The "something can't come from nothing" argument

[metis]

Metis, please remember that energy and mass are introvertible (or is the right word introconvertible or other word ?). I will go back and look at some of Hawkings work and modify my comment if needed.

Please do because I'm having a hard time following what you're saying. Maybe I just need more coffee.

BTW, Hawking has hypothesized that quite possibly gravitational energy alone may have caused our minute universe to appear.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Christianity was not only not the only game in town originally, it was persecuted by the most powerful empire on earth and even their by their own countrymen. Unlike Islam it did not grow based on power, loot, raiding caravans, and force in those early decades. It only had the strength of it's message to overcome the world, and did so astonishingly well. Your referring to a time long afterwards when that message had converted the empire that had tried so many times to destroy it. Yet even then it was not the only game in town. What I mentioned happened mostly during the enlightenment. Which was not as commonly thought a push back against faith, it was a push back against corrupt church domination of intellectualism. Even during the enlightenment it was Christians making the most progress. At that time less than 30% of humanity was Christian, yet most of the science came from that 30%.

At least half the people you mentioned were dead before the beginning of the Enlightenment.

The problem is that we really can’t know how many scientists in the past were actually theists or deists or whatever, given the environment they lived in where Church doctrine dominated and was hostile toward anything that fell outside their purview.

And then cut to modern day, where the majority of scientists seem to be atheistic or at least non-religious. So where does that leave your claim?

You are right that China and Islam added to scientific knowledge but not on any scale comparable to Christianity. For many centuries the greatest institutions of learning were monasteries. I have helped a PhD friend research the history of mathematics concerning his dissertation. 40% - 50% of the sources we found in the incremental process of mathematic advancement were monks. They were doing math hundreds of years ago that are more advanced that I was even required to take for engineering. BTW it was not Islam that helped Muslims produce science. At the time they were doing their best work they were the only people who had retained and taught Greek science. The diabolical Catholic church had suppressed pagan Greek and Roman science and this led to the dark ages. At the same time Islam was simply adding the next step to science invented a thousand years previously by others. In my ten years of higher education not one Chinese or Muslim was ever even mentioned in the history of my academic disciplines. They of course existed but were not necessary to establish the development of science.

Well, 1Robin has never heard of any of these people, so I’m sure that means their contributions to science were meaningless. /sarcasm

Come on.

How about, al-Zahrawi, ibn Sina, Abu Bakir Zakariya al-Razi, al-Battani, Sun Sikong, Shen Kuo, Yang Hui, Su Song, Gan De, al-khwar izmi to name a few?

I submit simply that people who are interested in science, will get into science. Whether they be Christian, atheist, Muslim, Jew or whatever else. There are plenty of different motivations that can be ascribed to someone who is interested in science.

You can get from arithmetic to Boolean differential calculus using approx. 20% Egyptian learning, 20% Greek learning, 20% Roman learning, and 40% Christian learning without need for anyone else. You cannot do the same minus the Christians.

Says you.

Can we get anywhere by excluding non-religious scientists as well? I doubt it.

 

[1robin]

I think your anecdote establishes that they aren’t really all that bad at predicting the weather 48 hours in advance, even if they’re off by a couple of hours. So I don’t know what you’re going on about.

We have beat this beyond recognition. If as is the fact, weather a few days in advance is not a very reliable possibility then predictions about a billion years from now are meaningless. If we cannot agree on how many soldiers were in pickets charge with a hundred battle reports then telling me details about how something crawled out of the slime a billion years ago is also meaningless. It is speculation on steroids disguised as science.

Never mind that you seem to think everything in the Bible occurred as written.

I have always maintained the bible has 5% error and that some of it's older teachings contexts are not known to me. I do find remarkable agreement between recorded history and biblical history.

You said there is no data of any kind. Scientists don’t say there is no data of any kind.

Data is a relative term. I mean data as being evidence that confirms a conclusion in this case. I do not mean as they do, any scrap of information that can be fit into a theoretical framework invented by humans. This is what Sherlock called the fallacy of arriving at conclusions before all the data is in. You invariably change the significance of data to fit the conclusion.

Then maybe order your stuff from a different factory.

You are really out of your depth. Each instrument comes from a legendary vendor. Like Hewlett Packard, Agilent, Fluke, and North Atlantic.

If you’re able to fix the stuff you get using science, then what are you going on about?

