If God Ever Stopped Intervening In Nature....

I think he means he doubts everything he can doubt; but that there are things he does not know about that he cannot yet doubt (but would when he discovers them).I think.

There is nothing on the plate. Molecules do not touch each other.

On the contrary, since orbitals extend to infinity, every molecule and atom in the universe not only "touches" but overlaps.

Ahhh so really there is only one molecule.

quote:

---

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
You have a right to be here. link

---

Dear Ringo,Again, great hearing from you, hope you are well. Well, that’s easy, for those of us that do not have it committed to memory, we can take a look at a ‘Periodic Table’ (at Wikipedia.org) and see that the Nitrogen Atom has an atomic weight of 7, water is a molecule of two Hydrogen atoms (atomic weight of 1) and one Oxygen atom (atomic weight of 8). As for the Carrots, we can tell that they are neither ‘Nitrogen’ nor ‘Hydrogen’ or ‘Oxygen’ though a morsel of carrot may contain any, or all of these ingredients.However, that is all beside the point. You have once again tried to sidestep the problem by changing the parameters of the argument. If you will recall you said: In this example you are talking about a column of air above a plate; not things necessarily touching the plate. A column of air would be more than one atom thick and thus the Atoms not touching the plate would not be ‘on’ the plate.The word above reinforces the idea that the column of air is not actually in contact with the plate; which is the point I was making.By the way, what I fined ‘silly’ is the argument that asking someone if they have eaten everything on their plate would be construed to include any item not actually touching the top surface of the plate itself.So, let me ask you this: what would be some of the things you do not doubt if, indeed, you do not doubt ‘absolutely everything’; as you, now, seem to be claiming?What do you mean by: true by definition? Are you implying that if something is ‘defined’ it is somehow less true?Also, I don’t get the Orange reference either; the fact that ‘Orange’ is the color of a fruit we call an Orange make this fact no more or no less true; and has no bearing on whether or not it is trivial.Hope to hear from you again soon.God Bless,
JRTjr

All of those numbers are wrong. You cited the atomic number rather than the atomic weight.Not that such things are important for the discussion, but it sure looks silly to pretend to be technical and then to get things wrong.

Credibilty gone completely JRTjr01.Even twelve years olds know the difference between the atomic weights and numbers. You don't.

No, that's not right. That would mean that if there is a hamburger on a plate, then the only thing that is on the plate would be the bottom bun. But that's silly, the whole burger is on the plate. Actually, Ringo made a really good point about how saying "everything" doesn't have to mean literally every single thing.If you tried harder to understand the point rather than just trying to score debate points by trying to make him wrong, then this discussion could have begun to move forward months ago.So, the column of air above the plate is technically on the plate as well as the food is. When a parent asks if you've eaten "everything" on you plate, they are not talking about every single thing on the plate (like the air above it), they are just talking about the food on it. That is because "everything" does not have to mean every single thing. Its like a tautology. The problem isn't that they aren't true, they just don't really tell us anything. That's what is meant by being trivial.The fact that something is itself and not something else is not some kind of profound insight, its trivially true. That it is the only example of an absolute truth that you can come up with, tells me that absolute truths are a pipe dream.If there really were good examples of absolute truths, then you would have simply said one instead of distracting the whole thing by focusing on a tautology.You've got nothing. You're fluffing up your lack of evidence and argument and trying to sound like you have some kind of evidence and argument. But all you've got is fluff.This whole thing started six months ago:

quote:

---

It may be a tautology but evidence is evident. You don't get to have your own set of evidence. If it ain't evident (to most people, on an objective basis) it ain't evidence. If it needs to be accepted a priori it ain't evidence.

---

quote:

---

You seem to be using the term "objective truth" in the sense of "absolute truth".
There is no absolute truth. There is only what most people agree on

---

And down the rabbit hole you've gone. If you actually had any evidence or argument, then you would have presented it. That you've instead decided to focus on irrelevancies and distractions tell us that you never had anything in the first place.

Nicely said CS. I agree that JR's entire line of argument is hogwash.

quote:

---

Thousands, even hundres, of years ago ‘most people’ thought the Sun revolved around the Earth; that did not mean it was true, factual or correct.

​

I would say that evidence must be based on objective truth.

---

The above statement is an argument going nowhere. Evidence is simply facts that, when interpreted correctly, make one proposition more likely to be true than another competing proposition. It is an true that if I plot the altitude and azimuth of the sun and stars on a graph, that the points will show a path across the sky for each object. There is nothing objectively or subjectively false about that. The error is in the interpretation. That problem is that the particular fact does not discriminate between a spinning earth and a stationary earth in which the entire universe rotates around the earth. It is for that reason that the fact is not evidence and that conclusions based on that fact can be wrong. Exactly. The "everything" would not include, for example your fork and knife if you left them on the plate. Your mom would not be expecting it to include food stuff that would require you to scrape at, or pick up your plate and lick, and she would not include that pat of butter you did not eat either.Plus your food is plenty full of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. No idea where that nonsense is going.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

You've missed the point. I'm asking how you can distinguish between a nitrogen atom in the air and a nitrogen atom in the carrot. Unless you can, you can't say that one is "on" the plate and the other isn't. Nonsense. When a parent talks about the food "on" the plate, he/she doesn't mean only the single layer of food molecules that are literally touching the plate. In the same way, you can't restrict the column of air to one layer of molecules. As I have said, I don't question the possibility of absolute truth. It is possible that absolute truths exist, though you don't seem to have any examples either. I doubt the truth of anything that has not yet been proven to be absolute. When (and if) you ever give us an example of absolute truth, that will be an example of something I don't doubt. "JRTjr01" is defined as "a member of the EvC forum" whose screen name is JRTjr01". There is no "truth" in that definition. A definition is just a gizmo to attach a word to a concept. It has no inherent truth value. If I send you to the store to buy "an orange fruit" you might bring me a pumpkin or an under-ripe tomato or an orange bell pepper. "Orange is the colour of an orange" doesn't convey any useful information. It requires the additional definition of "an orange".Similarly, defining "true" as "not false" conveys no useful information. It requires a definition of "false" - which you would no doubt give as "not true".

Elements come from stars.

There were elements before there were stars. "Some elements come from stars" is as trivially true as "some dogs are brown".

Also, there are synthetic elements.

Maybe I should ask for your definition of an absolute truth. Why should triviality disqualify something?Is there some H or He in this universe that has not been through a star? Perhaps I over reached though. How about — Carbon comes from stars. Is that trivial?