<p>silence_kit, the fact of the matter is we DO see infinite precision in everyday life. If you’re going to simply base your argument off examples that simply get the facts wrong, we have nothing to discuss.</p>
<p>The analogy isn’t bogus, and the fact that you just call it so does not make it so. The point is to show the nature of evidence, probability, and certainty given lack of direct proof one way or the other. Instead of realizing what the analogy is meant to show, you misinterpret its purpose and try to discredit it by not only not answering the questions asked of you, but you attack certain elements of the analogy that are completely irrelevant to what it is meant to show.</p>
<p>It’s not a strawman argument because it’s meant to show the absurdity of the logic inherent in a justification of God (or any other currently-unprovable, highly-improbable concept) in a world where we judge everything by merit of evidence.</p>
<p>My claim was that we never run across an irrational number in real life. give me one example of one such number. please don’t talk about the circumference of a circle, or the sides of a 30-60-90 triangle. these are abstractions. </p>
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<p>i’ve said this before. the honest christian doesn’t bother to prove the concept of god. he accepts it as given. he certainly doesn’t use physical phenomena as evidence.</p>
<p>i do the same thing for my ideological beliefs. you do the same thing for your ideological beliefs. i seriously doubt that your moral principles are empirically based.</p>
<p>They’re not “abstractions” in the sense that they aren’t “irrational numbers in real life.” Things like “pi” and “e” are ever-present. Every single thing in this universe has infinite precision. Even if that precision is .0, that’s still infinite precision. Every time you fill a water jug up from empty to full, the water’s height overcrosses a threshold of infinitely many numbers. There are infinitely many points within the space between your index fingers. You seem to think that infinite precision only exists as a basis of the “smallest discrete, whole unit” without realizing that even a whole unit can be used to describe a <em>smaller</em> part of itself. If you have a whole apple, we can talk about half an apple. If we have an atom, we can talk about spaces half the size of an atom. </p>
<p>What do you think a meter is? What do you think a micrometer is? Or a picometer? We can always go smaller and smaller and smaller as far as we want.</p>
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<p>Yes, but my point is that such a Christian is accepting something as true for no reason other than the ego/emotional utility. Otherwise <em>we would have NO reason at all to ever believe in a God because the evidence is not there</em>. Once you remove the faculties independent of the physical, you have nothing left <em>BY DEFINITION</em>.</p>
<p>Otherwise you are basically arguing “Do we want to choose to accept truth based off evidence, or truths based off whatever we want to be true?”</p>
Well having being dead for millions of years before I was born sure as hell is an inconvenience to me. I could have accomplished so much more by now.</p>
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I have no idea what the exact probability is. Yes I would need a calculation to “know” in the strictest sense of the word; otherwise I am just making an assumption.</p>
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Subjective.</p>
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Neither-I am told that it is an oblate spheroid and I am accepting this on the basis of scientific authority since I don’t really care whether it is flat, spherical, oblately spheroidical, or banana-shaped. </p>
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This is an awkwardly phrased question.</p>
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Uh, no. At least that’s what I’m told.</p>
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For how long?</p>
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I am certainly not very certain.</p>
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No. Perhaps the probability of you finding a unicorn under your pillow is less than 1%, or .01%, or 5%, or whatever other arbitrary value you like.</p>
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Actually, it usually is, and no, I can’t, not always.</p>
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In short, yes.</p>
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Yes? And?</p>
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How?</p>
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Do I have a choice? The technological limitations of scientific endeavors are not my problem. When science is perfect and we have an uninhibited ability to explore every facet of existence, then I will accept the “Empirical evidence is necessary for a statement to be true” mentality.</p>
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God does affect people though–or at least the idea of him does. Also, what if I argue that “God is whatever keeps the laws of nature/physics constant or at least consistent?”</p>
<p>Alright, I am now convinced you’re ■■■■■■■■. The way you sidestep the questions and mince semantics instead of facing the logic of the questions head-on is aggravating and I don’t care to continue discussing this with you.</p>