I fix it using hard knock lesson I gained in the military from hands on efforts. Millions of dollars of crap had to fail for me to learn what I have. Good thing science is so obliging in that respect. My boss uses some technical theory but mainly uses simple experience. I do not think I have ever used a single equation or theoretical principle I learned in school to solve a single technical problem in 25 years of technical work. Design yes, correcting the design on my part, no. I have been waiting for two days for the old tried and true if it eventually gets it right it is good enough claim. Where in the world does that come from. You throw billions of dollars at things, have 5000 years of mistakes to learn from, and pay engineers millions to destroy stuff until it works and it is inevitable. That is certainly not grounds for arrogance or complete confidence. There is no criteria. Maybe we are way behind where we should be, or way ahead. Who knows? What we do know is most of our conclusions and steps to get to a workable instrument are wrong but we eventually get it right if we do not bankrupt the money source first.

I don’t claim the supernatural exists, as you do. I also don’t claim that I know how this supposed supernatural realm operates, as you do. I also don’t claim some god exists without any empirical evidence backing it up, as you do.

But you do claim multiverses are a valid counter theory, that life came from non-life even though there is a precept in biology that says it has never done so, and you must believe something produced an extremely fine tuned everything by accident. These are not only things based on almost pure faith but some are even in-spite of evidence and reason. Again they and the myriad just like them require more faith than I need for God.

What claims have I made that require more faith than that?

Besides the above, how about atoms producing morality that is true. Natural law creating things from nothing, that you have the slightest idea what occurred a billion years ago or predictions about a billion years in the future. You assign a higher value to human lives than others that has no valid source. You believe we have rights without having any source for them, you believe we can make a meaningful determination for when it is ok to kill human lives in the womb without a foundation. You make the equivalent of 6 "science or nature did it" claims to every God did it claim I make and then complain about it to me.

 

[Enai de a lukal]

Then why did you do that very thing in reply?


In the land or the pathetic that is king.


It won't work. I am just burned on arrogance for the time being. You can attempt to fool your self into thinking I actually was scared of something you said if you want. I have no use for dishonesty with myself but do as you wish. I told I was getting tired of those emoticons being used where arguments should be long ago.

All smoke, no fire. You want to make claims, but you beg off backing them up.

 

[1robin]

What is nothing then? Do we have an example of nothing? Have you ever seen nothing?

Nothing is the absence of anything. By necessity you can't see the absence of something. Not that my eyes are the arbiter of all reality to begin with. Are you actually suggesting nothing is not a valid concept? Come on.

 

[1robin]

What are these medical aspects of the crucifixion you speak of? Where are they described? Even if your claim is true, how on earth do you make the jump from people having witnessed crucifixions before and knowing something about what happens to the human being involved to some divine occurrence going on?

They are described in the very book your arguing against. If you have to ask this then why are you arguing. I didn't make that jump, several forensic coroners did. If you want one of their papers let me know.

What evidence do we have that indicates anyone can rise from the dead? What does your forensic coroner have to say about that? What does he say about zombies rising from their graves and walking the streets?
I mean, it’s one thing to say a man was crucified, at least that much is believable. But zombies rising from the dead? That’s a stretch of the imagination if ever there was one.

First of all someone rising after being declared clinically dead is a fact not faith. There is an inexhaustible supply of testimony about knowledge to events that occurred when a patient was clinically dead and even people who came back to life and lived many more years. While I myself rule out most of these as fanciful, there are still so many undeniable events like this they can't be ignored. At one time the problem was so bad they installed signal devices of coffins. Most have a medical explanation (usually scientific incompetence) but many do not. I ran across one the other day where very recently a lady was medically dead for several minutes (the blood was actually drained from her brain) yet she know things that occurred during that period around her, and even some that occurred other places.

However your asking the wrong question. Frequency is not a factor in possibility. Many things have occurred for the first time or the only time in history. I do not say Caesar could not cross the Danube in one day because no one had ever built a bridge that fast. I look at the evidence and see if the proposition is the best explanation. Supernatural events are by necessity the extreme exception. You do not look at the rule to evaluate the possibility of the exception. If we did all of science would be the same as it was in pre-Egyptian times. I have more than enough evidence to know that people have come back from clinical death, more than enough to validate the belief that Christ rose from the dead. In fact the only reason to deny it is that it occurs infrequently and for reasons that our extremely limited knowledge cannot account for. History is full of extremely unlikely events. The 300 Spartans and their few allies killing 20,000 Persians, Cortez and 400 men taking a nation of 20 million, the sometimes very accurate predictions of mediums, prophecy, a thousand examples of recoveries that have no medical explanation, a universe where nothing once existed. The frequency of an occurrence or it's explanation is no justification for denying it.

