with half of the sockets filled (i got 600 led lights in my living room, takes 4 extensions to get them all running, half of the sockets are used....)

Geez, guys, this isn't wrong, you're just nitpicking on notation or trying to apply conventional wisdom to a counterintuitive proof. If it's so wrong why does everyone who does math or physics professionally have the same incorrect opinion about it!

At present this concept of design is just castle-in-the-sky nonsense. Empty piffle. A complete non-starter.

This is why the "mere mention" of "design" will get you "banned" from peer-review, because you could just as well have made a "mere mention" of Bigfoot and the loch ness monster in your zoology report, it's a big tell to your peers that you are a nut who fails to understand the nature of evidence and science, and a big sign that you are in for some fuzzy logic and dumb assumptions instead of solid science.

Design is a better hypothesis for the information we find in DNA, and the fine tuning we see in the physical laws. The reason design is a non-starter is because the idea this Universe was created by anyone is anathema to the scientific community:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

After essentially nullifying and disproving everything we have learned about biology the last 200 years, you still have all the work ahead of you, I'm afraid. You now have to build a completely new framework and model for every single observation ever made in biology that makes sense of it all and explains why things are the way they are. Shouting that a thing is "complex" is not cutting it, I'm afraid. You need a new theory of DNA, Immunology, Bacterial resistance, adaptation, vestigal organs, animal distobution, mutation, selection, variation, genetics, speciation, taxonomy... well, as Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" That quote is more relevant than ever.

Your error here is conflating micro and macro evolution. Creation scientists believe in micro evolution and speciation. That is part of the creationist model of how the world was repopulated with animals after the flood. Macro evolution, the idea that all life descended from a universal common ancestor, is not proven by immunology, bacterial resistance, adaptation, animal distribution, mutation, seclection, variation, speciation, taxonomy etc. The only way you could prove it is in the fossil record and the evidence isn't there. They've tried to prove it with genetics but it contradicts the fossil record (the way they understand it). So Creationists have no trouble explaining those things..and common genetics points to a common designer.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

Have you ever heard of the horizon problem? The big bang model suffers from a light travel time problem of its own, but they solve it by postulating cosmic inflation, which is nothing more than a fudge factor to solve the problem. First, it would have to expand at trillions of times the speed of light, violating the law that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. There is also no theory compatible with physics that could explain the mechanism for how the Universe would start expanding, and then cease expanding a second later. It's poppycock. See what secular scientists have to say about the current state of the Big Bang Theory:

http://www.cosmologystatement.org/

As far as how light could reach us in a short amount of time, there are many theories. One theory is that the speed of light has not always been constant, and was faster at the beginning of creation. This is backed up by a number of measurements taken since the 1800s showing the speed of light decreasing. You can see the tables here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v4/n1/velocity-of-light

I'd say the hypothesis "it was all made up" has infinitely more merit than the hypothesis "god is real". The former has actual evidence you can use to prove it. The latter has none.>> ^gwiz665:

The hypothesis "it was all made up" has equal merit, because you can find just as many traces of this than you can of it actually being real.
>> ^shinyblurry:
It's better to know the answer than remain ignorant of it. To say you prefer uncertainty is to say you enjoy the freedom of imagining that the answer is something else, because you don't like it. We aren't uncertain about everything. We have to be certain of some things, like the fact that we exist. Do we say that those who believe they exist embrace this answer because they are afraid of not existing? Clearly, certainty is useful.
If you want say that theists embrace God because they don't want to die, you could also say that atheists reject God because they don't want Him to exist. Take these scientists, for example:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97
No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.
Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182
To say God couldn't touch this world because the Universe is so big is a false argument. The Universe may be huge to us, but to God it is very small. If God is omnipresent, He is everywhere at the same time. Size and distance mean nothing in that equation.
To say God created the Universe is not the end of inquiry, it is the beginning of true inquiry and true science. How could you understand the creation without understanding the Creator?

