...it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico. Yeah, because any civilization that was even one iota more advanced than us would never have an accident, mistake, bad design, equipment failure, pilot error, or unforeseen outcome. In other words, they would be absolutely perfect.
Perhaps it's easy to create a vehicle that can travel the low-gravity vacuum of interstellar space, but to have it also be able to navigate the pressure and gravity of low orbit of a rocky planet can pose a problem. Local eddies of wind and uneven gravity could create a problem for those navigating manually.
Or is it the crashing in New Mexico part that gets you? That any other place for a crash would make more sense, like the mountains?
Err man... but the life expectancy in Europe is higher than in the USA... if we don't care about dying and we don't spend as much money as Americans trying to get a cure how do you explain that? I think what grandparent is trying to argue that what we practice here in the US is heroic medicine. With our limited health care funds, we'd rather take care of major problems, like late stage cancer, or keeping someone comatose alive on a breathing machine, rather than simple, easy, obvious stuff, like yearly cancer screenings, which is cheaper and would lead to healthier people.
To use the car metaphor, we can't afford to do regular and preventative maintenance, but we love to do expensive repairs! And then we don't have any money left for maintenance.
I suspected as much; I've just been too lazy to figure it out. Thanks a million!
It would be nice if they would automate it. I think a program could intelligently figure out major turns in the route, or which turns don't show up on the large map.
I'd like to see editing of the small turn maps that they have on the print screen. I don't need a little map to show me the turn out of my street at the beginning on the trip. I always get rid of it.
However, I would like maybe to see the 3 or 4 major turns in the trip, or a close-up view of some smaller, complicated streets that don't really resolve in the map of the entire trip.
What we have here is a case of market manipulation by insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies (among others) Don't forget the AMA. Doctors here make *way* more than they do in other countries; that's why people are choosing to go to, say, India for major surgeries. They can get an equally qualified doctor to do it for half the price. And it's not totally a function of the cost of living in other countries; doctors in Europe don't make as much as American doctors. American doctor's wages and prices are protected by a very powerful union.
I think he's more often called a humorist than he's called a storyteller. Wikipedia first identifies him as "an American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer..." [Emphasis mine]
As Mark Twain said, "The source of humor is pain."
If you look at almost any joke, there is something bad happening to somebody in it. There are also puns, which don't have any misfortune, but they typically aren't very punny-- er, funny.
It's like when Calvin asks his dad how they know how heavy of a truck the bridge can support. Calvin's dad tells him that they build the bridge, and drive heavier and heavier trucks over it, until it collapses. Then, re-build the bridge, they weight the last truck, and that's the weight limit for the bridge.
In reality, I think it's that they have pretty accurate values for all the properties of the various materials they are using, such as hardness and resiliency, and also good formulas for the forces acting upon them, such as gravity, momentum and torque. They just plug the values into the equations.
Yeah sure. The CIA is stuffed with emotionless automations who simply follow orders from the hot-headed, obsessive white house. Nobody at the CIA has their own ideas and fixations about what they need to do to set the world right or just make their job easier.
The thing with paper ballots is that attempts at fraud leave a much wider trail of evidence. There are more people involved, You know that boxes of votes are missing, or you can actually determine if particular ballots are a result of stuffing by examining them. And you can count the again, leaving out whatever fraudulent ballots might exist.
The fact that you can point to clear cases of paper election fraud shows the resiliency of this system.
Meanwhile, it is within the realm of possibility that the electronic systems that were used in the 2000 and 2004 elections could have all been hacked, remotely, by a single individual, leaving no evidence of election fraud other than the results not matching the exit polls. And the debate about whether or not the 2004 elections were stolen continues.
I never understood the hatred for the French. Well, I do. It's the WWII generation ( the "Greatest Generation" ) how thought the French caved to easily to Nazi Germany, forcing using to save the world, yet again.
But the French funded our revolution. We fought two wars against the British, the war for Independence and the War of 1812, in which the British stormed Washington DC and burned the White House. Our founders seriously considered making French the official language for government affairs.
But I guess the ties of common language and more shared culture, such as food, created such a divide that we just couldn't relate to French culture and mentality. A lot more Americans have English, Irish, and Scott ancestry than they do French.
1. It's unlikely they'll store fingerprints. They typically store some kind of proprietary hash value of the fingerprint. Don't you have to have identical scans of fingerprints, and I mean identical down to each and every pixel, to have a match of two different hashes of the same fingerprint? Unless you are somehow hashing properties of the fingerprint image itself, such as the relative position of loops and whorls, rather than a hash of the binary data of the image.
