metadigital

Are you advocating stoning?

Qwerty, before your ludicrous mutterings make me go back and draw out line-for-line this inane argument, just STOP. You started by telling me that I was wrong in calling the circular logic fallacious. Then you retreated to a semantic argument about the definition of a Formal Fallacy. Enough! Circular reasoning: also known as Begging the question.

We're all doomed! There is no future! Art is just a rehash! Science is just a re-imagining! Life is just a re-run!

Same here. I know 90% of movie games are utter trash, but don't care either - it's Transformers. You realise that you are keeping those moronic suits in marketing in a job, managing the overall content of games, simply because you reflexively purchase anything with a brand you like, don't you?

... And probably not be able to rejoin any society afterwards.

Opportunity cost commensurate with avoiding the hassle. "

Solar powered battery chargers.

Gesundheit!

how does one have a natural resistance to the supernatural?

I had to laugh because I just picked up Douglas Coupland's latest jPod novel, the central plot to which is the bad of geeks working in a development company are asked to retrofit a turtle character into the skateboard console game, that is already half-completed, because of a new marketing suit ... you're living in a novel!

Don't let ANYONE bully you into agreeing to something you don't agree with, ever.

Parsimony may be controversial, but it sure beats everything else.

I guess I should play the games.

It's a non-fiction book selection. The panellists are chosen, presumably on their achievements in their respective fields (science, history, media, publishing, etc). The book is being made into a film, too.

Qwerty, if you are agreeing with me that "Proofs" of the existence of God are based on faulty premises and use faulty logic, then I don't know why you are continuing to exchange replies. Your initial comment was that the logic was sound, even if the premise was not, which you now seem to be retracting. In any caes, I think it's pretty clear that the logic is faulty (fallacious), AND the premises are dubious. As for your "new, improved" version of the Aquinas Proof, it is still faulty. It's faulty because the set of "self-existent beings" could be null. It's just a restating of the infinite regress again. I'll grant you that this new, improved staing has the benefit of following the disjunctive syllogism format, but it is still Formal Fallacy, this time a Hasty Generalisation. Although discussing the niceties of formal logic is fun, it isn't really on-topic. What I'd really like to talk about is the origin of ethics ... Adding a First Mover is counter to Occam's Razor. And, even if we assume that there was a terminating agent for the infinite regress (called God), there is absolutely no need to ascribe any other characteristics, like sentience (omniscience) and omnipotence ... which brings you to a deist belief, that which the overwhelming majority of "religious" scientists hold. Calling it God is unhelpful at best and perniciously misleading. Who created God? To say that God wasn't created is equivalent to saying that the universe wasn't created. If God always was, then why can't the universe always have been? Why people of the Abrahamic faiths insist that there is a being that can see every thought, every atom vibrate, everything's fate, and that such a magnificent being would be frantically concerned with the intricacies of what consenting adult people do behind closed doors. Or, as Sam Harris put it, in Letter to a Christian Nation:

Panel of appointed people read loads of books and decide which they think is the best, every year.

Competition is good. Excelent article, Walsh.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has read the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize winner for Non Fiction Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone.

I would have thought foot patrols were a better way to police a state than from a gun-mounted humvee.

It is a judicious use of resources to emphasize the benefits of the project, whilst realistically confronting the challenges. "

It's a toast: Nunc est bibendum ("Cheers!" or "Now is the time to drink" in Latin).

Bummer if your plate mail has a permanent Haste ...

You're in third.

Let me tell you a story. There once was a programmer, who was brought into a similar situation to you (as a can-do super-fixer), where many other programmers had tried, failed and made a big mess. The new programmer was given the ludicrously long list of goals, which was duly scanned and filed. Then, the programmer found a really neat, visually stunning little effect that everyone had always wanted to implement into the game, but never got around to it owing to the ever-tightening deadlines and piling workload. So the programmer did nothing else except this really cool feature. Anyway, this took some time. All the time that the superstar had been given (about a week). To be fair, the implementation was fantastic. But what about the game? Well, as expected, the programmer was called in front of the directors to explain the situation and give a progress report. The programmer gave an intelligent, realistic and quite devastating status report. Then, during the questions, the demo (a looped view of the really cool visual feature) caught the attention of every management suit at the table. Every question met with the demo re-run, which was really cool to watch. the management team didn't remember all the details, but they were impressed with the demonstration and the skill of the programmer, as well as the brutal honesty of the status report and decided that the best way to recoup their investment was to invest just a little bit more into this super programmer.

Cant, I'm not putting words into your mouth, I'm trying to engage you in a discussion ... you've just given up, despite my reasonable attempts ... almost like someone who doesn't want to confront an ugly truth ... Qwerty, I'm struggling to understand why you insist on trying to assert that I cannot use the term "fallacy" in an informal manner. I'm also struggling to comprehend how, when I demonstrate that the proof for Purgatory -- as listed in the Catholic Encyclopedia, under Purgatory, Proof, hence the principle proposition (P) to be proved is the existence of Purgatory, by the establishment of the existence of intercessory prayers (Q) -- is affirming the consequent and therefore a FORMAL LOGICAL FALLACY. Now, as for the existence of God, let's just take the first three, and demonstrate their fallacious logic. Thomas Aquinas The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God. The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God. The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God. All these arguments rely on an infinite regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the (unwarranted) assumption God is immune to regress (who created God). Even if we allow a terminator, and call it God, there is no reason to imbue it with personality. So, the logic is: (P) God is uncreated, unmoved and uncaused (Q) everything is created, moved and caused Once again we are affirming the consequent (Q) and expecting it to prove the Proposal (P): P>Q Q. Therefore P Which, you will recall (or look above and READ) is a FORMAL LOGICAL FALLACY. It is also a faulty premise (as I also indicated) because there is no justifiable reason to assume that there is a terminator to an infinite regression. Really, the discussion of the correct semantic use of the term "fallacy" is so far from the topic of science and religion (well, except that religious people throughout history have used fallacies with monotonous regularity to prove the existence of God), that I doubt anyone of faith has bothered to read this far. ===================== Let me just help this argument out of the nineteenth century; the singlemost important consequence of the Darwin-Wallace evolutionary concept of natural selection is this (read it slowly, because it is breathtakingly important): it is (the only know way to explain) complexity from simplicity. Incremental specialisation doesn't require anything else to explain complexity. This is the most important concept for everyone to grasp. It really is beautiful and beautifully simple. A horseshoe doesn't create a blacksmith, a watch doesn't beget a watchmaker ... but, through evolution an eye can grow in usefulness from a flatworm's light-and-shade detector, through the Nautilus's pin-hole camera image with blurry edges, to a mammalian eye and up beyond to an eagle (for example), depending on natural selection. This is why, before Darwin and Wallace, thinkers were preoccupied with explaining our universe as originating from something more complex (God). There was no other explanation. And, if we had adhered to Church leaders like Martin Luther (vide infra), then we would not have this explanation. Reason is the enemy of faith Reason should be destroyed in all Christians Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but -- more frequently than not -- struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God. Martin Luther I trust this helps elucidate the matter to everyone's satisfaction.