That's an excellent summary but I wanted to correct you on one point. Prior to the Civil War, the South wanted laissez-faire and free markets and international trade, while it was the North that was dominated by its big city banking elite that wanted protectionism. The north wanted to sell its manufactured goods to the south while preventing the superior and cheaper European goods from being sold in American markets. The South saw this as an outright money-grab by the northern states (and I believe it was) and was one of the main, if not the main, motivations for southern independence---to create free-markets.
Invariably exporting economies favor international trade, while importing ones favor tariff barriers, mercantilism, and statism.
It's awesome that the central government makes laws about things like this. It makes me feel so warm and fuzzy to have the State go to the trouble of making these things into crimes and not letting market forces and property owners decide things like this on their own. This is another example of why the State is our Savior (Peace be upon it).
It is polarized precisely because there is legitimate disagreement within science itself about what is 'good' science and what's not, when the paradigm chosen has direct and immediate consequences in politics, economics, sociology, philosophy and religion. I am all for objective and evidentialist presentation of all the relevant facts that support one's theory, but not for the Lysenkoist politizing of science (i.e. of the truth itself) and the persecution of those who disagree with your paradigm, and suppression of their voices from science--something all too common in modern science.
How when Darwinism and the origins of life are discussed on/., despite many protestations to the effect that Darwinism is without serious errors or flaws and doesn't actually oppose (true) religion in any way at all [ah, but no true scotsman eats porridge...], the number of a-theistic or anti-god or anti-creator statements always are extremely numerous? In fact, it is difficult for a rational person to cohere the beliefs of a creator/divinity with the beliefs in molecules-to-man cosmic and biological evolution. Steven Jay Gould's attempt is nothing more than embarrassing hand-waving to create two separate non-overlapping magisteria that in fact overlap in empirical predictions quite systematically.
Here's a heretical thought: Maybe AIDS isn't contagious in these patients because HIV doesn't cause AIDS and never has been the cause of it. If that sounds crazy, maybe you've never explored the literature that points out the puzzling inconsistencies in the theory underlying the multi-billion dollar HIV research and pharma industries.
This 'problem' of controlling which scientific theories/hypotheses the government schools are 'allowed' to discuss only exists because of government schools. If all schools were private schools, then parents can simply send their children to whatever school they think is best, pro-Darwinian, anti-Darwinian, or mixed ('teach the controversy') biology/cosmogony curriculum. The current 'strategy' of mandating a physicalist/materialist theory of origins, banning and making illegal teleological theories, then using the Federal(!!) court system to defend this setup will obviously only lead to continued attempts to overthrow it every few years (unsuccessfully?) and lead to the continued emmigration from the public schools to private schools and home-schooling, which only strengthens the growing calls for government-vouchers to pay for private school, or for abolishing federal (and state?) government schooling altogether.
That, and twelve-year olds having sex and doing cocaine while being functionally illiterate (and remaining so at their graduations) also probably undermines the government schools' credibility.
The Feds involvement in this all is also on dubious legal grounds for semi-obvious reasons (so where is the Federal Department of Education in the US Federal Constitution anyway?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education#Opposition . But what's a hundred billion dollars of our money between friends, anyway? Unless you happen not to be a friend.
If they can interbreed and generate fertile offspring, as they obviously can, then they are obviously the same species, even if micro-evolution has taken them down different paths.
What this study may have discovered is the equivalent of the "black" giraffe, the "white" giraffe, and the "oriental" giraffe.
Thank you for your honest and charitable response. It is (too) easy to be like Voltaire and just mock everything, even complicated matters about which it is very hard to get a handle on and yet still remarkably easy to tease and poke fun of (such as when someone tells me what exactly happened 4.5 thousand million years ago, and I have obviously been guilty of that in the grandparent post teasing this latest report on 'assured' results in rock dating. While I have strong doubts that a historical science like radiometric dating even comes anywhere close to the levels of assured results that I would expect in my own field of power/electrical engineering, it doesn't make it right to lampoon something I am obviously not ready to back up with my own sustained arguments. Thanks for keeping me humble.:)
This is the kind of unhelpful response that doesn't win any converts to your way of thinking. The book is about various aspects relating to the theory of evolution by natural selection through random mutations, but the point of it is not to argue as an apologist towards a religion or towards a bible. Milton is himself irreligious and not a member of any religion. (To the other poster: And yet reportedly Milton's summary of Dawkins' review is that it is a hysterical atheistic screed denouncing him as a closest creationist, and short on any specific hard evidential criticisms. Have I read Dawkins' review myself? No more than you have read Milton's book.)