 

[SkepticThinker]

We have beat this beyond recognition. If as is the fact, weather a few days in advance is not a very reliable possibility then predictions about a billion years from now are meaningless. If we cannot agree on how many soldiers were in pickets charge with a hundred battle reports then telling me details about how something crawled out of the slime a billion years ago is also meaningless. It is speculation on steroids disguised as science.

You're trying to tell me that we can't predict the weather 48 hours (with broader implications in mind) in advance with an anecdotal story that indicates that we can in fact predict the weather 48 hours in advance, give or take a few hours. Sorry if I’m not following your line of reasoning.

I have always maintained the bible has 5% error and that some of it's older teachings contexts are not known to me. I do find remarkable agreement between recorded history and biblical history.

And yet you’re the one always going on about double standards.

Data is a relative term. I mean data as being evidence that confirms a conclusion in this case. I do not mean as they do, any scrap of information that can be fit into a theoretical framework invented by humans. This is what Sherlock called the fallacy of arriving at conclusions before all the data is in. You invariably change the significance of data to fit the conclusion.

While I don’t see that that is what is going on in the scientific world, it does in fact seem like that is where you are coming from. Belief in the Bible comes first, then corroboration based on those beliefs and interpretation comes after that. I.e. You’re trying to fit the evidence to what you already believe.

You are really out of your depth. Each instrument comes from a legendary vendor. Like Hewlett Packard, Agilent, Fluke, and North Atlantic.

All I know is that if I were ordering parts from a place and discovered that they were always 100% faulty, I’d probably stop ordering parts from that place.

I fix it using hard knock lesson I gained in the military from hands on efforts. Millions of dollars of crap had to fail for me to learn what I have. Good thing science is so obliging in that respect. My boss uses some technical theory but mainly uses simple experience. I do not think I have ever used a single equation or theoretical principle I learned in school to solve a single technical problem in 25 years of technical work. Design yes, correcting the design on my part, no. I have been waiting for two days for the old tried and true if it eventually gets it right it is good enough claim. Where in the world does that come from. You throw billions of dollars at things, have 5000 years of mistakes to learn from, and pay engineers millions to destroy stuff until it works and it is inevitable. That is certainly not grounds for arrogance or complete confidence. There is no criteria. Maybe we are way behind where we should be, or way ahead. Who knows? What we do know is most of our conclusions and steps to get to a workable instrument are wrong but we eventually get it right if we do not bankrupt the money source first.

Good for you. And if a whole bunch of scientists hadn’t come before you and established the groundwork for you, you wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on.

But you do claim multiverses are a valid counter theory, that life came from non-life even though there is a precept in biology that says it has never done so, and you must believe something produced an extremely fine tuned everything by accident. These are not only things based on almost pure faith but some are even in-spite of evidence and reason. Again they and the myriad just like them require more faith than I need for God.

I claim there is some evidence that makes it at least a possibility that other universes may exist. And there is some preliminary evidence that indicates it’s a POSSIBILITY. That’s it. I’ve never said it’s a done deal. In fact, I’ve said “I don’t know” many times.
I also claim that there is evidence that indicates it is possible for life to come from non-life, given the right circumstances. And there is plenty of it.
I’m a person who follows where the evidence leads. I take nothing on blind faith. I don’t have it in me.

Besides the above, how about atoms producing morality that is true. Natural law creating things from nothing, that you have the slightest idea what occurred a billion years ago or predictions about a billion years in the future. You assign a higher value to human lives than others that has no valid source. You believe we have rights without having any source for them, you believe we can make a meaningful determination for when it is ok to kill human lives in the womb without a foundation. You make the equivalent of 6 "science or nature did it" claims to every God did it claim I make and then complain about it to me.

The source and foundation for our rights is ourselves. What you really mean to say is I have no authority which is a different thing. I don’t think we have to follow the commands of some divine authority figure which may or may not exist, to be able to understand how and why morality is important to us.
Atoms produce all kinds of things, including brains.

 

[1robin]

All smoke, no fire. You want to make claims, but you beg off backing them up.

