Discussion about scientific issues as they relate to God and Christianity including archaeology, origins of life, the universe, intelligent design, evolution, etc.
Silvertusk wrote:Glad he is happy - but I am afraid I did not understand a word of that.
δεν έχει νόημα για μένα
Lol, it's all Greek, yes.
Here's basically what I understood from it. Those who are banking on this newly discovered phenomenon to refute the Kalam cosmological argument as well as the contingency argument (and by extension violate the Special Relativity Theory and refute the need for a first cause, since the discovery makes it potentially possible that A can create B as well as A) are mistaken. The reason, WLC says, is that the Special Relativity Theory does NOT prohibit an object from traveling faster than the speed of light, so long as this object ALWAYS travels at that speed. What it prohibits is an object starting out slower than the speed of light then ACCELERATING to faster than the speed of light. In other words, the experiment, even if corroborated, does not violate the Special Relativity Theory and does nothing to refute the cosmological and contingency arguments.
Let us proclaim the mystery of our faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.
Silvertusk wrote:Glad he is happy - but I am afraid I did not understand a word of that.
δεν έχει νόημα για μένα
Lol, it's all Greek, yes.
Here's basically what I understood from it. Those who are banking on this newly discovered phenomenon to refute the Kalam cosmological argument as well as the contingency argument (and by extension violate the Special Relativity Theory and refute the need for a first cause, since the discovery makes it potentially possible that A can create B as well as A) are mistaken. The reason, WLC says, is that the Special Relativity Theory does NOT prohibit an object from traveling faster than the speed of light, so long as this object ALWAYS travels at that speed. What it prohibits is an object starting out slower than the speed of light then ACCELERATING to faster than the speed of light. In other words, the experiment, even if corroborated, does not violate the Special Relativity Theory and does nothing to refute the cosmological and contingency arguments.
Beautiful, Bro! Plain English! Now why can't WLC communicate to me like THAT!
Silvertusk wrote:Glad he is happy - but I am afraid I did not understand a word of that.
δεν έχει νόημα για μένα
Lol, it's all Greek, yes.
Here's basically what I understood from it. Those who are banking on this newly discovered phenomenon to refute the Kalam cosmological argument as well as the contingency argument (and by extension violate the Special Relativity Theory and refute the need for a first cause, since the discovery makes it potentially possible that A can create B as well as A) are mistaken. The reason, WLC says, is that the Special Relativity Theory does NOT prohibit an object from traveling faster than the speed of light, so long as this object ALWAYS travels at that speed. What it prohibits is an object starting out slower than the speed of light then ACCELERATING to faster than the speed of light. In other words, the experiment, even if corroborated, does not violate the Special Relativity Theory and does nothing to refute the cosmological and contingency arguments.
Beautiful, Bro! Plain English! Now why can't WLC communicate to me like THAT!
Now it makes sense!
I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I'm really impressed by what William Lane Craig says. And, other times when he says something, I'm left shaking my head, and muttering "What did he just say?".
John 5:24 24 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.
“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
-Edward R Murrow
St. Richard the Sarcastic--The Patron Saint of Irony
Silvertusk wrote:Glad he is happy - but I am afraid I did not understand a word of that.
δεν έχει νόημα για μένα
Lol, it's all Greek, yes.
Here's basically what I understood from it. Those who are banking on this newly discovered phenomenon to refute the Kalam cosmological argument as well as the contingency argument (and by extension violate the Special Relativity Theory and refute the need for a first cause, since the discovery makes it potentially possible that A can create B as well as A) are mistaken. The reason, WLC says, is that the Special Relativity Theory does NOT prohibit an object from traveling faster than the speed of light, so long as this object ALWAYS travels at that speed. What it prohibits is an object starting out slower than the speed of light then ACCELERATING to faster than the speed of light. In other words, the experiment, even if corroborated, does not violate the Special Relativity Theory and does nothing to refute the cosmological and contingency arguments.
Beautiful, Bro! Plain English! Now why can't WLC communicate to me like THAT!
Now it makes sense!
I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I'm really impressed by what William Lane Craig says. And, other times when he says something, I'm left shaking my head, and muttering "What did he just say?".
In a weird way it's sort of understandable, his brain works so much faster than mere mortals like us that he articulates fast responses as he sees them and that's the result. He was sort of pressured into giving a fast response so he didn't have time to put it in plain words us ordinary folks can relate to. I'm sure he'll work on a more thorough response soon.
Let us proclaim the mystery of our faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.
