Somewhere south of San Francisco, there is a billboard that declares that there is physical proof of the existence of a god, and which suggests that you read their website. A reader sent it to me, and being the sort of open minded fellow who doesn't believe in any gods but is happy to look at any evidence someone might find, I looked.
I'm still an atheist. You can stop here if you want.
This thing is one big tease. It starts with a splash screen:
THE TIME HAS COME FOR YOU TO
WITNESS A MIRACLE
ARE YOU READY?
Sure, I'm ready. Although, really, this is the web, that nest of lies, so it's probably a bad idea to raise expectations so high right at the very beginning. So you click through to the next page and …
There now exists physical evidence...
for a message from God to the world. This marks the advent of a new era in religion; an era where FAITH is no longer needed. There is no need to "believe," when one "knows." People of the past generations were required to believe in God, and uphold His commandments ON FAITH. With the advent of the physical evidence reported on this site, we no longer believe that God exists; we KNOW that God exists.
Wow. OK. So tell me what this evidence is, already! It's not a miracle for some wanker on the internet to make grandiose claims. Someday, I want to go to a site that proclaims a miracle and see a real miracle, like a pie miraculously floating above my keyboard, or a MySpace page that doesn't look like technicolor vomit.
So I click through again. I want my floating pie.
The first physical evidence proving the existence of GOD.
There now exists physical evidence for a message from God to the world. This marks the advent of a new era in religion; an era where FAITH is no longer needed. There is no need to "believe," when one "knows." People of the past generations were required to believe in God, and uphold His commandments ON FAITH. With the advent of the physical evidence reported in this book, we no longer believe that God exists; we KNOW that God exists.
Hey, didn't I already read that?
Such knowledge is ascertained through God's final scripture, Quran, wherein overwhelming physical evidence has been encoded. Employing the ultimate in scientific proof, namely, mathematics, the evidence comes in the form of an extremely intricate code. Thus, every word, indeed every letter in Quran is placed in accordance with a mathematical design that is clearly beyond human ability.
Not only does the evidence prove the authenticity and perfect preservation of the Qur'an, but it also confirms the miracles of previous messengers including Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. None of us witnessed the parting of the Red Sea, or the virgin birth of Christ. However, upon reviewing the evidence presented here, and examining the appropriate narrations, the reader will be as positively certain as an eyewitness.
Wait; what? That's the "miracle," the "proof" — an exercise in numerology, another Bible code game, this time using the Quran? And when you dig a little deeper, it all consists of some enthusiastic moron declaring that it is amazing that the Quran uses the word "month" precisely 12 times.
I'm beginning to suspect that maybe we atheists are a bunch of mutants with weirdly wired brains, because without fail, every time I am presented an argument for the existence of a god, it is a pungent pile of watery crap. It's never pie; I'm disappointed every time. And it's not as if they even come close, like maybe they come up with a small biscuit or a tiny sliver of pastry; no, every goddamned time it's this malodorous, reeking inanity accompanied by some squeaking, quacking idiot of an acolyte who tries desperately to reassure me that the maggoty filth he is bearing truly is a splendid pie.
This is true of every "proof" and scrap of "evidence" for any gods that Western culture provides: Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Paley, they're all bakers of shit-pies. I read these with the same incredulity I do some crackpot Muslim who argues that the number 19 proves the existence of Allah. What is wrong with these people who try to make excuses for the inexcusably stupid? How can anyone read the Kalam Cosmological Argument and not break down laughing? All I can imagine is that the people who deal with these arguments are so used to raking over steaming offal and excrement and just plain bad arguments, that when they find one that the author did not intentionally take a piss in, they feel compelled to "ooh" and "aah" over it as a relative miracle.
Here's a real miracle: I can take a pen, and drop it. Every time, it falls to the floor. I can drop it from different heights, I can drop different objects of different weights, I can measure its velocity and acceleration, I can go down the hall to a physics class and see students doing similar experiments, and getting similar results. I can find formulas that describe the behavior of dropped objects with amazing precision; I can even find equations that describe the behavior of objects outside my personal experience, like the movements of entire planets or of objects traveling near the speed of light. And these observations, measurements, laws, and theories are even useful, whether it's for lobbing artillery shells at a target 10 miles away or sending a probe to the moon 250,000 miles away. I'm pretty well satisfied that gravity exists. I may not comprehend how it works, but the phenomenon has at least been satisfactorily dmeonstrated.
Yet when people try to tell me that there is something far more powerful and important than gravity, something that permeates the entire universe and has awesome knowledge and powers, that is greater than all and in control of the entirety of space and time, which personally and directly affects each individual on earth and offers them great gifts, like immortality and enlightenment and dominion, what do we get? Facile sophistry like petty farts in the wind.
Maybe it's the premise that is the problem. The theologically minded all seem to believe that you can manifest a pie if only you believe fervently enough and wave your hands fast enough…but we all know that really, if you want a pie, you need flour and sugar and fruit and lard and effort and a hot oven and a bit of real-world expertise, and that the proof will be in the eating. We atheists may not be truly mutant; we just have practical standards that seem to have been cored out of the brains of people who fall for these silly "proofs" that are generally simply pulled out of a well-exercised sphincter.
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I've often wondered that myself. Perhaps people don't understand because they can't understand. Their brains just don't work that way. You sometimes see it when teaching, say, math. I've watched math concepts just slip right by otherwise well educated people, who ended up just memorizing the words for the test.
Great, now I'm hungry for pie. I wonder if Biscuits has a recipe?
Sort of on topic...Have we seen any Quoran Codes yet, ala Bible Code? THAT would be funny, and if the codes were really juicy perhaps Dembski might become a Muslim. He is after all such a fan of the Bible Code.
Well said PZ. I think you've successfully pinched off another one of their attempts at a movement.
hey PZ don't you know that the modal ontological argument from ignorance says that just because you can do that with your pen doesn't mean that there is a law determining this outcome, you are just being shown an example of the Grace of God who has chosen to allow this pen to act in such a way that seems to conform to a law but really it is just a manifestation of His Divine Will and if you cannot account for that then you cannot account for why you love your wife anyway. and you are an atheist on a daily basis.
Basically when you presuppose laws of nature you are stealing the theology of the God of the Bible without giving proper credit, since according to this argument science is only possible if the gods of the bible exist.
But that is all a bunch of bullshit. I just went round and round and round with one such presuppositionalist and it really opened up my eyes to just how stupid that shit can make a person.
I forget where I saw it, but there's a line to the effect that science works because it doesn't attempt to cast spells on the universe. Magic and prayer both assume that if you ask really nicely the universe will give you privileges.
I can go down the hall to a physics class and see students doing similar experiments, and getting similar results.
Now, if they got the same results, that really would be a miracle. I've never known physics undergraduates get the same result in anything, let alone the correct one.
Numerology is pretty lame. Always makes for a good conspiracy theory though. Like 23. But most of their "proofs" work just as well if you had picked 38 as the magic holy number, or pretty much any factor of 19. I hate people who try to make a big deal out of these "magic" numbers. I'll show you a magic number, 1. It divides into everything and BECOMES that number. HOLY CRAP! It's all powerful, all knowing. 1 is omnipresent. 1 is omnibenevolent. Fuck it, I'm starting a church for the number 1. I just have to find a way to market around that whole loneliest number bit.
The pie is a lie.
No, PZ, we are mutants, and I am perfectly content with that.
What? You think I would be happy being a pre-biotic?
If figuring out the code isn't beyond human ability, then why would making the code necessarily be beyond human ability?
I think we should each send PZ a pie, so we can talk about the wonderful miracle of atheism that an atheist can magically turn a blog post into a whole mailbox full of pie.
That, at least, would be a tangible miracle.
i had about a year of seeing the number 23 everywhere (before i was even aware of all the crazy conspiracy shit surrounding it) - naturally i saw it more often after finding out about the supersitious stuff.
it got to the stage where there were actually massive 23 coincidences that quite scared me, even though i knew i was unconsciously looking out for it.
then i started reading Dawkins and thought "fuck it".
haven't looked for 23s since.
i imagine that prayer works like the 23s. i recognise the 23-hunting mentality in my Christian friends when they're knee-bending.
#8, did you realize how funny your post is, with proper regard given to your nick?
*scans crazy quranic numerology website*
Yep, I'm convinced.
Do I get my 72 virgins now?
Oh for chrisakes it's enough to make you want to go out and contact a Danish cartoonist. That is the worst thing you can do to an Islamist isn't it?
Coming soon from Dan Brown, author of that book that pisses of Christians AND people that like well-written books, The Danish Cartoon Code. What dark secrets of the Qu'ran code are hidden inside these depictions of the prophet? What deep conspiracy is sending an impossibly brilliant researcher of indiscriminate type and his attractive cohort on a race against time? How many people will believe there's a shred of fact or that it matters a whit?
Yeah, I could have stopped reading when you said, but I would have missed the gems in your response. "Bakers of shit-pies". I love it. The lesson to be learned: If you want pie, you have to bake it yourself!
Yet when people try to tell me that there is something far more powerful and important than gravity, something that permeates the entire universe and has awesome knowledge and powers, that is greater than all and in control of the entirety of space and time, which personally and directly affects each individual on earth and offers them great gifts, like immortality and enlightenment and dominion, what do we get?
I don't know about the knowledge and the gifts, but listening to a cosmology theorist talking about dark energy comes very lose to the rest. They even got mathematical models for it. Luckily, the ID people don't understand them, so they don't dare to subvert them for their purposes.
"Yep, I'm convinced.
Do I get my 72 virgins now?"
Sadly no, they're too busy playing a rousing game of D&D with a new resident of Heaven (Sorry, couldn't resist).
Makes perfect sense if you applied it to the Jesus Bible instead of the Quran.
PZ Myers said:
You misspelled "demonstrated" and, therefore, evolutionary biology has been thoroughly debunked. Score one for Team God!
A few years ago, Skeptic had an article about putting some works by Tolstoi through the same treatment and were able to find the same types of target words as the Bible Code.(Hitler, war, and so on) The argument was that one could do the same thing to any work that was long enough.
From the "basic facts":
Omega-9? God's a fatty acid?
Didn't I read something recently about some guys who wrote a computer program to scan the text of books like War and Peace and Moby Dick looking for predictions and so on? You'd think the Bible Code people would be smart enough to realize how easy it is to find whatever you look for in a book that big, if they're smart enough to "crack the code" in the first place.
Theists are in an odd position today, in that those who offer "proofs" of God will have such proofs shredded, and those who smugly fall back on the "of course one can't demonstrate that God exists; that's why it requires faith" argument will now end up having the concept of "faith" shredded.
That's really what's infuriating them about the so-called New Atheists -- they're refusing to go along with the blanket cultural approval given towards 'having faith' as a sign of character and depth. Thus the desperate attempt to make bad analogies to "believing in your mother's love even though you can't see it" or "believing that kindness matters" or "believing the sun will rise tomorrow." It's all damage control for an idea which really can't stand up to critical scrutiny. Better then to change the subject to something having to do with values, then, and hope nobody notices the category switch.
