If I had to bet, I'd be better of blowing my stake on lottery tickets. At least then I'd know if I won the bet or not.

The who created the divine creator argument is almost as old as the chicken and egg paradox which, if you apply naive logic, shows that chickens and eggs, and other birds for that matter, do not exist, and cannot exist, because the question of which came first has no logical answer.

As for the distant past, the idea that it is illusory is a rational and logical one, and is as plausible as your Linux box being installed from a DVD by a user at a fixed point in its history, vs everything having been compiled from scratch though the C compiler.

The truth is we cannot be sure about our distant origins, and we cannot even be sure that the distant past may even be deduced from evidence. Whether the apparent distant past is virtual or real is one for philiosophers, not everyday people, who just need a workable explanation to get the question answered to their satisfaction. Divine origins do this better than a rough principle (which is all the lay person will grasp from evolution) and to be honest, there is no single person alive who fully appreciates the complexity of evolution, let alone who can use it to explain our origins in terms of it to sufficient detail to rule out other alternatives (as is the case in physics for example.)

Those who believe that science can do more than offer a theory that fits the evidence do not understand the philosophical foundations of science or the limitations of inductive methods. Sooner or later on your philosophical and metaphysical travels, you will find, as I did, that you have to make a leap of blind faith. One cannot reason around this, and ignorance and scientifistic hand-waving do not provide an alternative, though they may be convincing to some.

Some of a religious persuasion have the arrogance to believe that they hold Divine Truth in their hands; too many followers of science are treating the scientific pronunciations of the day in the same way, and this is a tragic, as is the ignorance of the antireligious of the scientists, mathematicians and other rational people who see no problem with a religious faith. Think things through before making pronouncements on the silliness of someone who believes other than you do, or else appear silly yourself.

To apply logic, you either end up with P implies Q statements that say nothing concrete, or else you take certain hypothetical assumptions as true as an article of faith. Everybody does the latter all the time, but tend to be unaware that they are doing this. Furthermore, what hypotheses people take on faith in their daily life vary, and there is no True foundation that one can show to be the case. Even scientists must have faith that the universe behaves in a reasonable enough way that what they are doing produces sensible results (and at present it appears this way, though one cannot answer questions as to the past and future on such matters given only available evidence -- circularities abound when you try.)

As a study of the past, material science can only investigate 'what appears to have been, based on current evidence', and not 'what actually was' in the very possible case that these two notions: 'what appears to have been', and 'what was', do not converge. It is not sensible for one conducting a scientific investigation into 'what was' based on current evidence to assume otherwise, for then they have no foundations. But just because this is a necessary assumption for the investigating scientists neither makes it true, nor implies that others should take on this assumption. The alternative is that the past cannot be deduced logically from available evidence, and then one must look to other sources of inspiration. Scientists do not do this, but many religious believers do. Thus we find that the two camps may be standing on different, incompatible, foundations, both of which can make sense depending on your standpoint. Total victory on the part of the evolution brigade is as absurd as an 'it's all in Gen 1' approach, being possible only with the kind of conquest over peoples thinking and beliefs that the Christians and Muslims have tried in the past. (Guess what: other belief systems survived, and a new one is now in the ascendency, but needs to learn from past attempts at conquest of belief and realise that there are better ways forward.) On both sides, though more on the fundamentalist religious side, people need to be encouraged, gently, to open their minds to other possibilities besides the ones they take on faith. And this taking things on blind faith is, so far as I'm concerned, philosophically unavoidable. Anyone whether of a holy book or a science book, who believes otherwise is deluded.

Things do happen. For a reason? Reason requires linguistic expression and, on a pure combinatorical level, human language is inadequate to describe everything. Thus there will be many phenomena for which there are no rational reasons which humans will ever find. Some things happen for an understandable reason, others happen for reasons that will be forever beyond humankind, yet others will happen for reasons that theoretically don't exist. Thought experiment: Just look at the growth of possibilities as your 'universe' gets bigger and compare this with the growth of possibilities explicable within that 'universe'.

Magical Thinking is, at some point, unavoidable: the reliability of mathematics in the realm of physics is a phenomena that we trust and rely upon, but why it should be that way is not something we can deal with. It just works. Most examples of magical thinking express ideas of behaviour of reality which either contradict everyday experience or are unverifiable or unverified by science and the scientific methods available to us at the time. But to say that science can disprove magical ideas requires that we assume that scientific insights generalise well beyond the point where we've verified them experimentally, and this is, again, a kind of belief in magic. We've seen a pattern in nature and believe that pattern applies elsewhere, or someone's told us of a pattern and we believe in it. Science adds rigour but never totally gets us away from this kind of issue.

You either believe in magic and are aware of it, or else you believe in magic and are unaware of it. Either way, you believe in magic, and more than you realise.

Conclusions of a logical rational argument are only as good as the foundational assumptions on which they're based. In science and maths circles this isn't a problem, but when one gets beyond, to the rest of life, the fact that, as you dig down, you reach a point where you have to rely on bind faith matters. Also a problem with logic and reason is the unmanageable complexity of arguments that handle reality in its full glory rather than a greatly simplified model (which makes many unprovable and untestable assumptions). Logic and reason have their place, but the way the aggressive secularists and ultra-rationalists want us to believe in them is irrational and illogical: magical thinking just makes more sense when you actually get down to it and think about your thinking.

We seem to be getting confused over different posters ideas of memory and memorisation. Memorisation has its place, as does reading and not memorising. Furthermore, memorisation in and of itself is insufficient as a road to understanding. Things such as times tables or musical scales are apt for memorisation, as possibly is a piece of text or music, or a mathematical proof you wish to study in detail, but there are other tools of understanding and learning that are important and, without which the old wisdom of 'everything looking like a nail to one with only a hammer' starts to apply.

I recently started using Ubuntu and it seems I'm the only one who, after mac and windows, actually likes Unity. What I loved with apt was that, at the command line, when I typed latex, I got 'latex is not installed, to install, type sudo apt-get install texlive' so I typed it in and waited and, before long, latex was installed and worked. The gui package manager is great for listed apps (a step up in usability from either mac app store and much better than install uninstall on windows). All in all I'm happy with Ubuntu 11 and have never used 10.x so have nothing to compare it with in terms of recent linux distros.

The fun will be in inducing subtle variations in your own emotions so as not to be perceptible to those around you and yet force the interpreting code down long improbable paths, and see if the programmers covered every contingency.

Consider someone saying "I demand the right to determine my own Real Name. It's mine after all and I reserve the right to change it. Not that I will, but I don't want some busybody in Google telling me I can't." How do you tell them that they don't determine their real name, and have no choice in the matter, save for deed poll.

that they have verified that

1.) They are certain that heredity is solely controlled by genes.
2.) They are certain that DNA is the sole mechanism for passing on genes.
3.) That looking at DNA sequences is a productive method of finding causes of things.

Personally I believe that they are uncertain in (1), uncertain in (2) and that (3) is not true. DNA is a waste of time with regards to 99.99999% of human behaviour.

The mathematical models need access to a large number of independent human minds to effectively control the level of uncertainty exhibited by the stock market. Formal (and hence finitary) mathematical methods just cannot cope properly and reliance on them is usually the cause of stock market bubbles and crashes.

It doesn't hurt, and IE 9 has no free foundations, so I can't really accept it. Firefox works just fine, as does Chromium, under Ubuntu. Under Windoze I use FF also. IE just isn't relevant anymore. Microsoft should GPL the source of IE... then it would be a real player in the browser market, but for now it is their pet and not mine, and they can keep it.