Look at this comment and some of the responses. The story is 99% jokes about oregonians and 1% highly informative diatribes on volcanoes and vulcanism. It stands out like a vien of gold in a big wall of quartz.
No. We should not lie to people at all. We should responsibly let them "test everything; hold on to those things which are helpful".
beleivers in a Big Daddy in the Sky who beleive that nothing we do here on earth matters - it's all about the afterlife, baby. So blow up some infidels, or wreck the planet, whatever
Traditionally, Atheistic regimes have been responsible for several times the death tally of all Theisms combined. Your point was?
There's no connection between professed belief in a Big Daddy in the Sky, and ethical behavior.
The direct answer is: not AFAIK, but if Velikovsky is anywhere near right about Venus, Birkeland currents might have had a hand there even if only as a catalyst or secondary destabiliser. It'd be an interesting question to study. Jupiter's weather's gone all funny since Shoemaker-Levy slapped it about, maybe we'll get to see a re-enactment? (-:
...that article links to a description of Birkeland currents, which might give you a big tip about what the relatively coherent parts of the article are on alluding to. If Earth's Birkeland currents routinely hit a million amperes, can you imagine what the Sun's must be like? Nice shot of Jovian aurorae, too.
This appears to be the Birkeland in question. Nobel Prize nominee seven times, figured out how the polar aurorae worked, invented the gadget we use to manufacture nitrate fertiliser, and so ons.
THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE US WERE NOT CHRISTIANS!
True. But Christians are not the only people who believe in a supernatural being called God.
As it turns out, the Founding Fathers generally did believe in God. This is not a big achievement; according to James 2:19, the demons also believe. I don't think this is referring to Apache or BIND.
American (the USA) was not "filled with" people; there were far less Americans of any kind than there now are Australians.
The Americans who could not read and write did not need to. They were Indians, and had more effective and complete ways of passing along information. The Americans who could read and write brought them whiskey, rifles and venereal diseases -- what a brilliant combination!
America's literacy rate has never recovered since mandatory, factory-style formal schooling was introduced. Today, their (Western society's, basically) illiteracy rate is at least five times as high as it was then.
What education is doing is teaching us to not believe in God; or to put it another way, that nothing we do, cosmically speaking, matters. Big surprise, we have steadily increasing social problems to match our steadily longer and more rigorous educations.
I think Pastafarianism is great! It's a high-humour way to get people thinking about origins for real.
Another one I like to point out is Periannan Senapathy's warm little pond, which is mathematically far more reasonable than Gradualism. It approaches the abundant inconsistencies in both Atheist and Theist viewpoints from the serious end, and can make people really stop and think. My goodness, how that must hurt some of them. (-:
Perhaps next year's funny randomness cult can revolve around a Holy Hamburger Patty engraved with the powerful sigil IHS ("In Hot Sauce") and served with spinach as a testimony to Pope I?
...the better to entangle competitors in DMCA-like laws with?
They are full time employees delivering important components of large products.
Like that snippet of encrypted code in Win 3.11 that detected DR-DOS and crashed? Or badge-engineering BSD FTP? Or writing an XboX BIOS that deliberately shuts down if you replace the hard drive with something bootable? Or devising a weapon with which to kill Google?
Not trashing Asian IT workers, since they often outproduce Australians in Australia and are generally no more incompetent, but I really don't think you grok the focus of "important" in the eyes of Microsoft's management.
We just have to document every bit of structure in the entire universe, and the path it took for every quanta of time since the beginning of time itself, and prove that every path taken could have been random, and then we're done?
Come back when you're willing to reason, rather than rely on grandstanding debate techniques.
We need do no such thing. Proving that abiogenesis is probable would be enough.
That's going to be hard. Very hard.
We have some fine ideas about how many quanta of time are available, and how many quanta of matter. Factoring all of those out under the most optimistic of conditions (e.g. that distance doesn't exist and that every particle interacts in every temporal quantum) results in some stupidly big numbers of universes in which life doesn't happen. The odds stand at thousands of orders of magnitude against.
Doing things by degrees makes those numbers much worse.
Invoking a random (i.e. non-ID) anthropic principle (a principle, by the way, which lacks any direct evidence) doesn't help very much, since the vast, vast majority of the vanishingly small number of probability universes in which the way-beyond-impossible happens should all be considerably more hostile to life than the one we observe. If we are here through random anthropocentricity, we are still literally impossibly lucky.
