I'll let you overlay the graphs yourself, because if I send you to the place where someone has done the work for you, you will say "Oh, those graphs were made by liberals as a way of disregarding the data. If you do it yourself, you won't be able to claim that it's invalid because of the ideology of the economist who put them together. But try it. It works as I describe.
LOL, you must not have looked at my other posts. I'd be included in that liberal group.
I am very familiar with Christian theology. The only Christian sects which believes in so-called "saints" as a special class of believers is Roman Catholic and Orthodox.
I misspoke. I meant that most Christians have those beliefs, not necessarily the number denominations. Even assuming that the saint idea doesn't exist in anything aside from Catholics and Orthodox, they outnumber the rest quite handily. See here.
All other Christian groups hold with biblical teaching that all believers are saints. According to traditional Christian theology, when one dies one goes either to Heaven or Hell and the soul/spirit does not remain in contact with this world.
You'd better get to editing your holy book, then. And while you are at it, edit out the references from early Church Fathers about ghosts and such, too. A fictional setting should at least be self-consistent if it to be at all believable.
I have seen studies (although I no longer have links to them) that said that self-professed atheists were more likely to believe in ghosts than self-professed Christians. This made sense to me since the concept of ghosts is contrary to Christian theology.
Apparently you are not overly familiar with Christian theology. Most Christian sects believe in the ability of various human spirits to materialize before the living, especially in the area of so-called "saints." In addition, ghosts are referenced in their holy books. Are you not aware of the story of Saul and Sammuel? Or that the Jesus character affirms the basic characteristics of ghosts in the gospel of Luke?
Atheism is a lack of a belief in a deity. While it is likely strongly correlated with a rejection of all supernatural entities or events, I'm sure there are some self described atheists out there who accept whacky ideas like that. But to think that they are statistically more likely to believe in ghosts? I'm sure you would have to pull a "no true scotsman" and heavily restrict your definition of Christian to make that fly.
If you don't tech them creationism exists, then you are making them ignorant. You are part of the problem. I'm sure that a good teacher (optimistic, I know) will have no trouble showing why evolution is more correct.
Well, since you think that not teaching them groundless assertions, let's toss a few more in there. Let's make time to teach all of the different creation myths that humanity has thought up. After all, you wouldn't want to leave them ignorant. What's that? There's not enough time to explain and debunk every wild tale of creation that we've thought up? Why, then we had better stick to facts, and not bother with teaching unsubstantiated mythology in a science class.
Truth is an absolute. Science is not about finding the truth, thats the domain of philosophy and religion.
Philosophy is a lot broader than "truth." And religion is quite literally the opposite of searching for truth.
Are you so starved of religion that you have to insert concepts like Truth into science?
Are you so embedded in nonsense that you see religion as having anything to do with truth?
Please keep your religion out of my science.
Yeah, back at ya.
Sorry buddy but science is about making observations, making theories to explain your observations, then make more observations and revising (or sometimes discarding) your theories as necessary.
Good so far...
This is not Truth.
No, it is the closest approximation of the truth that we have. Didn't I already pound this point into the ground, or are you just having trouble reading?
Truth is something that is absolute, it cannot be revised.
See that? That's a religious statement. It has nothing to do with the ongoing work of science.
I am human. That is a Truth.
That is part of the truth, yes. I'm glad you grasped some of the obvious.
If you try to put more meaning into science than what it is then what you're doing is you're trying to make science into a religion. Which personally I find disturbing.
And when you ignore the point of science in order to support your vague, Idealistic claims about "Truth," then what you are doing is trying to make religion into a science. Which I personally find both disturbing and irrational.
So you've jammed Truth into science, what's next, good and evil?
Sure. I derive my ethics and morals from empirical data. What, do you simply take some fairy tales and declare that they are "Truth" and therefore unassailable? How stupid is that?
Sin? Souls? Don't get me wrong, its good to think about these things, but just remember that when you do you aren't thinking about science, you're thinking about philosophy and religion.
No, sin and souls have nothing to do with science. They are religious beliefs with absolutely no grounding in empirical evidence, and thus are just interesting to those purveyors of bullshit who find it appealing.
We don't really. We have a tiny percentage of some species that happened to be in the right place at the right time, which would itself be only a tiny percentage of all species which ever existed. Funerary rites would most certainly interfere with fossilisation, and if you wouldn't even want to credit them with that, you can at least envision that they would have an orderly process to dispose of the remains of their dead and not just leave them where they drop.
The aliens of Moses' time had a practice of shooting their dead into the sun. That's why you won't find their skeletons intermingled with human skeletons.
No, I think you don't. Take a look at these: http://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people/videos/#air-force-one About the only thing that might remain would be stores of gold, and even those could come a cropper or be rendered indistinguishable as artifacts, assuming you had the billion to one good fortune of digging hundreds of meters down in the right spot.
Yes, the same with the aliens. Their technology is designed to degrade quickly upon the signal from the mothership to leave. That's why you won't find stable elements surviving this long in the weather, or even unstable elements surviving in accidental perfect conditions.
The underlying assumption that we know all there is to know about everything? Bottom line is, we know very little about anything.
