From: glenn@moeng2.morgan.edu (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Is it Christian values or chavinism?
Date: 2 Oct 1992 02:56:18 -0500
Organization: The Space-Time Fabrication Institute, Rockville, MD.
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

Hope I got the attributions right -- there were a lot of them.

In article <1992Sep21.182632.7402@u.washington.edu> sieferme@milton.u.washington.edu writes:
>In article <1992Sep20.030811.17500@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> sdemitri@nyx.cs.du.edu (Suzanne Lucia Demitrio) writes:
>>You can't prove that the dead *won't* be bodily resurrected.
>
>Not if you change the meaning of "proof" from the commonly
>accepted one.  However, if what we know of the present and past
>is not sufficient to "prove" the future, then we are left
>with a universe of statements of the form:
>
>"You can't prove <X> won't happen, just because it has
>never happened yet"

That's true.  I was also under the possibly mistaken impression
that that _was_ the commonly accepted meaning of "proof".  

>For example:
>"You can't prove that my cat will not become a beautiful princess".

And I maintain that you _can't_ prove this sort of thing unless 
you put a time limit on them, and then only after the time limit
has expired.

What you can _show_ (but not "prove") is that such an event is
highly unlikely -- in fact, unlikely enough to be incredible.
The fact is, we don't _know_ the future.  We can make some
pretty good guesses about it, and do so every day.  (Tomorrow
morning the sun will rise.  I will drive to work.)  Sometimes
these guesses are wrong.  (Whoops -- need a new battery.  Drat.)

What you can _prove_ is that _given_current_knowledge_of_
_natural_laws_, a cat cannot become a (presumably human?)
princess _by_any_known_phenomenon_.  On the other hand,
space aliens _could_ come to visit and run kitty through
a modified Star Trek transporter that rearranged her into
a human.  I warrant that I'd be as surprised as you, but
at least I wouldn't have claimed to already _know_ that
it wasn't going to happen -- knowledge based on an alleged
"proof".

There are things I claim to _know_ about the future.  Most 
of these are properly matters of Faith.  Others are merely 
predictions in which I place a great deal of small-f faith.  
I do not claim to have a "proof" of anything I know about the 
future.  I will not call someone a fool for not believing
as I do -- after all, I have not given him proof, merely
stated what he cannot distinguish from a guess -- but claims
to have "proved" the opposite by extrapolation are quite
ludicrous.

Remember that even if you could know all the information
in an arbitrary starting condition, parts of physics do
appear to be nondeterministic.  Lots of unlikely things
can happen.  They're just not likely to.



-- 
D. Glenn Arthur Jr., The Human Vibrator, glenn@bessel.umd.edu
"Being a _man_ means knowing that one has a choice not to act like a 'man'."

How much interest is there in a Transvestite/Transsexual newsgroup?  How many 
would post there?   Anonymously?  How many would _vote_ non-anonymously?  And
what would you name it?  

You can send me mail anonymously at anonymus+262@godiva.nectar.cs.cmu.edu.

Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc