Why did Allah create Tsunamis and earthquakes?

[mawilson 2,133]

Oh, and as far as I am aware Earth is the only planet in our solar system that has tectonic plates that move about.

Probably because there are no oceans of water on other planets in our solar system.

[웃 910]

He wants LI to go there so he can hit LI with a mosquito guided missile. Malaria is a beeyotch.

Assuming Allah is real, do you think He bears some responsibility in using or allowing/creating mosquito-guided missiles to kill 1-2 million people each year?

[^_^ 5,021]

Assuming Allah is real, do you think He bears some responsibility in using or allowing/creating mosquito-guided missiles to kill 1-2 million people each year?

If Allah is real, then yeah he made those missiles. Maybe that's what he intended. Maybe he wants you to die of malaria. Maybe that is your destiny. You are not supposed to know why. This is his planet. You just live here.

Edited March 15, 2011 by \

[mawilson 2,133]

If Allah is real, then yeah he made those missiles. Maybe that's what he intended. Maybe he wants you to die of malaria. Maybe that is your destiny. You are not supposed to know why. This is his planet. You just live here.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

I am happy. Allah just blessed me at 26 years old with my 2nd rental home....I was nervous that I might not recoup all the money I poured into renovations. Wasn't sure how long it would take to rent out, if I'd find good tenants, how many times would I have to lower the price, etc.

Well Allah has been good. It took about 4 weeks of daily craigslist ads and many appointments. Thought I had it sold to a couple with THREE kids....Was a little more than I wanted in the home.

Lo and behold the deal fell threw and the next day I found a couple with 1 infant that wanted the house.

SHE IS A PH.D. and renting a house from little old me. I am 26 years old with a year left in my graduate program.

The price this PHD will pay me each month on the 10th is $1150!!!!! She put a $1,000 deposit in my hand a few days ago and put the remaining $1300 ($2300 total for first/last rent) on Friday!!!!!

I am all smiles right now as my monthly rent income has more than doubled!!!!!!!

Unfortunately I just found out that it is almost $600 to file for this next step in the visa process....Was hoping it would be more like $300 but to my surprise I have to fork over $600 within the next month or two.

I would never have guessed you to be a child with an unfinished education. Interesting. If you were my son, you would be number 3 and the only one over 22 years old without a masters degree. But hey, good luck with the house.

Why are you being surprised by visa fees? They are published information.

[웃 910]

I would never have guessed you to be a child with an unfinished education. Interesting. If you were my son, you would be number 3 and the only one over 22 years old without a masters degree. But hey, good luck with the house.

Why are you being surprised by visa fees? They are published information.

26 years old is a child? The education is currently pending, I am in classes now (so not sure 'unfinished' is the appropriate wording). Plus education is a funny thing. As you see there is a Ph.D. renting a house from me. I was looking at a table of repayments for financial aid today and I am sure she owes upwards of $100,000 and pays about $1,000 a month just for her loans. So it is great that she earned herself a Ph.D. but she obviously isn't very advanced in her savings or earnings (her and her husband combined earn about $80,000 a year).

Congrats that your kids all got master's degrees at such young ages. The question is what kind of career path did they choose? Are they like this Ph.D. with 6-figures of student loan debt and renting a house instead of owning?

...I was off to a very bad start in early adulthood. I actually finished my bachelors in April 2009 just before I turned 25. But I really turned myself around in the last 5 or so years.

If we flashed back to early 2006 you would see a totally different person. I still didn't have an associates, I smoked, and pretty much dedicated my life to doing coke every day. Changed my life around completely when I met my wife in March of 2006. Got my associates, then bachelors. Now on to my masters with only 5 classes remaining.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

26 years old is a child? The education is currently pending, I am in classes now (so not sure 'unfinished' is the appropriate wording). Plus education is a funny thing. As you see there is a Ph.D. renting a house from me. I was looking at a table of repayments for financial aid today and I am sure she owes upwards of $100,000 and pays about $1,000 a month just for her loans. So it is great that she earned herself a Ph.D. but she obviously isn't very advanced in her savings or earnings (her and her husband combined earn about $80,000 a year).

Congrats that your kids all got master's degrees at such young ages. The question is what kind of career path did they choose? Are they like this Ph.D. with 6-figures of student loan debt and renting a house instead of owning?

...I was off to a very bad start in early adulthood. I actually finished my bachelors in April 2009 just before I turned 25. But I really turned myself around in the last 5 or so years.

If we flashed back to early 2006 you would see a totally different person. I still didn't have an associates, I smoked, and pretty much dedicated my life to doing coke every day. Changed my life around completely when I met my wife in March of 2006. Got my associates, then bachelors. Now on to my masters with only 5 classes remaining.

26 is younger than two of my children, so yes. Maybe she paid cash or got full ride scholarships. Unfinished means you are still working on it. Yes, unfinished is the correct term. We have done 3 masters and a bachelors (not counting mine) with no student loans at all and number three just got a full ride through a Ph.D. He will be younger than you when he gets it. Started college at age 17 but he never did coke. Number 4 will gradyate high school this year ahge at 16. Glad you turned it around. The oldest just bought his 3rd home, number two just bought his first. No student loans to pay off. I am still undecided on real estate to tell you the truth. I am not unhappy my kids are buying homes, but I have never realized reasonable returns on investment from real estate though I admit i have never been "lucky" in that regard. I DO enjoy owning a home but only because I like to "play with it" and it gives me something to satisfy my passion for building things.. However I DO think the best use of real estate is to rent it out.

