Mainstream geology pays off. It helps people find oil, coal, minerals, natural gas, water, etc. etc. etc. How come "Flood Geology" doesn't make better predictions about such things if it's really a better, more accurate theory?
Why don't creationists take the $20+ million they spent on the museum, and use it to apply "Flood Geology" to finding valuable mineral deposits and such? They could open a bunch of museums with the profits, and provide solid evidence for their "theory" that would make those 'deluded geologists' take notice.
Funny how they never seem to want to actually try to apply what they say they believe...
Because you don't tip off the enemy how you are cracking their intellegence.
I repeat, "I don't believe that this administration would refrain from leaking such things to improve their profile." These are people who will out CIA operatives to make political points, and leak even questionable intel to make a case for war...
All the recent, hyped 'terrorist captures' have involved standard, traditional law-enforcement work and informants and so forth. Why haven't we had any high-profile captures due to the illegal wiretaps? I don't believe that this administration would refrain from leaking such things to improve their profile. So I have to conclude that they haven't actually produced any significant results at all...
This one for liftoff from Earth (exhaust is not radioactive), and in-system work, and this one for deep-space missions. We can move thousands of tons around with these, cheaply and safely. (Note: neither of these is an Orion type, which is another option.)
I'v got a Macintosh Plus [1Mb]... Seriously, it runs a [small:-] server... offline:
I've got a Mac SE/30... online. Sure, it can't handle a full Slashdotting, but people clicking in via the comments on Slashdot never made it break a sweat.
But if you want l33t, see the Lisa servers. Those guys get the chicks.
Compiling a small program on my dual 2GHz Athlon... 0.6 seconds. Compiling the same program on the SE/30... over seven minutes.:->
So your point is that now you're changing your argument?
I said "a similar 'pinch point'". The cheetahs were just shy of being wiped out. Down to (a minimum of) 5,000 reproducing females is low, but at least an order of magnitude (and possibly two orders) larger than the cheetahs. And the cheetah population was a couple orders of magnitude larger than the supposed human pinch point described in Genesis (eight people total, four reproducing females at most). (The tradition in Islam's a bit better, that there were ~80 people on board, but still everyone's supposedly descended from Noah's three sons.) That's not "similar". I'll grant that there was a pinch point, though.
[Human immunological diversity] has less to do with a difference in the number breeding pairs there were and everything to do with their adapability to the environment.
Okay, then, can you explain in detail how human adaptability to the environment - compared to the cheetah, a similarly-sized mammal - creates genetic diversity in the major histocompatibility complex? I'd be fascinated. It's not like cheetahs have an entirely different immune system, like plants or whatever.
"Let me repeat myself. The universe is probably older than 6,000 years. Not by another 10,000 or 20,000 years, but by several billion years. Now if you want to keep beating your head against this same wall, go right ahead. Just don't expect me to pay any attention."
Interesting that the clearest and most relevant quote you make here was posted after the comment you're responding to. You don't seem to grasp that I understand that you think it's 'unlikely' that the Earth is 6,000 years old - I do get that.
My specific problem is that saying that the "universe is probably older than 6,000 years" strikes me as similar to saying "there probably was a George Washington" or "we probably did send people to the moon in the late 1960's and 1970's" or "the moon probably isn't really made of green cheese" and so forth. Using the word "probably" in such a context is misleading at best.
Perhaps I'm oversensitive thanks to the schmucks I've already linked to, but I've really run out of patience for treating young-Earth creationism as anything but the balderdash it patently is. And if you didn't want a discussion about this stuff, why'd you post an inflammatory comment on a discussion forum?
What *could* have been a worthwhile discussion that would have provided you with a greater understanding of the other side of the argument was preempted by your own position that you already know all the answers.
I figured we'd have a separate thread to deal with the ad-hominem stuff. Feel free to provide a direct quote where I claimed to know "all the answers". So long as we're, y'know, asking for direct quotes and all.
Which, since it must be the case, raises the question of why you're even bothering to argue?
