Abstract

Monday, 12 May 2003

This page is put together from several e-mails in which my correspondent often took a short sentence or even part of a sentence to answer in line. It all got spallated and tedious, but is presented here in several chunks to try to maintain some principle threads while keeping together lesser ones.

• Comment from Carlos G

Mike, I have the following comments on: AskWhy! Science and Pseudoscience—God’s Truth or Pious Lies? Science or Religion?

What is proven? Is truth falsifiable? If you will never be sure in something are you a “real” scientist? These are only some of the thoughts which followed reading into your essay “God’s Truth or Pious Lies” .

Popper’s argument was that nothing could be proven unless every possible outcome of a set of experimental conditions was known. We cannot therefore claim strictly to have proven anything experimentally, as opposed to logically. Popper wondered how then anything discovered empirically could be known, and came up with his criterion of falsifiability. This allowed an hypothesis to be judged as scientific or not. A proper scientific hypothesis has to be capable of being falsified by experiment. Popper did not say that a scientific hypothesis has to be false, yet many people seem to think he did! The corollory of what Popper proposed is that a serving scientific hypothesis is true until someone has proven it false. So, a true statement must be able to be proved false—there must be a test that can falsify it if it is indeed false—but, since you say it is truth, it will not be so proved, at least within particular boundaries. What is true within these defined limits might be false outside them.

As for the real scientist, my own view is that scientists, unlike believers, are never certain. There is some possibility even that the sun will not rise on the earth tomorrow, because the sun or the earth will have been destroyed, perhaps. Most hypotheses in daily science are less certain than tomorrow’s dawn, and good scientists, I think, are humble enough to realise that their hypotheses are approximations. Lakatos called it by Trotsky’s phrase, permanent revolution.

When the scientist is sure of things then we know that there is a god! He will be it!

Thank you for your response. Popper evidently thought about scientific research and he called it “science” . At best it is a branch of the scientific functions. Once valid science establishes something (aerodynamics > planes fly, electronics > computers work , mathematics 1+1=2 etc.) that must be true therefore not “falsifiable” . Does it mean they are not included into the domain of science anymore? That would be hilariously absurd.

You are misunderstanding what Popper was saying. You seem to think that ’falsifiable’ means ’false’. What he meant was that there had to be a test that could have at least two possible outcomes, one which confirmed the hypothesis and one which denied it. If that was the case then the hypothesis was falsifiable. It does not mean that it had to be false. Take your example of aerodynamics. Every aeroplane that takes flight tests the science of aerodynamics, and fortunately we can have confidence that it is true, but aeroplanes still drop out of the sky.

That does not mean that the fact (truth) of aerodynamics are falsified. They work without failure as long as all the other factors are satisfied. If a plane crushes it does not mean that the aerodynamic principles are wrong only that something did not work according to them.

Well, I do not doubt that you are right, but you are still begging the question when you say as long “as all the other factors are satisfied.”

Not at all Mike. I talk about technological and manufacturing failures or atmospheric conditions. Not about principles upon which the possibility of flight based. They do not change. Laws of nature are not movable that is why ANYTHING can exist.

The investigators after a plane crash will be checking all of these factors, and when they find one they are adding a condition to the scope of validity of the laws of aerodynamics.

See above. They are not looking for unknown laws to discover but failures in quality or possible broken or weared out parts.

The conditions for the laws to apply are just as important as the laws themselves.

Perfect dear Mike. You just expressed a divine (biblical) principle flawlessly.

Thank you. What I have been trying to do is something that you cannot seem to get. Whether laws in Nature are there as part of Nature or put there by God, they are not revealed to us by prophets or messiahs. Scientists reveal them. The scientist has to have criteria for testing them. That is what we are talking about, not whether there are absolute laws or not. So, you are wrong to say that scientists are not looking for laws to discover.

I did not ever say that Mike.

It is pointless arguing with you. You just change your tune even when your words are registered in black and white. That is precisely what you said.

What I said was that when a plane crashes they ar not trying to find failures in the laws of aerodynamics but failures material parts or function. Tell me one case when the investigation decided that the laws which determine the lift on wings are wrong. I will not hold my breath until you tell me one.

What then are they doing? And how have the laws been discovered. The truth is that you are a Platonist. You have an idealized law of aerodynamics or whatever in your head and say that it is so, but it had to be discovered by humans, and so did its range of applicability, and that includes the factors you want to exclude from your idealization.

This is the answer. The theory of streamlined flow over an aerofoil is well established, so it is true in the Popperan sense, but the flow is not necessarily streamlined, and there are winds and so forth. You have only the ideal in your head, but an aeronautical engineer must have a much more comprehensive hypothesis, and that is what he tests and corrects in his daily job.

Let us look at I=P/R in eletctronics. (I= intensity of current, P= potential, R= resistance). This is a very simple formula practiacally always applied in electrical design. The law (or order if you wish) upon which it is based is the force which regulate their relations. With the same resistance (R=constant) if you increase the potential, the current increases proportionally and the opposite happens if you decrease P. Do you want to tell me that all of a sudden having problem with an eclectronic device “scientists” discover that I=P/R is not valid at that case? I hope you do not even have any thought like that in the farthest cornar of you mind Mike, for your own sake.

Thankfully for many modern inventions and applications, v=ir is not universally true as you think. It is true under certain defined conditiones but not in others. These others have given us many useful applications. Your grip on science is only basic.

“Popper did not say that a scientific hypothesis has to be false, yet many people seem to think he did!” Any kind of investigation must be falsifiable (which means: we still do not know what the TRUTH about it is, but we intend to learn it). If this condition would not be given at this function the activity would cease to be a search.

“What is true within these defined limits might be false outside them.” Not a problem. Facts are truth under certain conditions. When things change the conditions change too. Planes do not fly in vacuum. This does not change the TRUTH at all which refers to the fact/truth that planes fly in the air as the result of the laws of aerodynamics.

Yes, we quite agree. Euclid said that the three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. It is easy to test by measuring the sum of the three angles for different triangles and they add up to 180 as Euclid said they would. Even so, any triangle drawn on a globe from the north pole to the equator with a length of the equator as its base adds up to 270 degrees. So, Euclid’s theorem is wrong.

No it is not. What Euclid has found refers to flat surfaces and on them it is a fact and not falsifiable. A triangle on a spherical surface is a 3D form dramatically different from what Euclid talked about. He IS right.

All you are doing is stating the condition that makes the statement correct.

That is true Mike and logical too. Without stating the conditions we can not specify anything.

It is not universally correct, and people had to start thinking about the geometry of curved surfaces to realise that Euclid only applied to flat ones. Planar geometry was therefore specifically called Euclidean Geometry so that no one would think it applied more generally.

We tested it on a spherical surface and found it to be false. Euclid’s theorem only works on flat planes and not on curved surfaces. As long as we specify the condition, then it remains true.

Right. On the other hand if are not specific in our communication we create confusion.

Now you are agreeing with me about the same thing.

What is in practical use is constantly being tested and therefore subject to the criterion of falsification. What is true repeatedly passes the test.

The science of aeroplanes sometimes is found wanting thus urging people to check it and find the error. That is science at work in the Popperish sense. On the other hand God is love is not scientific because it cannot be tested. There is no way that it can be falsified.

It is actually tested by every beat of your heart and every breath of your lungs. God is life itself. His goodness is tested by his provisions. Evolutionists (sometimes even creationists) talk about the “building-blocks” of life. His manual (Bible) informs us that He IS life itself. That is not a “theory” . That is just told us. Life does not come by increasing the complexity of inert matter or bombarding it by electrical discharges. This is what Scriptures predict. Go ahaed guys try to falsify it. I will not hold my breath to see their “success” .

You are here again making a gross assumption that God is life itself based on what someone told you about the bible.

I’ve read it and understood it myself. It is written there. It is not “about” it.

God IS a theory, and not a very good one.

History is not theory as as said before and you know that too. Yet if it would be a theory it would still be far more superior to the “nothing evolving into all things” “theory” .

You are chopping little bits out of my paragraphs and replying only to the bits. Is this Christian Truth? Whether history is theory or not—and I do not know it is not because I believe the opposite—what bearing has it on God? History is theory because no one today saw what happened in history except for the last few years. I have several essays about the scientific approach to history mainly on my Judaism pages, but history most certainly is theory, and the further back it is the more hypothetical it becomes. Christian history is particularly hypothetical because Christians have been habitual liars and forgers of what they want people to believe, true or not, and have been habitual destroyers of the truth when it did not suit them.

I told you before that you have a disasterous misconception about the term Christian. Christians do NOT lie “Christians” do. Unless you get that Mike the “history” part of your argument is meaningless. Besides that forgive me please but insisting on the history equals theory makes your stand a confusion.

