philh

If there is a god I have no idea of how to prove it. It is up to the person that establishes the proposition to demonstrate the evidence for it, not the other way round. lets suppose i come up witha new theory to unite relativity and quantum mechanics but i provide no eivdence for such a theory. Do you think it would be reasonable for me to turn to the physics community and ask them how I should prove it before they scoff at it? of course not, it would be my obligation to demonstrate it. So if someone claims the existence of supernatural being its their obligation to provide the evidence. Moreover nothing is ever proved in science, what we have is varying degrees of evidence. what makes evidence especially strong is a methhod of falsification. If someone suggests a theory and shows how it can be falsified by experiment and the experiment is done and the theory is not falsified but confirmed then we have a high level fo evdience. enough to convince most reasonable people. A few examples: Relativity predicts moving clocks will keep slower time than stationary clocks: confirmation: this experiment was done by taking a clock on the space shuttle, sure enough it ran exactly the amount slower that relativity predicts. The theory that most Dna is junk predicts that if we remove that section of the dna then we will not observe any differences between that organism and another which has not had the junk dna removed. verification: an experiment in mice was done exactly as the theory predicts and no loss of function in the engineered mice was observed. None of these examples represennt proof but they are evidence and the stronger the evidence the stronger our belief. It is up to you to present your evdience that god exists. not up to us to show you how to do it.

what would my completley invisible undetectable friend have to do to prove to you that he existed?

That is an absurd notion of love. Why does someone dying on a cross mean other peoples sins are now forgiven. Why not just forgive them anyway? Imagine a group of poeple who havve sinned against a man lets say thhey assaulted him and instead of seeking justice against them or even forgiving them he decided to kill his own son. Any normal person would rightly think that man was insane, its a ridiculous notion of justice. of course theres no evidence that any of the events described in the NT about jesus even happened so even if it was a fair notion of justice it would make no difference.

Will I have studies homeopathy a little and I am knocking it. Im knocking it because the amount of dilution in homeopathic medicines guarantees they are just placebos. A homeopathic remedy that has 30c dilution (not uncommon) has one part active ingredient to 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 parts sugar water. In other other words its just sugar water. In order to get just one molecule of the active ingredient you would have to drink a vat of this solution the size of the entire solar system. Do you not see how absurd this is?

How about these recalls? I guess that proves that the rich evil parachute companies are focring prodcust down our throats as well? Cypres Recall Airtec, manufacturer of the CYPRES AAD, has recalled 1527 units manufactured between August 24 and October 31, 1993. Approximately 222 of these are Tandem CYPRES units. Airtec is releasing to each dealer the serial numbers of units which they alone have purchased. Mirage Systems has received 2 reports of reserve ripcord pins breaking under apparently normal wear. Although the company and the subcotractor who manufactured the ripcord assemblies have not been able to identify the cause of the failures, Mirage has issued the following mandatory Product Service Bulletin: MIRAGE SYSTEMS - Product Service Bulletin Issue date: 28 April 2003 Bulletin number: 280403-01 Subject: Soft Reserve Ripcord Recall Status: Mandatory. BACKGROUND: On February 20, 1987, a rigger in the field during pre-assembly inspection of a Talon harness and container system, found a reserve ripcord on which the pin had not been swaged during the manufacturing process. Rigging Innovations was immediately notified and the batch from which the ripcord came from was identified.

This is called data mining and is obvious trick of self deception.Lets suppose you think you are pyschic and can influence the outcome of a coin toss. every time you get ir right you record a correct answer , every time you get it wrogn you ignore that. When you look at the results you see wow i go tthem all right I must by pyschic. Of course this is just self deception. Now that is exactly what is going on here with prayer. You are including all the postive results and ignoring all the negative reults so of coourse it seems to work. let me give you one example fo a negative result. In the rwanda genocide many people turned to churchhes for protection, they prayed to god and what happened? The churches collaberated with the Interhamwe. Their prayers were not answered they were cut to pieces with machetes. Many people hhad their limbs cut off before they were killed. An example is listed here http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0882745.html here you will see two nuns convited for genocide in a Belgian court. for a more wide ranging discussion of the churchhes role in the genocide see here: http://www.afrol.com/Countries/Rwanda/backgr_cross_genocide.htm

