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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 8:07:29 AM   
rulemylife


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quote:

ORIGINAL: rightwinghippie


quote:

ORIGINAL: rulemylife

quote:

ORIGINAL: rightwinghippie

RML, thats a rather meaningless link. I am not most theists, nor is Esinn most anti theists (or wahtever term you like). We are both real people who have put real ideas into the debates.

Esinn, posits that God does not exist. He thinks he has proved it with the rules of logic. Posted it over and over. Has nothing to do with what you posted.

I would never attempt to say I can prove God exists. Becuase I can't.


It has everything to do with it.

You questioned his logic and the logic of someone else on another religious topic by using several well-known logical fallacies yourself.




No, I didn't. If you would like to give an actual example (instead of a groundles insult), I will explain it to you.


I wasn't insulting you, just pointing it out.

And I gave you a very clear example earlier in the thread.  The burden of proof fallacy was almost word for word what you said.

If you are going to start complaining of logical errors by others, as you have done several times, you need to hold yourself to that standard.

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 8:36:02 AM   
rulemylife


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig

If I am, as you say just rehashing the same old theist arguments,well perhaps it is because those questions have not been answered to my satisfaction by atheists. Can you answer my three main points that I listed as places where I start to question the atheist perspective? Can you tell me why a rainbow is aesthetically pleasing?


Only if you can tell me why devastating thunderstorms and tornadoes often precede that beautiful rainbow.

quote:



Can you explain to me why every culture (or damn near every one,as I am sure there has been a few that came up with a non theistic view of existence...I've just never heard of one) has come to the same basic model to explain the unknown?


I don't agree that is true.  You only need to look at the fact that a singular God is a fairly recent concept, historically speaking.

But the broader picture is we are all scared of the unknown, and a wonderful deity (or deities) watching over us and our welfare is a very comforting thought. 

Not to mention the fear of death, which most religions have taken great pains to assure us that we never really die.


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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 8:40:31 AM   
FirmhandKY


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quote:

ORIGINAL: rulemylife

quote:

ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY

rule, has anyone ever told you that you sometimes sound like a tired, jaded curmudgeon, whose mind closed to the wonder of the world and the universe a long time ago?


Let me answer the question with a question.

And bear with me here, I do have a point, and I'm not trying to set you up to make it.

Do you believe life exists elsewhere in the universe?

Just a friendly reminder, rule. I've answered your question, I believe.

Firm

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 8:42:56 AM   
rulemylife


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Status: offline 		Then I guess I missed it, so  do me a favor and save me the trouble of searching back through and tell me again.

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 9:42:08 AM   
FirmhandKY


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quote:

ORIGINAL: rulemylife

Then I guess I missed it, so  do me a favor and save me the trouble of searching back through and tell me again.


Post 56.

Firm

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 10:22:47 AM   
rightwinghippie


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Status: offline 		RML, But you were incorrect and were responded to already over that.

It's simply a false charge.

If you want to break it down go ahead.

Otherwise it is a baseless insult. Prove me wrong. Back it up.

and you said several.....

< Message edited by rightwinghippie -- 8/29/2009 10:24:21 AM >

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 10:51:29 AM   
FullCircle


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Status: offline 		FR I’ve always been curious:

Regarding the Drake equation which part of it accounts for the distances involved that a detectable signal would have to travel? If the signal is coming from so far away that the source in reality no longer exists then that isn't going to lead to any kind of meaningful interaction; then we also have to get the signal back say one hundred light years so a signal travelling at the speed of light would take one hundred years to get back. That would equate to some serious lag i.e. you receive a communication from one civilisation on one planet but send back a signal to a completely different civilisation on that same planet.

So what happened in Neighbours the other day
Oh it was sad bouncer died.

If the Drake equation is about life in the universe we can communicate with it should rule out all things beyond which the time lag would make it impossible to communicate say 50 light years or 100 light years if you pass the original communication down the generations.

Any idea how many of those planets exist within 50-100 light years? i.e. 100-200 years taken for one single two way communication.

I have no idea about this but a quick search seems to indicate we are looking in terms of thousands of light years rather than hundreds.

< Message edited by FullCircle -- 8/29/2009 11:13:58 AM >

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 2:19:15 PM   
ThatDamnedPanda


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quote:

ORIGINAL: FullCircle

FR I’ve always been curious:

Regarding the Drake equation which part of it accounts for the distances involved that a detectable signal would have to travel?


