Gorgon

And yet interesting implications for sauce.

The temptation to pick up an unconscious alien and put it in your backback is best avoided, even if it's just the one you need for the armor upgrade.

OMG dude from Nazereth totally walked on water.

She never actually said that. It was a misquote, probably nurtured by the revoultionists.

Maybe, and maybe for not having dallied around with religion they would be sporting tricorders and spandex suits and have eliminated hunger and disease.

This is getting into the whole subjectivity debacle again. Alright then, demonstrate God within the same margin for error as the existence of your bathroom.

And the sky could fall on our heads, and the sun might decide not to come up and you just might steer this conversation towards something sensible but the chances of all that are very very slim. Still, my original statement stands. We aren't discussing probability.

Also, the lot of you are assuming too much. I don't prosyletise anything. Certainly not atheism. I'm trying to have an original thought or two and not be hamstrung by dogma, whether it originates in religion, atheism, or middle of the road I don't want to have to think too hard about thisism

How do you know the existence of God can't be proven. That's complete nonsense. He could appear tomorrow 1000 feet tall and shooting thunderbolts from his eyes. You can't say to a certainty that he won't.

platitudes. God would still exist if we were able to prove it.

And how about proving the existence of God. I wonder what he would have to say about all the sneaking around and working in mysterious ways. If he's omnipotent he's got a lot to answer for... That is if he's actually one of the good guys. Could just be good PR.

An example of how naming something is also controlling it. When we are discussing the boundry between the natural and supenatural. 'Because that's what it's called'... It's not really much of an argument now is it.

Since we don't have a TV thread I have been streaming QI with the spectacularly gay Steven Fry. It's a (90s?) gameshow, which I now realise they made in Danish with the spectacularly Gay Jarl Friis-Mikkelsen. Don't remember what it was called. I suspect Fry of helping himself to several large glasses of sherry before taping, which doesn't hurt the entertainment value at all.

The difference is everything we have just gone over. Peer review, the theory is only good as its ability to withstand scrutiny. It's all the difference in the world.

I'm not saying that they are, mostly because religion doesn't come up anymore. It's personalized. You are no longer tried by the inquisition for stating that the world is observably round. If you do actively question religious dogma, still the underpinnings of a majority of religiously active people, it seems you are not allowed to use all your faculties but have to jump in blind and either accept it or not. It's a neat trick alright.

Yes, sure people can believe whatever they want, but if you want to find out if it's actually true you have to question and examine, the sociological construct that is religion aside.

Science and religion are not flip sides of the same coin. In science you try to understand the world around you, using whatever tools are at your disposal. In religion you basically just give up and accept a 1000 year old template without question.

Whatever do you mean. I don't know of any religion that discards dogma when faced with conflicting evidence.

You could start by examining a few of the postulates of religion. Do human beings have immortal souls. Are they subject to Newton's three laws. If not, Why ?. Why would God re-invent the wheel during creation and use entirely incompatible hardware on his side. Doesn't seem practical. Besides, weren't we created in his image.

Btw. can anyone tell me why my mouse has decided to doubleclick whenever I single click.

You don't need to. Many religions can point to a variety of miracles that have been well documented. But since scientific method demands independent replication you simply can't consider metaphysical in scientific terms. That just leaves out miracles. What about the weight of a soul as it leaves the body. Considering that it holds the lifetime memory of an idividual it must be very complex, it also must be made up of particles of some kind. These can be measured, the experiment would be repeatable. String theory suggests particles can be several places at once, even belong to alternate universes. It's logical to assume heaven would be made of familiar and detectable particles. We could scan for it if we knew the particle signature of human souls.

Why would one assume that the metaphysical cannot be observed with scientific means.

God would be a Schr

One can reduce everything to relativity and suggest that nothing can be definitively observed or proven, but it kind of leaves one backed into a corner. Does that leave you with the following division : 1/3 that God is real. 1/3 that God is not real. 1/3 that nothing is real making either eventuality equally likely. In the latter event the reality of God would be decided on the number of believers vs. the number of non believers, meaning that one could either create God or destroy him if one could achieve a 100% coefficiency among individuals, whether more than one actually exist or not.