Whether or not climate change is actually happening, whether or not the change is caused largely by man, the public debate on this matter has been thoroughly perverted from a scientific into a political debate, by all sides involved. Believers of global warming may well be right, and there is some evidence that they are (though not nearly as overwhelming as Gore would have you believe). But when the debate is no longer about science but about agendas, power and money, you'll have a hard time getting anyone accept proof that would run counter to the belief that we are the cause of global warming. Even just publishing that proof to the masses may prove hard. Yes, just like the 99.9% of scientists in relevant fields who accept atomic theory, general relativity, and the heliocentric solar system are just doing so to make themselves rich and powerful at the public's expense.
You sound like a creationist who tries to shelter his fantasy against reality by claiming that scientists are just trying to discredit religion so they won't have to go to church.
Just watch, when billions are at stake, dis-crediting will prove incredibly difficult. Yes, how can Big Oil possibly compete against all those super-rich scientists?
The problem is the MMR vaccine does not contain thiomersal, and indeed never has, so the attempts to explain one in terms of the other is baffling. Other than that it's a swell theory.
Or as the old Pope hold, science provides a description of how God created the world, while religion provides a description of why God created the world. And if that religion is Christianity, the resulting explanation is even stranger than the bizarre factual claims the religion makes.
Why didn't God just create us all as souls in Heaven? Everyone sings happily ever after, end of story.
But no, he has to create us with bodies in a material world and leave us unattended so we can fall prey to temptations we don't understand and get condemned to Hell for it, so he can show how much he loves all of us by saving a tiny, tiny fraction of us from eternal torture.
The factual errors in the bible can be swept under the rug if you're so motivated, but the theology is stupid beyond belief.
If you believe in science AND god then your a bloody hypocrite because the scientific method can never be used on god. I agree with that last part, but I don't see how it makes anyone a hypocrite. There are lots of things that I don't apply the scientific method to.
Its irrational to believe in something there is no proof of. Sounds good on paper, but I'll wager that there's no one on the planet who doesn't believe in things there isn't any proof of. (Even using a very loose notion of 'proof'.)
I've read slashdot for a long time. And the one thing that irritates me the most is the hatred everyone has towards religion and god. Post after post moderated to +5 insightful for saying "it's stupid to believe in god". Would you mind providing links to a dozen or so of those posts?
The bible actually agrees with science on a fair number of things. So does Lord of the Rings. The sun rises and sets. Trees have shadows. When you drop things they fall. Armor provides resistance to swords and arrows.
But that hardly recommends believing in all the rest of the story.
Big Bang - e=mc2 basically a lot of energy can create matter. God is stated repeatedly of having abundant power or energy. Now imagine the beginning of time, empty universe or what have you and God begins creation. He puts his finger to the empty 'canvas' and pours out his energy, and matter 'explodes' from his fingertips outward. (I'm not aware of) anything in the bible that contradicts this. But it damn sure isn't what the bible says.
Given enough of a free hand for interpretation, you can make a religious text "agree" with anything.
Dinosaurs - Everyone loves saying the bible is wrong on the creation account due to the lack of dinosaurs in the bible. Actually, I don't think I've ever head that claim at all.
There's more but I can't think of them atm.. So I'll close with an anecdote: I, OTOH, didn't start pulling my life together until I gave up religion.
Evolution has a large number of concepts though and it infers a Big Bang and a Spark of Life for it to work. Biological evolution does not require the big bang. It merely requires the existence of a system of imperfect self-replicators. Whether that system arose by divine intervention or purely natural processes is irrelevant.
We infer the big bang from a completely different set of observations. We infer that life started somewhere along the way because we know that the universe was once uninhabitable by LAWKI, but LAWKI exists now.
Strictly speaking we don't know whether the big bang and abiogenesis had natural or supernatural causes, but given the track record for claims of supernatural causes, I'm banking on the former.
In the minds of most of the religious public that has a real aversion to evolution of any kind - based on my experience with those people - evolution _specifically_ requires abandoning belief in God. Yes, because they have decided to make "evolution didn't happen" an article of faith for their sects.
Other sects, including many Christian ones, don't have any problem with it.
Religion is exactly as flexible as you want it to be. These people just don't happen to want to be flexible about evolution, even though it brings on a direct collision with reality.