We have been over this. It is not legitimate for you to define Christians after the fact. If being a Christian means nothing in practical honest terms before the fact, then what is the point of it at all? It is only to fool people! Christians say they are Christian for their own reasons and they are usually selfish ones. As for the history is hypothesis part, you are just contradicting again. No one knows what happened in history, so it is obviously hypothetical.

But in the Word you find PRINCIPLES above any human speculations. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Lev.19:18- part) If just this little command would be followed the whole world would be like paradise.

I agree to that, but this is a citation from the Jewish bible. The Christian bible merely repeats it, and, if I am to believe that God issued this law then I should be a Buddhist or a Taoist because they had this rule before Christ thought of it.

Mike you should just try to refresh your memories about the past-time records (history—not theory). Your knowledge biblically is not impressive and if you say Buddhists and Thaoists “had this rule” before Christ you evidently assume that Buddha is the Eternal One. But be assured : he is not.

All you are doing is contradicting again. You are right that certain elementary observation may be historical facts, such as dates of images and documents, though these need testing. Others have to be constructed as hypotheses. The religious scholars that I know of accept that the Golden Rule comes in all the great religions and most are much older than Christianity. You are the one who needs to refresh your knowledge.

I fear that Christians just cannot understand that their own position is untenable rationally because they have been indoctrinated to believe it is unquestionable. It most certainly is questionable, and a better question is why a minority of intelligent people still believe in this childishness.

Just think Mike about how “childish” the principle quoted above is.

You will have noticed Dr Horvath that this principle is not tied to any supernatural speculation about God. It is a simple and sensible principle for people to try to live by, and that most Christians ignore while claiming still to be Christians just as they do to many other principles enunciated by the Son.

Sure it is as all things which come from the Creator to educate us. None of the Christians ignore it “Christians” do. See above. Let confusion be left behind.

So the Buddhists and so on that accept it and live by it are Christians? You try to claim all good men as Christians whether they want to be or not.

I keep saying that you know a tree by its fruit.

So do not talk about false religions calling them Christians.

Look, if only ’good’ Christians are Christians why do they want to live in association with a load of Devils? The fruit of Christianity throughout history has been murder, robbery and all forms of wickedness. You say Christians did not do all this. Yet the people who did called themselves Christians. Where were the real Christians while it was happening?

If Christ says you must be poor to be saved, then how can rich people imagine that they will be? If I took a list of criteria of Christianity from the words of the Son in what you call His word, there would be scarcely a Christian in the world that would match them.

All who follow Christ (Christians) do match them. They are not many as the Word (Christ) predicted.

“scientists, unlike believers, are never certain.” Believers are those who believe something. Scientists believe too. So scientists are also believers. But you say they investigate. So do all the believers unless they are fools.

Scientists have criteria which let them be sure of what they know.

“Be sure” Mike? That most definitely goes against the falsifiability “principle”. I just heard the science can never be “certain” in anything. This of course is a nonsense.

You are zooming around like a blowfly in a small room. It is what you have just accepted that are the criteria. Truth is defined by boundaries or conditions.

Yes, absolutely. But that does not change the fact that under the same conditions the same law works the same way.

I am getting mystified now. You are agreeing with the points that I have been making. Have you had a revelation?

Do not be mystified Mike. I simply expressed again what I always said. You tend to use the cheap evo ad hominem method which comes up when there is no reasonable answer and the opposition is cornered. Nothing still can not explode.

Nor can nothing be made to explode by a hypothetical invisible and spiritual giant made out of nothing himself. You ought to know what ad hominem means. If I say Gabor is a fool so should not be believed, then that is an ad hominem argument. If I say Gabor does not believe any of the mass of evidence for evolution, therefore he is a fool, that is not an ad hominem argument. I use the second type of argument. When people wilfully ignore evidence just to keep their own bigoted ideas, then they are fools. That is not an ad hominem argument.

These boundaries or conditions are found by testing, that is seeking to falsify a hypothesis. On this question of falsifiability, testing and determining the criteria of truth, you seem to be agreeing with me, but want to seem as if you are not.

Their beliefs have been tested and are found to work. They are true. Many people however believe things without having investigated them, or not adequately, or even when they know of contrary evidence to their beliefs that they just ignore. A large number of people, probably more than the number that believe Christianity, believe in astrology. Astrology and Christianity are both unscientific because they cannot be tested in any way that will falsify them.

There is nothing common in astrology with christianity. Christianity is the substance of the message what the Creator of the universe sent to mankind. It actually goes diametrically against astrology. As a matter of fact I think astrology is closer to the evolution theory than to the biblical teaching.

You are not answering the point. Both are unscientific. They have that important fact in common.

Do you know what the criteria are that make something “scientific” or “unscientific”? If you do then you can see that the evolutionistic “theories” are fully unscientific. Sorry.

Unless I am labouring under a serious misapprehension, this is the very point of the discussion. We began talking about falsifiability as the scientific criterion.

Yes and I said that was a nonsense. Scientific INVESTIGATION yes it must be falsifiable because we do NOT know the answer. What we know is not falsifiable. Try to get that please my friend. Dr. Karl Popper fooled himself and those who swallow that misconception.(Some creationists included)

We are going round the circle again. I repeat for the last time that you are confusing falsifiable with false. Falsifiability means capable of being tested. There must be tests for anything that we know that prove it so or not so. If there are no such tests then whatever view is held is merely opinion. That is the case with Christianity, belief in God and so on. It is not the case with things like the aerofoil. If the tests are false then the rule is not true in some circumstance, but the fact that they are proved true each time they are tested does not mean that they are not falsifiable. The test is trying to falsify it, and failing so long as the hypothesis is valid. Let us not go through this again, because you are just showing your lack of intelligence or your willful determination not to understand. Final summary: If you are testing something, you are trying to falsify it.

Christianity is not falsifiable, so it is not scientific. Astrology is the same. Creationists like to argue that evolutionary theory is not scientific on the grounds that it cannot be observed, but no one except them now accepts that.

Wrong Mike. Lots of devoted evolutionists acknowledge the fact that their theory is not falsifiable. The evo bigots do not do that of course. I say still that the “falsifiability” principle is a confused concept.

More contradiction. Who are you? John Cleese?

The reason is that things have consequences and these can be studied even when the initiating event has finished. That is what the students of the Big Bang, of the evolution of species, and of history do.

“Theology just speculates. It is nothing but conjecture from beginning to end with nothing to test against.” This is a perfect description of pseudoscience. As the Bible calls it “science falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20-last part)

True knowledge of the Creator (real science, true theology) uses the Manual given by the Manufacturer (the Bible given by God). It is information. Now information is either true or false. It is not “theory” either way.

You describe their ideas as that nothing exploded and became something, and that is not scientific. Yet you seem to believe yourself in a Creator God who somehow existed even though nothing did, thought deeply about science, created the universe in six days before there were days, and also did it out of nothing (ex nihilo), or so the theologians tell us.

Nothing exploded and became everything—or so the “scientists” tell us. Do “skeptics” assume nothing can do somathing “on its own”? Surprisingly we can see that atheists, skeptics, agnostics happily swallow the ideas “science” forges on “cosmological” and “biological” “evolution”. That is clearly a bigoted and blind faith’.

In your reply, you say that “nothing” cannot explode, so cosmologists are not reasonable, and you are reasonable because you disagree with the cosmologists.

No, I am reasonable because I KNOW that nothing can NOT explode. And it is the most straigthforward and coherent reasoning. If they say nothing is not really nothing then it is confusion and their “science” is false.

This is hardly coherent reasoning. It ties in with a broad swath of modern American thinking that everything is good or evil, black or white with no shades of grey or other colors admitted into the reckoning. Again, what is really nothing? My understanding imperfect as it might be is that there are several ways under consideration whereby something can seem to be nothing. I used the analogy before of perspective. It seems that things contract into nothingness with distance, but we know that is an illusion. You cannot think about these things because it will spoil your self-imposed beliefs.

All things are composed of those yeses and nos. The “gray” areas as well. Only the proportion af “blacks” and “whites” are changing. See “digitals” if you wish and think about it.

I just do not get what you mean here. Whether you are talking about pixels or not the phenomena are real, and have to be taken into account. You believe that the Christian God is good and the Devil is evil, but millions of Christians are unutterably wicked, and millions of non-Christians are good. Are you sure you have the right God?

In that sense doubtless it is Christian in the simplistic Fundamentalist sense that has been successfully propagated in the US for almost a century. It is not however rational.

I guess we are in different lines Mike. “Fundamentalists” “US” are all irrelevant. The TRUTH is absolute as God is and all the same what different movements or groups try to promote. Galilei was not coerced to withdraw his teaching by the Bible but by the church which represented Greek “science” not the Scriptures.

It might be that the Truth is absolute, but you do not know what it is. You and the US Fundamentalists just think you do. To me, that would have to be a Satanic delusion. The Christian son, insisted that saintly men were humble. Fundamentalist Christians are the most arrogant of people. It is quite impossible, as men who think digitally like you must realise, that you cannot be arrogant and humble at the same time.