Notice the phrase recall, when a real drug is show to be defective it gets withdrawn, same with any product. do you see the same thing with alternative medicine? no you dont.

do you have any scientific evidence for your assertions or not? Your comment that you cant make money from them so they are not tested is absurd. Last time i went to my health food shop they weren't exactly giving the stuff away. In fact the Cam industry was estimated to have $34billion worth of sales in 2000 (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ap/pm/2002/00000035/00000002/art01057) in the Us alone and it has grown since then, worldwide this is an enormous industry making huge stacks of money. Take a look at the excerpt alone you will find that alternative medicine is 1 in complete contradiction to known laws of physics and 2 very profitable indeed. "Oscillococcinum, a 200C product "for the relief of colds and flu-like symptoms," involves "dilutions" that are even more far-fetched. Its "active ingredient" is prepared by incubating small amounts of a freshly killed duck's liver and heart for 40 days. The resultant solution is then filtered, freeze-dried, rehydrated, repeatedly diluted, and impregnated into sugar granules. If a single molecule of the duck's heart or liver were to survive the dilution, its concentration would be 1 in 100200. This huge number, which has 400 zeroes, is vastly greater than the estimated number of molecules in the universe (about one googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes). In its February 17, 1997, issue, U.S. News & World Report noted that only one duck per year is needed to manufacture the product, which had total sales of $20 million in 1996. The magazine dubbed that unlucky bird "the $20-million duck."

The drug companies are paying for the drugs to be tested because they are required to test their drugs by regulatory authorities. These durgs have been shown to work. alternative medicines have been shown not to work, your only criticism is that drug companies make money on their patents, so what? That happens with all inventions if people couldnt patent their inventions no one would invent aything. does that mean their inventions dont work?If you have direct evidence of fraud in a trial please present it otherwise you have no case. Those patents also only last fo a limited amount of time anyway and then the invention is patent free. Let me give you an exmaple of real medicine with real effects that was in the news only recently. This from the bbc:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4792756.stm The World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund revealed deaths (from measles) fell from 871,000 in 1999 to 454,000 in 2004. The largest reduction occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, which had been hardest hit by the disease, where cases and deaths dropped by 60%. Vaccination has been cited as the reason for the fall in cases. There are real peoples lives at stake here.

you say that you believe in god becuase he has been there for you. I presume then he has answered your prayers or you are happy with your life or somehting along those lines. But countless people throughout history have suffered the most terrible horrors , if you think people should believe in god based upon whether they feel god has been there for them then by implication those that suffered such horrors as Rwanda genocie, the Nazi holcaust, etc should not have belived in god , dont u agree?

This is irrelevant. The body has an immune system and can heal itself. but this immune system is far from perfect. When one gets ill there is a good (but not 100%) chance that by doing nothing we will get better anyway. If we take a teatment and then get better we do not know whether it was the treatment that made us better or some other factor such as our immune system doing its thing. That is why our personal experience as to what works is defintley not a good assesmnet. A good assesment is a randomised double blind trial. This will show whether or not its the treatment that is doing the curing or not. conventional medicines are subject to these trials and alternative medicines are not. In other words conventional medicines are put to objective testing , alternative medicines would not pass such testing that is why we should not trust them. if you are not familar with the randomised double blind trial i suggest: http://skepdic.com/control.html

and what about the people he hasnt provided for the hundreds of thousands of people that dies in the Asian tsunami, the milions that died in the holcaust etc etc, based on your argument they shoudnt have believed in him right?

you do not seem aware of the history of homeopathy and its current pratice. what you refer to is one of the principles of homeopathy , something for which I might add is not backed up by any evidence. But what you fail to see is the other primamry principle of homeopathy the principle of infintsemilas. this fundementlal principle of homeopathy is tht the more you dilute a substance th more potent it becomes. If you wish to read about it I suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy This priinciple is in direct contradiction to known laws of chemistry and physics so either these sciences are wrong or homeopathy is wrong. Your vibration comment is no solution.