Look at CS Lewis and Josh Mcdowell. Both atheists that converted. Mcdowell's stated goal was to prove the Christian belief a myth, and what happened? He became a believer. What's your point? Do you offer this as evidence that religion is real, or as evidence that they weren't critical thinkers?
What about "conversions" in the other direction? Or from your religion to some other? Have there ever been any? If so, what's the explanation?
Don't be such a fool. You're as bad as the creationists when you posit that science and God are at opposition with each other. They're simply unrelated. Until a religion starts making claims about reality that can be falsified.
Science is not a threat to religion. Until a religion starts making claims about reality that can be falsified.
Smart religious leaders limit their claims to a fantasy world that can't be checked on. Idiots stake their beliefs on claims that were refuted 200 years ago, and try to get their school boards and legislators to trump reality.
Science is based on the idea that all phenomena are explainable I don't think that's correct. We try to explain what we can, but I don't see any guarantees that we will be able to explain everything, even in principle.
Goedel, the halting problem, the uncertainty principle -- we know that there are fundamental limitations to the knowable.
Religion is based on the idea that some things are beyond explanation, and must be accepted as Mysteries by believers. No, religion is based on some arbitrary tradition (continually spiced up by new inventions). The whole bit about "mystery" is just a reaction to calls for supporting evidence, which is utterly lacking.
Either Science will progress to a point where all religious Mysteries can be explained in scientific terms What Mysteries are those?
or a proof will be established that shows why certain things are beyond explanation. What relevance would that have? We already know that certain things are unknowable, but they aren't supports for any religion.
There aren't any baskets! God and science are unrelated. The creationists are wrong about denying science and you're wrong about denying God. It takes a narrow minded person to believe in the basket analogy, whether you're on the God side or the science side. God is not an explanation of the things we don't understand. The idea of God was around before we understood much, and things were chalked up to God when people didn't understand them, but the idea of God is not simply an explanation of nature. Quit perpetuating a useless viewpoint that only serves to cause controversy. You forgot to explain what's wrong with the basket metaphor.
There are at least eight different "versions" of Windows Server 2008:, depending on what features are crippled: This from the company who used to posture as a refuge from the confusion of all the different Linux distros.
Mostly because of this:
we now have a much better picture of the large-scale structure of the universe and we know that galaxies are not uniformly distributed. 'Rather, they are in clusters sprinkled thinly in filaments and "bubble walls" surrounding huge voids hundreds of millions of light-years across,' which we have already known for decades. He seems to think all the cosmologists who have signed on with the dark energy model are unaware of it.
I keep seeing pseudo-scientific authors make the same argument that "there are X universal constants/laws and if any one of them were changed life could not exist, and the odds of that are [some astronomical number] to 1, thus that proves God/Intelligent Design/Xenu/etc."
First fallacy: the idea that the only kind of life that could exist in ANY universe is life AS WE KNOW IT is extremely arrogant and non-scientific. And *exceptionally* stupid when you're using it as an argument that God set up the system. If a god had the powers usually ascribed to him, he could have breathed the breath of life into a gold brick, a cloud of gas, a neutrino, or a black hole, just as easily as into a lump of clay. God doesn't *need* a universe like this one to support life.
Well, in fact, it does make predictions--off the top of my head, it would predict that the probability of the specific mutations required for "irreducibly complex" structures in the aggregate, given the available particular time period and population size, would be extremely low. ID doesn't predict any such thing. In science, predictions are things that are necessarily true if an hypothesis is true. Behe, like the rest of ID's pretend scientists, doesn't deal in hypotheses. He merely claims without support that IC structures cannot evolve, then looks for some real or imaginary IC structure that he can point to and exclaim "evolution can't explain that!", whence he jumps to the conclusion (via non sequitur) that somebody must have done something to "design" it (whatever that means).
If you're in the business of ID apologetics, you should at least find out what its pretend scientists actually say.
Now that the academic scientific orthodoxy has rallied to ensure for now that one disturbing inference, ID, is uniquely excluded FYI, ID excludes itself by not doing any science. No, in fact, "Darwin's Black Box" in itself contains extensive science. This is a verifiable empirical fact by looking at the biochemical causal chains specifically described, like, you know, on the pages. FYI, there's a difference between describing some facts and doing science.