My mother died a few weeks ago. I sat in the chapel with a huge american flag on one end and a huge backlit cross on the other.
The pastor said, without any doubt, that mom was in heaven eating candy with real sugar, has a perfect body and is singing with all of her dead friends.
He said it like I would point and say 'that ford pickup is blue'.
They have built this intelectual gated community around their understanding of the world. They have developed a mechanisim to insulate themselves from anything scary.
And that is truely scary.
I love this blog and pz is to be commended. I can only aspire to be as eloquent.
And the further trouble is that even if the Quran, Bible, or Danielle Steel's writings contained some impossible-to-code numerical or verbal messages, how would that prove God? That it would be a mystery (like ID, if they actually were able to show that evolution couldn't account for the adaptation we see), I don't doubt, but "mystery" does not automatically equal "God"--one significant problem being that we still don't know what this "God" is supposed to be.
Almost always in these "chains of reasoning" is some enormous logical lacuna such as the notion that mystery=god. I'm left wondering every time what they missed in the second grade, that they've never been able to reliably work through the simplest logic.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
mystery=gap
I'm completely baffled by this bit:
"This mathematical system is easily superhuman. This is especially awesome in light of the fact that (1) no person was aware of its existence until recently and (2) it was revealed during the Dark Ages of Arabia before the existence of the modern number system."
I'm not going to ask the meaning of "easily superhuman," because I really don't want to know.
But what does point 2 mean? The number 19 hadn't been invented yet? Or that Mohammed's 19 was different from the 19 of the "modern number system"? Should I be amazed that ol' Mo used 19 in our modern understanding of 19-ness? And how many was 19 in the Dark Ages of Arabia, anyway?
You did indeed. Check out the below for the predictions they found in Moby Dick using the Bible Code (Herman Melville had a thing about political assasinations, evidently):
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html
Of course the problem with analogies like a mother's love, kindness mattering, and the sun rising can all be shown as either hypothetical constructs or logical conclusion from evidence. Any lay-person can safely assume the sun will rise because it does every day and physicists can demonstrate WHY it rises every day. We don't have to believe in love as a construct when it's defined as showing affection, providing help, etc. Kindness tends to result in better treatment from others overall. There are exceptions of course and it's impossible to know a person's true feelings (or even our own) with any absolute certainty. But we can experiment and demonstrate that these things agree with our agreed upon constructs. From a strictly numerical view, you can certainly find more people across the entire human population that could agree on what love and kindness are. Compared to the vast differences in what even defines "god", let alone the tiny details of religion, and there's just no comparison.
And on a totally random note...if Expelled is such a big deal and a massively popular movie, why the heck is it so much harder to find a copy of it in torrent form then any other movie released in the United States? I mean not that I would EVER want to download something for free to have a good laugh at what passes for fact among those folks but come on...that big a film and NOBODY wants to get it free?
Heh, I saw that last night. I don't go down on the peninsula often, but I was down there for work the last two days. Driving home last night I saw that and though, "oh boy, what idiotic 'proof' have they come up with this time" I thought about writing down the website to investigate later, but then thought better of it. Why waste my time. I'm sure if the evidence is good, I'll hear about it thru "normal channels".
I also noticed a billboard (much smaller) further north on the 101 for "Christian Radio" (possibly "Christian Talkradio"). Both of those signs seem very out of place here in Silicon valley...but maybe with all the immigrants, both from other countries and from the midwest of people coming for the economic benefits. Interesting sociological study to be done.
Stephen Wells #6 :
Is this the quote you were thinking of :
"Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.
That is why science has succeeded where magic failed : because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature."
Jacob Bronowski, 'The Creative Mind', Science and Human Values (1956)
That's false, P.Z. You've been shown the proof. You just refuse to believe.
Okay, thanks for making Dew come out my nose (OW!) -- but other than that...
T-shirts for everybody!...
You're the Professor PZ, you're going to have to figure it out. I don't know what goes through their head or why they think the way they do. It blows my mind personally. It's like trying to understand the irrational. You can't.
"Yep, I'm convinced.
Do I get my 72 virgins now?"
Sure but they have to remain virgins! See there is catch, but you it's not mentioned explicitly for obvious reasons.
I think "The Floating Pie" would be a good name for an eatery.
As for mother's love and all that, I do believe in that stuff even though I can't see it, just as I believe in alternating current, in air, in the electro-magnetic waves being picked up by the antenna of my radio, in the beautiful and selfless gravitational attraction the earth itself has for my body, and any number of other things I cannot see but for which I have abundant evidence of their existence.
Why not? Worked on the cutie down the hall. It certainly explains why, in my younger religious days, prayer left me feeling fucked by the universe.
(Think "friends with privileges")
Of course the key to this whole miracle is actually demonstrating that the code was intended and that the decoder is not rationalizing or retrofitting. Never yet has this been deomonstrated (in fact the opposite has), so people should be able to see why we atheists are unimpressed.
There's none so dumb as those who won't think, particularly when thinking might mean they have to give up their favourite cuddle-blanket.
A depressing thought I know, but it's the only one I've come up with that explains how otherwise perfectly intelligent people can eat up this dreck without so much as a hiccup.
...and which also proves that God counts in base 10.
And they're all pimply-faced 15-year-old boys.
(I keed, I keed -- I also play D&D, and am well past 15, alas.)
Virgins wouldn't play D&D... what? Oh...
(.)(.)
Sometimes I wish I wasn't raised Jewish with the freedom to choose my own way (credit to my parents; thanks Mom and Dad). I know enough that the chance of me ever receiving a good reason to believe in a deity is microscopic, but I've been taught to think scientifically and to be open-minded, so I at least agree to hear what the crap-pusher has to say. Then, because I haven't heard the vast majority of shit-arguments because I didn't pay attention at synagogue - it wasn't a crazy poo-flinging synagogue, either - I have to waste more of my valuable time testing it in my head and recalling all of my philosophical beliefs to make sure that, yes, they're wrong again, and to come back when you have something substantive.
I also haven't been trained to the point that I give up when I'm arguing philosophy with someone who believes in God. It's so easy to forget the incredible leaps that one has to make to accept a deity we also forget that the leaps back are treacherous, and sometimes longer than the leaps they took getting there.
"cored out the brains" indeed!
This concept of compartmentalizing your rationale is fascinating to the extent it takes place in the minds of believers. Case in point: An award-winning molecular biologist in my lab seriously believing that it didn't rain on earth before Noah's flood. I'm still struggling to wrap my mind around it.
Pie is awesome. What we all need is more pie and less superstition.
"Do I get my 72 virgins now?"
"Sure but they have to remain virgins!"
And this is a problem for the guy HOW?
It still leaves *plenty* of options.
I don't know whether you have seen Michael Martin's TANG (Transcendental Argument for the Nonexistence of God)? It is pretty useful for shutting up some of the less well equipped presuppositionalists.
Essentially it argues that science, logic and morality presuppose the nonexistence of God, not the other way around.
A quick version: Consider logic. Logic presupposes that its principles are necessarily true. If logic is dependent on God, according to TAG, it is contingent on God, and not necessary. Therefore, God could make the law of non contradiction false, which is an absurdity (i.e. New Zealand is south of China and not south of it, at the same time).
Consider Science. It presupposes the uniformity of nature and that natural laws govern the universe. Christianity presupposes miracles that violate natural laws. Science presumes that in so far as there is an explanation, it has a scientific explanation - one that does not presuppose God, and that miracles do not occur. Therefore, doing science assumes that the Christian world view is false.
Consider morality. TAG assumes a type of morality similar to the divine command theory - that moral obligation is dependent on either the will or nature of God. This is incompatible with objective morality, as morality becomes arbitrary. In other words, if God willed that baby eating was good, that would be moral. Is something good because it is part of His character, or is his character that way because it is good? The first interpretation makes morality arbitrary, and the second means that there must be an independent standard of good that God's character exemplifies, and therefore, morality is not based on religion, but religion on morality.
Also, there is no objective basis for picking what God commands between the various religions, or the interpretations within the same religion. There are also thousands of modern moral issues that none of the Holy books address, so how does a theist decide what to do?
I can. I break down groaning and reaching for the paracetamol. Blessed are they that can laugh at inane religious arguments.
We are apes, with ape brains.
Much of this ape brain is dedicated to seeing the leopard that is about to pounce, hearing the cave bear crashing through the underbrush, distinguishing the voice of a mother in the babble of a crowded camp, remembering which berry takes us up and which one brings us down, and keeping track of the car keys.
In the end, there may not really be much space left over for abstract reasoning, after all.
I see what you did there with the background image for the quote blocks. Very nice.
"My brain hurts!"
I'm still trying to get my head around the stupid,
lets see, Quaran mentions 'month' 12 times.
12 months in a year.
Oh, I see, proof god does exsist! - NOT
Nevermind the fact that the Islamic calendar is off by something like 10 days per solar year (they alternate 29 and 30 day months IIRC) and that one can just as easily make a calendar of 10 months or 14 months just by changing the number of days in each. It is a human invention and quite arbitrary.
IF however, a solar year was exactly 360 days where all 12 months had 30 days, and THAT calender was spelled out in the Quaran, it might warrant further thought. or if a year was exactly 367 days (a prime number) that would be cool too.
So basically our pies have to be made the hard way, but at least they are real...and the more you make, the better you get at it.
People, people, surely, you must know that cake is the true pinnacle of pastry goodness, and far better than pie. If you're going to hope for a miracle, please remember: cake > pie.
"Thus, every word, indeed every letter in [the] Quran is placed in accordance with a mathematical design that is clearly beyond human ability."
Self-contradictory statement, ergo a false statement.
If the mathematical design is clearly beyond human ability (to design), then how can we perceive it in the first place? We cannot perceive the design without being able to imagine it; if we can imagine it at all that means we could have thought it up and delineated it ourselves, so clearly it is not beyond human ability.
The author's premise is clearly false. His argument has failed. End of discussion.
All this talking has made me hungry. I'm gonna go boil me up some minimalist octopus now.
Patrick @19: Deflowered and Delighted? He'd better not get too many rolls of that dice or there'll be lots of expectant martyrs arriving with lover's balls, and imagine how mean they'll be when they find no virgins.
There is a "w" in my name. "W" is the 23rd letter in the English alphabet. "W" is followed by "a" in my name. "A" is the 1st letter in the alphabet.
23+1=24;
24/4=6;
There are 6 beers in a six-pack.
Ergo,
God exists!
"We're Number One, And So Can You"
I didn't see the number 42 mentioned anywhere on the that site (although I didn't stay that long). Got to be a hoax.
Sorry, Rey Fox at #11. I missed your comment as I was scrolling down, and I didn't mean to rip you off. Obviously us mutants are at least on the same page.
I had a student bring me a more interesting one (we were discussing evolution): The gist of it was that the Big Bang violates the 2nd Law of Thermo so it is a miracle. Of course, it is just begging the question to say the unexplained can only be explained by "God". You might as well say that gravity itself is a miracle.
I'm an apieist.
There's enough evidence for tarts, flans, custards, puddings, quiches, pasties, crème brûlées, crème caramels, baklavas, and jelly doughnuts that it's possible to be intellectually and gastrointestinally fulfilled without invoking pie as an hypothesis.
