Timeline for What logical preconditions would guarantee that a book is of divine origin?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 5, 2017 at 8:41 | comment | added | nir | @user6552, How did you conclude that I don't recognize the limitations of knowledge, or that I believe in a personal God? to the extent that I understood what you mean by these claims, they are both false. | |
| Jan 5, 2017 at 5:35 | comment | added | user6552 | @nir I have great tolerance as long as the types, sources and limitations of knowledge are recognized, which they are not by you and anyone else who believes in a personal god. What you did, what all arguments for god do, is like we were in court, and you claim the defendant is a witch. "...you suffer from Tourette syndrome" The religious are so predictable, I could have guessed you would turn into a expert mind-reader/psychoanalyst in order to deflect the discussion away from your mistakes. | |
| Jan 3, 2017 at 10:31 | comment | added | nir | @user6552, ...anyway I assure you that your insults have none of the intended effects on me, and therefore I propose that you try the path of a civil discussion. Finally, I believe it is for your own good since more often than not people who are exposed to such exchanges perceive the side delivering the insults as rude and idiotic. you almost had me convinced that you are an idiot, but luckily I read the fine answer you posted to the OP and realized that you can actually think and express your self beautifully when you want to. | |
| Jan 3, 2017 at 10:19 | comment | added | nir | @user6552, there are many things that people consider to be dangerous. For example, I am particularly worried about the epidemical incapacity of people to exchange ideas in a civil manner, and intolerance in general, and in particular by people who consider them selves to be enlightened or wiser than others — samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse. using insults to provoke or promote critical thinking can work up to a point, however my feeling is that you are totally abusing this method — in fact to the point of suspecting that maybe you suffer from Tourette syndrome. | |
| Jan 3, 2017 at 9:18 | comment | added | user6552 | @nir "...very poor substitute for a proper argument" And you're not even using the correct tools to form your "argument". Philosophy is weak, completely unsuitable, and proven unreliable for all but the most low-hanging fruit of knowledge and yet religious people insist that it be used for the biggest questions like origins and universes. It's simply insane. Not just by my intuition, the history of science has PROVEN how unreliable it is. | |
| Jan 3, 2017 at 9:14 | comment | added | user6552 | @nir Myths deserve to be insulted and make fun of when they are anti-science/reality and potentially dangerous, like people believing evil spirits cause illness. If you think there aren't 1000's of modern examples like that which are equally dangerous you're just delusional. Embarrassing, insulting, and joking is a proven effective non-violent way of getting people to think. People who over-use philosophy or prioritize it over science deserve to be ridiculed. Would you try a new drug on your child if there was only philosophy behind it? I think not. | |
| Jan 1, 2017 at 4:29 | comment | added | nir | @user6552, ...more insults. I wonder what function they have. | |
| Jan 1, 2017 at 2:06 | comment | added | user6552 | @nir I give a clear sentence of science why you are wrong and you give 3 paragraphs of irrelevant philosophy. Logic, math, philosophy, are worth nothing compared to empiricism done properly. I fail to see how I was insulting but if I was you deserve it for that ridiculous nonsense and wasting everyone's time with your irrelevant biblical myths. Maybe you should surround yourself with people who actually care about truth instead of head nodding and emotional support, and you will be more thick-skinned and not see everything as an insult. | |
| Dec 31, 2016 at 20:39 | comment | added | nir | @user6552, I believe that the use of insults is a very poor substitute for a proper argument. | |
| Dec 31, 2016 at 20:19 | comment | added | user6552 | @nir I stopped reading after "wave length seems irrelevant to me" because I already explained why it's relevant, and I did it in one sentence, unlike you droning on with 3 irrelevant paragraphs. It's relevant, either think harder or ask the right person to give you the background that your science teachers failed to give you. With an unscientific poetic interpretation you can make any creation myth match any science or pseudoscience you want. To the creationist, words and ideas are like ingredients they mix together in a soup that must taste good, irrespective of evidence or truth. | |
| Dec 31, 2016 at 7:56 | comment | added | nir | ...and I don't know if the part about the early atmosphere's translucency has any basis. Why would Genesis predate light, and plants to the creation/appearance of the Sun and the stars? It does not appear to make simple sense. At both extremes, there are people who don't care - a religious person may say, it is simply the word of God, it is nonsensical to try to justify it scientifically, and a secular person may say that it is all nonsense so why bother looking for such correlations. nevertheless I personally find it extremely interesting, and I would not mind a good secular explanation. | |
| Dec 31, 2016 at 7:47 | comment | added | nir | ...then the animals. A religious person motivated to find correlates between Genesis and science, might propose the following: early after the creation of the universe there was light, then the earth formed, then the seas, then life started in the form of bacteria, then photosynthesis (which Genesis refers to as plants), then the oxygen crisis and the clearing up of the atmosphere, which made the sun and moon visible, then the animals (sea-monsters, possibly referring to dinosaurs?) It is admittedly shaky. For example in Genesis the Sun and stars are said to be created, not just visible... | |
| Dec 31, 2016 at 7:36 | comment | added | nir | @user6552, right and wrong. In Genesis God proclaims "Let there be light" and according to the Wikipedia "In physics, the term light sometimes refers to electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength, whether visible or not." So your point about its wave length seems irrelevant to me. Now, one may wonder the order of creation in genesis is light, then plants, then the sun and moon, and then the living creatures and the "sea-monsters" (sefaria.org/Genesis.1/en/…). After all the reasonable order would be sun, light, plants and... | |
| Dec 31, 2016 at 1:13 | comment | added | user6552 | @nir The photons you speak of are not all between 400-700 nm. They can be x-rays, gamma rays (deadly to life) or radio (invisible to life). The more important point is that plants require a nearby stable source of visible light photons that can only be produced by a main sequence G2V type star like the sun. | |
| Nov 23, 2016 at 11:56 | comment | added | nir | This answer reminds me of a passage from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. In the book Dostoevsky who was a religious person asks: "God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day. Where did the light come from on the first day?" Today scientists believe that photons indeed preceded the creation of stars in a so called Photon Epoch which started 10 seconds after the Big Bang. | |
| Sep 3, 2014 at 23:44 | comment | added | user6552 | Making a claim using general language (using the common meaning of "predict" instead of the much stricter type used in science) and leaving out details that science would never exclude, one can say that any X predicts any Y. In your linguistic sloppiness you have either lost intellectual integrity or exposed your ignorance of science. Neither the Quran, Bible or any other such text makes any predictions about the natural world even close to the standard of truth, evidence, non-ambiguity, explicit details and linguistic consistency that the most badly written scientific literature maintains. | |
| Sep 3, 2014 at 21:23 | comment | added | user6552 | "In the beginning" is no more remarkable than randomly guessing 1 of 3 choices correctly. The only three possibilities (4 if you split the last case into two sub-cases) for the nature of time are finite, infinite in both directions or infinite in one direction. It is even less remarkable considering a goal of religious text is to capture the readers' attention and "in the middle/end" would leave him wondering what happened in the beginning and why is this dumb-ass author not starting in the proper place. | |
| Apr 7, 2014 at 7:59 | comment | added | Neil Meyer | Any book claiming to inspired and predicting scientific discoveries by three thousand years has a good case for being inspired. | |
| Apr 1, 2014 at 19:16 | comment | added | Dave | Any book that starts with "In the beginning ..." is written by (a) god? | |
| May 26, 2013 at 9:55 | history | answered | Neil Meyer | CC BY-SA 3.0 |