Which is why I’m not adopting that argument. The same process made both Pluto and Earth, both Sol and Wolf 359. It’s fairly described as a natural process.
In my personal belief, there is a God, and He was responsible for defining the natural laws which resulted in the formation of all celestial objects, but the fact that celestial objects exist is no particular evidence of His existence.
Earth and 3753 Cruithne have no particular gravitational relationship, any more than the car next to me has any electronic connection to me just because our turn signals happen to flash on and off at the same frequency and at the same time.
Thing is, the tides are a pretty big *hindrance *rather than a boon. They force their own timetable on sailors, they regularly cause floods, and even if they can be harnessed for power it’s prohibitively expensive.
If GAWD had wanted to create a cool system for humans, he’d have made a world where seas are perpetually calm. No drowned fishermen, no waiting in the bay for 6 hours before you can get to or leave port, no surfer dudes and no high sea refuse washed out on the beaches. Net positive.
No classy Mount Saint Michel either, I guess, but considering how many poor fuckers got drowned by a sneak tide while trekking to it…
Colbert has it covered:
I recall hearing that five moons are buddies. I don’t know if they include the above, or it they hang in Lagrange points, etc. But I can’t find the cite, nor if the cite was later repudiated (e. g., third stage of a Saturn Five). Anybody want to clear this up?
So do I. If I recall correctly it’s from one on Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books, but I don’t recall which one. As I recall the book goes on to talk about how, because it believes that it’s world was designed for it, the puddle believes that everything will be alright, even as it starts to shrink in the sunlight. It continues to believe that everything will be fine right up until the very last drop of it evaporates. It’s an excellent analogy of the human condition.
Och! I met that the earth has five moons of various sizes in orbit around the earth…
LaGrange points are places where you would be stable, but there’s no moons there.
Unless that car that is next to also always happens to travel through the same neighborhoods along the same paths at different times and occasionally jiggle around your car and both orbit the sun. Oh, and both have scantily dressed slave girl fantasies. In any case they make more sense than Bill O’Reilly on the subject of tidal forces.
AFAIK it is not from one of his books but from his speech at Digital Biota 2
Cambridge U.K., September 1998:
http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/
Just before he passed away 
, I had a chance to hear live from Douglas Adams himself a variation of that speech at an American Atheists convention in San Francisco, got from him a signed copy of the Illustrated Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
No need to create a new term “tidal force” for which we already have a perfect good one" gravity. A “tide” is commonly understood to mean the movement of a liquid on the planet over a solid on that planet due to the gravitational pull of other objects in space.
Irrrelevant nitpick: Although the solider takes a turn for the worse (thanks to some sort of incompetence on Frank Burns’ part), he pulls through ultimately.
And that’s why Bill O’Reilly is a moron.
Tidal force is a perfectly good term, and does not mean ‘gravity’. A tidal force is caused by gravity, when the gravitational force is exerted unevenly across an object.
For example, if you fall into a black hole, at some point the difference in the gravitational force experienced by your head and that experienced by your feet will be so large that your body will be ripped apart. That’s a tidal force. The fact that one side of a planet is farther away from a star than the other also exerts a tidal force on the planet.
Say what you will ‘bout Bill O’, and I know you will, he still knows more about space science stuff than Sean Hannity does, “I don’t know how one can look at the majesty and the sophistication and the intricacy of universes within universes and the sun and the stars… and not hold out any possibility there’s a God*”.
(That’s his proof for the existence of God, “universes within universes”. :smack:)
CMC fnord!
*Cobbled together from a couple of sites, despite the countless number of times I’ve heard him use this “proof” for God I can’t find a link of him actually using it in full. 
Not in this context, where we were talking about whether planets like Mercury and Venus have "tides’. I asked if they really did have tides, and someone came back and said: well, they are subject to tidal forces.
If we want to talk about tidal forces, which really are nothing more than gravity, then everything is subject to tidal forces, and we could say that my body has "tides’. But that makes the term “tide” not mean what it commonly means.
This thread did not go quite as I expected.
Sure tidal forces are “nothing more than gravity”, but it’s a distinct enough phenomenon to merit a name. Tidal forces explain why the moon presents only one face to the earth. And yet the moon has no liquid on its surface. I suppose you could say that the moon’s orbital and rotational periods are the same because of gravity, but that’s not particularly illuminating.
And yes, everything that’s extended in space “has tides” in this sense. But most things don’t have tides that are significant, and so we don’t talk about them - much as we don’t talk about the gravitational attraction between my car and a comet orbiting Beta Cygni.
Mercury, on the other hand, experiences sufficient solar tidal force that it’s got a funky 3:2 spin/orbit resonance thing going on.
Everyone already knows O’Reilly’s a dunderhead, sure as the sun sets in the west (every time, no miscommunication).
Tidal force isn’t synonymous with gravity. It’s an effect of gravity.