Yes, the aliens were here to teach us all of the things we didn't already know. Why don't those teachings persist? Well, it turns out that there was a undefined catastrophe which caused them to leave, and their abort signal took care of the rest.
And we're off. The extreme example I used was intended to prove a point about the use of imagination in the scientific method and the way that the dogmatic herd thinking which is becoming prevalent runs the risk of damaging creativity in science. I often find this in engineers particularly who are labouring under the mistaken belief that they are scientists. Rigid and conservative thinking is a benefit in engineering, in science it is a detriment.
What? You are not immediately seeing the wisdom of alien Moses? How rigid and dogmatic of you not to see the brilliant insight I am bringing to archeology!
The scorn which is being heaped upon even admitting the possibility that such a killing evolutionary advantage as intelligence might have previously appeared before mankind is evidence of a problem. I don't expect you to solve the problem, just pointing out that it exists.
You don't get it at all. Is it in the realm of possibility? Maybe. Is there any evidence for it? No. So, there is no reason to give it any more credit than my postulation of an alien Moses. Do you accept my theory of alien Moses? Granted, I'm not bringing a single piece of evidence to the table in support of it, but I can defend my theory every bit as well as yours. What's the difference?
I dispute your point by asking what branch of philosophy is evidence driven.
Empiricism, for one. But you are correct. It is offtopic, and I apologize for the diversion.
No, science makes certain key assumptions. Without the axioms of causality and consistency (of the rules of science), there is no scientific method, no validating experiments, etc. Science may revisit its results, and refine its methodology to isolate problems/rectify misconceptions. But it can never revisit certain axioms.
In as much as it is founded upon observation, you are correct. But to say that it cannot revisit those axioms is absurd. If they prove unreliable, they will be revisited and refined. Of course, they have been proven reliable over and over again, so your appeal to a hypothetical future state is unconvincing in the extreme.
Right. Science accomplished things. Science is a good tool. Science is not able to find Truth. It needs to recognize the distinction. Because, frankly, there have been plenty of tools that worked but had no Truth.
Science is about the pursuit of truth. It is an accumulation of the best approximation of the truth that we are able to discover. And, frankly, no, if a tool worked, then it had some modicum of "truth," no matter how much untruth was mixed in. Ptolemy's work was an approximation of "the truth." Copernicus' work was a better approximation. There are no claims to absolute proof, and of course, if it turns out that we are all brains in jars, then all bets are off. But there is no reason to suspect that, and no reason to equate groundless fantasy with empirically derived proof.
I'm relying on the idea that such a group probably wouldn't dump their dead into tar pits as a general rule.
No other species relied on that, and we have their remains to poke at.
That's exactly right, you wouldn't recognise carved stone after its been ground to rubble under tens of millions of years of geology. I don't think you really understand what happens over geological time scales.
I think I do. I'm not sure that you are following the scope of the disappearing act that you postulate, again, on no evidence whatsoever.
I think you might be underestimating the amount of extinction events there actually were. Here are more than twenty that we know of...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
The number of extinctions changes what in my argument?
And that was the point flying right by you.
Here, let me make one last attempt to garner your understanding: Moses was an alien. Can you disprove it? After all, an alien capable of making the trip would also be capable of perfect deception. I could spend the next year giving you ad hoc reasoning as to why your objections don't mean anything. But I just pulled it out of my ass. It's a completely unfounded assertion. But I could defend it in exactly the same way you are defending your statements. The point is that without a shred of empirical evidence to base your claim on, you, too, are just talking out of your ass. And that, not some dogmatism, is what makes it nothing more than an amusing story.
I love the "power rush" I get from forums, especially Slashdot. Where else can you send hundreds of people into a rage with one post? Since I can't afford a trip to Europe this year I'll have to settle for whatever pleasure I get here...(sigh).
Hold up. Philosophy does this, and it practically epitomizes rationality.
No, some branches of philosophy do this. Certainly not all.
Science cannot prove it's own validity... we assume that the scientific method works, but there's a chance that tomorrow we'll wake up and find that causality was just a coincidence.
Certainly, you can embrace that level of Cartesian doubt. All you've done is make everything provisional. Guess what? That's the way science already treats knowledge. That's not the issue.
What it isn't, is Truth.
No, it is the best approximation of "truth" that we have, or have ever had. We have reasons for believing in the universe as revealed by science. We have none for fairy tales, thus there is no grounds for teaching them to children as science.
What it doesn't do is in any way disprove Adam and Eve, just means that the universe would have to have been created as though it were billions of years old.
Certainly, when you have regressed to the point of equating empirically derived proof with antique mythology, anything goes.
That said, Truth doesn't belong in a science class. Science is useful and needs to be learned. But it needs to get over itself.
Of course it does. I mean, it has only been the most wildly successful method for understanding the universe and bettering the human condition. There's no reason to hold it superior to bankrupt theologies which have nothing but drag humanity down and made us grovel to phantoms in the night./sarcasm
Ask yourself this - how much of the biodiversity of the ancient world have we actually recovered in the fossil record? One percent? One percent of one percent? It takes a pretty specialised set of conditions to create fossils, and it would suprise me not at all to find that funerary rites are not conducive to those.
