Posted on 02/28/2015 8:40:57 AM PST by Heartlander
Exactly as I ment it.
The science that attempts to explain it is totally bizarre and strange and completely unexpected.
Says who? Some jag-off who writes crap like The Dao of Physics? "Totally bizarre and strange" and "completely unexpected" are subjective, editorial comments that mean nothing. They may comport with your ideas, but so what? What we know about physics is determined by careful observation, serious logic and rigorous mathematics. People who attempt to mystify it are charlatans and poseurs.
I think there are two kinds of atheists - the kind that have to convince others that their view is the correct one and the kind that simply don’t believe the fairy tales but also don’t care who does believe in them.
The first type are annoying and arguably self-contradictory.
The second type don’t need to convince others because they themselves don’t need further convincing.
Sorry. I just don’t buy into it and thus I don’t have to worry about any crisis of conscience as I have seen with some of my other friends. I prefer science when understanding and explaining things as science is always a logical way of testing and can be flexible. But that does not mean I hate Christians or other religions. Far from that I truly believe everyone has the right to a free conscience and I am very angry at how Christians and Jews are being treated lately in the world and it seems the western free leaders don’t seem to care.
Actually, I’d love to hear how an atheist dismisses the Shroud and its 3D image that SCIENCE & technology has yet to duplicate.
I note your reply avoided answering that SCIENTIFIC question.
Without that it's a matter of faith. And I don't have any.
The fact the Shroud's 3D image created by a "mini Big Bang" when He rose from death cannot be reproduced by 21st century technology is scientific proof.
I understand atheists will engage in pretzel logic to deny God...not unlike leftists deny God so they can operate without guilt.
Good luck in your journey...and hope you find God and His Truth.
As I stated before, even satan knows that God really does exist.
the shroud is a silly sideshow attraction
It may well be. And absent proof of it's origins, That is what I consider it also. But to many it is a holy relic. A affirmation of their faith. Who are we to belittle their beliefs, no matter how odd or silly we find them.
There is nothing Christian about “holy relics”.
Einstein didn't magically come up with the theory of general and special relativity or the photovoltaic cell. His theories were based on a milenia of observations and theories such as Maxwell's equations, c is a constant in a vacuum, etc. Those theories were stepping stones. Maybe stepping stones in the wrong or imprecise direction such as Bohr's model of an atom but stepping stones just the same.
That is what classical and modern physics are all about. It is no different than when the theorists came up with the laws of thermodynamics.
Actually, and ironically both physics and thermodynamics share a very fundamental rule — matter and energy are not lost or disappear. All else is secondary.
The next level is if a person believes in a particular religion. religion's goal, in it's purest sense, is to suppress the evil (or animalistic) side of our nature. For example, the ten commandments is exactly that. Adultery, killing, etc.
Or best of all, can we actually walk through walls (tunneling). Is it really true that time slows down and I gain mass when I travel faster?
And actually we don't define a particle as a physical entity but a probability distribution function. A mathematical equation of probably of where a particle might be.
And some of the theories describing matter these days are pretty bizarre.
This is incorrect. Einsteins theories were based on theoretical considerations and probably not on direct observations at all -- although there is controversy about whether he knew about the Michelson-Morley null result -- there is very little doubt that the Special Theory of Relativity was based almost ENTIRELY on a consideration of the theoretical inconsistencies between Newtonian Physics and Maxwell's Equations ALONE.
The discrepancies were known for a few decades, certainly not for "millennia." But in any case, they had very little to do with experiment.
The constancy of the speed of light in vacuum is Einsteins second theoretical postulate of The Special Theory. Measurements of the speed of light in vacuum had not been going on "for millennia." And experimental physicists did not generally accept Einstein's explanation that c was a constant in all reference frames for quite some time.
The General Theory of Relativity also had nearly nothing to do with experimental observations. It explained the precession of the perehelion of Mercury nicely, but that was a very minor detail that didn't concern physicists terribly much. Einstein worked on the General Theory of Relativity as a necessary -- and purely theoretical -- generalization of the Special Theory of Relativity, which, as we have already seen, owed far more to theoretical consistency than to observation. The General Theory was not motivated by, and had virtually nothing to do with experiments, at all.
Neither did his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which was much more influenced by purely theoretical concerns pointed in his direction by Max Planck's resolution of the Ultraviolet Catastrophe through the quantization of black-body radiation. Planck had already laid the groundwork, and Einstein proposed quantization to make Plank's resolution and his own explanation of the photoelectric effect conceptually simple rather than ad hoc. Planck, in turn, was motivated to remove operational infinities from the mathematics of the theory of black-body radiation, which was already known. Again, a search for theoretical self-consistency; since the Stefan-Boltzmann law already gave the correct experimental temperature dependency of black bodies.
Those theories were stepping stones.
They were, as are all theories, but they were theoretical stepping stones, and not [for people who actually know the history of physics] experimental ones.
It is no different than when the theorists came up with the laws of thermodynamics.
This statement is false BOTH conceptually and historically. It could not possibly be MORE WRONG.
The Laws of Thermodynamics [except for the 0th law] are entirely observational, and have nothing to do with any theory. As a matter of fact, the classic post-graduate text on Thermodynamics [referenced at the end of my Home Page] says very clearly in the introduction: "If the atomic theory, the kinetic theory of gases, classical physics, statistical mechanics or quantum mechanics, or any other underlying theory of physics were invalidated tomorrow, it would have no effect whatsoever on the laws of Thermodynamics."
The laws of Thermodynamics are triumphs of experiment and observation, and they have no inherent theoretical basis whatsoever. ALL of them were originally stated in terms of observations made with heat engines.
Actually, and ironically both physics and thermodynamics share a very fundamental rule — matter and energy are not lost or disappear. All else is secondary.
Actually, and without the slightest hint of irony, this last statement has some howlingly ridiculous errors. Thermodynamics is a branch of physics. It's not separate from it. In terms of macroscopic phenomena, it must necessarily share that with which it is a smaller part. The claim that physics has a very fundamental rule that matter and energy are not lost or disappear is, on the quantum level, untrue. In quantum field theory virtual particles come into and go out of the vacuum all the time. What holds up is that if time translation invariance exists, an experiment will not measure the violation. But this is not the same thing.
In the the real world Experimentalists measure the expectation values of quantum observables. Those expectation values must imply the conservation of energy, because if they did not, we would also see observable violations of the law of energy conservation in thermodynamics... and we don't.
And there is nothing "ironic" about the requirement that a self-consistent theory must contain implications which are testable across domains.
As to the statement that "All else is secondary." Actually, this isn't the way physicists currently think about the law of conservation of energy. The 1st Law is actually of secondary importance to a specific symmetry, which we believe is exactly conserved. That symmetry is time-translation invariance. But even there, I doubt too many physicists would claim that to be the most important theoretical principle in physics, and NO physicists would agree that "everything else is secondary."
It’s very possible there’s no such thing as a real atheist and never was.
If God doesn’t exist, then there is no evidence of his existence.
If God does exist, then everything is evidence of his existence.
I cringe at the idea of don’t worry what my dad said, I’ll take care of things......idea.
When I worked sales I learned that the best way is by story telling.
How about that?
If the Bible is not true, then it’s a fairy tale.
But if true it’s a history book.
Don’t miss the fact that there’s nothing intrinsically deniable in the Bible. By this I mean that in order to claim any part of the Bible is untrue, you must necessarily argue from a starting point of secularism.
You sound like a person who listens to logic. Here’s some: if God was able to create the universe, then logically he has the power to accomplish everything in the Bible.
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