"...science can't escape the fact that ultimately it is merely a *description* of the universe it doesn't tell us the true nature of the universe or even what 'nature' is."
"All natural laws are merely descriptions of..."
You are missing a key concept here. Scientific theories are more than descriptions, they collectively form a 'model' of the observable world. As such, they may be used as predictive tools, which is not true of religious dogma. Given a certain set of conditions, outcome X will occur.
Religion, on the other hand, is descriptive of past events, and assigns causal relationships where there aren't any. Think of miracles - they can't be predicted, there's no evidence finding for a supernatural cause, and given the same set of initial conditions, the miracle can't be reproduced.
So evolution, natural selection, species environmental dynamics, etc. as a body of knowledge can be used to predict to a certain extent. Not exactly --what-- will occur, but that change in species characteristics will occur (speciation, see here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html) due to selection processes over time that have as their genesis factors such as isolation, mutation, interbreeding, etc.
Science is an axiomatic, rigorous, and predictive model, whereas religion is interpretation of history to fit a non-rigorous faith-based viewpoint.
Yup, me too. To the tune of $1.50. It didn't seem right, but hardly worth complaining about, or so I thought at the time. A nice little scam for ebay, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right.
"...science can't escape the fact that ultimately it is merely a *description* of the universe it doesn't tell us the true nature of the universe or even what 'nature' is."
..."
"All natural laws are merely descriptions of
You are missing a key concept here. Scientific theories are more than descriptions, they collectively form a 'model' of the observable world. As such, they may be used as predictive tools, which is not true of religious dogma. Given a certain set of conditions, outcome X will occur.
Religion, on the other hand, is descriptive of past events, and assigns causal relationships where there aren't any. Think of miracles - they can't be predicted, there's no evidence finding for a supernatural cause, and given the same set of initial conditions, the miracle can't be reproduced.
So evolution, natural selection, species environmental dynamics, etc. as a body of knowledge can be used to predict to a certain extent. Not exactly --what-- will occur, but that change in species characteristics will occur (speciation, see here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html) due to selection processes over time that have as their genesis factors such as isolation, mutation, interbreeding, etc.
Science is an axiomatic, rigorous, and predictive model, whereas religion is interpretation of history to fit a non-rigorous faith-based viewpoint.
Consider the volume of transactions done by ebay each day, my friend, and this is no small matter.
From ebay's SEC 10-Q here: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/040804/ebay10-q.html
they're hitting > $700M per quarter mid-2004, with growth rate of 7-17% per quarter.
All that growth is driven by increasing transaction volume. And rest assured that ebay knows precisely what's going on here.
Yup, me too. To the tune of $1.50. It didn't seem right, but hardly worth complaining about, or so I thought at the time. A nice little scam for ebay, though.
When's the last time you meta-complained ?