Re: Cookbook for Creation
Well trollface,
I find it amusing how consistently you demand others provide evidence for their beliefs and claims (even those "claims" which are not made by the person in question, but rather your twisting of their words), and yet when someone presses you to provide evidence for your own beliefs and opinions, you either switch the focus or provide non-evidence. Interesting trick, and it might even work, if only some did not see you using it.
I imagine that you may well "run away" as you did the last time I felt it was important to point out your debating tactics. However, since you have chosen to turn this thread into a soapbox from which to stoke your ego, I feel it is only right to expose these tendencies. Your "need" to make people wrong, even when it does not pertain to a discussion point, is the strongest tactic used by your ego to gain energy and protect itself. I ran a little experiment in one of my last posts, so let's start with that, shall we?
Thanks for taking that bait. I happily admit to being wrong here, as it allows me to prove my point about your ego-driven nature. You see, I planted that mistake purposefully, at the behest of a friend who has been reading some of your posts over beers. I did not think you would be petty enough to "make me wrong" on a minor fact that does not affect the veracity of my point. However, my friend thought you would. So you have actually made me wrong TWICE with one sentence...does that make your ego feel good? This psychological experiment is made even more relevant to the Einstein/Newton discussion because it is further proof that some details can be incorrect without destroying the correctness of the larger issue. In this case, I quoted the wrong numerical law attributed to Newton's F=ma. Even though I used the wrong number, it had absolutely no affect on the point that the "details" of F=ma are wrong when considering relatavistic effects. Therefore, this also refutes your claim of how some theory can be necessarily "wrong" if some of the details upon which it is based are wrong.
CAn you tell me what you find vague and non-specific about this statement, please? "So you'd actually say that God's observation of his work was not a seperate act of creation in and of itself, but was an aspect of the act of creation which is described as such? Or the latter of the two options I gave you, in other words." Seems perfectly simple to me.
Actually, I think I would rather rely on the words of someone we both know. See if you know who said this in an earlier thread:
Well, I don't care if you get an answer that satifies you or not. If you do, then re-ask the question in a manner that I will understand (which would have taken precisely the same amount of energy as your last post did).
If you don't, then stop wasting my time with petty game-playing. I am interested in debate, not childish point-scoring.
Therefore, if your original question seems "perfectly simple" to you, I trust you can reword it so I can understand it. Otherwise, if you cannot express yourself more clearly, then there is little point in me trying to answer a question that only YOU understand.
And he did not do this by ignoring the veracity of the details, did he?
Tactic. Here we see that, rather than addressing the point of my issue (which is that just because details may not be correct does not render a theory completely "wrong"), you chose to attempt to redirect the focus to make youself "right". I would rather you address my point: Simply because
SOME details of a theory may not be completely accurate does not render a higher level theory "wrong". I will even provide another example: V = IR does not adequately address the details of electromagnetic effects. Maxwell's equations are "more right" than Ohm's Law. Yet Ohm's Law is still taught, and still useful for the vast majority of electrical engineering problems. Please avoid trying to shift the focus, or I will have to again point out what you are trying to do.
Well, I know I said it last post, but it bears repeating. As, yes, a control systems engineer, you must be aware of the concept of GIGOL, right? You have heard of this expression before, right? Is it not one of hte fundamental principals of your profession, as it is mine? Well, it's probably just GIGO in yours, but GIGOL is more relevent, I feel.
Sorry, this is not evidence. Rather, it is a theory, and what's more it is only based on your opinion that the "GI" part is true. I was looking for evidence for why it is necessarily true that "GI" will yield "GO". I do believe, given my examples, that a theory can still be quite useful and "right" to a very high level, even if there is some "GI" assumptions. It is all a matter of how inaccurate the initial assumptions are. So I am still waiting for some evidence.
There you go, from the horse's mouth. Evidence that it is possible for the universe being the way it is to have come about "by accident".
Nice try, Slippery Sam, but I am not going to let you get away with it. This was not what I was asking for evidence of, as I obviously knew this was true. I will now spell it out very clearly for you, so you will have no excuse to not provide me some evidence for your claim:
I would like to see your evidence for why you believe it is more reasonable to believe universe came about as a result of a low probability event (accident) vs a higher probability event (by design).
You see, what I am getting at here is the basis of Occam's Razor. Your own words describing your belief is that it was "more reasonable" to assume the universe came about by accident, even though you admit that universal conditions show extremely low probability of them having "just occurred". Why do you think it is more reasonable? Based on what evidence do you select the LESS LIKELY option over the MORE LIKELY option? For those not familiar with Occam's Razor, it is a premise that states "the simplest explanation is most often the real explanation". So when it is much more likely that the universe could have been purposefully designed to show its very tight tolerances, why do you think it more reasonable to think something very unlikely happened? I would like to see the evidence.
Nice try at a Strawman, but I'm not going to bite.
And yet your ego was more than willing to bite at an opportunity to make someone "wrong" for what could have been an honest mistake, that had no relevance to the point. Interesting. I'd say this is even more telling evidence for how you use debate tactics to pretend to answer my issues, but instead you simply change the focus.
Again, this just bears repeating, really, and maybe I should clarify what I have already said somewhat. If you agree that there is no "ONLY 'right'" translation of the Hebrew text, then you must also agree that any interpretation which claims to be definitive must be questionable in that claim? So on what basis do you believe the interpretation that favours the figures you provided?