Asserting that life is inevitable given the properties of matter is not only distinctly unobservant, but even if it had a grain of truth in it you would be facing another Pandora's box: why should those physical principles exist as such?
Scientists are people, not omniscient robots. "Believe" means exactly the same thing for a scientist and a paddy farmer.
Many of the things that scientists believe are demonstrably false. I know this to be correct from empirical experiment. Yes, even when they're speaking ex cathedra.
Unfortunately for the ID crowd, no such feature has been found. They do a lot of hand-waving and lying, but in the end there simply isn't such a thing as irreduceable complexity among life on Earth.
Just look up "scaffolding" in this context if you want to see some serious hand-waving, lying, and a firm belief in things which have zero evidential existence.
It is statistically rigorous to regard odds of 10^50 against as "impossible" and the statistical likelihood of abiogenesis having ever happened anywhere in the universe as we know it, ever, are at least several times as many orders of magnitude less possible than that.
...I didn't say anything of the sort... but, since you called it to my attention, I think it's worth pointing out a couple of things.
One of them being that Evolutionism in general (including Darwinism) is very weak as a theory for precisely that reason: because it can be bent and twisted to fit any situation (including contradicting itself) it's about as useful for building a logical structure as wet spaghetti is for building a bridge.
You should also beware of confusing the Modern Synthesis with Darwinism. Charles Darwin (and no doubt his granddaddy Erasmus) believed in "pangenes", a form of Lamarkism. Darwinism per se is genuinely a disproven theory, even by the standards of other serious evolutionists. Which is sad, since there's a good chance that it's actually closer to correct than its successors. (-:
If evolution can't explain something, then the explanations get changed, the stories built around the theory (theories if you want to be pedantic) get wilder and more imaginative. The theory itself, however, is holy and sacrosanct. Few dare seriously commit the heresy of openly questioning it (thank you, for example, Antony Flew), and those who do are rapidly shouted down. Even the late Stephen J Gould, with his "survival of the luckiest" concept and punctuated equilibria, took a lifetime of sacrificial labour to get that viewpoint -- a relatively trivial change compared with what should be happening -- accepted as a kind of niche cult within evolutionism.
...which to cut a long story short is a Catholic carry-over from the Mithraism which preceded it, just like the concept that all of our dear departed are squinting down at us from a kind of celestial balcony seat.
Ain't nothing like an infinitely vengeful diety and a billion watchful relatives to scare the flock's bowels clean and keep them in line. A reasonable deity doesn't suit control freaks so well, and routinely gets shut out.
I am sure that given enough time, scientists can plug holes in the theory of evolution and answer questions that critics throw at it like.
What, a hundred and fifty years isn't enough?
Oh, wait, I remember... it takes millions of years, doesn't it? (-:
unprovable assumptions like 'there's a naturally occuring ipod on the dark side of the moon, since you can't disprove it, it exists' have no place in science at all
True. Which is why the labelling of evolution as "science" rather than "creation myth for Atheists" has long puzzled me.
The article referred to here is typical: we believe that speciation drives evolution, have done so since we believed that those incredibly intricate sets of interwoven biological factories called cells were just little bags of slime. Just now, after more than a century of holding this as nothing less than an article of faith, we think we might be seeing it happening. Maybe.
I've got news for you: speciation is pretty much inevitable from the perspective of a creationist. Any differentiation due to information loss or separation is, starting from the premise of a fallen, decaying world.
As to your Intelligent Design straw-man, it's easy to disprove. Simply show that all existing structure is practically achievable through random chance, and you're done. That's a lot harder row to hoe than you assume.
Last point: string theory is "safe" to criticise since it's off in the theoretical boonies, and there are other Materialist theories for it to compete with. There are no immediate theological consequences if string theory is proven useless.
The theory of evolution is not "safe" to criticise, since it can be tested in our own back-yard and has immediate theological implications whenever something that's effectively impossible to produce by evolutionary processes is found. And you know what? Each time something like that is noticed, it's written off with a statement along the lines of "we'll eventually find a way of explaining this with evolution, never you mind". That statement is an act of faith. "There's no evidence for it here, but I believe in evolution, brother, how about you?"
