Phi for All

Put your cursor in the Title box and type out your title. Tab will move your cursor to the next box, which is where your post should go. Do you plan on making a poll? If not, ignore that part.

I agree, I said the same thing later in that post. Disbelief is actually more like a religious belief to me, whereas not believing is accepting the lack of evidence as a sign that there's a better explanation. If not believing is a religious belief, then bald is a hair color.

You don't need any magical foreknowledge to answer this question. It's pretty simple. Your god claims to be infallible. It claims that it created people already flawed, and unless they worship this god they'll spend eternity being tormented by the fires of Hell because of those flaws. Your god knew how it would all work out, and is apparently still torturing sinners to this day. This is the deity you claim loves us all, yet it seems vengeful and petty, with all the fragile masculinity we've come to expect from men who don't know how to be a real father.

Are you going to be sidestepping all responses like this? I, for two, would like to hear your excuse for your god purposely creating an imperfect species he was always planning on tormenting for eternity. Is this the perfect father we're supposed to emulate?

I don't have any irrational motives for not believing in gods. At the most basic level, we've seen how Iron Age peoples thought their gods were responsible for many phenomena. Then, over the intervening centuries, we've seen rational explanations replace those mystical beliefs. In the end, there's no real questions I have that aren't answered by the knowledge humans have accumulated. If the churches were wrong about so much, maybe they were wrong about it all. I also don't think of it as "disbelief". I'm not actively refusing to believe in gods. I'm not reluctant to accept them. I simply see no evidence of them, so they don't qualify to be included in the way I explain anything. The idea that any atheist doesn't want there to be gods "simply out of spite against followers of a God" is laughable. Where's the reasoning behind that? Fear of the challenge of wild-ass guesswork about life after death? Please. The part about morals is actually quite insulting, given how morally unaccountable the churches have been throughout history. If you want to discuss morality here, I'd be happy to show you how weak your faith is in that regard.

Science does a much better job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Theory is provisional where it applies, and it stops being a theory as soon as it's shown false or fails at prediction. We don't build on a rotten foundation. The Abrahamic religions ignore many parts of the Bible that are unphysical or are contradicted by other texts of the time. They feel free to drop the inconvenient parts like Mosaic law or Catholic canon (Hamburgers on Friday!) as they see fit, yet want us all to believe the system is still good despite being built on a lot of Iron Age ignorance. In particular, the violence of the OT seems to accentuate the choice to believe in human kindness and benevolence, but we see very little of that historically. The churches have raped and pillaged their way throughout the pages of history, never holding any real moral high ground, pretending to care about people while simply setting themselves up exactly like the worst offenders from scripture. After thousands of years, we still have this horrible vertical moral scale that judges everybody based on a perfect father figure, who is still often used to justify modern violence done in the name of religion.

It's a good thing morality isn't based on belief in gods, isn't it? Think of all the religious people who have great crises of faith, when that's all their morality is based on. When they question their gods, they can question all the behavior as well. My morality is aimed at the people living side by side with me in this society. The religious people I know think they're better than me, they want to be considered above me when it comes to morality and who gets into their god's kingdom. These are the folks who only think morally when it comes to those who believe the way they do.

Do you have any evidence that such a situation was ever the case? This person who makes $1B but gives away all but $10M sounds made up to drive your point. And perhaps charities wouldn't be needed in the first place if more Christians weren't so fixated on extreme wealth (or extreme nationalism, or extreme behavioral modification, or, well the list goes on). I personally don't consider it charity if it's for tax purposes.

Got a couple of test results back. I got a 75 on COVID, what the hell does that mean?! Also, my IQ came back positive.

I find it hard to believe in this " key " approach when there is so much misinformation out there that the right seems attracted to. I've seen MAGA supporters interviewed who claimed California allows abortions up to 3 months AFTER birth. Others claimed some women were having 2 or 3 abortions a month. And the things they believe about the border with Mexico! The "No Scandal Key" cracks me up.

For replies, I usually quote the person I'm replying to, so when I hit "Quote" at the bottom of the post, the text area comes up under the quote, with the cursor already in place.

ChatGPT seems to think you think energy is a thing that can be "concentrated" or "held together". In your idea, is energy physically manifested? Can you show me some pure energy, unattached to anything else?

! Moderator Note And since, historically, you bite any hand that tries to help, you're going to need to find a different place to practice your insincerity.