Lol, I sort of got parts of it but I was hoping for an interpretation as well. I "thought" that the point was that the principle of causality isn't what's at stake here, but rather the "Einsteinian interpretation". I wish he had gone into the causality issue a little more... but while I haven't looked around a lot I haven't really heard a lot from big atheist names about this when you'd think that if this could potentially refute KCA or something it would be all over the headlines (maybe I just haven't seen it I guess).
But I would definitely expect Craig to go into this in more detail, maybe with a podcast or something.
A second test was done and it yielded the same result. Just a quick check with you all, if this is proven true, will this hurt any arguements for God's existence like the fine tuneing, cosmological and so on?
From RTB's perspective they said no back when the first expirment on this thing was done, but at that time, they felt like that this was just a fluke which would be disproven later, but according to the link, this may be really be true as far as neutrinos breaking the speed of light and disproving Einstein's theory of general relativity.
"So within days, everyone will probably have to get used to the fact that the OPERA neutrino speed anomaly has nothing to do with the shape and duration of the pulses. I still believe that a subtle time-independent bug in the whole GPS system's quantification of either positions or times is the most likely explanation of the crazy result"
"It is necessary here to note that since distance from source to detector and time offsets necessary to determine the travel time of neutrinos have not been remeasured, the related systematics (estimated as well as -possibly- underestimated ones) are unchanged. The measurement therefore is only a "partial" confirmation of the earlier result: it is consistent with it, but could be just as wrong as the other.
Just to make an example, I will reiterate here the doubts I have on one of the time offsets necessary to obtain the timing measurement in Gran Sasso: an 8-km-long light guide brings in a 40,000+-1 ns offset: in order to determine a "delta t" of 60 nanoseconds, a subtraction of that large number has to be made. This offset was measured three years ago, and could have changed if the refraction index had changed even very slightly (e.g. due to aging of the plastic material). This offset was not remeasured in the new analysis, and the possible associated systematic uncertainty remains in my mind an issue.
One peculiar aspect of the new neutrino interactions is that they highlight the presence of a rather large "jitter" effect: the timing of each neutrino interaction appears to be subject to a "smearing of width of the order of 25 nanoseconds. This could imply that something in the timing measurement is not well under control. Note that such a jitter could not easily be spotted in the global time distribution of the 15,223 neutrinos collected in the last three years; its effect on the global probability density function (which spans 10.5 microseconds) is too small to produce a global shape difference.
"
Last edited by 1over137 on Sun Nov 20, 2011 2:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.
-- 1 Thessalonians 5:21
For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.
-- Philippians 1:6
You know I don't recall much concern among Christian circles at all over this (RTB team saying it would require only minor adjustments) and not even the atheistic posturing that you'd expect for the most part (although maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places). I think some of the hyperbolic grand statements about how this changes everything were just that.
I don't recall exactly what WLC said now, but he was actually excited and was hoping the result would stand, he had an article and audio blog on his site about it. I have a fuzzy summary in my head of what his point was about it and how it would vindicate a model by one of his scientific heroes or something, but I couldn't begin to summarize it in words.
narnia4 wrote:I don't recall exactly what WLC said now, but he was actually excited and was hoping the result would stand, he had an article and audio blog on his site about it. I have a fuzzy summary in my head of what his point was about it and how it would vindicate a model by one of his scientific heroes or something, but I couldn't begin to summarize it in words.
"Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces." Matthew 7:6
"For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse." Romans 1:20
A second test was done and it yielded the same result. Just a quick check with you all, if this is proven true, will this hurt any arguements for God's existence like the fine tuneing, cosmological and so on?
But anyway, I'd like to see your all's thoughts.
I wouldn't think it would hurt many arguments but then again athiests will usually find a way....
Basically it wouldn't change anything. Einstein's theory says that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because as more energy gets converted to mass that thing would eventually outweigh the universe.- but says nothing about things already travelling at the speed of light or faster constantly - Take light particles for instance.
Craig holds to an A-theory of time and he seems to think if the Lorentzian interpetation of the Special Theory of Relativity is true that would refute the B-theory of time. Which would support his arguments for Christianity, so it's a good thing.
The first step to learning is to admit that you don't know.
I read about this but forgot to post about it. No disrespect to Cern or the people working on that, I think its very interesting... but it occurred to me that "This is what we're supposed to put our faith in before God?" (and yes I know most wouldn't put it that way and many don't believe that). All this hooplah and it turns out to probably be a loose wire!
Its stuff like this that would make it easy to dismiss every new theory that comes up as something that will be replaced in a couple months. That might not be exactly what true, but it does go to show that you should approach this stuff with caution (and I'm sure most scientists agree, they went through the right process here).
Plain English! Now why can't WLC communicate to me like THAT! 
