A number of thorium reactors have been built since 1960, starting with the thorium-based nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a few research reactors are in operation today. Today, thorium is seen by some as a thousand year solution to energy and environmental problems, but one that is offset by high start-up costs and a number of technical hurdles.
String theory suggests that the big bang was not the origin of the universe but simply the outcome of a preexisting state.
Philosophers, theologians and scientists have long debated whether time is eternal or finite—that is, whether the universe has always existed or whether it had a definite genesis. Einstein's general theory of relativity implies finiteness. An expanding universe must have begun at the big bang.
Yet general relativity ceases to be valid in the vicinity of the bang because quantum mechanics comes into play. The leading candidate for a full quantum theory of gravity—string theory—introduces a minimal quantum of length as a new fundamental constant of nature, making the very concept of a bangian genesis untenable.
The bang still took place, but it did not involve a moment of infinite density, and the universe may have predated it. The symmetries of string theory suggest that time did not have a beginning and will not have an end. The universe could have begun almost empty and built up to the bang, or it might even have gone through a cycle of death and rebirth.
Fred Adams (2019) cautions against claims that the universe is extremely fine-tuned for life. According to him, the range of parameters for which the universe would have been habitable is quite considerable. In addition, as he sees it, the universe could have been more, rather than less, life-friendly. Notably, if the vacuum energy density had been smaller, the primordial fluctuations (quantified by Q) had been larger, the baryon-to-photon ratio had been larger, the strong force had been slightly stronger, and gravity slightly weaker, there might have been more opportunities for life to develop (Adams 2019: sect. 10.3). If Adams is right, our universe may just be garden-variety habitable rather than maximally life-supporting.
“The more I study science, the more I believe in God.” ~Einstein 1929
"The word 'God' is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses;" - Einstein 1954
Albert Einstein 1954, "The word 'God' is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses; the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,"
In Hinduism, Shri Krishna showed Arjuna his Celestial appearance (Vishwa-swaroopa) and proved that he was God. Lord Rama had legendary powers, but chose not to use them. He defeated evil as a mortal and not as a God. They both showed that the real power comes from within and belief in the Para-Brahman.
Lord Shiva is the most powerful God in Hinduism, not because he has the third eye. It is because he IS Para-Brahman. He is infinite. He controls the flow of time. He is master of death. He is the very breath that we take and give out. He is the cosmic destroyer.
“Ananta koti Brahmandanayaka “ Literally means ‘O Lord of infinite crore Universes.’ Someone who is existent yet non-existant and who is capable of taking out an infinite number of universes by just opening his third eye is kind of hard to beat, don't you think?
From: Bsh1's Guide to Voting using the 7-point System
Now, that doesn’t mean you need to write pages upon pages for your RFD. Oftentimes a lengthy paragraph will suffice. As long as you touch upon everything you need to, your RFD is long enough. And, remember, longer doesn’t mean better. Long RFDs can be just as bad as RFDs that are a sentence long; quality should be emphasized over quantity.
In this debate this is the definition of God: The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent God of the bible. Con shows that a omnibenevolent God does not exist. Con states: Contention I: Gratuitous evils
p1. If God exists, there would be no gratuitous evils (GE).
p2. There are gratuitous evils in the world.
c1. God does not exist.
p1. is true by virtue of truism. By definition, a GE is a type of evil of which creates no good. A GE does not lead to virtue, does not teach a lesson, and is completely unjust. A GE definitionally cannot be cannot be justified by "free will" or "compensation in a latter life", for such would be a God justified good. By definition, a GE is inexcusably immoral. Thus, as God is omnibenevolent (all loving, infinitely loving) he would not allow gratuitous evil to occur.
Pro states: Me: I will agree that gratuitous evils do exist.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Confederate flag is a hate symbol. They say: In 1860-61, eleven southern states seceded from the United States to protect the institution of slavery, forming the Confederate States of America and precipitating the Civil War. During the war, the Confederacy and its military forces used a variety of flags, but the flag that became most associated with the Confederacy was the so-called "battle flag." Organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans adopted the flag as a symbol of Southern heritage but the flag also served as a potent symbol of slavery and white supremacy, which has caused it to be very popular among white supremacists in the 20th and 21st centuries. This popularity extends to white supremacists beyond the borders of the United States.
I will bet that Payton Gendron had one in his room.
What most people don't realize (it seems) is that the fallacy known as Appeal to Authority only refers to when someone cites as the rightful authority something or someone who is not. That is, when it is an appeal to a false authority.
If the authority is legitimate, arguing from authority is the most valid argument possible—the definitive argument.