None. The equation doesn't attempt to solve for any factors relating to the difficulties of communicating with other civilizations, only the number of intelligent civilizations that may exist.

And that's one of the serious limitations  on the usefulness of the equation. The difficulty may not be the number of civilizations, but the window of time during which each civilization radiates radio waves. Some astronomers believe it's likely that advanced civilizations only emit radio transmissions for a period of 100 to 200 years before either developing a different communications technology or destroying themselves. If this is true. then each intelligent civilization would spend billions of years evolving, emit radio waves for 200 years, and then go silent. Every intelligent civilization would be surrounded by a "bubble" of radio waves, about 200 light years thick and expanding at the speed of light, and that bubble would be the only evidence of their existence. If the bubble happened to sweep over us during a period when we were listening, we could detect  them; but if we turned on the receiver a couple of years too early or a couple of years too late, we'd never know they even existed.

< Message edited by ThatDamnedPanda -- 8/29/2009 2:20:15 PM >

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 2:23:36 PM   
FirmhandKY


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Status: offline 		Interesting events, in the attempt to communicate with intelligent life off the planet:

Make Plans Now: Earth to Be Destroyed in 2049

Extract:

A total of 25,880 text messages will be broadcast into space, transmitted 20.3 light-years to Gliese 581d. That world is the outlying planet in the Gliese 581 system, and orbits its parent star every 66.8 days. It may be covered by a large and deep ocean and is the first serious “waterworld” candidate discovered beyond our Solar System.

Great. So if there is an advanced civilization on Gliese 581d, the very first communication it’ll get from us will be a two-hour long text spam attack.

End extract.

We spam. They eat. Groovy.

Firm


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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 2:36:46 PM   
ThatDamnedPanda


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Status: offline 		Far out. Let's introduce ourselves as an entire planet of telemarketers. That'll make an impression. 

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 2:47:51 PM   
rightwinghippie


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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 2:56:28 PM   
ThatDamnedPanda


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quote:

ORIGINAL: rightwinghippie

Web Cam Girls. Send them lots of Porn and Chat invites...."Hot Young Sluts want to drink your Jizz......"


Great. Then they make the trip all the way here, and the first person they see when they step out of the saucer is Roseanne Barr. Can you imagine how pissed they'd be at us then?


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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 3:10:39 PM   
rightwinghippie


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Status: offline 		Or how pissed if they send Dr Nomgobi the 15,000 dollars to help get the funds cleared from the Nairobi bank....

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 7:17:20 PM   
Sanity


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I recently read a science article (which I unfortunately can't locate now) that explained how the SETI program was a waste of time and effort because its unlikely we'll ever make radio contact with another civilization due to the fact that radio waves disperse rapidly as they travel through space.

A similar theory was in the news back in 2004, though I can't recall what was unique about the more recent article, which I believe was published earlier this summer.

Here's an excerpt from a 2004 National Geographic article which explains the reasoning:

quote:

Alien Contact More Likely by "Mail" Than Radio, Study Says

A new study suggests it is more energy efficient to communicate across interstellar space by sending physical material—a sort of message in a bottle—than beams of electromagnetic radiation. Solid matter can hold more information and journey farther than radio waves, which disperse as they travel.

Researchers behind the study speculate that other life-forms may have already sent us messages, perhaps even as organic material embedded in asteroids that have struck Earth.

"Any contact that we might establish with extraterrestrial life-forms is more likely to occur from a physical artifact than from electromagnetic communication," said Christopher Rose, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rose is a co-author of the study.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/0901_040901_alien_contact.html



Scientists aren't completely unified on this though, as evidenced by this 2007 article:

quote:

Searching for alien broadcasts


A telescope array being built in Australia could detect earth like radio signals from 30 light-years away.

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars.

"Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars."

****

Loeb and Zaldarriaga calculate that by staring at the sky for a month, the MWA-LFD could detect Earth-like radio signals from a distance of up to 30 light-years, which would encompass approximately 1,000 stars. More powerful broadcasts could be detected to even greater distances. Future observatories like the Square Kilometer Array could detect Earth-like broadcasts from 10 times farther away, which would encompass 100 million stars.

