Has fergie actually offered anything approaching a critique of the book yet?

His ant atheist disjointed rants remind me of theists who rant against Professor Dawkins's The God Delusion, yet invariably haven't read a single word of the book, and simply rant at the title and author.

Oh, meanwhile, this one is truly delicious to savour, for reasons I shall come to shortly ...

You might argue that the game of life was actually carried out in a laboratory, but not by you and yet you BELIEVE it.

You have no first-hand evidence about the game of life yet you believe it.

You don't get it.

HA HA HA HA HA HA!

You really are a prize specimen, aren't you?

Not only have thousands of people who attended computer science classes learned about this, they have written their own code to implement this and seen it working.

In my case, I recognised that Conway's Game of Life was a special case of a larger class of such simulations, known as modular cellular automata, and wrote my own generalisation thereof in JavaScript. And it WORKS.

I can run this program in my web browser RIGHT NOW, take screenshots of the output, and post them here. I can also provide the source code I've written to those who are interested. Even better, I can provide video footage of me using this program if I need to. Indeed, I shall do this prior to posting this, and provide the link for everyone to view ... now that's done, here you go, watch my code in action:

Modular Cellular Automata In Action

You really are a complete and utter tool, Ferguson, if you think the dipshit apologetic fabrications you peddle here are something other than the products of your rectal passage. Watching you toss this shit into the ring and pretend that it constitutes some sort of killer put-down, is like watching a five year old taking a peashooter to an M1 Abrams main battle tank. Your fatuous drivel really does add several new dimensions to the word "pathetic".

Fergus, like most fundamental theists is keen on condemning science because it "changes its story" over time which clearly indicates his ignorance of how the scientific method works in the slow and deliberate accumulation of knowledge.

He seems to think science should be as revelatory and inerrant as the word of god which he would insist is constant and unchanging.

But Christianity too, has undergone countless changes since Jesus was allegedly executed.

First he was a very holy man, then the "Messiah", then the adopted son of god, then both mortal and immortal at the same time, then immortal but created in the flesh, then immortal but eternal, then the "Christ", then part of a triumvirate of essences of the one true god and a hundred other interpretations over several hundred years that has been the gist of endless debates and arguments that ended in the deaths of thousands if not millions in conflicts and pogroms. And all that in just the first 500 years.

The identity of god was also hotly disputed as to whether the benevolent fatherly god of Jesus was the same as the nasty violent god of the Jews, leading to many messy deaths.

The Albigensians declared the Roman Church and the world was run by Satan and abandoned the Catholic faith to take up their quest for the one true god that despised the sexual act that entrapped angels Satan had taken hostage, imprisoning them in mortal bodies of babies, to suffer in the temporal world. This obvious misinterpretation of the Catholic reality was punished and the ensuing indiscriminate massacres of entire towns and cities are legendary. "Kill them all, God will know his own." Apparently hundreds of thousands of angels were released from their fleshy prisons.

Then old widowed women living in villages, acting as midwives and herbalists were declared witches to be burned to death along with their pets, but ooops, much too late, no, as you were, they were just ugly old women, blamed for natal diseases no-one could other wise explain, other than as proceeds of witchcraft. Where was the universal and unlimited compassion of Jesus then? Its all the more disturbing to consider the passage "Suffer not a witch to live." from hundreds of years ago could also be translated as "Suffer not a poisoner to live." Infallible translations and interpretations of god's word seems to be a hit and miss proposition. Nothing unchanging there.

Then the greatest backflip of all, Catholicism is wrong and Protestantism is right and vice versa. Again no need to detail the widespread destruction and death here or to determine who was to blame. Everyone was so sincere in their belief. What a shame.

During all this time slavery is considered normal, owning another human being and treating them like personal possessions was perfectly fine as outlined in the bible, that even advised slaves to be contrite, despite the brutality of their masters. But then in 1839 Pope Gregory XVI gallantly decides to criticise it but oh... takes no action. Then at last at the beginning of the 20th century, long after the British Empire and the United States have already outlawed slavery, Pope Leo XIII finally condemns it as a "moral outrage".

The Catholic church has a history of supporting the death sentence, and issued death sentences against people who dared to have independent thoughts, the last being Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake in 1600 for his radical theories in cosmology and theology.
In 1942 the Vatican commiserated over the unfortunate fate of Bruno but insisted that it was his defiant personality and NOT his theories that got him killed which was a backhanded way of admitting Bruno was right. Ironically he is considered the first martyr of science.
In 2000 Pope John Paul II apologised for the Vatican burning Bruno. It seems the Vatican made something of a mistake despite access to impeachable divine knowledge and wisdom.

I could spent the rest of my day off itemising ideas and beliefs of which all religions, not just christianity, have changed their teachings but I too have a life to live.

You are right Fergus, science and religion are not the same, they do not propose to seek the same things.

Science investigates, makes predictions, experiments, then modifies those predictions, with further observations and eventually formulates theories that are openly subject to change for the sake of reaching accurate interpretations of how the natural world works that will lead to further research for further realities for the improvement of life for mankind.

Religion adopts dogmatic beliefs based on spontaneous revelations, interpreted dreams and signs, unfounded suppositions and guesses, rejecting and condemning all opposition, at all costs, until grudgingly making concessions on the insistence, usually, of common basic human decency.

Tell us what more you have learned from the book you consider too stupid to read. I love the way you approach things with an open mind.

edited for clarity