Total topics: 39
I have been following the "red sea crisis" pretty closely and I am of the opinion that Iran's ultimate goal is to draw the US into a costly conflict in Yemen and against other Iranian proxies, to, primarily, draw US military resources away from Israel.
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Current events
Can we not send specific people debate challenges anymore? I can't seem to find the button.
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DebateArt.com
Please post the best debates regarding God's existence. I'd like to read over a few, but I've been gone a while and haven't had my finger on this website's pulse for a couple of years.
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Religion
Now that Russia has actually invaded, what do you think the US should be doing? If you were president, what would you do? Would you respond to international pressure to punish Russia at all?
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Politics
What is the best piece of evidence that the 2020 election was fraudulent? And how has that evidence been addressed?
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Politics
America went into Afghanistan backing the losing side of the civil war. When the new government was put into place though, we were backing a government that didn't have the ability to impose it's monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force. It was common knowledge that once you were five miles outside of Kabul, it was total lawlessness. America was getting shaken down in convoy protection rackets, and we hit a point where we were pumping 300 million dollars a day into this war, which we were fighting mostly with hired mercenaries like G4S security.
I propose that the US should have pursued a bipartisan government with the Taliban and the Northern Alliance prior to pulling out of the country.
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Current events
I was hoping I could get some insight into what I need to work on. What are my strengths and weaknesses?
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Personal
I hypothesize that the huge voter turnout was influenced primarily by the four year mass media smear campaign against Trump.
Thoughts on how to confirm or disconfirm?
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Politics
If Russia expressed clear intent to fully annex the Ukraine, should America guarantee Ukrainian independence?
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Politics
I would like to know what you believe about ethics, and what motivates you to act morally.
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Philosophy
Why should we accept consent as a first principle of morality?
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Philosophy
Suppose you are talking to a Holocaust survivor that renounced their faith after their time in Auschwitz. How would you go about trying to reconvince them that there is a god, or that this god loves them?
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Religion
If I can know for certainty that I think, then that necessarily means that I am thinking in time, since I am having the thought now. The act of thinking necessarily implies an external world where time exists within which I may have a thought. Therefore, I can know with the same certainty that I think, that there is an external world to my thought that at least has time.
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Philosophy
Anyone want to play some Pokemon with me?
My username is Blastoix
I play Gen 4 OU and Gen 4 UU
Hmu if you want to get destroyed.
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Gaming
I think one major problem for the Ontological argument is that it cannot convey knowledge of god's existence. It is a wholly conceptual argument, and without an empirical element, it can only become more specific as a concept. But no concept, however specific, can convey actual knowledge if it doesn't correlate to some empirical element. So the argument can only generate specific concepts of god, but it is empty as a source of actual knowledge.
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Religion
RESPONSE TO PGA2.0
This post is the promised response to the questions PGA2.0 asked me in the comments section of "The Universe is Older than 10,000 years." Sorry it took me like a month.
PGA2.0:
"How do you justify not use an exclusively natural as opposed to a supernatural view (thus, the presuppositions nature of your argument) in interpreting the evidence? What was faulty thinking on either Wesley's or my part regarding the speed of light argument, and I am interested in your view on how the expansion (fast or slow) of the Universe could adversely affect its age. I am also interested in how you would answer the Thomas Aquinas issue?"
PHILOSOPHY
Methodological Naturalism is not the same as Ontological Naturalism. Ontological Naturalism is the presupposition that all that exists in spacetime is physical. Whereas Methodological Naturalism is simply A Posteriori investigation, in an attempt to create/acquire synthetic knowledge about the natural world.
LAWYERS VS SCIENTISTS
Often people will say that "we are looking at the same evidence and coming to different conclusions." In theory, two lawyers could walk into a courtroom and flip a coin to see who takes what side of a case to argue. Their presupposition is assigned to them, and regardless of what the reality of who did what in the case, their job is to convince you of their side.