You make a good point. In our daily life we are certain about a lot of things, or rather we accept things for granted without any thoroughly investigated evidence. We assume that we exist, because that's needed for us to assume it. We assume we have free will, because it feels like we have free will.

I also live as if there is no God, because of the "path of least resistance" - it is easier to assume there is no god, than to assume there is, and since it has no difference to me, the easiest solution is fine. I think for many theists, it least resistance to assume that there is a god, and live as if he exists, be it because of social pressure, mindset or what have you - in any case, their path of least resistance is to assume he exists. If you think about all the shit an outed atheist go through in some states, I can't really blame them for that too much.

It is a different deal when you get into the science of it, because in science we deal with what is real and what is not. The good thing about science is that it doesn't care. It doesn't care about your feelings, it doesn't care that lots of people like a thing, it only exist to show the truth and to show nature for what it really is.

Materialism is absolute in that it's really there, like Feynman says so excellent in his video about the electro-magnetic spectrum. It may not have much of an effect in your everyday life how light moves in waves and how it's similar to how water makes waves, but that doesn't make it any less true. You can assume that they are unrelated if you want, and if that makes you sleep better at night, but it's just not how nature works.

If you take the issue of God under the microscope, you find that there's not much evidence backing it up when you really look. The social pressure is there, and the cultural ramifications are there, but there's no evidence backing up the actual existence. The hypothesis "it was all made up" has equal merit, because you can find just as many traces of this than you can of it actually being real.

>> ^shinyblurry:

It's better to know the answer than remain ignorant of it. To say you prefer uncertainty is to say you enjoy the freedom of imagining that the answer is something else, because you don't like it. We aren't uncertain about everything. We have to be certain of some things, like the fact that we exist. Do we say that those who believe they exist embrace this answer because they are afraid of not existing? Clearly, certainty is useful.
If you want say that theists embrace God because they don't want to die, you could also say that atheists reject God because they don't want Him to exist. Take these scientists, for example:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97
No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.
Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182
To say God couldn't touch this world because the Universe is so big is a false argument. The Universe may be huge to us, but to God it is very small. If God is omnipresent, He is everywhere at the same time. Size and distance mean nothing in that equation.
To say God created the Universe is not the end of inquiry, it is the beginning of true inquiry and true science. How could you understand the creation without understanding the Creator?

>> ^shinyblurry:

It's better to know the answer than remain ignorant of it. To say you prefer uncertainty is to say you enjoy the freedom of imagining that the answer is something else, because you don't like it. We aren't uncertain about everything. We have to be certain of some things, like the fact that we exist. Do we say that those who believe they exist embrace this answer because they are afraid of not existing? Clearly, certainty is useful.
If you want say that theists embrace God because they don't want to die, you could also say that atheists reject God because they don't want Him to exist. Take these scientists, for example:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97
No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.
Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182
To say God couldn't touch this world because the Universe is so big is a false argument. The Universe may be huge to us, but to God it is very small. If God is omnipresent, He is everywhere at the same time. Size and distance mean nothing in that equation.
To say God created the Universe is not the end of inquiry, it is the beginning of true inquiry and true science. How could you understand the creation without understanding the Creator?

We're both ignorant. Only one of us knows it.

It's better to know the answer than remain ignorant of it. To say you prefer uncertainty is to say you enjoy the freedom of imagining that the answer is something else, because you don't like it. We aren't uncertain about everything. We have to be certain of some things, like the fact that we exist. Do we say that those who believe they exist embrace this answer because they are afraid of not existing? Clearly, certainty is useful.

If you want say that theists embrace God because they don't want to die, you could also say that atheists reject God because they don't want Him to exist. Take these scientists, for example:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

To say God couldn't touch this world because the Universe is so big is a false argument. The Universe may be huge to us, but to God it is very small. If God is omnipresent, He is everywhere at the same time. Size and distance mean nothing in that equation.

To say God created the Universe is not the end of inquiry, it is the beginning of true inquiry and true science. How could you understand the creation without understanding the Creator?

