Evolution is asserted as fact in basically every place where it is even remotely possible to make such an assertion. You're watching an IMAX movie when suddenly, "Millions of years ago, dinosaurs evolved into birds...", etc. There is NEVER any mention that "we currently believe that dinosaurs evolved into birds millions of years ago..."
Gravity is asserted as a fact in basically every place where it even remotely possible to make such an assertion, electricity is asserted as a fact in basically every place where it even remotely possible to make such an assertion. I've never heard any mention of 'we currently believe that gravity holds things down towards the earth and keeps the planets and sun orbiting one another'.
Yes, ID involves the supernatural, but if the supernatural exists, how can you exclude it from scientific discourse and still call yourself a scientist?
ID involves the supernatural, therefore it is not testable. Since science is based on observation, evidence and experimentation it is by definition only able to test aspects of the natural world. Wether something supernatural exists beyond the natural world (personally I hope there is) is an interesting phillosophical and religious question but is outside the scope of science. Its that simple.
The ID people simply want their own untestable and unscientific theory to be taught as a 'fact' as well, or at least as a 'science' since most people associate science with finding facts, even if that isn't strictly true.
Any debate about how science is taught in schools (and yes your point is very valid about teaching what a theory is and that science can never find absolute truths or facts) is a completely seperate issue. In fact letting ID into classrooms would just further take science teaching away from the scientific method and processes.
I'll have to respectfully disagree. I'm not particularly knowledgable in physics, but it's my understanding that the theory of relativity suggests that gravity warps space-time. Now I know that it has been empiracally and proven that two clocks travelling at different speeds will diverge. However, I don't know of anyone who's seen space-time, nor the effect of gravity on space-time. I know of no attempts beyond mathematical analysis to demonstrate space-time. I could very well be wrong here.
I think this is the reasoning that gives people so much doubt about evolution. The whole 'if I can't see it directly then how can I know it ever happened?' thing. It makes no sense to say 'I don't know of anyone who's seen space-time' since you're seeing it all around you, every second of every day. Similarly the clock experiment you mentioned is an empirical, physical, experiment. Its not some abstract mathematical proof or calculation.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the US made like the Aussies and had draconian bandwidth restrictions. With..I dunno..say $300 per gigabyte over 2GB down per month?
Luckily for us Aussies most ISPs no longer do that - they shape the speed down to 64 or 32 kbit/sec or something like that. Of course our lovely government-owned monopoly Telstra, which owns the infrastructure as well as being the nations largest ISP (what idiots thought that would be a good idea when they part-privatised it?), still charges exorbitant amounts for excess bandwidth and they include uploads in their counting too!
So let me get this straight- these publishers put their information on the internet, make it publicly available to anyone in the world for free and then complain when some other organisation creates an index of links to that publicly available information. How dumb are they? If they don't want it available then take it off the web or put it behind an authentication gateway, if they do want it publicly available then be happy that google is indexing it - it'll bring more visitors to that information and generate more sales for them.
I don't see how you could have lost anything when wiki's keep all page versions in the history. Sounds like a technical glitch on the part of whatever wiki program the site used more than anything else.
I'd mod you up if I could because I think most of your post was spot on. However there a few things:
"and have Visual Studio start building your class interface for you! And what does OSS have? Graphviz?"
Have a look at KDevelop. It is certainly nowhere near all the features and integration of VS but it does the basic things that a developer-friendly IDE would do - eg. auto-generation of boilerplate code, integrated visual editor for widgets (QT Designer) etc.
"A typical fanboy claim is that Linux is so much more secure than Windows. Look at the installed base for Windows compared to Linux!"
Linux is in the majority when it comes to webservers and is a significant part of the server market. It still doesn't have all the security probs of Windows, although that might change somewhat if it was popular on the desktop there's no indication that it would be anywhere near as bad.
"Look at the distributions that use root as the default user login!"
None of the major ones do, Linspire was the only one and they've stopped that.
"Why isn't there an effort, as in OpenBSD, to audit the Linux kernel and other security-centric tools and libraries for security vulnerabilities?"
They are, there are security researchers crawling all over Linux all the time and finding and reporting vulnerabilities, just like with Windows.
