Theists, are you immune to being decieved?

[pocaracas]

Let's clock it: start clock at 23:38

Sadly, today, I don't have the half hour to reply point by point.

Wow, it only takes you a half hour? It usually takes me longer than that.

Must be because you answer a lot of people!

Regularity in Nature is observed. We observe that there's something that consistently exhibits the same behavior, so we've named these things. Cataloged them and now use the catalog when we refer to them.

Yes, I am aware of that. However, I want to know what is causing these regularities. Simply observing that they exist does not explain why they exist.

We may never know...

Gods, on the other hand, we can't observe...

True enough statement.

You say it yourself, "the god of the bible"... not necessarily the real god, if such a thing exists... but the one described by the bible.

Well the only real god is the one of the Bible.

Just because the description you find on the bible fits with your perceived view of reality?
The description you find in the qur'an also fits with many people's perceived view of reality... how do you account for that? Are they all wrong?
What sort of god relies on people's writing abilities to pass on the message? yours and theirs!

It's not something we can observe. We can only trust in the contents of that bible and accept it... or not. Sadly, for the bible, there are many other such books, some describing similar gods (jews' yahweh, muslim's allah), some describing very different gods (hindu vedas, egyptian book of the dead...).

Sure, but believing in something unseen can still be justified belief. Only Yahweh has revealed characteristics and promises that can explain the regularities we see in Nature. Secondly, even if we could not pin it down to which god we are dealing with, that does not justify believing that no god exists. At the very least you and I should be discussing which god we believe it is rather than whether a god even exists or not.

I thought we were way over that "belief that no god exists" thing...
If there is a god that is in fact responsible for the regularity in Nature, then I want to know about it. I refuse to believe in the story written down thousands of years ago... nor any other of the countless similar stories.

And it doesn't need to be seen... I've never seen an electron, but I've seen its effects... and they are predictable and... well... regular.
Now, this god thing... any effect you claim for it, we can attribute it to something else. The regularity detail, the cause of the big bang and a few other gaps in our knowledge are... under investigation. Until then, it does no good to assume that a thousands year old story has the correct answer.

So, if trust is to be put on one of them, then how to decide in which?

What you will find is that Yahweh is completely unique from other conceptual gods and when you infer what the necessary attributes must be of a god you end up with Him.

necessary attributes?
Talk to a muslim... talk to Rayaan... I wish you both luck, as you'll be claiming the same things for each other's god.

I'd go with observation... but none of the gods described is the sort that actually shows up for scrutiny...
That leaves trust none as the most honest position available.

I keep trying to observe gravity, but alas it never shows up for scrutiny either.

It does behave in a coherent and predictable fashion, does it not?
Like electrons and all other elementary particles that have been cataloged.

Now, your god.... only shows up in the story...

So, how do I account for the regularity in Nature? What causes this regularity? Why is it regular?
I don't know.

Well I commend you for honesty. Genesis 8 tells us that it is Yahweh, and that makes perfect sense to me.

Well, it doesn't make so much sense to me...
You see... how did the person who wrote that know about it? If that person could come to know it, then we can all come by this information, coherently and consistently... Sadly, reality shows the opposite... you yourself rely on the story to describe the god thing... you yourself have failed to find the real evidence... you just trust that whoever wrote the book had it.

And if there was ever a person who knew about it, then I want to arrive at that knowledge, in an unbiased way... you see... the human brain is way too vulnerable to biases... and pre-acquired beliefs don't help a thing.

I think we first need to establish that there is an underlying reason for such regularity. There may not be.

There has to be a reason for it.

Perhaps...
Perhaps it's not the one you think.
Just because it makes sense, doesn't mean it's the right answer.

Think "Centrifugal Force".

String theory seems to be a step towards accomplishing that goal... let's wait and see how that turns out.

You seem to have undermined your objections above by now claiming to have faith in a rather ad hoc theory that is utterly unobservable and untestable.

I have no faith in string theory...
There are hundreds of string theories... all untreatable... all lacking in testability.

I used string theory as an alternate hypothesis, which requires no god and explains everything... in a coherent and consistent fashion.
I wonder why these words keep popping up....?

Until then, I see no reason to trust your favorite book of mythology... nor any other, for that matter.

Even though it has answers to questions that you admittedly cannot answer?

I doesn't explain how to arrive at those answers, making it useless.
It's no better than saying that the Flying Spaghetti monster explains all the wrong things with pasta.

Merry christmas, stat!

I hope you had a great one! I certainly did.

Did so, indeed!

End clock at 00:08---- 30 minutes!

[Statler Waldorf]

You need a life.

…says the guy who has spent nearly 16 times as much time on this forum as I have. I hope you were being ironic.

Or typewriting lessons.

I am a great typist. I just have numerous posts to respond to and I always take the time to get my information correct. Some people could take a few lessons from that on here; there are some very sloppy posters on here.

Let's clock it: start clock at 23:38

Got it!

Must be because you answer a lot of people!

No, that can’t be it! Apparently it’s because I do not have a life and am a slow typist…*shakes head*

We may never know...

What’s your basis for rejecting the Biblical explanation? If you do not know the answer how can you know that a particular answer is incorrect?

Just because the description you find on the bible fits with your perceived view of reality?

It’s not that it fits with simply my perceived view of reality but more importantly it fits with everyone’s necessary view of reality. There are certain things that must be true in order for us to learn about the exterior world, the Bible makes sense of all of these things unlike anything else can.

The description you find in the qur'an also fits with many people's perceived view of reality... how do you account for that? Are they all wrong?

The existence of Allah does not make sense of the preconditions I mentioned above. Allah does not account for immaterial laws of deduction, the regularities we see in Nature, future regularities and so on. He’s a completely different god with completely different attributes and many of those attributes are insufficient for what must be true about reality.