Well, I started by pointing out that "extra-universal hypotheses that explicitly define the extra-universal as undetectable are epistemologically worthless." I did not, for example, say that I thought the universe was "20 billion years [old] and that it's impossible that the universe might be a different age". I did say that it's essentially impossible (as in, so improbable that it's not worth worrying about) that the universe is only 6,000 years old.
You said, "but I didn't say that the Earth was only 6,000 years old", and I pointed out that the odds of that being the case are basically negligible, but you phrased things to imply that that was a reasonable possibility.
I then had to relate it back to the initial point - where theology makes testable predictions, it does indeed fall under the purview of science, and so far not many theogically-inspired theories have withstood scientific scrutiny. You bring up things like Noah's Flood and the Nephilim, and I pointed out that there's oodles of contrary evidence to show they didn't happen the way they're presented in the Bible. Then you admitted that you have problems with unspecified "lacks" in evolution, I pointed out a sliver of the panoply of evidence supporting it, and you responded with the typical creationist-style out-of-context quotes.
And the ad-hominem stuff, like the above. Then there's this gem:
I can only conclude that you have a personal vendetta against theology. Which further raises the question of where such a vendetta comes from? Some would argue that you must have been mistreated as a child.
The fact that I disagree with you, and am specific about where and why, implies not that I might have a point, but that I'm only resisting you for some psychological reason unrelated to the actual facts. Oh, wait, you try to put that in and then backtrack by saying:
I think the answer is more likely the same one that causes young Christians to go barreling into science debates with lame arguments: They think they know more than they really do, and they're eager to "prove it" to the other side. The truth is that they still have a lot to learn.
I disagree with your contentions about the differences and relationships between theology and science, and I've expressed that clearly. I've also pointed out where you've phrased things (IMO) misleadingly, and explained why I think it's misleading. Evolution's one of my hobbies, so I'm happy to point out where people are misunderstanding it (willfully or otherwise). That's not the same as picking a fight. Your original post has been moderated as flamebait, so I'm not exactly alone in my estimations here.
The rooting of the Tree of Life, and the relationships of the major lineages, are controversial.
Oh, and you're claiming I'm the one who only knows "enough to be dangerous"? Sure, the 'roots' of the tree of life are fuzzy, since it's tied in with abiogenesis and happened too long ago to leave useful fossils and there's the gene transfer problem alluded to in your selective quote. But that does not mean that the vast majority of the tree, particularly almost everything after the major lineages diverged, is 'controversial'. A quote you didn't include from that PhysOrg article: "Thus the TOL is great for fossils and museums and dinosaurs and most of visible life, over the last billion years." And gee, that in particular appears to be where you have problems - you know, with "macroevolution" and all.
The dual nested hierarchies of phylogeny and genetics is incredibly strong evidence for evolution, on top of all the fossil evidence, the practical utility of evolutionary algorithms, etc. etc. and etc.
Oh, and comparing human and cheetah genetic diversity points out why the Flood didn't "wipe out most of humanity" in anything like the way the Bible portrays. There's a huge difference between ~100 reproducing individuals for the cheetah and the 5,000 minimum specified in the article. How many of those "reproducing females" were on the Ark?
The truth is that you don't have the first clue, but you're going to argue it anyway rather than accepting the possibility that theology and science are not necessarily at odds.
So when I say, "most likely", I mean that while the universe's age is up for debate, it would take a radical shift in current knowledge to show the universe as 6,000 years old.
Ah, I see. "Most likely" equals "essentially certainly" in your vocabulary. Useful to know. Leaving aside the age of the universe - which is still uncertain but no one doubts it's over 10 billion years - the age of the Earth has been pretty well stable at 4.5-4.7 billion years for a long time. You might want to hip yourself to isochron dating before you suggest that there's any rationally perceptible chance that the age is off by six orders of magnitude.
I made the explicit point that theology must reevaluate itself in the face of knowledge about God's creation.
You might want to gather some more knowledge in that area, then.
The Catholic church already accepts something to that affect, including the whole ball of wax with evolution.
As a critical thinker, I cannot accept evolution as fact as of yet. At least not the theory in its current form. There simply is too much lacking in the models for abiogenesis and macroevolution.
