But as the trailer points out, people have done the research (no idea if its correct) but the second they try to publish it, the Darwinans label them crackpots and shot out: "Its not Darwinism, so its wrong" No, you're buying Stein's propaganda.
The cdesign proponentsists do not, as far as anyone knows, submit their work to peer reviewed science journals (except as in the Sternberg case, when they have an editor who will slip it in without actually sending it out for review). And with good reason: a peer reviewed science journal will reject any article that does not support its claims with evidence, regardless of what the article's ultimate claim is.
Acting like that is just childish. If Darwin was right, then you have nothing to lose by carefully writing a counter paper, countering the evidence. One of the big science journals (Nature, IIRC) gave the cdesign proponentists a free lunch by letting them publish their positions in a special issue. None of the claims have stood up to scrutiny.
And BTW, there is no evidence for ID for anyone to counter. All ID has is a clique of religious PhDs who offer sciency-sounding arguments based on factual and logical fallacies to support an untestable hypothesis. That won't make the grade in *any* field of science, whether religion is involved or not.
Why do people automatically assume Evolution is true just because they don't understand what other theories actually mean? Are you claiming that Ben Stein has a theory?
If so, I'd certainly like to hear what it is. Though I would wonder why he didn't make a movie presenting the evidence for his theory, rather than telling lies about a real theory.
one guy did get fired, but that's because he wasn't getting published or graduating many students. Sorry you didn't perform. Failing to make tenure is hardly the same as getting fired. Tenure isn't an entitlement. People who *do* perform sometimes don't make it.
And unless a freshly minted PhD is utterly clueless, he knows that when he signs on for the job, and has it continuously on his mind for his six years on the chain gang before the decision comes up.
I am saddened both by the poor science of many Creationists and poor theology of many Evolutionists. If you repeat what you feel to be "sound arguments against [Creationism]", you may simply be parroting popular memes of Evolutionists which are easily countered by anyone more familiar with the Bible (or whatever). After years of skimming talk.origins, I have come to the conclusion that the majority of vocal creationists don't know jack about what the Bible actually says.
And what is "good theology". Is there any theology in the entire world that is based on evidence rather than someone's interpretation of a mythical tradition?
Yes, but ID != creationism. Sure it is. It came out in the Dover case that the prase "intelligent design" was a cut-n-paste replacement for "creationism" in a creationist textbook, right after the courts ruled that teaching creationism in public schools violates the Establishment Clause.
It's amazing that anyone interested in this subject doesn't already know this.
But what Stein points out is that debate gets stifled instead of debated. Debate has actually been endless. It's just that after more than a decade the "cdesign proponentsists" are still just parroting their original long-refuted claims.
Are you aware that one of the major science journals (Nature, IIRC) let the cdesign proponentsists publish their claims just to ensure that they get a chance to be heard?
You are tacitly buying in to this propaganda film's basic message, which is utter bullshit. People aren't being "expelled" for doing ID; they're simply leaving science behind in order to pursue religious apologetics.
Why don't they show us the science instead of whining about being excluded? Oh, they can't -- they don't have any science to support their claims.
I fear that the ostracized members of the scientific community will make the evolutionists look just as much like religious zealots trying to purge their ranks of people with open minds. a) Ben's claims of ostracism are greatly exaggerated. (See the "Expelled Exposed" link.)
b) If you want a seat at the table in science, you have to BYO evidence.
Evolution denial hasn't been expelled; it simply hasn't met the admission requirements. If they had a case they'd be presenting evidence rather than making dishonest propaganda films. End of story.
Does it matter to the people doing it? The current administration has utterly ignored the consitution, federal and international law, treaties, and 200 years of US judicial precedent.
(Can't wait to hear how loud their supporters scream when the next democratic president lets his little toe cross the line of legality.)
More to the point isn't it ironic that Dawkins is appearing on a show that has been portraying the Doctor as a Messiah figure for the past three series? What is ironic about someone being able to distinguish fantasy from reality?