its clear you dnt understand evolution at all.evolution doesnt say that animals mate and they give birth to a new species. Thats a straw man argument.What evolution does say is that animals are made from geneic code, that code mutates when it is copied;most mutations are neutral and have no effect on the organism, many are harmful but some are beneficial . Those that are beneficial will be sleceted for and spread through the gene pool. over time this will lead to gradual chages which will add up to major changes as we move though time. to tak eyou up on the example of whales becuase i did a short a stintd at marine mammal labs in Hawaii and worked on a Catecaen project. I can tell you exactly the tranistional fossils found between modern whales and there ancient ancestors: Pakacetus circa 52million years ago- was a wolf life creature that had an inner ear adapted for directional hearing under water Ambulocetus circa 49million year ago; a cetacean with fingers and hooves but with a rear feet adapted for swimming Rhodocetus circa 47 million years ago has a simliar anatomy to Ambolocetus except the ear region is further enahnced for underwater, the legs are not attached to the pelvis and the neck is shorter all of these are adaptations to improve the animals performance in the water. Basilosaurus cicra 40 million years ago was very much like a whale but it still had left overs from its non whale ancestors, in particualr hind legs that it could not walk on. How do you explain that? You say humans are stlll humans and apes are apes, let me aks you a question, which of these then are apes and which not? Proconsul, Rangwapithecus, Dendropithecus, Limnopithecus, Nacholapithecus, Equatorius, Nyanzapithecus, Afropithecus, Heliopithecus, and Kenyapithecus, Austrolipthicus, h hablis, h rudolfensis, h georgicus, h floresiensis, h erectus, h ergaster, h cerpranensis, h antecessor, h heidlbergensis, h neanderthalensis, h rhodesiensis.

What vibration are you talking about? do you have any evidence this vibration actully exists or is just pseudo science? I would direct you to Avagadros number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avagadro%27s_number the implication of Avagadros number is that homeopathic dilutions exceed physical limits for the likley of a molecules remaining in the dilution. common sense should tell us that. So homeopathy is in direct contradiction to the laws of chemistry. Its even to suggets somethign like "vibrations" get you round this glaring contradiction but perhaps you can point to something with actual evidence to persuade us?

of course homeopathic medicine has no side effects becuase it has no medicine. Most Homeopathic medicnes are diltued to such an extent that they have practically no chance of having even one molecule fo the active ingredient. I went to my local health food store and looked at the average dilution , they were mostly 30c. even at 20c That means one part active ingredient to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 parts dilutant thats why theres no side effects its been diluted down to nothing, it is of course nothing.

If the huge amounts of rain really did fall as flood proponents say it did the salinity of the water would have declined massively. marine organisms cannot live in fresh water, these would have died. in order to postulate the sort of adaptation you are implying a rate of evolutionary change far faster than even standard evolutionary dynamics would allow. this is one of the whole problems with a literal interpretation of a flood. There are roughly 350,000 species of beetle alone, now either Noah took 700,000 beetles with him on to the ark or they evolved in the few thousand years since the flood!There are 980 species of bats , again did Noah take 2000 bats with him or is the rate of bat evolution one new species every couple of years?

The flood story is utterly ridiculous in its literal form. No one can take it seriously. For example, how could fish survive the changing salinity of the oceans? How could Noahs ark survive the pressure of the water? it would have rained 30 feet of water every hour. A much more likely explanation for flood legends is local floods which local people perceived to be global floods in their era of no global communication.

When you say allopathic medicine do you mean medicine that is based upon evidence as opposed to medicine that is based upon gut feeling? What do you mean by toxins? Everything is toxic given a large enough dose, similarly everyhting has no toxicity given a small enough dose. I would reccomend checking out the society of toxicologys web site: http://www.toxicology.org/AI/EO/principl.asp you will see in bold letter this quote from Paracelsus "All substances are poisons: there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy" Why is something natural necessarily good? Ricin is natuarrly occuring substance would you prefer that to a synthetic "allopathic" medicine? looking at what is in the vaccine is not necessarily relevant. Many things have posinous ingredients that are in a low enough dose that they dont matter. What one should do is assess the relevant statistics on a vacines safety and its risk factors.

