By contrast, the idea that "God created everything" rests on no evidence at all. It makes no predictions about things that we will see or not see in the world. There is no conceivable evidence that would weigh against it. In short, it's not science.
If God and a bunch of angels showed up at a scientific meeting to tell the scientists how He created the universe in six days from nothing, that would still not be scientific evidence for God's existence. Everyone was just having a hallucination. Science can only accept a god that is predictable and repeatable and follows the laws of nature; not surprisingly, science only sees evidence that has nothing supernatural in it.
As for predictions: DNA should probably look designed What would be the effects of a huge global flood? Humans could, in theory, live 1000 years. We are all descended from Adam and Eve. Also from Noah's sons and his sons' wives. Much of the gene pool had to fit in an ark of said measurements for a year; and spread from one spot to the rest of the world. Humans have only been around for less than 10,000 years (Israel's family tree is traced down to Adam and up to Jesus, usually with birth and death dates) Predicts life after death, and that the dead have interacted somewhat with the living. There's a bibleful of predictions out there, and be sure check out Revelations for your observational science.
The process of evolution is a fact, backed up by mountains of evidence. We can even see it happen over short timescales of a few days or weeks.
Care to give an example of evoultion that we have observed adding new information? Eg not a change that simply rearranges a protein without changing any functionality other than that it is no longer recognized by antibodies, or actually removing information (such as the regulatory mechanisms that prevent a bacteria from using too much of its resources on a resistance)?
No jump from one kind or grouping generally dubbed species, has ever been observed to have actually happened in all this experimentation.
Careful there; species seems to be defined as a group that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, though there seems to be plenty of exceptions. It's actually quite easy to create a group that cannot interbreed with the original species, even if it does look exactly like the same critter.
I'm always amused at creationists who think that scientists are in some kind of dark conspiracy to push "the agenda" of evolution.
I thought that the agenda was to push naturalism and atheism. (Hint: science cannot use, assume, or conclude supernatural things; it would then have to explain how they work under the laws of nature.)
What piece or pieces of evidence will it take to convince you that the Theory of Evolution is, in fact, true and that creationism is not?
How about this: analize DNA on a base-pair by base-pair level. The statistics should say whether the DNA can reasonably be explained by chance; if so the Bible is wrong (I don't think people can honestly reinterpret the Bible as saying that creation took millions of years and occured by chance).
Maybe that's because atheism is not officially considered a religion. (I, for one, would like to see it labled a religion, and more clearly distinguished from agnosticism.)
It was just a few years ago that abortion clinics and doctors were being firebombed and shot in order to protect the sanctity of human life.
And a few years before that, the Nazi concentration camps were desroyed and the "workers" there punished. And only because they were wholesale slaughtering a few million people. (If you don't see an analogy, maybe ypu should compare numbers and consider that some people consider humans of any "age" to be human.)/Godwin>
My own example is imagine if our intelligence had developed underwater as amphibious creatures, but the world was 90% water. We would have a hard time discovering fire. Our environment would have restricted our progress. The group with access to land probably would have dominated the world after a time because their intelligence had more access to resources beyond the rest that were restricted just to the ocean.
Also, we'd have discovered water-based technologies much more easily. Aquatic farming, fishing, extracting minerals from water instead of having to mine them, underwater communications, and some stuff that we haven't even discovered yet because we don't live underwater.
I think that lots of the benefits you saw in the Europeans were more related to living in cities, increasing their technology/specialization, resources, and resistance to disease.
Why does evolution work? What is the secret. The secret my friends is randomness.
Is that so? And to think that here I was thinking that selection (natural or otherwise) had something to do with it. No, the mutations are random, and the deaths follow a pattern ("fitness", whatever that means). Now if natural selection is not doing what we want it to do (ie, "fitness" is undesireable), maybe we can help it along -- though humans are so short-sighted that this would be a horrid idea.
Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly.
Just remember that whatever gas drives the turbine needs to be cooled at the other side of the turbine. That heat is waste heat, and needs to be disposed of (the more you cool it the more efficient your engine). How you cool it does not matter in the least.
In the real world, even women with fifth degree black belts in real Tae Kwon Do can often be physically overpowered by muggers [...], kids (especially teens) are often total morons compared to those older than them, etc.
