If God Ever Stopped Intervening In Nature....

Uh, just hand me the circle and the circumference will come with it?

1. No need to cut it out. I'll take the circle on any surface on which you care to mark it.2. And your problem is completely unrelated the issue of whether pi is absolute or exact. It is no more difficult to hand me 2 inches as it is to hand me pi inches.3. You would have the same problem with 1/2.4. Every four inch piece of string includes an infinite number of different pi length strings.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Your example does not demonstrate ambiguity. It simply demonstrates the inadequacy of a particular tests or set of tests.On the other hand, the statement that Newtonian physics is true (or not true) is ambiguous in another sense. Lots of the physics that Isaac Newton came up with is still believed to be exactly correct while other parts are shown to be at best approximations and at worst, wrong.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Here Message 64

removed as uncharitable. Take foot off of neck.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Kinda leaves the person you were debating in a tough spot, eh? He's been relying on what you said.

I don't mind helping out, but I have to admit that ringo's accusatory take on the issue ("supposed quote") irked me just a bit. I suppose I'm old enough that I should let stuff like that go...Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Perhaps you have not noticed that you are participating in a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality in which the premise is that your perception of reality and the rules under which it operates, including your own sense of yourself as an entity may well be illusion.It may well be that such a discussion is ultimately pointless, but you've blundered into it. It turns that pointing to any method of discerning what is real using reasoning and your senses accomplishes next to nothing, at least for the purposes of this particular rabbit hole which is well distant from any idea included in the OP of this thread. Perhaps you can still escape?

Yes. But quite obviously you are nowhere near addressing that issue with the current series of posts. You are instead charging down a blind alley leading nowhere. No. Ringo is actually asking you to rebut the idea that what you view as reality is illusion. You are responding by reporting your observations which are obtained from your senses and thus are subject to illusion. Regardless of how silly ringo is being, your arguments don't work. There are likely no arguments that will work.

I don't think your characterization is correct. The scientific method completely avoids the question of whether our measurements, observations, and even our existence are real or fictitious. The assumption is that what we observe is real (absent questions of viewpoint and physical illusions) and that we are real. Ringo is actually asking what I believe is an unanswerable question.

Quite frankly, nobody cares where the inspiration for an hypothesis comes from as long as you check that it does fit some observations before getting to far down the path of doing some experiments. If an hypothesis is falsifiable and makes predictions that can be verified by experiment, who cares where it came from.

So Hugh is describing the creation of the universe from a 'viewpoint' or 'perspective' (because surely, "frame of reference" is a horrible misnomer) that no living being actually occupied? Why would that be a sensible thing to record?It is perhaps understandable that a human being on earth at the time might have mistaken the time of the atmosphere turning transparent as the day the sun and moon were created, but in actuality, nobody could have seen any such thing. Instead man learned of (or made up) the story in Genesis well after all of the events in Genesis 1 and 2 were completed.Now given that there was nobody at reference point X and that the story in Genesis does not claim to be an eye witness account, for what purpose was the giving a bogus and incorrect account of creation. Was it really too much to expect early humans to understand the sun and moon being behind some clouds?I have to admit that in the past when you talked about 'frames of reference', I had assumed that there was some general relativity time/space explanation that munged up the order of events as perceived. But now I learn that we were pretending that some human on earth saw creation, something entirely inconsistent with the story in Genesis itself? Makes no sense to me.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I understand Hugh Ross's motivation. But that is not the point of my question regarding whether his interpretation makes sense.Other than in the same sense that it is meaningful for YECs to claim that there was a canopy of water over the earth until the Flood does it make sense to postulate that Genesis should be viewed as if written by a witness on earth. The question remains as to why or how anyone would write such a description given that most of the events in the description were entirely unseen by any human.As an example, what if Genesis could be interpreted as an accurate view of what someone might think they were seeing if they were located in a black hole and if we excused distortions of events by noting that reality cannot accurately be recorded from that position? Would it be reasonable to call the description accurate on that basis? What if some of the features attributed to black holes were mere speculation? Just when did the earth's atmosphere become translucent?What Hugh Ross describes is how a human might be misled by his senses if he viewed creation from a point on earth. And I say mislead because it is clear that the sun and moon were not created on day four under Hugh Ross' despite the fact that Genesis says such. The atmosphere supposedly merely became transparent on that day. Given that there was no such human in that position, how does it make sense to interpret Genesis as if it records a human experience that never happened.What it seems to say is that God told the authors of Genesis a fairy tale. I find that idea totally unacceptable.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Exactly so. We can see that Hugh is not really using the scientific method. He is re-expressing 'creation science' using scientific sounding language. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.