You will accept that a God for whom even the evidence is not incontrovertible let alone has ever been proved to exist DOES exist eternally…

The finite must accept the existence of infinite by believing it. The Eternal One gives the ability to man (finite) to rationally, reasonably see His existence from the created things.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

…yet the world itself cannot be admitted to have existed eternally. You are not addressing the point I made. If God can be eternal, why cannot the cosmos be eternal instead? And, Paul is wtong on this, because I cannot clearly see the invisible things of Him to which he refers. I cannot see them, and I have not seen any convincing evidence of them. God is almighty and could make all of these things perfectly clear to us if He existed. He certainly would not choose to reveal His invisble secrets through the medium of an obviously false and phony book. He tells you not to believe false prophets, but Christians believe everything that is impossible. He tells you not to believe in any other saviour but He Himself, but you believe a fake that comes along and says that God has appeared on earth as a man.

Existing laws and discoveries make it clear that the physical universe had a beginning. So what do you mean? Should I reject reliable science too in order to accept the tales of the false science?

Yet that is the deduction of some cosmologists who think the big bang is an illusion rather like the illusion of perspective. You criticise the cosmologists but somehow think that your own position is coherent.

I definitely accept a reasonably reliable information rather then a self contradicting “deduction” which is speculation at best.

Well, you are a Christian and therefore know everything, even though your favourite missionary told you that ignorance is bliss. I conclude that your knowledge is what it plainly is—ignorance. Doubtless you will not believe that disease is caused by germs because you have never seen one, and the word of God says they are caused by demons.

I repeat, how do you know what is true and what is false? You will believe anything as long as it was written more than 2000 years ago, but the discoveries of far more intelligent and educated men today you disparage. There is no need to disbelieve that the appearance of the big bang is real. But we know from eighty years of quantum mechanics that things on a tiny scale do not behave as they do on a large scale. Quantum mechanics shows how things work on a tiny scale, and we know that it predicts large scale phenomena perfectly, so must be essentially true. To return to the origins of this discussion, it has been tested in countless circumstances and has not been found wanting. This is the mechanics that have to be applied to the universe when it is compressed into a tiny space, as it was shortly after the big bang, and that is the theory that suggests that our perceptions of time, for example, might not be right in such compressed circumstances. I suggest you read something about these things before you come out with your irrefutable statements.

You say the Creator is infinite. How do you know what the Creator is? You confuse infinity which is spatial with eternity which is temporal.

Eternity At the start of my mail I talked about that. But for a brief summary here it is again: “infinity” means “endlessness”. If it is “temporal” it is eternity. If it is “spatial” it means space without end (or beginning of course). Well I might have been slack a little bit according to the English language conventions. Bear with me Mike in that please.

Of course I will bear with you in your English. I take it from your name that you are Hungarian and therefore not a native English speaker, but your English is good, albeit not perfect as you are aware. What I do not understand though, is why you have cut up the e-mail I sent and answered it in a different order, so that you now say you talked about this at the start of the e-mail, but have joined the subject again merely because you have chosen to answer it later in your own letter. It was in the third paragraph of my own e-mail. Why also do you use three typefaces but with no apparent meaning to them.

Anyway, you want to identify God with infinity because it suits you, not because the holy word tells you God is infinity.

Eternity has neither beginning nor end in time and infinity has neither beginning nor end in space. These things are notional constructs like the point in space, the square root of minus one and the ratio pi, useful mathematically, but you KNOW that God is both infinite and eternal. How do you know?

Reading the recorded history and putting it together with result of work of my brain which did not come from the primordial “chemical soup” since I simply KNOW it is cheap speculation dressed in the garb of “science”.

I suppose by recorded history you mean the partial and bowdlerized version that you find in the holy word. That is ancient propaganda. Read some of my pages, if you want to get closer to the truth about the holy word.

You are right that we exist and such things as infinity and so on are “assumptions” as you put it, but you cannot seem to comprehend that your God and Creator is an assumption—one that scientists reject as unnecessary and worthless as an explanation of anything. At least, these constructs are useful mathematically, but God is useless mathematically.

No, they are not. He (the Creator) IS the LAW (order). Without order math can NOT work. Think about it Mike. Even the most elemantary existence (literally the smallest particles simply can NOT exist without order). What is the origin of order/laws? I asked several of evo scienctists and never received any real answer only side-talk or gibberish.

Once again you are the one talking gibberish. Presumably your own idea is that God created order, but how can God exist Himself without it? The ancient Zoroastrians and later the Stoics thought quite sensibly that order was more fiundamental than God. If a God existed, it is impossible that He could do unless there was order. Order therefore must precede God, and God cannot be an explanation of it. One view of the laws of Nature is that they are created with the big bang and can take on various values. Not all of them lead to a stable universe, and even less of them allow life to evolve, and fewer still allow life to evolve intelligence. One such universe is the one we live in. That is speculation, all right, but makes more sense than having an disorderly God having to create order. That is more impossible than matter exploding ex nihilo.

Eternity is infinity in time. When we talk about the Creator we talk about the Eternal One (infinite in time) . The Omnipotent One is the same. He is infinite in power. The Omnoscient One is the same. He is infinite in knowledge. The Omnipresent One is the same. He is infinite spatially. These are all declared in the Scriptures (Bible). All the above make sense scientifically and any other way even mathematically. Since we are finite we are unable to search it out. So we have to accept it. But that acceptance is reasonable (logical if you wish) and the rejection of the revelation of Him is foolish and anything but real science.

I am glad you accepted that theology is pseudoscience, but all theology is based on what you call the manual, the ancient book of propaganda.

Not all, sorry. The TRUTH is which counts nothing else. Everything not based on it will be eliminated. Theology without TRUTH is false (pseudo) science without TRUTH is false (pseudo). Falseness is not based on the Bible.

You perfectly illustrate the reason why Popper devised his criterion of falsifiability. You chunter on about Truth and Falshood, but you have no idea what they are except that they are always what you believe in. In any case, you are not asnswering the point again. Theology depends upon the bible whether it is true or false. In my view all of it is false, but you think some of it is true—tha bits of it that you agree with. You might as well be God. You are not are you? Anyway, Christian theology necessarily begins with the manual, as you call it, but much of that is demonstrably false itself. Yet you persuade yourself that it is entirely true. Read some of my pages.

The word translated ’science’ in 1 Tim 6:20 is ’gnosis’ which properly means ’knowledge’. Your God’s manual here is simply doing what Paul does in several places, and that is disparaging knowledge.

That is absolutely misconcieved Mike. “avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called” is exactly what we talk about as pseudoscience. That is as a good example “cosmological” and “biological” “evolution”.

This is not argument, it is contradiction. Are you trying to say that the word translated as science is not the word “gnosis” which properly means knowledge? You are trnaslating the bible to suit yourself. And if I were to suppose you were right that Paul meant cosmological and biological evolution by these words, how would you persuade me? The fact is that you assume it because it suits you.

Christianity has to do that because whenever people get to know and understand things, the first thing they know and understand is that Christianity is a fraud.

Those who think that do not know what Christianity is and actually are under a strong spell of fraud which camouflages itself as “science”. Newton, Galilei, Kepler Von Brown, were Bible students. The Scriptures are against falseness which is NOT science.

Once again you are God and all the other Christians that have ever been except the few that believe like you are frauds. You are like the man in the mental hospital who thinks he is Napoleon. Nothing will persuade him he is not Napoleon because he is convinced that he is. Christians are just as insane, but like thieves they have no honour among themselves, or least do not when they are dead and can be freely attacked. The scientists you mention (Von Brown?) were all from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when it was either necessary to be a Christian to avoid being burnt at the stake, or at least to get a place in a university. You are fond of citing meaningless passages from your holy word which is too old to matter, and have the same inclination when citing scientists to support your views. Most modern scientists are not Christians because they can see that Christianity is a scam.

You say, with the confidence that Christians always have on no sound basis at all, that this manual is information that is true or false but not theoretical. Well, it is plainly enough false, but for some reason Christians think it is true. They THINK it is true but they have nothing to prove it is or even to suggest it is other than the word of their parents or parson, and they in turn believed it for the same reason. It is like a massive chain-letter that weak people have to believe out of fear that they will not get a reward promised.

The Bible gives a huge amount of information which is true (science) and which the pseudoscience of “evolution” tries to disprove without ever succeeding. So Popper being confused enough invented the “falsifiability principle”, eliminating mathematics, technology from the domain of “science”. Of course in reality those guys just try to make true one of the stupidest maxim “everything is relative”. That is of course a self-defeating statement logically. But they are happy creating for themselfes a world of delusion without absolutes.

Listen! I have been through the whole question of Popper both on my pages, and then tried to explain it further in this correspondence. You have ignored everything I have said, so you are wilfully determined to stick to your own prejudices despite any arguments I offer. You live in your own cocoon insulated from reality, so save me from wasting my time.