Good luck

[웃 910]

The work of Allah? Or global warming? This town got completely desecrated...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b-2iByqHVI

[HeatDeath 430]

Allah didn't create tsunamis and earthquakes, at least not the way you mean. Remember that the world is terribly, terribly damaged. Earthquakes and tsunamis are a failure mode of a world that Allah is NOT running. He handed authority for running it over to us, and we promptly handed it over [by sinning] to, depending on your theology, either Satan or the blind laws of physics.

He no more created tsunamis and earthquakes than an auto manufacturer produces crumpled fenders and blown airbags. In fact, come to think of it, I suspect that the natural disasters we do experience, like the destroyed auto safety features I just mentioned, are failure modes carefully engineered and chosen by God to be as minimally damaging as possible, given the circumstances. It may be solely due to God's careful engineering that we only get 30-50 foot tsunamis, and magnitude 7-9 earthquakes, as opposed to 300-500 foot tsunamis, and Atlantis-scale total tectonic plate collapses, for example.

Edited March 29, 2011 by HeatDeath

[Peikko 1,575]

Allah didn't create tsunamis and earthquakes, at least not the way you mean. Remember that the world is terribly, terribly damaged. Earthquakes and tsunamis are a failure mode of a world that Allah is NOT running. He handed authority for running it over to us, and we promptly handed it over [by sinning] to, depending on your theology, either Satan or the blind laws of physics.

He no more created tsunamis and earthquakes than an auto manufacturer produces crumpled fenders and blown airbags. In fact, come to think of it, I suspect that the natural disasters we do experience, like the destroyed auto safety features I just mentioned, are failure modes carefully engineered and chosen by God to be as minimally damaging as possible, given the circumstances. It may be solely due to God's careful engineering that we only get 30-50 foot tsunamis, and magnitude 7-9 earthquakes, as opposed to 300-500 foot tsunamis, and Atlantis-scale total tectonic plate collapses, for example.

Natural events follow very predictable patterns that are governed by what we can loosely term the laws of physics. While an individual earthquake can't be predicted, the type and strength of earthquakes and the areas they will strike very definitely can be predicted because these laws of physics are not whimsical but determined by the nature of matter. Man has observed studied and evaluated the world and can give a comprehensive explanation of what happens and how it happens. Physicists create mathematical formulae that exactly explain these things and the reality is that unless you have an advanced understanding of math you really can't understand physics beyond a very basic level. Tying to explain physics in English as apposed to math is like trying to explain a Mozart symphony in words rather than listening to it and understanding music on its own terms. 300-500 ft tsunamis are theatrical nonsense; the stuff of Hollywood not science.

[HeatDeath 430]

There is a wonderful description in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", about how different people perceive iron and other metal building materials. To your average inhabitant of an industrial culture, metal signifies strength and permanence. The very nature of things made of metal is that they are permanent, immovable, and unchangeable. Steel even more so.

But a blacksmith, a welder, an industrial engineer - they see structural metals very differently. To them iron is fluid, malleable, subject to their control and their direction, able to take on any shape they command. Their skills and abilities allow them to see as fluid, contingent, and controllable what other people see as hard, immovable, nonnegotiable, and permanent.

The reason I bring this up is that I see something of the first attitude in your post about physics and equations. As an educated member of Western Civilization, it is quite natural for you, as a materialist, to see the laws of physics as immutable, hard, unyielding, unchangeable, and eternal. Everything in your cultural surroundings inclines you to see mathematical formulae as immutable iron bands that circumscribe and form reality, and that is perfectly natural, in more ways than one.

But as a computer programmer [not to even mention my theism yet!], I see things very differently. Any computer programmer who has ever written even the simplest video game in which moving objects interact has created their own implementation of physics, their own equations of movement and acceleration, their own basic laws of reality. And any computer programmer with the slightest shred of imagination who has done so has realized that there is nothing at all inevitable about these equations. They are fluid, contingent - and totally subject to the creative will of the programmer. A programmer is under no obligation whatsoever to ensure that two pieces of simulated matter cannot occupy the same space, nor to ensure that the flux of radiated simulated light falls off as the square of the distance, nor even to ensure that a simulated body will continue moving at the same velocity unless it is acted upon by an outside force. Do you see? To the creative computer programmer, it is all up for grabs.

And you must admit, that if God exists at all, He had, at the time of Creation (and even now) at least as much control over our laws of physics as a computer programmer has over the internal physics of a video game.

This is why your argument - attempting to use the inevitability and immutability of the laws of physics as we experience them to establish the ontological and philosophical impossibility of worse disasters than we commonly experience today - is simply silly. The space of possible sets of laws of physics is vast, and the ones we have, if God created this universe, were chosen and engineered very carefully to fulfill specific purposes, onyl some of which we can even guess at. but it seems certain that mitigation of the severity of the failure modes would certainly have been a prime consideration, especially if the designer had reliable foreknowledge of an impending failure.