Yep. It never ceases to underwhelm me what might constitute 'evidence' for a god you've already made up your mind to believe in.
Mmmmm... Pie!
I just checked my spam folder in Gmail and saw that I had exactly 72 emails, proving that a) the Qu'ran is right; b) I am a Muslim martyr*; and c) whether paradise is full of grapes or virgins, you'd better stock up on V18GR8 before you get there.
*Best.Kim.Mitchell.song.ever.
Pies? Sure!
"Brandy! - Throw more Brandy!
Rum? I never mix my pies!"
We are supposed to glean something from this insane crap?
What a waste of time, print, and brain cells trying to
comprehend this utter moronic dreck! These religious
cretins will never relent on trying to prove and hope
their insanities will unleash critical thinking in the
already hopeless and insane.
Einstein said that you can live as if nothing is a miracle or you can live as if everything is a miracle. Theists hold on to the idea that there are supernatural miracles that defy our everyday experience.
Therefore, while gravity may be everywhere and be very powerful, theists don't point to something like gravity as a "godlike" power because of its darned predictability -- it is never a miracle (or always a miracle).
So have I, but not because of sites like that. After all, I don't think that "proof" will convince many other theists either. I bet you Dembski, Vox Day, Jonathan Wells, Ben Stein, Hagee, Bush, bin Laden and even Huckabee could see what's wrong with that site as easily as PZ does. (Then again, you might ask them, maybe I'm wrong.)
Which reminds me of a book I saw yesterday in a local mega-bookstore: "The Reason for God" by Timothy Ferris. Subtitled "Belief in an Age of Skepticism," the author "single-handedly dismantles each of [the most frequently voiced 'doubts' skeptics bring to his Manhattan church]."
Wow. One-handed dismantling? Sweet.
Any Pharyngula readers read this? I mean all the way through? Without vomiting?
Didn't think so.
I'd love to hear this guy's arguments for the existence of his sky fairy but I'm afraid of a text-induced coma. Can someone summarize?
All this talk of poop and pie reminds me of the old joke about "whoever complains about the cooking next, has to do the cooking". The unfortunate sap who gets saddled with the job tries to get out of it by fixing up a steaming fresh moose turd pie. The first grizzled old 'hand to take a bite, gags and exclaims "this tastes like shit!", but quickly recovers with "but it's GOOD shit!" The faithful have tasted the pie, but proclaim it to be "good shit", to avoid the dreaded duty of thinking for themselves.
Oh, and #31, there's a San Francisco joke in there somewhere...
This could also solve the dilemma of the 72 virgins remaining virgins.
I know what you mean. If it ain't spelled out in hundred-foot-high letters of fire on the side of a mountain, it ain't from God.
PZ, you really should do a book of essays. This one definitely deserves preservation between the covers of a book!
TIME TO GO BIG TIME!
I'm baffled by that bit for a different reason. If this was supposedly "revealed during the Dark Ages of Arabia", how is it that "no person was aware of its existence until reently"?
"The Reason for God" was written by Timothy Keller, not Timothy Ferris. Ferris is a fine science writer who wrote "The Whole Shebang", among several others.
apk @ #69 I saw that book by Ferris and I would not take
it if it were offered free. I used to have several books
by this quasi astronomer in my astronomy library, but
have since thrown them all out. He maintained good
science in his earlier books on astronomy, but then either
went bonkers or found religion, heck, the same situation,
and then interjected religion into all subsequent books.
I just could not stomach it any further and wrote him off
my list of worthwhile astronomy authors. What a phony
piece of crap he turned out to be by showing his true bent
on the irrational. He is not worth reading in any subject.
Sonja wrote, "it is never a miracle (or always a miracle)."
You remind me of one of my favorite bits of Chesterton;
From The Man Who Would be Thursday by G.K. Chesterton.
Yeap, I'm another atheist who loves Chesterton's works.
I'm not too annoyed by religous types who find their deity in the daily repeatable miracles. I get annoyed by the religous types who think a written text describes the world better than repeatable tests, or believe that a petition to a deity is more powerful than taking direct action.
If only the first type would denounce the second type rather than tolerate them.
Some things that never seem to occur to these folks, yet were instrumental in my loss of 'faith', are the implications of a subtle God. Let's assume that God exists, loves us, wants us to go to heaven and not hell, and requires us to pass a test by following a difficult set of rules to get in (Heaven's SATs, if you will.)
He knows that there are competing religions out there, and that most people on Earth will have been thoroughly enculturated in a different (ie 'wrong') religion before they ever get to hear the 'Truth', if they hear it at all. He knows that his test will be difficult enough to pass, even for those who never doubt the 'Truth'. Most salient of all, He knows our eternal souls are on the line. Why then, be subtle about his existence? How come we have to rely on douchebag preachers and slimy missionaries to hear His message? Why not write his signature in unmistakable 1000 foot high letters in the sky? It's no skin off his ass; He's God, for Chrissake! What's with the game of Hide 'n' Seek?
I'd like for these retards to stop trying to 'prove' the existence of God and start trying to prove how, if He exists, He's not the most psychologically abusive being the universe has ever seen.
Brownian -- SCREAAAAM!!
Ahem. I feel so much better now.
19 is definitely a super-cool number in the context of anything Arabic, but that's really only because of how cool a real Arabic 9 looks.
I'm beginning to think that theists are worse misanthropes than even cranky misanthropic atheists like me. I mean, why are you trying to give God the credit for stuff that people pretty obviously did? Isn't that, uh, kind of disrespecting those people? I mean, instead of saying, "Oh, wow, whoever that was wrote a work of literature that has continued to be widely read for centuries," you're saying "Goddiddit." Yuh. Sort of reminds me of how much anti-feminists actually hate men.
Numerology is like seeing shapes and faces in clouds. It's forcing an artificial structure in a place where it shouldn't be. Dante's Inferno is suppose to be so full of double, triple, and more meanings that people are still studying it today and finding new things. But it was written by a man. Just like the Qaran and every other holy book.
I've heard of this guy before-- If I recall correctly, his life is actually in danger because some extremists see him as a wild-eyed heretic. So be careful whose faith you set out to prove! (There was a similar, if less extreme, negative response to Burnet's efforts to ground Genesis and the flood in a scientific/geological story, which was seen as downright disrespectful messin' with the faith... It may well have cost Burnet a shot at being Archbishop, IIRC.)
I'm beginning to suspect that maybe we atheists are a bunch of mutants with weirdly wired brains, because without fail, every time I am presented an argument for the existence of a god, it is a pungent pile of watery crap. It's never pie; I'm disappointed every time.
I don't think our brains are wired differently -- theists seldom have trouble seeing when other people's arguments for a different religion don't work. And plenty of atheists can be irrational in other areas.
It may come down in good part to a different attitude on the value of having "faith" -- and an analytical ability to tell the difference between factual claims you want to be true but should remain objective on, and the value of having a general attitude of reasonable hope, trust, and expectation. Theists tend to blur things together by looking for vague or superficial similarities between their religious beliefs and ordinary beliefs, and then 'discovering' that it's now just as reasonable to believe in the first as the second.
I mean, look at this Muslim site. Faith is confirmation bias in action. That's why the poor arguments in apologetics will seem so compelling. They're not really looking to decide whether a belief is true or not. They're looking for reasons to keep on believing. That's a much lower bar.
Brownian -- SCREAAAAM!!
Uh, are you going to be alright?
Here's my 2 cents that I added in an email to these frauds:
So, let me get this straight. Because men were good at divining the number of days in the year, the number of months, etc. for the purpose of survival, planting, harvesting et al, and then applied that knowledge when writing a book, this proves God's existence?
I've heard some pretty mind-numbing nonsense in my short time on this planet, but this takes the cake.
This goes only further to prove that in your knowledge of how the world works, you have found the solution, only to seek the evidence later.
Nice try, knuckleheads.
Next time get the facts before you have the answer.
You are correct PZ. Mutants we be.
Dr. Jean Grey: Mutants are not the ones mankind should fear.
Magneto: I will bring you hope, old friend. And I ask only one thing in return: don't get in my way.
Magneto: We are the future, Charles, not them! They no longer matter!
Prof. Charles Francis Xavier: Don't give up on them, Erik.
Magneto: What would you have me do, Charles? I've heard these arguments before.
Prof. Charles Francis Xavier: That was a long time ago. Mankind has evolved since then.
Magneto: Yes, into us.
Vitis01: But I don't want a weirdly wired brain! I want frick'n laser eyeballz!
Most certainly god doesn't exist but apparently Italian bureaucrats can do miracles when they want to!
An elderly Italian woman is quarrelling with local officials claiming that their reports of her death are greatly exaggerated, according to the Italian news agency ANSA.
While recently trying to get a health card at the a national health office, the woman -- 80-year-old Ultimina Dalla Pria of Ferrara -- was told that she'd officially been dead since 1983.
Dalla Pria protested and figured the very fact that she was standing there might move the bureaucrats to correct the error. She was wrong. [...]
To prove she is alive, Dalla Pria will have to jump through more hoops than befits a woman her age. First, she'll have to get files from the public records office to prove she's not dead. Then, she'll have to get a lawyer to help her file copies of official documents at the public health office vouching for her un-dead status.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,539870,00.html
When this process will be over she will be one of the few people to return from the dead! (that means she is still dead)
I like this idea, but I've never made a pie before. Do you suppose it would be a bad idea to send my very first pie to PZ? It mightn't be very good is all.
You know, I've never played that game, but I've still picked up the phrase from friends (most memorably, the cleric in my D&D group pissed off some fey by saying it). A fun example of an infectious meme.
But this whole load of bullshit really is all about "Pie in the sky after you die." And the pie is a lie. Reminds me of a song on a CD I got from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
I've got a better proof of god. Ever see the "breakdancing fingers" viddy on YouTube? Now here's genius... http://www.youtube.com/watch?=UH35Lde8nWk&feature=related
Hey, PZ, why're you so disappointed when there's no "proofs" in the pudding? Sounds like you wanna be converted...
RE: #71
WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
[quote]"Do I get my 72 virgins now?"
"Sure but they have to remain virgins!"
And this is a problem for the guy HOW?
It still leaves *plenty* of options.
[/quote]
Let me put it this way. Everytime you try to fuck 'em they explode (isn't it ironic?)
So how did they crack this code? Draw a line around the edge of the CD it came on?
If God showed up tomorrow, what would it change?
Nothing.
There would be a few red-faced atheists scratching their heads but, after about two days of basic wonderment, people would go back to being themselves again. It would be on to the next fad, the next stupidity, the next episode of some schlock t.v. show featuring some brain-dead celebrity.
With regards to your mutation, PZ, the big question is is it heritable? (Skatje's blog suggests yes, but it's only a sample of one) And if it's heritable, will the variation be advantageous, disadvantageous, or neutral? Only time will tell.
As for gravity, it already has most of the qualities of god. Its range is infinite, it moves everything, it shapes the universe, it created the sun and the earth, it has been here since the beginning (we think), and there is a little bit of it in each and every one of us. It doesn't appear to be omniscient, but I can live with that. Maybe its part of a trinity (FSM, gravity, and the holy cuttlefish).
