I think you're underestimating infant mortality rates in prehistory -- and even, say, 400 years ago.

Just completely hypothetically, imagine you had a computer program that ran a massive physics simulation. And imagine your lifespan is such that you can observe it for massive periods of time. So you set up the starting conditions for a Big Bang, and hit the 'run simulation' button, and watch it go. And eventually, as you knew they would (because of the physics you programmed, and because of statistical likelihoods), some of the matter clusters into solar systems and planets, then on one planet some primitive proteins come about in some inorganic process, then prokaryotes, then an evolutionary process that eventually results in humans.

At that point, you could conceivably think, OK, these interesting entities in a remote corner of my simulation are doing some weird things. They seem to be controlling themselves in this structure in their heads. Perhaps I can put some hooks into the simulation so that I can observe what's happening in those brains. If I can reverse-engineer the structure that's evolved, I guess I could read their thoughts - and even write their thoughts.

And there's a mechanism, whereby "the guy running the simulation" can appear in visions, hear "prayer", and, if he also manipulates the rest of the simulation, perform "acts of god".

I thing somewhere there's a calculation that indicates that, if Moore's Law continues, the probability that this universe is a simulation running on a computer is greater than the probability we're in "real life". But I can't help but instinctively think it's fanciful.

You speak as if "monkeys on a floating rock" is absurd.

But we can see the monkeys. We can see the rock. We can poke at them both, collaboratively, and agree "yep, that's a monkey alright. On a floating rock. No doubt about it." There's nothing absurd about it at all.

I assume by "primordial goo", you mean a mass of single-celled living organisms.

Given what we know about mutation and selection, if prokaryotes existed 3.6 billion years ago, it's pretty much inevitable that they would have evolved into something as complex as humans by now (and fungi, and trees, and birds, and slugs, whales, and all that other stuff ...)

Now, we can look at fossil prokaryotes in the form of Stromatolite.

So if you're going to state that our evolution from these isn't the most likely explanation for our existence, you have to explain what prevented evolution from taking its natural course. Perhaps God did some intervention to suppress mutation, or to distort the effects of natural selection?

But humans are very good at maintaining two conflicting views at the same time. Frankly, if we couldn't we'd go mad.

So it's quite possible for an evolutionary scientist to do his job based on a firm assumption that all life on earth evolved from a single-celled organism -- and yet go to church on Sunday and sincerely praise God for creating Adam and Eve in His own image. We just compartmentalise our conflicting sides.

Actually it turns out that kindness, cooperation and charity are very good herd survival strategies. Which is why humans (and other successful species) evolved to exhibit those traits so much.

If it's in the universe, it ain't a god, in my book.

Since space and time is all I can observe, even indirectly, "exists outside of space and time" is equivalent to "invisible".

I am not the OP, but I would agree that all religion is false and a placebo.

In fact it's a pretty good definition of religion -- "Believing in stuff that isn't real, because it feels good".

I don't think you caught him out as much as you think you did.

Before anyone can say whether they believe in God, you need to agree on what you mean by "God".

If you give a sufficiently broad definition - "God is physics", then of course, anyone who believes in physics believes in God.

If you add in many of the other attributes that most people would associate with God -- is conscious (whatever that means), takes a personal interest in humans, takes a personal interest in individual humans, responds to worship and prayer -- then more of us are going to find that an impossible thing to believe in.

As the AC above says:

http://xyzzyawards.org/
http://www.ifarchive.org/

Getting pretty old now, but two wonderful free games you could try are:

- Curses - huge in scale, brilliant in concept and execution
- Christminster - don't be tempted to believe that the opening puzzle is an unsolveable hoax

These come as files for an interpreter, which you download separately. Those links have all the info.

But isn't that just because you're used to Visual Studio.

I know Eclipse. My brother in law is steeped in MS development, and says that using Eclipse is like "going back in time". But he also said that IntelliJ IDEA was better.

Well, I tried IntelliJ IDEA, and none of it made any sense. The keyboard shortcuts were completely unintuitive to me (apparently they're familiar if you've background in some DOS file manager or other).

I think I like Eclipse because I'm used to it, and you like Visual Studio because you're used to it. From what I can tell, the features I would actually use (and it's worth noting, I don't write GUIs) are pretty much equivalent on both.

Not only is it not theoretical, but it's been tested on public roads.

One initiative that doesn't go the whole way towards fully autonomous vehicles is the road train. A human-driven lead car shuttles back and forth the length of a multi-lane highway. As a driver of a suitably equipped car, you can drive up behind it, press a button, and become part of the convoy. The lead car now controls your car - brakes, steering, acceleration. When you're approaching your destination, press the button again, the controller will adjust the distances between you and the cars in front and behind, allowing you space to resume control and leave the convoy. Then the cars that were behind you will move in to fill your space.

The neat thing about this is that because the cars behind don't need to anticipate the movements of the lead car, they can be *much* closer together. Close enough to benefit from slipstream, which has a significant effect on fuel economy.

Normal money works for you. Bitcoin works for some people.

What's wrong with that?

Yes, there's a stickiness to pirating. Once you've got a Bittorrent-to-TV workflow set up, it's so convenient that doing anything else is a bit of a wrench.

I took to watching Lost on Bittorrent, so I could engage in the US forums in a timely manner. It was on FTA terrestrial TV in the UK a couple of days later, so it didn't seem like stealing. Once I discovered the right Torrent site, with predictable torrent names and an RSS feed, it was really easy to set it up so that it would download every episode, unattended, as soon as it became available. I could stream it to XBMC on my chipped Xbox. No ads. No hassle. Just switch on, browse to the programme, and watch. Or if I wanted to copy it onto an iPad to watch on the bus, or a Linux tablet, or whatever, I could. ... and once that was set up, adding a new RSS feed for a new series was trivial. So it was not only cheaper, but much more convenient.

I've stopped doing this now (moved house; retired Xbox; nothing motivated me to set it up again) but lots of people must be in a situation where they have it set up. Setting up Netflix instead, just for the sake of being legal -- well, why would you?