My own technical experience is in electrical engineering, not radiometric or isochron dating. Yes I am quite open to the possibility that I am the proverbial layman bamboozled by a technical charlatan and the profession itself is eminently respectable and completely in consensus at all points. On the other hand, the other field I know a lot about, economics, I am well-aware of there being no consensus whatsoever but contains the most heated debates imaginable about all points in the field. They are a science (someone is right after all and someone is wrong) but it is a 'softer' science because it is not like whipping particles around in an accelerator again and again and making measurements. And as for electrical engineering, where there is no debate on fundamentals, at least what we study (e.g. an electric machine) is right there in front of us, and we are not engaging in speculative historical study based on neat tools we think might work about a hypothetical machine ten trillion years ago. Where does isochron or more broadly, radiometric dating, rate on the scale of 'hard' or 'soft' science? You seem to be suggesting right at the 'hard' pole, while I think in fact (thanks to Milton), it is located much more in the 'soft' part of line, with results only as strong as the risky assumptions made in arriving at those results.
The main criticism I remember he pointed out again and again is contamination, and the inability to separate decay by-products from the isotope from the decay by-products of other materials that decay into the same elements, and the elements and isotopes of the nominal by-product initially present at time zero when they were formed. He then takes the two or three main types of rock-dating and constructs a skeptical attack on each one, demonstrating the range of factors we know will ruin our results or contaminate them so as to render the result meaningless. Yes it is skepticism, and no he doesn't have a better way to do radiometric dating that avoids the doubts raised, but that is not his job or mine either. Does your meteor Pb206:Pb207 line still mean anything in the face of the skeptical attack? I am not sure. This isn't my area of expertise. I still remember reading Milton's skepticism though and going, aha, the age of the earth is more speculative than it first would appear according to the mass media and PBS.
Whatever, flame me, it doesn't matter. I'd encourage you to read a skeptical attack on isochron dating (Milton's perhaps, as I already mentioned) to see if it problematizes your linear line or not at all. If not, you can be all the more confident you 'know' the earth is very old. I have no agenda. I am not a Christian, but consciously reject it. I don't want you to believe the bible. If anything I am a deist, when I am not agnostic.
Of course it is always good to begin on an insufferably arrogant note.
I was thinking principally of Richard Milton's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Milton_(scientific_researcher) devastating critique of radiometric dating methods in his book Shattering the Myths of Darwinism. In it, he outlines the precariousness of the logic underlying radiometric dating, arguing to my satisfaction that the results emitted by such methods don't really mean anything at all, and can't be used to argue for anything, for or against.
The mainstream media is very jealous of its role as gatekeepers to what the 'public' sees and doesn't see. Yeah, that's great, salaried nobodies with B.Journalism and B.A.'s in sociology or world literature telling me what's important about science, politics and religions. I take their opinions very seriously, of course.
Nothing to see here. It is not like the radiometric dating methods are completely speculative and saddled with risky assumptions at all. These dates are solid! 4Ma + or - 2Ma... or maybe + or - 4Ma or 40 trillion years, it is not like we are guessing at all.
Uh why don't we first get there before we pat ourselves on the backs about the sheer awesomeness of having gotten there? If I had a nickle for every scientist whose next experiment may very well change mankind and science itself, I'd be a very rich skeptic.
Alberta is experimenting with it too but wind has some incredible drawbacks fitting in to exisiting power systems, namely how it can start up all of a sudden from a state of no wind, and then just as quickly drop off again, when energy coordinators had expected it to continue. This leads to massive headaches and expensive problems for regulatory agencies wanting to avoid brown-outs and black-outs. It is actually wind's most serious problem and a huge reason to keep wind's contributions to a province's total generation capacity in a small area like 5% or so. Coal power, as dirty as it is, is completely reliable, ramps up at a predictable rate and can be easily turned off when it would oversupply the grid.
As if "mutations" are simple binary digits turning randomly off and on, somehow mysteriously creating incredibly complex biochemical structures from nothing. Like a little flick here in our genome and zap I have Wolverine's healing factor or Cyclop's eyebeam. Or oh sorry, that is too complex too fast, so lets break it up into a hundred subcomponent binary switches spread over a million years, after all we have all the time in the world. Then all of a sudden it makes sense and if you disagree you must be a Christian in disguise.
