Greg H.

Yes. There was more. I didn't think it was neccesary to post more than that. Let me post the entire response

 

Quite clearly the opponent attacked the arguer and not the arguement. That's the essense of an ad hominem attack in my opinion. I'd say that at this point we can agree to disagree. In this case he used the "He's out to get me." excuse.

In light of the text of the full post, I would say, yes, that was an ad hominem attack, since he clearly listed that as one of the reasons he was refuting your post. The context makes the difference.

Edit - grammar.

Thank you very much for your opinion.

 

As I understand it, an ad hominem is simply an attack on character of the person whom they disagree with. When the attack switches from the subject matter to the character of the arguer its called an ad hominem. An ad hominem doesn't argue a point.

To be precise, an ad hominem is an attempt to refute points in a discussion by attacking the person making them rather than the points themselves.

As an example, "You're not qualified to discuss biblical history because you're an atheist, so everything you say on the subject is automatically wrong." is an ad hominem (and a fairly blatant one). The statement you quoted doesn't (to me) seem to fall into that pattern (unless there was more to the message than you quoted here). As I said, it seems more like an expression of their own feelings, which is perfectly legitimate, even if it does nothing to move the discussion forward. Words like "seemed" are the key to my interpretation - they're expressing an opinion, not arguing a statement of fact.

To me it doesn't feel like an ad hominem, since they really didn't argue any particular point. It feels more like an expression of frustration to me.

"No human alien hybrids are possible" Are you serious? So if I were to take a mexican wife we couldnt have a child? Sir, that is extremely racist!

 

MY point being, is a person from another planet may be an alien but if they are human it is no different than some one in the US and some one in mexico. If you didnt get it.

 

To make an assumption like that is extremely close minded and I will no longer be responding to your nonsense.

Your strawman is quite beside the point, and it's not even funny. The idea that an alien from another planet would be genetically similar enough to humans to produce a viable offspring is the part that's nonsensical. We can't even reproduce with monkeys or apes, and we're as close to them as we're ever going to be with any living organism.

 

A human from another planet wouldn't be an alien - they'd be human, so no hybridization would take place - the offspring would be human.

I don't even know how to respond to the things youre saying.. I guess you just dont get it...

 

Alien - Belonging to a foreign country or nation.

 

Continuing to argue a straw man fallacy, especially after it's been exposed already, makes you look very silly. The fact is, very simply, that you have been offered multiple refutations of your theory as well as multiple opportunities to provide verifiable evidence of it. You have failed to do so, and reverted to fallacious, insulting jabs that do nothing to prove your point. Saying that rejecting this proposal is rejecting reason and science is not a convincing argument (at least not to anyone serious about science and knowledge) - if you want to convince people, you need to stop preaching and start doing two things:

• Provide evidence that does not have a simpler explanation than "Aliens did it." I admit, the bar is high, but that ties directly in with the nature of the claim.
• Actually answer the refutations from others, instead of dismissing them with vague hand waving and insults.

Until you are willing to do that, there's no reason for, or point in, continuing this discussion.

"No human alien hybrids are possible" Are you serious? So if I were to take a mexican wife we couldnt have a child? Sir, that is extremely racist!

 

 

 

MY point being, is a person from another planet may be an alien but if they are human it is no different than some one in the US and some one in mexico. If you didnt get it.

 

To make an assumption like that is extremely close minded and I will no longer be responding to your nonsense.

Your strawman is quite beside the point, and it's not even funny. The idea that an alien from another planet would be genetically similar enough to humans to produce a viable offspring is the part that's nonsensical. We can't even reproduce with monkeys or apes, and we're as close to them as we're ever going to be with any living organism.

A human from another planet wouldn't be an alien - they'd be human, so no hybridization would take place - the offspring would be human.

2- You are not scaled: gravity and other force keep you from expanding

To expand on this, think of like this. The "expansion" only happens at the level of galactic super clusters. Individual items, even individual galaxies are free to move closer together, as the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are currently doing. Additionally, the objects in the universe are not getting bigger. Envision how the Atlantic Ocean is currently getting larger due to the pressures from the mid-ocean ridge, slowly driving Europe and North America further apart. Yet neither continent is growing, only the space between them.

