The symptothermal method (STM) is a form of natural family planning (NFP) that enables couples to identify accurately the time of the woman's fertile phase by measuring her temperature and observing cervical secretions.
Truthfully there is just as much "theoretical evidence" for Gods existence as there is "theoretical evidence" to refute him. Atheists have no actual claim to any evidence, merely speculation and theory. Basically both religion and atheism are in the same boat as far as Science is concerned. Both share strong feelings, beliefs and thoughts forming philosophies, but NO EVIDENCE.
No, there is no actual evidence for the existence of gods. There is conjecture and hearsay aplenty though. The atheistic position is that it's safe to assume that gods don't exist, as we have no evidence to say that they do. Especially in the case of gods specific to the various religions of the world. Just like we assume that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist even though we can't prove it.
With that said, I'd like to add that Both the Faithful and the Faithless are political distractions to science and should both be IGNORED until such a time as Fact may be applied one way or the other.
Well, by excluding both "faithful" and "faithless", you've pretty much covered everyone. Right now though, the facts are with those who lack belief, because there's no actual evidence to support belief. Hence the need for faith in religious folks.
So we should not pay politicians well so that they will readily accept bribes (I mean deals), and then we can complain when they are bought and paid for? The fact that they are seeking money from other sources means they are not getting paid well enough for their work, and they have to other people's work to get paid. There will always be book deals and such no matter what, but it seems like you endorse that politicians use their influence and leverage to become millionaires. Not my idea of the person I want representing me in government. If we valued our leading politicians half as much as we valued our college basketball coaches, we might be able to get some politicians with a little more integrity.
WTF?!? You're talking blackmail here. Maybe we should pay everyone $175K so that they won't turn to crime! That's the argument you're making. That taxpayers should cough up more money so that congresspeople won't turn to crime! Why don't we have a zero-tolerance policy for congressional or white-collar crime? Why don't assholes like Rangel get locked up, or at least tossed out of Congress? Why aren't we throwing the book at all the politicians involved in the pay-to-play crap? At least they locked up William Jefferson. For all the charges he was convicted of, he should get more time IMO. We're far too soft on white-collar crime.
Not to get in the way of everyone bashing a congressmen (everyone's favorite activity) but he talked about struggling because of a direct question from a constituent angry about his salary level which he didn't choose (it's standard for all congress), and when he JUST became a congressmen (he's gotten 1 check). So he's not really just off the cuff complaining here, he's trying to defuse the situation with the questioner explaining to them that it's not like he's living high on the hog off their money but is instead paying of student loans, driving a used minivan, and paying mortgages on the residences he has to maintain in both his home state and DC (incredibly expensive). He's basically just trying to empathize with the questioner to defuse the situation which he has no control over.
He apparently doesn't think he should take a pay cut either, as he never said that he agreed that he was being paid too much. But apparently he does think that teachers making closer to a quarter of what he makes are being paid too much.
EVERYONE in Congress gets $174,000, people. Whatever your opinion is about the video, his salary is irrelevant. Keep that part out of it, unless you want to start asking why Chris Dodd needed a super deal on a Countrywide mortgage with his $174,000 salary, or Charlie Rangel needed to omit his properties and stock holdings from his tax returns, or why VP Biden doesn't donate anything to charity when he makes even more than Congress.
Wait a sec. I'm all in favor of asking all of those things! I thought Rangel should have been given the boot, but as usual, he gets off with a wrist slap. This jackass talks about just getting by on his $175K salary while saying that teachers making closer to a quarter of what he makes are being paid too much. That pisses me off.
So far so good?
30 mins of navigation on the out of the box browser make my fox eat up 700MB+ or RAM.
Am I missing something here?
Maybe you're missing some RAM? I don't know what you're expecting really. If the RAM is available to be used, why not use it? RAM does nothing for you if it's not being used.
FF4 is currently using 1.2GB of RAM on my system, but I have 97 tabs open. I also have 12GB of RAM, so I couldn't care less if it wants to use 10% of that. If it makes it quick and responsive while managing all of that content, then so be it. That's why I have the RAM in the first place. I leave FF and other apps open in the background while I play games and it doesn't seem to have the slightest effect on them.
For many years, Firefox has been the most unstable program in common use. On Windows XP, if Firefox has many open windows and tabs, it will eventually crash both itself and Windows.
Has the instability been fixed?
I've been using FF 3.x on Windows 7 for quite a while and I regularly have 50-100 tabs open. Occasionally FF will get slowed down to the point where I get annoyed and restart it, but it hasn't ever taken down the OS. FF4 seems to be better so far. I'm not experience nearly as much slowdown.