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=5110


Judging by what I've read I'd say that even if there were a plethora of intelligent life out there broadcasting freely we may never detect them through efforts like SETI due to the inherent weakness of radio transmissions.

< Message edited by Sanity -- 8/29/2009 7:18:00 PM >

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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 8:04:53 PM   
GotSteel


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
Can you answer my three main points that I listed as places where I start to question the atheist perspective?


To the best of my knowledge there isn't THE atheist perspective since atheism is just the lack of theism so all I can give you is my perspective.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
Can you tell me why a rainbow is aesthetically pleasing?


I don't really know what you're getting at here are you making some sort of rainbows are pretty therefore god argument?
If the beauty of a rainbow is evidence of a god does that make the displeasing nature of feces evidence there is no god?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
Can you explain to me why every culture (or damn near every one,as I am sure there has been a few that came up with a non theistic view of existence...I've just never heard of one) has come to the same basic model to explain the unknown?


I don't know that I'd call all the conflicting creation myths the same basic model, the assertions that the earth was puked up by a giant and the earth was made of a serpent rapping around itself 7,000 times seem a little different to me. I don't know what they demonstrate, maybe that humans have active imaginations or that a lot of other people are also uncomfortable with the unknown or maybe it's just that hallucinogens have been around for a while. If these myths were accounts of actual events where some sort of deity descended from on on high and explained the universe then why are the myths different and why are they completely contradictory to what we've learned about reality? Even if these claims were the same, saying they proved the existence of a god would still be an argumentum ad populum. For example, there are beliefs that a number of cultures have come up with, such as witches. Specifically that illness can come from one of your neighbors who has supernatural powers and that you need to kill them. This belief is still alive in Papa New Guinea, because other cultures have come up with the same belief does it mean that witches are cursing the Kombi with malaria and that they are justified in murdering their neighbors?


quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
As it is,I don't know, and I seek to know, and that isn't a particularly comfortable place to be.


Maybe that's why making up answers is so common. Seventy virgins may be a whole lot more comforting than I don't know, but admitting that we don't know and seeking the answer is a demonstrably more successful method of gaining knowledge than assuming that what we'd like to be true is true.



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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/29/2009 10:12:59 PM   
Arpig


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quote:

To the best of my knowledge there isn't THE atheist perspective since atheism is just the lack of theism so all I can give you is my perspective.
Fair enough. Before I address your points, I want to emphasis once again that I am not trying to present arguments to prove the existence of a divine,I am just saying why I sometimes suspect there might be, why I cannot comfortably say there isn't.

quote:

I don't really know what you're getting at here are you making some sort of rainbows are pretty therefore god argument?
If the beauty of a rainbow is evidence of a god does that make the displeasing nature of feces evidence there is no god?
Its more the fact that the universe is simply beautiful,and there seems to be no purpose in its beauty other than to be beautiful...what I call Senseless Beauty. yes there is much that is not beautiful,yet even feces, when viewed in the context of how the alimentary system works has a certain beauty in it. There is beauty in almost anything, and it generally has no reason, it just is. As I explained in the last bit of my long post, The divine (by which I envision as being all of creation, not something separate from it) glories in its own existence, and therefore its creation is glorious. I can't really explain it any better than that at the moment,but I find myself wondering why?

What I meant by the universality of the divine idea was that all cultures,when confronted with the great unknowns have come up with the idea of supernatural beings (or being) that in one way or another are responsible for creation. The details of the myths do not matter so much as the fact of the myths. It isn't that some,or many cultures have reached this basic conclusion, it is, to the best of my knowledge, every culture that has come to this conclusion. They all end up with the supposition that divine entities in one form or another, either singularly or in groups exist. This leads me to wonder...why?

quote:

but admitting that we don't know and seeking the answer is a demonstrably more successful method of gaining knowledge than assuming that what we'd like to be true is true.
I wholeheartedly agree, however, because there are to my mind some whys that science cannot even begin to address, I am not ready to dismiss the possibility of the divine, though I conceive of it differently than most religions do. Some Hindu mystics teach an idea similar to my conception, a universal godhead that encompasses everything. God would be the sum total of everything. If scientists could actually come up with some way of proving there was no first cause, then I would happily be atheist, but everything they do discover fills me with wonder and with admiration for the amazing design upon which the universe rests,and the deeper they dig,the more and more amazing the universe becomes. Yet it is so very complex that even one tiny detail out of place and it would not be able to exist,the way it is,is the only way it could be...and that leads me to wonder how it came about that by chance everything fell into place just so.

