okay so there's a public safety issue, and the traffic is prioritized, great. then the program at the other end receives the info and sends out a text message to first responders. and guess what? text messages are treated as low priority, so the overall delay is actually _increased_.

to make matters worse, let's say the public safety thing is spamming the alert, (maybe a design flaw in the program, maybe not), well that spamming is now prioritized, over, again, text messages, maybe even ip telephony, etc.

now you're causing congestion in times when congestion is the last thing you need.

and then a first responder finally gets on sight, and they don't know a medical procedure, so they look it up on the web, but guess what, web traffic takes the slow lane. or maybe its a video hosted by comcast - which isn't paying time warned the royalties it needs to not get throttled.

there's no telling before hand what information is needed, over what channels, over what protocols, and by who.

yes, all bits are of different value. but you don't know what that value is. that's the whole point of net neutrality.

My argument is deductive. That's better than inductive.

That's not because of any limit of science, but because it's impossible to answer the question "should" without stating a goal. once you state the goal, the answer is trivial, provided you know the science. e.g. should i remove the squirrel form under my porch? i don't know. do you want it under you porch? yes = leave it, no = remove it. see how that necessarily needs two parts? for a more complicated problem you'd need science. e.g. should we vaccinate? that's a moral question. should you inject a needle into everyone containing a dormant virus? well that depends... what's your goal? okay, lets say our goal is to avoid physical pain. then science tells us the answer is no. what does religion tell us? nothing. it doesn't tell us if it's going to hurt or not. science tells us that. you want to minimize pain in the long run? science tells us we should do it then. religion, again, tells us nothing.

i believe someone already pointed out this is false.

no, as much as i personally think the big bang theory is incredibly presumptions, it doesn't take it on faith.

dark matter/energy is a placeholder term for excess gravitational effects that have been observed and measured

firstly, this is the annoyingly common "god of the gaps" argument. secondly, a whole lot of that is just plain wrong and a whole lot is a bad question.
* gravity - yes it does. there's a problem of joining general relativity with quantum physics. that's a mathematical problem, not an empirical one.
* consciousness is a word we use to give ourselves pride. it's really not meaningful / useful beyond that.
* why we even exist is already assuming way too much and making some serious philosophical blunders. firstly, it's assuming teleology. and anthropocentric teleology at that.
* purpose of the universe - same problem, teleology. and anthropocentric teleology at that.

yes it is. there are many facets to that question. do you want to talk about sperm and egg cells? astrology? proto-life? be more specific and yes, since is very interested in that.

a lot. but usually, there's a funeral, and your body slowly decays or maybe is cremated. here's an experiment: take a plant, don't water it. observe.

again, not meaningful

you have a WHOLE LOT to learn about the philosophy of science. As, sadly, do most people in America. that is why it does not get the respect it deserves today. the era of enlightment, it got a lot more respect. and you know what we now call that era? the era of enlightment. but yeah, you have a lot to learn. pick up a book on it. maybe an introduction book, maybe some of the greats - popper, newton, descarte, russel, aristotle... there's plenty to read.

yeah... you got a few things wrong there. not even worth it.
though i do agree that the universe has "always" existed. that's a tautology. to say there was a time the universe did not exist... well, time implies universe, so that's self-disproving.

PoS more precisely is concerned with how to discover truth. Religion falls cleanly into this territory and is found GREATLY wanting. So while it is not concerned with $DIETY, or $OTHER_DIETY or $YET_ANOTHER_DIETY, the epistemological foundations it constructs says "no".

you are incouragable and offensive.

you said look it up in a dictionary and then you gave a WRONG definition of agnosticism and atheism and then i CORRECTED you and now instead of admitting that you were wrong and that the whole situation is, well, rather IRONIC, you are having a hard time dealing with it and becoming more aggressive.

no details there... that's plain as day.

it's a technique that you often use, maybe, but it so far doesn't seem to be very good at doing anything other than confirming beliefs that you already hold. i.e., to server as specious justification for confirmation bias.

actually mathematics does not depend on depend on mathmatical axioms that simply have to be presumed to be true. firstly, it's pure tautology. it's usefullness comes precisely from its tautological nature. secondly, you can postulate any set of axioms, and you don't have to postulate them to be true, you can postulate them to be false. and then you can work mathematically with an arbitrary set of presumed false axioms. but again, it's tautological. that's different than presumed true.

can i prove or show supporting evidence for that fact that 1+1=2? yes. very easily.

this is 1 dot: *
this is another dot: *

put them together,
* *
and that's two dots.