... every goddamned time it's this malodorous, reeking inanity accompanied by some squeaking, quacking idiot of an acolyte who tries desperately to reassure me that the maggoty filth he is bearing truly is a splendid pie.
No, not every time. Sometimes it's maggoty filth, other times their hands are empty, but moving around so you won't notice.
Evidence for the existence of God? Ah, oh yes, here you show man's hubris and desire to know everything in the face of his insignificance blah blah blah a universe of wonders beyond our understanding blah blah blah aren't there things we don't and cannot know blah blah blah beyond our abilities blah blah blah it's all so big and us so small, really.
Not even a pretense at pie. Sometimes it's only "You want a pie? Sure, I'll -- wait! Quick! Look out the window!"
Comment at #75 Error on my part. Wrong author!
Timothy Ferris is a great author and I have all his books!
The author I meant to state is ROBERT JASTROW. My remarks
@ 75 refer to him and not to Timothy Ferris. Sorry!
asw wrote, "With regards to your mutation, PZ, the big question is is it heritable? (Skatje's blog suggests yes, but it's only a sample of one) And if it's heritable,...."
While only a layman in these matters, the heritability of rational thinking may only be marginally affected by the genes.
However, by expanding the notion of heritability to include developmental environment then rational thought probably has a fairly strong heritable element. That is, parents who are rational thinkers are more likely to have children who themselves are rational thinkers.
The developing mind is very plastic and environmental factors are likely to have a large impact until adulthood. Which is why, it appears, some people suggest that religious teachings should be reserved for adults who can understand the subtleties (if any actually exist), while exposing developing children to religious thought may well retard their development of rational thought.
Of course, even the human adult mind is quite plastic. Which is decidedly handy when an adult discovers that rational thought allows them more opportunity and greater freedom.
Unfortunetly, this plasticity also allows a reversion to magical thinking.
This, to me, is one of the more fundamental flaws in their logic (or complete lack thereof). It is, as a rule, much more difficult to decode a message than to encode one. Therefore, if humans can decode the message, it is clearly possible for humans to encode such a message.
I don't remember if this specific issue was discussed in any of my programming classes, but a well-designed algorithm to encode a message should be able to execute in O(N) time, where N is the length of the message. I estimate that decoding the message would take O(N*K), where K is the number of possible keys (usually set up to be an extremely large number). Even if you somehow got hold of the key, it reduces to O(N) and thus takes as long as the encryption took. So, if a message exists, and humans can decode it, there's no reason humans couldn't encode it as well.
No one mentioned the fact that 19 squared is 361, which is the number of days in a year, or should be. The Bahá'í's have a calendar of nineteeen months with nineteen days each, and the Bahá'í religion is descended from Islam. Thus, Allah exists.
On the other hand, I'm not so sure 72 virgins is a better deal than the eternal sex on Planet X that Bob offers...
I think I made a few mistakes in estimating the execution times for those algorithms.
Let N = Length of message
Let K = Length of encryption key
Let A = Number of possible values for each element of key
In order to encrypt a message, you'd have to apply the key to each element of the message, so the required time is O(N*K).
To decrypt, knowing the key, is just the reverse operation, so the time required is the same.
If you DON'T already have the key, you'd have to repeatedly decrypt the message based on each possible key until you found the right one, so it would be something like O(N*K*A^K). This is far more time-consuming than the encryption operation, especially for large values of A and K.
Anyone with more experience in cryptography is welcome to offer ideas.
Oh man I'm so converted. Halleluia.
Bite me, god munchers. No wait, don't. I'm starting to think that they have a brain rotting disease and I don't wanna catch it.
I just checked my spam folder in Gmail and saw that I had exactly 72 emails, proving that a) the Qu'ran is right; b) I am a Muslim martyr*; and c) whether paradise is full of grapes or virgins, you'd better stock up on V18GR8 before you get there.
My Gmail spam folder has 5597 emails. Do I get 5597 virgins instead of the normal 72?
Well, I can't help with the pie, but I'll taje a crack at the MySpace page. It's easy on the eyes and blessedly silent.
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friend…
Uh-oh. Does my MySpace page prove the existance of God?!
the people who deal with these arguments are so used to raking over steaming offal and excrement and just plain bad arguments...
That's pretty much the sense I'm getting in Div School. Everyone here is so damned used to thinking in metaphorical terms. The world they live in is an imaginary one built by arbitrary consensus, and therefore it seems perfectly reasonable to them that "truth" is synonymous with "rhetorically compelling within my system." That's why all their arguments are crap: they have a completely different idea of what constitutes a good argument. If you're the kind of person who realizes that logic trumps rhetoric, then you've probably also accepted that science trumps god. But until then, you're just stuck with crappy arguments.
Oh, you stubborn scientists. You and your logic. You want us to live in a world where the glory of never ending pie isn't rational. Next you'll be telling us that pie are square! Gimme a break.
@RamblinDude:
...I made a square pie once. :D
Hmmm, I'm thinking the "physical" evidence for god is bullshit and I can prove that mathmatically.
Bullshit, is made up of eight letters. A bull has a four chambered stomach. Bulls are cud chewers meaning that food that is swallowed into the stomach is regurgitated then swallowed again back into the four chambered stomach. That would act as multiplying the number of chambers by two therefore equally eight, the same number as the letters in the world bullshit.
So if a bull were to eat a copy of the Koran it would use it's eight chambers to turn that copy of the Koran into the eight lettered word that we call bullshit. Once the bull expels the bullshit from it's anus then will the Koran truly become useful as fertilizer.
So I have scientifically proven, using Muslim science and reasoning, that the Koran is bullshit. Sure, it doesn't make much sense but neither did that website.
Next you'll be telling us that pie are square!
Oh, SNAP!
By adding the last two digits of my birth year to my birth month and day and then dividing the result by two, the answer is 42!!, which, when divided by two equals the drinking age in my state!
Further, the number of letters in the title of a USDA technical bulletin sitting on my desk equals the number of tiles on my office ceiling, which, when one subtracts the number of file drawers in my office containing taxonomic articles on Lepidoptera, again equals the drinking age in my state!
FINALLY, the number of keys on the second row of my computer key board equals EXACTLY the legal drinking age in my state.
Three independent 'proofs' for the existence of god. Coincidence, I think, NOT!
No, mothra, those aren't proofs of god. Just signs you've been drinking too much.
Or possibly not enough. :P
OK. I will give you proof that God exists.
I will do this in the form of a prophecy that will come true.
God has revealed to me that in the next 24 hours that a commentator will write the word, Logodaedaly in a comment on this thread.
If this does not happen I will dress in sack cloth and put ashes on my head.
Sheesh! No one's gonna write the word "Logodaedaly" on a thread like this. Get a life.
Logodaedaly? That's stupid. D'oh!!
But there is something more powerful than gravity--two things, in fact: the strong and weak nuclear forces. Of course, physics tells us that the stronger the force, the shorter its range, so the nuclear forces don't apply much outside the nucleus/atom.
This leads to an important corollary: if God is an infinitely powerful force, then the range of his power must be infinitely small. Maybe that's why he's usually nowhere to be found when something bad is happening and people really need him.
Don't hold back - tell us what you really think!
or
"Can I get an AMEN!"
I was kind of gutted that 23 turned out to be a shit film. 5 and 23 are the magic numbers of Discordianism (2+3=5, of course), for the precise reason than pretty much anything can be resolved into some combination of 2/3 or 5. It deflates numerological tendencies by making everything numerologically signficant, and hence nothing.
Leon wrote, "This leads to an important corollary: if God is an infinitely powerful force, then the range of his power must be infinitely small."
Heh.
I was just reminded of a line from Disney's Aladdin:
Genie: PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS! Itty bitty living space.
I am unconvinced. Now if the number of proofs had equaled the drinking age in your state I'd have said you were on to something. But what you've presented is merely suggestive, not definitive.
But wait! It's only 8 more days until International pi day! And we're talking about pies! And 8 is infinity sideways, and infinity is how long people have and will liked pie! It all fits!
Wait, I think I have to go lie down, the room is spinning.
Whoa. My bad. I know and enjoy reading Timothy Ferris. He's probably one of the reasons I enjoy science so much. My apologies to him and his readers for the unintended and unfortunate mistake.
I'm so disappointed I was expecting 30-foot high letter of fire saying "We appologize for the Inconvenience"
whether it's for lobbing artillery shells at a target 10 miles away
What, does the DoD fund this blog? When did you become such a war lover? People couldn't do something more useful with ballistic technology, like, deliver flowers righ to your yard?
That's only because you haven't seen the one based on Quorn yet ... ;-)
(Not that it exists but, if it did, it would probably favour the FSM.)
I think it's time you all knew, I am the messiah. I was born in Bethlehem, PA. My mother was a virgin. (I can't imagine that woman ever had sex.) I have cured some really lame people and helped them become popular. Babies love me. Plus I have told people to eat me, and a lot more often than that pretender Jesus.
Want more proof? I have converted water to wine. Hey, I don't need all of you to believe me. Just 12.
For zero (#8):
It shouldn't be too hard to market the supremacy of "1," even with that "loneliest number" bit. After all, you already have those fantastic foam fingers proclaiming your deity.
Was Tim Ferris the one who wrote "Evolution and the Myth of Creationism"? Or was that another Tim?
There used to be that show on HBO called "Dream On" with Brian Benben and Wendy Malick as a divorced couple. Malick's character "Judith" went on to marry Dr. Richard Stone, who was basically all-everything. Genius, Nobel Prize winner, humanitarian, NHL referee. Well, she got pregnant by Richard. While she was pregnant, Richard used to talk to the baby by Morse code.
Well, to make a long story short, she was on the Pennsylvania turnpike and got caught in a snowstorm, so the baby was born in a stable in Bethlehem. It was kind of funny they way they set it up.
Unfortunately, Wendy Malick is a total whack job in reallife, from what I've seen. Seriously woo.
Atheist Golden Rule
http://www.suyka.com/atheist.jpg
oh my god #9, EXCELLENT reference. wish it had come to me first. im filled with jealous rage.
If God has some amazingly important message for us, why doesn't he just tell us, instead of hiding it in all this numerology rubbish?
I reviewed some evidence about two weeks ago. Textual evidence. It turns out, "Red Sea" is a mistranslation. The Hebrew "yam suf" should be "Sea of Reeds," which would refer to a marshy area that can, in fact, be crossed without eliminating the laws of physics.
If human existence is utterly just a natural process working itself out via evolution, then none of our beliefs are actually beneficial except in that they make us behave a certain way. Thus you may teach your child that when they see orange and yellow flickering stuff, that it is the hounds of hell coming for them, and I may teach mine that it's a process of oxidization creating fire which can burn them; ultimately what matters is that they avoid the orange and yellow flickering stuff - their belief doesn't matter as such.