So, you are now relying on imagined funeral rites to explain the lack of skeletal evidence from a civilization of which you have no other evidence either?
As for the rest, what materials do you imagine would survive? Anything from say ten million years in the past would be indistinguishable from the surrounding strata.
So, you wouldn't recognize carved stone? Or metal? No one in your hypothetical civilization cut a gem, or built a massive city? No subways? No basements? No plastics? No analogues to Cheyenne Mountain? We can somehow find stone tools from millions of years ago, but a whole advanced civilization somehow evaporated?
And a measureable impact - there were many extinction events of various levels in the history of the earth, and by no means are all or even the majority of them satisfactorarily explained. I would add to that the note that we are right now in the midst of a massive reduction in biodiversity due to our own advanced civilisation.
So, let me follow your logic. We have some extinctions which are clearly due to outside events. We have some that are not yet understood. We are causing one ourselves right now. Therefore, it's plausible that an advanced civilization of which there isn't the slightest shred of evidence can be plugged in as a cause.
I don't expect anyone to take that hypothesis seriously.
Done.
I do expect people to entertain the possibility without pouring scorn left right and centre.
Bring something other than wild speculation and ad hoc reasoning to the table, and people will likely find it a lot more worthy of discussion. Until then, it's an amusing story, but nothing else.
How many Atheists think the theory of evolution is bunk?
Sadly, I've met a few. Atheist does not imply anything aside from a lack of theistic beliefs. That doesn't mean that there are not kooks out there who don't believe in a god yet harbor all sorts of other weird beliefs.
Yes its all based on empirical evidence, but it is an origin story just the same as Adam and Eve is an origin story.
And there is the difference. We don't believe it for any other reason. If you accord groundless assertions the same intellectual weight as empirical evidence, just shut down education, science and technology, because you've already given up on being rational.
If you believe in your heart that the theory of evolution is true, thats fine. But don't argue from your belief, because if you do you've already lost. Beliefs should not be taught in school. Don't say that Christians are stupid, because they aren't. They just see something that atheists have, but something all atheists deny: Faith.
Yes, by all means, let's dilute the word faith to include empirical truth. And let's then remove all faith from school. What's that? We just eliminated the entire curriculum? Huh, I guess that equating faith and empirical evidence is a self-defeating work of nonsense.
People that claim that living cells somehow came to be out of a chemical soup don't know much about science. The concept of abiogenesis (life from non-living matter) has NEVER been shown to be possible, even in a laboratory situation,
Look around you. Do you see living things? In the beginning of the universe, those living things did not exist. Therefore, at some point, abiogenesis occurred. I know, I know, you believe in a story with disembodied ghosts, talking snakes, rib women, dirt men, flaming swords, magical trees and spirit-fathered giants instead of relying on actual data. Good for you. Have a cookie in the corner while grown-ups discuss reality.
It is so statistically improbable that that it staggers the imagination that anyone can claim to even consider it part of science.
Ah, yes, the old "tornado in a junkyard" argument. I hadn't seen someone trot that out in a while. It's cute, going back to the golden oldies like that. How's about you go and try(and I realize that this will be very hard) to get a grasp of actual evolutionary theory? Maybe then you will might grasp how non-random selection processes turn random input into non-random output.
It has NOT impeded the progress of science to have the explanation for the existence of all the flora and fauna on Earth undetermined by science.
The whole point of science is to further explore the universe in a systematic manner. Declaring one bit off-limits because your ancient holy book is wrong is not the way to understand anything. Except the depths of human delusion.
It comes down to the same issue every time, which is whether there is a God or not.
Wow, it's a good thing you are here to speak for the majority of religious people, Christians included, who have no problem reconciling their faith with the empirical evidence.
Evolution is a pathetic attempt to counter the idea that there must be some intelligent design behind the universe. Science is science until we get to the theory of evolution where the religious belief, and claiming no religion IS a religious belief, of the person gets revealed.
No, science is science until we get to the point of religious morons such as yourself getting their theological panties in a wad because their favorite mythologies are disproved by evidence and then trying to get society to support them in their fact-free delusions.
Why are trying to "defeat" creationism? Why can't we just put the data and findings out there, and let people make their own decisions?
Presenting the empirical evidence(evolution) creates friction with the religious contingent who wish to have their creation myths taught as facts(creationism). The problem is precisely that some people don't want the data and findings to be "out there."
As Thomas Jefferson said, "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." People are always going to be ignorant... it's not the task of the "enlightened" to make them heel.
Uh, we are talking about schools. In case you missed it, schools are places where we send people to cure them of ignorance. Creationists are attempting to impede this goal.
The GP is not endorsing creationism, just shying away from the argument with its proponents. This may sound like a cop out to anyone not familiar with fundamentalists in the US. It is kind of a cop out, but not everyone wants to fight tooth and nail over high school curriculum, even though we'd be better off if someone did.
I guess we do cave too much to the fundie fringe, but just try arguing with those people. Give it a try, face-to-face with these folks and you'll see what I mean -- arguing with them on the internet is only a sample.
