Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sowelu]

Oh, yeah, and just to make it clear, stay civil.

They are to civil debate, which is what most of us are aiming for, here.

I'm not. Civility is distracting.

You're in the wrong thread.

[fqllve]

Beyond civility, insults obfuscate your point.

[Shrugging Khan]

I haven't been actually insulting anyone in a long time.

Edit: There are, however, plenty of people feeling the need to...feel insulted, apparently.

[Glowcat]

Glowcat: there's millions of uses for 0 beyond counting apples. And how is "something" not a lack of "nothing"? Wordplay, I know, but without the symmetry of opposites words become useless. If there's no darkness, how can we be sure that light exists, et cetera.

If there are a million uses please give a few that aren't dependent upon a quantity concept. Unsupported assertions do not make for debate.

Furthermore I find your stance on symmetry of words very wrong. Words are meant to be descriptive of our reality so as to communicate concepts. We do not have a word for not-a-pen to describe anything which doesn't fall under the label's current meaning, but we can claim that an object does not fall under the label's umbrella with deductive reasoning and knowledge of what that label represents. In our conversations we never refer to not-pens as if they existed independently of the pen concept.

The issue you encounter when claiming that there can be a not-something is that our entire mind is restricted to the concept of there being something (Space and Time). There is nothing we can compare something to so as to prove it isn't something because the umbrella of concepts that the word 'something' includes is literally everything we can conceive of or encounter. Absolute nothingness is an unreal concept that cannot describe anything without that thing being something -- an inherent contradiction.

EDIT: I should also probably explain more about why your Dark/Light example is wrong as well. Dark does not mean Not-Light, but rather it refers to an absence of light within Space and Time. This falls under the real sense of the word nothing, not the absolute version which I find incoherent.

[Andir]

Andir, I'm sorry, but you're contradicting a huge field here with very well-established theories and terminology.  I respectfully request that you read a book ASAP before I have to bash my head on my desk so hard I knock myself out.  This is completely aside from the theism/atheism thing:  Saying "If it's expanding out in all directions... there has to be a center" shows as much understanding of science as saying "If evolution is real, why are there still monkeys".  You're a complete layperson here, and some time with a good Stephen Hawking book (or whatever) would do you good.  Just because it makes no sense to you, doesn't mean it doesn't make sense.  But yeah, keeping this up isn't doing any wonders for your credibility in the eyes of anyone who knows anything about astrophysics and quite frankly it hurts to read.

...Er, sorry.

Hey, now. You're calmer in more recent posts, but still, while I agree with most of your point, try to be a bit more cordial 'bout it

Anyway! It's not that it's impossible to measure the stretching of the universe or anything, it is. But you have to keep in mind that it really is more like stretching than an expanding. I mean, I haven't read the links, so take what I say with a grain of salt; I'm going off of what I've read in physics classes and a few miscellaneous textbooks. I'm not a physics guy, so I may be missing stuff, but thinking of it like a pudding with raisins seems like an oversimplification, since if space itself is expanding, so too would be the raisins (but it would be less noticeable on the raisin's scale; 1.1 times magnification of something a centimeter long brings it to 1.1 centimeters which is rather a small difference, but it'd bring something 1 lightyear long to 1.1 lightyears, and .1 lightyear is pretty huge). I could be wrong, though.

I'm not sure what you mean... are you saying that our universe is like the atmosphere of Earth if the Earth were expanding where the Earth is a void of emptiness and space is also a void of empty?

Is basically it, although the void of emptiness isn't necessarily right, but it might as well be since accessing them would require some sort of 4-dimensional travel (spatial, not a time dimension, which would put the total up to 5 dimensions if you encounter time). Which is probably fictional.

This is my last post on the matter... I read large chunks of what he was saying and he basically explained it like so:

Our galaxy is the raisin.  The dough is space.  It is stretching (he actually said stretching) all around us but because we have all this gravity, the dough around us is not and we are not moving... or at least, we cannot perceive that we are moving because they say that the stretching dough around us hides the fact that it's stretching because it is stretching.  It's quite reaching if you ask me.  At one point it felt like we the raisins were actually pulling the dough in our gravity causing it to stretch all around us.  And the idea that our universe is expanding is actually the space around us is expanding, but not the space within us because we have Earth, and the Sun...  Ugh, in other words, it's speculation on how it all works to fit Einstein's theory.