Isn't matching fingerprints a hard AI problem? In order to match finger prints with a program, you would have to have the full image, I would thing. And even then I think it would be prone to a high false negative rate. So the fall-back is to traditional fingerprint matching techniques, which AFAIK, is done with the human brain and it's amazing fuzzy matching capabilities. I think with current algorithms it is near impossible to get a high positive match rate of two different scans of the same print.
What the hell are you talking about "kill it". What am I talking about? You might want to ask what Linji was talking about:
"Followers of the Way [of Zen], if you want to get the kind of understanding that accords with the Dharma, never be misled by others. Whether you're facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! If you meet a buddha, kill the buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go."
Here are some interpretations:
Alan Cohen, Are you the Buddha?
The goal of Buddhism, like any self-respecting spiritual path, is not to have titles or to make distinctions between degrees of holiness; it is to wake up. I love the famous Buddhist admonition, "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." This means that if you try to single out the Buddha and confine him to one form at the expense of all others, you have severely missed the point, and you must do away with your concept that this is the Buddha and all else is not.
Ordinary Mind:
It implies encountering something or someone outside or other than oneself. We all come to practice carrying around images or ideals of who we should be and what we imagine a Teacher or Buddha should look like. And we may chase after individuals that for a while seem like they live up to our image, ignore those who do not, and generally treat ourselves with contempt for not living up to the standards set by our imaginary inner "Buddha." All this may keep us pretty busy, but it has nothing to do with real practice, which is an awareness of who and what we actually are, not the pursuit of some ideal of who we think we should be. So "killing the Buddha" means killing or wiping out this fantasy image, and "the road" is two fold: the road outside where we look outside ourselves for the ones who have all the answers, and the inner mind road, where we set up all the "shoulds" we must obey to turn ourselves into the Buddhas we don't believe we already are, but think we must become.
It is said that Shakyamuni's last dying words to his disciples were, "Be a lamp unto yourselves." Be your own light, your own authority, your own Buddha. Kill off every image of the Buddha, see who and what you are in this very moment, see that there is no Buddha other than THIS MOMENT.
You can find a lot more interpretations about this quote.
I think this is a good change, but does Google really have the high ground here? They are using an extremely dominant product to market their other products. They use their search engine to push everything from google maps to gmail. Yes, but they don't have a monopoly, and their users have choice. You don't *have* to use google, and you are not forced to pay anything to them when you buy a new computer. They don't force any manufacturing partners into all-or-nothing bundling agreements.
Basically google has the bundled, horizontal software suite that MS would like people to believe *MS* is offering, while MS is really only offering a monopolized, choiceless platform. You want to run Linux on that box? Fine, you've already paid MS for a Windows license when you bought it. Don't want to use google? Go ahead, you haven't paid them anything. Want to use google? Fine -- you still don't have to pay them anything. If you develop something that integrates two google products, such as maps and orkut? Still fine, and you still don't have to pay them anything. Basically, google is doing it the proper free-market way. Not because you don't have to pay them, but because they don't have a monopoly position with the manufacturer. Now if you bought a machine that had a built-in cost that covered a 'google license', you never intended to use their services, you really weren't able to buy one otherwise, and google had exclusive agreements with all other manufacturers, that would be a different story.
I'd rather have two 800 pound gorillas than just one. Competition is good. Yeah, while they are busy duking it out with each other, they are exhausting themselves, and ignoring you.
Maybe you wrote quickly but Monte Verde isn't in Peru it's in Chile. Thanks, you're right! That was part of the controversy -- Chile is much further south than Peru.
Pro Clovis archeologists right? Well actually, it was Dr. Yerkes at Ohio state. His area of expertise ir pre-historic Ohio and historic Greece and Cyprus. He was talking about the controversy in a general archeology class... methods I think?
What I was trying to avoid was comments like "Science!? Bah! Where is the peer-review? Where are the experiments? Where is the objectivity?"
What happened was that Buddhists and Hindus were using a word, different in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese, that's best translated today as 'science'. ( Forgive me for not being able to recall that word off-hand. ) Though it is arguably the best translation, it is a lousy translation at that, because today in English, science means "Western empirical science", ( or you might say, western empirical science owns the word 'science' ) and certainly none of these practices are western or empirical. The word they used is actually more like what the word 'science' meant in English before empirical science -- as in the phrase 'arts and sciences'. The way Galileo was a 'scientist', e.g. studying the properties of light by painting, before Bacon introduced the scientific method. When empirical science was first introduced, it was called 'empirical science', to distinguish it from the other sciences, or serious, systematized, applied studies that were going on at the time. But now, to us modern English speakers, science means solely 'empirical science'.