You know very well I have no issue with backing up what I claim. I have 7000 posts to prove it. I do however have a problem with asking someone to lay off the meaningless, unnecessary, and arrogant face-palms and them not to even take notice. You know this latest tactic is not based in truth so why are you carrying on as if it was? This is also proven by the fact I have carried on discussions with you where the arrogance has not ben so obvious for post after post. Come off it.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Nothing is the absence of anything. By necessity you can't see the absence of something. Not that my eyes are the arbiter of all reality to begin with. Are you actually suggesting nothing is not a valid concept? Come on.

I'm suggesting it may be a nonsensical term.

What does nothing look like? How can we measure nothing? Do we have any examples of nothing? How can we know that nothing can even exist?

 

[1robin]

If I remember correctly the thing that was considered odd about Jesus's crucifixion was how quickly he died. Crucifixion was apparently a long dying process which is why the leg breaking was brought in, so that they body could not hold itself up.

That is true but there is little doubt he was dead. Romans were experts in this type of thing. They made extra sure by stabbing a 4 inch spear point through the heart. Their lives depended on their making sure. Romans ruthlessly enforced discipline and almost any failure was a capitol offense. Not to mention there was every reason for them to be extra sure about Christ in particular. Plus add in the fact he was sealed in a tomb for three days without medical care, food, or water. Even if only wounded gravely he would not have survived and certainly did not roll a heavy sealed stone open and escape two guards to go on a walk about with his friends for weeks after wards.

Your claim is similar to the swoon theory and has been completely annihilated many times over.

 

[Enai de a lukal]

You know very well I have no issue with backing up what I claim. I have 7000 posts to prove it.

Then please point me to any one in which you even endeavor to show that moral realism without God is necessarily false.

I do however have a problem with asking someone to lay off the meaningless, unnecessary, and arrogant face-palms and them not to even take notice.

I'm not going to stop using emoticons simply because you complain about it, sorry. They're fun and they're expressive, and if seeing a facepalm icon hurts your feelings, then don't say so many things that make me want to plant my face into a wall.

You know this latest tactic is not based in truth so why are you carrying on as if it was? This is also proven by the fact I have carried on discussions with you where the arrogance has not ben so obvious for post after post. Come off it.

How about this- here's a deal: you break your habit of making unsubstantiated claims, and then stalling and playing evasive when asked to back them up, starting right here, and I'll never post another facepalm in a post directed towards you. How's that sound?

 

[SkepticThinker]

They are described in the very book your arguing against. If you have to ask this then why are you arguing. I didn't make that jump, several forensic coroners did. If you want one of their papers let me know.

I just read it. I don’t see anything that can be construed as medical in nature.

Who are these people you speak of? And what are they basing their analyses on?

First of all someone rising after being declared clinically dead is a fact not faith. There is an inexhaustible supply of testimony about knowledge to events that occurred when a patient was clinically dead and even people who came back to life and lived many more years. While I myself rule out most of these as fanciful, there are still so many undeniable events like this they can't be ignored. At one time the problem was so bad they installed signal devices of coffins. Most have a medical explanation (usually scientific incompetence) but many do not. I ran across one the other day where very recently a lady was medically dead for several minutes (the blood was actually drained from her brain) yet she know things that occurred during that period around her, and even some that occurred other places.

It’s not a fact that someone can be clinically dead for three days then rise again.

Near death experience is not something for which we have any empirical evidence. I see no reason to accept it as fact.

People didn’t use to be so good at declaring when someone was actually dead as you noted, hence the signal devices in the coffins (this probably has something to do with the reason we now use brain death as an indication of actual death). It’s silly to go down that path because if you’re trying to compare this to Jesus’ resurrection in some way, then basically you’re saying he wasn’t actually dead in the first place.

Oh you met some lady that says she was dead for several minutes and witnessed everything that happened! That settles it then. Isn’t that like the equivalent of Sarah Palin meeting some women who said her child got autism from a vaccine and taking that as fact? Come on now, let’s be real.

However your asking the wrong question. Frequency is not a factor in possibility. Many things have occurred for the first time or the only time in history. I do not say Caesar could not cross the Danube in one day because no one had ever built a bridge that fast. I look at the evidence and see if the proposition is the best explanation. Supernatural events are by necessity the extreme exception. You do not look at the rule to evaluate the possibility of the exception. If we did all of science would be the same as it was in pre-Egyptian times. I have more than enough evidence to know that people have come back from clinical death, more than enough to validate the belief that Christ rose from the dead. In fact the only reason to deny it is that it occurs infrequently and for reasons that our extremely limited knowledge cannot account for. History is full of extremely unlikely events. The 300 Spartans and their few allies killing 20,000 Persians, Cortez and 400 men taking a nation of 20 million, the sometimes very accurate predictions of mediums, prophecy, a thousand examples of recoveries that have no medical explanation, a universe where nothing once existed. The frequency of an occurrence or it's explanation is no justification for denying it.