So far I'm liking FF4. Everything seems to work well. I'm getting used to the little popup preview of links in the bottom right corner. The sync functionality looks cool and I'm planning to try it out to sync with my Android phone. The only real issue I've encountered is related to the interaction between the Tab Groups feature (aka Panorama) and the Tree Style Tabs plugin, which I consider an absolute necessity anymore.
If I switch to a tab group, and then try to go back to my full display with all tabs shown, the tabs get all scrambled, lose their hierarchical positions, and some seem to disappear completely. I really hope there's a way to fix that, although it'll probably be up to the TST developer to do it. For now I think I'll just have to avoid using Tab Groups.
In legal terms, there is the concept of "chain of evidence" meaning that the material has not left authorized hands, nor sat on a shelf unattended for 53 years. If this was a murder trial, that "chain of evidence" would be completely broken. If this is required to prove the death of someone, it surely must apply to prove the "life" of something.
If you have a corpse, and you can identify who it is, but you don't know where it was for a little while, you're no longer sure that that person is dead?
I think the point must be that since we don't know what was going on with the flask during all those years, God could have easily slipped in and planted those amino acids!
A simple protein can be made from as few as 50 or as many as several thousand amino acids, and they must all be put together in a specific order.
The average functional protein contains 200 amino acids. The simple cell contains thousands of different proteins.
The probability of just one protein contain just 100 amino acids forming by itself is a mind boggling huge number.
Oh, and you need RNA first before you can make a protein, yet proteins are used to make RNA...
Lot of claims there, with no evidence presented for support.
Keep in mind that 98% of the people commenting here do not have a freaking clue what ID actually is. If you were to look at all scientific evidence from a purely unbiased perspective, ID makes at least as much sense (especially if you just do the math on the probability of creation and life's evolving through pure chance) as evolution.
Apparently you don't either. Look at all the scientific evidence, huh? What scientific evidence is there for ID? Care to cite some?
Like it or not, both evolution and ID require faith to believe. Neither should be considered pure science since neither can be repeated in the lab.
This old straw-man again. You're simply wrong, except about the ID requiring faith part.
For example peer reviewed studies in genetics, sedimentology and chronology of the earth performed mainly in the late 20 and now vigorously in the 21st century has shown that the modern Darwinian/Lyellian theory of origins of life evolving from star dust and a common biological ancestor is really a fairy tale such as the movie, "Princess Bride" is for adults or as the Cinderella fairy tale is for children. There is NO 65 million year gap between man and dinosaurs and therefore NO evolution of man from so-called lower forms of life as evidenced by C-14 dating of dinosaur bone collagen and other bone fractions from Texas to Alaska in the 23,000 to 33,000 year range www.dinosaurc14ages.com & www.sciencevsevolution and most recently evidence from lab and field studies in Russia, France and the USA showing that the sediments were deposited 2000 times more recently than "evolutionism dogma" claims www.www.sedimentology.fr
You make lots of absolute claims, but offer up a bunch of stuff that is largely junk to back it up. Skimming through those sites, most of their ideas have been debunked before. They certainly don't do much to support them scientifically, and even if something they said turned out to be right, it doesn't overturn all of evolutionary theory, unless they can also scientifically explain pretty much everything else that evolutionary theory explains, which they certainly can't.
By that logic, evolution is not a theory either. If anybody thinks they can decide what 'real academia' is, it will harm all academia by restricting the flow of ideas. Science is just a tool, and it was never meant to become a dogma. Until we are able to fully recreate or fully document one or the other in a truly scientific fashion, it is best to leave all theories open to discussion.
I don't care what "real academia" is. I do care that science be done according to the scientific method, because otherwise it isn't science. Since creationists seem to be incapable of applying the scientific method to their ideas, they shouldn't be teaching them as science, nor should they be paid for doing scientific work if that's not what they're doing. They can teach religion or philosophy classes all they want.
I'd be interested to know how you'd test the macro evolution theory. Micro evolution is simple, but setting an experiment running to prove macro evolution and still being alive to ascertain success/failure will be tricky certainly in higher level organisms, sure mutation in high living organism occur fairly frequently, but I have yet to spot any successes ni these mutations.
From my understanding both are attempting to describe from the evidence how such beautifully complex biological systems are in place, one solution places an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters and the other claims that surely there must have been some role of design in the produced works, a.k.a "a shakespeare".
I don't think it is possible to measure which is correct, ocassionally a monkey may type the works of shakespeare, and occassionally it could be argued that a new design has been made and set loose or enabled. Fitting the historic evidence, will not validate either, scientific method dictate generate a theory, test it hopefully with a pass/fail, and then attempt to resolve the sometimes gray answer you get from a real test.....
