JohnB

I presume that we'll see further videos from this woman where she burns a Christian Bible? I didn't think so.

Sorry if I gave that impression nec, it wasn't what I meant at all. I was thinking more of the pressure applied to researchers. Serious basic research can take many years or decades because they're flying blind. You might think a method will work and it takes 2 years to find out it actually won't. Basic research should be funded by the decade due to this problem. However funding is political and runs on a much shorter time span. In the minds of many, finding 15 ways not to solve the problem doesn't count as progress and funding would be cut. This puts pressure on the researcher to find something, anything that can count as "progress" in the eyes of detractors. This is a distraction that wastes time, energy and money. Put it in the context of Edison and the light bulb. After 2,000 tries he hit on the right combination and later said "I didn't fail 2,000 times. I found 2,000 ways not to make a light bulb." Let's say that you could design and test 100 designs per year and your funding for the "Light bulb" project was on a 5 year basis. After 5 years you are going to ask for more funding and your progress is that you've found "500 ways not to make a light bulb". After 10 years you've found "1,000 ways not to make a light bulb". Do you really think the third round of funding is going to arrive? Really? The pressure would be on to find anything that you could use as "progress" to prevent the funding drying up. What political powers often fail to understand is that negative results can be as important as positive ones because it saves other people from wasting their time on fruitless lines of research. It's not that we haven't made any progress in (for example) cancer research, it's that we would have made much more progress if the researchers weren't constantly being asked to justify their existence to satisfy political masters.

Like guns and hammers, nukes are tools, nothing more. A tool can be used or misused, but misuse is the fault of the user, not the tool. Like everything else, nukes are a people problem, not a technological one.

An interesting point about unemployment fraud and fighting it is the question "Is it worth it?" The majority of people are rather honest and won't claim if not entitled, those who defraud the system are a tiny minority. It is quite possible that nations spend more to combat fraud than the extra fraud would cost them if there were no checks. Consider this possibility (with numbers pulled totally out of the air) A State pays $10 million a year in benefits with all the checks in place and a wages bill for the department of $50 million per year to keep the paperwork straight, a total of $60 million per year. Now we change the system to "If you're entitled come on in. Give us your social security number and if you haven't had a cheque in the last 2 weeks we'll print you one on the spot." Let's say that due to the lack of checks, payments double to $20 million per year. But we have massively reduced the staffing in the offices and wages now only cost $10 million per year. The total cost, even with doubled payments is $30 million, only half what the State was paying before. Think of all the people in the average unemployment office. What exactly is their purpose? To ensure that only those entitled to a payment get one and that those payments are in accordance with the guidelines. Those are the sole reasons for the existence of their jobs. By doing away with the checks and general paper shuffling, staffing gets reduced from between 12 and 20 people to 4, three counter people and an office manager. Note that the rules are much simpler and therefore require no "interpretation" at all, there are no forms to fill out and clients get processed much faster. Now the USA is a big nation and there might be $100 million of fraud if the rules were relaxed, but how much are you spending to prevent that $100 million in fraud? $10 Billion? $20 Billion? It's a question worth asking.

I'm not sure the "gavagai" problem is relevent in the case of aliens. The translation of a totally unknown language is extremely difficult without a biligual. Note the impossibility of decoding heiroglyphs until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone trilingual. Similarly there was no headway in Cretan Linear B until the word for "King" was found on a bilingual. In the case of aliens we already have a bilingual, mathematics. Simply put, you can't build a radio telescope or starship by feelings or rule of thumb so there is a class of each race that already speak the same language. From this the rest can follow. However, this is not to say that understanding the thoughts behind the words will be easy. I'm sure each of us has met people whose thought processes leave us baffled. (Creationists come to mind here) We may be able to understand what they say, but we may not be able to understand them and their psychology. In general I think humans are amazingly adaptable and the extraordinary becomes the mundane very quickly. Consider the difference in reaction between the Apollos 11 and 17. The world stopped for Apollo 11, but by the time Apollo 17 came around it was "Ho hum, they're going to the moon again." Personally I think that this part of our makup is extremely old, going back to "Lucy" or perhaps even before. If a small, rather helpless species gets too involved in amazment over the extraordinary for too long they will miss the more mundane things that might endanger them, like the Sabretooth creeping up quietly behind them. "Extraordinary but not dangerous" becomes "mundane" so that we can continue to watch for "dangerous". 6 million years of survival as the physically weakest predator on the planet has bred it into us.

