Yada Yada / The Off Topic Arena

And many people spent their entire lives studying alchemy, doesn't mean they knew what they were talking about. I'll look her up though.

There are drugs that can make you "feel" like you had an "out of body" experience in high enough doses. Also when you have a very vivid dream where do you think that reality is being produce at? Personal testimony is the lowest form of evidence. It's completely unreliable and frequently changes once questions. These reports are also usually given to family members and believers, who rarely question the story, the person did after all just go through a traumatic event (I don't believe in that stuff but if my mother nearly died an said she experienced that I would just let her have it and shut my mouth). If it were possible for me to be there for someone's out of body experience that would be great.....they could then tell me how many fingers I was holding up behind my back when they were "brought back" and I would seriously start to lean towards believing it.

Quote from link:

I'm sorry but that website is full of nothing but personal testimony and some doctor saying, yeah I was there, I did the procedure.....at least in the 3 or so links for "evidence" that I looked at. I simply don't accept personal testimony as "scientific evidence" the way that website does.

A hypnotherapists who profits off of selling books about the afterlife is asking people questions while they are in a highly suggestible state of mind? Confirmation bias? Professionally unethical? Either way, this is still personal testimony from a patient....with the additional possibility that it has been nudged a certain way by a hypnotherapist.

It is a nontheistic religion. Semantic dispute but Buddhism certainly does fit the definition given for "religion" in the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.

 

It would still "exist", it would have just hit maximum entropy and/or be expanding at such a rate that particles would never be able to interact with each other....making it completely useless and unintelligible. I don't know if a new universe could come from that......and I'm quite sure nobody really does know for certain, that type of environment will not exist for a very long time and cannot be created, observed or studied (but I won't replace that ignorance with a magical being/philosophy). Also, "nothingness" includes no time as well.....so what happens "before" and "after" time stops in the universe is an impossible question to answer. The scenario I gave about "complete nothingness" was one of a few hypothetical scientific models on the death of the universe ("maximum entropy")...I believe only one of those models has a "potentially" optimistic outcome. But no worries.....it's only religious that say the universe is going to end anytime soon.

 

......said no astrophysicist ever.

So if we are currently ignorant about how something happened/came to be (such as the universe....or who drank the last Kopiko this morning and didn't go buy more ) we need to ask people to believe that magic or a miracle was involved?

I'm glad that the police don't use this logic when investigating crimes:
*guy is found dead with knife in his chest*
Police: "some more of that there magic right there guys! Case closed."

I've always been curious what it is that makes some (most?) humans so quick to pull the "god/magic did it" card when it comes to explaining how or "why" we/the universe came to exist and then consider any attempt to figure out a logical explanation as silly, pointless, heresy or an outright attack on someone's "beliefs"..... yet in our day to day lives we (at least most of us) frown upon or even laugh at such silly logic and behavior being used:

Let's say Billy Bob just moved to the Philippines. One day a coconut falls on Billy Bob's new car smashing his windshield. Since Billy Bob is, well, Billy Bob, he has never seen a coconut before and has no idea where they come from.

Unfortunately for Billy Bob the local purok ahole just happens to be on his morning walk and sees Billy Bob trying to figure out what the coconut is and where it came from. The local ahole notices that Billy Bob isn't all that bright and is desperate for answers so decides to have a little fun with him by feeding him a story about a magical omnipotent sky elf who is quite upset that Billy Bob has broken the 17th commandment ("Thou shalt never wear socks with Crocks.") and the sky elf poofs these coconuts into existence and drops them from his invisible home in the sky whenever he is upset (but if you follow his commandments and believe in him while alive you get to go chill with him in his crib after you die....and it's a pretty sweet place!). Since Billy Bob feels that not knowing where this coconut came from is completely unacceptable and he isn't "properly equipped" to figure it out himself, he buys this magical story from the stranger hook, line and sinker. He runs into town, drops off the car for repair and when he gets home he parks his car under the same coconut tree.