<p>^Poor thing. I’m not ■■■■■■■■; I just don’t think your beliefs are as well-founded as you purport them to be. I thought I answered your questions as well as I could given how ill-defined they were, for the most part.</p>
<p>Yes, you’re ■■■■■■■■. Instead of looking at the logic of the questions you seem more focused with answering everything with “That’s subjective/that’s a weird question/Possibly/Not always/You can’t disprove that/etc” without considering that these answers don’t get anyone anywhere. “When science is perfect” shows that you don’t quite understand what the implications of science, observation, evidence, and truth ARE.</p>
<p>Again, if you’re the type of person who will assume something as true without evidence, then that’s that. You don’t need evidence to be convinced of something. I do. </p>
Well, I am sorry that I’m more concerned with ensuring that the right questions are being asked in the correct way and less concerned with your little psychological demonstrations. You’re whining because I’m making it difficult for you to prove a point that you simply assumed would be easy to make, a tactic which may work on other people, but not me. “Don’t get anyone anywhere?” What is it with you and getting people places? Why ought we to go places?</p>
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I assume some things are true for myself; I’m not sure that I even believe in pure, objective truth.</p>
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Depends on what it is, and what counts as evidence.</p>
<p>No, I am calling you out because you are answering every single question with a sort of useless, arbitrary “maybe yes maybe not not always” framework. If you want to just operate off the cuff of pure epistemology (e.g. nothing is ever 100% certain and therefore we can never claim anything as being true or even find use in “subjective” probability), then that’s your call. You’re the type of guy who would say “Maybe – you can never know for sure” if I put a chair in front of you and asked you if there was indeed a chair present.</p>
Maybe it’s useless to you. How is it arbitrary? If anything, your system is arbitrary. What do you mean by “pure” epistemology?</p>
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Oh, we can probably find uses.</p>
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Oh no, you’ve got me all wrong! I love chairs! But in all seriousness, In my normal daily life, I am actually more pragmatic than I have been here. Philosophically/intellectually I come from a perspective that is probably very annoying to someone like you. ;)</p>
<p>a decision that’s led to a lot of success for him, he may or may not personally believe in it but it’s helped him out career-wise. i personally don’t believe that was his barrier to the presidency.</p>
<p>ahhh, peter_parker: there is soooo much wrong with you. You don’t understand, so therefore it can’t. That is all im getting out of ur posts. There catn be an afterlife b/c “how can the mental be without the physical?”…and how can G-d existat all? how can there be a thing that we can’t see? how can G-d create soemthing out of nothing? all of these won’t make sense if u keep looking at them through the same jaded perspective. the whole idea is theres MORE to life than what YOU (the prestigious Peter Parker) seem to understand. </p>
<p>@ itachirumon: one simple strate-forward question: do u think Obama accomplished as much as the majority of liberals thought he would in his first two years?</p>
<p>^del, there’s a difference between not accomplishing as much as we thought he would, and being “a horrible president” bakayaro.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, I’m annoyed Obama hasn’t shown more love for the LGBT community, gotten rid of DADT and DOMA yet. He hasn’t met our expectations, but he hasn’t done poorly either. Remember: he’s facing the Party of No who opposes him on EVERYTHING he does… little bit hard to do things in Washington even with a majority when one bloc of fools votes against everybody’s own interest.</p>
<p>If you don’t mind, my cat got run over by a car today, I don’t really feel like dealing with your bull****</p>
<p>ok, i know it’s like mean and all but th elast comment about ur cat was ******ng hilarious. lol. ur cat got run over by a car, i can’t stop laughing, i dont know why. </p>
<p>anyway , as long as u admit he’s not been up to ur expectations that’s a start. and yes, he has been horrible; and i really love the new “party of no” thing the liberals have got going on now. a classic insult for when u guys get desprate. You know, ppl who say no aren’t always the bad guys. what about the ppl who said no to hitler’s views- would u also call them the “party of no”. Explain to me why they should support Obama’s crazy, country-depricating bills and maybe ill admit that we should say yes. Obama has ruined this country- both economiclly, socailly, pur national security, and our international reputation. I mean look at his freakin’ backgroud. it wouldnt have taken a genuis to figure it out. We’de be 20 times better off with Palin than Obama. </p>
<p>and btw i dont know what those acronyms were.</p>
<p>My claim was that irrational numbers don’t exist. 5.0 isn’t an irrational number.</p>
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<p>How do you know this? I don’t think you’ve measured this–even if you were to only increase the height of water by a nanometer, measuring that verifying that water overcrosses a threshold of infinitely many numbers in that nanometer would take an infinite amount of time. Maybe if you could take measurements infinitely fast you wouldn’t need an infinite amount of time to do it. </p>
