Diamondeye wrote:
Corolinth wrote:
It is the height of folly to postulate that because Lenas is personally unable to prove the age of the universe, that it must necessarily be an appeal to authority to assert any such age. It is no more an appeal to authority than reading an email when one is personally unable to demonstrate the routing path that it took to reach you.
While that's quite true, the issue came up in response to people saying they "know" certain things. It was established long ago that it's perfectly acceptable in this forum to drag things off into the philosophical "but you don't KNOW that's true!" realm of philosophical masturbation when someone claims to just "know" something based on their personal certainty. Monty used to get bombarded with that all the time, although he was not the only one; quite a lot of threads fell victim to it.
Therefore, it's really not problematic that Amanar went off into that territory as well. You're right about the appeal to authority, but by the same token, people are claiming they "know" stuff with the same casual "I feel like it must be true therefore it is" that Monty used to get dogpiled for, and they're avoiding the same treatment becuase their arguments are more popular.
I'm not trying to derail this thread into philosophical masturbation. I'm not suggesting that we don't "know" anything. I'm just pointing out that the evidence for the age of the universe and a bunch of other scientific claims is the
same kind of evidence many religious people use for their belief in God. There's nothing wrong with an appeal to authority in any of these instances. I trust the authority of scientists and those who have studied the sciences extensively about the nature of the universe, and many religious people trust the authority of the Bible or the Pope or other religious experts/leaders on the true nature of God and the universe.
I just think it's wrong to dismiss the religion and the Bible out of hand. It's evidence just like anything else. If you don't find it compelling, so be it. But it's not fiction.
On another note, many of you don't seem to grasp how little we understand about physics and the nature of the universe. We have two main theories in physics that are incredibly well researched and supported by observational evidence, and they explain 99% of what we see in the universe. Yet they are
fundamentally incompatible with each other. One of them is necessarily wrong. How's that any different than all these Biblical inconsistencies?
And then the most popular resolution to this conflict is String Theory, which is not falsifiable and shows no possibility of evidence being able to support it in the near future. Physicists must simply have faith in it as a neat, beautiful explanation of why things are the way they are. It's eerily similar to religion.