If it turns out that these butterflies speciate -- or not -- it will be no more a proof of evolution than the variation in beak shape amongst Darwin's Finches was. If there's honesty in modern science, it's in the follow-up study to that one, which showed that the beaks changed right back when the environment changed right back.
0. save all user data from computer 1. install Mandrake Linux or similar over the top of Outlook and MS-Windows 2. restore user data 3. configure KMail or Evolution to play random sounds 4. problem solved. forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at this comment and some of the responses. The story is 99% jokes about oregonians and 1% highly informative diatribes on volcanoes and vulcanism. It stands out like a vien of gold in a big wall of quartz.
Traditionally, Atheistic regimes have been responsible for several times the death tally of all Theisms combined. Your point was?
I understand that the correct answer for this is:
...and at least some of the the Kuiper belt, too.
The direct answer is: not AFAIK, but if Velikovsky is anywhere near right about Venus, Birkeland currents might have had a hand there even if only as a catalyst or secondary destabiliser. It'd be an interesting question to study. Jupiter's weather's gone all funny since Shoemaker-Levy slapped it about, maybe we'll get to see a re-enactment? (-:
95.2% if you count ability to do any kind of reading and writing as "literate", which I don't.
Literacy correlates fairly directly with income, rather than with intelligence. Evidently, belief in God is not driven by material largesse.
...that article links to a description of Birkeland currents, which might give you a big tip about what the relatively coherent parts of the article are on alluding to. If Earth's Birkeland currents routinely hit a million amperes, can you imagine what the Sun's must be like? Nice shot of Jovian aurorae, too.
This appears to be the Birkeland in question. Nobel Prize nominee seven times, figured out how the polar aurorae worked, invented the gadget we use to manufacture nitrate fertiliser, and so ons.
As it turns out, the Founding Fathers generally did believe in God. This is not a big achievement; according to James 2:19, the demons also believe. I don't think this is referring to Apache or BIND.
- American (the USA) was not "filled with" people; there were far less Americans of any kind than there now are Australians.
- The Americans who could not read and write did not need to. They were Indians, and had more effective and complete ways of passing along information. The Americans who could read and write brought them whiskey, rifles and venereal diseases -- what a brilliant combination!
- America's literacy rate has never recovered since mandatory, factory-style formal schooling was introduced. Today, their (Western society's, basically) illiteracy rate is at least five times as high as it was then.
What education is doing is teaching us to not believe in God; or to put it another way, that nothing we do, cosmically speaking, matters. Big surprise, we have steadily increasing social problems to match our steadily longer and more rigorous educations.I think Pastafarianism is great! It's a high-humour way to get people thinking about origins for real.
Another one I like to point out is Periannan Senapathy's warm little pond, which is mathematically far more reasonable than Gradualism. It approaches the abundant inconsistencies in both Atheist and Theist viewpoints from the serious end, and can make people really stop and think. My goodness, how that must hurt some of them. (-:
Perhaps next year's funny randomness cult can revolve around a Holy Hamburger Patty engraved with the powerful sigil IHS ("In Hot Sauce") and served with spinach as a testimony to Pope I?
D'oh!
Not trashing Asian IT workers, since they often outproduce Australians in Australia and are generally no more incompetent, but I really don't think you grok the focus of "important" in the eyes of Microsoft's management.
How the heck am I supposed to know which way to mod you if you don't take clear sides?
<G/D/R>
We need do no such thing. Proving that abiogenesis is probable would be enough.
That's going to be hard. Very hard.
We have some fine ideas about how many quanta of time are available, and how many quanta of matter. Factoring all of those out under the most optimistic of conditions (e.g. that distance doesn't exist and that every particle interacts in every temporal quantum) results in some stupidly big numbers of universes in which life doesn't happen. The odds stand at thousands of orders of magnitude against.
Doing things by degrees makes those numbers much worse.
Invoking a random (i.e. non-ID) anthropic principle (a principle, by the way, which lacks any direct evidence) doesn't help very much, since the vast, vast majority of the vanishingly small number of probability universes in which the way-beyond-impossible happens should all be considerably more hostile to life than the one we observe. If we are here through random anthropocentricity, we are still literally impossibly lucky.