Read from the top. YOU are the only person here who is encouraging a fight. Admit it. The only reason you posted that comment was to pick a fight with me.

You don't know me. I don't pick fights. I had no idea such a stupid debate even existed on the internet. The point made in this video is interesting in spite of how it usually seems to go down out there in the rest of the net. Vi Hart's videos are usually about cool facts that can be derived from math, often ones that seem counterintuitive. Your comparison of Vi Hart to QM is vacuous.>> ^VoodooV:

So enlighten me, o' wise ones. What is the point of this other than troll-bait and/or ego masturbation?
This topic is the intellectual equivalent of QM coming in here and making ad-homs about "His Earness" or waxing egocentric about why he is virtuous and true and the rest of us are all immoral entitlement whores.
You saw how quickly messenger called into question the entire sift's intelligence over Entropy's post.
This sort of thing does not lend itself well to civil discourse. Admit it, the only purpose of a topic such as this is to entice someone to come in here and to argue that .999... is not 1 so you can have a grand ole time stroking your ego and patting yourself on the back over how smart you are and how the other person is dumb.

I’m going to respond to your last comment in two parts. The first part regards the god argument in which you have mischaracterized me as being closed minded and of having a bias. I can easily show that I am neither and this is my view on the whole god thing so you can at least understand my view if for nothing else. The second part I will address my primary contention against your methods of argument.

I am willing to listen, however, on its face the statement "I don't care about the whole god argument" indicates both bias and closed-mindedness. It also shows an intellectual incuriousity.

I admit that I don’t believe in a god or gods, or even advanced aliens. I just don’t see any reason to believe any of it. This doesn’t mean that I am saying that god doesn’t exist; I’m saying “I don’t know, but I highly doubt it and I don’t buy it.” What do you find confusing about that?

We have no real reason to suppose from direct evidence that a god, or gods, exist. Do all effects have a cause? Do all causes have an effect? If yes, why do you suppose it’s a god who caused all of the effects that you attribute him to such as the “fine tuning” or “the appearance of design”, why can’t it be something else? By resting on a god hypothesis as the answer to mysterious phenomenon, you are precluding all other answers that are just as good as a god, that have the same amount of direct evidence.

Scientific evidence indicates that time, space, matter and energy all had a finite beginning, making the cause of the Universe timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful and transcendent. Those are all attributes of God, and fit an unembodied mind. The fine tuning, information in DNA and appearance of design all point to a creator. Logic itself tells us that the first cause of the Universe must be eternal because nothing comes from nothing and you can't have an infinite regress of causes. Frankly I think it is ridiculous to believe that Universes just happen by themselves, and especially, as the greatest minds of our time are suggesting, out of nothing. Can't you see that when someone says that, it means the emperor has no clothes?

Does the god that you believe in have a cause? If not, how so? By what mechanisms does your god exist but without having had a cause? How can your belief be proven and why should anyone believe it based on rational information? What evidence is there that compels you to believe that your god indeed doesn’t have a cause? These are the kinds of questions that I think you should be asking for yourself. If you resort to “just needing to have faith” as an answer then you are actively avoiding exercising critical thinking faculties.

God is eternal, and He has no beginning or end, so no He doesn't have a cause. A God that was caused by something else wouldn't be God. My evidence is from logic which demands an eternal first cause. Otherwise, you're left explaing how you get something from nothing, which is logically absurd.

Unlike you, I don’t see the appearance of design in the complexity of biological systems or in anything found in nature. I study evolutionary biology, astrophysics, and chemistry for myself because I find it the mechanisms fascinating, not because I’m trying to disprove god.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.

Francis Crick Nobel Laureate
What Mad Pursuit p.138 1988

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker p.1

Even hardcore skeptics concede there is an appearance of design.

There is inherent beauty in all of it and it’s a shame that most people are ignorant of what we do actually know. While I’m open to the idea that a god designed the system then put it in motion, there just isn’t direct phenomenological evidence that suggest that’s what happened.