Alvin Plantinga, a man smarter in many ways than I wrote:
the conjunction of naturalism with the belief that human beings have evolved in conformity with current evolutionary doctrine-'evolution' for short-is in a certain interesting way self-defeating or self-referentially incoherent. Still more particularly, I argued that naturalism and evolution-'N&E' for short-furnishes one who accepts it with a defeater for the belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable-a defeater that can't be defeated. But then this conjunction also furnishes a defeater for any belief produced by our cognitive faculties, including, in the case of one who accepts it, N&E itself: hence its self-defeating character.
Citing Patricia Churchland, he develops further the idea I was suggesting earlier, saying
the most important thing about the human brain is that it has evolved; this means, she says, that its principal function is to enable the organism to move appropriately: Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival [Churchland's emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.
What Churchland means, I think, is that evolution is interested (so to speak) only in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. Natural selection doesn't care what you believe; it is interested only in how you behave.
Therefore, all of our beliefs of truth - if naturalism is true - have no foundation for being actually true. If they do in fact line up with reality, it is only by coincidence, and we have no reason to actually suspect this is the case.
So, again, the naturalist has no reason to propose what he proposes...
Oh! You mean the electromagnetic force, of course, of course!
Has anyone applied these 'seek and yee shall find" numerology algorithms to "The Origin of Species"? They just might find that Darwin's works were divinely inspired and that Darwin(PBUH) was not a naturalist at all, but was god's most recent prophet.
That doesn't follow from anything that precedes it.
A brain needs to survive, as you say, and sometimes produces ideas that don't match up to reality. But unless you'd like to argue that an eye is more likely to help its body survive if it does nothing to help you know what's in front of you, your argument is useless.
Of course what these guys really mean, no matter what their stripe, by "proof of the existence of God" is proof of the existence of their version of God, which they wrongly think is the same thing. But of course if one could prove a Supreme Being existed it would not be proof any specific religion was right. Even worse for believers is that such proof would not prove that God actually offers all those cool things like eternal life if you just follow path x. One can only imagine the denial if God suddenly announced his existence, with convincing proof, but went on to say that no, he didn't offer eternal life to those who behave in a certain fashion. "One life is all you get, I won't punish you for the wrong choice of bed partners etc." would just prompt believers to claim he was whoever they see as chief universal baddy, no matter how contrary such a claim would be to the evidence he provided.
"Want more proof? I have converted water to wine."
I have converted plenty of wine into water.
Pablo @ 125 No, Timothy Ferris is not the author of
"Evolution and the Myth Of Creationism'. This book was
written by TIM M. BERRA, published by Stanford U Press in
1990. I have read it and it is a worthy read. Do so!
"Facile Sophistry" would make a great name for a rock band, and "Petty Farts in the Wind" an excellent song!
A couple of serious problems here. One is that it leaves us with solipsistic radical skepticism as the only tenable position other than naturalism, which might be what you're advocating, but somehow I doubt it.
The major flaw in your reasoning, though, is that you have as an implied premise that it is possible to completely decouple "behavior" and "belief." It's not.
What you're after is something like 'natural selection only cares about what goes on outside your skull.' The problem is that everything that you want to classify as 'outside,' "behavior," has 'inside' precursors and concomitants. Just for an obvious example, natural selection cares very much whether you believe there's a poisonous snake in your immediate environment.
Up to here, I thought it's an obvious parody.
Of course, being a Bible Code thing, it could still be a parody... but sheer ignorance is more parsimonious.
Dembski still believes in the Bible Code? LOL.
"The worst math is no math at all."
So? Where's the entropy decrease?
LOL! Doesn't surprise me at all, though.
Oh, PZ, if only you weren't married. And if I were more than a few years older than your daughter. Oh, and if I hadn't already pledged my undying love to her...
Seriously, I hope your genes (and/or at least your words) proliferate and the future is filled with folks that take after you - I mean, really:
"It's never pie; I'm disappointed every time."
I wonder if Biscuits has a recipe?
Ask and you shall receive
Hey, I think I saw that billboard yesterday, on the 101 near my house! All I saw was "God" in big letters just before I passed it, and I rolled my eyes without even knowing what else it said.
I've also been seeing billboards all over the Bay Area for the Catholic Radio station. Out of curiosity, and being an ex-Catholic, I tuned my radio to AM 1260 and listened to a recital of the Rosary. The whole Rosary! Hail Mary over and over! Followed by an announcement for an anti-abortion rally, of course.
1+9=10
10 in binary is 2
There are 2 digits in 19
Therefore, god = 2 - 2 = 0.
And now that the sacred number 19 has been revealed, I would like to start a new religion, a purer, more sacred religion than all that have gone before, in fact the most pure and sacred religion mathematically possible.
The first paragraph of our holy book begins thus:
"19191919191919191919191919191919191919191919
191919191919191919191919. . . ."
It will be 1919 pages long. Each page will be 19 cm by 19 cm, and 19 microns thick.
Our year will have 19 months with 19 days each. This means the winter soltice will be offset by 4 days per year, eventually cycling back to fall on the same day again. The world will end after the 19 x 19 x 19th such cycle.
If you want to join, please donate $19.19.
You're basically talking about what I wanted to study in psychology before I had to resort to computer programming to not starve to death.
I wanted to study the comparative structures of brains and how they shape cognitive and perceptive abilities as it relates to belief or non-belief in religion.
Ie: Acquire the brains of some really die hard religious assholes. Like say Fred Phelps and a group of die hard Atheists, like say Penn Gillet and some regular people in the middle for a control group and dissect them.
Justin W #131 wrote:
There are several problems with this argument. First, as CJO pointed out, evolution does not entail that our beliefs would line up with reality only by random "coincidence" -- there would be good reasons that most of them would map reasonably well. One can also check beliefs against the environment, correcting them in a feedback loop. Living things evolve to do this.
But the major flaw in Plantinga's argument is that a brain molded by evolution to believe what is "useful" as opposed to what is "true" is really only a problem for the theist, not the atheist. It is the theist who needs to believe that humankind has been granted a special sense divinus, an instinct for God which can be trusted to lead to TRUTH, and which needs no checking against reality. It's the theist who demands and requires absolute certainty.
And we can't have it.
Naturalism predicts that human beings would often come to believe things that are not true. It predicts that one can correct such beliefs with continual cross-checking.
According to the presupper, theism predicts that ... what? People won't make mistakes? It can't be predicting that. You drag in "original sin" or some other post hoc nonsense to make sense of a human being who has been given perfectly reliable senses and intuitions -- but doesn't seem to have them anymore.
No, your own argument on the evolved brain only totally demolishes our trust in a "Basic Belief in God." Not everything else we sense and infer.
No pie.
As it turns out, God/Allah/.../The Flying Spaghetti monster also put "scientific proof" of his/her/its existence into the novel "Moby Dick":
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html
My guess is that using these code methods and a sufficiently large collection of words ("War and Peace", "Remembrance of Things Past", "Red Hat Linux Technical Manual"), you can get plenty of messages from the deity of your choice ...
asw - Unfortunately for you, I had a vision from God the other day and He told me that He works in hexadecimal.
Не забывайте Братья Карамазовы!
In the original Russian, of course. Translations won't yield accurate result, which of course raises the issue of the validity of this Bible Code nonsense as it applies to the KJV and other, ah, adaptations of the original sources...
Aw c'mon Carlie, everyone knows that hex is strictly for witchcraft!
If you're right, this only shows the depths to which even an intelligent person can descend in the attempt to shore up a pet belief. Plantinga's "undefeatable defeater" is in fact a non-starter. For it to be taken seriously, Plantinga would have to demonstrate that an organism with a tendency to form true beliefs (about, say, the proximity of a potential mate or a dangerous predator) would have no survival or reproductive advantage whatsoever over an organism without such a tendency. I doubt this can be done; certainly, as far as I'm aware, Plantinga hasn't done it.
Just wanted to remind some posters above that the sun does not rise. The earth rotates so as to make it appear that the sun rises. Let's keep critical thinking correct, please.
@136
Remind me to never ask you for a glass of water.
Kerry in #70:... moose turd pie.
"My Moose, that's god turd pie!
Good, tho'."
I hand you off to the master.
Actually, this whole post was a subliminal message to get you to rent Pi
Personally I'd be more impressed if every religious text suddenly sprouted a frontispiece with the notification:
"The following is a work of Fiction: Any similarity between the contents of this book and actual events or persons whether alive or dead is purely coincidental."
Commenter #2 asks if we have seen any Koran codes yet. Yes, we have--Koran numerology was the main claimed proof of imam Rashad Khalifa, who fled persecution in Egypt to the United States and started his own sect in Tucson, Arizona, near the campus of the University of Arizona.
He was murdered in 1990, apparently by Sunni Muslims in the Jamaat ul-Fuqra organization, including Osama bin Laden's secretary in Sudan, Wadih el-Hage, who also took part in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Nairobi.
I too am always disappointed by the vacuity of theological arguments. I would really like to at least hear something that made me pause and think, instead of a big wad of glaring logical fallacies.
I also really want pie now.
Justin W #131 wrote:
I fixed it for you.
More proof of God! :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huj3luakW4E
APOPHENIA; Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.
http://skepdic.com/apophenia.html
Eddington searched for profound connections between "apparently related phenomena" leading to his fine structure constant, 137 - as in mathematical astrophysics.
Pynchon attempted to demonstrate that gravity's rainbow connected everything - but was most convincing to "willing" literary types - as in psychological typology.
Muslims are especially weird because of their weird religious beliefs that the Muslims spontaneously select (exercise their free will) from a repertoire of readily available beliefs (or crazy hodge-podge)- as in smorgasbord.
If you took the time to actually *read* what is written you would realize that the Quran's mathematical system does indeed prove its Divine origin. Let me break it down for those of you who have trouble wrapping your minds around the content on this 5 page site:
1) We did not choose the initials to count - they have prefixed 29 chapters of the Quran for over 1400 years.
2) We did not choose the number 19. It is mentioned in chapter 74 verses 30-35 as "one of the great miracles."
3) Muhammad was unaware of the existence of this code.
So, this leaves you with a choice of accepting the argument of delusional skepticism - that this code, the initials, and the mention of 19 as "one of the great miracles" happened by accident, that a man in the desert of Arabia (during the Dark Ages) wrote this book while simultaneously controlling the frequencies of occurence of half of the Arabic alphabet with counts approaching the hundreds of thousands in multiples of the number 19, and that this occured in a society that was still using their alphabet to count (gematrical values). Oh, and he didn't tell anyone and we found out about it 1400 years later. Chew on that.
correction:
the mention of 19 as "one of the great miracles" happened by accident, **OR** that a man in the desert of Arabia (during the Dark Ages) wrote this book
Guess he got lucky here too:
[Quran 21:30] Do the unbelievers not realize that the heaven and the earth used to be one solid mass that we exploded into existence? And from water we made all living things. Would they believe?
http://www.quranalone.com/quran/ch21.html#30
Asubmitter, have you heard of the amazing propehcies of His Holiness Herman Melville?
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html
If you look hard enough, you'll find "miraclulous" numbers and "divine" codes in any work of sufficient length. Any idiot can predict the past. Making up a rationalization for something after the fact doesn't mean a damn thing.
Chew on that.
