You say that religion is counterproductive. I think that if I had no faith in a life after this one, there would be little point in living this life at all. Why go through all the pain that this life has if there was nothing at the end but death? Might as well go jump off a bridge right now and get it over with. Who cares if it makes someone else a little unhappy? They can do the same thing. And so on, and so on. Do you see what I mean?
This position has always perplexed me. With or without religion, I live a very fulfilling life. I am married to a wonderful woman who shares my interests and challenges me intellectually. I have a fascinating job that gives me the opportunity to solve interesting problems and explore areas that are at the cutting edge of mankind's knowledge. I live in a place where knowledge is plentiful and readily accessible, so I can spend my life learning about great discoveries. Life offers so many amazing things to do and learn that I could never live long enough to appreciate them all. The idea that life is miserable and it's all just a march to a better end boggles my mind.
Let me put it this way: Eating a delicious meal is not just about being full at the end. Maybe death will be a great adventure. I don't know. What I know is that life is more of an adventure than anybody could really take in completely.
But that is the de facto effect: if child A believes in a creationist story, be it adam & steve or the cosmic turtle and the teacher starts out in grade 3 by saying "the world was not created, here's what really happened" then you have a much more egregious violation of church and state than the aforementioned sticker.
At what point do you draw the line, though? If child A believes that the multiplication tables are the work of a false prophet, does teaching them constitute an equally egregious violation of church and state? What about the belief that water boling is spirits escaping from the liqud rather than lowering of vapor pressure at high temperature? The problem is not that we're teaching things that conflict with religious teachings. The problem is that we're not properly teaching children that science and religion answer different questions and sometimes conflict in their worldview. They need to understand that there is no inherent reason to discard either one in its entirety simply because some parables don't reconcile themselves well with scientific theory.
In fact, if people understood that they could accept the naturalistic methodology of science as simply a methodology and not an overarching life philosophy, we could avoid conflicts that arise when science tries to become religion or when religion tries to become science.
And you don't consider a court order to openly declare - and requiring the children to regurgitate under threat of failing the class, screwing up a GPA and being denied entry to college - religious beliefs assertively false an act that suppresses religious belief?
Children need to understand that understanding the prevailing scientific theories and their underlying data is not the same as adopting a new worldview. That's the deficiency--not the fact that some scientific results conflict with some religious beliefs.
Then a teacher shouldn't be allowed (ne, required) to say "the earth was not created," which has the clear, direct and unmistakable effect of declaring any believes that the world was created false. I'd say that's pretty much an official declaration on the part of the government that several religions are blowing smoke and are wrong.
I'm fairly certain that that doesn't happen most of the time, and that when it does, parents can and do have valid complaints. I think that there are a lot of people who seem to think that there is some vast atheist conspiracy to indoctrinate children in science classes into believing that the scientific process should encompass one's entire philosophy. There are certainly some (many!) people who believe that, and there are probably some teachers who push that agenda. Those teachers are damaging not just religion but education in general when they do that, though. They should be taken to task for it. They should *not* have to water down the actual coursework and push the religous agendas of the offended parties as some sort of settlement, though.
The ACLU tried to get the supreme court to ban a moment of silence: that 95% of the boys were using that moment of silence to lust after the 23 year old just hired teacher and/or the cheerleading squad wearing game dress and 95% of the girls were thinking about how they were fat next to all of those cute cheerleaders, the ACLU wanted to ban silent, unled, private, personal prayer. The teachers didn't even have to say "time to pray", just "let's have a moment of silence".
Excuse me if I don't put much stock in the ACLU's ability to reason.
Sometimes the ACLU goes overboard. They go well beyond what most moderates would want much of the time. That's their job. They're there to fight against any whiff of infringement on individual rights. People bring up the extreme cases all the time and ignore the fact that the ACLU takes on countless cases that they never hear about. You certainly don't hear Bill O'Reilly and his ilk p
Then teach proven science. If it is a theory then say "this is a theory". The opening line simply shouldn't be "your parents and priest/pastor/reverend/shaman lied to you, man evolved from apes".
I'm not sure where you see that happening. I certainly never experienced it. I was taught many theories. The theory of evolution was one. The theory of relativity was another good one. In fact, intelligent design was mentioned IN MY BIOLOGY CLASS (~10 years ago) as a perfectly valid philosophical position. However, it was also pointed out that as it stands, such a theory does not fall into the realm of science.
I'm not sure what everybody else was learning, but if problems like the one you're describing are really rampant, they should probably be corrected. Of course, the correct solution would be to tell biology teachers not to say that sort of thing. Dumping pseudo-scientific fluff that makes certain religious factions happy into the coursework is not the solution, and pretending that philosophical objections to evolution (and to the scientific method in general) are actually scientific objections is definitely not the solution.
Just curious, but would it bother you any less if they instead had overtly stated that their official reasons for outlawing the sale of alcohol in their county/town were because it led to health problems, social behaviour problems, family violence problems, drunken driving, etc, instead of "religion" reasons?
Not to speak for anybody else, but it would bother me a lot less less. I like my laws to have some piece of logical reasoning behind them that indicates that they will benefit society in some concrete way. I happen to think that the reasons you listed are demonstrably foolish, but the nice thing about laws based on measurable social impact is that one can argue them based on data.
Laws that are based on little more than what makes one faction's diety sad are generally very difficult to argue against, and they tend to make the rest of us feel surprisingly as though the government is favoring one religion over another (or the lack thereof). Of course, when those of us who don't share the particular religious convictions of the majority make noise about that sort of thing, the people who passed the law (who usually make up 80+% of the population and control all aspects of government) are suddenly up in arms because we're persecuting them over their beliefs.
2) If the fossil record was simply species moving around, where did all these species come from anyway? And where have they all gone? Was there some insane number species at the creation of this planet, gradually dwindling as they traipsed about the earth?