The big problem I have right now is that it simply cannot find the network. No matter what I do, the network connection is dead
Sounds like a driver issue. Unfortunately you may be out of luck with this kind of thing, although buying another NIC is pretty cheap.
I also tried to play some mp3s on it and none of the audio players installed would recognize the file. I've since read that I may need to install additional software to get those programs to use mp3s. WTF? Something that minor, playing an mp3 file, shouldn't be that big a hassle.
Its not a big hassle, although if your net connection doesn't work it might be. Its only some American distros that have had to cut MP3 support by default for legal reasons (ie. Fedora and Suse).
look up cfengine A simpler solution is to just have a script that rsyncs or scp's the configs out. There are multiple ways to do this kind of thing in Linux.
And with a package you execute (or even double-click on it in distros with GUI package managers) and its installed. No pointless point-and-click through licences, choosing install location, confirm that you really do want to install and all that other stuff. It may not matter for a single program but if you're installing 10 or 100 or 1000 (ie. a typical distro installation) using packages can literally save you hours of useless point-and-click time.
The loss of a hand is a tremendous blow to the bodies ability to cool itself, and the addition of anything that creates additional heat is usually considered to be non-starter.
I don't understand - how does the loss of a relatively small body part like the hand (or even a whole limb) wreck the body's cooling system?
You haven't really stated what specifically makes Debian any more 'modular' than SLES or RHEL or any other distro. Debian is very similar to RHEL - long release cycle, often older packages but with heavily backported patches and a binary software distribution system (dpkg/apt is equivalent to rpm/yum or rpm/up2date). I don't see how Debian is more modular, I mean could you have easily upgraded the glib in Debain - easier than in SLES or RHEL.
You're joking right? Very few companies use Fedora as a server because its a hobbyist/consumer OS. It lives on the bleeding edge which means things break regularly and it has short support cycles (18 months) which means you have to keep upgrading it (a real PITA for servers) or lose updates.
Businesses use distros like RHEL, Debian and SLES (note that's not the same thing as the desktop-oriented OpenSuse or Suse Professional) for servers because they have long support cycles (5-7 years usually), are focused on stability (often at the expense of 'newness' of packages) and because they are often certified for 3rd party products (eg. Oracle) and are supported by the vendors. Fedora Core meets none of these requirements, SLES does.
We have 12 RHEL subscriptions (and a couple more RHEL servers which aren't subscribed *wink*) as well as some Centos servers for testing and less important functions. Although we've found Centos to be as good as RHEL (as it should be) the boss still wants to stick with RHEL for our production servers simply for the reassurance - we know that if something goes wrong we can contact RHEL support FWIW. Its also because what would happen if the Centos project started to die off (as Whitebox seems to have done)? Managers like the reassurance that they are dealing with (and paying) an established company that is going to be around for a while.
Yeah I've had that same problem with the Mandriva Printer config dialog - if it doesn't detect your printer on the network there appears to be no way to add it. All you have to do is go Options->Expert Mode and you'll see all the options for adding the network printer details. Now that may not be obvious to the typical user but the typical user is going to at least mouse through all the menu options before doing something as drastic as reinstalling the entire system! Sounds like Zdnet got a Windows-trained if-it-don't-work-then-just-reinstall-the-whole-lot monkey to do this review.
If they weren't able to make the slightest effort looking around the system then I would take their declaration that Ubuntu is best with a few grains of salt.
No matter what statistical calculations you try and make if the experiments that produced those 'statistics' are nonsense and unscientific the statistics are meaningless.
You set up a bunch of people who pray for another group, perhaps to cure them of cancer. The experimental group has no knowledge they are even in a survey, nor do the doctors or anyone working with them. You come back a year later and see if there is a difference between them and a control group.
Ok and as I pointed out before even if some of them are cured of cancer this doesn't prove anything about the existence or not of god. People are cured of cancer everyday in hospitals - if you decide to attribute that to god that's your business but not scientificly testable.
Also if you're trying to suggest that if any of them were inexplicably cured of cancer that is not a scientific test of god, since it is not something that we can make happen. Its like if I were to say pray for a unicorn to appear and if one does that's proof of god. Its nonsensicle from a scientific point of view.