Same tactic of trying to shift the focus (again). Let's review here: The primary reason I responded to your website offering was because you were so adamant that the Sepher Yetzirah translation was "wrong" and that the website you offered was the "literal" Hebrew translation. My response used words from that very website to point out that even the translation provided in that website could not realistically be called "right", as there are many ways to translate Hebrew (Gematria being one useful tool for such). I would like you to address my point, rather than try to change the focus. You were stating quite strongly that the interpretation I favor in Sepher Yetzirah is "wrong". I would like you to now admit that judging the "wrongness" of ANY Hebrew translation of Genesis is tenuous at best.
Not that you'd ever twist someone's words.
Well, I certainly could not do better than the master...but I am learning things from you.
if it is significant who has found pertinence in the text, then would you like to speak about convicted multiple rapist and child molestor Ivon Shearing, AKA the head honcho of the Kabalarian Philosphy and successor to the founder of the religion, Alfred J. Parker?
I would say that the significance depends upon whether that person's work helped advance humanity. Clearly, any person who is a criminal, murderer, or cultist programmer has very low significance with regard to any beliefs they held. On the other hand, those people who are major contributors to "good" and "advancement" in society are worthy of studying their beleifs and where they may have derived their ideas. The fact that you cannot seem to see this difference in this significance is quite odd.
I think it's patently obvious which of us is on an ego trip.
Yes, I'd say it is, given what we've seen of your Slippery Sam tactics.
But I wouldn't call it significant (rotation) in the greater scheme of things.
And once again, I am waiting for evidence. Significance is often determined by how prevailing a certain effect is within an area of interest. If we consider the "greater scheme of things" to be how the universe works, I would say you'd have a hard time providing evidence that rotation does not have large effects on cosmology, given the fact that objects rotate about the earth, the earth rotates on its axis, the planets rotate around the sun, the sun rotates on its axis, and the mass of our galaxy rotates about its core. I'd like some evidence to back your claim here, please.
I have never claimed to be presenting anything other than my opinion.
And so this is how you avoid providing evidence? Just state that everything you say is your opinion, and therefore no one can hold you to provide evidence? Let's see how far you let me get with that line...
Wow, do you have to take quotes out of context and change their meaning to try to prove me wrong now? That's unbelieveably bad debating there, son.
Yes, it is...and do you know who I learned this tactic from?
*Looks at question mark on the end of his own sentences*
*Thinks "fact?"*
Do I need to quote your own words to help remind you of what you said? OK then, I will:
So, in fact, you do not claim that any control systems engineer would agree with your evidence, you claim that all control systems engineers believe in God?
So what were you saying about control systems engineers, then? Either they agree with you or they're unreasonable? Or not good at their jobs? Surely if your theory is as based in science as you claim and any reasonable person with an understandiong of control systems engineering would believe as you do, then that is what you're saying?
I'm glad you have learned to use the quote and bold features. Perhaps now you will take a solid look at the words I used. And if you do, you will see that nowhere did I use the words that you seem to attribute to me when you said:
you claim that all control systems engineers believe in God? Can you back this claim up?
So you see that I never said that all control systems engineers believe in God. This was YOUR claim from an incorrect inferrence. Please correct yourself.... unless this was another tactic to twist people's words?
I think it is quite clear that I was simply describing how systems engineers approach system analysis and design when faced with extremely tight tolerances, and multiple degrees of freedom. I did
NOT claim that all control systems engineers believe in God. Let me use another analogy to make it crystal clear, as my point here again throws-back to the probability that the universe came about as a highly unlikely accident: Many times, engineers are called-upon to "reverse engineer" a system or technology that they have no design data on. All they have is a sample of the system itself. One such example is purported attempts to reverse engineer an alien craft at Area 51 (no don't go saying that I am claiming this story is true!). The way we go about doing this is by examining the system, how its elements interact, and
SPECIFICALLY examining the tolerances with which system elements achieve their intended functions and meet their operating requirements. While doing this, if we were to simply assume "well, these tight tolerances are probably just an accident" we would be making a grave error that would likely cause us to miss some very salient aspects that the designer "designed-into" the system.
So again to summarize: I did not make a claim that all systems engineers believe in God. Rather, if you were to present all the detailed tolerance data and degrees of freedom of the universe to an design engineer, and then asked him/her "do you think it is more likely that all this came about by accident, or that it was purposefully designed", if faced with the kinds of data seen in the tolerances of our universe, most engineers would be MUCH less likley to claim it was an accident, and would be more likely to claim that the tolerances and degrees of freedom would tend to indicate it is more likely to have been purposefully designed that way.
Now....will you address this evidence? And provide me with your evidence for why it is "more reasonable" to believe the universe was an accident, rather than the simpler explanation that it was designed to the tight tolerances that it exhibits.
BTW... I have, indeed, had such discussions as above with some of my peers and friends in the aerospace engineering community. Many of them DO believe in God, and some do not. Yet even the ones who did not still marveled at the tightness of tolerances for our universe to be stable, and were not willing to admit it was an "accident". Those who do not believe in God were more apt to accept that there is some sort of higher-level, exo-universe system that set our universe in motion purposefully. Like Roel, they would adopt the stance that it was not "an intelligent, coherent God", but rather "just another system". But also as you and Roel have pointed about with regard to the God hypothesis, this does not answer the question of "where did that system come from and how?"
RMT
