Well, that settles it, then. /s

It’s not settled until the seance.

Amyjo, do you have a ouija board?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2018 02:38PM by babyloncansuckit.

No freaking way.

I'll leave the science to Hawking. And the spirits to Elvira.

ETA: Hawking's beliefs were his own. He isn't the end all be all there is to science, anymore than Einstein, or others. Each man formed their own views on life, and God.

I still default to there is a God, and science confirms that to me. The laws of science are too perfect, too exact, to be anything less than genius, and ordained by something out of this world.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2018 03:07PM by Amyjo.

Why would a loving, merciful ghawd create the current relationship between a circle's diameter and its circumference? Admit it, your ghawd totally screwed the pooch on that one!

When I become a ghawd, Pi is going to be 3, medammit!!

+6.022X10^23!

Used to make guaca-mole? ::run hide::

It took me a while, I ruefully confess.

Pi is three as long as your circles are hexagons. Six sides good, infinite sides bad, to paraphrase Orwell.

Pi is already three according to the buy-bull.

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> No freaking way.
>
> I still default to there is a God, and science
> confirms that to me. The laws of science are too
> perfect, too exact, to be anything less than
> genius, and ordained by something out of this
> world.


You are seriously arguing that if the laws of science were *not* perfect, *not* to exact, that that would be evidence that God does not exist?

How does the laws of science have any bearing whatsoever on there being or not being a God?

I mean, it's nice to simply see what you want in any evidence before you, but honestly, let's try some critical thinking.

But let's take a step back - what does the "scientific method" mean to you (if it means anything)?

I drew up a O. board but have not given it a try yet.

However, I noted the utube mediums and channels really enjoy when a 'renowned atheist' dies.

They tried to contact him and so did I ---- they sort of try to act 'in your face' with him. However, that doesn't work with 'spirit' there is no way to get them upset. Things are sort of 'facts' to them ----- what they believed, etc..

Most I have had a chance to listen to (a little) found similar things. He was very inquisitive when his body but not he/his spirit died. He seemed to have the scientific curiosity and attitude that he was going to learn something he did not believe before. He was very pleased to be 'whole' ---- no health issues.

Later, he stated he was just 'hard wired' as a scientist to 'require' proof. That is what he attributed to why he never discovered the God or the after life which he is currently experiencing.

Just my 2 cents as I don't think anyone else would look at what the channels and mediums were working on as far as Hawking.

in b 4 ~ Psalm 14 ~

He said it before I the accompanying pieces to the Hawking-Hartle State theory.

At the time of A Brief History of Time, he had a sort of Deist outlook. But that collapsed.

From article,

"His greatest concern, his daughter said, "is how divided we've become," adding: "He makes this comment about how we seem to have lost the ability to look outward, and we are increasingly looking inward to ourselves."

Hawking's final message to readers, though, is a hopeful one.

Attempting to answer the question "How do we shape the future?" in the book's final chapter, the scientist writes: "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet."

Reminds of the psalms: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. "

:)

"...at least, not anymore."

caffiend Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "...at least, not anymore."


Good one!

Apparently, somebody once wrote on a subway wall (or someplace),

"God is dead--Nietzsche"

Somebody wrote, underneath that,

"Nietzsche is dead--God"

If you accept Christian teachings, Hawking is not "dead" in that he has ceased to exist. He exists somewhere on a spiritual or astral-metaphysical plane, in a state of bliss or...something. As CS Lewis wrote, "You have never met a mere mortal."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2018 03:15PM by caffiend.

Isn't it interesting that "god" never actually says things like, "There is no Stephen Hawking" -- some human has to say it and pretend "god" did?

Hmm. :)

Damn you Hawking!

He was not supposed to tell anyone. Now what will we debate? Crud...

HH =)

There are lots of good topics remaining:

Which are better, Old Atheists or New Atheists?

How many agnostics fit on the head of a pin?

Our knowledge is ambient. We dont know enough to answer that question. I believe there is a creator. People believe as they wish. The issue is not weather there is a creator or not, but how ones belief is forced and received by others. Using that belief to control and hurt others, is the problem.

Live,love and be happy. Be the best you can be and treat others as you would like to be treated. In the end that's all you will be remembered by. If there is a God and another life then all is well for you. If not, then you have lost nothing but left found memories for those who knew you. It's a win, win...

I don't mean the life of the bon vivant, but the ancient Greek philosophy: There is no way of knowing if there is an existential reality beyond what we experience with our physical senses, so all we can do is make the best of things here and now--be good to ourselves, and each other, and enjoy what we can in this life and limited time.