Yes.
So why are there no rabbit fossils in the same strata as dinosaur fossils? Is there some geological phenomenon that causes rabbits to float to the top?
That's ridiculous, anything is subject to testing by the scientific method, ID is no different. It's just that, like evolution, the matters addressed by ID are not testable by any means available to us. This is also true for QM, or Astrophysics. I never said they weren't scientific, I only said that ID was no less scientific.
OK. Hypothesis: There is some intelligent force that has interacted with organisms to produce the variety of life that we see today. Its methods are not specified. Its goals are not specified. The nature of the interaction is not specified. The length and time of the interaction are unspecified.
Test away. I'm very interested in seeing what observations you can think of that might favor a null hypothesis.
But the office of commander-in-chief should not be filled by someone who engenders such strong feelings of opposition from those our nation has chosen to honor as its greatest heroes.
Maybe we should only allow Congressional Medal of Honor winners to vote. That would make the whole election thing a lot faster.
There's a more interesting question than what we would expect, though: what we wouldn't expect. What observations could possibly be inconsistent with an all powerful deity that does not have to obey any physical laws and whose motivations are unknowable?
Hi Copid! I am an armchair scientist. Just a computer tech-support guy who has been force-fed an evolutionary view since childhood in my schools, and in my entertainment.
Sure, and that's a lot of fun. I look into fields in which I have no expertise and enjoy learning about them. The difference is, when I see something that conflicts with my intuition, I tend to assume that it's my lack of data or understanding and look deeper into the matter rather than assuming that I've just demolished a theory that has been studied by thousands of academics with more data than I have. Intuitively, computers really shouldn't work. The tolerances and physics are absolutely amazing. It would be hard to convince somebody who had never heard of a computer that a device with no moving parts except for electrons could do calculations, but it can be done.
Stopped going to Imax, stopped listening to the typical "100 million years ago this fish needed protection from its enemies, so it evolved poisonuos spikes and camoflage..." voice overs in many "science documentaries" and started thinking a little more for myself. Now I just say BS. It is almost like the dark ages when the "church" held services in all Latin and said to the common folk that the words of scripture are to lofty for you to try and understand so we will interpret it for you.
You're welcome to that view, but how is it different from somebody telling you about the dark ages? Sure, they've studied some "evidence" and some primary source stuff, but you've never seen it. How do you know it's true? You rely on people who spend their time studying it to boil it down for you. The same holds true for quantum mechanics and relativity. Do you believe in relativity? If so, why? If not, have you looked at all of the data and really studied it?
The same is coming from the general sceintific community. "we have bigger words and know more than you so stop trying to discover on your own, and just know that we are correct."
I don't think that any such thing is coming from the scientific community. You're more than welcome to try to discover things on your own. Just don't be surprised that when you come to silly conclusions after looking at a fraction of a percent of the data, that you are not taken seriously. Do you think that none of the scientists studying evolution have had similar thoughts or looked at the data and assumed a similar naive interpretation? Do you really think that no geologist has ever considered the possibility of a worldwide flood? The fact is, modern geology started when Christian scientists went out to LOOK for evidence of a worldwide flood and instead found a complex geological column with amazingly intricate features.
The problem is that these things look like a religion because the barriers to entry are high. Carl Sagan pointed this out by talking about quantum mechanics. You need to study years and years of mathematics above and beyond what the average person covers before you can even begin to study the physics. If somebody without that background questions it, the scientists generally ignore him until he's done the legwork. It certainly looks like an exclusive priesthood. The difference is, QM doesn't conflict with most religions, so it's left alone. Evolution offends some people, so they use the priesthood argument to make it look like some sort of warring religion with lots of secrets to hide. Every argument you've put forth has been considered and discussed in the literature.
Sorry but I think there is a shift occurring towards an ID worldview.
You're very correct. But it's a political shift, not a scientific one. If you actually count the number of scientists who work in the relevant fields who agree that ID is a real science, you'll find that they're in an incredible minority. Sure, many of them believe in a creator. Many of them may believe in a creator who guides the proces
are you out of your tree? of course there is debate and it is massive has been going on since the Scopes trials and before that.
Let me rephrase it for the GP poster: There has been no serious debate among the experts for generations.
I imagine that the scientific journals of which you speak as being "reputable" are only the ones that have been supporting an evolutionary view. There are many journals and scientists that are purposely not published in those journals because of there "reprehensible" belief in special creation.
I see this conspiracy claim over and over again, but I never see a paper that was submitted to a jorunal and the associated rejection letters. Those letters would explain what is wrong with the paper. If the reasons for rejection are so transparently bad, why not post them somewhere instead of complaining about a scientific conspiracy trying to keep you down?
If you really feel you've got it all together, then you may want to check out some of the opposing sites like http://www.icr.org/ or http://www.answersingenesis.org/ amongst many. You have been led to believe and lied to blatantly in some cases where evidence has already proven so called evidence wrong.
OK, have you examined the counterarguments available at sites like talkorigins.org? I wouldn't think so, given that you used the eye example and describe the big bang as an "explosion."
Yet the school textbooks and Discovery channels still proclaim as absolute fact. If you can take a step back and just analyze what you hear and see being taught and broadcast everyday from a perspective that is open to all options, you will begin to get a sick feeling in your stomach that you have been misled.
It shoudln't be surprising to the average viewer that the more directly a person challenges and ridicules the work of thousands of dedicated scientists, the more that person appears not to know what they're talking about. Here's a question: Aside from the sites that you've mentioned, what have you actually studied on the topic? College coursework? Anything at all? If you're getting all of your information from the fringe minority, that's probably not a healthy way to get your science education. You're totally free to challenge established science, but you should know *at least* as much about the topic as the people you're challenging or you start to look kind of foolish. Quantum mechanics isn't intuitive either. In fact, it runs counter to what just about every non-physicist would assume. People generally ignore the fringe minority of physics cranks on the Internet who think it's a lunatic conspiracy, though. Why is that different for evolution?