Some supporters of the multiverse claim they have found real physical evidence for the multiverse. Joseph Polchinski of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Andrei Linde of Stanford University—some of the theoretical physicists who dreamed up the current model of inflation and how it leads to island universes—say the proof is encoded in our cosmos.This cosmos is huge, smooth and flat, just like inflation says it should be. “It took some time before we got used to the idea that the large size, flatness, isotropy and uniformity of the universe should not be dismissed as trivial facts of life,” Linde wrote in a paper that appeared on arXiv.org in December. “Instead of that, they should be considered as experimental data requiring an explanation, which was provided with the invention of inflation.”
Similarly, our universe seems fine tuned to be favorable to life, with its Goldilocks expansion rate that’s not too fast or too slow, an electron that’s not too big, a proton that has the exact opposite charge but the same mass as a neutron and a four-dimensional space in which we can live. If the electron or proton were, for example, one percent larger, beings could not be. What are the chances that all those properties would align to create a nice piece of real estate for biology to form and evolve?
In a universe that is, in fact, the only universe, the chances are vanishingly small. But in an eternally inflating multiverse, it is certain that one of the universes should turn out like ours. Each island universe can have different physical laws and fundamentals. Given infinite mutations, a universe on which humans can be born will be born. The multiverse actually explains why we’re here. And our existence, therefore, helps explain why the multiverse is plausible.
One of the most successful theories of 20th century science is cosmic inflation, which preceded and set up the hot Big Bang. We also know how quantum fields generally work, and if inflation is a quantum field (which we strongly suspect it is), then there will always be more "still-inflating" space out there. Whenever and wherever inflation ends, you get a hot Big Bang. If inflation and quantum field theory are both correct, a Multiverse is a must.
Scientists have reacted strongly to suggestions that creationist views be taught alongside scientific theories. Dawkins and Coyne (2005) have stated emphatically that there is no place in a science classroom for creationism. If science instructors were to take the “10 min to exhaust the case for (Intelligent Design)” (Dawkins and Coyne, 2005, One side may be wrong, para. 20) then they lend legitimacy to creationism by its mere presence in the science classroom. This is consistent with Grayling’s (2014) position that broadening the conversation to include non-scientific approaches validates those non-scientific approaches and provides them with institutionalized importance. Scott (2007) warns teachers about the potential incursion of “Teach the Controversy” policies that may affect curriculum: Under the guise of recommendations to teach critical thinking, these proposals present the false view that there is any question about whether evolution occurs. She writes:
It might be a useful critical thinking exercise for students to debate actual scientific disputes about patterns and processes of evolution, as long as they have a solid grounding in the basic science required…It would, however, not be a good critical thinking exercise to teach students that scientists are debating whether evolution takes place: on the contrary, it would be gross miseducation to instruct students that the validity of one of the strongest scientific theories is being questioned. (Scott, 2007, pp. 313–314)
I am grarteful Rational Madman has agreed to this debate.
I Argument: Debate no-votes should be abolished
I.a As noted in Description, 4% of all debates on DART result in finished debates of no-vote, resulting in a tie.[1] I am not opposed to debates ending in a tie in which there are multiple votes, but to allow a debate to dwindle in interest such that there is no member or moderator vote after the voting phase has reached its calendar end countdown is a shame and a disservice to both participants.
I.b I recognize that some debates concern subjects that are either disagreeable, absurd, whimsical, offensive, unpopular, and other adjectives, but if a member has proposed a debate that passes the muster of DART debate policy, and another member has agreed to debate the subject, I believe the debate ought to attract the concern of at least one other member/moderator sufficient to want to see a worthy outcome for the participants’ effort.
I.c In the process of accruing the stat of no-votes for the 1,150 finished debates [45 voteless debates], I noted as well approximately 180 – 200 debates having just 1 vote, making this issue more like in excess of 15% with very limited voting. I do not necessarily argue against one-vote debates, but I am in favor of imposing that no debate conclude in a no-vote tie.
Abraham, Jacob, Moses, King David, and King Solomon in all his splendour, never existed, a 15-year study of archaeological evidence has concluded.
The study—by Professor Thomas Thompson, one of the world’s foremost authorities on biblical archaeology—says that the first 10 books of the Old Testament are almost certainly fiction, written between 500 and 1,500 years after the events they purport to describe. Professor Thompson’s claims, outlined in a new book, The Early History of the Israelite People, are being taken seriously by scholars.
The British Museum’s leading expert on the archaeology of the Holy Land, Jonathan Tubb, said last week: “Professor Thompson may well be right in many of his arguments. His book is a work of tremendous scholarship. He has been meticulous in his research, and brave in expressing what many of us have thought intuitively for a long time but have been reticent in saying.”