Oh, so movies make people semm cooler than in real life?
Cars have also come a long way. A car 20 years ago is much less than what most cars are now.
What, because they have less metal, and have a computer chip to improve engine efficiency? Mybe anti-lock breaks and power windows, but that can't cost that much, can it?
Entertainment is the same. Movies now are much more than what they were 20 years ago. You aren't getting the same product. You're really comparing apples to oranges in this case. Would the average american want to watch a black and white movie, where you can see the strings, and there's only 6 actors, and the director/producer/editor/cameraman/lighting tech/lead actor is all the same person?
OTOH, there are also more viewers. Since copying a movie is essentially free, this translates to bigger budgets.
Maybe this might not be the best of options... But I recommend that you place some torrent files yourself. Place the demos of your games. If you're feeling lucky, place a full version that has a plea for donations. Maybe you'll be surprised. Certainly you'll earn some respect for it.
I, for one, wouldn't mind having a digital computer interfaced with my brain, to help me with mathematical calculations. And it wouln't hurt to have digital memory, either, so I can remember things my brain thinks are unimportant. I suspect that if it could be connected properly to neurons, a brain will simply incorporate it as part of itself. As for problems, I think that powering and cooling a chip might be the worst problems, but maybe an enzine computer would be easier.
Yea, those were the ones I was referring to when I said it wasn't changed. People expected to see the Bible "evolving", but the stories are unchanged. People did not become more heroic, and miracles did not become more miraculous. Things weren't fancied up, as was expected of any story over several generations.
and the Samaritan versions of the Torah.
I can write my own version of the Bible too, but it won't mean that "the Bible" has changed.
I find your comment about adding to the Bible ignorant and insulting. The Bible is one of the few "stories" that hasn't changed throughout the generations, except for the addition of the New Testament. Unlike science which has to change when pesky new evidence appears;-), the Bible is revelation straight from God. It won't be changed, and I doubt something as trivial as evolution would cause anything to be added to it. Though I do think the Catholic church might try to "embrace and extend" Darwin, they can just add it to their traditions, like praying to Mary and the canonized saints.
I'm glad to see there's some people out there that don't think religion and science are mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world.
Because we all know that science == evolution. Evolution is the current theory (not derrogatory, but the theory has changed a bit, and will likely change again), but it is not the whole of science. These folks are basically saying that they believe in the Bible, so long as it doesn't contradict the latest science. Others will believe in science so long as it doesn't contradict the Bible. Personally, I'm waiting for DNA to be compared bit by bit by statisticians, so that they can say "evolution has a one in n chance of being false", with n in the millions at least, rather than saying "most scientists say that evolution is true". This in my mind is necessary before anyone can go claiming that evolution goes on the same level as the laws of physics.
To each his own, but IHMO, both religion and science have productive places in society.
I'd say religion is an excellent guide for morality (human nature has not changed much in the past few thousand years), but if I get sick, I'll go to the doctor:-)
The difference between gigabit and gigabyte needs to be explained on Slashdot about as much as the difference between the Moon and the Sun needs to be explained to astronomers.
Judging by that +5, insightful, I'm tempted to make a snide remark about the ruling class (moderators). Why yes, I do have karma to burn.
Not true. The speed of light is a constant, even near a black hole.
But spacetime is bent quite badly near the event horizon. Light emitted in the appropriate direction would orbit the black hole several times before entering/leaving the black hole, so while the speed of light may be chugging along at 299,792,458 m/s, the distance it travels might not be what you expected...
"We describe the derivation of two new human embryonic stem cell lines in... culture that includes protein components solely derived from recombinant sources or purified from human material," reads the paper.
I mean, we know farmers get a bit lonely, and can "cross-pollinate" their sheep or other livestock from time to time - why don't we have man-sheep hybrids that are as smart as us?
We have those. They are called sheeple, and they outnumber the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, slashdot "fixed" my link. It should be tldp.org
Where is THE linux documentation? (if you're going to say man pages, please don't)
I think that woud be The Linux Documentation Project.
By contrast, the idea that "God created everything" rests on no evidence at all. It makes no predictions about things that we will see or not see in the world. There is no conceivable evidence that would weigh against it. In short, it's not science.