I do, man. Yes, they are over-the-top blowhards sometimes, but we can't afford to let them overrun actual education in this country. Yes, that means that we will get into stupid pissing matches with idiots. That's the price we pay for protecting society from the barbarians.
You still aren't grasping the basic facts of the issue here - teaching evolution, no matter how correct or factual it is, can still get teachers into a lot of shit. Why should they be forced to take that shit for you?
So, biology teachers should ignore the central unifying facts of biology to avoid trouble? Let's take that a step further. Let's not teach about the Civil War because it gets people upset. Let's not teach about the Holocaust in case Johnny's daddy is a Holocaust denier. Let's not teach about slavery in the south. Let's not teach about the history of the Native Americans. Let's not teach about the Cold War, or the Protestant Reformation, etc.
No matter what you are teaching, it will likely upset some wanker. The teacher's job is to teach their subject. The administration should be running interference for them if they are catching flak while adhering to scholastic standards. If we back down from this, then we might as well throw in the towel right now on education in this country, because all you are advocating is pandering to the local prejudices.
You don't make teachers teach about abortion, so why make them teach other difficult subjects?
If there is a class that touches on abortion(say, US History or Sex Ed.), then, yes, they should be teaching it. If my high school aged kid got out of those classes without a mention of abortion, it would be a travesty.
Please never have that conversation, it only hurts. There are far better ways t deal with it and a confrontational manner will only have them dig their heels into the ground. At that age, it could very well be the last opportunity for those people to get it right.
There are far better answers, from 'That's not what evolution says' to 'That's not where the science leads us.'
It's doubtful that either response will help. Until the kid is mature enough to be able to break with what he is being hammered with at home and in church, you won't budge them. And if they were that mature, you wouldn't have had that conversation to begin with. The best you can do is tell them that they will learn and be tested on evolution, regardless of whether they accept it, and then try to impart some critical thinking skills as you present the material.
On the one hand, the argument is perfectly factual that even a civilisation as advanced as our own would be completely erased in a matter of a few million years, even space based assets would either degrade into the atmosphere or fly off entirely.
No, it wouldn't. Biological matter can survive millions of years, let alone all of the artificial materials that such a civilization would have generated. And where in the world's history did this global civilization appear, without leaving anything behind or making a measurable impact on the environment of their time? How is it that we can find trilobites, ammonites, worm impressions, dinosaur skeletons and even the impressions of feathers dating back millions of years, but not one scrap of evidence of an advanced civilization?
Once people start dismissing things out of hand, admittedly things which are on the further edge of possibility, while nonetheless remaining possible, you've started to walk down a dangerous road of mental orthodoxy, which would be abhorrent to outside thinkers like Einstein.
The rejection of wild stories which do not match up with any known evidence is not evidence of "mental orthodoxy." It's evidence of a healthy regard for proof. Conjecture about ancient civilizations all you like. No one will stop you. But don't expect anyone to actually take you seriously until you pony of data.
How is it considerably more difficult? The same class of arguments apply in both cases. The same class of evidence is required, whether you are referring to Set or Yahweh. Arguing about particular tenets is interesting, but not the root of my arguments, though it may appear that way when the majority of arguments I get engage in are with Christians.
See that's the whole thing. He came back from the dead
Unproven assertion.
and fulfilled numerous prophesies told about the coming savior.
Unproven assertions, in addition to the fact that the writers of the later books were aware of the prophesies of the earlier books and thus were able to write their stories to match.
But go ahead and not believe and have fun.
Thanks! I am having more fun now!
No one is forcing you to accept that.
You are correct. I happen to live in a country with freedom of religion, and my social stature is such that I do not have to maintain a religious facade in public.
You get to choose what you believe and have faith in.
Wrong. I can only believe in what I think is true. When I saw how full of shit religion was in general and Christianity in particular, I no longer had the option of believing in it. I could fake it, yes, but I am not inclined to living a lie.
You get to put your faith in believing this material universe is all there was and all there ever will be, that all of this is random chance. That only things I can test empirically and only with current technology is all there is. And it's all just meaningless. You go on and believe that, but I pray you don't.
As opposed to hoping that some Bronze Age sheep herders spoke to a personified deity and got the scoop? No, you can keep your silly fairy tales.
Whatever your opinion on religion as a whole, the idea of taking doctrine from other living people makes Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholics both seem to me to be the same kind of deal.
And yet, taking it from dead people is somehow more sensible?
You may consider me a fool for believing the Bible, and that's fine, but I have read it myself, and I do interpret it for myself-- and I believe that's the most important two things possible for separating legitimate belief systems from gigantic cults.
I've read it, too. There is nothing to differentiate it from the rest of Bronze age mythology.
You may say Christianity and Catholicism are the same, but as a protestant, I would very much disagree with that idea.
No, I interpreted the grandparent as saying that Catholics weren't Christian, which is a load of crap. Obviously there are different branches of Christianity with different interpretations of different documents, but they are all in the same family tree, and very closely related to Islam and Judaism as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll let you overlay the graphs yourself, because if I send you to the place where someone has done the work for you, you will say "Oh, those graphs were made by liberals as a way of disregarding the data. If you do it yourself, you won't be able to claim that it's invalid because of the ideology of the economist who put them together. But try it. It works as I describe.
