Re: May 21 2011
Taking this post seriously - as someone who places enormous value on real evidence to decide what's true in the world, if I noticed millions of Christians disappear from the earth on a predicted date, I'd see that as good evidence that the Christian religion is true. I doubt I'd immediately start believing, but it would definitely make me a lot less skeptical of the religion's claims. Of course, I see no reason to expect that this miracle will happen, but if it does I wouldn't just ignore it because it doesn't conform to what I expect. In fact, it's one of the main tenets of scientific thought that a totally unexpected outcome means you have to change the way you think about the world.
At the moment there's no good evidence either for or against the religion, so I don't believe simply because the default position is to think something doesn't exist when you have no proof either way. It's the exact same reason I don't believe in Wotan, Santa Claus, Harry Potter, fairies, humanoid aliens, and so on. The fact that you would benefit if something were true is not a reason to think it really is.
EDIT: Oh yeah, for anyone who was wondering about the second: dividing the day into 24 pieces goes back to Ancient Egyptian times, although I don't know why they chose that number (probably because of how many factors it has). The Babylonians introduced the idea of dividing things into 60ths; so by the middle ages people had the concept of minute (from a similar Latin word meaning small), second ("second minute"), and even third and fourth if they wanted more precision. So by the early part of the last millennium people were already using a second to mean 1/(24*60*60) of the day.
As time went on, people eventually wanted more and more accurate clocks, and to do that they needed more precise measurements than how long the day is, especially since the exact length of the solar day isn't quite constant. These precise measurements were based on formulas or natural phenomena, but they were always numerically close to the existing amounts, so that all but the most precise clocks and astronomical charts could remain unchanged. The final result is a very specific and complex definition (the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom), but what's important is that it measures a physical constant which doesn't change, and that it is very close to the value of the second that has been used for many hundreds of years.
Taking this post seriously - as someone who places enormous value on real evidence to decide what's true in the world, if I noticed millions of Christians disappear from the earth on a predicted date, I'd see that as good evidence that the Christian religion is true. I doubt I'd immediately start believing, but it would definitely make me a lot less skeptical of the religion's claims. Of course, I see no reason to expect that this miracle will happen, but if it does I wouldn't just ignore it because it doesn't conform to what I expect. In fact, it's one of the main tenets of scientific thought that a totally unexpected outcome means you have to change the way you think about the world.
At the moment there's no good evidence either for or against the religion, so I don't believe simply because the default position is to think something doesn't exist when you have no proof either way. It's the exact same reason I don't believe in Wotan, Santa Claus, Harry Potter, fairies, humanoid aliens, and so on. The fact that you would benefit if something were true is not a reason to think it really is.
EDIT: Oh yeah, for anyone who was wondering about the second: dividing the day into 24 pieces goes back to Ancient Egyptian times, although I don't know why they chose that number (probably because of how many factors it has). The Babylonians introduced the idea of dividing things into 60ths; so by the middle ages people had the concept of minute (from a similar Latin word meaning small), second ("second minute"), and even third and fourth if they wanted more precision. So by the early part of the last millennium people were already using a second to mean 1/(24*60*60) of the day.
As time went on, people eventually wanted more and more accurate clocks, and to do that they needed more precise measurements than how long the day is, especially since the exact length of the solar day isn't quite constant. These precise measurements were based on formulas or natural phenomena, but they were always numerically close to the existing amounts, so that all but the most precise clocks and astronomical charts could remain unchanged. The final result is a very specific and complex definition (the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom), but what's important is that it measures a physical constant which doesn't change, and that it is very close to the value of the second that has been used for many hundreds of years.
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