Until they come up with "god-guided falling" to replace gravity.
Remember, creationism is fundamentally a new thing, unique to American evangelicals. Who's to say some wacko who managed to get elected somewhere high won't wake up tomorrow and decide Jesus told him special relativity/quantum theory/Bayes' theorem are the spawn of the devil?
They already do, to some extent. Some apparently deny relativity on the general priniciple that it ain't natural. Some deny various fields of science in order to support creationist beliefs, particularly as a way of refuting the factual age of our planet.
The strangest one I've seen is a claim that the speed of light is infinite coming toward you and half the actual speed of light going away (or vice versa -- can't remember the details). They needed the speed of light to be infinite for some argument about the age of the universe, and the half-speed in the other direction was apparently made up so the travel time to a mirror in back would work out right.
In general, I think we'll be seeing fewer creationists but they will become more and more fanatic and asinine in their denials of reality. In the age of DNA paternity tests, direct observation of continental drift, direct measurement of rates of mountain uplift, etc. etc. etc., people are starting to have to put their heads *way* up their asses in order to maintain their denial of reality.
What's a cause and how do you know all effects have them?
The traditional way of stating it is that all things that have a beginning have a cause. Modern science is based on that premise. Current cosmological theory says that our universe had a beginning (the Big Bang). The atheistic version of current cosmological theory says that not only didn't the Big Bang have a cause, it could not have had a cause (there was no "before" the Big Bang).
Minor point, a lot of cosmologists think (or speculate) that there *was* something "before" the big bang. Unfortunately, evidence is hard to come by.
(FYI, I put "before" in quotes because, AIUI, time AWKI started with the big bang. It would seem to have to be an unfamiliar notion of "before".)
Its also not very impressive when an AP teacher calls deductive reasoning "nonsense"
FYI, *lots* of deductive reasoning is nonsense. People make incorrect deductions (and inductions) all the time.
or when he denies the rational truth that "all effects have a cause".
Well, we don't know if that claim is truth or not, do we? We tend to derive that conclusion by induction, but is it really true?
General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are counterintuitive -- outright difficult for our minds to comprehend -- because we didn't evolve to deal with the scales and space and time where their effects become easy to observe. So we also evolved in an environment where every cause seems to have an effect - does that make it a universal fact, is it a sort of Newtonian Physics of reasoning?
ISTM that we already know that cause and effect is not always in play for quantum-scale events, but you should ask a physicist rather than a geek.
True, can't prove a negative. BUT, if Adam and Eve DID exist, then homo sapiens appeared the same day as every other living thing, and then proceeded to procreate until 6.5 billion people later here we are. What we know in biology is that homo sapien (sapeins) cannot interbreed more than a few generations before really nasty shit happens and the population eventually becomes non-viable. So everything that would have to happen if Adam and Eve did exist cannot happen based on the original assumptions. Again, can't prove a negative, but unless everything we know about biology is wrong, or there was a huge Deus Ex Machina, Adam and Eve very likely did not exist as a direction interpretation of the story goes.
Ok, poke holes in that statement now...:-)
If we all descended from one couple ~6000 years ago (or from a slightly larger gene pool ~4500 years ago, per the flood story), we would display a horrific genetic bottleneck. Same for animals. We don't. They don't (with a few exceptions). Ergo, the story is a myth.
Some famous biologist has said that, given what we know now, we'd know evolution happened if we'd never seen a single fossil.
Eve was created from Adam's rib. Doesn't that imply God just ripped out a rib, tore out the Pesky male Chromosome, cloned a twin sister for Adam, and patched him up before he could say "ouch!"?
Evidence to that effect comes from the fact that "on iOS, user reviews for Battleheart average 4.5 stars (4000 total ratings), which is quite good. On Android it's a stunning 4.8, with 1000 ratings," writes the developer. "So not only is it reviewed more highly, it's also reviewed more often,
Or is he saying that there are more than 4x as many iOS users as Android users?
Thought I read very recently that Android was more prevalent.
Sounds like you, too, are ready to move on to Indy Cinema - those films where you have good cast, good direction and a story which could end in any way possible. Much more impressive than anything at the corporate cinemas these days, where you see the trailer, you see the film.
Aren't the issues under discussion a problem with the comics the films are based on?
I don't read the comics, but after I see a movie I go read up on the topic on Wikipedia. Seems like nothing is permanent in the comic-verse.