Professor Thompson—from Marquette University in Milwaukee [and the University of Copenhagen]—says that there is a complete absence of archaeological and historical evidence for many events portrayed in the Bible. The inevitable conclusion, he argues, is that the Israelite exile in Egypt, the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land never took place.
The following is a comment by Michelle Thaller who was ranked as one of the 10 greatest living scientists in the world today.
MICHELLE THALLER: Chris, you ask the question about how religion affects our view of the cosmos. And the first thing I think about is simply the history of being human. There were so many things about the universe that we didn't understand. Thousands of years ago, we watched the seasons change or we observed things like thunderstorms and we had no idea, we didn't have the scientific knowledge to explain these things. And so it seems like a very natural, understandable, human instinct to try to ascribe these things to Gods, to beings that are so much more powerful than us we can barely comprehend them. And that sort of way of interpreting nature as spirits and things that are much more powerful than us I find very beautiful. Then, of course, what happens is you learn, you learn what causes lightning. The ancient Scandinavians might have said it was the god Thor actually causing lightning. Well we know it's not Thor – it actually has to do with friction inside clouds and generating electric charges. We understand now why the Sun shines and why the seasons change.
Exodus 20:11
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Isn't this one of the most ridiculous statements ever made by man?
Fred Adams (2019) cautions against claims that the universe is extremely fine-tuned for life. According to him, the range of parameters for which the universe would have been habitable is quite considerable. In addition, as he sees it, the universe could have been more, rather than less, life-friendly. Notably, if the vacuum energy density had been smaller, the primordial fluctuations (quantified by Q) had been larger, the baryon-to-photon ratio had been larger, the strong force had been slightly stronger, and gravity slightly weaker, there might have been more opportunities for life to develop (Adams 2019: sect. 10.3). If Adams is right, our universe may just be garden-variety habitable rather than maximally life-supporting.
The future is actually Nuclear Fusion power. Fusion does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short.
If you think about it, you will realize that there is no difference between God and Leprechauns. Lots of people talk about God as though he exists, but there is no actual evidence for God's existence. And there should be, because there are many positive claims in the definition of God. For example:
God has never left any physical evidence of his existence on earth.
All historical gods were imaginary and we know it.
None of Jesus' "miracles" left any physical evidence either.
God has never spoken to modern man, for example by taking over all the television stations and broadcasting a rational message to everyone.
The resurrected Jesus has never appeared to anyone in a provable way.
The Bible we have is provably incorrect and is obviously the work of primitive men rather than God.
When we analyze prayer with statistics, we find no evidence that God is "answering prayers."
Huge, amazing atrocities like the Holocaust and AIDS occur without any response from God.
And so on.
There is absolutely no evidence indicating that God exists. There is a tremendous amount of empirical evidence that God does not exist. For example, God is defined as a prayer-answering being, but we know with certainty that the belief in prayer is a superstition. Therefore we can conclusively say that God is imaginary.
If something does not exist , there will be no evidence of it’s existence. But there can be Evidence of it’s absence, and hence can be proved it doesn’t exist.
A perfectly good creator of the universe is the best argument of proof of no god.
Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn't add up. There are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus' historical existence. Hence Atheism is more reasonable.
A good refutation of Con's origins of the Universe is in the book, God: The Failed Hypothesis, where physicist Victor Stenger argues that science has advanced sufficiently to make a definitive statement on the existence or nonexistence of the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. He invites readers to put their minds—and the scientific method—to work to test this claim.
After evaluating all the scientific evidence—the studies done by reputable institutions on the power of prayer; the writings of philosophers who have puzzled over the problem of God and of good and evil; the efforts of biblical scholars to prove the accuracy of holy scriptures; and the work of biologists, geologists, and astronomers looking for clues to a creator on Earth and in the cosmos—Stenger concludes that beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God. He convincingly shows that not only is there no evidence for the existence of God, but scientific observations actually point to his nonexistence.
All modern humans are classified into the species Homo sapiens — a term first coined by Carl Linnaeus in his 18th-century publication Systema Naturae. The only extant member of H. sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago.
It should be interesting how Pro explains that the earliest fossils that scientists are relatively sure are animals come from around 550 million years ago.
gugigor states that Con's argument falls apart because he has not given one single example, study, expert, news, about people banding together to dislike just because they dislike. Actually, he got Ragnar to remove my vote to show people banding together to like just because they like.
YT's new policy comes after Google’s video service launched an experiment earlier this year to see if removing the count would protect content creators from harassment and campaigns that purposely drove up dislikes on a clip.
“In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior,” the company said.
Is the reality of pediatric cancer unbelievably fine-tuned? Perhaps reality is simply a distribution of "stuff", endowed with certain properties, through time and through space. What we call the laws of nature are then just patterns within this Humean mosaic (named after the philosopher David Hume). This is the idea behind best systems analysis, an approach developed largely by the American philosopher David Lewis in the second half of the twentieth century. It may be attractive to physicists troubled by the question of how something abstract and outside of the Universe can govern the motions of bodies inside it.
