Phi for All

The Religion section is a better place to make the argument. Evolution isn't magic.

No, he's not, and I pointed out both places where he's using sloppy definitions to make his argument seem worthy. Nothing exists as potential. Potential requires that it doesn't exist yet. You're wrong here, as well. There is NOTHING in nature that can't be explained without an intelligent designer.

Poor reasoning. Potential is defined as being capable of existence WHILE NOT YET BEING IN EXISTENCE. Nothing "exists" as potential.

I think you're talking about intelligence in general, but want to apply the argument specifically to human intelligence, which is far from normal or general. When you then switch gears to Intelligent Design, I sense you're arguing in bad faith. ID is an attempt to teach the Christian bible in US schools alongside science. There is no trustworthy science added to the curriculum. The high degree of intelligence present in (most) humans is due to many factors coming together to favor such. It had much more to do with cooking our food than with worshipping sky spirits.

Inventing fractions is impressive, but cutting things up is more concrete than abstract, imo. But I didn't realize they had a concept of zero, and while "no apples" is an observable phenomenon even in ancient times, it took a while for early societies to represent it in their maths. So yes, perhaps better than I originally implied.

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They were predictive when it came to numbers, but not in any abstract way. They knew about time, and the stars, and could predict eclipses. They built huge granaries to fill against future needs, which is smart. Their methodology was based on concrete observations or religious requirements (didn't they invent astrology?). They lacked the abstract thought required to say, observe a person who is ill, and predict a remedy based on what's noted. IIRC, it was the gods who made people sick in their society, so perhaps that accounts for part of why they didn't develop a better scientific method.

Your old account got banned due to your flipping out at one point over some topic, instead of for persistent rules violations. When you finally approached staff asking for another chance, we decided to wait and see if your style has improved. It's not up to me, an Admin would have to make the changes, but I'm inclined to think you're focusing more on the name and less on why you're being allowed to stay despite opening sockpuppet accounts. Will a name change improve the science in your posts? I think the whole staff is still on the fence wrt to this current account. You still have a tendency towards lazy methodology, but you seem more receptive to mainstream explanations, at least. We all figured you were young when you first joined, and perhaps had a bad patch, so you got a second chance.

You guys are applying Relativity to a purely pre-classical situation. The problem with Babylonian science is they had no predictive power. They were inventive mathematicians but they didn't do much abstract thinking, and as an early culture, they mixed their religions in with their science, which is rarely helpful. WRT "not subscribing" to modern science, I look to medicine. Ancient remedies have become modern ones, except we've used what we've learned over the millennia to remove what isn't necessary. Why would we want to eat the whole plant when a derivative of one of its parts is what cures us?

How long would it take you to make me one of your chessboards with an axe? And don't look at your watch! Use a water clock, or an orrery, or something ancient.

Spacetime curves due to mass and energy, but it doesn't have to do so gently. Consider tossing a baseball on the Earth's surface, or what happens to spacetime too near a black hole. That curvature of spacetime is what we perceive as gravity. Three spatial dimensions and a temporal one is the continuum we call spacetime. It's a coordinate system we can use to plot when and where in the universe an event happens. Matter has mass, mass curves spacetime. But the dimensions would still be there without the matter, so it's not a natural extension of them. There isn't a way anybody could possibly know anything about a time before the Big Bang. Our best maths fizzle out before we can get all the way back to t=0, where the heat and densities destroy any information we might be able to get. A model is the maths a theory is based on. Do you have a model, or want help with a model? You may have some gaps in your science you've filled in with popular misconceptions. It happens a lot when smart people get hold of parts of the puzzle, become hooked, and then make up the rest. I'm sure it makes perfect sense to you, now you have to explain it so peers can understand it.

Your subscription contains numerous flaws which have been addressed in more recent updates. How do you overcome such an inherent handicap? How do you draw a line in the sand on accumulated human knowledge ("NO, from here on the information can't be trusted!")? Where does the ancient power stop and science starts to decline? Can it be anything but arbitrary and subjective? I made a table using an axe only, and it didn't turn out nearly as nice as the one I made with my power tools. Why is that? This is the type of question one asks when one is determined to argue against any answer, no matter what. I'm truly sorry you see no wonder in our best current explanations.

MSC has been suspended for 3 days to help him sort his feelings about recent staff actions.

PG should act as a solvent for whatever volatiles are causing that bad rubber odor, so PG by itself should remove it (a scented product with PG would probably remove AND supplant the scent). You should be able to use any sort of cleaning product with a neutral pH (no ammonia, no vinegar).

Overall, I think the term is misused a LOT. I think many people who claim to study ethics consider themselves beyond reproach when it comes to ethical matters. It's very much like those who claim they're skeptics, because you can't possibly be wrong if you're questioning everything, right? It's tails I win, heads you lose, because I've already claimed the high ground. I also think too many people invest too much emotion in this sense of rightness. If ethics are so basic, we should be able to dispassionately cite why, instead of feigning moral outrage when the basics don't seem clear to someone else. I think too many people are motivated by love and hate because they've started with that emotional premise rather than finding an intellectual motivation and investing their passions in THAT. It's far too easy to react with a jerk of the knee rather than a reasoned response.