Do you even understand how statistics work, at a basic level? I'd recommend a basic text.
What have statistics got to do with this? Do you even understand what they are?
Consider. Suppose God answers a certain percentage of prayers. You set up a double blind trial... heck, don't even tell the subjects they are participating in a study. Statistical analysis would reveal whether or not the premise was true. It's falsifiable, and doesn't require a why to be answered from God. It's only non-scientific in that you have a black box doing actions without an understanding of how it operates. Yet math gives us the power to observe and quantify black boxes.
The dodge that nothing is 100% certain is solved neatly by stats. You set a confidence level, and leave it at that.
WHat utter nonsense. Even if any of these prayers were granted there is no way to distinguish wether it was by the action of a god or god's or simply by chance or any other factor. If you were to run this 'trial' and some of the prayers were answered then choosing to attribute that to god would be purely an act of religious faith.
In a similar vein, analysis could reveal influence on DNA. If a herd of horses sprouted wings tomorrow, without any latent wing DNA, then you'd have to say (with a high degree of certainty) a designer was involved. Not necessarily God (ID doesn't presuppose God, as much as people like to believe that), since a hobbyist with a penchant for gene splicing could have been responsible for it. Or aliens, or whatever.
Yes aliens or someone experimenting with gene splicing could influence DNA, and yes this is testable. However where did the aliens come from? Where they 'designed' by other aliens? Where did they come from? This is a recursive argument and no matter how many times you recurse it the original designer would have to be something outside the universe, ie. something supernatural.
You said "they have nothing to do with each other". If you can't carry on a cohesive argument, I won't reply further. Quit dancing around and take a shot at me, damn!
No I didn't say that at all. I said they deal with different things and they are seperate theories - and that is perfectly true. Quit trying to build straw-men in place of a real argument.
Depending on who you ask, typicall it is only the origin of life on earth. Abiogenesis would be an adequate explanation for life everywhere in the universe. If you want to talk about life in the universe, and a universal creator, then you quit comparing ID to evolution and start comparing it to the big bang theory, because evolution doesn't really explain how the universe got here.
ID claims to explain how life evolved and its proponents hold it up as an alternative to evolution, and spend most of their time arguing against evolution. There is no comparison between ID and evolution, abiogenesis and/or big band theory because ID is not a testable scientific theory.
According to QM, I could teleport across the universe right now, the chances of that are slim, impossible according to the law of probability
that is abiogenesis for you, impossible according to the law of probability
Huh? How is it impossible? its unlikely according to the laws of probability but not impossible.
As for the double-slit experiment, it raised more questions than it answered
This is probably true of QM in general - that's why there's so much scientific interest and research into unifying QM with relativity, what many people refer to as 'unified physics' or something like that.
even things like "just pointing out that there is no organised movement to interfere with religion by any significant faction of science or scientists", which is completely unfounded
I don't see how its unfounded. Science, by definition, is religion-neutral - science does not confirm or deny the existence of a god or gods of any kind. Religion is simply out of scope of science and its only politicians and lawyers who try to twist things round to make religious beliefs appear 'scientific'.
I've demonstrated that ID can be falsified using statistics alone
It is not an answer to everything, simply a disproof of the primordial soup theory. Evolution doesn't answer ALL the questions either though. Perhaps the answer to your question would best be solved through astronomy, or astrophysics. We still don't know where the Universe came from. People who tend to believe life happened at random may also be inclined to believe that the Universe came about for the same reason: none at all. Now purpose, that is a philosophical debate.
So what does it have to do with the ID/evolution debate? ID claims that it can answer the origin of life. The theory that life came from another part of the universe is a seperate theory that doesn't answer that. As I said before its not relevant to this discussion.
Are you seriously going to keep repeating this? Go read some of the other posts in this thread and see what everyone is talking about. Holy shit, you might as well be saying "relativity and quantum mechanics have nothing to do with each other".
