This had nothing to do with race. Shame on you.

The thing that really irks me about this case is how it became "racially motivated" because of the guys last name. Media saw "Zimmerman" and assumed White before they even saw his picture. This guy is in my opinion is less White than Obama. Obama was raised by his White mother and grandparents; Zimmerman by…

Torchwood is garbage, and nobody should ever watch it. Seasons 1 and 2 were inconsistent with a few decent episodes and a few bad but not-outright-terrible ones. Children of Earth was awful, simply an exercise in audience manipulation, and Miracle Day was nonsense that disappoints on a greater level than anything…

If a plane crashes right on the border of the US and Canada, on which side do they bury the unidentified remains of survivors?

So you're saying that two objects, even of different mass, will fall at the same rate? That's incredible!

Our brains can experience something untestable, nor does our brains ability to observe it even matter for whether or not it exists.

Joe, I think you're creating a false dichotomy here, similar to (though not the same as) the popular "If scientific knowledge isn't certainty, then I might as well believe in whatever I want."

Einstein said, "as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they…

The work of both Godel and Turing has demonstrated that there are hard, a priori limits to what questions can be answered by a formal system.

I don't believe that science will answer every question. However, this does not free religion from the obligation to justify the answers it provides. "Because I feel really strongly about it" is not valid justification. "Because I read it in a really old book that claims insects have four legs" is not valid…

You might find this thread a good read.

Well, to be fair, they only show that for any non-trivial formal system, there are axioms that are true that cannot be proven... The rest is (sometimes reasonable) extrapolation ;)

I don't know to what extent actual scientists or the scientific establishment are guilty of unexamined scientism and/or philosophical materialism. While those positions are the unacknowledged (in fact, vehemently denied) positive claims put forward on the "atheist" side of internet debates, those debates are generally…

Gödel's incompleteness theorem only applies rigorously to formal systems. It remains to be seen whether it is extensible to "the world". I suspect it is, but still...

Gödel's incompleteness theorems are a proof of some limits to logic.

Todd - Of course not. Blank slates only exist in classrooms after they are washed :D

Todd - Might I direct your attention to my first question? Does morality have a purpose? I posit here that if you define a purpose for morality, it will be, essentially, one or the other of the two purposes (not definitions) I offered. It can absolutely be a system of "shalls" and "shall nots", but I wasn't…

I've been accused of "scientism" because I don't accept the a priori position that there are questions that science cannot ever examine or resolve. There may be, but it's not possible to demonstrate that any given question is immune to reason.

if we define objective morality to mean "the way in which we humans can act towards one another such that we as a species persist longest in this universe" then you can see that theoretically there is a way for different moral systems to be tested and evaluated on this claim. HOwever this experiment is ridiculous to…

Excellent review — even-handed and fair. I thought this book was going to be "intellectual trolling", but "printed flame war" seems a better description....

"Curtis White paints various scientists as dismissive snobs, smug pseudo-intellectuals, manipulative showmen, immoral politicos, and people who make bad faith arguments from behind a protective screen of elite supporters." Gee good thing that doesn't happen anywhere else in society.