Bay 12 Games Forum

That's pretty impressive for something put together by code.

But... Is that creature an insect?  I know about as much as a watermelon does about biology, so I'm not sure if mammals or reptiles can have "body segments".  I'm leaning towards no, but I think my initial image of the creature threw me off.  I was imagining some small, furry creature with green fur, and then I hit the body segments bit and my mind nearly fell out of my ear.

That's probably just me, though, so don't look too deeply into it.

Sounds sweet - A nice out-of-the-box approach.

And only $10?  Wow.

Any society that wants to succeed needs some set of moral beliefs, and those beliefs usually come from religious sources - Or coincide with them.  Without any morals, we have no laws, and with no laws, everybody is killing you for your sandwich.  So religion has been a pretty important anchor for developing societies.  Science can grow from a lack of morals, like the things we learned from experiments in Nazi Germany, but we don't want to kill people off just to learn something from it.  We aren't playing a video game, after all.

So removing morality from science is a bad thing.  The morality of a society is gathered from religion (Or is formed into a religion, depending on the society and your point of view).  The religion puts the fear of God into people along with the fear of the law, so scientists aren't grabbing people off the streets and pumping them full of different chemicals.

I'm not suggesting that that's what a society would degrade into if morality were completely ignored - People who want the ability to experiment on human subjects are definitely few and far between.  I'm just thinking out loud.

As long as we stay on topic and stay civil and polite, we should be okay.

(Hint, hint.)


This thread has been pretty interesting to me, so far.  Mostly it's odd, because most of the anti-science (Which there has been very little of) and anti-religious sentiments tend to be slapping the trends of minority groups and/or the worse possible examples of individuals in a group and painting it across everyone else in that group.

Part of that comes from the sheer number of factions, groups, and sub-groups within the religious and even scientific community, and the extreme views that a few individuals hold within those communities, so I understand why that's an issue, but I don't think it should be such a big one.  It's like blaming an entire town for being bad just because there's a small group of drunks in it - It doesn't sit too well for the rest of the town.  If we're going to discuss religion civilly, we should do what Nikov's suggested while I was typing this: Resort to fewer generalizations.  Having an educated opinion helps.  If people avoided adding underhanded insults and insinuations in their comments, it'd help even more, but that's not a huge problem here.

So mostly I've learned the why of things, and learned a fair number of different ways atheists, agnostics, and other religions view things.  Most people seem to agree that Science and Religion aren't polar opposites.  So, yeah, I've grown from this, though I don't agree with everything that's said, I'm that much more informed.

One of the basic ideas behind natural law is inviolability i.e. it's universally consistent.  Assuming your proposition, the only way for God to influence the result is to change the initial conditions, which rules out an interventionist God.  This only holds if God is, by definition, not itself subject to natural law (i.e. God is supreme, not merely powerful, else why call it God, right?).  Religious discussions suffer when our definitions differ.

Pretty much what Criptfeind said.  I never said that God couldn't intervene, but I don't think he's swinging by every few days to make it rain.

I'm not sure I'd ever use the phrase "creating life out of lifelessness", if only because it sounds a bit odd to me.  Consider "creating rock out of rocklessness" and "creating soup out of souplessness".  It's like "souplessness" is a physical thing. 

Point taken, but it makes sense to me.

Too true.

A lot of times people take the anti-thesis to everything and slap that on everything else - An atheist saying that all people who believe in God to be close-minded and stupid, while people who get a little too defensive about their religion view anyone who has the slightest doubt God exists to be damned and foolish.  It doesn't really work like that, and I think there are a far greater number of neutrally minded people out there than we're lead to believe by the media.  It doesn't help that people swing left, right, up, down, and sideways all the time at the slightest inclination or mood.

Really, I don't see any reason that "Science", the desire to understand the universe and how it works, is opposed to "Religion", the desire to believe in something beyond what you can sense with your body.  Either one can be cold and ruthless, but at the same time you can find strong emotions on both sides.  Science tends to explain physical elements, while Religion tends to explain spiritual or quasi-physical elements - And they can interact seamlessly, because they need to, out of necessity.  One does not dominate the other, they simply coexist, and things are the way they are.

Sure, there are certain things we can prove, but that doesn't mean that the things that haven't been proven wrong are wrong.  Just because I can't prove that there's something smaller than an electron doesn't mean that there isn't.



Where the big problem comes in, I think, is when you get extremists on both sides - Die hard Bible-goers who think that anything outside of the Bible is heresy and Until-I-Die Darwinists that say that evolution is the only explanation for life.  The reality is that both of their arguments are bunk, because you can't prove either one to a shadow of a doubt.

Who says that God only said what he said in the Bible?  Couldn't he have said more, to more people?  Couldn't there have been people who were inspired to write something good, even though they weren't prophets?  Could some of those people have been non-Religious folk who unknowingly furthered God's will in some way?  Can't God use the natural laws that scientists are discovering to further his goals?

And, inversely, who says that just because there are means for things to exist naturally that God didn't have a part in that?  Evolution is a powerful method of saying that life exists on earth, but beyond explaining variety how can you explain creating life out of lifelessness?  Scientists, for all their knowledge and tools, haven't been able to create life in any circumstance, and we suddenly need to think that the only way life could exist is purely by accident or coincidence?

If that's the case, I'd hate for us to discover life on another planet, because even Earth alone is an insurmountable amount of coincidences piled up on top of each other.



So, basically, blind adherence to a law or belief is what causes this big debates and problems.  Haters gonna hate, and all that, but so long as they don't try to force their beliefs over me or insult me because of what I think or believe, I'm okay with that.  From where I'm sitting, neither view debunks the other.

The only debunking going on seems to be coming from people, not ideas.

If ASCII graphics are the most accessible, that's cool.  But if something a little more aesthetic comes up, I won't be complaining. 

Are you taking the Hermit's route of programming and making this all by yourself?  I'd offer to help, but I'm definitely not a professional, or even something like one.  I'm also assuming that there's another code hurdle if you wanted to go beyond ASCII - I don't know much about programming, though.