Are you seriously going to keep building straw-men like this? All I pointed out was that evolution and abiogenesis are different things. Abiogenesis concerns life coming about from non-living matter, evolution concerns the process by which life has evolved and changed over time. The theories concerning evolution cannot explain how life came about and the theories concerning abiogenesis cannot explain how life evolved. I never said there was no connection between them - that was a straw man you've built up and knocked down quit successfuly.
Speaking of which, is quantum mechanics falsifiable? Someone comes up with a huge complex set of equations that happen to work with each other, and it is widely accepted (after years of rejection). Some of it doesn't even make sense!
There are many experiments that have tested the theories around QM - see the light-through-a-slit experiments for example which you can do in any high-school science lab. There is still a lot of work surrounding QM because it doesn't fit in with the Einsteinian theory of gravity - ie. there's something missing in our understanding of the universe. Investigating things like this is what science is all about.
I'm glad you'd consider yourself a normal, rational person, but you may very well be an idiot, if you honestly believe that creationism is religious dogma. RTFA, the text is not referring to any literal truth, nor does it mention ANYTHING about religion! Holy shit man. And if you think scientists aren't trying to impose their beliefs on people, then you truly are an idiot, as I suspected. They may as well just throw every science journal together into one massive book and call it the bible, cause you'd just take it as the word of god wouldn't you?
I can see you're getting frustrated because you don't have any real argument, but calling me an 'idiot' doesn't amount to one. Creationism is by defintion religious dogma since it deals with the supernatural. What beliefs exactly is science trying to impose on people? Granted most scientists have their own political/religious/philisophical beliefs but the whole point of the scientific method and processes is that the influence of these beliefs are filtered out. Science is far from perfect but by and large it is successful - otherwise none of the technology you see around you would exist.
The motivations of some people are not as easy to understand as you may think. As some philosopher once said, altruism does not truly exist. Scientists are humans and are self-serving, and will put out a theory only to earn the respect of the rest of the community. "Science doesn't impose beliefs on people", you're personifying science? Science is simply the collaboration of humans, understand this.
Again see the point above - the whole process of science is designed to filter out biases and inaccuracies generated by the subjective beliefs of the scientists. Also I wasn't trying to personify science, but just pointing out that there is no organised movement to interfere with religion by any significant faction of science or scientists. The converse is not true with a politically significant faction of religious people trying to interfere with science by redefining it to be something its not.
You have a hard case selling intelligent design as not being a theory. It is a very minority theory, I grant you. And yes, it is proveable. All we need to do in order to prove intelligent design is to find the people who designed and seeded life on earth.
That could be $deity. It could also be aliens who are watching our progress from a secret base on Venus that the EU Venus probe could discover in the next couple of years.
This is another of those nonsense arguments that IDers put forward when they're cornered about testability. If life really did come about from another planet (and yes this is a testable theory, although so far there is no evidence to support it) then where did that life come from originally? No matter how many recursions you go through at the end the original 'Intelligent Designer' always has to be something supernatural - ie. outside the physical universe and therefore untestable.
Intelligent design is just an item on the list, although one that is not well supported. Evolution is an item, although one that is well supported. Tomorrow, that could all change. That is beauty of science.
The 'Intelligent Design' you are talking about is completely different from that being advocated by the religious right and taught in Kansas schools. Its also not an opposing possibility to evolution as it explains nothing about how life came about - ie. where did the aliens/asteroid/whatever come from?
Insisting that ONLY evolution CAN be right and ONLY evolution CAN be taught is just as wrong as saying that ONLY intelligent design can be right.
Science does not deal in absolute explanations. It deals in best explanations.
No one's insisting that ONLY evolution can be taught - you can teach ID or whatever you want in a religion class or church sunday school where it belongs. However at the moment the only scientificly valid theory with significant real evidence to support it is evolution.
It worries me more that so many/. types are unwilling to concede that evolution should ever be quetioned by anyone for any reason, ever. That makes me wonder if we didnt' quit teaching science in the US a long time ago...
Although I can't speak for others on this site I think you've seriously misread and misunderstood most of the comments posted if you think that. People just don't want non-science like ID taught as science for political reasons.
