I agree that they've achieved something worthy of respect, as, I think, would most people who know anything about them, which is why I name drop them when I'm getting too strong of the "all religious belief is the result of ignorant unintelligent nutcases" vibe.

1) Of course I believe it to be more valid. However my original point was advocating for courtesy to be extended to those who share my beliefs, rather than actually advocating for my position. Meta-advocation if you want to call it that. I thought it was unlikely that conversation on the same subject would be so…

I didn't expect it to persuade you. My question was "how would you act in a conversation with ..." . So...if you ever do that, please film it, and post it somewhere I can watch. Watching people getting their intellectual faces punched in never ceases to amuse me. I suspect all of them would be rather nice about it…

I wouldn't encourage anyone to be silent on important questions. But I strongly encourage them to be respectful unless they're really willing to go toe to toe with someone who is trained in formal reasoning and has a rigorous background in the relevant subjects. That was really the only point I wanted to make with my…

I'm glad you recognize Dawkin's favorite tautological argument for the bald-faced nonsense it is. The primary question has to do with causal closure, and whether or not physical things can happen with a non-physical cause. How reasonable this is depends on your interpretation of quantum mechanics and your response to…

Check out my reply to him :)

- I should have been more clear. It wasn't the derision so much as the way it was being expressed that made it clear that we had a bunch of armchair atheists who are more used to the echo chamber of the Internet than being challenged on theological issues by intellectual equals. I can't say I blame them for not taking…

The comment section of io9 is not the place to try and explain an entire theological worldview, but the amount of uncontained derision from my fellow commenters, and barely contained derision in the article itself, makes me think that many of you haven't really spent any time thinking seriously about philosophical and…

As a rather religious man myself: +1

Thank you so much.

That's a real shame, regarding Brooks, because Sword is indisputably his worst novel (at least within the Shannara/Word&Void universe). The rest of the original quartet were quite solid, and I adored the Voyage trilogy, the Word & Void trilogy, and the Genesis trilogy. Scions was also a solid quartet, and the High…

I don't recall that Brooks steered clear of sex entirely, and I'd say he even went farther than the "one foot on the bed" sort of thing you seem to be thinking of. On the other hand when it showed up, it was also more like high-PG-13/low-R sorts of material (by today's standards) than erotic fiction, so maybe we're…

Obvious point is obvious: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/09/the-bible-refers-to-jesus-wife-too/262545/

I don't understand the point of your comment.

Qualitatively speaking, this ought to make sense. The uncertainty principle has more to do with the quantization itself (with certain physical systems you can't ACTUALLY take h->0 in the limit definition of the derivative), and the wave-nature of matter (momentum is related to wave number, but localizing a particle…

Reading the abstract confirmed what I initially suspected. The Uncertainty Principle stands. What has been overturned is a stringent version of the "Observer Effect" which is often lumped together with the Uncertainty Principle as an explanation for it. This is mostly just an instance of hack reporters.

The Uncertainty Principle stands. What has been overturned is a stringent version of the "Observer Effect" which is often lumped together with the Uncertainty Principle as an explanation for it. This is mostly just an instance of hack reporters.

From the abstract of the journal: 'While there is a rigorously proven relationship about uncertainties intrinsic to any quantum system, often referred to as "Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle," Heisenberg originally formulated his ideas in terms of a relationship between the precision of a measurement and the…

NO. Unless I have terrible reading comprehension, basically, what's going on here is that science reporters are confusing the Observer Effect (which Heisenberg offered as a potential explanation for the Uncertainty Principle) with the Uncertainty Principle itself. The inequality Sigma-x * Sigma-p ≥ (h-bar / 2) remains…

Yes. Tolkien was one of the most brilliant and naturally talented scholars of human language to ever live.