The difference is that we have tons of evidence for (macro)evolution, and essentially none for "some kind of super-being created everything". That doesn't even begin to address the infinitely less evidence for the "oh, and my particular super-being left us this handy book/prophet/relative/artifact to tell us everything we need to know" beliefs. They don't even really address the same issue, as evolution doesn't cover the origin of everything, or even the origin of life.
That article is just one big straw-man argument. It's just fine to say we don't know. It doesn't particularly matter how the universe was created anyway. If science can someday figure it out, that's great. If not, who cares? Almost the entirety of it will remain far too distant for us to ever see up close anyway. It has no bearing on the ability of science to be incredibly useful to us. It also has no bearing on the veracity of religious myths at all. Those still lack the necessary evidence to be considered anything but myths.
Claiming that science requires anything like the faith required for religion is just complete nonsense. It's taking two different meanings of the word and conflating them to make a bogus argument.
thats the problem w/ all theory's of what went on before written history?
even evolution the only support is slow change in an unreliable fossil history(as in we extrapolated in every case)
you can only prove its possible, but when it comes the weather or not it happened and not another way that means slow change, its as "unsupported and untestable" as god
As unsupported as God? There's not a shred of evidence for God, especially of the sort described by most religions, except that which we manufacture in our minds. There's mountains of evidence for common descent.
The link content is close but not 100% relevant.
To say it in other words:
What faith does an empirical physicist have in science?
What faith does a general scientist have in empirical physics?
What faith does a plebian have in general science or empirical physics?
It gets back to the same thing. The further you are removed from the coal face the less understanding you have about coal mining.
First of all, what definition of faith are you using here? If you're using the definition of "acceptance without evidence", then that applies to religion, but not science. If you use the definition of "confidence in something", then I don't see what you're trying to make. I'll assume you're using the former definition, as your post doesn't make any sense otherwise.
It's not faith when you know the mechanics of something. Do you call it faith that the sun will rise in the morning? I call it understanding the way things work. I don't need faith to know that as long as the earth keeps rotating, the sun will rise in the morning. When it comes to more esoteric subjects, we aren't just putting faith in the explanation that science has given us (assuming it has given one), we understand how science works to bring us these explanations, and we have vast mountains of evidence all around us to show that those methods work.
So now we have a bunch of generalists who firmly believe in the objective truth of Darwinism, objecting against a judicial system based on Christian ethics and the belief in the Almighty.
Within the mind set of science, it comes down to accepting Intelligent Design as a competing theory, which it can't be. What it is though, is a container for all those niggling little things that can't be explained by evolution and mutation. The sudden appearance of a flagella's motor for example is classic ID. That can't be a mutation because it hadn't mutated from anything. It's a complex structure which just appeared.
So maybe there will be a refinement, perhaps leading up to a paradigm change of the Theory of Evolution, and for that reason alone, ID should be given an opportunity to survive and taken a bit more seriously.
You're going to have to explain what you're claiming here. It seems like you're using the IC argument regarding flagella. I don't see that as a particularly strong argument.
WTF are you talking about, Doc? We do have "those laws", and this article is about them being enforced.
Now we just need penalties that are actually a deterrent to companies violating these laws. Why are the penalties capped? The benefits could be worth billions, yet the penalty is a paltry couple of million. Anyone that can perform simple math wouldn't blink at violating the law. Especially when it seems rather easy to do it in such a way that nobody gets the finger pointed at them and has to serve actual jail time.
Although with a maximum of five years, it is probably worth the risk too. People risk a lot more time for less money all the time. Also, a $10,000 cap for a civil suit against a guy that probably got a half-million or more bonus for the results of the bribery anyway? What kind of joke is this? Why don't we get as tough on crimes dealing with billions as we do with selling a few bucks worth of drugs?
You must have a free exchange of ideas in order to get to the truth. Discriminating only holds you back in the end, for you will find yourself discriminating against the truth. Perhaps we will find one day that much of the "entire dept." is in fact wrong. But not if we don't allow other theories.
Agreed. Not hiring someone because of their beliefs alone would not be warranted. If they have shown the ability to engage in science and produce results, and are willing to use scientific methods exclusively in their work, then they should be considered for the job. Now it's entirely possible that there are many better candidates still, so they may not get the job, but they shouldn't be precluded from consideration. I don't know of any actual scientific work in support of ID at the moment. So if someone is a proponent of that, and wished to study it, I'd want to see how they propose to study it first. If they can't explain a scientific approach to the study of ID, then they shouldn't be hired.