Scientists found that damage in a certain part of the brain is linked to an increase in religious fundamentalism. In particular, lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduced cognitive flexibility – the ability to challenge our beliefs based on new evidence. This again refutes Con's statement that lacking the quality of being religious cannot possibly be productive or good for science
Con states in his arguments that Just lacking the quality of being religious cannot possibly be productive or good for science. On the other hand, being theistic can fill one with a passion and curiosity as they feel they are uncovering the work of a sacred deity. This is refuted by the following argument. In 2012 three articles published by labs in the USA and Canada presented the first evidence linking an analytical, logical thinking style to unbelief. Psychologists have been theorising about different ways that brains process information for a long time: conscious versus unconscious, reflective versus experiential, analytical versus intuitive. These are linked to activity in certain brain areas, and can be triggered by stimuli including art. The researchers asked participants to contemplate Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, and then assessed their analytical thinking and disbelief in god. They found that those who had viewed the sculpture performed better on the analytical thinking task and reported less belief in god than people who hadn’t seen the image.
What a fantastic theme for a debate. Who ever wins should think about hosting a tv show based on that religion. You should also get a woman cohost that would have coal-black streaks of mascara that would run down her eyelids.
Evolutionary biologists generally agree that humans and other living species are descended from bacterialike ancestors. But before about two billion years ago, human ancestors branched off.
This new group, called eukaryotes, also gave rise to other animals, plants, fungi and protozoans. The differences between eukaryotes and other organisms, known as prokaryotes, are numerous and profound. Dr. Lynch, a biologist at Indiana University, is one of many scientists pondering how those differences evolved.
Eukaryotes are big, compared with prokaryotes. Even a single-celled protozoan may be thousands of times as big as a typical bacterium. The differences are even more profound when you look at the DNA. The eukaryote genome is downright baroque. It is typically much bigger and carries many more genes.
Eukaryotes can do more with their genes, too. They can switch genes on and off in complex patterns to control where and when they make proteins. And they can make many proteins from a single gene.
That is because eukaryote genes are segmented into what are called exons. Exons are interspersed with functionless stretches of DNA known as introns. Human cells edit out the introns when they copy a gene for use in building a protein. But a key ability is that they can also edit out exons, meaning that they can make different proteins from the same gene. This versatility means that eukaryotes can build different kinds of cells, tissues and organs, without which humans would look like bacteria.
From the Brookings Institution: “Defund the police” means reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple. Defund does not mean abolish policing. And, even some who say abolish, do not necessarily mean to do away with law enforcement altogether. Rather, they want to see the rotten trees of policing chopped down and fresh roots replanted anew. Camden, New Jersey, is a good example. Nearly a decade ago, Camden disbanded (abolished) its police force and dissolved the local police union. This approach seems to be what Minneapolis will do in some form, though the nuances are important.
This is for someone else. You are right, I have been reading too many of EtrnlVw's comments. I actually think you are an intelligent person. My point was 360 circles placed within each other, one degree apart would give the appearennce of a sphere.
You are right, I have been reading too many of EtrnlVw's comments. I actually think you are an intelligent person. My point was 360 circles placed within each other, one degree apart would give the appearennce of a sphere.
The modern Christian does not adhere to the teachings of the Bible except, as they so often derisively say, by a "pick-and-choose" method. This is inevitable because the teachings of the Bible are scattershot and mostly impracticable. Modern Christians routinely disregard arcane Old-Testament laws — and then accept other ancient prescriptions as God's own self-evident will.
Your comment 'After 31,500 generations, the only significant beneficial feature that E. coli evolved was the ability to eat citrate in the presence of oxygen." does not make any sense relative to the billions of years that it has been around. This is a time span of only 14 years since the E. coli long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) is an ongoing study in experimental evolution led by Richard Lenski that has been tracking genetic changes in 12 initially identical populations of asexual Escherichia coli bacteria since 24 February 1988. The populations reached the milestone of 50,000 generations in February 2010 which is 22 years.
A number of thorium reactors have been built since 1960, starting with the thorium-based nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a few research reactors are in operation today. Today, thorium is seen by some as a thousand year solution to energy and environmental problems, but one that is offset by high start-up costs and a number of technical hurdles.
String theory suggests that the big bang was not the origin of the universe but simply the outcome of a preexisting state.
Philosophers, theologians and scientists have long debated whether time is eternal or finite—that is, whether the universe has always existed or whether it had a definite genesis. Einstein's general theory of relativity implies finiteness. An expanding universe must have begun at the big bang.
