Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1444 Editor's Choice: 20
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Mike Sulzer
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think it would be better just to say that there have been no verified sightings [of the Tooth Fairy and unicorns] and leave it at that.
And what conclusion do you draw from this fact? That they do exist, but we just haven't seen them? Or that they don't exist?
Do you really suppose that anything somebody can dream up might actually exist unless it can be 'proven' that they do not? Is that honest. I sure don't think so. It's simply not reasonable.
Gould is is using facts in the sense of a coherent structure that describes the operation of the universe.
Meaning what, precisely?
You are not.
Really? How so?
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Aycharaych
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The hard atheist says, "There is no God".
True, but incomplete.
The hard atheist concludes there are no deities because there is no compelling evidence or reasoning to support a different conclusion, and because there is compelling evidence to the contrary.
Keep in mind that Christians are also atheists, so far as believers in Zeus and Apollo are concerned. Atheism is a relative thing, but everybody is an atheist in some way.
Is it not so? And if not, why not?
When Christians understand why they themselves dismiss all the other possible gods, they will also understand why I dismiss theirs as well.
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Mike Sulzer
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Scientific conclusions are based on fitting together apparently independent or even contradictory "facts" through the use of logic and mathematics.
Quite right. And yet, science must rely on evidence which can be incompletely understood or even misinterpreted, which can result in conclusions which are less than precisely correct.
Science therefore cannot achieve absolute certainty the way mathematics can, which has no such built-in restriction, although science can come very close.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle alone prevents any scientific conclusion from being 100% correct. But 99.9999987% certainty is good enough for most situations.
Religion, of course, doesn't meet this standard of rigor by several orders of magnitude. Religion instead relies on 'belief', in contradiction to facts and logic if necessary. The religious admit this even when they do not proclaim it.
A unicorn does not fit in with anything else except in fairy tales.
Thank you for drawing that conclusion for us. That wasn't so hard, was it?
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Aycharaych
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There are a lot of "contrarians" out there who believe as they do simply because "everyone else" believes the opposite.
Which isn't reasonable of them.
I don't know of any true contrarians of the sort you propose, except possibly among the religious who outright reject evidence and reason almost exclusively in favor of 'belief'.
And I do know of atheists whose evidence and reasoning are seriously flawed, but none who are contrary simply for the sake of being contrary.
We should avoid such perversions in any case. Don't you agree?
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Mike Sulzer
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Heisenberg uncertainty principle limits the accuracy the simultaneous measurement of certain observables, such as pairs of corresponding position and momenta components.
And therefore limits conclusions based on those measurements to the limits of the accuracy of their measurement.
Is it not so? Why or why not?
It does not so limit any scientific conclusion
It obviously has to.
You're still a little fuzzy there, Mr. Sulzer. B minus.
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debaser
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Catholic Church hasn't proclaimed The Bible as The Unadulterated Word of God since at least The Council of Trent in the 1560s
Quite right.
And since the bible obviously cannot be infallable, in the 19th century the church resorted to explicitly claiming that instead the pope was infallable, although the implicit claim goes back at least to Luther.
Further, the Catholic Church has explicitly prohibited any interpretation of the bible except for its own since Constantine. In fact, the Vatican prohibited the laity from owning a bible for centuries, lest somebody point out that some of their interpretations have no basis in the bible, or contradict what the bible says. Vernacular versions of the Catholic bible didn't come out until the 19th century and none were approved until the 20th century.
The Church has had a bad enough time trying to keep its own clergy, like Luther, from pointing out those contradictions, which demonstrates that their prohibition wasn't extended far enough. You can't just keep some people stupid, you have to keep them all stupid.
In its early history the church spend hundreds of years and fought dozens of wars, largely through political proxies, stomping out dozens of 'heresies', meaning groups that had interpretations or included different texts. One schism in the church was the result of disagreement over whether to include a single iota. The church has historically relied on various rulers to carry out the appropriate massacres, pogroms, and inquisitions to enforce its religious authority.
We've been waiting on the Vatican's pronouncement on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin since the late Middle Ages. They won't be making one any time soon, mostly just to avoid appearing silly.
"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."
Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615, during the trial of Galileo
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Mike Sulzer
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Constants (such as Planck's) are observables in Quantum mechanics since one can devise an experiment to measure them, and the accuracy of such measurements is not limited directly by that principle as are momenta/position pairs.
You're quite wrong.
Would you like to look it up yourself, or shall I rub it in your face?
You're C minus now Sulzer, going for D. You might prefer a retraction.
I think you do not have enough knowledge of physics to be grading people.
Is that what you call it? Thinking?
You missed the unicorn thing, and that was bad enough.
I missed nothing. Neither I am not responsible for your sophomorism, Sulzer.