LOL, you must not have looked at my other posts. I'd be included in that liberal group.
Do you have a source for such a graph? Not being a dick here, I'd like to see it.
Nicely done! I haven't seen that anus in forever!
I am very familiar with Christian theology. The only Christian sects which believes in so-called "saints" as a special class of believers is Roman Catholic and Orthodox.
I misspoke. I meant that most Christians have those beliefs, not necessarily the number denominations. Even assuming that the saint idea doesn't exist in anything aside from Catholics and Orthodox, they outnumber the rest quite handily. See here.
All other Christian groups hold with biblical teaching that all believers are saints. According to traditional Christian theology, when one dies one goes either to Heaven or Hell and the soul/spirit does not remain in contact with this world.
You'd better get to editing your holy book, then. And while you are at it, edit out the references from early Church Fathers about ghosts and such, too. A fictional setting should at least be self-consistent if it to be at all believable.
I have seen studies (although I no longer have links to them) that said that self-professed atheists were more likely to believe in ghosts than self-professed Christians. This made sense to me since the concept of ghosts is contrary to Christian theology.
Apparently you are not overly familiar with Christian theology. Most Christian sects believe in the ability of various human spirits to materialize before the living, especially in the area of so-called "saints." In addition, ghosts are referenced in their holy books. Are you not aware of the story of Saul and Sammuel? Or that the Jesus character affirms the basic characteristics of ghosts in the gospel of Luke?
Atheism is a lack of a belief in a deity. While it is likely strongly correlated with a rejection of all supernatural entities or events, I'm sure there are some self described atheists out there who accept whacky ideas like that. But to think that they are statistically more likely to believe in ghosts? I'm sure you would have to pull a "no true scotsman" and heavily restrict your definition of Christian to make that fly.
If you don't tech them creationism exists, then you are making them ignorant. You are part of the problem. I'm sure that a good teacher (optimistic, I know) will have no trouble showing why evolution is more correct.
Well, since you think that not teaching them groundless assertions, let's toss a few more in there. Let's make time to teach all of the different creation myths that humanity has thought up. After all, you wouldn't want to leave them ignorant. What's that? There's not enough time to explain and debunk every wild tale of creation that we've thought up? Why, then we had better stick to facts, and not bother with teaching unsubstantiated mythology in a science class.
Truth is an absolute. Science is not about finding the truth, thats the domain of philosophy and religion.
Philosophy is a lot broader than "truth." And religion is quite literally the opposite of searching for truth.
Are you so starved of religion that you have to insert concepts like Truth into science?
Are you so embedded in nonsense that you see religion as having anything to do with truth?
Please keep your religion out of my science.
Yeah, back at ya.
Sorry buddy but science is about making observations, making theories to explain your observations, then make more observations and revising (or sometimes discarding) your theories as necessary.
Good so far...
This is not Truth.
No, it is the closest approximation of the truth that we have. Didn't I already pound this point into the ground, or are you just having trouble reading?
Truth is something that is absolute, it cannot be revised.
See that? That's a religious statement. It has nothing to do with the ongoing work of science.
I am human. That is a Truth.
That is part of the truth, yes. I'm glad you grasped some of the obvious.
If you try to put more meaning into science than what it is then what you're doing is you're trying to make science into a religion. Which personally I find disturbing.
And when you ignore the point of science in order to support your vague, Idealistic claims about "Truth," then what you are doing is trying to make religion into a science. Which I personally find both disturbing and irrational.
So you've jammed Truth into science, what's next, good and evil?
Sure. I derive my ethics and morals from empirical data. What, do you simply take some fairy tales and declare that they are "Truth" and therefore unassailable? How stupid is that?
Sin? Souls? Don't get me wrong, its good to think about these things, but just remember that when you do you aren't thinking about science, you're thinking about philosophy and religion.
No, sin and souls have nothing to do with science. They are religious beliefs with absolutely no grounding in empirical evidence, and thus are just interesting to those purveyors of bullshit who find it appealing.
We don't really. We have a tiny percentage of some species that happened to be in the right place at the right time, which would itself be only a tiny percentage of all species which ever existed. Funerary rites would most certainly interfere with fossilisation, and if you wouldn't even want to credit them with that, you can at least envision that they would have an orderly process to dispose of the remains of their dead and not just leave them where they drop.
The aliens of Moses' time had a practice of shooting their dead into the sun. That's why you won't find their skeletons intermingled with human skeletons.
No, I think you don't. Take a look at these: http://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people/videos/#air-force-one About the only thing that might remain would be stores of gold, and even those could come a cropper or be rendered indistinguishable as artifacts, assuming you had the billion to one good fortune of digging hundreds of meters down in the right spot.
Yes, the same with the aliens. Their technology is designed to degrade quickly upon the signal from the mothership to leave. That's why you won't find stable elements surviving this long in the weather, or even unstable elements surviving in accidental perfect conditions.
The underlying assumption that we know all there is to know about everything? Bottom line is, we know very little about anything.