If God and a bunch of angels showed up at a scientific meeting to tell the scientists how He created the universe in six days from nothing, that would still not be scientific evidence for God's existence. Everyone was just having a hallucination. Science can only accept a god that is predictable and repeatable and follows the laws of nature; not surprisingly, science only sees evidence that has nothing supernatural in it.
As for predictions:
DNA should probably look designed
What would be the effects of a huge global flood?
Humans could, in theory, live 1000 years.
We are all descended from Adam and Eve. Also from Noah's sons and his sons' wives.
Much of the gene pool had to fit in an ark of said measurements for a year; and spread from one spot to the rest of the world.
Humans have only been around for less than 10,000 years (Israel's family tree is traced down to Adam and up to Jesus, usually with birth and death dates)
Predicts life after death, and that the dead have interacted somewhat with the living.
There's a bibleful of predictions out there, and be sure check out Revelations for your observational science.
The process of evolution is a fact, backed up by mountains of evidence. We can even see it happen over short timescales of a few days or weeks.
Care to give an example of evoultion that we have observed adding new information? Eg not a change that simply rearranges a protein without changing any functionality other than that it is no longer recognized by antibodies, or actually removing information (such as the regulatory mechanisms that prevent a bacteria from using too much of its resources on a resistance)?
So what's your take on archaeopteryx?
arminw: None of the changes we have actually SEEN have evolved one species into another.
Though by 'species' I think he means 'what the layman would call the same species'
No jump from one kind or grouping generally dubbed species, has ever been observed to have actually happened in all this experimentation.
Careful there; species seems to be defined as a group that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, though there seems to be plenty of exceptions. It's actually quite easy to create a group that cannot interbreed with the original species, even if it does look exactly like the same critter.
I'm always amused at creationists who think that scientists are in some kind of dark conspiracy to push "the agenda" of evolution.
I thought that the agenda was to push naturalism and atheism. (Hint: science cannot use, assume, or conclude supernatural things; it would then have to explain how they work under the laws of nature.)
What piece or pieces of evidence will it take to convince you that the Theory of Evolution is, in fact, true and that creationism is not?
How about this: analize DNA on a base-pair by base-pair level. The statistics should say whether the DNA can reasonably be explained by chance; if so the Bible is wrong (I don't think people can honestly reinterpret the Bible as saying that creation took millions of years and occured by chance).
Maybe that's because atheism is not officially considered a religion. (I, for one, would like to see it labled a religion, and more clearly distinguished from agnosticism.)
It was just a few years ago that abortion clinics and doctors were being firebombed and shot in order to protect the sanctity of human life.
/Godwin>
And a few years before that, the Nazi concentration camps were desroyed and the "workers" there punished. And only because they were wholesale slaughtering a few million people. (If you don't see an analogy, maybe ypu should compare numbers and consider that some people consider humans of any "age" to be human.)
My own example is imagine if our intelligence had developed underwater as amphibious creatures, but the world was 90% water. We would have a hard time discovering fire. Our environment would have restricted our progress. The group with access to land probably would have dominated the world after a time because their intelligence had more access to resources beyond the rest that were restricted just to the ocean.
Also, we'd have discovered water-based technologies much more easily. Aquatic farming, fishing, extracting minerals from water instead of having to mine them, underwater communications, and some stuff that we haven't even discovered yet because we don't live underwater.
I think that lots of the benefits you saw in the Europeans were more related to living in cities, increasing their technology/specialization, resources, and resistance to disease.
Why does evolution work? What is the secret. The secret my friends is randomness.
Is that so? And to think that here I was thinking that selection (natural or otherwise) had something to do with it. No, the mutations are random, and the deaths follow a pattern ("fitness", whatever that means). Now if natural selection is not doing what we want it to do (ie, "fitness" is undesireable), maybe we can help it along -- though humans are so short-sighted that this would be a horrid idea.
Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly.
Just remember that whatever gas drives the turbine needs to be cooled at the other side of the turbine. That heat is waste heat, and needs to be disposed of (the more you cool it the more efficient your engine). How you cool it does not matter in the least.
In the real world, even women with fifth degree black belts in real Tae Kwon Do can often be physically overpowered by muggers [...], kids (especially teens) are often total morons compared to those older than them, etc.