You're doing horribly. You're intellectually dishonest and you have no inclination towards learning anything of substance. You seem entrenched in your confirmation bias, and can't reason your way through the scientific replies you're getting. You somehow think this is a competition rather than an opportunity to educate yourself. We're used to people coming to a science discussion forum to learn. It's not as common to have people join and then insist that their opinions and wild ass guesswork are equivalent to the knowledge accumulated by scientists over the centuries. You act as though education was a punishment your were able to avoid, rather than a goal you missed. I'm sure you're a lovely person IRL, but here you come off as willfully ignorant, which is shameful and wastes everyone's time. People here have studied intensively, and love sharing the knowledge they've gained, so your posts are often insulting in their lack of understanding and civility. You're more curious about what our "red line" is than about science, and that means anything you say from here on out will be in bad faith. Let's just part ways now. There are plenty of wild ass guesswork forums out there for you. This site requires more rigor than you're willing to give, but I guess that's our fault? Goodbye.

Siphon me off a gallon of energy from that storage device, please. Put it in a jug. Next, give me the equations that treat energy as an independent entity. The maths we have that treat energy as a property of things works really well.

It's not really known how the Moon got to be such an obnoxious little sister. She just showed up one day with a bunch of circular arguments, orbiting near the point of arrogance, and when called out for it, spent the next several eons acting like the victim. She never really seemed to want anything other than to push against the orbit, which is crazy since this is safe space for her if she'd just mellow out and pay attention instead of trying to make waves here on Earth.

You may think that, but it's wrong. Energy doesn't exist on its own. Energy is a property of a thing, not a thing itself. Unless you can hand me a couple of pounds of energy? So, maybe there's more than one possibility? Bad foundation, bad structure.

There's no "sides" to the knowledge we've accumulated via the scientific method, a process designed to weed out the guesswork and wishful thinking and cognitive biases. Either a theory holds up under every applicable test or it doesn't. The ones that hold up are mainstream knowledge. The rest isn't on a different side, it's just wrong, and demonstrably so.

I have the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model to support what I believe. It's amazing and it works extremely well where it's applicable. What evidence do you have? Sorry, proof is for philosophy and mathematics. Science prefers theory, which people have been trying to teach you about, but your fingers seem firmly planted in your ears. You should forget the balloon analogy, it confuses you. Instead, can you imagine a universe with nothing outside of it, but it's getting bigger really fast, not exploding, but expanding everywhere all at once, the matter becoming less dense, and cooling as it does so. Since this universe is all there is, the space inside it expands as the matter swirls inside the space inside this universe. Does this help? With the maths from this model, we can send a rocket off planet and land on an asteroid millions of miles away. That's like throwing a dart at a dartboard that's flying around the room with a bunch of other spinning dart boards and hitting the bullseye. Can your idea make predictions like that, be that accurate in real life? Then why are you bothering with it? Why aren't you taking some classes online at Khan Academy or something?

The things you've been asserting since you got here are NOT mainstream science, which means YOU are the one who needs to make the special effort to explain them. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to support them. Why does your guesswork get special treatment when you ignore the years of study most of our members have put into learning science?

What?! No, you used the phrase "I can't see how..." That implies that you're skeptical, that you don't believe the universe doesn't have a center, that you're incredulous about it. An argument from incredulity is fallacious, since you aren't offering any reasoning behind why you don't believe. And this isn't about opinion. This is in a hard science section, where we want to see evidence. If you want to support an idea that isn't mainstream, also requiring evidence, please start a new thread in Speculations.

! Moderator Note I'm moving this to Religion, unless you're ready to provide evidence that a "soul" exists in the first place. This can't stay in Biology without that level of support.

This isn't something you can "state". Even string theory explains rather than asserts, and it does so with lots of good maths. Is this a "we're all made of stardust" argument? Again, very specious. In point of fact, almost all of the universe is NOT a part of us. How many grams of you are there in the galaxy HD1, for instance? No. The universe is the bucket and nothing exists outside of it that we can observe. The water might be water in one part of the bucket, but elsewhere it might have given up its O to other molecules to form different compounds. Just because we're "part" of the universe doesn't mean we're the whole universe. You're straying heavily from mainstream science, and I don't think this line of reasoning will help you learn anything meaningful. So how does this help you understand what science has determined is happening in the observable universe? To me, saying the universe is a "unit" implies there could be more than one. It's fairly critical to modern cosmology that we treat the universe as all there is, not like a balloon that's expanding into some other space. Oh, wow. Here I was, using all those atoms thinking you were here to learn. Best of luck to you.

Can you explain how this helps describe what we observe? It just seems specious and doesn't make understanding the science any easier. The universe is all there is, so nothing inside of it could "contain" it.

So no, you don't understand what "literally" and "infinite" mean, especially when used together. None of what you just said addresses my comment, like you didn't really read it.