They are making the assumption, I think, that intelligent design is a religious view, so the bill is advocating a religious position in universities.
I think their assumption is wrong: ID is not a theological position; if you had to place it in a field it would be philosophy.
This is not to deny that it meshes well with certain religious systems.
I found it interesting that TFheadline talks about creationism--which is a religious position--while the law only mentioned ID which is a philosophical hypothesis.
Sorry, but the jig is up on the whole "ID is not religion" thing. It's pushed almost exclusively by religious creationists, and it's certainly not science in the way it has been approached by ID "researchers". If it was presented in philosophy classes, then it wouldn't be a problem.
Of course scientists are only interested in arriving at the truth, right?
It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren't averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."
Mr. Mann's main beef was that the journal had published several articles challenging aspects of the anthropogenic theory of global warming. Global Warming With the Lid Off - The emails that reveal an effort to hide the truth about climate science
Mann and his group are hardly the only climate scientists out there, and whatever you think of him flying off the handle about the pseudo-scientific stuff that some second-rate journal was publishing, there are plenty of other climate research groups that come to the same conclusions as him. I don't see any hidden "truth about climate science". I'd be pissed too if someone was using such bullshit tactics to try to discredit my work. It's one thing to be a skeptic and do honest research. It's quite another to use obviously fraudulent tactics, like cherry-picking your data, and then try to claim it's evidence. It was an indefensible study, as evidenced by their inability to defend it, and the eventual acceptance of even the journal publisher that they never should have printed it.
I doubt that the departments dealing with matters touching on evolutionary biology would be much (any?) better than the tainted "Climate Change" nee "Global Warming" departments in dealing with dissenting views regardless of the strength of the scientific case. That is really too bad. The skeptics are going to bring closer scrutiny of the theories and help weed out the bad ones better than those who love the theories. The scientists may deal with the ideas of evolution, but they are still only human.
I'm sure you doubt it. But then you don't seem to know what you're talking about anyway. New information is found all the time. Evolutionary theory has undergone a lot of changes over the years, as the information had to be accounted for. The theory itself hasn't been disproved, it has simply been made stronger and our knowledge has grown incredibly. Modern biology is based on these ideas, and works very well for us.
As soon as some other theory manages to explain more and be more useful in practical ways, it will displace the theory of evolution. Unfortunately IDers don't seem to be able to put together anything that's even testable, let alone complete enough to stand against the mountains of evidence supporting evolution.
Why can't we trust it here? Show me a prof with scientific evidence of god (that passes muster in the scientific community) and he can teach science all day long.
On the other hand, science has had 300 years of trying to prove the non-existance of God and has so far failed.
Ultimately, a point source of dense matter exploding into a universe, then falling back on itself for another big bang doesn't explain non-god, but lends credence to Hindu and Bhuddist beliefs instead.
The aim of science (as you know it) is not to prove the existence or non-existence of God but to investigate the internal and external worlds we percieve as reality. That's all it does and meant to do. It is not an instrument to judge religious beliefs.
Actually, it says "research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms." So it's just saying if you are Hindu or Christian or Pomo Indian or whatever, they can't fire you (or otherwise penalize you) for researching the subject. If you check out Ben Stein's "Expelled" you will see that a lot of people [including atheists who were simply researching the subject] have lost jobs, funding, academic support, etc.
But yes... you have full freedom to laugh at anybody you want. And that's kind of the point of this bill, I believe. We have full academic freedom in every aspect except beliefs in the creation of the universe -- be it Christian, Native American, Moslem, or whatever.
I don't care what they research, as long as science professors are using the scientific method, it doesn't really matter to me. The problem is when they don't use it, and instead substitute their "research" of scripture or attempts to reinterpret existing data without going through the steps of actually testing their hypotheses, or going through peer review. This is what we typically see from the ID "researchers" out there. They do not engage in science. If they don't want to do that, then they should stick to teaching religion or philosophy.
Theory of Evolution has certain aspects required that do not necessarily (i) fit everyone's idealogy (e.g. atheism), and (ii) necessarily fit the evidence long term. For example, there is no scientific evidence that things evolved from one species to another. Even Darwin's evidence in the Galapagos lacked sustainability. While there is ample evidence for short term, cyclic minor evolution there is zero evidence for long term macro evolution.
Even most creationists will agree with Micro-evolution. Macro Evolution is another story and substantially breaks down against the body of scientific evidence. When discussing Creationism vs Theory of Evolution it is primarily Macro Evolution that is in disagreement, and which is also founded on atheistic principles that most do not agree on to start with.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad to see you got my point.
I'm not sure you had one...