Back to the starchild skull. Once again we have a problem with opinion. Your opinion is that wiki is telling the truth. Lloyd Pye claims hes currently fighting with them because they changed all the results hes submitted.

The first sign of crackpottery is usually "I have information they don't want me to share with you, and they keep changing all my submitted results to hide the truth." A world-wide conspiracy of scientists, governments, and the media seems just a little too far-fetched to me. The simpler answer is "You're wrong."

Chapter 4 of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos spends a lot of time on the subject as well.

This discussion needs to take place so that our parliament can make an informed decision about what to do!

 

btw, why is polygamy illegal in so many non-Islamic countries? Most of these countries aren't the most conservative Christian countries imo so what gives?

Well, from what I have read on the Morrill Act of 1862, the Poland Act of 1874, the Edmunds Act of 1882, and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, here in the United States, it was simply an argument between the US Government and the LDS church - my supposition would be on the amount of clout the church was wielding in the western territories at the time, since two of those laws were aimed at directly limiting the amount of power a non-profit organization could wield and how much property they could own.

In my personal opinion, based on my readings, the US government, fresh from the horror of the civil war, was very concerned by the amount of political power the Mormon church held in the western part of the nation. The government set out to undermine that power by enacting a series of ever more restrictive laws aimed directly at undermining that power base, and clawing that political power away from the church. Remember that before the start of Civil War in 1861, the US only had 33 states - the other 17 were tied up in large territories in the western portion of the country, and the Utah Territory, where the LDS church had most of its power covered all of Utah, most of Nevada, and parts of Nebraska and Wyoming. In my opinion, most of these laws came about because the US was simply afraid the territory would cede from the union before it ever became a state, and form its own (land locked) country inside US borders.

See:

http://en.wikipedia..../Utah_Territory

http://en.wikipedia....Anti-Bigamy_Act

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Poland_Act

http://en.wikipedia....iki/Edmunds_Act

http://en.wikipedia....80%93Tucker_Act

Depends on the nature of the equations. And if a unification can be achieved, it also hints at some super-order behind the universe.

 

Think of it this way.. just entertain for a second there is a superintelligence in the universe. If we knew the equations which describe everything in the universe, then we would know the mind of God.

That's something of a leap. If we can describe everything in the Universe, all we can say for sure is this is the Universe. There's no need to invoke a God of any sort, especially if that figure is indistinguishable from the Universe itself.

I'd agree with that, but God isn't something without predictions. I could easily argue that our equations describing the universe will result in some kind of analogue of something or someone behind its creation, just as much as recently, we found binary error correction codes in supersymmetry.

 

It's all very premature to think that a God, in my eyes, is completely unthinkable.

And if we find the equation that describes life the universe, and everything, and there's no room for God, what then?

Ironically, the post above while you where posting this, actually speaks about ''the non-science of unfalsifiable theories.'' My point in the post above, is that theories of this nature are waiting until the technology or scientific breakthrough makes them at least measurable or falsifiable.

I'll concede that point. There are areas of science that (at least to my knowledge, someone with more experience in the field may correct me) can't currently be tested with the technology we have. However, those theories still provide testable predictions, even if we currently cannot test those predictions. The theory itself is falsifiable, even if the means to refute or confirm it does not yet exist.

And I can't answer questions like ''how do you test God''? This is not the nature of the OP to tackle that question. Especially of course for the fact that I can't.

You must have missed the OP about rejecting traditional theories of God...

 

That's ok, most of my words fall on deaf ears anyway.

It doesn't matter if you're discussing traditional theories or not. If matters not one whit if you're proposing that God is really Ralph from across the street - if you can't test it, it's not science, however hard you try and convince us it is.

I can't say I have heard of this. It sounds like a gravitational distortion but equally feels like entanglement.

I have to go with AW on this - sounds a lot like you're trying to describe particle entaglement, which has been observed in the laboratory between photons (which, if understand how you're using the the word, are luxons or massless particles that always move at the speed of light).