Genuine knowledge does not come revealed as perfect truth.

1+1=2 then is not genuine knowledge, neither do planes fly. What you put against the possible “imperfection” of aerodynamics or the euclidean geometry was discussed and (I hope) clearly proven wrong.

You are rambling, and I take it it is not a question of your English. When were any of the things that you mention revealed as perfect truth. Your English lapses are forgiveable but your mental ones are not. Read what I say before you reply.

It has to be struggled for through the scientific method, an imperfect method, but one which works even so. God is allegedly almighty. If He wanted to reveal anything, He could do it with no fear of doubt. He has not revealed anything unequivocally. Either He does not exist to reveal anything, or He does not want to reveal anything. If He wants to play games of revelation, then He is not a good God. He is toying with us.

No He is not. He tells us what happens if we obey and what happens if we disobey. And it shall happen as history proves it.

I repeat that an almighty God will behave like an almighty God and not like a used car dealer. You worship the God of the used car dealers, and you sound as if you are one. What in history proves God or anything about Him?

Science reveals things in a systematic way. If it works—and it does—and there is a God, you had better believe that God has provided it so that we can learn something without the lying assertions of priests and prelates. You would do better to study it rather than the empty phrases that you find in your supposed manual.

Yes, I fully agree with you that true science is actually in perfect harmony with the revelation of the creator of science—God.

True science? How do you know that science is true science and not false science. It is by testing, as we have already discussed. Certainly believing uncritically in ancient books that are scientifically utterly wrong cannot help, and it is not scientific to believe things that science disproves.

Do not be confused, dear Mike. Those you mentioned here historically and statistically were the most devoted opposers of the Scriptures. Read the history a little bit. Those amongst them which were not were the exceptions.

Well, you choose what to read and what not to, and what to believe and what not to, all on your personal whim. I have read, and written on my pages a great deal of history of the Church. It is the history of the Church because the people in it believed they were Christians. You now hope to salvage Christianity from history by disowning them all. It is a poor trick but one that is wonderfully effective when heard by gullible people. Let me remind you that Christ said, “Know the tree by its fruit”. It is an excellent criterion, and one which shows the Christian religion is a rotten tree.

Finally, let me repeat what you do not seem to get. If the primeval nothing is nothing but nothing, then God is nothing too. If God is nothing, then making something out of nothing makes no more sense because you suppose it is done by a God constituted of nothing than that it should just happen spontaneously. If something is to be made spontaneously, then one of the rules of science, the principle of parsimony, ensures that it does not have the assistance of other invented entities.

God is a “spirit” which is of course not “nothing”. All things made by God out of nothing by His command—his Word which is Christ—which is God himself in accordance with his report the Scriptures.

How much does it weigh, this “spirit” if it is not nothing? Now you tell me that God’s word is God Himself. What then is the difference bewteen God creating something and His word creating it? You are multiplying entities again, a habit that William of Ockham, 800 years ago told you you should not do, but you persist in doing it. You begin with nothing and then the universe is made out of it. This is done by inventing an infinite giant called God but God cannot do the trick immediately Himself. You have to let God create Himself first as His word, then His word creates everything out of nothing.

There is no advantage in explaining a spontaneous eruption of matter from nothing by inventing an abstract and unexplorable God to do it. It might as well happen on its own. But in fact, it might simply be an illusion.

What is then the “advantage” to put aside the information (Bible) and speculate out a totally absurd “hypothesis” i.e. nothing made itself everything by an “explosion”?

I repeat that, if it is absurd as you say that nothing made itself everything, it is no less absurd to believe it with an infinite giant invented to do the trick. Indeed, the invention of the infinitely powerful giant that does the impossible, is even more impossible.

Now these things are discussed on the pages that you said you were reading originally. I do not doubt that my explanations of these arcane matters might be inadequate. I am not a cosmologist or even a competent mathematician, but I see no point in inventing a giant to hold up the sky. It might be an adequate explanation for children, but it ought not to be for grown ups.

He is not “a giant” he is God. He is not “invented” he is revealed by Himself. That is not a “hypothesis”.

Well, he has not revealed Himself to me, even though He could do as the entity with all those infinite powers. I maintain that an almighty God would have found more convincing ways of revealing himself than the pig’s ear called the bible.

“When the scientist is sure of things then we know that there is a god!” Biblical scientists have already proven that there is no “god”. But there is God who is the Creator of laws, time , space, energy, matter and the Sustainer of them too. Non-biblical “scientists” BELIEVE that nothing (the lack of something) exploded and became everything. That is NOT valid science dear Mike. Just science falsely so called.

The scientist has no need of the hypothesis of God, as Laplace said, and it is not a clearly testable hypothesis, anyway. Tested against some of its supposed consequences, it fails miserably, but Christians will not accept any such tests as being valid.

I am not familiar with what Laplace said but I know that saying “hypothesis of God” shows that one does not know what he/she is talking about.

Come on. This will not do. “This is not argument, it is abuse”, as Monty Python said.

Anybody who calls a historical record “hypothesis” is surely confuses the meaning of terms. A historical report is not a “hypothesis” or “theory”. I do not know what Laplace said about it but if he said something like “God hypothesis” he surely did not know what he was talking about even if he was the great Laplace. The report says the Creator made the world, plant animals and man and then walked and talked with them.

You know, it is curious how often Christians are convinced that other people do not understand. They live in an utter fantasy world and talk about others not understanding.

Since they do not believe that nothing can become all things by itself. Well, think again about who lives in “fantasy world”.

Well, you have no explanation of how a disembodied being whatever His extent can do what you find impossible to believe otherwise. Science has explanations, as I have said, in quantum mechanics. You are merely saying, ’I believe’. That is sufficient for a Christian, but for the Christian it is not sufficient for a scientist to say that even when they have reasons and mechanisms. Your arguments, when they are not merely contradiction, amount to belief, and nothing more.

I repeat that history is a hypothesis. To avoid the pain of what we had to go through with science, let me be clear that something certain happened. History is whatever we can find out about it. It is therefore a hypothesis. Do you understand?

We are going in circles dear Mike. History is NOT theory. You can create a theory ABOUT history but that is NOT the history itself.

You are making your own definitions again. Some event happened but that is not history as you think. If no one saw it happen and it left no significant traces, then how does anyone know it happened at all. History is like science. It is whatever we discover. That is why it is a hypothesis.

You cannot get away from trying to be omniscient as if you were God Himself. You are not, and no one is. So what we have to do as human beings is look at evidence and form hypotheses about what happened. We are certainly going in circles, but it is because you choose your own definitions instead of the ones that obtain in practice. An almighty God might understand history in your sense, but for us it is a hypothesis. If you do not get it, let us leave this too. You are evidently determined not to understand simple concepts.

Could you tell me one example where it was “tested” and “miserably” failed?

Come on! Dr Horvath, you are wasting my time! I have pages and pages doing just this. Perhaps God has time to pander to your whims but I am only human, and haven’t the time. Try starting here.

I am quite familiar with those “arguments”. Evolutionists try to avoid public debates because anybody with sane mind sees how ridiculously illogical those theories are.

Are you the full shilling? What am I doing here but publicly debating them. You are just making unverifiable and untrue statements, and this one proves it. If you are familiar with the arguments and can refute them then do it.

Sure I can not verify that nothing can not explode. To prove that surely I would need something in the place of nothing trying to ignite it. The problem is: nothing does not have a place.

Erm, I thought that is what you believed, God being the igniter. Does a nothing God have a place?

The cosmologists of today who use the hypotheses and methods of science are groping their way towards an understanding of the beginning of the cosmos. You describe their ideas as that nothing exploded and became something, and that is not scientific. Yet you seem to believe yourself in a Creator God who somehow existed even though nothing did, thought deeply about science, created the universe in six days before there were days, and also did it out of nothing (ex nihilo), or so the theologians tell us.

He just created the laws of nature and the material world. Any “hypothesis” which leaves Him out is going to be a miserable failure.

Proof or even evidence, please. Read Laplace! He was a Christian too.

If Laplace was a Christian he did know what the Eternal One was. If he thought God was a “hypothesis” he was not a Christian a “Christian” maybe.

You contrive to make all Christians agree with you by counting as not-Christian any that do not. That is an extremely good reason why Christianity is fake. Jimmy Swaggart was such a sincere Christian…

Here we are again. A Christian is who follows Christ. A “Christian” is who says he does but he does not. You talk about Jimmy Swaggart. You have a serious problem of conceptual confusion Mike sorry.

Look, you are being utterly dishonest in this stupid clipping. Read what I said about Swaggart, instead of clipping it to suit yourself. I am sorry for you that you have to be so blatantly deceitful to seem to make a point. You are making it only to yourself, so it is self-deceit. I can see through it all right, but you live in your own fantasy of self-deception. If you have something to say in reply to me in future, have the decency to reply to what I said, not to what bits you choose to clip out. Half the time, I haven’t a clue what your clippings mean, they are so distorted.