Evolution has become more than just a theory, it is a religious belief of its own. The only difference is the secular humanist society wants no other views to be allowed and will use whatever means to shut opposing views down. Thus Intelligent design which is supported by more and more scientists is being locked out of public view.
No, intelligent design is "shut out" of schools, not public view. And it's shut out because it hasn't produced any useful results, it has only fringe support among scientists, has essentially no meaningful evidence, and runs directly counter to the scientific method. If they can come up with some useful evidence above the false dichotomy of "evolution couldn't have done it, there for an intelligent designer did," and then come up with some tests for their ideas, they might get some recognition. Until then, they're out. In science class, we teach established scientific results and the scientific method. ID is not an established scientific result and it completely discards the scientific method.
Science is observations and tests to hypothesize the why's and how's of the world around us. Creation does not stop this process it simply starts with an understanding that intelligence started it all. Evolution says that nothing started it all.
No, evolution has nothing to say what started it all. Evolution explains the diversity of species and their similarity in structure. It provides evidence for common ancestry. That's it. Everything else is left to other disciplines.
The problem is that if there was a creator as the Bible and other religious books and faiths suggest, then evolution as is almost soley taught in our secular society is wrong from the get go, and the evidence will show it.
Sure, if there is a creator who is running everything, lots of scientific theories might be wrong (depending on the nature of the creator and what he/she/it claims to be doing). That's a fine philosophy, but it doesn't belong in a science class. Let there be evidence.
Creation or intelligent design seems to line up much more than evolution does with real science. For example, you will never see an explosion create an ordered system however evolution starts with this theory as a basis.
You seem to be referring to the "big bang" theory. First, it has nothing to do with evolution. You're thinking of physics. It's a different area, but it also conflicts with some religious views. People who are offended by it like to conflate the two so they can paint science as being anti-God. It ain't so. Second, as the model lays it out, it looks very little like an explosion. To say it does is a terrible oversimplification that betrays a severe lack of understanding of the model. Without a deeper understanding, it's probably best to leave deciding whether it's a good model or not to the experts. This is not the sort of thing an armchair physicist can debunk with a thought experiment and no mathematics or data.
You will never see an animal involve into another animal as DNA shows this cannot happen.
Nonsense. You're just asserting your conclusion. What about DNA shows that it cannot happen? It's DNA that provides the strongest evidence that it DID happen!
Creation postulates that an intelligent designer created the universe around us and that there is order to the universe. DNA is a genetic blueprint that is incredibly complex and was only realized long after the likes of the first evolutionists who believe that cells were no more complex than a ping pong ball and yet even ping pong balls require an intelligent designer and the tools to make it.
Again, that's fine metaphysically. It's a solid philosophy that you can live your life by but has no place in the science classroom until you can play by the rules and come up with some data and tests.
Evolution as taught to the kiddies is heavily biased towards a material overview. Atoms come together in the swamp to somehow become algae, which through natural selection become plants and bacteria and animals and finally humans, the pinacle of the evolutionary process on this planet. Or maybe life's proto-structures were seeded from deep space. Little is said about the causes behind the changes seen in the fossil record, just a hint that there's certainly a good, material explanation. Certified Scientists just haven't figured out what it is quite yet.
While a pure-scientific model may be agnostic, scientists and teachers all have their biases (materialistic/vitalisitic/etc), and those biases color everything they do.
But the point is that the scientific method is necessarily a naturalistic pursuit. You can't open it to those other possibilities without throwing the scientific method out the window. What do you propose? We could say, "Here is evolution. Or God could have done it. Or the FSM could have done it. Or unicorns could have done it. Or, it could never have happened at all." All of those statements are potentially true from a philosophical perspective, but they have nothing to do with science class.
If that's the only objection, why is evolution always targetted? Why not germ theory? Oxidation / reduction equations in chemistry? Relativity? "The evidence seems to point to ____, or God could have done it" could be said for every chapter in every science book. I think that the answer is that evolutionary theory is hard to reconcile with certain religious beliefs, so people attack it and then try to cover it up with some nonsense about simply objecting to the materialistic aspect of it.
I don't recall exactly who said it, but he/she put it very succinctly by saying, "Intelligent design is not a scientific alternative to evolution. It's a metaphysical alternative to science."
I never said he did it to himself, just pointing out that the story seems to be at least a little embellished. It would not be the first time that a hate-crime hoax [wikipedia.org] was perpetrated. Not saying he did, just saying this all looks peculiar.
Oh please. You're not saying it was a hoax. You're just strongly implying it in the face of truly flimsy evidence. Sure, it's possible. If it is a hoax, I'll be the first to condemn him. Until then, though, this is all a pretty lame smear. Let's see here:
1) It wasn't smart to get out and face people who were agressively following. OK. I'll buy that.
2) He resigned at the recommendation of his colleagues. The recommendation and resignation are not terribly surprising.
3) Not a lot of detail in the report. Let's recount: a rough time, a rough place, physical description. Doesn't that basically describe the crime? What more do they want?
4) Twenty minutes before contacting police. Did he have a cell phone? Are we sure his estimate of the time of the crime is right (most crime victimes don't get this detail right)? Given a 5-10 minute fudge factor for memory of the time and the time it takes to get up and make a phone call, 20 minutes doesn't seem like that long.
5) The crime was initially labelled a hate crime and then re-labeled. OK. That's just stupid. I'm not sure what that has to do with the credibility of the case.
6) He has stopped talking to reporters. Well, they have the story. They have all of the information he seems able to provide. Nothing new has happened. Right now his department is the center of a publicity storm it doesn't want. So?