Cleaning the artifact can be done with "Brasso" or a similar product. If needed you could probably get by with some light sand paper (200 grit+) Remember it's probably brass and therefore quite soft. Now as to what it is, that's been bugging me because it looked familiar. I think it's a foundry tool, specifically a mouldmakers tool. When casting a compound sand mould you have two metal frames. Frame sizes vary but are basically the 4 sides of a box about 5 inches high with a couple of bars welded across so they keep their shape under pressure. The top frame usually has some lugs to align it properly with the bottom frame. The pattern is placed on a table with the bottom frame over it upside down. We then pour casting sand into the frame to fill it and pound it down with a stamper, something like a small sledge hammer but you use the top of the head, not the face to strike. Once the sand has been stamped and leveled off with the frame the whole thing is turned over. The pattern is now visible but totally inside the sand. We now need to remove some of the sand so that the pattern can be removed. Basically removing some sand until you get down to the halfway mark on the pattern so that it could be removed. Then we dust the surface of the sand and place the top frame in position. We then place a round tube where the pour hole will be and fill the frame with sand and tamp it down. Once that is done, we lift off the top frame and remove the pattern and the tube. Once this is done, runners are cut in the sand of the lower part to allow the metal to run from the pourhole to the mould. There may also be spots where the sand has stuck to the pattern and small imperfections need to be filled and then smoothed over for a good cast. There also needs to be a hemispherical hole made in the lower mould directly under the pour hole to prevent erosion of the lower mould by the molten metal. All this mucking about loosens the sand and gives a rough finish so there are many tools of many shapes used to both cut the runners and smooth the finished mould. I think your artifact is one of these smoothing tools. If you look at this pic on Flickr you will see a number of similar tools from the foundry trade. They are usually double ended simply to reduce the number of tools in the cupboard. Yours would appear to be a combination of ideas from the lower part of the picture. All of those tools are for freeing the pattern and cutting and smoothing runners. The width and depth of the runner is dependent on the size of the item to be cast and metal being cast. While you item doesn't show much wear, these tools last for decades of normal use. However being cast means that they are vulnerable to sharp knocks from being hit if there is a flaw in the casting. Foundrys have sand floors so dropping things doesn't do much damage. It was quite possibly used for years before being damaged. To check, I would find a local foundry that does sand mould casting and go and ask them, or a college that teaches metal casting. Cheers.

Random, I think you need to preface your comment with the phrase "To the best of our knowledge" when talking about the distances and energy requirements. As we currently understand the Universe some things are either very difficult or apparently impossible, but it may be that others who have had longer to study it understand the Universe quite a bit better than we do.

Why was I replying to this thread? I seem to have forgotten.

What it is, sorry but no idea. It's certainly interesting though. Judging from the lack of oxidisation I'd say fairly recent and probably cast in a metal compound die. (Although good quality sand casting can't be ruled out.) I agree about the probable handle or tang. Combined tongue depressor and medicine measure for an 18th Century physician?

Before you go any further in what I consider to be clearly racist remarks, I suggest you look into history a bit more. There were a people here in Australia before the Aboriginals, maybe you should find out what happened to them before continuing to denigrate any particular subset of humanity.

SMF, I've often wondered about the piezoelectric theory. It strikes me that it seems very reasonable and the "Earthquake Lights" are a form of Aurora caused by localised changes in magnetic field. That they don't show up for every earthquake makes me think that they are also dependent on local atmospheric conditions as well to produce a light show, but the mag field variation should be there almost always. One wonders if it is possible to predict or at least give warning of an earthquake by measuring localised magnetic field changes from space.

