Steve Zara, 7244

New Scientist has a bad habit of publishing articles with titles like "Quantum Mechanics is Deterministic" when the content of the article is actually extremely tentative.

I've noticed this before now, too. Every now and then it's even there in the text of the article, with a journalist apparently straining against the facts s/he has to work with to suggest a confident radical interpretation that just isn't there. It's not limited to New Scientist, of course - you see it in newspaper journalism all the time - but when I started getting New Scientist I sort of hoped they'd be a bit more resistant to this sort of unit-pushing sensationalism. Sell outs. (Still, I do love the magazine, and look forward to it every week.)

annabanana, 7250

My turn to be pedantic!

YHWH lied in the NT to Adam and Eve. He told them he would kill them (or that they would die, can't remember exactly which at the moment) if they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I suppose they did die eventually...but they didn't die immediately like he made it sound, anyway.

I think we can let Jahweh off the 'liar' charge, here! Did he make it sound like they were going to die immediately? I'd say that's just the way that we, who are used to death as the inevitable end of life, automatically hear it (as, if someone threatens us with 'You're going to die!' we can safely assume they don't mean '...at the end of your natural span'). If you try to imagine the (unimaginable, really) situation of not even knowing what 'death' means and confidently expecting to live happily forever, being made to die is as a dire a threat as you could face. It doesn't need to be this minute. And, of course, you could argue that death after any specific period of time is, when compared to immortality, as close to immediate as makes no odds.

And, rounding off the subject of the mendacious overlord:

Steve Zara

Can a perfect god say 'I am a liar'?

Yes: if it's being perfectly ironic.

(It really is a mug's game, this 'perfection' malarkey.)