littleyellowbirdie

All you've got to do to prove there's no God is come up with a scientifically verifiable explanation for our conscious existence in this universe that excludes the possibility that no conscious entity actively brought about what we perceive as existence.

Sciencism was something I made up on the spot to express an idea of using science as an all-inclusive philosophy to exclude other reasoning. If scientism is an existing term for the same idea then thanks for the info. I think @ron obvious is right that it would be great to have a pure philosophy thread. Getting back to the social, to me, religion is far more important in the social, cultural, and philosophical elements regarding human behaviour than what it may or may not have to say about the existence of an all-encompassing consciousness that was responsible for our existence. Fundamentally, if a group is getting so aggressively hostile to all religion that you would seek to oppress expression of religion simply for objection to the idea that the idea of a conscious entity may have been involved in our creation, , as some self-proclaimed atheists clearly are, then it's starting to display the sort of toxic behaviour that religions are often criticised for; it's going beyond secularism into what becomes ideologically-based oppression in its own right.

Atheism makes a specific unfalsiable claim: 'no conscious entity was responsible for the creation of us and our universe'. Would you agree or disagree with that statement?

Bearded guys on clouds are just an expression of the idea. In a way, it does exactly what you favour doing with Hitchen's razor, namely using it as a tool to put the stuff you can't explain in a box and not worry about it. When you get down to it, all religions really come down to the philosophical ideas of people about building societies and how to behave. 'God' is just a way of putting in a box all the unexplainable to focus on what they think they have explained.

It's not a twist. Science can't exist without unsubstantiated claims. Every new model in science is an unsubstantiated claim until it has been substantiated. You can't use it or apply it without substantiating it in a scientific context, but that doesn't amount to dismissing the idea itself, only dismissing it as an idea to use within the context of existing scientific models as 'true'. Dark matter is a recognised scientific term for something that has been inferred must be there but to this date hasn't been observed. The scientific conclusion of that is either we just can't see it or there's something fundamentally wrong/incomplete with our models. People continue to search for dark matter to vindicate scientific models Either way, the anomaly that it seeks to resolve can't and isn't dismissed as something to expend considerable thought on. Hitchen's razor would dictate to simply forget about Dark Matter and carry on regardless, killing a whole area of legitimate, and possibly important, scientific inquiry.

I'd suggest that if you're presenting Hitchen's razor as the ultimate definitive approach to reasoning, then the onus of evidence is on you to show that's correct.

Science is a subset of philosophy. There are assumptions in the scientific method itself that we are required to make for the scientific model to work. Science is good, functional, and useful. I love science; that's why I studied it at uni. Hitchen's razor takes the principles of science of working with what you can establish scientifically as a complete philosophy, which maybe could be regarded as sciencism.

Maybe people should club together to buy you a guide on how not to be so obnoxious. The muddying of the definitions of agnosticism and atheism is fundamentally disingenuous in my view and actually seeks to coopt agnosticism as an anti-religious idea for the benefit of atheists who want to pick a fight with religion like yourself.

I think there's a big difference between using Hitchen's razor to put aside what we don't know and using Hitchen's razor to both pretend there's nothing to know and also discourage people from wondering about what we know simply because of an antipathy to organised religion. In many respects also, the toxic parts of religion have nothing to do with the theistic elements of religion and more how it as an idea, can be corrupted as a political tool to manipulate people to your bidding. Communism, fascism, capitalism, all pretend to know all the answers by taking ideas that do work to some extend and then reaching beyond that to fill in the gaps to reject any other ideass.

Your Lack of belief is agnosticism; atheism is a rejection of an idea, but goes beyond reflection of simply monotheism, but also polytheism and also non-theistic metaphysical ideas like Buddhism.

Marketing ploy: £45 for a women's season ticket gets you a women's season ticket and priority on the men's season ticket waiting list; a men's season ticket includes a free women's season ticket.

I'll have a read, although I wouldn't presume as to which of them was closer to the truth and probably wouldn't do so even when I have had a good look at what Seth has to say. Penrose is a bit unfashionable thanks to the AI crowd being somewhat offended by the idea that Penrose basically thinks creating genuine AI computers purely on a rules base isn't possible. Scientists are humans too with egos and the fashions in the scientific community as new areas of science expand don't necessarily reflect what's settled on as being right in the end. Newton and de Broglie went head to head with their respective particle v wave approaches to light, Newton basically won out through bullying de Broglie with his stellar reputation and pretty much leaving science believing light was particles and that was that for many many years; then along came Einstein years later showing they both had elements of the truth contained in their respective models. I suspect the field is far too young though to really have an inkling of where the truth really is. In making a call this early, that in itself is a bit of a leap of faith. Looking for definitive answers in what they're talking about is completely missing the point though. It's the further questions raised that should remind everyone to have a bit of humility.

Sir Roger Penrose. Mathematician with a nobel laureate in physics, collaborated with Stephen Hawking, IQ in excess of 180. All I would say is his theory is that consciousness itself is non-computational. He's an agnostic.