Again, my concept of the divine doesn't even require that it is truly aware of anything other than its own existence.


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RE: Creationist Science Fair - 8/31/2009 1:06:23 PM   
GotSteel


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
Fair enough. Before I address your points, I want to emphasis once again that I am not trying to present arguments to prove the existence of a divine,I am just saying why I sometimes suspect there might be, why I cannot comfortably say there isn't.


I'm not arguing that there isn't "a divine" I don't even know what the word means. I'm arguing that we shouldn't have faith in faith and that how one feels about an explanation for the universe don't effect the likelihood of that explanation being true. To paraphrase, you gave a possible definition of god = universe. If that's the definition, well I'm fairly confident the universe exists so god exists. However, the rest of us already call that the universe so also naming it god seems superfluous. But I don't have a problem with that until it gets to the point of asserting characteristics on the universe without evidence. It's when people start asserting knowledge of the unknown that I get twitchy.


quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
Its more the fact that the universe is simply beautiful,and there seems to be no purpose in its beauty other than to be beautiful...what I call Senseless Beauty. yes there is much that is not beautiful,yet even feces, when viewed in the context of how the alimentary system works has a certain beauty in it. There is beauty in almost anything, and it generally has no reason, it just is.

Beauty is subjective, the universe isn't simply beautiful, you consider it beautiful. That you find the universe beautiful says something about you (finding feces beautiful certainly says something about you ) but does it really say something about the universe?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
As I explained in the last bit of my long post, The divine (by which I envision as being all of creation, not something separate from it) glories in its own existence, and therefore its creation is glorious. I can't really explain it any better than that at the moment,but I find myself wondering why?

Here your personifying the universe and transferring your feeling to it. A rainbow as far as we know doesn't glory in it's existence, it's you that glories in it's existence. Same goes for the universe or energy etcetera. That people tend to personify inanimate objects and phenomena is interesting but it seems to be evidence about how we work, not that those inanimate objects and phenomena are sentient beings. For instance a number of cultures have personified the moon, is that really evidence that the moon is a sentient being?


quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
What I meant by the universality of the divine idea was that all cultures,when confronted with the great unknowns have come up with the idea of supernatural beings (or being) that in one way or another are responsible for creation. The details of the myths do not matter so much as the fact of the myths. It isn't that some,or many cultures have reached this basic conclusion, it is, to the best of my knowledge, every culture that has come to this conclusion. They all end up with the supposition that divine entities in one form or another, either singularly or in groups exist. This leads me to wonder...why?


If this phenomenon is to be taken as evidence in favor of some sort of supernatural being/s then I have to disagree with you, the details do matter. If gods were beaming these thoughts, hallucinations, feelings into our heads as opposed to us making them up, shouldn't they be the same, shouldn't they contain real data? Unless you think that gods a troll who gets off on filling peoples heads with gibberish, wouldn't the conflicting nature of these superstitions (about everything from creation to the flu ) with each other and with reality point to the cause having to do with human beings not an external source?  

quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
I wholeheartedly agree, however, because there are to my mind some whys that science cannot even begin to address, I am not ready to dismiss the possibility of the divine, though I conceive of it differently than most religions do.


Since we are currently building a super collider to test for other dimensions and have been doing experiments to map thought, I'm not going to take a position on what the scientific method will or won't eventually be used to address. I'm not saying that you should rule out the possibility of the divine under any definition of the word, I'm saying that you shouldn't have faith in the divine. 

quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig
Some Hindu mystics teach an idea similar to my conception, a universal godhead that encompasses everything. God would be the sum total of everything. If scientists could actually come up with some way of proving there was no first cause, then I would happily be atheist, but everything they do discover fills me with wonder and with admiration for the amazing design upon which the universe rests,and the deeper they dig,the more and more amazing the universe becomes. Yet it is so very complex that even one tiny detail out of place and it would not be able to exist,the way it is,is the only way it could be...and that leads me to wonder how it came about that by chance everything fell into place just so.


This is a classic god of the gaps argument. "We don't know, I'm amazed therefore god" has a really terrible track record.  


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