Now that you know how "global warming denier" and "AGW denier" really came to be, you can stop using the term.
No, I only know how you think they came to be.
I use the term "denier" for both AGW deniers and evolution deniers, without regard to other things other people deny. And as I consider Nazis vile beyond human comprehension, I don't make a habit of tarring others with that name or other associations with them. I don't even like terms like "grammar Nazi".
I'm using the status quo here in reference to the current climate of the earth. Not political status or anything like that.
There's a pretty good reason for us wanting to maintain the (recent) status quo: our society is built on it. Change it very much and suddenly our choices for where we built our cities, where we get our grain, etc. go out of whack with the environment.
Both the US Department of Defense and the US intelligence community have identified global warming as one of the premier threats to us for this century. It's not hard to figure out why: populations are going to be displaced, haves are going to become have-nots, and have-nots are going to become haves. And we'll be trying to maintain the social/political status quo in a changed world, simultaneously emptying our pockets to move our coastal cities to higher ground.
There was no consensus in the scientific community that global cooling would happen.
You used to hear all the time on Slashdot that during the 1970s "everyone" thought we were entering an era of global cooling. Upon querying, the only supporting evidence I ever got for that claim was a paragraph-sized snippet from Newsweek stating that one scientist thought we were headed for cooling.
It's pretty remarkable that this and so many other seemingly scientific issues (evolution, plate tectonics, etc.) get fractured along "liberal/conservative" lines. Some of those are targeted because they conflict with religious doctrine, for sure, but why should so many conservatives have so much of an emotional stake in climate science?
Rich people tell their political suck-ups that they don't want to spend money mitigating global warming.
Political suck-ups tell FOX news that global warming is not really happening.
FOX news tells 30% of the USA public that global warming is a liberal conspiracy.
FOX viewers wash it down with the kool-aide.
The anti-global-warming view is "conservative" because of the myth that US politics is about conservatives vs. liberals. Once you realize that US politics is actually about billionaires vs. the rest of us, you can easily see why denialism is "conservative" in code-word speak.
"Denialist" is a really interesting turn of phrase. People started intentionally using it against global warming skeptics to directly call to mind Holocaust deniers. Yeah - by calling people "denialists," you're really calling them "Nazis."
Actually, I use it by analogy with "evolution deniers". I put global warming deniers in the same came as creationists, not Nazis.
Just admit you don't have everything figured out. I know that may give rise to healthy skepticism. People may not want to spend trillions in dollars to fix a problem you aren't certain about.
We're never "certain" about anything. However, it generally makes sense to act on the basis of the evidence. For example, if you house is on fire you could say "maybe it won't hurt me" and keep on surfing the web, but most people would go ahead and evacuate the house.
We're currently in an interglacial period of the current ice age, so it's not a matter of moving towards another one, but how long the interglacial period will last, and how if we're moving into a glaciation period will humanity be effecting that.
I don't know how things have turned out since, but about a decade ago there was an article in Scientific American by someone who said yes, there's some cooling going on, but there's also the warming, and at present the warming is out-forcing the cooling. We'd be warming more quickly if the interglacial wasn't coming to an end, or cooling if not for what we've done to the atmosphere.
Some Creationists say that God planted the fossils and other geological evidence to "test our faith" and I don't buy that.
It's funny that those people who think fossils are a prank God is pulling on them won't consider for a moment that Genesis is a prank that God is pulling on them.
But it gives an interesting insight into the way people choose their passwords: in this case, apparently, on a theme that reflects the nature of the site they're visiting.
The three most popular Slashdot passwords are 'troll', 'slacker', and 'clown'.
From what I've been told, most school districts have ditched whatever programming curriculum they once had because the standardized tests don't include it, so it's a distraction from "teach the test".
Slashdot Mirror
Until they come up with "god-guided falling" to replace gravity.
Remember, creationism is fundamentally a new thing, unique to American evangelicals. Who's to say some wacko who managed to get elected somewhere high won't wake up tomorrow and decide Jesus told him special relativity/quantum theory/Bayes' theorem are the spawn of the devil?
They already do, to some extent. Some apparently deny relativity on the general priniciple that it ain't natural. Some deny various fields of science in order to support creationist beliefs, particularly as a way of refuting the factual age of our planet.
The strangest one I've seen is a claim that the speed of light is infinite coming toward you and half the actual speed of light going away (or vice versa -- can't remember the details). They needed the speed of light to be infinite for some argument about the age of the universe, and the half-speed in the other direction was apparently made up so the travel time to a mirror in back would work out right.