Is this it? I'm glad my reputation isn't hanging in the balance if that's the kind of flimsy evidence and speculation it takes to destroy it. Face it: The people posting these articles and making these implications just don't like Mirecki and would love for him to be faking it. The least they could do is take a stand and accuse him rather than beating around the bush and saying things like, "I'm not saying it's a hoax, but..." Pathetic.
Eh, I'm not going to go so far as to claim the attack didn't happen, but it does seem like there are some oddities involved.
No, of course not. That would be taking a stand that you could be held to. Instead you'll just imply wrongdoing with insufficient evidence and claim to have clean hands if it turns out to be false. No reason to put your own reputation on the line while impugning that of another. How very forthright.
Honestly, I'm not seeing what creedence any of the articles posted here lend to the idea that he beat himself up for attention and pity.
I'm not sure why the "inconsistencies" are somehow consistent with fraud? Wouldn't he know where he called the police from regardless of whether he faked it or not? Without some serious evidence, this whole thing is looking like a pretty shameful smear.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping perpetuate the "hamsters with guitars" meme.
You're very welcome. While FSM theory is far more complete and has greater explanatory power than the Hamsters With Guitars (HWG) theory, I find the HWG theory to be a much more elegant model.
I'm not seeing this. A quick look at the DOJ's statistics doesn't seem to show any such trend. This seems to me like the "feelings" people get that society is going downhill morally. It's almost never justified by anything more than a hunch and longing for the good old days. History is littered with these claims (going back at least to ancient Greek society), and yet modern society hasn't fallen apart yet. Everybody longs for the good old days when there was no crime, no promiscuity, and when everybody was polite and wore suits to work. Nobody seems to remember that in general, there were just as many problems back then.
More than 3 billion people on the planet belong to one religion or another. This number is on the decline, yet the crime rates in many countries around the world are skyrocketing. This is a very simple comparison, of course, and not necessarily correlative, but I find it somewhat fascinating that where religious adherence falls, crime rates shoot through the roof.
Data, please. I've seen these claims before, and they always boil down to a gut feeling that things were better in "the good old days." They rarely pan out to be true, and I've never seen the connection pan out to be meaningful.
Of course, as you pointed out, it's hard to see causation as well. If your claim is true, crime rates also seem to be correllated to average global temperature or, to tip the hat to the FSM theory, the number of pirates worldwide.
I believe the issue is that the ID group *is* not arguing about any evidence of the judeo-christian concept of god but arguing that instead that there is "evidence" in the paleontological record that shows "irreducible complexity" which proves the existence of a creator in the sense that is outside of evolutionary history. ID argues *just* this.
And because that's all it argues (and all it can ever "safely" argue) it's absolutely content free. The whole "science" is that conclusion. They can't tell us anything about the designer. There's no rational way of distinguishing among the possible designers. They haven't even collected any real evidence to speak of aside from a simple argument from incredulity.
It is also worth noting that for not having anything to do with the Judeo-Christian God, a remarkably high percentage of the "researchers" are devoutly religious and funded by religious groups. Not that that casts doubt on the scientific validity of the subject by itself, but it certainly does make one suspicious about the political motivations of a movement that claims to be doing science but is more content to move into classrooms by political means than to publish real research.
The extrapolation to a judeo-christian god is explicitly and carefully not made by the ID community (though you and I know that that is exactly what they are thinking). The proper ID response to the use of FSM would be to state in fact ID states only that there is evidence for a super natural creator in the paleontological record and moreover in "machinery" of living organisms (an argument that can be done scientifically). Most importantly, whether that creator is FSM or a judeo-christian god is outside the realm of ID and science and is simply religion. Hense FSM is may be defined as a new religion and not science. while ID is not a religion but an examination of the archeological record and biological complexity for evidence of "supernatural tampering" and is therefore science.
The problem here is that regardless of the supernatural entity, any imaginable observation is consistent with it. There is nothing that could possibly falsify the hypothesis that there is a supernatural force interacting with reality in an unexplained and observable way. When they can posit a mechanism through which The Not The Judeo Christian God Desiner operates or give us some testable hypothesis about the designer, please wake me up and I'll be the first to contribute funding for their research.
In this sense, and it is much weaker is FSM relevant because FSM can be defined to be the god of the gaps in the same sense that any other creator but again that is not what ID is arguing, what they are arguing is that the god of the gaps argument is legitimate not *what* the god of the gaps is.
The FSM is funny, I am about to buy one of their shirts because they come off well and have a good sense of humor but I think its a mistake to argue that FSM is a "counter-proof" for ID.
The point, though, is that the whole "science" of ID stops exactly where it is right now. No more information can be gained or conclusions reached, so all ID does is lend pseudo-scientific creedence to any crackpot's theory of How Things Came To Be. Everybody who has an anti-evolution agenda can get together and hold hands and say, "Beleive whatever you want to believe. We're all equally right!" The reality is, the method is so popular because it appeals to the large Christian fundamentalist population in the US and, to a lesser extent, to people who hold minority views that could only generously be compared to the FSM theory. What it comes down to is that there is no rational way of distinguishing between any conclusion that could be drawn from ID, whether it's the FSM, the JC God, or magical hamsters with tiny guitars.
The new source control system in Team System is much, much better than Visual SourceSafe.
That's a lot like saying that the new source control system is better than printing out your source code and storing the paper in a big pile to be retyped every morning. I should hope that the new system is better than SourceSafe. Visual Studio is a pretty slick environment, but linking it into VSS is just embarrassing. It's like having a really nice house and a well maintained yard and then putting Astroturf on your porch.
I think that big bang cosmology and biochemical abiogenesis are pie in the sky philosophy. They can not be tested or falsified. How can you propose that they are areas of scientific endeavor? You cannot employ the scientific method to study them.
Big bang cosmology, like any other physical model, can be tested by observation. Right now it happens to mesh nicely with cosmic background radiation, neutrinos, and the frequency of occurrence of certain elements. It is possible to make predictions of what we expect to observe based on the model. Astronomers are busily observing. Don't be surprised if new data that change (or possibly shoot down) the model arise in the future.