Yet general relativity ceases to be valid in the vicinity of the bang because quantum mechanics comes into play. The leading candidate for a full quantum theory of gravity—string theory—introduces a minimal quantum of length as a new fundamental constant of nature, making the very concept of a bangian genesis untenable.
The bang still took place, but it did not involve a moment of infinite density, and the universe may have predated it. The symmetries of string theory suggest that time did not have a beginning and will not have an end. The universe could have begun almost empty and built up to the bang, or it might even have gone through a cycle of death and rebirth.
Founded in 1968, Auroville was intended to be a hippie communist society for people of both genders, all religions, and all nationalities.
No thanks, I'm not a Master Debater.
Fred Adams (2019) cautions against claims that the universe is extremely fine-tuned for life. According to him, the range of parameters for which the universe would have been habitable is quite considerable. In addition, as he sees it, the universe could have been more, rather than less, life-friendly. Notably, if the vacuum energy density had been smaller, the primordial fluctuations (quantified by Q) had been larger, the baryon-to-photon ratio had been larger, the strong force had been slightly stronger, and gravity slightly weaker, there might have been more opportunities for life to develop (Adams 2019: sect. 10.3). If Adams is right, our universe may just be garden-variety habitable rather than maximally life-supporting.
“The more I study science, the more I believe in God.” ~Einstein 1929
"The word 'God' is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses;" - Einstein 1954
Albert Einstein 1954, "The word 'God' is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses; the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,"
In Hinduism, Shri Krishna showed Arjuna his Celestial appearance (Vishwa-swaroopa) and proved that he was God. Lord Rama had legendary powers, but chose not to use them. He defeated evil as a mortal and not as a God. They both showed that the real power comes from within and belief in the Para-Brahman.
Lord Shiva is the most powerful God in Hinduism, not because he has the third eye. It is because he IS Para-Brahman. He is infinite. He controls the flow of time. He is master of death. He is the very breath that we take and give out. He is the cosmic destroyer.
“Ananta koti Brahmandanayaka “ Literally means ‘O Lord of infinite crore Universes.’ Someone who is existent yet non-existant and who is capable of taking out an infinite number of universes by just opening his third eye is kind of hard to beat, don't you think?
From: Bsh1's Guide to Voting using the 7-point System
Now, that doesn’t mean you need to write pages upon pages for your RFD. Oftentimes a lengthy paragraph will suffice. As long as you touch upon everything you need to, your RFD is long enough. And, remember, longer doesn’t mean better. Long RFDs can be just as bad as RFDs that are a sentence long; quality should be emphasized over quantity.
In this debate this is the definition of God: The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent God of the bible. Con shows that a omnibenevolent God does not exist. Con states: Contention I: Gratuitous evils
p1. If God exists, there would be no gratuitous evils (GE).
p2. There are gratuitous evils in the world.
c1. God does not exist.
p1. is true by virtue of truism. By definition, a GE is a type of evil of which creates no good. A GE does not lead to virtue, does not teach a lesson, and is completely unjust. A GE definitionally cannot be cannot be justified by "free will" or "compensation in a latter life", for such would be a God justified good. By definition, a GE is inexcusably immoral. Thus, as God is omnibenevolent (all loving, infinitely loving) he would not allow gratuitous evil to occur.
Pro states: Me: I will agree that gratuitous evils do exist.
This alone shows that God does not exist.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Confederate flag is a hate symbol. They say: In 1860-61, eleven southern states seceded from the United States to protect the institution of slavery, forming the Confederate States of America and precipitating the Civil War. During the war, the Confederacy and its military forces used a variety of flags, but the flag that became most associated with the Confederacy was the so-called "battle flag." Organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans adopted the flag as a symbol of Southern heritage but the flag also served as a potent symbol of slavery and white supremacy, which has caused it to be very popular among white supremacists in the 20th and 21st centuries. This popularity extends to white supremacists beyond the borders of the United States.
I will bet that Payton Gendron had one in his room.
Congratulations Novice. I would have voted like whiteflame, but I didn't have the time.
What most people don't realize (it seems) is that the fallacy known as Appeal to Authority only refers to when someone cites as the rightful authority something or someone who is not. That is, when it is an appeal to a false authority.
If the authority is legitimate, arguing from authority is the most valid argument possible—the definitive argument.
Some supporters of the multiverse claim they have found real physical evidence for the multiverse. Joseph Polchinski of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Andrei Linde of Stanford University—some of the theoretical physicists who dreamed up the current model of inflation and how it leads to island universes—say the proof is encoded in our cosmos.This cosmos is huge, smooth and flat, just like inflation says it should be. “It took some time before we got used to the idea that the large size, flatness, isotropy and uniformity of the universe should not be dismissed as trivial facts of life,” Linde wrote in a paper that appeared on arXiv.org in December. “Instead of that, they should be considered as experimental data requiring an explanation, which was provided with the invention of inflation.”