Because as I said, just because you can't observe God does not make it improbable. That's a cop-out. As for what I believe I have clearly told you what that is - is that a God is not outside of the realms of possibilities.

 

Some of the greatest minds in science believed in God.

And some of the greatest minds of mathematics believed in Allah. So what?

Belief is evidence of nothing, so why does it matter what some of the greatest minds in science believed?

Dissection of the eye would (presumably) reveal the presence of the tapetum lucidum, which humans (and many diurnal animals) do not have.

That is, assuming the cat folk kept it during the evolution/design.

- Hares and coneys are ruminants (Leviticus 11:5-6)

Evolution?

Evidence of speciation from the bible? I'll have to remember this one.

I say move on to a different aspect. I have enough "matter of opinion" arguements that go absolutely nowhere with my wife no know when a cause is lost. I respect your opinion but I would really like to hear it on the other aspects seeing as I'm obviously dealing with bright educated individuals.

 

This is exactly the issue many of us have with your position. Science is not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of testable fact. If you can't test something, you can't possibly falsify it, and if you can't falsify it, it's not science.

Black shoes or brown shoes with a navy suit is a matter of opinion (or taste), evidence of the existence of something is not.

As it happens you have made a testable claim -

Claim 1: Alien astronauts visited earth in ancient times.

The problem is there's no evidence to support it aside from anecdotal evidence which, honestly, is not enough for science to support the idea. There is simply no physical evidence (that we know of) that any beings from any other world have ever visited this one. And you would think we'd have found some, if as you say, they helped us with such massive construction projects as the pyramids. Someone dropped a pocket knife, or a wrench, or had a refuse pile. And while we find plenty of evidence of people from those eras, including things as fragile as broken pottery, we find zero evidence that anything out of the era was present.

This is not crackpot science, as this occures on a daily basis in the bermuda triangle, as well as ancient egypt.

So then, contrary to your claim, it's a crackpot notion.

And I can't answer questions like ''how do you test God''?

Then how can you make a scientific claim purporting that he exists? I can make all the claims I like, but if I can't devise a way to test those claims, they're not science.

Rubbish. Scientists don't know the truth to any theory they present so are they automatically agnostics?

 

If they are... give up on science. Agnostic to you is enough to ''give up'' on real investigative science.

 

Science should be any topic that could be real... theory is such a topic.If science cannot disprove it then science's outlook is incomplete. God is not some mystical fairy at the end of the garden. It is only one question that science has not answered.

 

Unable to answer as of yet.

As agnosticism is a religious point of view and not a scientific one, it's hardly applicable. Nice straw man though.

And a scientific theory needs to be testable. How did you plan on testing for the existence of God, exactly?

The world is far more complicated an ultimately unknown to knowingly think there is not some superior being existent.

So if I understand what you're saying, it's basically that "Things are so complex, that there must be some being (supernatural or not) equally as complex to explain why it's so complex."

This is exactly the part of these kinds of discussions I have a problem with. Why do we have to invoke the presence of some superior being just because something looks 'too complicated'? I'm not saying there is, or there is not, but why do we have to assume it's true just because there are things we don't yet understand?

(And if I am misunderstanding your point, please don't hesitate to let me know.)

It is my passion to stand against dogma.

 

What makes no sense is how otherwise intelligent people will swallow obvious fallacies because Authority tells them so.

 

If a wing lifts because the upper surface is curved;

How does an airplane fly upside down?

 

The curvature of a wing does not determine whether it produces lift.

How is it you do not know this?

 

ron

First, redefining terms because you want to is a good way to make people not take you seriously. Levity in no way means lift, despite your tossing that into the OP.

Second, read: Incorrect Lift Theory

You don't believe my sources and I dont agree with yours.

The difference being the sources we've given you hold up to serious scrutiny.

The more I read what I've said and what everyone else is saying I realize how futile arguing all those aspects. I don't neccessarily believe aliens helped build anything I just feel that when all the different monuments are surrounded by stories of ancients gods with what seems like technology has to raise questions and not simply be dismissed because "we think we know".

