VS and the religious element

I don't even know where in **** you're trying to go with this....

Because if there was no negative side to our lore, then we'd be the good guys and the other 2 factions would be the bad guys or would not have any reason to fight us and then it would be a 1v1 instead of 1v1v1.

I'm just saying you sound right at home in the NC. The VS being supremacists and all, I just don't think you'd fit in.

But if you did not have faith in your spaceship working, then why go ahead and build it?

We cannot know that the spaceship will work, but we think that there is a good chance it will. So we go ahead and build it.

Thinking without knowing is essentially having faith in something.

Uhm, do you even science bro?

Scientists function on the belief and expectation that things will continue to function as they expect them to, as all evidence has so far shown them and made them expect it to continue doing...

but if you're INABLE to account for a SINGLE example of counter-proof then you're no scientist and have no place in being one. As soon as some proof is shown to prove that something else IS possible, you MUST accept that and take that new proof with you into future study.

A scientists expects things to continue as all evidence has thus shown something to be but must always be ready to deal with being proven otherwise. ALWAYS.

The VS logically has to be much smaller than the NC and TR, or in-universe the Vanu would have stomped them both with their vastly superior technology. There must be a large ratio of NC/TR soldiers for every Vanu one. Given that there can't be more than a few million people on Auraxis, and that nearly the entirety of the VS was formed by intellectuals and their close followers, at least some of the soldiers are scientists by matter of necessity.

I hate "Space Murica"

I hate capitalism.

I hate corporatetocricy (new form of oligarchy).

I left the US army, IRL, for these very reasons (Minus the "Space" part of "Space Murica").

So... no. I wouldn't really.

I believe in PERSONAL freedom, NOT corporate freedom.

You're confusing the two different meanings of the word faith;

1) a secure confidence in a person, place or thing

2) a belief independent of evidence

That's not faith, that's reasonable expectation of desired results and acceptance of risk if there's a problem.

If you want to boil the definition of faith down to that, all thought is faith.

Nope, scientists don't need to believe that and many don't. You can't help it if they change, but that doesn't make building on our best information currently a bad idea.

Seriously guys:
Did NONE of you ever read/hear the start of the Perry Rhodan Universe?
I mean, it's a german SF Story and only partially translated but it's the still the biggest, longest and richest SciFi Story and Universe of all time.


for those of you who are ignorant:
perry Rhodan (and his Team) lands on the moon, an Alien spaceship crashed there, they learn the Technology, they come back to earth, they establish an independend Country in the midst of the Cold War and with the Technology of the Aliens they slowly "force" humanity to unity and elect a leader. all the while they simple shutoff nuclear reactions all over the planet, sit under a domeshield that tanks everysingle bit of explosives human Military have at their disposal and even use mindcontroltech.
and there is no Religion in place anywhere.
and you want to know why?
because humans are great at adapting. not physicly, but mentaly.
if you sit with a human down and tell him: "this super advanced stuff here does work like this and this" he'll understand it easily and therefor consider it science. simple as that.
if you don't believe me: it's the same way with secret stuff. you'd think that lots and lots of secret Information gets leaked all the time, but that isn't the case, because most humans who are working with those informations are used to it after an hour and don't even have the urge to tell anyone. (ofcourse if you never had contact with confidential stuff you might not quite understand... *sigh*

in short:
humans are complicated, but they'll never forego the possibility of just accepting something as normal, so they don't have to care about it. and Religion is timeconsuming.

That's my point. Unfortunately, scientists are limited to a subjective experience. This being a fact, they must have faith that their experience is the same as the experiences of all others. Which means they must rely on the fact that most witnesses are unreliable. The catch 22 being that if most witnesses are unreliable, and their experiences are the same as others, then theirs is also unreliable, except where empirical knowledge shows otherwise. However, given that we're all unreliable witnesses, in that we're limited to subjective experience, some faith is required that these conclusions based on unreliable witnesses are otherwise reliable.

Not at all, but if the rules aren't as they appear, then the faith in them would be unfounded, no? Whether or not they worked, that functionality would have been based on an appearance of things, not reality as it actually is.

Pretty much! We can't know anything for certain due to our fallible perceptions, so we all work off of faith. The faith in science is different than the faith in religion, but both are fundamentally the same thing.

Are you a postmodernist?

That's not faith, it's an axiom that permits the process of thought.

Are you going to refute his point?

Which is different from faith how, exactly?

Is it me, or does this whole thread reek of "militant atheist VS player" ?

Being a scientist has nothing to do with one's propensity to believe in what we would call "cult" things. From what I understand, they don't worship the Vanu - they believe that their way of governance is set to lead the human kind into a new age, which given humans on Auraxis were involved in a civil war at the time the Sovereignty was created one can forgive the VS originators of basically believing humanity was doomed if left to it's own devices.

The fallacy that because one is a scientist that they're not open to being coerced into a cult is laughable - the ***** were arguably a cult, and many very intelligent scientists were in their ranks.

But regardless - I for one imagine that the VS fighters, the front liners, are /not/ the scientists that started the movement, but more civilians who joined their cause - in the same way the NC was started by corporations and yet it's their workers and die-hard anarchists who are doing the fighting, not the suits.

So take comfort - when you're playing VS you're not playing as a scientist who worships alien tech, you're most likely playing as a deluded civilian manipulated by the scientists who most likely want whatever anyone wants - their way to be the way that wins.

Y'know, like EVERY WAR EVER.

Scientists only believe a handful of things unconditionally, the axioms. The three logical absolutes are typically the basis. Everyone needs to make those assumptions or the very act of thinking is impossible and you may as well not exist. He's essentially arguing for hard solipsism by arguing otherwise.

Beyond that, science revolves around testing falsifiable hypotheses with objective measurements taken by independent observers. Unless there is a systematic attempt at deception by a higher power (something we could never demonstrate and is rejected as a null hypotheses) you can verify your subjective experience with what is empirically verifiable.