*sniffs*
Hmm, delusional high-notes, a whiff of bullshit, an acrid aroma of self-importance, undertones of snow and credulous inanity...
Thanks, I'll pass.
phantom - Again, you are totally ignorant of the Quran's code and you ignored almost everything I said. This is not about "looking hard enough." We did not choose any of the parameters of this code: the number 19, the initials, or the chapters in which to count. Pick up any Quran in the world and you will see them there. Or, just read the site before you post!
Did we have to "look hard" to see this?
[Quran 10:1] A.L.R.* These (letters) are the proofs of this book of wisdom.
[Quran 13:1] A. L. M. R.* These (letters) are proofs of this scripture. What is revealed to you from your Lord is the truth, but most people do not believe.
[Quran 19:1] K. H. Y. `A. S.* (Kaaf Haa Yaa `Ayn Saad)
[Quran 40:1-2] H. M. This revelation of the scripture is from GOD, the Almighty, the Omniscient.
[Quran 42:1-3] H. M. 'A. S. Q. Inspiring you, and those before you, is GOD, the Almighty, Most Wise.
As you can see the parameters are fixed. So this leaves you in camp #2 - people who think Muhammad was somehow superhuman and made this up. Oh and he told nobody about it.
"I'm still an atheist. You can stop here if you want."
=
No need to investigate, I've already issued my decree.
Proof is not needed. I noticed that many of the anti-god arguments included false assumptions about what believers believe. That does not come as a surprise.
Also translated as "We clove them asunder", "We unstitched them", "We parted them", and "We opened them out", proving that the Qur'an also foreshadowed the modern Big Meat Cleaver, Big Seam Ripper, Big Pair of Curtains and Big French Doors models of the origin of the universe.
Kseniya hit it before I could, but all these "code" ideas beg the question - how did the original authors know how to insert the code so that it would be detectable only in editions that were specifically edited and translated who knows how many times, centuries later? I mean, what superhuman intelligence would it take to know which books of the bible would be included, which would be lost, and which ones the Vatican would lock up forever in their catacombs on top of predicting which words would be misspelled or mistranslated by scribes and reinterpreted by later rewrites from language to language or version to version? It's simply amazing!
BTW, pie are not square. Pie are round. Cornbread are square.
Wow! I cannot believe the bottons they've pushed on you athiests! Mathmiracle.com is incredible! Have you guys even examined what they're saying an spreading to everyone. I too thought that this could be seen as another "Bible Code" but this is nothing like it. God has been mentioned 2698 (19x142)times and if you add the verse numbers where God has been mentioned it is 118123 (19x6217)! This is incredible and certainly not the Bible Code. The Quran has 114 (19x6) chapters and 6346 (19x334) verses! And then there are the initialed chapters which the mathematic literature is beyond this world. Can any one of us (how about all of you together) write a 25 page essay and prior to writing it we'll say to make sure that collectively the number of "a", "w" and "t" will become a multiple of 17 or 23 or 31? It will be impossible. I truly hope that you all study the mathematics of this awsome book very carefully before making anymore negative comments because "PhD" or not, it will only show your ignorance and fear of the truth
Anybody else here that song about the Viet Nam war, "19", echoing in their heads?
So, Mrs Sherman, supposing what you say is true, and I'm not, why is it more likely that a deity wrote the book than a bunch of over zealous, mathematically-inclined Muslim scholars from way back made it so?
That's a very interesting question. If you and I wrote such a complex and yet easy to comprehend phenomenon way back when, why would we stay quiet about it? wouldn't we want the whole world to know our great talent? and why stop with one book? there are so many books written in the same era and none of them have such characteristics of the Quran! Look, all I'm saying is that the fact that in such sophisticated times with all our technology and scientific and literary glory, we still can't come up with a book like the Quran. During this time, I've learned even more about the science of it: Imploding of the universe, the big bang theory confirmed, the proportion of land and water mentioned is the same as the actual proportion on our planet, accurate embryology (trimesters, how the embryo hangs on the uterus- a knowledge only known to us since about 75yrs ago, the creation of bones followed by the flesh, etc.) and much more. BTW, we only found out via satellite pictures that the Earth is egg shaped and yet this was in the Quran for over 1400 yrs ago! please Dave, just read it and you'll see what i mean.
This is actually quite an amazing phenomenon. For a moment let's put our biases aside about what the implications of this whole thing may mean and let's just look at the evidence. Anyone who is familiar with encryption knows that two of the most prominent ways of encrypting a message is by use of either a prime number or key letters. A good read for anyone who is interested in encryption is The Code Book by Simon Singh. The way that this text is structured such that the particular initials are elegantly placed by the author on top of their allotted chapters and a prime number key is signified inside a chapter entitled "The Hidden Secret" makes this way more deliberate than mere numerology. There is definitely order in this text that is very analogous to the encryption methods that are implemented today. In my opinion to equate this phenomenon to numerology at this point would be equivalent to calling the German's use of Enigma during WWII nothing more than numerology.
Hmm. I'll be more convinced of something marvellous occuring if you can do this kind of mathemagical analysis to randomly selected books from the library and not find prime numbers and whatnot all over the place.
,blockquote>accurate embryology (trimesters, how the embryo hangs on the uterus- a knowledge only known to us since about 75yrs ago, the creation of bones followed by the flesh, etc.) and much more.
I beg to differ. My grandmother's midwifery textbook from the mid 1800's already had pretty detailed stuff about that, with illustrations, no less. Before the church put the kibosh on dissection of human bodies, lots of research had been done on development and disease in this way.
I think we'd all be in trouble if the earth were egg-shaped. A slightly flattened sphere, yeah, but an egg?
And again, were these "codes" derived from the original, unabridged, untranslated work, or a later version that was "fixed"? And if they can be written by humans and decoded by humans, how does that prove their divinity? And why would proof of a divine being require so much mental contortion?
I like the song "40" by U2 and "Song 2" by blur.
#176 - Alison, the common egg that you are familiar with are chicken eggs, but chickens were not common to the Middle East in 600 AD, but ostriches were. Please verify:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Ostrich
So for the people at the time when mention of an egg was made their understanding was that of an ostrich and not a chicken. With this in mind lets look at a picture of an ostrich egg:
http://www.eggcrazy.com/Images/ostrich%20egg.JPG
Looks quite like a flatened sphere to me.
For a scientist, "want" simply doesn't enter the question.
"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
You have overlooked two important things:
1) It is old news that science can only disprove and not prove. This is old news.
2) Evolutionary epistemology, the first time that philosophy built upon the results of science instead of trying to predict them (and failing).
An enormous book, that one.
No, the Bible Code uses the original Hebrew. Without vowels. (It goes without saying that this increases the chance of matches even further.)
LOL!
Bullshit.
No, that's an elongated sphere... They might look the same from a certain angle, but you'd notice the difference if you tried to pass them through your cloaca.
They might look the same from a certain angle, but you'd notice the difference if you tried to pass them through your cloaca.
I'm having another "I love being a boy" moment.
When I first heard about the whole Bible Codes thing, I was a bit excited at first, but even then being rather skeptical about God, it occurred to me that even if the examples given were true, they did not prove the existence of God, but rather, that information could be transmitted to the past.
Even then, that seemed far simpler and more parsimonious than a God that chose to communicate in such a convoluted way. Excuse me, why is the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe using bizarre encryption rather than plain communication?
And the whole "19" thing is even sillier. Again, even assuming that it's correct (rather than being the apophenic creation of numerologists), the most parsimonious explanation is that one (or more) of the editors of the Quran during the time of Caliph Uthman was (were?) a numerological savant.
I've just recently finished Born on a Blue Day, by Daniel Tammet, who is a mathematical savant with Asperger's syndrome and mathematical synaesthesia. In addition to having specific synaesthetic sensations for each of the various numbers (up to a large but finite number, possibly 1000 or 10000, as I recall), he perceives prime numbers as being (of course) uniquely special.
Someone born before the advent of modern neuroscience, during a period of time steeped in religious superstition, might well perceive a similar savant ability as being a divine gift, and a synaesthetic sensation of the importance of 19 as being a divine message, and thus forced an encoding of 19 onto the text of the Quran.
$ make pie
make: *** No rule to make target `pie'. Stop.
Well, maybe that's your problem.
I've thought about this miracle for a long time before accepting it.. One of the main reasons for me was the type of miracle it is, and that it perfectly fits for this era.
Imagine if 1400 years ago God revealed a complex mathematical code to the world, and almost no one could remotely comprehend it! It has taken many people, along with _computers_, to figure out this complex miracle! How could He have possibly revealed it until now?
It only makes sense that this code, which has been embedded within each page, word, and letter of the Quran for over 1400 years, be revealed in the "Information Age."
How can anyone possibly think that any man/men could come up with an incredibly intricate mathematical code in such an easy to comprehend book? And after figuring all of that out, keep the code a secret from everyone else! All of this in a time and place when this complexity of mathematics was far too difficult to even think of?
Because the "incredibly intricate mathematical code" is something that we know humans are capable of doing, if they care to. We know that some humans with the rare mathematical skills can obsess over numbers to a sometimes insane degree. And we also know that it's perfectly possible for certain numbers to turn up by co-incidence to a certain degree, and for those quantities that don't match the numerical pattern to be ignored. This is called selective attention.
However, actual communication from an intelligent being requires, not patterns of numbers showing up, but clear communication. You know, words. Like these.
When Allah talks to me using language as clear as the words that we use to talk to each other, then maybe I'll listen. Although of course, I would need a little evidence that it is indeed Allah, and not another human being playing tricks. Or for that matter, my own b Until
Heh. By an amusing coincidence, my fingers played a trick on me, and hit the "Post" button before I finished typing the sentence:
"Or for that matter, my own brain playing tricks on me. Until that happens, I have no reason to believe."
Guess where words like the ones you and I speak exist? IN THE QURAN!
God gives you the "words" in plain understandable terms, and you say you require a proof. God gives you the proof, and you say that it is too much, just give me "words."
You obviously have already dug yourself into a deep hole with no desire of trying to find a way out.
If only you knew and understood the proof of it, you would see that it is all inclusive and doesn't ignore any case.
If you want, check out a more fully detailed version of the proof here:
http://www.quranalone.com/the-quran/appendices/appendix-1.php
You'll find that there is not one set of Quranic Initials, not one instance of the word "God," not one instance of the word "Quran," or anything else which is ignored. All of them (and more), without exception, are multiples of 19.
Oh, a numerologist. How quaint.
Proves nothing of course. Even if every claim is true, all we have is evidence of uncommon writing patterns, indicating something more about the mindset of the people writing than any deity. You of course can't be sure that any scribe wasn't retentive about such things, or that Muhammad himself wasn't. But all in all, it's irrelevant as it is proof of nothing. You have yet to actually connect the idea of "strange writing style" to "perfect and divinely inspired book of an omnipotent god."
Muslims alive in Muhammad's time would likely have killed you for even suggesting that such numerical flights of fancy were even needed prove the truth of Allah.
How devilishly odd it is that you should have such a narrow grasp of history, while holing onto something centuries old. Yet, I can't say I'm surprised. It's common among conspiracy theorists and the devoutly religious. You must have hit the jackpot.