Your assertion that “supernatural events are by necessity the extreme exception” is based on the assumption that some supernatural world exists at all. That’s a pretty big assumption.

Not to mention the fact that you’re the one always talking about how we have no known examples in nature of something being uncaused and therefore everything must have a cause. Using your line of argumentation, something could have happened without cause, even just once, if that’s what we choose to believe. Anything goes if that’s the way you want to go with it. Mediums are right some of the time? Well, so is a broken clock. Big deal.

Were you planning on address the part about zombies rising from the grave and walking around town at some point? Or is the above paragraph supposed to cover that somehow?

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

That is true but there is little doubt he was dead. Romans were experts in this type of thing. They made extra sure by stabbing a 4 inch spear point through the heart. Their lives depended on their making sure. Romans ruthlessly enforced discipline and almost any failure was a capitol offense. Not to mention there was every reason for them to be extra sure about Christ in particular. Plus add in the fact he was sealed in a tomb for three days without medical care, food, or water. Even if only wounded gravely he would not have survived and certainly did not roll a heavy sealed stone open and escape two guards to go on a walk about with his friends for weeks after wards.

Your claim is similar to the swoon theory and has been completely annihilated many times over.

When did I make a claim? I'm just pointing out that is the only oddity that has been argued regarding the crucifixion. At best what scholars will agree on is up to the point where Jesus was crucified everything after that is left to the Gospels without much historical information outside of them if any.

 

[1robin]

At least half the people you mentioned were dead before the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Those names were not connected to the enlightenment. Once again your misapplying my statements. I gave only a tiny fraction of the names involved. I think they were in a rough chronology and given without any reference to the enlightenment. The enlightenment claim is accurate, my claims about Christian science are accurate, and my names were correct. They only have problems if you jam them all together and attempt to use them in ways I did not. A list of enlightenment Christian scientists names can easily be found if you actually wanted them.

The problem is that we really can’t know how many scientists in the past were actually theists or deists or whatever, given the environment they lived in where Church doctrine dominated and was hostile toward anything that fell outside their purview.

What? The majority of names (for example in the tope 100 list I use at times) claimed emphatically what they believed. people like Newton wrote more on theology than science. In fact this works in your favor because a Christian that was very private about his faith would not appear on the lists.

And then cut to modern day, where the majority of scientists seem to be atheistic or at least non-religious. So where does that leave your claim?
Well, 1Robin has never heard of any of these people, so I’m sure that means their contributions to science were meaningless. /sarcasm

Do not answer questions for me. Science is like any other group. It ebbs and flows over time. It does contain many atheists these days. This seems to go hand in hand with the theoretical becoming the new reliable I guess. I however was not talking about numbers of mere scientists. I was talking about numbers or those who had made the breakthroughs and formed the fields of science themselves. The only groundbreaking science done in modern times on the scale of calculus or the laws of motion for example is the Quantum. It is still in it's infancy but I can give most of the credit to atheists for that one. However decoding the genome, and even probably the most formidable cosmologist (Sandage) are Christians. Where are the modern atheist equivalents of Copernicus, Da Vinci, Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Faraday, Kelvin, Planck, Pasteur, etc .. ad infinitum. There are hordes of mere Chinese scientists, atheist scientists, Muslim scientists, Indian scientists, etc.. but the whose who of sciences golden age were predominantly Christian.

Come on.

How about, al-Zahrawi, ibn Sina, Abu Bakir Zakariya al-Razi, al-Battani, Sun Sikong, Shen Kuo, Yang Hui, Su Song, Gan De, al-khwar izmi to name a few?

Never heard of half of them. I was never ever taught about a single one in ten years of college, I never saw them in a single text book, even in the history of mathematics and physics classes. I have read about a few of them on my own and they are scientists but not among the Newton and Da Vinci type. Did you think I claimed you cannot find dozens of names of scientists in other cultures or something. Was a single one of them the father of a academic field?

I submit simply that people who are interested in science, will get into science. Whether they be Christian, atheist, Muslim, Jew or whatever else. There are plenty of different motivations that can be ascribed to someone who is interested in science.