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Evolution is asserted as fact in basically every place where it is even remotely possible to make such an assertion. You're watching an IMAX movie when suddenly, "Millions of years ago, dinosaurs evolved into birds...", etc. There is NEVER any mention that "we currently believe that dinosaurs evolved into birds millions of years ago..."
Gravity is asserted as a fact in basically every place where it even remotely possible to make such an assertion, electricity is asserted as a fact in basically every place where it even remotely possible to make such an assertion. I've never heard any mention of 'we currently believe that gravity holds things down towards the earth and keeps the planets and sun orbiting one another'.
Yes, ID involves the supernatural, but if the supernatural exists, how can you exclude it from scientific discourse and still call yourself a scientist?
ID involves the supernatural, therefore it is not testable. Since science is based on observation, evidence and experimentation it is by definition only able to test aspects of the natural world. Wether something supernatural exists beyond the natural world (personally I hope there is) is an interesting phillosophical and religious question but is outside the scope of science. Its that simple.
The ID people simply want their own untestable and unscientific theory to be taught as a 'fact' as well, or at least as a 'science' since most people associate science with finding facts, even if that isn't strictly true.
Any debate about how science is taught in schools (and yes your point is very valid about teaching what a theory is and that science can never find absolute truths or facts) is a completely seperate issue. In fact letting ID into classrooms would just further take science teaching away from the scientific method and processes.
I'll have to respectfully disagree. I'm not particularly knowledgable in physics, but it's my understanding that the theory of relativity suggests that gravity warps space-time. Now I know that it has been empiracally and proven that two clocks travelling at different speeds will diverge. However, I don't know of anyone who's seen space-time, nor the effect of gravity on space-time. I know of no attempts beyond mathematical analysis to demonstrate space-time. I could very well be wrong here.
I think this is the reasoning that gives people so much doubt about evolution. The whole 'if I can't see it directly then how can I know it ever happened?' thing. It makes no sense to say 'I don't know of anyone who's seen space-time' since you're seeing it all around you, every second of every day. Similarly the clock experiment you mentioned is an empirical, physical, experiment. Its not some abstract mathematical proof or calculation.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the US made like the Aussies and had draconian bandwidth restrictions. With..I dunno..say $300 per gigabyte over 2GB down per month?
Luckily for us Aussies most ISPs no longer do that - they shape the speed down to 64 or 32 kbit/sec or something like that. Of course our lovely government-owned monopoly Telstra, which owns the infrastructure as well as being the nations largest ISP (what idiots thought that would be a good idea when they part-privatised it?), still charges exorbitant amounts for excess bandwidth and they include uploads in their counting too!
So let me get this straight- these publishers put their information on the internet, make it publicly available to anyone in the world for free and then complain when some other organisation creates an index of links to that publicly available information. How dumb are they? If they don't want it available then take it off the web or put it behind an authentication gateway, if they do want it publicly available then be happy that google is indexing it - it'll bring more visitors to that information and generate more sales for them.
I don't see how you could have lost anything when wiki's keep all page versions in the history. Sounds like a technical glitch on the part of whatever wiki program the site used more than anything else.
I'd mod you up if I could because I think most of your post was spot on. However there a few things:
"and have Visual Studio start building your class interface for you! And what does OSS have? Graphviz?"
Have a look at KDevelop. It is certainly nowhere near all the features and integration of VS but it does the basic things that a developer-friendly IDE would do - eg. auto-generation of boilerplate code, integrated visual editor for widgets (QT Designer) etc.
"A typical fanboy claim is that Linux is so much more secure than Windows. Look at the installed base for Windows compared to Linux!"
Linux is in the majority when it comes to webservers and is a significant part of the server market. It still doesn't have all the security probs of Windows, although that might change somewhat if it was popular on the desktop there's no indication that it would be anywhere near as bad.
"Look at the distributions that use root as the default user login!"
None of the major ones do, Linspire was the only one and they've stopped that.
"Why isn't there an effort, as in OpenBSD, to audit the Linux kernel and other security-centric tools and libraries for security vulnerabilities?"
They are, there are security researchers crawling all over Linux all the time and finding and reporting vulnerabilities, just like with Windows.