So the phrase "The science of self-realization" is sort of a contradiction in modern English. But you kind of have to give them credit, because they were using the term long before the 1700s, and I'm not sure, but I would guess that in Olde English, it would have been translated to the old definition of 'science'.
But, a better classification would be axiomatic reasoning, based upon basic precepts of faith (similar to Aquinas in many regards). I'm not sure, because axiomatic reasoning is kind of theoretical, abstract, and hands off, where as Buddhist or Hindu science has a large practice component. In other words, you can't just think about it and make conclusions, you have to meditate ( which is different than thinking ), practice yoga, etc. The 'knowledge' or better yet, awareness, doesn't come from reason or logic, rather, it comes from internal experiences that are a result of a practice. So, if you are a talented debater, maybe you could convince someone that there is a foundation of reality that is non-logical and non-dual ( i.e. the Godhead ), but to consider yourself truly enlightened, you have to experience and perceive it, rather than have a theoretical notion about it. Supposedly, you can arrive at that experience and perception starting from logic, but logic doesn't get you there by yourself. It's just the starting point: "Now that I can see it's a possibility, maybe there is some way I can find it". You can also get to it without logic, which is why you see the uneducated country Zen masters being considered enlightened, without having studied at all.
Although I laughed out loud when I read this, at the part where God disappears in a puff of logic, rather than face the fallacy of His own Argument, I don't think this is such a philosophical quandry as it seems at first glance.
A miracle doesn't allow an logic or understanding, unless you think falling back on an unexplained, all-powerful deity as a last resort is a valid move in a logic debate. Any miracle is by definition unexplained and impossible without resorting to God on faith. Any arguer who is committed to the idea of logic and the idea that the entire cosmos is understandable and explainable would not accept a miracle as evidence of a particular kind of God.
In other words, it's not evidence of God, it's (supposedly) evidence against all other explanations, so you just fall back on God, which itself a leap of faith. You don't really have evidence that God did it ( maybe this miracle was the devil tricking you? ), you just assume God as an explanation.
And then managers will find a way to 'get their numbers up' to show their boss that they are constantly improving productivity. Meanwhile, the whole system, from employees to high level managers, has turned into a scam of figuring out how to improve 'presence' while not actually doing any extra work to improve the measurement scores.
Reminds me of how IBM used to measure employee productivity by numbers of lines programmed.
I think ID *could* lie in the philosophical or metaphysical camp. ***BUT*** not the ID promoted by the religious types as an effort to promote their religion and counter-argue science and evolution.
My argument goes something like this. We could create a definition of intelligence and design that allows us to take any kind of data ( or certain types of data ) and apply our falsifiable criteria for determining the influence of intelligence or design in the patterns in that data. It's not different than what archaeologists do when they find ambiguous rocks that look like they may have been shaped as tools by people long ago, or they may have been worn smooth by sitting in a river for a long time. This was a problem that a lot of archaeologists had with some of the stone tool evidence with rocks found at Monte Verde in Peru. The settlement was thought to be too early and too advanced for what we already knew to be human settlement patterns in South America.
A professor in one of my archeology classes talked about the controversy. A lot of archaeologists were skeptical of the stone tool evidence that were just river rocks, until they were shown similar rocks with twine wrapped around them, some with handles attached.
To bring it to the cosmic scale, and draw an intelligent force in the universe that had a hand in it's present configuration, it's not to different than SETI. With SETI, we are trying to determine whether electromagnetic data we gather from stars are simply natural processes, or were actually created by intelligences, either as intentional communication, or by-products of their intelligent ( i.e. designed with an end-goal in 'mind' ) activities.
So applying a similar, falsifiable criteria to something like, say, the big bang as a 'signal', we could say whether or not there is any evidence of intelligence in the big bang. In other words, if we have a scientific way of saying that "this signal or data shows intelligence", and apply that methodology to larger, cosmic-scale data sets, we could say with falsifiability, that the big band does or does not show evidence of intelligence activity.
That doesn't tell us anything about the Intelligence behind any ID evidence, or prove that the Bible is right. All it does is allow us to determine with more validity evidence of intelligence on a cosmic scale.