Scientists do not operate this way. A scientist's job is to construct a model of reality that best incorporates all the known data and makes testable predictions. They have to synthesize a model that most accurately describes reality. They don't come to the table with their conclusions assigned to them.
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QUALITIES OF A SCIENTIFIC THEORY
A scientific theory is an attempt to construct a model of some aspect of reality. A scientific theory must have three qualities.
1. It must be independently verifiable, preferably by making novel predictions about future data.
2. It must be potentially falsifiable, otherwise it can be discarded into the category of pseudoscience.
3. It must make as few assumptions as possible, the idea of Parsimony.
If a theory is not verifiable, or it's predictions fail, that is indicative that it is not a reliable model of reality. If a theory is not falsifiable, then it cannot be tested with the scientific method, and therefore is probably pseudoscience. And a theory that is not parsimonious will contain extraneous elements that limit the scope of its explanatory power, liable to be disregarded in favor of a model with less assumptions (Occam's Razor).
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THE SPEED OF LIGHT
The speed of light in a vacuum is constant [1]. A lightyear is a measure of distance. If we can measure light that is 10 million light years away, then that light necessarily had to travel 10 million years to get to us.
PGA2.0, you made a couple of critical errors with the following statements:
" We 1) see the stars out there and 2) measure the speed of light to and back from the stars for accuracy. You can't measure it accurately from one direction is the point here."
Response:
1. We see the stars as they were when their light was emitted, not as they are right now. That is a consequence of light having a finite speed.
2. We do not measure the speed of light to and back from the stars; we measure the speed of light in a vacuum experimentally, such as the experiment I provided.
We can measure the distance to galaxies far away by determining their recessional velocity. Their recessional velocity is Hubble's Law. According to my debate source [2]:
"Radial velocities are relatively easy to measure. Once we measure v for a galaxy, we can compute
d = v / H0 .
For instance, suppose a galaxy is moving away from us at 14,000 km/sec. Its distance, using the Hubble Law, is thus
d = (14,000 km/sec) / (70 km/sec/Mpc) = 200 Mpc.
The galaxy is 200 megaparsecs away (652 million light years), beyond the region where Cepheids can be used to compute distances."
PGA2.0:
"On top of that, it is assumed that the speed of light we witness now from an expanding Universe (matter in motion) is the same it was at the beginning of the Universe, or at least calculable (always the same constant - no miracles allowed, which creation week was said to be), AND that the current supposed rate accurately calculates the rate of/from expansion at the BB."
Science is inductive, and therefore will never deal in epistemic certainty. However, it does construct hypotheses to test, which can either be vindicated into a working theory, or falsified and discarded in favor of a more explanatory model.
That’s really the point, to construct models that can make predictions about reality as we experience it. The best inductive model for lights speed, that has been verified without exception, in innumerable tests, is the speed of light in a vacuum is approx. 300,000 km/sec. As for the Big Bang model, see this debate for my constructive.
The speed of light is so well known in fact that the standard unit of length (Metre) is based on light's speed [3]: "Since 1983, the metre has been internationally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. This definition can be realised simply and accurately using modern techniques and the speed of light is regarded to be a universal constant, making it ideal as the basis for a length standard."
The speed of light is not assumed, it is experimentally confirmed. The expansion rate of the Universe has been experimentally confirmed. These go into calculating cosmic distances. If you are going to suggest that laws of physics were different in the past, then you need to predicate that on something other than conjecture.
Miracles aren't unnecessarily interjected into the model, because that would necessarily make it less parsimonious, by virtue of the many assumptions that claiming a "miracle" makes. Sure, technically they can be allowed, but you have to establish that this happened with some kind of verifiability, or else the explanation that works better and makes less assumptions (that light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum) will always be accepted instead. Side note, cosmic distances are adjusted for the effects of gravity on the light.
" With all the paradigm shifts in thinking will the currently thought of age of the Universe remain what it is now?"