The big problem I have right now is that it simply cannot find the network. No matter what I do, the network connection is dead
Sounds like a driver issue. Unfortunately you may be out of luck with this kind of thing, although buying another NIC is pretty cheap.
I also tried to play some mp3s on it and none of the audio players installed would recognize the file. I've since read that I may need to install additional software to get those programs to use mp3s. WTF? Something that minor, playing an mp3 file, shouldn't be that big a hassle.
Its not a big hassle, although if your net connection doesn't work it might be. Its only some American distros that have had to cut MP3 support by default for legal reasons (ie. Fedora and Suse).
look up cfengine
A simpler solution is to just have a script that rsyncs or scp's the configs out. There are multiple ways to do this kind of thing in Linux.
And with a package you execute (or even double-click on it in distros with GUI package managers) and its installed. No pointless point-and-click through licences, choosing install location, confirm that you really do want to install and all that other stuff. It may not matter for a single program but if you're installing 10 or 100 or 1000 (ie. a typical distro installation) using packages can literally save you hours of useless point-and-click time.
The loss of a hand is a tremendous blow to the bodies ability to cool itself, and the addition of anything that creates additional heat is usually considered to be non-starter.
I don't understand - how does the loss of a relatively small body part like the hand (or even a whole limb) wreck the body's cooling system?
You haven't really stated what specifically makes Debian any more 'modular' than SLES or RHEL or any other distro. Debian is very similar to RHEL - long release cycle, often older packages but with heavily backported patches and a binary software distribution system (dpkg/apt is equivalent to rpm/yum or rpm/up2date). I don't see how Debian is more modular, I mean could you have easily upgraded the glib in Debain - easier than in SLES or RHEL.
You're joking right? Very few companies use Fedora as a server because its a hobbyist/consumer OS. It lives on the bleeding edge which means things break regularly and it has short support cycles (18 months) which means you have to keep upgrading it (a real PITA for servers) or lose updates.
Businesses use distros like RHEL, Debian and SLES (note that's not the same thing as the desktop-oriented OpenSuse or Suse Professional) for servers because they have long support cycles (5-7 years usually), are focused on stability (often at the expense of 'newness' of packages) and because they are often certified for 3rd party products (eg. Oracle) and are supported by the vendors. Fedora Core meets none of these requirements, SLES does.
We have 12 RHEL subscriptions (and a couple more RHEL servers which aren't subscribed *wink*) as well as some Centos servers for testing and less important functions. Although we've found Centos to be as good as RHEL (as it should be) the boss still wants to stick with RHEL for our production servers simply for the reassurance - we know that if something goes wrong we can contact RHEL support FWIW. Its also because what would happen if the Centos project started to die off (as Whitebox seems to have done)? Managers like the reassurance that they are dealing with (and paying) an established company that is going to be around for a while.
Yeah I've had that same problem with the Mandriva Printer config dialog - if it doesn't detect your printer on the network there appears to be no way to add it. All you have to do is go Options->Expert Mode and you'll see all the options for adding the network printer details. Now that may not be obvious to the typical user but the typical user is going to at least mouse through all the menu options before doing something as drastic as reinstalling the entire system! Sounds like Zdnet got a Windows-trained if-it-don't-work-then-just-reinstall-the-whole-lot monkey to do this review.
If they weren't able to make the slightest effort looking around the system then I would take their declaration that Ubuntu is best with a few grains of salt.
you forgot a few steps: "... Doesn't Work->Uninstall->Reboot->Install->OK..."
Google "t-test" and maybe you will figure it out.
No matter what statistical calculations you try and make if the experiments that produced those 'statistics' are nonsense and unscientific the statistics are meaningless.
You set up a bunch of people who pray for another group, perhaps to cure them of cancer. The experimental group has no knowledge they are even in a survey, nor do the doctors or anyone working with them. You come back a year later and see if there is a difference between them and a control group.
Ok and as I pointed out before even if some of them are cured of cancer this doesn't prove anything about the existence or not of god. People are cured of cancer everyday in hospitals - if you decide to attribute that to god that's your business but not scientificly testable.
Also if you're trying to suggest that if any of them were inexplicably cured of cancer that is not a scientific test of god, since it is not something that we can make happen. Its like if I were to say pray for a unicorn to appear and if one does that's proof of god. Its nonsensicle from a scientific point of view.