Ah, and here's the real meat - you don't want that to be true. Your use of the term 'macroevolution' is a revealing code word. (I mean, that's like accepting that you can 'microwalk' to the grocery store, but people walking across a continent - that's 'macrowalking' and requires miracles.) Tell me, are you familiar with 'ring species'? If one of the intermediate species went extinct for whatever reason - say Birula's Gull - we'd have at least two separate species. Why can't this happen with populations distributed in time as well as space? What prevents such changes from accumulating indefinitely?
Tell ya what - I'll grant you abiogensis, and say that we don't really know how that could happen. (That's not really true - we do have some decent ideas - but as I've pointed out before, things that were confidently asserted to require magic, like lightning, have turned out to be more mundane. I'm fine with saying, "We dunno, yet.")
But as to evolution after the origin of life - Why is it that the genomes of all life, when compared, form a nested tree where branches and mutations can be traced in detail and with quite rare ambiguity, and by remarkable coincidence that tree matches up essentially perfectly with the independently generated (indeed, generated before genetics) "tree of life" based on physical classification? It didn't have to be that way at all. For example, plants have certain variants of cytochrome C, and animals have different variants, and the pattern of mutations matches up with the proposed evolutionary tree extraordinarily well. But, corn that's been engineered to use the mouse version of cytochrome C grows just fine. The 'creator(s)' didn't have to arrange the genomes so they just happened, to a probabilistic impossibility, to match the phenotypic evolutionary tree. But golly, they do.
Perhaps you have problems with complex new adaptations arising without a conscious designer. Here's an example you can check on your very own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge
up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been
cited, even, as evidence for 'design' - just Google around a bit.)
See, it makes no sense to me why you'd do that considering that I just made a point of the fact that the universe (and probably the Earth) is most likely older than 6,000 years.
Using weasel words like "most likely" when you're referring to a six-orders-of-magnitude difference in 'opinion' is, well, weaseling. And I'm calling you on it.
This is a point where 'theology' is just wrong. Testably so. There are theologies that try to reconcile Genesis with the actual age of the Earth, and there are theologies that just say "God made it look older to test us", and those aren't ruled out (since, by definition, they make no testable predictions contrary to what science actually shows). But the theologies that claim that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that the scientific evidence supports this - those are just flat wrong.
Yup. I think both that author and you are misrepresenting things. There's really only one axiom of real note between religion and science. Science essentially assumes that things are knowable. It acknowledges the unknown, but doesn't accept the 'unknowable in principle'[1]. Religions, on the other hand (and there are more than just those that assume your particular first axiom, "A being exists who is superior to the very universe itself." - how about the polytheistic religions?), assume the supernatural - which is, by definition, beyond human ken and forever inexplicable.
Of course, a whole lotta things that have been confidently advanced as totally inexplicable, and demanding a supernatural explanation, have been discovered to be quite handily explainable. Lightning, reproduction, the apparent design of living things, etc. Time has, so far, not been on the side of the theists, as there are fewer and fewer gaps to wedge the supernatural into.
I already quoted Heinlein once in this topic, but I figure it's too apropos not to do it once more: "One man's 'magic' is another man's 'engineering'. 'Supernatural' is a null word."
What the heck is "flood geology?"
I was pointing out, rather pointedly, that geologists are a lot more than "reasonably certain" that the Earth is older than 6,000 years.
[1] Sure, there are things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but if you actually study QM you find that the reason you can't know a particle's position and velocity to arbitrary accuracy is because it doesn't actually have a position or velocity to arbitrary accuracy.
The truth of the matter is that the scientist is not yet sure of the age (though he's reasonably certain that 6,000 years is a bit shy) and the theologian needs to take another pass at his texts because his domain is not that of science.
You and others are repeating the exact same errors I pointed out.
Um... no. Let me direct your attention to a couple of quotes from my post. For instance:
"But then again, by definition that means it has no practical, detectable effect on our 'subset' - and that's the kind of chin Occam's Razor was made to shave."
I didn't say it was proof that no such being exists, I just paraphrased Laplace with his "I had no need of that hypothesis." Ditto with my saying that (emphasis added) "maybe it's just standard evolution plus game theory.".