The symptothermal method (STM) is a form of natural family planning (NFP) that enables couples to identify accurately the time of the woman's fertile phase by measuring her temperature and observing cervical secretions.
Wow. That would totally put me in the mood too!
Truthfully there is just as much "theoretical evidence" for Gods existence as there is "theoretical evidence" to refute him. Atheists have no actual claim to any evidence, merely speculation and theory. Basically both religion and atheism are in the same boat as far as Science is concerned. Both share strong feelings, beliefs and thoughts forming philosophies, but NO EVIDENCE.
No, there is no actual evidence for the existence of gods. There is conjecture and hearsay aplenty though. The atheistic position is that it's safe to assume that gods don't exist, as we have no evidence to say that they do. Especially in the case of gods specific to the various religions of the world. Just like we assume that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist even though we can't prove it.
With that said, I'd like to add that Both the Faithful and the Faithless are political distractions to science and should both be IGNORED until such a time as Fact may be applied one way or the other.
Well, by excluding both "faithful" and "faithless", you've pretty much covered everyone. Right now though, the facts are with those who lack belief, because there's no actual evidence to support belief. Hence the need for faith in religious folks.
So we should not pay politicians well so that they will readily accept bribes (I mean deals), and then we can complain when they are bought and paid for? The fact that they are seeking money from other sources means they are not getting paid well enough for their work, and they have to other people's work to get paid. There will always be book deals and such no matter what, but it seems like you endorse that politicians use their influence and leverage to become millionaires. Not my idea of the person I want representing me in government. If we valued our leading politicians half as much as we valued our college basketball coaches, we might be able to get some politicians with a little more integrity.
WTF?!? You're talking blackmail here. Maybe we should pay everyone $175K so that they won't turn to crime! That's the argument you're making. That taxpayers should cough up more money so that congresspeople won't turn to crime! Why don't we have a zero-tolerance policy for congressional or white-collar crime? Why don't assholes like Rangel get locked up, or at least tossed out of Congress? Why aren't we throwing the book at all the politicians involved in the pay-to-play crap? At least they locked up William Jefferson. For all the charges he was convicted of, he should get more time IMO. We're far too soft on white-collar crime.
Not to get in the way of everyone bashing a congressmen (everyone's favorite activity) but he talked about struggling because of a direct question from a constituent angry about his salary level which he didn't choose (it's standard for all congress), and when he JUST became a congressmen (he's gotten 1 check). So he's not really just off the cuff complaining here, he's trying to defuse the situation with the questioner explaining to them that it's not like he's living high on the hog off their money but is instead paying of student loans, driving a used minivan, and paying mortgages on the residences he has to maintain in both his home state and DC (incredibly expensive). He's basically just trying to empathize with the questioner to defuse the situation which he has no control over.
He apparently doesn't think he should take a pay cut either, as he never said that he agreed that he was being paid too much. But apparently he does think that teachers making closer to a quarter of what he makes are being paid too much.
EVERYONE in Congress gets $174,000, people. Whatever your opinion is about the video, his salary is irrelevant. Keep that part out of it, unless you want to start asking why Chris Dodd needed a super deal on a Countrywide mortgage with his $174,000 salary, or Charlie Rangel needed to omit his properties and stock holdings from his tax returns, or why VP Biden doesn't donate anything to charity when he makes even more than Congress.
Wait a sec. I'm all in favor of asking all of those things! I thought Rangel should have been given the boot, but as usual, he gets off with a wrist slap. This jackass talks about just getting by on his $175K salary while saying that teachers making closer to a quarter of what he makes are being paid too much. That pisses me off.
So far so good? 30 mins of navigation on the out of the box browser make my fox eat up 700MB+ or RAM. Am I missing something here?
Maybe you're missing some RAM? I don't know what you're expecting really. If the RAM is available to be used, why not use it? RAM does nothing for you if it's not being used.
FF4 is currently using 1.2GB of RAM on my system, but I have 97 tabs open. I also have 12GB of RAM, so I couldn't care less if it wants to use 10% of that. If it makes it quick and responsive while managing all of that content, then so be it. That's why I have the RAM in the first place. I leave FF and other apps open in the background while I play games and it doesn't seem to have the slightest effect on them.
For many years, Firefox has been the most unstable program in common use. On Windows XP, if Firefox has many open windows and tabs, it will eventually crash both itself and Windows. Has the instability been fixed?
I've been using FF 3.x on Windows 7 for quite a while and I regularly have 50-100 tabs open. Occasionally FF will get slowed down to the point where I get annoyed and restart it, but it hasn't ever taken down the OS. FF4 seems to be better so far. I'm not experience nearly as much slowdown.