If anyone is interested in reading a thoughtful critique of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis from a non-religious, non-biblical, purely secular perspective, they should really check out this book: Richard Milton's Shattering the Myths of Darwinism.
Good discussion, but anyone who's any one knows that WMA achieves transparency with CD audio at 64kpbs and so already the de facto winner of the format wars. (wink)
McCain is a lamer. Sure, I appreciate and sympathize with his being a POW and being tortured, but that doesn't make his welfare/warfare state views correct. Thankfully his campaign has faltered and he has no chance. http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/duffy-p3.html
It would be a difficult transition, but if correctly handled (which I have no confidence it would be, by interests vested in seeing it fail), it would be well worth it. Fiat money http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency is a completely nuts system.
Don't any of you dare contradict what some scientists and/or medical doctors say! Don't you dare think for yourselves, or post revisionist material for public consumption! Let the scientists handle these complicated issues themselves and then whatever majority group wins out can tell the rest of us what to think; we have no right to dispute it or be skeptical. Free thinkers are once again the enemies of mankind. __ Support Ron Paul for the Republican Presidential nomination. Live free or die.
That almost sounds like saying, since ID is untestable, therefore Darwinism (the only other theory on the block) is untestable, for between the two of them--broadly speaking--they cover the entire gamut of theories of our origins, using either teleology or blind impersonal natural forces. If the teleological theory is untestable in some relevant sense, then the blind impersonal forces theory MUST be necessarily true since it can't be contradicted. How could we ever show it wrong? We couldn't.
And that sounds... fake?
We've 'proven' God or gods or aliens or hyperdimensional beings didn't design us, and we didn't even have to leave our armchairs to determine that. That's convenient. Pretty thin though.
One thing I am invariably confused by whenever Slashdot posts an anti-ID story is whether the commentators here believe Intelligent Design/ Teleology is *necessarily false* and logically impossible because it is non-materialistic and invokes an external teleology to explain what is happening in the natural universe, OR whether Intelligent Design has been proven wrong by the cumulative empirical evidence gathered in the last two hundred years? (In my opinion, Darwin's Origins inaugarated a research program rather than definitively proved anything at all. After all, how could a primitive pre-critical biology prove anything without getting into the nitty-gritty of biochemistry, microbiology, and laboratory experimentation?)
In other words, do we need to leave our armchairs in order to figure out the Neo-Darwinian synthesis is true, or could we figure that out by a mere deduction from the philosophy of science we have chosen? Cuz, sometimes it sure sounds like teleology is ruled nonsense/pseudo-science before it even gets out of the gates and says anything about alternate interpretations! Which is remarkable to me. I am not sure how we can justify eliminating a Designer/Creator from the get-go, if that is what some are doing.
Time-serving members of the civil magistracy have ruled only atheism constitutes true knowledge while religion is declared to be mythology and superstition.
For all I know, the backstory now in place might be incompatible with explicit statements from 30 yrs ago. The whole Crisis on Infinte Worlds / Zero Hour / Infinite Crisis mega-story arcs retconned (altered the history of the DC universe) each time.
The current spin is that Parallax was a super-villain destroying planet after planet with fear, feeding off it, and the Guardians imprisoned him in the Battery and stripped him of his sentience billions of years ago. Since then the Guardians hid the fact that they did this because they didn't want any crazies to try to release Parallax. But recently, they imprisoned the renegade GL turn villain Sinestro inside the Battery, and while in there with his yellow power ring, he awoke Parallax. Then Parallax and Sinestro worked to take over Hal Jordan, and briefly turned Hal Jordan (to the outrage of nearly everyone) into a super-villain who single-handedly killed almost every single active Green Lantern in the universe and then destroyed the Battery, releasing the Fear Anamoly in full-force. He (that is, Parallax, which is how Hal Jordan became known) then tried to recreate the universe in his own image and started the Zero Hour story arc where Parallax kicked hte Justice League's butts time and again. But then Jordan's good side won over at the last minute and he saved the Earth from destruction by restarting the sun which had been "put out" by a Sun Eater intergallactic weapon.
Only two years ago or so, did it emerge that Jordan was possessed by Parallax. To the outrage of everyone, when the story arc was being played out, no mention was made of possession and it appeared that it was Hal Jordan himself of his own free will murdering Green Lanterns left and right.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an excellent summary but I wanted to correct you on one point. Prior to the Civil War, the South wanted laissez-faire and free markets and international trade, while it was the North that was dominated by its big city banking elite that wanted protectionism. The north wanted to sell its manufactured goods to the south while preventing the superior and cheaper European goods from being sold in American markets. The South saw this as an outright money-grab by the northern states (and I believe it was) and was one of the main, if not the main, motivations for southern independence---to create free-markets. Invariably exporting economies favor international trade, while importing ones favor tariff barriers, mercantilism, and statism.