The information in DNA is direct evidence that a higher intelligence designed the system.

There is enough information that we do know about speciation to suggest that evolution through natural selection does happen, is happening, and will continue to happen. The genetic code is enough to suggest common ancestry between all living things in a tree like family lineage.

natural selection can weed out some of the complexity and so slow down the information decay that results in speciation. it may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. it is not a creative force as many people have suggested.

Roger Lewin Science magazine 1982

The genetic code also suggests a common designer. As far as your tree claim, you need to research the cambrian explosion. It is quite a let down for gradualists, unfortunately. All the major body types, including the phylum Chordata (thats our phylum), were there from the beginning. We actually have less diversity today, not more.

(on the cambrian explosion)
And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker 1986 p.229

Certainly, we do not know yet exactly how the whole process of DNA or RNA reproduction started, but if we postulate that a god started the process without sufficient evidence, only on the basis that there is no better answer, then we can also postulate that it was an advanced inter-dimensional race of ancients who populate planets with the seed of genetic mechanisms. If we don’t have the answer to how the mechanism got the whole thing started, what’s the difference between those two different origin hypotheses?

I don't postulate that God 'started the process'. I postulate that God spontaneously created everything. You rule out God apriori and thus you accept this just-so story about how life got here. In your eyes, it must have happened. Interpreting the evidence to fit the conclusion isn't very scientific, is it?

Also unlike you, I don’t see what you call “fine tuning” and I also study all sorts of physics, my favorite being astrophysics personally. The term “fine tuning” implies that something above the system changed some dials to a perfect goldilocks range to support what we have right now. This is an interesting idea however I find it to be more prudent to see it the other way around; that what has formed, has only formed because the conditions allow for it, that the environment dictates what can exist. Wherever you look at an environment and find life, you find life that fits into that environment and we also see that when environments change, so to do species change to adapt to the new conditions. We never see an environment change to fit the species.

I don't think you're understanding the fine tuning argument. Many of those finely tuned values, if even moved an inch, would make life impossible in this Universe. Not just improbable, but impossible. The fine tuning is extremely fortuitous to an incomprehensible degree. The odds of these values randomly converging is virtually impossible. For instance, for physical life to exist, the mass density of the Universe must be fine tuned to better than one part in 10 to the 60th power. For space-energy density, it is 10 to the 120th power. That's just two out of dozens of values.

You claim that we haven’t seen macro-evolution taking place? Are you sure about that, how exactly do you know this is true, where did you read this? How do you know that what you are calling macro-evolution is the same thing as what evolutionary biologists call macro-evolution? The fact of the matter is that the fossil record has nothing to say about the most recent research on macro-evolution. It’s a fascinating material and I would suggest that you get out there and find it for yourself. Talk Origins has as list of the studies done on macro-evolution, you can start there if you like.

Yes, evolutionists are trying to dump the fossil record in favor of genetic evidence because the fossil record is actually evidence against their theories. As I've said, common genetics also indicate common designer.

Darwin made a great discovery, that creatures can adapt to environmental conditions. That's something that has hard scientific evidence. What didn't have any evidence was his extrapolation from that to the theory of all life having a common ancestor. He was counting on the fossil record to prove his case but it didn't, which is why he said this:

innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? ..why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?

Geologoy assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory.

Charles Darwin
Origin of the Species

Here we are 150 years later with billions of fossils and there still isn't any evidence. If Darwin was right, we should have indisputable proof that one species changed into another, but we don't. All we have is a smattering of highly contested transitionals which are all "more or less" closely related, but no true ancestors. When the facts don't match the theory it is time to throw that theory away, but the theory of evolution is the cornerstone of the secular worldview, and it isn't going to die without a fight, no matter how loudly the facts cry out against it.