I'm done with that topic... it's way off course for "creation" because it's no more concrete than the idea that God created it all.  It's strictly philosophy with accepted rules written out with others jumping on and using those rules to come up with "what if" cases.  (Like imaginary numbers in calculus.)

[fqllve]

Ah yes, we're all just lining up to feel insulted over things that aren't insulting to us.

Let me clarify: I'm not insulted at all. It wasn't directed at me, and even if it was I doubt I'd offended. But it was a mockery of something that many people are invested in, and it's obvious you didn't really try to understand why they feel the need to believe what they do.

In other words: completely pointless.

[Leafsnail]

2. Virtual particles (virtual photon to electron-positron pair and back, for instance, can be tested for existence but it's observable effects are so minimal as to be non-existant, and the split/join can't be predicted).

Come to think of it, I forgot to address this point...

While you can't predict each individual join or split, you can predict what is likely to happen for a large number of them.  In the same way that, while I can't predict whether a fair coin flip will be heads or tails, I can predict that over 2 trillion coin flips there's likely to be about 1 trillion heads.

[Shrugging Khan]

Ah yes, we're all just lining up to feel insulted over things that aren't insulting to us.

Let me clarify: I'm not insulted at all. It wasn't directed at me, and even if it was I doubt I'd offended. But it was a mockery of something that many people are invested in, and it's obvious you didn't really try to understand why they feel the need to believe what they do.

In other words: completely pointless.

Hold on, I have to bother with exploring the various psychological stress factors that lead to people picking up / sticking to religion, rather than to just go for the meaty bit of presenting why their wished-for deity does not actually explain the universe? And because that I didn't do, I insulted people who aren't even present, but to whose defence you must certainly rush, lest my coarse language cast doubt on the validity of their high-held yet nonetheless deluded and badly justified beliefs?

Why certainly, now I do feel like insulting someone.

[Bauglir]

Ah yes, we're all just lining up to feel insulted over things that aren't insulting to us.

Let me clarify: I'm not insulted at all. It wasn't directed at me, and even if it was I doubt I'd offended. But it was a mockery of something that many people are invested in, and it's obvious you didn't really try to understand why they feel the need to believe what they do.

In other words: completely pointless.

Hold on, I have to bother with exploring the various psychological stress factors that lead to people picking up / sticking to religion, rather than to just go for the meaty bit of presenting why their wished-for deity does not actually explain the universe? And because that I didn't do, I insulted people who aren't even present, but to whose defence you must certainly rush, lest my coarse language cast doubt on the validity of their high-held yet nonetheless deluded and badly justified beliefs?

Why certainly, now I do feel like insulting someone.

You can think they're wrong all you like. You can explain why they're wrong all you like. But don't call them stupid while you're doing it. Even if you don't think your posts should be irritating, they clearly are, so shape up and treat people with more respect. That's how society works, and I'm sure somebody as smart as you should be able to pick up on that.

[Leafsnail]

(What's with all the red?)

[Sowelu]

(It's snazzy!)

[Leafsnail]

Hmm, colour coding would make this thread far more interesting.

[Shrugging Khan]

You can think they're wrong all you like. You can explain why they're wrong all you like. But don't call them stupid while you're doing it. Even if you don't think your posts should be irritating, they clearly are, so shape up and treat people with more respect. That's how society works, and I'm sure somebody as smart as you should be able to pick up on that.

Hmm, lemme see...no, no pickup. Must be I'm too stupid after all, what with focusing on errors in argumentation rather than abiding by the sacred laws of civil debate and normalmost society.

Really, what am I thinking, calling this "civility" thing distracting.

[fqllve]

Right.

Those are all things I said. Especially:

but to whose defence you must certainly rush, lest my coarse language cast doubt on the validity of their high-held yet nonetheless deluded and badly justified beliefs?

I like it because it outs me as a christian apologist.

And yes, if you want to call a group of people stupid for believing something then you need to at least attempt to understand why they believe it.

Notice how I didn't use the words argue or against.

[Leafsnail]

Silence!  You cannot argue with someone who writes with red text.