…that he got people to send him millions of bucks for him to spend on loose women. Of course, when this was discovered, his true fans forgave him, and the others said he never was a Christian anyway. What a joke.

Now the cosmologists might be speculating beyond the boudaries of science but the necessities of it draw them, like gravity, back into it and they find each time they have found new clues that are testable by their cosmological consequences. Science speculates to discover testable truth. Theology just speculates.

Truth is absolute Mike in its completeness and in every detail. And it is real science too. I do not really talk about “theology” but rather biblical information which simply never fails and never did.

Oh, come on! You must be reading your bible with your brain closed. It is a skill that Christians are taught from an early age. The bible never fails because you Christians never test it. You are too scared to because you know it will not pass the test. It will not, either. So, you refuse to test it.

Now you use the typical evo strategy which is “ab ovo” a total nonsense. Assuming that anybody who disagrees is ignorant not able to understand those deep evolutionary thoughts. Sorry, dear Mike that is no reasonable at all. The Bible statements are tested all the time. Can you decide which one will be your next beat of heart? Can the govern-ment decide it? Can the “scientists” decide it? The Bible says everything has its time.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

Ecc 3:1

The Bible says God is life itself. That predicts that there are no “building blocks” of life. It is proven that there is no “spontaneous generation” or “abiogenesis”.

Telling the future is the test for the power of God according to the Scriptures. Prophecies are thoroughly tested and proven by thousands of years of history.

The only thing sensible in this is the citation from Ecclesiastes, a book written a few hundred years before Christ.

Wake up my friend. Christ is the Creator do not you know that? Then what do you KNOW please?

My God! Have you had a brain by-pass? How do you know that this Christ is the Creator? I know what is falsifiable. This is not. I might as well believe that Jimmy Swaggart is the Creator in your terms. In my terms I know he is not.

You say the proof of the bible is prophecy, but you have no proof that they were prophecies. The books were mainly written after the events. Those that were not were wishful thinking and are mainly demonstrably wrong, including Christ’s own prophecy of the kingdom within a generation.

Do not talk about math Mike if you do not know it. The same with the Bible. You show a very regrettable ignorance biblically.

Sorry, Gabor. This is incoherent. What asylum did you say you were in?

This is proof of Christian ignorance, not anything about science or evolution. You simply cannot understand plain English when it is the simplest and clearest English ever written, according to many English stylists.

Poor Coprenicus, Newton, Galileo Wherner Von Brown ! That they did not turn to those English stylists.

Incoherent too. They were talking, as I am, about the King James bible.

Nothing in the Jewish scriptures before the king Omri can be trusted. It does not agree with other evidence. Only a few anchor dates in the rest of it have been confirmed, and many of the kings of Judah and Israel are unknown outside the fiction that constitutes the Jewish scriptures. It seems fairly clear that Judah and Israel were not contemporary countries for the few hundred years that they were supposed to have existed, except perhaps briefly just before the fall of Samaria. There is not a jot of evidence for Solomon and little that is known about David. The escape from Egypt and conquest are utterly mythical. You believe the bible is inerrant despite a mass of evidence that it is full of errors. If that is not wilful ignorance, I would love to know what it is.

Tell me one EVIDENCE fro that “mass” please. The burden of proof is on you since you made that bold statement.

I must be talking to a fairground laughing man, or a computer programme like Eliza. My pages are full of this evidence. That is why they are there. Go away and read some of it.

You call a lot of ancient lies the truth, and then refuse to condemn madmen in the White House and running the Pentagon, that want to bomb the rest of the world into submission while pretending to be devout followers of the God of love. This is true Christianity at work. The Devil has fooled you into following him, because you all refuse to use the brain that you say yourselves God put in your head. Read some of the pages I have on my site, instead of giving me all this empty verbiage.

It is nothing but conjecture from beginning to end with nothing to test against. That is why Popper wanted to find a criterion of truth. Theology is not subject to it, and no one can know whether it is true or not. Skepticism demands that what cannot be proved should not be accepted.

You will believe a God that created things ex nihilo but cannot believe that they could have started out of nothing of their own accord. Your beliefs do not sound coherent, Gabor.

You are a reasoning mind, I love that. The statement, “Your beliefs do not sound coherent, Gabor.” Excellent Mike. Coherence means logically consistent. Nothing means the lack of something. The lack of something can not explode can it? If we assume it (guess) since we do not know our approach still can be logically consistent (coherent) or not. If “cosmologists” suppose something coming out of nothing they are not using sound reason. They are not “coherent” in their approach. I do not go with them so I am coherent.

The Creator is infinite. He did not start to be neither will He end to be. The Infinite One created the finite, the world. He was not created ( infinity does not have a beginning). There is no known way to prove (scientifically) that infinity does/does not exist. Even “sciencitsts” must either believe it or disbelieve it by “faith” if you wish.

Now we can say that all the above are “hypothethical” but our existence is not. So factually it is the proof for the “assumptions”.

Popper wasted his time. It is given in the Bible. The Creator speaks: “I am the way the truth and the life” (John 14:6 partial). The truth is fact and science.

What stops this from being the Devil speaking, not God? You do not say why you have such great confidence in this book. You just believe the men in black, the pastors and priests who have been lying for 2000 years. They wrote the New Testament, not God, and their predecessors in the Jerusalem temple wrote The Holy Bible Part I with its interminable laws supposed to have been abrogated by your God even though he said as clearly as possible that not one jot or tittle of them could pass from the law. You have all disobeyed your own God in this and in many other ways, but you all think you are saved.

Learn what the Word says Mike. Try to understand it instead of criticise it while you do not know it. Nobody who disobeyes is or will be saved. God’s laws are absolute and perfect. They shall not change. God is a righteous judge. All the people violated the law.Therefore all deserve death. Perfect justice will not even forgive the repentant violator. A murderer deserves punisment even if he feels sorry for what he did. But God is love. He is willing to forgive but only if it is possible meanwhile his justice is reserved. Now enter Christ.

For he had made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

2 Cor 5:21

You take an almighty God in your own view to be a dolt and a nincompoop, who breaks his own commandments. God made us sinners then makes us suffer for what He did, but sends His son to suffer in our stead, but records it only by people whom His son describes as thick as two short planks.

Look into your mirror Mike. Your ignorance biblically is truly astonishing and can only be compared to your boldness in your claims. But sadly it makes your blindness even thicker.

All contradiction, Gabor Python.

I do not believe in a God, but if I were inclined to do so, it would be impossible to believe in this Christian travesty of a God. That Christians do believe it is a judgement on them not on others.

That is why Christianity is dangerous and Devilish, and why professed Christians are ready to kill the very creations of God Himself, in your own view. Just where does God in the book that you call the Truth give Christians permission to kill other men who are also created by God, whether you like them or not? My recollection is that he commanded you and Bush alike, “Thou shalt not kill!”

Absolutely right Mike, my friend.

Instead of trying to disparage science, my friend, you ought to be wondering why God made Nature’s laws in such a way that science could reveal them, and seeing how you can apply them in a way that God might approve of—ie to show love not hatred.

I appreciate science Mike, I always did. If you had the impression that I did not accept my apologies please. But a trend which tries to exclude the Creator from creation is NOT science only falsely so called. The result of the work of pseudoscience—i.e. evolutionism or naturalism is confusion hatred and destruction.

We are back to God, the Idiot. If an Almighty God wanted to bragg about his powers so that a load of apes would build churches to worship Him, then He could have made it utterly clear in the laws that He allows us to discover. He has not done it. You believe it because you think an ancient book, that some priest or parson or perhaps your pater has made you read, is God’s word. God is not the beneficiary of this, but the Swaggarts, baptist ministers, popes and bishops, as well as a load of hangers on are the beneficiaries. They will remain the beneficiaries as long as there are so many people like you who would rather lobotomise yourself than see reason.

Your blasphemous mentioning of God’s name practically ends our discussion. Your evo gang spends billions of tax dollars to prove their unprovable theories. I do not want them to indoctrinate my children with that mental hogwash camouflaged as “science”. I want young people to learn critical thinking instead of spending their prescious time licking the primordial slime waiting for the “primitive cell” to come alive until the smart bio-boys hit the wall.

Incoherent again. What blasphemy do you mean? You have not even clipped it this time. If you want your children to think critically, you will have to teach them how to do it. You do the opposite. You believe! What is critical about just believing? I notice the pretence at science has evaporated. So, you could begin by stopping being a hypocrite. I agree that the correspondence should cease. You are intent on wilfully misubderstaning science, and offer nothing against it except contradiction, and repeating discredited ideas.

‘It is pointless arguing with you. You just change your tune even when your words are registered in black and white’.