You sir are the master.
It's awesome that the central government makes laws about things like this. It makes me feel so warm and fuzzy to have the State go to the trouble of making these things into crimes and not letting market forces and property owners decide things like this on their own. This is another example of why the State is our Savior (Peace be upon it).
It is polarized precisely because there is legitimate disagreement within science itself about what is 'good' science and what's not, when the paradigm chosen has direct and immediate consequences in politics, economics, sociology, philosophy and religion. I am all for objective and evidentialist presentation of all the relevant facts that support one's theory, but not for the Lysenkoist politizing of science (i.e. of the truth itself) and the persecution of those who disagree with your paradigm, and suppression of their voices from science--something all too common in modern science.
How when Darwinism and the origins of life are discussed on /., despite many protestations to the effect that Darwinism is without serious errors or flaws and doesn't actually oppose (true) religion in any way at all [ah, but no true scotsman eats porridge...], the number of a-theistic or anti-god or anti-creator statements always are extremely numerous? In fact, it is difficult for a rational person to cohere the beliefs of a creator/divinity with the beliefs in molecules-to-man cosmic and biological evolution. Steven Jay Gould's attempt is nothing more than embarrassing hand-waving to create two separate non-overlapping magisteria that in fact overlap in empirical predictions quite systematically.
Here's a heretical thought: Maybe AIDS isn't contagious in these patients because HIV doesn't cause AIDS and never has been the cause of it. If that sounds crazy, maybe you've never explored the literature that points out the puzzling inconsistencies in the theory underlying the multi-billion dollar HIV research and pharma industries.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6830231400057553023
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3983706668483511310
http://books.google.ca/books?id=pRWVZJKO0NsC&dq=Peter+H+Duesberg&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=peter+duesberg&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1&cad=author-navigational
This 'problem' of controlling which scientific theories/hypotheses the government schools are 'allowed' to discuss only exists because of government schools. If all schools were private schools, then parents can simply send their children to whatever school they think is best, pro-Darwinian, anti-Darwinian, or mixed ('teach the controversy') biology/cosmogony curriculum. The current 'strategy' of mandating a physicalist/materialist theory of origins, banning and making illegal teleological theories, then using the Federal(!!) court system to defend this setup will obviously only lead to continued attempts to overthrow it every few years (unsuccessfully?) and lead to the continued emmigration from the public schools to private schools and home-schooling, which only strengthens the growing calls for government-vouchers to pay for private school, or for abolishing federal (and state?) government schooling altogether.
That, and twelve-year olds having sex and doing cocaine while being functionally illiterate (and remaining so at their graduations) also probably undermines the government schools' credibility.
The Feds involvement in this all is also on dubious legal grounds for semi-obvious reasons (so where is the Federal Department of Education in the US Federal Constitution anyway?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education#Opposition . But what's a hundred billion dollars of our money between friends, anyway? Unless you happen not to be a friend.
If they can interbreed and generate fertile offspring, as they obviously can, then they are obviously the same species, even if micro-evolution has taken them down different paths.
What this study may have discovered is the equivalent of the "black" giraffe, the "white" giraffe, and the "oriental" giraffe.
Thank you for your honest and charitable response. It is (too) easy to be like Voltaire and just mock everything, even complicated matters about which it is very hard to get a handle on and yet still remarkably easy to tease and poke fun of (such as when someone tells me what exactly happened 4.5 thousand million years ago, and I have obviously been guilty of that in the grandparent post teasing this latest report on 'assured' results in rock dating. While I have strong doubts that a historical science like radiometric dating even comes anywhere close to the levels of assured results that I would expect in my own field of power/electrical engineering, it doesn't make it right to lampoon something I am obviously not ready to back up with my own sustained arguments. Thanks for keeping me humble. :)
This is the kind of unhelpful response that doesn't win any converts to your way of thinking. The book is about various aspects relating to the theory of evolution by natural selection through random mutations, but the point of it is not to argue as an apologist towards a religion or towards a bible. Milton is himself irreligious and not a member of any religion. (To the other poster: And yet reportedly Milton's summary of Dawkins' review is that it is a hysterical atheistic screed denouncing him as a closest creationist, and short on any specific hard evidential criticisms. Have I read Dawkins' review myself? No more than you have read Milton's book.)
