On Tuesday, November 6, 2018 at 2:10:08 AM UTC-7, Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article ,
says...

On Monday, November 5, 2018 at 7:36:36 AM UTC-7, Paul Schlyter wrote:

I know. The way to find the truth is science. We have no better way than
that.

Nope. We've already discussed that science is incapable of discerning
truth where phenomena cannot be controlled.

OBSERVED !!! Not controlled... Science has e.g. been fully capable of
discerning many interesting facts about the universe, even though we are
unable to control the universe...

Which is a bit outside the scientific method.

A circular "proof". I already know the Bible says that the Bible is
correct. WHat else could you expect?

What else could a closed mind say?

A closed mind would think that quote was the "truth from God". A closed
mind is incapable of even considering any other possibility...

A closed mind might also accept ONLY that other possibility.

Another circular "proof". I already know the Bible says that the Bible
is correct. WHat else could you expect?

You are being dishonest. It's not really circular at all. It is saying
that a mortal has no right to interpret scripture by himself.

In Europe some 100+ years ago, that rule was enforced by the authorities.
Back then you could be sent to jail for having had a religious meeting
without any priest present during the meeting. That was then a strong
motivation for religious minorities to emigrate to North America. And
there you have the reason for the very strong religiosity of todays
Americans. In the U.S. it is unthinkable for a politician to publicly
admit being an atheist -- their political career would end very soon
after having done that. In Europe, doing the same thing wouldn't be such
a big deal. After all, running a country is not the same thing as running
a church.

It's been done in the past.

WHICH profet?

Mohammed, who created Islam?

Joseph Smith, who created Mormonism?

Both claimed that an angel explained "the truth" to them...

MANY people have claimed that they have seen and spoken to angels. THAT
alone does not give them the right to start a religion.

Are you against freedom of religion?

Not at all. One may worship whatever he wants, even atheism. I was unclear
as I meant "right in the sight of God." Just seeing an angel is usually a
private experience meant for the one seeing. There's the story about
misinterpreting signs:

http://www.wikipreacher.org/home/the...ree/plant-corn


Perhaps you are against freedom of speech too?

The ones who are against free speech are the AGW fanatics and those who
wound hound a family out of a restaurant because they have different political
beliefs.

"Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret
unto his servants the prophets.+ -- Amos 3:7

Yet another circular "proof". I already know the Bible says that the
Bible is correct. WHat else could you expect?

You have blinded your mind with this baloney. That scripture (and many
others) isn't telling you to believe the Bible: It's telling you to pay
attention to prophets.

If I don't believe the Bible, why should I care when the Bible says I
should pay attention to some prophets?

Maybe you SHOULD pay attention. You may be wrong, you know.

And who are these "certified" prophets? Is Muhammed included? Or Joseph
Smith?

Or Edgar Cayce? Or L. Ron Hubbard? Or William Miller? Or Charles Taze
Russell? The Bible says (I know, you don't care what it says, but YOU are
asking the question about prophets anyway :-):

"I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee,
and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that"
I shall command him.
"And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words
which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him." -- Deut, 18:18-19

So GOD will call prophets. If they don't attest that He actually did that,
you can ignore them.

"When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not,
nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the
prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him."
-- Deuteronomy 18:22

So check out each of those people to see how they stack up.

So where is that list?

Of course, since religions aren't in ageement with each other, there can
only be either one or none in that list.

And you've already excluded that the list is empty. So your list must
contain exactly one religion. Which one is it? And don't just say
"Christianity" because that's too unspecific. Since you condemn most of
Christianity, you must tell what branch of Christianity you approve.

"I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the
sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that
all were wrong)?and which I should join." __ Joseph Smith

So your claim that an angel "explained the truth" to Joseph Smith is
egregiously incomplete and misleading. He claimed the Father and the Son
visited him. When he asked which church he should join, he was told none
of them.

OK, replace "angel" with "deity" then. But this doesn't apply to you
since you earlier said that your list of approvable religions was not an
empty list.

And he didn't run off and start a religion after having an
experience MUCH more profound that Mohammed.

So what do YOU KNOW about the experience of Mohammed? Not much I would
suppose...

He claimed the angel Gabriel visited him and commanded him to deliver the
message of peace to the world. I had a discussion with an Imam that seemed
to have a propensity to numerology (anything that didn't have a multiple of
19 involved in it had to be wrong).

By information from you, who admitted that there are errors in the
Bible. And since there are errors there, it's not an untrustworthy
source.

And since there are errors in the climate models used by the IPCC, they
are untrustworthy sources. If you maintain one is trustworthy but the
other is not, you are a hypocrite.

They should of course not be blindly trusted, as you tend to do with
MODTRAN. Science is, as always, about critical thinking, not about blind
faith.

If you don't investigate the details yourself, your "critical thinking"
is the same as blind faith.

However, even then you are biased, since you think there are errors
in my Bible quotes, but not in yor Bible quotes.

What evidence do you have that YOUR quotes are correct? None at all.
You're just playing word games. I explained how you can tell.

Well, what evidence do you have that YOUR quotes are correct?

Prophets and reports of NDEs.

You see? Not even Jesus is free from corruption....

I was asking YOU. I don't know for sure any mortals that are, but I know
MANY who are much closer than you or I.

Do you know any immortals who are?

Ummm, Gabriel, Elijah, Jesus Christ, Peter, James and John, etc.

And since you earlier said that being in error does not imply being
corrupt - I agree with that. Being corrput is having a bad intent to
deceive others. Everyone is in error from time to time, nobody is
flawless. But not everyone have bad intents.

And intentional errors can be inserted with the best of intentions by
a translator who KNOWS that the text could not possible mean what it says.

That's one major weakness of Modtran, or at least on how you use it.
The amount of water vapor is not a constant.

Umm, THAT'S why it can be changed in the program, of course :-))

So why do you have to enter a value, if the program sets new values by
itself?

It doesn't.

It is not even in a constant ratio relative to the saturation pressure
of water vapor. The amount of water vapor in our atmosphere is highly
variable, and can be anything between 0 percent and about 4 percent.

That's why the IPCC models just throw in the towel and ASSUME that that
the effect of CO2 is multiplied by a fixed constant.

Does Modtran match well with the very low humidity over the Sahara
desert?

Do the IPCC models? Of course not. "Sauce for the goose is sauve for the
gander."

**Any** GCM model of the atmosphere should produce low humidity areas
where we have our deserts, or else that model would be pretty worthless.

There ya go. The "G" in GCM stands for GLOBAL.

However, there are local models and there are global models. Which kind
of model is MODTRAN?

It's actually a local model. You selsct the area you're interested in:
tropical, midlatitude (summer, winter), subarctic (summer, winter), or
standard.

Of course. But when we can measure, we know more if we measure than
if we don't.

And MacDougall made measurements, so we know more than we did before.

Not nearly as much as we'd wish to know though. MacDougall realized that
himself, that's why he concluded that his experiment would have to be
repeated - not just once or twice but many times - before any conclusions
could be made.

Sure, three nines with four measurements begs for further experimentation.
But it also says that it would be imprudent to assume that a person is
nothing more than a body.

Palmer Joss asks Ellis Arroway to prove his feelings for his father. But
Palmer Joss does not question that the father did exist.

Right, but point is that there are important things, like love, memories,
and, yes, even experiences that lie outside of science. And some actual
evidence, even though it was captured by a fighter jet's targeting
computer, isn't "scientific" because it cannot be controlled
"scientifically."

Any subjective experience is of course outside the scope of science.
There is only one way we can find out if someone had a subjective
expericence or not: ask that person, and hope she doesn't lie.

One could then argue that religion is nothing but a subjective
experience, and I would happily agree with that. Religious experiences do
indeed exist, no doubt about that. But if God exists is much more
doubtful. However, we can feel much more sure about that some (actually
many) specific God does not exist. This applies to Thor, Woden, Mars,
Saturn, ...and also the Abrahamic "one and only" God.

I agree with you except for the last one :-)

But the religious experiences around this non-existend Abrahamic God,
these experiences do exist. Just like hallucinations exist even though
the objects being hallucinated may very well, and often are, non-
existent.

What about "supernatural" events observed by many?

"To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible
proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining
to the kingdom of God" -- Acts 1:3

I'm not questioning your religious faith. You could lie about your faith
of course, but I see no reason why you should lie about that, so I
believe you. After all, there are a large number of religious people, so
there's nothing remarkable about that.

So what I'm questioning is not your feelings, but the existence of the
object of your feelings.

If you require "scientific evidence" for that object, you're outta luck!

I know. As I explained earlier, those feelings are outside the scope of
science. However, I too have feelings, and these feelings I cannot
scientifically prove to others. But I find it reasonable that other human
beings, including you, also have feelings. Therefore I don't doubt your
feelings. But I'll have to view you as a "black box" (i.e. a device I
know nothing about the inside of, all I can do is to subject it to
various stimula and then observe the responses.

And I don't think you'll find any scientific study that concludes that
god does not exist, or the human soul/spirit/whatever does not exist.
THose questions are simply outside the scope of science.

Yes, they are, now.

Since when?

I was referring to the future, not the past.

Then you should have said "Yes, they will be in the future", not "Yes,
they are now"... :-)

It seemed clear to me. Sorry it didn't seem that way to you.

"I believe God himself will someday debate with and answer every objection
arrogant men can come up with against him" -- Criss Jami


It is very plausible that H2O provides a positive feedback loop,
amplifying the heating due to increased CO2. Also, when the air gets
warmer, more water evaporates from the oceans, causing even more water
vapor in the atmosphere.

However, humans are burning fossil coal at a large scale. If we instead
had burnt hydrogen at a large scale, there would have been large amounts
of human produced water vapor in the atmosphere. But we don't burn
hydrogen at a large scale, we burn coal at a large scale. Therefore the
major human contribution is CO2, not H2O.

Two hundred years to double the CO2 level and produce a 1.1 degree rise
in global temperatures. Something else is happening and we'd better find
out what it is before our great great great grandchildren burn up.

Coal use has dropped significantly in the U.S. and probably will all over
the world in the coming decades.

That is your expectation. It remains to be seen what actually will happen.

That is true of all prognostications.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/glo...emissions-data

Electricity and heat production account for 1/4 of the GHG emissions,
industry almost as much and agriculture, forestry and land use an equal
amount. Transportation is only 1/9. So how do we cut the CO2 production
in half without cutting our throats, too?

And half isn't good enough. That still puts an additional 1 ppm/year
into the atmosphere (assuming the same ratio going into other sinks
as now). It'll just take twice as long for the burn to happen.