Statistically speaking, god must exist

Well apparently I was wrong. The Qur'an logically must be correct, and therefore god must exist:

The Qur’an speaks about hundreds of things that were not known to men at the time of its revelation. Only in three options the result is .0017%. I leave it upto you, to work out the probability if all the hundreds of the unknown facts were guesses, the chances of all of them being correct guesses simultaneously and there being not a single wrong guess. It is beyond human capacity to make all correct guesses without a single mistake, which itself is sufficient to prove to a logical person that the origin of the Qur’an is Divine.

The 3 options mentioned are the Qur'an saying the world in round (known by the ancient greeks, and any sailor who's seen a ship sail over the horizon since the dawn of time), the fact that the moon gives off reflected light (given that you can see the features on it and not the sun or other stars, not too unreasonable), and the most unlikely correct statement, that all life is made of water.

It's difficult for me to point out how obvious it is that life on Earth is based on water. We drink it, we see animals drink it, we bleed liquid, we sweat it, animal meat is moist, corpses look different after they've had a chance to dry out...you'd really have to be a moron not to figure out that water is important.

The main logical error being committed here is assuming that prior to roughly 1700 A.D., people were complete idiots. Eratosthenes figured out the size of the Earth, in fact. The sad fact is that knowledge can be lost after being gained, and just because group of people knows something about the natural world, doesn't mean all of humanity knows it. This is still true, but was more true before books, newspapers, postal services, telephones, and the internet.

The other error is assuming that you need to be able to build an electronic computer, put a camera in a satellite, and snap a photo to figure out the shape of the Earth. You don't. See a ship sail away? The fact that it disappears from the bottom up (instead of to a point) means the Earth couldn't be flat. You can also observe the shadow the Earth casts on the moon during an eclipse. It's always a circle, something only possible if the Earth is a sphere.

Then there is the logical leap that, even given the Qur'an unlikely getting things correct, it must've been written by the creator. It could've easily been written by a more advanced Earthly civilization, or aliens. Or, even if it was written by a god-like entity, that's not proof that praying 5 times a day and stoning adulterers is correct or necessary.

Error rating: 6. Each logical error is slightly understandable, but there are several.

Soul Transplant List

Apparently, the ancient egyptians were right, the heart is the seat of consciousness. The Daily Mail reports:

They argue, in effect, that our hearts, livers and every single organ in the body stores our memories, drives our emotions and imbues us with our own individual characters. Our whole body, they believe, is the seat of the soul; not just the brain.

And if any of these organs should be transplanted into another person, parts of these memories - perhaps even elements of the soul - might also be transferred.

There are now more than 70 documented cases similar to Sonny's, where transplant patients have taken on some of the personality traits of the organ donors.

(Sonny received a heart transplant and fell in love at first sight with the donors wife)

Wow, 70 cases! That sure is a lot. No tangible medical evidence to speak of, no proposed mechanism for how organs might have memory, just anecdotal evidence of 70 cases out of many thousands*.

I think it's a load of new age crap that people would love to believe, but that's an unscientific thing to say. Who knows, maybe organs do store memories somehow, biology is pretty complicated. So if these people want to spend their time researching it, fine. But 70 cases is not credible evidence, and until they can propose a mechanism, it's barely science at all.

Error scale: 5. Could be right, be very, very weak evidence.

-Enginerd

* A little over 2,000 in the US in '06. Source: American Heart Association

The LHC and TEOTWAWKI

So, those wacky scientists are at it again, trying to destroy the world. The NYTimes reports:

"The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act."

This black hole business has been going around for awhile. The second somebody mentions black hole, people picture an interstellar vacuum cleaner which sucks up everything all the time.
For example, if our sun turned into a black hole, it would suck the Earth in and we'd all be dead, right?

Well, putting aside the process of the sun going nova (which actually would destroy the Earth), actually it wouldn't matter at all. A body's gravity is determined by it's mass, so if our sun were a black hole, we'd really be fine.

The tiny black holes which the LHC will produce will have the mass of a few protons, and will evaporate through Hawking radiation rather quickly. A black hole with the mass of a few protons has the same gravity as that many protons. Otherwise known as none.

As for the stranglets they mention, I admit I don't know anything about this. But, as the times mentions, we can look at cosmic ray interactions. The LHC will produce collisions at a bit over 1 TeV; that's 10^12 eV. Cosmic rays of this energy and higher impact the Earths atmosphere regularly.

So yeah, I'm not too worried about the LHC destroying the world. Except perhaps, the world of ignorance.

-Enginerd