We don't dismiss anything because we think we know. We do dismiss things because they don't fit the evidence combined with the principle of Occam's razor. I could explain friction with microscopic demons grabbing onto things to keep them from moving, but it fails both those principles.

There is no "fact" surrounding all the stories of the Gods, nothing is for certain, no historian knows whats true and what isnt. Allthough what reamains to be true is that almost every culture around the world has stories of a god or gods coming down from the heavens and meddling in our affairs. Many cultures tell of interbreeding, virgin conceptions, people leaving with the gods and returning.

 

 

When an ancient man describes the earth as it looks from outerspace how do you explain this? how can ancient maps of what antarctica looks like under the ice exist? The building aspect that the show ancient aliens seems to focus on is a mere spec in a galaxy of evidence.

 

Why did ancients all over the world see flying machines with powerful beings?? Why did those beings supposedly teach them language and math ect. Why do these stories exist? Mans imagination on a grand scale? I guess you could say its all a giant ancient hoax but I say theres something to it.

Of course we don't know what's true and what isn't, for ancient history. None of us were there. We can only go by the evidence we find, and so far there's nothing to suggest that Earth has ever been visited by aliens. That evidence is the "facts" you think don't exist, and until evidence comes to light that involves something out of place for humans of the kind, there's really no need to invoke an outside agency to explain it.

As far as little green men and other creatures that have been described why is that so hard to believe? If we supposedly evolved from primates why on another planet could reptiles not evolve into an upright intelligent species or any other type of creature for that matter? It would depend on which species comes out on top and has the freedom to evolve. Certain species of birds show high intellect and the ability to solve problems, other animals show emotions a anger just like humans. Its actually rediculous to think it hasnt happened on other planets.

It's not necessarily ridiculous, but it's certainly a little arrogant, and it's not good science to presuppose conclusions without evidence.

Which is exactly the problem with the ancient alien proposal - there's no hard evidence.

If you had a 5,000 year old building made with titanium, now we have something to talk about since, as far as we know, humans did not even know about titanium until the 18^th century, and we could not produce it in a pure form until the early 20^th. (FYI, this is one of the ways art historians can date paintings - they look for titanium oxide in the white paint).

Let's consider the problems with this idea:

1. Some alien culture discovered a method of interstellar travel that involved:

• a way of reaching our solar system from another (a journey of at least 4 light years)
• a method of shielding the crew from cosmic radiation (or a crew immune to its effects)
• a method of protecting the ship from cosmic debris
• a method of keeping the crew alive for the duration of the journey.

2. This alien culture had nothing better to do with our planet than pop down and build monuments to themselves. No mass extraction of resources, no colonization.

3. They managed to do all this without leaving behind more than anecdotal evidence about the whole thing. No signs of heavy construction equipment, no landing zones. (I mean if God descended from on high in your back yard, don't you think you'd kind of mark that spot and keep an eye on it in case He came back?).

As for the star child skull:

 

DNA testing in 1999 at BOLD (Bureau of Legal Dentistry), a forensic DNA lab in Vancouver, British Columbia found standard X and Y chromosomes in two samples taken from the skull, "conclusive evidence that the child was not only human (and male), but both of his parents must have been human as well, for each must have contributed one of the human sex chromosomes."

 

Further DNA testing in 2003 at Trace Genetics, which specializes in extracting DNA from ancient samples, isolated mitochondrial DNA from both recovered skulls. The child belongs to haplogroup C. Since mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively from the mother, it makes it possible to trace the offspring's maternal lineage. The DNA test therefore confirmed that the child's mother was a Haplogroup C human female. However, the adult female found with the child belonged to haplogroup A. Both haplotypes are characteristic Native American haplogroups, but the different haplogroup for each skull indicates that the adult female was not the child's mother.

(from http://en.wikipedia...._skull#Analysis)

Ancient man could not have made compound miders that you cant shine a laser through. If you honestly believe they could have then that simply sounds like youve never tried to cut a compound mider using wood let alone giant stones.

People have been cutting compound miter corners for centuries with nothing more than a saw. It's not hard to do, nor it is particularly tricky to learn. You don't need a compound miter saw or a laser, just a hand saw and some practice will suffice.