Phi for All

It's NOT my definition. Please read what I'm writing. Google "unwavering faith" and you get 953,000 hits on the phenomenon I'm talking about. Google "unshakable faith" and you get 873,000 hits. Google "the strength of faith" and you get 103,000,000 hits. "Faith is believing in something when common sense tells you not to." -The Miracle on 34th Street If this is not the way you define faith then that's fine, but there are a lot of people out there who do, and that's what I'm addressing in this thread. Why is the least supported type of belief considered the strongest by so many? And why do so many of those people consider trust in science, the best supported type of belief, to be the weakest?

I suppose because it's that sloppy thinking that I'm commenting on in this thread. You can question whether or not these people are being rigorous enough for you, but the fact is they're using the term faith in the way I've outlined. If I was pointing out that the way some people drive on the highway is dangerous, would you complain that I shouldn't be calling them drivers? But you can't know a god in the way you know your wife, not from a scientific standpoint. I honor the commitments and vows I made to my wife, and always have, and I trust her to do the same, but unquestioning faith? I don't believe in anything that way. Let's move the goalpost back where I set it in the first place. I agree that your definition is simple and uncomplicated, and therefore malleable and subject to multiple interpretations. The word "know" alone is so broad that it defines nothing in this context. Are you claiming you "know" God in the biblical sense the way you "know" your wife on the biblical sense?

Our current Admin, Cap'n Refsmmat.

I'm working from the definition that I find most people of faith around me use. These are predominately Christians who regularly use the explanation that their faith in prayers to their god can work miracles. If prayer doesn't work, they claim it's because the faith of those praying wasn't "complete", or strong enough in its conviction. So for the purposes of this thread, I guess we'll need to use the misdefinition (according to chilehed's interpretation) that the majority of Christianity uses, which is a secure, steadfast belief in God and an unquestioning acceptance of God's will. And for the record, chilehed, I find "an act of the will by which one adheres to another who is known" to be so vague and subject to interpretation as to be essentially meaningless. It certainly doesn't express any of the elements I've heard from those I've encountered.

I'll have to get back to you on that, once I determine how much info the company wants me giving out and how I can do so and still maintain my anonymity.

! Moderator Note One thread per topic, please. Also, one account per user. If this is two users in the same class using the same computer, please acknowledge or we'll need to delete one of the accounts. Thanks for understanding.

I've mentioned several times that faith, to me, is a form of belief that requires unquestioning adherence and unshakeable commitment. People who consider themselves very devout followers of their religion often talk about the strength of their faith, and how it's like a comforting rock of solid footing in the stormy sea of Life. In marketing (stay with me), we often take the weakest flaw in a product or service and paint it as one of our strongest points. Dick's Last Resort, a restaurant chain that despaired of ever finding a non-obnoxious waitstaff, eventually embraced the weakness and started hiring purposely obnoxious people and made it a convention for their whole chain. In US politics, the major parties have learned to spin their weaknesses into apparent strengths. Republicans cry out that Democrats don't respect the sanctity of free market enterprise to cover up the fact that their biggest contributors are corporations looking for special considerations that will let them unfairly trump their competition, which is about as foul a thing to do to the free market as there is. Is faith a similar weakness spun into strength in religion? Believing so strongly in things that have the least amount of evidence to support them seems ludicrous to me. Absolute conviction about things you can't possibly know is touted as steadfast, abiding faith, and practically every follower would be congratulated and praised for this kind of devotion to their god. If you divide belief into trust, hope and faith, faith seems the weakest to me but is often seen as the strongest. Are the priests who preach faith just great spin doctors or is unassailable, resolute belief in things you can't prove really a strength?

An individual human mind learns but does NOT evolve. The terminology used in science is, as you can imagine, required to be as precise as possible. Don't make the mistake of using the word "evolve" for anything an individual in a species does. Evolve has a very specific meaning, just like "theory" doesn't mean "an idea I've been pondering for some time now". I'm not sure what you mean by "a capacity limit". Every creature on the planet that has its skeleton on the inside of its body evolved from a common ancestor that you would call a fish smaller than your thumb. It's rivals were armored on the outside and really tough, but these fish with backbones and vertebrae were agile and fast and survived to keep breeding, each successive generation with adaptations selected for wider and more varied environments. The sheer numbers and enormous amounts of time gave chance and coincidence a breeding ground for all life you see today. It really depends on the animal. Tigers are awesome creatures and one of the fiercest of the big cats alive today, but leopards are much more adaptable and will most likely flourish as tiger populations dwindle. It will be interesting to see which animals can be cultivated offworld.

The perspective I was taught growing up was that Jesus, as the son of God, could have stopped the crucifixion at any time, thus making the sacrifice more meaningful. God also could have wiggled His nose and made it stop, but giving up His son to save humanity was the whole point, that people could worship the Son and have their sins forgiven instead of trying unsuccessfully to follow all the 600+ Mosaic laws in order to get to heaven. I was hoping this was going to be a thread on faith, since I've wanted to start one myself. Now it seems like it's going to be more about how everyone interprets the Bible completely differently from everyone else.