"If one of the gods decided to actually show up and do some, you know, godly stuff". I refer you to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Granted, you may not wish to believe the event or the accounts, but it is a central claim of Christianity that God has involved himself directly and personally in the world. The same can be said of the Greek, Norse, and a lot of other religious traditions.
How many of those traditions do you believe, and why or why not?
AMD dies, then Intel will jack their rates up about double. Of course. But we've seen AMD "lose" the CPU war before, and recover. Hopefully that will happen again.
Too bad about the layoffs, though. I think this is going to get worse (across the whole economy) before it gets better. Business is so slow that my state's tax revenues have plummeted.
To fail to consider the possibility that he may be Zeus is to wilfully ignore a branch of possibility, which is a distinctly irrational thing to do. I disagree. When the topic isn't religion, everyone realizes that some "possibilities" simply do not merit consideration.
Would you consider the possibility that he's a Nazi from inside the hollow earth, coming out to display the technology they've developed since WWII?
FWIW, 'agnostic' seems to have come into use due to a shift in the popular meaning of 'atheist'. Acording to Wictionary, the term didn't even exist before 1870. If people would try to quit reading more into a-theism than the word actually suggests, we wouldn't need a term for the neutral category. If we take "atheist" to mean "someone who doesn't believe in a god", then what do we call the annoying zealot who feels the need to loudly and continuously declare that not only does no god exist, but anyone who believes in one is stupid, delusional, childish, even outright crazy; or perhaps a devious schemer dastardly subverting the minds of the weak-willed to become his devout brainwashed slaves ?
The meanings of words change, sometimes for good reasons. Indeed they do. But in this case the change is propagandistic, and leaves us without a term for what the word originally meant, and the actual position a lot of atheists seem to take.
On the other, if you lower your standards of evidence to accept one religious claim, you have to accept them all (or else be hypocritical about it). You are making an implicit assumption that all religions have an equal amount of (or lack of) supporting evidence.
What about people who believe that there is more supporting evidence (usually strong supporting evidence) for particular beliefs? That is the usual case for people who do believe a religion to be true. And yet somehow they can never deliver when asked.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: people lower their standards of evidence enough to accept the lame "proofs" offered by the proponents of their own religion, but do not extend the same courtesy to competing religions. That's not a viable option for the intellectually honest.
I do think Dawkins does do one thing that is harmful: he attacks theism without understanding it. This is a fallacy. You positively do not have to be understand very much about Norse mythology to realize that's it's a silly belief system. The same applies to other gods. And for certain present-day religions that don't need to be named, the more you know about it the sillier it looks.
I don't know how many times you need to be told by someone that there is a chicken behind this door, no really, only to find when you open it that there is no chicken, before you suspect that there probably aren't any chickens here at all. \subject
However, if one of the gods decided to actually show up and do some, you know, godly stuff, and I'm not talking the ambiguous kind but serious, honest-to-whatever god stuff, heck, I'd be cool with that. Assuming he/she/it doesn't mind being poked by scientists for a bit anyway;-) I'm skeptical of even that.
Suppose an old guy with a beard approached you on the street and claimed to be Zeus. Would you believe him? What if he said he could call down a lightning strike, and then did it to demonstrate it. Would you then believe it was Zeus?
No, there are too many other considerations. Your first assumption would be that you are dreaming. Failing that, then hallucinating. Or maybe some con artist who figured out that giving the appearance of calling down lightning is as easy as giving the appearance of bending a spoon with your mind. Last resort, an alien with "sufficiently advanced technology". Would *anyone* capable of rational thought ever consider the possibility that he actually was Zeus?
Unfortunately (or not), this whole God thing is such a slippery concept that it will never be proven, any more than it will ever be disproven.
Like the other poster said: Please just read The God Delusion, it explains all of this. Read it. IMHO, Dawkins being belligerent and quoting other people doesn't make a very convincing set of arguments. Funny, but people seem to find it plenty convincing when theists do that.
