JackC

I think the clue is in the question.

You're not quite evil enough. You're semi-evil. You're quasi-evil. You're the margarine of evil. You're the Diet Coke of evil, just one calorie, not evil enough. ~ Dr Evil

I don't think faith is a particularly commendable attribute so unless god or his earthly representatives comes up with some evidence, I'm hell bound. Isn't that nice. You'd think an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god would at least fart in my general direction so save me from hell.

That's what I would need. Not necessarily the shining cross, but to take faith out of the equation, ie I'd need some evidence. I don't think that's unreasonable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK7n1Q-fDeA

You are a sick man. I hope for your sake that you can get to a doctor before it's too late. Yeah, everyone knows Vegemite is a piss poor substitute for Marmite.

Can you provide a link to a scientifically provable argument that concludes we have no free will please? Your profile says you are a scientist (although a mad one which I assume is a joke), so I expect you to know what a scientific argument is and the standards that are required for proof. Perhaps you can then explain why as a scientist after reading this alleged proof(!), you do not believe it and instead defer to you your fallible internal experience?

The first one. Does god exist? I went to church as a kid and often thought that it must be a wind up. The story just smelled like BS to me even at 6 years old. But since everyone else knew better about most things, I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Eventually I went to university and learned how the world really worked. God didn't fit with anything you can actually measure in any real sense. So I wondered if I could take what god was supposed to be and see if it made sense. It didn't. So I wondered if you could make sense of any kind of spiritual experience at all. I couldn't do that either. The more I read, the less sense it made. So I came back to the big wind up theory. That made sense.

When I started asking questions, it wasn't long before god vanished completely.

Now that is the funniest thing I've seen all week. I've got to hand it to you guys, you've got ironic comedy perfected.

But... but... he's a short, hairy, talentless gonk... What's that about?

I think you're missing the point. Many atheists have read about the subject, in depth. The fact that we have read, and thought, and read, and thought some more and still found that it is unconvincing has lead us to the position we now take. Simply rereading the same tired old arguments over and over will not make them any more convincing. In decades of trying, I have yet to come across one single "spiritual truth" that stands up to scrutiny. Heck, even pinning down exactly what a "spiritual truth" is, is virtually impossible. The simple fact that after all this time, effort, thought and debate, that the whole subject is still an incoherent shitstorm of a mess is probably the biggest single reason that I've come to the conclusion that it's grade one bullshit. Perhaps you are just annoyed that showing up the flaws in religion actually will fit on a bumper sticker.

I used to walk across the workshop with a watering can and find some unsuspecting schmuck and fill their pockets with water.

Rubbish, a universe with an active god would be very different from a universe without a god. And that difference is a scientific difference. But then of course, there is the non-interventionist 'first cause' God. How do you disprove that? Demonstrate that it is not neccesary, sure, but disprove? Hence my use of the word active. Non-interventionist gods are outside of what we can know, for both scientists and theists alike. It's scientifically meaningless to postulate gods that exist outside of the universe since we can never test anything or know anything about them. Gods that write books are fair game though. Nevertheless, if evidence for god were made available, science would investigate and religions would jump on it.

Rubbish, a universe with an active god would be very different from a universe without a god. And that difference is a scientific difference. If science came up with some evidence for god, every religion under the sun would be all over it. Likewise, if someone came up with a testable hypothesis for god, someone will test it scientifically. Prayer for example is one religious theory that's been tested up the wazoo. It's not that god isn't the realm of science, it's that science has quite rightly realised that god is a waste of time.

I was listening to the radio a while ago and the subject was advertising for casinos. The host and his guest, a professor of some kind, were discussing the governments request for some form of warning on the adverts and the radio host said "but surely you'd have to be a complete moron not to realise that you could lose money gambling?". To which the professor replied "quite, but some people are complete morons". Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. Any bampot idea you care to float and there is some stupid bastard out there who will buy into it, no matter how idiotic it is. The fact that people will believe any old crap in no way suggests that said crap is true.

It does happen that's for sure. But it's not like there is an SI Standard Nutter, a nutter by which all other nutters can be calibrated. The line between "reasonable" and "cognitively unhealthy" isn't universally defined. An otherwise certifiable schizophrenic is just a fundamentalist if it's god they delude themselves about. A part time heroin user might be completely normal in appearence and socially functional in all respects. But it is quite possible that somewhere down the line they will become smack addict extraordinare. Maybe that was an analogy too far.