Marat you have missed the point entirely. The original question was considering that God proves itself to exist but doesn't match the definitions humans have decided upon. this isn't me defining God in an "unusual way", it's about God not matching the usual definitions. There is a vast difference between the two. Humans might have decided that the creator of the Universe is an "omnipotent, omniscient being who is also infinitely good", but that doesn't make it so. The Universe does not have to acceed to our demands and dreams. Just because some forms of religious thought require there to be a caring daddy figure in the sky doesn't mean there is one. Even proof of a creator doesn't mean that it is a caring daddy figure either. Note that proof of such a creator means that the "omnipotent, omniscient being who is also infinitely good" daddy figure does not exist. Where does that leave the theologian? Let me see if I've got this right. The Creator creates a vast Universe, millions of Galaxies and billions of stars. It gives the intelligences that evolve everything they need for comfort and succour and you are complaining because it didn't also give immortality and a life free from pain as well? Is there anything else you'd like it to do for you? Hold your hand as you cross the street maybe? Simply to illustrate that many people throw around the infinite terminology without actually considering the implications of doing so. If there is an immortal soul then "illness, aging, decay, and death" are not "real" WRT the soul. If there is an immotal soul then the "death" of a particular body it inhabits is no more meaningful than the disposal of a worn out set of shoes. Sure, you might have liked those shoes and are sorry to see them go, but it doesn't really hurt you in any meaningful way. Add to that, who said God was perfect? That's another of your human definitions that may have no bearing on reality. Also who said that the life after this one is "much better"? Doctrine again. An afterlife would certainly be different to this life, but how do you guage "better" in this context? The idea was to try to get people to think outside the usual definitions, I'm sorry that this appears to be beyond your abilities. I've posed this type of question to a number of people from differing forms of religious thought and an amazing number just can't get past their own inbuilt definitions. God has to perfect and infinitely good and omnipotent and omniscient, he just does. They cannot conceive that it could be any other way. Note that the idea also messes up the atheists. Their arguments are usually based on the idea that such a being as defined could not exist. Guess what? They're proved right, it doesn't exist "as defined", but they're also faced with the proven fact that God exists anyway.

If you mean "lower ocean levels relative to todays level", then most of the change was due to the water being locked up on land as ice. As SMF said Isostasy is the study of this area. Continental drift does effect sea levels, but generally on a long term scale, IIRC in the very early days of the planet, most of the oceans were quite shallow and it was thought that there were very few mountains. Deep oceans and high land didn't happen until the plates started to move around. Once things got moving life got more interesting. Deep water got deeper due to the extra weight of water while mountains got higher. Higher mountains had more erosion which moved weight into the oceans which makes them deeper due to weight and shallower due to being filled with silt. Erosion also lightens the land and allows it to rise relative to the sea. Ice Ages come and go, moving vast amounts of mass around the planet and adding to the deformation of the crust. Magma breaks through the crust creating new islands which displace water and leads to a rise in sea levels. However most of the rise and fall of sea level relative to the land due to geological forces is small for short time scales, say less than 20 million years, the big one is always the ice. Without considering the ice, sea levels only change slowly due to deformations of the underlying crust. Ice, land ice that is, directly effects the amount of water available to fill the ocean basins. During an Ice Age millions of cubic miles of water is being removed from the oceans and placed on the land. The Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America covered more than 4,000,000 square kilometres with ice over 3 kilometres thick, that's 12 million cubic kilometres of water that was removed from the oceans and placed on the land, making a huge difference to relative sea levels. The big thing to remember is that WRT to sea levels, temperature and most other factors on the planet, there is no "normal". We tend to think of the levels of the last hundred years or so as "normal" sea levels, but 12,000 years ago it was "normal" to walk from Alaska to Russia and from England to France. The process is dynamic rather than static. Sea level is always relative to the land and a "sea level rise" could be due to more water and the sea rising or due to the land sinking. Even on short time scales the difference in sea levels can be dramatic. Evidence suggests that a mere 8,000 years ago in areas like the Maldives sea level was 2 metres higher than it is today. This is a local effect and the reverse is also true. Beaumaris Castlein Wales was build around 1300 AD and had a sea dock on it's southern wall where ships of up to 40 tons could tie up, granted it was a tidal dock. That dock is now 200 yards from the sea. Another castle (the name of which eludes me ATM) was reinforced and supplied by sea during a siege, it is now more than a mile from the water. However silting from erosion is probably a factor in both of these cases, how much of a factor we just don't know. Silting isn't a factor in Tonsberg Norway where the old Viking docks are now several metres above sea level. Scandinavia also has some ports that had to be moved due to land rise, what were ports in the 11th and 12th Centuries are now 5-10 kilometres inland, quite a change for a few hundred years. Similarly I've read about but have yet to confirm by original source documents a tactic of Drakes against the Spanish Armada. Apparently there was a rock shoal that submerged over a 60 odd year period in the English Channel. These submerged rocks were shown on English maps but not the Spanish ones. The idea was to try and force to Spanish into sailing into the area and grounding themselves. Did the sea level rise or did the land subside? This is why satellites are superior to tide gauges when measuring sea level. If the land is subsiding while the sea level is rising it will appear that sea level is rising faster than it is. However if the land is rising faster than the sea level is, then the gauges will show the sea level dropping. Like most things in planetary climate, sea level and its rise and fall is a very complex question with many interacting factors.