The question becomes, if there was/is a designer, what was designed first, the creature or the environment? To me, you are suggesting that humans were designed first in the mind of god, and then the environment was finely tuned in order to sustain the idea that god already had for us. Don’t you think this is a little bit too egotistical of a view? If that’s true, what makes everything else necessary? I don’t know if you study astrophysics or astronomy at all but there is a massive amount of stuff out there that has nothing to do with us and if we’re a part of god’s plan, he sure did create a lot of waste.

I'm saying He created all of it at the same time, in six days as Genesis describes. Why is the Universe so large? It could be for a number of reasons, such as that it gives us room to grow. If we were just hitting some sort of wall in space, it would also be a wall in knowledge that we could acquire. If it wasn't as large and complex as it is, we wouldn't be where we are today. Why are solid objects actually mostly composed of empty space? Isn't God wasting all of that space? Or is it integral to His design? Does the fact that almost everything is made up of empty space reduce the significance of solid objects? The size of the Universe doesn't say anything about our importance relative to it. The Heavens also declare the glory of God:

Psalm 19:1-2

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

To me, if the Christian beliefs are the most accurate representation of reality, god isn’t a very good designer. There millions of ways that he could have done a better job if he is all powerful. Of course, you can revert back to, “we can’t know the mind of god”, or “god works in mysterious ways”, but those aren’t answers, they are just ways of maintaining a pre-existing belief by silencing further inquisition.

Have you ever created a Universe? If not, how then would you know what a superior design would look like?

“Unless you can demonstrate a purely naturalistic origin of the Universe, you have no case against Agency.“

Agency needs to prove itself and so far it isn’t doing a very good job. Science as a whole isn’t making a case against agency and neither am I by suggesting that there are likely to be naturalistic causes. Agency simply isn’t necessary. That is what I think that you don’t understand. It’s that I don’t accept the case for agency until agency can be proven. A suspended judgment is better than an accepted unverifiable and untestable claim.

You can rule out the necessity of Agency when you can explain origins. To say that it is not necessary when you don't know what caused the Universe is not something you can determine.

If you are in any way the kind of person who culturally relates to Christianity then there is nothing that anyone can do for you. It is very difficult to have an intellectually honest conversation with someone whose basis for belief is deeply tied to a sense of culture or social belonging. Challenging your beliefs is synonymous to asking you to become someone else if your beliefs are tightly woven into your identity. The only thing I can ask of you is to ask yourself if what you believe determines how you will process new information that comes to you.

I'll give you a little background on me. I grew up without any religion, and until a few years ago, I was an agnostic materialist who didn't see any evidence for God or spirit. Growing up, I hoped to become an astronomer. I have studied all the things you have mentioned, and although I am just a layman, I know quite a bit about biology, astronomy, physics, etc. Like you, I assumed because of my indoctrination in school and society, that the theory of evolution and other metaphysical theories were well supported by hard evidence. When I became a Christian, I was willing to incorporate these theories into my worldview. It is only upon investigation of the actual facts that I was shocked to find there not only is there no real evidence, but that much of what I had been taught in school was either grossly inaccurate, intentionally misleading, or outright fradulent.

So, you're not dealing with someone who grew up outside of your worldview, who feels threatened by it and is trying to tear it down. You're talking with someone who was heavily invested in it, and even willing to compromise with it, and has turned away from it because of my research, not in spite of it. If it was true, I would want to know about it. Since it isn't, I don't believe in it.

At the very least, you can see now that I am not diametrically opposed to the idea of a creator or agency behind everything. The notion is interesting but I don’t believe that there is enough real credible information to suggest that it’s true.

You are more openminded than I originally gave you credit for, but you definitely have a huge evidence filter made out of your presuppositions.

There are enough logical arguments against the idea of a god or gods existing that the whole notion is worth dismissing.

The only logical argument of any value that the atheists have is the argument from evil, and that has been soundly debunked by plantigas free will defense. Feel free to bring one up though, because I have never seen an atheist offer any positive evidence for his position. "Worth dismissing" = close minded and biased, btw.