Later when Billy Bob is talking to his neighbor Joe about what happened with the coconut and the sky elf that day Billy Bob gets furious with Joe for questioning the existence of sky elf, creator of the mighty coconut, when Joe suggests that it is "possible" that coconuts grow on trees and it could just be natural for them to grow there and eventually fall to the ground.

Personally, I think Billy Bob (and his car) would benefit by just accepting that he simply doesn't know where coconuts come from and try to find a more logical explanation for where they come from while leaving the fairy tales for children.....but the commandment about not wearing socks with crocks is still pretty solid advice.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk.

 

Just a theory? There is a difference from how people use the word "theory" in day to day life and scientific theory: RF (radio frequency) theory is a scientific "theory". Because of our understanding of that theory we can make calls, send text messages and post these replies on the internet. Scientific theory is not "guess work". These theories are supported by mountains of empirical data. No astrophysicist has made a widely accepted claim about what happened before the big bang/rapid expansion....and they probably won't be able to for a very very long time, if ever. The answer is simply "I don't know", not "it was a miracle and just is that way". I've already went over this "replacing unknowns/things beyond our understanding with miracles" thing in previous posts.

It is not more logical. If everything must have been created and the universe was created by god, what was it that created god? Why is it that people can accept the idea of a timeless god but not a timeless universe? An infinite/timeless universe is more logical as it requires one less assumptions than an infinite god does, therefore it is more logical to assume that the universe is infinite.

And it is certainly not a 50/50 wager. If I said a 1928 Corvette is orbiting Saturn and it was on you to prove that it does not exist and until you can do that I have a 50/50 chance of being right. I could also say that I created the universe last Tuesday and I have only made it look as if the universe is billions of years old (or several thousand if that's what you believe) and until you prove that I didn't I have a 50/50 chance of being the creator of the universe.....which could never be proven wrong because any evidence you found that would prove that I didn't create the universe was put there by me, once again allowing me to say "oh, so you finally found that huh? lol Yeah, I put that there too, fooled ya again!". The way around these types of arguments is Occam's Razon, you have to shave off the most unlikely scenarios.....and if you want to shave off my claim that I created the universe last Tuesday you have to shave off the other completely unsubstantiated claim that there is an infinite/timeless/all powerful god that created the universe in 6 days several thousand years ago. If you don't you are presented with an endless amount of assumptions that need to be made.

Yes, those words exist and yes, we we have associated ideas and meaning to those words.

I never said they were all atheists. I also never said I was atheist either. For my "guesses" (not theory) there could be almost an infinite list of possibilities of what came before, or created the universe. So yes, a god could be one of them, but so could a very potent SBD fart after a being in an alternate dimension ate a bowl of curry. Nobody knows what came before the universe......though that doesn't mean I can write a book about a how a fart created the universe and then say it has a 50/50 chance of being right.

 

That's assuming that the universe was "created". Maybe the universe wasn't created and has always "just been" (the same as people claim that god just "is" and always "has been"). We are making an assumption that the universe needed a creator ......when we don't know if that was necessary or not.

Actually no, I'm not saying that there was a creator. I have no idea if the universe was created or has simply always been there in some form or another.

I simply don't know if there was a cause (or a need for a cause) and I likely never will.

Well since we are doing apples and oranges comparisons: Scientists also once had a hard time understanding what caused the tides. Just because we don't understand something now does not mean that we won't in the future.

I could accept that definition of god....though I would likely call it/him/her something other than "god". It's the "god" that people think gives a crap about us, plays a part in our daily lives and wishes us to worship him that I have a hard time swallowing. I find it highly unlikely for the god of the Abrahamic religions to exist in the way he is described in their books.

Again, it could have always existed.

Philosophy and science is like oil and water. They just aren't compatible.

Not saying it's impossible. Don't know what is outside of the universe and it is impossible to know. Saying something exists outside of it is just pure guess work as there is absolutely no evidence to back such a claim up.