Now certainly such research would be hijacked by creationsists as arguments for their side, even if there is no evidence. They will say, "See? Even scientists take this idea seriously". You might make a slippery slope argument, but I'm always for figuring out what the data allows us to conclude, regardless of the societal consequences.
God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith. If you see something that you think is proof of God's existence, you're wrong. He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out. There are some religions that don't have a big faith component. A lot of types of Hindudism and Buddhism, for examples. They claim that their traditions are 'sciences' ( and they made this claim well before modern western science came on the scene ), meaning serious, systematic studies. In this case they are studying the experience of consciousness, from the subjective point of view of the practitioner.
In other words, you don't need faith, they claim -- or rather, they don't even mention it at all. Just sit and meditate seriously for long enough, and you will have a direct experience of the divine. There's a famous maxim from one of the Zen masters, "If you see a Buddha on your path to enlightenment, kill it!"
While it's true that they would say you can't figure God out, either, they might claim that you can 'experience' 'Him'.
When a scientist, especially a social scientist, trys to say this is what class is they are going to be wrong (just as I would be wrong) I think a scientist, especially a social scientist, would look at class in America, with a bit more nuance and a lot more research and understanding than $50,000 == middle class.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think they were in space, and they crashed into Earth? I always thought that they were flying over the desert, and suddenly went down.
...it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico. Yeah, because any civilization that was even one iota more advanced than us would never have an accident, mistake, bad design, equipment failure, pilot error, or unforeseen outcome. In other words, they would be absolutely perfect.Perhaps it's easy to create a vehicle that can travel the low-gravity vacuum of interstellar space, but to have it also be able to navigate the pressure and gravity of low orbit of a rocky planet can pose a problem. Local eddies of wind and uneven gravity could create a problem for those navigating manually.
Or is it the crashing in New Mexico part that gets you? That any other place for a crash would make more sense, like the mountains?
To use the car metaphor, we can't afford to do regular and preventative maintenance, but we love to do expensive repairs! And then we don't have any money left for maintenance.
I suspected as much; I've just been too lazy to figure it out. Thanks a million!
It would be nice if they would automate it. I think a program could intelligently figure out major turns in the route, or which turns don't show up on the large map.
I'd like to see editing of the small turn maps that they have on the print screen. I don't need a little map to show me the turn out of my street at the beginning on the trip. I always get rid of it.
However, I would like maybe to see the 3 or 4 major turns in the trip, or a close-up view of some smaller, complicated streets that don't really resolve in the map of the entire trip.
I think he's more often called a humorist than he's called a storyteller. Wikipedia first identifies him as "an American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer..." [Emphasis mine]
As Mark Twain said, "The source of humor is pain."
If you look at almost any joke, there is something bad happening to somebody in it. There are also puns, which don't have any misfortune, but they typically aren't very punny-- er, funny.
It's like when Calvin asks his dad how they know how heavy of a truck the bridge can support. Calvin's dad tells him that they build the bridge, and drive heavier and heavier trucks over it, until it collapses. Then, re-build the bridge, they weight the last truck, and that's the weight limit for the bridge.
In reality, I think it's that they have pretty accurate values for all the properties of the various materials they are using, such as hardness and resiliency, and also good formulas for the forces acting upon them, such as gravity, momentum and torque. They just plug the values into the equations.
Yeah sure. The CIA is stuffed with emotionless automations who simply follow orders from the hot-headed, obsessive white house. Nobody at the CIA has their own ideas and fixations about what they need to do to set the world right or just make their job easier.
Have you tried searching a Reiser4 source package?
The thing with paper ballots is that attempts at fraud leave a much wider trail of evidence. There are more people involved, You know that boxes of votes are missing, or you can actually determine if particular ballots are a result of stuffing by examining them. And you can count the again, leaving out whatever fraudulent ballots might exist.
The fact that you can point to clear cases of paper election fraud shows the resiliency of this system.
Meanwhile, it is within the realm of possibility that the electronic systems that were used in the 2000 and 2004 elections could have all been hacked, remotely, by a single individual, leaving no evidence of election fraud other than the results not matching the exit polls. And the debate about whether or not the 2004 elections were stolen continues.
Honestly, I think they have you scan your nub.
I never understood the hatred for the French. Well, I do. It's the WWII generation ( the "Greatest Generation" ) how thought the French caved to easily to Nazi Germany, forcing using to save the world, yet again.
But the French funded our revolution. We fought two wars against the British, the war for Independence and the War of 1812, in which the British stormed Washington DC and burned the White House. Our founders seriously considered making French the official language for government affairs.
But I guess the ties of common language and more shared culture, such as food, created such a divide that we just couldn't relate to French culture and mentality. A lot more Americans have English, Irish, and Scott ancestry than they do French.
Isn't matching fingerprints a hard AI problem? In order to match finger prints with a program, you would have to have the full image, I would thing. And even then I think it would be prone to a high false negative rate. So the fall-back is to traditional fingerprint matching techniques, which AFAIK, is done with the human brain and it's amazing fuzzy matching capabilities. I think with current algorithms it is near impossible to get a high positive match rate of two different scans of the same print.
"Followers of the Way [of Zen], if you want to get the kind of understanding that accords with the Dharma, never be misled by others. Whether you're facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! If you meet a buddha, kill the buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go."
Here are some interpretations:
Alan Cohen, Are you the Buddha? The goal of Buddhism, like any self-respecting spiritual path, is not to have titles or to make distinctions between degrees of holiness; it is to wake up. I love the famous Buddhist admonition, "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." This means that if you try to single out the Buddha and confine him to one form at the expense of all others, you have severely missed the point, and you must do away with your concept that this is the Buddha and all else is not.
Ordinary Mind: It implies encountering something or someone outside or other than oneself. We all come to practice carrying around images or ideals of who we should be and what we imagine a Teacher or Buddha should look like. And we may chase after individuals that for a while seem like they live up to our image, ignore those who do not, and generally treat ourselves with contempt for not living up to the standards set by our imaginary inner "Buddha." All this may keep us pretty busy, but it has nothing to do with real practice, which is an awareness of who and what we actually are, not the pursuit of some ideal of who we think we should be. So "killing the Buddha" means killing or wiping out this fantasy image, and "the road" is two fold: the road outside where we look outside ourselves for the ones who have all the answers, and the inner mind road, where we set up all the "shoulds" we must obey to turn ourselves into the Buddhas we don't believe we already are, but think we must become.
It is said that Shakyamuni's last dying words to his disciples were, "Be a lamp unto yourselves." Be your own light, your own authority, your own Buddha. Kill off every image of the Buddha, see who and what you are in this very moment, see that there is no Buddha other than THIS MOMENT.
You can find a lot more interpretations about this quote.
Basically google has the bundled, horizontal software suite that MS would like people to believe *MS* is offering, while MS is really only offering a monopolized, choiceless platform. You want to run Linux on that box? Fine, you've already paid MS for a Windows license when you bought it. Don't want to use google? Go ahead, you haven't paid them anything. Want to use google? Fine -- you still don't have to pay them anything. If you develop something that integrates two google products, such as maps and orkut? Still fine, and you still don't have to pay them anything. Basically, google is doing it the proper free-market way. Not because you don't have to pay them, but because they don't have a monopoly position with the manufacturer. Now if you bought a machine that had a built-in cost that covered a 'google license', you never intended to use their services, you really weren't able to buy one otherwise, and google had exclusive agreements with all other manufacturers, that would be a different story.
What happened was that Buddhists and Hindus were using a word, different in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese, that's best translated today as 'science'. ( Forgive me for not being able to recall that word off-hand. ) Though it is arguably the best translation, it is a lousy translation at that, because today in English, science means "Western empirical science", ( or you might say, western empirical science owns the word 'science' ) and certainly none of these practices are western or empirical. The word they used is actually more like what the word 'science' meant in English before empirical science -- as in the phrase 'arts and sciences'. The way Galileo was a 'scientist', e.g. studying the properties of light by painting, before Bacon introduced the scientific method. When empirical science was first introduced, it was called 'empirical science', to distinguish it from the other sciences, or serious, systematized, applied studies that were going on at the time. But now, to us modern English speakers, science means solely 'empirical science'.
So the phrase "The science of self-realization" is sort of a contradiction in modern English. But you kind of have to give them credit, because they were using the term long before the 1700s, and I'm not sure, but I would guess that in Olde English, it would have been translated to the old definition of 'science'. But, a better classification would be axiomatic reasoning, based upon basic precepts of faith (similar to Aquinas in many regards). I'm not sure, because axiomatic reasoning is kind of theoretical, abstract, and hands off, where as Buddhist or Hindu science has a large practice component. In other words, you can't just think about it and make conclusions, you have to meditate ( which is different than thinking ), practice yoga, etc. The 'knowledge' or better yet, awareness, doesn't come from reason or logic, rather, it comes from internal experiences that are a result of a practice. So, if you are a talented debater, maybe you could convince someone that there is a foundation of reality that is non-logical and non-dual ( i.e. the Godhead ), but to consider yourself truly enlightened, you have to experience and perceive it, rather than have a theoretical notion about it. Supposedly, you can arrive at that experience and perception starting from logic, but logic doesn't get you there by yourself. It's just the starting point: "Now that I can see it's a possibility, maybe there is some way I can find it". You can also get to it without logic, which is why you see the uneducated country Zen masters being considered enlightened, without having studied at all.