By the way I'm not promoting agnosticism; I think that you have to make a leap of faith somewhere, and on this issue the options seem to me theism and strong atheism. How about ordinary atheism, as in "I merely reject one more unevidenced god than you do"?
IMO, that's the *only* viable option. On one extreme, no one can prove that no gods exist. On the other, if you lower your standards of evidence to accept one religious claim, you have to accept them all (or else be hypocritical about it). So the only options are ordinary atheism (as in "I don't believe anyones religious myths") and self-delusion.
FWIW, 'agnostic' seems to have come into use due to a shift in the popular meaning of 'atheist'. Acording to Wictionary, the term didn't even exist before 1870. If people would try to quit reading more into a-theism than the word actually suggests, we wouldn't need a term for the neutral category.
But in excessively religious societies like ours, people tend to interpret atheism as yet another competing claim, rather than merely a rejection of other people's claims. For me, atheism isn't a religious belief; it's a *lack* of religious beliefs. I suppose you could call it "a belief", but only in the same sense that my lack of any particular reason to believe in Bigfoot is "a belief" about Bigfoot.
I never really understood atheism anyway. They mock theists for their faith Yeah, and here's what happens when a calm and reasonable theist tries to engage a drool-spewing atheist in a reasonable discussion.
there's certainly no way to prove that there's not a god, so aren't they also believing in something independent of scientific proof? Actually, they are *not* believing in something that lacks any supporting evidence.
By your reasoning, we should believe every religious claim that has ever been made.
IMO agnosticism is the only tenable position for the non-theist. Everyone is an agnostic, including you.
As for "non-theist", that's exactly what a-theism means. (The Greek alpha privative is in fact cognate with our "non".)
The locking of the article for editing by senior editors only is a tad odd.
However, I don't know how common this is. If we are to assume innocence, then it might be that wikipedia was just trying to avoid being a location for mud slinging. If not, then yup, it's a bit odd. I don't have time to follow wikipedia closely anymore, but AIUI article locking has become fairly common over the past few years, as a way of stamping out edit wars.
Slashdot Mirror
The cdesign proponentsists do not, as far as anyone knows, submit their work to peer reviewed science journals (except as in the Sternberg case, when they have an editor who will slip it in without actually sending it out for review). And with good reason: a peer reviewed science journal will reject any article that does not support its claims with evidence, regardless of what the article's ultimate claim is. Acting like that is just childish. If Darwin was right, then you have nothing to lose by carefully writing a counter paper, countering the evidence. One of the big science journals (Nature, IIRC) gave the cdesign proponentists a free lunch by letting them publish their positions in a special issue. None of the claims have stood up to scrutiny.
And BTW, there is no evidence for ID for anyone to counter. All ID has is a clique of religious PhDs who offer sciency-sounding arguments based on factual and logical fallacies to support an untestable hypothesis. That won't make the grade in *any* field of science, whether religion is involved or not.
If so, I'd certainly like to hear what it is. Though I would wonder why he didn't make a movie presenting the evidence for his theory, rather than telling lies about a real theory.
And unless a freshly minted PhD is utterly clueless, he knows that when he signs on for the job, and has it continuously on his mind for his six years on the chain gang before the decision comes up.
And what is "good theology". Is there any theology in the entire world that is based on evidence rather than someone's interpretation of a mythical tradition?
It's amazing that anyone interested in this subject doesn't already know this. But what Stein points out is that debate gets stifled instead of debated. Debate has actually been endless. It's just that after more than a decade the "cdesign proponentsists" are still just parroting their original long-refuted claims.
Are you aware that one of the major science journals (Nature, IIRC) let the cdesign proponentsists publish their claims just to ensure that they get a chance to be heard?
You are tacitly buying in to this propaganda film's basic message, which is utter bullshit. People aren't being "expelled" for doing ID; they're simply leaving science behind in order to pursue religious apologetics.
