So you mean, God's omniscience is, well, sort of like not being omniscient at all. I mean I can look at the Universe and get all of the information I "need". Well, at least I can get all of the information I need if I'm omniscient enough to know what information I need before I look at it, or if I have moderate needs.

Next you'll be telling me It didn't really create the Universe, it just sort of nudged already existing stuff around, sort of like using a debugger to rewrite existing code. And that It doesn't really control the Universe, it just hacks it a bit so it does some of the stuff that it wants.

Then I'll be telling you:

a) sort of like, not being God at all, isn't it?

b) and besides, there is no evidence that any of these assertions are true, or consistent.

In the end, if God has nonzero information entropy, then It is not God. If it has zero entropy, it has no Choice (and is not God, not in any way that matters). The Universe has zero entropy already.

Assertions of God are almost invariably made without any appreciation for the mathematical challenges of complexity and information content on infinite domains. A shame, really.

rgb

An interesting science fiction plot that has been used so many times it is hackneyed.

It is also a horrendous abuse of the concepts of quantum theory. The problem with the hypothesis of God is that there has been no reproducible, objective, measurement or observation of God. Quite the contrary. The Universe unfolds precisely as if there were no such thing as God, with truly awesome, mind-boggling consistency, follow rules known only approximately (so far) as the "Laws of Nature" which leave no room whatsoever for God, unless it is God's will that the Universe evolve in time as if there were no God.

This is a far cry from asserting that the Aharanov-Bohm effect implies God, even allowing for the imprecision of stating that particles can be "controlled" by observing them, and worshipping something has never, as far as I know, caused that something to come to be.

Finally, there is an information-theoretic argument that proves it quite impossible to create a God by any means such as you suggest. It is quite literally as impossible as reconstructing an encoded string a gazillion bytes long from a single tiny fragment of that encoded string. The information content of God has to be greater than or equal to the information content of the Universe (this is literally the God-property of omniscience). I am a (very) finite part of the Universe. I have enormous (information) entropy relative to the Universe quite aside of the possibility that I have in some sense a quantum indeterminacy in my state. God (if God exists) has zero entropy, quantum Universe or not. There is simply no way the former can generate the latter. Violating the second law of thermodynamics is an understatement.

rgb

The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty. Of course, there is no shortage of conflicting, self defeating pseudo-science airheads that will believe anything else rather than making an attempt at living a Christian life with a little less ego.

I do not think that this "probability" means what you think it means.

I will try to tell you. No, it is too much, I will sum up.

Suppose you have an infinite barrel of marbles, 10% of which are green. Then the probability of drawing a green marble is (wait for it) 10%. This isn't a particularly small probability. If there is a single green marble, somewhere in the barrel, the probability of drawing it is asymptotically zero, statistically neglible, less than the chance of winning the lottery, and winning the lottery in one try is far from certain. If the probability that God exists is 1 x 10^{-403} in an infinite, probabilistic Universe, then the probability that God exists is (gasp) 1 x 10^{-403}. This is most definitely not certainty. Certainty isn't the "smallest chance", it is probability 1. It is the largest (possible) chance.

Even 1 x 10^{-403} isn't in the same ballpark as "the smallest chance", by the way. It is enormous compared to the probability that all of the air molecules in the room I'm in will suddenly (by pure chance) happen to bounce in just the right way to form a big blob of liquid air in the middle of the room and leave me gasping in a vacuum as air molecules outside of the house by strange chance miss all of the myriad pathways into the room. Which in turn is unbelievably, awesomely hugely enormous compared to the probability that the infinite, probabilistic Universe is in fact determined and known at the subatomic level by a perfectly organized, uncreated, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent superbeing that created it all by pure magic from nothing.

Oh, wait -- that's a contradiction, isn't it! If the Universe is infinite and probabilistic, then it can't be infinite and deterministic and hence known by an omniscient, omnipotent being, because there is nothing less probabilistic than something that is completely determined by an all powerful, all-knowing being. So your premises directly contradict your conclusion, in addition to demonstrating nothing more than the simple fact that you have absolutely no clue about probability distributions on continuous spaces.

Ego aside, you might want to contemplate learning something about probability and reason itself before you argue in favor of something empirically, logically, and statistically indefensible. God (as a concept) is all three.

rgb

The first thing the new owners need to do is to start talking to the right people so they can overcome all the licensing BS that stops ThinkGeek from shipping all their cool stuff (Marvel, Star Wars, Dr Who etc) overseas.

I've worked in a casino. I still picked my nose.

Obviously I wasn't handling chips or money

I point out it's the other way around.

The other claim is backed up by every news article on the subject that you care to google.

Crazy pills?

You have an agenda here, and it is not to have an interesting discussion or provide useful information, therefore I'm wasting my time. Good bye.

Which is why Lehman Brothers is still a successful private bank, yes?

Let's not build roads, because the Nazis did it, too. What a solid argument.

Sources?

My (german) magazines tell that they invested exactly because they were looking for profits. The mix of unexperienced bureaucrats looking for profits and too-good-to-be-true investment opportunities made the mess.

Nobody wants to give politicians control over banking. Some of us want regulations, which means courts can force banks to not play russian roulette with the economy.

That's true - olympic medals are only required to contain a minimum of 6 grams of gold, and at least 92% silver. Even still, it's a an incredible price

$9.4 billion for a 28 mile road. And we're not talking through an urban area, just simple new constuction. 4 lines. 28 miles. 45000 meters long with an actual driving width of... oh, let's say 3,5 meters per lane? Not sure what's typical. So about 157500 square meters. $60k per square meter. I mean, seriously, just think about that. You could stack $1000 Louie Vitton handbags 5 layers deep across the whole road for that money. $9.4 billion for 28 miles? You could pay Russians $3 an hour to carry passengers on their shoulder at 3 miles per hour and carry 50 thousand passengers per day every day and it wouldn't cost as much as the road for nearly 20 years.

Really? That's your example of something comparable to Roscosmos embezzling 10% of its annual budget? Operation Lightning Strike which turned out to be a big entrapment op that spent years trying to convince non-key players to commit crimes that they never would have otherwise, and a link that's anything but an endictment of NASA?

This is, after all, the same country whose 28 mile road to the Olympics cost more than if they'd covered the whole road with gold medals two layers thick. ;)

Concerning this privatization, the only question that remains is, which friend of Putin is going to get to "buy" the space agency at a " fair market value" ;)

So you definitely go to jail. Fun!

So is treating people who refuse to say anything as if they're obstructing justice.

Heh, what I really l hope for in the long run is that us Europeans start talking about a sovereign European nation.
We should all keep our regional differences and be proud of them but start to feel like what we are, members of the great European nation.
Be proud of what we share, cherish what makes us unique.

How misleading.

The "credit" from KfW was the german part of the bailout money. They didn't speculate in Greece, they were simple the vehicle through which the german government sent its share. Also, KfW is not a bank in the normal sense of the word. For example, you can't go there and open an account. It's a specialized government investment institute that is primarily used as a low-interest credit bank for government subsidized investment. For example, because the government wants to support renewable energy, you can get very cheap credits from KfW if you want to build solar panels on your roof.

I usually exit these discussions when people begin to argue ad hominem. You have no idea what I like, because we haven't talked about it. Also, you're wrong.

As far as the partially government-owned banks are concerned, they're not owned by the German government, but by regional governments. The national government is too much in bed with the major banks (Deutsche Bank, etc.) to run their own.