What sort of god relies on people's writing abilities to pass on the message? yours and theirs!

I wouldn’t trade the Christian manuscript tradition for the Islamic one ever though.

If there is a god that is in fact responsible for the regularity in Nature, then I want to know about it. I refuse to believe in the story written down thousands of years ago... nor any other of the countless similar stories.

Why do you refuse to?

And it doesn't need to be seen... I've never seen an electron, but I've seen its effects... and they are predictable and... well... regular.

Yet you do not know why they are predictable and regular.

Now, this god thing... any effect you claim for it, we can attribute it to something else. The regularity detail, the cause of the big bang and a few other gaps in our knowledge are... under investigation. Until then, it does no good to assume that a thousands year old story has the correct answer.

The age of a story is irrelevant to whether it is correct or not. Science itself presupposes that such regularities exist, have existed, and will continue to exist so it is incapable by nature of ever finding a solution to that particular question. I still see no reason to reject the Biblical explanation for it.

necessary attributes?

Yes, the qualities He must possess in order for us to know what we know.

Talk to a muslim... talk to Rayaan... I wish you both luck, as you'll be claiming the same things for each other's god.

I have talked to Muslims before; they do not take this approach because it does not work for their god. However, I am talking to you right now so I’d prefer we stuck to what we both actually believed.

It does behave in a coherent and predictable fashion, does it not?

Yes, thanks to He who governs in a coherent and predictable manner. I also know that it is going to do so until the end of days.

Like electrons and all other elementary particles that have been cataloged.

Exactly.

Now, your god.... only shows up in the story...

Not at all, you were just describing His governing acts above.

Well, it doesn't make so much sense to me...
You see... how did the person who wrote that know about it? If that person could come to know it, then we can all come by this information, coherently and consistently... Sadly, reality shows the opposite... you yourself rely on the story to describe the god thing... you yourself have failed to find the real evidence... you just trust that whoever wrote the book had it.

Well that’d be Moses; but the words were not merely his. You see, when the one who knows everything, who made everything, and who cannot lie reveals something to us we can know that it is true.

And if there was ever a person who knew about it, then I want to arrive at that knowledge, in an unbiased way... you see... the human brain is way too vulnerable to biases... and pre-acquired beliefs don't help a thing.

This seems to be an unreasonable standard. You mean to tell me that when you read about the DNA structure in a journal you demand to see the sequences for yourself and not just take their word for it? When you read about what it was like to walk on the Moon you demand to walk on the Moon yourself before you will believe any of it? Most of what we learn is learned from the experiences of others.

Perhaps...
Perhaps it's not the one you think.
Just because it makes sense, doesn't mean it's the right answer.

Then give me the right answer so I have a reason to doubt the veracity of my own.

I have no faith in string theory...
There are hundreds of string theories... all untreatable... all lacking in testability.

I used string theory as an alternate hypothesis, which requires no god and explains everything... in a coherent and consistent fashion.

How does it explain everything in a coherent and consistent fashion? I do not believe string theory is used to explain the regularities we observe in Nature at all.

I doesn't explain how to arrive at those answers, making it useless.

How does that make it useless? It gives us the answers. That seems very useful to me.

It's no better than saying that the Flying Spaghetti monster explains all the wrong things with pasta.

The FSM? You’re so much better than that tired fallacious analogy. Yahweh is not analogous to any such entity.

End clock at 00:08---- 30 minutes!

Mine took 32 minutes. I guess we were both being accurate. I am enjoying the discussion.

[Mystical]

You exhaust me, Statler. Can't you have a conversation without addressing every single point made? I mean would you break down someones speech in such a way during normal face to face conversation?
I ask, because I like you and I'd really like to talk to you, but you literally daunt me into boredom!

Oh and also rasetsu is a girl a very, very hot girl.

[Tonus]

You exhaust me, Statler. Can't you have a conversation without addressing every single point made?

Just bring up a single point each time! Before long we'll be calling him "the quiet one."

[Bad Writer]

You exhaust me, Statler. Can't you have a conversation without addressing every single point made? I mean would you break down someones speech in such a way during normal face to face conversation?
I ask, because I like you and I'd really like to talk to you, but you literally daunt me into boredom!

Oh and also rasetsu is a girl a very, very hot girl.

There's a method to his madness. When everyone gets tired if responding to his boring retorts he just sits back and claims victory, as if that was the prize all along.

[The Reality Salesman01]

You say you have an explanation. From the little bit of your book that I read, it's clear that you still have no explanation for this explanation...and it appears as though you've interpreted by pointing this flaw of yours out as a reason for not believing you an "argument from ignorance". Well isn't that special. I will accept that most gracious Socratic compliment. I don't believe you because you have not given me any knowledge about Gods, and due to your failure to establish anything believable, I remain ignorant in that regard. You clearly have no knowledge of Gods either, which makes 2 of us. Sadly, only one of us is aware of it. I will take my ignorance and a thirst for truth, and you can keep your artificial knowledge, it's not very quenching.


...and now, some cool stuff...HIT IT NEIL!

[pocaracas]

We may never know...

What’s your basis for rejecting the Biblical explanation? If you do not know the answer how can you know that a particular answer is incorrect?

You need to work better on these quotes... I don't remember what that was about... but I'll work with your reply.

Let's say science hasn't measured the sun's temperature... let's go to 100 years ago.
Now, you tell me that the sun's temperature is one million degrees celsius.
It is an answer to "how hot is the sun?"... it sort of makes sense... it should be very hot.
Is it the correct answer? 100 years ago, I wouldn't know. So I would ask you "how did you arrive at that answer?".