Asserting that life is inevitable given the properties of matter is not only distinctly unobservant, but even if it had a grain of truth in it you would be facing another Pandora's box: why should those physical principles exist as such?
And so on.
...priesthood-of-scientists dogma once again.
Scientists are people, not omniscient robots. "Believe" means exactly the same thing for a scientist and a paddy farmer.
Many of the things that scientists believe are demonstrably false. I know this to be correct from empirical experiment. Yes, even when they're speaking ex cathedra.
...so what do you believe is the best explanation?
...a synonym for "impossible".
True story.
It is statistically rigorous to regard odds of 10^50 against as "impossible" and the statistical likelihood of abiogenesis having ever happened anywhere in the universe as we know it, ever, are at least several times as many orders of magnitude less possible than that.
...I didn't say anything of the sort... but, since you called it to my attention, I think it's worth pointing out a couple of things.
One of them being that Evolutionism in general (including Darwinism) is very weak as a theory for precisely that reason: because it can be bent and twisted to fit any situation (including contradicting itself) it's about as useful for building a logical structure as wet spaghetti is for building a bridge.
You should also beware of confusing the Modern Synthesis with Darwinism. Charles Darwin (and no doubt his granddaddy Erasmus) believed in "pangenes", a form of Lamarkism. Darwinism per se is genuinely a disproven theory, even by the standards of other serious evolutionists. Which is sad, since there's a good chance that it's actually closer to correct than its successors. (-:
If evolution can't explain something, then the explanations get changed, the stories built around the theory (theories if you want to be pedantic) get wilder and more imaginative. The theory itself, however, is holy and sacrosanct. Few dare seriously commit the heresy of openly questioning it (thank you, for example, Antony Flew), and those who do are rapidly shouted down. Even the late Stephen J Gould, with his "survival of the luckiest" concept and punctuated equilibria, took a lifetime of sacrificial labour to get that viewpoint -- a relatively trivial change compared with what should be happening -- accepted as a kind of niche cult within evolutionism.
Never confuse motion with action.
...which to cut a long story short is a Catholic carry-over from the Mithraism which preceded it, just like the concept that all of our dear departed are squinting down at us from a kind of celestial balcony seat.
Ain't nothing like an infinitely vengeful diety and a billion watchful relatives to scare the flock's bowels clean and keep them in line. A reasonable deity doesn't suit control freaks so well, and routinely gets shut out.
Oh, wait, I remember... it takes millions of years, doesn't it? (-:
True. Which is why the labelling of evolution as "science" rather than "creation myth for Atheists" has long puzzled me.The article referred to here is typical: we believe that speciation drives evolution, have done so since we believed that those incredibly intricate sets of interwoven biological factories called cells were just little bags of slime. Just now, after more than a century of holding this as nothing less than an article of faith, we think we might be seeing it happening. Maybe.
I've got news for you: speciation is pretty much inevitable from the perspective of a creationist. Any differentiation due to information loss or separation is, starting from the premise of a fallen, decaying world.
As to your Intelligent Design straw-man, it's easy to disprove. Simply show that all existing structure is practically achievable through random chance, and you're done. That's a lot harder row to hoe than you assume.
Last point: string theory is "safe" to criticise since it's off in the theoretical boonies, and there are other Materialist theories for it to compete with. There are no immediate theological consequences if string theory is proven useless.
The theory of evolution is not "safe" to criticise, since it can be tested in our own back-yard and has immediate theological implications whenever something that's effectively impossible to produce by evolutionary processes is found. And you know what? Each time something like that is noticed, it's written off with a statement along the lines of "we'll eventually find a way of explaining this with evolution, never you mind". That statement is an act of faith. "There's no evidence for it here, but I believe in evolution, brother, how about you?"
If it turns out that these butterflies speciate -- or not -- it will be no more a proof of evolution than the variation in beak shape amongst Darwin's Finches was. If there's honesty in modern science, it's in the follow-up study to that one, which showed that the beaks changed right back when the environment changed right back.
...ramming the disk heads into the spindle and frying first the monitor and then the video card?
My goodness, some people have selective memories!
0. save all user data from computer
1. install Mandrake Linux or similar over the top of Outlook and MS-Windows
2. restore user data
3. configure KMail or Evolution to play random sounds
4. problem solved. forever.