I never said other wise. However the facts remain clear. Those that got into science based in some part on faith contributed far more greatly to science as a whole that those from any other cultural group and by a large margin.

Says you.

Can we get anywhere by excluding non-religious scientists as well? I doubt it.

I am not sure about excluding non-religious scientists. I am inclined to think we could if marginal people of faith like Einstein are not ruled out.

It was not me that said that. It was every textbook I ever used and all my instructors though not all of them went from A to Z themselves. I was educated in mathematics. Not a single Chinese, Muslim, or anyone beyond those groups I gave was ever mentioned to my knowledge. Now if you get beyond the fields themselves and into obscure off shoots then many nationalities would be necessary, but for the primary mathematic disciplines a few Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Christians are al that is needed until the quantum.


This is a big waste of time, so let me summarize this.

1. I do not bring up Christian scientists to either suggest atheist scientists are stupid or that Christians are superior. I use them to suggest that any pathetic claims about faith and science being incompatible is an abject absurdity.
2. I think it is true that Christianity more than any other cultural group has advanced science but do not really care to build upon that.
3. That the enlightenment was in no way a rebellion against faith, but only a rebellion against church oppression.

 

[1robin]

You're trying to tell me that we can't predict the weather 48 hours (with broader implications in mind) in advance with an anecdotal story that indicates that we can in fact predict the weather 48 hours in advance, give or take a few hours. Sorry if I’m not following your line of reasoning.

I will be very very generous and say weather 48 hours may have a 85% success rate. Well it will quickly drop of to single digits given a few years. If science is that inaccurate (and believe me I understand fully why they could not help but be) about the weather a few years in advance, then of what use are predictions about billions of years in the future. If we still fight over even the most well known events from a few hundred or a few thousands years ago with written documents of what accuracy are claims about millions or billions of years ago? If we cannot effectively hit a bulls eye a hundred yards away I am not going to listen to claims about hitting one a hundred miles away.

And yet you’re the one always going on about double standards.

I have no idea what that means. It seems to be answering someone else question and not to have anything to do with my statement it was responding to.

While I don’t see that that is what is going on in the scientific world, it does in fact seem like that is where you are coming from. Belief in the Bible comes first, then corroboration based on those beliefs and interpretation comes after that. I.e. You’re trying to fit the evidence to what you already believe.

That is completely wrong. I have never met a single Christian that ever held to true faith before they had investigated the bible thoroughly. In fact I have never met a group of people who test their beliefs more often than Christians. Find any seasoned Christian and you will find a person who has spent years and years questioning his faith daily. I like to say that since being born again I do not even need the bible, but without the bible's being accurate I would never have been born again. let's say you are given a treasure map. If you follow that map and it guides you in truth all the way until you find the exact treasure it promised, then on what basis do you conclude the map was wrong? Especially with teams of people testing the map and finding it more accurate than any other map of any kind from it's error. Can you imagine the frustration that a person must have trying to be patient with a person who never used the map declaring it is false? All Christians I know of are very aware of the historical corroborations on one end and are perfectly aware of the treasure they received after using the map at the other end. I am sure there are many that do have faith but are not aware of either but I do not consider them as Christians because Christ didn't. And since there are hundreds of millions of Christians of the type I mentioned any the simply swallow faith whole are not evidence of anything being unjustified. This is also a genetic fallacy by the way. Unlike others I do not yell fallacy and then hit send. I point out why it is incorrect.

All I know is that if I were ordering parts from a place and discovered that they were always 100% faulty, I’d probably stop ordering parts from that place.

100% failure is extraordinary but not unheard of in prototype instruments. In fact I would have expected it if not in drop in replacement instruments. They are new but they are also functionally identical to existing instruments. Trust me when I say failure rates of 50% plus are a norm. Even in the military we hade similar failure rates at times even after companies like this mine had gotten most of the kinks out.

Good for you. And if a whole bunch of scientists hadn’t come before you and established the groundwork for you, you wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on.

I agree in principle but most of the knowledge I use is self taught and not mathematical or technical. I just have developed a feel for troubleshooting. Many times I do not even know why I suspect a certain part until much later. I would of course not have a DAC to fix if they did not build it, but fixing it has nothing to do with Newton's, Da Vincis, and especially Hawkings. Unless you are in development an engineering degree is only a rite of passage. You do next to nothing with it. IN fact even in design my father was one of the NASA Apollo engineers that designed it's boosters and he only had a 2 year drafting degree. Now he is teaching geometrical tolerancong and dimensioning to Nasa and at the college I went to without a degree. He was one of the last that could do that without a degree.