Why don't they show us the science instead of whining about being excluded? Oh, they can't -- they don't have any science to support their claims.
b) If you want a seat at the table in science, you have to BYO evidence.
Evolution denial hasn't been expelled; it simply hasn't met the admission requirements. If they had a case they'd be presenting evidence rather than making dishonest propaganda films. End of story.
Since when is a screwed up Wikipedia article newsworthy?
Does it matter to the people doing it? The current administration has utterly ignored the consitution, federal and international law, treaties, and 200 years of US judicial precedent.
(Can't wait to hear how loud their supporters scream when the next democratic president lets his little toe cross the line of legality.)
How many of those traditions do you believe, and why or why not?
Too bad about the layoffs, though. I think this is going to get worse (across the whole economy) before it gets better. Business is so slow that my state's tax revenues have plummeted.
Would you consider the possibility that he's a Nazi from inside the hollow earth, coming out to display the technology they've developed since WWII?
The meanings of words change, sometimes for good reasons. Indeed they do. But in this case the change is propagandistic, and leaves us without a term for what the word originally meant, and the actual position a lot of atheists seem to take.
Not everyone is on a crusade.
What about people who believe that there is more supporting evidence (usually strong supporting evidence) for particular beliefs? That is the usual case for people who do believe a religion to be true. And yet somehow they can never deliver when asked.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: people lower their standards of evidence enough to accept the lame "proofs" offered by the proponents of their own religion, but do not extend the same courtesy to competing religions. That's not a viable option for the intellectually honest.
Just so you'll know, "aig-" is the Greek stem for "goat", and "nos-" for "disease". An aignostic would be someone with goat disease.
Suppose an old guy with a beard approached you on the street and claimed to be Zeus. Would you believe him? What if he said he could call down a lightning strike, and then did it to demonstrate it. Would you then believe it was Zeus?
No, there are too many other considerations. Your first assumption would be that you are dreaming. Failing that, then hallucinating. Or maybe some con artist who figured out that giving the appearance of calling down lightning is as easy as giving the appearance of bending a spoon with your mind. Last resort, an alien with "sufficiently advanced technology". Would *anyone* capable of rational thought ever consider the possibility that he actually was Zeus?
Unfortunately (or not), this whole God thing is such a slippery concept that it will never be proven, any more than it will ever be disproven.
IMO, that's the *only* viable option. On one extreme, no one can prove that no gods exist. On the other, if you lower your standards of evidence to accept one religious claim, you have to accept them all (or else be hypocritical about it). So the only options are ordinary atheism (as in "I don't believe anyones religious myths") and self-delusion.
FWIW, 'agnostic' seems to have come into use due to a shift in the popular meaning of 'atheist'. Acording to Wictionary, the term didn't even exist before 1870. If people would try to quit reading more into a-theism than the word actually suggests, we wouldn't need a term for the neutral category.
But in excessively religious societies like ours, people tend to interpret atheism as yet another competing claim, rather than merely a rejection of other people's claims. For me, atheism isn't a religious belief; it's a *lack* of religious beliefs. I suppose you could call it "a belief", but only in the same sense that my lack of any particular reason to believe in Bigfoot is "a belief" about Bigfoot.
By your reasoning, we should believe every religious claim that has ever been made. IMO agnosticism is the only tenable position for the non-theist. Everyone is an agnostic, including you.
As for "non-theist", that's exactly what a-theism means. (The Greek alpha privative is in fact cognate with our "non".)
Bet that won't result in any legal harassment.
However, I don't know how common this is. If we are to assume innocence, then it might be that wikipedia was just trying to avoid being a location for mud slinging.
If not, then yup, it's a bit odd. I don't have time to follow wikipedia closely anymore, but AIUI article locking has become fairly common over the past few years, as a way of stamping out edit wars.
Too bad the article doesn't tell us what the purportedly clueless interviewer *did* ask.