Not having done research I don't know, but from the laymans perspective..... There might sometimes be a fine line between "testing a hypothesis" and "confirmation bias". At one end of the spectrum the researcher is looking through a limited and known dataset for evidence to either confirm or falsify a very specific prediction. Swansonts example of the LHC is a good case for this end of the spectrum as you either find the Higgs, or you don't. There is little choice in which dataset you use and the results are quite specific and replicable. At the other end we have something like Lucy. The dataset is large and completely unknown as to size and content. It's the researchers opinion as to what data from that set is "relevent" to the research. The wider the freedom to pick and choose the data, the more likely that confirmation bias will be a factor. This is simple human nature, we pay more attention to those things that confirm our previous beliefs than we do to those that falsify them. I simply assume that researchers are human too. This would mean that somewhere on that spectrum "confirming the hypothesis" must lie beside "confirmation bias", exactly where I don't know, but that is where the line is thin. As we move from zero choice in data to total choice in data the probability of confirmation bias increases from zero to "very likely". I must echo swansont one this point though, a case of confirmation bias is an example of poor methodology and nothing more, it is not fraud or anything untoward, it's a rectifiable mistake. In many ways this is exactly the problem I have with dendroclimatology. We have two theories, one is that tree ring size is an indicator of temperature and the second is that tree ring density is also an indicator temperature. So we take 100 tree cores and find that for 12 of them the ring size tracks temps over the calibration period so we can use them in the paleo reconstruction. We then run them again for density and find a further 10 that thrack the temps so we can use them too. We now have 22 series that we can use for the reconstruction of paleo temperature, and they track the temps in the calibration period, so they must be reasonably accurate and a good indicator. What about the 78 that don't track the temps? Wouldn't their existence imply that there was something wrong with initial theories? There are 3079 datasets listed in the NOAA ITRDB database, yet when we look at paleo reconstructions the same 15 or 20 keep getting used. What's wrong with the other 3,000 datasets? (Granted that many won't go back as far as we would like, but I hope people see my point here.)

I think that King Kanute showed the fallacy of this idea. I do sometimes wonder if the idea of having a "Sabbath" came about through a desire for simplicity. The idea came from the Hebrews who wrote the Torah in circa 800BC, but civilisation and religious holidays were much older than that. The Sumerians, Babylonians and the later Egyptians all had religious holidays and festivals, but that was all. The people worked every day between festivals. By the time we get to the Hebrews, whose scribes were all trained in Egypt, they would have been aware of the myriad problems the various festivals entailed. You're juggling multiple calendars here. You have the annual calendar, which gets further out every year due to a lack of a leap year, you have the seasonal calendar for exquinoxes and solstices and you have the Sothic calendar based on Sirius. The calendars were constantly getting out of sync and hours or days would have to be added or subtracted to make them line up again, which messed up the timing for the festivals. Co-ordinating all these to have your festivals and holidays in some sort of logical order must have been difficult. Not to mention the various extra festivals for the Pharoahs birthday, ascencion to Godhood and any others that he/she might think appropriate to throw in now and again. Remember that the common man was illiterate and only had basic numerical skills. The people relied on the Priesthood to tell them when the festivals were going to be, they couldn't work it out for themselves. In some ways it would be quite human for a High Priest somewhere to think "Bugger this for a lark, we'll give them every seventh day off and call it a Sabbath. That way we can tell them that the next festival is on the fifth Sabbath from now. At least the uneducated twits can count to five and it takes a load of my priests." And Lo, the "Sabbath" was born.

Do a check and I'll bet there that nobody actually was offended. This push is by people (generally non christians) in a supposed attempt to not offend people. We get the same thing down in Oz "It might offend the non christians", yet every single time I've seen a muslim or buddist interviewed, they said they didn't care. Rather than being about not doing things that offend others, it's about not doing things that someone thinks might offend a third party. What rubbish. Ask the third party, and if they don't care and aren't offended then who are the do-gooders to talk? I've gone out and asked and I've yet to meet the non christian theist that is actually offended by "Merry Christmas" or by Easter. Zapatos, it's quite clear logic. You are a catholic, therefore you believe much the same things as evangelicals. Evangelicals believe in young earth creationism, therefore so do you, therefore you are a fool. What makes it funny is that I often get lumped into the same group, even though my lot were often "Guest of Honour" at Bar-B-Ques held by the Inquisition.

