That’s the trick though, isn’t it? Hotly detailed is in the eye of the beholder. Our brains are very good at discerning patterns, even to the point where we see them when they aren’t there. I’ve seen some extremely detailed pictures in clouds.
Why do you need it written in the stars?
If you consider how often highly detailed likenesses of Jesus and Mary show up in things like toast, than clearly this is far beyond what random chance would allow, therefore proving the existence of God.
Sorry. Visual cues discerned from nature are not going to work due to our brains’ pattern recognition which reads into them.
What most people feel is the “supernatural” would simply be the “natural” if found to be true. If there were detailed designs out there then the best explanation is most likely a creator – of those designs. For instance, a race of powerful star creators/movers, who would most likely be powerful enough to be considered gods anyway.
I know you have trouble with subtle concepts, but please, oh please try to think about this. Occasional Jesus-shaped toast isn’t the same thing as a mountain that looks like 12 highly detailed knights. For one thing there are a finite number of mountains and toast just keeps on a-comin’.
That said, I certainly don’t believe in the supernatural, but actual statistically impossible objects would be evidence for design. This doesn’t mean that it is proof of it, but it would be an argument.
Note that our world doesn’t have anything remotely like that, no matter how much creationists want to talk about the eye or flagella or whatnot. I’m just saying that if photographic objects were the only thing in the sky, the odds against natural star formation creating them would be so vast as to make the odds of the protons in your shoe decaying at the same time seem reasonable.
And assuming star positions are truly random (which I admittedly do not know) you’d be wrong and falling afoul of one of the most common errors people make re:statistics. Probabilities are finicky little bitches. Can’t trust them.
Anyway, I don’t know what better way to explain what I want you to understand than the die thing, but let’s try this:
The exact shape of Mt. Everest is just as unique and remarkable as your Round Table Mountain. It was just as unlikely that a mountain, any mountain in the Universe, would have been sculpted into that exact shape by random forces like winds, erosion, human action etc…
But it did. Once.
You don’t think it’s as remarkable on account of being just sort of lump shaped, when it comes right down to it. Not that all mountains end up sort of lump shaped: see the (now sadly defunct) Old Man of the Mountain.
Now, if we found exact replicas of Mt. Everest on multiple planets, including planets that don’t show any evidence of weather or whatever, that would be something very odd, a statistical anomaly that could lead to something in the vicinity of the idea some joker has been mass producing the planets from the same mold. Even more so if we found multiple Mt. Everests on a single planet.
But then again, see above. Probabilities are complete jerks. That statistical improbability, too, could be the result of random chance, and wouldn’t conclusively prove anything. Still, I admit I’d be impressed.
It’s taken me a long time to figure out what you meant, here. Bases matter very little in math, including the Fibonacci sequence. Even on earth, where most everybody uses base 10, ‘signs’ are gibberish places where the numbers don’t look like 0123456789.
Zeriel, you’re committing the same fallacy as Lobohan. It’s not entirely unlike the inverse gambler fallacy.
Say I have a perfect coin. It was made by God himself so that flipping that coin has a strictly exact 50/50 of landing on either side. I flip that coin 100 times. The odds of the coin landing on heads 100 times in a row are extremely low (1/ 2^100 if I’m not mistaken). I’d be a complete muppet to *expect *that coin to generate such a result. It is ridiculously unlikely.
But if it did, as it statistically can and is just as likely to as any other set of 100 results, you’d be 100% wrong to infer from that remarkable result that my coin is dodgy. Not only because that would be failing at statistics, but also because we’ve already established my coin was perfect.
Mountains are always changing, albeit slowly. More important is your point of view. There are nearly infinite viewing angles for one to gaze at mountains. 12 knight isn’t necessarily any more specific than Jesus. What are the knights wearing? What are they doing? Are they on horseback? How are they posed?
Your “12 knights” actually represents an infinite number of possibilities for what it might look like.
Lighting changes all the time, too.
Give me enough time and a big enough to travel, and I bet you I could get you a photograph of a mountain range that looked like 12 knights, you stupid fucking mook.
Which is why I said highly detailed, moron. If you think you’re gonna find a natural mountain that looks like 12 highly detailed knights in armor, with detailed chain under armor, swords with pommels, hair texture visible beneath the helmets and crazy pointy armored riding shoes with spurs and everything, you’re a moron.
Which, I suppose means you do actually think that.
The problem is that at some point, without the a priori knowledge of the coin’s perfection, that kind of analysis is pretty much exactly how we would go about testing a coin to determine if it were biased or not–toss it x number of times, and feed the numbers into an equation.
Naturally, you can’t force the universe to re-form for your scientific exploration, so the two situations aren’t comparable.
Also, the organization of the stars ISN’T entirely random–it’s based on gravitational interactions and (so far as I remember the last time I read any theory) the configurations of the initial matter of the universe at the Big Bang. If the pattern of stars diverges significantly from what we would otherwise expect based on physical interactions, that’s a far bigger indicator than the equivalent of drawing 11111111 on the lottery would be. It’s a rigged game to begin with.
It seems obvious, to me anyway, that Lobohan is theorizing a pattern formation in reality that’s not only highly detailed and conveys meaning to us, but is also at odds with the existing laws of physics.
Well, the stars are moving around, and the asterisms are gradually shifting. Maybe they’ll coalesce into a clear message in 1500 years, written in Middle Netspeak, as the descendant of the language that replaced late modern English will be known.
But are they Jedi Knights, or St. George vs. the Dragon knights, or knights of the round table, or samurai, or honorary knights like Sir Paul McCartney, or chess knights, or K.I.T.T. the car, or Bobby Knights (all throwing chairs), or Peter Knights (trying to distinguish themselves from Greg Brady), or Knights in White Satin?
x would need to be much, much higher than 100.
But other than that, yes, you’re right. Since we can’t reboot the universe, we can’t assume either way. Meaning the position of the stars, remarkable and meaningful or not, is irrelevant to determining the existence of a creator.
Note that it works both ways: we cannot infer that there was no creator from the fact our actual stars seem distributed at random. Could be a deliberately pattern-free design. Since science isn’t (and by definition, cannot) test for God, we’ll never know.
Yes, that’s what I meant by “short of the establishment of the pattern requiring to defy the laws of physics”.
But then, as I said, if the star pattern defied the laws of physics it would also be more likely that we’re wrong about them than the Universe flipping them on and off as needed.
I wasn’t responding to your post initially, so I didn’t see you say that.
I think my position on this would be highly dependent on the specific way in which said patterns violated physics as we understood it. There are ways (such as “stars show messages in multiple languages, such that every person can see a message in a language they are fluent in”) that I would be more likely to credit to divinity than others.
To be fair, all of those involve continuous changes in the apparent physical laws governing them, at least to the level of analysis I’m willing to devote to this.