Although I laughed out loud when I read this, at the part where God disappears in a puff of logic, rather than face the fallacy of His own Argument, I don't think this is such a philosophical quandry as it seems at first glance.
A miracle doesn't allow an logic or understanding, unless you think falling back on an unexplained, all-powerful deity as a last resort is a valid move in a logic debate. Any miracle is by definition unexplained and impossible without resorting to God on faith. Any arguer who is committed to the idea of logic and the idea that the entire cosmos is understandable and explainable would not accept a miracle as evidence of a particular kind of God.
In other words, it's not evidence of God, it's (supposedly) evidence against all other explanations, so you just fall back on God, which itself a leap of faith. You don't really have evidence that God did it ( maybe this miracle was the devil tricking you? ), you just assume God as an explanation.
And then managers will find a way to 'get their numbers up' to show their boss that they are constantly improving productivity. Meanwhile, the whole system, from employees to high level managers, has turned into a scam of figuring out how to improve 'presence' while not actually doing any extra work to improve the measurement scores.
Reminds me of how IBM used to measure employee productivity by numbers of lines programmed.
I think ID *could* lie in the philosophical or metaphysical camp. ***BUT*** not the ID promoted by the religious types as an effort to promote their religion and counter-argue science and evolution.
My argument goes something like this. We could create a definition of intelligence and design that allows us to take any kind of data ( or certain types of data ) and apply our falsifiable criteria for determining the influence of intelligence or design in the patterns in that data. It's not different than what archaeologists do when they find ambiguous rocks that look like they may have been shaped as tools by people long ago, or they may have been worn smooth by sitting in a river for a long time. This was a problem that a lot of archaeologists had with some of the stone tool evidence with rocks found at Monte Verde in Peru. The settlement was thought to be too early and too advanced for what we already knew to be human settlement patterns in South America.
A professor in one of my archeology classes talked about the controversy. A lot of archaeologists were skeptical of the stone tool evidence that were just river rocks, until they were shown similar rocks with twine wrapped around them, some with handles attached.
To bring it to the cosmic scale, and draw an intelligent force in the universe that had a hand in it's present configuration, it's not to different than SETI. With SETI, we are trying to determine whether electromagnetic data we gather from stars are simply natural processes, or were actually created by intelligences, either as intentional communication, or by-products of their intelligent ( i.e. designed with an end-goal in 'mind' ) activities.
So applying a similar, falsifiable criteria to something like, say, the big bang as a 'signal', we could say whether or not there is any evidence of intelligence in the big bang. In other words, if we have a scientific way of saying that "this signal or data shows intelligence", and apply that methodology to larger, cosmic-scale data sets, we could say with falsifiability, that the big band does or does not show evidence of intelligence activity.
That doesn't tell us anything about the Intelligence behind any ID evidence, or prove that the Bible is right. All it does is allow us to determine with more validity evidence of intelligence on a cosmic scale.
Now certainly such research would be hijacked by creationsists as arguments for their side, even if there is no evidence. They will say, "See? Even scientists take this idea seriously". You might make a slippery slope argument, but I'm always for figuring out what the data allows us to conclude, regardless of the societal consequences.
God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith. If you see something that you think is proof of God's existence, you're wrong. He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out. There are some religions that don't have a big faith component. A lot of types of Hindudism and Buddhism, for examples. They claim that their traditions are 'sciences' ( and they made this claim well before modern western science came on the scene ), meaning serious, systematic studies. In this case they are studying the experience of consciousness, from the subjective point of view of the practitioner.
In other words, you don't need faith, they claim -- or rather, they don't even mention it at all. Just sit and meditate seriously for long enough, and you will have a direct experience of the divine. There's a famous maxim from one of the Zen masters, "If you see a Buddha on your path to enlightenment, kill it!"
While it's true that they would say you can't figure God out, either, they might claim that you can 'experience' 'Him'.