Says who? Who wrote that "definition"? And on what basis? Somebody imagining what they thought a God should be? Note also that your definition only applies to the Christian and Islamic God. In the earlier pantheons Gods could be fooled and things could be hidden from them. The existence of the entity I described would show that the definition of God that you are using was wrong, would it not? Put anoth way. Who the hell are you to decide what attributes the creator of the Universe should or should not have? Why "evil"? Is a child "evil" because they start an ant farm to see what the ants do? You are ascribing human characteristics to an entity so far beyond human that it isn't funny. What I do find interesting is that when this type of question is posed (and this isn't the only place I've suggested it) people react at a gut level against the idea that humans actually aren't all that important on the Universal level. They want to believe that an entity capable of creating this vast Universe that we live in, billions of Galaxies that each contain hundreds of millions of stars, an entity that can transcend both space and time, has nothing better to do with its time than to pay personal attention to some ant like being on an average planet revolving around an unremarkable star. They then go on to create a definition of this entity that requires it to pay personal attention to them. Put simply Marat. If the entity that created the Universe doesn't think that you are important enough to lavish its personal time and attention on, you don't think it's worthy of being called "God". It's called an "ego problem". But let's look at this "evil" God idea a bit closer. We live on a beautiful and bountiful planet that is quite capable of feeding and housing everybody on it in reasonable comfort. We have brains that allowed us to develop technologies to better feed and house ourselves and to defeat disease. Everything we need to turn this planet into a paradise or a hell is contained within us right now, yet because some omnipotent daddy figure doesn't do it for us, it is at fault and therefore evil? Really? Let's go a bit further and try for a bit of perspective. "God" is somehow at fault for allowing "evil" to survive in the world. If you're going to make that argument, then you must believe in an immortal soul since believing in a religions God will entail some sort of afterlife. Immortal, think about that word for a minute, everlasting, eternal. Are you damaged by stubbing your toe when you were 4 years old? Of course not. The pain was transitory and it meant nothing when compared to the length of your life here. How much more transitory and small is your life here when compared to eternity? How fascinating. With the entire Universe to inhabit and look after, people expect this "God" to pay personal attention to them, and with all time to exist in they want the entity to pay personal attention to them right now. Am I the only one that sees this as exceptionally childish? "Daddy, daddy, look at me! Daddy, watch me now!" It's like a 2 year old in the playground. It's all about human ego. Maybe we'd be better off if we stopped expecting God to be something it probably isn't and got on with the job rather than expecting God to do it for us. A great quote from a Christian I met "Pray as if prayer is the only thing that works, and work as if work is the only thing that works."

Not going to shoot at all. What you said about the movements is basically correct. Think of the Earths surface as comprising of 3 things, the oceans as they were during the Ice Age, the land masses and an absolute sh*tload of water that can be ice or water. During an Ice Age the water is ice and is on the land, so all that weight is on the land and the land goes down. After the Ice Age the weight of the water is in the oceans so the ocean bottoms go down and the land goes up. That the density of water is less than that of rock really doesn't come into it. We have a large gel filled ball called Earth and the weight of a vast amount of water is being moved from one place to another. Wherever the weight of the water is, the surface underneath will be depressed by some amount. It becomes clearer if you think of the water that made up the ice shields as something separate to the rest of the planet, an extra weight that is being moved from place to place. Cheers.

When we are talking about rebound we are talking about the difference between the weight during the last Ice Age and now. The land rebound is easy and obvious, take the ice away and the land goes up. But that is just the first order effect. When land is depressed due to ice there are two distinct immediate effects. The first is the depression directly under the ice mass but the second is a bit odd. There is an upward bulge created outside the ice mass. This means that during the Ice Age Scotland was depressed due to the weight of ice, but southern England was artificially raised by the bulge. As these return to normal (whatever that means WRT long term geology) Scotland goes up and England goes down. BTW, I remember reading that some places in Canada are still rising at a rate of 2cm a year, which is massively fast when you think about it. Obviously when the ice melted it went into the oceans and they rose. This rise wasn't any piddly little 18cm, the oceans rose nearly 150 metres. The extra weight of a million square miles of water 150 metres deep is enormous, so the crust under the oceans depresses. It's not as dramatic as the depression of land under ice, but it's still there. Think of it this way, if the ice could depress 1,000 square kms of land crust by 800 metres, then when it melts, the water would depress 1,000,000 square kms of ocean crust by 1,000 th of that amount or .8m. And we are talking about millions of square miles of ice, not mere thousands. To put it another way. If we only consider the areas where the water is more than 150 metres deep, basically the places that were water during the Ice Age, then every single square kilometre of that ocean area now has an extra 150,000,000 tonnes of weight bearing down on the crust. It also helps to remember that the Earth has a pretty much constant volume under the crust, so if one bit goes up, another must go down.