<p>You’d start the measurement by adding a tiny amount of water (let’s suppose that water doesn’t come in molecules, so you could add an amount of water as tiny as you like), and then measuring the height. You really wouldn’t know where to start–you’d add a small amount of water, but, of course, there always is a smaller amount of water that you could add, so you remove a little bit, but not too much, and this process must go on indefinitely . . . you’d be spending an infinite amount of time just trying to take the smallest first step.</p>
<p>This is assuming that your instrument has infinite precision–and I can tell you that no measurement instrument has infinite precision.</p>
<p>This all of course, is absurd. What you are doing here is that you are taking the abstract concept of the real number line and are assuming that you can see it in the real world too, even though there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Verifying that would require:</p>
<p>1) infinitely precise instruments. </p>
<p>2) an infinite amount of time. or instruments that could take measurements infinitely fast.</p>
<p>3) throwing away the idea that water comes in molecules. </p>
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<p>Well yeah, you can talk about distances that fractions of a quark could occupy or whatever, but can you measure them? That’s my point. You are mixing up what we observe and the useful abstractions we use when we interpret what we observe. Also, the apple analogy is poor and makes my argument sound silly because we currently can resolve sub-apple distances easily.</p>
<p>Like I said, I’m not really in the mood to deal with your b.s today so I’ll make this quick… you’re disgusting for the Hitler reference (amongst other things), you have NO clue what you’re babbling on about. I dunno how being the bigger man makes us suddenly weaker via our international reputation but I’m sure you have some bogus claim for that too.</p>
<p>What’s his “freakin’ background” huh del? </p>
<p>By the way, those acronyms stand for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and “Defense of Marriage Act” which are both slowly dissolving, but not through any help via Obama.</p>
<p>? no u dont. this only follows if you presuppose that there is nothing outside of the physical. maybe i don’t understand what you are trying to say??</p>
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<p>i think you do a lot more of the latter category than you think you do. this isn’t a fault of yours–it’s something we all do. this category gets exercised even when we try to arrive at truths by looking at evidence. it’s unavoidable.</p>
<p>silence_kit: I urge you to study some mathematics because your claims are just absurd. I guess calculus is just total bunk since we can’t utilize infinite precision, eh? I suppose, too, that cardinality is a totally useless thing? </p>
<p>BTW you’re falling victim to the classic Zeno’s Paradox. </p>
<p>Good luck trying to get through life making claims that irrational numbers don’t really exist. If what you’re saying is true, you should be able to expect some Nobel prizes without much difficulty. Your understanding of infinity needs some work.</p>
<p>Well yeah, it’s absurd. I was trying to show you how verifying the idea ‘water in a glass filling up has an infinite number of heights’ is impossible. </p>
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<p>Well yeah, calculus is pretty useful. However, as useful as it is, the concept of the real-valued function isn’t something that occurs in real life. </p>
<p>Physicists use continuous charge & current distributions all the time to calculate em fields. Physicists aren’t foolish enough to think that those continuous distributions of charge actually exist. Charge actually comes in bundles, but the bundles are so small that the continuous approximation isn’t bad. Real valued functions and the calculus you do with them are abstractions.</p>
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<p>come on. if your profile is to believed, this lecture is coming from a guy who studied business in college. weeeeeak. </p>
<p>no seriously. point out what is wrong with what i just said.</p>
<p>You conflate the argument. Sure, I could tell you to use a ruler and draw a line that is 1 inch long. But it wouldn’t be <em>truly</em> 1.000… inches long. There would undoubtedly be some threshold of error due to the inherent imperfections of our measurement tools. But just because we have imperfect tools does not somehow imply that the dimensions of such things are rational or that the number doesn’t somehow exist. You assume space is somehow discrete, which is just complete fallacy and made-up physics on your part. If you want to get nitpicky, almost everything is irrational when it comes to measurement. Nothing is ever likely <em>exactly</em> 1 meter long or <em>exactly</em> 10 gallons full, etc. If you accept that 1/9 = .111 repeating or that 1 = .999 repeating = 1.000 repeating, then you also must accept irrational numbers/infinite precision.</p>
<p>BTW you misunderstand the water jug example. Any two points have infinitely many points between them. A one-gallon jug has infinitely many points alongside it regarding height.</p>