Similarly, if you come up with a model for biochemical abiogenesis, it's quite possible to analyze it using physical chemistry and knowledge of the chemicals available on the earth. In fact, you seem to be doing that here:
In fact, based on what we know of biochemical interactions, the possibility of biochemical abiogenesis is so pathetically unlikely as to be statistically insignificant. It's so close to impossible that it might as well be impossible. It's so unlikely that the right materials, order and conditions would be present that statistically speaking it would take more time than has elapsed in the proposed age of the universe for it to occur. The fragility of such initial life forms is so great that the strong likelihood is that none would survive anyway.
This claim is made very frequently, but it's rarely backed up, and when it is, there's usually a long list of assumptions. The point is, we don't know everything about the way things were on earth, and the idea that we can dismiss the possibility of abiogenesis outright is silly. There is no overarching theory right now, but a lot of smart people are working on it, and you can expect that any ideas they come up with will have testable ramifications.
The only reason to seriously pursue this area of study is if your world view demands that there be nothing "super" natural to kick start the life process.
Likewise, the only reason not to pursue it is if you have somehow arrived at a worldview that answers the question satisfactorally without any data. Some people aren't into that. I'm one of them. Because I can't rationally decide among any of the prevailing theological explanations (why should I choose Zeus over the Flying Spaghetti Monster?), I choose to think about other possibilities. There are too many potentially answerable questions that are left unanswered for me to bother with ones that I know are unanswerable. Sure, it could be completely wrong, but at least there's the potential for better understanding at the end of the road.
Also, the facts are that the 10 commandments have a unique relationship to the rule of law in our country and it's revisionist history to claim otherwise.
Which of the 10? The only obvious ones I see that are laws have to do with murder and theft, and I'm reasonably sure that there are at least one or two cultures who developed those ideas independently of the 10 Commandments.
What's happening here is not persecution. What is happening here is that the culture is becoming more intolerant and hostile to my worldview.
I have a different interpretation. A lot of people see parts of your worldview that aren't necessary for society to function smoothly (e.g. keeping the sabbath holy) as things that the government should not explicitly support. I would be horrified if the government was somehow preventing you from exercising those aspects of your worldview that are important to you, but I can't say that I'm all that concerned about their removing the more invasive symbols of it when those symbols clearly don't do anything for the rest of us.
Do you believe that when the school system rents a church facility to have graduation (because school facilities are not big enough to handle the event) that this is the state sponsoring religion? What if the "church" is a synagague, mosque or temple? Frankly I would absolutely NOT care if the school system rented and atheist-owned hall for graduation. If my kids' worldview was going to be damaged by one incident in one location one time, my world view would be pretty indefensible.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. Did somebody have a problem with that somewhere? Of course, what if a person's religion explicitly stated that going into a different religion's house of worship was a mortal sin? Do we trample their worldview because they're in the minority, or because they don't occupy the special place that many perceive Christianity to occupy in the US? These decisions aren't always easy.
With respect to the ACLU, while there may occasionally be cases where they defend the rights of Christians, I'd ask you to go to their page and search for "Christian" and see how many cases turn up in favor of Christian rights compared with the tsunami wall of cases against Christians.
When you're the overwhelming majority and you control all branches of government, you shouldn't be surprised when an organisation that fights against the persecution of minorities finds itself standing against you more frequently than it does for you. That's just how the numbers work out. If the US were majority Muslim, you'd find the ACLU fighting Muslims in favor of Christians more often than not. It's crazy for the majority to get their panties in a bunch over that fact. Isn't it nice to know that in the rare case when you are in the minority and you are being mistreated that the ACLU is there to stand with you?
How does the manufacture of all the fake apemen like Javaman, Piltdown man, Nebraska man, Lucy, etc. show scientific method? I wish someone could explain this to me. It is well known now that all these were faked. If evolution was so easy to prove then these would not have to be faked. But they were faked and backed by the scientific community for a long time, paraded in all the newspapers for years, and now everyone believes in evolution.
When they were discovered as fakes, there was not a whisper from the scientific community about their scientific method, and no retraction from the newspapers saying we were wrong.
Java man and Lucy were not fakes. They're quite real and well substantiated. You have been misinformed. Why am I not surprised?
Nebraska Man was a mistake, not a fraud. The correction was published (gasp!) by scientists in both Nature and Science, not to mention headlines in the New York Times and The London Times. I'll assume that you are uncritically regurgitating propaganda and now knowingly lying here.
Piltdown man was indeed a fraud, but it was exposed by professional paleontologists. It's an example of bad people doing bad things, but it's also an example of the scientific community correcting itself--a behavior creationists claim never happens. Anyway, your accusations are mostly nonsense.
If evolution is real then where are all the "in-between" animals? For instance show me a quarter-turtle, then a half-turtle, then a three-quarter turtle - anywhere? There are none. Point me to a URL where there is fossil pictures of partly evolved turtles.
What do you expect a half turtle to look like? The front half? Back half? Top half? That's not what evolution predicts. What would you describe as "halfway" there?
Here's a better question: Let's ignore the possibility of common ancestry for the moment. The fossil timeline shows that there was a time when no turtles existed, but other organisms existed. Where did the turtles come from?
As to my knowledge, they have yet to find fossils of the "half-breed" (for lack of a better term) creatures that were part this and part that. If they found one of these supposed creatures, then we would have that "link" proving that one thing did in fact evolve into another completely different thing.
There are lots of examples of interesting fossils that bridge the gaps between the modern forms we see today. Archeopteryx is one of the cooler looking ones. Of course, it's a "complete" creature just like everything else. A lot of creationists seem to want examples of incomplete organisms that could clearly never survive on their own. That is not what the theory of evolution predicts, though. It predicts creatures like archeopteryx.