Do you even understand how statistics work, at a basic level? I'd recommend a basic text.
What have statistics got to do with this? Do you even understand what they are?
Ok: "As biologists use the term, macroevolution means evolution at or above the species level. Speciation has been observed and documented. " http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB901.html
ROFL the page you linked to is a refutation of that claim
Consider. Suppose God answers a certain percentage of prayers. You set up a double blind trial... heck, don't even tell the subjects they are participating in a study. Statistical analysis would reveal whether or not the premise was true. It's falsifiable, and doesn't require a why to be answered from God. It's only non-scientific in that you have a black box doing actions without an understanding of how it operates. Yet math gives us the power to observe and quantify black boxes.
The dodge that nothing is 100% certain is solved neatly by stats. You set a confidence level, and leave it at that.
WHat utter nonsense. Even if any of these prayers were granted there is no way to distinguish wether it was by the action of a god or god's or simply by chance or any other factor. If you were to run this 'trial' and some of the prayers were answered then choosing to attribute that to god would be purely an act of religious faith.
In a similar vein, analysis could reveal influence on DNA. If a herd of horses sprouted wings tomorrow, without any latent wing DNA, then you'd have to say (with a high degree of certainty) a designer was involved. Not necessarily God (ID doesn't presuppose God, as much as people like to believe that), since a hobbyist with a penchant for gene splicing could have been responsible for it. Or aliens, or whatever.
Yes aliens or someone experimenting with gene splicing could influence DNA, and yes this is testable. However where did the aliens come from? Where they 'designed' by other aliens? Where did they come from? This is a recursive argument and no matter how many times you recurse it the original designer would have to be something outside the universe, ie. something supernatural.
http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/
You said "they have nothing to do with each other". If you can't carry on a cohesive argument, I won't reply further. Quit dancing around and take a shot at me, damn!
No I didn't say that at all. I said they deal with different things and they are seperate theories - and that is perfectly true. Quit trying to build straw-men in place of a real argument.
Depending on who you ask, typicall it is only the origin of life on earth. Abiogenesis would be an adequate explanation for life everywhere in the universe. If you want to talk about life in the universe, and a universal creator, then you quit comparing ID to evolution and start comparing it to the big bang theory, because evolution doesn't really explain how the universe got here.
ID claims to explain how life evolved and its proponents hold it up as an alternative to evolution, and spend most of their time arguing against evolution. There is no comparison between ID and evolution, abiogenesis and/or big band theory because ID is not a testable scientific theory.
According to QM, I could teleport across the universe right now, the chances of that are slim, impossible according to the law of probability
No! QM doesn't say that at all - you've been reading too much science fiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportatio
that is abiogenesis for you, impossible according to the law of probability
Huh? How is it impossible? its unlikely according to the laws of probability but not impossible.
As for the double-slit experiment, it raised more questions than it answered
This is probably true of QM in general - that's why there's so much scientific interest and research into unifying QM with relativity, what many people refer to as 'unified physics' or something like that.
even things like "just pointing out that there is no organised movement to interfere with religion by any significant faction of science or scientists", which is completely unfounded
I don't see how its unfounded. Science, by definition, is religion-neutral - science does not confirm or deny the existence of a god or gods of any kind. Religion is simply out of scope of science and its only politicians and lawyers who try to twist things round to make religious beliefs appear 'scientific'.
I've demonstrated that ID can be falsified using statistics alone
Where have you demonstrated that?
It is not an answer to everything, simply a disproof of the primordial soup theory. Evolution doesn't answer ALL the questions either though. Perhaps the answer to your question would best be solved through astronomy, or astrophysics. We still don't know where the Universe came from. People who tend to believe life happened at random may also be inclined to believe that the Universe came about for the same reason: none at all. Now purpose, that is a philosophical debate.
So what does it have to do with the ID/evolution debate? ID claims that it can answer the origin of life. The theory that life came from another part of the universe is a seperate theory that doesn't answer that. As I said before its not relevant to this discussion.