So far I'm liking FF4. Everything seems to work well. I'm getting used to the little popup preview of links in the bottom right corner. The sync functionality looks cool and I'm planning to try it out to sync with my Android phone. The only real issue I've encountered is related to the interaction between the Tab Groups feature (aka Panorama) and the Tree Style Tabs plugin, which I consider an absolute necessity anymore.
If I switch to a tab group, and then try to go back to my full display with all tabs shown, the tabs get all scrambled, lose their hierarchical positions, and some seem to disappear completely. I really hope there's a way to fix that, although it'll probably be up to the TST developer to do it. For now I think I'll just have to avoid using Tab Groups.
In legal terms, there is the concept of "chain of evidence" meaning that the material has not left authorized hands, nor sat on a shelf unattended for 53 years. If this was a murder trial, that "chain of evidence" would be completely broken. If this is required to prove the death of someone, it surely must apply to prove the "life" of something.
If you have a corpse, and you can identify who it is, but you don't know where it was for a little while, you're no longer sure that that person is dead?
I think the point must be that since we don't know what was going on with the flask during all those years, God could have easily slipped in and planted those amino acids!
A simple protein can be made from as few as 50 or as many as several thousand amino acids, and they must all be put together in a specific order. The average functional protein contains 200 amino acids. The simple cell contains thousands of different proteins. The probability of just one protein contain just 100 amino acids forming by itself is a mind boggling huge number. Oh, and you need RNA first before you can make a protein, yet proteins are used to make RNA...
Lot of claims there, with no evidence presented for support.
Keep in mind that 98% of the people commenting here do not have a freaking clue what ID actually is. If you were to look at all scientific evidence from a purely unbiased perspective, ID makes at least as much sense (especially if you just do the math on the probability of creation and life's evolving through pure chance) as evolution.
Apparently you don't either. Look at all the scientific evidence, huh? What scientific evidence is there for ID? Care to cite some?
Like it or not, both evolution and ID require faith to believe. Neither should be considered pure science since neither can be repeated in the lab.
This old straw-man again. You're simply wrong, except about the ID requiring faith part.
For example peer reviewed studies in genetics, sedimentology and chronology of the earth performed mainly in the late 20 and now vigorously in the 21st century has shown that the modern Darwinian/Lyellian theory of origins of life evolving from star dust and a common biological ancestor is really a fairy tale such as the movie, "Princess Bride" is for adults or as the Cinderella fairy tale is for children. There is NO 65 million year gap between man and dinosaurs and therefore NO evolution of man from so-called lower forms of life as evidenced by C-14 dating of dinosaur bone collagen and other bone fractions from Texas to Alaska in the 23,000 to 33,000 year range www.dinosaurc14ages.com & www.sciencevsevolution and most recently evidence from lab and field studies in Russia, France and the USA showing that the sediments were deposited 2000 times more recently than "evolutionism dogma" claims www.www.sedimentology.fr
You make lots of absolute claims, but offer up a bunch of stuff that is largely junk to back it up. Skimming through those sites, most of their ideas have been debunked before. They certainly don't do much to support them scientifically, and even if something they said turned out to be right, it doesn't overturn all of evolutionary theory, unless they can also scientifically explain pretty much everything else that evolutionary theory explains, which they certainly can't.
By that logic, evolution is not a theory either. If anybody thinks they can decide what 'real academia' is, it will harm all academia by restricting the flow of ideas. Science is just a tool, and it was never meant to become a dogma. Until we are able to fully recreate or fully document one or the other in a truly scientific fashion, it is best to leave all theories open to discussion.
I don't care what "real academia" is. I do care that science be done according to the scientific method, because otherwise it isn't science. Since creationists seem to be incapable of applying the scientific method to their ideas, they shouldn't be teaching them as science, nor should they be paid for doing scientific work if that's not what they're doing. They can teach religion or philosophy classes all they want.
I'd be interested to know how you'd test the macro evolution theory. Micro evolution is simple, but setting an experiment running to prove macro evolution and still being alive to ascertain success/failure will be tricky certainly in higher level organisms, sure mutation in high living organism occur fairly frequently, but I have yet to spot any successes ni these mutations.
From my understanding both are attempting to describe from the evidence how such beautifully complex biological systems are in place, one solution places an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters and the other claims that surely there must have been some role of design in the produced works, a.k.a "a shakespeare".
I don't think it is possible to measure which is correct, ocassionally a monkey may type the works of shakespeare, and occassionally it could be argued that a new design has been made and set loose or enabled. Fitting the historic evidence, will not validate either, scientific method dictate generate a theory, test it hopefully with a pass/fail, and then attempt to resolve the sometimes gray answer you get from a real test.....