I claim there is some evidence that makes it at least a possibility that other universes may exist. And there is some preliminary evidence that indicates it’s a POSSIBILITY. That’s it. I’ve never said it’s a done deal. In fact, I’ve said “I don’t know” many times.

If you had not said other universes I would have agreed. I do not think there is any evidence that makes another universe more likely. Your life from non-life evidence was much better if still woefully inadequate.

I also claim that there is evidence that indicates it is possible for life to come from non-life, given the right circumstances. And there is plenty of it.
I’m a person who follows where the evidence leads. I take nothing on blind faith. I don’t have it in me.

I agree it is theoretically possible. There are many reasons and better to think it didn't but I cannot rule it's possibility out. However a theory that devoid of evidence is not an effective counter to creation.

I have been generous. Let me get this over with. Every single thing you think you know or might know, or even considered possible is in some part based on faith. Nothing is known for certainty other than we think and many from your side even deny that. So lets just get that out of the way up front. You believe things you do not have any capacity to know them. I admit that we must assume many things to make any progress but I still am the only one that will admit that simple fact.

The source and foundation for our rights is ourselves. What you really mean to say is I have no authority which is a different thing. I don’t think we have to follow the commands of some divine authority figure which may or may not exist, to be able to understand how and why morality is important to us.
Atoms produce all kinds of things, including brains.

1. Even if that were possible it would be matter of faith. I see no rights you posses inherently and neither did even Jefferson unless God was included. You may like to think you have rights but that cannot be true or even defended without God.
2. Rights must be possessed by something in order to grant them. You came into this world possessing nothing if there is no soul anyway. You nor any government has rights stacked in a warehouse to bestow on anything. In fact everything including your body can be stripped completely from you. Only God can ultimately bestow inherent rights that even temporarily impeded are never the less true eternally.
3. The fact that no one has rights to grant is obvious by the fact that governments are tasked with protecting rights not bestowing them. People and institutions cannot grant rights, they are only required to not take them away. I can take every right you think you have away from you unless God restores what I have taken in an eternal sense. So in what way do you have anything without God?


Atoms arranged in even impressive ways do not have the power to create moral truth. They can apparently imperfectly apprehend moral truth but they can never create it. Without God there are no morals to detect.

 

[1robin]

I'm suggesting it may be a nonsensical term.

What does nothing look like? How can we measure nothing? Do we have any examples of nothing? How can we know that nothing can even exist?

I have no idea why the term that indicates the absence of something would be non-sensical.

What does love look like?
How can we measure beauty?
The entirety of reality contains much more nothing than something.
We know that nothing can exist because we know that everything began to exist.

If you have a perfect vacuum insulated from all energy fields is it something?
The thing we do know is impossible is an eternal or infinite something. That is not an option.

 

[idav]

If you have a perfect vacuum insulated from all energy fields is it something?
The thing we do know is impossible is an eternal or infinite something. That is not an option.

Yeah I don't think we can honestly say we know even that much.
After all time stands still outside of space-time.

 

[1robin]

When did I make a claim? I'm just pointing out that is the only oddity that has been argued regarding the crucifixion. At best what scholars will agree on is up to the point where Jesus was crucified everything after that is left to the Gospels without much historical information outside of them if any.

I recognized you may not be making the claim that usually inspires the one you did make after I had completed my post. I reasoned that if I was mistaken you would indicate that.

That is not the point at which scholars stop.

They go on to include (to only mention a few) that the tomb was found empty and that he appeared to even his enemies.

 

[1robin]

Yeah I don't think we can honestly say we know even that much.
After all time stands still outside of space-time.

Time does not exist outside of space. Time is related to change. It usually is used to indicate duration. If nothing exists to move time has little meaning. I will clarify my claims slightly. We have no current reason to think any natural infinite is possible.

 

[idav]

We have no current reason to think any natural infinite is possible.

I disagree. I think that special relativity makes it a possibility. Gravity and velocity can warp space-time to the point of being in a standstill. That's another way of saying eternity lies outside of space-time. We are obviously temporal but we are also in the midst of warped space-time but not completely free from it unless we had the energy potential of the speed of light. Power and energy are that powerful, we are not, at least not at the macro level.