(Edited to reposition post)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2018 05:02PM by caffiend.

Pretty close, surely.

There's a lot of overlap between the Stoics and the Epicureans. A "Stoic Epicurean" is not as oxymoronic as it seems.

I am one-half epicurean and three-quarters stoic. It's a lot of work and no one cares

The only appropriate reply to that is. . .


Crickets...

Carpe diem !

How ironic.
He believed in black holes for 30 years, then discovered Hawking Radiation, (White Holes) and said there's no such thing as black holes, just gray holes, since they radiate as much Hawking Radiation (Plasma jets) equals the matter absorbed by a black hole.
So there's supposedly a white hole on the opposite side of a black hole, where time goes in reverse, but nobody's ever seen one, much less a black hole, or the singularity, they're all just hypothetical.
https://www.space.com/40422-are-white-holes-dark-matter.html
So he believed in them and anybody who puts faith in Hawking, has to believe in them too because there's likely no way we can ever see a white hole. They're invisible, even more invisible than black holes, since they're going backwards in time, theoretically.
So who's to say that the singularity inside the black/white hole isn't responsible for both the white hole/black hole symmetry.
If so, wouldn't that be a lot like the tao and the white hole/black hole super symmetry be a lot like yin/yang?
Like the moon's perfect balance between the ocean and the sun.
Who's to say those laws are determine by something divine?
Isn't a sufficiently advanced alien species capable of being a god or gods?
WHy not the singularity?
Or the Great Attractor?
Or the God Particle,
minus the particle,
since it's more of a symmetry smashing field?

You are sooooo wasting your time here!

How does any of the twaddle you yammered above make you happy, given that no one here 'gets' what you're trying to do? Where's the fun in what you know, given that no one here shares in it with you?

Is it just the sensation of lording it over us? Do you stand in the bathroom and appraise yourself in the mirror and gloat over how much more with it you are than us?

What are you getting out of harping your twaddle to us?

Granted, I'm not the brainiac you are, but I simply don't think you make any useful sense.

koriwhore Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> How ironic.
> He believed in black holes for 30 years, then
> discovered Hawking Radiation, (White Holes) and
> said there's no such thing as black holes, just
> gray holes, since they radiate as much Hawking
> Radiation (Plasma jets) equals the matter absorbed
> by a black hole.

Nothing ironic there. It's called "learning and growing."



----------
> So there's supposedly a white hole on the opposite
> side of a black hole, where time goes in reverse,
> but nobody's ever seen one, much less a black
> hole, or the singularity, they're all just
> hypothetical.

So what? Your insistence on ignorance is like saying the relationship between the gun and the bullet in the victim's head is "hypothetical" since no one saw the actual bullet flying. You insist on a level of certainty that no one really requires in daily life, in which a very high probability is the basis for most action.



------------
> So he believed in them and anybody who puts faith
> in Hawking, has to believe in them too because
> there's likely no way we can ever see a white
> hole.

There is a difference between "faith" and "evidenced-based probability." Very few people have "faith" in Hawking or "believe" in him beyond the evidence and logical analysis he presents and which is "probably" accurate in at least its broad outlines.



------------
> So who's to say that the singularity inside the
> black/white hole isn't responsible for both the
> white hole/black hole symmetry.
> If so, wouldn't that be a lot like the tao and the
> white hole/black hole super symmetry be a lot like
> yin/yang?

Well no, since the words Tao and Yin-Yang have their own meanings and have nothing to do with modern physics. You might as well call those phenomena Ahura Mazda or Zeus and Hera. No one who knows anything about those ideas--yours and mine--would ever say they are astrophysical in nature.


-------------
> Who's to say those laws are determine by something
> divine?

There you go again, assuming your conclusion.



------------
> Isn't a sufficiently advanced alien species
> capable of being a god or gods?

Well no, not if you wish to do any honor to the established meanings of those words.



-----------------
> WHy not the singularity?
> Or the Great Attractor?

See above.



---------------
> Or the God Particle,
> minus the particle,

Putting aside the fact that a particle does not meet the established definitions of God, if you take Higgs boson and subtract the "particle" what you are left with is not "God" but "Goddamn."

That's straight from Lederman. He's smart.

Good post, koriwhore.

And quite on topic.

Yes!!

Thank you for having the Alabama ballz to tell it like it is!!

You go, girl!!

With fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Wait, already done.