Mike, you should train yourself in elementary logic. I did not say that scientists are not looking for laws to discover. That is precisely what you said What I said was in an accident i.e. a plane crush the investigators are NOT searching to find out that perhaps the applied laws were CHANGED. They are looking for finding problems in the applications. And I did not change “my tune”. Sorry Mike. You actually put the daring attribute to God’s name what I did not experienced from you before, neither are willing to accept your approach anymore if you think you can curse the Creator talking to me.

You said this: “They are not looking for unknown laws to discover but failures in quality or possible broken or weared out parts.” They will certainly begin by trying to eliminate the obvious such as worn out parts, but even if the crash is considered to be caused by a worn out part, that leads on to an investigation of why the part failed, and that can lead to new discoveries, or the extension of the boundaries of application of old ones. If no worn out parts are found, then the investigators have to look for other causes. They are not likely to have to do with the functioning of the aerofoil, because over a century of use has given scientists confidence in its applicability. In other words it has been so extensively tested that no one doubts its truth within the bounds we apply. It is those bounds where the discoveries are made. Naturally, after the century of constant testing in use, the boundaries are defined as unusual -- turbulent conditions, peculiar air pressure or other atmospheric conditions, and so on, but all of it is using hypothesis and testing to get to the truth of the matter. I repeat, that is the sense of falsifiability. I repeat that falsifiability does not mean false.

Now will you accept with me that falsifiability does not mean false but that it means testable? Then we can pass on from this debate. Science is successful and progresses because its hypotheses are testable, which means that a test can be applied that the hypothesis will either pass or fail. When we test an aerofil in calm conditions in air we do indeed find it gives lift, and we can apply scientific theory to explain it. But as you pointed out yourself, it does not work in a vacuum, and in turbulent conditions, it is much less predictable. These are the boundaries that make the law true. When we test it within the boundaries, it works and is therefore true, but outside the boundaries, it is falsified.

I do not know what the ‘daring attribute’ is, but I do not believe that there is a Creator, and even if there is, I do not believe that he cares a fig about what I say.

‘You have only the ideal in your head, but an aeronautical engineer must have a much more comprehensive hypothesis, and that is what he tests and corrects in his daily job’. An engineer does not look for discovering “new” laws. He may discover one but it is not his/her job,

Relax Mike. An engineer (aeronautical or other) does not base his work on “hypotheses”. Would you like to live in a building which was built in sctructural “hypothesis”? I hope not. Tests are showing facts. Facts are NOT speculations.

Here you are again. You seem unable to understand what someone is saying, and the reason is that you have a religious fixation. You seem to think that a hypothesis is necessarily false and necessarily not a fact. On one of my pages I try to explain for the simple brains of Christians and fifth grade kiddies what the scientific method is. I use the examples of finding a door apparently locked, and what anyone might do to open it. What they do is scientific. They make hypotheses and test them. No one is looking for new laws in doing this, but despite themselves by doing it they might find them. The engineer is the same. Here is a broken part. The question is, Did the part break and cause the crash or did the part break during the crash? The engineer has to make a hypothesis and test it. That is how he learns what seems most likely to have happened. How does the investigator know that something is a fact? As you say, by testing it. If it is not proven false by the test, then it is a fact. It is a fact because the test has not falsified it, but it had to be subject to the test for it to be a fact.

‘Your grip on science is only basic’.

I think that is mutual Mike but that is O.K. as long as understanding is there.

That is the difference between us, Gabor. I am trying to understand it, but you are wilfully trying to misunderstand it, to suit your preconceptions.

If being a Christian means nothing in practical honest terms before the fact, then what is the point of it at all? It is only to fool people!

A Christian is the one who follows Christ not the one who says he is one but does things what Christ would not do. Try to get that Mike.

That is very simple to get if we are talking about the stories about the man called Christ in the gospels. It counts out virtually everyone in the Christian churches from being a Christian. Try to get that, Gabor. The point is, and again I am repeating it, what is the point of being a Christian at all if all sorts of crooks and maniacs can freely be accepted as one. I say in my pages that Christians should not be trusted, but you say they should. How do I know whether a Christian should be trusted or not? When a man says, ‘I am a Christian. Trust me’. How do I know he is not one of the vast majority of Christians ‘falsely so-called’? In practice, Christianity is a scam.

The religious scholars that I know of accept that the Golden Rule comes in all the great religions and most are much older than Christianity. You are the one who needs to refresh your knowledge.

I talk about the Bible not about the opinions of “religious scholars”. Focus on that now please : Christianity started at creation. It would really be hard to talk about an “much older religion”.

Now you are inventing your own mythology. It is quite impossible to argue with people who make it up as they go along. The bible is an ancient and faulty book. No one even with the basic understanding of science could regard an ancient book of myths and tall tales as superior to modern discoveries. I said to you before, that you had better begin to realise that if we were created by God as you profess, then He made us with a brain, and it is the fruit of our using it that allows us to learn things. Like all Christians, you want us to pretend we have not got a brain, or that it is Satanic.

So the Buddhists and so on that accept it and live by it are Christians? You try to claim all good men as Christians whether they want to be or not.

Exactly! Anybody who is “good” is a Christian whether he knows it or not. The Bible says “…there is none good but one, that is, God…” (Mt 19:17 partial). That means if somebody is good (truly) then God is in him. Nobody who does not follow the voice of uncorrupted conscience in him or herself can be good. If the conscience is corrupt that man is a living dead.

You should read your bible more closely. Jesus was not saying what you say at all. He was saying that no one is good except God, because someone had said that Jesus was good, and he was denying that he was. Again you just make up your bible as you go along with your phony interpretations. As for making all good men Christians, I would say exactly the opposite. If men are good then they cannot be Christians because the Christians in history have an unprecedented record of wickedness. This is a fact, my friend.

The fruit of Christianity throughout history has been murder, robbery and all forms of wickedness.

See above Mike. You try to defeat a strawman. Murder, robbery wickedness in any form are those true Christianity teaches against with the uttermost rigor. Do not be like a broken record.

Broken records cannot be played. What I do is repeat the facts of history. You do not like them and seek through dishonestly defining ‘Christian’ in an absurd way to avoid the facts. I can read as well as most, and unlike many Christians, I have read some of their bible. You have still not given any definition of Christian that applies even to yourself. ‘Christian’ therefore means nothing.

Exceptions to well established hypotheses lead on to new knowledge. Initially these new hypotheses are speculation. They have to be tested, and some are rejected and others are accepted, and are then used.

So, what do you talk about? True Christianity an real science are in perfect harmony. The Bible says God created. False science says : nothing exploded. The contradictions are between the only true God and the totally falsely so called science.

One of the hypotheses rejected by science is that there is a God. It is not a falsifiable statement and so it is not scientific. You object to ‘nothing’ exploding but you do not object to something being made out of nothing. If we knew nothing else, both statements would be equally stupid, but having something made out of nothing is the more stupid because nothing called God makes the whole of creation out of nothing. Having nothing making everything out of nothing, is stupider than just having nothing explode into everything. Moreover science has the beginnings of an explanation of the explosion. You have no explanations for the effect of your double nothing.

‘v=ir is not universally true as you think. It is true under certain defined conditions’.

Just tell me ONE example of that please. I told you before that if conditions are not given nothing can be verified or disproven. This logic and math Mike. Study them.

You are a riot. You seem to have agreed with me in earlier letters that all laws have conditions, so why is Ohm’s law suddenly different. You ask for one example—superconductors. In fact, Ohm’s law really has only a narrow applicability—for conductors, mainly metals, but for everything else, and for particular conditions like high freqency, high voltages, inductive and capacitative circuits, Ohm’s law breaks down. So, you are the one who should study, but it is a lot easier just to blame everything on to God, and then no study is needed.

. The laws of anything are what we have discovered. Who is the “we” you are talking about? What are the “laws of anything” please?

So, I am talking with Eliza the computer programme.

automatically know them, unless you are a Christian Did somebody say that Mike? One thing is sure I did not.

How right you are. I said it. You are cutting the dialogue into little bits as is your wont. This is what I wrote to remind you, since you are too idle or too unsophisticated as a programme to bother looking at the older correspondence. “Now you are agreeing with me. We have been talking about how science discovers things, and suddenly you seem to have caught on. We do not automatically know them, unless you are a Christian, of course, when you know everything that is important automatically. The laws of anything are what we have discovered. We cannot be certain we know them fully.” There you are. Try to understand it as a whole.

‘I use the second type of argument. When people wilfully ignore evidence just to keep their own bigoted ideas, then they are fools. You wrote : “did you have a revelation?”

If you do not see the ad hominem aspect of that then you should get what “ad hominem” means.

I explained what it means to you.

‘Falsifiability means capable of being tested’.