Thus illustrating the complexity. A "local" cooling effect in the low tropics means less heat to be transported to the temperate zones by the Hadley cells.

It's so nice to return to the voices of sanity after cruising the creationist forums.

While they did use some deplorable tactics, on the whole I think the Empire was a good thing. For a start it helped spread Democracy across the world when it devolved into the Commonwealth. By 2000 there were 120 Democracies worldwide and 54 of them belonged to the Commonwealth, a not too shabby percentage. Especially when compared to the stirling efforts of the other Empires. The former colonies of Spain and Portugal in South and Central America have always been beacons of light and good governance to the world, have they not? Similarly the former French colonies have always displayed stability. Yes the British Empire did some very bad things from todays POV, but in the historical context they were the best of a pretty ugly bunch. And frankly for all the bitching about the whites "invading" Australia, I've yet to meet the Aboriginal who wants to give up his car, mobile phone, computer and supermarkets to go live in a Gunya and eat roos that he's hunted and speared himself. I find myself in sympathy with Monty Python.

Sorry Rigney, but I didn't need snopes. The gun buyback was for semi-auto longarms, it didn't effect pistol owners at all. There was a lot of hot air about the buyback, but the truth is that there are very few uses for a semi-auto longarm. Unless you're culling large numbers of roos a bolt action is fine. Besides, the Feds never knew how many semi-autos were out there anyway. We licenced the owner, not the weapon. It was estimated that there were more than 2.5 million longarms in Queensland alone (more than 1 each for every man, woman and child in the State) and the buyback got about 100,000 of them. Enquiries about the other guns are met a blank look and the statement "Semi-autos? No sir, I don't have any of them. That would be illegal, and I'm a law abiding citizen I am. I wouldn't ever have such a thing as an illegal weapon around, nosir." Anybody that thinks the Australian population are disarmed and acts on that thought will get a short, sharp shock. Besides, my latest aquisition is a Lee-Enfield Mk4, 1944 vintage, possibly the fastest bolt action in history. If you can get off 20 aimed rounds in a minute with a boltaction, who needs a semi-auto?

The key word there is "if". The concept that a God must be omnipotent and "good" is taken from texts. To make the idea behind the OP clearer. The entity provides scientifically verifiable proof that it is indeed the creator of the Universe. That's the assumption, that there is no doubt whatsoever that the entity is the "God" of this Universe. It then goes on to say "I existed before the Universe began and tweaked the Big Bang to set the Laws of Physics in such a fashion that the Universe would be hospitable to life. (Anthropogenic principle I think it's called?) I never communicated a purpose or religious text to anybody. Why did I do it? Because I'm immortal and bored and wanted to see what would happen." People are making assumptions about a creator based on their scriptural background. That the definition of a "God" is that it must be omnipotent, or omniscient, or good or something. But in the thought experiment God has turned up and it is nothing like what the scriptures say it is. So there is God, standing right in front of you, but he never inspired scripture, handed down commandments, sent angels amoungst man, ("What's an Angel?" it says) spoke to Noah, ("Who?") and didn't send intermediaries to impregnate random women. So now what?

Lemur, if you didn't understand the original question, why didn't you just say so? Mooeypoo tried to get you to understand and failed. The whole point of a thought experiment is to accept the original premise of "What if?" and go from there. If the original premise had been "Suppose the Earth was a cube. How would gravity work?" You've spent your time pointing out that the Earth isn't a cube. We all know that, but the question was "What if it was?" The point of the OP was to turn the tables a bit. It is very common for the theists to ask the atheists "What if you're wrong and there is a God. How would you feel? What would you do?" However this often contains the unspoken assumption that the proof of the existence of God would automatically also be proof of the theists preferred train of religious thought. People talk of their "Faith", as in belief without proof often without realising that there two factors to their faith and not one. If we separate the two we find a "Faith" in the existence of God and also "Faith" that their religion portrays this God (and His/Her views and wants) accurately. The purpose of the OP was to separate these two factors of Faith. The theist is then faced with the simple facts that while their faith in the existence of a God is proven correct, their faith in their religion being somehow the "Revealed Word of God" was wrong. Basically, how would a theist feel to find out that while God existed the Bible was no more based on fact or the will of God than "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was.