Slight problem with that. You can't prove the X doesn't exist anywhere in the universe. It's not provable. Even when X is a gigantic purple teapot orbiting saturn. Is believing in the purple teapot faith or delusion? I agree. There is a continuum of states between 100% sane and 100% psychotic. Unfounded belief (faith) is not necessarily a problem. I would say that a belief only becomes cognitively unhealthy when the believer's free will and normal critical processes have been damaged by doctrine. It becomes a mental disorder when it causes believers to deny empirical evidence (ie reality) in favour of an irrational unyeilding faith.

I get on well with the old Flight Unlimited series by Looking Glass Technologies. I still think 1 was the best as it was an aerobatic simulator but it was a DOS program. The next 2 were general aviation sims. You should be able to pick up Flight Unlimited III (the last one) for peanuts though. Plugins are a bit rare though. I've not tried anything by MS other than Flight Simulator 2000 and Combat Flight Simulator, FU3 is way better.

It's a doozie isn't it. Someone on this forum, I forget who but I think they had some psychiatric training, said that a person who hears voices (auditory halucinations) would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenic. Unless they were religious, then hearing god would not be considered abnormal. If you look it up, the American Psychological Association's DSM-IV describes delusional schizophrenia as involving a profound disruption in cognition and emotion, assigning unusual significance or meaning to normal events and holding fixed false personal beliefs. For the life of me I can't see why religion gets a free pass on this one. If there are any psychiatrists out there that can explain it to me, I'd be grateful. The only thing I can think of is that a diagnosis of schizophrenia could land you in hot water as the patient's religious beliefs are constitutionally protected.

Do aneurysms hurt? I think I might be having one.

In the immortal words of Wolfgang Pauli when faced with a remarkably dumb paper, "That's not right, it's not even wrong". Seriously Paj, do you even know what any of this shit means? Either Sarfati is being deliberately misleading or he really doesn't know what he's talking about. I'd suggest you look up vacuum energy renormalisation but I doubt you'd understand it, Sarfati obviously doesn't. Erm no. Raman spectroscopy uses the interaction of photons with phonons in a solid, which is obviously not a vaccum. The bands come from the allowed quantum energy changes in the material. You wouldn't get Raman bands from a vaccum. Again, Sarfati is full of shite. This is such a dumb argument it beggars belief. Obviously, Sarfati has never looked up the anthropic principle. If this universe wasn't here, we wouldn't be here to have this conversation. The only universe we can possibly know anything about, and have a discussion about, is the one we happen to be in. If banana-cat universe was the one to exist, the inhabitants of banana-cat universe would probably be having the same discussion about our universe. Did this guy really get a PhD? I dunno about him burning his, if they hand out PhD's to morons like this, I think I'll burn mine. Honestly, this stuff is so bat shit fucking bonkers it's enough to give me an aneurysm.

And yours is based on the assumption that something came from nothing, blew up, and became an organized everything. No. Something has been observed to come from nothing, see Casimir Effect. The universe has been observed to be expanding, see cosmic microwave background and red shift. Stuff has been observed to get organised all on it's own, see crystal growth. The theories are self-consistent, based on empirical data, with real testable predictions. You have no empirical data, no self-consistent theories and no testable predictions. You lose.

Sorry to burst your bubble but they don't. Religion is the antithesis of science. Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence but its independence from evidence is a source of great pride and joy. Why else would Christians be so critical of doubting Thomas? The other apostles are cited as role models because faith was enough for them. But not Doubting Thomas, he wanted evidence. Are you suggesting that you were once "aquainted"? Will you put the same effort into studying physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, paleontology, cosmology, astronomy, archaeology...? It always puzzled me why God, in his infinite wisdom, decided that he would get his autobiography ghost-written by a bunch of semi-literate bronze-age nomads, in the full knowledge that people would have to invent a special technique called hermeneutics, specifically designed for interpreting religious texts, in order to make head or tails of his piss poor prose. It's a schoolboy error.

You are justified by faith. That's got nothing to do with how much evidence there is. okay... Your "evidence" relys on the assumption that the world was created. That's begging the question. You cannot assume X in order to prove X.