Yes, the aliens were here to teach us all of the things we didn't already know. Why don't those teachings persist? Well, it turns out that there was a undefined catastrophe which caused them to leave, and their abort signal took care of the rest.
And we're off. The extreme example I used was intended to prove a point about the use of imagination in the scientific method and the way that the dogmatic herd thinking which is becoming prevalent runs the risk of damaging creativity in science. I often find this in engineers particularly who are labouring under the mistaken belief that they are scientists. Rigid and conservative thinking is a benefit in engineering, in science it is a detriment.
What? You are not immediately seeing the wisdom of alien Moses? How rigid and dogmatic of you not to see the brilliant insight I am bringing to archeology!
The scorn which is being heaped upon even admitting the possibility that such a killing evolutionary advantage as intelligence might have previously appeared before mankind is evidence of a problem. I don't expect you to solve the problem, just pointing out that it exists.
You don't get it at all. Is it in the realm of possibility? Maybe. Is there any evidence for it? No. So, there is no reason to give it any more credit than my postulation of an alien Moses. Do you accept my theory of alien Moses? Granted, I'm not bringing a single piece of evidence to the table in support of it, but I can defend my theory every bit as well as yours. What's the difference?
I dispute your point by asking what branch of philosophy is evidence driven.
Empiricism, for one. But you are correct. It is offtopic, and I apologize for the diversion.
No, science makes certain key assumptions. Without the axioms of causality and consistency (of the rules of science), there is no scientific method, no validating experiments, etc. Science may revisit its results, and refine its methodology to isolate problems/rectify misconceptions. But it can never revisit certain axioms.
In as much as it is founded upon observation, you are correct. But to say that it cannot revisit those axioms is absurd. If they prove unreliable, they will be revisited and refined. Of course, they have been proven reliable over and over again, so your appeal to a hypothetical future state is unconvincing in the extreme.
Right. Science accomplished things. Science is a good tool. Science is not able to find Truth. It needs to recognize the distinction. Because, frankly, there have been plenty of tools that worked but had no Truth.
Science is about the pursuit of truth. It is an accumulation of the best approximation of the truth that we are able to discover. And, frankly, no, if a tool worked, then it had some modicum of "truth," no matter how much untruth was mixed in. Ptolemy's work was an approximation of "the truth." Copernicus' work was a better approximation. There are no claims to absolute proof, and of course, if it turns out that we are all brains in jars, then all bets are off. But there is no reason to suspect that, and no reason to equate groundless fantasy with empirically derived proof.
I'm relying on the idea that such a group probably wouldn't dump their dead into tar pits as a general rule.
No other species relied on that, and we have their remains to poke at.
That's exactly right, you wouldn't recognise carved stone after its been ground to rubble under tens of millions of years of geology. I don't think you really understand what happens over geological time scales.
I think I do. I'm not sure that you are following the scope of the disappearing act that you postulate, again, on no evidence whatsoever.
I think you might be underestimating the amount of extinction events there actually were. Here are more than twenty that we know of... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
The number of extinctions changes what in my argument?
And that was the point flying right by you.
Here, let me make one last attempt to garner your understanding: Moses was an alien. Can you disprove it? After all, an alien capable of making the trip would also be capable of perfect deception. I could spend the next year giving you ad hoc reasoning as to why your objections don't mean anything. But I just pulled it out of my ass. It's a completely unfounded assertion. But I could defend it in exactly the same way you are defending your statements. The point is that without a shred of empirical evidence to base your claim on, you, too, are just talking out of your ass. And that, not some dogmatism, is what makes it nothing more than an amusing story.
I love the "power rush" I get from forums, especially Slashdot. Where else can you send hundreds of people into a rage with one post? Since I can't afford a trip to Europe this year I'll have to settle for whatever pleasure I get here...(sigh).
Ah, you mistake derision for rage...
Hold up. Philosophy does this, and it practically epitomizes rationality.
No, some branches of philosophy do this. Certainly not all.
Science cannot prove it's own validity... we assume that the scientific method works, but there's a chance that tomorrow we'll wake up and find that causality was just a coincidence.
Certainly, you can embrace that level of Cartesian doubt. All you've done is make everything provisional. Guess what? That's the way science already treats knowledge. That's not the issue.
What it isn't, is Truth.
No, it is the best approximation of "truth" that we have, or have ever had. We have reasons for believing in the universe as revealed by science. We have none for fairy tales, thus there is no grounds for teaching them to children as science.
What it doesn't do is in any way disprove Adam and Eve, just means that the universe would have to have been created as though it were billions of years old.
Certainly, when you have regressed to the point of equating empirically derived proof with antique mythology, anything goes.
That said, Truth doesn't belong in a science class. Science is useful and needs to be learned. But it needs to get over itself.
Of course it does. I mean, it has only been the most wildly successful method for understanding the universe and bettering the human condition. There's no reason to hold it superior to bankrupt theologies which have nothing but drag humanity down and made us grovel to phantoms in the night. /sarcasm
Ask yourself this - how much of the biodiversity of the ancient world have we actually recovered in the fossil record? One percent? One percent of one percent? It takes a pretty specialised set of conditions to create fossils, and it would suprise me not at all to find that funerary rites are not conducive to those.
