No Time For Life

I recently got into a debate with a co-worker of mine that lasted several hours. I actually like these debates, most of the time he turns red and storms off without talking to me for several weeks, but sometimes – such as this time – he is actually civil, coherent and enjoyable. Those times in which he turns red and storms off usually ends up in comic form on this site.

This time it started with the Oracle Octopus. It’s amazing! This thing can predict the outcome of the world cup games! (Comic here) He laughed… I laughed… we had a jolly good time until he says, “My girlfriend’s grandmother can actually predict the future. She has…” yatta yatta… fill in all the anecdotal evidence you’ve ever heard about psychics; everything from helping police to predicting a job change.

I debated with him for a long while. I told him about how none of these kinds of claims ever pass scrutiny. It’s mainly cold reading… – shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot – …Ignore the misses, praise the hits and justify if there were no hits.

He gave me the example, “What if someone were to come up to you and tell you… um… ‘Hey! You must be having car trouble! I can sense it.’”

I then replied to his example with, “I am! I don’t have a car.” (Which is true.)

“No, no, no,” he said. “This is just an example.”

“Right,” I said.

“So, ok. You’re looking for a car and this person comes up to you – someone you don’t know – and says, ‘I have a feeling that your cousin is going to offer you a car’”

“My brother offered me HIS car about two-three months back,” I said.

“Right… but… This is just an example.”

I then tried to explain to him that his “example” was perfect for my argument because without even trying he pulled off exactly what cold readers do all over the world. He gave me vague descriptions of things that may or may not be going on in my life. Chances are the someone you’re going to be talking to has a car and that car would be giving them trouble. Or in my case, the car trouble being that I don’t have one.

He gave me the Faith excuse and more anecdotal stories about moving and knowing things she shouldn’t have known and yeah… enough of that.

The debate didn’t stop at psychics. It went on and on and on to subject after subject after subject. All of which I required evidence to believe and he required faith.

One thing he told me is that he knows much more than me because I limit myself to the scientific understanding of the things in the world. He relies on faith, and just “knowing” things with his gut. It doesn’t have to go through all the scientific hoops, justifications, peer review tests and papers all the other things have to go through before he “knows” it’s true. Science moves slow, so does that mean that you can just fill in any answer you like?

No! You don’t believe things because you’re impatient and you don’t justify things that have been proven wrong with supernatural explanations! When something is Supernatural it is, by definition, not of the natural universe and therefore is not real! If the claim is that this supernatural… thing… is doing something, we can test its effects on what it’s effecting that’s within our natural world. If there is no effect, there’s no reason to think it’s there. If there is an effect, then suddenly, after test after test after test and scientific hoops, justifications and peer review papers, this “supernatural” thing… IS NATURAL!

Holy shit. Didn’t see that coming.

One of the most interesting things though, was his argument for the moon. He claims that the universe is in balance, and because of that balance, if the moon were to be torn away from our planet, it would cause a massive explosion!

Huh?

Sure, it would cause some havoc here on Earth if we just suddenly had no moon. But, an explosion?

“The moon is there to provide balance,” he would say. “It’s there for us.”

“No,” I would counter. “The moon is there, because it’s there, if we had no moon life on this planet could still be here. You’re arguing for a purpose when you don’t need to.”

“For example… the atom,” this might be interesting. “Atoms have electrons that orbit it. To make a hydrogen bomb, you take the electron and push it away from the Atom.”

“Causing a chain reaction.”

“Right… so, because the moon is orbiting the Earth in the same way. If we pull the moon it would be a massive explosion of energy! Killing everything!”

“But, the moon is moving away from us. Besides that, you can’t take physics in the quantum universe and just transpose them to the macro! It doesn’t work that way. There are two different sets of laws being applied here and several being considered for the “Laws of Everything”.”

We finish the discussion with him arguing that the quantum and macro laws are interchangeable because of the fact that electrons orbit the atom’s nucleus, the moon orbits the Earth, the Earth orbits the sun, the sun orbits the center of the galaxy and the galaxy (as well as all the other galaxies) is orbiting something else that we haven’t discovered yet.

I went ahead and pointed out that his logic failed after atoms. Electrons “orbit” atom’s, yes, but the Nucleus of those atoms don’t orbit anything themselves. If everything orbits everything then why don’t those? Why doesn’t the moon orbit the sun? It is after all the dominant orbital force in the solar system. Why doesn’t everything just orbit this massive thing in the universe you’re talking about? This, by the way, seems absurd because we’ve already determined the expansion of the universe, and not the rotation. If something were that massive in our universe, we would be sucked in and smashed more quickly than I can think.

“It’s not in our dimension,” he countered.

Can I slap him now?

This universe in a jar idea is continually being thought about. I don’t think of it as being possible. The laws within our own universe shows that it’s improbable that anything is smaller than what is known as a planck length, if anything is smaller it would be mathematically confused and constricted by the “quantum foam”. If there were beings that were vastly larger than our universe, looking at us, our existence wouldn’t seem possible to them because of the same mathematical constrictions and neither would the beings so far beyond them and so on and so forth.

They’re all turtles, all the way down.

I told him that I’m not opposed to the idea of a rotating universe (despite current observations) and if they were to ever discover this massive object that all the galaxies are orbiting around, I’ll go ahead and think of him because he knew it simply by faith and I rely on something that doesn’t move as fast as his faith; science. (His words)