I think we should dress this word salad with a vinaigrette and pair it with a nice white wine.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/18/2018 01:49PM by Lot's Wife.

Why not the Great Pumpkin?

Astrophysics is a sort of scientific religion. It tells us a lot about nature and it’s always changing to accommodate new knowledge. But still, there are more gaps than knowledge, which theoretical physicists are eager to fill with their pet theories.

It’s a lot better place to test new technologies than the battlefield.

or as a man?

Or was it a committee hired by the family to complete the book?

I certainly don't believe that a god of the type worshiped by Mormons exists. Whether there is some power that roughly approximates some of the widely disputed and various notions of "God" that have been put forth in the past several millenia is not going to be resolved by an appeal to the authority of Hawking.

When looking at the various platitudes and insights mentioned in the article, it's quite obvious that most, if not all of them are not based on rigorously applied proofs and unassailable mathematics derived from complete and ironclad observations of physical phenomena.

"I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature."

I know everybody loves Hawking. But this is not a startling or new viewpoint being put forward here.

"There are forms of intelligent life out there," he writes. "We need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further."

Go to any UFO convention and you'll hear 100 people say the same thing. Their evidence is still zero (except of course for the secret stuff held in the warehouse at Area 51).

"Travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding," he says. He also predicts that "within the next hundred years we will be able to travel to anywhere in the Solar System."

Maybe. Does he mean humans in their physical bodies? I won't hold my breath. "We" haven't even traveled to the moon even once during the past 4 decades, even though we did it in the late 1960s and early 1970s several times without the benefit of the past 4 decades of technological advances.

I sometimes wonder if Hawking hasn't been something of a puppet show for some time. A very sympathetic character to be sure. But you don't really need the "physicist" title to come up with any of the things stated in the article.

You're going to have to speak up. The agnostics in this room are terrible.

I don’t know about that.

Although most people here know I agree with the late Prof. Hawking, I feel I should warn any over-enthusiastic readers that this is a brazen appeal to authority.

;-)

I wonder why his funeral was in a church?

The Pythagoreans in 550 BCE believed that the laws of the universe were mathematical, involving either integers, or ratios of integers. That is precisely what they meant when they said the universe is "rational". It turned out to be somewhat more complicated than that, when they discovered relationships that could not be described as the ratio of integers ("irrational" numbers, like pi and the square root of two).

By and large, we still have every reason to believe that the laws of nature can be described by mathematics, and that those laws are discoverable by the human intellect. There are still plenty of things we do not yet fully understand, but I don't know of anything where we have thrown our hands up and decided that something is in principle beyond understanding.

BTW, even "irrational" numeric relationships, like pi and the square root of two have infinite series descriptions that are ratios of integers. It is really difficult to present mathematics in a text-only format like RFM, but I'll take a shot at it here. Bear with me.

There is a simple algorithm for creating "convergents" to the square root of 2. Convergents are a series of fractions that get closer and closer to the sqrt(2), though they never exactly represent the value, because that is impossible to do with a fraction of two integers. Here's the algorithm:

Start with the fraction 1/1.
Generate the bottom (aka denominator) of the next fraction by adding together to top and bottom of the current fraction. Yeah, I know that seems like a weird thing to do. Just do it, it works.

Generate the top of the next fraction by adding the bottom of the current fraction to the new bottom of the next fraction that you just calculated in the above step. (You are probably having a WTF moment trying to make sense of that, so here's the calculation of the first 4 convergents for square root of two)

1/1
1+1 = 2 (new denominator) 1+2 = 3 (new numerator) New convergent is 3/2

3+2 = 5. 2+5 = 7. New convergent is 7/5
7+5 = 12. 5+12 = 17. New convergent is 17/12
17+12 = 29. 12+29 = 41. New convergent is 41/29

Each convergent is closer to sqrt(2) than the previous one, and they alternately overshoot and undershoot the actual value of the square root of two. Square each convergent, and you will see that the squares are getting closer and closer to two.

This series converges pretty rapidly. If you calculate 4 more convergents, which you can easily do on the back of an envelope, you will have the square root of two accurate to 5 decimal places. That's not too shabby, for an algorithm a fourth grader could perform with pencil and paper.

So, to recap, the Pythagoreans 2,500 years ago, thought the universe was rational. Hawking still thinks it is. Actually, Mormons do too. Mormon theology, such as it is, believes that the universe is governed by laws, and that God is bound by those laws, and becomes god by living in accordance with them.