In general, I think we'll be seeing fewer creationists but they will become more and more fanatic and asinine in their denials of reality. In the age of DNA paternity tests, direct observation of continental drift, direct measurement of rates of mountain uplift, etc. etc. etc., people are starting to have to put their heads *way* up their asses in order to maintain their denial of reality.
the Abstinence Club (boy was that a hit)
Otherwise known as the Circle Jerk Club? Or just what did they do at the club meetings?
'All effects have a cause"
What's a cause and how do you know all effects have them?
The traditional way of stating it is that all things that have a beginning have a cause. Modern science is based on that premise. Current cosmological theory says that our universe had a beginning (the Big Bang). The atheistic version of current cosmological theory says that not only didn't the Big Bang have a cause, it could not have had a cause (there was no "before" the Big Bang).
Minor point, a lot of cosmologists think (or speculate) that there *was* something "before" the big bang. Unfortunately, evidence is hard to come by.
(FYI, I put "before" in quotes because, AIUI, time AWKI started with the big bang. It would seem to have to be an unfamiliar notion of "before".)
Its also not very impressive when an AP teacher calls deductive reasoning "nonsense"
FYI, *lots* of deductive reasoning is nonsense. People make incorrect deductions (and inductions) all the time.
or when he denies the rational truth that "all effects have a cause".
Well, we don't know if that claim is truth or not, do we? We tend to derive that conclusion by induction, but is it really true?
General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are counterintuitive -- outright difficult for our minds to comprehend -- because we didn't evolve to deal with the scales and space and time where their effects become easy to observe. So we also evolved in an environment where every cause seems to have an effect - does that make it a universal fact, is it a sort of Newtonian Physics of reasoning?
ISTM that we already know that cause and effect is not always in play for quantum-scale events, but you should ask a physicist rather than a geek.
True, can't prove a negative. BUT, if Adam and Eve DID exist, then homo sapiens appeared the same day as every other living thing, and then proceeded to procreate until 6.5 billion people later here we are. What we know in biology is that homo sapien (sapeins) cannot interbreed more than a few generations before really nasty shit happens and the population eventually becomes non-viable. So everything that would have to happen if Adam and Eve did exist cannot happen based on the original assumptions. Again, can't prove a negative, but unless everything we know about biology is wrong, or there was a huge Deus Ex Machina, Adam and Eve very likely did not exist as a direction interpretation of the story goes.
Ok, poke holes in that statement now... :-)
If we all descended from one couple ~6000 years ago (or from a slightly larger gene pool ~4500 years ago, per the flood story), we would display a horrific genetic bottleneck. Same for animals. We don't. They don't (with a few exceptions). Ergo, the story is a myth.
Some famous biologist has said that, given what we know now, we'd know evolution happened if we'd never seen a single fossil.
Because then you would be my cousin.
That and, by natural law, Eve was Adams sister.
Eve was created from Adam's rib. Doesn't that imply God just ripped out a rib, tore out the Pesky male Chromosome, cloned a twin sister for Adam, and patched him up before he could say "ouch!"?
Is it 'incest' if a guy bonks his clone?
Yeah, the ">" disappeared from my subject line. I should learn to pay attention to that 'preview' thingy.
Evidence to that effect comes from the fact that "on iOS, user reviews for Battleheart average 4.5 stars (4000 total ratings), which is quite good. On Android it's a stunning 4.8, with 1000 ratings," writes the developer. "So not only is it reviewed more highly, it's also reviewed more often,
Or is he saying that there are more than 4x as many iOS users as Android users?
Thought I read very recently that Android was more prevalent.
Of the data, yes. Of the hardware, which is currently missing, not really.
Really? I copy my hardware to my 3-D printer every night.
Of course the ultimate example of what you are talking about is Lord of the Rings. [ducks]
If you read the stuff published posthumously, some of Tolkien's stuff is so grim that I find myself wondering whether he had psychological problems.
Sounds like you, too, are ready to move on to Indy Cinema - those films where you have good cast, good direction and a story which could end in any way possible. Much more impressive than anything at the corporate cinemas these days, where you see the trailer, you see the film.
Aren't the issues under discussion a problem with the comics the films are based on?
I don't read the comics, but after I see a movie I go read up on the topic on Wikipedia. Seems like nothing is permanent in the comic-verse.