Oh, so movies make people semm cooler than in real life?
Cars have also come a long way. A car 20 years ago is much less than what most cars are now.
What, because they have less metal, and have a computer chip to improve engine efficiency? Mybe anti-lock breaks and power windows, but that can't cost that much, can it?
Entertainment is the same. Movies now are much more than what they were 20 years ago. You aren't getting the same product. You're really comparing apples to oranges in this case. Would the average american want to watch a black and white movie, where you can see the strings, and there's only 6 actors, and the director/producer/editor/cameraman/lighting tech/lead actor is all the same person?
OTOH, there are also more viewers. Since copying a movie is essentially free, this translates to bigger budgets.
Maybe this might not be the best of options... But I recommend that you place some torrent files yourself. Place the demos of your games. If you're feeling lucky, place a full version that has a plea for donations. Maybe you'll be surprised. Certainly you'll earn some respect for it.
I, for one, wouldn't mind having a digital computer interfaced with my brain, to help me with mathematical calculations. And it wouln't hurt to have digital memory, either, so I can remember things my brain thinks are unimportant. I suspect that if it could be connected properly to neurons, a brain will simply incorporate it as part of itself. As for problems, I think that powering and cooling a chip might be the worst problems, but maybe an enzine computer would be easier.
For those wondering who Darthwader is, he is the aquatic equivalent of darth vader.
This post brought to you by the Slashdot Spellchecker [TM]
If you want proof look at the Dead Sea Scrolls
Yea, those were the ones I was referring to when I said it wasn't changed. People expected to see the Bible "evolving", but the stories are unchanged. People did not become more heroic, and miracles did not become more miraculous. Things weren't fancied up, as was expected of any story over several generations.
and the Samaritan versions of the Torah.
I can write my own version of the Bible too, but it won't mean that "the Bible" has changed.
I find your comment about adding to the Bible ignorant and insulting. The Bible is one of the few "stories" that hasn't changed throughout the generations, except for the addition of the New Testament. Unlike science which has to change when pesky new evidence appears ;-), the Bible is revelation straight from God. It won't be changed, and I doubt something as trivial as evolution would cause anything to be added to it. Though I do think the Catholic church might try to "embrace and extend" Darwin, they can just add it to their traditions, like praying to Mary and the canonized saints.
I'm glad to see there's some people out there that don't think religion and science are mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world.
:-)
Because we all know that science == evolution. Evolution is the current theory (not derrogatory, but the theory has changed a bit, and will likely change again), but it is not the whole of science. These folks are basically saying that they believe in the Bible, so long as it doesn't contradict the latest science. Others will believe in science so long as it doesn't contradict the Bible. Personally, I'm waiting for DNA to be compared bit by bit by statisticians, so that they can say "evolution has a one in n chance of being false", with n in the millions at least, rather than saying "most scientists say that evolution is true". This in my mind is necessary before anyone can go claiming that evolution goes on the same level as the laws of physics.
To each his own, but IHMO, both religion and science have productive places in society.
I'd say religion is an excellent guide for morality (human nature has not changed much in the past few thousand years), but if I get sick, I'll go to the doctor
The difference between gigabit and gigabyte needs to be explained on Slashdot about as much as the difference between the Moon and the Sun needs to be explained to astronomers.
Judging by that +5, insightful, I'm tempted to make a snide remark about the ruling class (moderators). Why yes, I do have karma to burn.
This is just a lie being propagated by the makers of Soylent Green. Don't be fooled. *Puts on aluminum-foil hat*
Not true. The speed of light is a constant, even near a black hole.
But spacetime is bent quite badly near the event horizon. Light emitted in the appropriate direction would orbit the black hole several times before entering/leaving the black hole, so while the speed of light may be chugging along at 299,792,458 m/s, the distance it travels might not be what you expected...
"We describe the derivation of two new human embryonic stem cell lines in... culture that includes protein components solely derived from recombinant sources or purified from human material," reads the paper.
Stem-cell green is people!
I mean, we know farmers get a bit lonely, and can "cross-pollinate" their sheep or other livestock from time to time - why don't we have man-sheep hybrids that are as smart as us?
We have those. They are called sheeple, and they outnumber the rest of us.