Of course, even when presented with transitional fossils A -> C, creationists complain tht B isn't there. When B is found and we have A -> B -> C, suddenly we have TWO gaps! Where are AB and BC? Clearly evolution is wrong!
Once again, it's amazing to me that people spout off about a lack of fossil examples when they've clearly never looked at the fossil evidence. How many example transitional fossils have you looked at before making your claim? If the answer is zero, it's because you're not looking, not because they're not there.
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Let me put it this way: Eating a delicious meal is not just about being full at the end. Maybe death will be a great adventure. I don't know. What I know is that life is more of an adventure than anybody could really take in completely.
At what point do you draw the line, though? If child A believes that the multiplication tables are the work of a false prophet, does teaching them constitute an equally egregious violation of church and state? What about the belief that water boling is spirits escaping from the liqud rather than lowering of vapor pressure at high temperature? The problem is not that we're teaching things that conflict with religious teachings. The problem is that we're not properly teaching children that science and religion answer different questions and sometimes conflict in their worldview. They need to understand that there is no inherent reason to discard either one in its entirety simply because some parables don't reconcile themselves well with scientific theory.
In fact, if people understood that they could accept the naturalistic methodology of science as simply a methodology and not an overarching life philosophy, we could avoid conflicts that arise when science tries to become religion or when religion tries to become science.
Children need to understand that understanding the prevailing scientific theories and their underlying data is not the same as adopting a new worldview. That's the deficiency--not the fact that some scientific results conflict with some religious beliefs.
I'm fairly certain that that doesn't happen most of the time, and that when it does, parents can and do have valid complaints. I think that there are a lot of people who seem to think that there is some vast atheist conspiracy to indoctrinate children in science classes into believing that the scientific process should encompass one's entire philosophy. There are certainly some (many!) people who believe that, and there are probably some teachers who push that agenda. Those teachers are damaging not just religion but education in general when they do that, though. They should be taken to task for it. They should *not* have to water down the actual coursework and push the religous agendas of the offended parties as some sort of settlement, though.
Sometimes the ACLU goes overboard. They go well beyond what most moderates would want much of the time. That's their job. They're there to fight against any whiff of infringement on individual rights. People bring up the extreme cases all the time and ignore the fact that the ACLU takes on countless cases that they never hear about. You certainly don't hear Bill O'Reilly and his ilk p
I'm not sure what everybody else was learning, but if problems like the one you're describing are really rampant, they should probably be corrected. Of course, the correct solution would be to tell biology teachers not to say that sort of thing. Dumping pseudo-scientific fluff that makes certain religious factions happy into the coursework is not the solution, and pretending that philosophical objections to evolution (and to the scientific method in general) are actually scientific objections is definitely not the solution.
Laws that are based on little more than what makes one faction's diety sad are generally very difficult to argue against, and they tend to make the rest of us feel surprisingly as though the government is favoring one religion over another (or the lack thereof). Of course, when those of us who don't share the particular religious convictions of the majority make noise about that sort of thing, the people who passed the law (who usually make up 80+% of the population and control all aspects of government) are suddenly up in arms because we're persecuting them over their beliefs.
Test away. I'm very interested in seeing what observations you can think of that might favor a null hypothesis.
There's a more interesting question than what we would expect, though: what we wouldn't expect. What observations could possibly be inconsistent with an all powerful deity that does not have to obey any physical laws and whose motivations are unknowable?
Sure, and that's a lot of fun. I look into fields in which I have no expertise and enjoy learning about them. The difference is, when I see something that conflicts with my intuition, I tend to assume that it's my lack of data or understanding and look deeper into the matter rather than assuming that I've just demolished a theory that has been studied by thousands of academics with more data than I have. Intuitively, computers really shouldn't work. The tolerances and physics are absolutely amazing. It would be hard to convince somebody who had never heard of a computer that a device with no moving parts except for electrons could do calculations, but it can be done.
You're welcome to that view, but how is it different from somebody telling you about the dark ages? Sure, they've studied some "evidence" and some primary source stuff, but you've never seen it. How do you know it's true? You rely on people who spend their time studying it to boil it down for you. The same holds true for quantum mechanics and relativity. Do you believe in relativity? If so, why? If not, have you looked at all of the data and really studied it?
I don't think that any such thing is coming from the scientific community. You're more than welcome to try to discover things on your own. Just don't be surprised that when you come to silly conclusions after looking at a fraction of a percent of the data, that you are not taken seriously. Do you think that none of the scientists studying evolution have had similar thoughts or looked at the data and assumed a similar naive interpretation? Do you really think that no geologist has ever considered the possibility of a worldwide flood? The fact is, modern geology started when Christian scientists went out to LOOK for evidence of a worldwide flood and instead found a complex geological column with amazingly intricate features.
The problem is that these things look like a religion because the barriers to entry are high. Carl Sagan pointed this out by talking about quantum mechanics. You need to study years and years of mathematics above and beyond what the average person covers before you can even begin to study the physics. If somebody without that background questions it, the scientists generally ignore him until he's done the legwork. It certainly looks like an exclusive priesthood. The difference is, QM doesn't conflict with most religions, so it's left alone. Evolution offends some people, so they use the priesthood argument to make it look like some sort of warring religion with lots of secrets to hide. Every argument you've put forth has been considered and discussed in the literature.
You're very correct. But it's a political shift, not a scientific one. If you actually count the number of scientists who work in the relevant fields who agree that ID is a real science, you'll find that they're in an incredible minority. Sure, many of them believe in a creator. Many of them may believe in a creator who guides the proces
No, intelligent design is "shut out" of schools, not public view. And it's shut out because it hasn't produced any useful results, it has only fringe support among scientists, has essentially no meaningful evidence, and runs directly counter to the scientific method. If they can come up with some useful evidence above the false dichotomy of "evolution couldn't have done it, there for an intelligent designer did," and then come up with some tests for their ideas, they might get some recognition. Until then, they're out. In science class, we teach established scientific results and the scientific method. ID is not an established scientific result and it completely discards the scientific method.
