Moontanman

you are incorrect, you have indeed done nothing but appeal to authority and then use that authority to posit something that does not necessarily follow...

So all you have is an appeal to authority and then you use that to support the concept of god? How do you know it is a god and not just some fluke of nature, the odds have no meaning in this context because the probability of us being here is one... And btw, your appeals to authority do not answer my questions, how do you know that? Is not a request for what other people hypothesize, it is a request for evidence, so far you have given none other than "it had to be that because I can't think of another way" I think your entire premise is fatally flawed because it assumes the answer is god and not just any god but your own god and it also assumes that further scientific progress cannot be made... there for god did it....

So you are talking about the christian god... Before you posit the christian god don't you think you should show some evidence of any gods? I am willing to grant the possibility universe had a beginning and a cause but how do you posit that cause as a god? Again, how do you get to a god from a cause? AND HOW DO YOU KNOW IT IS THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD? How do you know the cause of the universe isn't some multidimensional brobdingnagian creature that ingests dark matter and excretes universes?

How do you know the universe is fine tuned? How do you know that our universe isn't the only way a universe can be? How do you know there aren't a infinite number of ways a universe can be and we are just lucky enough to exist in one that allows life? How do you know that different constants would not produce unique conditions that would allow things we cannot imagine?

For some reason i thought you were specifying the christian god, sorry, but none the less the idea of a first cause is not necessary see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekpyrotic_universe.

Again, you are making an unsupportable assertion that life is impossible outside those supposedly narrow limits, we only know one type of life in our universe, their could be others even in our universe. It reminds me of how a silicon life from on Titan would look toward the sun and see earth as an inhospitable hell. We cannot say the universal constants are random either, it may very well be that our type of universe is all that can be... in fact it is all that there is... There is no way to say that life as we know it is the only possible life, in other universes there might be other ways we cannot even imagine to produce life in universes we wouldn't recognize at all. If things were different... things would be different...

Yes if things were different they would be different... what is your point? the bible is hardly a source of empirical evidence of anything No, you cannot say that! You cannot know that a set of rules exist that makes life easier might exist, you assume it has to be tuned for life as we know it, we cannot know if any other constants would produce it's own unique life forms...

Odds? You are going with odds? Even if as you say the universe is fine tuned it most certainly is not fine tuned for life. In fact as far as we can tell we are the only life in this vast universe, how can you say it's fine tuned for life when so little of it is suitable for life? It should be pretty obvious what the odds are of life in this universe starting even if we are the only ones here to see it...

Ok, lets grant you the universe has a cause, first of all how do you get from cause to God? Then how do you get to the christian god? Then of course how can you say this god is eternal with no beginning, all I see is an infinite regress of causes causing each other... ...

While I agree with what you said I am sure you didn't mean to say your god doesn't exist, so I'll ask this simple question, can you show any evidence that the christian god or any other god is uncaused and has existed eternally or are you really saying your god doesn't exist?

Can you even show some evidence for your "Christian God" much less that it has always existed? And yes i can make up my own God and it's limitations are the same as your god...

Thanks DH...

Damn, I liked the sea cucumber stomach, which species of jellyfish?

Well boys and girls, what is it? I'm going to go with a sea cucumber the size of a whale coughed up it's stomach because a submarine scared it.... http://www.wimp.com/creaturecaught/

The cast iron reference comes with a serious memory for me, I once hit one of my grandma's cast iron cook pots with a ball bat and it shattered, later that day my ass experienced the feel of wood as well...

I think it's more of a concentrating of the energy shaped by the hollow body of the guitar. http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jw/guitarintro.html

Then what would it be?

This is due to the amplifying effects of either the hollow wooden body or electrical amplification... no net gain of energy is involved...

Completely broken, in fact high winds can throw wooden objects through metal, I live in a hurricane zone, high speed winds can do some amazing things like drive a piece of wood all the way through the metal sides of an automobile... And you have to consider that some metals are rather brittle and can be broken easily, all metals are not created equal... Cast iron comes to mind...

I am willing to engage you on this but it should be in another thread, in this one it is off topic...

Ok, I see what the problem is, anti matter is unstable "in the presence of matter" but no more unstable than "matter in the presence of anti matter", left apart, both are more or less equally stable/unstable...

I personally have used wooden mallets to bend form and sometimes break metal, put a nice seasoned piece of crepe myrtle into a reasonably powerful air cannon and I am sure it could penetrate a significantly thick piece of metal, I'm not sure 2" is a reasonable thickness of metal to do this with but I am quite sure metal in general can be broken by wood....

Krash, I read your link a couple of times and I couldn't find where it states that anti matter is unstable, Can you quote where it says that please? Maybe I shouldn't have said anti matter, I was thinking more along the lines of anti mass and anti gravity. I know that gravitational effects of anti matter is expected to be the same as matter but there are a few hypothesis that disagree and the experiments haven't been done as of now. Now back to the topic, wouldn't anti gravity require anti mass and would or would not it be attracted to positive gravity or mass?

The hair standing up on your neck is a reflex that is used to make a animal look bigger when it is frightened, since we no longer have enough body hair for this to be useful it no longer serves it's original purpose but the reflex remains... I was thrill seeker when I was young, racing motorcycles was my fav thing to do...