Michael X,
Perhaps you missed the part about this being a miracle for our generation and the Information Age. Gone are the times where miracles like turning a staff into a serpent mean anything. Just as you say a mathematical miracle in the time of Muhammad would be ridiculed, a man performing an act such as walking on water would be dismissed as merely magic today. God's miracles are meant to fit the times in which they occur. Just try to imagine the millions upon millions of people who have read the Quran since it was first revealed, and it is only now that we have found out about this mathematical miracle?
If scribes of Muhammad's time (or Muhammad himself) were capable of creating such an amazingly complex mathematically coded book, why is it that the Quran is the only one like this? And why is it that no one knew about it for over 1400 years? You and I can be quite sure that if this was an elaborate hoax or if there were other such books coded in the same way, those pieces of information would have been passed down through the ages.
So again we have another person wandering spouting words like "numerology" and "conspiracy." I want to refer you to the link I posted in #188 so that you may review the evidence for yourself. Or you can choose not to, lest you actually learn something life-changing.
No, I don't think you understood my point. Obviously, I didn't communicate clearly enough.
God hasn't given me any words. God has never spoken to me, or e-mailed me, or written me a letter.
All that there has been is people, like yourself -- people telling me that God spoke to, or inspired, various other people, many hundreds or thousands of years ago. And when the chain of communication is examined, it looks even more tenuous than that. For example, Mohammed didn't claim to hear God, he claimed to hear the angel Gabriel. Also, Mohammed never wrote anything down; that was done later by those who listened to him. The Quran was not the exact words of Mohammed as he recited them; it was compiled and edited together from many manuscripts, and some compilations existed that were different. Right there we have reason to suspect that the supposed chain of communication from God was unreliable.
But let me break down the basic concept a bit: People have told me that an entity that is all-powerful, and knows everything, spoke to other people many years ago.
Why doesn't this supposed all-powerful, all-knowing entity speak directly to each of us in our own languages, here, now, today, in such a way that it is unmistakable?
It can't be because God doesn't know how, since God is defined as knowing everything.
It can't be because God isn't able, because God is defined as all-powerful.
We can only conclude that either God is defined incorrectly, or God does not exist.
However, all religions are based on God having at the very least that basic definition (all-knowing, all-powerful). Therefore, all religions must be false.
So the only conclusion that we can come to is that either God does not exist as defined by religions, or God does not exist at all.
Either way, the supposed existence of various numerological properties in the Quran does nothing to answer this very basic reasoning.
As I tried to explain to our true believer here, Numerological properties are proof of nothing other than numerological properties and add no weight to the hypothesis of an omnipotent god, let alone the one mentioned in the quran. And after having read the "life-changing" information I am as nonplussed as before.
Still waiting on why such number games link to "omnipotent god."
Mathematicians and those who work with statistics often emphasize that we need to be very cautious about deriving any sweeping conclusions after finding "amazing patterns" in large reams of some material.
I once read about a Math professor at a very prestigious university who gave his graduate students a long page of numbers, and told them that, imbedded therein, was a code. A pattern. For extra credit and geek glory, their task was to find it. They had all semester.
Unbeknownst to them, the page of numbers had really been generated by a random number generator. There was no pre-set pattern, no message, no imbedded code.
But find "the" pattern they did. Lots of them. Some of them stumbled on the same ones. And the codes were ingenious. Specific. Regular. Remarkable. The sort of thing that would have taken geniuses or computers a great deal of trouble to come up with. The professor himself, when presented with some of the "solutions," found it hard to believe that there was no "secret code." The patterns seemed to be deliberately placed there. Once you saw them, you couldn't miss them.
And, after the Big Reveal, when the students did the statistics to find out what the odds were that, by "chance alone," the pattern they found would have just happened to be there, they were astronomical. For many patterns. After the fact.
But of course, it really WAS chance alone. Our minds hunt patterns. We create them even when they're not there.
I am thus very skeptical of these "amazing codes" in Holy Books. I do not think the apologists who tout them realize how very, very easy it is to find what wasn't there before you looked.
But of course, it really WAS chance alone. Our minds hunt patterns. We create them even when they're not there.
Ding. Ding.
What do you think the Quran is? What better way to speak to the entire world than through a single book which can be, and has been, translated into many different languages.
What would you like, for God to send out a mass email to everyone containing the text of the Quran?
God knows exactly what is the best and most effective way to spread His message. And now we are even seeing it appear online so it can reach more and more people. He is all-powerful and all-knowing, but it was us that made the decision to be placed on earth (Satan's temporary dominion) to find out if there can be any other god besides God.
This means that it isn't easy for everyone to accept the fact that God is in control of all things, and that ultimately no one else has any power.
Errr... Are you sure you're not a Christian?
Regardless, this doesn't quite explain why American Muslims have their children sent to school to learn the Q'ran. Not to study the Q'ran, but to learn the Q'ran by rote, so that they can recite it word-for-word.
In the original Arabic.
Which they have never learned, and can neither speak nor understand.
The rationale, apparently, is that The Word of God is more important than The Meaning of God, which seems in direct opposition to the point you're making about this astonishingly q'ryptic q'rossword.
Sastra,
The difference with the mathematical miracle of the Quran is that it isn't just a random set of letters/numbers where people let loose at trying to find patterns in it.
First of all, the message itself is one of profound meaning and truth, which is incredibly easy to read and understand for anyone. Each word and letter has been puposefully laid out in the Quran, so as to be a great message as well as to maintain its mathematical code.
Secondly, God has told us of the miracle in the Quran itself. No one went hunting for the most "probable" number, or a code which just happens to work in more cases than not (ie, Bible Code.. which by the way was "revealed" years after the mathematical miracle of the Quran). Everything is already laid out in the Quran about the number 19 being the signnature of the Creator and that it will be a miracle once revealed.
Kseniya,
Because of some people's actions, you make assumptions about the base idea of the religion?
The Quran was originally revealed in Arabic because of the effeciency, effectiveness, and clarity of the language itself. However, there is no requirement at all about the Quran needing to be recited or learned in Arabic. That is a false idea manifested by "Muslim" scholars who think they know best for everyone.
And the word of God (the Quran) is very important. This doesn't mean that you have to memorize it though.. of course, it is a book that you can constantly refer back to when need be. Through the word of God you get information about why we are here and what we can do to return to God's kingdom.
This is the problem that most people have today: they look at a group of "Muslims" and think that they are doing everything the right way. It is even written in the Quran that most of the Muslim/Arab world is corrupt because they worship idols (ie, Muhammad). God's message is extremely clear, to worship Him alone.
That may be true, but the key (19) itself is defined in the Quran to be revealed as a miracle. If people went hunting for random codes and patterns that work, then it would be a different story.
To say that this key is just a random number that happens to work and tie all parts of the Quran together would be like saying:
1. Some scholars wrote a book with a profound message.
2. The scholars went through the entire book to find some pattern/number that works in all cases (over 1400 years ago, mind you)
3. Once they find a pattern than works, they add it into the text itself and call it a miracle. (Remember, without the verses about 19 being a miracle, the mathematical miracle of 19 would fall apart).
4. Even ignoring that fact, after they add it into the book, they have to reverify that the code itself works still (which it wouldn't).
That is a false idea manifested by "Muslim" scholars who think they know best for everyone.
but that doesn't mean it isn't a current requirement for many muslim sects.
In fact, there were a couple of court cases recently in NY involving private schools requiring students to learn the Qur'an in the original arabic only.
This doesn't mean that you have to memorize it though..
again, this really depends on where you are.
see, again, exactly what I just referred to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/nyregion/16koran.html?ei=5090&en=37fa…
3. Once they find a pattern than works, they add it into the text itself and call it a miracle.
LOL
must have a really lax definition of "miracle".
4. Even ignoring that fact, after they add it into the book, they have to reverify that the code itself works still (which it wouldn't).
and if it did?
ever heard the term: self fulfilling prophecy?
You must not have read the original poster's comments.. I was making an example of how impossible it would be for his example scenario to exist.
If it is a requirement for Christians to accept Jesus as their lord and savior, would that make it the right thing to do by God? Of course not. So you can't look at what the majority of Muslims are doing and think that they are doing right by God. You have to look at the scripture itself and see what is acceptable to God.
No where in the Quran does it say to worship anything or anyone besides God. But even after all of that, most Muslims worship Muhammad (same way Christians worship Jesus). So looking to them as an example of how to be a good Submitter to God is not a great idea.
Communicating directly, of course. Directly meaning in real time.
I mean, here you are, an obviously real person, communicating in response to my words.
Like that.
Goodness, no. Spam is bad enough as it is.
No, the most direct communication would be simple speech that everyone could hear, and which would respond to any questions.
Something like: "Hello, I'm God. I created the Universe. Ask me any question, no matter how difficult, and I will answer or demonstrate in such a way that you will have no doubts as to its truth."
Obviously not, since here I am, an unbeliever.
There are far more non-Muslims than there are Muslims, and even among the believers, there are those who argue over meaning and proper interpretation. If God had truly communicated clearly with the Quran, there would not be the huge split of Sunni and Shia; between Wahabbi and Sufi and Druze. There would never be a Muslim doubter or apostate, and yet there are indeed those who were born Muslims who eventually rejected and today reject the Quran. There was a famous example in Afghanistan, where a Muslim wished to become a Christian (and barely escaped with his life for his apostasy). Why would he reject the Quran, if God's message is so effective?
Oh? I was under the impression that Islam rejected that Satan had any dominion at all, since all dominion belonged to Allah. Tell me, is this idea — that Satan has dominion on Earth — in the Quran itself, or is it not from the Quran?
As I noted, reason shows that there can be no God as defined , whatsoever.
If God is in control of all things, then Satan of course cannot have any dominion; cannot have any power. This contradicts your earlier assertion that Satan has dominion on earth.
However, God does not communicate directly. Therefore, as I said, either God is not able and does not control all things, or God does not exist.
God's message is extremely clear,
uh huh.
so clear there are a thousand sects of xianity and Islam alone.
clear as mud, that guy.
of course, rational folk just add that to the stack of things suggesting that deities are inventions of humans to begin with.
you?
oh, wait...
If it is a requirement for Christians to accept Jesus as their lord and savior, would that make it the right thing to do by God
wtf does that have to do with the requirement of reading the Qur'an in the original arabic, which you claimed did not exist?
So you can't look at what the majority of Muslims are doing and think that they are doing right by God
LOL
you're the one true Scottsman muslim!
glad to meet ya.
Why wouldn't it work? The editor(s) had complete control of the entire text; of everything that went in and was left out.
All they would have to do is make a few adjustments for the words saying "19 is a miracle". And then they're done.
Don't blame God just because nation upon nation of illiterate, stupid cranks never learned factoring. It's the nineteen, I tell you. The nineteen! Nineteen trumps twenty-three! It's not The Law of Fives! It's the law of Nineteen!
My agents are on their way to behead you.
[Insert mandatory "religion of peace" apology here]
So looking to them as an example of how to be a good Submitter to God is not a great idea.