Instead of getting an AI that just wants to outright kill us all, we got one that just wants to fuck with us...
We were expecting Doomsday, and got Dumbsday?
Now that you know how "global warming denier" and "AGW denier" really came to be, you can stop using the term.
No, I only know how you think they came to be.
I use the term "denier" for both AGW deniers and evolution deniers, without regard to other things other people deny. And as I consider Nazis vile beyond human comprehension, I don't make a habit of tarring others with that name or other associations with them. I don't even like terms like "grammar Nazi".
I'm using the status quo here in reference to the current climate of the earth. Not political status or anything like that.
There's a pretty good reason for us wanting to maintain the (recent) status quo: our society is built on it. Change it very much and suddenly our choices for where we built our cities, where we get our grain, etc. go out of whack with the environment.
Both the US Department of Defense and the US intelligence community have identified global warming as one of the premier threats to us for this century. It's not hard to figure out why: populations are going to be displaced, haves are going to become have-nots, and have-nots are going to become haves. And we'll be trying to maintain the social/political status quo in a changed world, simultaneously emptying our pockets to move our coastal cities to higher ground.
The future is bleak, from a defense/security POV.
There was no consensus in the scientific community that global cooling would happen.
You used to hear all the time on Slashdot that during the 1970s "everyone" thought we were entering an era of global cooling. Upon querying, the only supporting evidence I ever got for that claim was a paragraph-sized snippet from Newsweek stating that one scientist thought we were headed for cooling.
It's pretty remarkable that this and so many other seemingly scientific issues (evolution, plate tectonics, etc.) get fractured along "liberal/conservative" lines. Some of those are targeted because they conflict with religious doctrine, for sure, but why should so many conservatives have so much of an emotional stake in climate science?
Rich people tell their political suck-ups that they don't want to spend money mitigating global warming.
Political suck-ups tell FOX news that global warming is not really happening.
FOX news tells 30% of the USA public that global warming is a liberal conspiracy.
FOX viewers wash it down with the kool-aide.
The anti-global-warming view is "conservative" because of the myth that US politics is about conservatives vs. liberals. Once you realize that US politics is actually about billionaires vs. the rest of us, you can easily see why denialism is "conservative" in code-word speak.
"Denialist" is a really interesting turn of phrase. People started intentionally using it against global warming skeptics to directly call to mind Holocaust deniers. Yeah - by calling people "denialists," you're really calling them "Nazis."
Actually, I use it by analogy with "evolution deniers". I put global warming deniers in the same came as creationists, not Nazis.
Hope that makes you fee better.
Just admit you don't have everything figured out. I know that may give rise to healthy skepticism. People may not want to spend trillions in dollars to fix a problem you aren't certain about.
We're never "certain" about anything. However, it generally makes sense to act on the basis of the evidence. For example, if you house is on fire you could say "maybe it won't hurt me" and keep on surfing the web, but most people would go ahead and evacuate the house.
We're currently in an interglacial period of the current ice age, so it's not a matter of moving towards another one, but how long the interglacial period will last, and how if we're moving into a glaciation period will humanity be effecting that.
I don't know how things have turned out since, but about a decade ago there was an article in Scientific American by someone who said yes, there's some cooling going on, but there's also the warming, and at present the warming is out-forcing the cooling. We'd be warming more quickly if the interglacial wasn't coming to an end, or cooling if not for what we've done to the atmosphere.
Then a question occurred to me. If a god created the universe, who created the god?
God's God.
It's Gods all the way up, you know.
Some Creationists say that God planted the fossils and other geological evidence to "test our faith" and I don't buy that.
It's funny that those people who think fossils are a prank God is pulling on them won't consider for a moment that Genesis is a prank that God is pulling on them.
But... how can mutations occur but not evolution? Do they believe that it's impossible for mutations to be passed down to your offspring?
The two most common rationalizations are:
1) mutations happen, but not beneficial ones.
2) microevolution happens, but no amount of it adds up to macroevolution.
But it gives an interesting insight into the way people choose their passwords: in this case, apparently, on a theme that reflects the nature of the site they're visiting.
The three most popular Slashdot passwords are 'troll', 'slacker', and 'clown'.
Well; they can shove their tiny little minds and mouths up their copious arseholes...
See? Just like the article was talking about!
From what I've been told, most school districts have ditched whatever programming curriculum they once had because the standardized tests don't include it, so it's a distraction from "teach the test".