1 Dec 2000 (updated 1 Dec 2000) »
hackery
I have to do the following things:
study for the rest of my MCSE exams
write my paper for linux.conf.au
work on the gtkada program that this paper references
write my slides for said paper
work on miscellaneous SAGE-AU stuff, like the Code of Practice and a working web site
Things I’d like to do
Play tekken tag team tournament and ssx on my playstation2.
Which will win?
The religion thing
A reference site for all these philosophy related things: Yale’s Philosophy Resources.
Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one.
Religion is about beliefs. Science is about observable facts which lead to theories (some which can be modified as new facts come in, and some that are invalidated if facts fail to back that theory either by direct or indir ect means) or they just remain facts until something can explain them.
Many theories with models can make suggestions about observations, which can be then verified through repeatable experiment. Good examples of the latter would be gravitational lenses, or Higgs bosons, both essentially unprovable at the time that the associated theory was written.
Some theories are too well backed by observation to be anything but, well, proven. Some theories have little edges that can be tinkered with (quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, for example), but all theories preclude a deity by the dint of Occam’s Razor. $DEITY is just not necessary.
The problem I have is not that people have deeply held religious beliefs, but they try to push them onto others. The worst offenders are those pushing “creationist science” (an oxymoron, in my opinion). Most creationists working to promote creationism as a first-class cousin to evolution as we know it today use incredible sophistry, faulty logic and word games to “prove” their point.
There are no observable facts* that back up the Christian creation myth. There are plenty of observations that fill our current understanding of evolution and biology (and RNA chemistry, which underpin gene therapy and …).
Check out this paper as it could summarize this thread quite succinctly. It’s an interesting read and proves that people who are into philosophy more than us have already been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
* observeable fact: a red ball is a round sphere that has a surface that reflects light in certain wavelengths that appears red to a human eye. This round ball, if dropped in a vacuum on the planet earth will fall towards the centre of the planet at the rate of 9.8 m/s/s. The elements of an observeable fact cannot be argued as they are reduced to their smallest elements.
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