As you can see, an inquisitive mind wants to know the whole process.... not just the answer.... the answer, while making sense, may be inaccurate... and there are many many many wrong answers... and only one right one.
Without the process of arriving at the correct answer, I am not going to accept any answer that may fit my perception...

Just because the description you find on the bible fits with your perceived view of reality?

It’s not that it fits with simply my perceived view of reality but more importantly it fits with everyone’s necessary view of reality. There are certain things that must be true in order for us to learn about the exterior world, the Bible makes sense of all of these things unlike anything else can.

Do you mind elaborating on that "necessary view of reality" and which "things [...] must be true in order for us to learn about the exterior world" and how "the bible makes sense of all these things"?

The description you find in the qur'an also fits with many people's perceived view of reality... how do you account for that? Are they all wrong?

The existence of Allah does not make sense of the preconditions I mentioned above. Allah does not account for immaterial laws of deduction, the regularities we see in Nature, future regularities and so on. He’s a completely different god with completely different attributes and many of those attributes are insufficient for what must be true about reality.

Allah is the arabic word for "god". They just insist on using the arabic work to distinguish from any other god... particularly the jew and christian yahweh.... but, down deep, it's the same god. "the one true god".., I read that the qur'an has hundreds of ways to describe that god... I'm sure somewhere in that pot it also accounts for everything in Nature, regularity included.

What sort of god relies on people's writing abilities to pass on the message? yours and theirs!

I wouldn’t trade the Christian manuscript tradition for the Islamic one ever though.

I wouldn't either... if I had to pick the least of two evils... Luckily, there are many other options from where to choose!
Still, I couldn't help notice you didn't answer the question...

If there is a god that is in fact responsible for the regularity in Nature, then I want to know about it. I refuse to believe in the story written down thousands of years ago... nor any other of the countless similar stories.

Why do you refuse to?

Because I'm fully aware of a lot of details in the inner working of the human brain, and human society, that can account for all that is believed about a god... and all that has been written about all gods.

And it doesn't need to be seen... I've never seen an electron, but I've seen its effects... and they are predictable and... well... regular.

Yet you do not know why they are predictable and regular.

no... may never come to know... at best, you can offer me a respite from that by believing... Well, I want to know... belief not allowed.

Now, this god thing... any effect you claim for it, we can attribute it to something else. The regularity detail, the cause of the big bang and a few other gaps in our knowledge are... under investigation. Until then, it does no good to assume that a thousands year old story has the correct answer.

The age of a story is irrelevant to whether it is correct or not. Science itself presupposes that such regularities exist, have existed, and will continue to exist so it is incapable by nature of ever finding a solution to that particular question. I still see no reason to reject the Biblical explanation for it.

Because it doesn't have any support? No observable god, more than half the human population not convinced of the existence of that particular god.
Because it relies on belief? No tangible evidence for anything.
Because it may be one of the infinite wrong answers? provided the lack of support and evidence, it does have a damn good chance of being wrong.

necessary attributes?

Yes, the qualities He must possess in order for us to know what we know.

Do you mind elaborating on these?

Talk to a muslim... talk to Rayaan... I wish you both luck, as you'll be claiming the same things for each other's god.

I have talked to Muslims before; they do not take this approach because it does not work for their god. However, I am talking to you right now so I’d prefer we stuck to what we both actually believed.

Judging by a guy called Hamza, who seems to be somewhat of a youtube muslim celebrity, I'd say allah covers all that.

It does behave in a coherent and predictable fashion, does it not?

Yes, thanks to He who governs in a coherent and predictable manner. I also know that it is going to do so until the end of days.

Like electrons and all other elementary particles that have been cataloged.

Exactly.

Now, your god.... only shows up in the story...

Not at all, you were just describing His governing acts above.

Was I?
Oh, silly me...
Again, you believe in that... you don't know that. There's a difference there, you agree?

Well, it doesn't make so much sense to me...
You see... how did the person who wrote that know about it? If that person could come to know it, then we can all come by this information, coherently and consistently... Sadly, reality shows the opposite... you yourself rely on the story to describe the god thing... you yourself have failed to find the real evidence... you just trust that whoever wrote the book had it.

Well that’d be Moses; but the words were not merely his. You see, when the one who knows everything, who made everything, and who cannot lie reveals something to us we can know that it is true.

But... what if... what if... what was written wasn't true?
The description of the god wasn't true. Then, "who cannot tell a lie" isn't exactly like that...
The account of Moses wasn't true. Then... "the one who knows everything and made everything" isn't exactly like that...
The story... is just a story to entertain children...

What if?....

One more reason not to assume that the story is correct.

Surely, that possibility has crossed your mind, no?

And if there was ever a person who knew about it, then I want to arrive at that knowledge, in an unbiased way... you see... the human brain is way too vulnerable to biases... and pre-acquired beliefs don't help a thing.

This seems to be an unreasonable standard. You mean to tell me that when you read about the DNA structure in a journal you demand to see the sequences for yourself and not just take their word for it? When you read about what it was like to walk on the Moon you demand to walk on the Moon yourself before you will believe any of it? Most of what we learn is learned from the experiences of others.

Indeed and they all describe exactly all the steps they took to arrive at their destination.
While your story presupposes the existence of a god. No where is it stated how to determine the nature of this god, in an unbiased, non-psycho-fallacious way.

My standard aims to remove such fallacies that arise in the human brain.

Perhaps...
Perhaps it's not the one you think.
Just because it makes sense, doesn't mean it's the right answer.

Then give me the right answer so I have a reason to doubt the veracity of my own.