What is it with you freaks and submission. Maybe submission to an imaginary buddy is not a great idea. There's something to ponder!
hellosir #197 wrote:
Actually, that's not the critical difference between your claim about the mathematical pattern in the Quran and my example of the math professor whose students found math patterns in a random set of letters/numbers. I suspect that the teacher could have given his students an actual text with meaning -- a play by Shakespeare, parenting advice by Dr. Spock -- and they would have been able to search and find patterns.
The significant difference is that, in my example, the academic did not make a sweeping extraordinary claim and then refuse to run it through proper peer review, but come out instead with some breathless apologetics and an altar call.
I looked briefly at your site. I have virtually no skill in math. I am not equipped to evaluate the evidence, and then decide if it is indeed extraordinary, or something that could have happened by chance, or something which could have been done deliberately by anyone sufficiently brilliant or merely capable in math -- or groups of such people.
My point is that neither are you. Or any isolated group of enthusiasts.
Where have these findings been published, scrutinized, critiqued? Have they been run through the ringer, sifted over by skeptics well-versed in statistics and the problems with self-generated patterns? Or, if the pattern is clearly deliberate, is it really "impossible" that it was placed in the text by human beings? Has this evidence been torn apart in the academic process by enraged nay-sayers -- and emerged over time unscathed, and thus accepted by consensus?
That's the test. There's no shortcut. If you say you are not just making the usual unsupported assertions -- no, this time you have PROOF that God's hand is revealed -- scientific, mathematical proof no less -- then you must run that "proof" through proper channels. Run it by scientific, mathematical experts.
You do that FIRST. The very first step, is get published in a legitimate peer review journal. Even the "Equidistant Letter Sequences in Book of Genesis" guys did that. They were debunked, but they at least put it together enough to get it out among the serious mathematicians for a serious look.
No, instead, you go RIGHT to the general public. A billboard. A website. The scienceblogs commentary at Pharyngula. An appeal to ordinary people.
No, I am not going to take you seriously. I am not going to take you or your claim or your Holy Book or your God seriously because you, sir, are taking ME too seriously. I have no experience in this area. None.
How dare you tell me I am nevertheless an excellent candidate to be your critic, and evaluate your claims. I should click the link, read it all, and decide "for myself." If I don't or won't, it can only be because I am a chicken, afraid, rebellious, close-minded. It will of course have nothing to do with a perfectly proper sense of caution or restraint due to lack of qualifications.
No. I sense flattery, and I do not trust that. Nor should I. Your belief may be sincere, but your tactics are not honest.
Bah. Any Pythagorean Gematriist would beg to differ.
19 ⇒ 1+9 ⇒ 10 ⇒ 1+0 ⇒ 1
23 ⇒ 2*3=6 ; 2+3=5 ⇒ 6-5= 1
See? They're secretly the same!
Say, speaking of Pythagoras, he's a perfect example of the combination of mathematics with religion. Discover that the square root of 2 cannot be the ratio of two whole numbers ⇒ sacrifice 100 cattle to the GODS!
GLaD to hear it.
"Well, you found me. Congratulations. Was it worth it? Because despite your violent behavior, the only thing you've managed to break so far is my heart."
"Oh, you think you're doing some damage? Two plus two is... ten...
...
...
... in base four
I'M FINE!"
"Your entire life has been a mathematical error... A mathematical error I'm about to correct."
Yea, though I walk in the focal point of the hyperbola of the shadow of death, I shall fear no division, for the power of MATH is with me. The slide and the ruler, they comfort me.
I have prepared a table of logarithms in the presence of mine problem sets. My head is anointed with calculus, my FPU floweth over.
Wow. A simple post, and despite the barrage of unspecified criticism - all operating under the basic premise of "you can do this with any book if you try hard enough" - I have yet to see a response to these 3 basic points:
Point #1)We did not choose the number 19. The Quran says in chapter 74:30-35 that this number is the basis of the Quran's code, and that it is "one of the great miracles."
Point #2)We did not choose which initials to count, nor did we choose the chapters in which to count them. They prefix 29 chapters of the Quran - any Quran, anywhere in the world. Here are a few examples:
[Quran 10:1] A.L.R.* These (letters) are the proofs of this book of wisdom.
[Quran 13:1] A. L. M. R.* These (letters) are proofs of this scripture. What is revealed to you from your Lord is the truth, but most people do not believe.
[Quran 19:1] K. H. Y. `A. S.* (Kaaf Haa Yaa `Ayn Saad)
[Quran 40:1-2] H. M. This revelation of the scripture is from GOD, the Almighty, the Omniscient.
[Quran 42:1-3] H. M. 'A. S. Q. Inspiring you, and those before you, is GOD, the Almighty, Most Wise.
Point #3)The prophet Muhammad had no knowledge of the existence of this code as is made painfully obvious by the volumes upon volumes of so-called "Islamic" literature which hasn't a clue as to their meaning.
This leaves you in the faithful position of having to choose between 2 rather unlikely alternatives:
Camp #1) That the prophet Muhammad and his "savant" (lol) contemporaries created this complex mathematical system in the Dark Ages of Arabia during an era when the 28-letter alphabet was a shoddy substitute for a number system.
OR
Camp #2) That the prophet Muhammad had no knowledge of this code, but that Dr. Rashad Khalifa (the one to whom this code was revealed) came about 1400 years later and "made up" a mathematical code where none exists.
If, after reading this post, you still ascribe to the repetitious nonsense being spewed by the proponents of camp #2 then I am sorry to inform you that either your computer or your mind is seriously broken. Because as mentioned at least 3 times previously, the parameters of this code are FIXED and were not "manipulated" after the fact. Simple statistics would inform you that the probability of these counts within the 29 fixed and uniform parameters defined above haphazardly being a multiple of 19 is a very very very very very very small number. For those of you who think "nothing can be proven" (lol) - it is smaller than the probability of you being able to walk through a wall. Keep trying though.
For the rest of you (camp #1), it is likely that some day in the near future you will realize that you, too, ascribe to a religion. Yours is the religion of pure, comical disbelief in the most fundamentally obvious of truths - that God, your Creator, can communicate with His creation in any manner He chooses! And for all the philosophical nonsense of your theoretical responses (which have nothing to do with the simple probabilities mentioned), you have succeeded in convincing yourselves that the sky cannot be blue. And this is why you so adamantly refuse to open your eyes and have a look.
Cliffsnotes for some (you know who you are!): we did not choose the number 19, we did not choose which chapters to count them in, we did not choose which initials to count, and no person (including the prophet Muhammad) had any knowledge of this code until its discovery by Dr. Rashad Khalifa in 1974.
See? They're secretly the same!
LOL
Muhammad is irrelevant to the arguments, since Muhammed is not the one who wrote anything down.
Sigh. And once again... who says so? Not God. God never talks. It's always human beings trying to convince us of this silliness. Human beings who would never dream of trying to communicate to strangers using some numerical mishmash rather than plain, simple language.
That's a fundamentally obvious truth.
The fundamentally obvious truth of numerLOLogy!
I CAN HAS SEKRIT CODEZ?
asubmitter #213 wrote:
But I thought I explained to you why I "refuse to open (my) eyes and have a look!" It is because I am in Camp #3:
Camp 3): that mathematical and statistical arguments should be vetted through peer review journals in the field, to be critiqued and evaluated by experts who are familiar with the processes involved.
This is not "philosophical nonsense" or a "theoretical response." It is a reasonable first-step procedure, and a humble suggestion from one without said expertise.
It is a response, I see, you have ignored in favor of brandishing more threats and insults to people who are not susceptible to your flattery. If the probabilities are so "simple" and the result so convincing, write it up properly and submit it to a Statistics journal. What are you afraid of?
I would put myself in Camp #4, and my position is as follows:
The suggestion that a mathematical savant could have been involved with editing the Quran is just that, an idle suggestion, based on the assumption that the whole "19" business is correct and accurate.
The more likely explanation is that there is and was more than a little number juggling in getting all of those occurrences of "19" to pop out. But I really don't care enough to give it even a cursory look at this point in time, because even if the number 19 does show up a statistically improbable number of times in statistically improbable combinations, the most likely explanation is that the occurrences are natural and coincidental.
And I say that because it's a silly way for a supposed omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent entity to behave. Yes, a supposed God could "communicate with His creation in any manner He chooses". But no God who had those omni- attributes would choose "any" manner, but rather the clearest, most direct, and easiest to understand manner. Communication must necessarily reflect the abilities and understanding of the weaker and less knowledgeable party, not the stronger and more knowledgeable one.
I note that even Muslims are not in agreement about the alleged 19 business. So the alleged clear communication from God is not so clear:
http://monotheism.faithweb.com/response.html
And looking at just the verse, even ignoring most of the criticism, I would say that Rashad Khalifa did more than a little juggling of both words and numbers...
So asubmiter,
What happens when we happen to find an even less likely code in another religious book, that will of course convince you of that religions truth? If you are going to be intellectually honest, you must admit at least this.
So, thus being hypothetically convinced, by the same "proofs" you are offering here, are you ok with being murdered as an apostate? Or would you then, by being influenced by superior numerical probabilities, begin to disagree with the actual beliefs of the religion that your love of numbers seemingly supports and not think it right for you to be murdered? Or, instead would you remain a muslim, and be shown up as a hypocrite, only looking for whatever you think best proves your beliefs, beliefs that are themselves unassailable to evidence?
You see it isn't only that I am not convinced by contrived mathematical probabilities as evidence of Allah, it's also that the edifice that you claim such proofs support is ridiculous and irrational in the highest. Your religion of choice (or birth most likely) is not judged or found true or false on the merits of it's numerological uniqueness. It is taken for what it is alleged to be: the work of an omnipotent god. If the whole thing doesn't hold to that standard, then no numbers will save it. Indeed it fails many times and your numbers can't save it. Though I doubt that you came to this religion on such evidences, and wouldn't be convinced of another religions truth based upon the same.
And so you shouldn't, because they're unconvincing.
The first numeral is 1, the last 9. What is the first number after 9, 10? If you start counting a=10, b=11... Spell FRAUD and sum the letters. It becomes 95=5x19. There are 5 letters in word Quran.
This miracle is of course based on Rashad Khalifa's work in the 70's. He had to modify Quran to get these results. He randomly left out parts of Quran, he translated it again, he didn't count all the words. Many have tried after him and the numbers don't add up. Not even close.
Up to here, I thought it's an obvious parody.
Of course, being a Bible Code thing, it could still be a parody... but sheer ignorance is more parsimonious.
Dembski still believes in the Bible Code? LOL.
"The worst math is no math at all."
So? Where's the entropy decrease?
LOL! Doesn't surprise me at all, though.
For a scientist, "want" simply doesn't enter the question.
"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
You have overlooked two important things:
1) It is old news that science can only disprove and not prove. This is old news.
2) Evolutionary epistemology, the first time that philosophy built upon the results of science instead of trying to predict them (and failing).
An enormous book, that one.
No, the Bible Code uses the original Hebrew. Without vowels. (It goes without saying that this increases the chance of matches even further.)
LOL!
Bullshit.