It's simply a assertion of yours based on your preference to exclude the science that is there based on your disagreement with the inference. There aren't any inferences coming out of the ID movement either. There are some non sequiturs posing as inferences, but not any actual inferences.
You just arbitrarily "de-scope" the science, and thus exclude it from your characterization of ID. I'm using the same notion of science that everyone not trying to pass their religon off as science uses.
Sorry, not impressed. I hardly expect anyone who is impressed with ID to be impressed with facts.
The oped peice refers to religious faith as "belief without evidence." I believe this definition to be false. Certainly the characters who wrote in and were described by the Bible would not consider religious faith to be "belief without evidence." Rather they wrote what they considered to be personal evidence You've got a very naive notion of where the bible came from.
Slashdot Mirror
You sound like a creationist who tries to shelter his fantasy against reality by claiming that scientists are just trying to discredit religion so they won't have to go to church.
Why didn't God just create us all as souls in Heaven? Everyone sings happily ever after, end of story.
But no, he has to create us with bodies in a material world and leave us unattended so we can fall prey to temptations we don't understand and get condemned to Hell for it, so he can show how much he loves all of us by saving a tiny, tiny fraction of us from eternal torture.
The factual errors in the bible can be swept under the rug if you're so motivated, but the theology is stupid beyond belief.
But that hardly recommends believing in all the rest of the story. Big Bang - e=mc2 basically a lot of energy can create matter. God is stated repeatedly of having abundant power or energy. Now imagine the beginning of time, empty universe or what have you and God begins creation. He puts his finger to the empty 'canvas' and pours out his energy, and matter 'explodes' from his fingertips outward. (I'm not aware of) anything in the bible that contradicts this. But it damn sure isn't what the bible says.
Given enough of a free hand for interpretation, you can make a religious text "agree" with anything. Dinosaurs - Everyone loves saying the bible is wrong on the creation account due to the lack of dinosaurs in the bible. Actually, I don't think I've ever head that claim at all. There's more but I can't think of them atm.. So I'll close with an anecdote: I, OTOH, didn't start pulling my life together until I gave up religion.
So much for anecdotes...
We infer the big bang from a completely different set of observations. We infer that life started somewhere along the way because we know that the universe was once uninhabitable by LAWKI, but LAWKI exists now.
Strictly speaking we don't know whether the big bang and abiogenesis had natural or supernatural causes, but given the track record for claims of supernatural causes, I'm banking on the former.
Other sects, including many Christian ones, don't have any problem with it.
Religion is exactly as flexible as you want it to be. These people just don't happen to want to be flexible about evolution, even though it brings on a direct collision with reality.
What about "conversions" in the other direction? Or from your religion to some other? Have there ever been any? If so, what's the explanation?
Smart religious leaders limit their claims to a fantasy world that can't be checked on. Idiots stake their beliefs on claims that were refuted 200 years ago, and try to get their school boards and legislators to trump reality.
Goedel, the halting problem, the uncertainty principle -- we know that there are fundamental limitations to the knowable. Religion is based on the idea that some things are beyond explanation, and must be accepted as Mysteries by believers. No, religion is based on some arbitrary tradition (continually spiced up by new inventions). The whole bit about "mystery" is just a reaction to calls for supporting evidence, which is utterly lacking. Either Science will progress to a point where all religious Mysteries can be explained in scientific terms What Mysteries are those? or a proof will be established that shows why certain things are beyond explanation. What relevance would that have? We already know that certain things are unknowable, but they aren't supports for any religion.
What has your god got that 10,000 others don't?
WTF is a "correlation" between the DoD and the game industry?
This guy must have a secretary, because he's obviously too stupid to type his own editorials.
The only news here is that anyone bothers to publish his rants.
Actually they don't want to steal your hat; they just want to make you wear it shiny-side down.
First fallacy: the idea that the only kind of life that could exist in ANY universe is life AS WE KNOW IT is extremely arrogant and non-scientific. And *exceptionally* stupid when you're using it as an argument that God set up the system. If a god had the powers usually ascribed to him, he could have breathed the breath of life into a gold brick, a cloud of gas, a neutrino, or a black hole, just as easily as into a lump of clay. God doesn't *need* a universe like this one to support life.
If you're in the business of ID apologetics, you should at least find out what its pretend scientists actually say.