My own technical experience is in electrical engineering, not radiometric or isochron dating. Yes I am quite open to the possibility that I am the proverbial layman bamboozled by a technical charlatan and the profession itself is eminently respectable and completely in consensus at all points. On the other hand, the other field I know a lot about, economics, I am well-aware of there being no consensus whatsoever but contains the most heated debates imaginable about all points in the field. They are a science (someone is right after all and someone is wrong) but it is a 'softer' science because it is not like whipping particles around in an accelerator again and again and making measurements. And as for electrical engineering, where there is no debate on fundamentals, at least what we study (e.g. an electric machine) is right there in front of us, and we are not engaging in speculative historical study based on neat tools we think might work about a hypothetical machine ten trillion years ago. Where does isochron or more broadly, radiometric dating, rate on the scale of 'hard' or 'soft' science? You seem to be suggesting right at the 'hard' pole, while I think in fact (thanks to Milton), it is located much more in the 'soft' part of line, with results only as strong as the risky assumptions made in arriving at those results.
The main criticism I remember he pointed out again and again is contamination, and the inability to separate decay by-products from the isotope from the decay by-products of other materials that decay into the same elements, and the elements and isotopes of the nominal by-product initially present at time zero when they were formed. He then takes the two or three main types of rock-dating and constructs a skeptical attack on each one, demonstrating the range of factors we know will ruin our results or contaminate them so as to render the result meaningless. Yes it is skepticism, and no he doesn't have a better way to do radiometric dating that avoids the doubts raised, but that is not his job or mine either. Does your meteor Pb206:Pb207 line still mean anything in the face of the skeptical attack? I am not sure. This isn't my area of expertise. I still remember reading Milton's skepticism though and going, aha, the age of the earth is more speculative than it first would appear according to the mass media and PBS.
Whatever, flame me, it doesn't matter. I'd encourage you to read a skeptical attack on isochron dating (Milton's perhaps, as I already mentioned) to see if it problematizes your linear line or not at all. If not, you can be all the more confident you 'know' the earth is very old. I have no agenda. I am not a Christian, but consciously reject it. I don't want you to believe the bible. If anything I am a deist, when I am not agnostic.
Of course it is always good to begin on an insufferably arrogant note.
I was thinking principally of Richard Milton's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Milton_(scientific_researcher) devastating critique of radiometric dating methods in his book Shattering the Myths of Darwinism. In it, he outlines the precariousness of the logic underlying radiometric dating, arguing to my satisfaction that the results emitted by such methods don't really mean anything at all, and can't be used to argue for anything, for or against.
The mainstream media is very jealous of its role as gatekeepers to what the 'public' sees and doesn't see. Yeah, that's great, salaried nobodies with B.Journalism and B.A.'s in sociology or world literature telling me what's important about science, politics and religions. I take their opinions very seriously, of course.
Nothing to see here. It is not like the radiometric dating methods are completely speculative and saddled with risky assumptions at all. These dates are solid! 4Ma + or - 2Ma... or maybe + or - 4Ma or 40 trillion years, it is not like we are guessing at all.
Uh why don't we first get there before we pat ourselves on the backs about the sheer awesomeness of having gotten there? If I had a nickle for every scientist whose next experiment may very well change mankind and science itself, I'd be a very rich skeptic.
Alberta is experimenting with it too but wind has some incredible drawbacks fitting in to exisiting power systems, namely how it can start up all of a sudden from a state of no wind, and then just as quickly drop off again, when energy coordinators had expected it to continue. This leads to massive headaches and expensive problems for regulatory agencies wanting to avoid brown-outs and black-outs. It is actually wind's most serious problem and a huge reason to keep wind's contributions to a province's total generation capacity in a small area like 5% or so. Coal power, as dirty as it is, is completely reliable, ramps up at a predictable rate and can be easily turned off when it would oversupply the grid.
As if "mutations" are simple binary digits turning randomly off and on, somehow mysteriously creating incredibly complex biochemical structures from nothing. Like a little flick here in our genome and zap I have Wolverine's healing factor or Cyclop's eyebeam. Or oh sorry, that is too complex too fast, so lets break it up into a hundred subcomponent binary switches spread over a million years, after all we have all the time in the world. Then all of a sudden it makes sense and if you disagree you must be a Christian in disguise.