No, evolution has nothing to say what started it all. Evolution explains the diversity of species and their similarity in structure. It provides evidence for common ancestry. That's it. Everything else is left to other disciplines.
Sure, if there is a creator who is running everything, lots of scientific theories might be wrong (depending on the nature of the creator and what he/she/it claims to be doing). That's a fine philosophy, but it doesn't belong in a science class. Let there be evidence.
You seem to be referring to the "big bang" theory. First, it has nothing to do with evolution. You're thinking of physics. It's a different area, but it also conflicts with some religious views. People who are offended by it like to conflate the two so they can paint science as being anti-God. It ain't so. Second, as the model lays it out, it looks very little like an explosion. To say it does is a terrible oversimplification that betrays a severe lack of understanding of the model. Without a deeper understanding, it's probably best to leave deciding whether it's a good model or not to the experts. This is not the sort of thing an armchair physicist can debunk with a thought experiment and no mathematics or data.
Nonsense. You're just asserting your conclusion. What about DNA shows that it cannot happen? It's DNA that provides the strongest evidence that it DID happen!
Again, that's fine metaphysically. It's a solid philosophy that you can live your life by but has no place in the science classroom until you can play by the rules and come up with some data and tests.
But the point is that the scientific method is necessarily a naturalistic pursuit. You can't open it to those other possibilities without throwing the scientific method out the window. What do you propose? We could say, "Here is evolution. Or God could have done it. Or the FSM could have done it. Or unicorns could have done it. Or, it could never have happened at all." All of those statements are potentially true from a philosophical perspective, but they have nothing to do with science class.
If that's the only objection, why is evolution always targetted? Why not germ theory? Oxidation / reduction equations in chemistry? Relativity? "The evidence seems to point to ____, or God could have done it" could be said for every chapter in every science book. I think that the answer is that evolutionary theory is hard to reconcile with certain religious beliefs, so people attack it and then try to cover it up with some nonsense about simply objecting to the materialistic aspect of it.
I don't recall exactly who said it, but he/she put it very succinctly by saying, "Intelligent design is not a scientific alternative to evolution. It's a metaphysical alternative to science."
Oh please. You're not saying it was a hoax. You're just strongly implying it in the face of truly flimsy evidence. Sure, it's possible. If it is a hoax, I'll be the first to condemn him. Until then, though, this is all a pretty lame smear. Let's see here:
1) It wasn't smart to get out and face people who were agressively following. OK. I'll buy that.
2) He resigned at the recommendation of his colleagues. The recommendation and resignation are not terribly surprising.
3) Not a lot of detail in the report. Let's recount: a rough time, a rough place, physical description. Doesn't that basically describe the crime? What more do they want?
4) Twenty minutes before contacting police. Did he have a cell phone? Are we sure his estimate of the time of the crime is right (most crime victimes don't get this detail right)? Given a 5-10 minute fudge factor for memory of the time and the time it takes to get up and make a phone call, 20 minutes doesn't seem like that long.
5) The crime was initially labelled a hate crime and then re-labeled. OK. That's just stupid. I'm not sure what that has to do with the credibility of the case.
6) He has stopped talking to reporters. Well, they have the story. They have all of the information he seems able to provide. Nothing new has happened. Right now his department is the center of a publicity storm it doesn't want. So?
Is this it? I'm glad my reputation isn't hanging in the balance if that's the kind of flimsy evidence and speculation it takes to destroy it. Face it: The people posting these articles and making these implications just don't like Mirecki and would love for him to be faking it. The least they could do is take a stand and accuse him rather than beating around the bush and saying things like, "I'm not saying it's a hoax, but..." Pathetic.
No, of course not. That would be taking a stand that you could be held to. Instead you'll just imply wrongdoing with insufficient evidence and claim to have clean hands if it turns out to be false. No reason to put your own reputation on the line while impugning that of another. How very forthright.
Honestly, I'm not seeing what creedence any of the articles posted here lend to the idea that he beat himself up for attention and pity.
I'm not sure why the "inconsistencies" are somehow consistent with fraud? Wouldn't he know where he called the police from regardless of whether he faked it or not? Without some serious evidence, this whole thing is looking like a pretty shameful smear.
You're very welcome. While FSM theory is far more complete and has greater explanatory power than the Hamsters With Guitars (HWG) theory, I find the HWG theory to be a much more elegant model.
I'm not seeing this. A quick look at the DOJ's statistics doesn't seem to show any such trend. This seems to me like the "feelings" people get that society is going downhill morally. It's almost never justified by anything more than a hunch and longing for the good old days. History is littered with these claims (going back at least to ancient Greek society), and yet modern society hasn't fallen apart yet. Everybody longs for the good old days when there was no crime, no promiscuity, and when everybody was polite and wore suits to work. Nobody seems to remember that in general, there were just as many problems back then.
Data, please. I've seen these claims before, and they always boil down to a gut feeling that things were better in "the good old days." They rarely pan out to be true, and I've never seen the connection pan out to be meaningful.
Of course, as you pointed out, it's hard to see causation as well. If your claim is true, crime rates also seem to be correllated to average global temperature or, to tip the hat to the FSM theory, the number of pirates worldwide.
And because that's all it argues (and all it can ever "safely" argue) it's absolutely content free. The whole "science" is that conclusion. They can't tell us anything about the designer. There's no rational way of distinguishing among the possible designers. They haven't even collected any real evidence to speak of aside from a simple argument from incredulity.
It is also worth noting that for not having anything to do with the Judeo-Christian God, a remarkably high percentage of the "researchers" are devoutly religious and funded by religious groups. Not that that casts doubt on the scientific validity of the subject by itself, but it certainly does make one suspicious about the political motivations of a movement that claims to be doing science but is more content to move into classrooms by political means than to publish real research.
