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ydoaPs

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Everything posted by ydoaPs

  1. No, it doesn't.
  2. Largely because of his main two things (falsification as the only demarcation criterion and his anti-inductivist beliefs) being wrong. Yeah, you'll need a subscription (which you need to buy or just log on through a university computer) to see. Try Googling "Creation Science is not Science" and see if some university has a pdf on their website freely available.
  3. ! Moderator Note Unless you pony up with evidence that religion was "created in order to control human ingenuity and evolution" real soon, this thread will be closed on the grounds of trolling and flaming.
  4. Many of the replies have been about what the scientific methods are, rather than what the requirements are for a theory to be scientific. This is a topic in the philosophy of religion largely popularized by Karl Popper, but, despite his popularity outside of the philosophers, he was wrong about just about everything. He was right that falsification is a criterion, but he was extremely wrong when he claimed that it was the only one. There is more or less consensus that Michael Ruse hit it on the head with his criteria in this paper.
  5. While Kalaam is valid, it is nowhere close to sound. The first premise ("Whatever begins to exist has a cause") is unsupported and unsupportable: "Begins to exist" is the bit we need to pay attention to. There are two kinds of "begin to exist"; one kind is previously existing stuff being rearranged into other effectively new things and the other is stuff popping out of nothing. The first is called "Creatio ex materia" and is the only one we have any evidence for requiring causes. The second is called "Creatio ex nihilo" and is the one the argument claims applies to the universe (which, it actually doesn't). These two things are radically different and barely resemble each other. To use evidence for one as evidence for both is incompetence at best and lying at worse. The second premise ("The universe began to exist") is false: The universe has always existed and will always exist. This is true whether or not the past is infinitely long (bringing up arguments against an infinite past is called a "red herring" and is more evidence that apologists are being disingenuous). The fact is, at every point in time, there is a point in time. There is no such thing as "before" the universe. So, it is not the case that there was nothing then there was the universe. It is also not the case that there was other stuff then there was the universe. Not only because there is no before the universe, but also because there is no such thing as other stuff when we are talking about the universe. There is one option that they could take to try to disingenuously say the universe has a cause (which, they sometimes do) by defining "begin to exist" as something like "Object O begins to exist at time t iff object O exists at time t and there is no time prior to t at which O exists". On that definition, the universe begins to exist only because there is no time prior to t. And, here's the kicker. That definition of "begins to exist" (and anything else that could be used to accurately describe the universe) also applies to God. So, if the universe began to exist, God did as well. This leaves open, by the Kalaam argument (assuming the first premise is true), the question "Who created God?" and we have infinite regress.
  6. ! Moderator Note Do not purposefully misrepresent other users. And, in general, everyone play nice.
  7. ! Moderator Note As hypervalent_iodine just pointed out, keep the thread on topic. Failure to do so may result in thread closure. Also, if you see thread hijacking or other rule breaking, please use the report function as moderators can't scan all of the threads all of the time. ! Moderator Note Upon further moderator review, this thread is closed.
  8. Sorry about that; they're just so good.
  9. ! Moderator Note The staff at first was unsure of the proper place for this thread. After further deliberation, it was concluded that the proper place for this thread is the Trash Can. Thread moved.
  10. Indeed, as I've already said. Apparently Krash has a matter bias ior doesn't adequately understand the topic.
  11. Yeah, any system strong enough to do both addition and multiplication of natural numbers (which we can do with any reasonable form of set theory) will be incomplete xor inconsistent. You can't prove which one in that system, but that doesn't mean you can't prove which one.
  12. That's a brilliant strategy. If you can't support what you say, simply tell someone to go learn something. It reminds me of the time someone told swansont that he needed to go research atomic clocks.
  13. Magnetic fields and/or antimatter containers. If you somehow derive instability from annihilation, why anti-matter instead of matter? By your reasoning, you just as easily conclude that matter is "unstable". If we drop a few particles of matter in a part of the universe dominated by antimatter, what could store/contain it? The same could be said of matter if the container was made of anti-matter.
  14. It does not follow from annihilation that antimatter is unstable.
  15. "There's absolutely no reason to believe this is wrong (and all evidence points to it being true), but there's never been a direct test, so let's believe it is false" is an exceedingly terrible argument.
  16. I don't know of any result of Gödel's that would give that implication. Certainly nothing in Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I.
  17. Tests of conservation of energy? Every interaction. Ever.
  18. Without a consistency and completeness proofs, why should we care about any result you get? If the system is inconsistent, you can prove anything and everything.
  19. Antimatter has positive real mass. Who are these scientists "holding out for anti matter to have anti gravity effects when it comes close to matter"? Basically, [citation needed]
  20. While I am entirely apathetic to the history of philosophy and there do seem to be bits missing, I nevertheless found the graphics interesting.
  21. You'd be better off reading modern introductions. They are outdated and more difficult than necessary. For example, hardly anyone (even relatively experienced grad students) really "gets" Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I the first time through. I suspect it's vacuous name dropping.
  22. These two graphs are pretty cool. The first goes from 600BCE to 600CE and the second from 600CE to about 1930CE. It's a taxonomy of sorts outlining the relations between different schools of philosophy throughout history. I just thought it'd share something cool I found. Thoughts?
  23. It looks like an odd way to try to do modal logic. Have you tried proving consitency and completeness?
  24. JSTOR brings up about 1700 for GR and over 1200 for SR.
  25. A thread which was reported earlier reminded me of this thread. I recently ran across another paper called "Stars in Other Universes" which does the kind of multivariable analysis that should be done (but never is) by those who claim fine tuning. This paper looks specifically at star formation and finds that about a quarter of the possible universes (though, the author doesn't look into forces/constants that are just 0 in our universe) have stellar formation. The paper in the OP is about just one of the universes this paper analyzes.
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