Are you seriously going to keep repeating this? Go read some of the other posts in this thread and see what everyone is talking about. Holy shit, you might as well be saying "relativity and quantum mechanics have nothing to do with each other".
Are you seriously going to keep building straw-men like this? All I pointed out was that evolution and abiogenesis are different things. Abiogenesis concerns life coming about from non-living matter, evolution concerns the process by which life has evolved and changed over time. The theories concerning evolution cannot explain how life came about and the theories concerning abiogenesis cannot explain how life evolved. I never said there was no connection between them - that was a straw man you've built up and knocked down quit successfuly.
Speaking of which, is quantum mechanics falsifiable? Someone comes up with a huge complex set of equations that happen to work with each other, and it is widely accepted (after years of rejection). Some of it doesn't even make sense!
There are many experiments that have tested the theories around QM - see the light-through-a-slit experiments for example which you can do in any high-school science lab. There is still a lot of work surrounding QM because it doesn't fit in with the Einsteinian theory of gravity - ie. there's something missing in our understanding of the universe. Investigating things like this is what science is all about.
I'm glad you'd consider yourself a normal, rational person, but you may very well be an idiot, if you honestly believe that creationism is religious dogma. RTFA, the text is not referring to any literal truth, nor does it mention ANYTHING about religion! Holy shit man. And if you think scientists aren't trying to impose their beliefs on people, then you truly are an idiot, as I suspected. They may as well just throw every science journal together into one massive book and call it the bible, cause you'd just take it as the word of god wouldn't you?
I can see you're getting frustrated because you don't have any real argument, but calling me an 'idiot' doesn't amount to one. Creationism is by defintion religious dogma since it deals with the supernatural. What beliefs exactly is science trying to impose on people? Granted most scientists have their own political/religious/philisophical beliefs but the whole point of the scientific method and processes is that the influence of these beliefs are filtered out. Science is far from perfect but by and large it is successful - otherwise none of the technology you see around you would exist.
The motivations of some people are not as easy to understand as you may think. As some philosopher once said, altruism does not truly exist. Scientists are humans and are self-serving, and will put out a theory only to earn the respect of the rest of the community. "Science doesn't impose beliefs on people", you're personifying science? Science is simply the collaboration of humans, understand this.
Again see the point above - the whole process of science is designed to filter out biases and inaccuracies generated by the subjective beliefs of the scientists. Also I wasn't trying to personify science, but just pointing out that there is no organised movement to interfere with religion by any significant faction of science or scientists. The converse is not true with a politically significant faction of religious people trying to interfere with science by redefining it to be something its not.
You have a hard case selling intelligent design as not being a theory. It is a very minority theory, I grant you. And yes, it is proveable. All we need to do in order to prove intelligent design is to find the people who designed and seeded life on earth.
That could be $deity. It could also be aliens who are watching our progress from a secret base on Venus that the EU Venus probe could discover in the next couple of years.
This is another of those nonsense arguments that IDers put forward when they're cornered about testability. If life really did come about from another planet (and yes this is a testable theory, although so far there is no evidence to support it) then where did that life come from originally? No matter how many recursions you go through at the end the original 'Intelligent Designer' always has to be something supernatural - ie. outside the physical universe and therefore untestable.
Intelligent design is just an item on the list, although one that is not well supported. Evolution is an item, although one that is well supported. Tomorrow, that could all change. That is beauty of science.
The 'Intelligent Design' you are talking about is completely different from that being advocated by the religious right and taught in Kansas schools. Its also not an opposing possibility to evolution as it explains nothing about how life came about - ie. where did the aliens/asteroid/whatever come from?
Insisting that ONLY evolution CAN be right and ONLY evolution CAN be taught is just as wrong as saying that ONLY intelligent design can be right.
Science does not deal in absolute explanations. It deals in best explanations.
No one's insisting that ONLY evolution can be taught - you can teach ID or whatever you want in a religion class or church sunday school where it belongs. However at the moment the only scientificly valid theory with significant real evidence to support it is evolution.
It worries me more that so many
Although I can't speak for others on this site I think you've seriously misread and misunderstood most of the comments posted if you think that. People just don't want non-science like ID taught as science for political reasons.