Similarly, our universe seems fine tuned to be favorable to life, with its Goldilocks expansion rate that’s not too fast or too slow, an electron that’s not too big, a proton that has the exact opposite charge but the same mass as a neutron and a four-dimensional space in which we can live. If the electron or proton were, for example, one percent larger, beings could not be. What are the chances that all those properties would align to create a nice piece of real estate for biology to form and evolve?
In a universe that is, in fact, the only universe, the chances are vanishingly small. But in an eternally inflating multiverse, it is certain that one of the universes should turn out like ours. Each island universe can have different physical laws and fundamentals. Given infinite mutations, a universe on which humans can be born will be born. The multiverse actually explains why we’re here. And our existence, therefore, helps explain why the multiverse is plausible.
One of the most successful theories of 20th century science is cosmic inflation, which preceded and set up the hot Big Bang. We also know how quantum fields generally work, and if inflation is a quantum field (which we strongly suspect it is), then there will always be more "still-inflating" space out there. Whenever and wherever inflation ends, you get a hot Big Bang. If inflation and quantum field theory are both correct, a Multiverse is a must.
Scientists have reacted strongly to suggestions that creationist views be taught alongside scientific theories. Dawkins and Coyne (2005) have stated emphatically that there is no place in a science classroom for creationism. If science instructors were to take the “10 min to exhaust the case for (Intelligent Design)” (Dawkins and Coyne, 2005, One side may be wrong, para. 20) then they lend legitimacy to creationism by its mere presence in the science classroom. This is consistent with Grayling’s (2014) position that broadening the conversation to include non-scientific approaches validates those non-scientific approaches and provides them with institutionalized importance. Scott (2007) warns teachers about the potential incursion of “Teach the Controversy” policies that may affect curriculum: Under the guise of recommendations to teach critical thinking, these proposals present the false view that there is any question about whether evolution occurs. She writes:
It might be a useful critical thinking exercise for students to debate actual scientific disputes about patterns and processes of evolution, as long as they have a solid grounding in the basic science required…It would, however, not be a good critical thinking exercise to teach students that scientists are debating whether evolution takes place: on the contrary, it would be gross miseducation to instruct students that the validity of one of the strongest scientific theories is being questioned. (Scott, 2007, pp. 313–314)
Shouldn't it be: The history of Creationism should be taught in schools?
Don't forget that Putin is a Christian.
See fauxlaw's debate argument.
I am grarteful Rational Madman has agreed to this debate.
I Argument: Debate no-votes should be abolished
I.a As noted in Description, 4% of all debates on DART result in finished debates of no-vote, resulting in a tie.[1] I am not opposed to debates ending in a tie in which there are multiple votes, but to allow a debate to dwindle in interest such that there is no member or moderator vote after the voting phase has reached its calendar end countdown is a shame and a disservice to both participants.
I.b I recognize that some debates concern subjects that are either disagreeable, absurd, whimsical, offensive, unpopular, and other adjectives, but if a member has proposed a debate that passes the muster of DART debate policy, and another member has agreed to debate the subject, I believe the debate ought to attract the concern of at least one other member/moderator sufficient to want to see a worthy outcome for the participants’ effort.
I.c In the process of accruing the stat of no-votes for the 1,150 finished debates [45 voteless debates], I noted as well approximately 180 – 200 debates having just 1 vote, making this issue more like in excess of 15% with very limited voting. I do not necessarily argue against one-vote debates, but I am in favor of imposing that no debate conclude in a no-vote tie.
Lucy, a 3.2 million-year old fossil skeleton of a human ancestor, was discovered in 1974 in Hadar, Ethiopia.
Lucy, a 3.2 million-year old fossil skeleton of a human ancestor, was discovered in 1974 in Hadar, Ethiopia.
Abraham, Jacob, Moses, King David, and King Solomon in all his splendour, never existed, a 15-year study of archaeological evidence has concluded.
The study—by Professor Thomas Thompson, one of the world’s foremost authorities on biblical archaeology—says that the first 10 books of the Old Testament are almost certainly fiction, written between 500 and 1,500 years after the events they purport to describe. Professor Thompson’s claims, outlined in a new book, The Early History of the Israelite People, are being taken seriously by scholars.
The British Museum’s leading expert on the archaeology of the Holy Land, Jonathan Tubb, said last week: “Professor Thompson may well be right in many of his arguments. His book is a work of tremendous scholarship. He has been meticulous in his research, and brave in expressing what many of us have thought intuitively for a long time but have been reticent in saying.”
