They could make inferences. They see their friends dead and see you with their friends stuff. Two dots to connect.

...and, based on a number of those anthropological studies of which you seem so fond, their reaction to this inference would be: "Yikes, I don't want to get killed--I had better stay the hell away from that person or thing that's killing people."

Does it work for you?

Dude, I was the smash hit at last year's Christmas party. Seriously, you should try it sometime.

Obviously not, since you can invent no argument against it.

Don't confuse "can't" with "didn't."

As it happens, anthropologists know that social cooperation does work this way, and for the reasons I gave.

If social cooperation and ethics are synonymous, then please articulate the ethical principles to which bees or antelope subscribe.

Social cooperation is girded by hierarchy...by submission and domination. Ethical behavior can certainly be a helpful ingredient, but many "peaceful" societies have been controlled by profoundly amoral people.

Can't you think of any examples?

Until they get resentful and put your head on a pike.

But that wouldn't be very ethical. What about justice, and the burden of proof, and my fair trial? When do ETHICS step in and save everybody?

Which is the same as saying that one plus one can never equal two because one plus one will always be one plus one, and that addition is therefore impossible. Care to specify the name of this logical fallacy?

I'd be happy to name the logical fallacy that you're committing right now: false comparison. Because humans are not numbers, my atheistic friend.

"PZ Myers is a true believer, a science crusader with the singled-minded enthusiasm of a televangelist." = "Louis Pastuer is a true believer, a germ-theory crusader with the sinle-minded enthusiams of a tent revialist" = "Bruce LLee is a true believer, a martial-arts crusader with the single-minded enthusiasm of a radio evangelist."

The difference is that louis Pasteur and Bruce Lee were not obsessing against something. Also, their devotion to their respective fields manifested itself in great advances being made within those fields.

Bruce Lee didn't go around trying to prove to everybody how great martial arts were as a way of life and how anybody who didn't believe in the supremacy of martial arts was a lunatic.

And Louis Pasteur was a religious man, friend. His hero was not Isaac Newton--it was St. Vincent De Paul. Ironic for you, eh?

It's a wee gap, but god'll fill it! What have we got the math to now? Something like Pico-seconds into the big-bang? But since we can't go all the way back, the billions of years into the nano-pico-seconds before the pico-seconds now, there must be something ELSE. You know, like... mayyyyybe god? The one in the bible, maybe?

If you're claiming that science has conclusively documented the history of the material universe all the way back to a picosecond after the big bang, then you are greatly mistaken.

I think you're confused. The Big Bang Theory itself can be carried out as a mathematical model--and only as a mathematical model--backwards until whatever small fraction of time unit you want. But then it stops, because math is smarter than atheists-- math knows that nothing multiplied by infinity is still nothing. In other words, math cannot explain what occurred before the Big Bang, so math cannot actually explain the Big Bang.

But it almost can....right down to a picosecond, apparently.

What is UP with these people and their "meaning" and "purpose" and capital-T "Truth"? Am I the only one who notices that it is the religious who tell us we NEED these things, while at the same time claiming to have the product to fulfill those needs?

If you didn't care about meaning and truth, you wouldn't have written a lengthy message regarding your opinions on God and science.

Wrong, needlenose. We're comparing numbers to numbers of people, and therefore comparing numbers to numbers. That makes the analogy perfectly valid in one and only way it's being made.

Numbers don't have consciousness and they don't carry on internal thought processes pertaining to survival and social cooperation. So, in the context of ethics possibly serving collective purposes while being superfluous to individual people, it is not a good comparison at all. Unless you can show me a society of numbers that work and play together.

"Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment"

-Louis Pasteur, noted scientist and devout Catholic, explaining why something cannot evolve from nothing, and referring to his swan-neck flask experiment wherein he proved that fermenting microorganisms would not form in a flask containing fermentable juice until an entry path was created for them

Thanks to wikipedia for the quote.

Mike S, skip the technical semantics. You know what I meant, and I already passed pre-calculus--with an A!--so I'm not too greatly impressed with your grasp of TI-84 nomenclature. In fact, I'll even offer a retort on Wally's behalf, since he and I have become such good pals: the study of mathematics isn't confined to real numbers, so unless you're only trying to prove the inability of most people to spontaneously come up with complex mathematical proofs, I'm not sure what your point is.