Sisyphus

At the equinoxes, yes. Why?

Perhaps that came from taking the "surface of the balloon" analogy for expanding space too literally? It isn't accurate, though.

The universe doesn't have a center. Or the center is everywhere, depending on how you look at it. To see the oldest light in the universe, you can look in any direction.

Alright, that makes sense. But this thread is about a scientific support for the idea of some kind of conscious intent behind the "design" of the universe. Would you say that that is also nonpredictive, and therefore unscientific for the same reason? If not, how is it different?

Can you expand on that? Is that an apt analogy, though? (That's not a rhetorical question.) Any given person winning the lottery is extremely unlikely, but someone winning is all but certain, so a winner has no reason to suspect meddling.

It relates because it is a simple example of a mathematical concept that is not merely contained in the definition of quantity. There is more that you need, even if those things seem "so obvious they don't need saying" to the average human, and such it wouldn't occur to you that they are in fact necessay axioms. That 5-1=4 does indeed follow necessarily, a priori, from any other definition of 4 and the conventional rules of arithmetic. That doesn't mean it's tautological, however, any more or less than the conclusion of a valid syllogism is a tautology of its premises. Whether you want to say it's "contained in" or "necessarily follows from" the others is pretty much just semantic, but it is saying something additional. It needs to be deduced in accordance with rules, and the fact that 2+2=4 and 5-1=4 requires justification. (That justification being the difference between 5-1=4 and 6-1=4.) I'd also be careful with "mere conceptualization." There are an infinite number of arithmetic operations that yield an answer of four, so clearly nobody has ever conceptualized everything "four" implies, yet that doesn't mean nobody has ever said the word "four" with any meaning. That's all true, for the most part. But again, there's a difference between accepting certain axioms because you don't really have a choice, and in declaring that they are not axioms. Sometimes, in fact, they turn out not to be necessary. For thousands of years the idea of infinitely equidistant parallel lines was "contained in" the idea of right angles for all intents and purposes, but as an identified axiom, it was able to be declared false, and it turned out that a consistent geometry could be constructed nonetheless.

Interesting. It seems that article and the black hole article disagree (the latter saying the event horizon is an oblate spheroid). Will someone who knows more than Wikipedia chime in?

Surely any rotation at all would cause some bulge. Again, though, I think we should be more specific than saying "the black hole." We're talking about the event horizon. The singularity itself is of zero volume, always, but IIRC it is ring-shaped if spinning.

Ghosts of the gaps? Personally, I would remove the "other" from that sentence, and replace "logical" with "well-undersood." iNow, could you link to that video on "open-mindedness." I think it's highly pertinent to this thread. Not to pick on you, but this seems to be the crux of the issue.

It isn't infinitessimal. The event horizon is not the singularity itself, just the boundary beyond which nothing can escape. It has finite size. It is also not necessarily spherical - rotation causes the event horizon to "bulge."

Mostly agreed with what others say. It's certainly true that not all schools are created equal - far from it - but it's also true that there's no such thing as a "best school," just a best one for your personality, interests, and goals. Seeking out "brand names" is mostly useful for impressing people who don't know what they're talking about. (Not that that never comes in handy! I went to an extremely good school which unfortunately has almost no name recognition outside academia, and which has a very similar name to a much larger and crappier school...)

Still a much more extraordinary claim than a purely psychological explanation.

But we're not them. And if we found an alien code, most likely we would have no idea what we'd found. Show a guy from 1850 a DVD, and ask him what he's looking at.

Indeed, Houdini was very successful at seeking out and debunking pretty much every supernatural claim made at the time. It's sad, really, since he wasn't setting out to debunk them, he was desperately trying to find someone who wasn't a fraud or deluded. Obviously, he failed, but you have to admire that kind of intellectual honesty, to prove false again and again that which he so wanted to be true, when so many others were (and are) happy to let themselves be convinced.

It seems unlikely that an alien would a)know what it was looking at b)care c)want to recreate human beings d)be able to do so. But hey, maybe.

What's a circle? You're not entirely wrong - pretty much anything you encounter in mathematics can be deduced from a handful of axioms and definitions. See Euclid's Elements for the prototypical example of this. It's more than just a notion of quantity, though. It's also not just definition. You can define 4 as 2+2, but then you still have to determine whether it is equal to 3+1. You can define it as "that which is equal to 2+2, 3+1, 5-1, etc.," but that's an infinite definition and therefore incomprehensible, and it still hasn't been determined that such a thing is self-consistent. You can define a "blerg" as something which is equal to both 2 and 3; is that just as meaningful as the statement 2+2=4? More fundamentally than that, though, is the continued assumption that deduction 100% free of error is possible, i.e. that reason itself is trustworthy. It seems obvious that 2+2=4, and it's something we all agree on. But are we all mistaken? Do we, in fact, all agree, or are both our memories concerning it flawed in the same way? Do I even agree with you, or are we misunderstanding one another? Am I even real?

Huh? A bit of a non sequitur, no? This is incorrect. Everyone has a few mutations, and most of them don't have a noticeable effect. Nature doesn't care that you consider yourself superior. What does matter is the fact that we can now alter genetics directly and intentionally, which makes it pretty much inevitable that human beings are going to be changing quite a bit, very quickly.

You called? Oh, nevermind.

Right, but the term "anti-religion" comes from religious people. And when Richard Dawkins made The Enemies of Reason about psychic phenomena, ghosts, superstititions, etc., he was accused of really making a thinly veiled attack on religion. So if religion dominates the debate, then perhaps that's because the religious are the ones with the power to make it about them. There are no nations that consult "psychics" on policy (not since Reagan, anyway), but there are several living under Islamic law, evangelicals are still a key factor in American politics, etc.

I don't know where you're getting that. It seems to me that all the big "anti-religion" spokespeople are also anti new age witch doctor and "The Secret" and whatnot.

It's more complicated, though (or maybe less, depending on your perspective), because the observer only exists to ponder the universe within those narrow parameters (if they are indeed narrow). So, really, looking at a universe and wondering what the probability is that it could support life, the probability is actually 1, since the "looking" part requires it. If, hypothetically, there are many universes within all sorts of random parameters, every being contemplating those parameters would find them remarkably well-suited to complex phenomena. Analogously, each of us is the result of the combination of one of millions of sperm and an egg produced by a different person. So, in a way, your existence is extremelyunlikely. But you're not "lucky" for existing, as if you didn't exist there would be nobody here to be unlucky.

You can't go the speed of light. But if you were going at almost the speed of light, say 0.9C relative to the Earth, then yes, it would still be going at fully 1C faster than you. A person on the Earth would not see the light going at 1.9C, though, only 1C. To us it would look like the light was only going 0.1C faster than you. This is possible because velocity, time, and distance are not universally constant things, but depend (among other things) on the velocity of the observer. That's what relativity is all about.

It should be noted that all of this is relative to something else. There is no such thing as absolute velocity. It would take infinite energy to accelerate you to C relative to me, and you would have infinite momentum relative to me. You yourself would never get any closer to C in any absolute sense, nor notice any difference in yourself. No matter how long you've been accelerating and how much energy you expend doing so, the light from your headlights and taillights still both move at C away from you. This is true even though from my perspective the light from your headlights might appear to only be moving slightly faster than you (since it is moving at C relative to me, as well, and you are moving at almost C relative to me). This is an important concept in relativity: that light always moves at the same speed relative to everyone, including observers moving relative to one another. If that seems like a paradox, that's normal. The attempt to make sense of that observed and apparently paradoxical fact is what led to special relativity.

That doesn't really address the point. On what logical basis do you make the claim that a designer would choose to design a universe like ours?

In what context?