To belabor the point, I'm saying that extra-universal hypotheses that explicitly define the extra-universal as undetectable are epistemologically worthless. Of course it's not proof that something extra-universal doesn't exist, but unless they have some practical effect, positing them is pointless.
Conversely, if something extra-universal is posited to actually have an effect on this universe, then we ought to be able to detect it. Maybe it'll be hard, like with neutrinos, but if it has an effect, we should be able to detect it. That's why we gave up on polywater and N-rays - they were supposed to have an effect, but they didn't.
Science is restricted to the laws of the Universe in which we inhabit.
Of course, you're assuming that the "Universe" that we inhabit is a subset of some larger whole, and that it is impossible for us to get any information from the larger superset. I'm not so sure. Our 'subset' used to include just our solar system, and then we figured out the stars weren't just painted on a dome but were actual objects way far away - and the 'subset' then included our galaxy. Then we noticed that some of what we thought were just star clusters were actual galaxies, and our subset got a lot bigger yet.
If the 'superset' has no influence whatsoever on our 'subset', then sure, science can't pick up on it. But then again, by definition that means it has no practical, detectable effect on our 'subset' - and that's the kind of chin Occam's Razor was made to shave.
It seems to me that if man is hardwired with an sense of altruism and a desire to believe in a super-being, there can be no other answer to this question than the existence of a Creator.
It's telling when the DVD commentary focuses almost entirely on the special effects, and only rarely even mentions the acting or the story. Don't get me wrong, I love the movie, my kids love it, I loved the "Tron 2.0" game they made, but... well... Shakespeare it wasn't.
The funny thing was it didn't win an Oscar for special effects that year because the Academy felt they had "cheated" by using computers. (Of course, the computers were so slow they had to plan every shot out in detail because 'rerendering' would have taken too much time. And they communicated the data over the phone... by reading the numbers out loud.) Interesting to see how attitudes have changed.
I'm hunkering down and buying Palm III devices for my stockpile
Don't forget a USB-to-serial converter!:->
For a long, long time I was loving my Handera 330. Palm III form so all the peripherals worked with it, but two card slots (CF and SD) and a hi-res screen. Even a rechargeable battery (with battery life measured in weeks). Amazing what you could do with those things. But then one was stolen and the replacement's screen died, and the next replacement got a cracked screen out of nowhere.
Now I'm using a Treo 650, and I'm actually pretty happy. Fast, color's nice, and because it's a phone my wife can't complain that I carry it with me everywhere. The keyboard works pretty well, too, and I say that as a longtime Graffiti fan. MP3's aren't necessary, no, but they're nice. And my anniversary present was a bluetooth GPS and TomTom software - very slick and fun. If that last H330 hadn't broken I'd still be using it, but I've got no regrets.
Um, actually, the first Palm Pilot had only 128KB of memory. Amazing that they managed to get it to work at all, really.
One key concept that made it work was that the Pilot wasn't really supposed to be a computer in its own right, it was supposed to be an extension, a "tentacle" of your desktop that let you carry data from it elsewhere. Nowadays things are small and powerful enough that you could almost make a handheld your primary computer, but that sure didn't make sense then, and still doesn't quite make sense now. See here.
It wouldn't have been full memory protection and multitasking, but if they'd done something like this they could have had effective multitasking a long time ago. I really can't understand why they didn't do that.
But props to Palm for some things - considering that their first model had 128KB of RAM - yes, 1/8 of 1MB - they had to do some less-than-savory things with their memory management to make it possible to run at all. If they could have gone back in time and made one or two simple changes, the whole system would be dramatically easier to work with. Of course, they might not have been able to ship...
Apparently, God put all those there, meticulously altering their Carbon-14 content in an elaborate ruse, trying to pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
The argument isn't really intended to affect "the world was created last Thursday" types (indeed, they have hermetically sealed themselves off from arguments of any kind). But there are creationists who insist that the science really does support, say, Noah's Flood. I don't really expect to jumpstart their thinking processes (they've sealed themselves off, too - see here) but the argument provides a dramatic illustration of exactly what's wrong with "Flood geology" that anyone 'sitting on the fence' can understand.
