Megalomaniacs will keep lying and dig a deeper and deeper hole for themselves. You start with a small lie, and just can't stop, you have to keep going.
What's surprising though is the lack of judgment from BBC and other major news media. That same person made the same bogus claim 6 months ago. How does that not trigger major red flags? The only story worth writing about here is how he pulled off such a trick.
This is like God's existence. There is a simple way for God to tell us He exists, and which religion is right. But He never does. Instead, we must rely on testimony from various people, contradicting each other, and none of it is reproducible. Sure, you can believe... </controversial statement>
> lack of judgment from BBC and other major news media
Probably got more clicks / views that any other story today, so good business move to print the story, even if it's totally false.
I can't understand Gavin's angle though. It's amazing that he agrees that Wright is Satoshi. I would like to know his motivations in this whole thing.
> There is a simple way for God to tell us He exists, and which religion is right. But He never does.
Many religions would argue that this is a false statement :-)
From the Christian view, the existence of God is self-evident in Creation. And when it comes down to it, I think it takes more faith to believe that life exists because of random chance than because of a creator.
But God does not fit into a scientific proof framework whereby you can prove or disprove the existence of God, which is why it boils down to having faith.
On the other hand, there is a way for Satoshi to prove his/her/their existence.
> And when it comes down to it, I think it takes more faith to believe that life exists because of random chance than because of a creator.
If you have two alternatives you're considering, and both require faith for you, then you don't know which is right. So instead of arbitrarily choosing to have faith in one based on ignorance, it would be much more respectable to admit you don't know and either investigate, or just be satisfied with not knowing. Pretending you know something when you don't is just arrogance, and "faith" is not an excuse.
> But God does not fit into a scientific proof framework whereby you can prove or disprove the existence of God, which is why it boils down to having faith.
The "God is too hipster for the rules that apply to everything else" argument.
There is actually a sound argument behind it, regardless if you agree with it or believe in it.
Let's pretend that god exists and the bible is true. Under that assumption god wants humans to have faith and _choose_ to follow him/her/it, colloquially "if you love someone set them free". If god presents irrefutible evidence to his/her/its existence there would be no room left for choice/faith.
Regardless of your view on the rationality of that, it is part of the true/false teachings of that particular denomination, and within those set parameters I think the logic checks out.
Knowing a god existed would not remove the choice to follow him. If I were presented with irrefutable evidence that the god of the bible existed, I would absolutely not choose to follow him/her/it. The god portrayed by the bible is a petty narcissist who demands that people worship him, while using literally unlimited power to torture and kill people instead of doing anything helpful or responsible. He's also insane, as the only way he can forgive people is to send his son to be brutally murdered. I would not follow such a being even if it existed. Proving a god's existence would definitely not remove the choice of whether to follow a god.
Irrefutable evidence would remove faith (which is not the same as choice). But faith is just pretending you know something instead of admitting you don't know. So again, a god that wants you to pretend to know things you don't is not a being I care to follow.
At best, you've provided a picture of why an insane being might hide its existence, but that doesn't prove whether that being exists or doesn't exist.
It's not a logical argument, and we could go into it blow by blow, but essentially what you're saying is that God doesn't want there to be a logical argument, oh and as to why? That's just a given, which also makes the argument unsound.
> If you have two alternatives you're considering, and both require faith for you, then you don't know which is right
But if one takes more faith than the other, which do you choose?
Think of packing your own parachute for a sky dive vs accepting one that was packed for you. Still requires faith in the equipment to function when you go to open the chute, but it's not an arbitrary choice of which to trust.
> The "God is too hipster for the rules that apply to everything else" argument.
If God created the universe, then he exists outside of it. So the "rules that apply to everything else" probably do not apply to God.
> But if one takes more faith than the other, which do you choose?
I don't believe things based on faith, I believe things based on evidence. If there isn't evidence, I admit I don't know. Faith does not enter the equation.
> If God created the universe, then he exists outside of it. So the "rules that apply to everything else" probably do not apply to God.
And if god didn't create the universe then the rules of logic still apply to god. You've not proven that god created the universe, so you can't base arguments off that.
> And when it comes down to it, I think it takes more faith to believe that life exists because of random chance than because of a creator.
It seems like you're being earnest here, so I'll respond earnestly and follow you totally off topic.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're implying the following argument: if you uniformly randomly sample configurations of molecules, the probability of getting a living organism is so low as to be effectively zero. The problem with argument: life didn't emerge whole cloth from uniform random sampling. Rather, there was a bootstrapping process.
The first step, which has been demonstrated in the lab, involves molecules randomly bumping into each other that happen to promote each other's production, e.g., auto-catalytic sets. These are simple proto-replicators: certainly not quite life, and certainly nothing like the complexity of a living cell. But they have the basic feature that they promote the creation of more copies of themselves. And once you have that feature—which we have seen can emerge from random collisions—you can get random, incremental improvements. For example, an auto-catalytic set of three molecules might run into a fourth that is mutually catalytic with the original three.
And this incrementalism is the key to building up what we know as a living cell. Life can emerge slowly, bit by bit, starting from a proto-replicator, using occasional low-probability, but not impossibly low-probability, steps.
Which is not to say that it's not still a big mystery as to where the universe with these convenient laws of physics came from (1). :) But once you have physics, life doesn't require as much faith as you're asserting.
Where is a good place for it? r/atheist or r/christianity? I've already witnessed a far more respectful conversation on origins than almost anywhere else on the internet in this short thread. I come to HN because of the respectful tone that is maintained and required and I appreciate topics of all sorts, even if it is a rabbit trail off the original conversation.
So there are two separate questions. (1) Consider having a religious argument in various different places. Where will you get a good one? (2) Consider doing various different things in this HN thread. How will they work out?
It could well be that the answer to #1 is that HN is one of the best places to argue religion on the internet -- but also that arguing religion is one of the worst things you could do on HN. [EDITED: or, more specifically, in this HN discussion that nominally has nothing to do with religion.] In fact, I think it's likely that both of those are true, and the first may actually be because of the second.
... Because if HN starts being a common venue for religious arguments, it will tend to collect the sort of people who want to get into religious arguments, and regrettably those are often not actually good people for having religious arguments with. The same goes for politics, race, gender, and the like.
HN is mostly civilized and intelligent because as a community it makes some effort to avoid temptingly polarizing discussion topics, and the least civilized and intelligent discussions on HN tend to be on those temptingly polarizing topics.
Then how does God exist? To me, the argument that a creator makes more sense than naturally occurring existence simply displaces the issue. God is then the unexplained, naturally occurring existence.
What's surprising though is the lack of judgment from BBC and other major news media. That same person made the same bogus claim 6 months ago. How does that not trigger major red flags? The only story worth writing about here is how he pulled off such a trick.
This is like God's existence. There is a simple way for God to tell us He exists, and which religion is right. But He never does. Instead, we must rely on testimony from various people, contradicting each other, and none of it is reproducible. Sure, you can believe... </controversial statement>