similarities between New Age atheists and religious nut jobs (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, January 15, 2011, 02:58 (5039 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

I am not a fan of statistics myself, I just think it would be an interesting thought experiment.-One of my first posts to this forum in... 2008? Dealt with statistics. In the entire debate regarding intelligent design, statistics are misused constantly. -David periodically posts a blogpost detailing some ID advocate's math; and invariably it is sloppy if not useless. (And I take my role as a reviewer seriously; I do my best to try and describe to a non-mathematician why exactly the mathematical arguments don't add up.) -But Occam swings both ways: Just because biblical claims against the physical world have been largely demoted doesn't mean that fundamentally--every idea we've ever had about God is wrong except for the fact that he exists. This is more or less David's position. -To recap one of my ancient posts, we need to know these things before we can calculate real odds.-1. We have to have created life artificially--in my opinion, in any method possible instead of trying to mimic conditions that we "think" existed. -The reasons for this are many, but for brevity, you need to have complete knowledge of your system of study, or at least have a model that predicts reality reasonably well. If you don't have this, you have an infinite factor of error. This is why I automatically discard any discussion of the likelihood of God's existence via mathematical means. Dawkins... Dembski, all have tried and all fail absolutely because they are reasoning about processes that we currently and honestly--don't know anything about. -2. Once we've created life, we can start calculating it's probability to have occurred. Then--and only then--will any discussion regarding mathematics be able to bear any fruit at all.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"