Professor Thompson—from Marquette University in Milwaukee [and the University of Copenhagen]—says that there is a complete absence of archaeological and historical evidence for many events portrayed in the Bible. The inevitable conclusion, he argues, is that the Israelite exile in Egypt, the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land never took place.
The following is a comment by Michelle Thaller who was ranked as one of the 10 greatest living scientists in the world today.
MICHELLE THALLER: Chris, you ask the question about how religion affects our view of the cosmos. And the first thing I think about is simply the history of being human. There were so many things about the universe that we didn't understand. Thousands of years ago, we watched the seasons change or we observed things like thunderstorms and we had no idea, we didn't have the scientific knowledge to explain these things. And so it seems like a very natural, understandable, human instinct to try to ascribe these things to Gods, to beings that are so much more powerful than us we can barely comprehend them. And that sort of way of interpreting nature as spirits and things that are much more powerful than us I find very beautiful. Then, of course, what happens is you learn, you learn what causes lightning. The ancient Scandinavians might have said it was the god Thor actually causing lightning. Well we know it's not Thor – it actually has to do with friction inside clouds and generating electric charges. We understand now why the Sun shines and why the seasons change.
Exodus 20:11
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Isn't this one of the most ridiculous statements ever made by man?
Fred Adams (2019) cautions against claims that the universe is extremely fine-tuned for life. According to him, the range of parameters for which the universe would have been habitable is quite considerable. In addition, as he sees it, the universe could have been more, rather than less, life-friendly. Notably, if the vacuum energy density had been smaller, the primordial fluctuations (quantified by Q) had been larger, the baryon-to-photon ratio had been larger, the strong force had been slightly stronger, and gravity slightly weaker, there might have been more opportunities for life to develop (Adams 2019: sect. 10.3). If Adams is right, our universe may just be garden-variety habitable rather than maximally life-supporting.
The future is actually Nuclear Fusion power. Fusion does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short.
Since the description is "God is a widely believed theory across the world but why believe in it?", shouldn't Con be why we should not believe in it?
This is from God is Imaginary:
If you think about it, you will realize that there is no difference between God and Leprechauns. Lots of people talk about God as though he exists, but there is no actual evidence for God's existence. And there should be, because there are many positive claims in the definition of God. For example:
God has never left any physical evidence of his existence on earth.
All historical gods were imaginary and we know it.
None of Jesus' "miracles" left any physical evidence either.
God has never spoken to modern man, for example by taking over all the television stations and broadcasting a rational message to everyone.
The resurrected Jesus has never appeared to anyone in a provable way.
The Bible we have is provably incorrect and is obviously the work of primitive men rather than God.
When we analyze prayer with statistics, we find no evidence that God is "answering prayers."
Huge, amazing atrocities like the Holocaust and AIDS occur without any response from God.
And so on.
There is absolutely no evidence indicating that God exists. There is a tremendous amount of empirical evidence that God does not exist. For example, God is defined as a prayer-answering being, but we know with certainty that the belief in prayer is a superstition. Therefore we can conclusively say that God is imaginary.
If something does not exist , there will be no evidence of it’s existence. But there can be Evidence of it’s absence, and hence can be proved it doesn’t exist.
A perfectly good creator of the universe is the best argument of proof of no god.
Yes, you had it thrown out.
Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn't add up. There are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus' historical existence. Hence Atheism is more reasonable.
I think Double_R won and I am very glad whiteflame is reviewing this.
A good refutation of Con's origins of the Universe is in the book, God: The Failed Hypothesis, where physicist Victor Stenger argues that science has advanced sufficiently to make a definitive statement on the existence or nonexistence of the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. He invites readers to put their minds—and the scientific method—to work to test this claim.
After evaluating all the scientific evidence—the studies done by reputable institutions on the power of prayer; the writings of philosophers who have puzzled over the problem of God and of good and evil; the efforts of biblical scholars to prove the accuracy of holy scriptures; and the work of biologists, geologists, and astronomers looking for clues to a creator on Earth and in the cosmos—Stenger concludes that beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God. He convincingly shows that not only is there no evidence for the existence of God, but scientific observations actually point to his nonexistence.
All modern humans are classified into the species Homo sapiens — a term first coined by Carl Linnaeus in his 18th-century publication Systema Naturae. The only extant member of H. sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago.
It should be interesting how Pro explains that the earliest fossils that scientists are relatively sure are animals come from around 550 million years ago.
gugigor states that Con's argument falls apart because he has not given one single example, study, expert, news, about people banding together to dislike just because they dislike. Actually, he got Ragnar to remove my vote to show people banding together to like just because they like.
