Lateralus

Everyone seems to be so sure that reason/logic (applied in a "perfect" sense) are fallible. I do not agree. Sure, there are some "great mysteries", but to say that reason is fallible you'd have to find a way of showing that reason could never ever fathom them. My view is that they are mysteries now, but not forever. So, I see no reason to not think that logic is an infallible tool that can crack all the codes in the universe. By "great mysteries" I assumed he meant things like the existence of a God, which you can never really disprove because it's so easy to change the argument when new evidence comes to light. I have every faith in us discovering things like the unknowns of the quantum world and unifying quantum theory and general relativity and basically anything else physical science sets its sights on. There's always going to be philosophy and metaphysics which exist outside the realms of the testable.

Why, people are still discussing related issues. I agree some of the value is gone, but its not dead. It's just moving in circles at this point, and not even eloquent ones.

The value that this thread once had has long since passed and won't come again if it continues on like this. I think everyone should just pack it in.

Looks like you actually don't understand. I never said that. Anyways to Lateralus: I know and I hope you didn't think I meant to abandon logic. It is the best we have, but when you use it to try to explain the great mysteries of the universe, it's almost pointless. No matter what kind of reasoning we use, all it will come down to is theories yet some people think that we have substantial proof that there is no way in hell that a God can exist. (Yes, pun intended.) Well a mystery, by definition, is something that defies explanation by reason, so you're right there. All I can say is that if people are going to assert the existence of a god (especially one who seems to interfere with everything) because of a revelation or any other untestable means, it's not unreasonable to deny it. Theists don't mind because they have faith, but to have most of the 'evidence' on my side means a lot to me.

I can understand what you're saying, but the point is that logic is all we have.

I've always liked South Park, but I sometimes cringe watching the first couple of seasons because it was so crude. They still use lots of toilet humor, but it's not what keeps the show going now. The storylines are usually pretty clever analogies of current events, and it's the satire that makes the show funny, not the swearing (though that can be funny too).

Or not. That may be your explanation, but it's by no means correct nor indicative of the truth. ...Oh! I almost forgot. Let's play a little game. It's called "Spot the logical fallacy". 3K if you can spot the logical fallacy in the above quoted four sentences. Ummm... How about... No? The same thing I said above holds true here. That may be your understanding of God but that in no way, shape or form even closely embodies the truth. Simply because you want to play the God of the gaps game doesn't make it so. And just doubly no. I wish I could write no gazillion times, because I would. I just don't have that much time on my hands. A.) You can break down almost all of nature using nothing but numbers. Pythagoras figured this out about 2500 years ago. Galileo expounded on it. Sir Isaac Newton even more. And almost all of modern physics is based on this fact. Really, there's nothing "beautiful, startling and thrilling" about that Don't you think that fact in itself is beautiful? You can biologically explain birth, but try telling a new parent that there's nothing special about their baby. Richard Feynman is probably the most often quoted on this subject. Reason tells us that freedom is bad. Reason tells us it's okay to lie, cheat and steal. Reason tells us that it's okay to be mass murderers. Reason tells us that extorting others for personal use is perfectably acceptable. Reason tells me that you fail to understand that reason is limited by itself and provides no gauge of what is right and what is wrong; what is good and what is evil; what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, etc. etc. etc. You don't include ethics and compassion and empathy and all that other good stuff in your reasoning?

Singles usually get released ahead of albums.

Just because I feel like it Ladies and Gentlemen...Rick Monday saves the Flag e2fd9ivL1Vg From the funny picture thread... Didn't you post that already?

The current (I believe) leading explanation for the big bang theory doesn't rely on something coming from nothing. Many of the theories you might read about it won't even state where the explosion came from, and much of the mathematics in big bang theory details the events after the explosion, not where it came from. From what I've read (which could be outdated) the big bang was an explosion from a singularity, and would act like the explosion of a black hole. All logic tells you is that matter cannot be created or destroyed, it doesn't forbid an explosion which creates the universe. So what you can deduce is that whatever happened, it wasn't something being created from nothing.

I think you picked a bad example to explain faith. If you didn't know anything about the ground you wouldn't have any idea what or if you were going to hit. If you had fallen before you might expect to hit the ground, but without being able to see or feel it you'd never know.

Ha, I love the way Day Lewis says that line. For a few weeks after my friends and I saw the film, almost every silence was broken with a cry of "DRAINAGE!".

Ha, that gave me a fantastic mental image of some Wildean house of debauchery. I'm not being a spelling Nazi, I just thought this was funny.

It's a fantastic book - His best if you ask me.

Every Day Is Like Sunday by Morrissey into Sometime World by Wishbone Ash.

By 'catch' he meant to form an image from it.

At the moment I'm reading a fair bit of physics and poetry. I just finished rereading The Brothers Karamazov, which is a fairly lengthly novel so I'm having a rest for a few days before I start another, which will probably be For Whom The Bell Tolls by Hemingway. Next to me just now I've got Six Easy Pieces, Six Not So Easy Pieces and The Meaning of it All by Richard Feynman, and my collections of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Elliot. I started reading Paradise Lost, the epic poem by John Milton a few days ago, but found myself reading more of the bible than the poem itself. All the references were a bit more than my brain could handle at the time, but I'll need to get back to it.

Ha, me too. What a song.

If you believe in the God of the bible (and monotheism in general) then you have to claim to know certain things about him, omnipotence being one of them. So he can do anything, including ending world hunger and disease and creating a perfect world. Subjective perfection isn't really an argument that will work here, because obviously God and heaven are both supposedly perfect, meaning that some kind of objective perfection is possible if that's what you believe.

It's an interesting subject. Certainly there's certain pieces of devotional painting, music and poetry that never would have existed if the artists hadn't had the love for God that they did. However I don't know how much claim religion has over many of the commissioned pieces - Often the only work artists could get was through the church because it was the only institution that had enough money for that kind of frivolity. I don't doubt how much art religion has allowed to exist and inspired, but do you think the roof of the Sistine Chapel would have been any less beautiful if it was a painting of the milky way or any other non-religious subject?

Any light moving away (or to, for that matter) from an observer would cause red shift. The light wouldnt move any faster or slower, the wavelength would change. More specifically, light moving towards an observer would cause blue shift, though the link probably says that. I'm still confused, because if the astronaut is moving .999...c, and shines a light, wouldn't the light move 1c relative to the astronaut, which would be 1c + the .999...c of the spaceship, which is impossible. It's difficult to explain without going into the equations and all that, but what it basically comes down to is that if the speed of light is fixed, then it has to be other variables in the equation that change (space/distance and time). As you approach light speed the length of whatever you're in will contract along your axis of movement, and time will slow (relative to a stationary observer). If you were traveling at light speed and turned on the headlights of the vehicle you were traveling in, you would see them as normal, but a stationary observer couldn't see them because the light would never get ahead of the ship. The difference is that space and time change with velocity.

This will very likely rock the boat a bit, but I this is a cartoon/comic I StumbleUpon'd a while ago and found pretty powerful:

Siamese Dream and Melon Collie are fairly good albums.

Any light moving away (or to, for that matter) from an observer would cause red shift. The light wouldnt move any faster or slower, the wavelength would change. More specifically, light moving towards an observer would cause blue shift, though the link probably says that.

There's a joke about resurrection here somewhere, I just can't quite put my finger on it.