While I find the whole Mormon "we can become gods by living in harmony with the laws of the universe" thing silly (in fact I find the whole god thing silly), I do firmly believe the universe is in fact governed by laws we can discover and understand. No god needed. The universe just "is". I don't see that as any harder to believe than "the universe had to be created by a god, but god just 'is'".

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't see that as any harder to believe than
> "the universe had to be created by a god, but god
> just 'is'".

By definition it would be easier to believe, since it dispenses with the undemonstrated assumption of a being more complex than the universe...:)

Nicely done mathematical presentation, by the way. Bravo.

according to my calculator, the square root of 2 is 1.414 and a bunch of other numbers. Then when you take that number and square it, the answer is ... 2! So I found nothing irrational about it and you may be hearing from 2's attorney in the near future.

But then I went back and multiplied my calculator's figure for Pi times the figure for the square root of 2 ... and my smartphone shut down! Happened every time!

You must have the "close enough for government work" calculator. Try upgrading to an irrational model. Funny, you'd think the "government work" model would be irrational. :)

Was it yet another deathbed conversion to christianity again ?

Even if he had actually said that, it wouldn't matter.

Stephen Hawking was in no better position than anyone else to make such an assertion. Just bearing his testimony.

Well I can't say if I believe in a God but I do believe in our noble RfM moderators for whom Amyjo and I give our sincere thanks.

Couldn't agree more. No one should be asked to defend his views about God, Pakistani telemarketers (they are all terrorists, doncha know), or anything else.

The secret to higher civilization is indeed the triumph of will over intellect.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/18/2018 02:40PM by Lot's Wife.

Up your nose with a rubber hose.

That was a great show!

Okay, seriously, we should choose up teams, select team colors and pick team mascots. And though it hurts, I release my interests in the sugar plum fairy gliding marsupial, since I know he or she does not want to be alone.

Go, team!!

"For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God," he adds. "I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature." Hawking

"Yes I believe in god, if by the word, 'god', you mean the embodiment of the immutable laws that govern the universe." Sagan

"An Atheist would have to know a lot more than me about the Cosmos." Sagan

I'm with Sagan.

#1. Hawking doesn't define what he means by the word 'god'.
#2. Sagan does, "the immutable laws that govern the Cosmos".
#3. Not even Hawking could see inside of a black hole, to say nothing of a white hole, or singularity, all of which together could be responsible for the galaxies that form around them and would meet the requirements of a creator, god.
#4. What's so great about the name, 'singularity'? Or black hole or white hole?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/18/2018 03:18PM by koriwhore.

Hahahahahaha! And now you're with Amyjo! Yay, you!

No, he's with Einstein, Max Born, Carl Sagan, et al.

No, he assuredly is not with those men. He keeps ascribing to them thoughts that they disavowed.

He is with his imaginary friends.

koriwhore Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> #1. Hawking doesn't define what he means by the
> word 'god'.

Hmm. If Hawking didn't define "God," perhaps he wanted us to infer that he meant one or more of the dictionary definitions of that term. Unreasonable?

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/god



---------------
> #2. Sagan [defines God to mean] "the immutable laws that govern
> the Cosmos".

There's your first clue. If Sagan needs to explain what he means by "God," then he's the one who is not using that word in its established sense.

But he admitted that, right? It's in the "if."



----------------
> #3. Not even Hawking could see inside of a black
> hole, to say nothing of a white hole, or
> singularity, all of which together could be
> responsible for the galaxies that form around them
> and would meet the requirements of a creator,
> god.

None of those approximations of physical reality meet the established definition of God. So there's that.



------------
> #4. What's so great about the name, 'singularity'?
> Or black hole or white hole?

Nothing. If you don't care about communication, there is nothing "great" about using words precisely. But then you could call a black hole a donut or God the Tao, and we know how silly that would be.

I normally want to stay out of this but you have brought up something that I'm going to correct you on again.

Carl Sagan in that quote is saying that he does not believe in god. He is saying that for him to believe in god it needs to be something different. It is the same as him saying that he believes in god if by god you mean burrito.

And, and, and. The word law in this instance, and in every instance when used by a scientist, means a scientific law. Which by definition isn't a law but a description of an observed phenomena.

The universe doesn't follow the "laws" the "laws" describe what the universe is doing.

You insist on misquoting and misunderstanding these people so you can fit their square peg in your round hole. I really believe that you are willful about this.

Evidence?

Show us a single piece of evidence that God invented science.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/18/2018 09:10PM by Lot's Wife.