If that is the case all things fit. The problem is : your definition is wrong. Falsifiability means : it is possible to prove that it is false. That is what qualifies as a perfect nonsense for something what we KNOW. (Falsify 1+1=2 you can not of course so according to Popper math is not science and so on. Get that Mike)

Well, of course it is possible to have systems where 1 + 1 does not equal 2 so, I do not get your point. If we are talking about a purely abstract mathematics, then you might well be right because 1 + 1 = 2 by definition in particular number systems. That is not science. If we are talking about discovering what is true in nature, then there could be a lot of answers to what 1 + 1 equals. The point is that the answer is not assumed but has to be found by hypothesis and experiment. In other words by seeking to falsify the hypothesis.

understanding Since they do not believe that nothing can about who lives in “fantasy world”.

What is that Mike? Do you cut my senstence leaving the statement out then mix it with yours? That is why I use different fonts to show who says what. So I would appreciate it if you would just leave my part whole and with tha original

Oh, dear! I said I would leave this, not realising it would get stupider. We shall have to draw this converstion to a close, Eliza. Each of the three paragraphs here were in different fonts. The first is a citation of yourself from an earlier mailing. The second is yourself replying to yourself. The third is the continuation of the reply in part 2, but in yet another font. I would be more usefully employed writing an Eliza program than feeling obliged to answer someone who talks like one.

Your arguments, when they are not merely contradiction, amount to belief, and nothing more.

Quantummechanics doe not have explanations. If you think it has that is your denominational faith against facts. Nothing is the lack of something. Nothing can come out of the lack of something. And that IS scienctific friend. Vacuum is NOT nothing, get that Mike. I have read a book on quantummchanics written by Heisenberg himself. Of course it was a “popularizing” work. I was told that the math of quantummech. ( like the general relativity theory) is understood by about 30 +- people in the world. Are you sure they understand it indeed? Who can prove that? Others who do not get it? ‘Your arguments, when they are not merely contradiction, amount to belief, and nothing more’. I proved my points. Show me where those “contradiction” are. Or where my “belief and nothing more” section is.

This section is a purler! You cite the same sentence twice in two different fonts, proving that you are not using them consistently. The first answer is itself in two different fonts, dividing between “general” and “relativity”, proving that you are not even using one font for one purpose, but two fonts for your own answer. The same is true of your second answer, the font changing between “those” and “contradiction”. The first answer does not seem to relate to the citation. The first answer illustrates that your denial in the second is false because it is merely a contradiction with no evidence for it.

Conrtradiction is just asserting the opposite with no evidence—quotations from ancient books do not count as evidence. Ancient books say many stupid things and some that are true. A quotation could be either unless there is something else to confirm it. You ask where your ‘belief and nothing more section’ is, but that is what you are arguing throughout. You believe the absurd ramblings of an ancient and mistaken book, and disdain the findings of modern science. You accept that a nothing being of infinite extent of nothingness can make nothing into something, but at the same time pooh-pooh the idea that nothing can be something. You believe it can as long as another nothing makes it into something.

The quantum mechanics of the big bang are not talking about a vacuum. They are talking about a singularity. That is the whole of the energy of the universe compressed into zero space. That is not a nothing such as any that you might be familiar with. Quantum mechanics might be hard to understand because they are dealing with unfamiliar behaviour, but, by applying it, the results that emerge work. That is they can be tested and pass the test. Attempts to falsify them fail.

Erm, I thought that is what you believed, God being the igniter. Does a nothing God have a place?

Mike, again would you be willing to perceive it? God IS. That is his information : He did not start to be neither is He has na end. Infinite in existence. He is also the Creator of all things which STARTED to be (finite). Your god maybe the “nothing” what again you try to shift on my side. You write “nothing God”. What did you mean? I did not say anything like that.

How do you know that God is? Is it just because someone told you, or have you found it out for yourself? If this latter, then tell us how to do it, because the greatest minds in history have never yet been able to prove that God exists. ‘God exists,’ is not a statement capable of being tested. It is easy to understand why. Because He does not exist. That is why Christians have to believe that He exists. It is equally impossible to prove that fairies exist or Santa Claus. YOU are the one who keeps saying that nothing cannot explode. I keep telling you that a God who is also nothing cannot make it any more likely to explode. Either it explodes without the God or it does not explode. The evidence we have is that it exploded out of nothing. If it was nothing then God was part of it and so He was also nothing. That is why it is impossible to prove He exists. Nothing means that only nothing exists.

If you have something to say in reply to me in future, have the decency to reply to what I said, not to what bits you choose to clip out. Half the time, I haven’t a clue what your clippings mean, they are so distorted.

You are amazing Mike. The ranting above applies to you approach word by word. Thank you. If you do not have “a clue” what my “clipping mean” then send them back without cutting and mixing them up for you.

Hear this, Gabor. You are the one who does it not me. I try to answer the almost incoherent snippets that you turn my sentences into, and then you object that I am snipping and clipping. You are not the full shilling, as I said before.

‘My God!’

Whom are you talking about? Have you got a God? Tell me about Him please.

This is a well know expletive of exasperation. My God, if I am forced to identify one is Nature. That is truly wonderful and I can see it, hear it, smell it and use all of my senses on it. It is a real God. Yours is imaginary.

Sorry, Gabor. This is incoherent. What asylum did you say you were in?

You do not use “ad hominem” tools as you evo camrades Mike do you?

I explained ‘ad hominem’ to you, Gabor. You have not read it or understood it again, have you? It is not ‘ad hominem’ to conclude from what someone says that they are mad. That is what I am doing.

Incoherent too. They were talking, as I am, about the King James bible.

Mike, my native language is Hungarian—in harmony with the King James bible and I understand my language. I do not need “stylists” to explain what a sentence means.

I said before that I thought from your name that you were Hungarian. The stylists nevertheless say what they do. The KJV of the bible is often cited partly because it is the bible, of course, but also because that version is in particularly simple and expressive English. As for explaining it, I think you need exactly what you claim you do not need, because your interpretations are often absurd. The incident of Jesus rebuking the man who called him good is a case in point. Jesus was refuting the idea that he was the same as his father, the decision of the later church, plainly not Jesus’s.

You are intent on wilfully misubderstaning science, and offer nothing against it except contradiction, and repeating discredited ideas.

Now you seem to be confidently able to read somebody else’s mind. Hard job Mike. You BELIEVE thare is no infinity because the existence of it can not be tested. You BELIEVE nothing can explode. And you think you are scienctific. Wake up Mike.

What I do is interpret what you are saying, professor. When you persist in refusing to understand something simple, I am justified in deducing that you are doing it on purpose. When you have an axe to grind that explains your wilful behaviour then I am even more convinvced. I do not believe there is no infinity, I believe it is a mathematical construct like the square root of -1. It might correspond with reality, but whether it exists in reality or not it is useful. The concept of God has no similar use, and the idea that God is infinity is simply childish. Is God the square root of -1? It sounds very much like slotting God into the as yet not fully comprehended parts of science, a pittiful cop out.

Hope you can snap out of it,

So do I Mike.

I hope I remain sane.

Here is my concise set of reasons:

* God exists—that is why anything exists.

* He is omnipotent—that is He can be limited/restricted by Himself only.

* Anybody/anything that goes against Him shall fail. (False science etc.)

* His word is the law. (Physical and moral.)

* Doubting in His existence is makes us fools.

* He did not start to exist i.e. was not created. The cause and effect principle is created and maintained by Him together with all the other laws. Therefore He Is the ruler over all the laws. The laws do not rule over Him. (See: calming of the sea or Christ ascending to heaven—overruling gravity—also all the “miracles")

* He gave us free will, what he never takes back. That is, we may disbelieve in His existence he will not force anybody to believe in Him. This is the reason why any organization church etc. forcing man’s constience is antibiblical.

* Yet whether we belive in Him or recject Him will deside our final destiny. Taht is all for a briefing dear friend. Think about it.

I repeat the question from my last mailing. Why do you believe all this nonsense? What is the basis for it? How are you certain it is true? What tests of it are there? If your belief in all of this is arbitrary, then should I believe in fairies, Santa Claus, aliens from space, vampires, werewolves, witches, magic? Any of these can be believed and have been. You want us to believe it all again?

You are not living in Vlad’s Transylvania now, Gabor. The modern world allows us a better understanding, but you refuse to hear it.

Here are a few responses to your latest mails:

1.)I appreciate contemporary applied sciences.

2.)I do not respect philosophies camouflaged as science.

3.)God is the Creator and sustainer of all things.

4.)His creative activity means He, the eternally existing One (never started to be never ends to be) made all finite things (which started to be and will end to be)

5.) Anybody who talks derisively about Him draws guilt on him/herself.

6.) He is infinite in power, therefore can be limited by himself only.

7.) He created us and put into our brain an understanding of all the above things and more. That is I hope is clear. Anybody can chose to accept or reject it and receive the result of his/her decision.