In a 20-D space live a race of entities.
They are born, live, and die, much like us. They breed by matching 4 entities' "genetic" material to produce one offspring. These kids grow, go to their schools, do homework, college... work, etc.
One of these kids had a Uni assignment: to build a 3+1D universe with regularity that could be self sustainable.... so he did. And, being a perfectionist, decided to kick-start the whole thing in such a manner as to spark sentient life in a few corners of this universe.

There you go. Now tell me how this story is flawed and misses the whole regularity detail....

I have no faith in string theory...
There are hundreds of string theories... all untreatable... all lacking in testability.

I used string theory as an alternate hypothesis, which requires no god and explains everything... in a coherent and consistent fashion.

How does it explain everything in a coherent and consistent fashion? I do not believe string theory is used to explain the regularities we observe in Nature at all.

String theory aims to describe everything as strings, and different vibrations of these strings represent different particles... So the strings explain the regularity.
When and if that theory pans out...

I doesn't explain how to arrive at those answers, making it useless.

How does that make it useless? It gives us the answers. That seems very useful to me.

It does have a high likelihood of being the incorrect answer, remember?

It's no better than saying that the Flying Spaghetti monster explains all the wrong things with pasta.

The FSM? You’re so much better than that tired fallacious analogy. Yahweh is not analogous to any such entity.

yes, I know... nothing is analogous to yahweh...

Mine took 32 minutes. I guess we were both being accurate. I am enjoying the discussion.

dammit, I forgot to time this... oh well, doesn't matter... half an hour, or so...

[Mystical]

Oh My GOD you guys!! Stop it, just stop it! All I see is blah blah blah so boring blah blah blah pay attention blah blah read every single word of our posts for the last ten pages or you wont know what the fuck we're talking about blah blah blippidy boop.

[Statler Waldorf]

You exhaust me, Statler. Can't you have a conversation without addressing every single point made? I mean would you break down someones speech in such a way during normal face to face conversation?
I ask, because I like you and I'd really like to talk to you, but you literally daunt me into boredom!

I like you too. However, if a person does not want multiple points addressed then why would they try and make multiple points in their post? If I think something is in error, merely interesting, humorous, or something I agree with then I am going to remark upon it. If I did not do this, I’d have people on here whining about how I ignored their point. You know that’d happen!

Oh and also rasetsu is a girl a very, very hot girl.

Thanks, apparently she’s got no life though.

There's a method to his madness. When everyone gets tired if responding to his boring retorts he just sits back and claims victory, as if that was the prize all along.

No, I just feel addressing someone’s argument is a form of proper courtesy.

You need to work better on these quotes... I don't remember what that was about... but I'll work with your reply.

Did I mess the quotes up? I am not seeing that.

Let's say science hasn't measured the sun's temperature... let's go to 100 years ago.

Time travel, I like it.

Now, you tell me that the sun's temperature is one million degrees celsius.
It is an answer to "how hot is the sun?"... it sort of makes sense... it should be very hot.
Is it the correct answer? 100 years ago, I wouldn't know. So I would ask you "how did you arrive at that answer?".

As you can see, an inquisitive mind wants to know the whole process.... not just the answer.... the answer, while making sense, may be inaccurate... and there are many many many wrong answers... and only one right one.
Without the process of arriving at the correct answer, I am not going to accept any answer that may fit my perception...

Let me use your same analogy because I like it. Now what if I told you 100 years ago that the Sun was 5,778K and when you asked me how I knew that I told you that He who made the Sun, knows everything, and cannot lie told everyone that was the answer. Would you still have reason to doubt my answer was correct?

Do you mind elaborating on that "necessary view of reality" and which "things [...] must be true in order for us to learn about the exterior world" and how "the bible makes sense of all there things"?

Sure, there are certain things that must be assumed to be true before we can learn anything about our exterior world. A few examples would be: regularity (past, present, and future) in Natural laws, Universal laws of deduction, the reliability of one’s own memory, and the reliability of one’s own senses. In a universe created by the Christian God not only can we assume that all of these things are true but this assumption also makes perfect sense because these things would be true in any such universe. Now, contrast that with a purely material and unguided universe and we have problems. Yes, we have to assume these things are true, but it really is very unlikely that they would be true in such a universe. This is why the act of denying God’s existence actually undermines our ability to know anything for certain.

Allah is the arabic word for "god". They just insist on using the arabic work to distinguish from any other god... particularly the jew and christian yahweh.... but, down deep, it's the same god. "the one true god".., I read that the qur'an has hundreds of ways to describe that god... I'm sure somewhere in that pot it also accounts for everything in Nature, regularity included.

No, it’s not the same god, they have different attributes. Allah transcends logic and therefore is not required to behave logically, Yahweh behaves logically because it derives from His character and so on.

Still, I couldn't help notice you didn't answer the question...

The question about why God chose to preserve scripture that way? That’s a purely theological question that requires speculation. It’s a very effective way of preserving the text however. Within even 100 years of Christ’s death it was impossible to destroy all of the Christian manuscripts because there were so many of them and they had spread so widely. If there was one single authoritative manuscript it would have been easy for an enemy of the Church to destroy it. If I wanted to ensure that my words lived on I would write thousands of copies of the same letter and send them all over in much the same way.

Because I'm fully aware of a lot of details in the inner working of the human brain, and human society, that can account for all that is believed about a god... and all that has been written about all gods.

So anyone who has written about a god is automatically delusional? That seems rather unfair.

No observable god, more than half the human population not convinced of the existence of that particular god.

I do not see how that is relevant.

Because it relies on belief? No tangible evidence for anything.
Because it may be one of the infinite wrong answers? provided the lack of support and evidence, it does have a damn good chance of being wrong.