The difference is that we have tons of evidence for (macro)evolution, and essentially none for "some kind of super-being created everything". That doesn't even begin to address the infinitely less evidence for the "oh, and my particular super-being left us this handy book/prophet/relative/artifact to tell us everything we need to know" beliefs. They don't even really address the same issue, as evolution doesn't cover the origin of everything, or even the origin of life.
That article is just one big straw-man argument. It's just fine to say we don't know. It doesn't particularly matter how the universe was created anyway. If science can someday figure it out, that's great. If not, who cares? Almost the entirety of it will remain far too distant for us to ever see up close anyway. It has no bearing on the ability of science to be incredibly useful to us. It also has no bearing on the veracity of religious myths at all. Those still lack the necessary evidence to be considered anything but myths.
Claiming that science requires anything like the faith required for religion is just complete nonsense. It's taking two different meanings of the word and conflating them to make a bogus argument.
thats the problem w/ all theory's of what went on before written history? even evolution the only support is slow change in an unreliable fossil history(as in we extrapolated in every case) you can only prove its possible, but when it comes the weather or not it happened and not another way that means slow change, its as "unsupported and untestable" as god
As unsupported as God? There's not a shred of evidence for God, especially of the sort described by most religions, except that which we manufacture in our minds. There's mountains of evidence for common descent.
The link content is close but not 100% relevant.
To say it in other words:
What faith does an empirical physicist have in science?
What faith does a general scientist have in empirical physics?
What faith does a plebian have in general science or empirical physics?
It gets back to the same thing. The further you are removed from the coal face the less understanding you have about coal mining.
First of all, what definition of faith are you using here? If you're using the definition of "acceptance without evidence", then that applies to religion, but not science. If you use the definition of "confidence in something", then I don't see what you're trying to make. I'll assume you're using the former definition, as your post doesn't make any sense otherwise.
It's not faith when you know the mechanics of something. Do you call it faith that the sun will rise in the morning? I call it understanding the way things work. I don't need faith to know that as long as the earth keeps rotating, the sun will rise in the morning. When it comes to more esoteric subjects, we aren't just putting faith in the explanation that science has given us (assuming it has given one), we understand how science works to bring us these explanations, and we have vast mountains of evidence all around us to show that those methods work.
So now we have a bunch of generalists who firmly believe in the objective truth of Darwinism, objecting against a judicial system based on Christian ethics and the belief in the Almighty. Within the mind set of science, it comes down to accepting Intelligent Design as a competing theory, which it can't be. What it is though, is a container for all those niggling little things that can't be explained by evolution and mutation. The sudden appearance of a flagella's motor for example is classic ID. That can't be a mutation because it hadn't mutated from anything. It's a complex structure which just appeared. So maybe there will be a refinement, perhaps leading up to a paradigm change of the Theory of Evolution, and for that reason alone, ID should be given an opportunity to survive and taken a bit more seriously.
You're going to have to explain what you're claiming here. It seems like you're using the IC argument regarding flagella. I don't see that as a particularly strong argument.
WTF are you talking about, Doc? We do have "those laws", and this article is about them being enforced.
Now we just need penalties that are actually a deterrent to companies violating these laws. Why are the penalties capped? The benefits could be worth billions, yet the penalty is a paltry couple of million. Anyone that can perform simple math wouldn't blink at violating the law. Especially when it seems rather easy to do it in such a way that nobody gets the finger pointed at them and has to serve actual jail time.
Although with a maximum of five years, it is probably worth the risk too. People risk a lot more time for less money all the time. Also, a $10,000 cap for a civil suit against a guy that probably got a half-million or more bonus for the results of the bribery anyway? What kind of joke is this? Why don't we get as tough on crimes dealing with billions as we do with selling a few bucks worth of drugs?
You must have a free exchange of ideas in order to get to the truth. Discriminating only holds you back in the end, for you will find yourself discriminating against the truth. Perhaps we will find one day that much of the "entire dept." is in fact wrong. But not if we don't allow other theories.
Agreed. Not hiring someone because of their beliefs alone would not be warranted. If they have shown the ability to engage in science and produce results, and are willing to use scientific methods exclusively in their work, then they should be considered for the job. Now it's entirely possible that there are many better candidates still, so they may not get the job, but they shouldn't be precluded from consideration. I don't know of any actual scientific work in support of ID at the moment. So if someone is a proponent of that, and wished to study it, I'd want to see how they propose to study it first. If they can't explain a scientific approach to the study of ID, then they shouldn't be hired.
