On Hell and Forgiveness

[polymath257]

In what context does the number 4 represent something else? I think you are just being difficult and AS USUAL never give a reason for ANY of your answers. It is getting old.

The number 4 represents something different when applied to oranges and to apples. It represents something different in the ring of integers versus in the field of real numbers.

Sorry, i thought you understood some of the basics. I guess not.

That is another assertion without a reason. Mental events (non physical) cause physical effects all the time. If you claim that mental events are themselves physical--well, that's your opinion--and not one based on science.

On the contrary. Everything we know shows that mental events are physical events. Mental phenomena are physical phenomena. But more broadly, there is and can be no clean separation between mental events and physical events because of the complex web of causal links between the two. To call mental events non-physical would be as perverse as calling electromagnetic effects non-physical.

What division? I don't remember bringing up 'necessary'. You can talk about a concept without needed to bring up it's opposite. All scientific propositions are contingent propositions (by definition). It would be meaningless to test something without the concept of contingency--it is the very thing you would be testing for. 

All this shows is that you don't grasp how testing is done in the sciences. Contingency, according to the definition you gave, is irrelevant. All that is required is correlation.

You are drawing a philosophical conclusion where there is none to be drawn. Quantum indeterminacy is meaningless at the macroscopic level. Philosophy has always been at the macroscopic level. Claims that "classical causality" is wrong is, well, wrong. We have a better description but not one metaphysical principle changes. You have a problem separating science/math from philosophy. Causality is a philosophical concept--not a scientific one. Science relies on it because it presupposes it (through a philosophy of science).

And I think you are simply wrong here. Causality is a scientific concept: how do events at one time affect the development of events at later times? That *is* what causality is all about.

And no, quantum indeterminacy is NOT meaningless at the macroscopic level. In fact, it can be measured at the macroscopic level given the right situation.

I'm sorry, but the notions of causality from classical philosophy are not just incoherent. They are actually irrelevant to how the world actually works. The macroscopic level is built up from the quantum level. And if philosophy ignores that, then it makes itself useless (well, more so).

The things I mentioned are certainly not testable. All that is testable is "decent with modification". The rest of the grand evolution theory is one big inference. There is no debate here. It is simply a fact. 

Sorry, but that is simply wrong. The issues surrounding evolution are tested in labs all around the world, including issues of randomness of mutations, the conditions required for selection, etc.

Nope. You, like most people bring up this topic are equivocating on the word 'evolution'. When you need it to be "testable", you take the most narrow definition. Only small parts of evolution theory are testable. Very small parts. The problem is that the larger theory itself must infer things like common decent, how it might be possible to get around seemingly irreducibly complex functions, how biological networks came about, the story that fossils tell, why we can't make an evolutionary tree anymore, how convergent genetic traits came about, and perhaps most importantly, how traits with low selection coefficients get set in a population.

Seemingly irreducibly complex functions, can be tested for reducibility. And, the results of such testing is that there are NO known examples of irreducible complexity. How biological networks come about can, and has been tested by watching volcanic islands denuded of life and how life returns and re-forms an ecosystem. In fact, literally all the things you mention not only *can* be tested, but *are* tested all the time.