I think this could all be used to reject any belief that a person did not want to believe. I do not see how that makes such a rejection rational.

Do you mind elaborating on these?

I think I did above, if not let me know and I will.

Judging by a guy called Hamza, who seems to be somewhat of a youtube muslim celebrity, I'd say allah covers all that.

I’ll have to check it out.

Was I?

Yes sir.

Oh, silly me...
Again, you believe in that... you don't know that. There's a difference there, you agree?

Well knowledge is usually defined as justified belief, and it seems I have justification for those beliefs.

But... what if... what if... what was written wasn't true?
The description of the god wasn't true. Then, "who cannot tell a lie" isn't exactly like that...
The account of Moses wasn't true. Then... "the one who knows everything and made everything" isn't exactly like that...

Then all knowledge would be impossible.

The story... is just a story to entertain children..

It’s hardly a child-friendly story now is it?

One more reason not to assume that the story is correct.

Surely, that possibility has crossed your mind, no?

Sure, until I figured out that it has to be true.

Indeed and they all describe exactly all the steps they took to arrive at their destination.
While your story presupposes the existence of a god. No where is it stated how to determine the nature of this god, in an unbiased, non-psycho-fallacious way.

And how do you know that they indeed took those steps? Eventually you’re going to have to just take their word for it.

My standard aims to remove such fallacies that arise in the human brain.

I am unaware of any such fallacy, does it have a name?

In a 20-D space live a race of entities.
They are born, live, and die, much like us. They breed by matching 4 entities' "genetic" material to produce one offspring. These kids grow, go to their schools, do homework, college... work, etc.
One of these kids had a Uni assignment: to build a 3+1D universe with regularity that could be self sustainable.... so he did. And, being a perfectionist, decided to kick-start the whole thing in such a manner as to spark sentient life in a few corners of this universe.

There you go. Now tell me how this story is flawed and misses the whole regularity detail....

Well for one you never even mentioned regularities so I am not following how it explains those. Secondly, how do you know any of this? What’s your source of revelation? How does this account for future regularity? Lastly, it does not seem like this explanation can explain our moral imperatives.

String theory aims to describe everything as strings, and different vibrations of these strings represent different particles... So the strings explain the regularity.

What ensures that the strings remain regular?

It does have a high likelihood of being the incorrect answer, remember?

I am not following that. I also do not believe people reason this way at all.

A: “How did you get to my house?”
B: “I drove.”
A: “I did not see you drive up.”
B: “Well I did.”
A: “Well there are many possible ways you could have gotten here, and yet only one correct way therefore it is far more likely that you did not actually drive here therefore I do not believe you and you are a liar.”
B: “I am driving back to work now and taking the pizza you ordered with me sir.”

yes, I know... nothing is analogous to yahweh...

Bingo.

dammit, I forgot to time this... oh well, doesn't matter... half an hour, or so...

Seemed like 10 minutes! I went and got something to drink and came back and you had already responded.

[pocaracas]

You exhaust me, Statler. Can't you have a conversation without addressing every single point made? I mean would you break down someones speech in such a way during normal face to face conversation?
I ask, because I like you and I'd really like to talk to you, but you literally daunt me into boredom!

I like you too. However, if a person does not want multiple points addressed then why would they try and make multiple points in their post? If I think something is in error, merely interesting, humorous, or something I agree with then I am going to remark upon it. If I did not do this, I’d have people on here whining about how I ignored their point. You know that’d happen!

Every now and then, I need to reset this mega-quote post with you.

You need to work better on these quotes... I don't remember what that was about... but I'll work with your reply.

Did I mess the quotes up? I am not seeing that.

No, that's not it... could you keep the quote from two posts ago, like I do. Just to keep track of the conversation without having to scroll up to that post... our posts do tend to be huge, so it's a bit of a pain to look through them to find what we want.

Now, you tell me that the sun's temperature is one million degrees celsius.
It is an answer to "how hot is the sun?"... it sort of makes sense... it should be very hot.
Is it the correct answer? 100 years ago, I wouldn't know. So I would ask you "how did you arrive at that answer?".

As you can see, an inquisitive mind wants to know the whole process.... not just the answer.... the answer, while making sense, may be inaccurate... and there are many many many wrong answers... and only one right one.
Without the process of arriving at the correct answer, I am not going to accept any answer that may fit my perception...

Let me use your same analogy because I like it. Now what if I told you 100 years ago that the Sun was 5,778K and when you asked me how I knew that I told you that He who made the Sun, knows everything, and cannot lie told everyone that was the answer. Would you still have reason to doubt my answer was correct?

Of course I'd doubt that!
How did you meet this... person?
How do you know "he" knows everything?
How do you know "he" cannot lie?
"He" told everyone? Then why was that information unavailable before you said it?

Do you mind elaborating on that "necessary view of reality" and which "things [...] must be true in order for us to learn about the exterior world" and how "the bible makes sense of all there things"?

Sure, there are certain things that must be assumed to be true before we can learn anything about our exterior world. A few examples would be: regularity (past, present, and future) in Natural laws, Universal laws of deduction, the reliability of one’s own memory, and the reliability of one’s own senses. In a universe created by the Christian God not only can we assume that all of these things are true but this assumption also makes perfect sense because these things would be true in any such universe. Now, contrast that with a purely material and unguided universe and we have problems. Yes, we have to assume these things are true, but it really is very unlikely that they would be true in such a universe. This is why the act of denying God’s existence actually undermines our ability to know anything for certain.

"unlikely"? are you going for the fine tuning argument?

You don't know that an "unguided" universe would run into such problems...

And "the reliability of one's memory and senses"? really? I've never been under the influence of mind altering chemicals, but I hear they can mess up both those abilities... and then some more... and some people have trouble with them without resorting to such chemicals.