YT's new policy comes after Google’s video service launched an experiment earlier this year to see if removing the count would protect content creators from harassment and campaigns that purposely drove up dislikes on a clip.
“In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior,” the company said.
Is the reality of pediatric cancer unbelievably fine-tuned? Perhaps reality is simply a distribution of "stuff", endowed with certain properties, through time and through space. What we call the laws of nature are then just patterns within this Humean mosaic (named after the philosopher David Hume). This is the idea behind best systems analysis, an approach developed largely by the American philosopher David Lewis in the second half of the twentieth century. It may be attractive to physicists troubled by the question of how something abstract and outside of the Universe can govern the motions of bodies inside it.
Scientists found that damage in a certain part of the brain is linked to an increase in religious fundamentalism. In particular, lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduced cognitive flexibility – the ability to challenge our beliefs based on new evidence. This again refutes Con's statement that lacking the quality of being religious cannot possibly be productive or good for science
Con states in his arguments that Just lacking the quality of being religious cannot possibly be productive or good for science. On the other hand, being theistic can fill one with a passion and curiosity as they feel they are uncovering the work of a sacred deity. This is refuted by the following argument. In 2012 three articles published by labs in the USA and Canada presented the first evidence linking an analytical, logical thinking style to unbelief. Psychologists have been theorising about different ways that brains process information for a long time: conscious versus unconscious, reflective versus experiential, analytical versus intuitive. These are linked to activity in certain brain areas, and can be triggered by stimuli including art. The researchers asked participants to contemplate Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, and then assessed their analytical thinking and disbelief in god. They found that those who had viewed the sculpture performed better on the analytical thinking task and reported less belief in god than people who hadn’t seen the image.
What a fantastic theme for a debate. Who ever wins should think about hosting a tv show based on that religion. You should also get a woman cohost that would have coal-black streaks of mascara that would run down her eyelids.
Evolutionary biologists generally agree that humans and other living species are descended from bacterialike ancestors. But before about two billion years ago, human ancestors branched off.
This new group, called eukaryotes, also gave rise to other animals, plants, fungi and protozoans. The differences between eukaryotes and other organisms, known as prokaryotes, are numerous and profound. Dr. Lynch, a biologist at Indiana University, is one of many scientists pondering how those differences evolved.
Eukaryotes are big, compared with prokaryotes. Even a single-celled protozoan may be thousands of times as big as a typical bacterium. The differences are even more profound when you look at the DNA. The eukaryote genome is downright baroque. It is typically much bigger and carries many more genes.
Eukaryotes can do more with their genes, too. They can switch genes on and off in complex patterns to control where and when they make proteins. And they can make many proteins from a single gene.
That is because eukaryote genes are segmented into what are called exons. Exons are interspersed with functionless stretches of DNA known as introns. Human cells edit out the introns when they copy a gene for use in building a protein. But a key ability is that they can also edit out exons, meaning that they can make different proteins from the same gene. This versatility means that eukaryotes can build different kinds of cells, tissues and organs, without which humans would look like bacteria.
From the Brookings Institution: “Defund the police” means reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple. Defund does not mean abolish policing. And, even some who say abolish, do not necessarily mean to do away with law enforcement altogether. Rather, they want to see the rotten trees of policing chopped down and fresh roots replanted anew. Camden, New Jersey, is a good example. Nearly a decade ago, Camden disbanded (abolished) its police force and dissolved the local police union. This approach seems to be what Minneapolis will do in some form, though the nuances are important.
This is for someone else. You are right, I have been reading too many of EtrnlVw's comments. I actually think you are an intelligent person. My point was 360 circles placed within each other, one degree apart would give the appearennce of a sphere.
You are right, I have been reading too many of EtrnlVw's comments. I actually think you are an intelligent person. My point was 360 circles placed within each other, one degree apart would give the appearennce of a sphere.
Your low intellect doesn't allow you to see that if you can circle the earth from 360 circles 1 degree apart, you will see a sphere.
The modern Christian does not adhere to the teachings of the Bible except, as they so often derisively say, by a "pick-and-choose" method. This is inevitable because the teachings of the Bible are scattershot and mostly impracticable. Modern Christians routinely disregard arcane Old-Testament laws — and then accept other ancient prescriptions as God's own self-evident will.
Your comment 'After 31,500 generations, the only significant beneficial feature that E. coli evolved was the ability to eat citrate in the presence of oxygen." does not make any sense relative to the billions of years that it has been around. This is a time span of only 14 years since the E. coli long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) is an ongoing study in experimental evolution led by Richard Lenski that has been tracking genetic changes in 12 initially identical populations of asexual Escherichia coli bacteria since 24 February 1988. The populations reached the milestone of 50,000 generations in February 2010 which is 22 years.