What would convince you?

[TheKeyAuthor]

1 Would he have to appear on Oprah or the like? Which means he has to be a celeb first. How would he become a celeb?
2 Would he have to do tricks like change water into wine? Which means the likes of David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy etc. are candidates?
3 Would you believe a "miracle" on TV anyway?
4 Are we too sceptical and information overloaded to believe anything any more?
5 Would anything possibly convince anyone in the 21st century anyhow?

"If I were an atheist, would I approve of using human embryos for study? My first gut instinct was yes, because the currently living take precedence of the unborn"

That is not why.

I approve of it because stem cells are harvested only 5-6 days after fertilisation, when it is merely a tiny ball of 50-150 cells. No differentiation into any organs or any body parts whatsoever (which is why they are harvested then, as pluripotent stem cells) It is no more a baby than the skin I just cut off my cuticle, just a minuscule collection of cells.

The only reason you are opposing this is because you think it has a soul, which God created and put into those cells.

How is that slavery?

Isn't that the usual MO in a POW camp?

Slavery is usually a bit more drastic.

sciencelover did you read my post about it being immoral not to use spare embryos for research? Should the spare embryos just be thrown away instead or should all IVF treatment be banned because most IVF treatments rely on the creation of as many embryos as possible to give the best chance of success.

I don't understand how an atheist could argue against it, and if religion tells people that IVF is wrong then stuff religion it seems quite an inhumane and cruel stance.

I don't understand how an atheist could argue against it

Well, atheism isn't a religion. It doesn't tell you how to live your life or what your morals should be. There's nothing inherent in not believing in gods that means you have to agree with embryonic stem-cell research.

A vegan atheist, for instance, might think that all animal and/or embryonic research is wrong as a matter of principle.

Atheism doesn't inform a person's moral position.

I am personally in favour of stem cell research, for example- but another atheist may well be opposed to it.

An atheist is someone who lacks belief in a god or gods. No more or less than that.

"but he, with all the unanswered questions and gaps in the theory - that are interesting, that are a puzzle - goes off into non-science and declares the conclusion of this theory is that there is no God."

The whole point about science is that it isn't scared of gaps. Gaps are just places where science hasn't explained things yet. The problem with believers is that they say "oh, the,s a gap- that's where God fits" Rather then saying "That's a gap- how exciting. I wonder when science will advance and understand what's going on the"

I've looked at utube clip.

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation of evolution to me. Are you saying that nobody should ever have to think how they are going to answer a question?

And "if you had been there" and "a very long time ago" seem perfectly reasonable terms to use in the context.

Don't understand your point.

Theory, proof, probability, evidence .... OK, I will provide an example.
Context: Loss/removal of a child triggers a quasi-religious experience in parent X. Parent X is a mathematician, so struggles with the religious elements.
A. Parent X's birthday is the Annunciation Feast day (Jesus Christ's immaculate conception, Roman Catholic (RC) church).
B. Parent X stumbles across a significant numeric religious symbol that comes from the transformation of letters in Christ's name and the significance of the cross. A similar transformation on parent X's name yields the same number. The number is the birthday of parent X's mother.
C. The Chi Rho, Christogram or Christ's monogram, is the perfect representation of Parent X's name using 3 straight lines and 1 semi-circle. Initials and all symmetry is on display, meaning it is a beautiful solution for mathematicians. The configuration of the name is given by a RC ritual of the cross.

Probability of A, B and C is in the order of 20k billion to 500k billion to 1.
A little while after figuring this out, parent X witnesses a star in the night's sky that depicts the Chi Rho framed by a waning crescent moon: parent X's name is indeed written in the stars.

So, what would you make of that?
1/. So improbable that it could never happen (not realistic).
2/. Yes, that is intriguing and if verified or at least plausible would make me tend to believe
3/. Utter nonsense
4/. Have an open mind but would need to know more
5/. That would do it for me

What would I make of that - I'd make a string of coincidences, and it is well known that the human mind loves patterns and coincidences. I'd also make a person desperate for some sort of divine reason (i.e. taking the blame out of the hands of humans) for some terrible thing that has happened in their life.

Of course, the feast day of the conception is made up by the church and isn't actually the day of the year that Jesus, if he existed as an historical person, was actually conceived on. It also varies depending on what year we are in as it is one of the moveable Feast Days and then, which calendar do you use? The Hebrew calendar in use when Jesus is supposed to have been conceived? The Julian calendar? The Gregorian? Or just the one that suits your theory.

Have you ever looked at the Roman Catholic ritual of crossing one's self? Are you talking about the priest's crossing of himself or the congregation's crossing of themselves? They are subtly but very importantly different.

I'm very sorry, but I really think you are clutching at straws to try and make sense of the terrible sadness you have had in your life, so I say it's "utter nonsense" whilst trying to express sadness and compassion that your life has led you to this delusion.

Although I believe in a divine force that is transcendent of the physical world, I also belive that force actually doesn't give two-shits about a bunch of parasites on a rock in space.

A) Chance of someone's birthday matching a Roman Catholic festival of one form or other: About 1 in 10 (the BBC List of Christian events is very long). And quite possibly less considering the Birthday Problem.

B) Chance of some numerological connection: Not particularly unlikely at all, although it does depend on the mathematical function you use to reduce text to a number. What you're doing is using a hashing algorithm. If you use SHA-512 as your hashing algorithm and get a match in hash value with that then I'd say it's incredibly unlikely and hence could be significant. The probability of a SHA-512 hash collision is significantly less than 1 in 10^25.

If your hashing function is to add up all the letters as numbers and keep reducing the digits down until you get a single digit, it's about 1 in 9 and so not significant in the slightest. What's the hash function you use and over how many letters?

C) That sounds suspiciously like "If you take a 2D shape and break it up on imaginary lines it sort-of looks a bit like some letters that are significant to me." Sorry, but that is not convincing at all.

Chi Ro are two greek letters that look like an X and a P. There's a probability of 1 in 26 chance of your first initial matching one of these and 1 in 26 chance of your second initial matching the other. That's a probability of 1 in (26 x 26) = 1 in 676. Which isn't so extraordinarily unlikely that one would have to invoke a spiritual connection to explain it.

But that assumes that you're called Xavier Peterson or similar. If you're splitting up the Chi Ro symbol into letters other than X and P and then claiming there is significance, you're over-reaching.

D) Connecting up stars with imagined lines and then casting significance on the resulting shapes is a pass time that has entertained people for millenia.

The human brain has a built-in but over-eager ability to spot spurious patterns in random distributions. How closely did this pattern of stars actually match the Chi Ro? Was it perfectly symmetrical? Was the curve of the Rho fully formed? And when you say it was "framed by the crescent moon" are you suggesting that these stars appeared either on the face of the moon or somewhere between the moon and where you are? (and would it be wrong of me to point out that the crescent is a symbol more commonly linked to Islam than Christianity?)

To answer your question of what I would make of all this; I'd suggest that your method for estimating probabilities is way off.

worldgone: I was trying to keep it simple. Yes dates and feasts etc. vary for many reasons. In the UK the Annunciation is considered to be fixed (yes in general, points noted).

They are subtly but very importantly different. I didn't know that. What is the difference?

Snorbs:
A) As my comment to worldgone, I was trying to keep that simple.
B) Again not as complex as you have it. Again keep with UK as standard for dates and names. Match two letters exactly in same position and 1 DOB.
C) It is a monogram. Without knowing Chi Rho existed, make a monogram of a name (parent X). The monogram matches top half of Chi Rho. Name plus initials match it all.
D) Star is the Morning Star, which is Venus, the third brightest celestial body. It shines brightest in a crescent; hence the non-linear element.

A, B, C and D are all linked (in a straightforward simple way) to JC. Probability of A, B, C and D is tending towards the astronomical.

The context would be all important. On its own it is just a maths puzzle. Yes I know a crescent moon is linked to Islam. Crescentmoon's many interesting comments confirm that link.

A) How much critical detail can you miss out from "someone's birthday falls on the same day as a particular RC feast" when you simplify it?

B) I note you are still being coy about what it is you actually did to the letters/numbers to achieve this miraculous connection. Numerology doesn't have the most reliable of histories. Is the DOB just a day, or day and month, or day month and year?

C) So you take the symbol Chi Rho. You ignore the fact that the very point of it is that it represents the first two letters of "Christ" in Greek using letters that look like P and X. Instead, you then make a stylised representation of your name (which I'm guessing doesn't have an X in it) to make it look like Chi Rho and then - wowsers! - it looks like Chi Rho. And then you marvel at the symmetry of it even though Chi Rho is not symmetrical. Um. Hmm.

D) When you said it was "framed by a waning crescent moon", what exactly did you mean by that? And are you really suggesting that you saw the crescent of Venus with the naked eye and that formed the curve of the P? Must've been an incredibly small curve.

So let's talk of probabilities. (A) still seems roughly 1 in 10 to me. It's not hard for events to coincide with RC festivals.

(B) is harder to ascertain given your reticence to describe the numerology you used but let's assume it's matching two letters plus one day of the year = 26 x 26 x 365 = roughly 1 in 250,000. But I reckon it's probably a whole lot less than that. Not least because I don't regard this as random chance, it's clearly a guided effort to find a match.

(C) boils down to "how probable is it that I can take a random symbol and create a monogram that looks similar". 30 seconds work with a pencil and a piece of paper has shown me that I can create a monogram of the first two initials of my name that looks like Chi Rho. If you make Chi Rho fully symmetrical you can fit all my initials in there.

A further minute allowed me to do the same for my ex's initials and the Sacred Ikon of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs. Which on the one hand might explain an awful lot about my ex or on the other suggests it's really not very difficult.

Moreover guided efforts such as this are not very amenable to probability estimation because it boils down to how much effort and artistic license you will allow in getting the match. It's not random chance. Call it 1 in 10?

Combine all that and you get a chance of, at worst, 1 in 25 million. But, again, in reality I suspect it's massively less than that because a lot of what you say smells very strongly of you trying to find a correlation rather than purely random chance. And I struggle to see the significance of assigning a single number for probability in these circumstances as they're not connected in a cumulative way.

It's like saying "My daughter's friends are called Sophie, Amy and Grace. The chances of the first girl being called Sophie is thousands to one because of all the different girl's names in the world. The chances of the second girl being called Amy is also thousands to one, and the same for the third! Therefore the chances of my daughter's friends having those names is billions to one!" It's not significant. It doesn't mean anything.

How did you calculate a chance of 1 in 500k billion anyway?

but then, because little is known before that point

But that's simply not true. There's a huge amount known about how fish evolved and how some of those fish evolved into reptiles and so on.

The evidence is there which is why he said "Trust me, you would have seen that". There is fossil evidence that that is what happened. That Dawkins didn't, in one short clip, explain every stage of evolution from the first proto-life all the way up to the present day in exact scientific terms and with accompanying diagrams of the fossil record is not surprising. He wasn't talking to another evolutionary biologist and he didn't have a few weeks to explain it all.

I suggest if you want to know more, his books "The Greatest Show on Earth", "Climbing Mount Improbable" and "The Blind Watchmaker" are all very, very informative. Or if you have a personal dislike against him there are thousands of other excellent books on evolution and the evidence that supports it.