Allah is the arabic word for "god". They just insist on using the arabic work to distinguish from any other god... particularly the jew and christian yahweh.... but, down deep, it's the same god. "the one true god".., I read that the qur'an has hundreds of ways to describe that god... I'm sure somewhere in that pot it also accounts for everything in Nature, regularity included.

No, it’s not the same god, they have different attributes. Allah transcends logic and therefore is not required to behave logically, Yahweh behaves logically because it derives from His character and so on.

Well, I've seen christians who claim their god transcends logic, too...
That just makes the god you claim to exist not to be exactly the christian god... it's your christian god.

Still, I couldn't help notice you didn't answer the question...

The question about why God chose to preserve scripture that way? That’s a purely theological question that requires speculation. It’s a very effective way of preserving the text however. Within even 100 years of Christ’s death it was impossible to destroy all of the Christian manuscripts because there were so many of them and they had spread so widely. If there was one single authoritative manuscript it would have been easy for an enemy of the Church to destroy it. If I wanted to ensure that my words lived on I would write thousands of copies of the same letter and send them all over in much the same way.

No, the question about why god chose to use scripture in the first place. The same medium that allah chose... the same medium that shiva chose... the same medium that Ra&co. chose... writing by human hands.
It's almost like they are all equally man-made...

Because I'm fully aware of a lot of details in the inner working of the human brain, and human society, that can account for all that is believed about a god... and all that has been written about all gods.

So anyone who has written about a god is automatically delusional? That seems rather unfair.

Well, delusional is a bit much... but such wording has been used in the literature...
I'd go with biased, indoctrinated, ignorant... willingly erroneous.

The first people who came up with the story must have indeed been delusional.. the ones that follow it are just indoctrinated, or "experience" something they ignorantly fail to attribute to brain function... then there are those that build up on the original story... those would also be delusional. There are way too many people who suffer from such pathologies and can, for the most part, lead a completely normal life.

No observable god, more than half the human population not convinced of the existence of that particular god.

I do not see how that is relevant.

The god that requires belief fails to communicate with the majority of the world's population? fully relevant!
Oh... but all other gods also require belief... it's almost like they are all the same thing... the same man-made thing...

Because it relies on belief? No tangible evidence for anything.
Because it may be one of the infinite wrong answers? provided the lack of support and evidence, it does have a damn good chance of being wrong.

I think this could all be used to reject any belief that a person did not want to believe. I do not see how that makes such a rejection rational.

All god ever described by man are equally guilty of this, yes...
Sorry Stat, I disbelieve all gods equally, so I tend to lump them all in the same bag.... the bag of man-made myth.

Oh, silly me...
Again, you believe in that... you don't know that. There's a difference there, you agree?

Well knowledge is usually defined as justified belief, and it seems I have justification for those beliefs.

yeah... but your justification is not convincing... perhaps it is to you, but it should be to the nobel prize committee

But... what if... what if... what was written wasn't true?
The description of the god wasn't true. Then, "who cannot tell a lie" isn't exactly like that...
The account of Moses wasn't true. Then... "the one who knows everything and made everything" isn't exactly like that...

Then all knowledge would be impossible.

LOL.
I know my nick is pocaracas. I also know quite a lot of other things which don't require me to believe in something prior to knowing them.

The DNA example you used somewhere was a good one. When it was discovered, the methodology of how to arrive at it was also described. Others have corroborated that methodology. We could corroborate it. We'd just need to do what's described. And, what's more, when you read it, you're not required to believe in it. You just read the description and do it.

The story... is just a story to entertain children..

It’s hardly a child-friendly story now is it?

Some bits are more like "law of the land"... man-made law. So those bits would be directed at adults... the rest.. meh.

One more reason not to assume that the story is correct.

Surely, that possibility has crossed your mind, no?

Sure, until I figured out that it has to be true.

nuh-huh!

Indeed and they all describe exactly all the steps they took to arrive at their destination.
While your story presupposes the existence of a god. No where is it stated how to determine the nature of this god, in an unbiased, non-psycho-fallacious way.

And how do you know that they indeed took those steps? Eventually you’re going to have to just take their word for it.

Yes, I take their word for it... And I'm also fully aware that I too can take those steps and arrive at the same information.
Now, your story... many people have taken the same steps and arrived at nothing...
Many people follow a different story and arrive at something that's written in that other book... how does that work?!

My standard aims to remove such fallacies that arise in the human brain.

I am unaware of any such fallacy, does it have a name?

Many names... allow me to quote something apo (rasetsu) once posted

From Wikipedia, a list of over 150 common mental 'flaws' that you may have as a result of being human.

Decision-making, belief and behavioral biases

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Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general. They arise as a replicable result to a specific condition: when confronted with a specific situation, the deviation from what is normatively expected can be characterized by:

Ambiguity effect: the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown."
Anchoring or focalism: the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
Attentional bias: the tendency to pay attention to emotionally dominant stimuli in one's environment and to neglect relevant data, when making judgments of a correlation or association.
Availability heuristic: the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are, or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.
Availability cascade: a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").
Backfire effect: when people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.
Bandwagon effect: the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
Base rate fallacy or base rate neglect: the tendency to base judgments on specifics, ignoring general statistical information.
Belief bias: an effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.
Bias blind spot: the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.
Choice-supportive bias: the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
Clustering illusion: the tendency to over-expect small runs, streaks or clusters in large samples of random data
Confirmation bias: the tendency to search for or interpret information or memories in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Congruence bias: the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.
Conjunction fallacy: the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
Conservatism or regressive bias: tendency to underestimate high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies and overestimate low ones. Based on the observed evidence, estimates are not extreme enough
Conservatism (Bayesian): the tendency to revise belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence (estimates of conditional probabilities are conservative)
Contrast effect: the enhancement or diminishing of a weight or other measurement when compared with a recently observed contrasting object.
Curse of knowledge: when knowledge of a topic diminishes one's ability to think about it from a less-informed perspective.
Decoy effect: preferences change when there is a third option that is asymmetrically dominated
Denomination effect: the tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g. coins) rather than large amounts (e.g. bills).
Distinction bias: the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
Duration neglect: the neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value
Empathy gap: the tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.
Endowment effect: the fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.
Essentialism: categorizing people and things according to their essential nature, in spite of variations.
Exaggerated expectation: based on the estimates, real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).
Experimenter's or expectation bias: the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.
False-consensus effect: the tendency of a person to overestimate how much other people agree with him or her.
Functional fixedness: limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used
Focusing effect: the tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
Forer effect or Barnum effect: the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.
Framing effect: drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how or by whom that information is presented.
Frequency illusion: the illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly appears "everywhere" with improbable frequency (see also recency illusion).
Gambler's fallacy: the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. Results from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."
Hard-easy effect: Based on a specific level of task difficulty, the confidence in judgments is too conservative and not extreme enough.
Hindsight bias: sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened. Colloquially referred to as "Hindsight is 20/20".
Hostile media effect: the tendency to see a media report as being biased, owing to one's own strong partisan views.
Hot-hand fallacy: The "hot-hand fallacy" (also known as the "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand") is the fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts
Hyperbolic discounting: the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.
Illusion of control: the tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.
Illusion of validity: when consistent but predictively weak data leads to confident predictions
Illusory correlation: inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.
Impact bias: the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
Information bias: the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Insensitivity to sample size: the tendency to under-expect variation in small samples
Irrational escalation: the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.
Just-world hypothesis: the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
Less-is-better effect: a preference reversal where a dominated smaller set is preferred to a larger set
Loss aversion: "the disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it". (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
Ludic fallacy: the misuse of games to model real-life situations.
Mere exposure effect: the tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.
Money illusion: the tendency to concentrate on the nominal (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.
Moral credential effect: the tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Negativity bias: the tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
Neglect of probability: the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
Nonsense math effect: the tendency to judge information containing equations higher regardless the quality of them.
Normalcy bias: the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
Observer-expectancy effect: when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
Omission bias: the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
Optimism bias: the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).
Ostrich effect: ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
Outcome bias: the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Overconfidence effect: excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.[50]
Pareidolia: a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
Pessimism bias: the tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
Planning fallacy: the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
Post-purchase rationalization: the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
Pro-innovation bias: the tendency to reflect a personal bias towards an invention/innovation, while often failing to identify limitations and weaknesses or address the possibility of failure.
Pseudocertainty effect: the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
Reactance: the urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
Reactive devaluation: devaluing proposals that are no longer hypothetical or purportedly originated with an adversary.
Recency bias: a cognitive bias that results from disproportionate salience attributed to recent stimuli or observations – the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events (see also peak-end rule, recency effect).
Recency illusion: the illusion that a phenomenon, typically a word or language usage, that one has just begun to notice is a recent innovation (see also frequency illusion).
Restraint bias: the tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
Rhyme as reason effect: rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. A famous example being used in the O.J Simpson trial with the defenses use of the phrase "If the gloves don't fit then you must acquit."
Risk compensation / Peltzman effect: the tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Selective perception: the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Semmelweis reflex: the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.
Selection bias:: the distortion of a statistical analysis, resulting from the method of collecting samples. If the selection bias is not taken into account then certain conclusions drawn may be wrong.
Social comparison bias: the tendency, when making hiring decisions, to favour potential candidates who don't compete with one's own particular strengths.
Social desirability bias:: the tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.
Status quo bias: the tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).
Stereotyping: expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
Subadditivity effect: the tendency to estimate that the likelihood of an event is less than the sum of its (more than two) mutually exclusive components.
Subjective validation: perception that something is true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
Survivorship bias:: concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn't because of their lack of visibility.
Texas sharpshooter fallacy:: pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern.
Time-saving bias: underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
Unit bias: the tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item. Strong effects on the consumption of food in particular.
Well travelled road effect: underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
Zero-risk bias: preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Zero-sum heuristic: Intuitively judging a situation to be zero-sum (i.e., that gains and losses are correlated). Derives from the zero-sum game in game theory, where wins and losses sum to zero. The frequency with which this bias occurs may be related to the social dominance orientation personality factor.

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Social biases

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Actor-observer bias: the tendency for explanations of other individuals' behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one's own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
Defensive attribution hypothesis: defensive attributions are made when individuals witness or learn of a mishap happening to another person. In these situations, attributions of responsibility to the victim or harm-doer for the mishap will depend upon the severity of the outcomes of the mishap and the level of personal and situational similarity between the individual and victim. More responsibility will be attributed to the harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe, and as personal or situational similarity decreases.
Dunning-Kruger effect: an effect in which incompetent people fail to realise they are incompetent because they lack the skill to distinguish between competence and incompetence
Egocentric bias: occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would credit them.
Extrinsic incentives bias: an exception to the fundamental attribution error, when people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself
False consensus effect: the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
Forer effect (aka Barnum effect): the tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.
Fundamental attribution error: the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).
Halo effect: the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).
Illusion of asymmetric insight: people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.
Illusion of external agency: when people view self-generated preferences as instead being caused by insightful, effective and benevolent agents
Illusion of transparency: people overestimate others' ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
Illusory superiority: overestimating one's desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as "Lake Wobegon effect," "better-than-average effect," or "superiority bias").
Ingroup bias: the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
Just-world phenomenon: the tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people "get what they deserve."
Moral luck: the tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event rather than the intention
Naive cynicism: expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself
Outgroup homogeneity bias: individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
Projection bias: the tendency to unconsciously assume that others (or one's future selves) share one's current emotional states, thoughts and values.
Self-serving bias: the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).
System justification: the tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)
Trait ascription bias: the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
Ultimate attribution error: similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
Worse-than-average effect: a tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult

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Memory errors and biases

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Bizarreness effect: bizarre, or uncommon material, is better remembered than common material
Choice-supportive bias: remembering chosen options as having been better than rejected options
Change bias: after an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one's past performance as more difficult than it actually was
Childhood amnesia: the retention of few memories from before the age of four
Conservatism or Regressive Bias: tendency to remember high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies lower than they actually were and low ones higher than they actually were. Based on the evidence, memories are not extreme enough.
Consistency bias: incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.
Context effect: that cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa)
Cross-race effect: the tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own
Cryptomnesia: a form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.
Egocentric bias: recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one's exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was
Fading affect bias: a bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.
False memory: a form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
Generation effect (Self-generation effect): that self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
Google effect: the tendency to forget information that can be easily found online.
Hindsight bias: the inclination to see past events as being predictable; also called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect.
Humor effect: that humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.
Illusion-of-truth effect: that people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
Illusory correlation: inaccurately remembering a relationship between two events.
Lag effect: see spacing effect
Leveling and Sharpening: memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.
Levels-of-processing effect: that different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness
List-length effect: a smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well.
Misinformation effect: that misinformation affects people's reports of their own memory.
Misattribution: when information is retained in memory but the source of the memory is forgotten. One of Schacter's (1999) Seven Sins of Memory, Misattribution was divided into Source Confusion, Cryptomnesia and False Recall/False Recognition.
Modality effect: that memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received via writing.
Mood-congruent memory bias: the improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
Next-in-line effect: that a person in a group has diminished recall for the words of others who spoke immediately before or after this person.
Osborn effect: that being intoxicated with a mind-altering substance makes it harder to retrieve motor patterns from the Basal Ganglion.
Part-list cueing effect: that being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items
Peak-end rule: that people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g. pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
Persistence: the unwanted recurrence of memories of a traumatic event.
Picture superiority effect: that concepts are much more likely to be remembered experientially if they are presented in picture form than if they are presented in word form.
Placement bias: tendency of people to remember themselves as better than others at tasks at which they rate themselves above average (also Illusory superiority or Better-than-average effect) and tendency to remember themselves as worse than others at tasks at which they rate themselves below average (also Worse-than-average effect
Positivity effect: that older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
Primacy effect, Recency effect & Serial position effect: that items near the end of a list are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a list; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.
Processing difficulty effect
Reminiscence bump: the recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods
Rosy retrospection: the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
Self-relevance effect: that memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
Self-serving bias: perceiving oneself responsible for desirable outcomes but not responsible for undesirable ones.
Source Confusion: misattributing the source of a memory, e.g. misremembering that one saw an event personally when actually it was seen on television.
Spacing effect: that information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a longer span of time.
Stereotypical bias: memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g. racial or gender), e.g. "black-sounding" names being misremembered as names of criminals.
Suffix effect: the weakening of the recency effect in the case that an item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall
Suggestibility: a form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
Subadditivity effect: the tendency to estimate that the likelihood of a remembered event is less than the sum of its (more than two) mutually exclusive components.
Telescoping effect: the tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
Testing effect: that frequent testing of material that has been committed to memory improves memory recall.
Tip of the tongue phenomenon: when a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.
Verbatim effect: that the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording
Von Restorff effect: that an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items
Zeigarnik effect: that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

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In a 20-D space live a race of entities.
They are born, live, and die, much like us. They breed by matching 4 entities' "genetic" material to produce one offspring. These kids grow, go to their schools, do homework, college... work, etc.
One of these kids had a Uni assignment: to build a 3+1D universe with regularity that could be self sustainable.... so he did. And, being a perfectionist, decided to kick-start the whole thing in such a manner as to spark sentient life in a few corners of this universe.

There you go. Now tell me how this story is flawed and misses the whole regularity detail....

Well for one you never even mentioned regularities so I am not following how it explains those. Secondly, how do you know any of this? What’s your source of revelation? How does this account for future regularity? Lastly, it does not seem like this explanation can explain our moral imperatives.

How do I know any of this, indeed...
What's my source of the information, indeed...

How does it account for past and future regularity and morality? Come one, the kid I mentioned is a good student... he got an A+ for this work... now, would you want to know about his classmates' projects?

String theory aims to describe everything as strings, and different vibrations of these strings represent different particles... So the strings explain the regularity.

What ensures that the strings remain regular?

They just do. (that's a period)

It does have a high likelihood of being the incorrect answer, remember?

I am not following that. I also do not believe people reason this way at all.

A: “How did you get to my house?”
B: “I drove.”
A: “I did not see you drive up.”
B: “Well I did.”
A: “Well there are many possible ways you could have gotten here, and yet only one correct way therefore it is far more likely that you did not actually drive here therefore I do not believe you and you are a liar.”
B: “I am driving back to work now and taking the pizza you ordered with me sir.”

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, remember that?

yes, I know... nothing is analogous to yahweh...

Bingo.

Sarcasm got lost without the appropriate tag...

dammit, I forgot to time this... oh well, doesn't matter... half an hour, or so...

Seemed like 10 minutes! I went and got something to drink and came back and you had already responded.

You drink too slow!