Q.E.D.

is that how you typically respond to new information that disagrees with what you've stated? or should i feel special?

oh, and two more links for you buddy:

agnostic theism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
agnostic atheism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

so yeah, tone down the rhetoric a bit. get your facts straight first.

...though i should add that "gnostic", while it literally means "of knowledge" (greek), is popularly associated with "gnosticism", which was a colletion of ancient religion movements that shunned the "material" world in favor of the "spiritiual" world. so the phrase "gnostic atheist" does justifiably give a bit of cognitive dissonance. the atheistic positions are more commonly referred to strong/weak or positive/negative, rather than gnostic/agnostic. "positive" atheism is meant in the sense of "positivism" - that the lack of existence of deities is empirically demonstrable. for instance, by the principle of parsimony, burden of proof, that it is self-disproving because of contradictions, or evidence of absence ("In some circumstances it can be safely assumed that if a certain event had occurred, evidence of it could be discovered by qualified investigators. In such circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to take the absence of proof of its occurrence as positive proof of its non-occurrence."). "negative" or "weak" atheism is not believing in the existence of any dieties, but not positively asserting that there are none. this would be your agnostic atheist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

actually agnosticism is a position about knowledge, while atheism is a position about theism.

and the prefix a- means essentially not having.

a-gnostic = not having knowledge.
a-theist = not having theism.

a-gnostic is the position that you do not have knowledge. most people are agnostic. a lot of atheists are agnostic, _and so are a lot of theists_. though there are some fundamentalist theist who claim to have "knowledge" of god - those would be gnostic theists. likewise some atheists claim that they have positive knowledge that deities do not actually exist (e.g. that they are demonstrably figments of the cognitive biases in the human mind.). those would be _gnostic_ atheists.

thanks for playing, though.

come again.

and on the topic of abiogenesis, creationism is actually a form of abiogenesis. so you see religious people are also firm believers in abiogenesis. just that their particular, err, less then even a hypothesis -- creationism -- fails the scientific test miserably, and never really explained anything in the first place.

okay, in your first paragraph you made an ad homimen fallacy ( https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... ), and a rather aggressive one at that.

then you have a fallacy of causation - i forget what it's called, but essentially you're implying that something is false because some ways that people react to it might not be all that appealing. some unholy combination of post hoc fallacy and appeal to emotion fallacy.

and then you follow that up swiftly with a straw man fallacy https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... which is also a non sequitor.

and then i'm not exactly sure what you mean by "you don't have any room to browbeat religious people.", nobody is "browbeating". what may seem like "stern or abusive words" to religious people who play the victim card is simply logic that doesn't agree with their cherised beliefs. and they're pleading "intimidating" to provide an emotionally pursuasive way for them weaseling out of accepting that they've been believing a bunch of ridiculous baloney that's easily - EASILY - discredited. and instead of accepting that they made a mistake and moving on like a rational person would do, they double down on their delusions and get even more stupid.

so forgive me if i'm not all that sympathetic.

Bob is letting an unfounded assumption about the nature of the universe rule over evidence and reason gathered from that very universe that says something very contrary to his unfounded assumption. That is exactly within the realm of science and exactly unscientific. Through and through.

* His religion beliefs are statements about the nature of the universe. That puts them firmly in the realm of science.
* A scientific approach would be to _not rely on unfounded assumptions_.... so already he is being unscientific
* the principle of parsimony rules out the existence of dieties, so already bob has violated the principle of parsimony.
etc.

i could go on, but why? you get the picture. The disagreement is inside the realm of science. And Bob is not being scientific.

I believe you are confusing faith with trust and/or confidence.

I have trust and/or confidence in my beliefs because they are justified by observation and reason.
I don't take them on faith. In fact, when observation and reason justify changing them, i change them.
If i took them on faith, then contrary observation and reason would not cause me to change them.

My beliefs are _justified_ by evidence and reason. That is the _opposite_ of taking things on faith.