Maybe (I think I said this earlier), you would find that running an OS that is designed for the hardware you have instead of the hardware you don't, you'll get application performance on par with the quality of your legacy hardware.
Ah, I see. I suppose it was presumptuous of me to relay my experiences regarding the difference between Vista and XP for gaming stability and performance in a topic titled "Vista vs. XP Game Stability and Performance". I'll try to be more on-topic in the future. Please correct me if I err again.
He's running Vista on hardware that is a couple of years old, and he has the audacity to complain about performance on legacy equipment.
Um, actually, it's a Dell C521 purchased two months ago. And I upgraded the RAM for it, too. Imagine what it would be like with only 512MB...
Here's the system requirements for Aliens vs. Predator 2: "Pentium 3 or Athlon 450 MHz or higher, 128MB RAM or higher, 16MB DirectX 8 compatible 3-D video card, 1.3 GB hard disk space, 4X CD-ROM drive or greater,16 Bit DirectX 8 compatible sound card". This machine should be well above that. And yet, it runs as if it really were at the minimum specs.
To be fair, I only bought it so my wife could have her own machine to run Office on. It performs acceptably for that. But you might want to, y'know, actually read what I posted before you run off your mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't creationists take the $20+ million they spent on the museum, and use it to apply "Flood Geology" to finding valuable mineral deposits and such? They could open a bunch of museums with the profits, and provide solid evidence for their "theory" that would make those 'deluded geologists' take notice.
Funny how they never seem to want to actually try to apply what they say they believe...
I repeat, "I don't believe that this administration would refrain from leaking such things to improve their profile." These are people who will out CIA operatives to make political points, and leak even questionable intel to make a case for war...
All the recent, hyped 'terrorist captures' have involved standard, traditional law-enforcement work and informants and so forth. Why haven't we had any high-profile captures due to the illegal wiretaps? I don't believe that this administration would refrain from leaking such things to improve their profile. So I have to conclude that they haven't actually produced any significant results at all...
This one for liftoff from Earth (exhaust is not radioactive), and in-system work, and this one for deep-space missions. We can move thousands of tons around with these, cheaply and safely. (Note: neither of these is an Orion type, which is another option.)
I've got a Mac SE/30... online. Sure, it can't handle a full Slashdotting, but people clicking in via the comments on Slashdot never made it break a sweat.
But if you want l33t, see the Lisa servers. Those guys get the chicks.
Compiling a small program on my dual 2GHz Athlon... 0.6 seconds. Compiling the same program on the SE/30... over seven minutes. :->
Actually, it's 'whole kit and caboodle'. No biggie.
From your own cite: "Surely a tree is the right model for most multi-cellular animals and plants," Doolittle explained... So, again... how come the genetic and phylogeny trees match up so well?
I said "a similar 'pinch point'". The cheetahs were just shy of being wiped out. Down to (a minimum of) 5,000 reproducing females is low, but at least an order of magnitude (and possibly two orders) larger than the cheetahs. And the cheetah population was a couple orders of magnitude larger than the supposed human pinch point described in Genesis (eight people total, four reproducing females at most). (The tradition in Islam's a bit better, that there were ~80 people on board, but still everyone's supposedly descended from Noah's three sons.) That's not "similar". I'll grant that there was a pinch point, though.
Okay, then, can you explain in detail how human adaptability to the environment - compared to the cheetah, a similarly-sized mammal - creates genetic diversity in the major histocompatibility complex? I'd be fascinated. It's not like cheetahs have an entirely different immune system, like plants or whatever.
Interesting that the clearest and most relevant quote you make here was posted after the comment you're responding to. You don't seem to grasp that I understand that you think it's 'unlikely' that the Earth is 6,000 years old - I do get that.
My specific problem is that saying that the "universe is probably older than 6,000 years" strikes me as similar to saying "there probably was a George Washington" or "we probably did send people to the moon in the late 1960's and 1970's" or "the moon probably isn't really made of green cheese" and so forth. Using the word "probably" in such a context is misleading at best.