So, you are now relying on imagined funeral rites to explain the lack of skeletal evidence from a civilization of which you have no other evidence either?
As for the rest, what materials do you imagine would survive? Anything from say ten million years in the past would be indistinguishable from the surrounding strata.
So, you wouldn't recognize carved stone? Or metal? No one in your hypothetical civilization cut a gem, or built a massive city? No subways? No basements? No plastics? No analogues to Cheyenne Mountain? We can somehow find stone tools from millions of years ago, but a whole advanced civilization somehow evaporated?
And a measureable impact - there were many extinction events of various levels in the history of the earth, and by no means are all or even the majority of them satisfactorarily explained. I would add to that the note that we are right now in the midst of a massive reduction in biodiversity due to our own advanced civilisation.
So, let me follow your logic. We have some extinctions which are clearly due to outside events. We have some that are not yet understood. We are causing one ourselves right now. Therefore, it's plausible that an advanced civilization of which there isn't the slightest shred of evidence can be plugged in as a cause.
I don't expect anyone to take that hypothesis seriously.
Done.
I do expect people to entertain the possibility without pouring scorn left right and centre.
Bring something other than wild speculation and ad hoc reasoning to the table, and people will likely find it a lot more worthy of discussion. Until then, it's an amusing story, but nothing else.
How many Atheists think the theory of evolution is bunk?
Sadly, I've met a few. Atheist does not imply anything aside from a lack of theistic beliefs. That doesn't mean that there are not kooks out there who don't believe in a god yet harbor all sorts of other weird beliefs.
Yes its all based on empirical evidence, but it is an origin story just the same as Adam and Eve is an origin story.
And there is the difference. We don't believe it for any other reason. If you accord groundless assertions the same intellectual weight as empirical evidence, just shut down education, science and technology, because you've already given up on being rational.
If you believe in your heart that the theory of evolution is true, thats fine. But don't argue from your belief, because if you do you've already lost. Beliefs should not be taught in school. Don't say that Christians are stupid, because they aren't. They just see something that atheists have, but something all atheists deny: Faith.
Yes, by all means, let's dilute the word faith to include empirical truth. And let's then remove all faith from school. What's that? We just eliminated the entire curriculum? Huh, I guess that equating faith and empirical evidence is a self-defeating work of nonsense.
People that claim that living cells somehow came to be out of a chemical soup don't know much about science. The concept of abiogenesis (life from non-living matter) has NEVER been shown to be possible, even in a laboratory situation,
Look around you. Do you see living things? In the beginning of the universe, those living things did not exist. Therefore, at some point, abiogenesis occurred. I know, I know, you believe in a story with disembodied ghosts, talking snakes, rib women, dirt men, flaming swords, magical trees and spirit-fathered giants instead of relying on actual data. Good for you. Have a cookie in the corner while grown-ups discuss reality.
It is so statistically improbable that that it staggers the imagination that anyone can claim to even consider it part of science.
Ah, yes, the old "tornado in a junkyard" argument. I hadn't seen someone trot that out in a while. It's cute, going back to the golden oldies like that. How's about you go and try(and I realize that this will be very hard) to get a grasp of actual evolutionary theory? Maybe then you will might grasp how non-random selection processes turn random input into non-random output.
It has NOT impeded the progress of science to have the explanation for the existence of all the flora and fauna on Earth undetermined by science.
The whole point of science is to further explore the universe in a systematic manner. Declaring one bit off-limits because your ancient holy book is wrong is not the way to understand anything. Except the depths of human delusion.
It comes down to the same issue every time, which is whether there is a God or not.
Wow, it's a good thing you are here to speak for the majority of religious people, Christians included, who have no problem reconciling their faith with the empirical evidence.
Evolution is a pathetic attempt to counter the idea that there must be some intelligent design behind the universe. Science is science until we get to the theory of evolution where the religious belief, and claiming no religion IS a religious belief, of the person gets revealed.
No, science is science until we get to the point of religious morons such as yourself getting their theological panties in a wad because their favorite mythologies are disproved by evidence and then trying to get society to support them in their fact-free delusions.
Why are trying to "defeat" creationism? Why can't we just put the data and findings out there, and let people make their own decisions?
Presenting the empirical evidence(evolution) creates friction with the religious contingent who wish to have their creation myths taught as facts(creationism). The problem is precisely that some people don't want the data and findings to be "out there."
As Thomas Jefferson said, "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." People are always going to be ignorant... it's not the task of the "enlightened" to make them heel.
Uh, we are talking about schools. In case you missed it, schools are places where we send people to cure them of ignorance. Creationists are attempting to impede this goal.
The GP is not endorsing creationism, just shying away from the argument with its proponents. This may sound like a cop out to anyone not familiar with fundamentalists in the US. It is kind of a cop out, but not everyone wants to fight tooth and nail over high school curriculum, even though we'd be better off if someone did.
I guess we do cave too much to the fundie fringe, but just try arguing with those people. Give it a try, face-to-face with these folks and you'll see what I mean -- arguing with them on the internet is only a sample.
