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Author | Topic: The "science" of Miracles | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NoNukes Inactive Member |
Why? What's the difference between miracles and magic? There is no difference between the two ringo. I used them as synonyms in my post. The distinction is between technology and magic or miracles.
The point is that what matters is who calls it what. A UFO may be attributed to alien technology or not. If nobody is attributing UFOs to magic, then you would not seem to have a point. And you said no such thing in your post. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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So what's the difference between technology and magic or miracles? One man's technology is another man's magic. That's total malarkey. If folks think that the ships are piloted by beings from another planet using technology they do not understand, they are not calling those things miracles. You are trying to pretend that they are and then proceeding to make an argument out of stuff you've made up.
The point is that the attribution is what counts. One person attributes a UFO, etc. to unnatural causes and one person attributes the same phenomenon to (known or unknown) natural causes. And it turns out that some of those folks are just flat out wrong. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
You:[Ringo] "Everything is unprecedented until it happens." Tom Hanks: "Everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time."I agree with what Tom Hanks said and disagree with what you said. Perhaps in your mind there's an implicit "for the first time" on the end of what you said. A precedent by definition must be the first occurrence that we know about. Conventionally, a phrase like, "until it happens", would also imply the first occurrence of something. After reading both of your statements about this and going back to the threads, I am still puzzled at what you think is the difference between your version and Ringo's. As I see it, Hanks version is just a bit redundant, but that is not what you see. Could you clarify the distinction you are making? ABE: Actually, I think I see what you are doing. You: "Everything is unprecedented until it happens." By interpreting "it" so narrowly that the pronoun only applies to the current specific instance instead of the class of instances of the same thing, you can manage to make Ringo's statement appear to be ridiculous and to have a meaning he could not possibly have intended. One might say, "pigs flying" is unprecedented until it happens. And we would all know exactly what that was intended to mean. Few folks would take the sentence to mean that even if we saw a pig fly today, a different pig flying tomorrow would be unprecedented. Yet that appears to be the meaning you are attributing to Ringo's statement. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Might that adjustment in understanding include that physical laws can be suspended and superseded at the command of a shaman? If not then that is a refusal to consider the "what if." Can you cite any examples of modern science doing anything like what you suggest? I believe that scientists would respond to such behavior by one of their own by announcing that he/she was not following the scientific method. Science is an aggressive search for natural processes as an explanation for all phenomena. There is no point at which a scientist stops looking for his lost keys and considers the possibility that a poltergeist took them. If that is what you mean by "refusal to consider the what if", then yes, that is a limitation of science. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
At heart this is a simple "what if": What if science encountered a miracle? I don't think my comment reflects any missed context. If there were a real miracle, then science would fail in that instance because it does not accommodate miracles. Scientists would continue to search for a natural explanation. Your post claimed that their failure to consider that the shaman had suspended natural rules was a failure on the part of scientists. Okay, so it is a failure in some hypothetical sense. So what? Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
NoNukes writes: Your post claimed that their failure to consider that the shaman had suspended natural rules was a failure on the part of scientists Percy writes: Where did I say that? What I did say was that if the adjustment in understanding Ringo referenced Here is what you actually said... again.
Might that adjustment in understanding include that physical laws can be suspended and superseded at the command of a shaman? If not then that is a refusal to consider the "what if." Yes, it is a refusal. And science requires that its practitioners refuse to consider magic as an explanation. Again, so what? Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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So you're shooting yourself in the foot. Even if scientists did call something a miracle, which they seem to avoid, they still wouldn't think it was a miracle. Exactly. Why play silly equivocation games? Who cares if a biologist talks about the miracle of life if saying such things don't cause him to throw away his microscope and starting babbling creation science? Science is about looking for natural causes and is not so much about the exclamatory language that might or might not get used. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
first, the "what if" doesn't postulate any explanations like magic and so forth. That was left for discussion. Yes, you did postulate exactly that. The "what if" was that a shaman suspended the laws of science. The "what if" was completely contrary to science. In that case, there would not be a scientific explanation and the scientist would not find one, and would not consider a non-scientific explanation. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
IF a miracle occurred and was investigated by scientist and found to be inexplicable. Would the scientist then throw away all data pertaining to this event as not worthy of further investigation because it is inexplicable? None of us are claiming that data will be thrown away. What we are saying is that scientists continue investigating and looking for an explanation. A conclusion that something is magic would end the scientific part of the investigation. Scientists never get to that point. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand. Neil Young, Rockin' in the Free World. Worrying about the "browning of America" is not racism. -- Faith I hate you all, you hate me -- Faith
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