If you're talking about florescent tubes, the blackening on the ends is caused by a loss of metal from the filaments due to improper heating over time. Modern quick start ballasts turn the light on more quickly at the expense of a proper heating cycle. Once the filaments have heated to the right temperature, this loss is minimized. Strike another blow for convenience. Older tubes took longer to reach full light but lasted longer. Modern ones start up more quickly but burn out faster, so you spend more. My advice is to start using LEDs. As a matter of fact, I start working for my new client tomorrow and they just happen to make LED tubes that can be retrofit into florescent fixtures. Wow, I really hope you aren't talking about test tubes.

I dream of that. Sayonara3 got 00 status with MI6, we let that mouthy little brat from Michigan take over as Admin, and now the guy who invented screen doors for submarines is a Mod. Next thing you know, conservatives will probably start acting crazy. Viva la... wait, what?!

He did a great job with the big red "S" on your shirt.

! Moderator Note Friendly tip: it's unnecessarily antagonistic to accuse the members here of malfeasance. This isn't the first time you've done this and it hurts your arguments to lump everyone together as the bad guys. Just sayin'.

Hot air (gas) can move a balloon (solid). I think you're applying what you observe a little too liberally. Evolution is defined as the change in allele frequency within a population over time. Individuals do NOT evolve. Some creatures have such a short life span that we can directly observe the evolutionary process over many generations. Take a look at fruit fly experiments that have been going on for quite some time to see members of the animal kingdom evolve.

I love my new sweater! It's about time we had a Mod who can knit.

I can change it if you like. What would you prefer?

And this puts religion and gods in the supernatural category. Science doesn't deal in "proof", it deals in the best supported explanations for natural phenomena. That's why we have to move any topic involving religion to the Religion section. Speculations is for scientific speculation. You should start by reading as much as you can about evolution. Remember, you're not trying to "prove" anything, you're just looking at all the mountains of evidence that supports one of the best understood theories in science today. Many religions acknowledge that evolution is real, including the largest Christian sect. If you study it, you'll see that it's happening all around us all the time in reality. Belief can be divided into three basic parts: trust, hope and faith. Trust is what science asks of you, a belief in the best supported explanations, subject to change if something better supported comes along. You can hope that something is true without completely changing your life based on that hope (I hope this ticket I have will win the lottery but I'm not going to start spending the money yet). Faith, and I'm defining faith as unshakeable, unquestioning belief in something that has no evidence to support it, is actually the weakest form of belief pretending to be the strongest. Faith is basically steadfastly believing things you can't possibly know for sure. Sort of a Matrix kind of artificial universe? You might be getting into an area again where science isn't the right tool to use. If what you're describing can't be supported by evidence either way, we say it's unfalsifiable, or incapable of being proven false. Every hypothesis in science needs to be capable of being false (we'd have to reconsider what we know about gravity if you could somehow toss a normal ball into the air and it stayed up there). And a big part of the process is sharing as you're doing here, and listening to the critique of others. How would you set up an experiment to test your hypothesis? Are there any predictions you could make that might be testable?

Are you confusing the justice system and court trials with clinical trials of pharmaceutical products?

I could be wrong about this, but you've made several mistakes in this post. Firstly you misconstrue these "ideas" as theories, which tells us you don't understand what a scientific theory really is. Second, you bunched multiple ideas in a single thread, which will automatically make any discussion very disjointed and hard to follow. And third, you've made some claims that are trivially falsified, so a lot of folks won't want to invest much time talking with you about them. No offense of course, we always try to separate the ideas from the person who has them, and critique from there. Is that why you haven't responded to any of the replies there? We are a discussion forum, not a soapbox from which you can preach. You need to interact and reply to people.

! Moderator Note What a great example of ostrich rationale! To future readers, beware of listening to single sources. They can corrupt your thinking and make you blind to reality. Please question everything, and in the end do the experiments yourself before closing your mind and sticking your head in the sand. Thread closed.

! Moderator Note Biblical references used, moved to Religion. The Bible is a very poor tool with which to do science. It's like measuring the distance to the sun with a poem. Why? Evidence tends towards a light brown skin in multi-cultural examples. That might happen, if teeth eventually became sexually unattractive. Unnecessary parts are often kept because they encourage mating. Why? Wouldn't artificial gravity require the same muscles? Or are you saying we'd artificially reduce the gravity if we were offworld for extended periods? American heads have been getting bigger, according to some studies. But we've observed changes in body shapes with other animals as well, so that doesn't support your idea that humans alone are evolving. We have artificial lights that more closely resemble actual sunlight. What does this have to do with only humans evolving? One of the most compelling pieces of evidence I've ever seen that all vertebrates evolved from fishes is the laryngeal nerve. Check this out:

! Moderator Note If you're not here to learn, then you're here only to preach, and that's against our rules. Is there any reason we need you here at all?

That really changes nothing, but thanks.

! Moderator Note joeman, your sources are extremely questionable and biased. In the Speculations section, you're obligated to address questions put to you and you must provide supportive evidence for the assertions you're making. So far, you're not fulfilling your obligations. Your other thread was locked because creationist garbage against evolution has been refuted many times, and no one feels like banging their heads against the wall of your ignorance and lack of reason. Your arguments against AGW are proceeding in a similar fashion. Please address the questions and replies you're graciously being given instead of ignoring them.

! Moderator Note Speculative content moved to Speculations.