That particular article was posted on April 1st, and the 'confirmed' was the April fools joke, but the thinking is genuine; the scientific community genuinely believes it's about a 50/50 chance that what we experience actually is a simulation. This from Scientific American on the subject, but not on April 1st. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/

It's not complicated. Atheism definitively rules out anything if we can't comprehend it. We don't understand our own consciousness, but there's some really interesting thinking out there on the subject as to how the lumps of meat that are our bodies are the seat of an awareness operating at a quantum level. Literally we look at things and it changes the behaviour of what we're looking at. It's bonkers. It's absolutely wondrous. Have a read up on the work of sir Roger Penrose (nobel Laureate in Physics), and Stephen Hameroff regarding quantum state reductions in microtubules in the brain, which they postulate is actually where consciousness happens. When we're unconscious under anaesthetic, the functions in these parts of the brain are the bits that are completely shut down.If you've ever been under anaesthetic you'll know you're completely unaware and it's like no time has passed when you come about. And like that article said, which although it was a little tongue in cheek suggesting simulation theory is confirmed, all the arguments in it regarding c being fitting as an artifact of the universe's processing limits, which totally makes sense since it's fixed relative to the frame of reference of the observer and can then be viewed as something kind of analogous to the maximum frame rate in a computer game. To be honest, atheists who can look at that and say 'nah, I'm positive there's absoutely nothing going on beyond what's in the realm of our perception' display a degree of arrogance, dullness, materialism, lack of curiosity and lack of imagination that astounds me. In the early 20th century, there was a view that physics was done and there was nothing more to learn. Then Einstein came along and turned everything upside down with whole new frontiers of understanding to explore. Now we know a lot more and are also aware of vast areas where we have a lot to learn. Personally I'll stick to the view on it I've had the last 20 or so years: I'll find out when I'm dead, unless the atheists are actually correct, in which case I won't. And if people want to believe with a conviction so close to religious that they practically become missionaries preaching for a futile campaign to try and suppress expressions of faith and that there's nothing more to know or even be interested in, then live and let live, but not for me thanks.

To be honest, it seems the numbers are such that it would be worth playing catch up on the face of it? It's only going to grow in the future

Even if it was it, would have been immediately knocked off the top spot by the avoidance of the legitimate question with this cheeky bit of deflection. 😉

Why is our women's team competing at such a low level relative to the men's team? It seems weird to have such a big disparity.

These all sound like really good questions for an interview with the women's team manager.

I'm guessing my estimate is upper limit, but I think a club of our stature would be facing a lot of criticism if we were paying the women as full-time professional footballers as little as a hundred quid a game, which wouldn't even make the living wage. Perhaps @Essex Canary can enlighten us on the total wage bill for the women, seeing as he seems to have a pretty keen interest in the club's accounts? Does the club separate men and women's player salaries in the accounts?

Both the EU and US are pondering new sanctions on Iran after the attempted attack on Israel. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/16/us-and-eu-consider-new-sanctions-against-iran-after-air-attack-on-israel Yet again, those states who would claim to be on the side of the Palestinians in their outright rejection of Israel's right to exist prove a liability to the Palestinians for their uncompromising approach.

I just did a bit of digging on numbers. Apparently, an average women's football salary is 50,000 a year. Our first team squad is 25 players, which is 1.25 million quid a year on salaries. At £45, 27,000 season tickets would be £1,215,000, so it seems that they're aiming to build the women's games popularity to get it to break even on salaries, which seems fair enough given the infrastructure is taken care of by the men's game. I think it might be good for football overall if women's football became more popular. From what I've seen, the football's entertaining, and if some attention switches away from the men's game, maybe the financial crisis that would trigger would start bringing some sanity to the economics of the men's game.

Men and women alike can get a season ticket for the women's game if they want. The price is just a relection of the different economics of the women's game.. We're a long way from filling Carrow Road for women's fixtures, but there's no reason interest can't go up to that level, so why not make it relatively cheap to go in a bid to achieve that? It's supply and demand. What's the wage bill of the female players and what's the wage bill of the male players?

Thinking about it, which is the worst sort of profiling anyway? Assuming an event was Islam related because a lot of seemingly random people got stabbed as in a lot of similar terror-related events we see reported, or assuming it wasn't Islam related because the perpetrator appeared to have an interest in sport and didn't have a big hooky nose and a turban? As an aside, I read an interesting old article in the Guardian a little while back about a guy who'd been in the BNP when he was younger finishing up converting to Islam. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/24/religion.uk

That was a time when we no longer had Idah, Barnes doesn't really hack it without Sargent, Hooijdonk has shown since he's not really up to it yet, and Rowe was also injured; in hindsight he had no choices other than to try and make the best of it if he was to protect Sargent, which now looks more and more a good idea seeing as a healthy Sargent has been a large part of why we're now increasingly secure in the playoffs. To put it another way, a seemingly bizarre decision to protect a not fully fit sargent that lost us a couple of points that game that did turn out to have good reasons, may well have been a foundation for having picked up so many points now. Sounds like good management to me. But still obsessing over the 'should we sack the manager' question at a critical point in the season where we're unexpectedly in with a viable chance of promotion and it really is only down to whether our current manager and players can pull it off underlines how absurd this obsession with sacking managers is. Is it just general boredom?