She is into naturopathy that utterly bizarre notion that things that are natural are good and things that are unnatural are bad. Immunisation being unnatural is thereofre bad and should be opposed.

I was at dinner the other night with a friend of mine and we talked of our time in Africa.My friend said she wouldnt get yellow fever immunisation (as is required) becasue she is against immunisation on principle. I found this utterly amazing given the huge success in combatting disease that immunisation have had. Is this view widespread? I seriously hope not.

Ive just heard Yoko from Eloy has moved to Airkix in the Uk. Wow, i have to say Yoko is the one of, if not, the bets coach Ive ever had. Hada great time over in Eloy with some one who is an awesome flyer, very throrough, patient and lots of fun. if you are into freeflying or freestlye book her now. I wonder if shes brought her in air radios with her from Eloy?

"You are only correct when religion does not evolve - and that's not the fault of faith, that's the fault of power hungry leaders " it is the fault of faith. Faith is believing something without evidence. when people do that they are more likely to follow bullshit than if they learnt to question and think critically. re Aq why are you focusing on the leadership? AQ comprises more than just its leaders, lets suppose the leaders arent interested in religion (an utterly baseless foundation ) , the fact that their soldiers are shows the negative effects of religion. of course the leaders are motviated by religion. Here is my evidence for this: 1) they say so 2) many of thhe leaders gave up rich and influential lifestyles to go and live in a cave 3) killing female students,blowing up statues of the buddha and enforcing strict shria law 4) those that hav known thhe higher leadership claim they spend a large amount of time preying 5) aq leadership wantted to use guerilla tactics against saddams invvasion of kuwait rather thhan letting us troops on saudi soil becuase they didnt want infidels on holy land 6) they offered an end to all attacks if the us acceptted islam Moreover Aq has become more of a brand name rather than a strong structure, it unites miltant islamists to go and kill infidels. heir religion if their motivation and its not clear they even receive orders from the leadership.

"AQ religion isn't the reason, it's the rationalization for the conflict by leadership of AQ that desire power." if that were true why is one of their main strategies suicide attacks? This makes sense only in the light of their belief in the after life.If what you say is true it would be just as likely to see suicide bombers from other faiths, or even without faiths, but thats not whhat we see. what we see is that these terrorists actions are correlated with a certain belief and so the belief is an issue here. You dont just have to take my opnion on this either. In 1999 a group of world religious leaders including Buddhist, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim and many other faiths met in Geneva Switzerland during 1999-OCT. They listed 56 current conflicts which they believed had religous motivation. You can read the detailed article here: http://www.religioustolerance.org/curr_war.htm

"Major wars, in contemporary societies, are not caused by religion, but by the desire for power." is this a joke? Are you seriously suggesting the current conflicts in the middle east are not religiously motivated? AQ have very explicilty stated their motivation is religion, all their actions are consitent with that, what evidence do you have to doubt it? Its not just Aq either , the Isreali state, thhe Iranian revolution, hamas, hezbolllah. Can you say with a straight face they are not motivated by religion? "I do NOT believe one's beliefs are divorced from their actions. That's just bad reading comprehension from a need for ludicrous oversimplification. Actions are a result of beliefs and many other factors. I just believe that any set of belief will be applied in vastly different ways by individuals and that you can't just act as if everybody of a single belief will ALL act in a certain way. That's just naive. " I have never said that everybody with religious beliefs acts the same way, thats just bad comprehension from a need for ludicrous oversimplification. of course most religious people dont go off killing people because of their beliefs. However it would be ridiculous to deny thhat many people do; so my point is that belief in superstition will have negative conseuquences. Its not just wars either, if everybody believes illness is caused by possesion by evil spirits then its unlikely succesful medical treatemtns will be developed. That's why i care whether or not people believe in pixies/god or any other nonsense. If everyone believes witchhes are real and pose a threat to society then you will see women getting burnt alive. Widespread beliefs have consequences. Yes some people give to charity becuase of religion but as a whole I think the evidence points to religion doing a lot moe harm than good. But we have debated that in another post with thhe poll religion. problem/solution.