I should not need to say that it is not clear except to confirm what I have been saying. You make these outlandish assertions (3 - 7 above) about something that you can know nothing about. You keep repeating them when I ask you for any evidence that they are true. You never give me any because you cannot. There is none. You just believe it for no good reason. Your only ‘evidence’ is an ancient book, the authors of which you know nothing about and might have been charlatans, and probably were. You began this correspondence questioning the Popperan criterion of how we can know something, the criterion of what is scientific. You do not like it because it shows unequivocally that Christian belief cannot be scientific. Scientifically it is false belief because it has no basis that can be confirmed.

You sound interested enough in science that you could benefit from studying it, but you can obviously get nowhere as long as you continue to belief in fairy tales that are unscientific.

I love real science Mike. However I hate lies that is why I despise the “theory of evolution” which is just a destructive deception. Well, while I disagree with Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle I still like the fact that he did not consider the evo theories to be scientific ones. Use reason Mike instead of derising your straw-man idea of christianity. Do not talk about something of what you do not have even preliminary knowledge. Put aside preconcieved ideas friend.

You hate real science, and you love fantasy written by ancient crooks. I have tried to go into scientific method with you and to show you how science works, but you love it so little that you ignore it all. Evidence is needed for discovery not assertions. You only have assertions and you prove it once again by giving me more of them. Popper for example did at one stage think that evolution did not meet his criterion, but later accepted that it did. Science is based on examining consequences. That is what evolutionary scientists do, and so do historians, but you keep repeating otherwise showing who is the cracked record. A cracked record might play but a broken one is not merely cracked.

Christianity is nothing except preconceived ideas. Do me a favour, Gabor, and apply to yourself what you want to apply to others.

My “outlandish assertions” are based on straight logic: 1.)There is creation—therefore there is a Creator.

You destroy this assumption immediately that you accept that the Creator is not created Himself. We have been through all this before. If you can believe that a Creator does not need creating then there is no logical reason why you need a creator for anything.

2.) Finite can not create infinite. Infinite can create finite.

This is plain baloney. ‘Infinite’ can create nothing and nor can ‘finite’. These are adjectives not nouns. If I accept your statement that infinity can create finite things as a hypothesis, then you have to show how it can be done. Will infinity cut itself into pieces and thus yield finite creation? It does not work. Think about it!

3.) Laws can not “evolve”. They had to be there. There is no possibility even to hypothetise “evolving” laws. Without assuming existing laws “scientists” can not even make theories about “how” or “why” “evolution” “happenned”.

So far as I am aware, no one says that the laws of this universe evolve. What evolves is our understanding of them, unless it is your understanding of them when it cannot evolve. You have a God’s eye view of law in the universe, but you cannot seem to get that ordinary men do not have a God’s eye view.

4.) Since we are created by an infinitely intelligent/wise Creator it is evident that He wants us to know Him. Therefore He tells us about himself and his creation. See the Bible, which itself a self proving documentary set of information i.e. fulfilled predictions (prophecies) biological, physical facts revealed : humans have vege- tarian system, earth is a sphere hanged upon “nothing” (gravity forces) and many many more written thou- sands of years before “science” even had any guess about them.

Your first sentence begins with an assumption and deduces another one from it. So we now have two assumptions. That is your miraculous revelation. What is miraculous is that anyone believes it in the modern world. You then assume that this assumed Creator, whom you assume wants to know what he created, does it by writing books full of errors and fantasy—far from self-proving it is self-disproving. It begins by telling us that we had night and day before we even had a firmament. The earth was waste and void but it had waters… and so on and so on, deceit after deceit, lie after lie from beginning to end where Jesus declares that he will come quickly but has not come even 2000 years later. There is nothing preconceived about this. It is there in clear lies in black ink on white paper, plainly shouting out that it is false.

You say 1+1 can be other than 2. You say you are on the side of science. If not knowing something is what you mean then I do not object.

In your own holy book, one man and one woman added together to become two million Jews escaping from Egypt a few generations later. I suppose that does not count. What then happens when on Star Trek the engineer Scottie adds matter to anti-matter? They both disappear in a puff of energy. I suggest you read some science instead of spouting about it from a position of religious ignorance.

B.T.W. A “broken record” can be played with the problem that it will continue to jump the track at the crack and repeat the same thing over and over again. Evidently it does not mean a “crushed” record. It is just an expression quite widely used as far as I know.

I do not mind whether Christians regard themselves as cracked pots or cracked records. They are no more intelligent than either, and that cannot have been God’s intention when he gave them brains. Unfortunately for God, He did not realise how His believers would think the brain He gave them was Satanic, and so would ignore it, thus submitting themselves to Satan contrary to God’s intention. Now no amount of persuasion will let them accept anything other than that ignorance is bliss.

The funny thing is that all the fool ones think that all the sane ones are fool ones. ( I am very anxious now not to use an adjactive instead of a noun with my Hungarian English lameness in grammar.) The above statement points to a problem which is practically exludes the possibility of relevant discussion or reasoning together (dialogue if you wish) to eliminate disagreement. So do you think Infinity has a beginning or ending? Instead of starting to put Christianity or the Bible down just give a straight yes or no answer, will you?

Do you want to improve your English or keep it forever as a cover for your bad arguments? “All the foolish ones think all the sane ones are the foolish ones.” This is undeniable, but what is important is whether you are among the foolish ones or the sane ones. People who build their lives on ancient mythology while wilfully ignoring modern discoveries are foolish and insane, in my view, but not in yours. If you were to take your Christian God seriously, you would own nothing because he thought any wealth was Satanic, and to enter the kingdom of God you had to be poor. There are few Christians indeed who read this in their ancient book of myths. It does not suit them today. Christianity is purely subjective.

Finally, I am not in the situation of having to accept anything of your assumptions, so do not have to answer anything that necessitates them. Infinity is a mathematical construct. If it exists in reality then it has no beginning and has no end in space, and equally, if eternity exists, it too has no beginning and no end in time. Not only do you assume that these things exist, which is not terrible in itself, but you assume that they are attributes of your imaginary God, which you also assume exists in reality with no better authority. You then have your infinite God cutting off bits of infinity here and there to make finite things, but that is a trick that I cannot conceive of.

I have said before that when you see a straight road or railtrack running to the horizon, it seems to us as if it disappears at a point on the horizon. Obviously it does not. A similar illusion might explain other more complicated appearances, but for you they must be what the seem and nothing else. Do not get on that train or ride your car along that road or you will just disappear—according to you!

I do not “cover” my bad arguments with anything. If you think they are not good prove it. But do not deride the Bible or Christianity thinking that by doing it you refute my logic.

I have spent a lot of my time in the last few weeks answering your ’logic’. You say you are an engineer, but all I get is a load of assertions with little or no backing of evidence or logic in return. Here are your latest lot, which I have no intention of getting into. I can only conclude that you have finished any pretence of argument and have returned to what you understand—compulsory statements. You are the weakest link, Gabor. Goodbye.

Good by, according to your wish of course. With your atheistic “logic” you may still follow “Pascal’s wager”. Do it and think it through for yourself. Whatsoever I wrote was for you not against you. Sleep well, but try to avoid a very unpleasant awekening.

Yes. I enjoyed the earlier parts of our discussion, when you were at least arguing to some degree and not just asserting everything, but ultimately Christian apologetics always end up with bald unjustified statements because that is all Christianity is. As for sleeping well, I usually do, except when I’ve stayed on the computer too late at night, and my brain is still buzzing with thoughts and ideas. Programming is the worst for this, not polemics. Even then, I sleep well once I get to sleep. It is just hard to stop the old brain ticking over on such occasions. It is a problem that Christians do not have, I know.

Finally, are you seriously suggesting that an almighty and omniscient God will be taken in by someone persuaded to believe merely on the basis of Pascal’s wager. I am to believe, not out of sincerity, but because it is the safe and selfish thing to do. Plainly, any omniscient God knows of my insincerity and will reject my application. You show, Gabor, that you take your almighty to be an idiot. If you were to prove to have been right, and we awake into a new life after death, my conviction is that few indeed of you Christians will find it a pleasant awakening. That is when your God will alert you to your smug self-deceptioons, and will give you a master class in such things that He tried to persuade you were necessary for salvation, but all of which you ignore. In your last tedious list of beliefs, you included wealth. Yet, nothwithstanding what your priest, or minister says, or saint Paul or anyone else, the man you take to be God said himself several times as clearly as possible that it is impossible to be accepted in heaven and to be rich. Mt 19:23-24 could not be clearer to anyone except those who are determined not to see. Yet you are all convinced you will enter the kingdom of God. If I were God, I would automatically exclude anyone so presumptious, but I am not, and you tell me the Christian God likes you all to be like that. You had better pray that you are right, and that God is an idiot.

Comment from Carlos

Carlos G adds this from his own experience

Thanks for your kind letter, and your English is good—if not perfect, it is perfectly understandable. The main use of this sort of correspondence is to put it on the web for others to read. Some, though, like Gabor, reply in bits and it makes it hard to seem coherent. Anyway, your words from your own experience are interesting, and perhaps I shall add your note to the correspondence.

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