Letters to the Editor
droogoy
Published Letters: 608 Editor's Choice: 9
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Proving a negative is impossible
[Read the article: Romney and Huckabee's religious intolerance ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]sajwan wrote:
I no more can prove the existence of God then you can dis-prove it.
It is not up to us to "disprove" it, and in any case, any fool who's taken Logic 101 knows it is impossible to prove a negative (which is what disproof is tantamount to).
Let us instead scale down to something more within reach, and which devolves upon you and your lot as those who propose the entity that would add to existence.
We are talking about you providing "necessary" and "sufficient" conditions for your entity. This is a minimal requirement that shows you can provide at least a minimal support for your claim.
Because causality and arguments arising therefrom are so fraught with meta-analysis and self-reference, many scholars, see e.g. the textbook, 'Logic' by Robert Baum, p. 469, "Causal Explanations") instead endorse setting out of "necessary" and "sufficient" conditions. (A necessary condition is such that in its absence an event cannot occur, while a sufficient condition is such that in its presence it must occur)
For example, in order for there to be a car accident a car must be on the road -OUT of the garage. A sufficient condition is that for which the event must occur - or thing must exist - IF it is present.
Thus, a sufficient condition for a car accident might be that the car has lost all its brake fluid and the roads are icy.
Let's now examine this in terms of existence of an entity - say a hydrogen emission nebula. Well, a necessary condition for it to exist is that there must first be a cloud of hydrogen gas in space. A sufficient condition would be a radiative source in the proximity of the cloud that energizes the electrons in the cloud's resident hydrogen atoms - causing them to be excited to higher energy levels and then return to lower ones - with the emission of energetic photons.
Now, apply this to "God" - that we may have enough information and basis to distinguish between a nominal, impersonal Einsteinian "deity" , an impersonal "Universal Mind" a la Unity, or the standard, biblical Christian one--- or any other variant.
In other words, provide sufficiently discriminatory basis in the conditions that we can KNOW WHICH of the millions of god-concepts you are referencing or would have us pay homage to, or accept.
But just to say "I believe in "G-O-D" is no more intelligible than saying "I believe in the twelve dimensional flyhing spaghetti monster".
If one cannot provide such conditions, say for any claimed entity (assumed dependent on cause - or non-cause) then he or she is talking bollocks.
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Bonds
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thrasher wrote:
Barry Bonds watch out...
Well, hopefully this king of baseball thugs will soon get his. I am hoping for 35 yrs. at least, and the rescinding of his HR record, as was recently suggested by the head of the Track and Field Assoc.
In a Playboy issue that came out three months ago, Bonds' former gf related how he mutated into a huge monster over time. Misshapen and beastly, ironically - even as his genitals shrunk. She knew he was doing the cream. In addition, his personality changed into something malignant as he started swatting her and tossing her against walls.
She knew he was doing the steroids, merely from how he altered from man to monster.
Bonds is a pig and thug who doesn't merit the HR record and doesn't deserve to lick the soles of Henry Aaron's wingtips.
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Humans don't respond until catrastrophes are already on them
[Read the article: Desperate times, desperate scientists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In many ways, slow-moving catastrophes with long unfolding times are the worst for the human species - because the human brain is not materially equipped to deal with them.
This was first pointed out some years ago by Robert Ornstein in his book, 'New World - New Mind' - observing that evolution designed the brain to react to instant or readily perceived real threats - say like a saber tooth tiger sitting on the outcrop over there.
Slow, unfolding threats aren't registered, or at least not as urgently as the forest fire or saber tooth or whatever. As Ornstein observed, the tendency of the brain is to procrastinate when dealing with them.
This is tragic because all the data disclose that procrastination is a recipe for our extinction. As Carl Sagan pointed out in a CNN interview with Ted Turner in 1989 (still have it on videotape) when temperature increases veer toward the 6 C level, then we are talking about catastrophic climatic changes and he specifically named the "runaway Greenhouse effect".
As people familiar with his Ph.D. thesis may know, this is what he used to explained the transformation of Venus to a planet hot enough to melt lead - despite the fact Venus' orbit is not that much closer to the Sun compared to Earth (0.7 AU vs. 1.0 AU)