I'm sorry about some delay in my responses. With the site being up and down today the delays have been unavoidable.
Quote Originally Posted by SadisticNature View Post
My argument was just a parroting of an argument done in the opposite direction, which also did no tests. I'm not saying its a good argument. In fact I argued in order for the assumption to have value, one of the models has to be contradictory.
I thought that my argument implied tests, i.e., the search for evidence of gods. Your argument not only did not imply tests, but equated assumptions with evidence, a definite difference.
I have no problem with calling it the god hypothesis. My argument here is that there is no good proof that god does not exist, and that its not irrational to choose to believe in god.
And it's my stance that the person(s) making an extraordinary claim, such as the existence of supernatural beings, is the one who must provide evidence for his claim.
People are repeatedly claiming I posited that the existence of god is an absolute truth and that's outright hogwash.
If I have I apologize. I'm too used to dealing with people who claim just that.
I've just posited they can't show that belief in god is irrational behavior and they find that offensive. Argue against the claim, don't try and move the goalposts to make the arguments work.
Then explain to me what is rational about believing in beings which cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be touched and do not appear to have any influence on the workings of the universe? Is believing in large, white, talking rabbits rational? What about leprechauns? Or fairies? None of these can be proven to NOT exist, but after thousands of years of searching there has not yet been any evidence for them.
Lastly, why is it that people jump all over me for an exact duplication of someone elses argument in the reverse direction. You aren't doing science you're doing politics in the sense that if it supports your ideas it doesn't matter how bad the work is. I used that argument not because I think its correct, but to demonstrate that the originally posited argument was equally bad. Neither model does any testing.
As I stated above, your model was not a reverse of mine. I implied a search for evidence (testing) while you did not.
As a technical point, gods could carry out certain effects in patterns that would appear to be natural laws. The sciences have no way of proving that false, it's just an unlikely explanation that has no predictive power.
As a technical point you are correct. But that is like saying that Zeus casts down lightning bolts from the heavens by rubbing clouds together to form electrical charges. It could be true, but it seems kind of silly to speculate so.
Again, I mean more of relativity than just e=mc^2. What about time distortion of two objects moving away from each other each moving at a fraction below the speed of light, hence their relative velocity being greater than light speed? Now, the same problem for an object the size of a spaceship persay so one avoids the potential for complications due to fundamental breakdown (Examples we have are quantum scale and without a grand unifying theory its hard to understand the differences at a larger scale, but its certainly reasonable to predict the fundamental breakdown plays a signficant role).
I haven't got the education to argue the merits of relativity but it's my understanding that test with atomic clocks and space vehicles traveling at fairly high speeds have verified much of the time distortion claims. And direct observation, as shown in that Asimov article I linked to, have also shown the validity of relativity.
I never talked about my assumptions being absolute truth, I talked about them being true within a model. This is by definition local truth. As mentioned before, you should read about formal logic and models before wildly misinterpreting my statements and misrepresenting my positions.
And all I'm saying is that your model was flawed, as noted above.