(February 13, 2010 at 8:33 am)Welsh cake Wrote: What exactly do you mean? While I agree on many points you made, destructive and/or disruptive events are often occurring in our universe. If you're claiming the periodicity of mass extinctions that occur for given any possible catastrophic future change to our orbit and rotation of the sun, we rely on hypothesis using information available to us to predict said outcomes, not faith.
(February 13, 2010 at 8:33 am)Welsh cake Wrote: We don't need faith for hypothetical unforeseen elements, in the past the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event happened and a similar collision may happen again, we don't know for certain, but you'd be in error to assume having faith in that it won't happen again will somehow make it so, that's not just wishful thinking, its basically Special pleading.
I completely understand, and I never said faith changes anything. It's simply a psychological concept illustrating mankind's approach to the unknown.
I do agree with you though.
(February 13, 2010 at 8:33 am)Welsh cake Wrote: For any object large enough to dramatically alter earth's rotation the gravitational disturbances or anomalies caused by the rogue planet/brown dwarf/star tearing through our solar system would be detected *long before* it passed and/or collided. Science doesn't just stop working when suddenly there is new information available. You can't have faith in countless uncertainties and claim it's a sensible thing to do, since we know speculating the "What Ifs" is about the most unproductive thing you can do.
I agree.
I never said it a sensible thing to do, perhaps I'm illustrating something that operates on a subconscious level, but I think faith is something that is taken for granted for the most part, and to say "the sun comes up everyday" is a statement of faith rather than evidence is a false assertion. Perhaps I phrased my argument incorrectly. I do agree with you though.