The accepted age of the Universe has been getting nailed down as the error bars become smaller and smaller, but the age has always been calculated within a margin of error. So the accepted age will probably change a little as we zero down, but the answer is just getting more accurate.
Like here in 1998 [4], the age was calculated to be (tU ≥ 9.5Gyr). Gyr stands for gigayears, or, one billion years.
And in 2020, we get even more accurate measurements [5]: "We find that the average age of the oldest globular clusters is tGC=13.32 0.1 (stat.) 0.5 (sys.), at 68% confidence level, including systematic uncertainties from stellar modeling. These measurements can be used to infer the age of the Universe, largely independently of the cosmological parameters: we find an age of the Universe tU=13.5+0.16−0.14 (stat.) 0.5 (sys.) at 68% confidence level, accounting for the formation time of globular clusters and its uncertainty. This value is compatible with 13.8±0.02 Gyr, the cosmological model-dependent value inferred by the Planck mission assuming the ΛCDM model."
Notice how the older calculation is also correct, it's just less precise than the newer one.
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AQUINAS
As for the Aquinas arguments, please see this debate for objections I have to his argument from motion. But I'll throw some objections out there to all of them: they have no evidence, and assume what nobody actually knows. I can go more in depth If you'd like
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I hope that covers everything and there aren't too many spelling errors.
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Science and Nature
Is a (synthetic A Priori proposition = Impure A Priori proposition)?
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Philosophy
I've been doing this for a few months now, and I would like some feedback on where my strengths an weaknesses are; and what I could improve on. Your opinions are appreciated.
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Personal
1. If some constant in some possible Universe could be changed to create a life preventing Universe;
2. Then, any number of constants could be changed to produce infinite possible life producing Universe's.
C: There are an infinite number of possible life producing Universe's.
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Religion
How does the site determine what to put in the Quality Debates section? I'm positive i've seen FFs on there.
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DebateArt.com
Please post links to your favorite debates from here, DDO, or wherever.
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Miscellaneous
I've been thinking about sarcasm lately. It's interesting how, by exaggerating just one or two letters, the meaning of a sentence is reversed.
In the following examples, the sarcasm (and therefore the reversal of the sentence's original meaning) is underlined. Try saying them normally, and then again while exaggerating the underlined letters.
i.e.
- Oh, I love it.
- Gee, Thanks.
- Sure.
- Good for you.
It almost seems like sarcasm lies in the vowels. Are there any other ways to make a sentence sound sarcastic?
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Miscellaneous
One of the best things about this site is that if you have a debate idea, it probably hasn't been done yet. So almost every fresh topic feels like a pioneering step forward.
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DebateArt.com
Does the mind even exist or is it only the brain?
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Science and Nature
I'm curious if there's one I haven't heard yet. And....go!
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Religion
Why or why not?
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Philosophy
The assumption that all physical correlations were established at the beginning of time solves a lot of problems for quantum physics. So what do you think? Is superdeterminism the best philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics? If not, which one do you adopt?
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Philosophy
Happy Halloween everybody! It's also my wedding anniversary! Hence, Hallowversary
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Miscellaneous
The primary rebuttal to determinism that I found to be somewhat convincing is the idea that certain things on the quantum level are probabilistic rather than causal. But is probability just an expression of man's ignorance?
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Philosophy
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Philosophy
I've been trying to decide if it's unethical to eat veal. I'm not a vegetarian, nor do I have a problem with meat. But veal seems a little cruel.
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Personal
Anyone else playing squad these days? It's so much fun, but waiting on lobbies sucks.
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Gaming
So, when I debate, there's usually rebuttals I can predict that my opponent will bring up. I'm a six-shooter theory guy, where I like to keep my extra bullets in reserve instead of throwing everything out right away. Do you prefer to head off rebuttals in your arguments, like your opening statement, or wait until they appear and rebut them separately.
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DebateArt.com
How many active members are there usually? And are there any plans to add a way to search for members?
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DebateArt.com