Your counterargument simply doesn't make any sense.

Edited March 30, 2011 by HeatDeath

[Peikko 1,575]

There is a wonderful description in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", about how different people perceive iron and other metal building materials. To your average inhabitant of an industrial culture, metal signifies strength and permanence. The very nature of things made of metal is that they are permanent, immovable, and unchangeable. Steel even more so.

But a blacksmith, a welder, an industrial engineer - they see structural metals very differently. To them iron is fluid, malleable, subject to their control and their direction, able to take on any shape they command. Their skills and abilities allow them to see as fluid, contingent, and controllable what other people see as hard, immovable, nonnegotiable, and permanent.

The reason I bring this up is that I see something of the first attitude in your post about physics and equations. As an educated member of Western Civilization, it is quite natural for you, as a materialist, to see the laws of physics as immutable, hard, unyielding, unchangeable, and eternal. Everything in your cultural surroundings inclines you to see mathematical formulae as immutable iron bands that circumscribe and form reality, and that is perfectly natural, in more ways than one.

But as a computer programmer [not to even mention my theism yet!], I see things very differently. Any computer programmer who has ever written even the simplest video game in which moving objects interact has created their own implementation of physics, their own equations of movement and acceleration, their own basic laws of reality. And any computer programmer with the slightest shred of imagination who has done so has realized that there is nothing at all inevitable about these equations. They are fluid, contingent - and totally subject to the creative will of the programmer. A programmer is under no obligation whatsoever to ensure that two pieces of simulated matter cannot occupy the same space, nor to ensure that the flux of radiated simulated light falls off as the square of the distance, nor even to ensure that a simulated body will continue moving at the same velocity unless it is acted upon by an outside force. Do you see? To the creative computer programmer, it is all up for grabs.

And you must admit, that if God exists at all, He had, at the time of Creation (and even now) at least as much control over our laws of physics as a computer programmer has over the internal physics of a video game.

This is why your argument - attempting to use the inevitability and immutability of the laws of physics as we experience them to establish the ontological and philosophical impossibility of worse disasters than we commonly experience today - is simply silly. The space of possible sets of laws of physics is vast, and the ones we have, if God created this universe, were chosen and engineered very carefully to fulfill specific purposes, onyl some of which we can even guess at. but it seems certain that mitigation of the severity of the failure modes would certainly have been a prime consideration, especially if the designer had reliable foreknowledge of an impending failure.

Your counterargument simply doesn't make any sense.

Not to you, but then you seem to think that you can turn lead into gold. Man went in pursuit of that little whim for centuries, do you know why that didn't work out too well?

While physics is still evolving, it doesn't allow for everything to be possible. Comparing the natural world with a video game is patently absurd, but even then the math behind it is predictable and logical. Try again.

Edited March 30, 2011 by Madame Cleo

[Peikko 1,575]

Thanks for the laugh by the way, Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that book was a 70's cult classic, literally

[HeatDeath 430]

We can turn lead into gold perfectly fine. The device to accomplish that little trick is called a breeder reactor. They tend to be a little expensive, and building one tends to attract the attention of several major world governments [as they are also, by the way, the best way (by far) to make nuclear bomb fissibles], and making extra gold in any significant quantities would only depress the gold market price and erase your economic gains, so no one uses them for that, but it is possible.

But that's beside the point. You are displaying a deep confusion about what is possible within a set of laws of physics, versus what is possible when creating a set of laws of physics from the outside. Of course I cannot change the laws of physics, anymore than a video game enemy soldier could rewrite the source code that governs his behavior. We have no access to that level of our universe. But you display a crippling lack of imagination, being apparently incapable of even conceiving that a hypothetical architect of the universe would have had the ability to do things differently.

You keep using the words "absurd" and "nonsense". I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Edited March 30, 2011 by HeatDeath

[Peikko 1,575]

We can turn lead into gold perfectly fine. The device to accomplish that little trick is called a breeder reactor. They tend to be a little expensive, and building one tends to attract the attention of several major world governments [as they are also, by the way, the best way (by far) to make nuclear bomb fissibles], and making extra gold in any significant quantities would only depress the gold market price and erase your economic gains, so no one uses them for that, but it is possible.

But that's beside the point. You are displaying a deep confusion about what is possible within a set of laws of physics, versus what is possible when creating a set of laws of physics from the outside. Of course I cannot change the laws of physics, anymore than a video game enemy soldier could rewrite the source code that governs his behavior. We have no access to that level of our universe. But you display a crippling lack of imagination, being apparently incapable of even conceiving that a hypothetical architect of the universe would have had the ability to do things differently.

You keep using the words "absurd" and "nonsense". I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Imagining a 'creator' is the stuff of imagination only. You can imagine that any way you like and in every way you like the human brain can do that, but it doesn't make it credible or more importantly necessary. It isn't necessary at all.

Yes, it is possible but not in the alchemy sense of the word - and it's got nothing to do with suppressing gold market prices that it's not done.