Perhaps I'm oversensitive thanks to the schmucks I've already linked to, but I've really run out of patience for treating young-Earth creationism as anything but the balderdash it patently is. And if you didn't want a discussion about this stuff, why'd you post an inflammatory comment on a discussion forum?
I figured we'd have a separate thread to deal with the ad-hominem stuff. Feel free to provide a direct quote where I claimed to know "all the answers". So long as we're, y'know, asking for direct quotes and all.
Well, I started by pointing out that "extra-universal hypotheses that explicitly define the extra-universal as undetectable are epistemologically worthless." I did not, for example, say that I thought the universe was "20 billion years [old] and that it's impossible that the universe might be a different age". I did say that it's essentially impossible (as in, so improbable that it's not worth worrying about) that the universe is only 6,000 years old.
You said, "but I didn't say that the Earth was only 6,000 years old", and I pointed out that the odds of that being the case are basically negligible, but you phrased things to imply that that was a reasonable possibility.
I then had to relate it back to the initial point - where theology makes testable predictions, it does indeed fall under the purview of science, and so far not many theogically-inspired theories have withstood scientific scrutiny. You bring up things like Noah's Flood and the Nephilim, and I pointed out that there's oodles of contrary evidence to show they didn't happen the way they're presented in the Bible. Then you admitted that you have problems with unspecified "lacks" in evolution, I pointed out a sliver of the panoply of evidence supporting it, and you responded with the typical creationist-style out-of-context quotes.
And the ad-hominem stuff, like the above. Then there's this gem:
The fact that I disagree with you, and am specific about where and why, implies not that I might have a point, but that I'm only resisting you for some psychological reason unrelated to the actual facts. Oh, wait, you try to put that in and then backtrack by saying:
I disagree with your contentions about the differences and relationships between theology and science, and I've expressed that clearly. I've also pointed out where you've phrased things (IMO) misleadingly, and explained why I think it's misleading. Evolution's one of my hobbies, so I'm happy to point out where people are misunderstanding it (willfully or otherwise). That's not the same as picking a fight. Your original post has been moderated as flamebait, so I'm not exactly alone in my estimations here.
"[Geologists are] reasonably certain that 6,000 years is a bit shy [of the age of the Earth]". My point, again, is that they are not "reasonably" certain that it's "a bit shy" - they are bet-your-life-sure that the Earth is around one million times older than that.
Oh, and you're claiming I'm the one who only knows "enough to be dangerous"? Sure, the 'roots' of the tree of life are fuzzy, since it's tied in with abiogenesis and happened too long ago to leave useful fossils and there's the gene transfer problem alluded to in your selective quote. But that does not mean that the vast majority of the tree, particularly almost everything after the major lineages diverged, is 'controversial'. A quote you didn't include from that PhysOrg article: "Thus the TOL is great for fossils and museums and dinosaurs and most of visible life, over the last billion years." And gee, that in particular appears to be where you have problems - you know, with "macroevolution" and all.
The dual nested hierarchies of phylogeny and genetics is incredibly strong evidence for evolution, on top of all the fossil evidence, the practical utility of evolutionary algorithms, etc. etc. and etc.
Oh, and comparing human and cheetah genetic diversity points out why the Flood didn't "wipe out most of humanity" in anything like the way the Bible portrays. There's a huge difference between ~100 reproducing individuals for the cheetah and the 5,000 minimum specified in the article. How many of those "reproducing females" were on the Ark?
Gee, as long as we're doing direct quotes, how about one of mine: There are theologies that try to reconcile Genesis with the actual age of the Earth, and there are theologies that just say "God made it look older to test us", and those aren't ruled out (since, by definition, they make no testable predictions contrary to what science actually shows)..
Ah, I see. "Most likely" equals "essentially certainly" in your vocabulary. Useful to know. Leaving aside the age of the universe - which is still uncertain but no one doubts it's over 10 billion years - the age of the Earth has been pretty well stable at 4.5-4.7 billion years for a long time. You might want to hip yourself to isochron dating before you suggest that there's any rationally perceptible chance that the age is off by six orders of magnitude.
You might want to gather some more knowledge in that area, then.
Ah, if only that were true. Sadly not all of 'em do.
