Faith

Can you only trust or believe in those things that can be tested and verified?What about beauty? I have seen pictures I thought were beautiful that others thought simply paint smears.How about love? I've known people in love that I simply could not understand. It seemed totally absurd yet they loved each other and were happy. Many people have asked, "What does she see in that guy?" Could be the story of my life. What about music? Some pieces I like others consider just noise.Must everything resolve to just the results of tests?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

There you are, IMHO, wrong. There is a difference between faith and confidence.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Well, actually no. We can say with a very high degree of confidence that there is no huge object that can stop the earth's rotation anywhere nearby.

I'm glad that you brought this up because I think it is very important and helps illustrate the difference between science and faith.You had said

quote:

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We are only a heartbeat away from some huge object colliding with us and either stopping our rotation, or somthering the earth's atmosphere with debri, so that we won't see the sun anymore. It happened a mere 65 million years ago, so we believe.

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to which I replied.

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Well, actually no. We can say with a very high degree of confidence that there is no huge object that can stop the earth's rotation anywhere nearby.

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You went on to say again, We'll, we can say just that.First, it would take something bigger than Jupiter and a whole bunch closer than Jupiter to have any measurable effect on the earth's rotation. Jupiter and Saturn are out there, they are close enough that they were seen and known to be planets, not stars, long before the Christian era. And they are dwarfs compared to the Sun.Yet the most that the sun can do, big as it is, is effect the tides. Jupiter and Saturn have no measurable effect even on the tides.So yes. I can say, even with my limited knowledge, that there is nothing out there close enough to be a threat to stop the rotation of the earth. Wrong. It did not come inside the moon's orbit. But even if it had hit the earth, it would be unlikely to end life. Afterall, we have been through that before. It might well end the human phase and leave the world to the next species, but it is unlikely to end life.Second, we would have had many months of warning if not years of warning before something like that happened. And it is not a given that we can do nothing about it. It is reason though to get some of the eggs out of the basket.And that is the difference between faith and confidence.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Actually, IIRC, it was the conversion between Sacred Cubits and the Metric system that did it in.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Yup. Do you have any idea where the next solar system is?But what do any of these things have to do the topic?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

93,000,000
 9,300,000

True. But 0.1AU = 9,300,000 not 930,000 miles. WHAT?That has no meaning whatsoever. You don't have to just accept someone's idea of the probabilities, there is actually a risk assesment scale. Google Torino Impact Hazard Scale.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

One last time. It is not faith. It is confidence. There is a big difference.Confidence is based on observed, testable evidence.Faith is a belief without testable evidence.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

So just how big would that object really be?You see, this is just like the nonsense about the gamma ray bursts. Let's really stop and look at this example because the numbers really seem big.I'm going to try to walk you through this so you can understand why we differentiate between faith and confidence.The Earth has a mass of about 5,974,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons.If we take your object, 194,090,000,000,000,000, how big is it in relation to the Earth?Well, we can simplify it by dividing both sides by 1,000,000,000,000 and that gives us 194,090 / 5,974,200,000,000 0r .00000003 something.That is .000003% or 3 millionth of one percent of the mass of the Earth.And that is the difference. People show you the big numbers and they sound really impressive so you accept them on faith. But others actually do the numbers and so have confidence in what the result would be.To go back to the gamma burst issue you raised earlier, if you imagine the known universe to be the size of the earth, the sphere of desolation you propose (and there is no evidence that there even would be such a sphere of desolation) would be about the size of a basketball.Confidence vs. faith.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

You're right.

I've been trying to get RR to discriminate between Confidence and Faith for some time with no success.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

RatI'm still waiting for you to discriminate between confidence and faith.Can you explain the difference as you see them?This message has been edited by jar, 09-05-2004 04:10 PM

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Then I see little reason to continue this conversation.Bye.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Please do not judge Christianity by christians.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

The problem is all you've been seeing are the fruits.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion