I'm actually partially allergic to the damn stuff. It's bad enough that when I'm near a smoker for more than about a minute, I have to remove my contacts and my eyes get bloodshot. It's damn unpleasant.

And ice can be a blistering 273 Kelvin! Wow, that's a huge number!

The AP has ~4k fact checkers. So you're looking at about 0.25% of the total AP fact-checking force to look at a new release political book. Whadda ya know, context means something.

Also, various news programs and reports from members in the McCain campaign, including John McCain himself, has criticized the veracity of several comments in the book. There are also email records directly at odds with her statements regarding the Tina Fey skits.

Finally, here's an AP fact check from yesterday, and a direct check on a speech in September. Took me 15 seconds on Google to prove you wrong. I somehow suspect you get all your news from Glenn Beck and O'Reilly. It has that familiar evangelical pundit feel of "translate every criticism into an attack on Obama, warranted or not, because OMGZOBAMASSOCIALIST and eats Christian babies".

In other words, pwnd.

How could I not? Sometimes I feel like it is a responsibility bestowed upon those of us who have a practiced hand in debunking fallacies to keep those fallacies from perpetuating! The education system of the US has failed too many people, and somehow spat out a lot of them with an anti-intellectual bent (beyond just misinformation or under-information).

In other words, any time!

Witness testimony IS a justification for belief. Witness testimony may be the end of our verifiability, for instance, if the murder weapon is destroyed we may have to rely solely on witness testimony. The witness testimony IS the verification. So it may be fuzzily verifiable, but it is verifiable. Similarly, if many witnesses have written about what you might call a "religious" event, your reason for assuming they are lying is simply that you've already decided they are lying, not because you have some other evidence to the contrary. Their testimony IS the verifiability. Your job is to say why you would disbelieve witness testimony. Either they are telling the truth or they aren't, and the general assumption for a disparate group of witnesses telling roughly the same story is that they are probably telling the truth. I say roughly because if they told exactly the same story you might be able to assume that they made it up and are got their stories straight before hand. Regardless of whether you believe them or not, anyway, they are a source of authority on the subject in that they claim to have been their and are reporting on what they saw.

Except psychologists and other experts have known for years that witness testimony is not very reliable, and should only be used as a last resort in lieu of other facts. It's trivial to prove this. Consider magic tricks, or this popular test. Reality and what a witness would swear to are vastly different. This is even neglecting the idea of mass hallucination or suggestibility.

This is not to say that the witnesses are necessarily lying — just that they are, instead, fundamentally unreliable for reasons that has nothing to do with the personal attitude of a witness and instead has to do with basic human psychology and attention.

Thus, because extraordinary claims must require extraordinary evidence, claims of the supernatural require evidence that is extremely compelling. Citing a single reference that compiled a set of stories of questionable authorship spread over decades or centuries following an event at such a time that the common writing down of mundane records was uncommon, and thus subject to decades or centuries of the telephone effects, is absurd.

If you accept such cherry-picked witness testimony, there is no reason to deny the witness testimony of priests of Thor, Horus, or Zeus. There are hundreds of them, also in historical records, and many of their contemporaries claimed direct observation of the deities or their effects. I apply the same standard to modern religions as I do to the ancient ones. Anything else is hardly a consistent position.

Unless you're planning on sacrificing a lamb to Zeus today?

Validation does not come from verifiability, a valid argument is one where the conclusion follows from the premises. I can make valid arguments that are completely unverifiable if I just assume crazy unverifiable premises.

In which case, you may have a "valid argument" but the whole construct is still not verifiable and thus, in a greater sense, the whole construct is invalid. My point still holds.

I've been told by authority that I consider reliable that it is true, and the original point of my post stands, this is often enough.

This might fly as long as you never actually have to discuss the subject or things related to it. As soon as you do, it's really just intellectual laziness to rely on another's conclusion of third-party data. But if the topic must be considered in any fashion, really, the onus is on you to research your position and verify it. Otherwise, you get things like this intellecutal laziness which plagues public opinion. It's the same reason "Electromagnetic Radiation" is scary to the "common man" and there can be an uproar over WiFi causing cancer. They take "radiation" from loose discussions among non-experts and apply a bad connotation to it, and use that information as "good enough" to extrapolate further information.

It's intellectual negligence, plain and simple.

However, lack of theoretical observability is a compelling argument for non-existence. So, something like an electron with zero energy.

Definition: Something that exists is a construct with a isolated energy content > 0 J.

Done.

(By the way, if you pull something like "beauty", "beauty" is a quality defined by the flow of electrons across a potential barrier in a central nervous system. This has energy. Thus, something can be beautiful, and this definition very neatly ties in "the eye of the beholder", so to speak.)

However, neither of your examples are fundamentally untestable, just practically. For a given question, you can construct an axiom to develop a system to answer that question, perhaps to the exclusion of another but you could, in principle, do this. It reduces to a choice of which questions you wish to answer.

Similarly, while a full-scale big bang model is impractical, it's not theoretically unobtainable. Collapse the entire universe into discrete BH chunks that will self-aggregate and wait, for example (I don't even want to image spacetime distorted on that scale ..)

There is no reason to assume that there is any fact that is not scientifically constructible. "Faith" based elements are not even constructible in principle.

Um. No.

Or, (slightly) more eloquently:

I will not get into a religious debate on slashdot of all places, but the challenge of you must show that it would be more miraculous for the testimony to be wrong than for the event to have actually occurred. Is rather obviously false. Are you saying that you always believe the thing that is simply the least "miraculous"? That would put you firmly in the group that believes 100% in current science, not even allowing the possibility that humans make mistakes, especially in science.

This is wrong or misleading on a few levels.

1. Disbelief in current science is quite obviously not a miracle, or all the fundies wouldn't be doing it.
2. "Disbelief in current science" is also misleading. Science works on refinements. GR is a refinement of Newton's gravity. We did not throw out Newton and say he is wrong forevermore, merely consigned him to a set of low-velocity, low gravity regimes. There is not a scientist on this planet that disbelieves in Newtonian mechanics, and not one that doubts it is rather incomplete.
3. Humans make mistakes. This is graduated, however. There is "Completely false", "Incompletely true", and "True". Few things fall into either extreme, and you are attempting to shoehorn everything into both extremes and exclude the middle.
4. Operation on the least miraculous is better known as adhering to "Occam's Razor", or a form of Logical Positivism. I am quite pleased to say I follow both.
5. It is in fact science's great strength that it is continually refining, and that it's current proclaimation is never the final word. It should never be a mark of pride to say that your convictions don't change. You must be willing to adapt to new information and situations.

To date, there has been no evidence to suggest that there is anything that is fundamentally excluded from a rational, evidence-based theoretical construct. The truly ridiculous thing is to ever act on "miracles", because there is no such thing, and there is no evidence to suggest there ever has been.

The idea that religion is valuable is also questionable. Lack of religion promotes value in life, society, and your fellow human beings because this is all you have. On a not-so-practical level, it's also more honest — you're not being nice to play to a deity's favor, you're doing it to operate well in society and treat your fellow humans well. You never see humanists/atheists glorifying death, because, well, such an idea is perverse if life is all there is to things.

Calling this a "belief", "religion", or "faith" is like saying "I don't watch baseball" is my favorite baseball team to win the World Series.

Things like your chatter about people being woken up after being clinically dead? Well, there's a reason that qualifier is there. They quite obviously were not dead. When someone has been dead for three days, is cold, succumbing to rigor mortis, decomposing, and dessicating, then wakes up -- give me a call. If you actually believe that can happen, well, I lost this discussion before I started.

Apologies if the discussion is disconnected/rambly. I went up and down editing what I said a few times, so it makes sense in my head. Maybe not so much on-screen.

To pick a nit, GR is actually seemingly complete for all domains larger than a characteristic size, and though we've been looking for refinements, we've not found any yet. That's the whole crux of it -- GR works perfectly, if not in the quantum domain, and quantum works perfectly, if not in the GR domain. Whoops. Otherwise, good post.

You overstate the value of eyewitness testimony. Particularly in places where it is inconsistent, reliable and rigorous researches will disregard it, and there is a lot of psychology work to indicate that even that position may be generous to eyewitnesses. For example, try this simple test. That alone speaks volumes.

"Appeal to the masses" is a fruitless line of inquiry. You should be embarrassed for bringing it up. It does not matter one iota what "most of us rely on". That only speaks to the laziness of "most of us" (I, for one, try to read the sources involved where applicable. I don't just take things at face value).

The fact of the matter is that it is not whether or not an individual knows about a topic that validates it. What validates it is its capacity to be verified or falisified. Religion utterly, painfully fails here. It is capable only of making interpreted assertions based on a 2000+ year old fairy tale. Even tales of Ceasar have multiple records for varied individual with corresponding archaelogical evidence that agrees with this. Religion cannot do this.

So far as E = mc^2, read the 1905 paper by Einstein. It's fairly short and a pretty easy read (it is actually a supplement to his main paper of "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"). It has two testable assumptions (c = 299792458 m/s for all individuals and physics acts the same for all individuals), and the rest falls out of nothing but those assumptions.

^^ Exactly this. If even one person got it, they had to give them the source code with no restrictions, which is de facto the same as MS publicly releasing the code. The GPL is viral. I actually don't like it, myself -- I prefer the LGPL. If I write something for someone to use, they can use it on their own terms. It annoys me that people are against the LGPL, actually.

Amusing fact: I'm working on publishing a math-heavy work in a biology journal with the original written in TeX. They only take Word. Oy. But the journal is pretty awesome and said they'd try to find a way to use the TeX for the final version if it gets to the publishing point.

Seems to me they really *are* shooting themselves in the foot with this. Consider people like myself:

• Look at D&D rules via OGL SRDs
• Download some PDFs and realize they are a bit easier to find information in, and I enjoy much of the artwork
• Purchase several dead-tree versions to the tune of a few hundred dollars. Cash to WotC.

The 4th ed policies make SRDs harder, and with no PDFs to help draw me to paper versions ... well, they'd entirely have lost customers like me, and several of my friends who did the exact same thing. Bad idea, WotC.