If there is as god or gods, they aren’t doing a very good job of making themselves known or knowable.

Do you think that is why 93 percent of the world believes that God exists?

The simple fact is that naturalistic explanations are more useful ideas than any god concept because they provide both predictions that we can verify and help us make decisions about where to study next. No god hypothesis has ever provided either, therefore, in the pursuit of knowledge; the idea of god is useless.

Did you know that the idea that we can suss out laws by investigating their secondary causes is a Christian idea, based on the premise that God created an orderly universe governed by laws? Did you know that modern science got its start in Christian europe? Doesn't seem so useless to me. Science now must assume a little thing called "uniformity in nature" to even do science without the belief that there is a Creator upholding these laws. How do you get absolute laws in an ever changing Universe? What is the evidence the future will be like the past? Can you explain it?

Now you see why naturalistic explanations are predominate in science as the default standard.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

I have faith and belief myself... I believe that nothing beyond those natural laws is needed. I have no evidence for this. It is simply what I have faith in and what I believe.

Isaac Asimov

I see why you say that, and now you know why you believe that, because those who teach you these ideas are doing exactly what I have been saying all along. Suppressing the truth.


>> ^IAmTheBlurr:

The blunted point of this video: religion is about faithfully following and constraining curiosity, while science is about aggressively questioning and holding nothing sacred.

Science is also about atheistic materialism. The idea of the supernatural cause is rejected apriori:

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

Religion itself serves no purpose. Going to church, partaking in sacraments, putting on a public face of piety, these are the dead works of men. The heart of Christianity is to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, to know God intimately and experientially. It is not religion but relationship.

A point I would add is that in human societies there may be a time and a place for each, but they will still each question the value of the other.

At the outset, they were friends to one another. The idea of an orderly Universe based on universal laws is a Christian idea, and so is the idea that we can suss out those ideas by investigating secondary causes. Science really got its start in Christian europe. Though they are portrayed as rivals now, it is truly a false dichotomy. I think John Lennox explains this best:



What we should be talking about then is the individual common ground, in your own head, between these two things. You describe a more Unitarian God, responsible for creating/upholding the laws of a changing Universe, and nothing else. I might describe a God with far less impact or far greater impact on human lives here on Earth (...or hundreds of Gods along a God power-spectrum). I might also specify some particular stories about how I know my God to be the true God.

At their essence, I don't think there is any conflict. Religion tells us about who the Creator is while science tries to explain how He did it. The bible isn't a book about science, although it contains some scientific principles. It is a book that describes what God wants from us, why He created us. Science shows us His marvels, it tells us why the stars shine so brightly, it reveals their secret power.

The God I believe in is a personal God who created us for a purpose. His desire is for us to know Him personally and attain to eternal life through His Son Jesus Christ. I believe He is the true God because He transformed my life and being, made me whole by His love, and because I received the direct witness of the Holy Spirit. Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ will receive the witness of the Holy Spirit and then Gods existence will become undeniably true. God Himself provides the evidence if you approach Him in faith.

On the other side is Science, where neither bullshit nor treasured dogma are valued once proven wrong. Your world is composed of atoms, which we've taken pictures of, and we've landed robots on another planet... but where we wonder what the meaning of any of this is, and how long its going to be before we screw it up.

The idea that science is an objective enterprise is a myth. This isn't about the best evidence.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”

Max Planck

If you want to challenge the status quo, you need the support of the status quo. It's a closed system. You're not getting any grants or getting published unless you're towing the line on the conventional wisdom of the day. Check out some of the finds that modern science conveniently ignores..



Evidence starts around 10:00 or so

Also check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Myth-Conventional-Wisdom-Scientific/dp/1904275303

>> ^bamdrew:

This motion is extremely slow since a Mercurian day is 176 earth days, so the effect not as dramatic as depicted. Still, pretty cool.

Another counterintuitive fact about Mercury is that a day on that planet is about twice as long as a year (88 days).