Ah, and here's the real meat - you don't want that to be true. Your use of the term 'macroevolution' is a revealing code word. (I mean, that's like accepting that you can 'microwalk' to the grocery store, but people walking across a continent - that's 'macrowalking' and requires miracles.) Tell me, are you familiar with 'ring species'? If one of the intermediate species went extinct for whatever reason - say Birula's Gull - we'd have at least two separate species. Why can't this happen with populations distributed in time as well as space? What prevents such changes from accumulating indefinitely?
Tell ya what - I'll grant you abiogensis, and say that we don't really know how that could happen. (That's not really true - we do have some decent ideas - but as I've pointed out before, things that were confidently asserted to require magic, like lightning, have turned out to be more mundane. I'm fine with saying, "We dunno, yet.")
But as to evolution after the origin of life - Why is it that the genomes of all life, when compared, form a nested tree where branches and mutations can be traced in detail and with quite rare ambiguity, and by remarkable coincidence that tree matches up essentially perfectly with the independently generated (indeed, generated before genetics) "tree of life" based on physical classification? It didn't have to be that way at all. For example, plants have certain variants of cytochrome C, and animals have different variants, and the pattern of mutations matches up with the proposed evolutionary tree extraordinarily well. But, corn that's been engineered to use the mouse version of cytochrome C grows just fine. The 'creator(s)' didn't have to arrange the genomes so they just happened, to a probabilistic impossibility, to match the phenotypic evolutionary tree. But golly, they do.
Perhaps you have problems with complex new adaptations arising without a conscious designer. Here's an example you can check on your very own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as evidence for 'design' - just Google around a bit.)
It
Using weasel words like "most likely" when you're referring to a six-orders-of-magnitude difference in 'opinion' is, well, weaseling. And I'm calling you on it.
This is a point where 'theology' is just wrong. Testably so. There are theologies that try to reconcile Genesis with the actual age of the Earth, and there are theologies that just say "God made it look older to test us", and those aren't ruled out (since, by definition, they make no testable predictions contrary to what science actually shows). But the theologies that claim that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that the scientific evidence supports this - those are just flat wrong.
Yup. I think both that author and you are misrepresenting things. There's really only one axiom of real note between religion and science. Science essentially assumes that things are knowable. It acknowledges the unknown, but doesn't accept the 'unknowable in principle'[1]. Religions, on the other hand (and there are more than just those that assume your particular first axiom, "A being exists who is superior to the very universe itself." - how about the polytheistic religions?), assume the supernatural - which is, by definition, beyond human ken and forever inexplicable.
Of course, a whole lotta things that have been confidently advanced as totally inexplicable, and demanding a supernatural explanation, have been discovered to be quite handily explainable. Lightning, reproduction, the apparent design of living things, etc. Time has, so far, not been on the side of the theists, as there are fewer and fewer gaps to wedge the supernatural into.
I already quoted Heinlein once in this topic, but I figure it's too apropos not to do it once more: "One man's 'magic' is another man's 'engineering'. 'Supernatural' is a null word."
I was pointing out, rather pointedly, that geologists are a lot more than "reasonably certain" that the Earth is older than 6,000 years.
[1] Sure, there are things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but if you actually study QM you find that the reason you can't know a particle's position and velocity to arbitrary accuracy is because it doesn't actually have a position or velocity to arbitrary accuracy.
Gee, I have a link that I can reference, too.
Um... no. Let me direct your attention to a couple of quotes from my post. For instance: "But then again, by definition that means it has no practical, detectable effect on our 'subset' - and that's the kind of chin Occam's Razor was made to shave."
I didn't say it was proof that no such being exists, I just paraphrased Laplace with his "I had no need of that hypothesis." Ditto with my saying that (emphasis added) "maybe it's just standard evolution plus game theory.".
To belabor the point, I'm saying that extra-universal hypotheses that explicitly define the extra-universal as undetectable are epistemologically worthless. Of course it's not proof that something extra-universal doesn't exist, but unless they have some practical effect, positing them is pointless.
Conversely, if something extra-universal is posited to actually have an effect on this universe, then we ought to be able to detect it. Maybe it'll be hard, like with neutrinos, but if it has an effect, we should be able to detect it. That's why we gave up on polywater and N-rays - they were supposed to have an effect, but they didn't.