They are making the assumption, I think, that intelligent design is a religious view, so the bill is advocating a religious position in universities. I think their assumption is wrong: ID is not a theological position; if you had to place it in a field it would be philosophy. This is not to deny that it meshes well with certain religious systems. I found it interesting that TFheadline talks about creationism--which is a religious position--while the law only mentioned ID which is a philosophical hypothesis.
Sorry, but the jig is up on the whole "ID is not religion" thing. It's pushed almost exclusively by religious creationists, and it's certainly not science in the way it has been approached by ID "researchers". If it was presented in philosophy classes, then it wouldn't be a problem.
Of course scientists are only interested in arriving at the truth, right?
It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren't averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal." Mr. Mann's main beef was that the journal had published several articles challenging aspects of the anthropogenic theory of global warming. Global Warming With the Lid Off - The emails that reveal an effort to hide the truth about climate science
Mann and his group are hardly the only climate scientists out there, and whatever you think of him flying off the handle about the pseudo-scientific stuff that some second-rate journal was publishing, there are plenty of other climate research groups that come to the same conclusions as him. I don't see any hidden "truth about climate science". I'd be pissed too if someone was using such bullshit tactics to try to discredit my work. It's one thing to be a skeptic and do honest research. It's quite another to use obviously fraudulent tactics, like cherry-picking your data, and then try to claim it's evidence. It was an indefensible study, as evidenced by their inability to defend it, and the eventual acceptance of even the journal publisher that they never should have printed it.
I doubt that the departments dealing with matters touching on evolutionary biology would be much (any?) better than the tainted "Climate Change" nee "Global Warming" departments in dealing with dissenting views regardless of the strength of the scientific case. That is really too bad. The skeptics are going to bring closer scrutiny of the theories and help weed out the bad ones better than those who love the theories. The scientists may deal with the ideas of evolution, but they are still only human.
I'm sure you doubt it. But then you don't seem to know what you're talking about anyway. New information is found all the time. Evolutionary theory has undergone a lot of changes over the years, as the information had to be accounted for. The theory itself hasn't been disproved, it has simply been made stronger and our knowledge has grown incredibly. Modern biology is based on these ideas, and works very well for us.
As soon as some other theory manages to explain more and be more useful in practical ways, it will displace the theory of evolution. Unfortunately IDers don't seem to be able to put together anything that's even testable, let alone complete enough to stand against the mountains of evidence supporting evolution.
Why can't we trust it here? Show me a prof with scientific evidence of god (that passes muster in the scientific community) and he can teach science all day long.
On the other hand, science has had 300 years of trying to prove the non-existance of God and has so far failed. Ultimately, a point source of dense matter exploding into a universe, then falling back on itself for another big bang doesn't explain non-god, but lends credence to Hindu and Bhuddist beliefs instead. The aim of science (as you know it) is not to prove the existence or non-existence of God but to investigate the internal and external worlds we percieve as reality. That's all it does and meant to do. It is not an instrument to judge religious beliefs.
That's just a rather ridiculous argument.
Actually, it says "research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms." So it's just saying if you are Hindu or Christian or Pomo Indian or whatever, they can't fire you (or otherwise penalize you) for researching the subject. If you check out Ben Stein's "Expelled" you will see that a lot of people [including atheists who were simply researching the subject] have lost jobs, funding, academic support, etc. But yes... you have full freedom to laugh at anybody you want. And that's kind of the point of this bill, I believe. We have full academic freedom in every aspect except beliefs in the creation of the universe -- be it Christian, Native American, Moslem, or whatever.
I don't care what they research, as long as science professors are using the scientific method, it doesn't really matter to me. The problem is when they don't use it, and instead substitute their "research" of scripture or attempts to reinterpret existing data without going through the steps of actually testing their hypotheses, or going through peer review. This is what we typically see from the ID "researchers" out there. They do not engage in science. If they don't want to do that, then they should stick to teaching religion or philosophy.
Theory of Evolution has certain aspects required that do not necessarily (i) fit everyone's idealogy (e.g. atheism), and (ii) necessarily fit the evidence long term. For example, there is no scientific evidence that things evolved from one species to another. Even Darwin's evidence in the Galapagos lacked sustainability. While there is ample evidence for short term, cyclic minor evolution there is zero evidence for long term macro evolution.
Even most creationists will agree with Micro-evolution. Macro Evolution is another story and substantially breaks down against the body of scientific evidence. When discussing Creationism vs Theory of Evolution it is primarily Macro Evolution that is in disagreement, and which is also founded on atheistic principles that most do not agree on to start with.
You're so ridiculously wrong it's depressing.