If anyone is interested in reading a thoughtful critique of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis from a non-religious, non-biblical, purely secular perspective, they should really check out this book: Richard Milton's Shattering the Myths of Darwinism.
Good discussion, but anyone who's any one knows that WMA achieves transparency with CD audio at 64kpbs and so already the de facto winner of the format wars. (wink)
McCain is a lamer. Sure, I appreciate and sympathize with his being a POW and being tortured, but that doesn't make his welfare/warfare state views correct. Thankfully his campaign has faltered and he has no chance. http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/duffy-p3.html
It would be a difficult transition, but if correctly handled (which I have no confidence it would be, by interests vested in seeing it fail), it would be well worth it. Fiat money http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency is a completely nuts system.
see: "What Has Government Done to Our Money?" http://www.mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=92
Since when did Keynesianism stop being a collection of lunatic economic theories, and neoclassical economics start?
Don't any of you dare contradict what some scientists and/or medical doctors say! Don't you dare think for yourselves, or post revisionist material for public consumption! Let the scientists handle these complicated issues themselves and then whatever majority group wins out can tell the rest of us what to think; we have no right to dispute it or be skeptical. Free thinkers are once again the enemies of mankind.
__
Support Ron Paul for the Republican Presidential nomination. Live free or die.
That almost sounds like saying, since ID is untestable, therefore Darwinism (the only other theory on the block) is untestable, for between the two of them--broadly speaking--they cover the entire gamut of theories of our origins, using either teleology or blind impersonal natural forces. If the teleological theory is untestable in some relevant sense, then the blind impersonal forces theory MUST be necessarily true since it can't be contradicted. How could we ever show it wrong? We couldn't.
And that sounds... fake?
We've 'proven' God or gods or aliens or hyperdimensional beings didn't design us, and we didn't even have to leave our armchairs to determine that. That's convenient. Pretty thin though.
One thing I am invariably confused by whenever Slashdot posts an anti-ID story is whether the commentators here believe Intelligent Design/ Teleology is *necessarily false* and logically impossible because it is non-materialistic and invokes an external teleology to explain what is happening in the natural universe, OR whether Intelligent Design has been proven wrong by the cumulative empirical evidence gathered in the last two hundred years? (In my opinion, Darwin's Origins inaugarated a research program rather than definitively proved anything at all. After all, how could a primitive pre-critical biology prove anything without getting into the nitty-gritty of biochemistry, microbiology, and laboratory experimentation?)
In other words, do we need to leave our armchairs in order to figure out the Neo-Darwinian synthesis is true, or could we figure that out by a mere deduction from the philosophy of science we have chosen? Cuz, sometimes it sure sounds like teleology is ruled nonsense/pseudo-science before it even gets out of the gates and says anything about alternate interpretations! Which is remarkable to me. I am not sure how we can justify eliminating a Designer/Creator from the get-go, if that is what some are doing.
Time-serving members of the civil magistracy have ruled only atheism constitutes true knowledge while religion is declared to be mythology and superstition.
For all I know, the backstory now in place might be incompatible with explicit statements from 30 yrs ago. The whole Crisis on Infinte Worlds / Zero Hour / Infinite Crisis mega-story arcs retconned (altered the history of the DC universe) each time.
The current spin is that Parallax was a super-villain destroying planet after planet with fear, feeding off it, and the Guardians imprisoned him in the Battery and stripped him of his sentience billions of years ago. Since then the Guardians hid the fact that they did this because they didn't want any crazies to try to release Parallax. But recently, they imprisoned the renegade GL turn villain Sinestro inside the Battery, and while in there with his yellow power ring, he awoke Parallax. Then Parallax and Sinestro worked to take over Hal Jordan, and briefly turned Hal Jordan (to the outrage of nearly everyone) into a super-villain who single-handedly killed almost every single active Green Lantern in the universe and then destroyed the Battery, releasing the Fear Anamoly in full-force. He (that is, Parallax, which is how Hal Jordan became known) then tried to recreate the universe in his own image and started the Zero Hour story arc where Parallax kicked hte Justice League's butts time and again. But then Jordan's good side won over at the last minute and he saved the Earth from destruction by restarting the sun which had been "put out" by a Sun Eater intergallactic weapon.
Only two years ago or so, did it emerge that Jordan was possessed by Parallax. To the outrage of everyone, when the story arc was being played out, no mention was made of possession and it appeared that it was Hal Jordan himself of his own free will murdering Green Lanterns left and right.