"Generosity is inborn. Altruism is a learned perversion." - Robert Heinlein, quite a few years before this study came out.
Of course, you're assuming that the "Universe" that we inhabit is a subset of some larger whole, and that it is impossible for us to get any information from the larger superset. I'm not so sure. Our 'subset' used to include just our solar system, and then we figured out the stars weren't just painted on a dome but were actual objects way far away - and the 'subset' then included our galaxy. Then we noticed that some of what we thought were just star clusters were actual galaxies, and our subset got a lot bigger yet.
If the 'superset' has no influence whatsoever on our 'subset', then sure, science can't pick up on it. But then again, by definition that means it has no practical, detectable effect on our 'subset' - and that's the kind of chin Occam's Razor was made to shave.
Or maybe it's just standard evolution plus game theory.
The funny thing was it didn't win an Oscar for special effects that year because the Academy felt they had "cheated" by using computers. (Of course, the computers were so slow they had to plan every shot out in detail because 'rerendering' would have taken too much time. And they communicated the data over the phone... by reading the numbers out loud.) Interesting to see how attitudes have changed.
Don't forget a USB-to-serial converter! :->
For a long, long time I was loving my Handera 330. Palm III form so all the peripherals worked with it, but two card slots (CF and SD) and a hi-res screen. Even a rechargeable battery (with battery life measured in weeks). Amazing what you could do with those things. But then one was stolen and the replacement's screen died, and the next replacement got a cracked screen out of nowhere.
Now I'm using a Treo 650, and I'm actually pretty happy. Fast, color's nice, and because it's a phone my wife can't complain that I carry it with me everywhere. The keyboard works pretty well, too, and I say that as a longtime Graffiti fan. MP3's aren't necessary, no, but they're nice. And my anniversary present was a bluetooth GPS and TomTom software - very slick and fun. If that last H330 hadn't broken I'd still be using it, but I've got no regrets.
One key concept that made it work was that the Pilot wasn't really supposed to be a computer in its own right, it was supposed to be an extension, a "tentacle" of your desktop that let you carry data from it elsewhere. Nowadays things are small and powerful enough that you could almost make a handheld your primary computer, but that sure didn't make sense then, and still doesn't quite make sense now. See here.
But props to Palm for some things - considering that their first model had 128KB of RAM - yes, 1/8 of 1MB - they had to do some less-than-savory things with their memory management to make it possible to run at all. If they could have gone back in time and made one or two simple changes, the whole system would be dramatically easier to work with. Of course, they might not have been able to ship...
The argument isn't really intended to affect "the world was created last Thursday" types (indeed, they have hermetically sealed themselves off from arguments of any kind). But there are creationists who insist that the science really does support, say, Noah's Flood. I don't really expect to jumpstart their thinking processes (they've sealed themselves off, too - see here) but the argument provides a dramatic illustration of exactly what's wrong with "Flood geology" that anyone 'sitting on the fence' can understand.
Put your money where your mouth is.
Ah, I see. I suppose it was presumptuous of me to relay my experiences regarding the difference between Vista and XP for gaming stability and performance in a topic titled "Vista vs. XP Game Stability and Performance". I'll try to be more on-topic in the future. Please correct me if I err again.
I used Strip for a while, and it's good, but I switched to Keyring because it has a built-in conduit for Jpilot.
Um, actually, it's a Dell C521 purchased two months ago. And I upgraded the RAM for it, too. Imagine what it would be like with only 512MB...
Here's the system requirements for Aliens vs. Predator 2: "Pentium 3 or Athlon 450 MHz or higher, 128MB RAM or higher, 16MB DirectX 8 compatible 3-D video card, 1.3 GB hard disk space, 4X CD-ROM drive or greater,16 Bit DirectX 8 compatible sound card". This machine should be well above that. And yet, it runs as if it really were at the minimum specs.
To be fair, I only bought it so my wife could have her own machine to run Office on. It performs acceptably for that. But you might want to, y'know, actually read what I posted before you run off your mouth.