The problem here is that regardless of the supernatural entity, any imaginable observation is consistent with it. There is nothing that could possibly falsify the hypothesis that there is a supernatural force interacting with reality in an unexplained and observable way. When they can posit a mechanism through which The Not The Judeo Christian God Desiner operates or give us some testable hypothesis about the designer, please wake me up and I'll be the first to contribute funding for their research.
The point, though, is that the whole "science" of ID stops exactly where it is right now. No more information can be gained or conclusions reached, so all ID does is lend pseudo-scientific creedence to any crackpot's theory of How Things Came To Be. Everybody who has an anti-evolution agenda can get together and hold hands and say, "Beleive whatever you want to believe. We're all equally right!" The reality is, the method is so popular because it appeals to the large Christian fundamentalist population in the US and, to a lesser extent, to people who hold minority views that could only generously be compared to the FSM theory. What it comes down to is that there is no rational way of distinguishing between any conclusion that could be drawn from ID, whether it's the FSM, the JC God, or magical hamsters with tiny guitars.
That's a lot like saying that the new source control system is better than printing out your source code and storing the paper in a big pile to be retyped every morning. I should hope that the new system is better than SourceSafe. Visual Studio is a pretty slick environment, but linking it into VSS is just embarrassing. It's like having a really nice house and a well maintained yard and then putting Astroturf on your porch.
Big bang cosmology, like any other physical model, can be tested by observation. Right now it happens to mesh nicely with cosmic background radiation, neutrinos, and the frequency of occurrence of certain elements. It is possible to make predictions of what we expect to observe based on the model. Astronomers are busily observing. Don't be surprised if new data that change (or possibly shoot down) the model arise in the future.
Similarly, if you come up with a model for biochemical abiogenesis, it's quite possible to analyze it using physical chemistry and knowledge of the chemicals available on the earth. In fact, you seem to be doing that here:
This claim is made very frequently, but it's rarely backed up, and when it is, there's usually a long list of assumptions. The point is, we don't know everything about the way things were on earth, and the idea that we can dismiss the possibility of abiogenesis outright is silly. There is no overarching theory right now, but a lot of smart people are working on it, and you can expect that any ideas they come up with will have testable ramifications.Likewise, the only reason not to pursue it is if you have somehow arrived at a worldview that answers the question satisfactorally without any data. Some people aren't into that. I'm one of them. Because I can't rationally decide among any of the prevailing theological explanations (why should I choose Zeus over the Flying Spaghetti Monster?), I choose to think about other possibilities. There are too many potentially answerable questions that are left unanswered for me to bother with ones that I know are unanswerable. Sure, it could be completely wrong, but at least there's the potential for better understanding at the end of the road.
If an idea is not falsifiable, why bother running experiments or even gathering data?
Which of the 10? The only obvious ones I see that are laws have to do with murder and theft, and I'm reasonably sure that there are at least one or two cultures who developed those ideas independently of the 10 Commandments.
I have a different interpretation. A lot of people see parts of your worldview that aren't necessary for society to function smoothly (e.g. keeping the sabbath holy) as things that the government should not explicitly support. I would be horrified if the government was somehow preventing you from exercising those aspects of your worldview that are important to you, but I can't say that I'm all that concerned about their removing the more invasive symbols of it when those symbols clearly don't do anything for the rest of us.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. Did somebody have a problem with that somewhere? Of course, what if a person's religion explicitly stated that going into a different religion's house of worship was a mortal sin? Do we trample their worldview because they're in the minority, or because they don't occupy the special place that many perceive Christianity to occupy in the US? These decisions aren't always easy.
When you're the overwhelming majority and you control all branches of government, you shouldn't be surprised when an organisation that fights against the persecution of minorities finds itself standing against you more frequently than it does for you. That's just how the numbers work out. If the US were majority Muslim, you'd find the ACLU fighting Muslims in favor of Christians more often than not. It's crazy for the majority to get their panties in a bunch over that fact. Isn't it nice to know that in the rare case when you are in the minority and you are being mistreated that the ACLU is there to stand with you?
Java man and Lucy were not fakes. They're quite real and well substantiated. You have been misinformed. Why am I not surprised?
Nebraska Man was a mistake, not a fraud. The correction was published (gasp!) by scientists in both Nature and Science, not to mention headlines in the New York Times and The London Times. I'll assume that you are uncritically regurgitating propaganda and now knowingly lying here.
Piltdown man was indeed a fraud, but it was exposed by professional paleontologists. It's an example of bad people doing bad things, but it's also an example of the scientific community correcting itself--a behavior creationists claim never happens. Anyway, your accusations are mostly nonsense.
What do you expect a half turtle to look like? The front half? Back half? Top half? That's not what evolution predicts. What would you describe as "halfway" there?
Here's a better question: Let's ignore the possibility of common ancestry for the moment. The fossil timeline shows that there was a time when no turtles existed, but other organisms existed. Where did the turtles come from?
There are lots of examples of interesting fossils that bridge the gaps between the modern forms we see today. Archeopteryx is one of the cooler looking ones. Of course, it's a "complete" creature just like everything else. A lot of creationists seem to want examples of incomplete organisms that could clearly never survive on their own. That is not what the theory of evolution predicts, though. It predicts creatures like archeopteryx.
Of course, even when presented with transitional fossils A -> C, creationists complain tht B isn't there. When B is found and we have A -> B -> C, suddenly we have TWO gaps! Where are AB and BC? Clearly evolution is wrong!
Once again, it's amazing to me that people spout off about a lack of fossil examples when they've clearly never looked at the fossil evidence. How many example transitional fossils have you looked at before making your claim? If the answer is zero, it's because you're not looking, not because they're not there.