Re: Happy Resurrection Myth Weekend

For example, how many times must one observe the sun rising to "know"
the sun will rise tommorrow?

The sun doesn't rise. It's amazing how many people still have a
geocentric perspective.

<laughs>

We're dumbing it down for the anti-science folks.

"To sci" is "to know" -- it is the root of the word. Jim's comment is
essentially an attack on science. *Some* religious people hate science
(the search for "knowing") because they feel their dearest beliefs are
threated by the falsification method science uses. When a physical
theory is able to be tested, and is tested (over and over and over
again), it has the possibility of becoming a physical /Law/. (There
are some physical theories that cannot be practically tested.)

For example, the Second Law was declared a Law because *no exceptions*
have been found. "No observed exceptions" is one specification for
what we define as "knowing." IOW, my dumbed down arguments were
intended to give intuitive empirical appeal to people who do not
understand probability and scientific method.

But scientists do not dogmatically cling to the laws, as they are
sometimes accused of doing. For example:

"These [talking about preceding paragraph] are all examples of
irreversible processes, that is, processes that occur naturally in only
one direction. None of these processes occur in the opposite temporal
order; if they did, they would violate the second law of
thermodynamics.[1] That is, the one-way nature of thermodynamic
processes in fact establishes a direction of time.[2] You may have
witnessed the humor of an action film running in reverse, which
demonstrates the improbable order of events in a time-reversed world."
--Raymond Serway, /Physics for Scientists and Engineers, with Modern
Physics/, 3rd ed, 1990, p.588

That sounds rather absolute -- rather dogmatic. Until you read
footnote 1:

"1 To be more precise, we should say that the set of events in the
time-reversed sense is highly improbable. From this viewpoint, events
occur with a vastly higher probability in one direction than in the
opposite direction."

The author did not claim an absolute law. The Law is a practical and
probabilistic one -- which means in qualitive terms that it can be
highly trusted in its predictive and analytical uses. It is highly
improbable that the sun won't "rise" tommorrow for my reference frame.
I don't know what asteroid you're riding on. (Some jackass can chime
in now about how the earth is not a true intertial frame.)

We can make another probabilistic statement about dying and
resurrection. Resurrection based on observed (empirical) evidence
suggests it is vanishing as a probable event (that is why loved ones
get so understandably upset). So people like myself just don't bother
with it for that reason. I don't require absolute proof to say "know,"
because that is not what "know" means.

Anti-science people want to smear together the belief in improbable
events, with belief in highly probably events/laws. That way, they can
say "it is *all* just belief, your beliefs are no better than mine."
Of course, that is silly: it denies *any* sense of proportion and
evidence. It is senseless.

.

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