I do, man. Yes, they are over-the-top blowhards sometimes, but we can't afford to let them overrun actual education in this country. Yes, that means that we will get into stupid pissing matches with idiots. That's the price we pay for protecting society from the barbarians.
You still aren't grasping the basic facts of the issue here - teaching evolution, no matter how correct or factual it is, can still get teachers into a lot of shit. Why should they be forced to take that shit for you?
So, biology teachers should ignore the central unifying facts of biology to avoid trouble? Let's take that a step further. Let's not teach about the Civil War because it gets people upset. Let's not teach about the Holocaust in case Johnny's daddy is a Holocaust denier. Let's not teach about slavery in the south. Let's not teach about the history of the Native Americans. Let's not teach about the Cold War, or the Protestant Reformation, etc.
No matter what you are teaching, it will likely upset some wanker. The teacher's job is to teach their subject. The administration should be running interference for them if they are catching flak while adhering to scholastic standards. If we back down from this, then we might as well throw in the towel right now on education in this country, because all you are advocating is pandering to the local prejudices.
You don't make teachers teach about abortion, so why make them teach other difficult subjects?
If there is a class that touches on abortion(say, US History or Sex Ed.), then, yes, they should be teaching it. If my high school aged kid got out of those classes without a mention of abortion, it would be a travesty.
Please never have that conversation, it only hurts. There are far better ways t deal with it and a confrontational manner will only have them dig their heels into the ground. At that age, it could very well be the last opportunity for those people to get it right.
There are far better answers, from 'That's not what evolution says' to 'That's not where the science leads us.'
It's doubtful that either response will help. Until the kid is mature enough to be able to break with what he is being hammered with at home and in church, you won't budge them. And if they were that mature, you wouldn't have had that conversation to begin with. The best you can do is tell them that they will learn and be tested on evolution, regardless of whether they accept it, and then try to impart some critical thinking skills as you present the material.
On the one hand, the argument is perfectly factual that even a civilisation as advanced as our own would be completely erased in a matter of a few million years, even space based assets would either degrade into the atmosphere or fly off entirely.
No, it wouldn't. Biological matter can survive millions of years, let alone all of the artificial materials that such a civilization would have generated. And where in the world's history did this global civilization appear, without leaving anything behind or making a measurable impact on the environment of their time? How is it that we can find trilobites, ammonites, worm impressions, dinosaur skeletons and even the impressions of feathers dating back millions of years, but not one scrap of evidence of an advanced civilization?
Once people start dismissing things out of hand, admittedly things which are on the further edge of possibility, while nonetheless remaining possible, you've started to walk down a dangerous road of mental orthodoxy, which would be abhorrent to outside thinkers like Einstein.
The rejection of wild stories which do not match up with any known evidence is not evidence of "mental orthodoxy." It's evidence of a healthy regard for proof. Conjecture about ancient civilizations all you like. No one will stop you. But don't expect anyone to actually take you seriously until you pony of data.
How is it considerably more difficult? The same class of arguments apply in both cases. The same class of evidence is required, whether you are referring to Set or Yahweh. Arguing about particular tenets is interesting, but not the root of my arguments, though it may appear that way when the majority of arguments I get engage in are with Christians.
See that's the whole thing. He came back from the dead
Unproven assertion.
and fulfilled numerous prophesies told about the coming savior.
Unproven assertions, in addition to the fact that the writers of the later books were aware of the prophesies of the earlier books and thus were able to write their stories to match.
But go ahead and not believe and have fun.
Thanks! I am having more fun now!
No one is forcing you to accept that.
You are correct. I happen to live in a country with freedom of religion, and my social stature is such that I do not have to maintain a religious facade in public.
You get to choose what you believe and have faith in.
Wrong. I can only believe in what I think is true. When I saw how full of shit religion was in general and Christianity in particular, I no longer had the option of believing in it. I could fake it, yes, but I am not inclined to living a lie.
You get to put your faith in believing this material universe is all there was and all there ever will be, that all of this is random chance. That only things I can test empirically and only with current technology is all there is. And it's all just meaningless. You go on and believe that, but I pray you don't.
As opposed to hoping that some Bronze Age sheep herders spoke to a personified deity and got the scoop? No, you can keep your silly fairy tales.
Whatever your opinion on religion as a whole, the idea of taking doctrine from other living people makes Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholics both seem to me to be the same kind of deal.
And yet, taking it from dead people is somehow more sensible?
You may consider me a fool for believing the Bible, and that's fine, but I have read it myself, and I do interpret it for myself-- and I believe that's the most important two things possible for separating legitimate belief systems from gigantic cults.
I've read it, too. There is nothing to differentiate it from the rest of Bronze age mythology.
You may say Christianity and Catholicism are the same, but as a protestant, I would very much disagree with that idea.
No, I interpreted the grandparent as saying that Catholics weren't Christian, which is a load of crap. Obviously there are different branches of Christianity with different interpretations of different documents, but they are all in the same family tree, and very closely related to Islam and Judaism as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHRDfut2Vx0
Don't forget the anti-Christian rhetoric poorly disguised as anti-religious-in-general rhetoric. That's popular too these days.
One is a subset of the other. I am anti-Christian, and anti-religious. There is no conflict.